Spygirl (2 page)

At least eight seconds after the Big Ball hit the ground, I remember pushing my hand to Elliott's mouth, struggling to eke out a First Kiss, and shouting, “Oh My God, it's happening!” A shudder shook the room and a chorus of collisions and explosions and screams and bursts of light followed. I squeezed his hand and then
everyone ran to the window to watch and wait for the last blow. I hobbled over, wincing as I felt a swelling pain in my left knee from my earlier fall. This was it. The city was erupting in a final dazzling burst.

The groans of a great city in the throes of its final moments thundered around us. When we realized—about fifteen minutes later—we probably didn't have a cataclysm on our hands, but a fuckload of fireworks and screaming drunk people, Elliott deflat-edly opened four bottles of Korbel—one for each of us. We were, after all, on Eighty-second Street, and a straight shot up Broadway, transformed into a huge sound tunnel from the Times Square Millennium 2000 debacle. We scanned the television for some signs of crisis.

“How can this be happening? What about the electricity grid? What about that guy in Vancouver with the underground bunker made out of old soup cans I saw on
Nightline
last week!” I was yelling.

“Maybe we should have something harder to drink,” Lily said, giving Patrick an Amy's-Losing-Her-Fucking-Mind look.

Barring a stuck elevator in Japan and some AM radio transmission problems in Australia, we had escaped annihilation. Elliott squeezed in next to me on the couch, making a kissy face. Through puckered lips he taunted, “So it looks like it's straight to the bowels of New York for you, Spygirl.”

TWO             

Think what you want, but my job as a private investigator is not as glamorous as it seems. Arriving at the Agency for my first interview, I was struck by the aptness of the space. The office was housed in a cavernous loft, but the kind that missed the eighties renovation boom of glass-brick half-walls and the nineties look of iMac-inspired Lucite and brushed metal. There was nothing chic about it. Its six thousand square feet were a vast sea of buckled, bruised, and burned wood-slatted floors and enormous windows in different stages of disrepair, most of which required a claw hammer to open. It once housed a printing factory, so there were deep
black burnished grooves in the floor at regular intervals from the scorching machinery settling for thirty years into the hard oak. Some of the windowpanes in the back of the office were punched out or broken. Two, I later discovered, were fatalities of a game of office Wiffle ball, another a casualty of an angry (ex-)investigator who pitched a stapler out the window. The fractures were perfunctorily stuffed with cardboard wedges, seventies-era maxipads, and tube socks.

The Agency represented a prepubescent boy's fantasy of an office. It was dirty. Nothing was breakable that wasn't already broken. There were rat traps and sticky insect tape skirting the perimeters, some soiled with recent (or otherwise) catch. The walls had been painted white maybe four or five years prior, but even with a recent touch-up there was a funny-smelling brown, milky goo that seeped from the upper reaches of the back-left wall. The ceiling was bifurcated by a snaking metal air vent that looked like a massive tapeworm.

Evan Pringlemather was the office manager and highest-ranking investigator. He greeted me at the office door, and took me into a makeshift conference room, created by two cheap plywood walls that sectioned off a narrow corner of the loft. The conference-room wall was dotted with the oily impact of years of office jai alai. (“Yep, that's my ball grease,” Nestor, another of my coworkers, once proudly announced.)

First I was interviewed by Evan. Sporting the indie-boy uniform of a too-tight Superchunk T-shirt over a long-sleeve thermal, he was solicitous yet informal. “Wassup?” he inquired, leading me through two French doors with waxpaper windowpanes into the conference room. He wiped some errant orange peels and half a snowball off the table onto the floor and waved for me to sit down.

His hair was bedraggled. Short spikes were molded in two
plains around his face into a craggy faultline at the crest of his head. It was either an au courant half-mohawk, or bedhead.

It turned out he'd gone to Boston University (we both saw the Pixies at the Orpheum in Boston in ’89) and he had worked at Calvin Klein as a sort of callboy in the copywriting department for three years before starting here. “This is the only job I've ever liked,” Evan told me. Although, he admitted, he did miss working with all those hot CK girls.

Evan said he still did cases occasionally when they interested him, and he was also responsible for deciding which investigators got which cases, so “I'm the guy whose ass you want to kiss.”

Then Evan asked me for three words I would use to describe myself. I suppressed my gag reflex. “Okay … diligent, articulate, and smart-as-hell.” He appeared reflective and took more notes. “A negative quality? ” This was the stumper.

I hesitated. “Overly attentive to detail?”

“Nice one!” he responded, impressed. He said he usually answered that question by saying he liked to work too much and sometimes didn't take advantage of vacation time. “Listen,” he continued, “since these interviews are bullshit anyway, we can just talk about whatever till Sol comes in here to get you.” He winked. We compared notes about what bars we liked, he told me about his girlfriend, who worked in the fashion industry but who he was thinking of breaking up with (long story, he said), and about growing up in New Hampshire, where his mom ran a bed and breakfast and dated a Hell's Angel.

George, one of my would-be bosses, came in. He and Evan looked more like brothers than the manager and his minion. But then George opened his mouth. “That's enough of you, Ding-Dong. I'll take it from here.”

George led me to his desk. He had a large shaved head, an upper body like Marky Mark circa the Funky Bunch, and short, sinewy legs. He looked like a He-Man action figure. He was about the same size, too. Even though he was the “brainy behind-the-scenes guy,” his stocky five-foot-one frame endowed him with brute force enough for him and Sol, my other boss.

George was expert in the art in not looking at you when he was talking to you. “How-ya-doing-why-doncha-hava-seat,” George said, his eyes fastened to an imaginary coordinate thirty degrees below my left shoulder. His chin still tucked in, he thrust his hand out to squeeze mine while walking backward to his desk. He cut to the chase.

“I know you can do this work, you're obviously smart with a fancy education,” my soon-to-be-boss told me, motioning air quotes over the word “fancy.” He pursed his mouth and seemed to be chewing something before pausing and asking, “Why do you
want
to? ”

Why
did
I want to do this? I was caught short. I wanted out of corporate hell. I wanted adventure. I still wanted to be able to go where the boys go and not be begrudged for doing it. I sat there silently.

“This was the job I wanted to have more than anything at age eight.” He looked bored and wiped his nose with one big, overdeveloped forearm.

“That doesn't impress me.” My face was hot. “We're not the police. We can't arrest people. We're not lawyers, so can't subpoena them, and we're not Gambinos, so we can't threaten to break their legs. Being good at this business means making people talk. So say you're calling someone, an acquaintance of a guy you're
investigating, and he's hesitant to talk. What do you do to make him spill it?”

“Let them be the heroes.”

“That's all they teach you at Brown University?” He laughed nervously and I followed suit, feeling like I'd just walked out of a test and only answered a quarter of the questions.

Sol was the “people” guy. Since he and George had started the Agency with the seed money from Sol's bar mitzvah savings, he had been the only salesman hocking cases to clients and cold-calling venture capital companies. (“Okay,” I heard him say while I was waiting for our meeting, “I'll give ya two cases for 5G. You'll neva do betta.”) He spoke like a native Long Islander, which he was. Tall and slouchy he wore a blazer, khakis, and a tie with Energizer bunnies marching across it.

Sol put me through the interview wringer, too. “I'm choosing between you and two other people,” he professed, unapologeti-cally “Why should I choose you instead of them?”

I thought about it. “I don't know. Maybe you shouldn't.” He laughed and invited me out with the people who would become my new colleagues for beers at the dingy Blue and Gold Bar. I wasn't sure what the invitation meant until, on our fifth beer he told me, “Well, Gray, you sold us,” and bought a celebratory round.

That night I took the subway home from the Second Avenue stop on the F train to the Bergen Street stop in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and I felt vigorous and brisk with the anticipation of my new job and five Hoegardens. This was going to be as far away as I could possibly hope to be from the belly of the big German corporate publishing beast in which I'd been toiling for so long. Sitting across
from a couple of teenagers keenly involved in face-sucking, I joined with the winos and psychotic delinquents bantering to imaginary oppressors, proudly braving the New York City subway system, muttering under my breath, I want to know everything. Everything. Everything….

THREE             

After my stairwell encounter with the scarlet-faced bandit, Sol and George debriefed us. They explained that they tended to be rigid about only taking cases that were “corporate” in nature, meaning that they involved the executives of one company investigating another company and its executives to protect their assets, sometimes an investment, an initial public offering, a merger, or something like that. Or, sometimes, they simply wanted to know if, for example, Mr. A was keeping company with Mr. C, and if so, how much, or whether Mr. B had offshore accounts or shell companies that weren't reported on his books. But not all the cases were strictly corporate. George would make exceptions when he
thought he could be effective and enjoy some ball-busting, and he often agreed to take cases for friends of his and any of the investigators that came to him. Bill Mossvelt was one of those exceptions. Gone very very wrong.

Sol had actually been handling the investigation into the 900-number empire that had earned Mossvelt a gleaming Tudor-style mansion in New Jersey and a garage full of Aston Martins. Our client wasn't the typical stuffy venture capital paper-pusher but a neighbor of George's. He was considering putting a chunk of his savings into the
CALL-900-HOT-CHICKS
and other classy upmarket operations Mossvelt was running. George advised against it.

The paint hadn't even dried on the newly touched-up 1980 Corvette Mossvelt had bought when George found dozens of liens on the cars and his newly marble-tiled McManor. The client freaked out. He called a meeting with Mossvelt and told him he had George on his side. He was on to him. He knew what was going on.