by Lisa Lutz
“Tell me, Isabel. What color is this shirt?”
“It’s hard to say in this light.”
“Hazard a guess.”
“Off-white.”
“I think it’s pink. Are you willing to give me that?”
“Sure. It’s pink.”
“Your brother now has five pink shirts and not one white shirt to wear to school.” (The school uniform code strictly says white shirts only.)
“That’s unfortunate.”
“I think you had a hand in this, Isabel.”
“It was an accident.”
“Is that so?”
“A red sock. I don’t know how I missed it.”
“Produce the sock in ten minutes. Otherwise, you’re paying for five new shirts.”
I couldn’t produce the sock, because it didn’t exist. However, I did manage to get the red food coloring out of my bedroom and into the neighbor’s trash can without detection in that time frame.
I paid for those shirts.
Isabel, Age 14
By now my father has been permanently elected interrogator. Frankly, I think he was just missing his cop days; sparring with me kept him fresh.
Fifteen minutes pass in silence as he tries to make me sweat. But I’m getting better at this game and manage to look up and hold his gaze.
“Isabel, did you doctor the grades on your brother’s report card?”
“No. Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. But I know you did it.”
He places the report card on the table and slides it in front of me. (These were the old handwritten cards. All you had to do was pinch a blank one and solicit the services of a decent forger.)
“It’s got your fingerprints all over it.”
“You’re bluffing.” (I wore gloves.)
“And we had the handwriting analyzed.”
“What do you take me for?”
Albert sighs deeply and sits down across from me. “Look, Izzy, we all know you did it. If you tell me why, we won’t punish you.”
A plea bargain. This is new. I decide to go for it, since I don’t want to be trapped at home all week. I take a moment to respond, just so the confession doesn’t come too easily.
“Everyone should know what it’s like to get a C.”
It took some time, but eventually I grew tired of trying to dethrone King David. There had to be a better way to pave my own path. No one could deny that I was a difficult child, but my true life of crime did not begin until I met Petra Clark in the eighth grade. We met in detention and bonded over our mutual (and fanatical) love for the 1960s sitcom Get Smart. I couldn’t begin to estimate the number of hours we spent, stoned, watching repeats on cable, laughing so hard it hurt. It was only natural that we would soon become inseparable. It was a friendship based on common interests—Don Adams, beer, marijuana, and spray paint.
In the summer of 1993, when we were both fifteen, Petra and I were suspected of committing a string of unsolved vandalisms in the Nob Hill district of San Francisco. Despite the numerous Neighborhood Watch meetings in our honor, none of the cases could be proven. At the time we would reflect upon our transgressions the way an artist might admire his own paintings. Petra and I challenged each other to push the boundaries of our misdemeanors. Our crimes were childish, yes, but they possessed a kind of creative energy that was absent from your everyday vandalism. The following is the first co-list Petra and I created; however, many more would follow.
UNPUNISHED CRIMES: SUMMER 1993
Our staple activity was what we called the “drive-by.” When lack of inspiration limited our nightly activities, garbage night provided a backup plan. It was simple, really: We’d sneak out of our homes after midnight. Petra would pick me up in her mom’s 1978 Dodge Dart (which Petra had stolen), and we’d sideswipe trash cans left out for the garbage truck. It wasn’t so much the rush of destruction that appealed to me and Petra, but more the narrow escapes. By the end of summer, however, my luck had run out.
I found myself in the interrogation room once again. This time it was different, since it was a real interrogation room in a real police department. My father wanted me to give up my source and I refused.
8-16-93
The crime: Six hours earlier, I had snuck out of the house past midnight, hitched a ride to a party in the Mission, and picked up a guy who wanted to score some blow. Although cocaine wasn’t my thing, the guy was sporting a leather jacket and a Kerouac novel and I have a weakness for tough guys who read. So I told him I knew a dealer—for reasons I’ll get to later—and I made a call, asking if I could “cash in on that favor.” Driving to my source’s house, I made the leather jacket guy from the party as an undercover cop and demanded he drive me home. Instead, he drove me to the police station. When it was established that I was the daughter of Albert Spellman, a decorated ex-cop, Dad was called in.
Albert entered the Box still groggy with sleep.
“Give me a name, Izzy,” he said, “and then we can go home and punish you for real.”
“Any name?” I asked coyly.
“Isabel, you told an undercover police officer that you could score him some blow. You then made a phone call to a man you claimed was a dealer and asked if you could cash in on a favor. That doesn’t look good.”
“No, it doesn’t. But the only real crime you’ve got me on is breaking curfew.”
Dad offered up his most threatening gaze and said one last time, “Give me his name.”
The name the cops wanted was Leonard Williams, Len to his friends, high school senior. The truth was, I barely knew the guy and had never bought drugs from him. What I did know I pieced together through years of eavesdropping, which is how I learn most things. I knew Len’s mother was on disability and addicted to painkillers. I knew his father had been killed in a liquor store shooting when Len was six years old. I knew that he had two younger brothers and the welfare checks did not feed them all. I knew Len dealt drugs like some kids get after-school jobs—to put food on the table. I knew Len was gay, and I never told anyone about it.
It was the night of Unpunished Crime #3. Petra and I broke onto school property to steal from the phys ed storage closet (I was convinced that a secondhand sporting-goods business would solve our cash-flow problem). I picked the lock to the storage closet and Petra and I moved the inventory into her car. But then I got greedy and remembered that Coach Walters usually kept a bottle of Wild Turkey in his desk drawer. While Petra waited in the car, I returned to the school grounds and caught Len and a football player making out in Coach Walters’s office. Because I never said anything, Len thought he owed me. What he didn’t know was that I was good at keeping secrets, having so many of my own. One more made no difference to me.
“I am not a snitch” was all I ever said.
My father took me home that night without uttering a single word. Nothing happened to Len. They had only a nickname to go on. As for me, I got off easy, at least compared to my father, who endured endless jeering from his former colleagues; they found it infinitely amusing that Al couldn’t crack his own daughter as an informant. Yet I know that for a man who spent years working the streets, he understood the codes that criminals live by and to a certain extent respected my silence.
If you can imagine me without my litany of crimes or my brother as a point of comparison, you might be surprised to find that I stand up all right on my own. I can enter a room and have its contents memorized within a few minutes; I can spot a pickpocket with the accuracy of a sharpshooter; I can bluff my way past any currently employed night watchman. When inspired, I have a doggedness you’ve never seen. And while I’m no great beauty, I get asked out plenty by men who don’t know any better.
But for many years, my attributes (for what they’re worth) were obscured by my defiant ways. Since David had cornered the market on perfection, I had to settle for mining the depths of my own imperfection. At times it seemed the only two sentences spoken in our household were Well done, David an
d What were you thinking, Isabel? My teenage years were defined by meetings at the principal’s office, rides in squad cars, ditching, vandalism, smoking in the bathroom, drinking at the beach, breaking and entering, academic probation, groundings, lectures, broken curfews, hangovers, blackouts, illegal drugs, combat boots, and unwashed hair.
Yet I could never do as much damage as I intended, because David was always undoing it. If I missed a curfew, he covered for me. If I lied, he corroborated. If I stole, he returned. If I smoked, he hid the butts. If I passed out on the front lawn, he moved my lifeless body into my bedroom. If I refused to write a paper, he wrote it for me, even dumbing down the language to make it believable. When he discovered that I wasn’t turning in his work on my behalf, he took to delivering the papers directly to the teachers’ mailboxes.
What was so infuriating about David was that he knew. He knew that—to a certain extent—my failure was a reaction to his perfection. He understood that I was his fault and he genuinely felt contrite. My parents would occasionally ask me why I was the way I was. And I told them: They needed balance. Added together and divided evenly, David and I would be two exceedingly normal children. Rae would eventually throw everything off balance, but I’ll get to that later.
1799 CLAY STREET
The Spellman residence is located at 1799 Clay Street on the outskirts of the Nob Hill district of San Francisco. If you walk half a mile to the south, you’ll reach the Tenderloin—San Francisco’s heterosexual red-light district. If you head too far north, you’ll land in some variety of tourist trap, whether it’s Lombard Street or Fisherman’s Wharf or, if you’re really unfortunate, the Marina.
Spellman Investigations is conveniently located at the same address. (My father loves to joke about his commute down the stairs.) The building itself is an impressive four-level Victorian, painted blue with white trim, that my parents could never have afforded had it not been passed down from three generations of Spellmans. The property itself is valued at close to two million, which means my parents threaten to sell at least four times a year. But those are empty threats. My parents would rather have old furniture, chipped paint, and economic uncertainty than European vacations, retirement funds, and a home in the suburbs.
At the entrance to my family’s home/business, you will find four mailboxes that read, from left to right: Spellman, Spellman Investigations (we’ve only had one mail carrier who routinely differentiated between the two), Marcus Godfrey (my father’s long-lived undercover name), and Grayson Enterprises (a dummy business name that our firm uses for lighter cases). There are also two or three PO boxes around the Bay Area that the business sustains when more camouflage is necessary.
Once inside the Spellman home, you come upon a staircase that winds up to the second level, where all three bedrooms are located. To the right of the staircase is a door with a hanging sign that says SPELLMAN INVESTIGATIONS. The door is locked during all nonbusiness hours. Left of the staircase is the entrance to the living room. A threadbare couch with a worn zebra-skin pattern once provided the centerpiece to the room. Now it is an unassuming brown leather sofa. Mahogany furniture orbits the couch—each piece would qualify as an antique, but neglect has diminished their value. The only change the room has seen in the last thirty years (other than the couch) is the replacement of the wood-paneled Zenith TV (circa 1980) with a twenty-seven-inch flat-screen that my uncle bought after a very rare, but successful, day at the racetrack.
Behind the living room is the kitchen, which extends into a modest dining room with still more neglected antiques. While I’m still downstairs, I should unlock the door to Spellman Investigations.
My family’s office sits on the ground level, in a location that would be called the den in any other home. Four secondhand teacher’s desks (the beige metal variety) form a perfect rectangle in the center of the office. Thirty years ago there was only one computer—an IBM—atop my father’s desk. Now there is a PC on each of the four and a communal laptop in the closet. There are half a dozen file cabinets in an assortment of colors (also secondhand) encircling the room. Other than the industrial-size paper shredder and dusty blinds, that’s pretty much it. Files are sometimes stacked two feet high on each desk. Scraps from the shredder are scattered about the floor. The room smells of dust and cheap coffee. The door at the far end of the room leads down to the basement, where all interrogations take place. David used to claim that the basement was the best place in the house to do homework, but I wouldn’t know about that.
THE FAMILY BUSINESS
David and I began working for Spellman Investigations when we were fourteen and twelve, respectively. While I had already made a name for myself as the difficult child, my status as employee redeemed many of my other less-than qualities. I suppose it surprised no one that, generally speaking, I took well to breaking the rules of society and invading other people’s privacy.
We’d always begin in the trash. That was routinely the first job assigned to the Spellman children. Mom or Dad (or the off-duty cop du jour) would pick up refuse from a subject’s residence (once the trash is left out for the sanitation department, it is considered public property and legal to appropriate) and drop it at the house.
I’d put on a pair of thick, plastic dishwashing gloves (and occasionally a nose clip) and sift through the garbage, separating the trash from the treasures. My mother gave precisely the same instructions to all of us: bank statements, bills, letters, notes, you keep; anything that was once edible or contains bodily fluids, you trash. I often considered these instructions incomplete. You’d be surprised how many things fall into the none of the above category. Garbology often made David violently ill, and by the time he was fifteen, he was pulled off this assignment altogether.
The year I turned thirteen, my mother taught me how to do court record searches in the Bay Area. Most of our work at the time involved background checks, and a criminal record search was the first step. Once again, the instructions were simple: Look for derogatories. Translation: Look for something bad. When we couldn’t find a derogatory, the disappointment was palpable. People—the ones we knew by name or Social Security numbers—disappointed us if they were clean.
Background checks were the purest form of grunt work. They often involved traveling throughout the Bay Area to various courthouses, cross-checking names in record books. Before the municipal courts were dissolved in California, this meant visiting the records offices of at least four separate courthouses per county: superior criminal, superior civil, municipal criminal, and municipal civil (and occasionally small claims court).
Later on, our research time was abbreviated when the superior and municipal courts merged and most of the records could be found on microfiche. In the last five years, virtually all courthouse information has been transferred to computerized databases, and unless we were looking for a case more than ten years old, all the research could be done from inside the Spellman offices. What was once a twelve-to-fifteen-hour job turned into four hours or less behind a desk.
Aside from background research, the databases can also be used to locate an individual whose whereabouts are unknown. Acquiring a Social Security number is the key to this task. It is the holy grail of the PI world. But Social Security numbers are not public record. If you are not provided a Social Security number from the client, then a full name and a DOB (date of birth) or at the very minimum a full name (hopefully unusual) and city of residence are required. The next step is plugging a name and DOB into a credit header report. These reports provide some of the information on a complete credit report, such as address history and any bankruptcies and liens against the individual, but not the full report, since credit reports are also not public record. Through a credit header you can often get a partial SSN. Since one database might hide the first four digits of the SSN and another might hide the last four, if you look at enough of them, you can often assemble a full SSN.
Database research requires an attention to detail that my former teachers wou
ld not believe I was capable of. However, I liked finding dirt on people. It made all my trespasses seem trivial.
You could say first they tested our stomachs, then our patience, and finally our wits. For the second-generation Spellmans (and maybe even the first), surveillance was what we lived for. It was the part of the job that made you not care that you were working for your parents after school. But it is not without its lows. People aren’t on the move all the time. They sleep, they go to work, they have four-hour meetings in office buildings, leaving you waiting in the foyer, your stomach growling and your feet aching. I loved being on the move; David loved the downtime. He used it to catch up on his homework. All I did was smoke.
Age 14: My first surveillance job was on the Feldman case. John Feldman hired my family to keep an eye on his business partner and brother, Sam. John had a feeling that his brother was involved in some shady business dealings and wanted us to tail Sam for a couple of weeks to see if his instincts were correct. While John’s instincts were, in fact, correct, his assessment was not. Sam, from my observation, showed little interest in business altogether. He did, however, show great interest in John’s wife.
David and I were both surveillance neophytes when we began the Feldman detail. I was an expert by the end. My father would drive the van, my mother the Honda. Both connected with us via radio. When Sam was on foot, David or I took point. We’d jump out of the car, maintain a reasonable distance on foot, and announce our coordinates into the radio so that at least one vehicle would always be ready to pick us up should Sam decide to take a cab, bus, or cable car. Mostly he took a room at the St. Regis.
What we learned on the Feldman job, aside from the fact that Sam was screwing John’s wife, was that my years of sneaking around paid off. Simply put, my life to date had ingrained in me a certain natural stealth, had taught me how to test limits, and had disciplined me to know precisely how much I could get away with. I knew how to read people. I knew when I could follow a subject onto public transportation or when I needed to call a cab. I knew how long I could sustain the tail and I knew when it was time to quit. But half of it was that I didn’t look like the sort of person who followed people for a living.