Legalese

From Sokushinbutsu

My attorney encouraged me to invite the police to search my office.

She said, if they came in with a warrant like they did at the house it could get ugly.

I didn't have anything to hide at the office. It was tax records. My investment periodicals and prospectus issues showed up there. It was in a secure building. There was a desk and a fax machine and a rolodex, a land line phone. There was a fake mantle with a bust and some candles on it over a fake fireplace. There was some piece of modern wall art I dug when I was 30.

I went to the office and called the police without doing more than uprighting some furniture at the house. I didn't take a shower.

A plane-clothesed pair of detectives showed up relatively soon after I called them. I buzzed them into the building and started a pot of coffee.

“You guys are welcome to look at or under or behind anything in here, but I'd prefer it to be returned to how it was found. It would be more expensive and time consuming to put this office back in order than it will be to get my house back right."

The cops seemed apologetic, but they didn't apologize for ransacking my house. It wasn't these two, but they knew the score.

"My attorney is driving in from Chicago to meet with whoever is in charge of this investigation.

"So hey, what's being investigated? What is all this about?"

One of the detectives was leafing idly through the top drawer of a file cabinet, not even looking at the papers. He said, "If you were guilty, you'd know." looking my way but not at me. He pushed out his upper lip in a way that mashed his moustache into his nostrils and then curled up his nose to get it out.

He was taking long slow blinks. He pulled out my tax returns from 2001 and opened the folder and licked his finger.

I said, “I'm not sure you're allowed to look at my tax returns.” He said, “Oh, is that what this is?”

He closed the folder and carefully filed it between 2000 and 2002.

They asked me to take the wall art down and open the safe.

They smelled my cigars. They tapped on the floor with a flashlight one of them had under his blazer. They looked behind and under everything. They left a couple business cards and walked out without giving anything away.

I drove back home.

*

Fati Takitakshvili is my attorney. She looks like a normal white midwestern lady. Her parents emigrated here from Georgia, by Russia. She had seen me through some sticky IRS and Federal Trade Commission stand offs when that needed doing. When I got out of the business I kept paying her. She seemed like a good ally to have.

I hadn't talked to her in a number of years.

When I told her what had gone on at the house, she said she'd drive to town and see what was up.

I said, "Bill me for your time, Fati. I trust you'll get to the bottom of it."

As she drove the three plus hours from Chicago, I picked up around the house. It looked very much like everything had been handled and examined. Nothing seemed to be broken, but all the furniture was unceremoniously overturned and left that way. Everything was taken out of every cupboard and off every shelf. Closets were emptied onto the floors outside them. Everything had clearly been taken out of the fridge and put back in. Everything that had been in the freezer was in the kitchen sink: ice cream, frozen peas, vodka, cube trays, cold packs. Pots and pans were out on the floor. Plates and glasses were on the counter. The tray of silverware from the kitchen drawer was left on a stack of plates.

I turned the furniture in the living room back over and put the TV back up on the wall. I put the speakers back up. I found the vacuum under a pile of coats, some of which were not mine and vacuumed the carpet. There were dirty boot tracks and lint balls from under the couch cushions where the couches had sat upturned.

I turned on the TV and sat for five minutes with it on. There was news. There was fighting somewhere, a murder, kids arrested with drugs and pistols. I turned it back off and went after the pile of coats in the hall. I'd need a shovel to clean the kitchen. I went for the easy stuff first.

The coats and jackets were all still on their hangers. Whatever they were looking for, they must have thought was behind all these coats and jackets.

All there was at the back of the hall closet was the back of a hall closet. Poor bastards.

The kid had left a number of winter and fall jackets in my closet. All that shit was on the floor in a pile.

I found the one I'd seen him wearing at the bar the last time I'd seen him. It was a long buttery leather coat with pockets on the front big enough to put your hands all the way into, high wide lapels and buttons, but no buttonholes. It smelled amazing, like tobacco and cologne. I pulled it off the hanger and I got into it. It was light and it hung like cloth. It was an amazing coat.

***

I remember the first time I saw a bald eagle. They were endangered when I was a kid.

I was twenty-nine. I was test driving a nice car.

There was a bald eagle circling over the river as I crossed a bridge. It was right outside the passenger window.

Now there are packs of them in the trees around the last parts of the river free of ice.

When they call and blink they seem distinctly dim witted like willful and effective chickens with good clothes.

*

It had breast pockets too: the jacket. They were the perfect size for a pack of cigarettes. I looked at my reflection in the turned off tv. The hall light lit me up against the rest of the living room with the shades drawn.

They sat a police car in front of my house all night while they asked me questions I couldn't answer and ransacked my house with the shades drawn. What, so the neighbors couldn't see? Jesus Christ I was mad. Exhausted now, but still mad. I hadn't even considered sleep.

As I ran my hands down the front of this jacket and tugged the lapels, I noticed a bulge in the left breast pocket.

My phone rang. It was Fati. She was pulling off the freeway almost here.

As I said hello to her I pulled a ball of yellowish hand formed solid, rock cocaine a little bigger than a golf ball out of the inside breast pocket of this kid's pimp ass leather coat.

I stared at it as she explained where she was, what exit. She was saying, do I do this now? Asking if the turns she was making were right to make. And I was going, "uh huh" and staring at a prison-time amount of recently manufactured, boutique, uncut sugar booger.

A harbinger.

I got out a step ladder and put the ball up in the drop ceiling above the kitchen and started to put all the drop ceiling panels back in their squares while I was up there.

I had told Fati the front door was open when I had her on the phone. When she walked in I was up there straightening the ceiling panels and swearing.

I could hear her hand over her mouth. "Oh my god…Oh god."

She stopped at the edge of the kitchen floor and looked up at me on the ladder. I was doing what I am always doing- acting as if this was what I was supposed to be doing.

Fati said, "You look like hell."

I said, "Thanks! It's good to see you too. So you wanna get lunch first or just roll down to the station and fuck shit up."

"You smell." She said, "Take a shower and put on a clean shirt. I'll call down there and then we'll go get lunch.

"You got any coffee?"

I looked her dead in the eye for a little too long and then said, "It's right here." I made a sweeping motion with my hand from up the ladder as if to reveal the splendor and bounty that was my kitchen floor with every once contained dry good I possessed haphazardly applied to it and an accompanying hillock of small boxes, bags and empty Tupperware.

She mimed like she was gonna dive in.

I came down from the ladder and grabbed a shower.