Meter Maids Eat Their Young (24 page)

“He headed the DPE before he died.”

“I know who he is, Teller. I worked for the man for seven years.”

“So tell me about that, what it was like, how things changed after he … after Cooper took over.”

She shrugged, leaned back in her chair and stared up at the ceiling.

“Forest was a sweet guy,” she said. “A bit too OCD for me, at times, but it didn't bother me as much as it bothered his previous assistants.”

She laughed nervously. It sounded like china tea cups rattling in an earthquake.

“I was hired in mid-October and he'd already gone through three that year. His style of micro-management could get on your nerves real quick if you let it. Everything had to be labeled just so, with the right color label, the right heading. Oh, and did that man hate odd numbers.”

She sat forward, chuckling as the memory came.

“He would actually count the files in every drawer,” she continued.  “And if there was an odd number, he'd rearrange them until they were even, even if he had to add a blank file to make it that way. Forest was a hoot.”

“Yeah, I've heard he was a bit quirky.”

“Quirky doesn't come close but he knew what he was doing and, once he saw that I wasn't going to up and leave him in the lurch, he started increasing my responsibilities. Between us, we made that department happen. We hired good people, bought good equipment. We had an efficient system going, one with heart, I might add. None of this mercenary bullshit you see now. That was Cooper's doing. Six months after he took over, nearly all my original crew were gone.”

She went silent for a while, shaking her head and then turned to me.

“Where the hell he gets those people is anybody's guess,” she said. “Prison, maybe? The local insane asylum? Former mercenary types looking for a softer gig? Who the hell knows? They stalk about town in packs of twos and threes like rabid wolves seeking prey, marking their kills with white sheets of paper fluttering beneath windshield wipers. The number of tickets the department issued doubled and doubled again. There was so much money flowing into the city coffers, from the meters, from the tickets, the council members were falling all over themselves like birds at a ripe Pyracantha bush. It was sickening.”

“I spoke with Tom Philo the other day,” I said. “He filled me in on the money angle.”

“Tom?” she said, looking away again.

“Yeah. Philo. You know him?”

“Sure,” she said. “Not well or anything. Not really. But everyone, you know, knows Tom. He used to be very active in this town. Never up front. Never ran for office or anything like that. He started the Downtown Merchants' Association, though. I think that was the first year I moved here. Anyway, he headed it for five years or more and was a key player in the renaissance the downtown area went through.”

“Renaissance? About the only renaissance I've seen is that they remodeled the old Jewel Theater. Turned it back to what it was when I was a kid.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was a porno place when I moved here.”

“That's what it was when I left,” I said. “
Debby Does Dallas
,
Deep Throat
,
Behind The Green Door
. Definitely not your Disney kind of place. So what's this renaissance you're talking about?”

“Well,” she said. “There was a time not that long ago, when a lot of people would come downtown to sit in the coffee shops or stroll through the little boutiques, book stores and card shops that existed down there.”

I considered the downtown area that I knew. There weren't a lot of shops there. It was mostly walk-up coffee kiosks and take-out restaurants catering to the office worker crowd, places where you could get your caffeine and calories to go. There were a lot of empty buildings. A lot of ‘For Lease' signs. No bars and boards on the windows such as there were before I left but, that I could see, it wasn't a whole lot better now than the slum it had been. Prettier was all.

“Are we talking about the same town here?” I said. “I don't recall there being boutiques, book stores and card shops downtown.”

“No,” she said. “There aren't. Not anymore. Cooper and his parking meters changed all that. Do you have any idea why strip-malls are so popular, ugly as they are?”

“I don't know? Cheap jeans? Parking, I suppose, since that's what we're talking about. Plenty of parking.”

“Plenty of untimed parking,” she said. “The key is untimed. You can park there as long as you need with little or no worry.”

“Right,” I said. “Philo mentioned that. He talked about turnover. In the malls, that wouldn't be a problem.”

“Right. But in the downtown area, parking is at a premium.”

“So you need turnover,” I said.

“Right,” she agreed. “But it has to be a reasonable turnover. There has to be enough time for people to shop, drink their coffee, eat their food. The meters we put up gave everyone two hours. More if you went back and fed the meter. Cooper replaced those with half-hour ones. And, when your thirty minutes were up, you couldn't just feed the meter again. You had to move on. Who can eat a decent lunch, browse through a room full of books, or find that perfect card for Aunt Tilly in Twin Falls, all in thirty minutes? Especially with your eyes flicking back and forth to your watch, knowing full well that ten seconds after the red violation flag surfaced, a meter maid would be there slapping a forty-buck ticket under your windshield wiper. It was ridiculous, Teller.”

“I imagine so,” I said.

“And,” she continued, “should you get there just as the meter maid is finishing the ticket, well, you might as well be confronting
The Terminator
for all the good your pleading will do. You don't bargain with cyborgs, Teller. They have no conscience. And, you could end up maced and hauled off to jail if you protested too much, let anger get the better of you. The meter maids always won. It wasn't like that when we ran the show. The meter patrols were very loose, very forgiving. If you happened to return to your car ten minutes after the meter expired you weren't likely to find a ticket fluttering beneath your windshield wiper. And, if you and the meter maid arrived at the same moment, no ticket was issued, even if the ticket had been completely filled out. The meter maid would just tear it up, issue a friendly verbal warning and move on. Likely as not, the car owner and the meter maid would stand around talking about the weather or the local sports scores. It was a very convivial atmosphere.”

From my experience over the last four months, I couldn't imagine a car owner and a meter maid doing anything together, other than try to pummel each other.

“And things changed,” I said. “Is that what you're saying?”

“Oh, they changed all right,” she said. “Big time. Because of the decrease in parking time, the number of shoppers willing to shop downtown declined. As the shoppers disappeared, so did the shops. For a while there, it was looking like a return to the past; shops boarded up, the homeless returning to the stoops and doorways, litter everywhere. It was a real mess. Then, the city council passed an ordinance forbidding the boarding of shops. They could stand empty, for lease forever for all the council cared, but they had to look pretty or you found yourself hauled into court and slapped with a huge fine.”

“But what about the tax base?” I said. “It doesn't make sense to drive people away from businesses.”

“Not unless there's more money to be made elsewhere. You talked to Tom. He gave you the money angle. Think about it. The sales tax is state based. The city gets a portion of that at the beginning of the fiscal year; they've got to fight tooth and nail for it and more often than not, end up with less than they need. Parking meter revenue, though, that's city based. The city gets it all.”

I thought about the hundred and twenty mil. It made sense in a perverted sort of way.

“Tom lost several businesses down there,” she said. “Did he mention that?”

“No,” I said, suddenly very interested. “He didn't.”

“Yeah. Really hit him hard. That little coffee kiosk up the street from the Coney Island place? The café behind it was his. Featured local folk, bluegrass bands, poetry readings on the weekends. It was a great little place. Tom owns that whole row of buildings, from what used to be the Bountiful Boutique to that little bakery next to the theater. And there's a little electronics shop, down next to what's left of the photo shop, that's his as well.”

She gave me a strange look as she said that. Almost as if she wanted to take her words back.

“An electronics shop?” I said.

“Uh, yeah,” she said. “Gizmos and stuff.”

“Gizmos?”

“Well, I don't know what they are, Teller,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, wondering why she was becoming so uptight. “He lost the buildings?”

“No. He still owns them. It's the businesses that shut down and moved away.”

“Because DPE changed the meters?”

“More or less,” she said. “People stopped coming downtown to shop. The mall was easier with no possibility of a parking ticket. All the small shops downtown started closing,” she added. “Not just Tom's.”

“And that's when he started that little anti-parking meter campaign of his?”

“Yeah. I think so. Somewhere around there.”

“And this was?” I said.

“Well, the electronic shop went first,” she said. “Maybe a year, year and a half ago. Not long after Cooper changed the meters, anyway.”

“And the café?”

“He kept that open a while longer,” she said. “Still a lot of workers down there but his biggest trade was Friday and Saturday nights when he featured the bands. When the DPE extended the meter hours downtown to 10:00 p.m. that was when business fell off to nothing. I think he finally closed it down, set up that little kiosk, a month or two before you came back to town.”

“And he had CARPE running by that time?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But he's kept his part in it a tight secret. It was small at first, maybe a dozen people in all. It didn't start growing until you started writing your articles.”

And until the Meter Mangler showed up, I thought.

“Why a secret?” I said.

She turned to me, staring deep, as if she was debating what to say.

“Let's just say that the way things are in this town, it's not good to be seen as opposing the DPE.”

I thought about what HL had said about his total lack of support in opposing the department and had to agree: they seemed a formidable enemy.

“And what about you?” I said. “You work for them. Where do you stand?”

“Me?” she said. “I'm the elephant in the living room. I collect a paycheck and that's about it. They're too afraid of a discrimination suit to fire me.  They don't want any more heat than the Mangler and your stories have already brought down on them.  But they've cut me out of every loop there is. I probably play a thousand games of solitaire a day while I'm there. I think they hope I'll get so frustrated and bored, I'll just quit.”

“Will you?”

“Not a chance. That's my department. What Cooper has done to it, to this town, is an obscenity. No. I won't quit. They'll have to drag me out of there, kicking and screaming.”

After Jaz left for work, I sat on the porch, struggling with my thoughts, an exercise that was the equivalent of trying to herd cats. Between my investigation and the anniversarial revelations of the morning, I was on information overload. Add to that the growing paranoia I was feeling over the tickets and all I wanted to do was crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head.

Though I was reluctant to burden HL with the tickets, I knew it was the right thing to do. After the attack last night, those tickets were a key piece in the puzzle.

It didn't take long to retrieve them. There was one last thing I needed to do before I turned the tickets over to HL. I stepped out the elevator door before it had a chance to close and hurried up the stairs to the second floor.  Forty minutes later, back on the elevator, willing it to move faster, I emerged on my floor, cross-legged and anxious as I hobbled toward the john.

Another of the finer points of fifty-something is becoming quite familiar with the location and interior design of bathrooms. Road trips are no longer calculated on the basis of destination, or the attractions you might encounter along the way, but by the number of rest stops, and whether the attractions might have bathrooms. Those huge, ugly, brown Saw Palmetto capsules become a daily routine: the first thing you swallow in the morning, the last thing down the pipe at night. And don't ever make the mistake of biting into one of those. The taste is beyond bad and will stay with you for hours regardless of what you do to rinse it out or mask it.

When I got back to my office, Rafe was standing by my desk.