Casebook: A novel

  B. 8

  C. 15

  D. 16

  E. 64

  Boop One pushed her pencil so hard it made a hole in the paper. She bit the end of her hair. I grabbed the pencil and started working, but Boop Two skidded in, squinted at the problem, and said “Fifteen” before I finished. I checked. It worked.

  “How did you just do that?”

  She shrugged. She didn’t know.

  Friday nights, Hector reread Sherlock Holmes out loud to study induction techniques. But I didn’t care just then if Eli was a spy or a bum. Hector’s rabid suspicion took away mine. I just wanted to haul my grades up to where they belonged. Hector was doing way better without working at all. He wanted to buy the RadioShack device. I balked at spending the money. We could always just hook up the extension again. What was the difference, really? But Hector figured out the difference: I had to be here to pick up the receiver and listen in real time for that old phone to work. The RadioShack thing digitally recorded. Late one Friday night, we heard rustling in the garage. In the barely lit cavern, I found my mom and Eli bent over our old bikes.

  “Hey, Miles, do you know where the pump is?” the Mims asked.

  I found it in a cobwebby corner, in a box we still hadn’t unpacked from our old house.

  “He probably wouldn’t like pink,” she said, yanking out Boop One’s old bike. They settled on Boop Two’s Sting-Ray with the banana seat. The Mims asked me to fill its tires. She knelt down to wipe the fenders with paper towels. Then Eli shook his head. “Maybe I don’t have to rub it in her face at Christmas,” he said. “I’ll just buy him one.”

  My mom straightened up. “Whatever you think.”

  The Boops didn’t know their old bike had been almost donated to a kid they’d still not met. I was glad Eli didn’t take it. I always liked that banana seat. And was there anything the Mims wouldn’t give him? She’d saved her favorite of my outgrown clothes. She had a bagful waiting clean and folded by the door, my childhood red hiking boots on top. In our old house she’d kept that stuff in the basement in a trunk for our kids. I didn’t like her robbing my future son.

  Hector looked up from Sherlock Holmes when I returned. “Have you noticed discrepancies in Eli’s stories?” Talking about this with Hector was way better than being scared alone. The only thing was, once Hector got going, I couldn’t slow him. And by now, I’d pretty much decided I’d made up most of the bad stuff. I remembered when I’d jumped up to tap that guy’s shoulder; he’d turned around and wasn’t Eli.

  I couldn’t think of discrepancies. Only small things I might have remembered wrong. Once, he’d told my mom he married his wife because she wanted to, that he knew he wasn’t in love. Other times, he sounded more patient with his younger self. We’d started this relationship we both wanted and I was going to England … The facts weren’t different, really, it was the way he said them. But that was probably normal.

  “Think harder.” Sometimes Hector drove me bat-shit.

  The main discrepancy concerned Eli’s wife’s geographic location when his mother died. Where was Jean? my mom had asked him, and he’d said, That was the question. Where was Jean? Which made it sound like she wasn’t there, where his mother died, in an apartment in Montclair, New Jersey. Another time, though, he was talking about cleaning out his mother’s place after. Jean went home to Wisconsin for the holidays. He couldn’t go. He was in no shape for Christmas. Which sounded like Jean actually had been there when his mother died but then left. Is that what you meant when you said Jean wasn’t there? the Mims asked. She was coaxing him to the truth, feeling around for it in a bag full of things she couldn’t see. He’d murmured Mm-hmm. Maybe she’d broken his code and could decipher him.

  He’d said his wife had wanted a baby. He said that having a kid was like You dig a hole to fill a hole. He said if they had to have a kid, he’d wanted to adopt. But his wife researched and found all these problems with adopted kids.

  Hector shot me a look. You couldn’t say a thing like that in our school. Our class had three adopted kids. We’d been taught to believe that adopting was noble. And we did believe that. I still do.

  But then, a different time, Eli had been talking airily about if his mother had lived; then, he said, he would have had children earlier. Because there would have been a purpose. But how did that jibe with digging a hole to fill a hole, and if his wife was still a virgin, how could they have, even if he wanted to? When his wife had a baby he didn’t like it. Back when they were married, his wife had asked the Mims to talk him into loving it.

  “Varlet,” Hector said. “Feckless mountebank.”

  “It’s getting so I need a dictionary to be your friend.”

  The next morning we biked to RadioShack. The thing wasn’t thirty dollars, like the kid had said in FLAGBTU. Forty-nine with California’s steep taxes. And then, when we got it home, it took a long time to set up. We had to hook the recorder to the place the phone line came into our house. We couldn’t find that. I wasn’t going to ask my mom. I’d have to get Esmeralda to show me, but she wouldn’t come for a while. So we prowled around, with no success. Three weeks later, Esmeralda led me. The back of the basement. Here. Phone and electric. I snuck down and used the knife my mom peeled cantaloupe with to shred off the plastic on the wire ends. I twisted the copper strands together and sealed the joint with duct tape.

  But then it worked. And after all that, we heard only bits of things.

  Why don’t you just sleep here?

  I’m not sure that’s the best thing for your children.

  We did it once. They didn’t mind. I loved that night.

  I know, sweetie. I loved that night, too.

  The problem seemed to be cell phones. We were hearing the ends of conversations. They’d talk for an hour, and when her juice ran out, she’d call him back on the landline. We seemed to have always just missed the best part.

  Sweetie, if you had a deformity that didn’t get in the way of the relationship, if you had a limp or if you were missing a leg, that would be fine. That wouldn’t prevent our having a relationship. But this does.

  “What’s this?” Hector asked.

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “She forgot his birthday that time.”

  “So, she forgot his birthday. Does that prevent their having a relationship?”

  “Not more than his wife not having sex.” But then I remembered my dad screaming beyond the tennis courts. “Maybe sex isn’t that important, though.”

  “I think it is,” Hector said.

  “No offense, dude, but how would you know?”

  “Movies. Books. That woman in Pasadena, did she have both legs?”

  “Of course. Anyway, that wasn’t Eli, I’m pretty sure.”

  Our landline seemed to be getting worse. It carried a ticking sound, sometimes bad enough that the Mims said, I’ll call you back on my cell.

  I love you so much, we heard him whisper once. Then nothing else. Just breathing. I turned it off before any sex talk started. I’d still never told Hector that.

  We had finals for the first time, and this year’s grades, I kept remembering, would go on our permanent records. Hector pulled A’s out of thin air. A bad premonition sunk into me, of a frozen, menial future.

  I woke up hearing my mom and Sare moving in the kitchen. Boop One had called my dad the night before; he’d driven over and taken them both. Her crying worked, sometimes.

  IT’S MUCH EASIER TO PROVE SOMETHING YOU ALREADY KNOW IS TRUE was on the blackboard.

  I put my bagel in the toaster and went to sit at my spot by the heating vent.

  “… Not just that they do something but that they do it with care,” I heard Sare say. “I mean, we put our best into this.”

  The toaster dinged, and I skidded in on socks. They had the Christmas assembly line going. Baskets covered every counter. In each, they’d put a red-netted bag of walnuts, a jar of quince jelly, and now they were baking little loaves of pumpkin bread. After the baskets w
ere full, they’d wrap them with red cellophane and raffia. Boop One hated our homemade baskets. “You’re supposed to give a candle,” she complained.

  “Do you have the yellow pages?” Hector asked. “I’m buying you a present.” Then he found what he wanted on that flimsy paper, the one time in my entire life that I saw anyone let their fingers do the walking. He called three private investigators. Two agreed to meet us that very day. The first was far away in a neighborhood Hector thought would make him be cheap. On bikes, it took us almost an hour to get there. The old building had three traffic schools, Jewish Social Services, and him. We knocked on number 207.

  “Who is it?”

  “You don’t know us,” I said. The door creaked open to a square room with a nine-foot American flag covering the far wall and a suit in dry-cleaner plastic hanging on the back of the knob. I had to lift a Dopp kit from the chair before sitting on it, and I tipped over a bar of deodorant at my feet. A toothbrush and razor stuck out from a pencil jar. The guy’s hair was shaved on the sides, like Eli’s, though this guy’s was light brown. There was a picture of him in a Marine uniform. He stood up to shake our hands. He was wearing shorts and had the meatiest calves I’d ever seen. Like two footballs.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “We’re not sure.” Hector and I looked at each other.

  “I thought I saw someone,” I said finally.

  “Saw someone what?” The detective stole glances at a sandwich, mayonnaisey egg salad oozing out onto its wax paper on the desk.

  “It was my mom’s boyfriend. He lives in DC, but I thought I saw him here.”

  “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 sen
se, 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.