After the divorce, he began plowing through Philip Marlowe and Mike Hammer. He drove to the shoe store imagining he was cruising through the City of Angels in the fifties. At work, he pretended every woman customer was a floozy with a hard-luck story who only needed a good slapping.
During his third Monday on the job, Paul was lacing up oxfords with a gritty, hard-boiled savoir faire. Three truants ran through the shoe store, grabbed the left oxford and played keep-away from Paul. Paul repeatedly jumped in the air, trying to grab the shoe the youths held over their heads. “C’mon, guys!”
The youths grew bored and shoved Paul into a promotional pyramid, and he went sprawling on the floor in an avalanche of Hush Puppies. Even his customers laughed. He’d had it. If life was going to kick him in the teeth anyway, he might as well be doing what he loved.
Paul dipped into his proceeds from the sale of his house. He hung out a shingle and had his name painted in gold block letters on the window of his office door. His enthusiasm for the job started paying off in any case that had no possibility of human contact. Tracking lost assets, researching ancestry for probate, taking surveillance photographs of empty buildings. Because Paul was so terrible with people, his other senses began to compensate, and Paul learned he had an almost mystical clairvoyance when it came to inanimate objects. Word got around, and Paul was sought out by law enforcement and the private sector for a specific kind of case. He began making headlines. “Lost Gems Located After Eighty Years,” “Murder Weapon Recovered from Lake,” “Human Skull Found in Victory Garden.”
Paul was patted on the back for his results and then browbeaten over the size of his bill, and his net rates became the cheapest in town. But with each success, Paul became more confident and assertive. A metamorphosis was taking place. Of course in Paul’s case, it was all relative; there could only be so much change.
He became Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye.
One afternoon in November, Paul was sitting in his office with his feet up on the desk, asking questions of one of those large novelty eight balls that tell fortunes. An answer floated up in the ball’s liquid window. “Fat chance.” The phone rang.
It flustered Paul and he threw the eight ball over his shoulder and out the third-floor window. He grabbed the receiver.
A t four-oh-five on a cool fall afternoon, the public information officer of the Montgomery, Alabama, Police Department called the assignment editors of the collected capital press corps. He announced a “walkout.” A walkout was a staged event where a police department assembles reporters and walks a suspect out in front of the cameras, at the optimum photographic angle and light, just in time to lead the six or eleven o’clock broadcasts. Reporters are supposed to yell, “Why’d ya do it?!”
At four-fifty, in front of a compressed line of still and video cameras, two husky officers escorted a handcuffed teenage girl out of the police station to a waiting jail van. The girl had ratty hair down in her face.
“Why’d ya do it?” a dozen reporters yelled in harmony.
The girl answered with the middle digit.
The snarling teenager seen on the six o’clock news across the great state of Alabama that night was the incorrigible daughter of the senior records keeper at Montgomery Memorial, a good, hardworking woman trying to straighten out her child. So she took her to work on a recent Friday afternoon and left her in an auxiliary records office to do her homework…where she logged on to the hospital’s confidential computer files and telephoned twenty patients, falsely informing them of positive HIV tests, malignant growths, late-stage leukemia and something she made up called “brain worms.”
Officials at Montgomery Memorial Hospital had been trying for three days to track down the twenty patients. They had reached eighteen. The nineteenth had shot himself in the head that morning. That left only one.
They tried the home phone but got no answer, so they sent someone out to his house. There was no car in the driveway and nobody answered the door. They couldn’t find Aristotle “Art” Tweed.
Neighbors hadn’t seen Tweed around in at least a week, so the hospital asked the police to trace his long-distance phone calls, credit-card charges and ATM withdrawals. The credit-card company already had an eye on Tweed, who, although not over the limit, had begun to amass charges with a frequency and eclecticism that tripped the company’s security software designed to detect cards that had fallen into the hands of binge criminals.
At the behest of the hospital’s civil attorneys, a private detective was dispatched to bring in the nomadic Mr. Tweed before he could incur any liability.
When Montgomery Memorial Hospital was advised to retain a private eye to track down Art Tweed, they followed the same corporate philosophy that guided patient care: cut cost regardless of result. Any law firm worth its salt would have known that the particular private detective selected by Montgomery Memorial was not right for this type of job: It involved people, not inanimate objects. However, the hospital had also retained the cheapest law firm in town, and there were no objections. They dialed the phone.
“I’m on the case,” said Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye. He put on a fedora, got in his black Ford Fairlane, put “The Peter Gunn Theme” on the radio and headed for Florida.
I have attained a humility that involves no loss of pride,” said Jethro Maddox, just after passing gas in the blue Malibu heading down U.S. 19.
Art Tweed quietly stared out the passenger window, saddened by all the bullies in the world.
They were in the Big Bend, where Florida ’s panhandle makes the wide turn south into the peninsula. There were no more beaches, no postcard scenes. A small rusty bridge spanned a gorge. Art saw a brown highway sign at the river that had a bunch of music notes and the name Stephen Foster. As they crossed the Suwannee River, Art looked down and saw a handmade wooden canoe knifing the glass surface of the water.
The gas needle was on E, and Jethro aimed the Malibu for the turn lane and the old gas station with a tin awning.
On the gas station’s porch was a whiskered man with a large carving knife, whittling a table leg into a tree branch. “Ain’t no way that Hurricane Rolando-berto is gonna hit Florida! I can feel these things. I got the shine.”
“All the weather reports indicate otherwise,” said Jethro.
“They also said we landed on the moon, but that was TV tricks.” The old man leaned and spit. “You’ve been brainwashed by whitey!”
“But you’re white,” said Art.
“Bah!” the man said in a crotchety voice, dismissing Art with a careless flick of the knife. He got up and went inside.
Jethro and Art stepped over a lactating Labrador in front of a rusty Yoo-Hoo machine and followed the man into the station.
Jethro pulled out a Visa card and asked for fifteen bucks of regular unleaded.
“We don’t accept charge cards,” said the old man, displaying undependable teeth.
Jethro pointed out the window at the Visa sign on the gas pumps.
“The distributor put that up,” said the old man. “It’s only good at participating dealers. I’m not a participating dealer.”
“What determines whether you are a participating dealer?”
“Whether I feel like it.” He lit a filterless cigarette and pulled a piece of tobacco off his tongue. With an insulting slowness, he picked up an open gold can of Miller High Life next to the register.
“Okay,” Jethro said in resignation. “Can I get the key to the restroom?”
“Are you buying any gas?”
“No, I am going to a participating dealer.”
“Then you’re not a customer. Can’t you read the sign? Restrooms for customers only.”