by Dan Taylor
I check my watch. It’s almost eleven. I say, “You’re going to have to start talking, Eric. I can’t phone the ambulance until I have this thing wrapped up. Which means you could bleed out. You’re going to have to tell me who Spaghetti Bean is, and you’re going to have to do it fast. And then you’re going to have to help me get him here.”
He glances at Detective Lucy, and looks back at me. “Check what’s in the refrigerator,” he says.
Detective Lucy and I glance at each other. I look back at Eric. “Why?”
Then he says something that blows my mind.
50.
“I was hoping to get to that son of a bitch before the cops did. And if I’m going to jail tonight, I at least want one decent meal before I go there,” Eric says.
Before he has a chance to reply, Detective Lucy says, “You’ll shut your cake hole if you know what’s good for you.”
Eric looks at Detective Lucy and says with conviction, “The game’s up, Detective.”
Frowning, I look at them both. Detective Lucy says, “Don’t believe a word he says, guy. You can’t trust him as far as you can throw him.”
I ignore him and ask Eric, “So you’ll talk, as long as you eat first?”
He shrugs. “Just don’t make it a salad.”
Two minutes later Detective Lucy’s watching me feed Eric Chinese takeout with a fork. His eyes are smoldering, but he’s gone quiet.
When he’s finished and after asking me to wipe his mouth with a paper napkin, Eric says, “First thing you need to know is that guy isn’t Tracy’s brother.”
“Detective Lucy?” I ask.
Eric nods yes.
Before Eric can elaborate, Detective Lucy says, “You don’t believe him do you? You’ve seen my badge. ‘Detective Lucy,’ remember? You can’t trust that dude. He’s a pervert, for Chrissake!”
I don’t know what to make of what Eric’s saying. But I do know that this—whatever it is—will go a hell of a lot better if Michael J. Cop is silent, relatively so.
I pick up the sock Eric had in his mouth and stuff it into Detective Lucy’s mouth. He bucks as I do, moving his head from side to side. When it’s in, I tape it in place.
Eric burps, loud and long and satisfying. Then he says, “You order a hell of a Chinese takeout.”
“Thanks.” Planning to take what Eric says with a whole bunch of salt, I ask, “If this isn’t Tracy’s brother, then who is…?” My voice trails off, and then I realize something. I go to the living room, pick up Detective Lucy’s badge from the coffee table and open it and read the first name. “Richard,” I say under my breath.
I go back to the kitchen, and Eric says, “It’s her husband.”
“If this is Tracy’s husband, then why’s he been saying he’s Tracy’s brother all night?”
But it’s a dumb question.
Eric’s sole response is to raise an eyebrow. It’s obvious. “Because he killed Tracy.”
51.
“Hold on a second and let me think,” I say, getting up. I pace around the kitchen, trying to make sense of it. My first question for Eric is, “Then who’s Spaghetti Bean?”
“That’s Tracy’s brother. And he doesn’t have shit to do with any of this.”
I stop pacing. And then I tell Eric, “I don’t believe it. You’re posing with the guy in a photograph, on a fishing trip. And he’s the guy who got me to come to Tracy’s tonight.”
“I don’t know what Uncle Robert was thinking when he came to your office tonight, but he sure as hell didn’t plan on framing you for Tracy’s murder.”
I think of something. The database, and his not showing up on it. I then realize I made a huge assumption the whole time I’ve been investigating this mess. An assumption I made back in my office. I ask Eric, “What’s Uncle Robert’s surname?”
Eric frowns. “Marshall.”
Under my breath, I say, “Tracy’s maiden name.”
I’ve never been too sharp when it comes to working out how people are related to other people, as documented by the assumption I’ve made all night. So I ask him, “Uncle Robert?”
“Yeah,” he says, going red. “Before I go on, I just want you to know—before I did all the filming and developed feelings for Tracy—I had no idea Tracy was my aunt.”
“Oh, boy.”
52.
The next three or so minutes, I stand there gobsmacked, Eric cries like a kid who’s been stung by a bee for the first time, and Detective Lucy shouts muffled gibberish at me.
It’s a lot to take in, but I know one thing for sure: I believe Eric.
When he’s calmed down, Eric tells me the story of his childhood, and how he came to be his aunt’s neighbor without knowing it.
Eric grew up a child of a single mother. When he was a boy, his mother told him some horseshit story that his dad was a war hero who died during Nam. But he worked out later—when he was able to do math—that maybe his mom wasn’t being completely honest with him. As a precocious eighteen-year-old, he hired a private detective to locate his real dad. The investigator was a scam artist—some guy calling himself Harry Folds. He was a bona fide investigator as much as a ten-year-old who puts a fish bowl on his head and calls himself an astronaut works for NASA. He found nothing, always coming up with excuses why he needed more money for the investigation. But the point is, his mother found out about Eric having hired him, and wanting to both satiate his curiosity and be a fully transparent parent for the first time, revealed to Eric that he’s the child of an ‘illegitimate courtship.’ His dad was some guy who his mom went on a few dates with, ended up getting her pregnant by, and who ran off before even finding out. His dad was also married at the time, his mom later found out.
“Turns out it was much worse than them having just go on a few dates,” Eric says with a cynical chuckle. “They only met the once, at a bar in San Antonio. And they went ahead and skipped second and third base.”
His mom—naively, when you think about it—begged Eric not to make contact with him. He wouldn’t care, she said. And even if he would, she didn’t know where he lived—or even if he was alive.
Eric located his dad, hiring a reputable private investigation firm, using the money he’d saved up from advertising revenue from a website he owned that hosted emulated retro video games you could download and play on your PC—titles for the original Nintendo, shit like that. It was all very much illegal, of course, but the advertising revenue came in nonetheless.
His dad was making a life for himself in L.A., the private investigator reported to him. And “If I’m going to be honest with you, kid, I’d let sleeping dogs lie. In my experience, you’ve got around a thirty-percent chance you’ll have an Oprah moment, where you hug and he tells you he’s sorry. And around a sixty-percent chance he runs away from you like you’re a suicide bomber with an itchy trigger finger.”
“What about the other ten percent?” asked a young Eric.
“He socks you in the mouth,” the investigator replied.
Of course, Eric ignored the advice of the investigator and his mom, and while his peers were partying in Florida for spring break, Eric took a road trip to L.A. in his beat-up first car. “The only two things I had was a family-sized bag of Cheez Doodles and a crinkled up piece of paper on which his address had been written. Right there in my pocket. Every couple of miles I’d take my hand off the steering wheel and check it was still there.”
Eric had spent his youth watching TV. His mom worked two jobs—she’d had to. With having been left alone so often, Eric’s social skills were a little underdeveloped. And besides, he’d driven all that way, so it made sense to him that he would take the most direct route to get in contact with his dad. Eric says, “I went straight to his home, where he was home with his wife and my baby half-sister, and I didn’t think anything of it. I certainly didn’t feel like I should be hiding the fact I was his kid.”
His dad answered the door, and at first Eric thought he’d read the address wrong, or
written it down incorrectly, as the guy he was presented with didn’t look a thing like him. He was a tall guy, “Thin enough to be able to escape from prison without greasing himself up first. I guess his genes knew he wouldn’t stick around for long.”
The investigator was right. Upon being told the twenty-something standing in front of him was his kid, he freaked, even went as far as to manhandle Eric away from his door, after he’d checked his wife hadn’t followed him.
He escorted Eric back to his car and told him to stop smoking the shit he’d been smoking. He must’ve known on some level the kid who’d come to his door was telling the truth. His reaction and the action he took was all but confirmation. And that might’ve been the end of it. Eric might’ve got in his car, dejected and in agreement with his mom that it wasn’t the right move, and driven back home. That might’ve happened, if not for Eric, in one last desperate plea before his dad slammed both the door to Eric’s beat-up first car and his life, blurted out, “The Rusty Mexican,” the name of the bar at which Eric’s mom had met his dad.
“What did you say?” his dad asked, now having gone ghost white and a tremble having developed in his grip.
“The Rusty Mexican. The place you met Mom!”
It was all too heavy for his dad to handle. Shit, imagine some tubby kiddy knocking on your door telling you he’s the product of some back-alley liaison you had almost twenty years ago. They didn’t experience an Oprah moment, at least not then and there in the driveway of his dad’s home. What they experienced was more akin to a segment on an episode of Jerry Springer.
Eric was sent away crying and inconsolable. “I still had to drive around and find a motel for the night. I still kept a hold of that piece of paper with the address on it, and checking it was still there had become a force of habit,” Eric says.
Later that night, when Eric was sleeping, there was a loud knock on the door—three times, like it was the police. Scared and alone in some motel room on the outskirts of a city he didn’t know, Eric got out of bed and walked cautiously to the door in Y-front briefs and peeked through the curtain. His dad was standing outside the door, one hand on his hip, the other having its nails chewed seemingly down to the bone.
“Open up… Eric, is it?” his dad said, his tone of voice suggesting he was more likely there to tan his hide than tell him what a fool he’d been.
Eric moved away from the window, letting the curtain fall back into its resting position. He needed to think. All he knew about his dad was that he had a hell of a grip for a skinny guy, and that he would do anything to protect the life he’d built for himself in L.A.
Fearing a violent response to the problem Eric had posed by turning up at his door, Eric remained silent.
“I know you’re in there… Son. Open up so we can talk.”
Upon hearing his dad address him as son, hearing it for the first time from a man, Eric walked to the door, conscious of each step, and opened the door slowly.
Eric’s dad reached out with his hands and pulled his son into him, gripping him tightly as he hugged him. Neither one cared that Eric was just wearing his underwear.
They talked until sunrise. About how his mom was getting on. If she was happy. He’d never forgotten about her, his dad said, it just wasn’t in the stars that they’d stay together, or even develop their relationship beyond one night of uncontrollable attraction. “He was interested in me, too. And not just that ‘what have you done at school today, son’ way, but really interested. What I liked, what I didn’t like.”
Eric’s dad made two things clear, kind of: He both wanted Eric in his life and didn’t. “His wife, she was the religious sort. The crazy kind. She wouldn’t abide her husband having another kid out of wedlock. The embarrassment of that alone would be enough to put a serious strain on their marriage, let alone that he’d run off, abandoning a pregnant young lady, and not seen his boy until he was big enough to be competitive in an arm wrestle. But he also wanted to have me around. So he came up with a solution.”
Eric’s dad’s parents fostered a number of children, as well as having two of their own. Most of these had stayed in touch. Came home for the holidays, wedding anniversaries, visiting on occasion. But one of them, a girl called Rachel, had fallen out with his folks, ran off and joined the Peace Corps. The story they’d give to their family members was that her adult son had flown the nest, and had sought family members who lived in the States, and that’s how Eric had gotten in contact with the man who is technically his biological dad. “He said I’d call him Uncle Bob, and no one would be none the wiser,” Eric says with a cynical laugh. “I didn’t like it, but I accepted it. I’d have called him anything to be in his life. He left the motel room that night, and I went and finished up my studies. We stayed in contact, writing each other emails, going on the occasional fishing trip—I never mentioned liking fishing, but dad wanted to catch up on all the parenting he’d missed out on, and I guess what he’d learned about having a son he’d learned from Robert Redford movies.” Eric sighs deeply, before recounting, “The signs were there. He never mentioned his family in his emails. Never talked about his wife. So I should’ve known that there was trouble in paradise. The dumbass that I am, after I’d finished college, I moved out here to L.A., turning up at his door again. His wife opened the door, and I said, with a huge smile on my face, ‘Hey, it’s Eric, Uncle Bob’s nephew!’”
By the look on her face, Eric could tell Uncle Bob had never mentioned him, but despite this she invited him in. Uncle Bob was out at the moment. Maybe he could come back later. Dejected, Eric left and went and stayed in the same motel room he’d stayed in a few years previous.
When Uncle Bob came knocking that night, he was drunk and super-pissed. When Eric answered, he told him he couldn’t just knock on his door like that. “Why not?” Eric asked. “I thought we had a plan. You’re Uncle Bob, remember?”
Despite the fishing trips and emails and hugs that seemed to last twenty-seconds longer than his mom’s, Uncle Bob was going back on his word. The years that had passed between him being a young guy who had frequented “The Rusty Mexican” and him being a cop in L.A. who was family first meant nothing. Eric wasn’t to meet Robert’s family. He never would. They’d mess up and let it slip at some point. Someone would work out that their relationship wasn’t merely that of an uncle and a long-lost nephew—and not even biological, to boot.
“So where does that leaves us?” Eric asked, tears forming in his eyes.
Uncle Bob smiled, sadness in his eyes, and said, “I know of a river we haven’t fished. It has salmon the size of baby elephants.”
It had been decided. Eric hadn’t really cared about being social with Robert’s family anyway. When he asked where that left us, he was worried his dad wouldn’t allow him to stay close to him, that he’d forbid him from staying in L.A.
But the opposite turned out to be true. He encouraged him to.
Eric stayed in L.A., getting a gig as a coder for some tech firm.
Five years ago, Uncle Bob said he’d come into some money, bought a duplex in the Hollywood Hills, and he’d love for Eric to be his tenant. It would give him an excuse to come out and see him more often.
After telling me this, Eric becomes pensive, sad, almost. Then he says, “I guess on some level, Dad wanted me to be close to family, which is why my neighbor turned out to be Aunt Tracy.” He looks around—noting the situation: the cameras, the videos in the attic—and says, “But I don’t think Uncle Bob intended any of this.”
That story nearly put me to sleep like a horse. Standing up, that is. But I manage to rouse myself enough to ask, “How did you find out Tracy was your aunt?”
“She was out one morning, and the mailman wanted to leave a package with me. I just figured before that he was a hands-on landlord.”
“Her surname was written on it,” I say, half to myself.
“Yeah. Needless to say, I didn’t feel too well after finding out.”
I glance at Detecti
ve Lucy. He’s looking at Eric with wide eyes. It’s clear this story is news to him.
I leave them alone, as I need time to think.
I go back to the living room and sit down on the sofa chair.
Eric doesn’t need to tell me the rest of the story. It’s easy to fill in the blanks.
Nor do I need to ask Detective Lucy for his side of the story. Detective Lucy and Tracy, according to Uncle Bob, were in the midst of a messy divorce. I don’t think that Detective Lucy didn’t know about Eric having filmed Tracy, but I gotta admit, he had me fooled when I ‘broke’ the news to him after taking him captive. After finding out her neighbor had filmed her doing sick shit, Detective Lucy spotted an opportunity to get back at his wife one last, final time, and to have someone to take the blame for it. Or maybe after finding out how promiscuous she’d been since their separation, that made him pissed, and was the catalyst for his wanting to murder her. It doesn’t matter.
What does is that he intended to frame Eric for Tracy’s death.
I think a second about why he came back here afterwards. Maybe it was so he could call it in. It would be a ballsy move to find his own murder victim, but he had to do it to get rid of the microphone he’d planted in her kitchen. And with him being a cop and still technically her husband, it wouldn’t raise any red flags in the eyes of investigators that he was the one to find her dead in the bathroom.
All he needed to do was to visit her one day to talk about the divorce with her, feigning amicability, and then slip poison into some leftovers while she was on the can or whatnot. Come back when she’d eaten it, ‘find’ her, and phone it in with tears in his eyes. And what do you know, there’s a collection of VHS cassettes in the attic, and pinhole cameras installed in her bathroom and bedroom, and the sick fuck living next to her had to be the guy who put them there, as he’s the one who owns the video tapes.