Copyright © 2011 Mark Joslyn. All rights reserved

Mrs. Ganson snapped her fingers, looking for the word. "Underachiever, that’s what he is. Always been a real underachiever."

Ray kept his eyes fixed on his notebook, avoiding the sideways victory glance I threw his way. I had just won the bet.

We had pulled up to Mrs. Ganson’s rundown bungalow twenty minutes earlier. We wanted to see if she had any information about her son, William, who had relieved several liquor stores of their cash and, for some reason we never quite hashed out, their blueberry schnapps. He had three down before we finally got a decent sketch of him. A day after the sketch hit the news we got a call from William’s landlady. We raided his apartment, but he had already taken off.

While Ray knocked on Mrs. Ganson’s door, I tried to get a look inside the windows, but the curtains were drawn. I had never seen printed flowers look like they were wilting before, but the set on those curtains was pulling it off.

After three minutes of Ray making his knuckles red, the door jerked open an inch. We were greeted with a vulture eye peering at us over the door chain, and a shrill voice coming through the crack.

"What?"

Ray cleared his throat, ran his hand through his touched up black hair ("It’s natural!") and put on his best calming, yet authoritative smile, the one they hand out when they give you your gold shield.

"Good afternoon Ma’am, I’m Detective Brubeck, this is my partner Detective Forbes. We were wondering if we could ask you a few questions about your son, William."

"He’s not here."

"I see ma’am, but there are a few things we’d like to ask you."

"I haven’t seen him."

"Still, if we could just have a little bit of your time."

"The house isn’t ready for company."

"We’ll only be a moment ma’am."

This went on for another ten exchanges or so. To Ray’s credit, he kept that department issued grin on the whole time and ignored the faces I was making at him.

Eventually she opened the door and let us get a full look at her. Despite the fact that she was fully dressed, she looked like she was freshly out of bed. She squinted her eyes like they were just being introduced to the sun, a tired slump ran from her shoulders to her knees, and as for her hair… well, just picture a bird’s nest that had a bar fight take place in it.

She didn’t ask us to come in, but I got the feeling her not slamming the door on us was the most pleasant invitation we were going to get, so when she shuffled into the living room, we followed.

It was quite a sight. The wallpaper was jaundice yellow and the carpet was a kind of sea-foam green that was popular for about 10 minutes in Peoria in the 1980s. The framed pictures on the wall featured people with smiles so forced I couldn’t help but wonder if they weren’t taken at gunpoint. The couch and the chairs, all of which were garnished with duct tape, were angled towards a spotty and sticky looking television set. It wasn’t so much the décor of the room that bothered me; it was the fact that I had been in this room before.

When she asked us to excuse her while she got her coffee ("and would you like any?" "No thank you ma’am"), I turned to Ray, and, with deadly seriousness informed him "She’s my mother."

Ray’s eyes got that soft and concerned look he usually reserved for the guy who kept coming to the precinct to warn us about the impending invasion from Neptune. Ray Brubeck: Impervious to hyperbole.

"I don’t mean literally. I mean she’s like my mother. Really like her. Exactly like her. Same make and model."

"Dylan…"

"I’m serious! The furniture, the bird of prey eyes, the decade old Christmas cards on the mantel! I’m telling you, they came in the same value pack or something."

"You’re exaggerating"

"Oh yeah? I’ll bet you beers after she says the word ‘underachiever’ at some point during the interview."

"Real beers or that PBR crap?"

"Real beers."

We were shaking on it when Mrs. Ganson came back with her coffee and drooped into the imitation leather sofa.

As usual, Ray took the lead in the questioning. "Cause I’ve got the looks for it, that’s why," he explained to me when I asked him about it once. "The young ones think I’m their dad and the older ones think I’m friendly and nonthreatening." He was right about the second part at least. The grey eyes, square jaw and slightly protruding belly gave him a certain likability that my novelty ties just weren’t matching. I glared at the dice rolling in a narrow line down my chest. Useless bastards.

Once Mrs. Ganson looked ready, Ray flipped open his notebook and started. He began by asking her when she had last seen her son, which she took to mean, "Please give us the unabridged history of your son, William Ganson Jr." She started with kindergarten and had made it up to 5^th grade when she dropped my libation winning word.

"Total underachiever. He used to come home with C’s on his report card and act like he deserved an award. An award for C’s! Can you believe it? I mean..."

"No, that’s really something ma’am," I said, hoping to stop this unauthorized biography before we hit Willy’s awkward teen years. "So you say you haven’t seen him in about a week then?"

"That’s right. Even though he only lives a mile away."

"Okay," Ray said, scribbling down the details "Has he tried to contact you at all? Called you on the phone?"

"Ha!" Mrs. Ganson waved the suggestion away with her prematurely bony hand. "Two minutes every two weeks is the best I get from him. As soon as I ask him what he’s doing for work these days he says he’s gotta go, cause he’s using up his minutes."

"Right, So..."

"He can’t fool me!" She yelled, with steadily increasing volume. "I see those commercials on the TV. I know you can get a plan so you can talk to certain people for free. I guess his mother isn’t good enough to be certain people. I guess twelve hours of labor, don’t get you a spot in his top five!"

We let that sink in for a minute before I spoke up; "Is there anybody your son is close to, somebody he might go to if he was in trouble? Maybe a girlfriend?"

She shot one very mean eye, although I wasn’t sure at whom. "Do strippers count?" Not actually being interested in my thoughts on the subject, she quickly followed with, "No they don’t! I tell him, throwing bills at a girl to shake her rump in his face is not what I call a relationship. Does he listen? No. Although Lord knows those dances last longer than most of Willy’s real relationships. Oh, he never learned how to treat a woman right. Just a hole in a bed sheet, that’s what he treats them like."

She took a sip of her coffee, and as she put it back down, leaned in and whispered, "Gets that from his father honestly, God rest his soul. I loved the man but he was a bit of a pervert really. The things he would make me do..."

"So he likes strip clubs," I interrupted, before we went down a very dark road, "Is there any one in particular he likes?"

"He goes to one called Salty. Don’t ask me why they call it that. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know."

Ray nodded and was writing the name down when his pen ran out of ink. When I reached into my pocket to give him mine, Mrs. Ganson almost had a stroke.

"You’re not gonna smoke are you!"

"No…"I said, and managed to catch myself before I added "Mom." I handed Ray my pen and she breathed a sigh of relief.

"Oh good. I quit years ago myself. Got that patch thing. A miracle it was. Not like Willy. Smokes from sunup to sundown. I tell him, bosses don’t want an employee, and women don’t want a husband, that smells like an ashtray. Does he listen? No."

Something about her saying that bugged me. Besides the childhood flashbacks, I mean. I couldn’t quite nail it down though.

Armed with fresh pen, Ray continued the questions. "So no girlfriends; does he have any friends?"

"Not really," she said, picking at some of the duct tape on the couch, "No one to speak of anyway. Just people he owes money to and people whose girl he’s trying to sleep with. Never learned to play well with others. I remember when we signed him up for little league…"

I held up a desperate hand, "Ma’am, I don’t really think we need to go into..."

"Dylan, please." Ray shushed me, "We never know what might be important." He tried to keep his face serious, but the corners of his mouth were twitching to make a smile. The sadistic bastard was enjoying this.

Mrs. Ganson, meanwhile, had not paused during our sidebar "… at his head! Threw the ball right at the poor little boy’s head. And he was such a nice boy that Tommy Kazan. He’s got a good job now. Michigan Ave. I’ll bet he calls his mother all the time!" She had again gotten progressively louder with the story and had clawed the strip of tape she had been playing with. "Meanwhile Willy won’t even get me a new TV. I can’t see anything on this set. I got a special eye condition, he knows I got a special eye condition."

On that note, I decided to tend to my own eye condition, which consisted of taking off my glasses and wiping them with a handkerchief. They didn’t actually need the sprucing, but it was something to keep my hands busy. As opposed to, you know, strangling someone.

While I cleaned my lenses, I quickly did the checklist of questions: Last contact? Check. Girlfriend? Check. Friends? Check. Hang-outs? Check. Well that should just about…

"What about a car?" Ray asked. Crap. I had forgotten the transportation question. "We found his outside his apartment, but do you think he might have a friend’s he could borrow?"

"I told you, he don’t have friends."

"Right, right, doesn’t play well with others," Ray nodded grimly "Well, do you think he might come back to try and take yours?

Mrs. Ganson put her hand to her chest in shock "I wouldn’t let him have it. Even if he wasn’t on the run, he was never responsible. Never took care of other people’s things. I used to have good China in this house. You know where it is now?"

"Broken?"

"That’s right!" She confirmed, clapping her hands at us.

"Okay," Ray nodded that one over. "You think maybe he might just try and steal it?"

That gave Mrs. Ganson a chuckle, one empty of humor or warmth. "He wouldn’t know how. He’ s no good with cars. Or anything else for that matter. I told him, you gotta learn a skill. Only way to make it out there. Does he listen?

I took a wild guess. "No?"

"No. Never took an interest in anything. Just wanted to sit around, watch TV and feel his ass grow. Meanwhile, I never heard the end of it from Sheila!" The volume had returned.

"Who?"

"Sheila Pedanski; she lived across the street," she said, as if she had told us a thousand times, "What a loudmouth. Every time she came over, I had to hear about her kids scoring goals or getting on honor role, or… or…"

"Winning blue ribbons in science favors?" Ray offered with a smile. I never should have told him that story.

"Right, right," Mrs. Ganson went on, "But Willy? Nope. Didn’t want to do nothing, didn’t want to learn nothing. We could tell early on he wasn’t gonna be college material."

On that note, Mrs. Ganson once again leaned in close and began to whisper. "Of course it’s a good thing we were right, because when we saw he wasn’t going anywhere we spent the bit of cash we were saving for his college on the house. Nothing fancy, just some things that..."

"Ma’am why are you whispering?" And as soon as I asked, I knew. And I knew what had bugged me about her smoking tirade.

I walked past Mrs. Ganson towards a glint of light in the kitchen that had caught my eye when we first walked in. When she saw me enter the kitchen, she instantly started a series of pleas for me to not move anything around as she had it designed in a special way, all from this Japanese book she was reading, cause they really know their stuff, the Japanese. Smart people. Sensitive people. Not like her Willy…

She was still going on about decorating styles of the orient when I walked back in and put the glass ashtray with the stubbed out Marlboro in front of her.

"Whose cigarette is that?"

And then, miracle of miracles, she shut up.

Ray damn near dropped his notebook. Had I turned water into wine, I don’t think he would have been any less surprised. I kept my eyes on Mrs. Ganson. She held my stare, then looked at the ashtray, then looked at her shoes. After that her eyes started doing the tango every which way about the room. Every which way, except for up and to her left.

I headed up the stairs, Mrs. Ganson’s yelps following me the whole time. I left Ray to educate her on the finer points of probable cause, as I tried to find the room that would have been above us and to the left. It was mostly bare, just a rug on the floor and a naked bed against the wall. I figured it was probably Willy’s old room and I knew for sure when I checked the closet, which featured nothing but the kinds of shirts and sweaters your mother gives you, and you don’t take with you when you leave. I sympathized.

I looked under the bed and on the roof right outside the window, but no sign of anything. Then I took another look at the wannabe Persian rug lying on the floor at a crooked angle. Seemed odd Mrs. Ganson would waste it on an empty room. I pulled it up and smiled at the trap door it had been hiding. I held my gun in one hand, grabbed the handle with the other, gave it a pull…

And in the crawl space, there he lay; William Ganson Jr., in all his chain smoking, stripper loving, never-calls his-mother glory. He was in there face down and even though he must have felt the rush of air, he wasn’t turning around. The ostrich defense. I took the time to make sure he didn’t have a weapon in his hands, and then tapped my foot to let him know I had managed to see through his clever strategy. When he looked up I smiled and showed him my badge. He let out a long sigh of defeat, one that sounded old and practiced.

I put the cuffs on Willy and then led him down the stairs. He kept quiet until he saw his mother, which prompted an explosion.

"God damn it, Ma! You were just supposed to get rid of them! Tell them you hadn’t seen me and get rid of them! Why couldn’t you shut up? Why can’t you ever just shut up?"

"You see how he talks to me! You see…" Mrs. Ganson started to yell but we hurried to the door. As we opened the door, Ray took a look back and then whispered to me "You know, technically she obstructed justice…"

I pictured the small interview room I would be in with Mrs. Ganson as I tried to take her statement.

"Not worth it. Keep moving."

After we read him his rights and had him in the back of the car, Ray turned to me. "Alright, I’m impressed. How’d you guess it?"

"You kidding?" I said, "Trapped in a tiny space with nothing to do but listen to his mother list every single thing wrong with him? I must have that nightmare twice a week."