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A few years back, longtime Wichita private investigator Emery Goad took his granddaughter, Kara Hudson, with him to collect a debt and serve some evictions. She was apprehensive about his work, with good reason as it turns out.
One woman, who didn't appreciate Goad stopping by, slapped him across the face.
"You know, Poppy just looked at her, and he never did a thing," Hudson told her grandmother, Goad's wife, Jackie, upon their return.
"He said, 'Are you through?' "
However, Hudson added, "If looks could kill, that lady would have been dead.' "
Jackie Goad knows the look well.
"He controls a lot with his looks," she said. "It's because he has a very authoritative manner. I think he might like to rule the whole world that way."
Though some describe her husband's tactics as too aggressive, most who know him say it's his intellect that prevails.
"His ego does not get engaged with whatever challenges may be thrown his way," said attorney Dan Monnat, who started using Goad's services 25 years ago.
"He's pretty cool-headed."
Goad generally talks his way into getting what he wants, Monnat said.
When witnesses don't want to talk, Monnat said Goad will say: "I completely understand what you mean, but wouldn't you just like to hear the questions?"
"That appeals to people's curiosity," Monnat said. "They let him in the door. He asks them the questions, and they can't resist answering them.
"I think that opens a lot of doors that otherwise don't get opened."
The cigar-chomping Goad — he gave up actually smoking the things after getting cancer under his tongue in 2009 — has understated tactics for dealing with people who aren't pleased to see him.
For instance, the louder someone screams, the lower he talks.
"So I'm going to end up whispering so they have to stop talking to hear me," Goad said. "It's pretty easy to manipulate (people) that are preoccupied with their eviction.
"For that matter, it's pretty easy to manipulate anyone with a lot of practice."
Beacon of journalism
Goad, a native of Junction City, has always been interested in investigations — and not the car business his father hoped to leave him.
Initially, the investigations were through journalism.
Upon graduating from journalism school at the University of Kansas, Goad and some classmates interviewed with the managing editor of The Wichita Beacon.
Later that day, Goad said, the editor was driving home, pulled off the expressway, had a heart attack and died.
Six months later, Goad said, the editor's widow was looking through his briefcase and saw that her husband had scribbled that the paper ought to hire Goad.
She contacted The Beacon, and the paper wrote to Goad. He received the letter after a seven-month stint with the Army Reserves during Vietnam and brought it to The Beacon.
"I just literally showed up," Goad said. "They decided to honor it."
His first big story was about how Sedgwick County Sheriff Vern Miller might not be doing the great job everyone thought he was.
"They had nothing but pat-em-on-the-back stories," Goad said.
The paper had received tips about rampant prostitution and liquor violations in area bars. Goad investigated for two weeks, wrote a story and took it to Miller.
"My first impression was that he was the kind of reporter that was really doing a lot of snooping around and investigating and that maybe he had something good that I should look at," recalled Miller, who read the story and gave a quick, "No comment."
The story was to run in The Beacon the next afternoon.
Miller preempted it, though, by rounding up every available law enforcement official and making a slew of arrests across the city from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m.
Though Goad's story never ran, Miller was impressed.
"I learned from that and a couple of other things that Emery Goad was a top-notch investigator even though he hadn't been trained as a police investigator," Miller said.
Eleven months later, Goad left The Beacon to be a special agent for Miller when he was elected attorney general.
"I was probably more into the investigation than the journalism," Goad said. "It was an absolute ball."
In his four years at the office, Goad investigated a variety of corruption.
"I arrested district court judges, superintendents of schools. God, it was just endless."
Miller said Goad "was a dandy."
"He was able to put together more cases than anybody I had," Miller said.
"There's no doubt people don't like him because he's aggressive, but he's following court order.
"You've got to have courage enough to stand up and say, 'This is right, and this is wrong.' He's a cautious fellow."
Goad said, "I know criminal law upside down and backwards."
When he went to Topeka, he decided to become an attorney, but he almost immediately dropped out.
"I knew from the second day being a lawyer was for the birds. This is too much fun."
'The biggest pain'
Miller started a Wichita law firm after leaving office and hired Goad as an investigator, but there wasn't much business during the start-up phase, so Goad started his own company, Kansas Investigative Services.
Goad, 64, has been in business 36 years.
He says there are about 30 part-time private investigators in Wichita and only a few full-time investigators, including himself and an employee.
KIS offers a variety of services. A third of Goad's work is research, such as background searches for employers and witness interviews for court cases.
Another third is paper service, such as evictions and repossessions.
His favorite thing, though, is investigation, which comprises the rest of his business.
That could be dealing with a ransom note or finding someone who's been kidnapped.
"There's an odd world out there that a lot of people don't know about," Goad said. "We do a really large amount of this stuff, but it's all in a black hole."
He's hesitant to share even general stories of his millionaire or billionaire clients, let alone name names.
"They'd deny it in a second."
Once, a client called from the back of George H.W. Bush's limo while sitting next to the president.
"You'd just really be surprised how many clients I have that are in those kinds of places," Goad said. "It's because I have a really good reputation for solving those kind of situations."
People in a certain economic strata turn to investigators instead of law enforcement for privacy and efficiency, Goad said.
"Sometimes we're just around for a little ingenuity."
He's been sued a few times, over things such as an eviction and a repossession, and arrested more than a couple of dozen times, mostly for conflicts with law enforcement over authority.
"He always wins because he's right," Miller said.
Former Wichita Police Department Capt. Darrell Haynes first met Goad when he was revising the department's policy on dealing with process servers.
"I thought, well, who's the biggest pain in the way of a process server that we have? And that would certainly be Emery Goad," Haynes said.
"When we revised our policy, it was in no small part due to his input," he said. "He's probably a good and decent person when it's all said and done. He's certainly the person you'd want out there collecting your debts."
Adrenaline addiction
On eviction days, Goad sports a yellow-green vest that declares he's a court-ordered process server. He has a can of Mace at the ready. An employee carries a gun.
On one recent eviction, Goad awoke a couple lying on a fold-out couch at a west-side apartment complex and immediately ordered them outside.
"This is kind of a complex of not nice people," Goad said, noting the address shows up in jail bookings about every other day.
Goad suggests to the young man, who's leaning against the rail outside his door with his hands tucked between his underwear and his baggy pants, that he talk with the apartment manager about getting his things back.
"I ain't talkin' to no manager," the man said. "He played me."
So Goad, still not letting the man in, collected and returned some of the man's tennis shoes.
Later that day, Goad allows an older woman back into her daughter's apartment to collect several loads of belongings because he makes a judgment that she's safe.
It's an adrenaline rush every time Goad arrives unannounced on someone's doorstep.
His doctor told him adrenaline probably saved his life in 2005 when he was shot while seizing a Rolls-Royce.
He'd been to the man's house previously.
"He'd been ornery before but never had a weapon."
The man said he needed to go in his house for his glasses. Unlike when he's doing evictions, Goad didn't have the authority to restrain him.
He and fellow investigators were standing in the bright sunlight near their vehicle — far enough from danger, Goad thought — when the man emerged from his dark garage with a .357 handgun.
Goad said he considered a number of escape options in the nanosecond before he was shot. Roll under his vehicle and risk getting burned or stuck? Jump behind the vehicle?
A bullet the size of a man's pinky hit his rib cage, blew out his spleen, severely damaged his colon and stomach and went through his diaphragm twice.
"He always told me that he was one step ahead of everybody, and I think he always has been except that one time," Jackie Goad said. "He's alert. He knows what's happening around him."
It was almost half a year before Goad could return to work.
Jackie Goad said she didn't bother trying to dissuade her husband from coming back "because I knew he wouldn't listen."
Goad is up at 4:30 a.m. daily and in his office by 5:30 a.m., drinking coffee and working the Jumble after reading The Eagle.
Goad is old school and does a lot of dictation — he has someone else handle his e-mail —before the onslaught of phone calls demands his attention.
He works until about 6 p.m., goes home for dinner and says he's in bed by 7:30 p.m.
"He's not easy to work for if you ask the employees," Jackie Goad said. "He's demanding. He's a perfectionist. He doesn't think anybody should make mistakes."
Now that he's older, though, she said, "He realizes he's made a mistake or two."
The Goads met when Jackie applied to KIS for a job.
She was appalled by his office.
"He doesn't throw any pieces of paper away.
"I thought, get up and leave.... But I sat it out."
She got the job — something clicked immediately, she said — and the two married 60 days later.
'Goad, the PI'
Not long after being shot, Goad received a call from a producer of "Dog the Bounty Hunter" about possibly doing a show on him.
"I told him straight up what it's like. It's like five minutes of excitement once a week."
There's enough to hold his interest, though, whether it's walking into an apartment to find someone engaged in a sex act, alone or with others, or an alligator in a bathtub.
"It's kind of interesting to poke into everybody's private life," Goad said.
There are some thrilling moments, too, such as delivering kiss-off notes instead of ransoms or chasing people in their underwear through the snow.
Goad's dry sense of humor is on regular display as he makes his rounds.
"What kind of Gestapo did he call us?" he asked an employee about a recent slur.
"Nazi Gestapo," the employee answered.
"You don't have to put 'em together," Goad said. "It's redundant."
There's something of a provocateur in Goad, who enjoys occasionally tipping reporters to stories.
"I'm really big on the public's right to know — when it has nothing to do with what I'm working on. I mean, they kind of ingrained that in J-school, and I believe it."
It can be beyond awkward doing some of the jobs Goad does. He thrives on it.
"Mmm, hmm," he said, flashing a devilish grin.
"This is living."
