Blame Charlie ©
by K Pelle
Chapter 1
One Monday morning last spring, I was just sitting down to savour my first cup of coffee of the day while listening to the news on the radio when the phone rang. I just raised my eyes to look at it and frowned. You see I believe that my telephone is for my convenience, not for anyone else's, so I didn't even move - that's what I have an answering machine for. Four more rings and the machine kicked in, then my recorded voice came out of the built in speaker on the machine.
"If you're a friend or a relative, leave me a number, then if what you have to tell me sounds interesting, I can call you back. If this is a preacher, a politician, a do-gooder lookin' for a handout, a snake oil salesman or any other form of obnoxious vermin, you might as well hang up now, 'cause I ain't interested in your nonsense. Here comes the beep - oh and make it short, the phone cuts off thirty seconds from . . . now!" There was a pause for a second or two, then; "BEEEEeeeep"
"Dave, it's Charlie, and have I got a deal for you! You can make ten grand a month and not do one damn thing, but if you do decide to do any work you'll earn fifty bucks an hour. Call me back! Soon! Please!"
"Clunk" and the dial tone came on for a second or two, then there was a short purr from the machine as it rewound itself.
Oh great! No number, no last name and of course, I didn't recognise the voice. Now I must know twenty guys named Charlie, so I just shrugged my shoulders as I cleared the message. That extra ten grand a month would be nice, but I wasn't broke and didn't expect to be broke in the next while either. Let's face it, my needs were taken care of and I didn't have lot of extra wants right then. If it was a real important deal, then whoever 'Charlie' was he'd have to call back, because I wasn't about to sit down and start dialling all the different guys I knew named Charlie.
I finished my coffee, shut of the radio and went outside to do my morning chores, getting met at the door by my collie dog and petting her for a second before heading for the barn. I fed and milked my cow, collected the eggs from my chickens, fed them, then walked to the corral fence and quickly checked over my horses before heading for the house to make breakfast. The dog followed me back to the house and I tossed her a few treats before carrying the milk inside, then pouring it into the bowl of the cream separator and flipping the switch to turn the machine on. Habit made me double check that I'd put a clean bucket under the milk spout and a clean jar under the cream spout, but after that I headed for the kitchen, leaving the machine to do its job.
Ten minutes later I was sitting down to my freshly cooked breakfast, but I glanced at that dang answering machine and saw the light flashing again, announcing at least two more messages. Whoever 'Charlie' was, he must have called back, but right at the moment my belly was feeling empty and I prefer to eat fried eggs while they're still hot out of the pan, so I ignored the flashing light. I even reached over and turned down the volume on the speaker, just in case he called again and disturbed me while I was eating. After all, my mama had taught me that "Breakfast is the most important meal of the day," and I agreed with her.
I ate and then washed up my dishes before I listened to the answering machine, which now had three messages on it, all three were virtually identical to the one I'd heard before. Four messages and not even a hint of the dork's phone number. Whoever the dumb jerk was, he was definitely a stupid idiot!
Then just as I was headed for the door to go outside and do more work, the phone rang again. This time, since I was standing beside it, I picked up the receiver.
"Hello."
"Dave, it's Charlie, and have I got a deal for you! You can make ten grand a month for a whole year and not do one damn thing, but if you do decide to do any work you can earn fifty bucks an hour. What do you think of that?"
"Who the hell are you anyway? I know a couple of dozen guys named Charlie, but you can't be anyone I've talked to recently, because I don't recognise your voice. So, since you didn't leave me a number, I couldn't call you back."
"Oh, shit! Sorry, it's your brother-in-law, Charlie Mullins. I didn't think you'd forget my voice so fast."
"Ex-brother-in-law, Charlie, thank you. I've been divorced for eight years and I haven't talked to you since then. Now what the hell is this nonsense about, another of your harebrained, get-rich schemes that involves someone ripping off widows and single mothers for their welfare cheques?"
"No, no man, I've turned over a new leaf. This is honest and above board, completely legal. I'm working for a guy who needs to put up a twenty-four foot metal-roofed dome on a relatively isolated piece of property to do some sort of atmospheric tests. The only problem is he needs to have a reliable source of electricity as well as a semi-isolated place to do it. I was thinking maybe he could do it out at your place. I mean, you're what, maybe five miles from your closest neighbour? Besides, you've got ten acres of fully fenced land and all that other acreage that just . . ."
"Charlie, I live here because I like quiet and seclusion, and I don't need to screw up my privacy just to make a few bucks. Besides, what kind of atmospheric tests does this guy do and how will it affect me and my animals? I have livestock here and I don't want any weird crap or heavy traffic upsetting either them or me, so forget it. Find another sucker." Then I hung up on him.
Now if it had been anyone else but Charlie Mullins, I might have listened to him, but like the rest of the Mullins clan, Charlie was a crooked slime-ball. I know his family well, I had made the mistake of marrying his sister. In the six months Helen and I lived together I got to know her utterly useless, freeloading relatives quite well and I soon realized the mistake I'd made in marrying that scheming bitch.
Oh, at first she was the sweetest little thing, accommodating, enthusiastic and very cuddlesome, but inside of a few months that mask was torn away rather rudely. You see I worked downtown then, so I had a house in town at that time, but on the way to work one morning my car had a flat tire. I pulled off to the side, hopped out and opened the trunk to get at the jack and the spare, but neither one was there. Since the tire had gone flat only a few blocks from home, I walked back to see if the spare and the jack were in my carport. Helen and her sister had used the car the day before to move some of the sister's belongings and I thought perhaps they'd needed the space for some reason and had taken them out.
As I was walking up the driveway I had to pass right under the open kitchen window and I heard Helen and her sister, Aggie having a conversation. I damn near had a heart attack from the shock of what I overheard though.
"Shit, I can't believe Jack is so fucking dumb, Helen. Where the hell did you find a sucker like him?" Aggie said loudly.
"Oh, don't kid yourself, Sis, he's not dumb, just damn trusting and really fucking gullible. I mean, he gave me a credit card that has a ten grand limit on it for Christ sake. Just after the twelve months of cohabitation are up I intend to load that card to the hilt, then I'll hit him with divorce papers for irreconcilable differences. In fact, give me another month or two and I'll be able to forge his signature perfectly, then I'll start swapping some of his stocks into my name too. If there's any shit raised over that I can claim they were gifts and it will be his word against mine. Not only that, but after a year, I'll attempt to claim half of the value of this house, his wages and his pension, even if I only get part of it, I'll be well off. Once I leave him I intend to live well off the little bit of tail he's getting from me now."
I stood there and listened to her lay out her scheme to rip me off for several minutes, until I couldn't stand to listen any more. I didn't go into the carport looking for that spare tire or anything else, that might make a sound which would make them suspect someone had listened to them. Instead I headed back to my car and called a tow truck to haul it to a high school chum's service station. Next I called work to take the day off, and after that I called a cab to take me to my bank. My first urge was to cancel all my accounts and shift my money somewhere safe, but my banker talked me out of doing anything quite that simple. Oh, I should mention that my banker is also my cousin, Fred. He called his brother, Bert, who happens to be a lawyer and he came over to the bank as well so we could put our heads together and salvage my financial future.
In half an hour we had hired a private detective to keep an eye on Helen, as well as having him check into her background. Then we sat down and did some family 'magic' with my finances.
We made a few real-estate swaps, shuffled some stocks and bonds around, then did a bit of horse trading, including an increase in my investments in a couple of family held promissary notes. Finally we scraped up all my loose funds and emptied almost everything out of my bank accounts, then invested that money in a long term venture that we knew would pay off - in about two years. The very last thing I did was to pay off and cancel all of my credit and debit cards, well actually, both Helen's cards and mine. When we got done every buck I had was invested so deeply in family enterprises that it would take a tax lawyer and a dozen accountants five years to find it and yet it was still available if I needed it.
I had traded my house, my boat and most of my 'liquid' assets for a chunk of land that was thirty miles from town. I now owned 67% of a large horse ranch that my family had inherited from my grandfather. Only, on paper it looked as if I'd only ended up with Grandpa's home place, ten acres of land, a house and a few buildings. Actually, owning a major share of the whole ranch was what I'd been working toward since I was a kid, but I don't think I'd ever mentioned it to Helen. Well, other than asking her if she liked horses and if she'd like to live on a horse ranch, then hearing her rave about the idea. Of course that was while we were just starting to date, only now that I knew her better I was sure she'd probably been feeding me a line of horse pucky, just to impress me.
After all the financial crud was done, my cousin Bert, dropped me off at the service station and I proceeded to make a deal with my buddy, Lennie. Lennie had an old two-ton farm truck that he kept licensed because he owned a five-acre hobby farm as well as the service station. I made a deal to swap him the use of my Oldsmobile in exchange for the use of that old farm truck for two months, so when I backed into my driveway later, I was driving that old clunker truck.
The reaction when I stepped inside the front door was classic.
"What are you doing driving that piece of junk?" Helen screeched, which astonished me because she'd never raised her voice to me before.
"Oh, you mean my new truck?" I tried to keep the grin off my face because she'd stepped right into the trap I'd set.
"Of fucking course I mean the truck. Where's our car? Aggie and I are going out tonight and we need the car."
"Well, I'm not sure where it is now. You see I need a truck now, not a car, so I traded it off."
"What!!! What do you need a truck for?" she squawked.
"I bought a farm," I grinned. "You said you liked horses, so I sold the house and bought some shares in a horse ranch."
"You did what?" her mouth dropped open and she mumbled the words in disbelief as she began to frown deeply.
"Helen, you're not deaf, you heard me the first time. We'll have to move by the end of the month though. By this time next month we'll be living on a ranch, thirty-five miles from all this city crap, just like you said you wanted."
"What? I never said anything of the sort!" now her face was growing red and her frown was deepening
"Yes, you did! You told me that while we were on our very first date. Remember, the waitress was standing right there at the time and she thought the idea of living on a horse ranch was wonderful and very romantic. If I recall correctly, we were at 'Chez Michelle,' so I'll bet we can even ask the waitress and she'd remember the conversation."
"You didn't really sell this house because of some stupid discussion we had on our first date, did you?"
"Yep, this is Bert's house now, you remember him don't you, my cousin, the lawyer? He's moving in on the first of next month and he'd really appreciate it if we could move out early so he can redecorate."
"But I just finished decorating the house so it looks the way I want it. Aggie and I repainted everything and we even had my cousin Marvin redo the kitchen and hallway floors with new tile."
"Yeah, but if you remember when they visited us Bert and Muriel didn't seem to like your choice of colours much, but you can't blame them for that. I mean the hallway is the almost same colour as a jail cell for goodness sake, and as lawyers they see enough jail-house green while they're on the job. On top of that they said the tiles were cheap rejects that should never have been used for that job."
"What are you implying?"
"Why would I be implying anything? We were just talking about paint colours for cripes sake. Don't tell me you've seen the inside of a jail cell? I have, but that's because I went along with Bert one time and the guard at the jail showed me around while Bert was busy with a client."
"You son of a bitch, implying that I might have been in jail. Fuck you, you bastard! We'll see about that deal with the house too. We're married, so you can't sell this house without my approval."
"Sorry, Helen, but your name isn't on the title of the house and never would have been since this house has been family property for donkey's years. I inherited the place with the codicil that it could only be sold to or owned by another blood relative of my family. Oh, while I'm thinking of property and money, you might as well cut up those credit cards I gave you. I needed the equity from them, as well as all of my stocks and bonds to swing the deal, so I paid off the credit cards and cancelled them. I cancelled the debit cards for my regular bank accounts too, because I had to close those out. I know our income will drop drastically for a while, but we can make do for a short while. We'll get new credit cards, just not with as big a balance – well we will, once we've established our residency on the ranch and manage to raise a few horses. Two or three years of living frugally ought to do it."
"But you've still got income coming from your job, don't you?"
"My job? Oh, I'm going to have to quit that fairly soon, after all I'm a farmer now - well a rancher anyway. I certainly won't have time to work in town, but then neither will you. We're both going to be working long hours on the ranch from now on, just to make a go of it."
That did it. To Helen, hard work was anathema, just another pair of four letter swear words, but I already knew that.
"Fuck you, I'm leaving you and I want a divorce too!" she screeched.
She packed her clothes and a few other things, some of which I considered mine, then called her brother to come get her and Aggie. Since she'd mentioned that magic word; 'divorce,' I now had other options open to me. As soon as she walked out the door I phoned my lawyer, Bert, then a locksmith and got the ball rolling. The locksmith had the locks all rekeyed by eight o'clock that evening and Bert didn't sit on his butt either. He made the divorce application out for abandonment as well as irreconcilable differences, but he was unable to find her to serve those papers for a few days. Then one morning, about a week later, the private detective took photos of Helen breaking into my house just after I'd left for work. Then to top it off, the neighbour across the street called the police when he saw Helen and a friend loading my family antiques into a ratty old van.
The cops called me, I called Bert, and Helen was served those papers shortly after she was booked for breaking and entering, attempted robbery and resisting arrest. The resultant divorce did not go well for her, even though I refused to have her or her friend prosecuted for breaking and entering or attempted robbery. After all, none of my furniture was damaged and I got it all back. Unfortunately my lawyer proved that during the time she had lived with me she had contributed almost nothing toward our joint expences, but instead had been quite wasteful of the funds in our joint accounts. Then to top it off the the judge placed her under a peace bond for resisting arrest. I don't know what she did while she was under the peace bond, but I heard later that she ended up serving six months in the crowbar hotel for whatever it was, so it must have been relatively serious.
Of course, all of that crap happened several years ago.
However, because of my impression of Helen and her whole family, there was no way I was going to have anything to do with Charlie Mullins, or with this new deal he had cooked up. He couldn't seem to take no for an answer though and even showed up on my doorstep one day. I finally had to tell him that if he called me again, I'd have him listed as a nuisance caller and if he showed up on my property once more, I'd have him arrested for trespass. That threat finally seemed to sink into his thick skull. Of course being escorted off the ranch by José and Diego may have had something to do with him no longer feeling welcome on the property.
Unfortunately he had shown my place to the oddball who was doing the research and he wasn't as easy to get rid of as Charlie had been. For some reason the guy had it in his head that my place was absolutely perfect for whatever he was trying to do. Just looking at the guy gave me the creeps and I didn't want to spend much time near him, let alone have him spend any time on the ranch. Up until I saw that guy, I didn't think I had any prejudices, but dammit, I simply didn't like him to be anywhere close to me. He was just plain ugly, he didn't talk English very well and he walked like a duck. On top of that he looked and acted like an absolute weirdo, but perhaps if I describe him you can understand what I'm trying to say.
First off, he was tall, well over six feet, but at the same time he was skinny, thin as a rail, a walking beanpole. Then too, his head was too big for his body, and it was a strange shape, wide, but not very deep from front to back. His forehead, what there was of it, sloped back and yet his hairline hardly showed from the front. On top of that his eyes were spread wide apart and the bridge of his long, broad nose started well above those round, bovine-appearing eyes. In fact his nose was the largest feature on his face by far, because his cheeks were flat, and his mouth wasn't much more than a slit, with hardly anything for lips. Then too, his chin receded so gradually that I had a hard time deciding where it ended and where his neck began. His skin was dark black, shiny and had a hint of green to it, while his hair was short and greasy, a dark, blue-black mat that looked almost as if it was glued to his strange shaped skull. He certainly didn't have enough hair to hide his oversized ears, which would have made an African elephant jealous. He looked so weird that he could have taken a job in a science fiction movie like 'Star Wars' and wouldn't have had to wear an ounce of makeup.
Although I had already refused him twice, he showed up a third time, but the third time he came by, he was carrying an attache case. When I ordered him off the place, he set that case down on the top step of my front porch and flipped it open.
"Rent for small biece your land, one year, blease" he slurred in that funny voice he had.
When I looked down, I saw that the case was filled with Krugerrands – legal gold coins – each coin containing a full ounce of gold. I'd handled a few Krugerrands and I knew how big the legal ones were, 1.28 inches in diameter and .11 inches thick. That attache case was about 12" by 18" and at least 3 inches deep. I estimated that there were at least 8 rows of coins across, at least 13 rows in length and it would take about 25 coins in a stack to make up the height. I knew that gold was selling for something like $1500.00 an ounce at that time, all because of the stupidity of the US gubernators(1), but that's another story. At any rate, as a rough estimate that little case was worth about four-million bucks. In other words, enough money to make an offer to purchase on my whole ten acre hobby farm, including my house, my buildings, my machinery and all of my livestock.
So there he was, the homeliest man I'd ever seen and he was standing on my front step, offering me a small fortune just to rent a little chunk of my property. He didn't want to buy it, just rent it and only for a year. Yet the guy was so darn ugly that I had a hard time looking him in the eye and just being close to him made me feel extremely uncomfortable. Even worse than that though, he'd been brought here by Charlie Mullins who'd never turned his hand to an honest day's work in his life and that fact rang extremely loud warning bells for me.
Yet this guy was offering me a fortune in legal gold for something that meant so little to me, since I owned a chunk of land five miles wide and seven deep. What harm could he do to an acre or two of land in a year? After all, I wasn't about to let him start a mine or drill an oil well on my place.
Only . . . something about the whole deal worried me . . .
Just what the devil should I do, give in to greed and take the money, or call in the hounds and run the guy off?
In the long run I put him off for a day. I said I'd sleep on the problem and give him an answer in the morning. He looked at me strangely, then shrugged his shoulders, turned around, walked over to his weird looking foreign car and drove off. He'd already disappeared over the edge of the hill near the road that ran past the ranch before I realized that he'd left the attache case and all that gold behind. In fact the lid of the attache case was still open and the sun was still glinting off all that bright and beautiful bullion.
Dang, and I thought I was forgetful!
Chapter 2
(1)Gubernator is actually the Latin word for the pilot or helmsman of a ship, but in the last few years it has become a slang term for a somewhat less than spectacular form of government 'helmsman.' At the moment I am somewhat less than impressed with the members of the people at the helm of the US government whether they are in congress or senate - whether liberal, conservative or pee party member - in fact many of those idiots whole aim seems to be to shout loudly; "Pee on you mack, I've got mine and don't ever try to tax what I've got or else I'll find a way to stab everyone in the back!"