THE SPELLMANS STRIKE AGAIN

by Lisa Lutz

“Why can’t I get it through your thick skull? They’re fake dates. I’m going out with lawyers to improve our relationship.”

  “Why is it that half o’ what you say doesn’t make a damn bit o’ sense?”

  “Not half,” I replied. “Crunch your numbers again.”

  “You’re right,” Connor replied. “More like 60 percent.”

  “Better than a lot of people in this city,” I replied.

  “But worse than most.”

  A long silence followed. I was afraid that Connor would see this last bit in a string of family interventions as his final breaking point. I had to figure out the best way to phrase things.

  “Why don’t you look at it this way?” I suggested. “For a half hour, twice a month, I’ll be having coffee or some other kind of beverage with other men. I should point out that I meet with male clients all the time and we drink things together. And rarely do we end up having sex. Rarely.”

  Connor didn’t respond, but he did this head-nod, which meant that the fight was out of him. I leaned across the bar and kissed Connor on the cheek.

  “You’re the best Irish boyfriend I’ve ever had.”

  “That’s not funny anymore,” Connor replied, trying to fight off a smile.

  Then my phone conveniently rang.

  It was Maggie.

  “Hi, Isabel. I need a Rae extraction.”

  RAE’S OBSESSION

  Twenty minutes later I was at Maggie’s modest office near the Bryant Street courthouse, observing a standoff.

  “I would like to go home for the day,” Maggie said. “Rae would not. And apparently she is accustomed to winning these kinds of simple debates.”

  Maggie and I stood in the doorway of the file room. Rae had made a desk of the floor and encircled herself with a mass of thick, yellow files. Her attention was so wrapped up in the cases she was studying that my shouting her name elicited only a “Shhhh.”

  I flicked off the light switch.

  “Hey!”

  Rae got to her feet and flicked it back on. I flicked it off. She flicked it on again.

  Back and forth until Rae said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I was called for an extraction,” I said.

  “I have work to do,” Rae replied. “Real work. Serious work. People’s lives are at stake here.”

  “You also have home work and Maggie would like to leave for the day.”

  “All things insignificant compared to this,” Rae said, sweeping her hand across the assemblage on the floor.

  Maggie tried to reason with her. “Rae, you’ll come back on Wednesday and pick up where you left off.”

  Rae simply ignored her “employer” and returned her attention to one of the files.

  “Where’s the circuit breaker?” I asked.

  Maggie led me into the break room and I flicked off the file room lights. When we returned to the file room Rae had found a flashlight and was continuing her work under its glow.

  Maggie is about five foot seven and a hundred and twenty-five pounds. I’m five-eight and more than that.1 Rae is approximately five foot two and around ninety-five pounds. Suffice it to say, Maggie and I had enough manpower, so to speak, to physically remove her.

  After a very brief consultation, we decided that it was the only way.

  “I’ll take her head. You take her feet. Watch out,” I said. “She’s a kicker.”

  Fifteen minutes later, in the car on the way back to the Spellman house, Rae was deep into her tirade about the abuses in the criminal justice system.

  “False confessions are way, way more common than you think. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t confess to a crime I didn’t commit, but you never know. Like, if somebody didn’t let me pee for hours and hours, I think at some point I’d crack,” she said.

  “I’d like to see an appeal on a conviction based on no bathroom breaks,” I said.

  “It’s not just that,” Rae replied. “There are so many ways a person can be wrongfully incarcerated: biased police lineups, coerced confessions, bad forensics, misuse of informants—the list goes on, and I’m not even thinking about police corruption, like planting evidence and stuff. Which I won’t mention in front of Dad because he’ll get all mad, but it happens.

  “So, anyway, Maggie shows me the files she has. These are all guys in prison who say they are innocent. She can only work on one pro bono case at a time and she told me to review the files and pick the three most likely candidates. How am I supposed to decide something that important? How? Do you realize that I am holding a man’s fate in my hands?”

  “Rae, do me a favor: Try not to let your ‘volunteer’2 work turn you into a narcissist.”

  I pulled up in front of the Spellman house.

  “Why are we here?” Rae asked.

  “Because this is your home and it’s where you eat most of your meals and where you tend to sleep.”

  “No!” Rae said, shaking her head, annoyed. “I was supposed to go to Henry’s house after Maggie’s.”

  “Why?”

  “The SATs are in two weeks and he’s helping me study.”

  “Have Mom or Dad drive you,” I said, unlocking the door.

  “Do you see either of their cars in the driveway?” Rae asked.

  She was right. Mom and Dad were out doing . . . I really don’t know what they do when I’m not around.

  “Where are they?”

  “They have a yoga class on Monday evening. Then they go to a vegetarian restaurant afterward.”

  “When the house starts smelling like patchouli, you let me know right away,” I said.

  “Sure thing,” Rae replied. “Now, how about that ride to Henry’s?”

  Henry’s apartment isn’t that far from my place, so I agreed. However, I took the opportunity to bring up an issue that had been on my mind.

  “You have money, Rae,” I pointed out.

  “Yes. Do you need a loan?”

  “No, but I think you should use some of that money to buy a used car since you are so opposed to public transportation.”

  “I don’t want to use my own money on that,” Rae said. “I think eventually someone will buy me one.”

  I pulled up in front of Henry’s house.

  “It’s been fun catching up,” I said. “Let’s do it again in six months.”

  “Aren’t you coming inside?” Rae asked.

  “Nope.”

  “You should come inside,” Rae said. “I think Henry has some information for you.”

  “What kind of information?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Something about Rick Harkey,” Rae said as she got out of the car.

  I took the bait, just like a dumb fish.

  THE TROUBLE WITH HENRY

  Clearly my appearance in Stone’s home had been orchestrated, but the players were so casual about the fact that I didn’t see any point in drawing conflict from this particular event.

  “I’m starving,” Rae said as she entered his apartment and carefully hung her coat on the rack.

  “I ordered pizza,” Henry replied.

  The previous statement, coming from almost any non-lactose-intolerant human, would not come off as borderline insane, but Henry is more than something of a health nut and in the three years I have known him, I have not heard him utter those three magical words.

  “What’s going on here?” I asked, my eyes shifting around the room for evidence of something seriously amiss, like bandits hiding in the back room.

  Rae followed my line of thinking and explained, “It’s not what you think, Izzy. Whole-wheat crust, and he orders it with broccoli and spinach. And he makes you eat a salad on top of that. Feel better?”

  “Yes,” I replied, and then turned to Henry.

  “I hear you have some information for me.”

  “Have a seat,” Henry said. “I’ll get you a beer.”

  “I was just hoping for the information.”

  “Why don’t you stay for dinner?”

  “I have p
lans.”

  “Your boyfriend works nights and your best friend is in Florida and probably in bed by now. What kind of plans?” Henry asked, sounding nice and all, but it was too pushy to be really nice.

  Maybe he didn’t want to spend a full evening with Rae and needed to be sure an adult was around for an extraction later. I could sympathize, and since I was in fact hungry and wouldn’t mind some pizza, even if it did have broccoli on it, I sat down on the couch, conceding some kind of defeat.

  Henry served me a beer, which eased the pain.

  The SAT practice began shortly after that, which increased the pain. I asked if I could watch television, but my question was met with glares, so I turned to Henry’s bookshelf and picked up a volume that I hadn’t seen before in his collection: The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

  Henry noted the selection I’d chosen from the shelf.

  “I got it for Rae, but she refuses to read it.”

  “That book is so prehistoric,” Rae said.

  “It’s a classic,” he said.

  “That’s what prehistoric people say about prehistoric things.”

  “ Atavistic,’ ” Henry said, changing the subject. “Definition and use it in a sentence.”

  I opted to focus on the words on the page rather than the ones floating around the room punctuated by random bickering. It had been years since I had read anything by Doyle, but while turning those pages, a flood of memories washed over me. When I was thirteen my father foisted the Sherlock Holmes canon on me with a relentless zeal. I rejected it at every turn, merely because it was suggested by an adult. Sometime later, I was grounded and all forms of entertainment were removed from my bedroom. During one of my food-delivery windows (steamed broccoli and brown rice) my father included an old paperback of The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. I spent the first few hours of my house arrest making artwork out of my dinner and trying to plot my escape (all exit routes were carefully contained). But eventually—twelve hours in—I turned to Sherlock Holmes. It was the first time in my life I’d found comfort in a book. Only, as further punishment, my father had removed the final pages of each adventure. So I read the Incomplete Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and by the end of the night, I thought I would go mad. When my father finally released me, I rode my bike straight to the San Francisco Public Library to have the endings fully realized. My mother thought this marked a promising literary turn in my adolescence. Sadly for her, that trip was the last voluntary library visit of my teenage years.

  As I returned to those pages, I felt a certain comfort in knowing that I was holding an unmutilated book, one that wouldn’t deprive me of resolution. I was lost in the last pages of “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” in which Holmes searches for the origin of a goose that was sold containing a valuable stone in its craw. (There’s obviously more to the plot, but I don’t want to ruin it for you.) I always thought of it as a Christmas story for curmudgeons. Nothing too feel-good about, but I liked how Holmes didn’t turn the perp in at the end. Maybe that’s the crux of my affection for the fictional detective: his sense of justice wasn’t absolute, his codes were flexible, and while that flexibility wouldn’t work within police forces in the real world, I tended to agree with Holmes’s moral judgments. He made sense to me, that’s all. Although even I think he took way too many drugs.

  I shelved the book and dinner was served. Now it was time to get what I came for.

  “I’ve been patient enough,” I said. “What have you got on Harkey?”

  “He has a lot of insurance clients. Did you know that?”

  “You better start singing some real songs or I’m taking this pizza to go.”

  “Do you know how he gets them?” Henry asked.

  “I know! I know!” Rae said, raising her hand as if we were in English class.

  I turned to my sister. “You tell me. Your answer sounds more interesting.”

  “Schmoozing,” Rae said, giving the word more length and significance than I thought it had.

  “That’s how we get a lot of our clients, too,” I said.

  “No, we don’t,” Rae replied defensively.

  “Yes, we do.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “What do you think ‘schmoozing’ means?” I asked.

  “Don’t you know?” Rae said, lowering her volume and staring at me like I needed a special ed class.

  Henry, also closely following the conversation, appeared confused as well.

  “Define ‘schmoozing,’” Henry said.

  Rae rolled her eyes and replied, “‘To chat informally or be ingratiating toward somebody.’ But it’s code for taking clients to strip clubs and buying them hookers.”

  “Huh?” Henry and I said in unison.

  “Dad told me all about how Harkey got his insurance clients when I was asking Dad why we didn’t have more insurance clients.”1

  Henry and I didn’t argue the semantics; I was more troubled by the fact that Henry thought this code-word “schmoozing” was the kind of legitimate information that was worthy of my time.

  I turned to Henry, growing annoyed. “That’s all you got for me? Schmoozing?”

  “Why can’t Dad just go to a strip club if it means more high-paying clients?” Rae asked. “Or Mom, for that matter?”

  “Shut up, Ms. Work-for-Free,” I replied.

  While I was waiting for Henry’s response, Rae extracted the broccoli from her pizza with medical precision.

  “Put it back on and eat it,” Henry said like a drill sergeant.

  “I’m here for information, not pizza and conversation,” I interrupted.

  “If I weren’t sitting at the ADD table, you would have the information already.”

  “You have the floor,” I said. Then I turned to my own slice of pizza and stripped it of all vegetation. The act was less in protest of broccoli and more for the guilty pleasure of irking Stone. And based on his sharp gaze away from my plate, the irking was happening.

  I had a sinking feeling that Stone was going to provide me with knowledge that was already on my radar. A large portion of Harkey’s business is insurance investigation. That I know. I also know that insurance cases are easily corruptible from almost any angle you look at them. First there’s the individual filing the claim, then the investigator investigating the claim and also the physician or insurance adjuster involved in assessing the damage, and last but not least, the lawyer taking the case. Each part of the system can find a way to rig it to his or her advantage. However, it would take hours of off-the-books surveillance for me to prove that Harkey was faking surveillance reports (which would be how a PI could corrupt the system). This was the kind of case that needed an inside man.

  Unfortunately, I blew that chance last year when I went to work for Harkey part-time to access information on another case. It was then that I got evidence of Harkey’s corruptibility—recording conversations, a violation of California Penal Code §631(a). However, since I stole the recordings from his office, I was hardly in a position to mete out any form of justice. Now I had to find another way. Hence my two-hour wait for Henry’s shred of information.

  “Harkey does worker’s comp investigations,” Henry began.

  I interrupted: “Don’t tell me I sat through an hour of SAT prep and a garden pizza for that.”

  “Zip it. There’s more,” he said, at his wit’s end. “Harkey’s brother-in-law Darren Hurtt is a worker’s comp physician who has been investigated for fraud, but nothing could be proven. He and Harkey are never seen in public together, but they could have a deal going on. If you could show the link, show Harkey’s team surveilling a claimant, and then show that same claimant entering Darren Hurtt’s office, you might have something there. Although, I do think I should mention that any investigation on Harkey would be extremely time-consuming and maybe unwise. But if you’re looking for an angle, it’s better than just sitting outside his office all day waiting for one to turn up.”

  “I
did that once, Henry. Just once.”

  A horn honked outside. Rae cleared her plate from the table, scraped it in the sink, and stuck it in the dishwasher. Henry had apparently taught her well. She turned to her BFF and said, “That’s my ride.”

  As Rae left, she punched Henry in the arm, thanked him for dinner, and said she would see him soon.

  Henry replied, “Give me at least forty-eight hours.”

  “We’ll see,” Rae said as she slipped through the door. “Bye, Izzy.”

  After Rae departed, I quickly got to my feet, didn’t bother clearing my own plate, and took my coat from the rack.

  “Where are you going?” Henry asked.

  “I’m outta here,” I said. “The only reason I stayed this long was I thought she’d need a ride home.”

  “That’s the only reason you stayed? I thought we were friends now.”

  “That’s your opinion, not mine,” I said, making my way to the front door.

  “There’s only one logical reason why you would be unable to remain my friend,” Henry said while blocking my exit through the front door.

  “What’s that?” I smugly replied.

  “You’re in love with me and can’t bear the thought that I don’t reciprocate your feelings.”

  “I would smack you right now if I didn’t think the act would confirm your delusional diagnosis.”

  “Thank you for not hitting me.”

  “You’re welcome. Please step away from the door.”

  “Unless you still have feelings for me, logically it follows that we are still friends.”

  Tossing in the word “logically” must have confused me, or at least slid a confused expression on my face, since Henry elaborated on his logical theory.

  “We were friends before. Do you deny that?”

  “No,” I quietly conceded.

  “Did I do something wrong? Did I betray you in any way?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Is there anything else I did that was so awful that it would prevent our remaining friends?”

  There was that unreturned kiss that torched my ego, but of course I didn’t mention that. “No.”

  “Then we’re friends,” Henry said in an authoritarian tone. “Got it?”