Casebook (27 page)

Whom
, Hector mouthed. I kicked him.

Then what’d he do? we asked. When she wasn’t there.

“He did like you. He took the bus. For him, it came. He learned how to read a bus schedule.”

That was a little dig. He thought we were spoiled. He was right. We were spoiled. And he didn’t even know about the taxi.

But that poor guy, the stalker. He paid to fly out here for just his lonely dream. He must have understood, even as he hoped against hope, that the real girl wouldn’t be standing there holding his picture at the bottom of the escalator where the arriving passengers came down to the luggage conveyors. There just wasn’t any reality in it.

“What happens to him now?” I asked.

“He’s in his hotel. He’s got the little sign on his door that says don’t disturb. So maybe he’s taking a nap. Day two of his great adventure. We’ve got a psychiatrist on call.”

“Who pays for that?” I asked.

“She does. The celebrity always has to pay the psychiatrist.”

“Doesn’t seem fair.”

Ben Orion shrugged, driving. I looked at the glove box, imagining the gun. A Glock 9mm. I’d never seen a live gun. I wanted to. “I’ll take you guys home. I’ve got to get back and jump on the computer.” But when we were just a little past USC on the 10, his phone rang. It was one of those systems where it broadcast through the whole car.
0:400, the object is getting in his rental car and driving in the direction of the target property
.

“Oh, man. Okay. Meet you there. Keep him in sight. Let me know if there’s any diversion.” He told us, “I’ve got to make a detour. See, this is why I shouldn’t have kids in my car.”

We could have volunteered to jump out, but we just stayed
quiet. His car was comfortable. Air-conditioned. I thought if we were very still maybe he wouldn’t do anything about us. He made two calls to a Dr. Gilmore. He made a call to someone who must have been in the house. And then he called the police.

The car went steadily but fast. Ben was gripping the steering wheel. We exited and drove north. When we finally slowed and parked outside a huge property, he told us to stay in the car. He opened the glove box, took out the gun. The real thing. He went around to the back of the car and put it in his trunk. Locked it.

“What does he think, we’re gonna go Rambo on him?” I whispered.

There were two other cars parked in front of us. We couldn’t see what was going on. There was a hedge all around the yard and a gate in front. Hector got out and looked through the trees. He said it seemed as if a bunch of guys were standing around in the yard, talking tensely. He said the way they stood looked like if you plucked them, they’d twang.

I asked if there were cops. “No uniforms,” he said. “No badges.” But when they finally came out of the gate, we had a glimpse of the guy, in handcuffs. He looked up around him wildly and then settled politely in the car parked two ahead of us.

Ben Orion slammed in. “You guys’re gonna have to walk home from my place. The psychiatrist’s already on his way there. There’s a 9:03 flight to Twin Falls, and we’ve got to get him on that plane.”

We didn’t answer. At his house we just sat in the car. We said we were hungry. He told us we could hit his pantry but not to leave the kitchen. And cool as his house was, there was something dry about the pantry. On inspection, his snacks resembled ours. Bags that looked like chips turned out to contain dehydrated peas. The only graham crackers were certified organic. He had stacks of those foil-wrapped seaweed wafers Boop Two loved. We settled for the graham crackers. We had to. We leaned against the door trying to hear something.

“I wonder what’ll happen,” Hector said.

“I know. Me, too.” I kept thinking about Jean Lee saying
they’d
bought a house and now had seven walls of books. I could see Eli with seven walls of books.

“What do you think?” Hector finally asked me.

“I don’t know. I don’t even want to know if Eli doesn’t really live in DC.”

Finally, we heard noise. We weren’t allowed out, but the pantry had a window onto the front. We saw a slant view of four men, the guy in the center. He had his hands just hanging down in front of him. He looked at his hands.

Ben banged into the kitchen. “We’re taking him to the airport. We’re going to see that his car gets returned, and we’ll put him on that plane. Let’s talk tomorrow and we’ll figure out what to do about your case. Wait till we’re all out of here, and then you guys should head home.”

Poor stalker. No sightseeing even. And after this, he wouldn’t be able to use his worn, familiar fantasy. At least I wouldn’t be able to, if I were him. Since Ella hadn’t called me back, I couldn’t work up the little scenes that I used to rely on to help me fall asleep. There just wasn’t enough reality in them anymore. I didn’t actually have a big imagination. Once I knew something was impossible, I couldn’t use it, even for the pleasure of a dream.

On a table near the front door was a book called
The Sound of the Mountain
, with a picture of a flat-topped hill you could tell was Japanese. What was it with Ben Orion and Japan? I thought he probably did have a thing for Asian girls.

That night, Eli called. The phone rang, I answered, and it was him. That startled me like a gunshot. He told me his cat had died.

53 • Surveillance

The next day we rode our bikes to Ben Orion’s.

“So you want to go to Pasadena?” he said. “Do some surveillance?”

I had to make myself ask him what that would cost. He waved me off. “Let’s go.” He opened the refrigerator and grabbed a six-pack of root beer in bottles. “Maybe we’ll learn something. Settle in, guys. It’s a long ways.”

I felt glad for the drive. I wished I had Tylenol. I leaned against the car door and let myself drift. Hector asked what we were going to do when we got there.

“Well, first, we’ll go to the city hall, department of records. See if we can pull a deed. See if there’s really a
they
that bought a house.”

Wilshire Boulevard rolled out straight and forever until it finally began to change, passing our desolate downtown. On the freeway, we passed close enough to see empty buildings, some of the windows glinting jagged silver. We were growing up in a city whose very own downtown had fallen to waste and windy debris, a place we were driven to in cars a few times a year with muffled automatic locks to hear music before the long ride home. Now there’s a whole world there.
^*
But then, as we passed through WPA tunnels and the fanciful bridge to Pasadena, we seemed to enter a different time. Pasadena had been built to be a city, the city, and now it was not a ruin like LA’s stark, hulking downtown but a shrine, a beautiful place no longer central. Because of heat. Because of smog. Ben Orion said the air in LA was much better now than when he was our age.

“My mom says that, too,” Hector said. “My cousins live here. In Mar Vista they had a nine-hundred-square-foot Ain house. They moved into a mansion in San Marino.”

The trees bowed, with ancient trunks and leafy branches. We stopped in front of a bronzed municipal building that seemed to be made of sandstone and announced itself with a long pleat of stairs.

The heat, when we stepped outside the car, made my legs wobble.

I counted steps. Then, inside the refrigerated air, Ben led us down corridors and around corners. At the end of a maze, he spoke to a woman behind a high desk.

Fifteen minutes later, we held the document in our hands. Eli and Jean Lee had bought a house in August 2004. They paid one million two hundred ninety-five thousand. They put down three hundred twelve K. “So they’ve got a million-dollar mortgage,” Ben said. A four-bedroom, three-bath house. Twenty-eight hundred square feet.

My stomach went. So he didn’t live in DC? When had he moved? He’d told us he’d pay for half of our house if she ever let him move in. What now? I crumpled in the clean old tiled hallway and fell against the wall. I just needed a minute. Then another. I wanted to go blank. But I didn’t quite.

They were talking above me. Then they were down, on the floor, their voices on my face.

“What about the key?” I asked. “That he showed us. Did he still get an apartment?”

“That key could belong to any lock,” Ben said. “We have no way of telling.”

I still pictured a building on Wren Street. Could he lie that much?

“There’s a local Realtor listed. Should we look for her?” Ben asked.

Maybe he rented the apartment from her? I felt along for the ride. We were done with the world as I knew it. The real estate office doors were bolted. But Hector spotted a testimonial on the picture window.

Dear Carol,

You had a keen sense of the kind of house that would appeal to us as a family. You were a
SAVVY, SKILLFUL, AND ENERGETIC NEGOTIATOR!
I know we’re going to be very happy living on Maybank!

—Jean and Eli Lee

The note was written in ink, with a flourish, the signature loopy and old-fashioned. Jean and Eli Lee! One generation down from Mr. and Mrs. The kind of couple I hadn’t wanted him to be with my mom. My side cramped—but maybe she wanted to be that kind of
we
. Idiotically, names chimed in my head. Sarah and Dale. Eli and Jean. My parents had too many syllables. Cary. Irene. Nobody was the Dale. The Jean.

With Ben Orion’s phone, Hector took a picture.

There could be nothing more good to discover. All I wanted was unconsciousness. I was ready to go home. But we were at the end of a string tending to a center. I wondered if I could fall asleep in the car that was nodding through residential streets. Finally, the string was spooled and we stopped.

“That’s it,” he said. “Their house.”

It took me a moment to understand. It was white. Two stories. Way bigger than ours. And Eli and Jean Lee owned it. It looked a little like our old house.

“Not as nice as yours,” Hector said, always loyal. “Your mom wouldn’t have bought this house.”

“More expensive than ours would be, if it was even for sale. And if it was, we couldn’t afford it.”

“Not as pretty.” In all the years I’d known him, I’d never heard Hector say the word
pretty
. I’ve never heard him say it since.

Pretty or not, it was Eli’s house, all right. I believed it because of a round chair, swimming-pool-colored, on the porch. That was why he’d been so mad when they fought about colors! She’d had no idea she was insulting his chair! And he couldn’t tell her.

We sat in the car as streetlights magicked on, all at once. A woman stepped out to the porch. She had one pink curler at the top of her forehead. On her feet were those things women put between their toes for polishing.

“Can we get out and look around?” Hector asked.

“Didn’t you say they had a dog?” Ben Orion said. “You’d need treats.”

“Can we get some?” Hector asked.

“Seems risky,” Ben said. But he drove to Trader Joe’s, and we wandered through the aisles. Then he parked down the road from the house and let us wade closer. Two dogs sniffed and wagged at our legs, a lab and some kind of pit mix. We’d bought long bully sticks, and they settled, each working on a bone. Hector and I crept down the side yard near the back. Their neighbors had a fort built into the crux of a tree, the floor rotten, but little rectangles of wood had been nailed onto the trunk, and we climbed up. Light warmed the windows of a room that must have been the Lees’ kitchen. On an old couch, a square-faced kid lay watching
Scooby-Doo
. The woman with the curler bent over an ironing board. Behind her was a rack with a row of white shirts, already pressed. I found myself following Shaggy and Scooby-Doo. I loved those old Hanna-Barberas. It was a sickeningly Rockwell-type tableau.

“What if they see us?” Hector whispered.

“I really don’t care,” I said in a normal voice. I thought, Pasadenan Pens Revenge Tale. This would be mine.

Then Eli stepped into the kitchen in sweatpants, no socks, and a T-shirt with a hole in the shoulder. He went to the refrigerator, took a carton of juice, and walked out, drinking from the triangular opening. Okay, I said, we can go. I jumped down, landing with a line of pain in one knee. We passed the dogs, who looked up at us, then returned to chewing.

“You know, he wanted to come Christmas Eve but he had to be there when his son opened presents in the morning. And my mom
said,
You can’t count on a plane landing in Wisconsin in the middle of the night in December. They have snowstorms!
He kept saying,
I’m not worried about that
. Well, now we know why. He lived
here
.”

“So he’s pretending to be Superman flying through blizzards—”

“When he’s got a clear empty road to Pasadena.”

“You guys want to find out more, you should come out here one day early in the morning and check their garbage,” Ben said. “You can learn a lot from people’s garbage.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” I asked Ben.

“No,” he said. “Not now. Why do you ask?”

I’d pretty much known that he didn’t. I could just tell. I said, “Because it’s Saturday night.”

“You guys ask too many questions,” he said, but then he told us during the long drive in that early dark that he’d lived with Zoe Fisher, the art teacher at Cottonwoods, for eight years when Ezra was small. He’d helped raise Ezra. That’s why he’d perked up when we’d said we went to Cottonwoods. After that ended, he’d tried dating, but he wasn’t really a dating kind of person. Like he told us before, he said, girls these days all hated cops. It had been six years since he and Zoe broke up. He said he’d like to get in touch with Ezra. He’d started letters to them. He knew Zoe was with somebody else now. She was happy. That was good. Oh, and she was who taught him about Japanese woodblock prints. They’d searched for them together at swap meets.

“Do you ever talk to Ezra?” he asked us.

We had to tell him no, not much. Ezra was older. This year, he’d gone to college. We didn’t know where. I was sorry to tell him that. We were probably his blind alley. But Reed, Charlie’s brother, had played in a band with him. I could ask Reed.