Spygirl

by Amy Gray

  From the glint on my shoes on her desk, I gazed over the view, watching airplanes leaving La Guardia, rising like tiny discol-orations, almost indistinguishable filaments against the bruised pale sky, and then surging up, from behind the arching girders of the Brooklyn Bridge, like tendrils rising out of the massive towers. The incoming planes followed a sweeping path to the left of the bridge, and the outgoing ones rose in a half-ellipse to the right. Together they formed a V, like the two edges of a highway meeting at a distant vanishing point.

  “What are you doing in here?”

  Gloria was standing, red-faced, sharp-eyed in the doorway, her language a little slurred, a cup of water in her hand. My eyes stung. I swung my feet off the desk.

  “I thought you weren't coming in.” She closed her eyes for a second into slits, and looked like she might pass out, then opened them up again so wide I thought they might roll out of her head. “Amy, what the hell is going on? ” I geared up to explain why I was in her office—I was up all night working … I was getting some tea from her desk … “I was just in your office and I saw files in there I gave you days ago,” she said. “Plus, there's a contract I haven't heard back from you about.”

  I threw her a bone, albeit a false one. “The Bielman contract is signed and done.”

  “No, no, that's not it.” She paused and looked confused. “Well, I can't remember what contract it is, but I'll get back to you about it, but whatever it is, you should be coming to me and not the other way around. You have to think one step ahead of me.” The one-step-ahead thing was her mantra. She was constantly telling me that. But one step ahead of her was as useless as ten steps ahead of her, since she was miles behind everybody else. All of her books were years behind schedule because she took months to “edit” every page, if she was doing anything at all, and 80 percent of the work I did for her was personal: organizing dinner parties, drafting thank-you notes to the socialites that seemed to be friends of hers through her dead husband, sending to-do lists to her gardener, her housekeeper, her accountant, her lawyer.

  But that day, she seemed too out of it to remember to dress me down for being in her office, and instead sent me to my desk to get a pad of paper because she had something she desperately needed to get done, and by the way she'd be working late tonight and she'd need my help. I couldn't tell if she'd been crying, but she probably had. She continued to issue edicts, despite an unsteadiness and a suspect swagger when she turned corners.

  That night at seven she had me follow her into the bathroom (“I'm in a huge rush—we just can't miss a beat here!” she said) and take dictation from her to the sound of her piss hitting the water while I scratched down a note to her mother, filling her in on who would be attending a dinner party. My empathy for her had hardened into an angry piece of coal in my stomach, which was stoked to incandescence every time I even thought about her. A week later, I quit my job.

  NINE

  One thing is, to be a spy, you have to rely on your hunches.

  —WOODY ALLEN, “THE WHORE OF MENSA”

  If This Guy's Who He Says He Is, I'll Eat My Own Asshole

  “Don't mix business with pleasure.” George told me that. In the case of the Three-Ring Wedding Bandit, the two were impossible to separate.

  George was doing some preliminary research for a wedding planner, the friend of a friend of a former employee. He was heard cackling across the office, “Ha! If this guy's who he says he is, I'll eat my own asshole.” I'm certain none of us wanted to see that happen.

  As George explained when he called me over to give me the case, he'd been doing this stuff for twelve years and he knew when he was dealing with a criminal, and this guy the wedding planner had called him about was the real thing. But even though he could tell me that and even impart his suspicions to the client, what we acted on had to be entirely based on what we knew in evidence, not just on what we suspected.

  George had been approached by Goldie Gabriel, a grande dame in the cutthroat New York wedding industry. An hour after George debriefed me, we paid a call to Goldie. “Oh my gawd!” she exclaimed when George and I came into her office, which was upholstered in a potpourri of throw pillows, each in a different pattern and color scheme from the sofa's side cushions, as well as from the balloon curtains, with their separately upholstered valences. “Yoor adoorable! I love this—don't you love this? I love this!” She wrung her hands together with excrescent energy and kissed George and me hello, saying, “I can't believe there are real private investigators here—This is so wild,” pointing us out to her barefoot, long-haired assistant, Paul, as if to say, “Who woulda thunkit?” Paul scratched his disarrayed, curly black tresses and shuffled around his desk, smiling at her familiar histrionics.

  Goldie took us into her office, which looked like a war zone of competing English floral patterns. At the center of this cacophony of climbing roses and ranunculus on balloon curtains, envelopes, and wallpapering, Goldie held court. She explained that she'd been approached by a couple a few days before to “do an event,” which she'd been doing for fifteen years, by the way, and she'd never had doubts like this before. It became clear that Goldie possessed a highly attuned cultural barometer in which the combination of a no-carat ring and a six-figure flower budget was “lunacy,” forgoing the use of a private caterer in a loft space was “borderline,” and a stipulation that “money is no object”—no matter how rich the client—is cause for calling the local investigator, which is just what she did.

  “There is nobody, nobody so rich that money is no object. I don't care if you're the Sultan of Brunei; even he has a budget, and let me tell you, the richer they are, the cheaper they are.” Goldie imparted this with the hushed tone of someone divulging a grave but certain truth. The groom-to-be and object of Goldie's misgivings was older. He looked forty-five, she said, even though he said he was only thirty-eight. The bride-to-be said she was twenty-seven, and probably was. There was no ring, and he'd said they were in such a rush that he'd given her one of those gold-plate cubic zirconium artificial Tiffany settings that you could get at any good pawnshop for $200. “That was naawt normal,” Goldie declared. “I don't care how rushed you are; when I see a rich older guy like that and a young woman like that I expect a rock on her finger and nothing less. I'm not saying rich people won't skimp on some fronts, because they definitely will. But …” She threw her hands out as if to indicate all of the above was just so obvious, “Nawt the ring.”

  “Listen, I like to cut through the bull,” Goldie said defiantly, “and I think I know what this guy is doing. I think they might be reporters, and they might be undercover to do an exposé about the wedding business, for, say, Vanity Fair I want to know if they're going to write about me!” I imagined a subterranean war room of journalists and infiltrators meeting around a strategy board at the center of which was a cutout of Goldie's head, and around her an elaborate system of arrows, snapshots, stratagems, and frilly fabric swathes. Graydon Carter would sit at the head of the table in camouflage, this season's black, and imposing Lagerfeld-style sunglasses, barking, “Find her secrets out at any cost!” No, I didn't think there was a cloak-and-dagger story in the works. George looked intent, his blue eyes converged, his upper lip protruded earnestly in what seemed to be a sign that he had checked all sarcasm at the door. I tried to look serious, too, even though Goldie's Vanity Fair fantasy made me want to giggle. But I didn't crack a smile.

  George asked lots of questions, and I wrote down things I thought might be relevant on the pad I'd brought with me. What did this guy do for a living? Goldie wasn't sure—he had a startup, or maybe it was an older company that he'd taken over—and then some foundation that he was starting for his future wife. Or maybe the foundation was the startup, but he also implied that he had the security of a vast family fortune. He mentioned the Willkommen family, the founder and owners of a small but profitable Austrian airline called Rheintalflug Air. They had assembled a net worth of more than $400 million doing it. Goldie though
t he had also mentioned something about a family marinara-sauce business, which “raised some red flayags” in her mind. “It was very Gawdfawther.”

  George took a very cautious position, saying, “Listen, I'll tell you right now that I think this guy's a crook, but until we have evidence, you should be doing nothing and saying nothing to him. Just don't accept any checks from him.”

  “Oh,” Goldie said, “Well, I guess that's another thing.” The groom said they were in such a rush to book the whirlwind wedding, he'd asked her to start booking vendors immediately. But the check he'd written her for the $100,000 to cover the just-getting-started charges had bounced and she'd written checks to the vendors that were supposed to draw on this check, including a $10,000 deposit at the Waldorf and another $6,500 for the Carolina Herrera dress. The guy had apologized for the bounced check, saying it was a miscommunication with his bank. Supposedly he was wiring her the money now, although nothing had come through yet.

  George and I left the meeting with about fifteen pages of notes and a Xerox of the guy's card, which read:

  Garry Wilbur

  Entrepreneur/Philanthropist

  917-555-9899

  It reminded me of a card I'd gotten from a guy who followed me all the way from the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn to my gym. He followed me for two blocks, calling, “Excuuuse me, miss!” before he said he couldn't help but notice my “beautiful spirit” and “nice booty.” Saying he wanted to “portray me in paint,” he handed me his card, which read: “Tyrell G. Artist, Portraits, Dancing, Business Consultant.” After spending the next forty minutes hiding in the ladies’ changing room of the New York Sports Club, I ran home.

  The Arm-Wrestling Champion of the World

  Back at the office I put Wilbur's card in the file and booted up my computer. I wanted to impress the hell out of my bosses with this case. I would eat and breathe it until I had cracked Wilbur open like a nut.

  I looked up. Linus was diving across my desk. He came to rest in a classical pose and flashed me a crooked smile. “Let me ask you something.”

  “Okay.”

  His eyes flickered behind trifocal lenses. “Do you think you could outwrestle Noah?” Noah was one of the new guys who started with me, and our desks were blocked side-by-side. We barely spoke. I probably outweighed him by about fifty pounds, even though he subsisted on Ding-Dongs, Egg McMuffins, and sopping-wet pressed Cuban sandwiches from the Twenty-One deli around the corner. He was a caloric black hole.

  “What kind of wrestling? Arm-wrestling or regular?”

  He thought about it. “Arm.”

  “I think so.”

  Linus turned to the rest of the room triumphantly. “Okay, she's in! I'm taking bets here. Three-to-one odds for Amy!” Sol and George were laughing as Sol threw a twenty at Linus and said, “Just take it. For making this happen.”

  “Listen, I don't know if I want to do this.” It became clear that they wanted to see Noah getting beaten by a girl. I felt embarrassed for him if I beat him, and even more embarrassed for me. What would that make me—a she-man? I wanted to be a girl whose wit allowed her to muscle out of situations and kick ass, but I didn't actually want to be seen as manly or otherwise mannish. But things had escalated beyond my control. Big Gus, Wendy, Evan, Otis, Morgan, Sol, George, and even Assman and Nestor were crowded around my desk. My protests of “I don't know about this, guys” were met with thumping chants of “Fight, fight! and “Let's go!” “Let's do it!” and “Kick her ass, Noah!” In an etherlike suspension between humiliation and punchiness, I rolled up my sleeves and leaned over the desk. Noah seemed shell-shocked.

  I beat him in five seconds. I'm not sure he was even trying, but the roar of the crowd and the cries of “You go, Gray!” and “Aww, beaten by a girl!” told me I'd won. Noah stumbled away, dazed, and I sat down to catch my breath. We were like the two kids sent into the closet in junior high to make out, emerging from the darkness with their shared trauma having done nothing to pierce the rift between them. The whole scene harked back to a time of Benetton sweatshirts, Wham!, and constant indiscriminate humiliations.

  When things settled down later, I got an instant message from Evan asking if I wanted to drink at the office that night. (This in spite of the fact that it was an even day.) He postscripted me that he had a bottle of Wild Turkey in his desk to get us started. At five-thirty Sol was the second boss to cut out, and when the steel door slammed shut behind him, Evan lit a Camel Light and poured us all whiskey shots.

  “To A. Gray, the arm-wrestling champion of the world, and to Noah, for taking getting beaten by a girl like a man!” We all drank to that. Everyone was gathered in the conference room except for Assman and Nestor. “Do you guys want to drink with us? ” I asked tentatively. Nestor grunted something about how he had somewhere to be and Assman said he had to do laundry. Then he said, “But you run along and hang out with the cool kids,” and then turned away from me. I flushed. I was hurt by their closedness, but said nothing.

  There were some rumors circulating among the investigators about the Wilbur case. Everyone wanted to know what was going on and how I got assigned to it. “What's up, Dingleboy?” Gus said. “What's Gray doing for you that I'm not? I thought I was your ‘go to’ guy for this stuff.”

  “You were, but now I'm using your mom,” Evan said.

  How Can He Be So Skinny and Live So Fat?

  The next day at work, George and I made a list of things for me to do. I plopped a sixteen-ounce Gatorade on my desk and a bottle of Alleve. We had in our notes an exhaustive catalog of every contact Goldie had ever had with the couple, when it was had, what information was shared by which individual, physical descriptions of both, and a list of all the other vendors that were allegedly and verifiably in contact with them. At the top of my agenda was getting in touch with the people in the eight penthouse apartments of the Sixty-second Street and Central Park West address where he claimed to be building a luxury duplex for himself and his new bride to be, Alexis Dominique Whitcomb. I called a bunch of their neighbors, saying my client was considering doing business with a man who claims to live in that building, and that I was trying to get some independent references about him.

  Although nobody had heard of him, his rich alleged neighbors seemed loath to cast any doubt on him, and seemed to have a fraternal rich person's alliance with their notional neighbor. They said things like, “Well, I don't know him, but perhaps he's been leasing the place to Mrs. Haverman,” or “My apartment is very well soundproofed, so I might not hear the workmen doing the renovations.” I got the feeling that people in this building took pride in their collective claim to agoraphobia, a birthright to keep to themselves and protect their right to ignore one another. I imagined bony women living there for decades and walking their Lhasa apsos in hand-crocheted doggie coats past faces they saw daily and to which they never cared to attach names.

  It turned out a few not-too-minor celebrities, including Ru-tanya Alda, who you might remember from The Deer Hunter, as well as the guy who played Doogie Howser, M.D., were living in the building, the Worcester. I looked up the property records for the building and got the name of the broker at Sotheby's real estate division who handled the sales on six out of the eight penthouse flats in the building. She was a chirpy Australian who seemed enthralled by the possibility of an imposter claiming to live in the building. “This is vaary serious, of course,” she commiserated. “It puts all the residents there in jeopaady This maan could be gaaining unloorful access to the propaaty” She couldn't remember if Mr. Wilbur was a client of one of her agents. I had spoken to the residents of the two units she hadn't sold, as well as four of the six owners of the other flats she transacted, and ruled them out as having any association with Mr. Wilbur. The property records for the other two listed a Mrs. Alix Von Albrecht Halle and a Ludmilla Melnikov as the owners, respectively. Mrs. Peacock, the realtor, said she'd “git baaack to me on this as soon as possible.” In the meantime, I took the liberty of calling
Mrs. Von Albrecht Halle, who was listed as living in Vancouver.

  It turned out Mrs. Halle had passed away, but her middle-aged son Claude, in his words, “knew nothing of this Wilbur character!” I left a message for Mrs. Melnikov, and in the meantime was planning to visit the building to talk to the building manager, when I got a call back from another neighbor I'd called, who lived in the apartment directly below one of the penthouses that I thought might belong to Wilbur. The apartment was actually listed as belonging to Lani Guinier, the Clinton nominee for U.S. assistant attorney general of civil rights, but John Speakbrooks, the guy who called back, explained that he was her nephew-in-law and that she had leased the apartment to him. After he confirmed that he didn't know Mr. Wilbur, I had an inspiration. “You know, I was thinking that talking to the building manager, superintendent, or doorman might be helpful to clear this up, since I haven't had much luck with the residents.”

  He gave me a number for Hector, the handyman, assuring me, “Hector knows everybody in this building, and he's been here at least ten years.” I called Hector, who didn't seem surprised by my call.

  “Yeah, I figured I'd get a call from somebody like you at some point,” Hector said.

  “Really? ” My pulse hurried—my mouth was cottony.

  He told me that there was a guy, whose name he couldn't remember, who had been claiming to live at that address for years. “He's a real piece of work—there was a piece about him in the Daily News a few years back about how he planned a circus wedding in Texas and bilked some people down there out of the whole cost of the wedding.” Hector didn't recognize the name Garry Wilbur, but when I mentioned that the guy I was checking out was working on another wedding scam, he seemed convinced. “That's definitely the same guy. I don't know about the name, but I know it's him, and if it is, there are guys at the Sixteenth Precinct lookin’ for him. He was indicted in New York too a few years ago for an insurance scam.” Hector gave me the name of a detective friend of his in the Sixteenth. I got off the phone and reported my eureka moment to George.