by Steve Brewer
I checked my watch. Seven o’clock. I figured there wouldn’t be any activity before eight A.M. at the earliest, but I’d wanted to make sure. I sat in the car, sipping coffee and trying to convince myself that I was a TV detective on an important stakeout. It didn’t work. The thing is, on TV you never see a detective sit in a car for hours. After all, they only got an hour to solve the whole case. At worst, you get a time-dissolve, and then the quarry emerges from the house.
In real life it doesn’t work that way. I sat there sipping coffee and looking in the rear-view mirror, and by eight o’clock I was bored silly, I had a stiff neck, and I had to take a terrific piss.
The front door opened at 8:05.I was all tensed up and ready to go, but it wasn’t Harold. It was Barbara and the kid.
MacAullif had given me a snapshot of Barbara and Harold, which would have been helpful in case I’d happened to confuse them with some other young couple with a seven-year-old kid who happened to live at the same address, which gives you some idea of MacAullif’s estimation of my detective skills.
I must say the picture didn’t do her justice. Barbara MacAullif Dunleavy was a knockout. Short brown hair, round pink cheeks, soft eyes, and a figure that wouldn’t quit, as a tough detective would say. And all of that through the rear-view mirror. I would have loved to have turned around and taken a better look, but my prudence and/or cowardice forbade it.
The kid was cute too, by the way, but then, all seven-year-old kids are. The mom was something else. Jesus Christ, I thought, so this is MacAullif’s daughter. Who would have thought it?
Barbara went to the garage and swung up the huge double door. Inside were a Chevy station wagon and a Mercedes convertible. I knew Barbara and the kid were going to get into the wagon. They did. I cursed Harold Dunleavy for a sexist pig. Barbara would have looked great in the convertible.
The station wagon pulled out of the driveway, hung a left, passed me and drove on down the street.
O.K., ace detective, put that down in your notebook: “8:05—mother drives kid to school.”
I sat there, feeling stupider by the minute. It didn’t help, having to take that piss.
At 8:25 the front door opened and a man came out. About thirty, 5’ 10”, one hundred sixty pounds, dark hair, blue eyes. I checked the photograph. Son of a bitch. It was him. Harold Dunleavy. The perpetrator himself. I’d done it. I’d identified him.
Harold Dunleavy got in his car, pulled out of the driveway, turned left, drove past me, and headed back toward town. I gave him a head start, then pulled out and tagged along.
There’s a trick to following someone in a car. Unfortunately, I don’t know it. However, in this instance, there was a saving grace. A stockbroker living in the suburbs with his wife and kid doesn’t expect to be tailed on his way to work.
Harold drove into downtown Atlantic City, drove down Atlantic Avenue and pulled into a parking lot. I was lucky to find a meter. The meter said no parking between eight and nine A.M. It was only 8:45, but I figured I couldn’t be fussy. I also figured if I got a ticket it would serve me right.
Harold came out of the parking lot, crossed the street and went into an office building.
I whipped out my pocket notebook and checked. Sure enough, that was the address MacAullif had given me for Harold’s firm.
I didn’t follow Harold into the building. I didn’t want him to see me, and there would have been no point. I just stood on the sidewalk, cursing Harold, cursing MacAullif and cursing myself.
I stomped off to a diner down the street, went in the men’s room, took the piss of my life and stomped back out again, without even feeling guilty that I hadn’t ordered anything.
There was a pay phone on the corner across from the office building. I went to it and called Rosenberg & Stone.
Wendy/Cheryl answered the phone. “Good morning, Stanley, right on time,” she said.
“I believe in punctuality,” I told her.
“You went out of beeper range,” she said accusingly, as if that were my fault. “Richard was furious. We had to stay late last night and call every hotel in town.”
“I’m glad you found me,” I lied.
“Yes but it’s a real nuisance, having you out of beeper range. Richard wants you to call in four times a day, at nine, twelve, three and five.”
“I’ll set my watch.”
“What?”
“No problem. You got anything for me?”
She did. Two more photo assignments, vaguely in the area, confirming my suspicion that Richard was paying me back by loading me up with the shit. I didn’t care. Having figured out what was going on, I knew there was nothing urgent about the photo assignments, so it didn’t matter when I did ’em. I figured I’d knock off as many as I could on my way back. I certainly couldn’t do ’em now. Not while I was on this terribly important assignment.
I got off the phone with Wendy/Cheryl and called Alice. Predictably, she was pissed I hadn’t called her the night before, but delighted to discover I wasn’t dead.
I told her about my adventures in the casinos. She voiced the opinion that I was an ignoramus. I had to concur. I promised her I would lay off gambling and concentrate on the very important MacAullif’s daughter case. I also told her I was defraying my expenses by knocking off photo assignments for Richard. That mollified her somewhat. I was glad. It sure as hell didn’t mollify me.
I got off the phone and went back to take up my vigil. Nothing much seemed to be happening. The front of Harold’s office building looked pretty much the same as it had when he’d gone in.
For lack of anything better to do I checked my car. I hadn’t gotten a ticket, but the parking meter was beginning to look hungry.
I checked it out, something I hadn’t bothered to do when I’d been keeping Harold in sight.
It was an hour meter. It said: “1 dime = 30 minutes.” Underneath it said: “For your convenience: 1 quarter = 1 hour.”
I blinked. I looked again. Yes, I’d read it right. Only in Atlantic City, where all machines are designed to rip people off, could you consider it convenient to be ripped off for a nickel.
I fished in my pocket. All I had was quarters. I didn’t have any dimes.
I was pissed off at the parking meter, and I didn’t want to give in.
There was a newsstand across the street. I figured I could run in there, give ’em two quarters and ask for five dimes. But I figured if I did, Harold would probably come out and I’d miss him. Besides, the guy probably wouldn’t give ’em to me unless I bought something. I’d have to buy a candy bar to get change. I didn’t want a candy bar. Shit.
I put a quarter in the meter. I felt like an asshole.
Three quarters later Harold emerged from the building with another young man, similarly dressed in suit and tie.
I followed them two blocks down Atlantic Avenue, where they went into a restaurant. Gee, I thought. I think I can figure this one out.
Forty-five minutes later they emerged, walked back to Harold’s office building and went in. I was glad. It was just time for me to shove another quarter in the meter.
It was about 2:30 and I was really getting fed up when Harold came out of the building again. This time he was alone. He set off down Atlantic Avenue.
I still had a good half hour on the meter, but I didn’t know how long this was going to take, so I shoved another quarter in just to be sure, and set off after him.
Harold walked about a half dozen blocks and then turned onto Tennessee Avenue, heading south. My pulse quickened. Great. He was heading for the Boardwalk and the casinos.
Two doors down the street, however, he went into an office building. I couldn’t go into the lobby with him, of course, so I watched from across the street until he got into the elevator. As soon as the elevator doors closed, I raced across the street and into the lobby.
I watched the elevator indicator to see which floor he got off. Unfortunately, that turned out to be another one of those things that works great in the movies but s
ucks in real life. There’d been people in the elevator with him, and the elevator stopped on four of the five floors.
I checked the call board in the lobby. The tenants in the building were largely lawyers, real estate brokers and, yes, stockbrokers.
I waited outside the building for forty-five minutes. Toward the end I started getting antsy, wondering if I was going to get a parking ticket on top of everything else. Then Harold came out again. He walked right back to Atlantic Avenue, back to his building and in.
I fed another quarter into the parking meter.
I considered strangling MacAullif.
Five o’clock, Harold emerged from the building, went to the parking lot and got his car. I wondered who’d paid more for his parking, Harold with his lot or me with my quarters.
I followed Harold up Route 30 back to Absecon and home.
The double doors to the garage were open and the station wagon was already inside. Harold pulled in beside it, got out of the car, pulled the double doors down, and locked the garage.
I figured Harold was through for the night.
I figured I was too. Jesus Christ.
I went back to the hotel and called MacAullif. He didn’t seem a bit disappointed with my report.
“Ninety percent of surveillance is waiting,” MacAullif said. “We do it all the time. Just stick with it. You’re doing fine.”
I hung up the phone and called Rosenberg & Stone for the fourth time that day. They seemed to have run out of moldy photo assignments. I assured Wendy/Cheryl I was on the job, promised to call first thing in the morning and hung up.
I called Alice. I got to talk to Tommie about camp. Swimming had been great, but they hadn’t played baseball.
Alice got back on the phone. I told her what I’d accomplished. As usual, she was sympathetic and supportive.
“So, what are you doing tonight?” she asked.
I hadn’t even thought of it. I told her so.
“I hope you’re not going to gamble,” she said.
I told her I thought I’d had my fill.
I hung up the phone and lay down on the bed, exhausted. Jesus, what a day of doing nothing. All right, what the hell am I gonna do tonight? I mean, here I am, footloose and fancy free in Atlantic City, with the evening stretched out before me. Aside from gambling, what sort of pleasures could a gentleman seek?
The thing is, I’m not the type of guy to cheat on my wife. Now please don’t take that to be any chest-thumping declaration of overwhelming virtue on my part. True, I’m a happily married man and I love my wife and kid and all that, but that’s not the only reason. The fact is, I am scared to death of women. They are an inscrutable species. I don’t understand them. In my opinion, any guy who claims he understands women is either a fool or a liar. Oh, sure, some guy may be considered a great ass-man and do well with women, but understand them—I don’t think so. Women are incredible creatures. They have an almost magical quality. I don’t know what it is—if I did, it wouldn’t be magical—but they have it. And they all have it, from my wife right on down to the gum-chewing ticket seller in the movie theater.
So chasing after women isn’t quite my style. Oh, that’s not to say I haven’t thought about it. Like Jimmy Carter, I have lusted in my heart many times. I have my fantasies. One of them has always been becoming so successful a writer that starlets and groupies and what-have-you were constantly throwing themselves at my feet. This is a very pleasant fantasy. My wife and kid don’t enter into it, incidentally. In the fantasy, they just conveniently aren’t there. That’s the nice thing about a fantasy. Reality doesn’t have to intrude.
That particular fantasy sustained me for many years.
Then along came AIDS.
I must say, I resent AIDS. I realize that’s an incredibly boorish and insensitive statement, sort of on a par with saying, “Lepers make me nervous.” But it happens to be the truth. I resent AIDS. I mean, here’s a reality so harsh, so cruel, so brutal and so graphic that it does intrude on the fantasy. And that’s the unkindest cut of all.
I remember back in the days when sex was young and innocent. It used to be, if you had sex, you might get the clap, in which case you’d get a shot and have to take it easy for a week. Then it got a little worse: if you had sex, you might get herpes—you couldn’t get rid of it, but it wasn’t that bad: a lot of people had it, and you could all kind of itch together.
Now, you have sex and you die.
AIDS has gotten so frightening they’re even advertising condoms on TV. To me, this is mindboggling. When I was a kid, you couldn’t even find a condom. Druggists kept them hidden under the counter. If you wanted one, you had to ask for it. For a pimply-faced kid, that took a lot of guts. And you’ll recall, I was never long on guts.
They didn’t call them condoms then, either. We kids called ’em rubbers, of course, but that was slang. The proper names were contraceptives (for prevention of pregnancy), or prophylactics (for prevention of disease). A contraceptive or prophylactic or rubber was like a thin, transparent balloon. One looked at it and thought, “Jesus Christ, this is the only thing standing between me knocking up some girl, dropping out of school and fucking up my entire life?” And then one usually wound up filling the damn thing up with water and dropping it out the window on a passing classmate, which, while not quite as much fun as having sex, was infinitely safer.
But that was contraceptives and prophylactics. Today we have condoms, which I hope would be tougher, seeing as how they have a more important job to do, keeping you from getting dead. They seem tougher, somehow. Even the name sounds tougher. CONDOM. It sounds like a steel-belted radial. It inspires confidence. CON-DOM.
I can recall back in my youth, on one of those few occasions when I did actually wind up having sex, I used two contraceptives, just to be sure. I’m sure I only would have needed one condom.
At any rate, I wasn’t going to be chasing any women in Atlantic City. Because, when the cowards line up to be counted, they can count me in. And I’ll tell you something. In this new AIDS society we live in, they can talk about safe sex all they like. But I am such a big coward that, as far as I’m concerned, in my opinion, the only truly safe sex is masturbation.
With a condom.
I went to the movies.
9.
NEXT MORNING, BRIGHT and early, feeling like a complete asshole, I drove out to take up my vigil in front of the Dunleavy house.
I cruised by the house slowly at ten of eight. The garage doors were closed, both cars presumably still inside.
I drove on by to take up my position under the oak tree. Only I couldn’t do it. There was a car parked right in the spot. Great, I thought. What else can go wrong?
I drove on by, hung a right, drove around the block, and came up on the house again. This time, instead of driving past it, I stopped a few houses down the other way. It wasn’t nearly as good a position. In the first place, there was no overhanging tree to shield me. In the second place, I had to look straight out the window to see the house, instead of being able to glance into the rear-view mirror. But beggars can’t be choosers. Besides, by now I figured I had the routine down fairly well.
Sure enough, 8:05, Barbara and the kid came out, opened the garage doors, got in the station wagon and pulled out.
Hot stuff. Log it in the notebook.
I watched the station wagon drive off As it went by, the car that had been parked under the oak tree in my spot pulled out and drove off too.
Coincidence?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Well, fuck Harold, I thought. Odds were he was just going to work anyway.
I pulled out and tagged along.
It took less than half a mile to confirm my suspicions. During that stretch the station wagon made five or six turns. The car that had been parked in my spot made them too. So did I, for that matter.
We made quite a procession. It seemed like overkill, somehow, the three of us, all driving one kid to school.
/> The car I was following was a nondescript, beat-up Chevy of a bluish color, not too old, not too new, just the sort of thing a real detective would drive. I couldn’t see the guy driving it very well, just the back of his head, which was enough to tell me he had dark hair and was bald on top. I hoped to hell he wouldn’t spot me. I realized there was no reason that he should. After all, he was concentrating on following the girl. He had no reason to suspect he was wearing a tail.
The station wagon pulled up in front of an elementary school, and the kid got out and went in. The station wagon drove off. The driver of the Chevy and I, who had been discreetly parked half a block and a block, respectively, down the road, pulled out and gave chase.
The station wagon went through a series of turns, and I realized we were headed back the way we’d come. Sure enough, ten minutes later we wound up back at the house.
Barbara pulled back into the garage. Harold’s car was already gone. I figured he’d gone to work. At least, I certainly hoped he had.
The Chevy went on by and took up its station under the oak tree again. I stopped toward the other end of the block, as before.
Barbara got out of the car and went into the house.
We sat there for two hours.
Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. I felt like going down to the Chevy and asking the guy, “Would you like to play some gin rummy while we wait?” I rejected the notion.
I had just realized I had forgotten to call Rosenberg & Stone this morning and was now in deep shit, when a truck came down the street and stopped in front of the Dunleavy house. The letters on the door said, “JOHNSON’S TREE SURGEONS.” I thought it would be neat if it turned out the oak tree my buddy in the Chevy had aced me out of had Dutch elm disease, and the guy in the truck pruned it all away.
It didn’t happen. The guy got out of the truck. He was a young guy, early twenties, with blond, curly hair, wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans. He looked tanned and healthy. He went up to the front door of the Dunleavy house and rang the bell. The door opened, and he went in.
My friend in the Chevy got out of his car. He looked around him, somewhat furtively, I thought. He couldn’t see me, scrunched down in the front seat of my car. But I could see him. He had a thin face, with a thin, hawk nose, and somewhat protruding lips. He reminded me of a weasel.