The other half of a two-part piece.

HE SUSPECTED


The guy says his name is Bruce and already I don’t like him. Before I met him down at the stores, I talked to him a couple of times on the phone. He’s got this little skinny high-pitched voice and he talks real fast. Fact is he never stops, not even a pause. How does he keep pouring out all those words without taking a breath? I suspect he does it to keep any sharp words from coming back at him.

Mr. Brucie is this hot-shot property manager my brother Don found. Don says we’re both getting too old to manage the strip mall anymore and this guy is gonna take care of everything. All we’ll have to do is sit back and let the cash roll in. Easy for Don to say, he lives in Prescott, Arizona and hasn’t done anything but let the cash roll in for years. Since I live right here in Dallas, I’m the one been doing all the work down at the stores.

Now a strip mall in Dallas, Texas may sound like a pretty sweet proposition, but that place was built in ’65 and every time I turn around some old wiring or plumbing needs repair. Getting Don to agree to spending money on the place is like pulling teeth, and I am sick of arguing with him. Seems like the neighbor hood keeps going downhill too, and I had taken to carrying my little twenty-two hand gun when I went to collect the rents. It’s a damn shame how things change.

My wife Betty Lou and I have been talking about retiring down to Galveston for the last few years. We could pick up an old shrimp boat for peanuts. Since Katrina, lots of guys have given up shrimping. We could fix it up and live on it dirt cheap. Hell, we think it’d be fun.

So I agreed to talk to this Bruce guy, met him down at the stores three months ago and walked him through all the known problem areas. I have to say here, he doesn’t look like a Bruce. More like a wanna be Hollywood producer. His hairs a little too long for my taste – all those curls floating just past his ears – but his jeans were Wranglers. So.

His cell phone was a Blackberry, wouldn’t you know. I don’t think he ever let it out of his hand, except maybe when we climbed the ladder to the roof to check out the situation with the AC units.

I didn’t mind his fast talk so much that day, seeing as how he was agreeing with everything I said. He was backing me up on all the things I’d been trying to get Don to understand need to be fixed. Real smooth. So I ended up signing the damn management contract, and Betty Lou and I packed up for Galveston. I was even thinking about how nice it was gonna be to have somebody else run things for a while.

The first two months things seemed to be okay. Bruce was getting Don to agree to some major repairs he’d been fighting me on, a couple new AC units, paving that end lot, even fixing the roof. I was a little po’d that Bruce’s contractor’s prices were coming in higher than anything I’d got, but at least things were getting done. I thought.

But now I’m thinking that little SOB is more of a con artist than a property manager. I haven’t seen a red cent in two months. I called the bank to find out what the balance is in the working account and they told me they can’t say, as my name isn’t even on the account.

So now I’m thinking, I need to haul myself back up to Dallas and track down that little bastard and see just how fast he talks when he’s being held up-side down with his head banging on the pavement in front of the stores.

I may be old, but I’m still pretty tough, plus I got a friend used to be a linebacker for the Cowboys and between him and me, I bet we’re stronger than that little pissant Bruce.