When the talk gets cheap

Posted by admin in Uncategorized Nov 15th, 2004 | 2 responses

Note: This story is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent and most definitely guilty.

Chapter 1:

The Job and a Whole Lotta Mountain Dew

It was late Saturday afternoon, October 30th. One of those days that stretched like cheap gum on the boardwalk, and you step on it, and it sticks and stretches out, and you gotta find some damn scissors to cut it off or a damn Foot Locker to get some new shoes. The room was hot, and the oscillating blades of my Honeywell commercial grade fan did nothing but blow in more hot air. Hot, stinking Los Angeles air that was giving me cancer, which would kill me a lot faster than any product of the tobacco companies could. There’s a price to pay for every city you live in. Los Angeles is no exception.

I was on my way out when I heard an urgent knock on the door.

“Who is it?” I yelled.

I don’t yell very often, but my door is thick, and you gotta yell. The guy on the other side didn’t know that, and just pounded harder. I checked the peephole. Some geekish looking Asian kid sweating bullets and taking boxing lessons on my door. Some people just don’t know when to quit.

I waited until he started his flurry of knocks before I yanked the door open. He stumbled in sheepishly, shaking his hand off. He obviously didn’t know that if your fist ever gets into a boxing match with a door, the door usually wins. That’s because a door doesn’t have feelings.

“I’m, err, sorry about the knocking,” he said coyly, “I didn’t think you were in.”

“So knocking harder would magically teleport me in the room, is that it?” I retorted.

“Err, no. I guess not. I’m sorry.”

“You damn well should be. I was on my way to get lunch, and then you bust in outta nowhere.” I was getting impatient.

“You eat lunch this late in the day?” he asked, genuinely surprised.

“I get up late, alright? I’m a nocturnal guy. That’s just how my circadian rhythms go. If you wanna lecture me on my sleeping habits, then scram. I don’t need it. My mom does it for me.”

“No, let me explain. I need your help,” he said.

“Sure ya do.”

“My name is Freddie. I’m a freshman here,” he explained.

“No kidding. My name is Freddie too,” I told him.

“I know. That’s why I came. I’ve lost something of mine. Something valuable. I mean it was stupid, I shouldn’t have…”

I pulled the brakes on the stammering bus before it drove clear off a cliff and killed everyone riding it. “Shut up and sit down. Start from the beginning.”

He pulled a seat by my desk and sat on it, hunched over, running his hands nervously through his hair. I leaned up against my bed.

“Yesterday night… well, this morning at around 1 AM, my friend Max and I were shooting pool in the Birnkrant building lobby next door.”

I knew Max. He was a friend of mine, too. I had shot with him a few times, too. Small world.

“Anyway, we were tired, so we left, but I left my coat behind, on a chair by the pool table. I woke up today, and just remembered it, and I ran down to get it.”

He was wearing a silver coat already. “Is that the coat?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“The coat was still there. It’s what was in the pockets that’s missing,” he said.

“And what was in the pockets?” I asked. Probably something embarrassing. Or highly personal. That’s how most private dick jobs were in the movies. My instincts screamed “naked pictures,” but he didn’t seem to be the type. Maybe “semi-naked pictures.”

“I had my cell phone and my iPod in there,” he said.

I let out a low whistle. The iPod was worth a cool $400. That could buy you a lot of Mountain Dew. I could used a cold Mountain Dew right about now.

“Did you have any naked or semi-naked pictures of yourself on that iPod,” I asked.

“No! Why? That’s disgusting!” he said, terribly offended.

“Kid, that stuff is as good as gone. It doesn’t matter what you have on there, you ain’t getting it back,” I told him.

He sighed. “I know. It was a stupid thing to leave lying around, and I’m an idiot for wanting it back. But I want you to do what you can.”

I rolled my eyes. “Alright, alright, I’ll look into it, but only because you’re a friend of a friend.”

He looked thankful. “I’m very thankful,” he said.

“I know. You looked that way,” I told him. “Now I’m going to need all the information you got. Anything that might help me out.”

He handed me a sheet of paper with a bunch of information on it. Passwords, serial numbers, the works.

“That should be enough,” he said.

“Alright, now scram. I gotta eat,” I said. He stayed in his seat.

“How… will I get in touch with you?” he asked.

“I’ll get in touch with you,” I said, as a grabbed my coat, walked out into the hallway, and closed the door behind me.

About halfway down the hall, I remembered something and turned around. I ran back to my room and opened the door. Freddie was still inside sitting, like I had left him.

“I’d also appreciate it if you’d get out of my room when I’m not in it,” I said.

Chapter Two:

Food for Thought and Stealing Laptops

Everyone’s Kitchen was a ghost town. Or a ghost kitchen, because it wasn’t really a town. Either everyone had died because of food poisoning, and they were chopping up the bodies in the back to make tomorrow’s meat loaf, or people don’t eat lunch at 4:30. I guessed the latter.

There were some scattered insomniacs chowing down on cheap Mexican food around the room as I grabbed a tray and sat down facing the door. I had seen a Discovery Channel program on how you should always face the door just in case mad gunmen came busting in and spraying lead like water from a garden hose. I can’t remember why, but I think it’s so that way, you take the steaming lead slugs right in your chest like a man, and not in the back, like some wussfaced ninny. You can always trust the Discovery Channel for good advice like that.

As I dug into my bland meal, I took out the sheet of paper Freddie gave me and took a closer look. It had a little diagram of the pool room, and where things were, and a brief sum up of what went down when. The serial number and part numbers of the iPod would only be useful if he had to file a police report, but I knew how LAPD worked. Unless you had some grease to smear all over the gears, nothing would turn for you, especially not in a case like this. And I’m not talking about real grease either. I’m talking metaphorical grease. And that metaphor stood for money.

There was a username and password for his T-Mobile account. I stored it away in the back of my memory. It might be useful later on to check up on that phone of his. I committed the contents of the paper to memory, and tore it up and mashed it into my mashed potatoes. They tasted a little better, actually, and I know fiber is good for you in any case. I put my tray away and headed out. It was time to check out the scene of the crime.

The bright hot Los Angeles sun slapped me right across the eyes as I stepped outside. All the damn detective movies set in L.A. had perpetual rain and fog. Not in Southern California. It was sunny twenty-four/seven down here. Well, not literally. The sun set and all. We weren’t insane, like those poor saps in Alaska or some other craphole. But it was pretty sunny and hot, pretty much all the time. This was not the kind of weather suited for the Byronic detective. It was more suited for ditzy girls in pink mini skirts and Ugg boots, and guys on long boards wearing surfer shorts.

Birnkrant was less than a minute away. There were two entrances, a main entrance, and a smaller single door to the right. I tested it. No way you could enter from here unless somebody let you in. The main doors were locked up like precious pirate booty. You needed an I.D. card to get in, and I didn’t have one. Luckily, somebody happened along and I followed her through. She eyed me suspiciously. I eyed her back.

“Do you live here?” she asked.

“No,” I replied, “I’m only here for the laptops.”

She ignored me, and disappeared around the corner where the elevators were. Immediately to the right of the entrance was the door into the lounge. It was a long room, with a row of chairs on the right side next to the large windows with vertical blinds drawn. No way anybody could see into this room. There was a TV on the left desk, flanked by two garbage cans, and a red pool table at the far end surrounded by some chairs. I walked over to it.

I sat down on the chair the coat was on, according to Freddie’s diagram, and looked around. There was no chance anybody walking in the lobby back and forth from the main entrance to the elevators could see it. Nobody from outside could possibly see it either. Whoever took it either knew it was there, or regularly canvassed the room for stuff to pick up.

I left the building, and bumped into Freddie as he was heading to a class.

“Was there anybody else in the room that night?” I asked.

“There was a group of people earlier who watched a movie while we shot pool. This other guy played with us for a bit after the movie, but everyone was gone by the end. Why?”

“Just curious,” I said. I left him and headed back up to my room. Time to check up on his T-Mobile website.

Chapter 3:

A Sloppy Doofus

“It would take a phenomenal idiot”, I thought as I turned the key and opened my door, “and a great deal of luck if this turns up anything.” Most of the time, when somebody steals a cellphone, they sell it, or strip it down and sell the parts. Sometimes they rip out the SIM card and reprogram it. I knew that most T-Mobile stores in particular kept the SIM cards underneath the stack of bills in the drawer, alongside the fifties and hundreds. There’s no trace of your phone, and it’s as good as gone. So I was pretty pessimistic about my chances when I fired up my laptop and logged onto the website.

Imagine my surprise when the log showed calls made after the phone was stolen. This was a huge break. It took a huge proverbial piece broken off from a massive sized Kit-Kat Bar of crime. Not only did the person keep the cell phone, they were using it, and from here on out, I could see who they were calling. The first call was made this morning at 7:46 AM to a Long Beach number. At 12:00 PM, there was a long sixteen minute call made to an Inglewood number, and at 4:30 PM, another long fifteen minute call to the same number. I checked my watch. It was 4:56.

It must be a student, I thought with grim satisfaction, as I headed over to Max’s room. He or she must’ve been in the lounge that night, noticed the coat, and returned when Freddie left. But the nature of the calls was a bit odd. They were all being made to residential phone numbers in the Los Angeles area. The person must know the area well, or have friends around.

I had Max do some quick reverse phone number lookups for each of the numbers that were called, while I wrote down the information. Random women’s names popped up from what was previously nothing. What was their relation to the theif? Relatives? Friends? No way I could find out unless I called those numbers myself, but I wasn’t quite ready to let the thief in on my secret. This call log would be one of my only leads, and I wasn’t going to start hounding and barking at the numbers until I had more information.

Max ran each of the last names of the reverse lookup through The Facebook and USC’s student directory, filtering out only those who lived in Birnkrant. One of the last names hit a single match, a girl named Erin Jones. Her Facebook profile revealed she was a member of the “Birnkrant Monday Night Movies” group. Problem was, yesterday wasn’t a Monday. It was a Friday. That is about as far away from Monday as you can get, unless you start talking crazy talk about extra days of the week or some quantum scientific mumbo jumbo like that. I never liked that stuff. Still, maybe the group rescheduled their showing that week.

“What’s this for,” asked Max.

I filled him in quickly. “This Freddie guy, he’s kind of a sloppy doofus, isn’t he?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Max a bit too quickly.

In any case, I had my first suspect. I totally gave myself a high-five for a job well done, and wrapped up work for the day. From here on, it would be a waiting game as the thief continued to make calls, and I continued to watch them for clues. I never liked waiting games much, but sometimes you have to wait. For example, in chess, if you start moving your pieces while your opponent’s thinking, he’d probably reach over and rip your face off. You have to wait your turn to move, and then move.

It’s the same in detective work, really. Except less face ripping.

Chapter 4:

Something to Throw

As the week rolled on, the calls kept being made, but doubt was beginning to fill my mind about Erin Jones. Quite frankly, the more I mulled it over, the less it seemed possible that she, or for that matter, any other student could have stolen it.

The first clue was that the first call made when the phone was stolen, the Long Beach number, was getting called every day, at around 6:30 in the morning, first thing. Maybe she was calling a friend to wake her up? Not likely. Birnkrant housed mostly freshman, and freshman wouldn’t have off-campus friends that required wake-up calls. And no self-respecting student would ever get up every day at 6:30 in the morning, either. The earliest classes started at USC was 8:00. Nobody is up at 6:30, unless they stayed up the night before drinking away their troubles and tuition, or were secretly robots. And if it was a robot who stole the stuff, than I had a whole lot more troubles on my hands than I had anticipated when I took this job.

The worst-case scenario would be a drunk robot. Only lightning quick reflexes and a hot soldering iron could take those suckers down, if they were a mad violent drunk. If you got lucky, the robot would be a sad drunk, so you could attack him while he was sitting by the bar, glumly telling anybody who’d listen how life as an artificially sentient being controlled by preprogrammed inalterable processes was such a drag. And believe me, after about thirty seconds of that, you either take him out with the soldering iron for his sake, or jam the soldering iron into your ears for yours.

The final nail in the logic coffin was that, quite frankly, no student at USC would ever have the need to steal a cell phone and use it in the first place. They don’t call it the University of Spoiled Children for nothing – you can’t walk three feet without bumping into or getting bumped into by some doofus yapping away on their cellular phone. USC housing also provided phone service for free in rooms anyway. Who would want to steal a cell phone and use it, and moreover, who would be stupid enough to keep using it at all? Again, the compass seemed to swing towards the robot direction, but common sense tells us that robots didn’t need cell phones. Or did they?

I buried the “student” theory in the graveyard at the back of my head. Rest in peace, I thought, as I simultaneously summoned a thunderstorm to revive the “robot” theory.

It was a Wednesday, when Freddie pounded on my door again. I let him in.

“Tell me, kid, do you know any robots? Ever make any android enemies?” I asked.

“Uh… No.” He seemed a bit confused.

“You sure about that?” I said desperately.

“Pretty sure.”

“Damn.”

“Why?”

“That was my lead. Looks like I’m going to need another funeral plot in my head…”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.

“None of your damn business!” I shouted, “Get out of my mind!”

I stumbled over to my desk and sat down, pissed. Who would be in that room at that time, I wondered. Then it hit me like fat beats dropped by a DJ from a twenty-story tall penthouse. The cleaning staff.

As I was wondering how to pursue this newfound information, Freddie chimed in. “By the way, I hate to tell you this, but my mom called me just now. She’s killed the account.”

By this point, my fantasies had progressed to the point where I was receiving an award from the mayor of Los Angeles himself for my excellent service to the community. Terminated account meant no more phone updates. “What!?” I shouted, “That was the only lead we had!!”

“Sorry,” said Freddie, “that’s just my mom I guess.”

I started a long string of expletives and didn’t stop until I had knitted a sweater out of them. A sweater of profanity. Sam Spade never had to deal with their respective mothers getting in their way and screwing up with their cases. Just when I was about to get some answers, my only source of info gets cut off.

“And, well it gets worse,” said Freddie in-between my swearing, “She, uh, called a few of the numbers and asked about the stolen cell phone.”

At this point, I was well on my way to weaving a Guinness Book of World Record sized profanity quilt.

“What!? So these people know the jig is up!?”

“Pretty much,” said Freddie.

I grabbed the nearest throwable item (my phone) and proceeded to throw it through my screen window. Somewhere in the street below, someone yelled something.

“This means that they’ll know, and that they’ll talk to the thief, and the thief will freak out,” I said. “The slim chance you had of getting your stuff back is basically zilch now,” I told him.

“Yeah, but I trust you’ll do fine,” he told me optimistically as he left the room, “Good luck.”

I wish I still had something to throw at him.

Chapter 5:

An F in Social Engineering 101

I had no choice now but to call these numbers and pull some social engineering to see if I couldn’t trip up the party on the other side into dropping a name. The odds were terribly against me – the people on the other end would be on their guard and be waiting for my calls. I decided to go the straight route. The first number on my list was the one the thief called at 6:30 every morning. I set my alarm for 6:30 and settled in for a night of uneasy rest. Although I can’t remember exactly what I dreamed about, I recall that it was very symbolic of my current case. Also, I think at some point, I was biking around World War II-era Germany on the side of the Allies and thinking, “The bicycle is an awfully inept war weapon.” I woke up wondering exactly what that was all about as I stumbled downstairs into the lobby, picked up the payphone, and dropped fifty cents into the coin receiver and punched the number. The recorded voice on the other end politely informed me that, because this was a number in Long Beach, it was going to cost fifty cents for five minutes. I had better keep it quick.

The phone rang a few times before a Hispanic woman picked up the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi, my name is Freddie,” I told her, “I’m investigating a missing cell phone. I have a list of phone numbers that have been called after the theft, and this number shows up every morning at around this time. I was w…”

She cut me off immediately. “No, I don’t know what you are talking about.”

This was going to be like pulling teeth. I could tell right away. This went back and forth for a while.

“Somebody calls this number every morning at 6:30 in the morning. Every day this past week. I want to know who is calling,” I told her.

She was taken a bit aback. “I don’t know what you are talking about. I don’t know who would be calling.”

Finally, I asked her, “Is this a residential number?”

“No, it is a group home. I work here a few days a week. I don’t know who is calling.”

If she was telling the truth, I was wasting my time with the wrong person. If she was lying, there was no way around it. I sighed, “Could you put the person in charge on the line, then?”

“Ok, hold on.”

Now I was getting somewhere. Just as I thought this, the phone beeped, and asked me to insert a nickel for another three minutes. I cursed, digging through my empty pockets for a damn nickel and coming up empty. She heard on the other end.

“You know, man, I think you are lying. Why are you calling from a payphone?”

“Because if I had a cell phone, I’d call you on that!” I snapped back. Then the line went dead. I was frustrated. From now on, I’d keep more spare change in my pockets, I thought, as I ran up to my room and roused my roommate Brett. He was sleeping.

“Brett! I need to borrow your cell phone!” I said.

He grumbled a bit. “What? Uh, sure…?”

“Thanks.”

I grabbed it and keyed in the number again. The same woman picked up.

“Listen,” I said, “is this the same woman I talked to earlier?’

“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know about no cell phone or anything.”

After a minute more of this, it became painfully obvious I was wasting my time. I thanked her through my teeth, hung up, and crossed off that number from my list. Next up was the number with the longest call times, an Inglewood number. I punched it in, and an elderly Hispanic woman answered.

“Hello?” she said.

I gave her my spiel, and got the same response as the first woman. Repeated denial.

“I can’t believe you don’t know anything,” I told her, “I mean, you talked to this guy every day this week for twenty minutes.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t talk to nobody here, nobody knows my phone number.”

“You mean you spend twenty minutes talking to absolute strangers on your phone every day? I don’t believe you.”

She considered this for a moment, before going back to the tried and true response “No, I don’t know. I don’t know.”

I was getting frustrated. These people were lying to me through their teeth, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I grudgingly thanked her for her time, and hung up. Here I was again, right back at the beginning with absolutely nothing. The other numbers led to indefinite ringing, or answering machines.

The women’s repeated chorus of “I don’t know” rang in my head like Quasimodo going apeshit on the church bell. They don’t know anything. I don’t know anything. Nobody knew anything.

Chapter 6:

Bright Ideas

I got breakfast and walked around a bit. It was very early, around 7:00 AM. The cleaning staff was beginning their jobs. The timing matched up with my theory that a member of the cleaning staff was responsible for the thievery. I walked into Birnkrant again. A guy named Andre was cleaning the floor. I stopped him to ask him some questions. I explained my situation, and he told me that only one guy, Pedro, came in on weekends to empty the trash. Everyone else had weekends off. The cell phone was stolen on a Saturday morning. He told me to talk to Luigi, his supervisor.

I checked with Luigi, the cleaning staff supervisor. He confirmed the information I got from Andre. Pedro is the only guy who came in on weekends. He started his shift at 8:00, and left at 4:30. The first call was made at 7:46 in the morning, which made sense if Pedro got in a little early, and the longest call of the day happened right when he got off work at 4:30. All the signs pointed to him, as if the signs were all magnetic compasses, and Pedro was the north pole, or like in those old Warner Brothers cartoons where Bugs Bunny popped up under a sign pointing to a bunch of cities, except here, all the signs pointed to Pedro City, USA.

Later that night, I tried another number, pretending to be looking for somebody else. A Hispanic man picked up.

“Hi! Is Jonathan there?”

“Who?”

“Jonathan? Is that you? Quit kiddin’ around buddy!”

“No this is not Jonathan.”

“C’mon.”

“I think you have the wrong number.”

“What? Who is this?”

There was a brief hesitation. “John.”

“You’re a terrible liar, John. Who is this, really?”

He hung up. Nobody would naturally lie to a stranger if they called the wrong number. People tend to trust the voice on the other end. He had been coached too to keep cagey.

I tried the last number on my list, a number that was only called once. It belonged to an adult day health center. Whoever stole my phone was looking for a daycare for an elderly person in his family. I guessed the old woman. Checking the addresses based on reverse phone lookups, the daycare center was less than a mile away from the old woman’s listed address. There was definitely a connection, but without a name to use, I couldn’t call either of them and use this information. It would be no use at all to call these numbers anyway, it seemed. Pedro had been tipped off, and got there first.

I exited the phone booth, disgusted. I was running out of room, fast.

On a whim, I checked the pool room in Birnkrant. The chair that the coat was on was directly in the line of sight of the right most trash can. I had a suspect, and a strong case against him. All the evidence I had was circumstantial, but overwhelmingly so. Still, it couldn’t do anything, and if I went to police with what I had, they’d laugh me straight into next week. I had to tie the numbers with this name, or use the numbers to get Pedro to return my stuff on his own accord.

I tried the first approach. I drafted up a fake script for Max, one time telemarketer himself, and he tried calling the old woman again. We assumed she was perhaps Pedro’s mother, seeing as nobody other than close relatives calls elderly women that often. No dice – she didn’t respond to the last name.

I had no choice but to try and put the heat on Pedro to return the stuff on his own accord. Reed suggested I give him a letter with his name on it to try and scare him, and it sounded like a good idea. I drafted a somewhat threatening letter, telling him to drop it off at the Taper Hall lost and found, or suffer the consequences of a police theft report. I attached a copy of the numbers called, and gave him a nice map to Taper Hall. I gave him one day to return the iPod. I let him keep the phone as a “token of goodwill.” I also knew that, if he were like me, he would’ve tossed the cell phone as soon as it stopped working. That would mean that if I demanded both the iPod and the cell phone, he would figure that since he can’t satisfy my requirements, he might as well keep the iPod and take his chances. I didn’t want that.

I knew that if I told him to give it to our building’s lost and found, he wouldn’t go for it, because that’d risk getting caught. The official Department of Public Safety lost and found was too official and too far away from Birnkrant. The Taper Hall location was one I used before – it was really the room for computer and equipment checkouts. They just happened to handle lost items for the building. It was run by students. It offered me the greatest chance of getting the iPod back.

The next day, I woke up early and gave the envelope to Andre, to give to Pedro when he came in that day. This was the second time I had gotten up way early for this damn case, and I intended it to be the last. Too bad Freddie couldn’t pay me back in lost sleep. It was Thursday. He had until 2:00 Friday to comply. The only thing I could do now was wait and hope. And play Halo 2. I did a little of all three.

Chapter 7:

The End of the Beginning

Taper wasn’t open on Friday, so I waited all the way until Monday to check. I busted into the lost and found, and sheepishly asked the man sitting at the desk if anybody had turned in an iPod in the past few days. He said no.

Damn.

I had no choice but to compile everything and go off and file an official police report at the Department of Public Safety building. I asked the lost and found desk located there if they had an iPod in their database. She gleefully pounded some keys and stared off into her computer monitor.

“Well, could you describe it?” she asked. She was looking at something.

“It’s white.”

“Was it in a case?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Oh, never mind. This isn’t it then.”

If there weren’t a desk separating us, I would’ve taken her computer monitor and introduced it to her cranium. Multiple times.

I filed the paperwork for the theft report, turned in all my information, and headed out into the oppressively bright Los Angeles sun, defeated. It was two weeks from when the iPod was stolen. I was simply too slow, and I wasted too much time. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that if I had been a week quicker, I would have the iPod in hand. But unless I could find a time machine, such sentiments were useless. There was nobody else in the world that could have stolen the items but Pedro, but I had no way of ever nailing him for it. Sometimes, the world blew chunks.

I ran into Freddie on my way back to my room.

“What about the case?” he asked, “any luck?”

“None whatsoever. You paid a $500 fee to enroll yourself in ‘How Not to Be an Idiot 101.’”

“Does that mean I’m not getting my stuff back?” he asked.

I could tell he hadn’t graduated from the course yet. “No, unless you get phenomenally lucky.”

“But that’s a terrible way to end this! You should be able to get the stuff back!” he protested.

“Sorry,” I said, “This is real life. This is Los Angeles. Not Fakesville, USA.”

He walked off crestfallen. I closed my door behind me and sat down. Nothing to do now but wait for the organized police to figure it out, but I knew how well the organized police did things. They did them terribly, like a retarded preschooler learning how to finger paint. But I had been too slow, and sometimes that’s just the way the world works.

And sometimes, the world works a bit like a retarded preschooler trying to finger paint.

TO BE CONTINUED?