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“You got any kids?” he asked.

“Five sons. They’re all grown.”

Von Winkle ran his eyes up and down Susette. She looked too young, and her figure looked too good for a mother of five grown boys. She grinned.

“Well, welcome to the ’hood,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Do you want to go for coffee?” he asked.

She explained she really needed to finish removing the brush from the sidewalk.

“Don’t bother cleaning that up,” he said. “Just call the city and tell them to clean it up.”

She laughed. He smiled. “C’mon, Red. Hop in,” he said.

No one had called her that in years. And she’d never been in a Jaguar. She brushed the dirt off her knees and got in. A couple of blocks from Susette’s house, they passed the city’s sewer plant, noting the smell. Neighborhood residents had complained about its odor for years. The city basically ignored them. Von Winkle couldn’t resist boasting what he had done just one month earlier.

Fed up with City Hall’s inaction, he had sent a fax to the city manager that read: “It stinks down here. Can you smell it in your office yet? In time you will!” A week later, during a public hearing at City Hall, Von Winkle entered the building with big buckets of chicken manure. He dumped some on the steps and put the rest in the elevator, along with a bag of Glade air freshener. The stench forced people to evacuate the building, and it shut down City Hall.

Susette laughed hysterically.

“Didn’t you hear about this incident?” he asked.

“No,” she said, trying to regain her composure. “I don’t know anything about this.”

Von Winkle couldn’t believe it. The case had been all over the news. Even Jay Leno had joked about it in his monologue. After a monthlong investigation, the police had arrested him just a couple of days earlier for reckless endangerment and breach of peace.

Susette explained she hadn’t paid much attention to the news lately. And she hadn’t really met many people in the neighborhood yet. But she admired Von Winkle’s willingness to stand up to City Hall.

His tales of mischief kept her laughing until they reached Stash’s, a neighborhood bar that occasionally hosted live bands. The minute they pulled up, one of the worst memories of Susette’s life flashed through her mind.

On a wet evening in 1991, she had been at a neighbor’s farm, looking at dairy cows when her son Nicholas—seventeen at the time—left the house to attend a sports banquet. It was a cold, wet night. When Susette got home, her thirteen-year-old son Jonathan met her at the door, his face ghost white.

“Nick was in a car accident,” he said.

Just miles from home, Nick ended up in a head-on collision when a drunk driver crossed the median at high speed. After surgery and hospitalization, Nick survived. Days later, a newspaper story reported that a concert at Stash’s had been canceled due to an injury to a band member, the same guy who had crashed into Susette’s son. Susette felt the story had a sympathetic tone.

Livid, Susette called the paper. “I screamed bloody murder at the reporter,” she recalled. “‘Do you have any idea what this man has done?’”

The injury to her son put Susette on a crusade. A drunk driver had taken something away from her. She vowed to make sure the driver was brought to justice. But in the end, she felt the system had wronged her; a failure to administer an alcohol test at the accident scene ended up hampering the prosecutor’s case, and the driver served very little jail time. Unable to let go, Susette joined Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and she never allowed her older boys to bring alcohol into her home.

While Susette talked, Von Winkle ordered a beer. He had an edge to him, she thought. His off-the-wall antics and the fearless, distant look in his eyes made him irresistibly unpredictable. She couldn’t help but like him, especially his sense of humor. He might be the perfect friend in a new neighborhood, she figured.

An hour later, Von Winkle dropped her back at her house and gave her his cell phone number.

“If you need anything, Red, call me.”

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