Casebook: A novel

  “You need two cars to follow somebody?”

  “Well, the FBI uses seven. Her career isn’t … you know, actresses, as they get older. But she always says one more year.”

  These stories depressed me. Love ruined people’s lives, the way our parents said drugs could. I didn’t believe it about drugs. Before we left, Hector took out money. I didn’t know he had any. Forty-two dollars: a twenty, a five, and crumpled ones. I gave mine: I had eighty, not half the amount it would have been if the Mims had let us sell soup. I started to say he should just do a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth for us, but he pushed the curled-up bills to our side of the table.

  “Keep your money. I’ll run a few checks. I’ve got the software. Most of these databases don’t have fees. Plus you’ve got me curious. More will be revealed.”

  See? Hector looked at me. People always did want to help Hector. I wasn’t the only one. Why did the PI bother with us? Hector didn’t wonder, and the attention felt natural, even to me, although we’d rarely gotten it before. That was the thing about attention when it finally came: it never seemed amazing. It felt, if anything, maybe just a little late. We mostly stayed under the radar at school. Ben Orion didn’t have kids; that was pretty obvious. He wasn’t married, he said when I asked him. He grinned. Not yet.

  Then he complained about women. “This younger generation now is so antipolice.”

  “But you’re not a cop.” That was Hector’s way of reconciling the fact that we were antipolice, too.*

  “I was a reserve officer. You go through the academy; you just don’t get paid. Five months. Twenty hours a week. You learn all the criminal justice stuff. Self-defense. Firearms. Driving a police car on wet tracks.”

  “Do you have a gun?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “What kind?”

  “Glock nine millimeter.”

  “Have you ever used it?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve never had to use it. If I’m going out at night, I’ll have it in the car with me. But I got a whole lecture the other night from these two girls at R+D Kitchen. They hate cops. And all those same people love the firemen. Everyone loves the firemen.”

  * * *

  * Though not nearly as antipolice as we would get. Then it was just style. The substance(s) came later.

  49 • Not Looking

  But I didn’t google for Eli’s middle name. I didn’t ask the Mims in what state he filed divorce papers. I tried to forget the whole thing and stay on the lit, apparent side of my life. The rest had been my twisted imagination, I decided. Hector asked me about it a few times, and I blew him off.

  All that spring, I strained toward simple pop melodies: I kept my earbuds in, listening to Pet Sounds while my mom and Sare complained in the kitchen. Simon’s dad had enrolled in a pastry-making class, Sare said. Now he baked all the family’s desserts. “That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

  These were notes I’d heard all my life.

  They lowered their voices to talk about Philip. Marge had gotten him a class to teach through UCLA extension. He was really trying to finish his dissertation now, the Mims said. He’d started running with Marge, but she’d hired a trainer anyway. Philip was offended; he couldn’t believe what the guy charged. “But the trainer gives me little head rubs when he stretches me out!” Marge had told my mom. Sare asked if Kat still had the boyfriend the kids hated. My mom said yes, but she didn’t know why they hated him so much. Even I thought they hated him too hard.

  Marge had asked my mom to collaborate with her on a complex system model. The math of crime. My mom had said she’d try it. She’d never worked with someone else like that before. She thought it would be good to talk to someone about the steps, though. It might help her confidence.

  I heard them like a chorus.

  And tennis started again. On April 1 I poured fake blood in the bathtub and lay head askew. The Mims came to find me because I was late for school and yanked open the shower curtain.

  Once, Hector was over when Sare said, “Is it my imagination or is Eli coming less?”

  “The cat’s still sick,” the Mims said. “I think it’s dying.”

  “Can’t it hurry up?” Sare said.

  The Mims didn’t laugh.

  I knew Hector’s expressions. Sometimes it was hard to believe what I thought, without him seeping through. I started to sit at the big tables at lunch, so I wouldn’t be alone with him. I invited other guys, too, Friday nights, but in the few years since we’d had the Jocular Rabid Rabbits’ blowouts we’d become less popular. The other guys went to malls now where they met up with girls and they didn’t invite us along.

  I found Boop Two curled up on the floor. “What’s up? You okay?” I nudged her with my shoe.

  “I finished a book, and they didn’t even notice or get me anything.”

  “Well, they probably noticed.”

  “You ask Daddy. He couldn’t even guess the name of the book.”

  What could I say? She was probably right. “I’ll give you something,” I offered.

  “That’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have anything I want.”

  “Yeah, I do, come here.” I pointed to my shelves. “You can pick any book.”

  “They’re all too hard for me.” She looked like she was about to fall off a cliff, so I opened a Coke can I’d bought from an online spy shop and took out a twenty.

  “Really?” she said. “Thanks.”

  That save reinforced my already-strong belief in the universal language of money.

  At my dad’s house, I found another letter slid under his modernist wall-sized glass doors late at night. After Holland, we never met the women he dated or even learned their names. But he took us out to dinner with guys he worked with.

  “These are the stages of a Hollywood career,” he said while we studied the tall menus.

  Who’s Harrison Ford?

  Get me Harrison Ford!

  I want someone like Harrison Ford.

  Get me a young Harrison Ford!

  Who’s Harrison Ford?

  He said his career was at the Get me a young Harrison Ford stage. One of the other guys had to go in for a pitch on a thick book. The producer had had it for years; he’d never read it, but kept it around because it was the perfect size for calf stretches.

  My mom answered the phone. “We’re just sitting down to dinner, may I take a message?” If she’d been a dog with ears that shot up, it couldn’t have been more obvious: the pedophile terror. She asked, trying to sound offhand, “Who’s Ben Orion?”

  “A guy at our school.” It was the first lie that big I ever told her.

  I was furious at Hector. How did the guy get my number? Hector must have called him without telling me. “We can’t have a detective!” I yelled at him. “There isn’t even anyplace he can call us back without getting me in trouble. We don’t have money!” Hector thought maybe we could give him Dylan Land’s number. Dylan Land was a kid who had two cell phones because his parents gave him everything he wanted. Maybe he’d lend us one.

  “Your parents are divorced, man!” Dylan told us in school. “They owe you guys phones. You go to a psychologist, tell him you’re getting a divorce, and the first thing they’ll say is Get the kid a cell phone. Your parents probably went to divorce shrinks.”

  “I highly doubt it,” Hector said.

  I tried that on my dad Monday night, his night. I said, “You owe me a cell phone.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. My dad made a point of not spoiling us. And except when it was convenient for him, he really didn’t. Hector knew better than to try Philip. Philip thought cell phones were one of the many things wrong with the modern world.

  When tennis got rained out, I sat in Dr. Sally’s waiting room again, reading my homework as the Grateful Dead crooned in my ears. I remembered how I’d once heard the two women giddy, laughing as they plotted to placate Eli, when he was in such a hurry. When did that stop? Maybe it hadn’t. M
aybe I just wasn’t letting myself listen. I didn’t believe that, though. Something had changed. For a long time, I hadn’t wanted Eli to move in—not yet. I’d been not wanting it, not wanting it, and then poof: all of a sudden, he was gone.

  Because his cat was sick.

  The guy with shoulder-length gray hair who sat at the desk in Neverland Comics offered me a summer job. I told my dad on his night. He stood up from the table and made a call, then returned, saying, “Your mother and I have decided it isn’t a good idea.”

  They were actually insane. When I pressed him, he said, “It’s not the healthiest environment. I’ve seen a lot of lone, sad-looking men in there.” He actually used the word lone. I had to call Hector. In eighth grade, Hector had dragged around saying, I’m a lone lorn creature. And everything goes contrary with me.

  “What are you laughing about, Miles?” my dad said.

  I knew how this would go. When my mom picked me up, they talked for a long time, standing up in his kitchen.

  “You’re such homophobes. I mean, come on, guys, I’m fifteen years old. No men at Neverland are going to molest me. I can politely decline.”

  “Well, we didn’t mean only men,” my mom fumbled. “You could be approached by a woman, too.”

  This was so lame.

  “And this woman, what would her measurements be?” I rounded my hands over my chest. My mom started laughing. She couldn’t help herself. But they still said no.

  Finally, Hector ambushed me. “Eli James Lee. November tenth, 1963. I found him in the American Academy of Sciences. Now we just need the divorce state.”

  I felt a headache starting, a small pulsing growth at the back of my neck. “Can we give this a rest? We’re leaving in a week.” For the first time, Hector was going to my camp. Last November, we’d put down that we wanted the same cabin, but now I yearned to be by myself, with guys I didn’t know. “We might even see Eli,” I added. Every year, one parent and I flew east, stayed overnight, then rented a car and drove up to Maine. This year was her turn. She’d probably invited Eli along.

  The next morning, my camp stuff was spread out over the kitchen floor. The Mims stood checking off a list.

  I felt poignant for life passing. A Boop swung outside on the tire. Summer came full on, and even in our happiness, all of us home, there was a quality of waiting. The Mims’s contentment rested on a belief that Eli was coming, coming with a dog, coming with time for family walks after dinner. You and your family romance. Could she go our whole lives like this, waiting, believing in something sweet? Was it so different from all those people who went to church once a week and maintained a precarious faith in heaven? I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. My eyes hurt on the back, inside my head.

  I still had that message from Ben Orion I hadn’t returned. As the Mims ironed labels into my T-shirts, I said, “You know how I put down to be in the same cabin with Hector? I kind of want to be on my own now.”

  “Don’t you think he might need you, his first year there?”

  I assured her Hector was fine, and she made the call.*1

  But even while I was avoiding Hector and the PI, I harassed her. Why was I busting her balls? I’d always been a know-it-all. Now I didn’t want to know and hated not knowing and took it out on her. I asked if we were going to see Eli in the East, and it turned out that he didn’t plan to be home. He was bringing his son here on vacation.

  I picked a fight between them; I knew, because I heard part of it. “But I told you the dates months ago,” she said. “Why did you plan your trip for then?” It was true: he knew her schedule. He’d memorized my schedule, for crying in the bucket. Unlike certain fathers.

  Eli told her it was the equinox, and he loved that, he loved that light. That was when he’d wanted to take his son to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. So we’d miss him in both the East and California.

  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?”