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Bobby Fraley scoured public police records through the Van Nuys public library internet system, seeking out anyone convicted of art theft in the past few years. He struggled to find a single report on this matter. He mentioned hiring a private investigator to the photographer who took Bobby’s portrait, but he balked at the idea, stating to Bobby that, “It was just a photo.”
It was rumored that Bobby Fraley took that comment personally. So personally, that he vowed to ruin that very photographer’s local business, by training himself the art of photography over the next ten years, opening up a portrait studio right next door to the photographer’s place of business, and running session discounts so attractive, that Bobby would steal all of the portrait business in the area, ending his long time rival’s career, and putting his shop out of business. One of the problems with that long term plan for Bobby was that the only building next door to the photographer’s business was a McDonald’s. Bobby claimed that he would find a way to partner up with the burger company in his scheme to make things right for the community.
After almost three months of mediocre investigative work by Bobby, he had decided to purchase advertising space on a large billboard, located at the corner of Fulton and Ventura Boulevard near the Casa Vega restaurant. The sign simply had a photo of the stolen portrait with the words: Have You Seen Me?, as well as Bobby’s cell phone number at the bottom of the bright yellow signage. There it was, Bobby’s face, with his phone number, for the entire Valley to see.
The calls came pouring in. Day after day, Bobby sifted through the hundreds of voicemails that he received, most of them prank calls made by vulgar tongued teenagers, a few odd characters claiming they were with Bobby on the UFO craft that had abducted them in ‘83, and also some that had a love interest toward the man with the sunburned photo, which by now had faded from his everyday look.
Bobby soon became such a local legend, that the neighborhood’s small companies would offer free merchandise to him, in hopes of some needed exposure. One clothier even began making Bobby Italian silk capes, free of charge, but in exchange for some word of mouth advertising when folks asked him about his eye-catching style.
Bobby enjoyed the exposure at first, but felt that all of the attention he was receiving was steering his investigation in the wrong direction. He let people know, on 4” x 6” flyers he had printed, that the purpose of all of this hubbub was not about him, but about the famed portrait of him. Through Bobby’s efforts, he was able to raise a reward for information leading to the reacquisition of the stolen photo. The sixty-eight dollars could be all that was between Bobby and recovering the object.
Bobby’s background in mathematics allowed him to calculate the prize money into a tangible offering so that the common person could see the value that it stored. One would be able to purchase eighty cans of tuna, if done so during the Tuesday sale, when the price dropped to .79 cents a can. This would leave the buyer just four cents short of purchasing the eighty-first can, when including the California sales tax rate. A metric, according to Bobby Fraley, that could “easily be found in the cracks of sidewalk, underneath the parking meters along Ventura Boulevard.”
One evening, while Bobby Fraley sipped a mint tea in the cozy confines of his 650 square foot apartment, he received an interesting phone call. A woman spoke to him on the other end of the line, claiming that she knew where the stolen portrait was. She told Bobby, that her name was Janice. She told Bobby, that she was the one who had stolen the framed artwork the night of October 29th, 2011. She told Bobby, that she wanted to meet him in two hours, at the laundromat on Moorpark Street, when the clock struck midnight.
- Part Two.
Person of Interest (Part Two)