L.A. Success (6 page)

“All right Speedy Frogzales, just don't
get too many tickets.” It really was amazing how fast he was learning English.

Ballsack and I took off on foot to
buy something to eat for my dad and me. On the way out of the neighborhood I
saw one of the Mrs. Oldhags. I waved and yelled over “do you like my new dog?
He was a little expensive, but hey, I'm worth it, right?” Being Dennis for a
day had been great. I was thinking I could get used to it.

We made it back to Dennis' place
with burgers and sodas. I gave the big poodle a bowl of crunchy dog food and
left him in the courtyard. My dad was still staring at the computer screen. It
didn't look like he had moved an inch since I left.

“Hey Dad, you went to the bathroom
while I was gone, right?” I could see from the way he glanced over at me that
he was about to explode. I walked over to the computer and pointed at the chess
clock on the screen. “Look here—you've got 15 minutes to make each move. You
can get up and go do something else. As long as you make one move every fifteen
minutes, you're good.” He stood up and ran into the bathroom. When he came out,
he looked much better.

“Here's something to eat.” He sat
down with me on the couch and scarfed down the burgers and fries. I really
liked seeing my dad happy like that. Maybe the only reason he liked to live in
Venice was because he didn't realize he could play chess all day inside. I'd
have to give him some time to see.

After we finished eating, I let the
dog in and turned on the TV. I wanted to wait around long enough to show my dad
that he didn't have to accept another game immediately. It took another four
hours for him to finish that game. He won, so he took a dollar out of the bag.

“Okay. Now watch this. When you
finish the game and you want to relax, you close the laptop like this. When you
want to play again, you open it like this, and it'll be ready. So now we want
to close it so we can sleep.”

I got a couple of blankets from the
closet and made him a place to sleep on the couch. I could see he was a little
freaked out by the idea of sleeping in a new place.

“I'll leave my number by the phone.
If you need anything, just call it. You don't have to say anything. I'll just
come right over.”

I took the dog with me so he
wouldn't bother my dad. We went back to my place and got ready for bed. I let Ballsack
sleep near my feet, but at first he went crazy looking for frogs. He thought
they were real, but after listening to them for thirty minutes or so, he gave
up and dozed off.

14

The next day I was hanging out with
my dad getting wasted when I started thinking about how cool it would be to
continue being Dennis for a while. I staggered up the stairs into his room and
opened up the closet. I chose some sweet detective clothes—real tough-guy
stuff. I took off everything but my Arnold shirt and put on Dennis' clothes. I
couldn't wear his shoes, which was too bad because he had some sweet wing tips.
Anyway, with all the booze I had drunk that day, I was thinking my flip-flops
looked good with the dark leather jacket and khaki cargo pants. I had a kind of
fat Indiana-Jones thing going on, but with a black baseball cap instead of a
fedora.

I was admiring all this in the
mirror when I heard the doorbell ring. I panicked a little and spilled some
booze on Dennis' pants, but then I calmed down. No one was going to realize I
was wearing Dennis' clothes anyway. Hell, they wouldn't even realize I wasn't
Dennis.

I was so lit up that I don't
remember getting from Dennis' closet to the courtyard. I swung the gate open.
There stood a man who kept weaving left and right. Or maybe that was me.

“Yeah, what the hell is it?” I
asked.

The man was wearing a tan,
wide-brimmed hat pulled down low. He had on a trench coat. This definitely had
to be some secret Dennis stuff.

“I'm looking for...Mr. Bates,”
whispered the man.

“He's...” I started to say and then
stopped, mainly because I had to belch and was trying to hold it back, but also
because I began to have an idea. Dennis Bates the private investigator didn't
exist anymore, so what harm would it do to give this guy the next best thing?
Maybe this would be the opportunity I had been looking for to take a little
vacation from my life.

“I mean,” I continued, “he's me. How
can I help you?”

“You...you're Dennis Bates?”

“Yeah, that's me—the
private-investigator guy.”

“And you...live here?”

“Yes. When I'm not out in the
field,” I said. “What do you want?”

The guy looked around behind him for
a while, as if he was looking to see if he had been followed. As I watched him,
I got the feeling I'd seen this guy before. I couldn't exactly place him
though.

“I need to...uh...hire you. You
see...” he said and paused again to look around. He looked to be about 60 years
old. He had a fine beard with a lot of gray in it. In fact, he looked a lot
like that director guy, Spieldburt. “...I have a problem, and no one can know
about it because my image is very important to me. It's my lover. I believe
she's cheating on me.”

“What's her name?” I asked. He
squinted as he looked toward the neighbor's lawn. Then he turned toward me and
leaned in close.

“Gertie Elliot,” he said.

It was like a bomb going off in my
head. I knew that name. Those were the names of those kids in E.T. I was sure
more than ever that this was that director guy.

“Quick, come in,” I said. He stepped
into the courtyard, and I shut the gate. “What's your name?” I asked. He
hesitated for a long time.

“You can call me Mr. Stevens. I have
to keep my real name hidden.”

Oh yeah, it was him. He didn't even
go very far to think of a fake name.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Well...I want you to follow Gertie
Elliot and tell me who she is with. I have to know. Just spend as much time as
you can following her. Sit outside her house all night if you have to.”

“Where does she live?”

“Uh...I shouldn't have to tell you
that. You
are
a good investigator, aren't you?”

“Of course. No information needed.
And where can I find you when I have what you need?” I asked.

“You can never come to me. I'll come
to you. Just wait for me. I don't even want you to know my real name in case
you get discovered. I'm a happily married man and I don't need my wife knowing
that I'm stalking my lover.”

“Okay. I'll do it.”

“Good. Get started immediately. I'll
be out of town for about a week. I'll get in touch with you when I get back.”

“Um...this is not going to be free,”
I said, feeling bold with the booze running through me.

“When you give me the information,
I'll give you double your usual fee,” he said and left.

I had no idea what my usual fee was.
I'd have to ask Dennis somehow. Anyway, I was happy because double is always a
good word. But I still had some questions. At least I thought I had some
questions. I seemed to have forgotten what they were, so I decided to have
another beer while trying to remember them.

When I passed by my dad on the way
to the fridge, I saw that he had started his first chocolate sculpture. He was
using knives and forks from the kitchen to do it.

“What are you sculpting?” I asked.
He pointed to the courtyard.

“Talking people.”

“Good idea.”

I grabbed a beer and watched him go
at it for a while. It was going to take him forever. He was working on a TV
tray. He had one chunk of chocolate for me and another for Spieldburt. He had
other little chunks spread around for plants or something. An hour went by
before he had shapes that looked like humans. I could recognize mine because it
was a lot fatter than the other one. He had to stick the tray back in the
fridge every now and then to make sure the chocolate wouldn't melt.

Then the important question came
back to me. Why did Spieldburt's lover have the same name as the characters in
E.T.? Maybe he had named the characters after her. That was weird, especially
if he was trying to keep her hidden. It didn't seem too smart to me.

I was going to have to find out more
about all this, but I couldn't do it immediately because I wasn't going to be
able to drive until I had sobered up.

I did a couple of searches on the
internet to get some more information, but “Spieldburt” came up with nothing,
and “Gertie Elliot” always led back to an actress who liked to flash people on
talk shows. This might not be as easy as I'd thought.

15

The next morning I put on some more
of Dennis' clothes, took the dog and jumped into the Mercedes. I stopped by the
perfume store on the Promenade and picked up a gift box, and then I drove out
to Helen's sister's place. It was a nice neighborhood, not too far from the
Griffith Observatory. I knocked on the door, and after a while Helen opened it.
She didn't look as clean as I remembered.

“Hi,” I said. I knew I couldn't try to
win her back immediately—she'd be prepared for that.

“What are you doing here?” she
asked, looking at me strangely. I could see she was confused by Ballsack.

“This is my friend's dog. I'm
looking after him for a while. Hey, I dropped by to give you this.” I held out
the box I'd bought from the perfume store. She refused to take it.

“Presents won't change anything,”
she said. I knew she would say that, and she was right. But that's not why I
had bought it. I was just using it as a pretext to drop by.

“This isn't really a present. I
bought it for you when we were still together, with your money. I was going to
give it to you for Christmas. You may as well have it since you paid for it.”

She hesitated for a minute and then
took the package. I didn't want to stay around and push my luck, so I started
to back away.

“It was good to see you. I gotta go
walk this guy. Call me anytime,” I said, trying to look calm.

“Thanks,” she said and shut the
door.

I got into the car. I could see her
watching me from the window as I drove away. She must have been wondering why I
had a sweet Mercedes now.

16

I picked up tacos and headed over to
Dennis' place. My dad was playing chess again, although I knew he had been
sculpting also because there were little chocolate shavings all over the coffee
table. I wiped those up and we ate lunch.

My dad was doing better, so I
decided to ask him to walk the poodle—not because the poodle needed walking,
but because I thought it would do him some good to get out and stretch his legs
a little.

I went upstairs and opened Dennis'
investigator closet. I took out the boxes and started looking through them. He
had all sorts of cool stuff. In one box he had a bunch of different sized
binoculars and spotting scopes. In another box he had a microphone that looked
like it had a little satellite dish behind it. I turned it on and plugged some
earphones into it and then aimed it out the window. There was a woman pushing a
stroller down the sidewalk. She was talking on the phone, so I pointed the
microphone at her. The sound exploded in my ears and made me half deaf, so I
turned the volume down.

“...so I told him that if he wanted
to change places with me, he'd see how 'easy' it was to stay home all day,” she
said. She waited for the other person to finish talking and then continued. “Oh
no, you think I was serious? I'm a baby machine now. No way am I going back to
cutting hair.” She stopped pushing, walked around to the front of the stroller
and started to bend over. I rushed over to the box and picked up the spotting
scope, as any good man would have done. I took off the lens protectors and
aimed it in her direction. I tried to focus the thing, but it wasn't easy.
After a minute or two, a clear image of the eye of a lawn flamingo came into
view. I lowered the scope and looked out the window, but she was gone.

I decided to practice using all the
equipment so that I wouldn't have any difficulty using it on Gertie Elliot once
I found her. I got pretty good with the spotting scope, but for anything that
wasn't really far away, it wasn't the right choice. Then I took out the
binoculars and started scanning the neighborhood. After a while I saw my dad
coming down the street. I followed him around as he and the big poodle went
from yard to yard. Two houses down, Ballsack pulled my dad over to a
real-estate sign and started sniffing away. Then he cocked his leg up and peed
all over the agent's picture.

And then I couldn't believe my eyes.
I took out the spotting scope and zoomed in on the picture of the real-estate agent.
She looked to be around sixty years old. Her red hair was all done up in curls
that made her look like she was from the 50's. She had the fakest smile you can
imagine, and since I was zoomed in tight on it, I could see that she had
yellowish teeth and upper-lip hair that got darker as it moved out to the
corners of her mouth. It was one of those poses where the photographer tells
you to turn away from the camera with your body, but to look directly at the
lens. But the part that was the most interesting to me was written to the left
of the picture. I moved my scope slowly from left to right over the words
“Gertie Elliot: I just do one thing. And I do it right.” Spieldburt’s lover was
a real-estate agent. I’d probably walked by that sign several times without
even realizing it. Following this old broad around was going to be easy. If I
ever lost her, all I'd have to do is call the number on one of her signs and
schedule a house showing. I could even go to some open houses all disguised up.