The Spellman Files

by Lisa Lutz

  The woman’s jittery hands and nervous bearing piqued Rae’s interest. My sister closed her book as the woman took her leave, waited the requisite twenty seconds, and then followed her. I was still parked around the corner at the other end of the block. I quickly started the car and turned onto Polk Street, driving as slowly as I could until I caught up with Rae. I made a quick turn in front of my sister as she was crossing the street.

  “Can I give you a lift?” I offered as I rolled down the window. She knew that I had followed her. She knew that I knew what she was doing. I could have written out the math equation she was internally calculating. Defiance was typically not Rae’s method. Unlike me, she acquiesced whenever her heart allowed for it. She knew enough to avoid raising further suspicion.

  “Thanks. I didn’t feel like walking,” she said, getting in.

  I said nothing, thinking this might be a one-time deal and so what if, after school, my sister on occasion shadows complete strangers? It is exercise, isn’t it?

  I let it slide for a few weeks, as she tested her curfew more and more. Then it appeared that she had scaled back her recreational surveillance. She was suddenly returning home before dinner and staying in her room most of the night. My parents attributed the solitude to Uncle Ray avoidance. I, on the other hand, was not so ready to trust someone who shared my DNA.

  My attic apartment sits just above Rae’s bedroom on the second floor. An outside fire escape connects the two rooms. When Rae was five, she caught me sneaking out one night and discovered an alternate passage into my bedroom. I quickly disabused her of this habit, not just because it was dangerous, but also because my bed sat just below the window and her late-night entrances usually involved leaving size-three tread marks on my face.

  Six Months Ago

  I heard the slow creak of the fire escape ladder shortly before 7:00 P.M. I was about to look out my window when the telephone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, is this Isabel?” a male voice asked.

  Generally I don’t answer questions like that, but this was my private line.

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Hi. My name is Benjamin McDonald. I met your mother at the library.”

  “The library?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which library?”

  “The main library. Downtown.”

  “What was she doing there?”

  “I assume checking out books.”

  “Did you see her with any books?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you remember which ones?”

  “No.”

  “Not even one?”

  “No. Anyway, the reason I’m calling—”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Where?”

  “At the library?”

  “Oh, I had some research to do.”

  “Legal research?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “So you’re a lawyer?”

  “Yes. So I was thinking that maybe we could—”

  “Have coffee?”

  “Yes. Coffee.”

  “No. I’m no longer having coffee with lawyers. But could I ask you a question before we hang up?”

  “All you’ve been doing is asking me questions.”

  “Good point. What did my mother tell you about me?”

  “Not much.”

  “So why did you agree to this?”

  “She offered me a twenty percent discount on investigative work.”

  I hung up the phone and raced downstairs.

  “Mom, we need to call in the white coats and have you hauled off just like Blanche DuBois.”

  My mother clapped her hands together enthusiastically. “Benjamin called, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. And I can guarantee he won’t call again.”

  “Well, Isabel, there goes your raise.”

  “You weren’t going to give me a raise.”

  “Yes, I was. If you went out with Benjamin. But now, nothing.”

  “I can get my own dates, Mom.”

  My mother rolled her eyes and said, “Of course you can,” then switched subjects, since she knew nothing was going to change. She would continue fixing me up with lawyers and I would continue dating men who could comp my drinks.

  “I’m taking you off the Spark Industries background work tomorrow and giving you a surveillance job,” Mom said.

  “New client?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Peters. Called last week. She suspects her husband, Jake, might be gay.”

  “Did you suggest she ask him?”

  Mom laughed. “Of course not. Business is slow.”

  I returned to my apartment and reviewed the materials for the following day’s surveillance.

  At 10:15 that night, I heard rattling on the fire escape. I turned the lights off in my bedroom and carefully peered through the curtains. I caught sight of Rae’s legs wiggling through the window into her room. I quickly slipped on a pair of sneakers, defenestrated myself, and climbed down the fire escape. I crawled through Rae’s window before she had a chance to take off her shoes.

  “I have a door, Isabel.”

  “Then why aren’t you using it?”

  “Cut to the chase,” she said like a cowboy in an old Western.

  “Surveillance isn’t a hobby.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You have to stop following complete strangers.”

  “Why? You do it all the time.”

  “I follow people when I’m paid to do it. Get the distinction?”

  “I like it enough to do it for free.”

  “We give you as much work as we can.”

  “Not as much as I used to get.”

  “You could get hurt, Rae.”

  “I could get hurt playing squash.”

  “You don’t play squash.”

  “Not the point.”

  “You could follow the wrong person and get kidnapped or murdered.”

  “Unlikely.”

  “But not impossible.”

  “If you’re talking about me quitting cold turkey, it is not going to happen,” Rae said as she slipped into a chair behind her desk.

  I sat down across from her. “How about you cut back?”

  Ray scribbled on a square notepad, folded the paper into quarters, and slid it across the desk. “How does this number work for you?”

  “You need to spend less time with David,” I said, commenting on her technique. When I unfolded the paper, I practically shouted, “Ten percent?”

  “The point of writing it down is so you don’t say it out loud.”

  “Yeah? Well, ten percent does not work for me.”

  Rae pushed a pen and notepad across the table. “I’m willing to negotiate.”

  I chose to play it her way, since I knew we’d be negotiating the method for hours if I didn’t. I wrote down my number, folded the paper, and slid it back to her.

  Rae laughed incredulously. “Not in this lifetime.” She jotted down her own number and slipped it back to me. “Let’s see how this works for you.”

  “Fifteen percent? You can’t be serious.”

  “You’re doing it wrong! Don’t say it out loud.”

  I wrote down my own number again and held it up for her to see: forty percent. “Rae, I’m not leaving this room until you agree to that.”

  Rae mulled it over and figured there had to be a way she could make that work.

  “If I trim my recreational surveillance by this number, then I’ll need to compensate for it in other ways.”

  “Where are you going with this?”

  “At least one day a week, you take me on one of your jobs.”

  “If that’s how you want to spend your weekends.”

  “And holidays and administrative half days.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  After we shook on it, Rae confidently suggested, “How does tomorrow work for you?”

  According to Mrs. Peters, Jake Pet
ers was playing tennis the next morning with an unidentified male whom she believed to be his lover. The job would begin at the San Francisco Tennis Club. Mrs. Peters had already followed her husband to that site on a number of occasions and there was no need to risk getting burned for a ten-minute drive from the Peterses’ home to the club.

  In the morning, I drank coffee with my mom and went over the case file on Mr. Peters, which included the schedule Mrs. Peters provided for her husband. Between my second and third cup, and right after my mom said, “Maybe you’d be less snippy if you cut down on that stuff” and I replied with, “Please don’t use the word ‘snippy,’ it doesn’t suit you,” Rae hopped downstairs wearing white shorts, a pink Izod shirt, and socks with pom-poms, carrying a Wilson aluminum tennis racket.

  “Mom, do I look okay?” asked Rae.

  My mother glowed with approval. “Perfect,” she said.

  “Rae, you’re wearing a pink shirt,” I observed, praying for a logical explanation.

  “I’m not blind,” she replied, reaching for the Froot Loops. I was about to protest, but remembered it was Saturday. Rae shook the box, hearing the weak resonance of powdered sugar. She poured the leftovers into the bowl, which offered up not even one solid loop.

  “Bastard!” Rae shouted.

  “Rae, Grandma was married when she had your uncle,” my mother corrected.

  “Sorry,” Rae said, then replaced the prior insult with “big fat jerk.”

  “Thank you,” my mom said, as if a lesson had really been learned here. “Sweetie, look on the bottom shelf in the storeroom behind the paper towels.”

  Rae burrowed in the nether regions of our pantry and surfaced with a box each of Cap’n Crunch and Lucky Charms. My mother, brilliant at anticipating potential conflict, had bought a secret stash. Sometimes she amazed me.

  “I love you,” Rae said more sincerely than you might imagine.

  “I thought you wanted Froot Loops,” I said.

  “I didn’t know I had options,” Rae replied, pouring herself two separate bowls of sugar.

  I knew the answer to the question as I was asking it. “So what’s up with the outfit, Rae?”

  Rae turned to our mother before she answered. My mom nodded the go ahead, you can talk nod.

  “Mom’s invoking section five, clause d.”

  Rae was speaking of the Spellman Investigations Employment Contract. All employees (full-time or seasonal) are required to sign it. Like my family itself, the contract alternates between reasonable employer dictums and wildly unabated whims. Section 5, clause (d) falls into the latter category. Essentially, the clause in debate states that Albert and Olivia have random wardrobe control whenever a case requires some element of camouflage. A tennis club falls into that category. When I reached maturity and was required to sign the contract, once again, I negotiated an addendum stipulating that section 5, clause (d) could be invoked no more than three times in a twelve-month period. My parents added another stipulation, which specified that if I breached this clause, they could fine me five hundred dollars. (This was added when the threat of firing me proved ineffectual.) The contract has been drafted and redrafted throughout the years by my brother. Therefore, it is legally binding and my mother insists that should any part of it be breached, she will enforce the fines.

  Even so, I had to protest. “No. No,” I said, tossing my coffee into the sink and running upstairs to my apartment.

  “If I were you, I’d shave my legs,” my mother shouted after me. I could feel a lump forming in my throat.

  I found the outfit hanging on my front door. All crisp and white and painfully short. I’d never worn a tennis dress before—mostly because I’ve never played tennis. But if I did play tennis, I can guarantee I would never willingly wear the dress. I showered and shaved my legs (for the first time in two months). For about ten minutes, I stared in the mirror, trying to stretch the skirt out and diminish my posture so it would appear longer. Nothing worked. I pulled an extra-large gray sweatshirt out of my drawer and headed downstairs.

  David was waiting in the foyer when I reached the bottom landing. At first he emitted only a hearty chuckle, but when my father joined him and doubled over, the two lost complete control and began laughing so convulsively it occurred to me they might need medical attention.

  I walked into the kitchen and poured more coffee. My father and David remained in the foyer, apparently still paralyzed with hysteria. Uncle Ray entered the kitchen and looked me over inquisitively. He kindly remained nonreactive. He simply observed, “Section five, clause d?”

  I nodded my head and told my sister to get her stuff. My mother stood in the corner, sipping her coffee with a satisfied grin. David and my father finally learned how to walk again and met us in the kitchen.

  David turned to my mom and said, “You were right, Mom. It was totally worth it.” Then he handed me his tennis bag and suggested I not lose it.

  “You need to get a life. All of you,” I snapped as I headed outside.

  Rae quickly ran after me, racket in hand. I stopped in my tracks and looked over my shoulder at her.

  “Tell me the truth,” I said. “How much is my ass hanging out?”

  “How much is it supposed to?” Rae asked.

  I tied the sweatshirt around my waist and got in the car.

  THE TENNIS WAR (TENNIS 101)

  Rae and I entered the San Francisco Tennis Club minus the snobbish questioning we had anticipated. I suppose, in our crisp, white outfits, we passed for the country club set. Based on David’s brief floor-plan tutorial, Rae and I headed up to the second level. A clean, wood-floored hallway encircled the building, offering a glassed-in overhead view of the four courts below. The airy space between the concrete floor and the wood beams above offered an odd mix of echo and silence. The pings of the balls bubbled through the building, but voices, conversations, the things you really wanted to hear, remained mute and impenetrable.

  I showed Rae the picture of Jake Peters and she spotted him immediately on the bottom middle court. We returned to the main level and found our way to the four-tiered bleachers dividing the courts. We sat to the left of center, pretending to observe two middle-aged women in outfits more immodest than mine.

  But it was Jake we were really watching as he performed a slow but legal serve. His opponent responded with an even slower backhand.

  “Who’s the other guy?” Rae asked, pointing at Jake’s weak but remarkably handsome opponent. While there were many things to notice about this man, it was his legs that were hardest to ignore. They were the color of cocoa, brilliantly set off by his white shorts. His sinewy muscles subtly contoured his long, elegant limbs, which were almost feminine, but never crossing that subjective line. The man was dark, but not swarthy, with a strong brow that highlighted a pronounced Roman nose.

  “What are you staring at, Isabel?” Rae said, snapping me out of my daze.

  “Nothing. Can you tell who is winning?”

  Rae and I continued watching the painfully slow rally, accompanied by Olympian efforts and awkward stumbles.

  “When you play as bad as this, who cares?” Rae said.

  Something about this game seemed all wrong—suspicious, in fact. When we finally heard the score after the first set, it was Jake who was ahead four games to three.

  In the realm of all things possible in this world, Jake beating his dark, handsome opponent was possible. However, Jake was a forty-eight-year-old man who—by his wife’s own admission—had only started playing tennis three months ago. His legs were scrawny, his belly was not. His arms, especially the serving arm, revealed no identifiable muscle category. So the idea that he was beating a man at tennis who was ten years his junior and had evidently exercised in recent years seemed off.

  That said, we were not here to observe Jake’s tennis game. We were here to observe whether Jake seemed in love with his tennis opponent. He did not. He seemed eager to beat him, eager to shout out forty-love, but he in no way seemed eager to hop
into the sack with him. And I can personally guarantee that if he were gay, that would be the foremost thing on his mind.

  “Why do you keep staring at that guy? Do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know,” she said in her annoyingly knowing way.

  “Shut up, Rae.”

  For forty-five minutes, Rae and I watched what would have gone down in history as the dullest tennis game ever if more people had witnessed it. We observed underhand serves and lobs so slow the ball appeared frozen in midair. We watched full-grown men beat themselves with their own tennis rackets and trip on their own shoelaces. When the game mercifully ended with Jake Peters a two-set victor, he leapt over the net and fell flat on his face.

  His cocoa-legged opponent shook Jake’s hand as he helped him to his feet. He said, “Nice game,” without even a hint of bad sportsmanship.

  Jake patted his opponent on the back and offered a compliment, trying to cultivate the easy confidence of a winner. The act seemed as unnatural as walking on water.

  The mismatched men parted ways without a hint of longing on either side. I began to wonder what had garnered Mrs. Peters’s distrust. We could tell her that, simply, she was wrong, that she should look within herself for her own suspicions. But that would leave both her heart and pocketbook empty. She wanted more information, and for what she was paying, I was willing to give it to her.

  Rae and I lagged behind our subject as he exited the court and passed through the hallway into the men’s locker room. I told Rae to sit in the foyer and keep her eyes peeled for Mr. Peters. She adjusted the volume on her radio and pulled out a newspaper. I turned back and looked at my sister briefly. She had been using the “reading the newspaper” foil for years. It always struck me as being silly, almost a parody—especially when she was eight or nine and would choose the business section of the Chronicle. But this was the first time I looked at her, newspaper folded in half, eyes darting between the pages and her environment, and it somehow appeared legitimate.