Trail of the Spellmans (14 page)

“Ostav’te menja v pokoeugrey.
”
⁶

“You’re up to something. I’m sure of that. Why don’t you just tell me so I don’t have to investigate?”

“Excuse me,” Mom said. “I have some crocheting to do.”

My mother then opened her desk drawer, withdrew a canvas bag, and removed a crochet hook and a misshapen mass of yarn.

“So it is crochet, not croquet. What on earth are you making?”

“A
hat,
” Mom snapped. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not in the slightest.”

Just then we heard a key in the front door and an unnerving squeak of the hinge. From the end of the hall my father shouted, “Chinese wall.” Then Dad swung open the far quieter office door and repeated himself more dramatically. He took off his coat and tossed it on the back of his chair, rolled up his sleeves, and said, “We’re enacting a Chinese wall immediately.”

Dad pulled the Adam Cooper file from the cabinet (subject: Meg Cooper [also known as Margaret Slayter]) and locked it in his desk drawer. He then passed me the Margaret Slayter file (subject: husband Edward Slayter) and said, “From now on, your mother and I will deal exclusively with Adam Cooper and you will handle only the work requested of you by Mrs. Slayter. We will each take care of billing individually and there will be absolutely no communication between either side on the cases.

“And, Isabel, your only contact with Mrs. Slayter should be as a client. You provide the information she pays for. End of story. Even if we’d never
discovered this conflict of interest, you should not have been surveilling the client. If that ever got out, our reputation could be sold at the five-and-dime store.”

“They don’t have those anymore,” I replied.

“Nothing about this is funny, Isabel.”

“Maybe not funny,” I replied, “but it is kind of awesome, if you think about it. Also, did Mom tell you about Mr. Slayter visiting the office?”

“Briefly,” Dad replied. Then he turned to my mother. “Please call him back and tell him that we cannot offer our services to him at this time.”

“Something is going on here that is not your typical domestic non-bliss,” I said.

“That is not our concern,” my dad replied.

“What if Mrs. Slayter hired us to babysit her husband while she has an affair?”

“We have no evidence of that fact,” Dad replied.

“We kind of have something resembling it. What if Mrs. Slayter is having us track her husband’s moves so she can plan a hit on him?”

“That only happens in detective novels,” said Dad.

“One of these days we’re going to catch a murder,” I said.

“We can dream,” my mom replied.

“Do you want me to take you off the Slayter case?” my father sternly asked.

“Yes, and put me on the Meg Cooper case. We can swap for a week and then swap back.”

“I meant,” my father said, correcting me, “do you want me to take you off all cases?”

“Well, of course not.”

“Chinese wall it is. There will be no further discussion. Agreed?”

“No. We’re not really in agreement.”

“Agree or you’re on desk duty until all conflicting cases are closed.”

My dad was serious; I had no other recourse.

“Agreed,” I replied, and maybe I meant it at the time.

Imaginary walls are merely boundaries. As you’ve undoubtedly gathered by now, I’m not particularly practiced with that sort of thing. When my father calls for a Chinese wall—and it’s only happened once before
⁷
—I take it seriously because he takes it seriously. And when I don’t take seriously things that he takes seriously, my day-to-day life becomes difficult. When I say “difficult,” I don’t mean that my father is rude or gives me the cold shoulder or even yells at me; I mean that the simple things in life become challenging. My car won’t start, my winter coat goes missing, my breath spray is replaced by vinegar, my keys don’t work as well as they used to, the heel on my left shoe falls off. The sabotage is subtler than the type practiced by, say, Rae or my mom. My father’s tactics avoid direct assault. He is not calling for war. His goal is to make me believe I’m experiencing some cosmic retaliation for my misdeeds.

For many years when this sort of thing happened, I actually thought that maybe something bigger than me or my dad was at work. That was until I caught him filing down one of my shoelaces. I wasn’t up for the level of vigilance required to overtly defy my father. There had to be another way.

After work, I had a drink at the Hemlock to try to figure out a route around the Chinese wall. One beer down, I had no bulletproof solutions to my problem. To occupy myself, I decided to tackle less troubling and more scalable information blockades.

First I phoned Henry to tell him I would be late.

“I’m going to be late,” I said.

“I see,” said Henry.

“So I won’t be home for dinner.”

“Wasn’t expecting you.”

“Oh. I guess I’ve had a lot of late nights recently.”

“Anything else?” Henry said. I’ve gotten the cold shoulder from him before, but this time he was putting his heart into it.

“I washed the dishes this morning. Did you notice?” I said. I was working on having some redeeming qualities.

“I did,” Henry replied, unimpressed.

“So you don’t plan on throwing me a parade or releasing a bunch of doves or something?”

“Anything else, Isabel?”

“Say hi to your mom.”

“She’s not here,” Henry replied.

“Where is she?” I asked. Silly question.

“I don’t know. She left a note that said,
I’m not here.
I think she thinks it’s funny.”

“I kind of think it’s funny,” I said.

“I don’t,” Henry replied.

“I’ll be home as soon as I can,” I said.

Henry hung up the phone without saying good-bye.

I phoned Gerty to see if I could convince her to spend some time with Henry, since they had barely seen each other in the last few weeks. Other than the notes, I couldn’t be sure that Gerty was still even in the city. In fact, if she didn’t date them and change them daily, I would have called the cops. I phoned her cell and left a message on her voice mail. She never did return my call.

RECREATIONAL SURVEILLANCE

F
rom the bar, I phoned Dad to get the location of Mom’s purported pottery class. He picked up on the first ring.

“Hi, Isabel.”

“Hi, Dad,” I said. I’ve grown to miss that part of the phone call where you identify yourself. Mostly I miss the part where I misidentify; caller ID has definitely cramped my style. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Dad said, letting out a deep sigh.

“Is something wrong?”

“It’s just so lonely here,” Dad said. “Your mother’s gone all the time and I don’t know where D is. You want to come over? We could play gin rummy or just drink.”

“Rain check, Dad. So, Mom’s at pottery tonight?”

“Yes, pottery,” Dad said.

“Where is the pottery?” I asked. “Shouldn’t our house be swimming in ceramics by now?”

“She doesn’t bring it home anymore.”

“So you’ve seen it?”

“I saw one piece. I made the mistake of laughing. Your mother can be more sensitive than you might imagine.”

“Uh-huh. Where is this class of hers?”

“Isabel, she really is taking a pottery class tonight.”

“Why all the hobbies?”

“She’s trying to keep busy, that’s all.”

“Have you noticed her work is suffering?”

“It’s a phase. It’ll pass.”

“Where’s the class?”

“You’re wasting your time, Isabel.”

“Maybe I want to take up pottery.”

“She’s at Sharon Art Studio, next to the carousel at Golden Gate Park.”

“Bye, Dad.”

I drove straight to the park and wove up the short tree-lined road to the art studio. I circled the building, peering into lit classrooms stocked with a mismatched collection of amateur artists, all paying rapt attention to their paintings or sculptures or the instructor’s lecture. I found my mother in the back of the pottery class, straddling a wheel and having a physical altercation with a mass of clay. My lip-reading skills informed me that my mother’s moratorium on profanity was purely for Demetrius’s benefit. The female instructor, whom I could have spotted in a lineup sight unseen (there are still some patchouli-scented, flower-power retirees left in the city), approached my mother and appeared to offer her soothing words. My mother appeared to respond with less soothing words. The instructor backed away slowly, like you would from a rabid dog.

The snippets of Russian Mom had integrated into her vocabulary, the painstakingly tangled crochet yarn, and a few baked goods that were above par for her, but below par for even an amateur baker, all pointed to the fact that my mother was indeed developing a serious hobby habit, but I couldn’t begin to tell you why.

I somehow managed to get through the rest of the week with almost no interaction with Ex 13. Tuesday and Thursday he had late nights and I got sleepy early. Wednesday I claimed to be working a surveillance but went to
the movies instead, and Friday I opted to use the Avoidance Method™ for a more professional matter.

A light shone in Vivien Blake’s apartment, backlighting her silhouette in the window. She had the hunched posture of someone studying. There was no legal parking with a visual so I edged my car perpendicular to the palm-treed traffic island on Dolores Street. In a city with a dearth of legal parking, some reasonable rule-breaking has been quietly indulged. You could say that about San Francisco in general. We’ve had a naked guy roaming downtown for years.

I sat in my car, listening to a music-appreciation podcast that Henry had loaded into my iPod. It was as dull as I expected, but I promised to give it a chance. I wondered if five minutes qualified. But then Vivien extinguished her desk lamp, sparing me any more unnecessary educating. Five minutes after her apartment went dark, Vivien was walking east on Twentieth Street and I had to decide whether to follow her in the car (in case she hopped a cab) or hoof it. Since the Mission is rife with young people and booze-soaked establishments, I assumed she would stay in the vicinity. I left my car in the not-so-legal spot and followed subject on foot.

Vivien flashed an ID at the door to [redacted]
¹
and worked her way through the sloppy maze of inebriated hipsters. Her eyes darted around the room. She was looking for someone, but in the dim light she squinted to distinguish between patrons who seemed oddly homogenized considering how hard they were trying to brand themselves as unique.

Then she stood on her toes, waved, and pushed her way through the crowd to the back of the bar, where two pool tables divided the room. She worked her way to a corner booth and sat down. A young male in many layers of clothes, the top one adorned with a band’s name, slid a pint of beer across the table. She took a gulp and turned to the young woman sitting next to her. Vivien said something and the young woman laughed. I saw no introduction take place between the two, and within minutes they were
whispering to each other behind the young men’s backs. These details are important for one particular reason: The woman sitting with Vivien Blake was none other than Rae Spellman.

I snapped a few photos with my camera, but I couldn’t be sure that they would turn out in the dim lighting. This was not the time to confront my sister. While there were two offenses I was witnessing, underage drinking and consorting with a client, it was the second that I took issue with. My parents could handle the first.

As I was walking back to my car in the uncomfortably crisp air, watching my breath blow plumes of smoke into the night, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

“My apartment has flooded.”

“Okay, I’ll be there in about twenty minutes to check on it.”

“No,” he said. “I mean this time, it really is flooded.”

Thirty minutes later, I was helping Walter sop up the bathroom floor with old towels. We’d wring them out and start again. The bathtub had overflowed and spilled onto the bathroom floor. Walter arrived home just in time to stop the flood from bleeding into his bedroom carpet.

“The neighbor called from downstairs,” Walter said. “I was on a date. I wasn’t even thinking about the bathtub or the toaster. I’m sorry to call you so late. I don’t know how this happened. How did this happen?”

“I don’t know, Walter. But we’ll figure it out.” I twisted a heavy towel into the bathtub, dumping at least half a gallon of water. “There’s something I should tell you . . .”

And then I told Walter about the previous leak, and the coffeemaker and the toaster that were plugged in when I knew that Walter always unplugged them. And then I mentioned the footprint. Walter reacted with an appropriate shade of concern, but something about his response was off. As if he expected this news. But still, he had to ask the obvious question.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“Because, at first I thought you had just slipped up once or twice and I knew that if I told you things would only get worse. But then it occurred to me that something else was going on; someone else was responsible.”

“Who would do this to me?” Walter asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “But I’ll find out.”

I stayed with Walter until there was only a pile of soaked towels as evidence of what had transpired. I dusted the front door for prints but figured I’d find only my own and Walter’s. I asked him if anyone knew about his date and he said only his date. I asked where they’d met. Online. She had no idea where he lived. I asked if he would see her again. He told me that he’d asked her out again on the date, but now he wasn’t so sure. She bit her nails, and maybe the flood was a sign. I made Walter promise me that if I found out who did this, he would go out with her again. I wouldn’t leave until he promised, and he did, because by midnight he really wanted me to leave.

I was exhausted after fighting Walter’s deluge, but my brain kept ticking and I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I drove to the Philosopher’s Club, hoping that the oafish, uncomplicated company of Bernie would serve as a kind of temporary brainwashing of the day’s events. In the morning I could fret about conflicts of interest, investigator misconduct, a client with an unusual form of stalking, and the conversation I’d been dodging at home for the last two months.