Paul soon found the six-month buyout was based not on his current salary, but on a mathematically suspect twenty-three-year index, and in today’s dollars Paul received the equivalent of two paychecks. He went to work selling shoes at the Mega Mall.
Paul’s wife was not passive. She was a thirty-six-year-old loud bottle blonde with qualified good looks, possibly sensual, but not elegant. Put it this way: She’d be the best-looking woman you could expect to find at ten A.M. in a bar, which was where she went every day after Paul left for work.
They were newlyweds, and they hadn’t had sex since the wedding night, which she only did for tax reasons.
She married Paul because he owned his house outright, and her lawyer/lover estimated the shortest possible time she had to stay married to Paul to have a realistic legal shot at getting half. It was a modestly priced place when Paul purchased it in the sixties, but the area had become exclusive Cloverdale, and the house had appreciated wildly.
On the first day Paul’s wife was in the eligibility zone for a fifty-fifty split, she asked for a divorce, and for the first time in memory, Paul said no.
On the second day, Paul came home and found her naked on the dining-room table, her lawyer riding herd. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. I-won’t-give-my-wife-a-divorce. How was work today, honey?”
She got her divorce.
Paul was forced to sell the house and move into a cramped apartment on the Atlanta Highway, closer to the shoe store.
Since he was a teen, Paul found refuge during difficult times in the pages of hard-boiled mystery novels. He read Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. He watched Robert Mitchum on the big screen. A private detective-it was all he ever wanted to be. He fancied his life a dog-eared twenty-five-cent paperback, a dame, a shot of bourbon and no regrets. But he never followed his passion because he found out it might involve confrontation.
After the divorce, he began plowing through Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer. He drove to the shoe store imagining he was cruising through the City of Angels in the fifties. At work, he pretended every woman customer was a floozy with a hard-luck story who only needed a good slapping.
During his third Monday on the job, Paul was lacing up oxfords with a gritty, hard-boiled savoir faire. Three truants ran through the shoe store, grabbed the left oxford and played keep-away from Paul. Paul repeatedly jumped in the air, trying to grab the shoe the youths held over their heads. “C’mon, guys!”
The youths grew bored and shoved Paul into a promotional pyramid, and he went sprawling on the floor in an avalanche of Hush Puppies. Even his customers laughed. He’d had it. If life was going to kick him in the teeth anyway, he might as well be doing what he loved.
Paul dipped into his proceeds from the sale of his house. He hung out a shingle and had his name painted in gold block letters on the window of his office door. His enthusiasm for the job started paying off in any case that had no possibility of human contact. Tracking lost assets, researching ancestry for probate, taking surveillance photographs of empty buildings. Because Paul was so terrible with people, his other senses began to compensate, and Paul learned he had an almost mystical clairvoyance when it came to inanimate objects. Word got around, and Paul was sought out by law enforcement and the private sector for a specific kind of case. He began making headlines. “Lost Gems Located After Eighty Years,” “Murder Weapon Recovered from Lake,” “Human Skull Found in Victory Garden.”
Paul was patted on the back for his results and then browbeaten over the size of his bill, and his net rates became the cheapest in town. But with each success, Paul became more confident and assertive. A metamorphosis was taking place. Of course in Paul’s case, it was all relative; there could only be so much change.
He became Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye.
One afternoon in November, Paul was sitting in his office with his feet up on the desk, asking questions of one of those large novelty eight balls that tell fortunes. An answer floated up in the ball’s liquid window. “Fat chance.” The phone rang.
It flustered Paul and he threw the eight ball over his shoulder and out the third-floor window. He grabbed the receiver.
A t four-oh-five on a cool fall afternoon, the public information officer of the Montgomery, Alabama, Police Department called the assignment editors of the collected capital press corps. He announced a “walkout.” A walkout was a staged event where a police department assembles reporters and walks a suspect out in front of the cameras, at the optimum photographic angle and light, just in time to lead the six or eleven o’clock broadcasts. Reporters are supposed to yell, “Why’d ya do it?!”
At four-fifty, in front of a compressed line of still and video cameras, two husky officers escorted a handcuffed teenage girl out of the police station to a waiting jail van. The girl had ratty hair down in her face.
“Why’d ya do it?” a dozen reporters yelled in harmony.
The girl answered with the middle digit.
The snarling teenager seen on the six o’clock news across the great state of Alabama that night was the incorrigible daughter of the senior records keeper at Montgomery Memorial, a good, hardworking woman trying to straighten out her child. So she took her to work on a recent Friday afternoon and left her in an auxiliary records office to do her homework…where she logged on to the hospital’s confidential computer files and telephoned twenty patients, falsely informing them of positive HIV tests, malignant growths, late-stage leukemia and something she made up called “brain worms.”
Officials at Montgomery Memorial Hospital had been trying for three days to track down the twenty patients. They had reached eighteen. The nineteenth had shot himself in the head that morning. That left only one.
They tried the home phone but got no answer, so they sent someone out to his house. There was no car in the driveway and nobody answered the door. They couldn’t find Aristotle “Art” Tweed.
Neighbors hadn’t seen Tweed around in at least a week, so the hospital asked the police to trace his long-distance phone calls, credit-card charges and ATM withdrawals. The credit-card company already had an eye on Tweed, who, although not over the limit, had begun to amass charges with a frequency and eclecticism that tripped the company’s security software designed to detect cards that had fallen into the hands of binge criminals.
At the behest of the hospital’s civil attorneys, a private detective was dispatched to bring in the nomadic Mr. Tweed before he could incur any liability.
When Montgomery Memorial Hospital was advised to retain a private eye to track down Art Tweed, they followed the same corporate philosophy that guided patient care: cut cost regardless of result. Any law firm worth its salt would have known that the particular private detective selected by Montgomery Memorial was not right for this type of job: It involved people, not inanimate objects. However, the hospital had also retained the cheapest law firm in town, and there were no objections. They dialed the phone.
“I’m on the case,” said Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye. He put on a fedora, got in his black Ford Fairlane, put “The Peter Gunn Theme” on the radio and headed for Florida.
I have attained a humility that involves no loss of pride,” said Jethro Maddox, just after passing gas in the blue Malibu heading down U.S. 19.
Art Tweed quietly stared out the passenger window, saddened by all the bullies in the world.
They were in the Big Bend, where Florida ’s panhandle makes the wide turn south into the peninsula. There were no more beaches, no postcard scenes. A small rusty bridge spanned a gorge. Art saw a brown highway sign at the river that had a bunch of music notes and the name Stephen Foster. As they crossed the Suwannee River, Art looked down and saw a handmade wooden canoe knifing the glass surface of the water.