Casebook (26 page)

“I found an article about the writer of
The Other Woman
.” Hector said. He unzipped his backpack and took out a folded paper. I
was shocked that this was the first I was hearing about it. I took the paper and tried not to seem upset. But my hand was jumping without permission. It seemed to be an interview with the Victim on a blog called
The Romance Reader
. A librarian had interviewed her.

She talked importantly about how she made her male character believable.
I just asked my husband
. As Ben Orion read, he highlighted a section:
We recently bought a house because we got sick of having all our books in boxes in other people’s garages! Now we have seven walls of books!

“She likes exclamation marks,” Hector said. We all sat there, quiet. Leaves fluttered outside the window.

“So maybe he lied about being divorced.” The PI shrugged. “Or maybe he’s even Steven. Wouldn’t be the first ex-wife to say she’s still married. Why don’t you guys go visit that librarian. Says here she works in Glendale, California. You can take a bus. Ask her what she knows. She must have talked to the lady on the phone, at least.” Ben Orion printed out a map of bus routes. We waited on the couch. In this room, there was no clutter. There were neat stacks, and on the wall, he’d hung his framed diploma. My parents had both gone to colleges and graduate schools I’d heard of, but I’d never seen one framed diploma.

Ben Orion was tracing his finger on a map now, explaining MTA routes and transfers, but my mind skittered around. I had no capacity to master the transit system. Almost any drawer in our house you opened, there’d be papers, keys, rubber bands, matches, a pencil, chewed on one end. I was like our house. Cluttered.

Before we left, I complimented the picture in his living room, of a woman going over a bridge in rain.

“It’s a woodblock print,” he said, lifting it down. “It’s art I can afford.” He told us about the artist. Kawase Hasui. He was farsighted, he said, so to sketch, he had to get just the right distance. He could not see clearly close-up. He’d traveled all around Japan, sketched outside, and then went back to his inn and added the
color. He lost his home twice: An earthquake wrecked his print blocks, and he had to start all over. Then, during World War II, his house got hit during an air raid.

I asked if he was still alive. But he died in 1957. Ben took us to his bedroom to show us his most valuable print, by a different artist named Kotundo. He opened the door for us to see it, but he stayed back in the hall. It was a nude woman, stooping, combing her long Japanese hair. Maybe he had a thing for Asian women.

“You guys know a teacher at Cottonwoods named Zoe Fisher? Teaches art? She has a son, he’d be a year or two older than you?”

“Yeah, sure,” we said. We knew her. We knew Ez. He was a friend of Charlie’s brother. He played drums in a band.

I thought Hector had paid attention to the bus routes. But he hadn’t. I avoided the whole thing for the last days of summer, and Hector, weirdly for him, didn’t push me.

Finally, when we went, we decided to be the Westside kids we were and took a taxi we found in front of a hotel in downtown Santa Monica. We told the driver we wanted the Glendale Central Library, on Harvard Street in Glendale.

Hector was wearing a button-down shirt, his only one. We didn’t talk much as we rode. I was watching the meter.

How far are we? I asked, on the freeway.

Still a long ways, the driver said. Already it was more than fifty dollars. I was holding the money. Hector’s forty-one dollars, which hadn’t grown since the day he’d unfisted them for Ben Orion, and my eighty, which had increased, via poetry and Hart relatives, to a hundred and some.

We were literally speeding on the freeway and the meter was ticking away, counting every mile. Something about money made me clear. I looked out the window at the unfamiliar, anonymous LA. Los Angeles was so big, I thought. Any other city, this would be three cities. “What are we doing?” I said. “We’ve gone crazy.”
We were two rising high school juniors, underachievers, spending our entire net worth chasing down a rumor about my mother’s boyfriend’s ex-wife. We were spinning farther and farther away from our real lives. But we were more than halfway there, the man driving the cab said, and now the fare was approaching seventy.

“This has got to be the end,” I said, to myself more than to Hector.

Hector had rolled down his window and had a hand out.

The meter passed a hundred before he took the exit for Glendale. I thought of asking him to just let us off. We didn’t have nearly enough to get home. Now we really would have to take the bus.

When he finally stopped, we paid him almost all we had. I knew we were supposed to tip, but we only had eleven dollars left. We’d need that. I explained that Glendale was farther than we thought and more expensive, and looking back now, I’d have imagined he might have laughed at our pile of crumpled dollar bills, but he was immune to our charms. That seemed to have been happening more often. He turned around and roared off.

The air outside was crushingly hot. It felt like someone picked you up and squeezed the oxygen out. We hurried inside. The library turned out to be louder than I would have expected, with little kids and their moms draped over furniture, pawing through stained books. Homeless guys nimbly fingered DVDs. They felt too close to my situation. I was already obsessed with how we’d get back. We asked at the information counter for the librarian Joanna Greenwood and waited while someone pushed a square button on a telephone and then were told she was at lunch, due back in a half hour. We lolled around. Hector was hungry, and this library had a café, outside behind the glass doors, but we needed to keep our eleven dollars. Who knew how much the bus would cost? Hector dragged me then to the
L
shelf and found more books by the Victim. We turned to the dedications. Every one except
The Other Woman
was dedicated to Eli. “That marks a change,” Hector said. “All those to him and this one to C.” It must have been when he left
her. Maybe C was a new boyfriend? Christopher? Carl? I hoped so. She sure wrote a lot of books. They all had covers with vividly painted skies. More than one took place in the mountains.

Finally, a tall, obviously pregnant woman with curly hair and humungous breasts tapped my shoulder. “I’m Joanna. You were looking for me?”

We explained that we wanted to ask about Jean Lee. We said as little as we could, but we kind of tripped over each other, explaining what the other one said, and it came out that we hadn’t
met
Jean Lee, but we knew Eli Lee and he was my mother’s boyfriend, and we were under the impression that they were divorced.

“What gave you that impression?” she asked.

“He told us,” I said.

“He said that exactly,” Hector added.

Her head moved as if she were looking for someone else around who could help, then she turned back to us. “I interviewed her for our Lunchtime Locals Series. I only met him once. He came here to pick up their son.”

“What did he look like?” Hector said.

“Oh, he was a normal-looking boy. Cute. I think he had a stain on his shirt. Active, you know.”

But Hector had meant Eli. He opened the tiny notebook from Kat and penciled a thumbnail drawing of him.

“Yes, that’s him, I think. You draw well.”

We asked if she knew who was C, the book’s dedicatee, but she didn’t.

She looked from one to the other of us as if wondering what it was all right to say. “I don’t know what to tell you. She definitely
sounded
married. Everything was
my husband
this,
my husband
that.” Then she lifted her hand to her mouth and right in front of us bit at a hangnail. It was awful to see a pregnant person gnaw at herself.

“Wait,” Hector asked. “You said Lunchtime Locals. Is Jean Lee local?”

“I thought they lived in Pasadena,” she said.

“Would you have a maps section here?” I asked. “With, like, bus routes?”

She led us to a computer, where we googled the MTA. She left us with that big screen open—it seemed we would have to go downtown, either on a 780 rapid or a 92, 93, or 94 to Broadway. We’d need to get off south of First, then take the 30 or the 31 to the MTA station at Pico and Rimpau. From there we could catch a Santa Monica Blue Bus, line 7, or Super 7.

“Looks like at least two hours,” Hector said. “Maybe three.”

As we were walking out, Joanna Greenwood came up to us again. “Here, I found this,” she said. It was a Xerox of a clipping from the Pasadena paper.

PASADENAN PENS REVENGE TALE

After writing sixteen romances, including the best-selling
Heirloom in August
, a Pasadenan scribe publishes a tale about adultery.

When we left the building, heat slammed into us the way a huge kid could, knocking our wind out. I didn’t say anything. I kicked the debris by the curb, trying to orient myself to the bus stop.

“So what do we think?” Hector said.

That was the question. I really didn’t know. The ex-wife, the Victim, whom I’d imagined in Wisconsin, stomping in rubber boots among cows and Nazis, with a sick cat and a stolen dog, now seemed to live here. With the kid, it had to be. What that meant about Eli, I didn’t know. Was he pretending to be still married to her but living in Washington working for the NSF? Then why would she live here, though? And she hadn’t dedicated her book to him this time. She must have known they were split up. But why had she said
my husband this, my husband that
? Had she
ever
lived in Wisconsin? When did she move?

But whatever was true, and it was all a storm in my head, I was pretty sure he’d lied to us. I hadn’t heard anything about his kid moving here. That would have been a huge big deal! He couldn’t
have told the Mims, or I’d know. He probably visited his kid on the same trips when he saw us. I’d been told once to be careful touching a baby’s head, because there was a part right at the top where the skull hadn’t fused yet, and it was fragile, the brain swirling just below the skin. I felt like I could feel that drain at the top of my head now, pulling liquids down. And the air in Glendale was so hot and static that little specks of ash attached themselves to our skin.

We were walking to the bus stop. Even under trees, even in
shade
, it was murderously hot. The trees here looked dusty, half their leaves giving up and dying. “Do we think he never got the divorce he said he did, and that he’s living with his wife and kid in Pasadena?” Hector asked.

“But he couldn’t live here and work at the NSF. That’s in Maryland. I know for sure. I mean, my mom and Marge have
been
there.”

“He’s got your mom thinking he’s flying in to see her from DC. Do you ever see the plane tickets?”

“I never really looked.” I should have. All the doors I’d listened behind, why didn’t I check his bag? Eli living
here
! I hadn’t thought of that. It never occurred to me once, even after I saw him that time in Pasadena. I couldn’t believe it, really, even now.

“I think he has to live in DC. For his job.”

“I wish we had a phone. We could call the NSF. See if he’s there.”

That made me feel awful, because I had a phone in my backpack. The dictators had finally broken down and gotten me one, for my last birthday. I hadn’t told Hector. He and I were like the last kids in our grade who didn’t have phones or smoke dope. I didn’t want to tell him I’d defected. I thought of myself really wanting the phone but not being able to tell Hector and Eli lying and that that connected us. I made myself open the zipper of my pack, pull the thing out, and toss it to him.

“Oh, we do have one. Good,” was all he said.

By then we were at the bus stop, a small ugly metal tent over an equally ugly bench with no one on it. We waited. Fifty minutes, and the bus still hadn’t come. Hector finally called Ben Orion. I
wouldn’t have had the number on me. But he kept it in his little notebook. He explained that we’d met the librarian and that she’d told us Jean Lee lived in Pasadena. That Jean Lee had said
my husband this, my husband that
. I hoped Ben Orion would rescue us.

But Ben was in a car following a stalker who’d arrived the day before from Idaho. The stalker was in love with a nineteen-year-old singer my sisters listened to. He’d rented a car yesterday and checked into a hotel. He must have taken a shower and gotten himself something to eat, Ben said, and then, finally, hours later, he drove to her house—he knew where it was—and he walked straight up to her front door, carrying a bouquet of roses he’d bought from Vons. By the time he rang the doorbell, Ben had the house staff ready. A maid answered and told him the singer wasn’t there and she wouldn’t be back for a long time. It was true she wasn’t home. She was hiding out in the Chateau Marmont. But then today the stalker drove to her manager’s office and hassled the receptionist. Now he was heading toward his hotel, a low-rent Days Inn on Santa Monica Boulevard, where another car with one of Ben’s guys was already parked.

We waited and waited. The MTA never came. I began to think we’d read the bus schedule wrong. Ben called back. “What’s the story?” We told him, and he said to call our parents. We said they were working and anyway we couldn’t reach them, and he finally said he’d get us. But he told us to leave messages. We said sure and then just didn’t.

“Remember how she said in that article how
they’d
just bought a house?” Hector said while we were still waiting.

“She might’ve meant her and her son,” I said.

“May-be.”

Ben arrived at last. On the front seat there was a picture of a guy, younger than my dad probably but with wrinkles. Not good-looking. But not bad-looking either. He had on one of those cowboy ties. Ben said he’d lived with his parents most of his life; then the father died, and a month ago the mother got sick. Ben thought that set him off. He’d sent the nineteen-year-old singer that picture
of himself and told her what flight he was coming in on. Poor guy was probably disappointed when she wasn’t standing there waiting for him at LAX. The girl of his dreams who he’d never met.