Ready For Retirement
Hugh Lessig

I dug through my bottom drawer and pulled it all out: a Rico Petrocelli baseball card, a Bozo Pez dispenser, a press pass to the 1952 Republican Convention, something that was once a coffee mug.

I never saw the guy come in.

He said: "You're Picasso Smith, the geezer who writes that column? They say it's your last day of work. I guess I got here in the nick of time. You're really 87 years old, huh?"

I continued to clean out my desk without looking up. A few seconds passed. My hearing aid whooshed like a seashell. 

"Well, anyway," the man continued, "I brought something for you. I want you to look at it."

Something solid and heavy hit my desk, and I wanted to roll my eyes. In the newspaper business, only the Trojans gave gifts-a bottle of wine or a box of cigars, but with something else inside, something ready to crawl out and stab you. Me? I preferred an honest, ball-grabbing Spartan. Besides, I couldn't smoke cigars or drink wine anymore. My chest tightened at the sweet phantom smell of . . .

Cordite? Gunpowder? 

Oh no.

"Straighten up, Mr. Smith. There's a .45 caliber pistol sitting on your desk, and I just killed a guy with it. Shot him straight in the face."

Slowly, I put down a fistful of papers and looked up at the man who stood before me. He was short, 60ish and going bald. He had thick, hairy forearms and no wedding ring. He could have been anyone. Then again, that's how they all look. They all could have been anyone.

"Why did you just kill someone? " I asked. "And why would I be interested in that?"

The man cracked a grin, relieved he was talking to the right person.

"I killed this guy," he said, "because of your column last week. That was one kick-ass column, Mr. Smith."

I fought to remember what I wrote last week. "Do you mean the column about the rubber tire plant?"

The man folded his arms. "That's the one," he said proudly.

"You killed a guy over a column about a rubber tire plant?"
*
My column was called Dirty Old Secrets. I had wanted to call it Reopening Old Wounds, because that's really what it was, but the headline wouldn't fit in a one-column hole. At any rate, last week's column was nothing to brag about.

Back in the 1950s, the Venture Tire Plant was losing business, so management hired these "time-and-motion" guys, which was a big thing back then. They'd watch men work an assembly line and figure out how long it took to do each task, what tasks could be done faster, and so on.

The T&Ms took notes for a few days and found all kinds of trouble. The powerful union had kept production quotas ridiculously low. Most workers made their quota by 1 p.m. Then they'd sneak out and go to the bar until quitting time. One guy stayed behind to punch out everyone's time card at 3 p.m.

Management tried to increase production quotas. The union threatened to walk out. The owner said the hell with this and moved the plant to Galveston, Texas. The city of San Francisco lost 5,046 jobs and lawsuits filled its rarefied air, but the damage had been done. 

It qualified as a Dirty Old Secret because I never got around to reporting the story-I was ass-deep into politics and prostitutes and God knows what back in the 1950s. But I kept my notes, thinking I could use it as column fodder one day.
*
"You must've been union," I said.

"Amalgamated Rubber," the man answered.

"Who'd you kill?"

"Emil Stolzfus, that cheap Dutch bastard. He headed up the T&Ms. He was like their executive director or something. You mentioned him in your write-up. You said he was in a local nursing home."

"Did I? Why would you want to kill him?"

The man leaned forward. His shadow fell over the gun. He smelled of baby powder and peppermint gum, which frightened me for no particular reason.

"He. Cost. Me. My. Job." A soft, white index finger tapped the desk with each word. "You don't put someone out of a job."

"That was back in the Fifties . . . " I began.

"I couldn't find him in the phone book," the man continued, "but I knew he was in the area, thanks to your column. So I had my nephew look him up on the computer. I said I had this old friend from the rubber plant, and wasn't there a way to look up someone on the computer. My nephew got me the name and address in 20 minutes. Kids these days. Smart as whips."

"It was so nice of you to involve him," I said.

"Yeah, well. Emil Stolzfus was at Crestview Nursing Home. I go to the reception desk, right? I say I'm a friend from the old days. The nurse says he's probably sleeping, but why don't I go sit with him."

"What happened next?"

"I go in, right? He's there sleeping with his mouth open, not even snoring, the goddamn Pennsylvania Dutch bastard. I put the gun in his mouth and start talking to him, and still he doesn't wake up. So pretty soon I hear a bus pull up, and as it pulls away from the curb, I put a pillow on his face and squeeze the trigger. The back of the guy's head breaks apart like a melon. You got rind, pulp, seeds, the whole kit-and-kaboodle right there on the bed."

"Did anyone see you?"

Mr. Rayborn's face broke into a wide grin. "That's the hell of it. I figured I'd be caught right there. But no one came running. So I lock his door and walk out."

"They'll come soon enough," I said.

He waved me off. "Like I care? That bastard's room stank so much, they'll have a hard time figuring out what smells worse, you know what I'm saying? He wore a bag to catch his business, for chrissakes."

"Why did you come to me?"

Mr. Rayborn took a step back. His face screwed into a funny kind of expression. "You don't consider me a story? Geez, I just killed a guy here. Don't you have standards or something?"

I explained my standards to Mr. Rayborn. Today was indeed my last day at The Frisco Foil. I had retired in 1968, but kept working part-time for lack of something better to do. I had started full-time in 1930, when I had too much energy and too much lip, and in between that day and this one, if I had a nickel for everyone who came to my desk with a loaded gun and said 'I just shot someone with this,' I could have blown up a bag and floated off into the Pacific sunset a long time ago.

"And now I'm cleaning out my desk. I'm through writing."

The air seemed to leak out of Mr. Rayborn. "Well that's a helluva thing. I read you all the time. This is the first time you really moved me to do something productive."

Jesus. "I can't hit the mark every day, Mr. Rayborn," I said.
"Sometimes my fastball just isn't working. Why don't you let me make a phone call?"

"Sure, I'll wait."

I motioned him to a chair and called my editor, an impossibly young boy named J.D. Bow.

"J.D.? There's a man sitting here in my office, a Mr. Rayborn. He says he just killed a guy with a gun. He's brought the gun to us--well, to me--and he wants me to interview him. What should I do?"

J.D. did not hesitate for a moment: "Does he have ID?"

"I assume he has ID, yes." Mr. Rayborn heard me and nodded. He fumbled for his wallet.

"Do we know for a fact the police are searching for him? Did you see an arrest warrant?"

"No," I admitted.

"Neither did I. Talk to him, Smith. Grill'em like you used to. Just because it's your last day of work after 69 years on the job doesn't mean you get off easy. Why would you even ask my permission? Don't be a wuss."

I heard the smile in his voice. These new punks were all right-hell, they even liked Benny Goodman again-but they had no business trying to make me feel better. Over the years, when someone put a gun on my desk, my story grew legs to Page One. Even if the gun wasn't loaded. But the air had slowly leaked out of me, too: a bad ticker, carpal tunnel, nose polyps. I had a list of docs who nodded thoughtfully and took notes and refused to tell the truth.

"Very well, Mr. Rayborn. Let's hear your story. Why don't we start with your first name?"

"Why don't we start with a drive in my car," he said evenly.

Rayborn had taken back the gun. It wasn't pointed it at me, but it wasn't pointed at the floor, either. "I'm thinking about what you told me," he said. "The cops'll come soon enough. People saw me. Someone might've seen me drive away. I think we should get out of town. Whaddaya say?"

I grinned too broadly. "Sure, just let me call my boss first."

"No. Don't reach for the telephone again."

A flash of chest pain washed over me like a hard rain, but I shrugged my shoulders like nothing mattered. "OK, then. You lead the way." 
* 
Mr. Rayborn's first name was Ralph, and he drove a used Dodge mini-van. He had extra-big cupholders "for those 7-11 whaddayacallems" and a note pad affixed to the dash so he could write down random thoughts that came to him. One could only imagine.

We drove straight from San Francisco to Chicago in two days, stopping only at interstate rest areas.

In Chicago, at a restaurant in the train station, I ordered a burger and he ate tacos. He kept one hand under the table. I suspected the gun was pointed at my crotch.

"I'm working on a novel," Rayborn said. "Maybe I'll let you read it when we get back to Pennsylvania."

"That's where we're going? Pennsylvania?"

"Yep."

"That's where you're originally from?"

"Originally, yes. My parents are buried there. We have a couple of cemetery plots."

I tried not to think about the significance of that. I had learned
little about Ralph Rayborn in the two days we had ridden together. He had talked about his days at the rubber plant, where he dated a secretary. She moved to Galveston with management and he never saw her again. He said they wanted to marry, but the labor troubles changed all that. He had no money to follow her to Galveston, and she never answered his letters.

He blamed Emil Stolzfus for the breakup.

He blamed Emil Stolfzfus for his inability to hold down a real job for the next 10 years. He blamed Emil Stolzfus for pushing him onto welfare in the mid-1970s, where he did the drunk'n-detox shuffle. He blamed Emil Stolzfus for transforming his life into a giant 12-step program,
rollercoasting between anger and grief.

"I pictured Stolzfus living the life of Riley," Rayborn said as he
finished his taco. "Maybe floating in a pool in one of those gated communities. When you said he was living in a local nursing home--well, that was one kick-ass column, Mr. Smith."

"You've already said that."

Had I still been a reporter, had this been 1936 or maybe 1949, I would have known everything about Ralph Rayborn in the two days it had taken to drive from San Francisco to here. He would have told me about his bank account balance, his love life, his tattoos and what he called his first dog. I would have phoned in stories on the fly to rewrite men and threatened to kill them if they changed too much. A first-person kidnapping story. I never got the chance to do one of those, and now that I did, I just sat back and listened while chest pains crashed over me in intermittent waves. One day, perhaps soon, the pains would come and stay, and I wouldn't care.

Maybe I could blame Emil Stolzfus, too. 
* 
In two days, we hit Quarryton, Pa., a small town near the Jersey border. It had a toy factory, a few tired blouse mills, and what had once been the deepest slate quarry in the world, back when slate quarries mattered.

The cemetery sat on the outskirts of town next to a stone church surrounded by rolling hills.

When we passed through Pittsburgh, I had snagged a copy of the Post-Gazette. It carried a blurb on A-6 headlined "San Francisco newspaper columnist missing." It identified me as "one of the last original muckraking journalists" and it fingered Ralph Rayborn for the snatch. It said Rayborn's neighbor came forward after The Foil wrote about my disappearance. The neighbor said Rayborn had bragged about "getting a big write-up in the paper."

The blurb said Rayborn visited Pennsylvania frequently, and state police had started a search. It did not make him for the Stolzfus killing, just kidnapping me. Rayborn, as far as I could tell, didn't see the
Post-Gazette. He didn't seem to read newspapers at all.

Anyway, we came to the cemetery and got out of the mini-van. We faced the graves of Ralph's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Rayborn. Ralph held his .45 at his side. I figured he'd point it at his head and break down crying, and I would go find the pastor of the church, and the pastor would call a cop, and there'd be a trial or a medical eval, and Rayborn would spend the rest of his life in the back ward of a mental hospital. The local paper would write a story about him and they would question me, and I would have to answer stupid questions from a long-haired cubbie or worse, a TV chick with poofy hair and bird legs.

A tiny spark of anger began to burn in the pit of my stomach.

"Aren't you going to take notes?" He asked. "I'm about to talk to my parents here."

"I'm not your stenographer, Mr. Rayborn. If you're going to shoot yourself, get on with it."

He moved toward me with a white-knuckled pistol grip, eyes pinpricked with rage. He wedged the gun high against the inside of my mouth and cocked the hammer. The gunmetal cracked the tender skin of my gums and I tasted blood.

"You newspaper guys think you got such balls," he said. "I thought you had the balls to write about me, and you ain't even interested. You ain't . . . ain't . . ." his words backed up, brainlocked with rage. I wonder if Mr. Stolzfus saw any of this, if maybe he was playing dead, hoping this madman would leave his bedside.

Rayborn pulled the gun out and stalked back to his dead parents. It had been years since someone held a gun to my head. Years, hell. It had been 1958. The Barbary Pick-Axe Murders around Jackson Square. The bodyguard for the apartment complex had tried to get rough, as I recall. He had a revolver, and he didn't want me questioning the tenants. I remembered laughing as the barrel squeezed my throat, because I knew he wouldn't kill me. Somehow I just knew from the look on his face. That was 1958, but that kind of look never changes. 

I saw it now on Mr. Rayborn as he looked over his shoulder at me.

I took out my notebook and clicked a pen. "Do you have any tattoos, Mr. Rayborn?"

"Excuse me?"

"It's a simple question. Do you have any tattoos?"

"No." He cocked the gun. The tiny spark in the pit of my stomach grew to a flame. My pulse thrummed on an adrenalin high.

"How about your bank account balance, Mr. Rayborn? Do you have lots of money?"

"No!"

"Well, what exactly do you do for money? You have to keep gas in your van."

"I'm a mall security guard. I told you that back in Gary, Indiana, but you weren't listening. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to make my speech. I need to talk to my parents. Then we're gonna ago somewhere."

"Excuse me," I put in. "I'm not finished. This broad you dated in the Fifties. This secretary. What makes you think she wanted to get hitched? She went to Galveston and didn't return your letters. Wasn't that a hint? Or are you that stupid?"

Mr. Rayborn turned around and glared at me. He set his mouth in a straight line and came up with the pistol in a practiced, two-handed stance. He fired. As the bullet passed, it made a funny sound in my hearing aid, like fingernails against a screen.

"That's all she wrote for him," Mr. Rayborn said.

I turned around and saw a man lying on the ground. He wore the brown uniform of a sheriff's deputy. The bullet had entered his mouth and tore away the lower portion of his jaw. His tongue wagged freely for a few seconds. His right leg jerked spasmodically, as did the hand that held his gun. I went to him. His eyes were clear for the few seconds, but before I could say anything, before I could promise anything, his vision clouded over and he stopped moving.

I took some notes. The victim was right-handed. He wore a wedding ring. He was young enough to bite his fingernails. The back of his hand was smooth and hairless and pink. He was chubby around the middle and he wore a small pin underneath his badge that read "Quarryton Cleanup Day, May 12, 1999." About five feet away, I saw part of his jaw. All of his made me quiver, as if I was sucking up the last of his life energy.

Mr. Rayborn appeared at my shoulder. "I can't talk here now," he said. "Too many distractions. You still haven't written anything about me."

I straightened up and turned off my hearing aid. The tips of my fingers tingled where I held my pen.

"Let's go then," I whispered. "You're on the lam, get on with it."

"I can't let you stay here," Mr. Rayborn said.

"What the hell did I just say? Let's go. You got me in your pocket. Now you and I, we're gonna go. I'm gonna ask you lots of questions and I'll find out your story and I'll write it in my own good time. Do you know what it's like to be harassed, Mr. Rayborn?"

"No," he said dumbly.

"Of course you don't. People have never paid attention to you. I will pay attention to you, Mr. Rayborn. I will pay very close attention, and if you want to shoot me at the end of all of it, feel free. But now, I have questions. Oh, we'll have a good time. Get in your goddamn mini-van and let's go." 
*
SUSPECTED KILLER FOUND DEAD,
COLUMNIST STILL MISSING. 
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP)-Ralph Rayborn, wanted for the murder of a nursing home patient in San Francisco, was found dead Wednesday at a highway rest stop near here, state police reported. Police said he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Rayborn is also suspected of kidnapping newspaper columnist Picasso Smith, longtime reporter of The Frisco Foil. Smith's whereabouts remain unknown, although several tourists have reported seeing a man fitting his description sitting on the boardwalk with a laptop computer.

Telephoned for comment, Foil editor J.D. Bow did not sound concerned. "He'll show up, but he better not put in for expense," Bow said. "Not if he's on the Jersey shore. Anyway, he still owes me a final column. Are you reading this, Smith? Remember, we run a daily, not a weekly." 

Hugh Lessig <mailto:hugh@pinn.net> has been a newspaper reporter for 17 years. He currently lives in Newport News, Va., with his wife, Ann, and works for the Daily Press. His work has previously appeared on The Thrilling Detective <http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/> website, and more Picasso Smith stories appear online at The Pulp Foil <http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/8002>.