The man at the VA put his glasses on the desk, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and said in a low, hard voice, “Floyd, that doctor is Marvin Quill. He lost his license in California in 2019 for signing competency papers for patients he had never examined. He has been working off a Nevada license that the board is already investigating. And I have an investigator from the office of the Attorney General sitting two doors down who has been looking for the guardianship fraud ring for eight months.” I am Floyd Mercer, eighty four years old, and I sat up in my chair.
His name was Lou Pappas, and he had been the service officer at the Reno VA since 1984. He had processed my first claim when I came home from Vietnam with a ringing in both ears. He stood up, opened the door, and called down the hall. A woman in a gray blazer walked in with a legal pad, shook my hand, and introduced herself as Investigator Teresa Gomez. “Mr. Mercer,” she said, “we have three cases that match what your son said on the phone. We have never had a recording. If you are willing, we would like to help you make one.”
I did not sleep much that night, on my cot beside the dryer. Gary came in at midnight, smelling of cigarettes and the casino carpet, and threw a load of shirts into the machine without a word. I lay with my eyes shut and my heart knocking against my ribs, and I listened to the tumble of his clothes. In the morning, I made the coffee myself, and I said, quite casually, that I would be happy to have lunch with his doctor friend at the club. I saw his shoulders loosen. He thought he had won.
A cot beside a dryer gave one retired barber the length of a Friday morning to bring his son back to the truth in Reno.
I gave my terms to Gary at the end, once the recording was safely done and Investigator Gomez sat in the next room with her pad. “Gary, listen to your father. The doctor will answer for what he has done. You can answer for it too, in a courtroom, or you can answer to me in this kitchen. I will not press charges if you withdraw the guardianship petition today, give up the poker machines, and take the counseling that Mr. Pappas has arranged. You will pay back every dollar I paid you for that cot. And you will help me find a place of my own.”
My son stood in the laundry room doorway, with his fingers clenched on a basket of warm towels, and his face crumpled. “Pop, I owe the Peppermill two hundred and ten thousand dollars on markers,” he said. “I put it on my credit cards, and then on the house, and then I could not stop. I told myself I would win it back by Christmas. Dr. Quill said he could make a case that you were failing, and the VA money would cover the interest.” He sank down on the dryer, shaking. “I am so ashamed. I am the son of a man who walked out of Khe Sanh.”
But then the old fear flared up in Gary like a pilot light. He glimpsed Investigator Gomez in the doorway of the front room with her badge on her belt, and he panicked. He snatched the digital recorder off the dryer, where I had left it running, and bolted for the garage door, meaning to smash it on the driveway. He ran across the kitchen. Lou Pappas, who had been waiting in the hall, stepped out in his gray cardigan. Two men in Marine caps from my VA coffee group walked up the driveway. And the investigator moved in behind him.
Gary stopped in the open garage door with the recorder in his fist and the bright Nevada morning behind him, the sprinklers hissing across the lawn. The men in the Marine caps took up positions on either side of the driveway, saying nothing. Lou Pappas spoke first, gently. “Gary, I have known your father for forty years. He raised you on haircuts and nickels. Do not make him watch you run from your own garage.” Gary looked at the old men, and at me in the kitchen doorway. His hand slowly opened. The recorder dropped into the palm of Lou.
The consequences were firm. Dr. Quill was arrested before the end of the month, and eleven other families received letters from the Attorney General. Gary withdrew the guardianship petition, entered a program for gamblers in Sparks, and sold his boat and his condo to pay the markers. I moved into a bright little apartment near the river with a window that faced the mountains and a washing machine of my own. Gary came by every Sunday, thin and quiet, with groceries, and he always stood in the doorway until I told him to sit.
In the name of my wife Dorothy, who passed in 2019, I started the Dorothy Mercer Fund. It pays for legal help for older people and veterans targeted by guardianship fraud and for barber school tuition for young people who want a trade, in Washoe, Storey and Lyon counties. In the first year we protected thirty eight seniors from false guardianships and sent nineteen students to barber school. One was a twenty two year old from Sparks who cut her first clean fade in the practice chair and looked at the mirror, then at her mother, who had come to watch.
On a clear Saturday morning in May, I stood behind a chair in the new Mercer Barber Shop on Virginia Street, which the fund had reopened with a grand opening and a ribbon, the scissors in my steady hand and the radio playing old Sinatra. Gary came in through the front door in a new shirt, one hundred and sixty days clear, and took a seat in the waiting row between two old Marines. When it was his turn, he climbed into the chair. “Pop,” he said, “give me whatever you gave me when I was ten.” I tied the cape around his neck, and I smiled.
