I’d gone to the cops. Nothing. I’d even hired a private investigator I’d known when he was on the police force, a guy named Mike Cobb. Smart guy and he tried hard. We went back through every story I’d ever written that could have even remotely pissed somebody off. Examined in detail my personal life back to grade school. Friends, enemies, relatives, school mates, teammates — he looked at all of it. And wasn’t able to turn up a thing.
The cops raised the possibility, a legitimate one, that the note writer might be a crank — some heartless bastard who had read about the fire and decided to play the cruelest of jokes as a follow-up. Cobb couldn’t see it and neither could I. The message coming a year to the day after the fire, the reference to Donna’s corny little plaque that had sat next to the front door….
Eventually the cops came to agree with what Cobb and I had already concluded.
There was someone in this world who hated me.
One
November 2013
It was annoying. A noise I couldn’t quite get my head around. A loud noise. A loud banging noise.
It was playing hell with my sleep. Sleep that I needed to combat the hangover that was sure to be an unpleasant reality once my sleeping was done. Which I was hoping wouldn’t be for some time.
The banging noise seemed to have other ideas. I sat up in bed, looked over at the digital clock. 8:35. The banging had been joined by another noise. Yelling. It occurred to me that the person doing the yelling might be the same person who was doing the banging. I was about to shout something disagreeable at the noisemaker when I realized that what he was yelling was my name. And what he was banging on was my door.
I threw the covers back and stood up. It didn’t feel pleasant to do that but I didn’t think I’d die from it either. I stepped over the clothes I’d worn the day before, walked to the door, leaned on it and said, “I’ll make you a deal. You quit making that Goddamn racket and I’ll open the door in sixty seconds.”
The yelling and pounding stopped. The person on the other side of the door said, “Deal.”
I found the light switch and flipped it on, a decision I instantly regretted. I walked to the sink, shook three Extra-Strength Tylenol out of a bottle that was sitting on the counter, and gulped down the pills and two glasses of water. I turned away from the sink, reached down, extricated a pair of well-worn jeans and an ancient Bryan Adams Waking Up the Neighbours T-shirt from the pile on the floor, and threw them on the bed. I sat, pulled off my sweat pants, and in relatively few attempts was able to exchange the sweats for the jeans and T-shirt.
The voice outside the door said, “You’re at forty-five seconds.”
“Shut up.”
“I’ve got coffee out here.”
“What kind?”
“Starbucks. Pike Place. Grande.”
I stood up, crossed the floor a second time, and opened the door. Mike Cobb looked down at me. I’m not a little guy, but I was small standing next to Cobb. He smiled. “Milk and sugar or black. I don’t remember.”
“Milk and sugar.”
He extended one hand.
I accepted the coffee and stepped back to let him in. My apartment is a large bachelor, which means the bed is in the living room, the far end of the room. I led Cobb to the kitchen/living area, gathered a couple of days’ newspapers off the table, and threw them on a pile next to the fridge. I pulled out a chair and sat down.
I more or less pointed at one of the other chairs at the table and Cobb also sat. He was wearing a brown leather jacket over a bulky knit tan sweater. Wrangler jeans with no belt. New Balance trainers that looked fresh out of the box. A Jersey Boys ball cap sat just slightly off centre, revealing light brown hair parted on the left with no hint of grey at the temples, though he had to be getting close to that time. Cobb had never told me his age but I figured he was maybe five years older than me, which put him in his early forties.
I thought about apologizing for the mess but decided against it, first of all because mess is a relative term and I’d seen my apartment look much worse, and secondly because people who drop in unexpectedly this early in the morning can damn well take the place the way it comes.
“See you got rid of the moustache,” I said.
“See you grew one,” Cobb replied. “Kind of evens it out.”
We sipped coffee. He removed the ball cap and set it beside him.
“You busy?” He was still smiling.
“Do I look busy?”
“No. You look like crap but you don’t look busy.”
“Banging, yelling, and insults. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
I’d talked to Cobb a couple of times since he’d tried to help me with my arsonist/anonymous note writer problem. I’d used him as a resource for a couple of stories I’d done that had a crime focus.
I looked at him. Though he hadn’t been able to track the person who sent the note — and also very likely burned down my house and killed my wife — Cobb had worked hard at it, then returned half his fee when he wasn’t successful.
He didn’t answer. Instead he stood and walked around, surveying the apartment. He’d never been in here before. He stopped at the stereo and CD collection, a series of boxes and stands that takes up a third of the space.
“There are record stores that don’t have this kind of selection. You actually listen to these?”
“Yeah.”
“All of them?”
“Yeah. Listen, Cobb, I’m betting you didn’t come over here at the crack of damn dawn to discuss my music preferences.”
“It’s 8:44.”
“The crack of damn dawn.”
He turned away from the music to look at me, then came back to the chair at the table and sat down again.
“I could use your help with something.”
“Sure, just make an appointment with my secretary. I may have an opening next Tuesday.”
“I was thinking more like right now. There’s a bit of urgency to my request.”
“I’m listening.”
“Good because this will take a little time.” As if to reinforce what he’d just said, he pulled off the jacket and draped it over the back of his chair.
I drank coffee. Waited.
“A guy came by my office yesterday morning, a guy named Larry Blevins.”
I looked up from the coffee. “Don’t know the name.”
“You will. Blevins has a seventeen-year-old son, Jay. High school dropout, got into alcohol in more than a recreational way in tenth grade, moved on to drugs a year or so later, was out of school a few months after that.”
“Cocaine?”
A small nod. “Kid has eclectic tastes. Crack’s his main thing though. The family’s tried every way they could think of to get the kid off the juice and off the street — treatment, counselling, spent a lot of money, threw him out, took him back home, tough love, real love, all of it. Last week the kid ended up in hospital; they almost lost him. Overdose. The family figured maybe this would be the thing that might get Jay motivated to get off the stuff.”
“I think I know where this is going,” I said.
Cobb nodded again. “When they got him home they talked about it, cried, begged, bargained, all the stuff they tell you you’re not supposed to do. Four nights ago Jay got some money and the car keys