by Lutz, Lisa
Even though my apartment has a fully functioning kitchen, I usually head downstairs in the morning and drink my parents’ coffee and read their paper. I observe Rae’s activities and determine that she is in no rush. Then I state the obvious.
“Rae, it is eight twenty-five.”
“I know.”
“Doesn’t school start at eight-thirty?”
“I’m going to be late today,” Rae says casually, as she scoops the pancake batter onto the griddle.
WEDNESDAY
I arrive in the kitchen at 8:10 A.M. Rae pours me a cup of coffee and hands me the newspaper.
“Read fast,” she says. “You’re driving me to school.”
“Don’t you think you’re taking this too far, Rae?”
“No, I don’t,” she says, as she takes a bite out of an apple.
The last time I saw Rae eat an apple it was pureed and came in a tiny jar with a picture of a baby on it. In fact, produce in general has never been a part of Rae’s food pyramid, which is primarily built on ice cream, candy, cheese-flavored snack food, and the occasional beef jerky. I’m so pleased to see her ingest something that fell from a tree that I don’t protest when Rae grabs her backpack and tells me she’s going to wait in my car, a 1995 Buick Skylark.
THURSDAY
At 7:45 A.M. my father yells from the bottom of the staircase, “Rae, you still need a ride to school?”
“Yeah!” Rae shouts from a distance.
“Then hurry up,” my father bellows back.
Rae rushes to the top of the staircase, jumps onto the banister, and slides down to the bottom. As she and my father head out the door, my father says, “I asked you not to do that anymore.”
“But you told me to hurry.”
My father tosses Rae a Pop-Tart as they get into the car.
FRIDAY
I enter the kitchen at 8:05 A.M. Rae sits at the table, drinking a glass of milk (another first) and eating a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich.
“How are you getting to school today?” I ask, praying that she won’t hit me up for another ride.
“David’s driving me.”
“How did you swing that?”
“We negotiated.”
I don’t bother with a follow-up question. I pour myself a cup of coffee and sit down at the table.
“You’ve done that five days in a row, Isabel. Drinking coffee and reading the paper.”
“No one is going to abduct me, Rae.”
“That’s what all abductees say.”
My Evidence
The sprawl of facts that I am piecing together comes from an assortment of methods. Through direct contact or indirect observation, by questions after the fact, tape recordings, interviews, photographs, and eavesdropping whenever an opportunity presents itself.
I don’t pretend that my evidence is flawless. What I am offering is a documentary of my own making. The truth, in the individual facts presented, is reliable. But don’t forget that every image I submit is in my own frame and there are countless frames I cannot provide.
Inspector Stone has said that the past is irrelevant, that my treasure hunt of evidence has no real purpose. But he is wrong. Knowing what happened to my family is not enough. I need to understand how it happened, because maybe then I can convince myself that it could have happened to any family.
ONE YEAR AND EIGHT MONTHS AGO
One year and eight months before my sister disappeared, it was the third week in May and I was three months into Ex-boyfriend #6. Name: Sean Ryan. Occupation: Bartender at the Red Room, a semiswank joint in the Nob Hill area. Hobby: Aspiring novelist. Unfortunately that wasn’t his only hobby. But I’ll get to that later.
My mother and I had been surveilling Mason Warner for the last five days. Warner was a thirty-eight-year-old restaurateur who ran a successful bistro in North Beach. We were hired by one of his investors, who suspected Warner of skimming cash from the business. While a forensic accountant would have been more suited for this job, our client didn’t want to raise any eyebrows. Warner had the effete handsomeness of a modern-day movie star and he wore nice suits; therefore, my mother stood by his innocence. I liked the job because Warner was on the move most of the day, so I wasn’t trapped in a car for eight hours listening to my mother say, “Why can’t you bring home a guy like that?”
I followed Warner into an office building on Sansome Street. I’d worn a baseball cap and sunglasses, so I decided to join him on the elevator ride to see his ultimate destination. Fortunately it was a crowded elevator. I entered first, hit the button for the twelfth floor (of a twelve-story building), and slipped into the back corner. Mason got off on floor seven. I followed him out of the elevator, removed the cap and glasses, and hung back until Warner turned a corner. He entered the office of a psychoanalyst, Katherine Schoenberg, MD. I returned to the lobby and waited in the foyer. I turned my radio back on and told my mom that we had an approximately fifty-minute wait ahead of us. She decided to get coffee. I sat down on a leather bench and read the paper. Five minutes later, Warner was back in the lobby, heading outside.
“Subject is on the move,” I said into the radio.
“Take point. I’m still at the coffee shop,” said my mom.
Normally we’d have given Warner a generous head start and let my mom run the tail from the car. However, without a second visual, I needed to keep my eyes on the subject continuously until my mom could provide backup. I dropped the newspaper and shadowed Warner outside. The second I was out the door, Warner turned back around and proceeded straight in my direction. I fished through my purse and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I quit smoking years earlier, but a cigarette still is the best prop there is in our line of work. As I patted down my pockets, looking for a book of matches, Warner stepped in and gave me a light.
“Stop following me,” he said, offering up a charming smile before he casually walked away.
I should have known: Men like that never go to shrinks.
That night, Ex-boyfriend #6 and I were having drinks at the Philosopher’s Club, an old man’s bar in West Portal. It’s too clean to be a dive, but it has just the right amount of wood paneling and dated sports posters to remind you that this is not a place catering to the San Francisco elite. I saw the image of a martini glass adjacent to the words “Philosopher’s Club” as Petra and I were riding the L train on the way back from her birthday celebration.1 There was something about the sign that compelled us into the bar and we stayed the whole night, mostly because of our bartender Milo’s bottomless bowls of peanuts and popcorn. That was six years before I arrived that night with Ex #6 and seven years before now. I’ve been a regular all that time. But the only reason Ex #6 and I were at the bar that night was because I won the coin toss.
“Tell me about your day,” Ex #6 said.
“I got burned on a surveillance job.”
“That means you got made?” he said, showing off his learned jargon.
“Uh-huh.”
“You told me you never got made.”
“Rarely. I think I said rarely.”
Milo stepped over to us and refilled my whiskey. Milo was then in his midfifties, now (for those lousy at math) in his early sixties. He’s an Italian-American male, approximately five foot seven, with thinning brown hair streaked with gray. He wears only pleated trousers, short-sleeved oxford shirts, an apron, and usually the latest in athletic footwear, which provides the only modern touch to his ensemble. You might imagine that I have only a passing relationship with Milo, but you’d be wrong. I’ve seen the man at least twice a week for the past seven years. I count him as one of my closest friends.
Ex #6 patted the bar and pointed to his glass. Milo eyed him rudely and refilled his drink at a snail’s pace. Ex #6 put some bills on the bar and snapped a thank-you.
“I got to take a leak,” Ex #6 said as he strode to the back of the bar. Milo watched him disappear, with the phony smile on his face dro
pping off as he turned to me.
“I have a bad feeling about that guy,” said Milo. I didn’t pay attention since Milo has said the same thing about all my boyfriends since I was twenty-one.
“I’m not having this conversation again, Milo.”
“It’s your life,” he said.
Sometimes I get the feeling it isn’t.
The following morning, I was in the Spellman offices typing up a surveillance report from a job earlier in the week. My mother was waiting for Jake Hand, a twenty-four-year-old hipster, guitar player, and porn shop clerk we occasionally employ when we’re overbooked on surveillance jobs. Dad and Uncle Ray were working a case in Palo Alto. The clock struck 8:00 A.M., and Jake walked in the door sporting his tattoos and an extra spring in his step.
“Mrs. Spell, look at the clock.”
My mother glanced up at our classroom-size timekeeper and said, “You’re on time. I could kiss you.”
Jake thought my mother was serious and offered up his cheek. She gave him a quick peck and then sniffed the air.
“Did you shower, Jake?”
“Only for you, Mrs. Spell.”
Jake is secretly in love with my mother, which manifests itself primarily in grooming-related activities. In fact, most of her male acquaintances are secretly in love with her. Mom’s blue eyes and ivory skin are perfectly offset by long, dark auburn hair (from a bottle these days). Only the crow’s-feet around her eyes give away her age. But Jake can see no flaws through their thirty-year age gap, and Mom enjoys the luxury of having a truly devoted employee. I often wonder what turns their conversations take after eight hours in a car together.
“Isabel, when you’re finished with the background, I need you to go shake down your brother,” my mother said casually as she gathered her surveillance equipment.
“About?”
“About the twenty grand his firm still owes us on the Kramer job.”
“He’s going to tell me the same thing he always does. We get paid when they get paid.”
“It’s been three months. We expended six grand out of pocket and have not seen any return. I can’t pay our bills.”
My father likes to remind me whenever he hands me my paycheck (and has some time on his hands) that PI work will never make me rich. The fact is the PI bill gets paid last. Rent, office supplies, utilities are necessary for a business to thrive, but you can live without your private investigator. Although my parents have made a decent living for themselves with the business, there are times when we have a serious cash flow problem, which often happens when we do jobs for David.
“Then you talk to him. He’s your son,” I said. “You can use the whole guilt thing on him.”
“Your brother responds more to violence than guilt. Rough him up if you have to. But don’t leave that office without a check.”
Mom zipped up her bag and headed out the door with Jake in tow. When she was halfway out, she turned back to me. “Oh, and give David a kiss from me.”
I decided to drop by David’s office at 1:00 P.M., thinking I could get a free lunch out of the visit. When I arrived, his secretary, Linda, who is not-so-secretly in love with him, told me that my sister had already arrived. Linda, like all of David’s secretaries, believes that one day he will return her affections. But like so many other alpha males, my brother thinks monogamy is something you do somewhere between the age of forty and retirement. In fact, if I were searching for David’s single flaw, this would be it. My brother is a true and unrepentant heartbreaker.
I entered David’s office on the offensive. “What are you doing here?” I said, glaring suspiciously at Rae.
“Visiting,” Rae replied without a hint of contrition.
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“Half day,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Show her the evidence,” said David.
Rae handed me a crumpled piece of paper—an official memo from school. Evidently she expected David to ask for documentation. I’d never known Rae to ditch school, but we are related, so it was natural for me to be suspicious.
“Okay, I’m out of here. See you next Friday, David. Later, Isabel.”
After Rae left, I turned to David for an explanation. “Next Friday?”
“She drops by every Friday,” David explained.
“Why?”
“To visit…mostly.”
“What else?”
“Well, she usually asks for spending money.”
“David, she makes ten bucks an hour working for Mom and Dad. She doesn’t need your money. How long has she been doing this?”
“Almost a year, I guess.”
“You give her money every week?”
“Sounds about right.”
“How much?”
“Ten dollars usually. Sometimes twenty, but I try to remember to keep the smaller bills on me these days.”
“So you’ve given her about five hundred bucks this year?”
“Do you ever say ‘dollar’ anymore?”
“That’s pathetic.”
“Isabel, why are you here?” David asked, desperate to change the subject.
“For money.”
“I see,” David replied, smirking, the irony of the situation not lost on him. “A collection call.”
“I can break a finger or two, bruise a few ribs, but Mom says to leave your pretty face alone. It’s twenty grand, David. Pay up.”
“You know our policy: We pay when the client pays. I can write you a personal check.”
“Mom won’t take it.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, Isabel.”
It didn’t end there. I plopped myself down on David’s couch and refused to move until he let me speak with a superior. David sighed and walked out of the office, returning ten minutes later with Jim Hunter. Hunter had been a partner in Fincher, Grayson for five years and specialized in fraud defense. Hunter is a fit-looking forty-two-year-old divorcé with a boyish haircut and an unsettling way of looking you directly in the eye. Since I couldn’t go home without some cash, I had to match his stare.
I thought my intimidation tactics were working when Hunter said he could get the bookkeeper to cut me a check for ten grand before I left.
“Under one condition,” he said. “You have dinner with me next Friday.”
Caught off guard, I said yes, knowing that if I didn’t I wouldn’t get paid that week, and if Mom found out I turned down both a date with a lawyer and ten grand, I’d never hear the end of it.
“I’ll pick you up at eight,” Hunter said, exiting the office.
David stifled a smile and I realized he had planned the whole thing.
“So you’re my pimp now?”
While I was trying to squeeze money out of David, my mom was dodging Jake’s flirty questions as they sat parked outside Mason Warner’s bistro.
“Mrs. Spell, were you always so hot?”
“Jake, give it a rest.”
Warner was on the move. He hopped into his Lexus and drove down Larkin Street. He parked on the corner of Larkin and Geary and entered the New Century Theatre, a strip club. After Warner entered the establishment, Jake unbuckled his seat belt and turned to my mom for instructions.
“Dream on,” my mother said, unbuckling her own seat belt and hopping out of the van.
Inside the New Century, my mother sat at a booth and ordered a club soda. Warner seemed decidedly uninterested in the floor show, studying paperwork provided by a gray-haired patron in a black turtleneck and designer jeans. There was a smattering of customers throughout the sea of maroon velvet.
However, it was not Warner who caught my mother’s eye. Seated in the front row, regarding the auburn-haired stripper with the focus of a religious zealot, was Sean Ryan, (soon-to-be) Ex-boyfriend #6. My mother is a woman who has seen everything, and so finding her daughter’s boyfriend in a strip club did not in itself raise a red flag. What troubled her was that the ent
ire staff knew his name.
Warner left after a half-hour meeting with the turtleneck guy. Their conversation was lost under what sounded like the soundtrack from Shaft. My mother reluctantly exited the club on Warner’s heels and finished the job with Jake.
However, the next day, my mom pawned off the Warner detail on Dad and Uncle Ray, and returned to the New Century Theatre, wearing a shoulder-length blonde wig and sunglasses. She didn’t expect to see Sean there again, but he returned at precisely the same time and sat in precisely the same spot. Two days in a row at a strip club spurred my mother’s suspicion and she extended her tail on Ex-boyfriend #6 for the next week. He returned to the New Century twice more and frequented a number of sex shops in the neighborhood during the daytime. At night, Mom dropped her tail, knowing that Sean was either with me or at work.
My mother asked me when Sean’s birthday is. I fell for that trick since she was reading the horoscopes and had gone through every member of the family and a few of our seasonal employees first. When she asked about Ex #6, it was so casual, I didn’t catch on. I just assumed she was showing some interest, since Sean and I had been seeing each other for over three months—which, I should remind you, was some kind of record for me.
However, the birth date was not so Mom could buy him a present, but to acquire a Social Security number and run a credit check. (I never fell for that again.) From the credit check my mom used her sources at one of the credit card companies to access his recent charges. The ethics and legality of this move are beyond questionable, but my mom had a question that she needed answered.
Thursday morning, after my mother determined that her investigation was complete, she called me into the office for a debriefing.
“Sweetie, your boyfriend is a porn addict.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said, thinking if she really loved me, she’d have waited until I’d had my coffee. “And you know this how?”
My mother itemized Sean’s behavior during the prior week and then presented me with several credit card bills, as well as his rental history at Leather Tongue Video. I skimmed the titles, trying to keep my expression steady, but it was hard when the list included Tits of Fury; Dude, Where’s My Dildo?; Double-D Inspector; and Sperms of Endearment, among less derivative, but equally X-rated, titles.