Save Me from Dangerous Men--A Novel

by S. A. Lelchuk

  This time I didn’t hesitate. “Trick question. Marlowe works L.A. If that rotten, thieving bastard headed for San Francisco I’m calling Sam Spade.”

  There were approving nods. Abe Greenberg looked up from spreading cream cheese, fingers working the knife across his bagel with the care of a violinist. He was the founder of the ZEBRAS, and, happily adrift somewhere in his eighties, probably the oldest. He’d had a long career as a physicist at the nearby Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and people said he’d forgotten more about nuclear research than most in his profession ever knew. When it came to mysteries, he seemed even more knowledgeable. “Okay, here we go, for all the marbles. You have to beat the goddamn Commies before they take over the world. George Smiley or—”

  “Just stop right there. Smiley’s the only man for me. Now look, are you gonna buy some books or just sit around talking all day?”

  Abe cheerfully ignored me as he cut lox into postage-stamp-size squares and applied them to his bagel as though plastering a collage. His blue eyes were bright under unkempt gray eyebrows and a corduroy beret. “Lisbeth, why so busy? Would you like to request use of our deducing abilities? We all need help sometimes.”

  I ran a hand through my hair and tried not to smile. If I ever allowed Abe to suspect that I found him even the least bit charming he’d never leave me alone. “I can’t afford your rates, Abe. And stop calling me that.”

  “Anything you need, Lisbeth, we’re here for you.”

  “Just save me one of those bagels.”

  “Sesame, right? Light schmear?”

  “You know me so well.”

  “He doesn’t ask what my favorite bagels are,” Laney put in.

  “With all that pipe smoke fogging up the air you wouldn’t know a sesame bagel if it bit you on the tuchus,” Abe shot back.

  “Okay, sadly some of us have to work,” I put in. The ZEBRAS moved at their own pace. When I had the time, I could easily spend an hour bantering as we tried to stump each other with esoteric mystery and detective references, but this wasn’t one of those days. “Speaking of which,” I added pointedly, “we’re closing soon.”

  Abe threw me a wink and cupped an ear. “Going a bit deaf, I’m afraid. I didn’t quite catch that last bit.”

  I shook my head in mock despair and went upstairs. The day almost at its end.

  My upstairs office was plainly furnished with some chairs and a beat-up metal desk. In the corner was a steel safe, next to some struggling houseplants. I’d tried an aquarium once but the cat had gotten up there one calamitous morning. After that, we figured one pet was enough. The back window faced out to Telegraph, and a cube of four black-and-white television monitors sat stacked on a file cabinet. I liked to know what was going on. The only decorations were framed pictures and portraits of favorite authors: Thomas Hardy, Carson McCullers, Graham Greene, Flannery O’Connor, George Eliot. I liked looking at their faces. Some people prayed, went to synagogues or mosques or churches to find support. I had my writers. Wise men and women, even long dead. I liked to think they were capable of guidance nonetheless.

  I slid a couple of inches of scotch into a mug. It was almost five and there was a seven o’clock showing of Double Indemnity. I’d finish up the time log and invoice for Brenda Johnson and then take off. My favorite Chinese restaurant was a block from the theater. I looked out the window, watching people pass on Telegraph. A couple holding hands. A homeless guy pushing a shopping cart. A group of laughing undergrads. A silver Tesla pulled up and parked across the street. The vehicles were all over San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but scarcer in Berkeley. Only so many people spending $100,000 on an electric car.

  A man holding a briefcase got out. The man squinted toward the bookstore, then jaywalked across the street. I turned back to the time log. The details drove me crazy: times, mileage, locations. But divorce cases had a tendency to end up in a courtroom, and I’d been called to testify more than once. In court, documentation and precision ruled.

  The intercom on my desk crackled. “Nikki? Man here to see you.”

  “He say what he wants?”

  I heard fuzzy laughter through the intercom. “Do they ever?”

  “He can come up.”

  On one of the monitors I watched Jess talk silently to the Tesla owner. She walked him over to the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. On another monitor I watched the man climb upstairs with brisk, energetic steps. He disappeared from the frame and the next monitor picked him up at the door. There was a knock. I got up and opened the door.

  I was greeted with a broad smile and an avalanche of enthusiasm. “Nikki Griffin? How do you do? I’m Gregg Gunn. Call me Gregg.” He glanced around. “Oh, Nikki. We’re going to get along so well, I can feel it. This street—this charming little bookshop—it’s all so wonderfully seedy.”

  “Seedy,” I repeated. “That’s the look I gave the decorators. Come on in, I suppose.”

  That was how Gregg Gunn entered my life.

  10

  “You’ll have to understand,” I said. “You caught me as I was heading out.”

  “I’ll be no time at all!” my visitor said, sitting down unprompted.

  The first thing I noticed about Gregg Gunn was his energy. He was constantly moving. His hands, his feet. He wore fitted selvedge jeans and black New Balance sneakers and a button-down blue shirt. Late forties, an athletic build, curly sandy hair, clean-shaven. A long time ago someone had told me that the best way to guess a man’s worth was by looking at his shoes and his watch. A lot of rich people liked to dress casual. A suit, even a nice one, didn’t mean much anymore. Especially in Silicon Valley. Gunn’s sneakers were nothing special. Along with the jeans and button-down or polo shirt, the de facto uniform of the Valley, from CEOs to interns. The watch peeked out under the shirt cuff. Soft gold dial, leather strap.

  I took another look. A Patek Philippe. Meaning it probably cost about as much as his car. Definitely not something the interns had.

  “You don’t talk much, do you?” He held up a finger. “Wait! Don’t tell me. ISTP, right?”

  “Huh?” I looked at Gunn, confused.

  “ISTP,” he repeated proudly. “You have to be, right? I’d bet anything.”

  “IS-what now?”

  He gave me a funny look as though I was teasing him. “Don’t tell me you don’t know your type?”

  “My type? You mean, like tall, dark, and handsome?”

  He laughed. “I love it! You truly are a diamond in the rough. Take Myers-Briggs sometime, Nikki. ISTP, I guarantee it.” He glanced around affably. “I can’t remember the last time I was in a bookstore. And people still come in? To buy books?”

  “As crazy as it sounds. What can I do for you?”

  His knee bounced up and down like a jackhammer. “I’m correct in my belief that you sometimes handle … delicate work?”

  “All I know about delicate,” I said, “is that it’s a setting on my dryer.”

  “You do have a reputation for discretion.”

  “This line of work, you don’t get too far by writing in to the Chronicle about what you had for breakfast.”

  He switched knees. Bouncing the other one now. He hadn’t been still a moment since he’d walked in. “With lawyers, of course, there is attorney-client privilege.”

  I nodded. It was a common question. People came to me with private problems. They wanted the problems fixed. They also wanted the problems to stay private.

  “But you’re not an attorney.”

  I spread my hands in a what-can-I-do gesture. “Sorry to disappoint. But if you need a lawyer, San Francisco is right next door. I bet you could find yourself one or two.”

  Gunn laughed. Now the original knee was bouncing along like an off-kilter metronome. “The last thing I need is another lawyer. I have too many already. I just need to know how you handle information that is of an extremely confidential nature. Call me paranoid, but one can’t be too careful.”

  I sat back in my chair. “You walked into
my office. You need something, you tell me. Maybe I can help. Maybe not.” I gestured, taking in the plain white walls, the plants and secondhand furniture. “No megaphones or microphones in this place. I get subpoenaed? Let me tell you loud and clear, I don’t do perjury. Not for love or money. So if you have a body on your hands and you’re looking to dump it? Save your time and go somewhere else. Anyway. I got sick of kick-the-can back in grade school. You talk to me, or not, Mr. Gunn. It’s all the same.”

  He took this in. “Okay. I’ll trust you.” He paused. “But I must ask you to sign this.” He opened his briefcase, removed a packet, and handed it to me. I took the papers and flipped through them. A nondisclosure. This one happened to be about ten times longer than normal. I didn’t bother to read through it. Just set it aside.

  “You’re not going to sign it?”

  “I might sign it,” I said. “And I might not. Depends on a few things. Including what exactly you want me to do.” I had pegged him for a blackmail job. He seemed the type. A male or female prostitute with an illicit video, maybe a rogue coke dealer—some enterprising and immoral figure realizing they’d stumbled across a gold mine in the form of Mr. Gregg Gunn.

  He was on his feet. “Okay,” he said. “But I should begin with some context.”

  I nodded. Trying to resist the urge to check my watch.

  “I’m the CEO,” he explained, “of a company down in Sunnyvale called Care4 that plans to revolutionize childcare. We make monitors and sensors that can live-stream a child’s every sound and gesture to a parent via cloud-based wearable technology.” He reached into his briefcase again, this time handing me a small white object that resembled a golf ball. There was a slight indentation on one side so it could be placed on a surface and not roll. “Motion and voice activated, longest battery life on the market, HD video, multiple microphones for stereo audio, widescreen lens with digital zoom.” He sounded proud enough that he could have been talking about an actual child.

  “Looks good. When I have kids, I’ll come find you,” I said, turning the little ball around in my hands. There was a tiny aperture in the sphere, barely visible. A lens. I tossed the thing into the air, caught it. The material felt like some kind of polymer and was very light.

  I handed it back to Gunn but he shook his head. “Call it a souvenir. I have plenty more.” He smiled easily. “I hand those suckers out like business cards.”

  I shrugged and put the thing on a nearby bookshelf. “So you sell cameras?”

  “In a sense. We like to think of ourselves as being a communications company that happens to be in tech. We sell communication. That’s what today’s busy mothers and fathers crave—constant communication and uninterrupted access. Four million babies born each year in this country alone. The daycare and childcare services market in the U.S. is over fifty billion. Care4 stands at the crossroads of technology and the fundamental humanity of parenting—”

  I felt like I was drowning. “Save the pitch. Whatever I can do, it’s not going to be writing you a check.”

  He stopped, startled, and laughed. “You’re right. What we do doesn’t matter, does it? The point is, there’s a huge amount of money at stake. And unfortunately, in this day and age, corporate espionage has never been a greater problem.”

  I glanced at my watch. Dinner was out. I could get some popcorn at the theater.

  “The Chinese and the Russians are the worst,” Gunn was saying. “But these days it’s everywhere. All over the world, gangs discovering that cybercrime is a lot easier than trying to move heroin over a border.” His fingers tapped his knee. “It’s a cesspool, Nikki. Everyone willing to steal, cheat, bribe.”

  I could have made some guesses by that point. I didn’t. The point wasn’t to convince a client you were smart. The point was to shut up and find out what they wanted.

  “Recently,” Gunn went on, “we have had crucial intellectual property stolen. We suspect a specific employee is taking it.”

  “And that’s where I come in.”

  “That’s where you come in, yes.”

  “A question.” I didn’t wait for an okay. “You run a big company down in the Valley, but you’re here talking to me. Why aren’t you at one of the big firms that specialize in this?”

  “Good question.” For the first time he sat still. “I could go to one of those firms, but they’re in my world—we move in the same circles. I can’t risk even being seen visiting one of them or people will suspect there’s a problem. That’s all it takes for word to get out that we’re in trouble. There are sharks everywhere, circling, looking for weakness. You see, Nikki, we’ve received several rounds of funding and we’re on the verge of receiving our last private investments before a public offering. If investors spook now it would be catastrophic.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “I need this employee followed. We have to learn what she’s taking and who she’s giving it to.”

  “Why not just fire her?”

  Gunn nodded as if he had expected the question. “I wish it were that easy. But then whoever she’s working with will keep probing for another weak spot until they find someone else. We need to learn who is trying to steal from us.”

  It had been a slow month. I had the time. I shrugged. “Sure.”

  Gunn smiled. “Wonderful. How do you bill?”

  “Retainer up front,” I said. “Hourly or daily rates after that. Depending on what I have to do, how far from home it takes me.”

  He turned to his briefcase a third time and handed a bulging manila envelope to me. I opened it and saw stacks of green bills. I pulled out one of the stacks, seeing “100” on the corner.

  “That’s twenty thousand dollars. Is that sufficient to begin?”

  Usually my retainers were a few hundred dollars. So much for the movie. “Can I offer you a drink? Water? Scotch? Coffee?” I figured twenty grand bought him a drink.

  Gunn shook his head. “I have.” He took out a bottle filled with a murky green liquid. “Cold-pressed juice. The vegetables all come from a sustainable farm down in Gilroy. Want me to send you a case?”

  “No thanks. I’ve never been able to drink my dinner. Anyway, tell me who I’m following.”

  He took a big glug of cold-pressed whatever. “Sure. But first, I really do need you to sign that document.”

  Was he telling me everything? Of course not. Then again, they usually didn’t. With any luck I could make a decently quick job of it and leave my corporate espionage career behind.

  I accepted the pen he handed me and reached for the papers.

  11

  Following another human being was both simple and incredibly complicated. Simple, because following was just a basic set of actions. Especially if someone didn’t suspect they were being followed. In a car, drive after them. On foot, walk after them. Get on the same bus. Sit in the same restaurant. Complicated, though, because people could be unpredictable and it was a big world, one that was increasingly easy to move around in. Someone could jump in a cab, go to an Amtrak or Greyhound station. Or an airport. A person could be thousands of miles away in a matter of hours.

  And with a tail you only got one chance.

  I’d lived in California my whole life but still didn’t really get Silicon Valley: an unplanned constellation of cities with San Jose roughly in the center. Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Mountain View, Milpitas, Palo Alto, Menlo Park. Each with the same bland little downtown strip of shops and restaurants. Impossible to tell when you had left one and reached another. Endless pavement, endless freeways. Building after building, vast glassy complexes, arid hills. Often passing signs for some household name, Yahoo!, eBay, Apple. More often passing a hundred names that meant nothing. They might someday. They might not.

  Care4 was in Sunnyvale, a large building at the edge of a huge office park that must have held ten other companies. The motif seemed to be black tinted glass. A parking lot full of late-model cars. Tech paid. It was hotter than in Berkeley, awa
y from the chilly breezes and fickle weather of the Bay. I started working my way through the parking lot. I had a make and a license plate, plus the employee, Karen Li, drove a distinctive car. A red Porsche Boxster convertible. License plate 5LA7340. I cruised up and down the rows. Not a small parking lot, but not huge. I wasn’t searching an airport lot with a hundred different lettered and numbered sections. I saw a red convertible but it was a Mustang. I drove down a few more rows and then I saw it. A little red roadster. Soft top, jaunty, fun to drive. At least as fun as anything else on four wheels. Cars had never been my thing. I stopped nearby and looked around. No one in sight, the employees hard at work inside. I strolled in the direction of the Boxster and dropped a pen I was holding as I walked past. It rolled near the back tire. I squatted down by the Boxster’s rear bumper, one hand fumbling for the pen, the other reaching under, toward the chassis. I felt the powerful magnet grip onto the metal underside of the car.

  A minute later I was gone. I’d passed a little plaza on my way in. Nail salon, Starbucks, fast-food restaurants. I ordered iced coffee from the Starbucks, bought a newspaper, and settled in to wait.

  Following someone used to mean turn by turn, but these days, an average civilian could buy products that would have made a Stasi agent sick with envy. Voice recorders and hidden cameras, keystroke loggers that recorded and transmitted every letter typed on a computer. And GPS trackers. I’d never felt the need to own a lot of the modern technology being sold. Not out of any deep philosophical belief. I just didn’t see how fitness trackers or toasters that connected to the Internet would make me happier. But technology had its uses. Instead of standing in eighty-degree heat with a pair of binoculars, I was sitting in an air-conditioned café working my way through my second iced coffee. The device I had used was barely bigger than a matchbox, enclosed in a weatherproof magnetic case. The batteries were good for close to a month and it transmitted to an old iPad Jess had given me. The display showed a map, and a dot on the map.