by Steph Cha
Arturo was in his office when I arrived, wearing the same clothes as the day before. This happened at least once a week, and I wondered if it was because he slept at the office or at his lady’s. I would’ve believed either, but I wouldn’t have dared to ask.
I walked in and set up the tarp before going back to my car for the garbage bags. I snapped on a new pair of latex gloves and got to work. It took three trips, and Arturo and Chaz watched in amusement as I traipsed back and forth. Neither offered to help, and by the time I returned with the last batch, they were standing in front of the tarp, arms crossed and grinning.
“It’s like the good old days,” Chaz said to Arturo. “Back when she was an intern.”
“I was never an intern,” I said, doing the call response to one of Chaz’s favorite jokes. “You paid me.”
“Did I?” He scratched the back of his neck, then turned to Arturo, squinting. “Did I, really?”
Arturo nodded. “We both did. And that’s why she’s a garbage professional.”
I laid out the trash on the tarp. “You guys are free to help.”
“We’re busy,” Chaz said, giggling.
“Sure, you look totally slammed.” I squatted in front of the spoils. “Well, I don’t mind. I’ve got nothing better to do. What am I looking for?”
“Client is a rich man in his fifties,” said Arturo. “Target is a penniless woman in her mid-twenties.”
“Oh,” I said, swinging my arms together in a mock swoon. “This sounds like a love story.”
He nodded. “Our client, who is paying us lots of money—something to keep in mind if he happens to visit the office while you’re here—is gearing up to buy a fat piece of Harry Winston.”
“And before he signs up for a hefty future alimony, he wants us to check out his potential wife’s character?”
“Very good. That’s exactly it.”
“He’s worried she’ll want to marry him for something other than his shining personality.”
“That’s part of it.”
“And he has just enough self-awareness that he knows he can’t ask for a prenup.”
Arturo smiled and rocked on his heels. “Not quite. He already asked.”
“And she cried and asked why he’d even want to marry her if he didn’t trust her? Actually, it’s a good question.”
“That’s exactly what happened.” He turned to Chaz. “Is Song as smart as you say she is or are we all just that predictable?”
I felt a blush come to my cheeks, the praise momentarily negating the smell of garbage, still waiting for my exploring hands.
“Combination,” Chaz said. He winked at me, sharing my pleasure at the compliment. “Song’s a smart lady, but this client is fresh from central casting.”
“Who is he?” I asked. “Do you have a picture?”
Arturo smiled, and I knew he’d indulge me. “I don’t have one on me, but his name’s Harvey Emmanuel.”
I took off my gloves and googled him while Arturo and Chaz watched. I found a company photo. He was a CPA at KPMG, round, balding, and mottled. His head rose straight out of a blue suit—he had as much neck as your average snowman. I passed my phone to Chaz and he squinted at the screen then put it down, laughing.
“He’s no Brad Pitt,” he said.
“He’s not even Paul Giamatti.” I turned to Arturo. “Well? I know you have a picture of the girlfriend.”
Arturo nodded and passed me his phone, the photo in question already enlarged on the screen. “This is Brandy.”
“Of course it is,” I said, staring. She was a young tanned blonde with balloon tits straining against what must’ve been a Baby Gap tank top. “This is the picture Harvey sent you?”
Arturo nodded.
“Daddy must be really proud,” I said. I looked closer. She had a pretty face, not extraordinary but well above average. “I think she’s selling herself short. She could probably nab an accountant her own age. Maybe I should send her an anonymous tip, tell her to hire a PI to run down his finances. He can’t make more than a couple hundred thousand a year.”
Chaz laughed. “Look at Miss Moneybags over here. All three of us together don’t make two hundred thousand a year.”
“And I don’t see anyone trying to marry us for our money. Arturo, does he have an ex-wife? Any kids?”
“One ex. Two kids.”
“So I figure he takes home, what, a hundred and twenty? And I don’t know how much child support is, but I imagine it’s not nothing. We’re talking take-home pay of maybe $80K, and that has to do for both of them. She has to sleep with this”—I held up my phone screen—“for limited use of eighty-thousand dollars a year. I hope she has a friend who’s laying out the math for her.”
“As much as I share your concern for this moral paragon,” Arturo said with a smirk, “our job is to audit her, not the client.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “Just anything that looks like dirt?”
“Yes, anything that might embarrass him, or give him pause about marrying this woman.”
Chaz laughed again. “Didn’t he send you that picture?”
“How do we even know what stuff is hers? She can’t live in that house by herself.”
“You’re right, she doesn’t. She lives with her mother. But generous Harvey sent mother out of town, a ten-day vacation to Mexico. He decided it was a good opportunity to get some eyes on his girl.”
“A real sweetheart.”
It was amazing what you could learn about someone by sorting through her trash. Habits, lifestyle, even values came through in the garbage, the waste telling stories about the lives that produced it, sure as shit gave a window into diet. After an hour of dirty work, I had a pretty good handle on Brandy.
I started with the recycling. I learned right away that she didn’t know how to cook. She’d gone through a lot of microwave dinners in the past week. I sympathized, though even I’d left Hot Pockets back in college where they belonged. She drank Diet Coke but never finished the cans, and the warm liquid splotched almost everything in the bags.
She was also a potential compulsive shopper. I found ten paper shopping bags and over twenty receipts, all dated within the past week. There was one for groceries, where I found the bulk of her frozen meals, but most were for random frivolous purchases, made at various shops around town. Tops, earrings, cosmetics, housewares. There was one receipt for a felt fedora. None were for more than $50, but they added up, I tallied, to over $600. There was also a cardboard box from Amazon—at least one online purchase, which wouldn’t have generated a paper receipt.
The trash was grosser and trickier to sort. I was thankful that I was right in my initial assessment—that she wasn’t much of a cook. None of the wet egg shells or pungent oils that made trash hits truly terrible. There were some wrinkled Luna Bar wrappers, vegetable packets from instant noodles discarded whole. The few takeout boxes were more or less empty—just rice grains and a localized spill of cornstarch-thickened sauce. A couple of black banana peels looked and smelled well over a week rotten, but that was the worst of the food.
The used condoms were easy enough to isolate. There were three of them, and I nearly retched at the thought of fucking the neckless accountant three times in one week, though there was no way to know whether they all belonged to him, unless Emmanuel wanted to test the sperm. I noted the number, at least, assuming he’d know how many he’d been responsible for. I checked them for holes, just for good measure. I’d never actually seen a sabotaged condom. There was no evidence of other birth control, or of a menstrual cycle, but most of the trash from these things was limited to specific windows. I was happy enough to miss out on tampons.
There was a lot of bubble wrap, packing foam, and ripped plastic, the molted remains of newness. There was also an empty tube of purplish lip gloss and an empty container of foundation. Might have been coincidence, but it seemed likely that she went through makeup a lot faster than most women I knew. I didn’t wear much, and even Lori, w
ho always looked perfect, rarely finished using a lip gloss before she’d had a chance to lose it. This had the look of an expensive habit, though probably one that Emmanuel would have to be willing to maintain.
I separated out the true junk, and photographed it in a few wide group shots. I separated out the condoms, the receipts, anything else I thought might be of any interest to the client. I photographed these items individually. When I was done, I had Arturo scan over what I’d done, and he gave me leave to take out the bulk of the trash. The whole process took about an hour and a half.
He patted me on the back. “Thanks, Song. That was a big help. Do you think you’ve got time to write it up?”
I heard Chaz belly laughing in his office.
*
I was wrapping up the write-up and thinking about lunch when my cell phone rang, the caller ID showing an 818 number. I didn’t make a habit of answering unrecognized numbers—I’d gotten too many cold calls from Yale and the Democratic Party, asking for cash—but I couldn’t risk missing a call from Rubina or even Lusig.
“This is Song,” I said, with a sharp saccharine note of hopefulness in my voice.
“Hey, it’s Lusig. I’m sucking it up.”
“You mean you’re taking Rubina up on her offer?” I kept my voice neutral and pumped my free fist.
“That’s right. I dance for her and you dance for me.”
“Happy to.”
“I’d like to start as soon as possible. Are you free at all today?”
I didn’t have to open up a calendar to know my day was scheduled full of quiet, excluding whatever grunt work Chaz or Arturo might push on me. “Sure. Coffee?”
She laughed. “We can meet at a café, but Rubina doesn’t want me drinking coffee.”
“Really?” I said. “Okay, so you tell me. You can’t drink booze or caffeine. What exactly can you do?”
“I can eat like a beast. I feel deprived if I go two days without a bucketful of pastrami.”
We arranged to meet at Langer’s at one, leaving me about half an hour in the office. I finished the write-up and walked into Arturo’s office, trying not to beam.
“I’m on a job again,” I said. “It’s going to take most of my time, I think.”
Arturo raised his eyebrows to look up at me, more or less indifferently. “Good for you, Song.”
“I just emailed you the trash write-up. Do you need me to do anything else on that case? Protect this noble client from his temptress’s wiles?”
“You’re free to go, but don’t make me feel like I have to protect my client from you.” He pointed at me with a ballpoint pen. “Remember, you’re a professional. And none of us make our bread by choosing our own clients.”
I nodded, slightly chastised. “I know, Arturo. I was just trying to get off the hook, to be honest.”
He smiled. “I know that.”
“I have a winner here,” I said. “A case I can really get into.”
“Chaz told me about your missing activist. Congrats, Song. Don’t go crazy.”
I visited Chaz’s office next, letting loose my grin of triumph.
“Uh oh,” he said. “Looks like someone just handed this cat the canary.”
“I’m back on,” I said.
“I heard,” he said. “Hey, Art,” he called through the wall without raising his voice.
“Chaz,” Arturo called back.
“I’m happy for you,” he said, turning back to me. “I’m glad you have a proper avenue for your obsessions again. Juniper Song stressing out about men and children was a bit too Twilight Zone for my taste.”
I laughed and changed the subject. “You’re some kind of computer genius, aren’t you, Chaz?”
He gave me a broad, crooked smile that said he was in the mood to be flattered. “I don’t know about genius, Song. I can’t keep up with you kids these days. I haven’t made any apps.”
“I need a favor.”
“What else is new, huh?”
It was to my advantage that Chaz loved doing favors for the grateful. He had a paternal streak, and he cherished the idea of his own indispensability.
“Can you find anonymous commenters from a Web site?”
“What kind of anonymous commenters?”
“You know, the usual. Racist pests, harassers of women, the riffraff that hang out in the dark corners of the Internet.”
“Have you been reading the comments on YouTube?”
“On a political site. Nora Mkrtchian’s. Can you help?”
“It depends,” he said, twisting his mouth. “I’ll tell you right off the bat that sometimes it’s downright impossible.”
“I thought all this stuff was trackable. You know, like Edward Snowden and all that?”
“Do I look like the Pentagon?” He chuckled. “Even if everything is accessible to some people, which, I’m not sure that’s true either, I can tell you there are barriers for a working snoop.”
“Can you try?”
“What do you think?”
“You’ll try.”
“Anything for you, Girl Detective.”
*
I took the subway from Koreatown, something I liked to do when it made sense, maybe once every few months. Langer’s was in MacArthur Park, across the street from a Metro station. I liked to think the Metro station was built as a portal to Langer’s.
The train was dingy and somewhat crowded, with just a few empty seats on the far sides of passengers who looked like they’d sigh loudly if I asked to climb in. Some days I would have punished one of these commuters, but I was too restless to sit sandwiched between a resentful stranger and a subway car wall.
I held on to a pole and looked around as the train rumbled through its tunnel. The L.A. Metro was less essential to the daily life of many of its citizens than transit systems in comparable cities. Its lack of reach and general shittiness were, in fact, one of the greatest strikes against L.A. in the opinions of annoying outsiders.
A black-and-white sticker caught my eye on one of the windows next to an empty seat. I squinted, trying to make sure of the text, and then I made my way through the aisle. I looked at the scowling man beneath my nose. He was thickset with heavy eyelids, and he smelled less than fresh from a few feet away.
“Sorry,” I said. “May I?”
He got up—I’d known that he wouldn’t scoot in—and I crammed myself up against the window. On it was a bumper sticker, about three inches square, with white text touting Who Still Talks. There was another sticker next to it, which I hadn’t been able to read from a distance. This one had the URL for Who Still Talks written in one corner. The rest of it was devoted to the words FIND NORA.
I snapped a picture on my phone and wondered how these stickers were circulated and how many of them were around. I was not such a believer in coincidence that I thought I’d stumbled on a message, a clue designed to reach me alone. I wondered if Lusig knew about the stickers. It was even possible that she was behind their printing.
The train stopped a minute later at the Westlake/MacArthur Park station, and I made my way around my fellow commuters and got out into the sunlight.
MacArthur Park was a notoriously dangerous part of town still awaiting its turn to gentrify. The park had seen a lot of crime, and the wide lake, so pretty in daylight, suggested shady possibilities. In the public imagination, the lake was clogged up with bodies and discarded weapons. There was a seed of truth to this idea—the park was a bit of a gang-murder mecca in the ’80s and ’90s, and that was after the lake was drained in the ’70s, revealing hundreds of firearms like so many wads of chewed gum hidden under a used classroom desk. It was safer now, a bit revitalized in recent years. The Metro station was part of that. Still, it wasn’t exactly Beverly Hills. Street vendors sat on the sidewalk hawking $5 shoes and flammable toys, and I got one offer for a counterfeit green card on my way across the street, from a tiny, whispering, middle-aged Latino man. I would’ve been offended, but he offered me a driver’s license in the
same breath, and I probably looked as foreign as I did underage.
Langer’s predated the gang violence by a few decades. It was a Jewish deli with the best pastrami in the States, about as historic a restaurant as you might find in L.A. The violence and recession almost drove it out of business, but the Metro came along to save the day. The deli drew a large lunch crowd, many of them in business casual, stopping in from downtown. It didn’t take the Census Bureau to determine that Langer’s had the highest concentration of white people in the neighborhood.
Lusig was already waiting when I walked in, tucked into a booth with her back resting against a wall. She raised her hand when she saw me, and I slid in across from her.
“Have you been waiting long?” I asked.
“Sweet freedom,” she said. “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes, just drinking it in.”
I nodded with sympathy. Rubina had her on quite the leash—I knew something about that, as part of its apparatus.
“I spent the weekend at her place, thinking it over. It wasn’t so bad, I guess. She didn’t drive me too crazy.”
“I’m glad you said yes.”
She shrugged. “I don’t see what my other options are. I can’t put myself in actual danger, and I don’t have the money to hire you myself. It’s just one more month. Or maybe this fucker’ll come early.”
I smiled.
“I don’t mean like tomorrow,” she added quickly. “You know, like two weeks early, when he’s still going to be safe.”
“Lusig, I’m not here to judge you. I live in a glass house with millimeter panes.”
We ordered big sandwiches, hot pastrami on rye with Russian dressing. She got extra pickles and a matzoh ball soup. She asked the waitress to make sure hers was piping hot, and patted her bulging belly in explanation.
“You can’t have cold pastrami?” I asked.
“Nope. No cold deli meats.”
“That’s rough.”
“Oh, yeah.” She pulled out her phone, fiddled with it a bit, and started reading off her screen. “Also forbidden—sushi, soft cheese, rare meat, hot dogs … Technically I can have a beer now and then, but not with Ruby playing goalie in my throat.”