Single Jeopardy (4 page)

Thinking about Mel’s suggestion more seriously, I take the big fat file of my case over to his office - the address that appears on his letterhead and checks. It’s only a few blocks away from the Marina, but when I get there I discover it’s one of those private mailbox places. The address is the same as on Melvin’s stuff, and it looks like he’s using the box number as his ‘suite’ number – much like Ricky Hansel, the law clerk who got me suspended in the first place. I hope that this isn’t going to be a rerun of my last disaster, because the next step down for me will be disbarment and criminal prosecution by my ex-wife.

I think it would be better to visit Melvin personally on his houseboat to get some answers. On the way back to the Marina I stop for a beer or two, finally getting back to the dock at about six thirty in the evening and discover that I’d better stop drinking that much. What convinces me is walking by Laverne’s boat, being smiled at, and thinking that she’s starting to look better.

Melvin’s boat is locked up for the evening. The only sign of life aboard is that small cat glaring at me through the window.

Next morning the little girl and her two partners do their daily parade up to the electric car, and I notice that the dog has something in its mouth. This is too good a chance to miss… I follow them as they drive down the sidewalk in their e-car. When they pull up to a mailbox, the little girl gives a command to the dog in some foreign language. The dog hops out of the vehicle, walks over to the mailbox, stands on his rear legs and with one paw pulls open the mail slot. He then deposits the mail from his mouth down into the mailbox. I haven’t seen an animal act like this since reruns of the old Ed Sullivan show, and my curiosity about this trio is really peaking. After the mailbox stunt they drive down the alley to the rear entrance of the private mailbox place where Melvin’s ‘office’ is technically located. I’m able to see through the back door that the little girl is opening up a large post office-type box, mercifully located on a low enough level. She then gets back into the e-cart and drives further down the alley to the rear kitchen entrance of the local Washington Boulevard Chinese restaurant, where all three of them enter the back door. I hope that when they come back out the cat will still be with them. After about twenty minutes of waiting, I give up and go back to work.

Not being the legal-eagle my ex-wife always wanted me to be, I’m not quite sure of the legality of a minor driving that glorified golf cart, or if it’s even street legal. But as so often happens in real life, the law doesn’t really govern everything. I’ve eaten in that local Chinese restaurant enough times to realize that the little girl obviously has a connection with the place. All the local cops eat there and treat her like their mascot, so she shouldn’t have to worry about ever getting a traffic ticket in this neighborhood. Come to think of it, I never saw any cop in uniform ever getting charged full price there. Maybe that’s why like clockwork, they’re in there every day at the same times: Noon for the morning watch’s lunch and four-thirty in the afternoon for the day-watch’s lunch time. There are also second-Tuesday-of-the-month interagency luncheon meetings of all the local police authorities to discuss their new policy of cooperation and sharing of intelligence and computer files. The lunch checks all get paid in full on those days, and from what I’ve seen, the brass is allowed to drink while on duty.

The restaurant doesn’t have too much competition in the neighborhood. There’s an Italian place across the street, and a seafood place a couple of doors west, but they don’t compete for customers. No-one can eat Chinese food or Italian food every night of the week unless they’re Chinese or Italian, and then it’s not Chinese food or Italian food: it’s just food.

The real competition between them is for parking spaces on the two city-owned empty lots on both sides of the restaurants. The other two eateries are both owned by some rich old guy who lives in a penthouse down the street at the Marina City Club, so the fighting is left to the operators of their two car-parking valet companies.

This evening I’m considering allowing myself to be invited onto Laverne’s houseboat for a drink. I’m rationalizing this daring move as an attempt to get some information from her about Melvin’s small cadre and that fifty-foot Grand Banks, the new love of my life.

Right on cue, after the gangway gate slams loudly behind me, Laverne appears at her window. As I walk by she smiles and holds up two elegant plastic wine glasses. She gives me a wink, and clicks the glasses together. Once before in my life this phrase passed over my lips and it caused me quite a bit of trouble over the years. My wife and I had been living together in her house for over a year and one night she gave me the dreaded ultimatum that every man will probably hear at least once in his life: “either get married or get out.” It was then that I said those romantic words of acceptance: “aw what the hell, I might as well.” I hope that this time it’ll lead to nothing more than a glass of wine and some information.

Laverne’s metallic houseboat is furnished rather interestingly. For lack of a better description I guess you could call the décor ‘early whorehouse.’ There’s a lot of gaudy red velvet wallpaper and a framed picture on one wall of some dogs playing poker. Another wall has a picture hanging there that looks like a sober Laverne. It’s one of those phony oil-painting-type of prints that’s really just a touched-up enlarged photograph. Some cheap imitation fringed Tiffany lamps are lit. One of them is a hanging ‘swag’ model. This is probably the first residence she’s ever lived in that doesn’t have wheels. I guess you would expect Tonya Harding or Paula Jones to have decorating styles not much different. Also not too surprising is what’s playing on her television set: one of those crappy reality shows, but with the sound turned off. When I ask her how she can enjoy it without the sound, she tells me not to worry, because she’s taping it. What a wonderful videotape library she must have. All that her living room lacks now are some vibrators mounted on the flocked wallpaper. I’ll have to remember to leave a couple of twenties on the dresser when I leave.

Aside from the gaudy trappings, Laverne is pleasant enough, and when she sits down, her housecoat momentarily opens to reveal a little more than I was expecting to see. I’d like to believe that housecoat’s ‘grand opening’ was an accident, but I soon learn that no matter how drunk she gets, Laverne doesn’t do anything accidentally. After my third drink and her third ‘reveal,’ our conversation turns toward more personal matters and I discover that she really doesn’t drink that much. Her tolerance for alcohol must be very low because after just four or five glasses of wine, she’s totally plastered, but not too drunk to remember courtesy towards her guest: she suggests that it would be safer if I stayed over, to avoid any accident trying to make it home at such a late hour. Not wanting to be a rude guest, I accept.

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Depending on how you judge success, the meeting at Laverne’s is hard to rate, but I do remember that most of the pumping was to get information and I never learned what Laverne does all day. She did tell me that neither she nor anyone else on the dock knows the inside information on that cute little Asian girl, except for the fact that she never speaks to anyone. That may be because she doesn’t speak English. I also learned that another dock tenant with a forty-two-foot Californian Motor yacht is a retired eye surgeon with a bad back, who is reputed to espouse that the mere existence of a female’s curvaceous rear end is proof that there is a God. Maybe that’s why his nickname on the dock is ‘Snatch Adams.’

Some lecherous sixty-something lawyer named Unger who works for Melvin owns that fifty-foot Grand Banks I admire so much. He’s probably the L. Martin Unger who volunteered to help with my petition for re-instatement. I thought it would be nice to be able to visit with my new attorney on his boat, but Laverne said he was out of town for a couple of months, making a semi-annual trip to his personal Mecca – some smorgasbord hotel in Thailand that offers its clients all the young Thai girls they can eat. A fantasy races through my head: if L. Martin can afford that big boat by working for Melvin, then maybe I’d better get that petition through as soon as possible so maybe I could move up from my old wooden junk to fiberglass luxury.

The evening wasn’t a total loss - she made some breakfast for me. I guess it’s for me because the table is set and it’s on the plate waiting for me. She’s already been picked up for the day… to go wherever she goes and do whatever she does. Not wanting to be a rude guest I finish the greasy French toast, do the dish, and then go to my own boat to shower off the evening’s experience. She isn’t exactly a raving beauty, but you could tell that about twenty years and twenty pounds ago she must have really been something to look at. I don’t plan on making a steady thing out of this, but at least I know that as long as I live on the dock, Laverne will see to it that my complexion is kept clear.

Stepping off of her houseboat I notice a Norman Rockwell scene taking place down the dock in front of Melvin’s houseboat: the huge Saint Bernard is sitting up next to the dockbox, and standing on a milk crate to reach all the way to the top of its head is the little Asian girl, complete with floppy sun hat and sun dress, using a Flowbee type combination comb & cutting device. She’s softly singing some foreign song to the dog, while giving it a haircut. I’m not the only one watching… the small cat is on top of the dockbox, half asleep and half watching the haircut – and me. When she finishes with the dog, there are several dock neighbors waiting to sit on the milk crate for their monthly trims.

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My next assignment requires going to the Courthouse to research some civil suits there, and while in the filing room I run into a few attorneys I’ve known over the years. Several of us went to school together, so they know Melvin. Each one has a different story to tell, but averaging all their information and gossip together, it goes something like this:

Jasmine, a bow-legged waitress at the local Chinese restaurant, was having some trouble getting a green card. Maybe it’s because she was an illegal alien, having overstayed her student visa and smuggled her young daughter into the country through Canada. Of course having a steady job didn’t help either, because even if your student visa is valid, you’re not supposed to be employed. That must be because our INS doesn’t want foreigners taking busboy jobs away from all the Americans who go to college just to prepare for that career.

As the story goes, Melvin ate in the restaurant so often that he had his own regular table there. When he learned about Jasmine’s problem, he offered to fix it in his own inimitable way, and he did… he married her. Her little daughter Suzi was supposed to be a real cutie, and they certainly got that part of the story right. Unfortunately, a year or so later Jasmine died in a car accident (not having anything to do with the driving ability of Asian females) and since then Suzi has been living with her stepfather on the houseboat that the Marina provides.

It wasn’t surprising that Melvin got a wife in that manner, because any other way would probably have been out of the question. He set the bar rather high for his ‘perfect’ woman, who he said must be a super-model who could read the Torah. When we were law students together he once bragged to several of us how he was dating a nice Catholic girl until he noticed a cross over her bed and refused to sleep with her. As the story goes, he told her that if he was going to get into bed with a woman, he wanted to be the only illegitimate Jewish con man in the room. Needless to say, he lost out that night to the guy on the wall.

Armed with this information it isn’t hard to start piecing together the rest of the story. Melvin practices off the boat. He sends out nasty letters and makes threatening phone calls to delinquent debtors and tenants. L. Martin Unger does Melvin’s court appearances, with flunkies like me serving the papers and doing the occasional legal research.

Most collection agencies were worried that when the federal Uniform Debt Collections Act was passed that it would crimp their style... but not Melvin. Whenever he made a threatening call outside the bounds of the UCDA (too early in the AM, too late in the PM, harassment at the debtor’s place of employment, etc.), he would also ask what the debtor thought of some political issue polarizing the country at that particular time. This was his devious way of setting up a defense for himself, so if anyone ever tried to prosecute him for violation of the Act he could claim he was conducting a political poll, and it was his right to free speech to call and ask those questions. The main secret of his success was an uncanny ability he displayed in finding the debtors that nobody else could find. No one knows how he does it, but it’s the main reason he gets a heavy load of collection and skip-tracing work. Someone on his staff certainly knows how to search on the internet. From what I’ve been told, everyone in the country is in there somewhere. One of these days, I’m going to have to learn how to surf like the kids do. They can find anything online.

Because he didn’t have to go out very much, his main traveling was about a mile, to a massage parlor on Washington Blvd., where he keeps his regular appointments every Tuesday and Thursday for ‘physical therapy.’ Being so overweight, his back is always giving him trouble, so he bamboozled his insurance company into paying for his alleged therapy. What a wonderful state of affairs... the insurance companies refuse to pay for patients’ life-saving bone marrow transplants, but they’re paying for Melvin’s blowjobs.

As clever as Melvin was though, I don’t think he ever came across the defense that I used once: four or five years after passing the Bar, some jerk collection agency was going after former students of a Bar Review Course I took, for not turning back in their study materials. Of course the statute of limitations had already run, and no one ever turned back in that study material because it was all marked up and obsolete. New cases came down each year and the materials were always getting annual updates. I decided to take a new tack with the collector. A Federal anti-pornography law had been passed to fight the mailing of unsolicited obscene materials, and any Classification as ‘obscene’ depended solely on the opinion of the mail’s recipient. I informed the collection agency that
in
my opinion
the mail and phone calls I was getting from them were obscene, and if they didn’t cease and desist immediately, their agency would be turned in to the Federal authorities and they would be fined five thousand dollars for each violation of my privacy with their calls and letters.