The Spellman Files

by Lisa Lutz

  I didn’t tell him that I had no plans—for the day or the rest of my life. I didn’t tell him I was glad to have the distraction of another Lost Weekend.

  “Sure. I’ll meet you at the house” was all I said.

  Uncle Ray had been missing only fourteen hours when Rae began organizing a search party. The day after the first night he didn’t return home, she telephoned all of his known acquaintances, told them there was a death in the family, and said that should they come in contact with her uncle, they should drive him home immediately. Uncle Ray was still a no-show, but my parents did receive a number of condolence calls. On day two, Rae took a bus after school to the location of his first poker game, and through interviews and “a Budweiser trail,” she discovered that he’d spent the next night at yet another illegal poker game at a Motel 6 in the South Bay.

  Typically my father began tracking his brother after a forty-eight-hour absence, the same rule the police apply to missing persons. My sister refused to respond to Uncle Ray’s sudden departures and routine debauchery with the same unruffled acceptance adopted by the rest of the family. Fighting Rae on anything always made me question the cost-benefit ratio, But when it came to Uncle Ray, I let her win on all fronts.

  A cease-fire was enacted while I helped look for my uncle. I picked my sister up after school and we began an exhaustive search of all the rundown motels in a fifty-mile radius. The poker games, which were illegal in and of themselves, often included illegal substances, prostitution, and a fair amount of cigar smoke damage. Ray and his friends discovered that the individually run economy motels were the most likely to look the other way. The men would pool their money and add an extra two hundred dollars for “cleaning costs” to the bill and were welcome to return at a later, randomly selected, date.

  My contribution to the search was acting as Rae’s chauffeur. She used study hour at school to map motels on the Internet and planned a three-hour road trip, connecting the dots to twelve different establishments in the Bay Area. Generally, Uncle Ray’s poker buddies stuck to motels off Highway 1 or 280, usually staying between Marin County and San Mateo. I’d pull the car into the parking lot, Rae would jump out, go to the front office, show them a photograph of Uncle Ray—keeping a twenty-dollar bill in sight—and ask whether they had seen this man recently.

  The first five stops on the motel connect-the-dots were dead ends, but the desk clerk at the sixth motel said that Ray had just checked out. He was with a woman, but the clerk could not offer a description or comment on their future travel plans. We spent the rest of the afternoon hitting the next six motels, to no avail. Instead of doing her math homework that night, my sister rephoned all of Ray’s gambling buddies, asking whether hookers were at the last poker game. It goes without saying that a fourteen-year-old girl querying sixty-something men about illegal prostitution is unlikely to result in a forthright response.

  “Kid, your uncle’s a grown man. What he does, who he does, is none of my business” was the standard response.

  When the phone interviews proved futile, Rae turned to mapping more motel stops for the next day. She tried to convince my parents to let her skip school to continue the “manhunt,” but thankfully, they refused. There had been twenty-four Lost Weekends before the twenty-fifth. Each one dulled the impact of the next.

  After three days of afternoon searches, after hitting eighty percent of the motels within Uncle Ray’s generally agreed-upon travel perimeter, my sister and I found him shacked up with a redhead named Marla in room 3B at the Days Inn in South San Francisco. Uncle Ray borrowed the fifty bucks I had on me, gave it to his new friend, and insisted that we drive her the fifteen miles home to Redwood City.

  Uncle Ray walked Marla to her door and they said their good-byes. After we were back on the road, my sister turned to Uncle Ray and asked him if he had practiced safe sex. Uncle Ray told her to mind her own business. Rae then offered a collection of rehab clinic brochures as “reading material” for the ride home. This was not the first time Rae broached the subject of rehab to Uncle Ray and it would not be the last.

  Enemies can unite for a common purpose, but when that purpose no longer exists, they are often enemies once again. The lull in my family’s discord, precipitated by the search for Uncle Ray, ended immediately upon his return.

  Uncle Ray helped me load the last few boxes into my car and asked me where I was planning on staying. I told him I would probably crash at a motel while I apartment-hunted. He told me motels were depressing—an odd statement from a man who considers them his second home—and offered me the keys to an old friend’s place in the Richmond district. The friend was out of town at a “convention” (Uncle Ray used finger quotes) for two weeks. I moved into retired lieutenant Bernie Peterson’s two-bedroom apartment that afternoon. Based on the decor, one would conclude that Bernie had two loves in his life—golf and women—although women had to be listed second and in the plural.

  Bernie’s apartment had the sad tidiness of a career bachelor with a regular maid. His decorations lacked taste but not expense, as if he purchased items purely to impress, but without consideration for comfort or design. The result was a crime scene of patterns, every view punctuated by a freshly dusted amateur golf trophy and an expensively framed photograph of a buxom, deceased starlet. Uncle Ray gave me the grand tour, which meant showing me where Bernie kept his liquor and snacks. Opting not to waste an opportunity of freedom from the watchful eye of his younger niece, Uncle Ray opened a jar of peanuts, cracked a beer, and sat down on the couch.

  “So what is it about this case that’s making you work overtime?”

  “It just doesn’t add up.”

  “What have you got so far?”

  “Abigail Snow. The mother. She claims her husband is golfing when he is in fact living twenty-five miles away with another woman and has been for ten years. She cleans obsessively and masks the smell of bleach with potpourri.”

  “She sounds like a ball of fun.”

  “Her son, Martin Snow, cheated his parents out of at least a hundred thousand dollars and he’s made it clear that he doesn’t want me looking for his brother. Isn’t that suspicious?”

  “Yeah,” Uncle Ray concedes. “They usually want you to look. What else?”

  “The friend of the brothers, Greg Larson. Even though he went camping with Andrew and Martin almost every other time they went camping, this particular weekend, he went to a concert in the city. And he buys a car from his uncle around the time of Andrew’s disappearance, but no one remembers the car.”

  “Maybe he bought the car for someone else. Maybe he kept it in a garage to fix up and resell.”

  “A Toyota Camry, Uncle Ray. It’s not the kind of car you buy as a restoration project. And one more thing. I got a phone call from a woman claiming to be Abigail Snow, asking me to stop working the case. But Abigail never called me.”

  “Could it have been your mom?” asked Uncle Ray.

  “I don’t think so. I asked. She denied it.”

  Uncle Ray takes a sip of beer and mulls over the information. “What’s your next move?” he asked.

  “I think I need to revisit Hank Farber,” I replied.

  I got up from the couch and grabbed my coat and car keys. Uncle Ray also got up and grabbed his coat and car keys.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “‘We’ are not going anywhere.”

  “Sure we are,” he said with an uncompromising grin.

  “How much are they paying you?”

  “Double overtime.”

  “Traitor.”

  “Sorry, kid. I need the cash.”

  The standoff was brief. I weighed my options and figured that the trip down the stairs was the only chance I had at bridging a gap between me and Uncle Ray. Once we were on the road, there was no way I could lose him.

  So I made a run for it. A move that I thought would prompt my uncle into his first aerobic activity in years. Instead, he leisurely shut and locked the door behi
nd him and sauntered down the stairs. I raced down two flights and out the door.

  Ray was still on the top landing as I reached my car. I was breathing relief until I looked down and discovered a piece of well-chewed gum over the keyhole. As I peeled the sticky substance out of the lock and off the key, Uncle Ray had time to casually reach his car, unlock the door, start the engine, and adjust the radio station before I was even inside mine.

  “Disgusting, Uncle Ray,” I shouted over to him.

  He rolled down the window, shrugged his shoulders apologetically, and said, “You run fast, kid.”

  THE SNOW CASE

  CHAPTER 7

  Rather than risk a car accident or test Ray’s more-than-ample skills, I drove to Hank Farber’s apartment well under the speed limit and without any creative use of turn signals. I parked in front of Farber’s building, waited for Uncle Ray to pull into a space down the block, and knocked on Ray’s window.

  “I need to rattle this guy. See if he’s lying. Can you help me out?”

  “Love to,” said my uncle and we entered the foyer of the cheap Tenderloin building.

  Judging from the spacing between apartments, the entire structure was made up of equally small studio apartments. The carpet in the hallway was holding twenty years of human dander and coffee stains. I hoped that Hank would crack a window, but he seemed more interested in making a stew of his own cigarette smoke and body odor.

  It was 3:00 P.M. when Uncle Ray and I arrived at Hank Farber’s home. According to my uncle’s calculations based on the empties on the kitchen counter and Farber’s lazy speech, Hank was probably on his third beer. Like a good host, Hank offered refreshments and my uncle gratefully accepted. They chatted briefly about Sunday’s 49ers game and then contemplated the future of baseball. Uncle Ray asked Hank if he had any snacks. Hank cracked open a bag of potato chips and prepared a plate of sandwich cookies.

  I asked Hank once again what he remembered about the weekend Andrew Snow went missing. In less than a minute, Hank delivered, almost verbatim, the same details he offered up on our previous meeting: His nephew Greg was visiting; he went to a concert of one of those loud rock bands; he came home around 11:00 P.M.

  We left after Uncle Ray finished off his second beer. On the short, stuffy elevator ride to the lobby, Uncle Ray said, “He starts early.”

  “What? The drinking?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He starts early,” Uncle Ray repeated, lost in thought.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking he was probably asleep by 11:00 P.M., if he drank anywhere near that much.”

  “It was years ago, Uncle Ray. Maybe he wasn’t so bad back then.”

  “He’s been at it a while,” said my uncle, and I was inclined to believe him.

  “Do you think he was coached?” I asked.

  “That would be my guess,” said my uncle. “There’s no way he’d remember that weekend, let alone the exact time his nephew came home, after twelve years. There’s no way.”

  I drove back to my parents’ house with Uncle Ray in tow. The driveway was empty, so I knew my parents were out. I decided to do some research in the office and was surprised to discover that the locks had not been changed. Uncle Ray followed me in and looked over my shoulder as I ran a criminal, civil, and bankruptcy search on Hank Farber through our databases. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Uncle Ray jotting down notes on a square pad of paper.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I got to put this in the report.”

  “What report?”

  “The surveillance report.”

  “On me?”

  “I don’t get paid unless there’s a report.”

  If I were still employed or even employable, I would have offered to match their price to get him off the job. But standing between Ray and money is the same as standing between Ray and a beer. There ain’t no mountain high enough.

  As predicted, Hank Farber had a record. No history of violent crimes, but a series of public drunkenness arrests and DUIs as far back as fifteen years. It didn’t come as a complete shock that his driver’s license had been revoked, but the timing was interesting since it happened just two months before Andrew Snow’s disappearance.

  I showed the report to my uncle since he was going to look at it anyway.

  “What do you make of it?” he asked.

  “I think if he was staying off the road as he was supposed to, Greg could have taken the car at any time. Just gave him the money for it a few weeks later. It would be easy to fool a guy who spends that much time intoxicated.”

  “He doesn’t know how to pace himself. That’s his problem,” said my uncle.

  “Yeah, that’s his problem,” I replied sarcastically.

  I phoned the Marin County Sheriff’s Office and left a message for Sheriff Larson. Uncle Ray jotted that down in his notes, too. I got up to leave; Uncle Ray shadowed my every move.

  “I can’t take much more of this, Uncle Ray.”

  “Sorry, kid. I’m just doing my job.”

  “I can’t go anywhere without a tail. Do you have any idea what that feels like?”

  “As it turns out, I do. A few years before the cancer, the IAB was investigating me for some missing heroin at a drug bust. I couldn’t take a whiz without some guy in a coat watching me. It was rough, I tell you.”

  Uncle Ray and I, like two pathetic mimes, were in the middle of a game of mirror when my parents entered the office. Ray threw up his hands and said, “I’m done for the day.” He raced into the kitchen and made himself a pastrami sandwich.

  I looked at my mom and dad and debated whether I should make a run for it. I’m faster on my feet, but if they pulled anything like Uncle Ray’s gum trick, I wouldn’t have a chance. As I weighed my options, I inched closer to the door, hoping to casually afford myself a clear exit.

  My mother kicked the door shut with her foot. “We need to talk,” she said in that voice she used to intimidate.

  It was then that I noticed the open window. The Spellman office is on the first floor. The window is just a five-foot drop to the ground, and the cement path along the side of the house leads directly to the driveway, where my car was parked unobstructed, I believe. I could kick open the window screen and make a run for it. My parents, being adults, wouldn’t take the window. They would have to go through three doors and a flight of stairs to meet me out front. My confidence grew. I could escape. Avoid a talk. Have a day of freedom.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I asked, shuffling toward the window.

  “If you want to be out of the business, then be out of the business,” said my mother.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Stop working the Snow case.”

  “But that was our deal—one last job. Remember?”

  “Consider yourself fired,” said my dad.

  “He’s threatening to sue us,” said my mother.

  “I told you not to worry about Martin Snow. He’s bluffing,” I said.

  “We can’t take that chance, Isabel,” said my mother. “You have to stop this now. I mean it. Now.”

  I would have stopped, had this been an ordinary unsolvable case. But it wasn’t. Opening the Snow case only brought about more questions, more suspicions. Not a single answer. Three people were lying to me, a car had vanished, and a hundred thousand dollars was unaccounted for. This was almost a real mystery. We never have those in my line of work. I couldn’t stop. Not then. I had to get out of that house. It was the only thing I was sure of.

  I pushed open the window, kicked out the screen, and jumped feet-first to the gravelly path alongside the house. I ran to my car and opened the door. The lock, thankfully, was unobstructed. I could hear my father call out to me but couldn’t decipher the words. I put the key into the ignition and…the car was completely dead.

  I sat for a moment listening to the breeze of my quick breath. My mother stood at the front door, watching me. I popped th
e hood of my car and checked the engine. There was no art to what I found. The wires hung uselessly in the air and an empty space where the battery should have been stared back at me with smug silence.

  “Where’s the battery?” I asked my mother.

  She shrugged her shoulders and said, “I don’t know, sweetie. Where did you see it last?” Then she returned to the house.

  I sat down in my car and tried to come up with a plan, a plan that would include getting a battery and driving off undetected. An impossible plan, I realized, as I sat there, reluctantly accepting that my parents had outwitted me once again. I stopped thinking about the consequences or reason or what was inherently right; I just wanted to win, just this once. I left Martin Snow yet another telephone message, calling his bluff. I made it clear that his threats didn’t scare me. I also suggested it was time for us to have another talk.

  Rae opened my car door and asked where I was going and if she could come. I said sure, since I was going inside. I stormed through the house, into the office, through the kitchen, and circled around the living room. Rae followed me along the entire path until I spun around and grabbed her by the shoulders.

  “Wanna make fifty bucks?” I asked.

  “Is that a rhetorical question?”

  “A car battery is hidden somewhere in this house. Find it.”

  I set Rae loose to search for the battery while I combed the house for my parents. I caught them on their way downstairs to the office.

  I was ready for a fight. I was ready to end this once and for all.

  “Unless you want to spend the rest of your life looking at me through a set of binoculars, you will stop. No more tails, no more bugs, no more lies, and no more threats. Just. Let. Me. Go.”

  I turned to leave and found Rae standing behind me, holding the battery. Her hands and shirt were covered with auto grease. I reached for the battery and she stepped back.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.