The Spellman Files

by Lisa Lutz

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “Are you coming back?”

  I turned and looked at my parents, then back to Rae. “Not anytime soon.”

  Rae stepped back and I could see her small fingers clutching the battery with a death grip. I could see she was prepared to fight me for it.

  “I’m doing this for you,” I said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I’m doing this so that one day you won’t wake up and realize that you don’t know how to behave like a normal human being.”

  “Rae, give your sister the battery,” my mother said.

  “No!” Rae shouted back.

  Uncle Ray walked into the hallway, disengaged Rae’s greasy fingers, and handed me the battery. He then turned to my parents and said, “Give her a fifteen-minute head start. Let’s all take a breather, shall we?”

  I left the house, attached the battery, and drove off without a family member tailing me. I wasn’t sure how long or if it would last, but Uncle Ray had given me the one thing I really needed—a chance to breathe.

  I decided to drive over to Daniel’s, hoping to figure out which episode it was where Max crosses a street by climbing in and out of a series of cabs. But then my phone rang. It was David.

  He asked me to meet him in the Haight. Now. I asked why and he told me I would find out soon enough. Before we hung up, he asked, “Is Mom still tailing you?”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied.

  “Don’t come unless you’re sure you’re alone,” he said and quickly hung up.

  Puff #2

  Twenty minutes later I was sitting with my brother in a tattoo parlor, reviewing a portfolio of potential body art.

  “I never asked her to get rid of the tattoos,” David said.

  I believed him. What I still couldn’t believe was that my brother was dating, no, cohabitating with my best friend. My brother—the square, perfect lawyer in thousand-dollar suits—with a woman who has pierced or permanently dyed half of her body. My best friend since eighth grade, a woman he has known for over fifteen years. Petra had removed three pieces of body art since she began seeing David—Puff the magic dragon, Jimi Hendrix’s RIP, and a heart and arrow with “Brandon” in calligraphy over it.

  I had automatically assumed that David had initiated the body-art removal through comments subtly designed to undermine her confidence. Instead, David used subtly designed questions to find out where she’d had the body art done. He needed me to identify the missing pieces. His plan was to tattoo his arm with one of the tattoos she had removed, in an effort to convince her to stop. We opted for Puff, since David was never a big Hendrix fan and “Brandon” was just too gay.

  David began to sweat as Clive coated his upper arm with alcohol.

  “Is this going to hurt?” asked David.

  “This will hurt me more than it’ll hurt you,” said Clive as he turned on the motor. I decided I liked Clive. A lot.

  David sustained his wince for the next three hours. Other than the accompanying moans of pain, I did all of the talking:

  “You better hope your face doesn’t freeze like that.”

  “Tell me you’re not crying.”

  “Oh, buck up, will you?”

  “You know tattoos are permanent, right?”

  “This is fun. Thanks for inviting me.”

  David was pale and nauseous by the end of the session. We walked down the Haight to a local brewery and ordered a round. I had to ask the obvious question.

  “Have you recently had a near-death experience?”

  “Excuse me?” David responded grumpily. His wince had reduced to a mild tic.

  “Last I heard, you were commitment phobic,” I clarified.

  “People change.”

  “Not that again.”

  “I thought you’d be happy for me.”

  “I am happy for you. For her, not so much.”

  “I love her, Isabel.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she doesn’t think I’m perfect.”

  “I can’t begin to imagine what it is like to be you.”

  David adjusted the bandage on his tattoo. “If she asks, tell her I was brave.”

  “Sure,” I said. “What’s another lie?”

  THE SNOW CASE

  CHAPTER 8

  On my way back to Bernie’s apartment, my cell phone rang. “Is this Isabel?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “Martin Snow.”

  “Finally.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I need you to meet me,” I said.

  “Then the phone calls have to stop.”

  “Meet me just once and they will.”

  “Where?”

  “The San Francisco Public Library.”

  “I can be there in an hour,” he said.

  I promptly drove to the library and found a seat in the history section. I phoned Daniel, trying to make plans for later, but he wasn’t home. Then I tapped compulsively for the next thirty minutes. Occasionally I’d try to pick up a book and read it, but my mind couldn’t focus and I went back to tapping until Martin Snow arrived.

  “This is the last time I’m going to do this,” Martin said sternly.

  “Go to the library? That’s too bad. They say people don’t read like they used to.”

  “Why am I here?” he asked point-blank. I decided my pleasantries were wasted on him.

  “I just have a few questions. Then you can go.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Who called me pretending to be your mother?”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t my mother?”

  “Positive.”

  “I don’t know,” he said without a hint of curiosity. “Next question.”

  “What happened to the Toyota Camry that Greg bought from his uncle?” I asked.

  Martin swallowed and pretended to scan the bookshelf in thought. “I think he bought it for a friend.”

  “What friend?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did you do with the hundred thousand dollars your parents supposedly spent on your education?”

  “I went to school for seven years, Ms. Spellman. Higher education is extremely expensive. I’m sure you wouldn’t know about that.”

  I smiled at the dig. My brother has given me harsher insults over brunch.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” I said. “Your friend the sheriff is a better liar than you. At least he doesn’t break a sweat. I think you know exactly what happened to your brother. If you ever want me off your back, you’ll tell me the truth.”

  Martin got to his feet and tried to conjure a threatening stare. “You’ll be hearing from my attorney,” he said and quickly made his exit.

  I left the library and went back to Bernie’s place. Jake Hand was parked out front—once again, asleep. I would have loved to rat him out to my mom, but Jake’s lack of work ethic served me well.

  Just as I was about to go to bed, Daniel called.

  “Isabel, where are you?”

  “At Bernie’s place.”

  “Who is Bernie?”

  “An old friend of my uncle’s.”

  “Why are you staying with him?”

  “I’m not. He’s out of town.”

  “Oh,” Daniel replied. “Guess who just called me?”

  “The police?”

  “Your mother.”

  “That was my second guess,” I replied.

  “This isn’t funny,” he said, clearly losing his patience.

  “I’m sorry. Why did she call?”

  “To ask for help. She wants you to stop bothering the Snow family. She told me they are going to file a TRO. What’s a TRO?”

  “A temporary restraining order.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “He’s bluffing, Daniel. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I’m starting to find your behavior disturbing.”

  “That’s my mother talking. Listen, once thi
s case is over, everything will get back to normal.”

  “That’s the problem, Isabel! I don’t think you know what that is.”

  I managed to convince Daniel that I knew what normal was, although I didn’t convince myself. The phone call ended with a plan to visit him at the office the following day. He wasn’t as much in the mood for hours of dated television as I was. I got off the phone and went directly to bed. I put in a pair of earplugs, which drowned out the sounds of traffic and the exodus of drunken patrons leaving the pubs on the street below. They also drowned out the sound of Bernie coming home and getting into bed with me.

  I screamed when I felt the hand on my ass. Bernie screamed when I screamed and he grabbed his heart. I quickly explained that I was Ray Spellman’s niece and I needed a place to stay. I sat Bernie down on the bed and checked his pulse. After his heartbeat returned to normal, I made him a cup of tea. Bernie explained that he thought I was a welcome-home gift from his poker buddies.

  “Do I look like a welcome-home gift?” I asked, wrapped in my best blue-and-green flannel pajamas.

  “Not the best gift I ever had. But not the worst,” he replied.

  Bernie apologized in that men-will-be-men kind of way and kindly offered me his bed for the night.

  “I’ll take the couch,” he said, followed by a wink. I checked Bernie’s pulse one last time and gathered my things. Jake Hand was still asleep in his car and I managed to make my getaway undetected.

  I drove two blocks away and slept until dawn in the backseat of my car. In the morning, I changed into street clothes and drove to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office. Greg Larson kept me waiting two hours before he would see me. When I was finally guided back to his desk, he casually looked up from some paperwork and said, “Isabel, so good to see you again,” in his carefully guarded fashion.

  “What happened to your uncle’s Toyota Camry?”

  “I sold it to a used-car dealer a week after I bought it,” he replied without a flinch. I got the feeling he came prepared for my questions.

  “Why would you buy a car and sell it a week later?”

  “If you looked up my uncle’s record, which I assume you did, you’d have noticed the DUIs. All I wanted to do was get that car away from him so he couldn’t hurt himself or anybody else.”

  “How noble. Do you have any paperwork on that?”

  “It was twelve years ago, Isabel. You don’t have to keep financial records past seven years. You know that.”

  “Do you remember the license plate number on that car?”

  “No. I hear you haven’t been sleeping, Isabel.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “From your mother.”

  “When?”

  “I called her this morning. When you got here,” Larson said, still only breathing and blinking. His fractional expressions were starting to really get on my nerves.

  “Did you tell her I was here?”

  “Yes. That’s why I kept you waiting two hours. To give her time to take a shower and make it over the bridge. She’s really quite charming.”

  I stood up and looked out of Larson’s window. My mother was parked in the spot next to mine.

  “I don’t believe this,” I said, slowly losing my breath.

  “She’s worried. She says you’re obsessed with this case and you won’t stop.”

  Through the window my mother waved at me. When Sheriff Larson seated himself behind his desk, his back facing the window, she smashed my left taillight and quickly returned to her car.

  “Did you see that?” I said.

  “See what?” Larson casually asked as he turned around.

  I pointed to my car. “She just smashed my taillight.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t like that before.”

  “That is unfortunate.”

  “I want to file vandalism charges.”

  “Against your mother?”

  “Who else?”

  “Isabel, you are free to file a report, but without any witnesses—”

  “I am a witness.”

  “Not the most reliable one.”

  “You are a witness.”

  “I didn’t see anything, Isabel.”

  “Let’s see. You look out the window. My taillight is intact. Then you look again and it’s smashed. The only person in the vicinity is my mother. What the hell did they teach you in the police academy, how to chew on toothpicks?”

  “Among other things,” said the sheriff, refusing, yet again, to give me any kind of reaction.

  I knew I was getting nowhere with him, but I had to end our meeting with a threat.

  “I’m onto you.”

  Weak, I know.

  I walked outside and knocked on my mother’s window. She casually laid down her newspaper, started her car, and rolled down the window.

  “Isabel, what are you doing here?” my mother said, feigning pleasant surprise.

  “You’re paying for that,” I said and got into my car.

  I had only one thing on my agenda that day: Lose Mom. I drove to Petra’s hair salon. I parked two blocks away and entered through the back door. She was going over her schedule for the next day and was free to talk. Free to do the talking, that is.

  “I hated that damn tattoo. Every time I looked at it, it reminded me of dry heaving for four hours straight.”

  “That’s what all your tattoos remind you of,” I said.

  “You were with him the entire time. You could have stopped him. Now I have to look at that damn thing on his shoulder the rest of my life.”

  “The rest of your life?” I asked.

  “However long it lasts. You should have stopped him.”

  “I don’t get to see my brother in pain all that often.”

  “He refuses to get rid of it.”

  “He just got it.”

  “Is this your version of revenge, Izzy?”

  “No. My version is an awful lot like plain old revenge. I didn’t stop him because a) my mother will go into hysterics when she sees it, and b) it meant he loved you. He could say it all he wanted, but he’s the kind of guy who’s said it before. I figured once you saw Puff on his arm, you’d believe him.”

  Petra wanted to stay angry. She really hated that tattoo. But I was right, and rather than acknowledge that, we changed subjects.

  “Your mother still tailing you?” she asked.

  “Twenty-four/seven. I need to borrow your car.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “David has it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your father is using David’s car.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you smashed out every single light on your dad’s car.”

  I exited the front entrance of Petra’s salon wearing a blonde wig and an oversize army jacket that I nicked from the lost and found. I might as well have worn a bull’s-eye on my back. There was no losing my mother. She heckled me as I strolled to my car. Without a foolproof plan, all I could do was wear her out. And I figured, as I tested her ability to stay awake, I might as well take a nap myself. I had planned to drop by Daniel’s office anyway, which was coincidentally the last place I had had a decent rest.

  Mrs. Sanchez, Daniel’s trusted employee, was not pleased to see me. But she was more than happy to have me out of the waiting room and asleep in a chair. She kindly informed me that I didn’t have the personality to carry off blonde hair. I was so tired, I didn’t think about what that meant. I simply leaned back in the dental chair and slept.

  Daniel woke me approximately two hours later.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  Even in my postnap fog, my instinctual response to those words—words I’d heard far too many times—kicked in. Daniel didn’t just want to have a chat about our relationship, he wanted to end it.

  “Oh no,” I said, jumping to my feet.

  “Oh no, what?” he replied.

 
“I got to go.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “Isabel, we need to talk.”

  “I don’t need to talk.”

  “Well, I need to talk.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You just think you do. But really, you don’t.”

  “Sit down.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Never.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I just took a nap.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “You can’t break up with me right after I take a nap.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if you do, I will forever associate naps with being broken up with.”

  In truth, I knew the breakup was inevitable ever since the fake drug deal. It made him wonder how many more fake drug deals or their equivalent would be in our future. If I could do this to my own family, I could do it to him, too. For the Castillos, love meant trust and respect; for the Spellmans, the definition was far messier.

  Daniel followed me out of the office, mumbling something about how I couldn’t always use the napping excuse.

  My father leaned against David’s shiny black Mercedes and struck the pose of a middle-aged man who doesn’t care that he’s getting old because he’s got an unbelievable piece of machinery to drive. At least that’s how it would have appeared to a complete stranger. The sadder truth is that my father’s sense of pride was merely in the fact that he had a son who owned an amazing piece of machinery and was willing to lend it to him at the last minute because his older daughter had smashed out the lights on two of the three family-owned vehicles. The even sadder truth was that the father thought that if he drove the son’s expensive, impressive, and hard-to-repair car, his daughter would leave it unharmed. That was the saddest part.

  My father waved at Daniel in a friendly, denying-everything-that-had-previously-occurred kind of way. Daniel had still not forgiven him for their first encounter, and so he nodded and smiled weakly in return. He then noticed my smashed taillight and asked the obvious question.

  “Isabel, did you know your taillight is broken?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did that happen?”