The Attitude Adjuster: Three Cavanaugh/Protector Stories Read online

  “Vince, thanks for coming,” Cavanaugh said.

  “Well, you said the magic word ‘friendship.’ ”

  “Where’s Gwen?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “Jamie phoned and gave us directions to the house. Gwen’s helping to pick up the little girl from school.”

  “That finally covers the bases,” Cavanaugh said.

  Again, Dan’s eyes struggled open. “Who . . .” He squinted at Vince.

  “Another friend,” Cavanaugh said. “Isn’t it nice to be popular?”

  Dan’s eyes drooped.

  “Somebody sure worked him over,” Vince said.

  * * *

  “Had a tattoo,” Dan said a day later. His words were hard to understand because he spoke through mangled lips. “A rose. Here.” Dan pointed toward his right forearm.

  “Yes, you told that to your wife and me when you were unconscious,” a police detective said. “Ever see him before?”

  “No.” Dan breathed and rested. “But he knew my address.”

  Cavanaugh leaned close.

  “He claimed I paid him. For what he called an attitude adjustment,” Dan murmured.

  “What does that mean?” the detective asked.

  “He said I won an auction.”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that, too. He must have been crazy. A crack head who wandered into the house you were showing,” the detective concluded.

  “But then why would he go to the hospital and attack Dan a second time?” Jamie asked.

  “That’s the thing about crack heads. They don’t make sense,” the detective told her.

  “He said I’d done something terrible.” Dan forced out the words. “. . . said he was easing my conscience.”

  “By beating you? Crazy for sure,” the detective decided. “We’ll check our files for crack heads who are religious fanatics.”

  A physician entered the room, examined Dan, and announced that there wasn’t any reason for him to remain in the hospital any longer. “I’ll prescribe some pain medication. You’ll probably get a quieter rest at home.”

  * * *

  Helping to get Dan settled in the master bedroom, Cavanaugh asked, “Do you feel alert enough to answer more questions?”

  “Anything to catch him.” Dan took a painful breath. “To stop him.”

  “Do you have any enemies?”

  Dan looked puzzled.

  “Sweetheart, he asked me the same thing,” Laura said. “I told him I couldn’t imagine anybody hating you.”

  “How big is your real-estate firm?” Jamie asked.

  “Twenty brokers.”

  “One big happy family?”

  “They’re all a great team.”

  “No exceptions?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “No.” Dan’s pain-ridden eyes clouded. “Except . . .”

  “There’s always an ‘except’,” Jamie said.

  “Now that I think about it . . .”

  “Exactly. Now that you think about it . . . It’s a great team because the ones that didn’t fit got sent away.”

  “Six months ago. I had to tell a broker to leave the firm,” Dan remembered.

  “Why?”

  “Sexual harassment. Sam Logan. He kept bothering a secretary.”

  “I remember now,” Laura said. “But that’s so long ago . . .”

  “But wouldn’t he have tried to get even with me earlier?”

  “Not if he made himself wait until he hoped you’d forgotten him,” Jamie said.

  “But Sam wasn’t the guy who attacked me.”

  “So he hired somebody,” Jamie suggested.

  “Auctioned somebody,” Cavanaugh added, referring to the word the detective had mentioned.

  “But what auction?” Dan winced from the pain of talking.

  “Set that aside for the moment. Tell us more about your business. Is anything unusual or dramatic happening?”

  “Just that this year was fabulous for us. Enough that Ed Malone made an offer.”

  “Ed Malone? Offer?”

  “He’s the best broker I have. He wants to buy a share of the firm and open a branch office close to the beach.”

  “You seriously considered his proposal?” Jamie asked.

  “Not much. I told him I liked things the way they are.”

  “Do you suppose he wanted a share strongly enough that he decided to put you on your back for a while?” Cavanaugh wondered. “If business suffered, maybe he could buy a share of the firm for a lower amount.”

  “Ed?” Dan looked astonished. “Never in a million years. We get along perfectly.”

  “Tell us about the Baxters. Laura told Jamie you were supposed to have dinner with them the day you were beaten.”

  “Yes,” Laura said. “They watched our daughter while I went to look for Dan. They’re close friends. They’d never do anything to hurt us.”

  “Because of the dinner invitation, they’d be the last people you’d suspect,” Cavanaugh noted.

  “You know,” Dan said painfully, “I don’t like the way you think.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Cavanaugh told him. “You’re tired and sore, and we’re badgering you with questions. We’ll talk about this later. Meanwhile, arrangements need to be made. Jamie and I have an assignment in Los Angeles tomorrow. Vince and Gwen go with us. But you need at least two protectors. Also, you need to tell your daughter’s school to take precautions while she’s there.”

  “Two protectors?” Laura asked.

  “Three would be better,” Jamie answered.

  “We’d hire them?”

  “Jamie and I were happy to do this for friendship,” Cavanaugh said. “Vince and Gwen did it as a favor to us. But protectors who don’t know you would certainly expect to be paid.”

  “How much?” Laura frowned.

  “A reasonable rate would be three hundred dollars a day.”

  “Times three? Per day?” Laura looked shocked.

  “Good God, for how long?” Dan wanted to know.

  “Until you’re recovered. Meanwhile, they’d teach you how to secure the house and to change your patterns and behavior when you’re outside. We call it Condition Orange, a basic alertness that helps you anticipate trouble. You should read Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear. It teaches you to pay attention to your instincts when they warn you something’s wrong.”

  “The Gift of Fear?” Dan asked. “Condition Orange? This is insane. You make it sound like we’re living in a war zone.”

  “Not far from the truth. The world’s a dangerous neighborhood,” Jamie said.

  Laura studied her. “You’ve certainly changed.”

  “Things happened that forced me to change,” Jamie said. “I wouldn’t be alive today if I hadn’t started thinking this way. I’ll explain it to you later.”

  “Meanwhile, think about this while you rest,” Cavanaugh told Dan.

  “I don’t have time to rest.” Dan shifted in the bed, wincing. “Not when I’m losing business. Laura, get me my laptop. I need to see the new listings and—”

  “Do you really think working as soon as you get home from the hospital is a good idea?” Laura asked.

  “The alternative is to let Ed try to replace me. That’s how your friends have got me thinking.”

  “Sorry,” Cavanaugh said, and started backing from the room.

  Laura brought Dan his laptop and helped him sit up. Groaning, he opened it and used the hand on his unbroken arm to turn on the computer.

  “We’ll let you do your work.” Jamie left the room with Laura.

  “Please, close the door,” Dan said.

  Halfway down the stairs, Laura halted. She thought about something, then glanced up toward the bedroom.

  “Excuse me for a minute,” she told Jamie and Cavanaugh.

  Laura climbed the stairs and opened the door. After a motionless moment, she stepped inside and closed the door. The back of her neck was red.

  * * *

  At the bottom of the stairs, Cavanaugh
and Jamie looked at each other.

  “Something’s not what it seems,” Cavanaugh said. “Laura was more upset about the expense of hiring protectors than Dan was. Do they have money problems?”

  “Not if somebody’s trying to buy into Dan’s business and he keeps refusing.”

  “I’m bothered by something else,” Cavanaugh added. “The police detective said Dan talked about an auction and a rose tattoo when he was unconscious, but Laura never mentioned a word about the auction and the tattoo when we met her. Why would she leave those details out of her explanation?”

  “Auction. What does that mean to you?” Jamie asked.

  “Christie’s. Sotheby’s. Paintings. Statues.”

  “Sure. But . . . Maybe it’s because I used to be in the dot-com sector. Christie’s and Sotheby’s aren’t what I immediately think of.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll give you a hint. The auction’s on the Internet.”

  “eBay?”

  Jamie went into a study next to the living room and approached its desk-top computer. “Just out of the hospital, Dan was far too impatient to get on the Internet.” She turned on the computer, tapped a few keys, and pointed toward a list that appeared on the screen. “These are the ten sites that this computer accesses the most.”

  “No eBay,” Cavanaugh said. “That hunch didn’t work out.”

  “But what’s this bod.com and eBod?” Jamie wondered. “Let’s see if this computer and the one upstairs are networked. Yep.” Jamie tapped more keys. “Dan already signed off. Strange. He couldn’t wait to get on, and now he couldn’t wait to get off as soon as Jamie went back to the bedroom.”

  Jamie typed www.bod.com. A prompt asked for a password.

  “Looks like this has a parental control,” Jamie said. “Let’s check out the site on my iPhone.”

  The image that popped up on her iPhone made her say, “Gosh.” She tilted her head, trying to look at the screen upside down.

  “Double gosh,” Cavanaugh said, peering over her shoulder.

  “I didn’t know that position was physically possible,” Jamie decided.

  “Just goes to show, we never stop learning. But I suspect they needed a chiropractor after doing it that way.”

  “A porn site,” Jamie said.

  “Chiropractor or not, would you mind if we tried that position?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “I have no idea where we’d find the harness.”

  “Can’t wait to see what eBod is.” Cavanaugh pointed toward a directory, where eBod was an option.

  After Jamie pressed that portion of the screen, the new page made them motionless.

  “An auction site,” Cavanaugh finally said.

  “Well, now we know where to get the harness. Also weird-shaped dildos, erotic creams, exotic vibrators, and inflatable dolls.”

  “Anatomically correct,” Cavanaugh said. “Hey, the bid for that one is only up to twenty dollars. At that price, it’s a steal. Let’s try for it.”

  A directory at the top of the screen included the word “services.”

  “I wonder where that leads,” Jamie said.

  When she clicked on it and they read about the things that people were willing to be paid to do to one another, Cavanaugh said, “The road of lost souls.”

  “Seen enough?”

  “To last a lifetime.”

  As they returned to the living room, Laura descended the stairs.

  “Hey, Laura,” Cavanaugh said. “Remember, at the hospital, I told you we might need to suspect what seemingly couldn’t be suspected?”

  Laura frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  “How long has Dan been addicted to computer porn?”

  “What kind of question . . .”

  “Is that what he was looking at when you went back to the bedroom just now?” Cavanaugh asked. “Were you checking up on him? Even fresh out of the hospital after taking a beating, he couldn’t resist taking a peak. Is he that far gone?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Bod-dot-com and eBod.”

  Laura’s cheeks paled.

  “We all agreed Dan was kind and decent. A loving husband. An attentive father. Good-natured. Generous,” Cavanaugh said. “None of that’s incompatible with a porn addiction. He’s not hurting anybody, right? If he enjoys watching, what’s the big deal?”

  The room became silent.

  “Unless he gets more turned on by fantasy than reality,” Jamie said. “Then the expression ‘loving husband’ has a limited application.”

  “Jamie, you’re supposed to be my friend.”

  “I couldn’t understand why were you so concerned about the cost of the protectors. If you were worried about Dan, the price would have been cheap,” Jamie said. “Unless you knew who’d attacked him and why. Unless you were fairly confident the guy who did it wouldn’t return after the second attack.”

  “You hired the attacker,” Cavanaugh added. “You used the auction directory of the porn site that Dan’s most addicted to. Poetic justice.”

  “Did he stop having sex with you?” Jamie asked. “Did he get all his satisfaction from the porn site?”

  “Jamie, really, I’m begging you as a friend. Leave this alone.”

  “Did you resent the way he ignored you? Did you plead with him to stop going to the site? Did you promise he could indulge all his fantasies on you, but even that didn’t tempt him to pay attention to you?”

  Trembling, Laura hugged herself.

  “I’m sorry,” Jamie said.

  “Damn him, he wouldn’t stop. I wanted to punish him. I wanted to put him in a position where he needed me, where he’d appreciate that I took care of him.”

  “The second attack?” Cavanaugh asked.

  “A mistake,” Laura answered. “I contacted the man and made sure he knows not to come back.”

  “That’s why the cost of the protectors bothered you. Because you knew they wouldn’t be needed.”

  Laura’s knees bent. She eased onto a chair. “I don’t think I can bear going to jail. Being away from Bethany will kill me.”

  “We’re the only ones who know,” Cavanaugh said.

  Jamie looked at him in surprise.

  “Except for Dan,” Cavanaugh added. “Dan has to know.”

  “You mean you’re not going to tell the police about this?”

  “It seems to me there’s been enough suffering,” Cavanaugh said.

  Laura looked hopeless. “But you insist I tell Dan?”

  “Otherwise we won’t stay quiet.”

  “When he finds out, he’ll leave me.”

  “Possibly. But the way things were going, one of you would have left soon anyhow. So you’re not exactly losing anything. Do you still love him?”

  “Yes, Lord help me.”

  “And maybe, despite everything, he still loves you.”

  “Do you seriously expect me to believe Dan will forgive me? That’s not going to happen.”

  “Perhaps if you can forgive him. There’s no denying this is a mess,” Jamie said. “But you won’t know if this marriage can be saved until the two of you face the truth.”

  “I feel nauseous.”

  “I know.” Jamie went over, crouched next to her, and held her hands.

  No one moved for several minutes. Finally, Laura took a deep breath, freed her hands, and stood. “There’s no sense waiting to tell him. It only hurts worse.”

  Gripping the banister, Laura slowly climbed the stairs.

  “The attacker,” Cavanaugh said.

  “He called himself an ‘attitude adjuster’.”

  “What’s the email address you used to get in touch with him?”

  Laura paused at the top of the stairs. Her face was even paler.

  “Don’t worry. We won’t tell the police,” Cavanaugh said. “If we did, he’d implicate you. Then he wouldn’t be the only one going to prison.”

  “But he needs to feel responsible for his actio
ns,” Jamie said. “He should do some soul searching the same as you and Dan are.”

  * * *

  EBOD

  I WILL ADJUST YOUR WAYS

  High bidder receives an attitude adjustment. I am strong and

  tough from years of outdoor work. If you win this auction . . .

  QUESTION TO SELLER

  I have been bad. Frightfully horribly bad. I have never felt so

  ashamed. I can’t eat or sleep because I feel so god-awful guilty.

  I need to be punished as soon as possible. Please. I’m begging you

  to adjust my . . .

  * * *

  Barry put on his leather gloves. A refinement he was proud of, they protected his knuckles. At the same time, they guaranteed he wouldn’t leave fingerprints. I don’t know why I didn’t get the idea earlier, he told himself. The gloves were shiny black. Their thin leather fit snugly on his hands. He loved their smell.

  Time to earn my pay, he thought.

  He was in San Francisco, another interesting city he had not visited until his auctions led him in new directions. Cable cars. Fisherman’s Wharf. The Golden Gate bridge. The cemetery where James Stewart followed Kim Novak in that spooky Hitchcock movie. There was certainly plenty to see, and the food was wonderful, especially at that fancy Italian restaurant Fleur d’Italia, where the waiters wore tuxedos and the wood-paneled walls were dark with age. A little pricey, but adjusting attitudes was bringing in cash, especially when he robbed people after beating them senseless, making it look like a mugging. The world was purer by the day.

  Almost midnight. A thick fog came in off the bay. A ship’s horn blared. Barry was outside a warehouse. At a corner of the building, a light glowed faintly in an office. He peered past moisture on the window. A man sat at a desk. His head down, he sorted through documents. Crutches leaned against the wall behind him.