The Stalking Horse

CHAPTER 1

We were sitting at a table in the dining room at Heroes Restaurant next to a window that overlooked the Manassas Amtrak station. On the far track, a northbound Norfolk Southern freight slid by. A blast from its horn cut the air as the train rolled through the Main Street crossing. The last car passed by, and small town, southern, midday noises once again drifted through the open window on a late September breeze.

The passing train had momentarily stifled conversation in the restaurant. I glanced around the room at photos of three generations of American heroes. Most of them were famous and easily recognizable. John Wayne, Albert Einstein, the Apollo astronauts and Ty Cobb were just a few of the greats who stared silently from the exposed brick walls.

Most of the noontime crowd was gone and only a few of the tables remained occupied. I saw a lawyer who specialized in defending clients accused of drug-related crimes. He nodded in my direction before he resumed a quiet conversation with an older couple who probably had taken a second mortgage on the house to bail out an ungrateful offspring. Two tables away was a vice president from the local savings and loan, with a woman not his wife. We ignored each other.

I drank some Victory lager while she resumed her story as we waited for lunch. Her glass of chardonnay sat untouched.

I’m looking for a man. I let the obvious wisecracks go unspoken as she withdrew a photograph from her purse. Leaning forward, I took the black and white photo from her outstretched hand.

It was square, about three inches on a side. Along one edge was the date imprinted by the processor - 1961. In the picture, a tall, lean man stood languidly beside a dark sedan. The front and rear of the car were out of the field of view, but I could tell it was a 1960 Chevy, dark in color. It gleamed in the sunshine and was possibly brand new when the photo was taken.

The man was dressed casually. White, short-sleeved shirt, light colored pants, probably tan, and dark shoes. His hair was cropped close and appeared to be light brown. Given the size of the car behind him, I guessed his height at about six feet, weight around one-seventy. His grin looked strained. Eyes with a certain hardness to them, a perfect nose and a strong, dimpled chin looked back at me across three decades.

His name is Jake Carpenter. His given name is Jacob. As you can see, that’s an old picture, but it’s the only one I hav—, ah, could get. He’s the beneficiary on an insurance policy and the company, National Life in Philadelphia, is making an effort to locate him.

The waitress arrived with her Caesar salad and my medium-well burger. I finished my beer and nodded for another.

How much is the policy for, Miss Tilton?

Two hundred thousand, she replied. The insured was an uncle of Carpenter’s who died last week.

What was the uncle’s name?

Milo Carpenter. Milo X. Carpenter. He was eighty-two. Cause of death was heart failure. The words rolled off her tongue like the sound of a computer voice synthesizer. Emotionless lines delivered in a bad play.

You said you came down from Philadelphia to find this man. Are you with the insurance company? And if you don’t mind me saying, you don’t have a typical Philadelphia accent. I’ve met some Philly people over the years, and they have a distinctive way of talking. I smiled to let her know I wasn’t trying to insult her, just being curious.

She cleared her throat nervously and brought the wine glass to her twenty-something lips. I watched her face as she eyed me over the rim of the glass. It was a face you could watch all day. Brown eyes nicely spaced beside a small, delicate nose. Her lips glistened in the afternoon sunlight and though the mouth seemed too wide, I thought how the same type on Bacall had made more than one heart beat faster.

No, she answered as she brushed a stray strand of hair from her cheek. Although I do have a financial interest in the matter. You see, there are two beneficiaries, me and Mr. Carpenter. And I’ve spent years getting rid of that Philly accent you mentioned. A small frown passed over her face but only for a moment.

My second beer arrived. I sipped cold lager in silence.

Before she could continue, our waitress asked, Are you Martha Tilton?

She nodded ‘Yes.’

You have a phone call. Please follow me and I’ll show you where you can take it.

Tilton arose and I politely came halfway to my feet. The two women walked across the hardwood dining room floor. I settled back into my chair and noticed the appraising looks of the men in the room as Miss Tilton passed by them.

When I had arrived for our meeting, she had been waiting at the table. Until now I hadn’t seen the whole woman.

She was wearing a blue business suit with a skirt that stopped an interesting distance north of her knees. A small slit on the side exposed just enough thigh to cause a married man to stuff his ring into his pocket and try to look single. Her three-inch heels gave her rear an undulation when she walked that bordered on hypnotic. I drank some beer to break the trance I felt coming on.

As she spoke on the phone in the restaurant’s foyer, she idly toyed with a thin, gold chain hanging around her neck. I watched as she turned slightly in my direction and provided a view of her splendid breasts which were pushing against the confines of a white silk blouse. She put a hand on her hip and shifted her weight to her right leg, pulling the shirt taut. I realized I was holding my breath as I took in her incredible physical appearance. There was something in the back of my mind, nagging at me. Had we met before? No, I’d remember that woman. But something was very familiar about her.

She ended her conversation and returned to the table. For a moment she stood and looked directly into my eyes. I wondered if she could read the dark secrets of my overactive libido. Apparently my lust was well hidden, or she was used to the type of depravity that I felt was evident on my face because she flashed a wistful smile and resumed her place across from me.

Sorry, she said, a family matter. I left the restaurant’s number in case I was needed.

Quite all right, I offered. You were telling me about two beneficiaries, you and Mr. Carpenter.

Yes. I was a housekeeper-nurse for the late Mr. Carpenter. I had worked full-time for him since graduating from nursing school. It was four years in June. We had a very close relationship and he listed me as a co-beneficiary on the policy. As if to defend her relationship with the deceased, she added, Mr. Quinn, I was the daughter he’d never had. I didn’t even know he had done it until after his death and a lawyer called me to tell me I was on the policy.

So you get half of two hundred big ones. Nice. But I don’t understand why you need a private investigator to do something you could do yourself. Open a phone book, find ‘Carpenter, Jake’ in the C’s, call him, and cash in the policy.

I wish it were that easy. Jake’s uncle always described him as a vagabond. Never stays in one place very long. Milo said Jake was the first hippie. One of the first, anyway. He never put down roots. About two weeks ago Milo got word that Jake was in Manassas.

I lit a cigarette and exhaled. Two weeks turns a trail pretty cold. And a guy who lived on the road… I let it die.

He could still be here, she offered.

Why Manassas? Nothing much ever happens around here. In fact, my friend who teaches at the high school says every kid’s dream is to get out of here as fast as they can after graduation. They want to move someplace where there’s some excitement. Hasn’t been much of that around here since the early 1860s.

Jake once lived here. But I’m afraid I don’t know where or how long ago.

I thought it over. If the guy was a gypsy like his uncle said, he could have skipped days ago. In any direction.

Then she played her trump card.

Find him within a week and I’ll pay you a bonus. Five thousand dollars.

That’s an incentive I don’t usually get. Two hundred a day and expenses, yes. Instant lottery prizes, no.

I promised myself I’d find him. She drew a deep breath and looked down at her hands resting before her on the table. After I learned of Milo’s gesture to me.

So my client was a romantic. That meant there were at least two of us in the room. Her eyes glinted and I thought I spied a tear in the corner of the right one.

I’ll do it.

She smiled, took an envelope from her purse and passed it across the table to me. Inside were five one hundred-dollar bills, the picture of Carpenter, and a slip of paper with the name of the motel where she was staying.

I paid the bill and headed back to the office with more than one idea in mind on how I could spend five thousand dollars. Most of them, in fact, quite legal.

CHAPTER 2

The office smelled of stale cigarettes. Closed all weekend, the air was hot and I began to sweat when I entered the waiting room. By the time I had unlocked the door to the inner office, I was perspiring on a serious level. My place is upstairs from an insurance agent, sandwiched between two attorneys’ offices, across the street from the old courthouse.

The two windows in my private office overlook Grant Avenue and offer a view of the old Piedmont Savings and Loan building. I opened them both to get some ventilation. It took a few minutes for the breeze to bring the temperature down from the level of an out of control sauna and dispel the aroma of burnt tobacco.

I hung my sport coat on the back of the door and rolled up my sleeves. If I’d had a tie on, I would have loosened it.

Sitting at my desk, I inventoried the mail I had picked out of the box on my way up the stairs. Mostly junk, an envelope with my return address marked Return to Sender - Addressee Unknown, a reminder from the landlord that rents would increase five percent on the first of October, and the annual personal property tax bill on my ’64 Chevy. I filed everything in the wastepaper basket except the returned bill and the property tax notice. I’d find my former client in the near future and try to collect. It’s tough to stick a detective. Sooner or later he’ll find you to settle up. If I was lucky, he’d cough up enough to cover the tax on my car.

Except for the desk, a filing cabinet, and a semi-comfortable chair for clients to use, the office was sparsely decorated. A small portable radio and a few books occupied a battered, three-shelf bookcase along with my 1965 Little League All Star trophy.

Usually I meet clients at their homes, or like today, at a restaurant. People are more at ease in friendly surroundings like home or in a bar. A private investigator’s office can seem too much like a police station. Or be a reminder that they’ve reached the end of their rope and need outside help to deal with what looks like a desperate situation.

I didn’t have much to go on when it came to finding Jake Carpenter. I pulled a writing tablet from the center desk drawer and made notes. Automatically, I reached over to the radio and flipped on WBBM, The Big Band Music station in Northern Virginia. The Glenn Miller band was halfway through String of Pearls.

I’ve listened to a lot of music in almost forty years, but Big Band reaches closer to my soul than any other type. For the most part, friends, both younger and older than I am, cannot understand the attraction. I know why I like it and that’s all that really matters.

Linda Ronstadt, her full, clear voice backed up by Nelson Riddle’s orchestra, picked up What’s New? as the Miller tune ended. Listening to the vocalist, something nagged at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t pin it down. I leaned back in my swivel chair and lit a cigarette. Exhaled smoke whipped ceiling-ward on the flow of air from the window.

I found only two listings for Carpenter in the local phone book. After calling both numbers I realized they were both dead ends - one a recently relocated family from Texas and the other an eighty-two-year-old retired piano teacher who had never heard of either Jake or Jacob Carpenter.

For the next half hour I called contacts in the state department of motor vehicles, county and city police, and the phone company. It’s next to impossible to exist in this country without your name or social security number being in someone’s database or files. With a little luck, Jake Carpenter would show up with a driver’s license or a phone number.

I butted my third cigarette and wondered, though, if a middle-aged hippie vagabond would pop up in anyone’s software. About that time I noticed the personal property tax bill laying on my desk. I thought about Martha Tilton’s comment that Carpenter had lived in Manassas. Even though she didn’t know where or when, I knew someone who could help along those lines.

Karen Spencer works in the county tax office and has helped me in the past by putting an address with a name when I’d asked. We had sorted out this arrangement about a year ago. Six months ago she stole my heart and we have been a couple ever since. I’m a divorced guy who never thought he’d find someone again who he would consider the love of his life, but Karen held that title now.

I picked up the phone and poked out seven digits. She answered on the second ring.

Karen, it’s Bill. Mind if I stop by the office this afternoon for a minute?

Bill, how nice of you to call. It’s been a while. I thought maybe you’d fallen down a hole and died or something, she said icily.

Suddenly I remembered a promise to call her that had been made a week earlier. Oh, man, I think I’m in hot water.

I’m sorry. I should have called before now. Listen, I’ll come over and apologize in person. Okay?

Suit yourself. I’m not going anywhere until five o’clock.

She took what I had on Carpenter and wouldn’t promise that she’d be able to check it out before the end of the workday. Tax season was underway, you know, and things