"We've gotten a lot of complaints about this guy; looks like we'll have to check him out". Detective Andrews opened the Jack Winters file and flipped through reports from Visa, Mastercard, American Express and several merchants. Rawhide suitcases priced at $700, $300 owed for a leather billfold etched with Aztec motifs. At Smitty's, the man had charged a $4000 purchase of custom fitted wool suits and silk shirts, never paying a cent in nine months. He owed $3500 for a cruise to Barbados, $7000 for a European excursion and $10,000 for a tour through Thailand and India. Airfare, gourmet meals and stays in four star hotel suites had all been charged to his credit cards; now the banks demanded immediate payment. Checks to local restaurants, wineries and theaters had bounced.
"About $30,000 owed", the detective grunted.
"Yeah, but what can we do?" Bob, a young cop, asked. "Maybe threaten him a little? But didn't debtor's prison go out of style a long time ago?"
Mr. Winters hadn't responded to letters or calls from the collection agencies. His bank account held less than fifty dollars and he earned less than fifteen hundred dollars monthly from his pension and social security; the address in the file indicated an apartment in a deteriorating neighborhood, rather than a privately owned home. This suggested to the detective that the man had deliberately written bogus checks, and had no intention of paying his credit card debt.
"We might have him on fraud. At least on theft of services - the services of the cruise ship, the air line, the hotel staff." Detective Andrews coughed gruffly. "Or maybe financial incompetancy, if he's just old and crazy senile, and spending like a madman because he's forgotten he's poor. Maybe he just needs a nursing home. That's what we have to see; that's why we have to visit him."
Bob nodded. An easy case, he thought, unless crazy Jack Winters stood watch with a sawed-off shotgun. Probably, the old man would answer the door in bare feet and without his dentures; he'd only squirm, bite and kick feebly in resisting transport to jail or a psychiatric center. Much easier than subduing the guard at a crack warehouse, Bob thought, as he and Detective Andrews strode towards the squad car and started for the address on the file.
*******************
"Mr. Winters?"
A ribbed cotton undershirt, wet with perspiration, clung to the man's protruding ribs. Angular cheekbones jutted through parchment skin and his dry brown lips quivered to show stubbed yellow teeth. Behind the man, a refrigerator groaned and water dripped methodically from rusting spigots. Detective Andrews coughed back the stench of urine and booze that rose from the stairwell.
"Police. We have to talk."
Mr. Winters nodded feebly, then limped to a splintering wood table where he sat, then sipped from a glass of warm milk. Behind him, nail holes pocked the barren wall; a cot's legs buckled under a thin frayed mattress. In a dusky alcove, a recently flushed toilet gurgled and sputtered as water strained through the pipes; clumps of dusk clung to the chipped base. Detective Andrews spread the creditors' complaints across the small table.
"Explain."
Mr. Winters sighed. "See that church over there? That's where the service for my wife was held, last year, after the nursing home," he stammered, gasping between words; sweat inched down his jaws and neck. He stared out the window, squinting at the patched shingles on the pitched roof, the cracks in the steeple's gleaming whitewash and each skewed window casing in the squat main building. On the asphalt lot, preening schoolgirls now convened in twittering coveys. Mr. Winters recalled how relatives he hadn't seen in decades had gathered in the same lot before filing dutifully through the oak portal. Several nameless younger women, the grand-nieces of cousins he'd seen at someone's wedding when they were still kids, had promenaded through the church door after checking their lipstick in compact mirrors; they'd fingered their pearls during the service, while glancing coquettishly from under pertly angled, black straw hats. Five or six anonymous older women had perched on the ricketty pews, their crimped silver hair gleaming as they whispered to their cronies from behind dainty lace veils. Mr. Winters' daughter had finally flown home from California and his son had reported from Texas after a five year silence. Men had fumbled through wadded papers in their pockets and fidgetted until the pews creaked; Mr. Winters' own son had scribbled in his daily planner and his daughter had repeatedly stroked her watch band.
Mr. Winters glanced up at the glaring detective and his silent frowning colleague, then down at the reports from Mastercard and Visa.
"But the burial ended with a storm," Mr. Winters rasped. When he rode to the cemetary, fog shrouded all but one gnarled pine on the hill; in that pine, his wife seemed to take her last stand on earth. When the casket was being lowered into the ground and the minister droned his pre-fab eulogy, the thunderclouds rushed forth, searing the sky with lightning and slashing the ground with cold, prickly rain. All the powers of nature protested against the inadequate finale and mankind's indifference, screaming "This is the end of the scene, pay attention!"
Detective Andrews had flown to Illinois after his father's death, too late for apologies and reconciliation, but quickly forgetting his regrets as he busily helped his mother make funeral arrangements. For mother and son this had been a chore to be carried out efficiently, followed by work days and ordinary social obligations.
On the day of the funeral, the sun shone as it did on a million other mornings; a few clouds idled in the sky and the winds slept. The gods painted no special stage set; they composed no clamoring Wagnerian symphony, nor raging, screaming light show in the sky. If Father was a hero, it was of a myth known to few; the powers of nature worked unaware, without comment. Real life mourning wasn't like that portrayed in books; it lacked the dramatic grandeur. One didn't grieve so much as accidentally and occasionally remember.
"I'm a cop, here on business," he told himself. There was no time now for sympathy. Now was the time for questioning a law breaker, for staring into those feeble watery eyes until he figetted and confessed all. He cleared his throat. "OK, but what's this got to do with your money problems? You're not in debt to a funeral parlor."
"A month later, I heard the word." Mr. Winters felt claustrophobic, as though asphixiating inside a tin can. He paused to catch his breath. "Mesotheloma. I had a year, maybe two, to live. Six to nine months before the pain and wasting."
On the fire escape, a mangy cat lept atop the iron railing; it stared through the window with haughty amber eyes and grinned. Grease stains extended up the wall above his stove, tapering into dusky tentacles ready to jab him or coil around his chest and suffocate him. The warm milk, already curdling, smelled rancid; the bare mattress, only steps away, reeked of old sweat and decay.
"That kind of diagnosis makes you think," Mr. Winters panted. He recalled sending his daughter $500 checks, because his wife and his conscience had said he should; meanwhile, he's imagined shaking her lazy, impudent shoulders and bellowing that thirty-five year olds should fend for themselves. He'd bought new and improved appliances, the most advertised brand of dining room furniture and another mink coat to please the nagging wife; sometimes he'd loved her, but sometimes he'd imagined smothering her with his own tattered parka. His aching lower back and throbbing head had protested against that boring job for twenty years but fear, always the dread of unemployment or of hearing the family's complaints, had kept him with the company. Fear of confrontation and the unknown could paralyse a man for years, while the hrowing resentment consumed him like a cancer.
"Maybe I'd postponed living for seventy years, maybe I'd spent all my savings on the wife's nursing home bills," he hissed. "But now I had a lot of catching up to do, had to cram a lot of living into six months. Why should I care about the damn banks? Selfishness is a virtue when you're a dying man."
Call it his salvation, that selfishness - maybe the last sign of any life glimmering inside him, maybe the last spark to keep him going this long, Detective Andrews mused, then jerked awake as Mr. Winters strained forward and pushed the creditors' reports to the floor; sweat drenched the ancient face.
"Take your papers! Take me to jail!," he barked. "This tumor inside me's growing around my lungs; soon it'll encase them completely, like an iron wall. So, I already have a prison inside my own body, what does another jail matter?"
The old man coughed violently, clutching the window sill for support as his face flushed. Detective Andrews gaped; like most people, he tried not to think about nursing homes and terminal diseases. He instinctively looked away from gaunt faces and hunchbacked crones leaning against their walkers. He preferred the trivialized grim reaper of cartoons and Halloween costumes or mortality turned into the cold verbal abstractions of a court litigation. He avoided death unless it spat at him, but sometimes his job forced him to look at the unsanitized pictures of how a life could end.
The detective bent to gather up his papers, then returned them to their folder.
"Well," he muttered as he tapped the file mechanically against his left palm. "Well, it's a $30,000 debt, spent when you knew you had no money. That could be construed as fraud, Mr. Winters. This is serious, don't you forget it." He glanced at Bob, who stood mutely on guard beside him, then motioned to the door."Officer?"
Bob nodded, then walked to the exit.
"You might hear from us again," Detective Andrews asserted as he followed Bob; then he strode down the narrow stairwell to the cracked pavement outdoors, where he breathed in the bright, odorless, afternoon air.
**************
"So, what are we going to do?" Bob asked.
Detective Andrews rested his head against the high-backed squad car seat. "It's not like he has any money; nothing to pay a fine with or repossess. As he says, Mother Nature's already done a good job of punishing him. And if I knew I only had a few months left -"
"Yeah, but what are we going to do?" Bob demanded. "What are we going to write in our report?"
Nearby, gnats swarmed around a stiff baby bird half buried under silt; beside it, a sunflower had sprouted. Up the block, teenagers flailed their arms and shuffled in time to a boombox beat. On the church lot, a stray dog slept in the shade under an abandonned car; overhead, a jet hummed indifferently.
"I don't know, maybe -" Detective Andrews turned the key in the ignition. "Maybe we can say he wasn't around. Say we couldn't find our man." He paused. "Say that - We couldn't find the criminal."
