“One hundred and forty thousand dollars,” I said out loud, in the dark of my bedroom. That was the number written on the cardboard in the photo, the exact amount I had watched Kyle lose on the poker sites since spring. Under it, in smaller letters, someone had added a second line: and Pop pays. The text came with a message. We know about the 3.9. Cash by Monday, or Jennifer gets a different photo. I read it three times. My hands were steady, which surprised me. Fifty years of holding a brush will do that. Then I did what no one in that situation is supposed to do. I called my friend Tom Pavlik.
Tom was a sergeant with the Omaha Police for thirty one years and we have shared a pew at St. Wenceslaus since 1989. He picked up on the second ring. I told him everything, including the poker, the camera in the garage and the sale. Tom was quiet. Then he said, “Gerry, stay by that phone. I am sending Detective Maria Alvarez to you in twenty minutes. Do not call the number back. And do not pay anyone a penny.” Then he asked the question I had been avoiding. “Who knew about the sale?” I looked at the ceiling. “My lawyer. The buyer. And the man who sold me my own security cameras.”
Detective Alvarez arrived at one thirty in a wool coat, with a tablet and a face that did not waste time. She traced the text to a prepaid phone and the photo to a poker backer named Rudy Kessler, who lent money to losing players at forty percent a month. She had been trying to catch him for two years. Then she asked for the Christmas card photo, and I showed her the cardboard sign. “Mr. Novotny, Kyle told them,” she said gently. “Men like Kessler do not find out about private business sales on their own. A player in debt hands over a name. The richest relative he has.” I closed my eyes. I had known it, somewhere.
A retired sign painter who sold his company in secret helped Omaha police rescue his gambling son in law from loan sharks and then gave his family a fresh start.
Tom drove over himself at two, with a thermos of coffee and a bag of kolache from the bakery on South 24th Street. He sat across my kitchen table and set his badge next to the salt shaker, just to make me feel better. “Gerry, I have seen this a hundred times,” he said. “The sign is meant to scare you into acting alone. You did the opposite. That is why this will work.” Then he told me about his own brother, who lost a house to cards in 1998. Nobody had helped him. I held the cup with both hands and listened.
At dawn, Jennifer came to my kitchen in her bathrobe, shaking, with the two children asleep in the car. I told her about the sale, the poker, the one hundred and forty thousand dollars. I will never forget her face. It did not crumple. It hardened, like a sheet of plywood. “So he put a sign in your hands,” she said, “and laughed.” “Honey, let us get Kyle back first,” I said. Alvarez had a plan. At ten, the man of Kessler would call to arrange the handoff. I would answer, say I had the money in my office safe on Industrial Road, and ask for Kyle to be brought there.
It worked. Sunday afternoon the building was empty except for the old neon sign shop in the back, where I keep the first sign I ever painted. I stood next to my workbench with a suitcase full of paper, mostly cut up phone book pages on top of a few real bills. Six officers were behind the vinyl plotters. The Escalade pulled up at four. Kessler himself got out, a thin man in a camel coat, with Kyle in front of him, pale, unshaven, and in the same sweater he wore at Thanksgiving. Kyle saw me and started to cry. “Pop, I am so sorry. I did not think they would come to the house.”
Kessler opened the suitcase, looked at me, and smiled. “Smart old man. One hundred and forty thousand.” Alvarez said, “Rudy Kessler, you are under arrest,” and six officers came out from behind the machines like Christmas lights on a switch. Kessler did not even run. His driver put his hands on the hood of the Escalade. The whole thing took ninety seconds. They found a ledger in the car with the names of twenty three players, including a pharmacist and a high school coach. Alvarez told me later it would help two dozen families, and that Kessler would be looking at ten years.
Kyle walked out of the building with a blanket on his shoulders and sat in my truck. I let him cry for a while. Then I told him how it was going to be. He would hand Jennifer every password and every account. He would attend Gamblers Anonymous at St. Margaret Mary every Tuesday and Friday, and I would drive him myself for the first month. Jennifer had already called a lawyer and would decide the rest. “And one more thing,” I said. “You are going to hold a sign for me.” He nodded without asking what it said. I handed him a board I had painted the night before. It read, I AM SORRY, in gold leaf.
Jennifer took the photo herself on Christmas Eve, in the same living room in Elkhorn, with the same fancy camera on a tripod. Kyle held the gold sign. The grandkids, Lily and Max, held my hands. Jennifer posted it with one line: “This is the real family. We are fixing what was broken.” This time there were eleven hundred likes, and the man I used to bowl with wrote, “Welcome back, Gerry.” Then I told Jennifer about the money. Four hundred thousand dollars went into a college fund for each grandchild, with Jennifer as the only trustee. Not one cent went to Kyle.
Kyle has been to ninety one meetings now. He drives a used Honda, works at a hardware store on Dodge Street and calls me every Sunday just to say good morning. I do not forgive quickly, but I am trying. Last month Jennifer and the kids came to the shop, and I taught Max how to hold a mahlstick. The old Novotny name still shines above the door on Industrial Road, and the first sign I ever painted still hangs in the back. Dorothy would have loved the gold leaf. She always said my best lettering was the kind I never meant anyone to read.
