"The number you have dialed is not in service. Please be sure you have the correct number and have dialed it correctly"
That was my result after hours of worry about exactly how to make the phone call to the phone number on the business card. It was a let-down, believe me. I insisted that Rose be there when I made the call. I repeated the recorded put-down to her.
"So, Rose, tell me, what's the purpose of printing expensive business cards with wrong phone numbers on them?"
"Maybe the phone number used to be right, when our suspect lived here."
"A throw-away phone, you mean? Discarded after use? I thought only gangsters used them."
"I guess so. We should watch more TV, so we can keep up. Too much time wasted painting pots and looking at landscapes, I expect. Besides, isn't he a gangster? Who else would frighten Indians by shooting their children's goats?"
"So what now, Sherlock?"
"Elementary, my dear Watson. I haven't the faintest idea."
"The phone number is disconnected. Maybe the post office box is no good either.
Maybe, but maybe the treatment center is somewhere near the post office box. Maybe we can see what he's up to in the neighborhood, or the city. I think it's worth a try.
We looked at the rest of the contact information on the card. I rejected the email. We would be giving too much information away with very little hope of receiving any.
There was a city name and a post office box number. I stared at the card. Why would I want to believe that the picture of the treatment center would be anywhere near the town where the post office box was? Then I wondered what we wanted to find in the first place. The treatment center, I supposed. Would our suspect be somewhere near the treatment center? Or was the whole thing phoney?
I thought it out with Rose. "This card must mean something. The owner must have been able to contact our suspect somehow, if only to collect rent. The rent checks must have come from somewhere, at least while he lived here."
We agreed on that. As a practical matter, it got us nowhere. At long last, we elected to go to the town on the card, try to find the building in the picture, assume that the card was supposed to be helpful to somebody sometime, and hope for the best. In the movies, the private detective pulls into an empty parking space in front of the biggest bank in Las Angeles at high noon. I wondered what our experience would be. Does the same magic hold for potters and painters?
Well, not exactly. We found the town. With a little looking, we found the building. We marveled at that, until we walked up to the building. It was closed, and more than that, it was boarded up. It was, in fact, in the smack middle of a construction site. We stood on the steps of the abandoned building and looked out on the scene before us.
Houses, dozens of them, very nice houses, thank you, in various stages of completion filled the block around the boarded-up building. We weren't in the town itself, exactly. We were about two miles out from it on one of the two roads that connect the town with the rest of the world.
It was noon and the construction site was full of guys eating lunch out of lunch boxes and bags. I looked for someone to talk to. I didn't want to arouse suspicion and hoped we would pass for curious tourists or even possible house buyers.
Looking over the guys eating lunch, I saw a guy by himself sitting on a box in the shade of a storage trailer. Young fellow, scruffy beard, brown baseball cap, not tall, leather tool bag on the ground beside him and not drinking beer, I noticed. Rose and I walked over to him.
He smiled at my smile and looked at me. He was a white guy. Why do I always think the white guys know more of what's going on than the Indians? Probably just the opposite. Anyway I was here now and had to say something.
"Hello," I managed from force of habit and long years of training.
"Hello," he returned, not unfriendly but not engaging either. None of the "Can I help you ?" This guy was not trained in customer service. He seemed open, friendly and unafraid.
I had no idea how to conduct this conversation. Not that we hadn't thought about it. We had, for hours while driving out here. Rose, I noticed, had positioned herself one step back and wasn't going to say anything.
I could remember absolutely nothing of what she and I had discussed, and eventually surprised myself by blurting out the honest truth, asking directly for what I wanted to know.
"What's going on here?"
"Construction," he said, smiling and waiting for my reaction. Then he apparently decided his joke had gone on long enough and that I wasn't going to laugh or get angry. I didn't feel any sort of reply welling up. I just stood there looking at his sandwich and his face, hoping for more.
"We're building a housing community here."
It was a construction site with the building on the card in the middle of it. I showed the guy the card. "Do you know anything about the treatment center, that building now boarded up in the middle of all this?"
"Yeah, I lived here when it went up. I was just a kid. We all knew it was a drug treatment center. I thought for a while they were building it just for me," he laughs, "but no, they had a bunch of Indians in there. The treatment center didn't last long, about two years and a couple of months later the construction group arrived. I've been working for them since then, building houses. At some point, they're going to tear down that building. They used to use it for an office and storage but I think it's empty now. It might become a park, who knows?"
"Have you ever seen the owner?" The question was inane. How would he know? But I was desperate.
"Don't know. Probably not. I generally don't get introduced to people. I'm just a helper, not a lead carpenter."
"Just one more question. When did you start work?"
"Spring, two years ago. April I think. That's when they started construction. They hired locals for helpers, and brought in their own lead carpenters and whatever."
"Thanks."
Now he was curious.
"Why do you want to know all this? Are you looking to buy out here? You don't look like you need a treatment center."
I didn't have a good answer for that. Truth to tell, I wasn't sure myself. "Yes, we might. And we might end up needing a treatment center, too."
I got scared and didn't go any further. Rose and I went back to the van to think things over some more. We hadn't learned much for all our travelling around and asking questions. But the building did exist and had contained a drug treatment center at least for a while. How long did drug facilities last, anyway? Two years seemed like a very short time. But now we had an exact address of the treatment center building and we knew what was happening around it. Maybe we could find an actual owner. We drove back to the castle.