Peacock PI
By Mark Williams
I was next in line at Perk Up, staring at a barista who was a solid two inches taller than me. Solid in both senses and attractive to all of mine. Her eyes were deep blue. Her shoulders ripped. “Can I help you?” 🙂Cindy🙂, according to her nametag, asked with a frown.
I’d planned to order a medium iced tea. But what kind of impression would that make? “I’ll have a large Butterscotch Americano,” I said, reading from a menu on the wall. “Iced.” It was early August.
“Perfect,” she droned. Five minutes later, she handed me a large Butterscotch Americano. Hot.
Normally, I would not have complained. First impressions matter. I’d hoped to make a good one. But given the responsibilities of my job, in particular question #4, How does the employee respond to a complaint?, I shifted the sleeveless cup from hand to hand and said, “I’m sorry, I asked for it iced,” hoping my complaint would be received lukewarmly.
“Why are you sorry?” she asked, heatedly.
“Let me rephrase that,” I said, first impressions be damned, “You’re the one who should be sorry.”
“Mr. Tough Guy,” she said. Then, as her eyes started tearing, “The day that keeps on giving.”
I might have complained more, but I had a yoga instructor to assess and questionnaires to fill out. I put my coffee on the counter and left.
In my case, it was life that kept on giving. I’d been kicked out of college for plagiarizing Cliff Notes; I was two points away from a driving suspension; and my girlfriend had dumped me on Valentine’s Day. According to Kylie, any man who made no dinner plans on that day proved he had no plans at all. Yes, I was still living with my parents. But at the time, before my undercover gig, I was making good money at The Hole—making donuts and stealing gift cards. I’d feed the cards fifty dollars and sell them to friends for thirty-five. Carl Hanratty, who owned The Hole, didn’t catch on until July.
Carl went to First Decree, the church my parents attended. He said he wouldn’t press charges or tell my parents if I quit The Hole and went to Sunday services for a year. “A little religion never hurt anyone,” Carl said. I wasn’t so sure, but the immediate problem was how to tell my parents why I’d quit my job. Enter Mick Peacock—into The Nine Ball, where I sought refuge the day Carl fired me.
Mick and I had been on our high school wrestling team. His dad had wrestled in college. He showed Mick things. Mick showed me. For instance, with an opponent lying on his side and your arm beneath his head, your thumb is free to gouge a mat-side eye. The ref needs to have his cheek against the mat to spot it, and most refs ignore a wrestler’s cries.
While working at The Hole, I’d sold a dozen fifty-dollar gift cards to Mick for thirty dollars each, knowing he planned to sell them for more. I was the base of a two-tier pyramid until Carl Hanratty toppled it.
It wasn’t the first time I’d run into Mick at The Nine Ball. We’d drink beer and shoot straight pool to a hundred. A dollar a ball. If either of us won by more than five balls, the other was having an off day. Out of a job, doomed to church for a year, I was having an off day all right.
“What’s wrong, Rich?” asked Mick as he pocketed my seventeen dollars. After I explained my situation, he said, “Maybe I can help. Rack ’em up.”
Mick’s dad, Bill “Wild Bill” Peacock, owned a used car lot. He also owned a tanning salon, a video store, and part of a Chuck E. Cheese. “Now he wants to start another business,” Mick said. Three racks into the second game, he was up six balls. But as he told me how I might fit in, I began to sink shots.
Mick worked for his dad at Peacock Motors. He cleaned the cars, Bill sold them. Their car business was doing okay, but Bill thought his other ventures could do better. And he held his employees responsible. Bill had hired each one. If he or Mick dropped in to check on a worker, they were bound to step up their game. Bill had used Mick in TV ads since he was a kid. “Everyone knows me,” said Mick, “but no one would suspect you. And Dad knows other business owners he could sell your services to. You’d be like, his quality control guy.”
Services. I liked the sound of that.
“All you’d have to do is buy stuff with Dad’s money and report back to him.”
“Do you really think he’d hire me?”
“Dude, you’re the last person anyone would expect to know quality.”
If hired, I could tell no one about my job. Word would get around town, and my services would be useless. If I got the job, I should say I worked at Peacock Motors.
“I’ll tell my dad about you,” said Mick. “How much did you make at The Hole?”
“Seven twenty-five an hour.”
“No wonder you sold gift cards. I know my dad can beat that. If you don’t hear from me tonight, you’re hired. Come to the lot in the morning.” After I sunk my one-hundredth ball, Mick handed me three dollars.
That night, I told my parents I had a lead on a job at Peacock Motors. I said the pay was better, and I wouldn’t have to get up so early. (Carl’d had me punching holes by sunrise.) “And no hair net.”
“What do you know about cars?” my father asked. “Besides driving them too fast.”
“I’ll learn,” I said. “And I thought I might go to church with you this Sunday.”
“Praise the Lord!” said Mother.
*
That night—no call from Mick. The next morning, eight o’clock at Peacock Motors—no sign of Mick or his dad. Weekdays: 9-6. Saturdays: Noon-5, read the sign on the door.
I bore Carl Hanratty no grudges. With an hour to kill, I went for coffee and a chocolate glaze at The Hole, where Carl manned his register. After I placed my order, he asked if he’d see me at church on Sunday. I said he would. Plus, I told him I’d gotten a job at Peacock Motors, loud enough for a man sitting at the counter, a fairly-regular, to say, “Peacock Motors. We help you strut your stuff.”
It had been years since he’d appeared in his commercials. But his voice was still used in voiceovers. It had never occurred to me that the man I’d served strawberry jelly-filled’s to was Wild Bill. The years had not been kind to him. He looked like he’d spent too many hours in his tanning beds with no tan to show for it. Too many Chuck E. Cheese’s with plenty to show for that. “Have a seat,” he said, patting the stool beside him. Over donuts and coffee, in a voice loud enough for half the crowded shop to hear, he said I’d be “easing into sales” by washing cars, accompanying people on test drives, and making occasional “house calls.”
Peacock Motors financed its sales. I’d soon learn that Mick’s nephew Larry, who’d served two years for criminal recklessness with a deadly weapon (nunchucks), made the house calls. “I’ll see you at the office at nine,” said Bill. Then, almost in a whisper, “and tell you what you’ll really be doing. For seven-fifty an hour.”
That morning, my first assignment was at Bill’s video store, Movies and More. With mainstream movies streaming, it was the downstream movies—for sale or rent—that kept the store afloat. At some point Bill had even moved a wall. The first room, the Movies room, was now small. You could have fit three of those into the More room.
Sitting behind the register, a guy with a purple Mohawk asked, “Wha’s up?”
“I’m looking for Irresistible Michelle.” (As in adult film star, Michelle Ferrari. On the way over, I’d done some research in my Wrangler.)
“Back there,” he said from his chair, pointing his hair at the More room.
Assuming there must be an alphabetical order to things, I asked, “Would it be under I for Irresistible or F for Ferrari?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I found it under Foreign. And when I gave him Bill’s five for the three-dollar fifty cent rental, he only gave me two quarters in change.
From there I went to Bill’s tanning salon, Glory Rays. Without looking up from her Vogue, the leather-skinned woman behind the counter asked, “How long for?”
Fortunately, I had searched first time in tanning bed. Google said ten minutes is the sunlight equivalent of two hours. Ten minutes and I’d be the color of strawberry jelly. “Five minutes,” I said.
She smirked.
Bill had told me to report back to his office after my visits. There, I filled out questionnaires on both workers—on a scale of 1 (the worst) to 6. Did the employee seem pleased to serve you? Did the employee demonstrate a knowledge of product? and so on.
Low marks for Mohawk. Similar marks for the Glory Rays receptionist.
Bill played poker with a Wendy’s franchisee and the assistant manager at Fit Start Sports. The next day, I ordered a Dreamsicle Frosty at Wendy’s and bought a dozen golf balls at Fit Start. My services had been sold.
It was mid-July. No one could mess up a Frosty. As for Fit Start, the assistant manager had doubts about his golf guy, Frank. After arriving at the store and finding Golf, I asked a short man, built like an over-stuffed golf bag, if he was Frank. I was prepared to say he’d been recommended, but Frank, it turns out, beat me to the punch by saying, “Who’s asking?”
As for Frank’s pleasure to serve, I penciled in a 0. For knowledge of product, I gave him a 1. Even I knew soft balls went farther than hard ones. In the days that followed, I assessed a clerk at So-Hi Liquor and a groomer at Pooch Palace. (Mick’s Burmese mountain-mix, Mad Dog, threw up on my car seat.) I checked out Chuck E. Cheese at Chuck E. Cheese (his left ear had moth holes). And one day I drove Bill’s cousin Larry to repossess a Ram. The owner had threatened harm to anyone who tried to take it. On the way over, Larry looked my one hundred thirty-two pounds up and down and said, “You might as well stay in the car.”
By then it was August, and I was next in line at Perk Up. “Can I help you?” asked Cindy.
*
My parents had jumped ship from the church I grew up in, Saint Barnabas, to First Decree. I knew it would be different from Saint B, but this: PowerPoint hymnals, a seven-piece drum set, a Praise Team filled with attractive young women? For each of the first three Sundays, I’d hoped an attractive opportunity might present herself. Four Sundays into my fifty-two-week sentence, one did.
From thirty pews away, she stood out, praising the Lord right and left. When the service ended and the Praise Team filed out backstage, I told my parents the drummer was a friend of mine. “I’ll get a ride home with him,” I said with my eyes on her. I knew if I hung around a door to the right of the stage, she’d eventually come out. “Hi, Cindy,” I said when she did.
“Do I know you?” she asked, never breaking stride through the sanctuary.
“I remember you from Perk Up,” I said, hustling to keep up.
“I used to work there,” she said, “but I don’t remember you.”
Used to?
“I came in a few weeks ago and ordered an iced coffee. You served it hot.”
“It happens,” she said as we walked out of the church. “Wait, you left your coffee at the register after giving me a hard time. Right?”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
I had given little thought to whatever trouble I’d caused Cindy. Even though I knew her job might depend on me, I gave her low marks. But as we left the church and walked toward her Prius, I told her I’d felt bad as soon as I walked out of Perk Up. I said it seemed like she’d been down about something, and I was sorry if I’d made things worse. “Could I take you to lunch today?”
As Cindy got into her car, she said, “I lost my job two days after you hassled me. For all I know, it was you who got me fired.”
“Me? I didn’t say anything to anyone.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Why shouldn’t you?”
Credit my persistence, credit First Decree’s cross in the background. “I had to skip breakfast this morning,” she said. “You’re buying, right? Meet you at Bob Evans?”
Credit hunger. Credit frugality.
I’d come to church with my parents. They’d already left for home. “I walked to church,” I told Cindy. “Can you give me a ride? I’m Richard, Rich.”
“Get in, Richard.”
On the way to the restaurant, I told Cindy I’d never ridden in a Prius. She told me she’d never ridden with a man who wears bolo ties. I was wearing my Colts string tie. The blue stone is shaped like a horseshoe.
We proceeded in silence to Bob Evans, a silence broken after Cindy scooted into a booth and asked me to sit on the other side. Then, looking at the menu, she said she was a vegetarian and ordered the Veggie Scramble. “I’m a vegetarian, too,” I said, hoping I didn’t have bacon breath (my mother had made bacon burritos for breakfast). “I’ll have the Blueberry Banana Oatmeal, please,” I told our waitress. As she walked away, I loosened my horseshoe and asked Cindy what she did for fun.
“I sing,” she said, “and swim.” That explained her shoulders, the swimming.
“At the same time?” I said.
“Very funny. What about you, Richard?”
I told her that I wrestled.
“Really?” she asked, wide-eyed. As if there aren’t lower weight classes.
“In high school. But only with my conscience now—for making you feel bad that day.”
After she choked on her coffee, Cindy sang a verse of “Smooth Operator.” An alto. I’d always had a thing for altos. “So, where do you work, Richard?”
“Peacock Motors. We help you strut your stuff.”
“Seriously? I bought my car there.”
Not only had she bought her car at Peacock Motors, she was making payments to Wild Bill. He had been an accomplice to the firing of someone dependent on her job to make payments to him. Cindy asked me what I did at Peacock Motors. I told her I was in sales. Then, anxious to change the subject, I asked, “Am I right, something was bothering you at Perk Up that day?”
“You might say.”
She’d had her twenty-year-old cat, Toby, euthanized the morning I walked in. Toby had shown up at her parents’ house when he was a kitten and Cindy was five. She had taken him with her when she moved into her apartment. “Toby was my best friend,” she said. “And now my other cat, Moby, is lonely.”
Her best friend was a cat? Maybe she wasn’t seeing anyone. “And then I show up complaining about coffee. I feel terrible. Have you found another job?”
She hadn’t. But as luck would have it, Bill had recently sent me to assess Fit Start’s assistant manager: Bill’s poker friend, the same friend who’d requested an assessment of Frank-the-golf-guy. Fit Start’s manager had suspected Bill’s friend of selling unaccounted-for returns on eBay. Bill sent me to buy a pair of shoes and return them to the suspect. The manager would then check to see if they were restocked. But not only were the size 10, Nike Giannis Immortality 2s not restocked, they showed up on Bill’s friend’s eBay account at a thirty-dollar discount.
I figured the manager would fire his assistant and give the job to one of his workers. But that worker’s spot would need to be filled. Also, I hadn’t seen anyone in Golf when I returned the shoes. With the impression Cindy made, I thought she could sell anything, provided Moby stayed healthy. When I told her I heard Fit Start might be hiring, she said she bought her swimsuits there. She guessed they’d give her discounts, and she thanked me for the lead.
I was getting somewhere. But from the time I got into Cindy’s car until I scraped the final flake of oatmeal from my bowl, there was only one thing on my mind. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked.
“Not anymore,” she said.
*
Cindy got a job at Fit Start in Aerobics selling exercise bikes, treadmills, and step machines. By way of thanks, she agreed to see Dune with me. Our elbows touched on the arm rest. Two weeks later, she suggested we see The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (he’s the guy who painted the big-eyed cat pictures). Halfway through the movie, I inched my hand toward hers.
Rating five or more workers a day, I’d been needled by a chiropractor (high marks) and advised by a career counselor. I’d bought a lawn mower for Bill, a carbon fiber pool cue for Mick, and an air fryer for Bill’s wife (“tax write-offs,” said Bill). But all I could think about was Cindy. By the end of Louis Wain’s life, I was holding her hand.
With my parents hanging around, I couldn’t invite her to my house. But as I drove back to her place, I said, “Do you think I could come in? I sure would like to meet Moby.”
In addition to after-church lunches, we’d gone out four times: Dune, The Blue Note (karaoke night: Cindy killed with “Desperado”), Ten Pins (she rolled a 165), and that night Louis Wain. Not once had she invited me in.
“Maybe for a little while,” she said. “You can also meet my roommate.”
She’d never mentioned a roommate, but as soon as I entered the apartment, a stunning black woman was pumping my hand like something might spill out. “I’m Laura,” she said. “You must be the car guy.”
Laura was wearing pink tights and a white sports bra. Like Cindy, she appeared to know her way around a swimming pool or gym. “We took Bill Peacock to court last year for rolling back an odometer,” said Laura.
Could this explain why Cindy hadn’t mentioned her?
Laura was a paralegal in a firm specializing in consumer protection. In a way, that’s what I did, protect consumers. “I’ll leave you two alone,” said Laura as she walked down the hall. “Have fun.”
I hoped to.
“Can I get you something, Rich?” asked Cindy.
Rich! Up to now, it had aways been Richard.
Focusing first on Cindy, then on a loveseat recliner, I said, “No thanks.” But no sooner had I sat on the loveseat, than a cat jumped into my lap. A big white cat with no tail. “He doesn’t have a tail,” I told Cindy.
I learned that before Cindy adopted Moby, he’d had his tail chopped off in a car motor. “In a Buick Regal,” she said, as if the car-make mattered, “at Walmart last March. Early March, the shelter people told me.” Talking non-stop, Cindy sat beside me and jumped into treadmill sales, Praise Team practices, and age-group swim-team tryouts. It seemed like she wouldn’t quit talking. Was she nervous? Or was this her way of putting me off?
“So, Rich,” she said, “I went to Peacock Motors the other morning to make a payment. I asked for you, but Bill said you were driving a car back from Chicago. How did you get there?”
“Just my luck. How many people make payments in person? “Bill’s nephew took me.”
“Larry? He was in the office.”
Just my further luck. Cindy knew Larry. She said he’d paid her a visit after she missed her August payment—after losing her job at Perk Up. “Why was Larry back in town before you?” she asked.
He flew back? He teleported? Instead, I told her Larry drove me there the day before. “He drove home that night,” I said. “I stayed with my aunt Sylvia.” (Aunt Sylvia lives in Reno.) Then, with no warning, Cindy took Moby from my lap and stood.
“Goodnight, Richard.”
In the following month, we saw Boiling Point at the Cineplex; Cindy sang “Leather and Lace” at The Blue Note; and we ate dinner at Red Lobster. On Sundays, we ate at Bread and Breakfast or Bob Evans. But when we went back to her apartment, I heard about step machine sales, Praise Team infighting, even Moby’s hairballs. All this talk, every time, before focusing the conversation on me.
Mostly, I talked about test drives I had gone on (not). I told Cindy I did my best selling with the customer behind the wheel. “But it’s me in the driver’s seat,” I said.
Each time I talked, Cindy would hands-in-lap sit there, taking it all in before suddenly reaching for Moby and sending me on my way. If good things come to those who wait, I had excellent things awaiting.
Meanwhile, I kept busy. Bill must have known every business owner in town. And one day, he asked me to drive Larry to Indianapolis to repossess a Charger. “Go to the door with him and see how he does it,” Bill said. “I might have you doing it one day.” When we got back, he had me rate Larry.
A few weeks later, mid-October, I took Cindy to a Jason Aldean concert at the fairgrounds. Afterwards, Cindy invited me into her apartment. Beside me on her loveseat, as Moby purred in my lap, Cindy said she’d made her car payment to Bill the day before. “Let me guess, you were on a test drive. You know, Rich, you can be honest with me. I appreciate an honest man,” she said, smiling as she leaned toward me.
I was good at what I did. Nine people had lost their jobs after my evaluations. It would be nice to share my work with someone other than Bill, Mick, and Larry. Yes, Cindy had lost her job at Perk Up because of me. But thanks to me, she had a better paying job now. One she liked. With swimsuit discounts. Unless Bill put me into sales, my job was sure to come out eventually, especially with Cindy coming to the lot to make her payment every month. And if there was a chance of Cindy showing her appreciation . . .
Two months of dating and I was no further along than Moby making biscuits on my stomach. “There’s something I need to get off my chest,” I said. “I don’t sell cars for Bill, exactly.”
“Then what do you do, Rich?” she asked, taking my hands into hers and leaning ever closer.
Misguided as they were, my hopes soared high. “I work for Bill,” I said, “but in a different . . . capacity.”
“What kind of capacity?”
Her nose had five freckles.
“I’ll tell you, but first tell me how you like your job, the one I found for you.”
Her hair smelled like vanilla.
“I love my job. I’m glad I got fired from Perk Up.”
Higher still, my hopes. “The thing is, Bill has a company that rates the workers at other companies. I’m like a private eye. But I investigate workers, not crimes. The day I came into Perk Up—”
“Wait, you were rating me?”
“Yes, but—”
Jumping from our loveseat, frightening Moby from my lap, Cindy shouted, “Laura, he confessed!”
In the time it takes a fit woman to sprint an apartment’s short hallway, Laura was in the arms I had hoped would embrace me. “Finally,” said Laura.
“Not that we owe you an explanation, Richard,” began Cindy, “but…”
After losing her job at Perk Up, Cindy couldn’t make her car payment, so Larry went to make a house call. That much had been true. Laura loaned Cindy that month’s payment. When Cindy went to pay it at Peacock Motors, she explained to Bill that she’d lost her job at Perk Up, and she was sorry she was late. Bill realized Perk Up’s owner had fired Cindy because of my report. Bill’s company’s report. “Bill was sorry, too,” said Cindy. “He told me everything.”
I could imagine Bill caving. One look at Cindy, most men would.
By now, Cindy shared the loveseat with Laura and Moby. I had moved across the room into a straight-backed electric chair. Or so it felt.
In fact, Bill was so sorry, he offered Cindy a three-month job of sorts. For every time she went out with me, he paid her thirty dollars. Her job was to test me and see if I cracked. She had three months to see if I did. “If you hadn’t told the truth by then, he thought he could trust you,” said Cindy. When I asked her why she always began our conversations by talking about herself so much—her job, the choir, Moby—before asking questions about me and my job, she said she’d searched how to make someone confess. One of the suggestions was to set up a “conversational decoy.” That way, your “target” feels a false sense of security before you “interrogate.”
I had told Mick about my required attendance at First Decree. Mick told Bill, who told Cindy she could run into me there. “You know how I love to sing,” said Cindy. “Why not join the choir? I didn’t even have to look for you. You did the running.”
“And if you told the truth about your job within three months, she could skip a car payment,” said Laura. “Thank you!”
They kissed.
Self-esteem is a fickle thing. One minute I was out of the donut business: low self-esteem. Soon after, I worked for Wild Bill: high self-esteem. Before that, Kylie dumped me: low. Within a few months, I met Cindy: high.
“If Bill was paying you thirty dollars every time I took you out, you’d have been better off if I hadn’t confessed until just before the three months were out.”
“Money-wise, maybe,” said Cindy. “But I would have had to spend more time with you.”
Very low.
Wild Bill fired me. But despite Mick’s collusion, we continued to shoot pool every now and then. Between racks one night, Mick said he heard Cindy and Laura had moved to Saint Louis. A few shots later, he called the three in the corner. I remember this because the three-ball reminded me of Cindy’s eyes. Blue. Before our final date, I even wondered what color eyes our children might have. Cindy’s and mine. My eyes are brown as a seven-ball.
As Mick chalked his cue, I asked him if he’d known that Cindy and Laura were partners.
“Dude,” he said as his cue met the cue ball…
Mick would have usually slammed a mid-range shot. But thinking back, it seems like we could have shot another rack in the time the three-ball took to roll to the corner. (“When your thumb is in an opponent’s eye, press gradually,” he once told me.) Then, at long last, as the three clicked into the leather pocket, Mick stood up slowly from the table, turned to me, and said, “everyone knew that.”
Mark Williams’s fiction has appeared in “Eclectica,” “The Main Street Rag,” “The Baffler,” “Valparaiso Fiction Review,” and other journals and anthologies. His poems have appeared in “The Southern Review,” “Rattle,” “New Ohio Review,” and elsewhere. He lives in Evansville, Indiana, with his wife, DeeGee.
