Squirt goes out leaving a wake of odd bakery smells in her wake. The bagel sits on my desk. Maybe she’s trying to poison me, I think, because she wants her storage closet back. Or she wants to be the only female at Polenta Brothers. Although, from what I can see, she’s usually the only PERSON at Polenta Brothers. My father’s away, and my Uncle is where, flipping pancakes?
I take out my laptop and Map Quest Mr. Black’s address so I can be in position to tail him later. I look at the picture that Mrs. Black gave me of her husband. He has a long Henry Fonda-ish face with black horn rim glasses He looks like what you would want a grandfather to look like, a grandfather who wasn’t cheating on your grandmother, that is.
I call the guy from my “In” box folder that my uncle just gave me. He’ll stop by the office after he finishes work today. I’m on a roll.
It’s time to follow Mr. Black. He does indeed turn right out of Hillcrest Homes (not a hill in sight). He’s easy to follow because he’s got a maroon Cadillac with gold trim—very snazzy. He proceeds along his journey like a small cruise ship. He ends up at Holiday Lakes. There’s a gatehouse with a nice retired gentleman inside. “I’m with my dad, Mr. Black,” I tell him gesturing forward toward the maroon Cadillac. The gatekeeper smiles and motions me on.
Mr. Black ends up in a cul-de-sac of modular homes. I stay at the entrance to the street and I see him pull into a driveway. I pull out my mini-binoculars and find “Eighty one” scrolled on the house. It has pink shutters. He walks up to the door and knocks. A woman answers the door and he goes in. It doesn’t look like a poker palace to me.
I drive to the next cul-de-sac and try to see the house from the back. A lot of the homes have lanais looking out over a little lake. There’s a woman sitting out on the lanai of the pink shuttered house. I think it’s the same woman who answered the door. She has a flowered shirt on, and she’s knitting something. “What did you do with Mr. Black?” I say. I watch for a little while, but nothing happens.
I go to the clubhouse which I passed on the way in, and park. I know I can’t sit around in my car and loiter in a place like this. I pull my pink Bikini Headquarters’ baseball cap down low and take a walk back to Mr. Black’s cul-de-sac. I make two loops, then I go to the next cul-de-sac over and do the same thing. The woman continues to drink her iced tea on the lanai. Mr. Black has been swallowed up into the bowels of the modular home.
I walk back to the clubhouse and get a Diet Coke from a machine. I ask the woman at the front desk for a directory. They have people listed alphabetically, but also by cul-de-sac. Every cul-de-sac is named after a marine creature. “Dolphin Drive” is where Mr. Black is, and all the “Dolphin Families” who live there are also listed. How convenient, and how cute. It’s like kindergarten all over again. “Mr. and Mrs. Forth” it says for the house in question. “Do some of these people rent their homes?” I ask the woman at the desk. “Oh yes,” she says, “many of our people rent their homes for part of the year.”
I get back in my car and think about what to do next. I can see the entrance to Dolphin Drive in my rear view mirror. I realize I should have gotten some pictures of Mr. Black entering the house. I read in the intro to my P.I. class, that clients like to see every little inch of your progress: “Don’t only take pictures of the husband when he’s with the woman he’s having an affair with—the definitive “clincher” shots—but also take pictures of the woman’s house, the yard, close ups of the woman’s face, full view AND profile, how the woman looks from the front and the back. Even take shots of the woman’s dog. The proof is not the whole story.… Clients want to know WHY. And although a lot of photos won’t ever answer that question, we recommend taking them….” the PI course advised.
I walk down Dolphin Drive. This camera has a viewfinder not only behind the camera but on the top, so I can hold it down near my side and look down at it to see what I’m taking a picture of. I pass by the house and try to take some pictures as I walk. It’s not so easy to do. I can’t see the viewfinder without my reading glasses, and when I put them on, I can’t seem to walk well because I feel dizzy. When I get back to the main road, I review the pictures. One is of the corner of the house (but actually shows the house number so that’s good), two are of the pavement. I sigh. I go to the other cul-de-sac. This time I try standing still and holding the camera down near my thigh while taking a picture of the woman on the lanai. The zoom pops out obediently and I snap two shots. Then the woman gets up. Aha, I think. I start to sprint back to the clubhouse and my car. I have to stop to take my glasses off because I didn’t see the hibiscus bush I should have seen. It tangled me up a little and my knee is bloody, but I get back to my car. I’m just starting it up and I see Mr. Black pulling out of Dolphin Drive. I wait, then I decide.
I walk up Dolphin Drive like ho hum, I’m just strolling. When I am past the house, I take a sharp turn into the yard and hide behind a bush. I look around. Nobody saw me. I creep up to the house and look in one of the windows. Kitchen. Nobody in there. In the next room there’s a woman in a hospital bed. She looks like she’s about ninety pounds and at the end of her rope.
I turn around and the woman from the lanai is standing behind me.
“What are you doing?” she asks. For some reason, she doesn’t seem surprised or alarmed.
“Um,” I say. “The complex hired me because the plants are getting Tropicana Fungi on them.” I’ve got the fungi expert on my brain, I guess, because it’s the first thing I can come up with.
“The fungi is contagious,” I plow on. Although that doesn’t seem like the right word. “It’s spreading,” I amend. “We may have to spray with Hydrogliferide Juice,” I add.
She picks a hibiscus flower, looks at it.
I say, “It’s organic, so you won’t have to worry about not breathing it in or anything.”
She says, “Then why were you looking in my window?”
Whenever I try to lie, I end up talking too much.
This is bad. I can’t think of anything to say. My father and my uncle are going to kill me. “Mrs. Black hired me,” I admit.
She twirls the flower in her hand. “I told them I hate secrets,” she tells me. “I’m very bad at them.”
Me too.
I tell her my name. I say, “Mrs. Black wants to know where Mr. Black goes every other day from 1-4,” I tell her.
“Oh Lord,” she says, “I saw you walking around taking pictures. I thought you were a realtor.”
So much for my spy camera. “He left early today?” I ask.
“My mother isn’t well. She isn’t having one of her better days,” she tells me.
We stand there looking at each other.
“Come in,” she decides. She brings me out to the lanai. She gets me an iced tea. We sit down. I lean forward. Okay, This is what I love about this job so far; you never know what’s going to happen next.
“I’m Ceil,” she introduces herself. “My mother and Mr. Black—Daniel—knew each other a long time ago. They were in love. Then World War Two happened, and Daniel went off to war. He was a gunner on a fighter plane, and he was shot down on one of his first campaigns. He was on a mission to bomb a tank factory in Austria. Daniel was listed as missing in action for six months. They didn’t like to admit it when a plane was shot down back then, maybe they still don’t. Then, they found some of the plane and some burned remains near a mountain town in Austria. Daniel’s mom killed herself soon after—she had had bouts of depression her whole life and that news evidently sent her over the edge. Daniel’s dad decided to have a funeral for both of them together. You can just declare someone dead, you know; you don’t need proof. It’s not legal, but a lot of people do it anyway. They need to move on, or some such…
“My mom told me that the whole town came to the funeral. Six months later, my mom married my dad and they moved to Cincinnati. I guess she needed to move on too. Turns out Daniel wasn’t dead though. He was one of two people who were able to parachute out of the plane and we
re captured by the Germans. He was a prisoner of war for one whole year. Can you imagine? When he came back to the states, he found his whole life in tatters: His mom dead, his father kind of crazy and ruined from too much grief, and his girlfriend gone off and married to someone else. My mother, of course, found out that he was alive from her parents who were still living in the same town. But Daniel never contacted her, and she didn’t contact him either. Well, those were different times, weren’t they? People had more, what would you call it, restraint?”
I nod at her. Maybe, I think. Although it seems like I’ve had a whole marriage of restraint myself. This story is making me very uncomfortable.
She tells me, “I never knew any of this until this summer after my mom was diagnosed. She has cancer of the bile duct. It’s not a good kind of cancer to have.” She squints a little, takes a deep breath. “She asked me if I could look Daniel up on the Internet for her, told me he was an old friend and she wanted to see if he was still alive and where he was, but she didn’t know how to do it. My dad has been dead for ten years now. She told me the whole story then. I couldn’t believe it really. My mom was so, how can I put this—undramatic—in all ways, and to have this story as part of her life, well, I have to say that I was stunned by it all.
“They started emailing back and forth. Two months ago, my mother asked me if I would come to Florida with her. Daniel asked her to come. He knew she was dying. And she knew that he was married. I guess they just decided they wanted to spend some time together. I had taken a leave to care for her anyway. So, here we are. I don’t expect you to understand,” she says.
“Daniel is very kind. He reads articles from the newspaper to my mom. Mostly she sleeps through it. He reads with such expression.” She smiles. “He tells her stories about himself and his life and even his wife. She speaks when she can. I listen sometimes, and sometimes I leave them alone and come out here. When they talk, they sound like an old married couple—more married than my parents ever sounded.” She nods like people do when they recognize the truth.
I take a sip of my iced tea. She sips hers. The ice cubes clunk in the glasses. We look out at the quiet lawn beyond the screening, the man-made brownish lake, a squirrel jumping around in a bottlebrush tree. I put the glass down on the coaster. I stand up. She stands up. “Thank you,” I tell her.
Chapter 21
Squirt pauses in her typing, “How did your surveillance go?”
“I need a Band-Aid,” I tell her.
She pulls a first aid kit out of her drawer. I have a scrape on my knee and one on my palm. I feel like I’m eight years old.
“Some guy is coming in at 3:30,” I tell Squirt, handing her back her Band-Aid box. It’s almost that time now.
“Mr. Drainage?” she says, consulting her desk calendar.
“I think its pronounced Dra-nahge,” I say it kind of French.
She looks at me blankly. Right then, the bells on the door ring.
“Hi,” a guy says walking over to Squirt. “I’m Lou Drainage, I have an appointment.”
Squirt nods at me. “It’s Mr. Drainage for you,” she says, making it a point to pronounce it just as he has—drainage, as in drainage ditch. I shake his hand. He’s a thin, rabbit-y looking man, kind of twitchy around his mouth. He sits down in my office. He squirms around in my new chair. His right leg is crossed over his left and his foot is jiggling. He’s got shiny cowboy boots on.
“I like your boots,” I say, even though I don’t.
“They’re alligator hide,” he says. “They don’t let you make boots out of alligator anymore. These are collector’s items.”
“Is that so? How can I help you?” I ask him.
“There’s someone I want you to find out about. I want you to find out something about her, I mean. Do you do that?”
“Your wife?” I ask looking down at the intake sheet in his file.
“No,” he says. “Someone else.”
“Oh,” I say. I put down his file. I wait.
“I’ve been having an affair. It’s very serious. It’s been over two years now. She’s married and I’m married too, but we want to marry each other. I’m getting ready to leave my wife, and she says she’s getting ready to leave her husband. But I’m not so sure.”
“About?” I ask.
“About her leaving,” he tells me. “I’m not sure that she’s really getting ready to leave. And I want to be sure before I leave, you know what I mean. I don’t want to give up everything and then find out that she didn’t mean what she said.”
“Ah,” I say.
“So, I want you to find out about her.”
“What exactly do you need to know?”
“Well, she tells me she doesn’t sleep with her husband anymore; she sleeps on the couch. But I don’t KNOW that. She says she doesn’t really talk to him except, you know, who’s picking up the groceries and stuff. But I don’t really know what their day-to-day life is all about.”
“So, you want me to watch her and see if I can find out where she sleeps and if she speaks to her husband beyond chore-related sentences.”
“I just want to know if I can trust her.”
“Well, I can find out the answer to those two questions, but I won’t be able to tell you if you can trust her. That part will be up to you.”
“Bummer,” he says.
“What else do you want to know?” I ask him.
“I just want to be sure,” he tells me.
“Sureness is another one of those things like trust,” I say. I want to say, “Those are FEELING words,” but I restrain myself. “How ’bout I watch her for a day. If I find out something, I’ll tell you. Then we’ll decide how to proceed from there.” I like to use the word “proceed.” It makes my job sounds so stately.
“She works all day. She’s a teacher.”
“Okay then, I’ll start in the evening then.” I take all of his information and I walk him out. “I’ll call you in a couple days.”
I hand Squirt the signed contract, “Another web of lies,” I tell her. She nods at me and stamps his check for deposit with a firm hand. Nothing fazes her.
“I wasn’t very nice to him. I kept wanting to smack him and his alligator boots,” I tell her.
She shrugs.
I go into my office and call up Mrs. Black. “I lost your husband on Rt. 41,” I tell her.
“You lost him?” she can’t believe it. She knows he drives like a snail.
“There was an accident. There was a detour,” I tell her.
“You didn’t get any pictures?” she asks.
“I lost him,” I tell her again.
“I want pictures,” she tells me.
“I know, I know,” I say. “I’ll follow him again next week. My schedule’s all filled up for the next few days.”
“Next WEEK?” she complains.
“Best I can do,” I lie again. I don’t know what else to do. I have to tell her SOMETHING. I don’t want to break her heart. It’s an emotional situation, so I decide to stall. Then, I realize, that’s what I always do.
Chapter 22
The detective calls me and tells me to come into the station. “Again?” I say.
“I want to go over some things with you.”
“Over?” I say. “Do I need a lawyer?”
“Up to you,” he says.
I decide to take my chances. I’m living on a budget. My father’s paying me barely above minimum wage.
When I sit down, he says, “I could arrest you right now.”
“I don’t think it would stick,” I say with more assurance than I feel.
“Everywhere I go, every step in this case, there you are,” he says.
I notice a picture on his desk of a woman with a young girl. I didn’t notice it before. I guess I was too nervous the last time to look around. There’s a dying plant on the window sill. Everything else is neat. Cramped, but orderly.
“Is that your family?” I ask.
“That’s my daug
hter,” he tells me. “My wife died.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He nods. “Listen,” he tells me. “This is not a game.”
“I know that,” I say.
“Listen,” he says. Then he looks around at his office. The neat row of file cabinets, the orderly stacks, the afternoon sun streaming through the window, a big shiny black bird looking at us from the limb of a bottlebrush tree.
I look around too as if to see what he’s looking at, or for. His eyes get vague the way a gaze does when you’re looking at something close up but you’re really thinking of something far away. His eyes go to the picture. The wife is all cheekbones, short boyish black hair, slim. She’s sitting with a little girl. Their heads are both bowed. The kid is scribbling a picture with a crayon. The mother is watching. The kid’s tongue is out the side of her mouth and her hand is like an awkward fist on the crayon like she’s squeezing it to get the color out of it. There’s something tender, earnest, trying-really-hard about the picture.
“It’s dangerous,” he tells me.
“I’m not interested in safe anymore,” I tell him. For some reason, I get the feeling we’re talking about something else.
“That’s…” He stops.
“Why am I here?”
“I just wanted…” He stops again. “You’re in over your head. You’re a fish out of water.”
“That’s a lot of clichés,” I say. Little Miss English Teacher.
He taps a pencil eraser-side down on his desk. There’s no sound in the room except for the little thumps. Then the bird outside the window caws really loud. The bird hops off the branch right to the window sill and pecks at the window.
The detective says, “She wants her bread crusts. I always give her some before I leave.”
I tell the detective, “Birds are creepy.”
“Creepy?”
“Nature is creepy.”
“Nature is creepy?”
I tell him, “When I first started dating my husband, Ed, he had a miniature parrot. His name was Bob. Bob would sometimes sit on Ed’s shoulder, but, most times, Bob would go down Ed’s neckline and flutter around in the dark of his shirt. It was weird. To say the least.
Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped Page 10