“Good, Eddie. How’s life treatin’ ya?”
Eddie Mayhew shrugged. “Oh, you know, busy, busy, all the time, busy. The stuff’s always coming in, you know, always coming in.”
“How’s the missus?”
I looked at Lawrence. Missus?
Eddie made a face, like he’d caught a whiff of something that smelled bad. “Oh, you know, still talk talk talking, wants me to drive her out to see her sister in the spring, out in Milwaukee. Both of them, talk talk talk, for a whole week.”
“They got a lot of beer there,” Lawrence said, trying to offer Eddie a glimmer of hope.
“Yeah, beer, yeah, that’s good. What I really need, really need, is something to put me out for the drive out, so I won’t have to listen, won’t have to listen, to my wife.”
“That’s kind of difficult if you’re the one doing the driving.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I know. Can’t win.” But then, oddly, a look of calm came over him. “Oh well, oh well. Maybe it won’t be so bad, so bad after all. A lot could change by the spring, yeah.”
“I’d like you to meet my friend here, Eddie,” Lawrence said, allowing me to step forward. “This is Zack Walker. He’s a writer for The Metropolitan, he’s going to do a feature on the auction, have someone take a few pictures.”
“Oh sure, yeah, sure, that’s fine. Good paper, The Metro, I read that. Read that all the time.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I explained that I was doing a color piece on what it was like to buy a car at a government auction. Eddie said he could spare some time to answer my questions, and Lawrence excused himself to register and check out what vehicles were available.
“We’ve got boats, motorcycles, furniture, high-end stereo equipment, oh yeah, we got everything,” Mayhew said. “Sometimes we have people submit written bids, whoever bids highest wins.”
“Like those silent auctions my son’s high school does sometimes for fundraisers,” I offered.
“Well, sort of, I don’t know, I don’t have any kids, never had any kids, but the stuff they’re auctioning off at your kid’s school probably didn’t all belong, at one time, to drug dealers and smugglers, am I right? Huh?”
“That’s probably true.”
“But today, okay, today we’re auctioning off some big stuff, and we’re doing it the way you’re probably more familiar with, with an auctioneer, right? Mostly cars, SUVs, couple of boats, good stuff, really really good stuff. Come on, we’ll go out into the paddock, out in the paddock, I’ll show you.”
We wandered out into what looked like a used-car lot, with the odd boat, motorcycle, and RV tossed into the mix.
“So, who’d this stuff used to belong to?” I asked, scribbling into my notebook.
“We’ve got goods here that belonged to biker gangs, mean ones, you know, mean bikers, and drug smugglers, big-timers who got away with it for a long time, and small-timers who thought they could make it big but were a bit too stupid to do this kind of thing without getting caught. Even some CEO types, stock fraud guys, get their fancy Beemers and boats seized. I know the history of everything out here. Make it my business to. It’s interesting, you know? You got your whole crime microcosm here, wrapped up in these cars.”
“I’ll bet,” I said.
“Ask me anything,” Eddie said. “Go ahead, go ahead, ask me anything about anything you see. Go on.”
“Uh, okay,” I said. I pointed to a shiny red Mustang. “What’s the story there?”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, okay, okay, I know,” he said quickly. Eddie seemed to be running on premium unleaded. “Bobby Minor, twenty-four, bought the thing from money he made dealing crack on the north side, it’s got a V8 under the hood, barely 15,000 miles on it. Go ahead, check the odometer, go on, check it, see if I’m right.”
With some reluctance, I opened the door and glanced at the dash. The car had 14,943 miles on it.
“Pretty good,” I said.
“Ask me another,” he said. “Go on, ask me.”
I didn’t know how long I wanted to play this game, but figured I could go another couple of rounds.
“All right,” I said. “That one.” I indicated a motorcycle.
Eddie, cocky behind the Coke rims, circled the bike. “Harley-Davidson, belonged to a member of the Snake Eyes gang, yeah, that’s right, loosely affiliated with the Hell’s Angels, those Hell’s Angels, ran prostitution, table dancers, that’s what they did. This bike belonged to Buzz Crawley. They called him Nut Crusher.” Eddie giggled. “Guess why? Go on, guess.”
“I think I have an idea.”
“You know why? He’d go visit guys, guys who owed the gang money, grab their boys with a set of pliers, drag ’em around the parking lot that way. Oooh, that would hurt, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that hurt?” He was smiling big-time now.
“That would hurt.” I had stopped taking notes.
“You see that Land Rover? That got taken away from the Jamaicans; that little silver car, that was in Lenny Indigo’s driveway before they put him away; that one, that green Winnebago there, that was—”
“You really know your stuff, Eddie, no doubt about it. I think what I’m going to do is, talk to some of the people who’re planning to bid on something, get a bit of color for my story.”
“Oh, good idea. But you need anything else, I’m always here.”
“Don’t you ever go home?” I asked.
He grinned, leaned in toward me. “You knew my wife, you’d know why I’m here all the time. Like to avoid going home as long as possible, you know? You married?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about, right? You know what I’m talking about, oh yeah, I can see it.”
“Well, thanks again,” I said, and broke away.
I’d called The Metropolitan’s photo desk ahead of time to arrange for a photographer to meet me here. I’d been a reporter-photographer myself on another paper a few years back—what they called a two-way—but my new employer was content to limit my skills to writing.
I spotted Stan Wannaker, one of the paper’s most distinguished shooters, who you’d be more likely to run into in Afghanistan or Pakistan or one of the other “stans” where people are always shooting each other and blowing up things because they don’t have access to cable. He was evidently slumming it to be covering something as mundane as a police auction alongside a lowly reporter like me.
“Hey, Stan,” I said, interrupting him as he snapped a couple of frames of a guy inspecting a Lexus.
He glanced away from the viewfinder. “Hey, uh, Zack, right?” He reached into his pocket where he’d stuffed a folded blue assignment sheet, opened it up and confirmed that I was the reporter he was supposed to meet. I was still relatively new on staff, and this was the first time I’d linked up with Stan. Given that I’m not exactly a foreign-correspondent type, what with my aversion to getting sand in my shoes or visiting nations where intense heat is likely to cause me a rash, our paths had not crossed.
“How come they’ve got you doing stuff like this?” I asked.
“I’m in town for a while, catching my breath,” he said. “Until all hell breaks loose someplace else, which shouldn’t be long.” Stan’s in his early forties, unmarried, lives in a tiny apartment someplace in the city, and isn’t saddled with the kinds of obligations that might keep the rest of us from leaving at a moment’s notice for the North Pole or Taiwan or the Falkland Islands. His jeans and multipocketed jacket hung loosely on his thin frame.
“So, what kind of shots you looking for?”
I shrugged. “I just got here. I’m gonna talk to people, see what they’re looking for.”
“Well, give me a shout if you need me. I’ll wander.”
I found Lawrence checking out a Saab convertible, then looking it up on the sheet he’d been given listing the items available for sale.
“Interested?” I asked.
“Not really.”
“I’m g
oing to talk to some people,” I said.
“Knock yourself out. Auction doesn’t start for another half hour.”
I meandered with my notebook open, pen in hand, chatted people up. Some were civil servants of one stripe or another—cops or firefighters or clerical workers—who had an inside line on when these kinds of auctions were held and made a point of attending them. And there were general members of the public who were on mailing lists, or signed up at Internet sites that, for a fee, let one know when and where these types of sales were going to be held.
One guy, an accountant, told me he thought it was cool that his current car, a Lexus, was once owned by some notorious cocaine dealer. “Gives me something to tell my lady friends, gives me a little cachet,” he said. Sort of like being a badass by association, which struck me as pitiful.
Even though a lot of these cars were going to go for rock-bottom prices, I didn’t see much in my price range. Most of the vehicles were listed with a suggested opening bid, and maybe a loaded 7-series BMW at $25,000 was a good deal, but it was still a lot more than I could spend.
I’d just finished talking to a guy who planned to bid on a 1998 Land Rover that had sustained a lot of damage in a police chase and was going for next to nothing (“I can rebuild anything,” he said) when I spotted the silver compact four-door that Eddie Mayhew had pointed to earlier. Nice flowing lines, but not too flashy. Bucket seats, a sunroof, reasonably roomy backseat.
A couple of other potential bidders were checking it out as well. A woman I guessed to be in her early sixties, and a short, balding guy built like a fire hydrant. He brushed past me as he rounded the car, and I noticed he was dressed in an expensive suit that didn’t fit him worth a damn. You spend that much money on clothes, you figure you could spend a few more bucks on alterations. He coughed, took a swig of juice from a glass bottle in his right hand, coughed again. There was a jingling noise coming from his left hand, which turned out to be full set of keys hanging from his index finger. I guessed they must have been a set belonging to his wife or daughter. You don’t see that many guys with a two-inch Barbie doll hanging from their key ring.
“Nice, huh?” the woman said, noticing that we were both admiring the same car. “The Virtue is such a cute car. It’s perfect for my daughter.”
Hmmm. It might be perfect for mine, too, if the price was right.
The guy in the ill-fitting suit kicked the car’s tires, coughed again, took another sip, and shot me a look as I made a closer inspection of the car’s interior. I looked at the dash, the layout of the gauges, which were placed in the center of the dash and angled toward the driver. There were several buttons I couldn’t figure out the purpose of, then realized they controlled the CD player. A CD player!
I found Lawrence and asked him for the auction list. “What’s a Virtue?” I asked. “I think I’ve seen some ads.”
“One of the big Japanese companies makes it. It’s one of those hybrid cars.”
“A who?”
“A hybrid. Has like two engines. A gas one and an electric one. The electric one keeps the gas one from working so hard. When you’re stopped at a light, electric motor kicks in so you don’t have to waste gas; light changes, you hit the accelerator, gas motor kicks in. Like that. Great gas mileage, hardly pollutes the environment.”
“Okay,” I said, remembering what I’d read about hybrids in the paper’s weekly automotive section. “Is this the one, the electric engine is always recharging its own batteries?”
“Yeah, and it’s got a lot of them. They got one of those here?”
“I guess it belonged to a drug dealer who was environmentally conscious,” I said. “There’s a little good in everybody.”
“Yeah. Wasn’t Hitler nice to his dog?”
“Come and have a look at it.”
Lawrence followed me over. “Looks in pretty good shape,” he said. He opened the door, checked the odometer. “Not all that many miles on it. And I hear they have a pretty good reliability record.”
“And the suggested opening bid,” I said, finding the car again on the list and holding my thumb there for future reference, “is kind of reasonable.” I slipped in behind the wheel. “I like it,” I said.
I checked out everything. The size of the glove box, the map pockets on the door, more storage pockets on the back of the seats, the interior trunk release, the sunroof buttons. “Seems pretty well equipped. And you know what else I like?”
“Tell me,” said Lawrence. “What else do you like?”
“The statement it makes. Says you care about the planet, that you want to do your part to preserve the ecosystem.”
“Yeah,” said Lawrence. “Chicks love that.”
“Some might.”
“So, you gonna bid on it?”
I was nervous. I’m always this way when I consider spending a lot of money. I get short of breath and my mouth goes dry.
“I think maybe it’s worth a shot.” I paused. “You know what? Let me give Sarah a quick call.” I dug my cell phone out of my jacket and called her at her desk at The Metropolitan.
“City,” she said.
“Me. I’m at the auction. I think maybe I found us a car.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, just listen. It’s perfect. Good on gas, perfect for Angie commuting to school, an excellent repair record according to Lawrence.”
“Is it a convertible?” Sarah sounded tentatively hopeful.
“No, it’s not a convertible.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“You’re something else, you know that?”
“I didn’t say it had to be a convertible, I was just asking. What color is it?”
“Silver,” I said.
“I’m not crazy about silver, but I can live with it. What kind of money?”
I told her the minimum bid was $8,000, and I could almost feel her intake of breath. “Listen, you said that was sort of in the ballpark of what we could manage. If I have to go way over, then I’ll just walk away.”
“You promise.”
“I promise.”
“And don’t do something dumb like pull on your ear. They have all these signals. You could end up buying it and not even know it.”
“I’m not in a Dick Van Dyke episode,” I told her. “I just have to— Oh shit.”
“What?”
“I didn’t bring my checkbook. I figured there was no way I’d buy anything. No, wait, Lawrence said he could buy it for me, I could pay him back after. That way—”
“Don’t fucking take my picture, man!”
I whirled around. Stan Wannaker was being shoved up against a Ford Explorer by the short guy with the bad cough and the Barbie keys. “Call you back,” I said, and slipped the phone back into my jacket.
“Fuck you!” Stan shouted back, the two cameras hanging down on his chest suddenly flinging about like enormous necklaces.
“Give me your film!” the man demanded.
“Fuck you!” Stan said again. He’d dealt with bad guys all over the world, in countries a lot scarier than this one, and he wasn’t about to surrender his film to some short asshole with a bad attitude in an ill-fitting suit.
“I wasn’t even taking your picture,” Stan told the man. “I was just doing an overall shot. Take a pill or something.”
The short guy was in Stan’s face now, as best he could, being about six inches shorter. He set his bottle of juice on the hood of the Explorer so he could poke a stubby finger into Stan’s chest. “You gonna hand over—” and he coughed “—that film?”
Stan backed up an inch to avoid any incoming phlegm. “Listen, dickwad, I’m here for The Metropolitan and if you want my film you better call our fucking lawyers and take it up with them. And if you touch me with that finger again, I’m gonna snap it the fuck off.”
The short guy was a bomb about to go off. His face went flush red, his shoulders tensed, and even Stan, as fearless as he’d been a moment earlier, looked like he was getting ready to move sidew
ays in a hurry if he had to.
But then Stan’s attacker began to notice that he was getting a lot of attention. People had stopped looking at cars and boats and motorcycles and turned their heads in the direction of the commotion, not sure whether to intercede, watch, or move on. The guy glanced around, his lips pressed firmly together, breathing in and out in short bursts through his flat, wide nose. He gave Stan a final shove up against the SUV and strode off in the direction of the paddock exit.
“You okay?” I said once I’d reached Stan.
He was unruffled, just checking his cameras for any damage. “Fucking little Nazi,” he said. “Thought I was at an Afghan checkpoint there for a minute.”
“He was crazy,” I said. “I thought he was going to explode there for a second.”
“A suicide bomber without the dynamite,” Stan said flippantly. “Anyway, good thing he decided to take a hike.” He smiled, nodding his head toward the crowd. “Too many witnesses around. I’ll have to watch myself in dark alleys for a while.”
Once I was sure Stan was fine, I rejoined Lawrence.
“Let’s bid on the Virtue,” I said. “But I don’t want to go over eight-five. Eight-six, maybe. But that’s it. Maybe eight-nine.” I’d started sweating again.
Lawrence said, “You’re grace under pressure, aren’t you?”
9
The older woman who’d been eyeing the Virtue the same time I was bailed out at $8,800. And I managed to go through the bidding process without tugging my ear or nodding my head in such a way as to end up with a $100,000 yacht by mistake.
There was some paperwork to deal with, forms to fill out, and then the car was ours. And not just any car. But a fuel-conserving, environment-saving, socially responsible automobile. And yet, I had a feeling, once I got home with it, I was going to be made to feel like Charlie Brown after he came back with the spindly Christmas tree.
Actually, it wasn’t quite mine yet. Lawrence wrote the check, and once I’d repaid him by the end of the day, he’d transfer the ownership to me.
We split up outside the government auction headquarters. Lawrence left in his Jag, and I had the Virtue. I decided that its first adventure would be a drive down to the newspaper. The car’s mileage was relatively low, and it had cleaned up nicely. The ashtray didn’t even appear to have ever been used for anything but candy wrappers, and the coils on the lighter weren’t smudged with ash. What were the odds, a drug dealer who didn’t even smoke? Lawrence’s theory was that it had been a drug dealer’s wife’s or daughter’s car. How else to account for its pristine condition?