Lisa Lutz Spellman Series E-Book Box Set: The Spellman Files, Curse of the Spellmans, Revenge of the Spellmans, The Spellmans Strike Again (43 page)

I
drove by the Chandler residence and parked in front. Upon exiting the car, I caught sight of her miniature poodle, barking by the fence to the backyard. It was kind of hard to miss since its coat was dyed hot pink. The second I saw her dog, I rushed back into my car and drove away to avoid being spotted. You see, ten years ago, my first crime against the twenty-year widow was dying her miniature poodle cobalt blue. But that was only the first of many crimes against the woman.

Constance “Connie”
¹
Chandler has lived three blocks away on Pacific Avenue as long as I can remember anything. She was a high school art teacher by trade, a hippie by all appearances, and a millionaire by her checkbook. At the age of forty she was widowed by her financier husband. Their marriage was the most striking example of opposites attract that I have ever seen. Some years after her husband’s death, budget cuts in the San Francisco school district (and, I suspect, knowledge of her flush financial situation) led to her early retirement. Soon after that Mrs. Chandler’s holiday enthusiasm took a turn for the worse (or better, depending on whom you ask).

“Art” or “eyesore” was how most of the neighborhood split on their reactions to Mrs. Chandler’s holiday decorations. Shortly after retirement, the widow began channeling all her “artistic” energy into seasonal installations in front of her house. Her attempts to cover every major and minor event, from Christmas nativity scenes to Valentine’s Day cupid landscapes, simply screamed “Vandalize me!” At least Petra and I heard the scream.

1992 was the year Petra and I began editing Mrs. Chandler’s elaborate decorations. Having cased the widow’s residence for two years, we were able to predict her decorating style and plan our capers accordingly. The following is a complete list of the crimes Petra and I committed against Mrs. Chandler during the 1992–93 season. We began with Thanksgiving.

Adjustments to Mrs. Chandler’s Holiday Tableaux

Thanksgiving

Mrs. Chandler presented a peaceful banquet scene between the Native Americans and the recently landed British.
²
Mrs. Chandler, an incorrigible optimist, presented a world that she wished existed. In her world, the white devils and the Native Americans joined hands in unity and each partook of the other’s delicacies. The “authentic” menu on Mrs. Chandler’s table included wild turkey, fish, maize, nuts, squash, beans, and dried fruit (since none was actually in season). To make the picture more realistic, Petra and I threw US Army blankets around the Native Americans, painted pox marks on their faces, and placed empty whiskey bottles by their sides.
³

Christmas

Christmas was, of course, Mrs. Chandler’s raison d’etre. Her nativity scene was as fine a piece of amateur secular art as there ever was. Portraying Jesus as a sixties-era hippie (in Birkenstocks and hemp clothing, and wearing a hard-to-miss peace sign around his neck) was Chandler’s personal touch in the exhibit. Plus, she burned patchouli incense instead of myrrh. Petra and I wanted to respect her efforts but provide a more universal
⁴
appeal. Using stage makeup, we painted all the mannequins chocolate brown. Then we smoked some pot and came up with an addendum to that idea. We returned a few hours later with Afro wigs and NBA headbands and placed them on the three kings.

New Year’s Day

Mrs. Chandler, I suspect, could find no political message in New Year’s, so she did nothing. Petra and I, in turn, left her alone—mostly because we were just too hungover to bother.

Groundhog Day

When this half-holiday rolled around and Mrs. Chandler’s lawn remained untouched, Petra and I decided (partly based on our love of the recently released Bill Murray film) that we had to honor this day on our own. Grass of any legal variety is in short supply in San Francisco. Sometimes you’ll find a small patch of wild lawn behind a Victorian row house, but in front it’s extremely rare. Mrs. Chandler’s residence is one of those exceptions. Years ago, she dug out the cement driveway in front of her home, replaced it with a plot of lawn approximately six feet by eight feet, and wrapped a picket fence around it. It looks completely ridiculous but provides for her the main stage for her outrageous decorations.

Petra’s and my ode to Groundhog Day was a no-brainer. We simply dug up “rodent holes” in her grass.

Valentine’s Day

It was hard to explain an old hippie’s fondness for a Hallmark holiday, but we later learned that Mr. Chandler was a traditional romantic sort who pulled out all the stops on February fourteenth—flowers, candy, candlelit dinners, violins, etc. Mrs. Chandler resorted to mythology and styled her yard with winged and diapered cherubs, along with hearts and arrows suspended in midair. According to Petra’s and my research, she was mixing genres, so we added another genre to her mix: horror film.

We toppled Mrs. Chandler’s cherubs on their sides. We dismembered some and split the cloth guts of the others. We sprayed red food dye in a crime-scene pattern and left the murder weapons—plastic knives from the costume shop—at the scene. We wiped all smooth items for prints and discarded our tainted clothes at the dump. We called it the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.”

St. Patrick’s Day

Mrs. Chandler’s husband was Irish and so the widow could not neglect this “holiday.” We transformed a lively green scene of leprechauns, pots of gold, and a rainbow into the aftermath of a drunken wake. We kicked over the leprechauns and strew at least fifty empty cans of Guinness
⁵
on the lawn. We titled it “The Morning After.”

Easter

Mrs. Chandler’s motif was the traditional pastel violet landscape of an Easter egg hunt, with baskets of painstakingly decorated hand-painted eggs. The only Chandleresque touch was that the eggs all had peace signs on them. Petra and I brainstormed for hours on how to adjust this particular installation, and then it came to me: we swapped out the pastel-colored eggs in the giant white-painted straw basket for eight-balls. If you think painting Easter eggs is time-consuming, try acquiring two dozen eight-balls
⁶
without actually paying for them.
⁷

Independence Day

By the time the Fourth of July rolled around, word on the street was that Petra and I were the saboteurs of these elaborate decorations. And yet, Mrs. Chandler appeared to be taking no measures to stop us. One day, when we were casing her yard for our next attack, trying to figure out how we could violate a collection of peace-loving mannequins in a sit-in, Mrs. Chandler exited her home and approached us.

“Hello, ladies,” she said. “I think it’s time to make a formal introduction. I’m Constance Chandler; my friends call me Connie. And you are?”

Petra and I mumbled our names while we tried to figure out a speedy but non-guilty-looking escape.

“We’re not so different, you and me,” she said, making direct eye contact.

Petra and I looked askance at each other and waited for her to continue.

“I’m all for personal expression. That’s why I do my art,” she continued, sweeping her hand over to her latest installation. “And I understand the need for sabotage. But I ask you to consider the statement you’re making. There was a political undercurrent to your Thanksgiving and Christmas designs, although I do think you could have done without the NBA headbands and Afros. Unnecessary, and it diminished the point you were making. But lately, I think you’re slipping,” she said.

Petra and I were slowly backing away, but Mrs. Chandler, believing us to be a captive audience, didn’t stop.

“Groundhog Day? A Valentine’s Day murder scene? St. Patrick’s Day? Ladies, that’s just juvenile vandalism. If you’re going to attack my art, I ask you to think about what you’re doing. I ask you to take a position.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “But have a nice evening.”

Petra and I turned on our heels and made a quick exit. As we briskly headed up the hill, Mrs. Chandler shouted after us, “And I hope that was all-natural food coloring you put on my dog!”

A few minutes passed in silence as Petra and I reflected on our recent encounter.

“We’re done here,” Petra said, marking a definite end to our “adjustments.”

“You heard her. She’s not going to turn us in. She just wants us to take a more political slant,” I said.

“First of all, Izzy, it’s no fun if we’re adjusting our adjustments to make our victim happy; second of all, I think the neighborhood watch committee wants to take action. Even if Mrs. Chandler doesn’t mind, they do. Lastly, I’d like to stay on that woman’s good side.”

“Why?”

“Couldn’t you tell? She was totally stoned. We’re gonna need another source in case Justin’s
⁸
connection dries up.”

As it was, we never used Mrs. Chandler as a drug source, but we did end our attacks on her decorations. That night Petra and I made a pact that we would never admit our crimes, to ensure that we could never be punished or turned against each other. When any reference to our previous crimes was made, we both spoke the same exact refrain: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Monday, April 24
1050 hrs

Mort’s overgrown eyebrow rose about an inch as he jotted down notes on my petty criminal past.

“Do you have a record,” Morty asked, “besides your current one?”

“It’s sealed,” I replied.

“Juvi?”

“Yes, Morty. It was a long time ago. People make mistakes in their youth.”

“Izz, you’re thirty years old and you’ve been arrested four times in the last two months.”

“Two don’t count!”

“But what about the other two?”

“I’ll be vindicated as soon as I can get some real dirt on Subject.”

“My point, Izzy, is you’re getting a reputation, and your line of work is all about the reputation.”

“No. My line of work is about getting to the truth.”

T
he truth isn’t my primary goal. My job is about discovering answers for specific questions asked of me. For instance, if I am providing a background check on a potential employee for a major corporation, the question they want answered is whether the individual is who he says he is and also whether that individual might become a danger to the already vested employees.

First I run a criminal check on the potential employee to be certain there are no felonies in his wake, then I make sure he is exactly who he says he is. If Potential Employee claims to reside at 12 Lombard Street, I run a credit header and cross-check the addresses. Most of my job is cut-and-dry. If a wife wants to know if her husband is cheating, I follow him for a week or two until he does or doesn’t. Usually, what we want to know about someone can be discovered quite easily, but the problem with my work is that I’ve grown accustomed to having answers at my fingertips. I expect a brief stab of curiosity to be sated by five minutes at a computer or five hours behind the wheel of my car.

My job requires me to be curious and insists that I be naturally suspicious. But there are many occasions when I simply cannot provide an explanation for the facts presented to me. On those occasions I may cross some ethical boundaries to reach my goal, simply to get answers to questions that won’t go away. I have many flaws, but I suppose the only one that truly damages my life is that I believe all questions have answers and I believe that I am entitled to those answers.

I say all this because I hope it will explain all the events that have transpired. If you have enough unanswered questions, you have a certifiable mystery, and those are impossible to resist.

After breakfast with Subject, I returned to the Spellman offices to finish up a series of background checks for our biggest client, Xylor Corp. Since Mom and Dad took on the giant conglomerate, there have been no more cash flow problems, although the work has gotten decidedly duller. Backgrounds are almost exclusively desk work—database research with a couple phone calls thrown in. Any time I’m stuck in the office means more quality time with the family.

Since it was Saturday, Rae was home and bored. She strolled into the office to disrupt my already lagging work ethic, plopped down in an old vinyl chair, rolled herself over to me, and put her feet up on my desk.

“Dad’s definitely having a REAFO,” Rae said.

“One yoga class does not a REAFO make,” I replied.

“I’ve been watching him,” Rae said. “He’s taking showers outside of the house, which can only mean one thing.”

“Oh my god,” I replied, other factors weighing in on my response. “He’s going to the gym, isn’t he? I thought he’d lost some weight.”

“He goes at least three times a week and to that yoga class. But the part I don’t get,” Rae said, “is that he tries to keep it from Mom.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “She’s the one who’s been nagging him to do that for years.”

“He sneaks out when she’s not around. It’s really weird.”

“Maybe that’s just a coincidence.”

“I doubt it,” Rae replied. “But I’ll take this REAFO over MILFO number three any day,” Rae said, spinning around in the chair.

“Can’t argue with you there.”

“So this is REAFO number two, right?” she asked.

“According to my calculations.”

MILFO #1—“Mirror Man”

Dad’s first MILFO began in his forty-eighth
¹
year. At the time we referred to it as a mid-life crisis, since it so completely resembled one of those. In Dad’s case it took the form of vanity. He purchased sharper clothes, dyed his hair, and checked himself in the mirror with the regularity of a cuckoo clock. He would even solicit fashion advice and ask random family members to go shopping with him. He started wearing bracelets and using expensive moisturizers. Although the origin of this first MILFO was never scientifically proven, Rae and I surmised that it was a direct product of attending Mom’s twentieth high school reunion. My father is a large man—six foot three, in the mid-two-hundred-pound range, with slightly oafish features. The reunion reminded Dad that he married a woman both far better-looking and ten years younger than him, which we believe contributed to his insecurity. The MILFO lasted approximately a month. However, my father, not being a naturally vain man, soon lost interest in his looks when he realized my mother had not.

The MILFO acronym was coined when Dad had his next flip-out. Rae and I were under the impression that a mid-life crisis was supposed to happen once in a man’s life. We decided that if Dad wanted more than one, they needed a new name. MILFO #2 occurred approximately four years later. We would eventually discover that MILFOs and REAFOs recurred with the frequency of a leap year. Not on the dot, but close enough.

MILFO #2—“Space Detective”

Spellman Investigations was going through some financial difficulties at the time. Dad picked up the Datebook section of the
San Francisco Chronicle
one morning and read an article about a screenwriter who penned the latest Bruce Willis vehicle and earned two million dollars in the process. Dad then decided that he had a screenplay in him. Over the next two weeks he purchased Syd Field’s book on how to write a screenplay, worked on his pitch, and eventually concocted a story about a detective who accidentally
²
ends up on the space shuttle and discovers the body of a murdered astronaut. In the strict confines of the gravity-free shuttle, Detective Jack Spaceman
³
had to solve the crime before all the “real astronauts” were killed and there was no one left to bring the shuttle back to earth.

One of the major problems with Dad’s screenplay, other than the characters and plot, was that he didn’t actually want to write it, he just wanted to practice his pitch on family members. I was a teenager at the time and put up with it just once. David was a bit more patient and offered feedback maybe two or three times before he pled his too-much-homework case. Mom, after hearing the title, refused to listen to a single word. Uncle Ray had the best excuse of all: “Movies ain’t my thing,” he’d say, and run off to the bar.

Unfortunately, only one family member remained—Rae, who was eight at the time. Dad would tuck her into bed, night after night, reworking his screenplay pitch as a bedtime story. On day seven, Rae went screaming into Mom and Dad’s bedroom, crying hysterically to Mom, begging for a new bedtime story. Mom told Dad that making Rae listen to his screenplay pitch was tantamount to child abuse. She suggested Dad write the screenplay and stop talking about it, which brought MILFO #2 to an end.

MILFO #3—“The Learning Annex”

Three and a half years later, Dad decided his worldview was limited, and MILFO #3 began. Dad first took a class at the Learning Annex called “Two Thousand Years of World History in Two Days.” Then he moved on to “How to Speak to Anyone about Anything,” “Conversational Latin,” and then the bizarrely inappropriate “Knitting 101.” These classes would have been fine if Dad could have kept them to himself, but he felt the need to share, and Rae, as the youngest and least able to defend herself, usually got the brunt of Dad’s regurgitation of information.

Being a curious and intelligent child, Rae didn’t mind the condensed history lesson that Dad provided, although we would later learn that his grasp of the Civil War and the American Revolution was sketchy at best, with a number of commingling facts. However, Rae’s brief lesson on Latin greetings got the cold shoulder, since my eleven-year-old sister was already stuck in beginner’s Spanish.

What really got under Rae’s skin was the knitting lesson. She protested loudly for a full evening until my father left five spools of yarn in her bedroom and told her to think about it. Rae, realizing that you can’t knit yarn if it’s chopped up into a bunch of tiny little pieces, woke up early the next morning and began dicing the spools up in two-to-three-inch strands with a pair of scissors from her art supply box. My mother came upon the crime scene the next morning, finding my sister’s room carpeted in a motley assortment of yarn. They spent the next hour cleaning up the mess. When my father finally got out of bed, Mom informed him that MILFO #3 was over.

By the time MILFO #4 rolled around, Rae pointed out that Dad was no longer middle-aged. We both concurred that the MILFOs needed to be renamed and came up with the greatly superior acronym REAFO. Which brings me to REAFO #1.

REAFO #1—“Wood Shop”

After building a flower box in class, Dad decided he was ready for a more ambitious project. Soon after his three-week class came to an end, he began construction on a loft bed in Rae’s room, with a study annex underneath. David was at college at the time, so Rae slept in his room for the two months Dad worked on this project. What I remember from those months was a great deal of swearing and yelps of pain coming from upstairs. I recall Dad’s fingers covered in makeshift bandages, blood seeping from an assortment of wounds. But my father’s dedication was tireless. When his project was completed, he placed a large sheet over the construction and invited the family into the room for a formal unveiling.

My mother eyed the primitive-looking structure with a great deal of skepticism. Rae ran for the ladder, eager to climb her new, exciting piece of furniture. But my mother pulled her off the bottom rung and turned to me.

“Isabel, would you mind testing this out first?”

“Oh, right. Sacrifice me,” I said, giving my mom a look of mock betrayal. “This is just like
Sophie’s Choice
.”

I approached the construction. The ladder creaked beneath my weight as I reached the top of the bed. I threw myself onto the mattress, expecting (and half hoping) that the structure would crumble beneath me.
⁴
Sadly, the loft bed merely swayed back and forth, creaking like the stairs of an abandoned building after years of decay. There would never be any dramatic collapse. My mother instructed my father to disassemble the bed immediately. Rae cried all afternoon and REAFO #1 came to an end.