I’m a piece of work. That’s what my clients tell me. I’m arrogant and out of touch, they say. Maybe because I smoke real cigarettes and drink good Scotch out of glasses made of glass. Sometimes I tell people things they don’t want to hear. But the clients keep coming and they keep paying me significant sums of cash.
People say, “Don’t you have Venmo? Cash app? Zelle? Pay Pal? I tell them to fuck themselves. I take cash, the full amount, up front.
This city is falling apart. Sometimes I think about moving to Alaska. I could buy a coat, learn to fish, have my pick of women. My army buddy Clark lives up in Fairbanks and sends me a postcard every few years. Apparently, they have moose. But for now, I’ll stick around here in Florida. I’m not going to run scared because of a few meth heads and a lot of very bad drivers. It’s my town. I might not be the mayor of Bradenton, but I know plenty about this town’s secrets and where the real power lies, where the bodies are buried. (That’s actually the least useful kind of information, to know where bodies are buried.)
But I know how to solve the kind of problems people don’t even want to admit they have.
Case in point: It was a dark afternoon two weeks ago, and the wind was tearing at the palm trees outside the window in my office, bending everything that bends, whipping trash up out of back alleys. I figured most people were hunkered down in their tacky condos watching those slick HBO series people gobble up these days, the ones that try to make murder funny or stylish or ironic. Murder is never funny, stylish, or ironic. It’s always pathetic and a mistake—not worth the trouble.
Thunder started rumbling. I watched the interesting weather and waited for the phone to ring.
The phone rang. Rain was tapping at the window now and my air conditioner kicked on.
“Keller here,” I said.
“Ray Keller?” a nervous man asked me, his voice breathy, like he was trying to talk quiet.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’ve heard that you help people with … with hard-to-solve problems?”
“Mmm,” I said.
“And that you name your price right up front and take cash.”
“Mmm,” I said again.
“I was told you can be trusted to keep quiet too.”
“Was this a Yelp review?” I asked him. His preamble was getting on my nerves.
“No, no, not at all. Sorry, sorry. My friend Scarlet gave me your name and contact info. She said you’d helped her out of a jam a few years ago.”
I remembered Scarlet well. In her twenties, light brown hair, pretty with a long thin nose and a big smile, wore clothes that looked like she was dressing up as a gypsy for Halloween. No visible means of support, no job, but lots of real gold jewelry. She said she made money as an influencer. Influencing who? I asked her.
“People online, people who buy things,” she told me. She’d probably never influence me then, I told her, since I don’t “go” online and the only things I buy are coffee, cigarettes, and lunch every day at the Chinese buffet on 117th Avenue. And of course, dryer sheets and lightbulbs and toilet paper, that sort of thing. I’m not an animal.
“The things I influence people to buy are luxury things—trips and jewelry and nice skincare products.”
“I see,” I said, getting now how she might make money on that kind of influence, if the sellers were giving her a cut. Not only retailers, but anyone who had an interest in people staying online longer than they should might also want to pay her.
Scarlet was being blackmailed, she told me, over something she’d done at a college roommate’s wedding in upstate New York. She wouldn’t tell me what exactly, just that there was a camera with film in it. She’d taken some of the pictures herself, presumably of something that would tie her to her bad behavior, and then someone else had used a camera to take even worse pictures, she told me, and run off with it.
“Remember those disposable yellow cameras I guess you used to be able to buy at grocery stores in the olden days?” Scarlet had asked me.
“Yeah, I remember 1998,” I told her. I wondered if “olden days” had been a joke or really the way she thought of the 1990s.
“Well,” she explained, “when Megan and Josh got married, they put one of those cameras at every place setting at the reception dinner. Josh’s dad was a Kodak exec and he had like a basement filled with boxes of cameras that never sold. The idea was you could take beautiful pictures at their wedding and then leave the cameras behind for them to develop. Then, voila, they’d have all these cool, surprising photographs of their special day.”
“Did none of their friends have iPhones?” I asked.
“We all had phones, obviously,” she said impatiently, “but it was a 90’s themed wedding. The bridesmaids wore brown lipstick, and the menu was beet and goat cheese salad with balsamic vinaigrette, spring rolls, and blackened chicken. They hired Blues Traveler to play at the reception.”
The existence of this yellow plastic camera had been hanging over her for years, she told me, and now finally someone had contacted her anonymously and was demanding money in return for the camera and the undeveloped film inside the camera.
“I think part of me was just waiting for film to die all together as even a thing, and for everyone who knows how to develop film to just fade away,” Scarlet had told me with an embarrassed laugh.
The blackmailer was demanding that she wire him $100,000, which she said she did have but would wipe her out.
I asked her if the blackmailer was revealing their identity.
“No, but it must be someone else who was also at the wedding, right?”
The whole problem seemed like a non-issue to me.
“How bad could a photograph be in an era when any photo can be faked?” I put to her. “Plus, how could you be sure that the yellow camera the blackmailer returns to you is the same one with the incriminating photos on it? Those cameras all look the same.”
“They had stickers on them with your name and your table number,” she’d told me. “And the blackmailer texted me a photo of the camera. It’s mine.”
Which made me think that the blackmailer either really did have her camera or had at least sat at her same table at the wedding. With a little digging, I could probably unmask the blackmailer, but I didn’t think it would be worth it. Instead, I advised her to do something else.
****
If this nervous, whispering man on the phone was friends with Scarlet, he was probably some rich guy in trouble with porn or gambling or a luxury shopping addiction. Not my favorite kind of client. But you can’t be choosy when your rent is due and you’re down to coffee beans, cigarette money, and an eighth of a tank of gas.
“What kind of trouble you need help with?” I asked him.
“I’d rather not say over the phone, you know?” he said. A real whiner.
“OK, fine. Come to my office. 876 Manatee Drive, just past the gas stations on 112th street.”
“Now? Could I come by now?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why not?”
He knocked on my door fifteen minutes later. He was a sandy haired guy in his early thirties, wearing a black leather biker jacket and khaki cargo shorts with bulging pockets. Not a rich guy with a shopping addiction then.
His name was Gabe and he sat down immediately in the only other chair in my office.
“Scotch?” I offered.
“No thanks, I don’t drink,” he said, his eyes darting around the room. He was as skittish as a pound dog hoping to get adopted.
“But do you mind if I vape?” he asked, reaching inside his leather jacket. I shrugged. Loser fake smokers, pulling on candy-flavored mist ten times more deadly than tobacco smoke.
“How well do you know Scarlet?” I asked him.
“Pretty well. We went to college together. I mean, she didn’t tell me what you helped her with, just that you were good at your job. I got the feeling it was something private.”
“And what kind of problem are you having?”
“Death threats,” he said.
“Yeah?” I said.
“Someone is sending me emails that include information only someone who knows a lot about me could send,” Gabe told me. “They’re demanding I give them something, something no one should know I have. I don’t want to give it to them, but they are saying they’ll kill me if I don’t. And they seem serious.”
“Do you want to find out who the person is, or just neutralize the threat?” I asked him.
“Both, I guess,” he said.
“You’re going to have to tell me what it is they want from you,” I told him.
After some hemming and hawing, he admitted that he was in possession of some disposable film cameras from a wedding he’d attended a few years prior.
“Mmmm,” I said. “Scarlet go to this wedding too?”
“You know she did, man,” he said, looking right at me now. Suddenly his nervousness looked less like fear and more like excitement. He was hopped up on something.
“Sounds familiar, these cameras,” I said.
“That was you who told Scarlet to start posting fake photos of herself committing crimes, right?” he asked me.
“Indirectly. I gave her some ideas. Worked pretty well, too,” I said.
Scarlet was now big on the dark web as a gore influencer, bigger than she’d ever been influencing people to buy eye cream.
Under my desk, I reached for the pistol I keep in a bracket there. I put my finger on the trigger and flicked off the safety.
"It made your real photos pretty useless, didn’t it?” I asked him, putting two and two together. Here was Scarlet’s `blackmailer, sitting in my office, his eyes hot with revenge, his leg bouncing. The only question was, had he come for revenge on me, or did he really want to pay me to help him somehow?
“Yeah. But now I think Scarlet is threatening me. There’s no way I’m giving her these yellow cameras,” he said.
Okay, so he really wanted help. I could almost see my bank balance rise.
“How many cameras do you have?” I asked him.
“Two,” he said, “Hers and mine.”
“What’s on them?” I asked him. Scarlet had never told me, but maybe this guy would.
“Proof that she killed Boris Frankel. I know he raped her in college. And then at that wedding he was acting like they were exes or something, like they’d had a real relationship. She pushed him off the gorge cliff. I got that shot, the perfect shot, from the other side of the gorge. And then I saw her take out her yellow camera and take a picture of his broken body lying on the rocks at the bottom of the gorge.”
“Where are these cameras?” I asked him.
He hesitated. He looked scared again.
“I’ve got them with me,” he said.
“And for, say $5,000 in cash by the end of business today, you want me to protect you from Scarlet, who still wants the film, even though you probably can’t hurt her with those pictures, since she’s become famous for posting realistic looking pictures of herself doing crimes, and she makes millions off them, because she has so many sick fans who can’t get enough, the bloodier the better, bonus points for bloody and funny and shot in a beautiful location?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “And I brought cash with me.”
I’d find out if he was lying soon enough.
“Why not just send her the cameras and have it over with?” I asked him.
“Because there are some pictures on hers that could get me in big trouble,” he said. “I’d just destroy them now, but I’m thinking they are the only thing keeping Scarlet from hurting me. She wants them, but for all she knows I’ve hidden them in a safety deposit box with instructions that they be developed if I die or go missing.”
I pulled the gun up where he could see it. I said, “Siri, Facetime Scarlet Schwartz.” The phone replied, “Facetiming Scarlet Schwartz, cell phone.” Scarlet picked up. There she was, still dressed like a gypsy. Her face looking up at us from where my phone lay on the desk between me and her victim, her blackmailer.
“Scarlet, I’m here with Gabe. He has the yellow cameras. Gabe, hand them over.”
With his eyes glued to the barrel of my gun, he pulled the two yellow cameras out of a pocket of his cargo shorts and threw them on the desk, where they skittered and slid toward me. I picked the first one up and showed it to my phone, to Scarlet.
“See this one?” I said. “It’s got your name on it, and the pictures of you murdering someone. And pictures of your victim lying at the bottom of a gorge after you pushed him.”
I slammed the camera hard against the corner of my desk and its black plastic case broke open in two pieces. I grabbed the roll of shiny brown film and pulled it out, exposing it to the dim light of my office. It would be enough.
Scarlet gasped.
Gabe said, “Fuck!”
Stupidly (because I was pointing a goddamned pistol at his chest), Gabe lunged for the second camera, but I was too fast for him. I smashed it as I’d done with the first one.
Then I turned my back to Gabe, who had slumped back into the chair in defeat, switched to the back camera of my phone, and held up the phone for a selfie view of both of us. Scarlet looked pale and shocked.
“We good?” I asked. “You kids good? There’s nothing left to fear, nothing left to threaten. You can both go about your business.”
The internet, which is fake, is forever, they say. But film, which is real, is vulnerable to light, even the pale light of a stormy afternoon at the edge of a dying town in Florida.
That night, I filled up the tank and fried myself a nice sirloin.
This is Emily Writes Back, where I’m publishing as many new stories as I can write between now and August 12, as part of my fudraising stunt for Hospicare & Palliative Care services. All donations to the cause make a difference in the lives of terminally ill patients and their friends and families.
I consider this essay the first true work of 90's nostalgia.
Chandler is laughing his dead ass off. Well done Emily! Dryer sheets indeed.