Money To Burn

“I never smoke after sex, though I have been known to purr.” I offered this tidbit to my visitor only because the skinny guy in glasses was asking.

I’ve had clients in all flavors, but Thomas Nash was a new one. At around six foot four, he weighed about as much as my left thigh and had unruly light brown hair that waved at the temples. His face had a perpetual sleepiness to it. Drooping eyelids and wide, narrow lips made him sexy in an intellectual sort of way.

He reminded me a little of Leslie Howard in Intermezzo. I wanted to pull off his glasses and plant a big one on that expressive mouth, just to see if smoke would billow out of his ears and steam blow from his nostrils. Unfortunately, I am more early Courtney Love than Ingrid Bergman. I suspect he would have fainted from fear had I attempted the maneuver.

“Are you listening to me, Miss Jones?” he asked politely.

Miss Jones? Yikes. He must mean me. I’m Casey Jones, private detective sans the official license (though I keep that little fact to myself), tethered by fate and cruel necessity to a 360-pound blimp named Bobby D., who does have a license and who fancies himself my boss—though never my superior.

“Could you repeat the question?” I asked, still imagining what he looked like naked and wondering why I cared. The man was wimpy but he had… something. It wasn’t
athletic grace, however. So far he had tripped over a leg of Bobby’s chair, run into the back of my office door, knocked over his coffee, kicked my trash can and dropped his pen three times. The guy would be positively lethal on a dance floor.

“I asked if you smoked at any time at all,” he repeated. “It’s very important that I know.”

“No,” I assured him. “I absolutely do not smoke. Not even after six gins in a row. In fact, I have been known to swat cigarettes from the mouths of fourteen-year-old strangers on the street while lecturing them on the evils of tobacco.”

“Good,” he said, sighing. He settled back in the chair. “It’s incredibly important you be on my side one hundred percent.”

I wanted to assure him that it was my job to be on the side of my clients, but I was currently going through the charade of “deciding whether I would take him on.” The truth was that I was flat broke and, if he had the money, I had the time.

“Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?” I encouraged him, though I was really wondering whether he wore boxers or briefs.

“I’ve been receiving death threats, midnight phone calls, that sort of thing,” he said. He glanced out to the hallway as if some unknown assailant was lurking there with a club. “I think someone is out to destroy me.”

“Is that all?” I joked.

“Isn’t that enough?” he countered indignantly.

Uh oh. No sense of humor. His sexiness quotient just took a big dive.

“Can you be more specific?” I asked, resisting the urge to look at my watch. Never mind that I deserved to be lying on a lounge chair by a hotel pool with a bevy of college boys oiling my suntanned body. It was nose to the grindstone time. By now, I was willing to pull teeth if I was getting paid by the hour. And I’d be willing to pull a lot more than teeth if my dire financial straits kept up.

“I’m a tobacco researcher,” he explained. “Have you ever heard of the Clean Smoke?”

“Sure,” I admitted. “With a two-billion-dollar ad campaign, who hasn’t?”

“I invented that for Teer & Talbot. It’s not all that flavorful, but it is relatively tar and nicotine free.”

I stared at him. This was no time for niceties. “You must be loaded,” I said.

He shook his head. “My employer at the time owns the patent. I received a nice bonus, that’s all.”

“Hope you bent over all the way for that one,” I observed.

“I know,” he agreed. “I have a lawsuit pending asking for a share of the royalties. In the meantime, I jumped ship and formed my own company. I own half of King Buffalo Tobacco now. I’m working on the Safe Smoke, a chemical-free curing process that’s as efficient as modern day methods.”

“Great concept,” I interrupted. “People can light up a Safe Smoke after having safe sex.”

He blinked at me without smiling and continued. “I want to change the world of tobacco. Instead of tearing down the industry, I hope to transform it by removing the dangers and saving the farmers. King Buffalo is my vehicle.”

Thomas Nash was off to a good start. King Buffalo Tobacco was one of several independent firms that had sprung up in the past decade to provide yuppies with a way to get lung cancer naturally. The firm produced charmingly crude cigarettes that appeared hand-rolled and had given more than one street cop a heart attack when lit up in their vicinity. They tasted like crap, but they allowed rich white kids to pretend they were as cool as the crowned buffalo on the label.

“I hear your company is doing okay,” I said.

He nodded. “Being privately owned, we can focus on the big picture instead of quarterly profits. I make enough to fund my research. I’m not interested in short-term sales, it’s the long term I have in mind.”

“Got any partners?” I asked, wondering if they were as equally unenthusiastic about current profits. Money was always a motive.

“One. His name is Frank Cosgrove. He’s a marketing whiz, used to work at Liggett & Myers and at T&T with me. MBA and the whole bit. We make a good team. He supports my long-term view.”

Sure he did. Show me a marketing whiz with a long- term view and I’ll show you a candidate for the unemployment line.

“What did you mean when you said someone was trying to destroy you?” I asked. “Tell me more about the harassment.”

His foot jerked nervously. “Someone is trying to kill me,” he explained. “Or, at the very least, frighten me away. The power brake cable on my car was cut and the tires have been slashed twice. I’ve received threatening letters in the mail, telephone calls that end in hang ups, even a dead rabbit in my mailbox.”

Yuk. “A dead rabbit?” I asked.

“With duct tape wrapped around its mouth.”

Hmmm … Glenn Close was currently starring on Broadway, so I could eliminate her as a suspect. One down and 274 million Americans to go.

“Why do you think someone would want to harm you?” I asked.

“To keep me quiet,” he explained. “Have you heard about the Hargett suit?”

“Sure. Who hasn’t?” Horace Hargett was an old geezer who had a small farm tucked into the mountains off the Blue Ridge Parkway. About ten years ago, he had come down with lung cancer. His son, Horace Jr., had followed his footsteps into the cancer ward two years later. Both blamed Blue Tips, a brand of cigarette manufactured by Teer & Talbot Tobacco. Blue Tips used to be an old farmer’s brand but, in the early sixties, had been successfully repositioned by T&T to appeal to a younger audience. It was one of the nation’s leading brands today.

The Hargett family had been able to accept the old man coming down with lung cancer, it seemed, but when the son was diagnosed with it at age thirty-five, they had a lot more trouble accepting his fate. Word had it that an eager county health official—tired of footing the bill for treating public lung cancer patients—had talked the Hargetts into instigating a class action civil suit against Teer & Talbot. The suit charged T&T with intentionally marketing Blue Tips to underage smokers while knowingly concealing the presence of addiction-causing substances in their products. Turns out young Horace had picked up a pack at the age of ten and seldom been without Blue Tips since, though he had tried to quit many times. Now the family wanted someone to pay for the consequences.

It was a familiar story—lawsuits like this were proceeding all over the nation. But not in North Carolina, where thousands of tobacco farmers live, work, and, most important of all, vote. For North Carolina, the lawsuit was a first.

“In fact,” I told Thomas Nash, “I’ve been following it pretty closely. Never thought it would happen here in North Carolina, but the time’s they are a-changing. What’s it got to do with you?”

“I’ve been asked to appear as a witness for the plaintiffs,” my client explained. “Specifically in the matter of marketing cigarettes to underage smokers. I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you anymore than that. Except to say that I could probably successfully destroy Teer & Talbot if I told the whole truth.”

“I thought you wanted to save the industry, not destroy it,” I said.

“I do.”

“If you ask me, it’s a little odd to find a tobacco scientist opposed to smoking.” My own feelings about smxt”ngs abooking were unequivocal: licking an ash tray was more efficient. But I’d grown up in the Florida panhandle where people knew damn well that smoking caused cancer but puffed away like fiends regardless. It was a way of telling the world to go screw.

“I’m not opposed to adults smoking,” Nash explained. “They know the risks. But until we come up with a safer blend, no company has any business selling to young people who haven’t got the sense to know what they’re getting into. I quit T&T over that very issue. I feel rather strongly about it.” He brushed a lock of thick hair absently off his forehead. Unfortunately, he forgot to put his felt tip pen down first and ended up drawing a zigzag of black ink across his skin. It was a wonder he didn’t poke an eye out. He must have had a season pass to the emergency room as a child.

“Okay,” I said. “Fair enough. So you think someone from T&T is threatening you in order to keep you from testifying in the Hargett case?”

“That’s my best guess,” he said. “They’re sending me a message of some sort to keep silent. Otherwise, who would bother to duct tape a rabbit?”

Someone who can’t find a gerbil? I kept the theory to myself. “What do you want me to do about the harassment?” I asked.

“I’d like you to find out who it is,” he said. “I talked to a lawyer and we almost brought suit against T&T, but then I realized I didn’t really have any proof. There was another complication, a personal matter I would prefer not to go into. But once I dropped my plans to sue T&T, the harassment got even worse. So now I don’t know what to think. I thought you could follow me around and keep an eye on things, just in case it gets even uglier. Maybe even spot whoever it is that’s been doing this to me.”

“Who told you about me?” I asked him, stalling. I wasn’t accustomed to having such an upfront, clean-cut guy for a client and, to be honest, I didn’t trust him because of it. I am actually more comfortable working for slimeballs— they’re so seldom subtle and I like to know who I’m dealing with.

“Francine,” he told me.

“Who?”

“The girl down at Elmo’s. The waitress with the gold ring in her tongue.”

Oh, yeah. The tiny brunette with the very large continental shelf who had the good sense to keep my coffee cup filled to the brim whenever I staggered into Elmo’s Diner seeking a morning hangover cure. We’d talked a few times. She knew I was a private investigator and how to get in touch with me. I’d helped her reclaim a stereo system and television set once when a boyfriend had moved out abruptly with half of her possessions in tow.

“You know Francine?” I asked. Maybe Thomas Nash wasn’t such a klutz in bed after all. Francine was just over twenty and maybe half of this guy’s age.

He looked offended. “I understand what you’re insinuating, and I have a very respectable girlfriend, I assure you. Francine is simply an acquaintance. I don’t even want her to know I’ve hired you. I told her I had a missing relative I was trying to locate.”

“I consider missing relatives a blessing,” I said. “Better find a new cover story.”

This time he didn’t even blink. The guy must have been a barrel of laughs at parties. But I didn’t need a client with a sense of humor, I needed one with money—which was one thing he definitely had.

“Okay, Mr. Nash,” I decided. “I can help you out from nine in the morning until around midnight or so. I need a few hours off to eat and sleep, or not sleep if I get lucky.” He didn’t smile. “If you want, I can pull someone else in to cover the night shift,” I offered.

He shook his head. “No, I’m not concerned about that. So far, all the incidents have occurred during the daytime or early in the evening. That’s another reason why I think we’re dealing with a corporate amateur rather than a professional.”

A professional what? I wondered. All the really good professional harassers were out in Hollywood stalking stars.

After agreeing to begin work that afternoon, I asked for a nice chunk of money upfront and got it. Bobby D. would be pleased to know we’d covered the rent for the month and here it was only fifteen days into it.

After I shook Mr. Thomas Nash’s hand, he charged into the broom closet instead of out the exit door, then careened through the outer office and bounced off Bobby’s desk before disappearing down the street with a distracted gait. I watched him bang his head on a street sign before turning the corner. Absent-minded professor, indeed. It was a wonder he was still alive.

Shaking my head, I pulled a chair up to Bobby’s desk to discuss the situation. Seeing that he was not currently eating, I figured it was safe.

Bobby was fiddling with a black device that looked like a miniature flying saucer with buttons and dials glued all over it. To say that the sight of it annoyed me was an understatement. One reason we were in a budgetary pickle was Bobby D.‘s current mania for spy gadgets. A new shop promising “state-of-the-art security devices” had recently opened up in North Raleigh. Bobby had quickly become their best customer. I had explained to him again and again that when your primary assignments involve following cheating spouses so stupid they take their mistresses to the same cheap motels over and over—not even bothering to draw the curtains all the way—it’s really not no treally ecessary to possess infrared laser-beam underwater high-altitude sonar, sound and sight devices that can penetrate any substance known to man, including Lois Lane’s underwear. He wasn’t listening. He’d spent ten thousand dollars, and counting, to date.