Casebook: A novel

  I’d crawled into a spot in the basement under the Mims’s room where I could hear. I sat cross-legged on the dirt floor. A big pipe touched my head. I couldn’t really move.

  “We have a plan,” Marge announced. “Come to the kitchen.”

  I heard footsteps right above me. I climbed out then, brushed myself off, and went upstairs. Sare had the refrigerator open and was taking things out.

  “Are we making something like cookies perchance?” I said.

  “We’re making something like lunches. You can help. And then, I’ve got the answer. Marge brought it.”

  Nobody asked for what. I’d noticed before that Marge Cottle kept multiple beverages going. She had a glass of wine, a bottle of iced tea, and water while making sandwiches. Then she pulled a boxed DVD set from her bag. The answer turned out to be serial television. “After Stanley died, this got me through,” Marge said. “The first few you won’t like, but then you’ll be hooked.”

  We watched the first episode of The Wire on my mom’s bed. I couldn’t really understand the dialogue. She fell asleep before it was over. The next day she went running at dawn by herself and returned with her face glossed with tears.

  “If you died,” Boop One asked on the way to school, “would Esmeralda be my nanny?”

  My one earbud was playing LCD Soundsystem.

  “If something happened to me, your father and brother would take care of you.”

  “I wouldn’t like that,” Boop Two said.

  “Neither would I,” I said. “Dad, I mean I love Dad, but …” She couldn’t die, I thought. I didn’t want to be stuck with them. I had my life.

  58 • Tampering with the U.S. Mail

  I kind of missed Ben Orion. We called him and just got his machine.

  “It’s a bad ending,” I told Hector. “Not like in Holmes.”

  “Our deduction was sound. We got the truth,” Hector said. “We just don’t like it.”

  “The reality Holmes uncovered seemed better,” I said.

  “Don’t forget the guy was an opium addict.”

  Ben Orion returned our call a week later, from Arizona.

  “How’s your guy there?” I asked. “He still on the up-and-up?”

  “No recidivism?” Hector said. Show-off, I mouthed.

  “Yeah, he is, he definitely is,” Ben said. “But there’s a wrinkle. My guys were tailing him, and they followed him right into a Twelve Step meeting. That freaked them. So I flew there and attended undercover. The group turned out to be for codependence. His son had gotten into some drug trouble. Our guy was there to help his boy.”

  “Like in Shakespeare,” Hector said. “Your kid pays for everything bad you do.”

  “It never goes the other way?” I asked. “From the kid’s bad to the parents?”

  I was thinking of my grades, which my mom didn’t know about yet, because I’d intercepted the report from our mailbox. I’d been lucky; it had arrived when she was at UCLA. She tore through the mail every night now, probably expecting something from Eli, a refutation of all the documents that had already come to her or at least an apology. The way she grabbed the envelopes made me think she and Eli weren’t speaking. Because of cell phones I couldn’t be sure. But the house was quiet now all night long. Normally, she would have wondered where our midways were. I’d had to confiscate the Boops’ too, because seeing theirs would have reminded her of mine. The only virtue of her misery was a loosening of her vigilance around the house, though every day she didn’t wonder about our reports frightened me. Didn’t she need to read them?

  I thought I had to open the Boops’, just to make sure nothing was wrong. Boop One’s was perfect: Emma was a hard worker, a good student, and she was learning, the teacher wrote, to be consistently inclusive. The teacher worried about Boop Two’s happiness, but said that her reading was improving and listed two books she’d completed. The Mims would have given her a reward for those two books, but I couldn’t without arousing suspicion.

  Our mom sat at the table with us now at dinner, but she still didn’t eat much. I didn’t notice at the time, but I must have eaten less, too. People began to say I was losing weight. Sometimes we looked at each other and said, This will have to be a two-episode night.

  Hector doodled all day in school. He kept a pencil behind his ear. Even on tests, he drew in margins. One Friday night, he asked if I had a picture of Eli. He wanted to improve on the sketch we’d shown the librarian. I got the one Sare took at my mom’s birthday party. Hector had already perfected the crenellated head of Bart Simpson. It wasn’t a huge leap to Eli, whose head was the shape of a shoebox, with the shaved sides and hair straight up on top. His hair was already cartoon. That was the beginning of Our Psychopath. A comic epic. I thought maybe we could make money with it.

  “Did you know that liars hide their hands? They stroke the backs of their heads.”

  “Eli did that. But my dad does it, too.”

  A week later, in school, Hector showed me a stapled flyer he’d taken down from a Co-opportunity community board:

  Best Days for Surveillance to Catch a Cheating Spouse

  We’ll Give You Peace of Mind

  Call: 1-800-94-TRUTH

  • The cheater’s birthday

  • Wednesday before Thanksgiving

  • The Friday following Thanksgiving Day when claiming they have to work

  “Man. He came late for Thanksgiving because he was ‘working in the shelter.’ ”

  “He lied with lies that made him sound noble,” Hector said. “He got credit for being with dying animals when he was at some big dinner with his wife and kid. You know what I found in that book? Lying isn’t a means to an end. They’re in it for the deception. It’s a high. They call it duper’s delight.”

  That bothered me more than anything.

  You don’t dupe people you love.

  The next day, Hector hauled me into the computer lab.

  “Look at this. A live psychopath! He wrote in to an advice column.”

  Dear Dr. Ambrose,

  I am a moderate sociopath, and though part of me doesn’t want to change, another does. It’s entertaining to see how stupid people can be. They’re so gullible. Yes, I am parasitic, but even so, there are some people I would like to stop hurting. I knew I was a sociopath before the age of ten but have only recently had it officially diagnosed. I have been lying and destroying others’ sanity for a long time. So, please post some tidbits that might help sociopaths resist the sweet urges we get when we encounter weak human beings. Sociopaths, though born that way, are people, too.

  “He’s Shakespearean,” Hector said. “ ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity.’ ”

  “I wish I knew some uses.”

  59 • Retroactively Chumped

  I developed rituals. As soon as I got home from winter tennis, the first thing I did was pick through the mail. I found a catalog of cookies the Mims ordered every year and put that on the top of the pile. I found a letter she had written to Eli Lee, at 4201 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA 22230, stamped NO ADDRESSEE. RETURN TO SENDER. I tore the thing open. It was a thank-you note she’d written him months ago for flying out to her birthday party. It didn’t mention the cheese platter. I’d one-clicked a book called Blankets the guy at Neverland told me about, and I was watching for that Amazon package. One day, I picked up an envelope, addressed to Irene Adler, no Miss or Ms. or Mrs., and a blank where a return address would be, postmarked SANTA ANA, CA. I thought I recognized Eli’s penmanship. I hid it in my sock drawer until Hector arrived. We knew to open it with steam. We boiled a pot of water. I didn’t realize, though, that the envelope would ruffle. That would show.

  Dear Irene,

  This letter is the most difficult I’ve ever had to write. Literally. I know I must write this by hand, but my hand is always so wobbly I can’t make out my handwriting. And right there, in that first sentence—by focusing, as I always have, on my feelings rather than on the difficulties and pain that I’ve caused and am
causing you—I’ve added to the obscenity of what I’ve done. What I find myself muttering and have been muttering to myself for so long is that I’m sorry and that I never meant to hurt you.

  My connection to you and the small ways that I’ve been able to help you have been so central and addictive to me.

  You will ask why I’ve done this.

  I deeply wanted to be with you.

  Many people experience great calamities and overcome them. I’ve never been able to overcome, really even slightly, my mother’s death, and it’s left me in need of connections to her. I know almost no one who knew she ever lived. Those connections now amount to Jean and my brother. My memories of her and of Coco are stained completely by their terrible illnesses—that’s really all I think about when I think about them, and I think of them hourly. And I don’t know where to put this, but I wanted to make sure I was with my dog when she was died. She’s old now, too. More important, toward the end I knew there was no way you could be with me after I revealed what I’d done.

  For a time I convinced myself that my deception was not so bad. Then I realized that I’d have to reveal to you my terrible deception, one that soon became monstrous. I cataloged my lies. Those lies are deeper and fuller than I’ve ever told you—and even now I can’t send you the catalog. Every day I tried to summon the courage to tell you: I always failed. I couldn’t bring myself to reveal these bad things because I prized your esteem. I imagined I would extricate myself, we wouldn’t talk for a year or eighteen months, and then eventually I could start to try to get you back.

  I will always be available to help you. You can trust me to listen, to keep your confidences, to advise, to help me find the right teakettle. But you must not trust me to give you an honest view of myself—my self-loathing and readiness to lie are too deep.

  I knew long ago that you had given me the greatest happiness, and that I have repaid that with actions that bring me (again—me) profound shame. I will carry both with me forever.

  A teakettle! I put the thing down. My hand was shaking. “A teakettle!” I started to laugh, but the shaking grew. I’d never cried in front of a guy before. Eli hadn’t even proofread. He wrote me when he meant you. That’s how unimportant we were. When I finally looked up, I saw Hector’s face. All this time, Hector had gone bad cop on Eli, but now his features were drained, and his bones stuck out.

  “She’s banked her life on him, and he offers to help her select, not even buy, a teakettle,” he said.

  “He said himself that he was monstrous.” He didn’t even mention my sisters or me. “Do you think we should glue the envelope and put it back in the mail?”

  “She’d probably feel retroactively chumped off. Maybe we should burn it.”

  We rode bikes to Ben Orion’s house. We didn’t even call first. Just as we slowed, our shoes sanding the sidewalk, a woman with a ponytail dashed out of his gate and into a white car.

  “You guys look different again,” Ben said, opening the door. When he first met us, we’d worn shorts. California kids stay barelegged for years. Then, overnight, they start wearing jeans. It happens around the time you switch from baths to showers. Boop Two still wore shorts. But one day soon she’d come out of her room and it would be over. Forever.

  “New girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Oh, no, that was the lady I told you about. After this last trip, she finally decided to fire me. Was kind of emotional. We’ve been doing surveillance together nineteen years.”

  “After that guy, did she ever find someone else?”

  “For a while she did. Now she’s on her own with a kid. How’s your mom?”

  “Every day she makes an X on the calendar,” I said. “We’re on week nine. But we got this letter.”

  After he read it, Ben put the folded paper down. “Well, the guy has a way with words. I couldn’t of written that.”

  “You’d never have to,” I said.

  His finger traced over the paper, picking out traps and lures. “See, he’s laying out a scenario. Eighteen months. He’s setting her up to hang on another year and a half. People who get out, get out,” he said. “They get out tonight. I see it all the time.”

  “Too bad he didn’t send that catalog of lies,” Hector said. “I’d like to see it.” I knew Hector: he wanted it for our comic book.

  “He didn’t make any list a lies,” Ben said. “He’s grandstanding. People who do inventory, they’re deep in. He’s still just spinning cotton candy.”

  “You can tell from just this?”

  He picked up the envelope. “He doesn’t even give her his address. Doesn’t know we already have it.”

  “Should we burn the thing?” Hector asked. “She hasn’t been doing so well.”

  Ben Orion shrugged. “We’re not God. It’s her letter. Let her open it or not.”

  I stuffed it back into the ruffled envelope, glad to be told what to do.

  “I’ve got bread rising,” Ben said. “You guys know how to knead?”

  “His mom does,” Hector said.

  He handed us aprons that looked like bibs. “Really? I thought mathematician. Head in the sky.”

  He took the puffy dough out of an oiled bowl. It was like a stomach. Kneading was fun at first, then work. You had to keep going. My hands hurt.

  “People at UCLA probably still think Eli lives in Washington,” I said.

  “Sure,” Ben said. “They’re in the ‘Irene’ column.”

  “Why did he have to find us?”

  “Con artists are canny judges. They find good people,” Ben said. “He’s not going to be taken. Be a lot worse if she’d married him.”

  “But her happiness,” I said, “it was all fake.”

  “Was she happy, really?” Hector asked. “Maybe it was just hope for happiness.”

  “Hope for happiness is happiness,” I said.

  Ben shook his head. “Love. It’s the one thing you should never lie about.”

  “That woman we saw,” I said. “How did she finally get over the guy?”

  “I don’t know that she did.”

  “Well, then how did you talk her into firing you?”

  “I didn’t. It was our guy in Arizona. I told you he’s in Twelve Step. As part of that, you have to make amends to everyone you’ve wronged. He sent back money he’d taken from her, with the interest compounded.”

  Ben showed us how he’d put bricks inside his oven to form an open box. The kind of thing Sare was always complaining our dads didn’t do. But I couldn’t exactly imagine our moms with Ben Orion either. It had something to do with Sacramento State College and the way he talked, what I recognized but wouldn’t have then called class.

  He walked us out to our bikes. The moon hung low, close to the rooftops, a huge ball.

  “Sure you guys don’t want to wait till the bread comes out?”

  But we had to get home. “Hey,” I said. “What happened to the stalker you sent back to Idaho?”

  “That’s all quiet. He’s living with his mom again. We’ve got somebody in Boise checking up on him. Make sure the old lady doesn’t die. Still the same job, but he joined a group at the local library that meets once a month to talk about American Idol. All the studies show just being a member of a group, any group, makes people happier.”

  “What Eli did should be a crime,” Hector said.

  “It was, once upon a time. You could sue a man for harming a woman’s marital prospects. But your mom’ll have plenty suitors.”

  “How do you know?” I tried to say that in a nice way.

  “I saw her once. Going into your house. She was carrying a bag of groceries.” So he thought she was beautiful, too. Maybe Ben Orion had a crush on the Mims from afar. Maybe that was why he’d helped us for free. “You think she’s okay for money and everything?” he asked.

  I really didn’t know. She’d been counting on Eli’s seven thousand a month. I didn’t tell Ben or Hector that. I was ashamed we needed money.

  60 • Flushing Drug
s

  I glued the envelope, but it still looked tampered with. I tried to iron it smooth on the ironing board in the basement. I browned a corner, then just slid it back into our mail, between two bills. The next day, when Hector and I loped in, Marge stood in our kitchen mixing batter, her arm like a ham. “Bundt,” she said. My mom bent over chopping walnuts. I checked and found the letter still unopened. I’d buried it too well. The bills weren’t opened either.

  The Boops sat on the Eli-sofa, decorating tags: From the Adler family. Cakes cooled on mesh racks. Hector asked how many they were making.

  “Hundred, hundred ten,” Marge said. “It’s everybody at your school and all the departmental secretaries.”

  “Nothing like this ever happens in our house,” Hector said. “I don’t even think our oven works.”

  The oven too now! I knew the washing machine was busted. He didn’t tell me these things. And he knew everything about me! Why didn’t Philip just call a repair guy? I felt bad about his oven. Once, a long time ago, his mom had made jam with us in their kitchen.

  When Philip arrived to pick up Hector, Marge poured him a glass of wine. “Not too shabby,” he said, the glass in one hand, a small cake in the other. For him, this was ebullience. I felt like asking him about his broken machines. My sisters tied their tags onto red-cellophane-wrapped cakes for the teachers, janitors, parking patrol guys, secretaries, and the school nurse. The assembly line reminded me of all the other years, but the Mims stood like a zombie, doing her job with blank eyes. I worried about money.

  Hector herded his dad to the door. “I’ve still got Latin and my book’s at home.”

  School was all of a sudden hard. While we’d been busy, we found ourselves dropped into the time when everything counted. I had a paper due, but I kept thinking of presents my mom had given Eli. She’d bought him a digital camera once to take pictures of his son. She’d given him cuff links and what should have been my watch. I assumed the parties he attended, where he wore cuff links and the four suits, took place far away. At least we’d found out before Christmas; she wouldn’t buy him anything this year. Did he wear that watch with the Victim? Did she ever ask where it came from?