“These things happen,” Owl finally said.
“Yeh, well, I only bring it up so you know, any recommendation Matt gave you no longer stands up. I doubt he’d say the same today if you called and asked him.”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Owl said. “Cards on the table, I had heard something like that already, but wanted your side of it.”
“No side,” I said. “Just a professional disagreement.”
“Over what?”
“Oh, my being a professional. Matt disagreed.”
Owl snorted. “Guys like Matt, they don’t understand freelancers like you and me, Payton. That’s the trouble. He doesn’t…doesn’t get why we do it.”
I cleared my throat. “Why do we do it?” I asked. I didn’t even know myself. “But then again what I do, Mr. Rowell, and what you’ve achieved over your—”
“Oh fuck that,” he said, and it shut me up, but to my credit I didn’t sputter like my Aunt Fannie. “I mean going out on your own, Payton, starting your own business! Most people don’t know what that means. It takes guts.”
“Guts, yeh, but not brains,” I said. “Like spelunking with my dick out.”
He laughed.
“Something like that. But I made it. And it looks like you’re making it, too.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know how you managed it for fifty years, Owl.”
“Tell you one trick. You don’t think about the last fifty years. You don’t think about the last year. You think about tomorrow, you move with the times. Y’know how old I am?”
“How old?” I said.
“Eighty-four last month. But I still stay current with all the new technology. Just to keep my hand in. Lotsa guys my age, all they do is bitch about young people always talking on their cell phones, and meanwhile they’ve all got one, too, only none of them knows how to use it. Me, I don’t have a cell phone—but I’ve got a device that listens in on other people’s cell phones from up to twenty yards away, and you better believe I know how to use it.”
I heard a click on the line then, followed a moment later by the sound of a coin dropping into the phone’s metal guts.
When his voice came back, he got right down to business.
“Listen, Payton. The reason I called. I need your help to flush a tail out into the open. There’s a meeting later today and one of the people leaving the meeting, I think, is going to be followed. I need to know who is doing the following. It’s not much, just daywork, maybe into early evening. But you’ll be covered for the whole day. What’s your rate, Payton?”
I heard a sharp crack, like a distant rifle report or a wood plank slapping the ground, over the phone and out my window. I looked out, but didn’t see what made it, then heard it again, just out of view directly below my window, sounding more clearly like a flat wooden board smacking pavement.
Something about Owl’s call was bothering me, something off. My normal rate was $50-an-hour plus expenses, but I told him, “Hundred a day.”
“Please, not your professional rate, Payton. What’s your regular? C’mon, I’m retired, just a private citizen now, not a private eye.”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
“Oh, this? It’s a personal matter. Client is someone I owe a favor to. Old time’s sake. You live long enough, it’s actually a pleasure to still be around to repay your debts.”
Long as you don’t chalk up more along the way, I thought. But didn’t voice it.
“I should be comping you, Owl, professional courtesy. If it gets around to the other agencies that I’m not, I’d never get another referral throughout the five boroughs.”
That was it, the not-quite-right-something bugging me. George Rowell was connected, had friends in all the top agencies in Manhattan. Hell, he was tight with Moe Fedel. He only had to ring up Fedel Associates and have a half-dozen ops at his disposal, with probably a groovy spy-van thrown in, and all on the house. Even Matt Chadinsky—perennial tightwad—would have only billed him pro rate, and then torn up his check. Before he’d been recruited into the upper echelon at Metro, Matt had learned the ropes as Owl’s apprentice.
So with all that at Owl’s fingertips, why was he calling me? I’d be the first to say it: he could do better.
“Okay, a hundred,” he said. “But I buy you dinner later.”
I agreed. I’d never intended to comp him anyway. It was just bluff. I wouldn’t even comp my own mom these days. But I couldn’t just lap it up either. I asked him, “Why you bringing this to me, Owl? It can’t be my mad skills.”
Maybe the slang threw him, he didn’t respond right away. If not for the background noises and my looking down at him, I would’ve thought he’d hung up.
Instead, he gave me a jolt. Turned and tilted his head up and looked right at me framed in my second-floor window. Knew I’d been watching him, sensed it; he was a canny old bird. He smiled, a big toothy grin. Tall and bony as he was, for a second he did resemble an owl, an old white owl like on the cigar boxes. He shrugged his stooped shoulders.
“It’s short notice. And it’s right here, just a couple blocks away. Thought about who could cover it and you came to mind.”
“We talking hard cover? If it’s muscle you ne—”
“Nah,” Owl said. “Soft cover. Simple. Nothing rough. It’s just legwork, but I haven’t got the legs for it anymore. You do. And the Lower East Side is your neck of the woods. You’ve got the natural coloring.”
I nodded my head, but wasn’t completely convinced.
“And how’s this job tied in with Law Addison?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’ve turned him up?”
Owl laughed, no mirth in it though.
“No, no…haven’t found him. But I may have stumbled—”
Another click on the line. When no more coins dropped, an automated voice interrupted saying, “Please deposit twenty-five cents for the next three minutes.”
I told Owl to save his quarter and come on over. He waved in agreement and hung up the phone. He put a slip of paper in his jacket pocket, then, squaring his shoulders, he walked to the corner. I got my first good look at him.
He was ancient and not too steady on his pins. Rickety. Yeh, he needed a legman, all right. Hell, he could’ve used a registered nurse; every day I saw geezers younger than him wheeled around the city by their vacant-eyed assistants.
What was a guy his age doing still mixing in the business? If that’s what this was. That something-not-quite-right was still niggling at me. Possibly the rumor I’d heard that Owl had died from Alzheimer’s, maybe a kernel of truth in it? Going off on tangents. Strong emotion in his voice a couple times, anger, agitation. Was I about to be enmeshed in some sad senior moment? Dementia might account for his approaching me rather than one of his old friends if they were already alert to such episodes of Owl imagining himself back in harness.
The light changed and he started across. He looked frail, but had sounded solid enough over the phone.
Well, solid enough for me because, fact or fantasy, I could use his hundred bucks, even if I only spent the rest of the day tramping after heffalumps and woozles.
Waiting for him to buzz, I tried to make myself and the office more presentable, but there wasn’t much to work with. The floor was littered with debris, spent matches, scratched lottery tickets, splayed newspapers, and balled-up socks. I definitely didn’t put on much of a front. Trouble was there wasn’t much back of it either.
Two-thirds of the year gone by and I’d only had four paying clients, all small gigs lasting no longer than a week. In some ways, satisfying jobs. But I couldn’t live on satisfaction.