The Detective & the Chinese High-Fin

by Michael Craven

  I’d told Nancy this. And I’d also told her that if she left, I’d understand. But she’d said she was an adult and could make her own decisions. I understood that, I’d made a decision too. And I felt that it was the right one. Because of that, while knowing that I’d never have that other life gave me great pain, I knew the pain would be greater if I went into situations on the job and hedged a bit. Gave it less than I thought was necessary. It’s a strange irony in a way, the fact that to do a lot of things well you have to put it all on the line. You have to be willing to fail in a spectacular way in order not to fail in a spectacular way. You have to be willing to lose everything to gain everything. Tough choice. And in my line, sometimes—not always, but sometimes—you have to be willing to die to find out what happened, what really went down, and who did it.

  Does this mean I have a death wish? I don’t think so, but I don’t know. I hope not. I do know that what I’m saying is true. And I could feel the need to take one of those risks with this guy Lee Graves. I could feel a situation like that coming. And, yeah, I know that if I don’t go all in, I might not find everything out. So I’m prepared to do it. Shit, I like doing it. In a way, my body telling me that I won’t have this other life is also my body telling me that something’s coming. It’s saying: That dream has to die. Know it, feel it, so you can be fully prepared to face the possible nightmare ahead. It’s saying: Are you ready? Are you still ready to do what you might have to do?

  Is that why Dave and Jill and Davey Treadway entered my story? To show me a life I wasn’t going to have, but also to say: Are you going to be ready?

  I focused again on the beach, then looked beyond it to the ocean, where I could now see some sailboats way out near the horizon, moving steadily, catching gusts of wind. I walked back down to rejoin everyone.

  A few hours later we were all back at the Treadways’ apartment. We had decided to have dinner together and were contemplating what to do. Make something, go out, order in? Had this day put the four of us on the verge of becoming real friends? Were Nancy and I going to be part of one of those groups of four, or even six or eight, people who were all in reasonably happy relationships, who hung out together, vacationed together, relied on one another? Oh my god, it was terrifying.

  I walked down one of the hallways out of the main room, headed for a bathroom, when I noticed, in one of the back rooms of the apartment, a Ping-Pong table. The table sat in a man cave, a study-type room. Dave’s hideout. Now, was the room big enough for actual Ping-Pong? Well, no. But the table did not have anything sitting on it. No papers, no pens, no backpacks. So that was good. Respect. And the room was definitely big enough for beer pong. Which the four of us were going to play, if I had anything to say about it. Remember earlier how I said there was some beer pong in this story? Well, it’s about to happen.

  I walked back out to the front room, introduced the idea. The Treadways and Nancy loved it. We ordered two pizzas and two cases of Bud Light, had them delivered. That’s right, two cases of Bud Light. Beer goes quickly, very quickly, when you’re playing beer pong.

  This was shaping up to be my kind of night.

  For the record, there are two kinds of beer pong. The kind where you attempt to throw a Ping-Pong ball into a cup full of beer at the other end of the table, and the kind where you are essentially playing a modified form of Ping-Pong, only instead of trying to win the point in the traditional way, you are trying to hit a Ping-Pong ball, with a Ping-Pong paddle, into a cup of beer at the other end of the table. Now, if you are playing beer pong the Ping-Pong way and you are playing doubles, like we were about to, each team has two cups of beer in front of them, and each team has two cups of beer to aim for on the other side of the table. So you start a point, you and your teammate take turns hitting back the balls that don’t land in the cups in front of you, toward the cups on the other side, with the intent being to land your shot in one of their cups. When a ball does land in a cup, that’s a plop. If you and your teammate get plopped, you both have to drink your beer. If you and your teammate plop the other guys—well, you get the gist.

  That’s it.

  That’s all you have to do to have the best time of your life.

  Dave put Davey to bed and brought a viewing monitor into the Ping-Pong room. Everyone had a couple slices of pizza, and then we got to it. Nancy and I versus Dave and Jill. I took it easy, intentionally missing a lot, to make sure everyone got a chance to get into it, to sink balls, to feel the thrill of beer pong.

  And boy, did everyone feel the thrill.

  When Jill sunk a ball, she screamed, I mean screamed. She didn’t even say anything. She just screamed a glorious scream.

  When Nancy sunk one, she yelled: “Yes! That’s right! Yes!”

  When Dave hit a plop, he closed his eyes and clenched his fist in an almost primal way.

  We had finished a few spirited games and gone through almost a full case of beer when Dave said something I’ve heard a lot over the years when people play beer pong, either for the first time or for the first time in a while. He looked at me and said, with a real longing, a real desperation, in his eyes, “We’re going to play more games, right?”

  To which I responded, “Yes. Yes, that’s right.”

  Dave put on some music. The Descendents. Somery. A Southern California choice. A great choice. A pop-punk band that I happen to love. Whose lyrics are clever and moving. “Cameage”—one of the great punk anthems ever, for my money. Jill then went into a closet and came back out holding four hats and said that from now on we all had to wear a hat while we played. Nobody objected, not for a second. Jill gave Nancy a black baseball cap with a marijuana leaf on the front. I got a green John Deere trucker hat. Dave got a big straw Vincent van Gogh hat, and Jill gave herself a tiny little cap with a propeller on top. We looked good. We looked ready. It was getting crazy. I was all for it.

  We started a new game. I served, got the first point going. (By the way, you don’t aim for the cup on the serve.) Dave hit my serve back, missed. Nancy hit the ball back toward their cups, missed. Then Jill hit, missed. Then I hit the ball, going for it, zeroing in—missed. Barely. Fucking barely. Shit. Then Dave hit, his barely missed too. Then Nancy hit one, high, real high, a nice arc to it, and . . . PLOP. Dead center. Right into the cup in front of Dave.

  I looked at Nancy in her black marijuana hat and said, “That’s why I love you.”

  Dave grabbed the ball out of his cup and said, “I’m glad you did that. Because I want to do this.” He slammed his entire beer in one sip, even though he technically had a minute or two if he needed it.

  Then Jill said, “Me too.” And she took down her entire beer in one fluid chug.

  Professional behavior. I liked it. We kept playing. After two more games everyone had a hefty, hefty buzz.

  I said to Dave, “Do you by any chance have any southern rock?”

  Dave said, “I can’t believe you’d ask me that. Name a Marshall Tucker song.”

  As I thought for a sec, he screamed, a wild smile across his face, “Name one!”

  “‘This Ol’ Cowboy.’”

  “Coming right up. And I think it needs to be a little louder.”

  We played a few more games, everyone making shots, everyone loving it, everyone getting even looser, crazier, sillier. Jill was checking the baby monitor and periodically leaving to check on Davey in the other room. I admired her for having fun and still being a good parent.

  Eventually and, as far as Dave and I were concerned, reluctantly, we stopped playing. One and a half cases of beer, down. We all went back into the living room. Nancy and I accepted the Treadways’ invitation to stay in their guest room. At this point, let’s face it, it really wasn’t a decision we had to think too much about. We were pretty wrecked. But now that we were officially spending the night, it was quite easy for Nancy and me to partake of the joint that Dave and Jill had just lit up. We passed it around, each taking a hit or two. Or three. And soon I, and I think everyone, had a
nother kind of buzz on top of the hefty beer buzz. It was giddy, but also dreamy, wistful, even slightly hallucinatory. The lights in their apartment were low. The music was low, too. We all talked and told stories and laughed about, reminisced about, some of the better beer pong points. Then we all went out onto the balcony. The cool, soft ocean air felt amazing. And at night, without the cars and traffic down below, you could hear the ocean too, hear the waves coming in. A lot of the city lights of La Jolla were out, but many weren’t. You could see intermittent lights amid the blackness, almost like stars. At some point, I can’t remember the actual time, Dave and Jill went off to their bedroom. And a little after that, Nancy and I went off to ours.

  Lying in bed, hanging on to consciousness by a thread, Nancy looked at me and said, “That was fun, John.”

  And I said, “Yeah. Yeah. It was.”

  And we both shut our eyes and were out.

  28

  The next morning, up, some coffee, some hugs, some good-byes. Thankfully there wasn’t that thing that happens on the last day of a trip, or the next day after you’ve had a really good time, where everyone turns into a totally different person than they were the days or night before. You know, walking around stressed and weird and short and tensely packing bags while sighing and interacting with everyone in just a totally bizarre way. You know when that happens? You know when that happens. Awful. Weird. Unnecessary. And as I said, in this case, not happening.

  Which was nice.

  The drive back wasn’t too bad either. However, before we could hit the road for real, we had to stop for gas right outside La Jolla, which was mildly annoying. But, hey, the Focus needed fuel. And this little speed bump gave Nancy and me the idea to indulge in some fast food at a Mickey D’s right near the gas station. As you all know, you’re allowed to eat fast food when you’re on a road trip. You can go to McDonald’s or Burger King or Jack in the Box and just go to town, like we did. If you are not on the road, if you are in your actual town, and you do what we did, somehow it becomes exceedingly depressing. But because we were away, it was exceedingly fucking delicious. I got both an Egg McMuffin and a Sausage McMuffin, by the way. One or the other just wouldn’t have been enough.

  Once we got back to L.A., I took Nancy to my house so she could get her car. But when we got there, I had a thought. I gave her the Focus, grabbed my black carry bag out of it, then got in her car, a silver 2012 VW Passat.

  Then I drove that car to work.

  That’s right. On a Sunday. My second-favorite day to work. You’re still stealing time, but you can feel Monday tugging at you, so the experience is a little less freeing.

  I got to the warehouse lot, but I didn’t park in my usual space. I drove right past it, drove across the lot, and parked on the other side, in a guest spot in front of someone else’s warehouse, in front of someone else’s slider. I backed the Passat in, tucking it behind a white Acura that was parked facing forward. I could see three-quarters of the lot out of my front window, and I could see the rest of the lot, and the entrance to my space, through the Acura’s rear window. I scanned the lot. Nothing out of the ordinary. Some trucks moving some things in and out of spaces. Some cars that I recognized, some that I didn’t. It was just normal, semislow Sunday activity.

  See, I was thinking that it’d been a couple of days since I’d put a little bee in Lee Graves’s bonnet. Irritated him. Disrespected him. And I wondered, it being Sunday and all, if he, or somebody he worked with, might come around to look into me. Like I’d been looking into him. To see if I was in on a Sunday. To see what I was doing. To put me in a location. Maybe even to break into my space and look around a little. Or stake out my space to figure out the best time to illegally enter it. He wouldn’t send anyone around to tell me to back off—you know, bring some guys by to threaten me, intimidate me. No, he wouldn’t do that, not yet; that would imply that he was doing something wrong. No, at this point he’d just want to see whether he could glean anything that might tell him if I was good. If I was a good PI. If Graves was involved in something illegal, I thought, that’s what he would be wondering. Who is this guy, Darvelle? Is he someone I need to worry about? Is he someone who’s on to something? Or is he just a hack PI who heard that Keaton Fuller worked at Prestige Fish and came knocking?

  Of course, Graves’s sending someone today, or coming by himself, might not happen. Maybe that all went down yesterday, while I was in La Jolla. Or not. Maybe he wasn’t thinking about me at all. Yeah, this was just a guess, a hunch. A Sunday hunch.

  About forty minutes later I watched a van enter the lot. Pretty new, white, nondescript, almost friendly looking. Nonthreatening. It was driving around almost like a cop drives, not when he’s in pursuit of something but when he’s just making his presence felt, or just very casually and confidently looking around for something. Slow. Deliberate. Steady. It was circling around the other side of the lot, near my space. I noticed two things. One, the van never stopped moving. When you come to a lot with a bunch of warehouses and you’re driving a van, you usually, almost always, eventually stop at one. To pick up some stuff or unload some stuff. Or to do something. And two, when I looked at the driver of the van through my field binocs, he looked an awful lot like the Mexican man who was sitting behind me stoically in Lee Graves’s office the other day. If the Mexican man who was sitting behind me stoically in Lee Graves’s office the other day had his hair pulled back tight and tied up underneath a ball cap and was wearing sunglasses big enough to cover most of his face.

  His mouth. That’s what it was. That hard line gave him away.

  On its third pass by my slider, I noticed the van slow down ever so slightly. One last look, same result. Nobody home. All locked up. And the white Ford Focus, the car I’d let them see the last time I’d visited Prestige Fish—well, that wasn’t there either.

  So the big Mexican man could now report to his boss that I wasn’t around, I wasn’t at work. And while he couldn’t put a location on me, he could tell Graves one place I wasn’t. Maybe he thought I was at home getting psyched up by watching old Matt Houston reruns. I hope so.

  The van, keeping its slow, steady pace, made its way to the little road that takes you off the lot, then headed out, surveillance done for the day.

  I cranked up the Passat and followed.

  The van twisted through Culver City and hopped on the 10, headed east. I did too, hanging back, ten, fifteen cars between us.

  We took the 10 past downtown proper, then past that warehouse-laden, industrialized section of the city just east of downtown. Smokestacks and drab concrete clusters and the L.A. Times building hanging on for dear life.

  We kept going east, kept heading out the 10, like we were going to Palm Springs, or maybe farther east, to Arizona, or to Texas, or all the way to the other side of the country. We curved through some unfashionable, more affordable areas outside of L.A., Boyle Heights, West Covina, until we got to Pomona, where we exited off the interstate.

  Pomona is where the L.A. County Fair takes place. I’d been a couple of times. Experienced some fried dough, and some wild-eyed looks from some fried Ferris wheel operators. Amazing how when you go to a fair you’ll put your life in the hands of a guy who hasn’t slept in three days and has never been to the dentist.

  Pomona does have a real farm culture, thus the fair. It also has some nice, gentrified, mildly bucolic neighborhoods. It’s got some gloomy, poor, strange neighborhoods too. Hoods without a lot of hope.

  I stayed on the van, four, five, six cars back now, through a small, charming sort of downtown area that felt like it belonged in a different time: a general store, a bakery, a boot store. We cleared downtown, then wound through a down-market neighborhood that was nonetheless clean, taken care of, people doing their best to make a nice life for themselves.

  We kept going, just two, three cars between me and the van now. I was pretty sure the Mexican man hadn’t made me, hadn’t even registered that there was a Passat in his rearview. Now, though, now tha
t there were fewer cars between us and we appeared to be getting toward a destination, I planned to be a little more careful. But, truth is, I didn’t think I’d have to be that careful. He had a different car in mind for me, and on top of that, I don’t think he was looking for me. It’s amazing what you can get away with when no one’s on the lookout for it. Walk down a city street someday and just pick out somebody to follow. And do it, follow them. And watch how far you can go before they notice you, if they ever do. Trust me, you’ll end up thirty miles away from where you started, standing in their front yard, right out in the open, watching them head inside their house, unnoticed.

  The down-market but respectable little neighborhood gave way to a bleak, treeless section of Pomona: some houses, some commerce, but a nondescript, undefined feeling to the whole area. And then just past that, practically right next to it, we drove into some of that golden, beautiful California farmland.

  And now there was just one car between me and the van. The Mexican man might look into his rearview, see the pickup behind him, see a silver Passat behind that. So what. We drove for about five miles, now passing big farms on both sides. Big swaths of beautiful green and yellow-brown land, silos, barns, cattle, Americana.

  The van began to slow down, then reached a dirt-road intersection and turned right. The pickup in front of me and I continued straight on. In my rearview, I could see that the van had stopped about twenty yards down the dirt road at a cattle gate. I watched the man get out of the van to open the gate. And I looked to see where he would go once he got through the gate—way down the dirt road to a distant farmhouse.

  I drove straight on, passing more big chunks of farmland. The van was now heading down the dirt road to the farmhouse, but it was tiny in my rearview, like a toy. The pickup and I got to an intersection, I’d say about a mile away from where the van had gone right. The pickup went straight. I took a right, down another road flanked by farms. About two hundred yards down, I pulled my car over to a little dirt area just off the road and got out.