Casebook (23 page)

The day before we left, Ben Orion called again. That time I answered. He said Hector had found something. I felt ganged-up on. I was still ringing from the luck of my having been near the phone when it was him. And all Hector had was a middle name, I thought. But I rode my bike over to the PI’s place anyway. He answered the door in sock feet and led me to a room full of file cabinets my height and a computer. Hector was sitting on an old crushed-leather couch.
What was he doing here before me?
I wanted to think about other things. A petition was circulating to get a proposition abolishing same-sex marriage on the ballot.

Hector handed Ben Orion a sheet of paper. “We still don’t know the divorce state. Probably Virginia, though, right? That’s where DC is?”

Ben Orion scribbled a note. He had glasses on, and I saw his eyes sketch over the paper with finicky hunger. He looked at us. “Hector found an article the other day. Eli’s ex-wife or whatever she is … there’s a Jean Lee who writes
romance books
. I went to the bookstore to buy one of her productions, but they didn’t have any. I ordered her latest one, and it just came in.” He handed over the package. “She probably makes some kind of money with these.”

I slowly opened the bag and took the small paperback out. It was called
The Other Woman
and had a drawing of a lady in a long dress in front of a castle. I turned the book over. There was a postage-stamp-sized author picture, and it was her, the woman I’d seen in Pasadena. I’d only seen her from the back, but it was this same hair, flipped up at the bottom. I studied the expression in the tiny photo, the thin eyebrows lifted, frantically friendly like a clown. I didn’t tell Hector or the PI.

I turned to the dedication page. It read:
For C, who made writing less lonely
.

“It’s not dedicated to Eli,” Hector said. “I guess that’s good.”

“I’ll run the background check,” Ben Orion said. “Maybe we’ll have something by the time you get home. Just forget about this and have fun at camp, ’kay?”

“Did you go to college?” I asked him.

“Yes. I have a degree in criminology from Sacramento State,” he said. “It’s a pretty easy major. It’s all retired cops, telling stories.”

I wondered if Sacramento State was an okay school. Maybe I could go there. Questions jumped in my mind. If it was a decent college, then why didn’t Ben Orion have women falling in love with him the way my dad did? I couldn’t say that to Hector, though, because I was pretty sure Philip hadn’t had a date since Kat moved out. He might never have a date again in his whole life.

“Did you always know you wanted to be a PI?” Hector asked.

“It’s all I ever wanted to do. I used to say, ‘
Mannix
is responsible for my career.’ ”

“Do you have lots of cases like this?” I asked.

“Not really. These marital problems, boyfriend-girlfriend cases, they’re not my thing. Too messy. And I don’t take cold calls usually. We don’t advertise.”

“So what kind of cases do you like?” Hector asked. “Besides reality shows.”

“I like the security stuff.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“For me, a legitimate stalker, that’s a good case. We do threat assessment. Some celebrities keep us on retainer. They have fan mail services. And the fan mail company will send something over if it looks suspicious. They’ll say, ‘This guy says he’s coming out to LA in two weeks.’ For a few people, we get all the fan mail directly here.” He pulled open a file drawer. “These are all fan letters. The great majority of fans are not a problem. They’ll just send letters. Only a small percentage are dangerous. It’s the ones that just got divorced or lost custody or were fired from their job. They tell you a lot in their letters. Sometimes they write up and down in
the margins. Ninety-nine percent are just pen pals. But a few are mentally ill.”

“And what do they do then?”

“Well, they come out here and try to meet the person. They’ll go to a hotel; they’ll rent a car and drive to the celebrity’s home.”

“How do they know where it is?”

“Well, we try and make that hard, but these days you can find the addresses pretty easy on the Internet.”

“And what do you do then, call the police and arrest them?”

“You can’t arrest them yet. Unless they’re actually trespassing on the property, they haven’t done anything. You usually don’t want to go with a restraining order. We increase the security on the celebrity, and we follow the person. The goal is for them to realize
I can’t reach my star
and go home. Then we keep on them. Every six months we check to see if they’re back at work. If they have a relationship. If they have friends. If they’re a loner and go into gun shops, then you worry.”

“Wow.”

“Have you heard of Gavin de Becker? De Becker’s office has almost four hundred people. At any given time, they’re working on three hundred stalking cases. LAPD has less. De Becker’s time is billed like an attorney’s. No one knows where he lives.”

I hadn’t heard of this guy, but I could tell Ben Orion looked up to him and envied him a little. My dad had a few men like that. I knew their names. I only had Hector. I looked up to him, but I didn’t envy him, really. I knew, even though he was way smarter than I was, I’d still rather be me. I pinched a roll of my fat.
^*2

As we left, I looked back once at Ben Orion’s neat living room. There was one framed picture of buildings and a woman in a
kimono walking over a bridge, holding an umbrella in slanting rain.

Hector carried
The Other Woman
. “I suppose we should read this,” he said. “You want a crack at it first? It probably contains evidence.”

“You’re the reader,” I said. He and his dad had listened to
The Odyssey
on the car ride back from Idaho.

“Ben’s a good-looking guy,” I said when we were alone.

“I gue-ess.”

“Have you ever heard of Sacramento State?”

“No,” Hector said. “I’ve heard of Sacramento.”

I remembered Eli’s hand on my back when he told me he was in love with my mother. Did he sneak his ex-wife and kid to Pasadena for a visit without telling us? But why? I was still wondering that when Hector’s dad picked him up. He told us about collaborations in Shakespeare. “A guy would say, I’ll do acts one and three. Why don’t you do two and four?” There was one guy, he said, who just wrote clowns. Philip taught at extension, but he didn’t get benefits and earned less than two thousand dollars a class. “I asked the students, If Juliet was your friend, what would you advise?” he said. “And they all shouted,
Go for the Other Guy! Go for Paris!
”

Then, after they left and I was alone, I thought our life was over, though I couldn’t have said why. I took out the garbage without being asked and just stood in the alley. It was a tender evening sky, blue with gray clouds, the way skies were supposed to look but didn’t most of the time here. Something I’d believed in more than I knew was over. My mother’s hope. Our good future. The happy ending, but to what? I’d thought Eli would help us afford our life. He’d said he would. Now what? So much we’d imagined and counted on …

All of a sudden, it seemed our family had been lying. We’d been trying to be this great divorced family when really our lives, like
the lives of any kids who were the products of failure, were coming out worse. Like being illegitimate. Or adopted. We’d been churning fast, trying to convince people. Probably nobody believed us anyway. That’s why the Boops were so obviously disturbed. Everyone knew it was better not to be a
divorce kid
or a bastard or adopted. Schools like Cottonwoods existed for us. People like our parents sent kids there to be educated in the art of pity.
IS IT TRUE? IS IT KIND? IS IT NECESSARY?

I tried to conjure my dad as an antidote. Sare had once called him my mother’s Prozac. Maybe he would get remarried, I thought, and have a whole nother family. An unbroken one. His way of dealing with divorce had been comedy.

You can see my progress on my Amazon bills
, he’d said.
In October, when I moved out, the bill listed eleven self-help books. By April, the statement had no books at all
.

Only a 52-inch plasma television
.

Still, as starkly as night lurched, morning rang back morning in our house: the scrape of the whisk against the bowl; the Mims calling,
Come on, slugabeds;
Boop Two’s eager-to-please
I AM up, Mommy
.

We’d received a Belgian waffle maker from Marge, and my mom stood pouring batter, the glass jar of maple syrup knocking against the pot of boiling water.

I tried again what I’d tried before: to forget. I thought, Even if
this
Jean Lee is Eli’s ex-wife, what does that prove?

I left it all in California: my sister’s reading, our funny, abrupt father, our potentially dismal future, and, unfortunately, the thing plugged into the jack downstairs. I’d meant to dismantle the machine but I forgot. I thought of those wires a few times on the way to camp. I considered drawing a diagram for Boop Two to take it apart but that seemed risky. The Mims could intercept the letter.

She talked on the phone with Eli as we drove through New England. He directed us to a place that had great caramel ice cream, saying, Turn right, now right again. He stayed on the phone until we found it.

I thought of things. “Do we
invite
Eli’s brother for Christmas?”

“Yes,” she said. “But Hugo won’t travel.”

“They put us in separate cabins,” Hector said when I finally saw him at camp, sitting on a top bunk, his legs swinging. He jumped down. We were the only ones there. From under clothes in a cubby, he pulled out the book. We flipped through to find sex scenes. There weren’t many. Raoul “entered his wife tenderly.” He “made love wildly.” That was to the mistress who, in a hilarious touch, admired the wife. Everyone admired the wife.

“Artistic license!” Hector said. “But the mistress has a misshapen head. Your mom’s head’s normal.”

“Anyway, this was probably about the affair he had. Not my mom,” I said. It seemed to be about a woman the husband worked with. That was like Eli’s affair.

I wished then that we were in the same cabin. Hector seemed disappointed. He assumed the camp had just separated us. I didn’t tell him I’d asked. And he didn’t make friends, really, with the guys in his cabin. I saw him alone, walking around or sitting against a tree trunk, reading. Maine camp wasn’t really his thing. That was the only time he went.
^*3

The Other Woman
was a strange story. The husband loved the wife but he was in an affair, like a drug addiction. He wanted to quit. He tried. Then one day he and his mistress got attacked by
a gang. He handed over his wallet and she gave her purse, but she wouldn’t take off her grandmother’s necklace. He tried to defend her, and they both ended up injured. On the pavement, in pain, he wanted his wife. Only his wife.

Malc sent us a package of fifteen big Milky Way bars. We sat on Hector’s bunk, eating them. Fifteen was enough for one cabin, not quite for two, so we kept them for ourselves, hiding them under Hector’s clothes.

“What are we going to do when we go home?” Hector said. It seemed like a big question. I told him we had to get through my mom’s birthday. Sare had planned a party.

On our last day of camp, Hector wanted to wash his clothes. I helped him sort stuff. We had the whole laundry room to ourselves, and we used all four machines. We folded and hunted down every sock’s wife. He was probably the only kid in the camp who was going home with a duffel full of clean clothes.

Mine stank so much my dad had the camp UPS it.

^*1
I never suspected
.

^*2
You say that even fat, you would have still rather been you. Well, I would have rather been you, too. That was one of my problems then. I wanted your house and your mom who cooked and plenty of money
.

^*3
I didn’t know until I read this thing that you were why we didn’t end up in the same cabin. That was pretty sucky. And you got away with it. But you didn’t have to feel sorry for me for not making friends with those thugs. I didn’t mind being alone. I liked reading
.

50 • Wiretapping

I was home two days before I remembered the device. When I did, I shot up from the table and skidded to the basement, where I found the thing making a ticking noise. I shoved it into the old file cabinet where my mom kept extra school supplies, like muffling an about-to-detonate bomb.

“Miles?” she called from the kitchen. “Come back. We’re starting!”

I carried it up late at night after everyone was asleep and hid it under my bed. But I couldn’t keep Hector off of it for long. He played it and turned the volume up when he heard Eli’s voice.

I never thought I’d have a fifteen-year-old stepson
.

Eli made that sound like an important responsibility.

We heard the Mims sigh. A jewel in her hand. A great hope for her, a correction.

Maybe he meant it. I wanted to forget the whole business, I thought wildly, and throw the machine out.

Eli complained that Sare had assigned him to bring a cheese platter to the party. He kept saying
expensive
cheese
platter
, with spin on the word
cheese
. But it was her forty-fifth birthday. Shouldn’t he be bringing
at least
a cheese platter? It was a joke, I supposed, but also mean, something my mom accused a lot of my jokes of being.

Sentences got cut off on the machine, as if we were listening to bits of conversations.

Eli said,
Call me back
.

Is this better?
she asked.
I’ve got to get somebody out from the phone company
.