by Lisa Lutz
Mr. Wayne (calculus): “Every day she goes out of her way to make sure I know that I’m boring her. Constant yawning, nodding off in class. Oh, and tell her to stop counting my ‘uh’s. I know she’s the one doing it and writing the number on the board every afternoon. I will not tolerate that kind of disrespect.”
The next question you’re probably asking yourself is how my mother got both camps on board with her scheme. Another excellent question.
She didn’t. Mom knew after the cheating incident that the anti-Rae camp would still believe she was a cheater and be naturally biased against her, lowering her marks on any subjective exam. The pro-Rae camp, however, was all for a moderate push in the right direction and willing to play this little game with my sister.
The question my mother posed to me was this: “Am I doing any real damage to Rae? Is this inherently wrong?”
Well, what do you think I said? I had my own Gaslight game I was poised to play. I cleared my mother’s conscience with the skill of a priest and returned to bed, finally clocking in a few hours of sleep. Rest was what I needed, since the next night I would hardly sleep at all.
STUNG
I waited three weeks for my sister to repeat her crime so that I could enact my revenge. Henry and I didn’t plan the kind of sting operation that involved a “gotcha” moment when we’d jump from behind the curtains and reveal our evil identities. No. Our plan, our purpose, was more subtle than that. We wanted Rae to endure a night when Murphy’s Law was illustrated with the heaviest hand nonfiction would allow.
The following evening, the alarm that indicates when my car is moving went off at 12:30 A.M. I got up, threw on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and exited David’s house, stuffing my laptop in a shoulder bag. I walked four blocks to Van Ness and Broadway and tried to hail a cab. I phoned Henry, waking him from a deep sleep, and said, “Subject’s on the move. I’ll be at your house as soon as I hail a cab.”
“I’ll pick you up,” he said.
“No,” I replied. “It’ll be faster this way.”
Honestly, I hadn’t thought about this glitch in my plan. I should mention that San Francisco isn’t like New York in terms of hailing cabs, but it can be done. Fortunately, that night taxi luck was on my side. I arrived at Henry’s house and we briefly reviewed the variety of plans we could put into effect, opting for flexibility over careful orchestration. This is how the night went down:
Phase I
Fifteen minutes later, Henry drove as I directed him toward the current location of my vehicle. It was parked on Baker, near McAllister (in the vicinity of the Panhandle, near Golden Gate Park).
Henry slowed his car as we approached the area. I spotted my car blocking a driveway in front of a single-family home.
“If she’s blocking the driveway, they might not be staying too long. What do you think?” I asked.
“I’ll keep watch,” Henry said. “Let the air out of the left back tire. They won’t be able to see you from the house.”
Henry turned his lights off and remained double-parked a few doors down. I exited his vehicle and crouched down as I approached my car. I unscrewed the cap on the tire and stuck a pin in to release the air. A few minutes passed, the tire deflated, and my cell phone buzzed. I looked up to find the front door of the residence open. I quickly put the cap back on the tire, ducked past a few more cars, and sprinted around the corner. I hid behind a tree until Henry picked me up a few minutes later.
Henry made a quick U-turn and raced down the block in the direction we’d come. In a few minutes, we were approximately fifty yards behind my sister’s vehicle as she drove south along Divisadero.
“She’s driving like there’s nothing wrong,” I said.
“Sometimes people don’t notice flat tires,” Henry replied.
“Wait. She’s passing a gas station. Maybe she’ll pull in.”
I’m sure you’re biting your nails with anticipation right now, so I’ll cut to the part where Rae doesn’t even notice that she’s driving on a completely flat tire. Nope. She turned right on Fell Street and continued west, turning onto Lincoln and heading into the Outer Sunset. Then she somehow found a legal parking space right away. She and two other adolescent females and one adolescent male exited the vehicle, none of whom noticed the flat.
Subjects entered a nearby house from which muted sounds of music and laughter emanated.
Whatever excitement Henry and I felt at the beginning of our caper had washed away. Gloom was starting to set in already, and we were only in phase I.
“What do I do?” I asked. “If she doesn’t put air in the tire, she’ll ruin the wheel and I’ll have to pay for a new one. That result would be in complete conflict with what we’re trying to do here.”
“Let me think,” Henry said, and since it looked like he was thinking really hard, and since I trusted that he wanted revenge as much as I did, I remained silent.
“There’s an air pump in the trunk,” Henry said. “Reinflate the tire while I disconnect the battery.”
“You have an air pump in your trunk?”
“Battery powered,” Henry replied.
“Wow. You think ahead,” I said, feeling a swell of affection.
Henry double-parked again. We jumped out of his car, raced across the street, and completed our assigned tasks. We checked the perimeter as we returned to his car to lie in wait.
Phase II
An hour later, subject exited residence alone, got in my car, and tried to start the engine. Approximately one minute later, subject popped the hood of the car and checked the engine. Subject left the car with the hood open, knocked on the door of the residence subject had previously entered, and a few minutes later returned with an unknown male and a flashlight. Both subjects studied the engine out of view of the investigators. Shortly after that, they entered the vehicle. The engine started and subject pulled the car onto the road.
“They sure figured that out fast,” I said, sounding—I’m sure—defeated.
Henry refused to lose focus on the task in front of him. He was a cop, after all, and his surveillance skills were impeccable. Henry and I maintained a tail on subject, who may have foiled some of our plans but at least remained unaware of the surveillance performed on her. Subject drove to a residence in West Portal and double-parked while Unknown Male #1 exited the vehicle and knocked on the door of a nearby residence. Unknown Male #2 answered the door and both returned to the car.
Ten minutes later, all three subjects returned to the Outer Sunset residence where they were previously seen. Subject parked the car a few blocks away, and all three subjects walked together back to the party.
Henry parked in a driveway a few doors away from my car. From that location we couldn’t view the party, but we agreed that the best way to monitor Rae was to keep an eye on my car.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Phase three,” Henry replied.
Phase III
When I was sixteen, Petra’s cousin Hugo taught me how to siphon gas out of a tank. It’s not that hard, but Henry made it clear from the get-go that he would not partake in this activity. 1 He simply purchased the supplies.
“The hose and the gas can are in the trunk,” he said, popping the lid. “Use the end of the hose that’s marked with masking tape.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I washed it in dish soap.”
> “Thanks. That was sweet.”
I tried to look inconspicuous carrying a six-foot garden hose and a gas canister through this relatively quiet residential neighborhood. I had to duck in the bushes for a few minutes while some revelers seeped from the house and disappeared into the distance. Then I ran as fast as I could to my car, unlocked the door, opened the gas tank, swirled the hose in a single loop, inserted one end into the tank, and began sucking on the other end until I could hear, smell, and almost taste the gasoline bubbling through the hose. Then I lowered the hose below the level of the gas tank and inserted it into the canister. 2 I knew there wasn’t much gas in the tank earlier that day. We had simply hoped that we could siphon enough to make Rae either A) run out of gas, or B) at least have to pay for some.
Ten minutes later, I returned to Henry’s car with the fuel and the hose. I returned the supplies to his trunk and sat down in his vehicle, where we waited for fifteen minutes in silence.
“Are we just going to sit here in the cold?” I asked.
“It’s a little pathetic, isn’t it?” he replied.
“Yes.”
Long pause.
“I have something to tell you,” Henry said.
I felt my heart jump for a second—just once. I thought that maybe the only thing that would make this night less of a disaster was if Henry confessed his undying love or something like that. Don’t get too excited. His follow-up sentence was a letdown on all fronts.
“There’s a good chance,” Henry said, “that the car won’t run out of gas.”
“I know,” I replied, once I’d scanned his words and accepted there was no hidden meaning in them.
This could go down as one of the worst nights in my history as a PI. Worse than that night three years ago when my dad slept through his alarm clock and failed to relieve me from my post outside a North Bay residence. At 2:15 A . M ., when the subject decided to move, I was relieving myself behind his shrubbery. The only worse night I can think of was when I was forced to team up with Joey Carmichael (ex-cop, acquaintance of Dad’s) and he kept asking me to pull his finger all night long. My point is I had to do something to alleviate the pain.
“There’s a diner around the corner,” I said. “Let’s wait there. I can have my phone beep when the car moves again.”
Five minutes later I was eating cherry pie à la mode, minding my own business, when Henry said, “Do you have any idea how much high-fructose corn syrup is in that pie?”
“Do you want a bite?” I asked.
“Yes,” Henry replied, stealing my fork.
The bright neon lights of the diner did nothing to boost our spirits. The night had been an epic disaster.
“Is she always going to win?” I asked.
For a moment Henry looked defeated, but then he wouldn’t allow that emotion to take over.
“No. You can’t think like that,” he said, like a soccer coach in a Disney movie trying to rally the team’s spirits. “We’ll never win if we don’t improve our attitude.”
“I should remind you that so far, all of our plans have been foiled. What happens when she drives straight home and the car doesn’t run out of gas? What’s phase four?”
Henry thought for a moment: “The silent treatment.”
It was as if Henry and I were suddenly watching ourselves on a giant movie screen. Two full-grown adults, professional sleuths, trying to take down a teenage girl by the most amateurish means.
“If you think about it really hard,” I said, “this is kind of insane.”
It didn’t take Henry all that long to agree. “It’s not my finest hour,” he replied.
It could have been the massive jolt of caffeine in the early hours of the morning, or the exhaustion that had set in, or the sense of failure about this entire charade, but when we started laughing, we couldn’t stop. And when I say we couldn’t stop, we really couldn’t. It was convulsive, uncomfortable laughter, tears dripping down our faces. The embarrassing, I-hope-nobody’s-watching-me laughter. And people were watching. Especially our waitress, who dropped off the bill and suggested herbal tea might be in order. The laughing didn’t stop until my phone buzzed.
Henry left $20 on the table and we raced out of the diner and hopped into his car. Within minutes we were in hot pursuit of my Buick, filled with the subject and at least four unknown subjects. One in particular had his head out the window.
“That one better not vomit in my car,” I said.
“She better not be drunk herself,” Henry commented, suddenly finding the situation far more serious. “Maybe I should have a squad car give her a sobriety test?”
“Yes!” I said enthusiastically. “That would be great!”
Henry phoned the precinct and made his request, providing the license plate number and the vehicle’s current coordinates. Within ten minutes a squad car closed in on the Buick and signaled with its loud buzz for the car to pull over.
From a distance, I watched through binoculars as the officer gave my sister a sobriety test.
“Let me see,” Henry said, taking the binoculars from my hand.
“She’s sober,” I replied soberly.
Don’t get me wrong, I was happy my sister wasn’t drinking and driving. Best as I could tell, she was using my car primarily to drive drunk people home from a party. However, it was my car and she never asked my permission!
It was late. It had been late for hours. Henry and I were tired. Maybe our minds weren’t as sharp as they ought to have been, because suddenly Henry stated the obvious.
“I have another idea for phase four,” he said.
“What?” I replied, not too hopeful.
“You could report a stolen vehicle.”
RAE ARREST #1
H enry and I celebrated our victory by taking a three-hour nap at his place—different rooms; thanks for asking—while we waited for Rae to call me to bail her out of jail. (We assumed I would be her first choice.) Three hours later, we realized we were wrong.
My mother was the first person I saw as Henry and I entered the police station on Valencia and Seventeenth Street.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?” my mother asked.
“I believe,” I said, “if I have the facts straight, Rae has been booked for driving a stolen vehicle.”
“She borrowed your car without asking,” Mom clarified.
“Where I come from that’s called stealing,” I replied.
“You’re dropping the charges,” Mom said.
“No, I’m not,” I answered.
“Isabel, be reasonable,” my mother said, not sounding reasonable at all.
“She can do whatever she wants and there are never any real consequences. What’s the harm in making her meet a court appearance and do community service or whatever else they give her? She’s turning into a monster!”
“She’s testing her boundaries,” my mother replied. “That’s all. You did exactly the same.”
“And I paid!”
My father now approached the nexus of the drama. “What’s going on?” he said to no one in particular.
“She doesn’t want to drop the charges,” Mom said.
Henry finally came to my defense. “I could have had her arrested two months ago for trespassing and vandalism when she changed the locks on my door.”
“
Once again, Henry, we’re very sorry about that,” my father said in his most sincere mode.
“I will not have two daughters with a juvie record,” Mom said.
“Come on, Isabel,” Dad continued, tag-team style. “She was driving drunk kids home from a party. Her blood alcohol level was zero. It’s not like she was dealing drugs.”
That’s when I lost it. “I was a pothead; I was never a drug dealer!” I shouted in the middle of the police precinct.
If you’d placed a wager against me in this battle, you probably would have doubled your money. Just when I dug my heels in and adamantly refused to negotiate, my father whispered in my ear: “Drop the charges or I’ll tell David where you’re living.”
When Rae was released, she looked rested and chipper—not at all the way someone is supposed to appear after she’s been graciously sprung from a holding cell.
“Sorry about the misunderstanding, Isabel,” Rae said after she embraced both of my parents.
“It wasn’t a misunderstanding, you little rat. You stole my car.”
“No, I borrowed your car,” Rae replied. “I just forgot to mention it to you.”
“That’s called stealing, or at the very least, conversion.” 1
“How about I pay for a tank of gas and we call it even?” Rae suggested.
“You can’t be serious,” I replied as I felt the inside of my head start to overheat.
“Rae,” my dad said slowly. His tone was Watch yourself ; she didn’t.
“I know you’re low on funds these days, being jobless and all. How about I give you a cut of tonight’s earnings?”
“I’m going to kill you,” I said as calmly as I could.
“In a police station? How bold.”
