Wednesday morning -- "Fools and broken glass".

Wednesday morning

“Fools and broken glass, Norman,” Charlie replied.

            Charlie Culpepper stared from his fourth floor vantage point on the corner of Eastern Avenue and Broadway in East Baltimore, and quietly shook his head. A smoked silver 600 series Mercedes with the price tag still stuck in the driver’s side rear window had just plowed into a faded green ‘73 Chrysler New Yorker with the shriek of burned rubber followed by the crunching of sheet metal. Both drivers were screaming at each other in different languages, neither of which was English. The driver of the Benz, a short Middle Eastern fellow dressed in immaculate blue threads, was waving at his car and shouting something in Arabic. His buddy, a huge man also dressed in immaculate blue threads, stood back with his arms crossed, saying nothing but looking quite menacing. Mr. Chrysler, a local from the neighborhood’s Hispanic community and a stout fellow in his own right, stood on the hood of his car and gesticulated wildly, exclaiming to Dios that something, and something, and something.

“Somebody will have a gun and they’ll make the papers,” I said.

            “Then we’d have dead fools and broken glass.” He turned and faced me, his eyes twinkling that weird twinkle of his; touched by demons. “As far as the eye can see.” He gestured with a sweeping motion down Eastern Avenue towards Highlandtown and beyond.

I had just left work at The Sun’s office downtown and was in the middle of grinding out my third cigarette of the day. Putting out The Evening Sun afforded me the opportunity to knock off for the day at 11 in the morning. Genuine luxury is time to relax during the day.

            “So what possessed you to put your office here instead of downtown with all those silk stocking lawyers?” I said lighting my fourth cigarette of the morning.

            “There are several flavors of reality Norman,” he said looking at his watch. “This is my favorite. And besides, there is something to be said for moral and intellectual superiority. And when I see it, I move next door.”

            Charlie Culpepper was right in that one. His personal philosophy, and mine too for that matter, began and ended with the same basic truth: dead rich people with pedigrees and connections decayed at the same rate as rudderless schizophrenics who froze to death on subway grates. The net result was the same.

            I reached into the bottom drawer of Charlie’s desk and grabbed his bottle, an 18 year-old Macallan. He was enjoying his drama du jour, as lurid and tabloidish as it might be. He stared out the window, completely amused by other’s misfortunes. “You are a twisted fellow, Charles Culpepper. Got a glass?” He didn’t turn around.

            “Just because it’s good scotch, doesn’t mean you have to drink it out of a glass.”

            Sentient point.

            “When is your client supposed to get here?” I took a long pull off the bottle that tasted like the end of the day, full of oakiness and fruitiness and a warm feeling all the way to my sternum.

            “She should be here any minute, Norman.” Charlie spun around and extended his arms skywards. Then, he bent at the waist and folded in half, palms touching the floor. The sash on his red silk gi opened slightly. His unkempt, shoulder length blonde hair touched the floor.

            “Trying to impress the future divorcee with a show of manliness?”

            “You wanna’ get punched?”

            There was knock on the glass part of the office door, the part that read “C.M.D.F. Culpepper V; Investigations”.

            “Ah, Norman, it’s showtime.” Charlie cinched up his robe and plopped down on his desk. It was at best, contrived nonchalance. I capped and stashed the bottle quickly in Charlie’s bottom desk drawer and took down a thick lungful of smoke to try to mask some of the smell of the expensive single malt. I didn’t really think it would work.

            Charlie: pause, then, “Entree.”

            Her entrance was an entrance. She was tall, blonde, maybe 40ish, with a taught slim, body by Nautilus. Dressed in understated navy blue, with expensive pumps and a pillbox hat ala Jackie in the early ‘60s, she positively reeked of old money. Her hair was freshly coifed and her nails were painted a fierce, fire engine red which exactly matched her lipstick. Her lips were big and pouty and they contrasted dramatically with her china doll complexion. There were some faint wrinkles under the eyes, so it seemed that it had been a while since her last lift and tuck. Somehow, her face didn’t quite match her body. Maybe too many lifts and tucks. Still, she was probably the heiress of some robber baron who fled the city at the turn of the century to live the life of a country squire. I’m sure she enjoyed fox hunts.

            “Mrs. Andrews?” Charlie inquired.

            “Sheppard-Andrews,” she responded with a low country, lockjaw accent. Her eyes flitted around the room. “I s’pose I should get used to using that name again.”

            “Let’s not be hasty,” Charlie countered. “Ms. Sheppard-Andrews—“

            “Sally Ruth.” Pause. “My friends call me Sally Ruth.”

            Charlie sighed heavily. I could see his patience starting to slip already.

            “Sally Ruth, this is my associate, Norman Kaplan.”

            I should have laughed, but I nodded politely.

            “Does he work for you, Mr. Culpepper?”

            “Norman...” He paused and looked over at me. “Norman works with me.” He looked back at Sally Ruth. “He’s my On-line Information Acquisition Expert.”

            “Yes ma’am,” I said. “I’m part of the union.” A cloud of smoke and scotch and words came out of my mouth all at once. When she looked at me, she pulled her head back, retreating away from what was coming out. I looked back, completely stonefaced. It was painful, but I did it anyway.

            “Well, I don’t want too many people to know my troubles.”

            “Norman here is completely trustworthy.” Charlie took a 1-2-3 show business/comic pause before he redirected. “Now tell me, Sally Ruth, what is troubling you?”

            “Well,” she said sitting down, “this is so hard.” She fumbled with her purse and produced a pack of cigarettes, Merit Ultra Lights. I extended my lighter and lit her cigarette. She took one puff and placed it in the ashtray that Charlie extended to her. Tag team.

            “Thanks,” she said. “Our marriage lasted so long...I thought we had one of the real ones, you know? We weren’t like other people. Our marriage was going to last ...till death do us part.” She started to cry, but pulled back. “We were stronger than that.”

            Charles and I looked at each other, then looked back at her.

            “Oh, I know,” she continued. “We were an April - October marriage. Jack is older than I. But we thought we could make it. At least I did anyway. What a little fool I was.”

            “And you suspect that your husband may be seeing someone else?’

            “Yes.” Long pause followed by a mournful stare out the window. “I think. I suspect.” She turned to face Charlie. “I know. Something is going on. I can just tell.”

            “Why do you suspect your husband of infidelity, Sally Ruth?”

            “Little things. Changes. Forgetting things.” She took another long pause, then continued. “Then, there’s a strand of hair. Red hair, not mine. And wisps of strange perfume. Not mine.”
            All this sounded like to me was a mid-life crisis. A middle-aged man curses at his expanding waistline and his receding hairline, then buys a Corvette that’s the same color as Sally Ruth’s lips. Momentary indiscretions at happy hour, nothing more. Charlie seemed to sense this too, and redirected.

            “Do you have anything concrete? You know, hotel receipts that are unfamiliar? Matchbooks from restaurants you’ve never been too? Mysterious long distance numbers? Credit card bills from places you’ve never heard of? Anything like that?”

            “No. Not really, just a nagging feeling that something is terribly wrong.” She seemed to be making a mental inventory of the office, her eyes bouncing over every object.

            “Then, just what evidence do you have?” Charlie asked. There was just the slightest edge of frustration in his voice. Normally, his clients came recommended, with a dossier forwarded prior to the initial consultation. He was more of an attack dog than a bloodhound. Pulling teeth was not his bag, though he did have the people skills of a certain Nazi dentist I saw one time in the movies.

            There was a long pause as she stared out the open window. A draft of ripening garbage wafted in amongst the bilingual obscenities. She fumbled in her purse and produced one of those compact mirror deals. She popped it open and stared into for a minute. She looked up, then closed it with an authoritative click.

            “You can just tell,” she said. “Like, he’s always having business meetings. And he comes home with her cologne and that red hair on his lapel. Oh, I know.” She uttered those last two words with a brittle timbre in her voice. She was very defiant and very angry, with her very slight jowls shaking. Her once white face was starting to turn red and blotchy, red around the eyes and cheeks but not along her chinline. Very strange.

            “Do you know when the next one of these little ‘meetings’ is supposed to take place?”

            “He called from the office and said he would be home late tonight, that he had a meeting ...”

            “Where does he work and what sort of car does he drive?” I chimed in. I didn’t want to seem completely out of place.

            “I wrote it all down, along with this picture.” She handed a slip of paper and a Polaroid over to Charlie. “Happier times. That’s our daughter Maggie Mae. Just after she graduated from Friends last June.” She almost sobbed, then quashed it, picking up then grinding out her cigarette. “She was the salutatorian.” More tears. “He doesn’t even talk to her anymore.”

            “Well,” Charlie said standing and moving around to the other side of the desk, “it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to shadow your husband and find out what kind of business he’s really up too.” He sat down in his wooden office chair. He flexed his shoulders, making him even bigger than he already was and exposed a little wisp of hair on his chest. A smile creased his face, chiseling dimples where there were none just moments earlier.

            Forefinger extended, three fingers curled back, thumb up. Point 90 degrees away from the recipient. Smirk.

            “It really shouldn’t be that hard.”

            She looked at Charlie for the first time and there was a visual break in the tension. Doe eyed, she stared back at Charlie and heaved a huge sigh. After a second or so, she seemed to compose herself. She smiled back.

            I could actually see the thought balloon over her head:

 After the divorce, I’ll have young Charles here as the household studmuffin.

            “I’m sure lots of things are easy for you,” she said.

            “Well ma’am, I’d be delighted to take this case,” he said. “There is the little matter of my fee, though.”

            “Oh, Dominic said you could just bill him,” the client replied, almost nervously. “That is okay, right? I mean, I wouldn’t want to take money out of the household fund. Jack would find out before you could prove anything. Doesn’t that make sense?”

            “Sure. Shouldn’t be a problem. Dominic and I go back a long way.”

            “He said you were in law school together.”

            “Yes ma’am.”

            “Ma’am? Please call me Sally Ruth. Ma’am makes me feel so old.” Pause. “Will you find out who she is? I really need to know.”

            “And so will Dominic, if I know him at all.” I had to break this up. It was too much. She turned to face me.

            Charlie cleared his throat. “Dominic, Norman and I were all friends back in Chapel Hill.”

            “Oh,” she replied. Then there was one of those long uncomfortable pauses between acquaintances where nobody really has anything to say. Our business was done and since our relationship is business-related, the conversation was over. “Well, I suppose I must be going.” She stood up slowly, and pivoted towards the door, always keeping her eye on Charlie.

            “Goodbye. You will stay in touch, won’t you? I’m home alone all day.”

            “Of course I will.” Charlie smiled and stood up, straightening his gi and flexing at the same time. She smiled, opening the door, then exited. There was a long pause. Charlie put out her cigarette. I half expected surging strings to well up in the background just before we went to commercial.

            “I’m home—alone—all day. Where do they come from?” I said. “Campy melodrama.” Charlie just snorted out a chuckle and crumpled over in his chair.

            “Norman, she was really weird.” Heavy sigh. “Since when do people light cigarettes and then not smoke them?” Charlie chuckled his way into the bottom desk drawer and pulled out his bottle of single malt. “I rarely do this in the daytime, Norman.” He pulled a big gulp and passed it to me. I took a big swallow.

            “You think she wants to use you as some kind of stooge?” I asked, passing the bottle back.

            “Norman, there are less expensive patsies in this city.”

            “Yeah, but none as respectable to the blue blooded crowd,” I countered. “But you are wearing a bathrobe.”

            “Norman, I think that she thinks that something is up.”

            “And just what do you think that something is?”

             “Norman, I grew up in a town of sadistic bullies and pathological liars, but I have never seen anything as openly fraudulent as what I just saw.” He stood. “But, I don’t think that we can contemplate such weighty matters on a empty stomach. Norman, it’s time for lunch. I’ve had a weird day and it’s just eleven o’clock.”

February 2004 – Two Mondays before ...

There is a direct correlation between the amount of humidity in the atmosphere and the brightness of a full moon. On the night that Charlie Culpepper rescued Adriane Catherine Bascombe, the humidity was down to about 28 percent, providing me with a fabulously clear night from which to take pictures with a long lens.

            The upshot of the case was this: the fourteen year old Ms. Bascombe was fooling around at the Hunt Valley Mall when she was grabbed by two hooligans: William Henry McDade and Anthony Xavier Carposi. They had recognized her as being a member of the local gentry and, as such, was an asset to be stolen and resold. Both Bad Billy and The X-Man were minor teenage hoods with minor teenage records, doing the sorts of things that bored, sociopathic Baltimore County kids do: joyride in stolen cars, shoplift consumer electronics, shake down kids for pocket money at the rec center. Both had been arrested a number of times before they could drive. Indeed, when they got their respective licenses, their adolescent brand of terrorism became as widespread as the amount of gas in their car.

            I didn’t know that Bad Billy and The X-Man were the culprits in question on that crystal clear winter night. I didn’t find out that little tidbit until after Charlie had beaten them half to death with a mop handle and the local cops carted them away in an ambulance. I even remember thinking at the time that this solo rescue—Charles Matthew David Fitzgerald Culpepper the Fifth versus The Great Unknown—might turn out terribly. There was the distinct possibility that I would witness my best friend’s murder courtesy of his Nikon F1 and an outrageously high quality 600 millimeter lens. I remember racking the lens to try and find him, skulking through the long grass of that Wicomico County bog, only to have him pop up in the distance and, knowing I would be following his progress, flipping me off.

            “What a way to end a 15 year friendship,” I thought. “He flips me off, then gets murdered in front of my very eyes. What a way to go.”

            But that didn’t happen. This did:

            Charlie was brought in the fray by an acquaintance from Law School, Dominic Linetta. One of Dominic’s clients was Harold Bascombe, of Bascombe Container Lines, the worldwide shipping magnate. Dominic recommended that Charlie be brought in to recover the girl in exchange for a piece of the reward. Mr. Bascombe didn’t want the police brought in until after the fact, fearing a repeat of the hamfisted approach executed by another branch of law enforcement down in Texas recently. So after an initial meeting, Charlie was brought in to monitor calls and hopefully trace where the bad guys were, then bring force to bear upon them.

            Tracing the call was as simple as using Caller ID. He found the number, traced the address and, dressed for a covert operation, away we went to Maryland’s Eastern shore.

            The house the pair had rented (using their real names) was a small white stucco bungalow situated in the center of a field surrounded by short pines and tall grass. In the brilliant moonlight, the white house just gleamed. It had a picture window which faced the street (and the carhood I was leaning across) where I could see clearly the young Ms. Bascombe, in a stage of undress, tied to a chair ala a Betty Page pin-up.

            I had settled in for the confrontation when I saw Charlie do something that my editors still thank him for: he popped up out of the grass and mouthed to me “Come on and bring The Light of Day.” The Light of Day was Charlie’s pet name for his camera. He held up his right hand and spaced his thumb and forefinger about 2 inches apart, then clapped his left hand about five or six times in rapid succession. Then he sank down into the high grass.

            “Hum,” I remember thinking, “short lens and a flash unit?” It might be dangerous but the payoff would be amazing. I quickly changed lenses and mounted a flash to his camera.

            And away I went.

            Charlie’s Corvair was parked next to the driveway entrance and about 300 feet from the house. I stumbled through the darkness and through the grass towards the house. Dry grass crunched under my feet and I thought I would give the whole thing away.

            I didn’t.

            Charles was crouched by the door on the side of the house where the young Ms. Bascombe was parked. His face was smeared with mud, apparently a recent development because it wasn’t that way getting out of the car.

            “Where did you get mud?” I whispered.

            “It’s a secret,” he replied. He smirked and pointed at a mop handle next to the door. “I think it’s time to kick ass, Norman. What do you think?” He nodded his head.

            I paused to think why on earth he would ask such an idiotic rhetorical question and I could actually feel a blank expression crawling over my face for about a second. He didn’t disappoint.

            Standing, he grabbed the mop handle and smiled a big cheesy grin.

            “Take a picture, Norman. It’s showtime.”

            I put the camera to my face and squeezed off a single shot. The motor drive whirred. Inside I heard some stirring. In the door’s window, one of those three panel kitchen deals, the curtain moved back to reveal Bad Billy, checking the scene to see what caused the flash.

            Charlie kicked the door in.

            Charlie followed through, leaving Bad Billy on his ass, a small dent in his forehead evident.

            Charlie stepped into the room.

            Turning, Charles addressed The X-Man.

            Backhanding the mop handle, Charlie struck The X-Man in the face.

            The mop handle followed through, collapsing The X-Man’s cheekbone.

            Charlie shouted something at The X-Man, mop handle by his side.

            Charlie tucked and began a standing somersault, mop handle partially extended.

            The mop handle struck the lit but bare bulb in the overhead fixture, shattering it and sending sparks in every direction.

            No ambient light other than the flash. Charles swung at Bad Billy, who stood slowly.

            The mop handle struck Bad Billy in the back of the head, slightly depressing his skull.

            Bad Billy crumpled.

            Charlie planted both feet.

            Charlie spindled on his right foot, cocking his left leg.

            Charlie extended his left leg.

            Rotational inertia brought Charlie’s left foot in contact with the right side of The X-Man’s face.

            Charles followed through. The X-Man tumbled towards the wall.

            Charles set.

            Charles bowed to The X-Man.

            Turning, Charlie bowed to Bad Billy.

            “What do you think?”

            “Pretty impressive, Charles. You’ve been working out again.”

            “You journalists are geniuses. Masters of the obvious.”

            “Who are you?” the young Ms. Bascombe screamed. In the excitement, I sort of forgot about her.

            “Not to worry ma’am,” I said.

            “We’re freelance policemen,” Charlie adds. “The old man hired us to bring you back. That we will do.” He picked her up, still in her chair, and placed her on his shoulder.

            “You know, I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” He looked up at his passenger. “Are you hungry?”

            “Untie me!” she demanded. “Put me down!”

            “When we get outside,” he said. “Norman, I’m starving. I need to eat.”

            His entire demeanor changed instantly. Gone was the warrior with the mud-caked face. In its sted was Charlie the Goofer, focused for the moment on dinner, presumably something to be consumed in the front seat of a car. I squeezed off another shot. Charlie started for the door. He continued to babble about food, at one point asking Ms. Bascombe if she thought the fish in fish sandwiches was “too square” and should be “more fish shaped.” Ms. Bascombe endured the bumpy ride back to Charlie’s car and complained with enthusiasm. He put the chair down and cut her bonds with a folding, wooden handled French pocket knife. She was cold and started shivering. Charlie got out his heavy black leather jacket from the car and put it around her. She started sobbing softly and buried her face in Charlie’s shoulder. I took one more picture, number twenty-three; with Charlie’s black leather jacket shining in the moonlight, his cammo gi slightly open. That’s the one that made the front page of the Sunday’s Sun. That’s the one the editors still thank me for.