It was an honest question. For a moment Ben had forgotten what task he had assigned the private investigator. The good night’s sleep had momentarily scrubbed his brain of all concern.
Mental note to Ben: You’ve moved on. Bravo.
“Stuart George Raymo.”
The name snapped Ben back to consciousness. His stomach turned slightly. Or was it just morning hunger triggered by the sweet smell of breakfast cooking?
“You wanted to know what this Raymo guy was doing in August of ninety-five,” confirmed Woody. “The email?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” remembered Ben.
“Stuart George Raymo of Carson City was doing eighteen months in an Idaho pen for possession and burglary.”
“Sure about that?” asked Ben.
“Already faxed the sheets to your office,” said Woody. “Should I refax ’em to the house?”
“No,” said Ben. He was sitting up now, legs hanging off the bed with his toes brushing the hardwood floor. The hard sleep had left him with a stiff neck. He unconsciously kneaded it with the knuckles of his right hand.
“August ninety-five,” Ben repeated, wondering if he had his dates right. As if Ben could have forgotten the date of the most horrific event in any person’s life, let alone his.
“What happened back then?” asked Woody.
“Just... something,” answered Ben. Instinct told him to end the discussion. He sought help from Nina. “Look. One of the girls needs me so I gotta go.”
“Rest is in an email. Talk to ya.” Woody hung up. Ben shoved his mortal memories and plastered on a smile for the near-ten-year-old.
“What about blue markers?” asked Ben.
“Purple markers!” barked Nina.
It was morning. A radiant new Southern California day. And Ben was driving. He slowed at the corner of Alamo and Stearns. It was 8:14 on a Wednesday. Ben had the red light at that intersection timed to forty-eight seconds. He looked on his dash. There sat his BlackBerry that held his phone book, calendar, and email. He knew that in the forty-eight seconds allotted by the red light he could safely check his email. Or he could dial a number and let the Bluetooth do the rest so he could drive and speak hands-free, reducing the risk of accident to himself and others. That was the smartest option. The one recommended by everyone from Triple A to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Safe was always an option.
Ben’s daily credo. He repeated the same ad nauseam to clients and friends at nearly every opportunity.
Ben chose to review his email. It was a three-click move. All with his thumb: button, scroll, button. It took all of two seconds. Then three more seconds to scan the little yellow “unopened mail” icons and their senders, leaving forty-three seconds to choose a message and read it. Ben unconsciously chose an email from Woody Bell. Only Woody’s missives were always sent as attachments. The speed documents downloaded depended entirely on the quality of the mobile connection. In those quiet seconds Ben watched the phone’s progress bar and remembered a study that claimed drivers were far less distracted by their cell phones than other things such as reaching for items in the glove box, applying makeup, wolfing down a Jumbo Jack while keeping the secret sauce from staining a dress shirt, and—worst of all—maintaining a state of peaceful détente between backseat-riding siblings.
Ben hadn’t planned to actually read Woody’s email while waiting for the signal to change. He only wanted to peruse it for importance then determine if he needed to pull off the road so he could safely digest it. The connection appeared clean and efficient. Ten seconds to download. Ben glanced upward to make certain the signal was still red, then down to the screen on his BlackBerry.
47... 48... 49... 50... 51...
The light remained red as Ben counted in his head. I must have miscalculated. Either that or an emergency vehicle was bounding down Alamo Street. The local firemen and cops had transponders in their vehicles that automatically extended the “green time” of traffic signals, thus extending the “red time” at the intersecting boulevard. Ben looked left, then right. He saw no emergency vehicles nor heard any sirens. Still, that signal remained cherry red.
So with his BlackBerry still in his right hand, Ben glanced downward at Woody Bell’s delivered email. The note was succinct and easily read without so much as a single blink:
Found something Josie missed. Stew Raymo Remodeling and General Contracting. North Hollywood. 818-555-5999.
Ben blinked and reread the twelve-word message. He found himself stuck on the word Stew. As in goulash, he thought. A mishmash of meat and vegetables. Josie had fine-tuned her searches on everything from Stu to Stewart. But not the definition of last night’s mélange sealed and refrigerated in Tupperware.
Stew? What kind of man calls himself Stew?
Then came the scream. It was Ben’s scream. A sharp shock-of-a-noise that escaped his lungs—a result of the auto-electric jolt served courtesy of his central nervous system in response to the giant air horn blowing at his rear bumper. When Ben’s eyes finally found the rearview mirror, all he could make out was the chromium grill of a semi-tractor trailer rig with the name “Peterbilt” spelled backwards.
The traffic light had somehow clicked to green while Ben was in a fog. Exactly how long it had been since the signal had turned? Two seconds? Five? Ten? Before Ben could switch from the brake pedal to the accelerator, the air horn blew again. And this time Ben heard every frequency. The sonics of the air horn made the Volvo’s windows hum while sending another bolt of adrenalin directly into Ben’s foot. The pedal hit the floorboard and rocketed the car forward. Normally, Ben’s good driving habits would have had him checking both directions before pulling into the intersection. But history had taught Ben that habits, good or bad, were easily nullified by a hasty helping of primal fear. His lizard brain had ordered his body to get away—and fast.
Ben eased off the gas only after he had spun the Volvo onto the freeway on-ramp and the diesel rig had disappeared from all his mirrors. The interior temperature of the Volvo was a cool sixty-seven degrees Fahrenheit. Still, Ben twisted the air conditioner hard to the left until the arrow was pointed at the snowflake icon. He needed it cooler because he had already sweat through his dress shirt.
“Hello,” answered a voice that sounded hurried and out of breath. Ben had pulled off the freeway at Tampa Avenue and found a parking space in the shadow of a Whole Foods Market. Without planning what he was going to say, let alone his true motive for making the call, Ben had dialed the number Woody had emailed him. After five rings, a woman answered. When Ben asked to speak with Stew, she informed him that Stew was on site and could be reached by his cell phone. She politely paused, breathing heavily into the phone until Ben said he was ready to write down the number. Then in the nanosecond before Ben was about to say “ready,” the out-of-breath woman asked, “You a client?”
“Just lookin’ to talk to Stew,” Ben answered, almost too cryptically.
The lull that followed sounded anything but patient. The woman’s heavy breathing had vanished, replaced by an air of suspicion as she delivered the number. Wife, thought Ben. Or jealous girlfriend. Ben’s vague response to her simple question had set off alarms in the woman.
“Why don’t I take a message for him? Just in case you don’t catch him on site.”
“I’m sure I’ll get him,” Ben assured her. “No big deal. Thanks a lot.”
Ben clicked off.
In the near silence of his car he could still hear the tone of the diesel’s air horn in some auditory memory synapse buried deep in his brain. And the poor woman, he thought. He had cold-called a number with little forethought, asked to speak with her husband, and then made it sound like he was trying to make a drug deal.
Sometimes you’re a real dumbass, Ben.
The cell number was scribbled across the front of a gas station receipt. Ben pressed it up to the windshield, letting the daylight bleed through, further blending his quick scrawl with the thermal printing on the paper.
What Ben was hoping for—wishing for even—was a feeling, a divining rod to his gut that would tell him the truth. That by simply staring at a phone number he would instinctively know if the possessor of that phone number, the man attached to that one cell phone, was the same man who had butchered his family.
But no such feeling happened. How could it? reasoned Ben. It was just a stupid phone number. Only by meeting the actual man would Ben be able to tell. He would shake the man’s hand and look him in the eye. God knows he had seen it in countless movies. Like Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone. Then Ben laughed at himself. What were the odds, anyway? Of all those Stus and Stewart Raymos Josie had unearthed, what were the chances that “Stew” Raymo, General Contractor, would be any kind of killer, let alone the man who had personally flushed all that Ben once thought he would ever love.
“This is Stew,” answered a voice that sounded like a mixture of ground glass and a lifetime of Marlboros.
“Hi. This is Martin Benjamin,” Ben lied. “I’m looking for your site but I think I have the wrong address.”
“One-three-nine-eight-eight Camellia,” said Stew. “Studio City. That do ya?”
“Yeah, I gotcha,” said Ben before Stew hung up, ending the connection as quickly as it had begun. Easy, thought Ben. The lie he had prepared would remain unwrapped. Soon enough, thought Ben. Studio City was just off the 101. A ten-minute drive. With rush hour traffic? Twenty minutes.
Then Ben would shake Stew’s hand and know.
Pamela Raymo’s stomach was grinding up a storm after the weird phone call. She chewed two Tums and chose to carry on with her self-assigned chore of cleaning out the garage. Sure, it was a guy’s job. Something the man was supposed to do on weekends between church and ball games. Pam even had a strapping hubby who swung a hammer for a living. A classic man’s man. Still, when the marital duties got divvied up in the Raymo household, somehow Pam got the garage. It was mostly her mess, anyway, Stew had argued. Old shopping bags loaded with everything from discarded kitchen utensils to years of old tax files. Quarterly, Pam would pick a sunny day, empty the garage of clutter, toss out half the junk that had built up and find shelf addresses for everything else.
But damn that Stew!
That phone call had pissed her off. The caller was cryptic and way short of forthcoming. The trust button in Pam had been pushed again. And by whom? In the aftermath she tried to convince herself that the unfamiliar voice could have belonged to anybody. A subcontractor. A lumber supplier. A building inspector. Or maybe just an old chum who didn’t think he needed to answer to his old drinking buddy’s suspicious wife.
So Pam used the garage to work up a sweat. She checked her heart rate. One hundred thirty beats per minute. Faster, she thought. Her goal was two hours at 140 b.p.m. That’s the kind of burn she could dine out on. After finishing up, she would shower and call up Stew, suggesting they eat out that night. Don Cuco’s in Toluca Lake. They would order a pair of Diet Cokes and a tub of guacamole as a starter. Then as Stew sucked the salt off the tortilla chips, he would watch the platters of margaritas roll past and recount his twelve steps to sobriety.
And count all the women you fucked that I don’t know about.
For all Pam knew, the unknown caller could have been another pissed-off boyfriend or angry husband, looking to hang Stew for his Happy Hour conquests. There were days when she wondered if Stew was going to die with his own claw hammer buried in his skull.
The phone rang. Pam reached and picked up the cordless unit on the half-ring.
“Hello.”
“It’s me,” said Stew.
“So it is.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothin’.”
“Bullshit,” called Stew. “What’d I do now?”
“I said nothin’ and that’s what I mean,” calmed Pam.
“Okay... So what are you doin’?”
“Garage.”
“Finally,” said Stew.
“You could come home and help.”
“And you could get me Mikey’s new shipping address,” goosed Stew. “Think it’s on a Post-it next to the computer.”
The garage was detached from the house. And for good reason, thought Pam. In most single-family dwellings, a garage was built for one or two cars and served as a shield against the elements. But in Pam’s world of calendar-year sunshine, the garage was brimming with junk and clutter so she could keep her house neat and free of consumer chaos. Though on the smallish side, the Raymos’ single-story house was a postcard for Martha Stewart Living. Pam even subscribed to the magazine. Every month when a new issue arrived, she would secretly puzzle over who she had become, who she wanted to be, and what the “old honeys” would think of her now.
“You got it yet?”
“No,” lied Pam.
The house had three bedrooms. A master suite add-on in the rear and two bedrooms that faced the street. One was a converted office—aka “Stew’s Room.” The other was for the baby that hadn’t yet found its way into their lives. “A room filled with hope,” Pam would call it. She had even furnished it with the fundamentals of a newborn’s necessities. If only their baby lawyer would call her back. He teased her with tales of young Russian mothers who, for a fee, were happy to give up their unwanted children to American couples. Pam cursed herself for all the abortions that had left her body able to conceive, but unable to carry a baby to term.
Stew’s Post-it was right where he said it would be. “So who called you?” Pam asked.
“Who called me when?”
“I dunno. Thirty minutes ago. Some guy. Wouldn’t say why.”
“Not a clue. Wanted to know where the site was,” said Stew, sounding incrementally annoyed. “Got plumbing inspections today. Probably him. You got Mikey’s address yet?”
Pam swiveled in Stew’s desk chair, the Post-it stuck to her chipped nails. She thought of having a mani-pedi as a reward for her efforts in the garage, but that would require first showering the stink off and applying some makeup. Not that she needed any. Her skin was tan, thirty-years-old going on ageless. Her hair was naturally blonde and short enough to be called low maintenance. All she ever needed was to shampoo it and shake it out for her to look like a million bucks. The rest of Pam was small enough to dance in a teacup. She stood barely five feet tall, but was so perfect, yet cartoonish in her proportions that in photographs, she could easily be mistaken for a six-foot swimsuit model.
Pam fanned herself with the Post-it as she guessed whether or not Stew was telling her the truth.
“Your office is a mess.”
“My office,” said Stew. “If it’s not next to the computer, try the phone.”
“You know that guy who called. His voice sounded a lot like that Pilot Guy—”
“You on that again? Jesus, Pam!”
The Pilot Guy, remembered Pam. He was shacked up with the Cheesecake Factory Hostess Girl who Stew was conveniently pounding during the hours he was supposed to be playing twilight golf with a client. When Pilot Guy suspected Hostess Girl was cheating on him he began secretly dialing every number stored in her pink, designer mobile phone. The Raymos’ home number was saved under the give-away heading, “Stew’s Ex-Porno Wife.”
“Not the same exact guy,” saved Pam. “Just the same kinda cryptic I-don’t-wanna-give-my-name-tone—”
“You wanna start a fight? Is that what this is about? C’mon, P’Amazon.”
P’Amazon. That was Stew’s pet name for his beautiful wife. When he used the word it usually sounded like he was begging for mercy. He didn’t sound guilty. So Pam decided to cut him some slack.
“Got it,” she said.
She read Stew the address on the Post-it. Before neatly replacing it next to his computer screen, she grabbed a Sharpie and drew a red heart on it. “Let’s go to Don Cuco’s tonight.”
“Sure,” he said. “Gotta go, babe.”
“Love you,” said Pam.
But Stew was gone. That was his w
ay. Gotta go and hanging up. Getting on with the next phone call or nail he had to drive. And certainly never waiting around for the gooey “love you” part.
3
STEW SNAPPED HIS Nextel shut and holstered it into the clip on his belt. For the briefest of moments he was enveloped in his bubble, his ears plugged by the sound of his guilt and rage. I should’ve just played golf, he vexed to himself. The shaming thought was counterbalanced by another more common inner voice that screamed: That nosy fucking ball-busting bitch! She fucked how many men before she met me? Five hundred? A thousand? Inside out, upside down, two ways, three ways, in one hole and out the other?
But Stew loved Pam. That much he knew. He loved the way her hair smelled at daybreak, the way she would fuck him any way he demanded, and the way she had made the second act of his life seem almost normal.
And she’s still pissed at me for banging some Cheesecake Factory girl instead of playing stupid twilight golf?
The sounds of pounding hammers penetrated Stew’s skull. Agreeably so. To him, it was the sweet cacophony of progress. A constant pitch of metal against wood, driving steel, circular saws, and hydraulic nail guns. Stew purged his anger, then with his long legs, strode across the small, residential street to stand at the bottom of the ramped driveway. Once there he briefly stopped to admire his biggest venture yet. This wasn’t one of those fast, buy it and flip it remodels that had been his recent stock in trade. This was far more ambitious. The next level.
What had once been a classic, pre-war San Fernando Valley ranch was gone but for the original dirt, a flat rectangle corralled on three sides by a rickety, ivy-covered fence. The modest, eleven-hundred-square-foot house had been replaced by a wood and steel skeleton that would soon be two stories and nearly four thousand square feet of a brand new, five-bedroom home. The financing Stew had scraped together proved enough to beat out twenty other real estate speculators in a quick-claim foreclosure auction. Stew had obtained the design and engineering schematics cheaply from an Internet site specializing in black-market blueprints. And while the new architectural footprint ate up most of the lot, there would still be room for what most Southern California buyers demanded—a swimming pool.
The Safety Expert Page 4