The Triton Mystery

It started with a receipt from Triton, AKA Leather's Truck Stop, in Aurora Oregon. The receipt fell out of the black nylon backpack which I use as a briefcase. The receipt was a withdrawal from checking in the amount of 200 dollars. A terminal fee of 1.50 had been added bringing the total transaction amount to - yes you guessed in 201.50 dollars – you are wiz at math.

Pat yourself on the back.

The receipt was dated July 21st, 2009 and despite being only a few days old the receipt had lived a hard life. Much like Leather. Leather must have had a hard life. She is in her mid 60s but looks 90. Still brown from sun received in the 70s. I have never met her but know she is skinny. She would have to be skinny. Not fit skinny.

Just skinny.

No Stairmaster in front of a mirrored wall with CNN blabbering away. No aerobics. Not even a jazzercise tape. Not even during the 80s. No time for jazzercise hustling the casino in the back room of the Peppermill.
Leather never set foot in a gym.

Leather’s skinny came another way. A diet of cigarettes, red meat, and liqueur since she was 16.

She's a tough old broad huh, how else would have had risen from nothing to owing a truck stop in Aurora? It was not handed to her. No silver platters in her history.

No silver anything.

Right now she is sitting in her office. Smoking. Who cares if it is against the law, this is her place and she is going to do as she pleases. The office is down a hall and across from the bathrooms. One wall, the one behind her is shared with the kitchen. If the cooks turn their music up too loud she bangs on the wall. Just once is enough. Even the cooks, carrying knives, are scared of her. And cooks, as you know, are a tough group.

The receipt must have been crumpled into a ball or stuffed into a pocket before making its way into and falling out of my briefcase. This would not be unusual. Every few days I take receipts from lunches, coffees, or other purchases and transfer them from pockets, my car, or my wallet into my briefcase. The receipts live in my briefcase until I get around to doing an expense report. Typically once or twice per year.

For a second I did not think much of it. Barbara, my wife of 17 years, must have made the withdrawal. Why would she have been at a truck stop in Aurora? Why would she have needed 200 dollars cash?

I entertained myself by making up stories.

I expect she would have told me if she were in Aurora and needed money. I expect she would have told me about stopping at Leather's Truck Stop. An exotic local, surely. Our days are not so exciting that a visit to a truck stop, especially a truck stop with the name of Leathers would escape mention.

All the digits of the card number except for the last four had been replaced with asterisks. 8608. None of our credit or ATM accounts end in 8608. This was not Barb's receipt. It was not my receipt.

I put Leather's out of my mind.

Not for long. I thought about throwing the receipt away. I didn’t. It sat on the windowsill in my office. Every few days I would glance at it.
I asked the guys in the office.

“Is this your receipt?”

No one would claim it. Somehow it was mine. Not mine in the sense that the money came from my account and I could claim some sort of official relationship with the receipt but mine because the responsibility lay with me to figure out how it made its way into my briefcase.

It was not going to be easy. Leather has no history as a gym rat I have no history as a PI. Oh I’ve watched Magnum, Spencer for Hire and Law and Order but what does that get you? Nothing but a lust for Ferraris and penchant for one liners. No help, no method, no clue as to how I should go about determining how the receipt came to be mine.

Is it a crime to slip a receipt into a briefcase, wallet, or satchel with the intent of confounding the slipee? Maybe that’s not the perp’s intent. Maybe the perp was trying to set me on a path.

A path to Leather’s? To Leather?

To Triton?

Taken at face value it will be much easier to get to Leather’s.
Not enough of a renaissance man, as science geek to catch that? Still think Pluto is a planet? Triton is a moon of Neptune. As such it is approximately 2.7 billion miles from my house. Aurora is a town in Oregon.

Considerably closer to my house.

There are no marks other than those printed by the ATM on the receipt. No clue. No “Meet me at Leather’s, 7/8 @ 1” Nothing.

Maybe I need to look harder. Maybe there is nothing to look for. Maybe one of the guys is screwing with me. Maybe but probably not. I need to look harder, put on my thinking cap, ruminate on this for a while.
Something will turn up.

There is a stylized image of a shell by the Triton logo at the top of the receipt. Not a scallop shell like the one Shell Gas Stations have but a shell like you would find on the beach in Hawaii. A shell with two pointy ends and about twice as long as it is thick. Even though the shell is printed in black and white I think of it as being creamy white with brown stripes.

A clue. Not Triton the moon. Triton the mollusk.

Why would an old woman name her business after a large mollusk?

In addition to the shell, “Trition” and address there are some other tidbits on the receipt.

Terminal # CR000123
The date 06/21/09 (you already knew that but I am trying to be thorough) The time 05:42:04 PM.
***Withdrawal From Checking***
The card number ************8608
Auth # 00000000 and Seq# 33010

After that we have the amount requested, dispensed, the terminal fee, and the total withdrawal.

On the back of the receipt CARDTRONICS is printed three times.

That’s it.

I put the receipt aside. I did not forget about it as it sat under my monitor on my desk at home, but I did not think about it. Not until I noticed a strange series of dead birds.