Casebook (20 page)

“It’s a free country. Maybe he was visiting.”

“But I saw him with a woman and a kid. He has a kid, but
that
kid’s living in Wisconsin.” We told our story in bits that didn’t make sense, even to me. The PI said the first thing he’d do was run a criminal records check. Hector and I looked at each other again. “I kinda doubt he’s a criminal,” I said.

“You never know with these guys. A lady came in here with credit card statements; her husband’d been charging lingerie, every month five hundred, six hundred bucks, sometimes once a week. All different stores. She’s crying, she thought he was having an affair. I had to tell her, ‘Lady, that’s no mistress. A guy spends that kind of money on lingerie, it’s not for a woman. It’s for himself.’ ”

I looked down, then at Hector. We started making excuses. I
stuttered like Eli. As we shoved up to go, the guy couldn’t stand it anymore. He lifted the messy sandwich and took a bite.

That was enough for me. I wanted to go home, but we had another appointment. Hector had told the second guy we could ride our bikes to his office, but that PI had suggested a public place. “A suspicious detective,” Hector said.

When we got to the Starbucks, Hector took a tiny notebook from his pocket.

“What’s that?”

“Kat bought it for me to write down homework assignments.” He was calling his mother Kat now. I flipped through the pages; they were all blank.

I’ve often thought back to that afternoon and what we must have looked like to him: two kids in shorts, bikes mangled at our feet. He was a good-looking guy wearing jeans and a blazer, sunglasses—glamorous in the sheer December light. He seemed about our parents’ age, a little younger or a little cooler. I thought he resembled Tom Cruise.

His name was Ben. Ben Orion.

Hector and I told him the whole story, interrupting each other. This time, we made sense. It felt exhilarating to spill it out as Starbucks piped Christmas music onto the sidewalk. I’d been alone with this a long time. And then it had just been me and Hector.

We told him about all our devices. He laughed out loud at the story of the walkie-talkie that had to be on all the time and then ran out of batteries. He looked at us strangely when we described rigging the extension with Silly Putty and nail polish. That seemed like a long time ago now. I said that through that phone I’d heard Eli say he’d lend us a million dollars to keep our house, but that later, he and my mom signed a joke contract to move to Pasadena. And Eli was like a prophet because we really did have to move. Not to Pasadena, though. To a non-million-dollar house we were anyway just renting. And where we’d hooked up the RadioShack digital-recording machine.

Then Pasadena was where I saw Eli, or thought so that time.

Eli loved animals, but he stole a dog and told us. He went bat-shit crazy once in the shelter, but the other time he held dying cats. He hung a tire swing at our new house, but he lied about taking out to dinner a mathematician of light who looked like Audrey Hepburn.

“A mathematician?” Ben Orion stopped me. I had to explain that my mom and everyone she knew were mathematicians, the worst-dressed people on the earth. I told how Eli said that Marge was unglamorous but that she’d gotten him a job.

Eli lied and they fought and he called her friends and then he vanished. Eventually he came back, carrying flowers.

Hector recounted other details. The box that didn’t arrive.

“Or at least I didn’t see it,” I corrected.

The two suits. (I hadn’t told Hector there was another call, another suit made. So Eli was up to four now, that I knew about.)

Eli borrowed a dog once, and slept over.

Hector talked about his brain operation and how he didn’t have a scar.

I reminded him that a doctor had said it wasn’t the brain exactly. And that they went up through the nose. Listening to Hector, I wondered what made him so rabid. Only a few things really bothered me about Eli.

I just wanted those irritants explained away.

He had an affair on his wife.

But the worst ones I couldn’t say: him asking my mother in that voice to get him off.

“He wanted to
drug
your sister,” Hector was emphasizing.

“Well, because of the animals. She’s allergic.”

He was jealous of an old man who taught fractals. He was a neat freak. He wanted the Mims to run outside in storms.

I didn’t know how to explain about whether his wife was there when his mother died. Or if he really did or didn’t ever want the baby he already had.

The PI posed a lot of questions, maybe to calm down Hector.
He perked up when we told him we’d gone to the Hollywood Spy Shop. He knew the guy who owned it.

Hector said that the Mims had asked Eli to keep a diary of every time they were together.

“People do that kind of stuff,” the detective said. “Couples.” He told us about a case where a guy wanted him to spy on his girlfriend. He thought she was cheating. The girlfriend was some thirty years younger. Ben Orion’s guys tailed her for five weeks. She wasn’t doing anything. She went out to dinner once or twice with her girlfriends. “Cost him forty-five thousand dollars,” Ben said. He shook his head. “Silly case.”

The figure stunned me. We had to get out of there, I thought. Would he charge us? I kicked Hector under the table. He looked at me, not knowing why. We’d just assumed he’d help us. We were used to people helping. I was only beginning to understand that hidden from us, somewhere behind a curtain, people were being paid. We had saved money from my allowance. But less than a hundred dollars.

“What is it you really want to find out?” Ben Orion asked me.

We both stayed quiet. When he said it that way, I came up empty.

“I feel like the guy has a secret,” Hector finally said. “And Miles should know it.”

“Do you think that, Miles?”

“I mean, he’s odd. I guess I want these things that seem weird to be—understandable.”

“He could be an impostor,” Hector said.

“Are you afraid he might be a con man?” Ben asked. “Do you think he’s after your mother’s money?” He addressed these questions to me.

“She’s a math professor. We’re not rich.”

Hector looked down. “You’re kinda rich.”

My neck blotched hot. I never knew he thought that. I guessed
it made sense, but we weren’t. Not now, anyway. “Maybe my dad is, more.”

“Must be really smart,” Ben Orion said. “Mathematician.” He shook his head. “The main thing that set you off is you thought you saw the guy with another woman?”

“I guess,” I said.

“You know it could be that he’s married and planning to leave after the holidays. People postpone things like that till the new year.”

“Wait, you think my mother is the other woman, the, the mistress, like Eli’s dad had?” Eli had a mistress once, too, I remembered. “My mom’s not a mistress.”

“My aunt is,” Hector said.

I knew she was, and now I felt bad for saying it this way. “She’s not really. I mean, it’s different.” When Hector’s aunt Terry was young, she fell in love with her boss. They’d worked together every day for more than twenty years, but he had a wife and family, too. That’s why she bought really expensive clothes. He had a cell phone for just her. She was the only person who knew the number. They traveled together all over the world. They were architects. “No offense to your aunt, but that’s not at all like my mom and Eli.”

Ben Orion kept biting down his bottom lip. The first time I’d recognized pity was after the divorce. Then I’d hated it; sometimes now, I was beginning to use it. But if Eli was married—and he wasn’t, I just knew he wasn’t—my mom had no idea. I said that, my leg swinging up against the middle bar of the table, so Ben Orion’s by-now-cold latte spilled. Hector was looking down like he felt sorry for me, too. “If he
was
married, it would be better,” I said. “This way, she’s counting on him. For years already.”

The PI’s head whipped around sharply. “How many years?”

“I’m not sure. Pretty many,” I said. “I think he’s okay, it’s just …” I thought I had to prove my case. But I didn’t know where to start. It felt unfair. Anything I could say would sound wrong.

The detective had a nice way about him, though. “Let’s just get through the holidays and then see. You guys have my number.”

“Hey, you believe me, don’t you, man?” I said to Hector as we lolled on our bikes past Maude Stern’s house. On the corner, three Brentwood girls stood in shorts. I made my eyes look up to the branches of a tree, and they slid back by themselves, and I had to do it all over again. The girls pretended not to notice.

“I believe you,” Hector said. But I could tell when he was just being loyal. Eli said to my mom once,
I don’t lie to you. That way when I say something’s okay, you can know it really is
.

“I lost seventeen pounds,” Marge announced at dinner. She did look a little different. Still, she wasn’t
thin
. “Next I’m going to have to find a trainer.” She looked straight at me, saying that.

“Oh,
don’t
.” Philip groaned. “Waste of money. I’ll get you running with Miles and Hector. You won’t have to pay anything.” I saw her looking at me and thinking she wanted more results.

“I’ll give it a try. If it works, I could spend the money instead on a personal shopper.”

“Didn’t the lady in that store think Eli was your personal shopper?” I asked the Mims. This year, I didn’t hear anything about gifts for Eli, but my mom sent presents to the kid that I still worried would end up in my room. She bought it a rainbow maker and two baseball gloves, a father-and-son set.

That night, we got a tree, an eight-footer. Once we cut the ropes, its fronds sprang out to cover a good portion of our living room, touching chairs. We’d always bought big trees for our other house. Our rooms smelled uplifting, even though we had to press against the wall to get out the front door.

47 • Scraps of Paper in the Dresser Drawer

Our dad took us to Hawaii that year and it rained for four days out of five. On the pad of paper next to the telephone, he kept calculating the room bill. One day, we went to the most depressing JCPenney’s in the world, and in the diner, he said, “This cup of coffee is costing me two thousand dollars,” and that became a running joke. Later, he told me it wasn’t really the money. He’d been terrified that his one vacation with us was going to be a bust. No beachside dinners near torch-lit waves, no smoothies by the pool, and no lobby life, either, because everyone had fled to the mall just for something to do. So he was worried about that and thought he was wasting thousands of dollars. Boop One didn’t care about the weather. She hung on our dad’s arm the whole time. Boop Two roamed outside looking for sea turtles that came up on the rocks, also not minding the rain. For me, it was just fine. I didn’t like the beach much anyway. We had one at home. Inside I could watch movies, and since it was vacation, I watched them from the bathtub.

We flew home a day early. My dad came for dinner Christmas Eve.

Nobody even mentioned lights.

Philip had their car packed up outside our house—he was driving Hector and Jules to Canada through the night. Marge and the Mims packed them sandwiches and a thermos of coffee. My dad went home first. Marge and my mom cleaned the kitchen, swilling champagne and listening to what Hector had called angel music. Eli didn’t make it for Christmas—because of the sick cat—but he sent gifts: sweaters for my sisters and, for me, a pen and a book called
How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way
. I planned to pass that along to Hector.

Christmas morning, the Boops hung rainbow makers from their stockings. They really did bounce colored arcs all over the
walls. At noon, there was a knock at the door: two guys with a clipboard. “Delivery,” one said. “You’re working on Christmas!” the Mims said. I figured somebody had sent us flowers. My dad, probably. He was the only flower-sender we knew. But they came up the front yard, hauling in a sofa. We had to move Sare’s futon couch to fit it in the living room. “It’s from Eli,” the Mims whispered. She sounded shocked. “We saw it once in a store.” I ran back to my room to find the receipt.

The Alvar sofa
. The paperwork they left matched the receipt. So there was no house in Pasadena! Only a store called Moderne. We wouldn’t move. But why had it taken so long to come? Eli had bought the sofa on August 19, according to the small paper. The Boops and my mom were already sitting on it. Happiness really may be just a form of relief, I thought.

I had to remember to tell Hector.

The Audreys returned five days after school started.

“I didn’t factor in a blizzard,” Philip told my mom. I could tell she was appalled.

On their trip, Hector had found a book in a cardboard box at a library sale in Idaho about the guy who’d invented criminal profiling. “He’s better than Holmes,” he said. From a corpse, he could tell the age of the killer, that he lived with his parents and had a stutter. “A lot of murderers have speech impediments, it turns out.”

“Eli stammers,” I admitted, because Hector already knew. He was beginning to make me nervous. Sometimes I wished I hadn’t told him all this; Hector got so into things. In kindergarten he’d eaten bugs with an insane relish. Right away, this minute, he wanted to haul the RadioShack machine up from the basement and hear what it’d recorded.

From two hours of listening, our ears to the tiny speaker, all we learned was that Eli had returned the father-son mitts my mom
had sent for Christmas. “I could never use leather mitts,” he said. The animals! Of course. “Keep them for the twins. But Timmy really likes that rainbow maker.” We still hadn’t met his kid.

“Does he know it’s from me?” she asked.

“I tell him it’s from my friend Irene.”

They talked about his sick cat, its medicine, and his trips to the veterinarian.

I kept reminding Hector, he’d bought us a whole sofa. It was expensive.

“So on our trip,” Hector said, “I learned to drive.”

“Cool,” I said.

“If you consider a frozen highway cool. My dad miscalculated where the hotel would be. If it weren’t for the food your mom and Marge packed, we would have starved to death. There was nowhere to stop. One night, he skidded on ice and almost killed a moose. That was when he taught me to steer.”