Something Out of Nothing
written by: Robb T. White
Mavery’s sister called me from Bluefield to tell me her brother was in the hospital. I’ll admit I had mixed feelings over the news. Mavery had screwed me out of a thousand dollars, and I wasn’t inclined to pity him.
I’d met her once. She was the darker half to his blond side. Fraternal twins. It didn’t surprise me he wound up in the prison hospital. That place was crawling with the Aryan Brotherhood.
“He has a serious concussion,” she said. “He said he was hit with a metal can of something.”
A couple cans of mackerel or tuna in a thick athletic sock makes for an effective homemade sap. They usually don’t dish out that kind of punishment unless you’ve crossed a serious line. Knowing Mavery Bickford, I wasn’t surprised. He was doing five years in a max-security prison for telemarketing fraud that usually got you sent to a white-collar prison camp where you spent your day playing with modeling clay.
She must have been reading my mind in the pause because she said, with some urgency, “He didn’t do nothin’, Mister Haftmann!”
I heard the sob catch in her throat. I knew Mavery had a twin back home. I didn’t know whether Maeve Bickford knew what crimes her brother got up to here in Ohio. Mavery once told me he never ran any scams because he lived there and didn’t want to foul his nest.
The thousand he ripped me off from was my fee for doing background checks on a couple dozen people and properties between the State Lodge on Lake Erie and a couple hundred acres of uncultivated land along the lakeshore. Mavery told me he was “the liaison” for a consortium of businessmen from Akron, Canton, and Cleveland interested in a major land purchase. Checking out land records at the Jefferson County courthouse and using public databases was nothing; prowling through dense foliage to take videos wasn’t much trouble, either—if you discount some big dogs running free in two places.
The money was for investigating the property owners. Knowing him as little as I did, I could guess he was looking for the right psychological approach to use with the money offered to get the land without creating a stir. He didn’t have to say much about the reason for the “discretion” he insisted on: it was rumored for years that casinos were coming to Jefferson-on-the-Lake. It would rocket our podunk resort town straight into the big time if it happened. Whoever got a foothold on the best real estate would score big. Once word got out the state was on the verge of licensing casino gambling up here, the gold rush would be on. Mavery told me he wanted to avoid “a bidding war” for land that you could have bought for a song before word traveled. It meant nothing to me personally. Gambling was never my vice.
I have only one chair in my tiny office on the trip. I call it a “bingo chair” because it came from out front on the sidewalk of the bingo arcade that shut down years ago. There’s a bar in there now, which, if any drinking establishment here has a claim to being upscale, it would be Tonio’s. All but a handful of my clients have come from my website. I could count on one hand the number of people who dropped in requesting my investigative services. The last time was two years ago when a local shopkeeper had her French bulldog stolen.
Mavery squirmed in the chair to rummage in her purse. Although Mavery was slender as a weasel, his sister was, to use an old-fashioned word, buxom. She came overdressed, and when the chair collapsed under her as I feared, I had a view all the way up those shapely legs. I scooted around my desk to assist her to her feet and had a second surprise that morning: her body weight didn’t jibe with her physique. There was muscle underneath that femininity. Her perfume stung my nostrils—cheap, citrusy.
Her hair was a little mussed, and she was embarrassed by the pratfall. I told her, half in jest, she could probably sue me for that rickety chair. The contents of her purse had spilled, all women’s things, cosmetics from what I could see. She shoved everything inside and fetched something out of her purse to hand me: a check, signed by Mavery Allen Bickford, for $1,500.
“It’s five hundred too much,” I said.
She was still a little flushed in the face from her fall. “He wants . . . he wants to hire you again. He told me to tell you that’s only a down payment on the bill.”
“What does he want me to do?”
“What you done . . . did before, only he wants you to offer these people money for their property.” She looked up suddenly, searching my face. “All fair and square, Mister Haftmann. He wants to buy the land from them at market value. He says you can fifteen percent higher, but any higher you need to contact me so I can tell him and we can go from there.”
More digging in that purse. She came out with a piece of paper.
I read the names of four people I’d investigated, although not like a cop with their databases, I can’t afford for deep dives. I checked them out through friends and family, spent time “accidentally” bumping into them or their relatives in grocery stores, cafés, and a few bars in town to see what tidbits I could gather up in my amateur profiling way.
“Did he tell you why he wants me to do this?”
“Oh yes, sir,” she said. The “sir” made me wince. Beautiful women of any age calling you that mean you are way beyond the pale. “he told me about the casino people he’s working for.”
“Is Mavery still—employed by them?”
A front man doing serious time in the Graybar Hotel seemed odd.
“Yep, he’s still workin’ for them. He told me to tell you he has no secrets from me on this one particular thing.”
I nodded. “That’s good.”
Mavery struck me as the type of fraudster who’d shove his grandmother off the sidewalk if he saw her standing on a dime. A real con artist wouldn’t hesitate to lay out money as the cost of doing business. Still, he was a client, and I had to hear it from him. She left my office with her heady perfume wafting around. It wasn’t the perfume that bothered me, though.
The penitentiary number was in my directory. I’d already made one call down there to talk to him after he stiffed me. He gave me ten pounds of bullshit in a five-pound bag why he couldn’t pay me. I figured that was the last I’d hear from him and planned to write it off on next year’s Schedule C tax return.
“Tom, great to hear from you, man.”
You’d think we were old friends catching up.
“How’s your head, Mavery?”
“I spent three days puking from the concussion,” he said. “Still throbs a bit.”
“You get right with those people?”
“I will,” he said, “once I get out of SHU.”
Segregated Housing Unit. The AB doesn’t consider a bill paid until they say so.
He readily confirmed the fact that Maeve was his liaison while he was in stir. He wouldn’t go into detail or name names of his “partners” in the prospective deal to secure land other than that they were “one-hundred percent copacetic, Tom.”
There was no point in chewing up his single, fifteen-minute phone access. But Mavery’s definition of copacetic and mine weren’t on the same planet, let alone ballpark. In the end, I agreed to follow up. I’ll confess it seemed like easy money to me, and I hadn’t exactly been rolling in cash like some gangbanger on Facebook. I told him to take care of his sister, considering he’d involved her that much in his so-called business venture.
“You don’t need to tell me that,” he snapped. “We’s twins, man. One blood! What’s mine is hers, and hers is mine.”
I doubted his comprehension of the fertilizing biology of twins was much more accurate than mine, but I let it go. I was now the payee in this relationship and grateful for any reason not to dwell on Penny’s Lounge, the bar across the street with its single neon sign beckoning me every idle afternoon.
The first name on the list was someone I knew of. He was a college graduate and a beneficiary of his parents’ will. The father was a notorious figure on the Strip. His father had bought up half the land on the Strip back when Tommy Dorsey’s swing band used to play here. The post-World War II boom brought the families of factory workers from all over Ohio and PA, and soon vacationers from Michigan to New York State came for the rental cottages and the beach. They left with souvenirs and T-shirts with tacky or obscene sayings on them and some bad sunburns. But they kept coming until you had a mix of college-aged drinkers, outlaw biker groups, families, locals, and runaway teenagers. Most of my money came from those last three groups.
I’d see the kid around in the summertime, trailed by his retinue. His father owned several bars by then, and they’d go pub crawling with him until the early hour; nobody had to spend a dime. I heard he got several bartenders fired for balking at his princely “drink on the house” habit of commandeering a bar until closing time.
The house he inherited was one of the biggest around. Now that we’ve achieved a kind of middle-class gentility, the place isn’t the showplace it once was in his grandfather’s day.
Two messages on Bradon de Mare’s recorder asking for an appointment to discuss business went ignored. His father wielded a heavy influence in the politics on the Strip, including zoning enforcement and alcohol licensing with state bureaucrats. I didn’t know how much the son inherited of that, but even a small measure would be significant. I knew of two businesses on the Strip that went broke over some falling out with Brandon’s old man.
The steel swing grate between the two foundation piers didn’t have a padlock, so I got out of my car and let myself through.
He answered the buzzer only after the third and longest ring to get him to the door. He arrived in a Japanese silk kimono with pheasants on it. The belt was loose, exposing his black Speedo briefs.
The scowl on his face said he wasn’t happy to be seeing me there.
“Mister DeVoe,” I said. “Thanks for answering the door. I was afraid I was getting a calloused thumb there for a while. I’m Thomas Haftmann, I own the—”
“I know who you are,” he snorted. “Our local gumshoe. Word around here is that the bartender has to pry you off the bar stool at Penny’s every night.”
I never saw him in the place. He bought it from my friend Tico ten years earlier. Too downscale for his tastes, a working-class bar, no trendy types, the TikTok crowd. “Yes, I’ve put a few bucks into your bank account over the years. I was wondering if you could spare me ten minutes of your time?”
“I have company.”
“We can talk here. No problem.”
He turned around as though his company was right behind him. When he turned back to face me, he had a smile on his face.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Fuck off. Go find a motel with windows to peep into.”
The door slammed. It missed taking some polish off my brogues by a centimeter. I chose Bradon first because I suspected he’d be the most difficult. That hunch just proved out. I returned to my office and sat thinking behind my desk.
The sun was well over the yardarm, so I headed across the street to Penny’s. Three Sheriff’s deputies were having an off-duty drink at one end of the bar, although that might have been up for debate. I knew two of them, the third by reputation. Tall, heavy-set, married, he volunteered for nights and weekends to lie in wait for women leaving the bars intoxicated. It was rumored he’d wheedle sex out of some in exchange for tearing up the ticket. I despised him on sight. Our little town is too small for secrets.
When the deputies on either side of Johnny Roback left, I made my move. He was a source for some of my best information on the legal goings-on in the county. My appreciation was proportional to the information. Johnny thought he was Gen-Z’s answer to James Dean, although most of his contemporaries would have to Google the name.
I was twice blessed because Deputy Roback was in a mood to gossip. The twenties I laid on the bar top were my way of greasing the conversation along. Young Braden DeVoe had higher political aspirations than his father and grandfather. He was being groomed for the state legislature by a party big shot. It wasn’t the first time this came up, but Roback put stock in it.
“The kid will be shelling out half his fortune to hush up scandals,” Johnny said.
Rumors about his womanizing weren’t new, either. I was beginning to think my money ill spent when he said: “He got himself into some shit out in Vegas last month with a stripper. She wrecked his EV Beemer.”
“No shit,” I said. Well, do tell.”
He did. Braden picked up a girl from a strip club or a casino. Johnny wasn’t sure. They were stopped on a desert highway doing 130 m.p.h. “If BMW didn’t cap those things at 130, who knows how fast he’d been driving it?”
“He? You said she was driving.”
“That’s what the charging document says,” Johnny told me. “By the time they got pulled over, she was in the driver’s seat, he was slumped on the passenger side. Cop out there made a call to see if he had any priors.”
“Did he?”
“Believe it or not, no.”
“So he gets her to take the rap, pays her fine, lawyer if need be, and gives her a nice little bonus for being so kind. Strippers having hearts of gold and all that.”
“Something like that.”
Not much but it would have to do.
My next call to young Braden was backed by a little research and some moderate fibbing. The Supreme Court said cops are allowed to lie. They didn’t say anything about private eyes.
My phone message was just enough to pique his curiosity. He left a message on my office phone: “I’ll give you ten minutes, Haftmann. Better be good.”
“That would depend on you, Braden,” I said to my little office mirror, adjusting my suitcoat. I wear it on special occasions, such as when I confront scumbags with their deeds.
Same entry procedure as before except that I didn’t have to wear out my thumb on the buzzer. This time, I was allowed in as far as the foyer. The furnishings and colors didn’t go with the house: mauve, apple-green, and oyster white. Lots of steel and chrome from where I stood. It looked more like an office in a Manhattan high-rise. This time he was dressed. Summer was winding down, but his tan looked great.
“Eilleen Whitehead,” I said before he had a chance to open his mouth.
“What? Who?”
“Your Vegas pickup,” I said. “What name did she give you—Bubbles?”
“What about her?”
“Her parents called me yesterday afternoon. They were asking me if I’d do a background investigation on you. They didn’t say, but I gathered they’re thinking of a lawsuit.”
“What the hell for?”
“It would seem the—shall we say—recompense you provided their daughter wasn’t enough. Poor Eileen has a suspended license now and had to give up her career in the entertainment field. But she has ambitions like you, Braden. She’s considering a career switch to med-surg nursing. Jiggling her assets on a platform under pink lights in a neon thong gets tougher when you turn forty.”
It was true that she did have parents, but they’d been divorced for twenty-six years. The father lived in Tacoma, Washington, a retired aerospace mechanic.
“God damn it, how much?”
“How much what?”
“How much do you want to keep your big mouth shut and stay shut, flatfoot?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything,” I said.
He stared at me with large dark eyes, pupils big. I wondered if he was high. The effect clashed with the red spots appearing on his cheeks. Like an angry Kewpie doll.
He jabbed his index finger into my chest. “I said how much—”
I flattened it against my chest and bent his finger backward. Not hard enough to break but hard enough to make his eyes water and his knees buckle. I released it.
“You fucking psycho—”
“All right, all right,” I said. “Let’s dispense with the cussing and the theatrics and discuss this like two gentlemen.”
“She was driving, you clown! I told that to the cops out there!”
“Of course you did,” I said. “You wouldn’t have much of a career in politics otherwise.”
In a way, I had him by the short and curlies no matter whether he was the driver or the passenger. The suspicion alone would be enough to put the kibosh on his budding political career. Nothing paints like mud.
When he becalmed himself enough to talk about something else, he asked me why I wanted that property.
“It’s all rock and sand,” he said. “There’s no lake access. It’s not even fallow, it’s worthless. My grandfather knew something about land values.”
“I didn’t ask the people who hired me,” I said. “Maybe they want to establish a Lutheran camp.”
He named a price.
“That’s pretty steep for a few acres of worthless land, Braden,” I said.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Take it or leave it. That’s my price, not a dollar less.”
One down, three more to go.
Mrs. Ethan Garrett had the largest chunk of land: twenty-seventeen acres.
“My husband wanted to build a campsite on it,” she said the following day. I was seated on a couch in her modest living room. “But the riots ruined business for Ethan and everybody back then. It was like that Marlon Brando movie, what’s it called, The Wild One.”
Before my time. But I knew it from chatting in bars with locals. Anyone around Mrs. Garrett’s age wouldn’t need reminding of it. To this day, people believed biker gangs tore the Strip apart in a battle that left businesses on fire and destroyed. The National Guard was deployed, and eight hundred arrests were made on the Fourth of July, 1965. The spark that set it off seemed to be the overcrowding in bars packed with college-aged drinkers. Fights broke out, bricks and bottles were thrown. Biker gangs were blamed, still are, but there wasn’t any evidence; it was all media hype. Some outlaw bikers were blamed because of their antics on the Strip, like wearing dead sheep’s heads around their necks and public urination. But it killed business for a decade until families felt safe enough to return.
Now I had my second Memorandum of Agreement in my coat pocket. My third name was a problem. Mrs. Spero Kristoff was pleasant, even jovial. She asked me three times what I did for a living. She was in the early stages of dementia. I wheedled the name of a daughter in Canton out of her, thanked her for the delicious green tea, which required a single sip of the foul liquid, and drove down to see her that day.
She was in her forties, frazzled, a mother of four young ones and clearly on the verge of exhaustion from having to drive up to Jefferson=-on-the-Lake every two days to check on her mother.
“She left the stove burner on last time,” she said. “The smoke alarms saved her life and kept the house from burning down that night.”
I pitied her. The prospect of selling the land appealed to her. She had, I discovered, power of attorney as well.
“She needs to go into a facility soon,” the daughter said. “I don’t know what else to do. I’m overwhelmed here.”
I told her what the market value of the land was currently worth. I told her not to sell for a dime less than four times that.
I left with her signed MOA in my pocket, feeling less elated than before. It was different with DeVoe. Was I cheating vulnerable people, even a dirtbag like DeVoe? Mavery licked his lips over titles like “liaison” and “front man.” They made me question the scraps and dregs of morals I still clung to, having shucked the rest long before I joined the Cleveland PD.
The last name was a local barfly I’d buy drinks for if I happened to bump into him at one of our less savory taverns, which were the only ones that hadn’t banned him. Sonny Greb was in his sixties. A devoted Browns fan, he wore his leather starter jacket until the wrinkles had wrinkles. His face was fissured from a lifetime of hard drinking and smoking. He’d get surly sometimes; more often than not, he was a happy drunk.
“You know I’m related to the ‘Pittsburgh Windmill,’ Haftmann?”
“I believe you told me that once or twice, Sonny.”
Harry Greb was a legendary middleweight who fought in the light heavyweight and heavyweight divisions. He earned his nickname from his bizarre, swinging style. Dempsey fought him and after the fight said he thought a glove factory had fallen on him.
Sonny should have balked. He didn’t. He signed the MOA right away. I don’t know think he completely understood what he was signing, although I explained it as carefully as I could. Nothing I said had as much significance as his fretting over the Browns’ quarterback problem. Before I left Annie’s, I made sure he understood he was coming into some money and that he was to wait until I gave him an asking price, no matter what lawyer the company sent around said was “fair.”
***
Another beautiful fall day. Winter seemed months away, but everyone knew it was right around the corner. I brought the report with my fee, marked Paid in Full, to Maeve’s room in the motel on the interstate. She was following her twin’s orders to remain here until he had the information for his business partners to act on.
It wasn’t that early when I knocked on her door, but she wasn’t dressed for the day. The two-piece sleepwear she had on was sheer, and she seemed to realize that as soon as she let me inside. One of the beds was loaded up with her things, mostly clothing and cosmetic bottles. My ex-wife taught me enough about women’s clothing to recognize the expensive from the knockoffs at a glance. Mavery was doing right by her. Like all narcissists and con artists, he had a knack for wrapping others in his life. I’d listened to him go from his slangy hill accent to perfect English, with who and whom distinguished correctly as fast as Philippine actors switch back-and-forth from English to Tagalog in my binge-watching films. Maeve didn’t tell me anything about herself or what she did for a living down there in Bluefield, West Virginia.
She excused herself to run into the bathroom with an armful of clothing scooped up from the bed. When she came out, her short black hair was brushed back behind her ears, she wore no makeup, and her clothing was baggy. Except for her crimson toenail polish, she looked like a wholesome, girl-next-door version of the one who’d shown up in my office that day.
She offered me coffee while I gave her the details about the four prospects in the file. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap, listening intently, occasionally nodding, but not asking me questions. I told her what I thought she should emphasize to her brother to make the sales pitch work.
When I was through talking, she asked me a strange question.
“You think Mavery’s up to one of his scams, don’t you, Mister Haftmann?”
I said, “Maybe,” then Yes,” and finally, “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “It makes me uncomfortable,” I said. “I don’t want any of those people cheated. They should be told they have the option of waiting until Mavery’s consortium actually moves on the deal.”
“I understand how you feel,” she said. “My brother has a way of soothing away your concerns without much regard for—” She hesitated.
“The truth,” I offered.
“He’s always been like that,” she said. “I was real shy when I was young. He always tried to make me feel better about things even when they was going bad, like when our parents would drink and fight. Sometimes the cops would come.”
She giggled like the young girl she had described herself to me. “When we used to go outside to look at the stars at night, I asked him why they didn’t fall to the ground. He laughed and told me it was because they was so small and nobody would get hurt. I don’t know how old I was, but I believed him.”
At the door, I stopped and turned to look at her. “Tell Mavery we’re squared up,” I said. “But I don’t want any more jobs from him.”
I left her there sitting on the bed, hands folded. A pretty girl from the hills of West Virginia as out of her depth as I was.
***
The rest of my day was spent talking to potential clients and following up on older cases, drafting bills and reports, answering calls and emails I’d been neglecting since the Bickfords monopolized my time. A long, dull day. Bypassing a nightcap at Penny’s to stay in my office in the dark, I couldn’t shake the feeling I was a shitheels. Drinking from the bottle in my drawer didn’t help. I hadn’t done anything illegal. But something wasn’t right from the git-go. That hunch was confirmed when I locked up my office to go home. It was close to three a.m.; the Strip was deserted. A few cars on the street. No pedestrians. The last bars had closed an hour ago.
That’s when I got tackled to the ground. Someone hit me from behind, around the knees, at the same time somebody came flying around the side of my car to hit me high. The classic convict takedown just like TV cop shows. What wasn’t just like the cop shows was the shellacking I took. I like to think I got a couple good licks in for the blows I took, but that would be an exaggeration. They left me stumbling against my fender and trotted off in no big hurry—job well done. It wasn’t the typical streetfighter brawl you see once in a while on the Strip. They knew how to punch without telegraphing it from here to Cleveland. They wore weightlifter gloves to protect their hands. Mine were swollen and scraped, bloody at the knuckles. That’s stupid TV, too. Throwing a punch at a human head is only going to smash your metacarpals. My jaw ached. My ribs punished me with every step.
Another excuse to hit the bottle when I got home. I made a cold compress out of soaked towels packed with ice cubes and lay on my couch thinking of who would want to kick my ass. They didn’t want to kill me, just give me a first-class trimming to let me know I’d made somebody unhappy. The only name that came to mind was written in big red letters across my neocortex.
Jim Beam kept me company while I pondered ways to make young Braden DeVoe pay. I passed out on the couch with a pleasant image of him tied by the wrists to a barbed-wire fence while I stroked his back with my cat-‘o-nine tails, barbed at the tips.
I don’t own a whip like that, much less like the ones they used to sell to kinky floggers in the sex shop on the Strip. It wasn’t likely Braden would be home to me if I came calling, so I had to put on my PI cap to surveil him. He wasn’t hard to follow in his yellow Lamborghini Gallardo because there wasn’t another one like it in the county. He had it tricked out with under-glow chassis lighting and LED light bars. You could see him coming, driving down the Strip on summer nights. It worked on some girls, no doubt, the way bug lights attract insects.
I was surprised when he pulled over to the curb at the donut shop. I figured him for one of those YouTuber nut jobs who pitch wholesome foods.
I caught him just as he reached for the doorknob. He took a long look at my bruised mug and swollen eyebrow ridge.
“I like the new look, Haftmann,” he said. “Neo-Neanderthal. It suits you. You should—”
He was off his feet, firmly gripped in my sore hands by his shirt front, knotted tight under the chin. It’s an easy hold to break if you know how. I jammed him against the brick siding of the shop. A worker in a white cap behind the glass counter saw the fracas and ran to the back of the shop.
“Before that kid inside gets off the phone to the dispatcher, tell me why you had your guys rough me up.”
He squirmed against my forearms, unable to free himself. His face was so close to mine that I saw flecks of spittle in the corners of his mouth. “You braindead moron! Whatever shit you got yourself into had nothing to do with me!”
“Prove it.”
“I don’t have to prove shit to you, you psychopath!”
I released him and stood back on the sidewalk in case he wanted to take a swing. The precinct wasn’t far from here. Local cops tend to arrive fast.
“I won’t be so nice next time.”
Walking back to my car, I was insulted and cursed a dozen times, all unoriginally. Epithets about my character and parentage, or incestuous taboo references involving me with my mother, bounced off my backside. It was like being stoned with popcorn, as my old partner Jack used to say when we cruised the mean streets of East Cleveland.
I thought about my parting remark. A classically stupid TV line there. But the damned thing was, I believed him. You get a feel for shitbirds when they lie to you. I didn’t believe he was. That meant I had more problems than I thought I did.
Jack taught me something else in homicide investigations: when you hit a dead end, go back. I had to go back to the beginning, and the beginning was Mavery.
I got on the phone to the assistant warden at Mavery’s prison, and I explained who I was and what I wanted. He was agreeable with certain restrictions he expected me to observe. He also gave me the contact with the GIU officer involved in Mavery’s dustup with the Brand.
The drive down to Lucasville on the Ohio River was pleasant. The air had less snap to it, and I let my mind roam among the hills and abandoned farms along the interstate. The trees hadn’t begun to turn colors yet, but it wouldn’t be New England when they did, which was always good enough for me.
Going through the prison rigmarole took an hour before the Gang Intelligence Officer appeared in the small room where they put me off the administration corridor. We were out of the way of the general population. These were the state’s bad boys and regulations were followed to a boot-camp rigor. I had a view of the yard where the cons were standing solo or mixing in groups, some jogging round the track. Some shirtless men were hoisting iron on the bench presses. No prison guard I ever spoke to wanted to see prisoners deprived of weights despite how bulked some of the men got from non-stop lifting; it kept them preoccupied, busy. Gerbils on a wheel won’t bite you if they’re exhausted from running in circles.
Benny MacGowan was one of those redheads who looked anywhere between thirty and fifty. Crows’ feet around the eyes. A downturned flicker of smile. Lots of years listening to the convict grapevine trying to sort the wheat from the chaff.
“They still use kites here?” I asked him. Triangular papers with code on them attached to a string passed from one cell to another.
“Kites, mirrors for lipreading, Morse code in the ductwork—shit, you name it, these guys have tried it or invented it.”
The Aryan Brotherhood famously used a cipher invented by Sir Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century, embedding the letters A and B in their communications inside and outside the walls. For years, they ordered hits, punishments, drug deals, and communicated orders to “associates” outside the prison to do their bidding until the FBI cracked the code.
He had the file on Mavery’s beating with him to remind him of the details.
“What I’m trying to find out,” I said, “is what the punishment was for.”
“Mavery told us it was over extortion. Deposit a certain amount of money in a con’s commissary account every month. The con wouldn’t be a gang member. He’d just realize he had some money to dispense, and he’d better be prompt about doing it.”
“That’s what Mavery’s sister told me,” I said.
“A week after that, one of my CI’s on Mavery’s tier told me it was bigger than that. We’d already intercepted phone calls from Mavery to a check kiter living in Columbus before the incident. He was pleading for contact with a certain member in the state legislature on an important committee. Apparently that committee was responsible for liquor licensing, casino gambling.”
“It sounds like Mavery was working for his investment group.”
“My source didn’t think so,” MacGowan said. “It sounded to him that Mavery was the one trying to bribe the legislator to stall it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Maybe you will if you listen to the tapes. But the only one who can give you that permission is the warden.”
More prison rigmarole. I signed three NDA’s in the warden’s office. He told me it was necessary in case the tapes became evidence in a future investigation into legislative malfeasance.
I listened to three fifteen-minute conversations between Mavery and the check kiter. Lord Bacon would have been impressed by the semantic subterfuge between these fraudsters. It was dull as dishwater, but it gradually dawned on me that Mavery was the one behind the stalling. It was also clear why in the third and final chat: he was representing a second group of potential investors unknown to the group he was acting as liaison for.
He wasn’t going for a liaison fee; he wanted a full partnership share.
The ride back to Northern Ohio in twilight was pleasant in a different way. Red streaks of sunset made the tops of trees glow and cast a softer light on the empty fields and hunchbacked barns. Horses and cattle in the fields I drove past made you think that life could be better, sweeter without the hustle and chaos we surround ourselves with. Sentimentality is the killer of older men. I steel myself against it every day.
***
Maeve was dressed to go clubbing. She begged me to excuse her for a moment while she ducked into the bathroom to apply her “warpaint.” I hadn’t heard that expression since my ex told me she was going out one evening after supper.
“You need makeup to go visit your sister?”
I’ll never forget the way she froze in front of the vanity with the tube of lipstick in her hand and the expression on her face. She was formulating a lie. That’s when I knew she was cheating on me.
“You never told me a second investor group was trying to muscle in on Mavery’s group,” I said.
I couldn’t see her, but from where I stood in the room, I had a perfect view of her reflection in the small bathroom mirror.
“There, all set,” she said, smiling at me, walking into the room. Her cheery disposition belied the substance and tone of my question.
“I don’t know who they are,” Maeve said. The moue on her face looked genuine. “He said they were bad people, dangerous men. One of ‘em’s a guy connected to a Youngstown crime family. Another one’s a gangbanger from Cleveland. The other guy, he said, looked ‘Mexican.’ Mavery said he worked for a cartel.”
“That sounds like an internet conspiracy,” I said. “Or a joke. ‘Three guys walk into a bar. One’s a mafioso, the second guy’s a Heartless Felon, the third guy’s a cartel assassin.’”
“Does Mavery have any names? I could investigate. It might help to know who he’s dealing with.”
“I’ll be sure to ask him when I speak to him, Mister Haftmann.”
She beamed a gorgeous smile at me, a hundred-watt lumens. Her one flaw presented, like an unexpected gift. One of her front teeth had a slight angular tilt to the other. You wouldn’t notice it easily. The boys in the holler down in Bluefield must have gone mad to get next to her.
She picked up her purse hanging from the chair, bent over to search among the items scattered on the second bed for her cell phone. The prolonged leaning was for my benefit: a view of her cleavage. When she straightened up, she would catch me staring and expect me to blush and leave in embarrassment. I haven’t blushed in twenty years.
“You knew your brother was planning a double-cross,” I said. “He got tangled up with some snitch for the AB down there, and they wanted a cut of the proceeds to come. Big money in casino gambling nowadays.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about, mister.”
Full-on hillbilly umbrage now.
“Maybe he got careless. Said something in the yard or in the chow line. The Brand doesn’t like somebody running a money-making operation under their noses. That’s their house.”
“Get the fuck out of my room.”
“I’m guessing whoever these people are, Mavery’s taking a full cut or maybe even asking for a bigger slice since he’s the top dog in this deal. Knowing him, knowing what a chiseler he is, I’m betting he isn’t putting up a dime. He has the people with land as his leverage, thanks to my work. He’ll have the right connections to get these people to sell right before the state legislator he’s bribing in Columbus will announce the decision. How am I doing so far, Maeve?”
“Shows what the fuck you know, asshole,” she snapped. “That guy in Columbus is my guy. I’ve been sucking his old, whiskey-limp dick for a year, and it’ll pay off big time as soon as I give the signal.”
That was news to me. Twin sister was the boss, not her convict bro.
The Japanese have a word for this. They call it a satori, something like our word for an epiphany.
“You had those guys beat me up,” I said.
“Fucking-A,” she said. “You did what you were paid to do, and I needed you to fuck off. Why didn’t you?”
“Stubborn, I guess.”
I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Maybe I stared too long at the family photos on the shelves and hanging on the walls in Mrs. Kristoff’s tidy house. Looking at the tired face of her daughter trying to do her best by her mother while being mobbed by her own children. Something gnawed at me ever since then.
“Stupid, you mean.”
“Maybe that, too.”
“Well, gee whiz, fucko. I guess you’ve been played all along. I was wonderin’ what was wrong with you for a while now. I practically been shovin’ my tits and pussy in your face and you ain’t done nothin’. I figured you was gay, ugly as you are.”
“You figured everything, right, Maeve? You played Mavery, too. He’s down there walking a tightrope now because of your little scheme. How long do you think it’ll be before he figures it out and begs you to save his neck?”
“Surprised it ain’t happened yet,” she said. “What do you care anyway? He was just an opportunity to make money. From the looks of your operation in this crappy little town, you sure as hell need it.”
“So who are these people you’re bringing in?”
“I’ve already wasted too much time on you. Get the fuck out of here.”
“Just curious,” I said. “People are going to gamble the same as they’re going to drink and do drugs. I don’t waste my life thinking about it. That would be shoveling hit against the tide as my father used to say.”
“I’ve got it from here, mister shithead private investigator, so if you don’t leave my room before I get to that fuckin’ door, I’m gonna bawl ‘rape’ at the top of my lungs. I’m fixin’ to go dancin’ at that redneck bar you got.”
“You might want to dress less provocatively for your mugshot.”
“Nobody’s got nothin’ on me, loser. I made somethin’ out of nothin’, ya hear? Didn’t have to spend a friggin’ dime to do it, neither! Just a few slurpy blowjobs to that old geezer and I’m gonna be about to cash in big time. The money’s lined up, them fools up there are ready to sell, thanks to you, and I’m gonna make more money in a day than my brother made in ten years from all his half-assed scams!”
“I can stop you.”
“You even think about it, fucker, that next beatdown’s gonna leave you in shit pants and a bib to catch your drool. It won’t be no crack on the head like my brother got. Ya-all gonna find out right quick what them AB boys can do with a punk like you, motherfucker. They’ll make sure them prison queens have some fun with your ass.”
She laid on the accent with a trowel, just like Mavery in one of his whimsical moods. But I knew she was serious as a prison fight.
I stepped aside. The perfume in her wake was the same shitty scent she’d used before.
***
It took me half the time to reach everyone on Mavery’s list. I drove down to Canton to see the busy mother first to make sure she understood she wasn’t to sell until the offer was right and far more than the figure I’d estimated.
The ones I didn’t contact meant I had to spend time in the courthouse records, but I got to most of them in two days, left voicemails for some, and had to drive out to one loner living in a cabin built from a kit on the lakeshore. He had plenty money, he said, but he was into the Henry David Thoreau thing.
“Life got too complicated for me,” he told me.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
The Sheriff’s Office put me in touch with the Ninth District AG, who was interested in what I had to tell him. I didn’t know the name of Maeve’s legislator, but he’d be easy to deduce from the committee listing. The AG was discreet and didn’t give me much feedback on what I had to say, but the conversation ended with me feeling confident the decision to sanction casino gambling in Jefferson-on-the-Lake was on hold for the moment.
I was surprised when young Braden DeVoe took the bar stool next to mine in Penny’s Lounge. He told the bartender to give me another.
“Who drinks Tom Collinses nowadays?” he said.
“I do.”
“You’re a dinosaur, Haftmann.”
“Maybe I am, but you just bought me a drink.”
“That’s because you saved me a boatload of money,” he said. “Some shill of a lawyer stopped by Tonio’s last week and offered me money for that land you wanted me to sell.”
“Did you sell it to him?”
“Fuck no. Not after all that ruckus you caused with spreading rumors of a casino being built next door to the State Lodge, for God’s sake. Everybody knows they’re holding on to a gold mine. I goddamned near gave that land away for nothing. Now, thanks to you, everybody knows to wait for the deal to come through down in Columbus before selling. This place is going to see a couple new millionaires.”
“I heard they put the brakes on casino gambling up here. Besides, you’re already a millionaire.”
“You dope,” he said. “You believe that? Once it gets started, it won’t stop, brother. My daddy taught me that. Human nature, he said. Greed and sex make the world go round. As for me being a millionaire—” he said, pausing to slug back the dregs off his dirty martini, “—no law I know of says you can’t have more.”
I watched him walk out the door. I thought about what he said: greed and sex being the twin pillars of civilization. I had a weird image of Atlas holding up the world with his deltoids marked “Greed” and “Sex.” He didn’t leave a tip.
They had a warrant out for Maeve. I don’t know all the statutes this state has for bribing an official. My ex married the lawyer she cheated on me with. Maybe I’ll ask her the next time I see her.
I heard from Johnny Roback they were looking for her down in Bluefield. So far, she’s still in the wind. I still see her in my mind’s eye, staring me down, mocking me, telling me how she outwitted me and everyone, including her own twin brother. Something out of nothing rings in my ears. I even said it to my reflection in the mirror in my house. I tried saying it in her accent, but it came out goofy, not at all like the way she did with malice that came from deep inside her.
The trouble with life is that when you try to live it right, it always comes out wrong or sounds like something from the movies.
The End
- Something Out of Nothing - August 2, 2026
