The Spellman Files (4 page)

I
cannot tell you about new Uncle Ray without a fair profile of Uncle Ray before there ever was a Lost Weekend. One Ray means nothing without the other.

Uncle Ray: my father’s brother—three years his senior. Also a cop. Or was a cop. He joined the force when he was twenty-one, made homicide inspector by twenty-eight. His moral compass was highly evolved, as were his dietary standards.

He ran five miles a day and drank green tea before anyone ever told you to drink green tea. He ate leafy greens and cruciferous vegetables and read
Prevention
magazine the way Russian lit professors read Dostoyevsky. He drank exactly one whiskey and soda at weddings and wakes. No more.

Uncle Ray met Sophie Lee when he was forty-seven, and while he had always been a serial monogamist, this was the first time he really fell in love. Sophie taught elementary school and happened to be the only witness to a vehicular homicide Ray was investigating.

Six months later they were married in a banquet hall overlooking San Francisco Bay. I have little recollection of the night. What I can say for sure is that, at twelve years old, I drank more at Uncle Ray’s wedding than he did.

From all I could tell, Uncle Ray and Sophie were happy. Then shortly after their first anniversary, Uncle Ray, a man who never smoked a cigarette in his life, got cancer. Lung cancer.

Within a month, Uncle Ray went into the hospital, had part of his lung removed, and endured a grueling stint of chemotherapy. He lost all of his hair and twenty pounds. The cancer metastasized. Uncle Ray began another spate of chemo.

The whispers in our house during that time were deafening. There was a constant hum of words, short phrases, and occasionally muffled arguments all unintended for our ears. But David and I are highly trained eavesdroppers. “Surveillance starts at home” we used to say. Over the years we discovered “soft spots” in the house, specific locations where the household acoustics allow you to listen in on conversations in an entirely separate location. David’s and my intelligence gathering resulted in yet another list.

• Uncle Ray’s chemo wasn’t working
  
• Sophie stopped visiting him in the hospital
  
• Mom was pregnant
  

The pregnancy was an accident, David and I concluded upon comparing notes. After thirteen years of raising me, I was sure my parents were ready to call it a day. But new life is the only thing that softens death. And when it became clear that Uncle Ray was going to die, it was then, I suspect, that my mother decided to have the baby. It was a girl and they named her Rae, after the man who would soon be dead. But then Uncle Ray didn’t die.

No one could explain it. The doctors said he was within weeks from the end. It was as obvious on his medical chart as it was on his body. This was a dying man. And then he just got better. When the dark circles around his eyes faded and the flesh seemed to return to his cheeks, we still said good-bye. Three months later, after his appetite returned and he gained back thirty of the forty pounds that he lost during the vicious chemotherapy treatments, we still said good-bye. Six months later, when the doctor told Sophie that her husband was going to live, it was Sophie who said good-bye. She left him with no explanation. That is when the new Uncle Ray was born.

He started drinking, really drinking—more than one whiskey and soda at weddings and wakes. For the first time in my life, Ray could hold his liquor better than me. He started gambling, not friendly poker matches among friends, but high-stakes games with minimum bets of five hundred dollars in secret locations delivered through codes on a pager. The racetrack became his second home. The ponies were his new love. The only time I ever saw Uncle Ray run again was during halftime of a 49ers game when he ran out of snacks. His health food days were over. Mostly he ate cheese and crackers and drank piss beer by the case. He was no longer a one-woman kind of man. Uncle Ray would play the field for the rest of his life.

It could be argued that the new Uncle Ray was more fun than the old Uncle Ray. I, however, was the only person doing the arguing. Uncle Ray lived with us for the first year after That Fucking Bitch left him. Then he found a one-bedroom in the Sunset district just around the corner from the Plough and Stars pub. During football season, you’d find him in our living room watching the games with my dad. Uncle Ray would pile the beer cans next to his chair, forming a perfect pyramid—the base sometimes as wide as eight across. Once, my father commented to Uncle Ray on his new diet and nonexercise regime. Uncle Ray said, “Clean living gave me cancer. I’m not going through that again.”

I
was fifteen the first time Uncle Ray disappeared. He missed Friday night dinner, then Sunday morning football. His phone went unanswered for five days. My father dropped by Ray’s apartment and found a week’s worth of letters and flyers jutting out of the mailbox. He picked the locks to Ray’s apartment and discovered a sink full of moldy dishes, a refrigerator devoid of beer, and three messages on the answering machine. My dad used his more-than-ample tracking skills and located my uncle three days later at an illegal poker game in San Mateo.

Six months after that Uncle Ray disappeared again.

“I think Ray is having another Lost Weekend,” my mother said in muffled tones to my dad. This was the second time I had heard my mother refer to Ray’s disappearing acts by the title of the 1945 film, a cautionary tale starring Ray Milland. We’d watched the film in English class once. I can’t remember why. But I do recall thinking that 1945 debauchery didn’t hold a candle to modern-day depravity. That said, my mother’s reference stuck, and while I had no idea what truly went on during Uncle Ray’s first two Lost Weekends, by the third I was an expert. That brings me back to the list I mentioned earlier:

Phase #1: Lost Weekend #3

It was a weekend that lasted ten days. Not until the fourth day of Ray’s absence did we begin our search. The phone numbers, which my father amassed during the first two mysterious disappearances, were now typed, alphabetized, and filed neatly away in his desk drawer. Mom, Dad, David, and I quartered the list and began making inquiries. Several generations of contact numbers later, we learned that Uncle Ray was staying in room 385 of the Excalibur Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Uncle Ray wasn’t like those dogs you hear about that get lost on a camping trip with their family and somehow manage to limp, starving and dehydrated, the three hundred or so miles back to their owners. Uncle Ray would be dehydrated all right, but he never seemed to find his way home.

My father decided to invite me along “for the ride.” David wanted to go, but he was in the middle of filling out college applications at the time. Any notions of a fun father-daughter vacation were soon laid to rest. The invitation to accompany my dad was my parents’ version of an after-school special on the evils of drug and alcohol abuse.

Dad banged on my door at 5:00
A.M
. We were scheduled to be on the road at 6:00. I slept in until 5:45, when my father grew suspicious of my lack of noise and made some more of his own. This time, a deafening series of thumps followed by a guttural
Get your lazy ass out of bed
. I dressed and packed in fifteen minutes and made it to the car as my dad was pulling away. I jumped into the moving vehicle like an action star in a buddy film. The image was lost after I buckled up and my dad told me I narrowly missed the worst grounding of my life.

I slept the first four hours of the drive and then flicked through the dismal radio station options for the next two, until my dad told me that he was going to rip my arm off and beat me over my head with it if I didn’t stop. We discussed the open cases on the Spellman calendar for the final three hours. What we didn’t talk about was Uncle Ray, not for even a minute. We stopped for a quick lunch and arrived in Vegas shortly before 4:00
P.M
.

Ignoring the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign, my dad banged on the door to room 385 of the Excalibur, I think even louder than he banged on my door that morning. There was no answer and my father managed to convince the hotel manager to open the room for us. A commingling of scents greeted us at the door—stale cigar smoke, flat day-old beer, and the sour, distinctive odor of vomit. Fortunately, the manager excused himself and allowed my father and me to take in this spectacle privately. Upon viewing the room, with its tacky winks to medieval times, Uncle Ray’s debauchery seemed a fitting homage to King Arthur’s court.

My father scanned the room, searching for evidence of Ray’s present whereabouts. He gathered a few scraps of paper from the nightstand, studied the refuse, checked the closets, and then headed for the door. In the foyer, my father turned and looked back at me.

“I’m going to find Ray,” he said. “You clean this place up while I’m gone.”

“What do you mean, clean?” I asked, needing clarification.

My father replied with the dry, even tone of a computerized voice, “To clean. Verb. To rid of dirt. To remove half-empty beer cans from window and dispose of appropriately. To empty overflowing ashtrays. To mop up vomit on bathroom floor. To clean.”

That wasn’t the definition I was hoping for. “Dad, they have this thing in hotels now. It’s called housekeeping,” I said in my own instructional tone. But my father didn’t like my response. He closed the door behind him and came back into the room.

“Do you have any idea how hard those people work? Can you try to imagine the kind of filth that they see, smell, and touch on a daily basis? Do you have any idea?”

I’m pretty good at not answering rhetorical questions, so I let him continue.

“Uncle Ray is our mess,” he said. “We clean up after him, whether we like it or not.” With that last sentence, my father stared at me pointedly and then left the room. I knew he was reminding me that my messes, too, had to be cleaned up. I was sixteen at the time, and although his lesson was not without some impact, I didn’t change. Not then.

Phase #2: The Foyer-Sleeping Incident

At nineteen, I wasn’t much different. Instead of going to college, I went to work for my parents. I moved into an attic apartment in the Spellman home that was refinished as part of my employment contract. While I was still an asset to Spellman Investigations, I continued to be a liability in the Spellman household. My list of misdeeds had lengthened in three years and many of my habits, like staying out long past midnight and returning home too tanked to find my keys, were now out of my parents’ control.

I don’t remember much about the night of the Foyer-Sleeping Incident other than the fact that I had been at a party and had to be at work at 10:00 the following morning. I walked up the front steps, searched my pockets for the house keys, and came up empty. In the past, when I’d locked myself out—as I mentioned, a common occurrence back then—I’d climb up the fire escape to my bedroom or shimmy up a drainpipe in the back of the house and knock on David’s window, which was closest to the ground. However, the fire escape ladder was not extended and David had left for college two years earlier, so his room window was locked. I weighed my options and decided that sleeping on the porch was more reasonable than dealing with my parents at this hour and in my state.

Rae, now five, discovered me the next morning and shouted out my location to our mother. “Isabel’s sleeping outside.” I slowly came to as my mom stood over me. Her expression was a hybrid of confusion and annoyance.

“You slept out here the whole night?” she asked.

“Not the whole night,” I replied. “I didn’t get back until three.”

I picked up my coat/pillow, casually walked inside the house, and climbed the two flights of stairs to my attic apartment. I slipped into bed and grabbed three more hours of sleep. Added to my porch rest, that was almost seven hours total, which was well above average for me at the time. I woke somewhat refreshed and worked my full shift.

That same night, I arrived home just after 11:00. I had my keys this time and unlocked the front door. It opened just a crack. Apparently the security chain had been attached. I shook the door a couple of times, testing the strength of the chain, wondering if this was some kind of not-so-subtle hint from my parents. Then my mother came to the door, shushed me, shut the door in my face, released the chain, and let me in.

“Be careful,” she said as she blocked the door and left only a small triangle for entry. I slipped inside and followed her gaze to the floor. There was Rae, bundled up in her sleeping bag, clutching her teddy bear, sound asleep.

“Why is she sleeping there?” I asked.

“Why do you think?” my mother snapped back.

“I have no idea,” I said, trying to keep the brusqueness out of my voice.

“Because she wants to be just like you,” my mother said, as if she had a bad taste in her mouth. “I found her on the porch two hours ago and after twenty minutes of coercion I managed to convince her to sleep in the foyer. You’re setting an example here, whether you like it or not. So don’t drive drunk, don’t smoke in the house, cut down on the swearing, and if you’re too wrecked to make it up the stairs to your bedroom at night, don’t bother coming home. Just do that for me. No, do it for Rae.”

My mother, exhausted, turned around and walked up the stairs to her bedroom. I did change that night. I did what I had to do to keep Rae from becoming the mimic of a fuckup like me. But my mother set the bar too low; I was still me and I was still a problem.

Phase #3: The Missing Shoe Episode

Before I opened my eyes, I knew something was amiss. I could feel a breeze overhead and heard the hum of a ceiling fan, which led me to the logical conclusion that I was not in my own bed, since I don’t have a ceiling fan. I kept my eyes closed as I tried to piece together the night before. Then I heard ringing and quiet grumbling—the human kind—the male human kind. The ringing, or subtle chirping, was my cell phone. The moan was from a guy I must have met last night, although if pressed, I couldn’t tell you where. All I knew was that if I didn’t find my phone before it woke him up, awkward small talk would ensue. I knew I wasn’t in the mood for small talk, because when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed, my head began throbbing violently. Fighting back nausea, I staggered through the room, which was a dump and I’ll leave it at that. I found my phone under a pile of clothes and muted the sound. Then I noticed
DAVID SPELLMAN
on the screen and I clicked open the receiver and walked into the hallway.

“Hello,” I whispered.

“Where are you?” He didn’t whisper.

“In a café,” I answered, thinking that would make him less suspicious of the whispering.

“Interesting, since you were supposed to be in my office fifteen minutes ago,” he fumed. I knew I was forgetting something. Besides the last twelve hours, that is. I had a 9:00
A.M
. meeting with Larry Mulberg, head of personnel for Zylor Corp., a drug company that was considering outsourcing their background checks. David occasionally throws business in our direction with clients of his firm. Although I was twenty-three at the time, I still would not have been charged with such a delicate responsibility, but Mulberg had called for the meeting at the last minute, offered no other scheduling option, and Mom and Dad were out of town on business. I suppose they could have asked Uncle Ray to handle it, but generally he refuses to get out of bed before 10:00, and Lost Weekends come on unexpectedly, just like the flu or a skin rash.

While I was more than comfortable committing run-of-the-mill screwups, blowing the chance at bringing in another hundred thousand dollars a year to the family business was not a screwup I or my parents could afford. I tore through random male’s apartment, gathering my clothes and dressing as if it were an Olympic sport. I was already contemplating a professional career when I realized that I couldn’t find my other shoe—the match to the blue sneaker already on my right foot.

I limped down Mission Street like Ratso Rizzo. As I staggered along, I tried to come up with a plan, one that involved me showing up at the meeting with two shoes and freshly showered. But it’s hard to find new footwear before 9:00
A.M
. and I was running out of time. I checked my wallet and found a three-dollar BART ticket. I trod carefully down the piss-stained stairs of the Twenty-fourth and Mission station and began rehearsing my apologies to David.

I arrived on the twelfth floor of 311 Sutter Street thirty minutes after my initial conversation with my brother and fifteen minutes late for my meeting with Mulberg. I should mention that David, at this point, was an associate at the law firm of Fincher, Grayson, Stillman & Morris. After high school, he attended Berkeley, graduated magna cum laude with a double major in business and English, and then went on to Stanford Law. I believe it was law school that destroyed David’s sympathetic patience. By the time he was recruited by Fincher, Grayson in his second year, David had learned that not all families were like ours and that being perfect was nothing to feel guilty about. In essence, David discovered that I was not his fault and abruptly ceased his habit of compensating for me.

I entered the Fincher offices through a back entrance to avoid detection. I was hoping David had kept Mulberg in the reception area, so I could have a chance to clean myself up before I was seen. I wove through the mazelike hallway, trying to remember precisely where David’s office was located. He spotted me first and yanked me into a conference room.

“I can’t believe you go to cafés looking like that,” David said.

I realized I probably looked worse than I thought and decided to come clean. “I wasn’t in a café.”

“No kidding. What was his name?”

“Don’t remember. Where’s Mulberg?”

“He’s running late.”

“Late enough for me to go home and take a shower?”

“No,” David replied, looking down at my feet. He then stated the obvious with sullen disappointment. “You’re wearing only one shoe.”