The Pen—A Small Caper

I wasn’t expecting the bright glint of steel when I shined my desk lamp into the bottom of a file cabinet drawer. I was getting rid of the desk, and I thought I had cleaned out the file cabinet side last week

But there the damn thing was.

And I have to admit it spooked me a little.

Okay, a lot. I hadn’t seen the pen in at least fifteen years. I thought I had gotten rid of it, and really, even now, have no idea how it had gotten into the bottom of the file drawer.

The pen had been nice when it was new. Not fancy, but nice. It was stainless steel, with lines etched along the slim barrel. It also had that blank, smooth space where you could have your son or daughter’s name and high-school graduation date engraved to give them in that boxed set with the matching mechanical pencil. The company that made it started with the letter ‘C’ and always stamped that name into the base of the pen’s pocket clip.

This pen, however, had no personalized engraving. My life would have been a lot easier if it had been, considering what happened all those years ago after I found it.

It was in a puddle of rain next to my car one afternoon in 1993. It had just rained hard, but the sun came quickly out from behind the clouds that day. And so strong sunshine shone on the pen, the glint off its steel barrel caught my eye, and there it was. It was in a puddle formed in a small pothole, and I suspect if the sun had not come out I would never have seen the pen at all.

It was late on a Friday afternoon, before a three-day holiday weekend. Mine was one of three cars still in my office parking lot. The other cars belonged to people I worked with who also had to stay late, but both were parked at least 25 yards from mine.

So, as I picked up the pen I knew whoever had dropped it was long gone and wouldn’t be back until Tuesday, if they even worked in my building at all. As I said, it wasn’t personalized, so I slipped the pen into my inside suit jacket pocket thinking I had a nice little souvenir-good-omen to start the long weekend.

I threw my briefcase and suit coat onto the back seat of my car, then slipped into the driver’s seat and strapped myself in for the commute home. I hoped traffic wouldn’t be too bad going north, but if it was I would just deal with it because I had her to see when I got home. And I was looking forward to that. So I jabbed my keys into the ignition and started up the car.

But it wouldn’t start. I tried again. I could hear the ignition start to catch this time, but the car quickly died. Pissed off but feeling optimistic, I tried a third time and the engine turned over almost immediately, like it usually did. Looking back now, I probably should have given things some more thought, but I just wanted to get to home. So I made the short drive from my office to The 101 North onramp and her.

In those days, my office was in Mountain View, a Silicon Valley town about 40 miles south of San Francisco. I lived in a quiet little town just outside the San Francisco city limits, so with decent traffic and speed conditions my commute was usually about 45 minutes. Today, it was faster. As I had hoped, there were fewer cars on The 101 this late on a holiday Friday, so I was able to get door-to-door from the office to my home in half an hour.

That made me pretty happy, despite my lingering annoyance at how my car had had trouble starting up. Would have to talk to the father-in-law, a former auto shop teacher, about that. And about how the engine seemed to seize a little bit while passing San Francisco Airport.

Well, that bullshit could wait until tomorrow. The car was older, an ’84 Chevy Citation, and probably needed its annual tune-up and fluid change. My father-in-law had the maintenance log, so he would tell me.

Then, as I parked at the curb in front of my house I smiled that inside it there were some cold beers and a beautiful woman. So I shut off my engine, grabbed my things from the back seat, and locked the car. As usual, I wasn’t more than six or seven steps away from the Chevy when my rather large orange and white tabby came from the bushes to greet me. He was rubbing against my legs and purring, making walking a bit of a chore, but it did make me smile again. And then I looked up to see her waving from our open front door.

And that’s the last thing I clearly remember for awhile.

Because then the Chevy exploded.

I woke up in the intensive care unit at the main Kaiser Hospital in San Francisco three days later.  It would be several months before I could go back to work. I ‘officially’ woke up after three days, but I spent two days after that slipping in and out of consciousness. When my waking moments were in the day, I usually saw my wife’s worried face looking over me, and I could smell the light scent of her tuberose perfume. In the night, I usually saw a nurse standing over me or looking at the vital signs monitor next to my bed.

When I slept, I remember dreaming about flying. I never had flying dreams before, not even as a kid, and they were quite wonderful. There’s a movie with an English actor who plays a repressed bureaucrat who dreams of flying in a shining suit of armor and giant white wings to find his true love in the clouds. My dreams were like that.

Other times awake, an anxious-looking plain-clothes detective was there. His first name was Sam, and he was with the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office. Sam was quite young for a detective. He asked me questions about my exploding car. I told him about finding the pen, and how my car had acted up and I hadn’t seen anyone around my car that entire Friday. He asked about old enemies with grudges and my possible involvement with something illegal that went wrong, and other things he had to ask because that’s what detective school graduates do. I told him I’d only been a private investigator for a year right after college. Not enough time to acquire enemies who made car bombs. I had been a technology writer and journalist for years. Gates and Jobs did not want me dead, I was pretty sure.

I don’t remember feeling much pain, although I received a major concussion, a broken eye socket, five broken ribs, and second-degree burns over most of my back and buttocks. The skeletal injuries were from me flying across my street and landing in a steep driveway which I rolled down, crashing face-first into a thick tree.

I only cried when my wife told me the rather large orange and white tabby hadn’t survived the blast. He succumbed to explosion burns the day I woke up in intensive care. Nothing could be done. I still miss that damned cat, all these years later.

Still, I was lucky. We were lucky. Our house was okay, except for some blown-out windows.  Our insurance would pay for those, our neighbor’s busted windows, and my new car. The remains of the Chevy were impounded for evidence, then taken to a scrap yard. My personal effects, including the pen, were returned to me in one of those plastic zippered bags the day I was released from the hospital fifteen days after the explosion. The desk I am removing now had been new then, but I don’t remember putting the pen in any of its drawers. But I’d had a lot of morphine in the hospital and some lovely hydrocodone pills to ease my pain during home convalescence.

So I was a little loopy for a couple of months after my Chevy exploded.  To help me get through, my wife got us a new orange and white cat. A girl this time. She lived to be 14, only dying last year of natural causes, very loved and very happy.

As I healed and got stronger, I thought about the pen and the explosion as I did chores around the house most days. I became pretty sure that whoever wired the bomb to my car dropped the pen by accident. Whoever did it was goddamn lucky it bore no engraving or fingerprints. The cops had the same pen theory.  Sam told me this a month after I’d been home. But there was no concrete connection, nothing to help the police. No evidence to make any arrests in the case.

No bomb signature stuff.

Nothing.

Open case.

And WHY my car?

But the day I went back to work, just under three months after the explosion, I saw the strangest thing: I saw my car.

The Chevy, the one that blew up.

It looked so much like my ex-car that I briefly considered I was having some kind of PTSD-induced hallucination. I had my first cellular phone in those days, so I almost called my wife to have her come take me home. But I didn’t, because I wanted a closer look. I needed to know I was fully healed, and something about my explosion was really nagging now. Hard.

As I approached the Chevy, I saw that it was real, and nearly, no, almost perfectly identical to my dead car. Same model, same year, same trim, same paint, same hubcaps. When I got still closer to it, I looked inside. Yes, this Chevy had the same upholstery, same dash, same factory radio. Same everything, except the personal items in the back and passenger seats. Jesus Christ, the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up now, and I was getting very, very fucking pissed off.

I was pretty sure the bomber blew up the right car, just owned by the wrong person.

And when I saw whose name was on the reserved parking sign, I was sure of it.

A couple of days before my car exploded, I heard a rumor that a very successful and high-priced criminal defense attorney had moved into offices in our building. The rumor was he had to skip out of his fancy digs in San Francisco out of fear for his life from a wealthy sociopath drug dealer client who this attorney could not get acquitted. The attorney, the rumor said, moved down the peninsula to keep an almost invisible profile while still practicing law. I figured it was the usual office gossip, to which I paid little attention. In my office, we all had a lot of work to do that week before the holiday weekend.

I guess things had cooled down for the attorney, if he thought it was okay to have his name put on a private parking spot. I was going to be late for my first day back, but I didn’t care. I stormed into my office building lobby and looked for the attorney’s suite number on the wall directory. I wanted a word with this attorney, to thank him for the bomb wired to my car, for almost getting me killed.

For killing my cat.

The sign outside the glass-doored suite said the attorney’s hours were 8:30 to 12:45. It was just after 8, and the front of the office suite was dark. But I could see light coming from a door behind what looked like a very large reception desk. I figured the attorney had come in early or something. He could probably hear me if I knocked loudly, which I did several times, receiving no response.

So I tried the door.

Surprisingly, it opened. I figured in an open office building, entering the unlocked door to a business wasn’t committing any crime, so I went in. I was fuming. I wanted to yell at this guy.

I called out his name, said I needed to speak with him. NOW.

No answer. No sound. If no one was there, why was the office light on?

I moved closer to the open office door. The light from it made it easier for me to get around the large reception desk as I got deeper into the suite.

I was just about to place my hand on the office door to go inside, when I suddenly realized I didn’t have the pen with me. I wished I had had the pen with me, to show the attorney as I vented my rage at him. But how could I know things would play out this way this morning?

I couldn’t.

So I opened the office door anyway and walked inside, ready to yell.

I could have yelled at the top of my lungs, and he wouldn’t have heard me. Not one damn word. And he didn’t need to see my pen to know what it looked like, because he already had an identical one of his own.

The attorney’s pen was sitting in another puddle, of his own blood apparently. And this puddle was coming from where the attorney’s neck and head were bent over the edge of a very large executive desk. I could see his dead face. There was what looked like a barbed garrote around the man’s neck, cinched up at the base of his skull. Pretty grisly. I almost threw up. But I didn’t because I realized I was really seeing.

See, the blood was really dark, looked sticky, and you could smell what I assume was decomposition starting to occur. But except for being in a puddle of drying blood, the pen was pristine. Nothing on it, no drops of blood, shiny clean. It was a calling card of some kind, had to be. The attorney’s murderer must have ripped the man’s throat open, waited for him to bleed to death, then carefully placed the pen in the blood.

I’m guessing that my pen had been for the attorney to see before his own Chevy blew up, maybe on the seat or the dashboard. Perhaps the bomber had been rushed, because I don’t think my car had been broken into to wire the bomb. But I think about it some times.

I still had Sam’s card in my wallet from my hospital stay, so I pulled it out and dialed him from the reception desk phone. I didn’t touch anything in the attorney’s office, but I figured leaving a few fingerprints on the reception-area light switch and phone wouldn’t hurt anything or make me a suspect. Probably should have used a hanky, but I didn’t have one.  There was a box of tissue on the receptionist’s desk, but I didn’t give a shit anyway.

Because the next call I made was to my office. I explained to my secretary that something had suddenly come up related to my exploding car and that I would be in the next day to resume my job. She asked me if I could tell her what was happening, and I told her she would know all about it in five minutes when the police arrived in our building lobby. Then I hung up the phone.

In the quiet minutes before the police did arrive, I thought about the pen, the car, the bomb and the attorney. Then it happened, and I really couldn’t help myself. I started laughing, hard, long, until tears streamed down my face and I had to steal a tissue from the receptionist’s desk to dry those tears.

The pen? I might let you have it if you really want it.

But the laughter I keep for myself.