His signal was heeded. An hour later his parents appeared at the door, along with the family’s lawyer, John Kellem. They were escorted by two armed policemen.
“George,” his father, Alan, said, “You know better than this. We had to pay the lawyer a fee to get you released.”
George stood up and one of the officers handed him a large plastic bag enclosing his personal effects.
“I was just–” George started to say. His mother put a finger to her lips in a gesture George understood to mean, Keep quiet.
George, his parents, and the lawyer sat down at the table. The officers left. “We’ll be right outside the door, Mr. Kellem,” one said.
“Fine,” the lawyer answered. “I’ll knock when we’re done.”
Then he said, “OK, George, tell us what you wanted to say.”
“Well,” he answered," “This bum came out of nowhere and tried to take my money. He wouldn’t leave me alone. And he punched me.” George showed them the sore spot above his left eye where the derelict had hit him.
The lawyer thought a minute. “They identified the homeless man,” he said. “I can get you cleared because you were defending yourself.”
“But you’re still going to have to make that fee up to us somehow, young man,” said Alan. “We’ll talk about that at home.”
George, happy to be dealing with his parents instead of the law, acquiesced. Kellem knocked on the door and the officers opened it; George, his parents Alan and Florence, and the lawyer, left, and all went to George’s house. George went to bed while his parents stayed up with the lawyer to plan things out.
The following morning, when George appeared at the breakfast table (it was a Saturday), Alan and Florence briefed him about their talk with the lawyer the night before. George was dressed, and 77R was still in his wallet.
George decided how he was going to spend 77R while his parents were nattering away. It came to him in a flash. He was going to buy a model of the Starship Enterprise, study all its miniature parts and then use it as his model to build a full-fledged starship and finally escape this miserable planet he had been abandoned on. George had always thought he was not of this Earth. So, he bought the model, handing 77R over to one Hapmill Pimplestain, the store clerk. Hapmil, big surprise!, a big wheresgeorge fan, pocketed 77R along with several other twenties from the till, went home and logged on to wheresgeorge to trace 77R’s epic journey into his own theiving hands. After that Hapmil…
…just lay around at home fantasizing about what he was going to do with his swag, and there came a knock on his bedroom door.
“Yeah, who is it?” he yelled.
Hapmill’s father opened the door. Standing there with him was Doris Sharp, the clerk’s day manager–and George Sharp’s older sister (one of them, anyway). “Son, Ms. Sharp says that the till is short on 20s—it was $80 short this morning. Do you know anything about it?”
Mr. Pimplestain and Ms. Sharp had those piercing eyes that always communicated to the kid, "We expect the truth out of you and we want it now."
“Uh–well,” Hap stammered…
“…it was stolen.” Uncharacteristically, Hapmill shut up.
“And…?” Ms. Sharp encouraged.
Hapmil said nothing, but reached around with his toe (which was out of sight) to a cord just behind the bed. He tugged the cord. He only needed a few seconds.
Things happened.
A large box of bricks, suspended over the door, felll to the floor. Hap’s father and Ms. Sharp were a few feet farther into the room, or they would have been brained.
“That’s just enough,” said Hap’s father. “You’re grounded as of this moment.”
“Let me take care of this matter at the store, sir,” said Doris. “I may want to discharge him or otherwise discipline him–keep him out of jail.”
“All right,” Mr. Pimplestain said. “You’re to go to the store when your manager sends for you and nowhere else.”
“Show me your wallet, Hap,” Doris said. Hap’s father gave him that look that said, “Do as you’re told.”
Hap complied. Doris counted the twenty-dollar bills in the wallet. There were four.
“We keep quiet about this, Hap? Not a word to anyone,” his father said. Doris nodded. “Your mother and I will discuss your punishment.” Hap was thankful he wasn’t going to be arrested and probably wouldn’t get fired–Doris was a fair supervisor. She took the $80 and left.
Back at the store, Doris looked at the bills as she put them into the till and balanced the journal. She noted 77R–its wear, and the wheresgeorge stamp. She replaced 77R with a $20 bill from her own wallet and took it home, to the Sharp mansion she and her parents and siblings lived in. She logged onto the site herself and found out her brother George had had the bill–twice! She wondered, Should I tell him about this?
She then thought, “well, his birthday is day after tomorrow and I need to do something about it”, so she decided she would give him 77R along with the paisley ascot she had already bought. George, meanwhile, was thinking to himself, “I bet that sister of mine, Doris, will get me yet another paisley ascot for my birthday! I wish, just once, she’d be a bit more original when we meet up at the pool hall for the all you can eat pickled egg and boilermaker special to celebrate.” Little did George know that Doris…
would be hit by a bus and flattened as she crossed the street on her way to his birthday party. Her purse was collected by an ER nurse and locked away. When she was pronounced dead four hours later, they were turned over to George, as her next of kin. He saw 77R and several other loose bills in her purse, along with a small tampoon holder, a bottle of aspirin, a tube of lipstick, a half-empty can of Mace, matchbooks from three different nightclubs, eight intriguingly-ribbed condoms and a pair of handcuffs covered in angora fur. The last two items got him thinking of things he’d rather not think of when it came to his late, dearly departed sister. So he took 77R and…
Went to a bar. He was well into his cups when the transplanted Thai Bar Girl blew him a thick lipped, wet kiss, and he stuck 77R into her tiny bra, without result.
The bar girl, Laurie Pinhirin, looked at 77R and wondered about the wheresgeorge stamp. She decided to have her brother Jonny check it out. After all, he was a bank teller and knew all about currency.
Meanwhile, at the coroner’s office, an examination of the dead woman from the bus collision precipitated a discussion between the assigned deputy coroner, Dr. Ling, and a forensic specialist who had examined the body and inspected the victim’s personal effects.
“I think the police dropped the ball on this one, Doctor,” said the specialist, Barbara Thompson.
“What do you mean?” asked Dr. Ling.
“Well, this purse is unquestionably Doris Sharp’s, but the fingerprints on the body don’t match those on the record the Pinkerton guards at the Sharp mansion gave us, nor does the DNA.”
What about the blood on the body?" the doctor asked.
"Well, some of it is this woman’s, but other blood found on the garments does belong to Doris Sharp, Barbara said. “We got Ms. Sharp’s blood data from the Kaiser Hospital in Lodi.”
“So we have two questions for the police–why did this woman have Doris Sharp’s purse, and where IS Doris Sharp?”
Doris, meanwhile, was on a plane to Rio. She had plotted long and hard to make her escape to Rio with the family fortune and be with her one true love, Raul, a ne’er do well grifter she had met once at Carnival. Meanwhile Jonny had examined 77R closely and then pocketed the bill as he was wont to do. Jonny was a scoundrel! That evening Jonny passed by a stripper bar on his way home and decided to go in and get a lap dance and a boilermaker. He payed for his lap dance with 77R and four other twenties. The stripper who received 77R, one Miss Collagen LeBoobs, kept 77R as part of her tip money for the night. After her shift she went to an all night grocery store, the Pack 'n Sack where she…
Bought some anti biotic cream with 77R to put on the strange rash that had begun appearing in her pubic region.
She was smart enough to isolate the $20 bills, suspecting they could have caused the rash. She also had a friend of hers pay a “visit” to Jonny to find out if he was infected.
As for Doris Sharp, her parents Jack and Eloise agreed that she had a lot to learn about the “family fortune” she was sure she had absconded with. The gold and silver the Sharps owned was still in the underground vault at the mansion. The Sharps’ bank accounts were intact and so were the safety-deposit boxes holding the hoard of securities Jack and Eloise owned.
“Then what ‘fortune’ did she take with her?” Jack asked his wife.
“The ‘fortune’ in the wall safe in the foyer,” Eloise answered. “We won’t send the police after her–she’ll come cringing back when she finds out what that ‘fortune’ really is!”
Ms. LeBoobs went to her doctor but the “rash” turned out to be from a juniper branch. Jonny had apparently been pruning his juniper plant before going on duty; the stripper guessed properly that the rash would vanish in a few hours. She put 77R back in her wallet.
Meanwhile, Doris Sharp, arriving in her hotel room in Rio de Janeiro with Raul, found out what her mother meant. Boy, was she surprised when she found out that the foyer wall safe contained…
no less than eighteen badly-defaced Confederate war bonds (all dated April 3, 1865), which she knew from hard experience had little value even to scripophiles. She threw them down in disgust, dialed long distance, and waited impatiently as a phone rang in a distant city.
“Mad Dog Negotiations & Repossessions, Eddie ‘Mad Dog’ Butler here,” the voice at the other end said. “How can I help you?”
Ms. Sharp snarled, “They tricked me! They’ve got it and it’s mine and I want it back.” She looked out over the famous landscape of Rio and it brought her no pleasure.
Meanwhile, 77R rested in the wallet of Ms. LeBoobs as she performed. At the end of the show, a sweaty LeBoobs, whose real name was Colleen LeFebvre, returned to her dressing room to count her night’s take and prepare the tip-out for the others. 77R was destined for the dishwasher, a shyish guy who had a serious hardon for her. He was cute and not pushy, though, so she wasn’t as ill-disposed towards him as she was towards others.
There was a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” Colleen asked.
“Jeffry Herndon, the dishwasher,” answered a familiar nerdy voice from outside the door. “You said come right away.”
Colleen opened the door. She was wearing nothing but a sheer pair of panties, and as he saw her, Jeff’s hardon became fuller. His loosely-belted pants fell down and she saw what a big one he had.
“Oh, Put it IN me!” she squealed. And as she pulled Jeff over to her bed, she also handed him 77R and said, “take this, too!” He put it in a pocket just before undressing and mounting Colleen in the bed. A wild session of sex ensued.
Meanwhile, Eddie Butler said over the phone, “Who is this?”
“Doris Sharp,” came the answer. Eddie blanched and started mumbling.
“Who took what?” he asked.
“My parents, that’s who!” said Doris. “They switched bundles on me and I wound up with a stack of worthless Confederate war bonds instead of–”
“Nothing doing, Doris!” growled Eddie. “I’d sooner tackle a SWAT team than your parents and their guards! You know that!”
“But, Eddie–” protested Doris. Eddie hung up.
“Damn,” muttered Doris. “NOW what am I going to do?”
Back in the Sharp mansion, Eloise said to Jack, “She should realize where she stands just about now.” Jack nodded and smiled.
They didn’t have a long wait. Doris had to use her credit card to pay to fly back home. Her parents decided she’d been punished enough.
Meanwhile young Mr. Herndon, fresh from his encounter with Coleen, staggered out to a favorite hangout. He had 77R with him.
The name of the hangout was:
Freakshow, a bar and “performance space” that featured the weirdest of the weird. The waitress took Herndon’s proferred 77R and brought him a rum and Coke, which he sipped pensively as three men on stage did things with six shaved, sunflower-oil-covered penguins that would give him nightmares for days. 77R wasn’t long in the Freakshow till before it went…
…out again, as change for a man from Ontario, California, who wanted to be called Maple Breath and slathered in icing sugar by dark women with stocky builds. He was very disappointed, because of the Freakshow’s ‘no touching the customer’ rule. He left, vowing to find a service that would ‘do him right’.
As he left, however, he was still counting his change; 77R and the other banknotes in a sizable wad were clearly visible to the street. They attracted the attentioon of one William No Last Name, who was on the prowl for a meal or something better.
William was wild. He’d run away from home for the final time at age 12, putting abusive parents behind him as he cleaned out their bank account and set thieves on their house to cover his own theft. He survived on the street by being faster and more cunning tham many a muscle-head, though he was by no means weak. And the Ontarian’s money had his full attention…
as he approached and said, “Hey buddy, want me to show you a good time?” Maple Breath thought, “Hmmm… he is dark complected and stockily built, why not” and said, “Sure! What you got in mind?” William motioned for Maple to follow him into a nearby building where he…
…led Maple up stairs and into a wretched room. The paint was peeling, the window didn’t close, and the light was the proverbial bulb on a string, but it had what counted: a mattress. William motioned towards the mattress. “I can show you a real good time. Give me money.”
Maple was becoming excited, and agreed immediately. “Here’s a hundred.”
William had originally planned to just knock Maple over and take off with his money, but he knew well the adage about keeping the cow around so it can be miilked more than once (though he didn’t put it that way). This looked like a cow that could give more than once. He changed his plans.