by Lutz, Lisa
ISABEL: Only two weeks left until the final session of my court-ordered therapy. [Dr. Ira consults his notes.]
DR. IRA: Indeed you are right, Isabel.
ISABEL: So our time is nearing its end.
DR. IRA: Should I interpret that to mean you plan to discontinue therapy after your final session?
ISABEL: That was my plan.
DR. IRA: [disappointed] I see.
ISABEL: We should do something to celebrate.
DR. IRA: What do you mean?
ISABEL: What’s customary for celebrating the end of therapy?
DR. IRA: There is no custom.
ISABEL: I was thinking of bringing in a cake. I should probably order it now, if we want anything decent.
DR. IRA: I think it would be better if we just focused on the next few sessions.
ISABEL: You’re saying no to cake?
DR. IRA: I don’t feel that cake is appropriate.
ISABEL: Why not?
DR. IRA: Let me ask you a serious question, Isabel: Do you think you’ve made any progress?
HOW I ENDED UP IN THERAPY
About a year and a half ago, I briefly moved back in with my parents, into the attic apartment where I’ve lived most of my adult life. During that brief phase of regression, I had a bird’s-eye view of a suspicious neighbor’s activities. Let’s call the neighbor John Brown, because that, it turns out, is his real name. To make a long story1 short, I began investigating the suspicious neighbor maybe more than I should have—or more than society deems acceptable. A restraining order was filed (against me) and the next thing you know I was in some serious legal trouble. (You met my octogenarian lawyer just a few pages back.)
Having a restraining order filed against you is one thing; violating that restraining order puts you in an altogether different boat. To anyone contemplating a ride in said boat, let me make a friendly suggestion: Don’t do it. Just let it go.
Anyway, back to how I ended up in therapy. You see, my retired-cop father had some connections and so did my ancient lawyer, so they convinced the district attorney that court-mandated therapy was the appropriate way to deal with “someone like Isabel.”2 I was required to see a psychologist or psychiatrist roughly once a week for three months. I was given three months to begin therapy, and I took my sweet time. In retrospect, I should have been more proactive and found my own shrink;3 instead, my mom found one for me. I have only lukewarm words to say about the shockingly mild-mannered Dr. Ira, but this I can say for certain: He was not the right shrink for me.
Eleven weeks and three days after my court ruling, I made an appointment for the following Monday at eleven A.M. My dad phoned me on my way to the session to impart some information he thought I should have.
“Sometimes they don’t talk right away,” said my dad. “So don’t just sit there and give the doctor attitude. You might have to talk first. Okay?”
“Who is this?” I replied.
My dad sighed and said, “Don’t blame me for all of your problems, either.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I plan on blaming Mom.”
Dr. Ira Schwartzman’s office was (and is, I presume) located on Market Street, right by the exit to the Montgomery Street BART and Muni station. It seems my mother thought convenience was the most important factor in finding me a therapist. The office was unlike the shrinks’ offices you see in movies and television. The waiting room could fit inside a decent-sized closet. It contained two cloth chairs and a wooden coffee table. The furniture was marred by age—coffee stains, frayed edges, worn wood.
Dr. Ira Schwartzman opened his office door.
“Isabel?” he asked.
“That’s me,” I replied as I got to my feet.
The doctor invited me into a room not much bigger than the waiting room. The furniture was superior to the waiting room furniture but similarly outdated. What the office lacked in cinematic authenticity Dr. Ira Schwartzman certainly made up for in his physical being, from the comfortable loafers and tan corduroy trousers to the white oxford shirt and the brown sweater with patches on the elbows. Dr. Schwartzman had one of those kind, wrinkled faces that give you the sense that you could tell him anything and he wouldn’t judge you. Unfortunately, it was my plan from day one not to tell him a thing.
Dr. Schwartzman sat down in his comfortable leather chair, snapped a tiny cassette into a tiny tape recorder (he should really update to digital), and asked me if I minded if he recorded our session, explaining that sometimes he likes to revisit some topics to figure out a better way to help his patients. I told him it was alright and pulled out my own palm-sized digital recorder and asked him if he minded if I, too, recorded the proceedings. Dr. Ira seemed pleased, which I assumed meant he thought I was taking the whole therapy thing seriously. I didn’t want to lower his expectations at that moment, so I just switched on my recorder and launched into my introduction.
THERAPY SESSION #1
[Partial transcript reads as follows:]
ISABEL: Dr. Schwartzman—is that what I should call you?
DR. IRA: Most of my patients call me Dr. Ira.
ISABEL: Dr. Ira it is. So, you know why I’m here, right?
DR. IRA: Why don’t you tell me?
ISABEL: I have to come here. If I don’t, I could go to prison. This seems better.
DR. IRA: So you’re here to avoid prison? Is that what I’m hearing?
ISABEL: Yes.
DR. IRA: Is there another reason?
ISABEL: I think that’s a pretty good reason. [Long pause.1]
DR. IRA: How does it feel being required by law to seek therapy?
ISABEL: Not great.
DR. IRA: Can you elaborate?
ISABEL: I think that states it pretty well.
DR. IRA: Is this your first time in therapy?
ISABEL: Yes, totally.
[For approximately ten minutes, Dr. Ira launches into what seems like a scripted exposition about the rules of therapy. If I threaten to hurt anyone, he can report it to the police, blah, blah, blah. Then the real work begins. When he was finished, our session continued.]
DR. IRA: So is there anything you’d like to discuss?
ISABEL: I can’t think of anything.
DR. IRA: Well, why don’t you tell me about your family?
ISABEL: They’re pretty ordinary, really. Just like any other family.
WHERE WAS I?
That was how my therapy began. I’ll spare you sessions two through nine (you’ll thank me later, or not, if you like). Suffice it to say I lied to Dr. Ira about my family, which I’m sure you’ve guessed already if you read either of the previous two documents or glanced at the appendix. If not, you don’t know much about me, so maybe I should mention just a bit more.
I am a licensed private investigator who has been working for the family business, Spellman Investigations, since the age of twelve. No, that is not a typo. It sounds fun, I know. But after decades of having your boyfriends investigated, your bedroom searched, your phoned tapped, your vehicle tracked, and your every move documented, it gets old. In my family, we don’t ask questions; we investigate.
After the trouble I had last year, I decided to take an extended break from the family business. It was my job that got me into trouble, so I figured a temporary career change might solve some of my problems. Unfortunately, my job skills were limited, so I began working at a bar, the Philosopher’s Club, which used to be my own personal watering hole.
I assumed bartending wasn’t bad work if you could get it, but I didn’t know that on a good night I could earn $200 in tips. Sure, you have to be on your feet the whole time, but you don’t have to sit on your ass in a car for eight hours waiting for someone to leave when you know he’s not going to leave. I’m not saying that I saw a future serving drinks for a living, but I am saying it was a nice change of pace. I liked not having my parents as bosses. I liked not being concerned with what other people were doing besides what they poured dow
n their throats.
I needed a change and I got it. As for therapy…I’ll admit that with Dr. Ira, I didn’t give it my all. I saw therapy as a punishment—which it was. There’s no way I could call it anything else. So, like I would any punishment, I thought I’d simply endure it. My point is that it never occurred to me I could get anything out of therapy. At least it didn’t until long after Dr. Ira decided to take a stand.
I moved into David’s house on Monday at 6:00 P.M. Within the first twenty-four hours, I slept in his bed, used his electric toothbrush (I changed the head), moved the chaise longue closer to the television, drank a single shot of each liquor on the do-not-drink list,1 and visited exactly one porn site just for the sake of his browser history.
David occupies a restored three-story Victorian all by his lonesome. Even for a married man, or a married man with two children, a couple of dogs, a cat, and a giant tropical fish tank, his 2,500-square-foot home is a lot of space, especially for anyone accustomed to San Francisco living. I made plans that week not to make plans so I could fully enjoy my brief time living in the lap of luxury.
I suppose I should mention my own living situation.
For the first eighteen years of my life, I occupied a single room on the second level of the Spellman family residence, located at 1799 Clay Street in the lower Nob Hill district of San Francisco. For the next ten years I resided in an attic apartment (approx. 700 square feet) at the very same address. At the age of twenty-eight, I decided that it was time to move out of the family home and began subletting a one-bedroom apartment (approx. 650 square feet) from Bernie Peterson, a retired police lieutenant who was friends with my uncle Ray (now deceased). Last year when Bernie was having marital difficulties, he decided to move back into that apartment. After months of being an unwelcome guest in an assortment of locations, I eventually realized that I had to find a place of my own with a lease in my name. That is when I moved into my current residence—a studio apartment (350 square feet) in the Tenderloin. My bachelor apartment is sandwiched between two other bachelor apartments, one occupied by a sixty-five-year-old retired schoolteacher with a snoring problem (Hal) and the other inhabited by a thirtysomething woman who I can only assume is a hooker; either that or she does a lot of entertaining. I don’t sleep well in my apartment, and frankly, asleep is the only condition in which I don’t feel like complaining about my apartment. Perhaps that explains why I was so pleased to have four weeks of vacation from my real life.
After I found some time to unwind and reorganize David’s liquor cabinet,2 I began my preliminary investigation, which consisted of ransacking my brother’s office looking for some sign of foreign travel preparation. My theory was this: David is a type A, education-obsessed individual who would not consider traveling to a foreign land without taking a serious crash course in its language, culture, and key sightseeing attractions. I was looking for at least a minor collection of Italian for Beginners tapes and travel literature. What I found was a gun.
It wasn’t in an obvious location. I should mention that. It was taped to the underside of the bottom right drawer on his desk. This was confusing for a number of reasons:
A) David has never been the gun-toting type, or even the taping-a-gun-to-the-bottom-of-a-desk-drawer type. B) David doesn’t like guns; he’s more of a pepper spray kind of guy. C) I knew there was a C, but frankly, the discovery of the gun was so alarming that I couldn’t come up with a C at that moment.
To be honest, I had no idea what the gun meant, if anything. I was only sure of two things at the time of my discovery: David wasn’t in Italy, and my investigation was far from over.
THE END OF THE ROAD
Aside from my brother and my new client, Ernie Black, I had one other investigation that was perhaps the most urgent of all—a matter of life and death, come to think of it.
Morty and I agreed to have lunch that Thursday at a diner on upper Market Street. Since Morty and David both live in Russian Hill, I knew I could ask him for a ride without raising suspicion.
My octogenarian friend swung by at 11:45 A.M.—another sign of aging, I’ve noticed, is the taking of meals earlier and earlier in the day. Before I got into Morty’s Cadillac I took a moment to inspect the exterior of his vehicle. I spotted a scratch along the front fender and another small dent on the rear bumper. Oh, and the car was filthy, which normally isn’t the sort of thing I’d comment on, but Morty is not the kind of guy to drive around in a grimy car. It was simply yet another sign of neglect.
I got into the Cadillac, removed the glasses from Morty’s head, and cleaned them.
“How do you not notice that they’re dirty?” I asked. “They’re right in front of your eyes.”
“I have more important things on my mind,” he replied, snatching the glasses out of my hand, returning them to his head, and pulling onto the road without checking his rearview mirror. Fortunately, no one was coming. But you can only get lucky so many times. On the fifteen-minute drive, Morty broke about half of the traffic laws out there—most significantly running a stop sign at twenty-five miles an hour and making a left turn without using his turn signal (a particular pet peeve of mine). By the time we were entering the restaurant, I’d determined that my objective during lunch would be to identify a person who had the power to take away Morty’s driver’s license.
“Is Ruthy still in Florida?” I asked.
“As far as I know,” Morty replied.
“When is she coming back?”
“‘When hell freezes over’ is her current plan.”
“I see,” I replied, realizing that the situation was far worse than I’d imagined. “Who is your emergency contact while she’s out of town?”
“What? I don’t know.”
“I assume it’s your son, the cardiologist.”
“Sure. I guess so. He’s in the south of France for the summer with his new girlfriend.”
“If he’s in France, he can’t be your emergency contact. What other relatives do you have in the area?”
“What’s with the third degree, Izzele?”
“I just think I should have the number of your emergency contact.”
“My grandson. Gabe.”
“You should give me his info. Do you have your phone book on you?”
Morty pulled his black book from his breast pocket. “He owns a skate shop south of Market. Here’s his number. I’m sure you won’t need it. I don’t have plans to break my hip anytime soon.”
“No one plans to break their hip,” I said.
“Bah,” Morty replied.
Gabe Schilling’s skate shop was flanked by a high-end fashion boutique and a comic book store in South Park. I felt obliged to handle this matter in person to be sure it was taken seriously, so I drove to the shop after lunch.
I asked the pimply young male at the counter if Gabe Schilling was in. He stared at me as if I were a tax collector.
“May I ask what this is regarding?” he asked, with mock formality.
“It’s a personal matter,” I replied in the same tone.
The young male shifted his head toward the back of the store and dropped his professional demeanor.
“Dude, you have a visitor.”
Another male in his mid-to late twenties with sloppy brown hair, tanned skin, and grease on his fingers, which he was wiping off with a rag, came to the front of the store. Unlike the kid at the counter, who I later learned was his employee, Gabe—Morty’s grandson, ex–professional skateboarder (smashed his knee in a career-ending accident), current entrepreneur (one skate shop open in San Francisco, another on the way in the North Bay)—didn’t eye me with the same suspicion. He smiled. It was warm and oddly familiar. He had pieces of Morty in him, I realized later, just not enough to make him seem, well, pickled or something.
“Hi. I’m Isabel Spellman, a friend of your grandfather’s.”
Gabe’s eyes turned upward, consulting his memory. “You’re Izzele? The one who g
oes to jail?” he said as if he were speaking to a celebrity.
“Most people call me Izzy.”
“What can I do for you?”
“When was the last time you were in a car with your grandfather behind the wheel?”
“I never let him drive. He’s a terrible driver.”
“He’s worse now.”
“How much worse?”
“If he were my grandfather, I would have confiscated his keys already. But he’s yours. Just go for a drive with him. If you survive, you can make up your own mind.”
CASE #0011
CHAPTER 1
Ernie Black insisted this would be the easiest job of my career. His wife worked at his muffler shop, went to a book club now and again, occasionally took in a movie with a neighbor friend, and handled domestic duties. A couple of times a month, Linda claimed to be having lunch or shopping or both with a very old school friend named Sharon Bancroft. The friendship seemed odd for a number of reasons, but mostly because of the disparity in their social status. Sharon was married to a congressman from a well-to-do San Francisco family. “Old money,” Ernie said, rubbing his thumb and fingers together. Ernie had never met Sharon, even though the women had met in grade school. But Ernie always found Sharon suspicious and he never quite understood how a politician’s wife found so much time to spend with a muffler shop owner’s wife. Ernie seemed a little too conscious of status for my liking, but he was older—fifty-five, according to his credit report—and maybe things like that mattered more where he came from.
Ernie gave me his wife’s vital statistics so that I could run a background check if need be. But he insisted it was unnecessary. Ernie just wanted to make sure his marriage wasn’t in trouble. If all she was doing during her long absences was having lunch with an old friend, then Ernie could rest easy. All he wanted to know was whether his wife was having an affair or shoplifting or dealing drugs. Once I had the answer, case closed.
In light of Ernie’s recent suspicions, I asked him if he’d ever followed his wife to see whether she was, in fact, only having lunch. He responded, “No, I’d never do that.”
I’m fascinated by ethical distinctions like that.