Blame Charlie
Copyright© 2012 by dotB
Chapter 1
One Monday morning a while back, I was just sitting down to savour my first cup of coffee of the day while listening to the news on the radio when the phone rang. I just raised my eyes to look at it and frowned. You see I believe that my telephone is for my convenience, not for anyone else’s, so I didn’t even move - that’s what I have an answering machine for. Four more rings and the machine kicked in, then my recorded voice came out of the built in speaker on the machine.
“If you’re a friend or a relative, leave me a number, then if what you have to tell me sounds interesting, I can call you back. If this is a preacher, a politician, a do-gooder lookin’ for a handout, a snake oil salesman or any other form of obnoxious vermin, you might as well hang up now, ‘cause I ain’t interested in your nonsense. Here comes the beep - oh and make it short, the phone cuts off thirty seconds from ... now!” There was a pause for a second or two, then; “BEEEEeeeep”
“Dave, it’s Charlie, and have I got a deal for you! You can make ten grand a month and not do one damn thing, but if you do decide to do any work you’ll earn fifty bucks an hour. Call me back! Soon! Please!”
“Clunk” and the dial tone came on for a second or two, then there was a short purr from the machine as it rewound itself.
Oh, great! No number, no last name, and of course, I didn’t recognise the voice. Now I must know twenty guys named Charlie, so I just shrugged my shoulders as I cleared the message. That extra ten grand a month would be nice, but I wasn’t broke and didn’t expect to be broke in the next while either. Let’s face it, my needs were taken care of, and I didn’t have a lot of extra wants right then. If it was a really important deal, then whoever ‘Charlie’ was, he’d have to call back, because I wasn’t about to sit down and start dialling all the different guys I knew named Charlie.
I finished my coffee, shut off the radio, and went outside to do my morning chores, getting met at the door by my collie dog and petting her for a second before heading for the barn. I fed and milked my cow, collected the eggs from my chickens, fed them, then walked to the corral fence and quickly checked over my horses before heading for the house to make breakfast. The dog followed me back to the house, and I tossed her a few treats before carrying the milk inside, then pouring it into the bowl of the cream separator and flipping the switch to turn the machine on. Habit made me double-check that I’d put a clean bucket under the milk spout and a clean jar under the cream spout, but after that, I headed for the kitchen, leaving the machine to do its job.
Ten minutes later, I was sitting down to my freshly cooked breakfast, but I glanced at that dang answering machine and saw the light flashing again, announcing at least two more messages. Whoever ‘Charlie’ was, he must have called back, but right at the moment, my belly was feeling empty, and I prefer to eat fried eggs while they’re still hot out of the pan, so I ignored the flashing light. I even reached over and turned down the volume on the speaker, just in case he called again and disturbed me while I was eating. After all, my mama had taught me that “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. ” and I agreed with her.
I ate and then washed up my dishes before I listened to the answering machine, which now had three messages on it, all three were virtually identical to the one I’d heard before. Four messages and not even a hint of the dork’s phone number. Whoever the dumb jerk was, he was definitely a stupid idiot!
Then just as I was headed for the door to go outside and do more work, the phone rang again. This time, since I was standing beside it, I picked up the receiver.
“Hello.”
“Dave, it’s Charlie, and have I got a deal for you! You can make ten grand a month for a whole year and not do one damn thing, but if you do decide to do any work, you can earn fifty bucks an hour. What do you think of that?”
“Who the hell are you anyway? I know a couple of dozen guys named Charlie, but you can’t be anyone I’ve talked to recently because I don’t recognise your voice. So, since you didn’t leave me a number, I couldn’t call you back.”
“Oh, shit! Sorry, it’s your brother-in-law, Charlie Mullins. I didn’t think you’d forget my voice so fast.”
“Ex-brother-in-law, Charlie, thank you. I’ve been divorced for eight years, and I haven’t talked to you since then. Now, what the hell is this nonsense about, another of your harebrained, get-rich schemes that involves someone ripping off widows and single mothers for their welfare cheques?”
“No, no man, I’ve turned over a new leaf. This is honest and above board, completely legal. I’m working for a guy who needs to put up a twenty-four-foot metal-roofed dome on a relatively isolated piece of property to do some sort of atmospheric tests. The only problem is he needs to have a reliable source of electricity as well as a semi-isolated place to do it. I was thinking maybe he could do it out at your place. I mean, you’re what, maybe five miles from your closest neighbour? Besides, you’ve got ten acres of fully fenced land and all that other acreage that just... ”
“Charlie, I live here because I like quiet and seclusion, and I don’t need to screw up my privacy just to make a few bucks. Besides, what kind of atmospheric tests does this guy do, and how will it affect me and my animals? I have livestock here, and I don’t want any weird crap or heavy traffic upsetting either them or me, so forget it. Find another sucker.” Then I hung up on him.
Now, if it had been anyone else but Charlie Mullins, I might have listened to him, but like the rest of the Mullins clan, Charlie was a crooked slimeball. I know his family well; I had made the mistake of marrying his sister. In the six months Janet and I lived together, I got to know her utterly useless, freeloading relatives quite well, and I soon realized the mistake I’d made in marrying that scheming bitch.
Oh, at first, she was the sweetest little thing, accommodating, enthusiastic, and very cuddlesome, but inside of a few months, that mask was torn away rather rudely. You see, I worked downtown then, so I had a house in town at that time, but on the way to work one morning, my car had a flat tire. I pulled off to the side, hopped out, and opened the trunk to get at the jack and the spare, but neither one was there. Since the tire had gone flat only a few blocks from home, I walked back to see if the spare and the jack were in my carport. Janet and her sister had used the car the day before to move some of the sister’s belongings, and I thought perhaps they’d needed the space for some reason and had taken them out.
As I was walking up the driveway, I had to pass right under the open kitchen window, and I heard Janet and her sister, Aggie, having a conversation. I damn near had a heart attack from the shock of what I overheard, though.
“Shit, I can’t believe Jack is so fucking dumb, Janet. Where the hell did you find a sucker like him?” Aggie said loudly.
“Oh, don’t kid yourself, Sis, he’s not dumb, just damn trusting and really fucking gullible. I mean, he gave me a credit card that has a ten grand limit on it for Christ’s sake. Just after the twelve months of cohabitation are up, I intend to load that card to the hilt, then I’ll hit him with divorce papers for irreconcilable differences. In fact, give me another month or two and I’ll be able to forge his signature perfectly, then I’ll start swapping some of his stocks into my name too. If there’s any shit raised over that, I can claim they were gifts and it will be his word against mine. Not only that, but after a year, I’ll attempt to claim half of the value of this house, his wages, and his pension. Even if I only get part of it, I’ll be well off. Once I leave him, I intend to live well off the little bit of tail he’s getting from me now.”
I stood there and listened to her lay out her scheme to rip me off for several minutes, until I couldn’t stand to listen anymore. I didn’t go into the carport looking for that spare tire or anything else, that might make a sound which would make them suspect someone had listened to them. Instead, I headed back to my car and called a tow truck to haul it to a high school chum’s service station. Next, I called work to take the day off, and after that, I called a cab to take me to my bank. My first urge was to cancel all my accounts and shift my money somewhere safe, but my banker talked me out of doing anything quite that simple. Oh, I should mention that my banker is also my cousin, Fred. He called his brother, Bert, who happens to be a lawyer, and he came over to the bank as well so we could put our heads together and salvage my financial future.
In half an hour, we had hired a private detective to keep an eye on Janet, as well as having him check into her background. Then we sat down and did some family ‘magic’ with my finances.
We made a few real-estate swaps, shuffled some stocks and bonds around, then did a bit of horse trading, including an increase in my investments in a couple of family-held promissory notes. Finally, we scraped up all my loose funds and emptied almost everything out of my bank accounts, then invested that money in a long-term venture that we knew would pay off - in about two years. The very last thing I did was to pay off and cancel all of my credit and debit cards, well, actually, both Janet’s cards and mine. When we got done, every buck I had was invested so deeply in family enterprises that it would take a tax lawyer and a dozen accountants five years to find it, and yet it was still available if I needed it.
I had traded my house, my boat, and most of my ‘liquid’ assets for a chunk of land that was thirty miles from town. I now owned 67% of a large horse ranch that my family had inherited from my grandfather. Only, on paper, it looked as if I’d only ended up with Grandpa’s home place, ten acres of land, a house, and a few buildings. Actually, owning a major share of the whole ranch was what I’d been working toward since I was a kid, but I don’t think I’d ever mentioned it to Janet. Well, other than asking her if she liked horses and if she’d like to live on a horse ranch, then hearing her rave about the idea. Of course, that was while we were just starting to date; only now that I knew her better, I was sure she’d probably been feeding me a line of horse pucky, just to impress me.
After all the financial crud was done, my cousin Bert dropped me off at the service station, and I proceeded to make a deal with my buddy, Lennie. Lennie had an old two-ton farm truck that he kept licensed because he owned a five-acre hobby farm as well as the service station. I made a deal to swap him the use of my Oldsmobile in exchange for the use of that old farm truck for two months, so when I backed into my driveway later, I was driving that old clunker truck.
The reaction when I stepped inside the front door was classic.
“What are you doing driving that piece of junk?” Janet screeched, which astonished me because she’d never raised her voice to me before.
“Oh, you mean my new truck?” I tried to keep the grin off my face because she’d stepped right into the trap I’d set.
“Of fucking course I mean the truck. Where’s our car? Aggie and I are going out tonight and we need the car.”
“Well, I’m not sure where it is now. You see, I need a truck now, not a car, so I traded it off.”
“What!!! What do you need a truck for?” she squawked.
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