by Lisa Lutz
“Is her husband at this hotel?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“I followed Mrs. Slayter here.”
“Why?”
“Because something was fishy about the job.”
“Isabel, you were not hired to follow the client; you were hired to follow her husband. You need to leave immediately.”
“Wait, how long has Margaret/Meg been seeing this man?”
“End of discussion.”
“But I need to know why she’s hired us. I think it’s to keep track of her husband while she—”
“Isabel, if you aren’t out the door in five seconds, you’re fired,” my father said.
I can usually tell when my father is bluffing, and this was no bluff. In fact, his face was turning a shade of crimson that only occurs when he’s either drunk or about to go into a rage.1
I was out the door on the count of two.
I checked my phone when I got in the car and saw a text from Finkel from just ten minutes before.
Sub on move.
Where?
1799 Clay Street.
ha ha.
No. Seriously.
UR a dead man.
ha ha.
No. Seriously.
1799 Clay Street, in case I haven’t mentioned it, is the address of the Spellman compound. As I approached the front door, Fred surfaced from the small alley that divides our house from the next.
“What’s he doing in there?”
“I don’t know,” Fred replied, appearing genuinely baffled. “You think he made me?”
“He made you the other day when you had coffee and chatted like a pair of biddies on a park bench. But that doesn’t explain what he’s suddenly doing at our office.” I pulled sixty from my wallet and passed it to Fred. “Keep-your-mouth-shut money.”
I could tell he was about to question the overpayment on a botched surveillance, but I needed him in my corner. One day I’d need a favor from Fred and I was merely laying the groundwork.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Get out of here.”
Just then a black limousine double-parked in front of the Spellman house and idled there for about five minutes. I paused along the side of the house until I saw my mother walk Mr. Slayter to the front door. They shook hands and my mom said she would be in touch. Mr. Slayter got into his limo.
Once the car was out of sight, I entered the house. “What did that man want?”
“The one who just left?” Mom asked.
“Yes. Did he tell you his name?”
“Mr. Slayter. Don’t we have another Slayter case?”
“What did he want?”
“He had the oddest request.”
“Let me guess. He wants you to follow his wife.”
“No,” my mother replied. “He wants us to follow him.”
Part II
THE WALL
(October)
BRICK BY BRICK
Conflicts of interest are not unusual in my line of work. San Francisco is a small city, and the PI business has taken a beating. With Harkey (our main competition for twenty years) out of the picture,1 there are only a handful of other firms in the city, and most people would prefer a momand-pop shop to the corporate ice cube2 that is our main competition. It’s not unheard-of to have domestic cases intersect, but a three-way intersection was new territory.
Dad called Mom from the field after our collision. He told her to keep me in the office until he returned home. While I still had a window to gather information, I used the time to get to the bottom of Mr. Slayter’s visit. Unfortunately there was no bottom to get to.
“So a guy walks into the office looking to hire someone to follow him and you don’t ask why?”
My mother sighed impatiently. “Of course I asked, dear, but he wouldn’t say. He merely said that he wanted an investigator to document his daily activities.”
“Didn’t you find that suspicious?”
“I found it unusual.”
“Did you ask him how he came to our agency?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He said that he found us on the Internet.”
“Interesting.”
“Rae did an excellent job redesigning our website.”
“Did he say anything about his wife?”
“That’s all I can tell you, dear.”
I stacked files and errant paperwork in an untidy pile on my desk—my typical end-of-day ritual. Then my mother explained that we were to have an emergency company meeting and I would have to wait in the office until Dad returned home. I grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and turned to a chess study website to practice my endgame, which Henry had informed me was sorely lacking. Although at other points he’d mentioned the same thing about my opening game and middle game.
“I’m still on the clock,” I informed my mother.
“Then you should do some filing.”
“Three out of five,” I said, holding out my fist. Mom and I played rock-paper-scissors to decide who would file, and I won. Which I had been doing ever since Demetrius pointed out that I favored rock (then launched into a long-winded explanation about how my preference for rock indicates my personal preference for inertia, since when you’re a rock you don’t have to do anything at all). After I stopped favoring rock I had a whole lot less filing to do. And I like to think that in the not-too-distant future filing might become as obsolete as fountain pens.
My mother tried to amuse herself with idle gossip while she stuck pieces of paper inside folders inside larger folders with letters on them. See how dumb that sounds?
“So Demetrius is going on a lot of dates,” my mom said. “I hope he finds someone special.”
“Mom, has it occurred to you that D isn’t actually going on the dates? Because what kind of grown man lets his fifty-seven-year-old employer control his Match.com account?”
“Yes, dear, that occurred to me.”
“Do you know for a fact that he is actually braving the singles world?”
“Truth be told, I had some suspicions and I followed him one night. He was having a perfectly nice dinner with a very attractive woman who I believe works at a veterinary clinic. She had no profile picture, so I can’t be sure it was the same one, but I have vetted all of them. No pun intended.”
“Did they go on a second date?” I asked.
“No. D said there was no rapport. He said she carried a Hello Kitty purse.”
“That would be a deal-breaker for me too.”
“Anyway, he’s been on a few other dates, but so far, no one special.”
“You understand, Mom, that if he does meet someone special, he will eventually move out.”
“I do,” my mother said. The tone of her voice had shifted. I had clearly touched on a dental-level nerve. I switched topics to ease the tension. “Don’t you have a class tonight that you’re missing?” I asked. I took a photocopy of Mom’s schedule from my drawer and reviewed it. “Ah, yes, Monday you have Beginning Pottery. Curious that you have nothing to show for it.”
“My pieces are still in the kiln,” Mom replied.
“Likely story. Are you even going to these classes?”
“Krasivaya bluzka,”3 Mom said, in Russian, I guess.
“What does that mean?”
“It means ‘Of course I am.’”
Inside my desk, I turned on my digital recorder.
“How do you say, ‘Where is the restroom?’” I asked.
“Where is the restroom,” Mom replied.
“Hilarious. In Russian, please.”
“Vy ne mogli by govorit’ pomedlennee.”4
“How do say, ‘What time is it?’”
“Etot mužčina platit za vsë.”5
“How about ‘My hovercraft is full of eels’?”
“Ostav’te menja v pokoeugrey.”6
“You’re up to something. I’m sure of that. Why don’t you just tell me so I don�
�t have to investigate?”
“Excuse me,” Mom said. “I have some crocheting to do.”
My mother then opened her desk drawer, withdrew a canvas bag, and removed a crochet hook and a misshapen mass of yarn.
“So it is crochet, not croquet. What on earth are you making?”
“A hat,” Mom snapped. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not in the slightest.”
Just then we heard a key in the front door and an unnerving squeak of the hinge. From the end of the hall my father shouted, “Chinese wall.” Then Dad swung open the far quieter office door and repeated himself more dramatically. He took off his coat and tossed it on the back of his chair, rolled up his sleeves, and said, “We’re enacting a Chinese wall immediately.”
Dad pulled the Adam Cooper file from the cabinet (subject: Meg Cooper [also known as Margaret Slayter]) and locked it in his desk drawer. He then passed me the Margaret Slayter file (subject: husband Edward Slayter) and said, “From now on, your mother and I will deal exclusively with Adam Cooper and you will handle only the work requested of you by Mrs. Slayter. We will each take care of billing individually and there will be absolutely no communication between either side on the cases.
“And, Isabel, your only contact with Mrs. Slayter should be as a client. You provide the information she pays for. End of story. Even if we’d never discovered this conflict of interest, you should not have been surveilling the client. If that ever got out, our reputation could be sold at the five-and-dime store.”
“They don’t have those anymore,” I replied.
“Nothing about this is funny, Isabel.”
“Maybe not funny,” I replied, “but it is kind of awesome, if you think about it. Also, did Mom tell you about Mr. Slayter visiting the office?”
“Briefly,” Dad replied. Then he turned to my mother. “Please call him back and tell him that we cannot offer our services to him at this time.”
“Something is going on here that is not your typical domestic non-bliss,” I said.
“That is not our concern,” my dad replied.
“What if Mrs. Slayter hired us to babysit her husband while she has an affair?”
“We have no evidence of that fact,” Dad replied.
“We kind of have something resembling it. What if Mrs. Slayter is having us track her husband’s moves so she can plan a hit on him?”
“That only happens in detective novels,” said Dad.
“One of these days we’re going to catch a murder,” I said.
“We can dream,” my mom replied.
“Do you want me to take you off the Slayter case?” my father sternly asked.
“Yes, and put me on the Meg Cooper case. We can swap for a week and then swap back.”
“I meant,” my father said, correcting me, “do you want me to take you off all cases?”
“Well, of course not.”
“Chinese wall it is. There will be no further discussion. Agreed?”
“No. We’re not really in agreement.”
“Agree or you’re on desk duty until all conflicting cases are closed.”
My dad was serious; I had no other recourse.
“Agreed,” I replied, and maybe I meant it at the time.
Imaginary walls are merely boundaries. As you’ve undoubtedly gathered by now, I’m not particularly practiced with that sort of thing. When my father calls for a Chinese wall—and it’s only happened once before7—I take it seriously because he takes it seriously. And when I don’t take seriously things that he takes seriously, my day-to-day life becomes difficult. When I say “difficult,” I don’t mean that my father is rude or gives me the cold shoulder or even yells at me; I mean that the simple things in life become challenging. My car won’t start, my winter coat goes missing, my breath spray is replaced by vinegar, my keys don’t work as well as they used to, the heel on my left shoe falls off. The sabotage is subtler than the type practiced by, say, Rae or my mom. My father’s tactics avoid direct assault. He is not calling for war. His goal is to make me believe I’m experiencing some cosmic retaliation for my misdeeds.
For many years when this sort of thing happened, I actually thought that maybe something bigger than me or my dad was at work. That was until I caught him filing down one of my shoelaces. I wasn’t up for the level of vigilance required to overtly defy my father. There had to be another way.
After work, I had a drink at the Hemlock to try to figure out a route around the Chinese wall. One beer down, I had no bulletproof solutions to my problem. To occupy myself, I decided to tackle less troubling and more scalable information blockades.
First I phoned Henry to tell him I would be late.
“I’m going to be late,” I said.
“I see,” said Henry.
“So I won’t be home for dinner.”
“Wasn’t expecting you.”
“Oh. I guess I’ve had a lot of late nights recently.”
“Anything else?” Henry said. I’ve gotten the cold shoulder from him before, but this time he was putting his heart into it.
“I washed the dishes this morning. Did you notice?” I said. I was working on having some redeeming qualities.
“I did,” Henry replied, unimpressed.
“So you don’t plan on throwing me a parade or releasing a bunch of doves or something?”
“Anything else, Isabel?”
“Say hi to your mom.”
“She’s not here,” Henry replied.
“Where is she?” I asked. Silly question.
“I don’t know. She left a note that said, I’m not here. I think she thinks it’s funny.”
“I kind of think it’s funny,” I said.
“I don’t,” Henry replied.
“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” I said.
Henry hung up the phone without saying good-bye.
I phoned Gerty to see if I could convince her to spend some time with Henry, since they had barely seen each other in the last few weeks. Other than the notes, I couldn’t be sure that Gerty was still even in the city. In fact, if she didn’t date them and change them daily, I would have called the cops. I phoned her cell and left a message on her voice mail. She never did return my call.
RECREATIONAL SURVEILLANCE
From the bar, I phoned Dad to get the location of Mom’s purported pottery class. He picked up on the first ring.
“Hi, Isabel.”
“Hi, Dad,” I said. I’ve grown to miss that part of the phone call where you identify yourself. Mostly I miss the part where I misidentify; caller ID has definitely cramped my style. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Dad said, letting out a deep sigh.
“Is something wrong?”
“It’s just so lonely here,” Dad said. “Your mother’s gone all the time and I don’t know where D is. You want to come over? We could play gin rummy or just drink.”
“Rain check, Dad. So, Mom’s at pottery tonight?”
“Yes, pottery,” Dad said.
“Where is the pottery?” I asked. “Shouldn’t our house be swimming in ceramics by now?”
“She doesn’t bring it home anymore.”
“So you’ve seen it?”
“I saw one piece. I made the mistake of laughing. Your mother can be more sensitive than you might imagine.”
“Uh-huh. Where is this class of hers?”
“Isabel, she really is taking a pottery class tonight.”
“Why all the hobbies?”
“She’s trying to keep busy, that’s all.”
“Have you noticed her work is suffering?”
“It’s a phase. It’ll pass.”
“Where’s the class?”
“You’re wasting your time, Isabel.”
“Maybe I want to take up pottery.”
“She’s at Sharon Art Studio, next to the carousel at Golden Gate Park.”
“Bye, Dad.”
I drove straight to the park and wove up the short tree-lined r
oad to the art studio. I circled the building, peering into lit classrooms stocked with a mismatched collection of amateur artists, all paying rapt attention to their paintings or sculptures or the instructor’s lecture. I found my mother in the back of the pottery class, straddling a wheel and having a physical altercation with a mass of clay. My lip-reading skills informed me that my mother’s moratorium on profanity was purely for Demetrius’s benefit. The female instructor, whom I could have spotted in a lineup sight unseen (there are still some patchouli-scented, flower-power retirees left in the city), approached my mother and appeared to offer her soothing words. My mother appeared to respond with less soothing words. The instructor backed away slowly, like you would from a rabid dog.
The snippets of Russian Mom had integrated into her vocabulary, the painstakingly tangled crochet yarn, and a few baked goods that were above par for her, but below par for even an amateur baker, all pointed to the fact that my mother was indeed developing a serious hobby habit, but I couldn’t begin to tell you why.
I somehow managed to get through the rest of the week with almost no interaction with Ex 13. Tuesday and Thursday he had late nights and I got sleepy early. Wednesday I claimed to be working a surveillance but went to the movies instead, and Friday I opted to use the Avoidance Method™ for a more professional matter.
A light shone in Vivien Blake’s apartment, backlighting her silhouette in the window. She had the hunched posture of someone studying. There was no legal parking with a visual so I edged my car perpendicular to the palm-treed traffic island on Dolores Street. In a city with a dearth of legal parking, some reasonable rule-breaking has been quietly indulged. You could say that about San Francisco in general. We’ve had a naked guy roaming downtown for years.
I sat in my car, listening to a music-appreciation podcast that Henry had loaded into my iPod. It was as dull as I expected, but I promised to give it a chance. I wondered if five minutes qualified. But then Vivien extinguished her desk lamp, sparing me any more unnecessary educating. Five minutes after her apartment went dark, Vivien was walking east on Twentieth Street and I had to decide whether to follow her in the car (in case she hopped a cab) or hoof it. Since the Mission is rife with young people and booze-soaked establishments, I assumed she would stay in the vicinity. I left my car in the not-so-legal spot and followed subject on foot.