Unplugged

by Lois Greiman

  “Oh! I just . . . Oh,” I said again. Clever. I might as well have said, “I didn’t break into Solberg’s house. It wasn’t me falling over your fence. And I’m pretty sure you’re not digging a grave in which to bury your latest victim.”

  “Do I know . . . Oh,” she said, and looked almost relieved. “You’re, ummm . . . Christina, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Yes.” I realized rather belatedly that she was carrying one of those four-pronged garden thingies, but so far she had neither stabbed me with it nor called the cops.

  This is what I call a good day.

  “Haven’t you heard from Jeen yet?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, still trying to catch my breath, and maybe a few fluttering brain cells. “I haven’t, and I was just wondering if maybe you had learned anything.”

  “No, but there’s been some weird goings-on over there,” she said, nodding toward Solberg’s yard.

  I was tempted to blink, press my fingertips to my chest, and say, “Whatever do you mean?” in my best Scarlett O’Hara imitation, but I managed to control myself. “Really?” I said.

  “There was someone in his house the other night.”

  I felt as stiff as uncooked linguine. “Maybe it was Solberg.”

  “Well, if it was, he came shimmying over my fence and racing across my yard.”

  “Across your yard?” I actually gasped when I said it. Move over Julia Roberts.

  “In fact, I think there might have been two of them.”

  “Two of what?”

  She scowled a little. I think. There wasn’t a wrinkle to be seen. Either she’d been introduced to Botox or her face was made of wood. “People,” she said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were.”

  “Well . . .” And here is where my real genius shone through. “I hope your husband was home.”

  She paused for just an instant, shifting the garden implement to her other hand. “He’s, ummmm . . . out of town.”

  “You mean you were alone when all of this was going on?”

  She nodded and glanced restlessly down the street. “What did you say you needed?”

  “Oh.” I shook my head. “I was just concerned about Solberg, but now I’m worried about you. Your husband’s home now, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. Of course. He came home last night.”

  “Oh, good. I mean . . .” I laughed. Ha ha ha. “Men. They’re the next best thing to a guard dog and a loaded bazooka, huh?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “And I’m told they’re good for yard work,” I rambled. “But mine never has been.”

  I waited for her to chime in. She didn’t.

  “It looks like you have to do your own, too, huh?”

  She glanced down at her pronged thingy. “Well, Jake’s awfully busy with work.”

  “Oh? What does he do?”

  “He’s a corporate attorney . . . with Everest and Everest.”

  “Probably works evenings and weekends.”

  “Sometimes.” She shifted her gaze away again. “Well, I’m sorry I can’t help you with Jeen. Tell me if you learn anything, will you?”

  “Of course,” I said, and knowing that was my cue to leave, I headed for my car. I drove away waving merrily, rounded the block, and headed up a windy road into the foothills. It wasn’t five minutes later that I parked on a scruffy little knoll that overlooked Solberg’s neighborhood. Los Angeles has a thousand such places. The city covers about a zillion square miles of desert, but half of that is perched on inaccessible crags that even Angelites avoid.

  On this particular mountaintop, paths marched away through the scrub in several directions, but I was only interested in the houses below. If I’d had binoculars I could have looked straight into Tiffany’s toilet bowl.

  But why would I want to?

  Three hours later, I’d had ample time to consider that question. I was also hungry and my left butt cheek had been numb so long, it felt like it had been amputated.

  No one had entered or exited the Georges’ abode, which, of course, didn’t tell me much, but as I traversed the 210 toward Sunland, I was sure Tiffany had lied her little ass off.

  Her husband hadn’t come home. And she knew more than she was saying.

  Which was a hell of a lot more than could be said about some of us.

  One glance at Elaine’s face on Friday morning reminded me why I was continuing the search.

  She’d been crying. Her eyes were red and her nose was runny, but she still looked gorgeous.

  No one ever said life was fair. At least no one in the McMullen clan. But then, we come from a long line of depressed Irishmen who tend to drink when they’re down, or happy, or otherwise emoted.

  “Angie.” I greeted my final client of the day. She’d just turned seventeen a couple weeks ago and had celebrated by getting a tiny clutter of stars tattooed below her left ear.

  Angela Grapier had been my client for over a year. She was small and cute and would have been adorable even if you dressed her in burlap and cut her hair with a buzz saw.

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  “Good.” She shrugged, and grinned a little. “Well . . . pretty good. I suppose if I were too good, I wouldn’t get to skip Algebra and come here, huh?” She tossed her backpack onto the floor, slipped out of her untied sneakers, and curled her legs under her on the couch.

  If I ever have a daughter, I’d like her to be like Angie. Only without the drug addiction and the boyfriends I wanted to exterminate.

  Or rather, ex-boyfriends. I gave myself a mental high-five. I took some credit for getting rid of Kelly. He’d been a loser of profound proportions. She’d known it even before coming to me, but I liked to think I helped her muster up the nerve to kick his ass out of her life.

  “So . . . how’s it going with Sean?” Sean Kippling was her latest beau. He liked classical music and wore pants that didn’t fall off his hips and show his underwear, which was what the cool guys wore, but Angie seemed able to forgive him his fashion faux pas.

  “He’s good.”

  “Have you made him see the glory of rap music yet?”

  “I’m working on it.” She grinned again. I’d seen her smile more in the last three weeks than in all the previous months put together. “You ever heard of Enya?”

  “Just polkas for me. Remember?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She laughed. “Anyway, she’s not too bad.”

  “I’m sure she’d be thrilled to have your endorsement.”

  “Sean gave me her CD,” she said, and fell silent.

  I waited. She chewed her lip. “Other day he left an African violet on my desk in Chem class.”

  “You like violets?”

  “Yeah.” She looked thoughtful. “I guess I must have told him. But I can’t remember when.”

  I stifled a sigh. A guy who listened and actually responded appropriately. Maybe if she dumped him I could get him on the rebound. So what if I was his girlfriend’s therapist . . . and sixteen years his senior. There’s not much point to living in La La Land if you can’t do something idiotic, and maybe felonious, once in a while.

  “He likes to give me stuff,” she said.

  “Sometimes guys are like that when they’re in love,” I said. Not that I’d know. I’d once dated a guy who gave me panties at every possible opportunity. Size 2. I couldn’t fit a size 2 on my head.

  But again, why would I want to?

  “You think he loves me?” she asked.

  The age-old question. I shrugged, hoping to look enigmatic but secretly thinking that plucking a daisy might give her more insight.

  She scowled. I waited. It had taken her a few weeks to open up to me, but since then it had pretty much been nonstop chatter.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  She looked at me. She had eyes like a beagle puppy. She shifted them toward the floor and back.

  “He doesn’t want to do it,” she said finally.


  Uh-oh. I leaned back in my chair, looking casual. “Do what?” I asked, but I was pretty sure I knew what she meant—the ubiquitous “it.”

  “You know. Sex,” she said, confirming my suspicion. The topic usually comes up at therapy sessions. And if it doesn’t, it probably should. My personal theory is that hormones rule the world. But who rules the hormones?

  “Oh.” I nodded, trying to look wise. But in my experience no one looks very wise where sex is concerned. It’s simply an illogical act. There’s no making sense of it. I mean, if you try to think of it in practical terms, it’ll boggle your mind. It’s been around since man exited his first cave, and yet it’s still a number-one box-office draw. The Rubik’s cube came and went, but it looks like sex is here to stay. “What makes you think that?” I asked.

  “Well . . .” She chewed her lip some more. “He says we should wait.”

  I folded my hands in my lap, patient and deeply philosophical. “Maybe there’s a difference between not wanting to and believing you shouldn’t,” I suggested.

  She glanced up, eyes bright. “Yeah?”

  “Could be.”

  “You believe in waiting?”

  I refrained from snorting. What the hell would I wait for? Judging by some pretty accurate physical evidence, I wasn’t getting any younger. “Sometimes it’s a really good idea,” I said.

  “How come?”

  “You’ve got a lot on your mind. School, family problems. Are you still hoping to get into Berkeley?”

  “I’m going to fill out the application this week.”

  “You’re going to have to keep up your GPA.”

  “That’s what Dad says.”

  She and her father had come to an understanding of sorts recently. I liked to think I’d had a hand in that, too.

  “Sex can really mess with your head,” I added.

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe Sean knows that.”

  She looked thoughtful. “So you think maybe he wants to do it, only he doesn’t think it’s a good idea?”

  Uh-huh. “Unless he’s a homosexual, I think it’s pretty likely.”

  She scowled. “I don’t think he’s gay.”

  I let her go at her own pace.

  She scrunched up her face. “When we kiss I can feel his . . . you know.”

  I thought I did, if memory served.

  “So you think he finds you attractive?”

  She shrugged. “Jenny Caron walked by the other day when we were talking and he didn’t even glance at her.”

  “Jenny’s good-looking?” I guessed.

  She rolled her eyes. “Jenny’s got boobs like torpedoes. Everybody looks at Jenny. Hell, I look at Jenny.”

  I tried not to laugh, in honor of her serious expression.

  “He says when I’m around he can’t think of anything else, and that he’s afraid if we had sex he might walk in front of a bus or something. Get spattered all over the street.” She crinkled her nose. “He’s a weird guy.”

  I thought for a minute that I might be in love. Weird guys often affect me that way. My very first crush had had six toes on his left foot. He’d shown me on the playground on the first day of school—proud as a patriot.

  “It does kind of sound like he’s attracted to you,” I said.

  “Yeah.” She grinned again, impishly, then sobered slowly. “So you think . . .” She paused, thinking herself. “Do you think good guys, you know, the guys who really care about you, do you think they maybe think they should wait?”

  “Could be,” I said, inscrutable to the end, but later I sat alone in my office and swore a blue streak.

  I hate it when I learn stuff from clients. Especially when they’re half my age and recovering drug addicts.

  But the truth couldn’t be avoided and went something like this:

  A: I hadn’t had a mature relationship with a man in all of my thirty-three years; and B: I owed it to Elaine to find the long-celibate Solberg.

  10

  Men have two outstanding features—their brains and their genitalia. Unfortunately, both rarely function simultaneously.

  —Professor Eva Nord,

  who may have had some dating issues of her own

  M Y TOILET BACKED up after work. I plied my plunger like a jackhammer and prayed for divine intervention. God is good, and apparently didn’t want me to waste my money on a new septic system any more than I did.

  I was only five minutes late and pretty sure my hands didn’t smell like raw sewage when I walked into the Safari.

  “Hi.” Ross stood as soon as he saw me.

  The restaurant was decorated in an African motif, with reed mats on the floor and wooden masks leering from the walls.

  Leaning forward, Ross touched my arm and kissed my cheek. Nice. “Thanks for coming.”

  My nerve endings were still buzzing from the unexpected skin-to-skin contact, which interfered with my talking apparatus, so I said, “Thanks for inviting me,” which wasn’t original, but at least it didn’t contain any syllables that made me spit.

  The hostess’s name was Amy. She was the approximate width of a chopstick. She beamed at us as if we’d been sent by God. Or maybe Allah. She might have been Muslim. Her eyes were the size of twin Cinnabon. The analogy made me realize I hadn’t eaten since . . . well, since lunch. But lunch had been small and more than two hours ago. No wonder I was starving. I had quit smoking again—after finishing off a pack while I sat in my Saturn down the street from Hilary Pershing’s house.

  I’d learned nothing, except that I truly loved to smoke, and that I didn’t have the attention span to become a private eye.

  Assuring us that our waitress would be with us shortly, Amy handed off the menus and sprinted away. I checked to see if my date watched her backside. He didn’t. Instead, he smiled across the table at me. Hmmm. Off to a promising . . . and surprising . . . start. Maybe she wasn’t Jenny Caron, but she wasn’t compost, either.

  “You didn’t have any trouble finding the place?” Ross asked.

  We sat on a little raised dais near the window. An exotic hide that I couldn’t identify hung on the wall beside our table. “No,” I said. “No trouble.” I didn’t bother telling him that I could find a sugar donut in a snowstorm. “I called ahead for directions.”

  “Good. I hate getting lost. And this place is hard to find. Once . . .” He stopped himself, lips parted, then laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m chattering like a chipmunk.”

  He was also as cute as a chipmunk.

  “I do that when I’m nervous.”

  I tried not to look stunned. But why the hell would he be nervous? As for me, I was afraid I was going to sweat right through my swanky blue jacket. It was cut short, as the fashion gurus insisted. Apparently, the fashion gurus don’t worry about the width of my ass, which I had covered in cobalt slacks that matched the little jacket to perfection.

  “Can I get you some drinks?”

  Wouldn’t you know it, the one time when I’m not salivating for a waitress, she shows up, Johnny on the spot, like a damned meter maid.

  Ross motioned toward me.

  I ordered a strawberry daiquiri. Usually I stick to iced tea, but I wanted to encourage Ross to imbibe. Not that I was trying to get him drunk or anything. It’s just that he would probably be more inclined to tell me everything he knew if he’d had a few. And besides, daiquiris are pretty tasty. Like liquid dessert.

  He ordered a lager.

  The waitress hurried away to fulfill our every desire. I was fairly comfortable with the width of her hips and didn’t bother to notice if Ross watched her departure.

  “Nervous?” I said instead, picking up the frayed thread of our conversation.

  “Yeah, well . . .” He rubbed the back of his neck. As nervous habits go, it wasn’t a bad one. I’d once dated a guy who would break out in hives. In retrospect, I think he might have been allergic to me. “I don’t date much. I mean . . .” He lowered his arm and shrugged. He was wearing a tan button-down shir
t with a black tee underneath. He had nice shoulders. “I just broke up with someone.”

  Warning bells chimed like fire alarms in my head. I had to drown them with a drink of water. Could be I’d need something more potent. Like a case of vodka. “Oh?” And the tone—oh-so-nonchalant.

  “Well . . .” He grinned. “I guess ‘just’ is a relative term. I haven’t seen Tami in over a year.”

  I tried to muffle my sigh, but I felt my shoulders droop with relief. “How long did you date her?”

  “Six months maybe. But . . .” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Old news. What about you?”

  “I’m not dating Tami, either.”

  He laughed. It might not have been entirely out of pity. “Have you heard anything from J.D.?”

  “No.” I shook my head. Our drinks arrived. I took a sip. Good stuff. “How about you?”

  “Sorry. But I really don’t think you have to worry.”

  “Oh?”

  “J.D. . . .” He shrugged. “He likes the girls. And there are a few of them in Vegas.”

  I would have liked to explain that the Geekster couldn’t possibly be interested in someone else after Elaine, but there’s something about that missing X chromosome that makes men . . . Well, men are stupid. I know it sounds sexist. But I’m a trained professional and I’ve done thirty-odd years of research. Which meant what? That the Geekster had gotten involved with the Vegas mob scene?

  When I ran the idea through my mind, it didn’t sound as ridiculous as it should have.

  “So you think Solberg stayed in Vegas for . . . entertainment purposes?” I asked.

  Ross took a sip of his beer and shrugged. “Could be.”

  I studied him. It wasn’t much of a chore. “Did he meet someone there?”

  He squirmed a little. “We all met someone there. I mean, it’s a bunch of us nerds at a Vegas convention.”

  I wanted to ask who he had met but I stuck to the topic like bubblegum. “Do you know who Solberg met?”

  He shrugged. “Sorry.”