Contest of Wills Chapter One

Chapter One

 

“Most of the time it’s not what you see, but what you don’t see, that matters.” Jimmy Hanigan said this without looking at me, his eyes roving over a small yellow house just down the block from where we were parked. “You take our guy here, for example. Mr. Dillon. Friday he walks into court rolling an oxygen tank behind him and sucking on the thing like it was filled with milk chocolate. I thought Walter was going to go nuts.”

     Walter Daley, owner and senior counsel of Daley & Associates law firm, was our boss. He didn’t handle too many cases himself anymore, so I assumed he had been sitting in the back of the courtroom with Jimmy when all this occurred.

     “We’d never seen the guy trundling a SCUBA tank before then, so you know it’s all a hoax. Hoping to play on the jury’s sympathies.” I knew no such thing, having signed on as Jimmy Hanigan’s assistant at Daley & Associates only two months earlier. At first I had stuck to what I do best, which is Internet background checks and retrieval of court documents, but Jimmy believed in on-the-job training. He’d taken me on a wide variety of firm assignments, from depositions to neighborhood door-knocking, and I’d already learned a lot under his tutelage.

     I was now sitting behind the wheel of a pickup truck that belonged to one of Jimmy’s many friends. He liked to switch vehicles during surveillance jobs like this one, and so we would use this rig only once. I looked away from the yellow house, and was struck once again by the youth of my new mentor in the PI business. Jimmy Hanigan was twenty-seven, which made him four years younger than me, but he’d been working various jobs in the investigations business for close to ten years.

     His hair was jet black, and his brown eyes were so dark that they might just as well have been black too. He stood a shade under six feet, which made him my height, and his trim physique hid what I already knew was impressive physical strength. I’d seen him pin an uncooperative informant to the wall of an alley one time, and had felt no doubts about the struggling man getting away. This morning he was wearing a white collared shirt untucked over a set of blue jeans, and a set of black boots that he wore more often than not.

     “But hoax or not, the jury saw that tank, and so we have to prove Mr. Dillon’s playing a game. Like I said, most of the time it’s not what you see that helps you discredit something like this-- it’s what you don’t see. I made some calls after court yesterday, and I learned that anybody working that hard on that size oxygen tank is going to have to get it re-filled within a couple of days.”

     “So we’re going to sit here until we see him take the thing for a fill-up?” I’d been employed on the periphery of the PI business for over a year by then, and had developed the habit of questioning much of what was said to me. Off the top of my head I could see three or four ways we could be thwarted in this quest. Additionally, I’d once sat with Jimmy in the back of a small van for an entire day and night, and didn’t really want to try it again.

     “That’s not what I’m saying.” His forehead wrinkled momentarily, but he still didn’t look at me. I thought for a moment that the rising sun had caused him to squint like that, but soon saw that he’d only found my question silly. “That was just an example. Someone with a breathing problem like that should be receiving regular medical attention. So if we don’t see him go to a clinic, or get a visit from some home health care outfit, it all helps us prove his little breathing apparatus is a prop.”

     “And exactly what does that do in court?” Jimmy knew a lot about the law, and on more than one occasion I had come across him discussing nuanced legal points with Walter.

     “It’s not so much a court thing, actually. If we can gather enough evidence that this guy’s a fake, Walter can contact the other side and let them know we can make their guy look like a fool. They’ll know that our next step will be in court. We’ll wait until he’s on the stand, ask him who his doctor is, how often he visits, that kind of thing. Once the answers are on record, we’ll shoot them down one by one.

“After that it can get really embarrassing, particularly if it’s a no-nonsense judge.” He finally looked at me, but only for an instant. “Walter’s on very good terms with a lot of the robes in the Panhandle, so the other side can expect real trouble if Walter dimes them.”

     I was about to ask how long we were expected to watch Mr. Dillon when something caused Jimmy to lean closer to the windshield. I looked down the street again, and then glanced down at the photo sitting between us on the truck’s bench seat. Jimmy had snapped that picture at the end of court the previous week, and I now recognized Mr. Dillon as he came out his front door.

     It was a quiet neighborhood, but Monday was getting started and so there were people out and about. Some were going to work, some were getting the paper, and a couple, like our friend with the oxygen tank, seemed to be getting ready to go for a jog. The Mr. Dillon before us was a thin middle-aged man, dressed in running shorts and a sweatshirt, and we watched in silent amazement as he went through a long series of stretching exercises. No oxygen bottle, or assistance of any kind, was in sight.

     I spoke slowly, as if stupid. “So you were saying we wouldn’t actually see what we needed, and that it was what we didn’t see--” I didn’t get to finish that barb, as Jimmy began hissing orders over his shoulder while searching the truck’s floor for the appropriate tools.

     “We need to get shots of this.” He handed me the telephoto camera, knowing that I had been trained in its use by my girlfriend, a photography instructor at a local community college. “Scrunch down and rest the lens on the side mirror so he doesn’t see what you’re doing. Try not to zoom in too much. We need to show he’s outside his house.”

     Both of the truck’s windows were open, and I soon had a nice shot of Mr. Dillon doing an impressive side stretch right in front of his doorstep. The camera was digital, and I confirmed that I had captured the moment just as Hanigan came up with a camcorder and the day’s newspaper.

     “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. He’s going to run off in a bit, and we’re going to follow him nice and slow. There’s a park near here, popular place for the runners, and if we’re lucky he’ll do a few laps.”

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We stayed well back, which was easy because Mr. Dillon took off at a very respectable clip. Jimmy got some footage of him speeding down the street until the jogger, as predicted, hopped onto the running trail at a small local park. The path went around a small pond before being obscured for a distance by some trees, and close to a dozen people were already jogging in the new morning’s sun.

     Jimmy directed me to a space with a good vantage point, and we let Mr. Dillon go by once so that we could select the proper park bench. I held the camcorder low in the window, panning it left and right to show our surroundings while waiting for our quarry to return. I had to admire Mr. Dillon’s grace when he came back around and passed a man seated on one of the park’s benches. The man had one black boot crossed over the other, and his face was obscured by the front page of the local paper.

     “Well that was quick, I’ll say that.” Jimmy commented as he hopped back in and took the camera from me. He watched the replay, nodded his head in approval, and then handed it back. I looked into the viewer, and soon saw Mr. Dillon running past a very legible shot of that day’s paper.

“Went jogging after appearing in court wheeling an oh-two tank.” I looked up at Jimmy. “Not very smart, is he?”

“Most of ‘em aren’t. I’ve staked out disability frauds who worked secret jobs, guys with supposedly bad backs who I filmed tossing cinder blocks into dump trucks.” Hanigan took the camcorder from me and began seating it in its case. “You gotta love the dumb ones, though. They give us more time to work on the smart ones.”