by Amy Gray
“Yeah,” I said. Only in Skye's universe is this business as usual. “So, are you gonna see him?”
“I wanted to do a profile of him in my book, but it seems like that's not really what he's interested in, which is too bad.”
She agreed to call me back again if he hassled her any more.
Which Comes First?
I read some summary news and gleaned a sense of what Egg-licious was about, how they were funded, who their clients were. The case seemed pretty clean, to my chagrin. It was probably a one-pager. I was both disappointed and loaded for bear. I was blood-hungry I wanted burnt CEO for dinner. So I gave it one more look before I handed the case in; I went over all my notes and a few articles I had only skimmed before.
I was almost ready to present the case to George when I came across a news item that pricked my interest: Mr. Egghead had moved to Kansas for a while in the late eighties and worked at a computer-consulting firm, something that was missing from every other biography of him I'd read so far. I took the article to George, who was working at his desk.
“What?” George doesn't like to look at people. Especially his employees. It's a callous but effective mind game that weeds out the bullshit, which is exactly what he wants. Unfortunately, it still made me nervous, so I stuttered a bit and generally sounded stammering and unintelligible. I think I even called him “Sir” at the end, and I noticed a kind of bemused flicker pass over his face. All the while he continued typing on his computer, staring directly at the screen in front of him and maintaining the most astonishing composure, registering nothing of what I was saying. “So, I think we should do court searches in Kansas as well?”
George pulled his usual duck-and-dodge, not even acknowledging my presence by looking at me. He deadpanned, “Are you telling me or asking me? ” I wasn't sure. I wanted to be doing whatever he wanted me to be doing. Telling you, asking you. My mother, my sister.
“I'm, um, asking you?” I realized as I was doing it that I was asking him if I was asking him. “Why the fuck are you asking me?”
One strike. “If you think we should do it, tell me why. You have to make the case to me, one way or the other. I get to listen.” The issue, I gathered, was money. Some court records were available for a limited period of time online or in databases, but the rest of the searches had to be done manually, by court record researches we farmed out, and they were very expensive. We only did manual searches in areas where we knew our subjects had lived.
Choking the Chicken
I pleaded my case that Egghead hadn't been anywhere near Kansas, according to any published reports supplied by our client or found by us, and that, with the case as clean as it appeared to be, this was at the very least an opportunity to show our commitment to diligence on the matter. I got the green light.
I had to solicit Vinny's help getting the litigation. “Hiya, Amy. What kan I dew you fawr? ”
“Vinny can you help me out with the network setup?” Gus had snuck up behind us, and he winked at me and whispered, “You gotta just tell him to shut up.” An hour later, Vinny dropped the goods off on my desk, with a note that said, “Would you like to get a steak dinner at Luger sometime?” Ugh.
That night I took a sleeping pill, had a bath, and put on my softest jammies. I was dozing off in bed when the phone rang. Terror-stricken, I sat up in my bed. “Hello? ” “Amy, it's Skye.” “Hi.”
“Okay, I really need your help. DeeBee is leaving tonight at one for London, but he wants to get a drink, and I was thinking if I could just sketch him and use it for the book, it would be really cool.”
“Wait—what? Who?”
“DeeBee—it's David Blaine's nickname.”
“Okay, Little Miss Insider.”
“So he says, ‘Please, come meet me.’ But I don't want to go alone, and he said he'd bringing his friend Leo.”
“Do you think it's … Leonardo?”
“I think so, but I'm not sure. But you have to come with me. Please. They're meeting at the bar at Spy in an hour.”
“I don't even think Leonardo is cute.”
“I know. Me neither. It's a business thing. I need you for moral support and/or protection.”
“Okay, but I have to get dressed, and it'll take a while to get there on the subway.”
“You're the best ever.”
“I know I am.”
Now, fully awake, I was faced with a crisis about what to wear to our double date with DeeBee and Leo. I knew they were probably assholes anyway, and I would be the baby-sitting, less-desirable chaperone, but I couldn't help at least wanting to try to look attractive.
A Crime in Four Movements
Skye and I met at Barmacy a dive about five blocks north of Niagara and equally seedy. It was an old pharmacy space (hence the name) and the owners had kept old medical-equipment boxes and dusty bottled serums and medicines along the perimeter of the bar.
“Whaduyya want?” the bartender asked.
Behind the glass there was one cough syrup that Skye and I had always coveted. Belladonna was now an illegal over-the-counter syrup that had been a cure-all in the fifties and was loaded with morphine. My dad's parents would give it to him as a little boy.
“How about a swig of the old belladonna?” I asked.
The bartender, Vic, who was pierced in six places on his face, just stared at me, unamused. I noticed that he had two tattooed vines running up his neck that turned into spitting snakes by his ear. “Two Vicious Vaccines,” Skye said, leaning in front of me. He grunted something and walked away.
What does Vicious Vic have up his ass? I wondered.
Luckily, the special house concoction was served in syringes and administered by waitresses whose too-tight nurse uniforms glittered starkly against their Betty Page bobs. If I never saw Vic's punctured face again it would be too soon. We shot up and sat at the bar for an hour, suffering the occasional dead glare from Vic. After an hour, Skye's hyperactive babble slowed to an occasional mutter, and then silence.
She tried DeeBee's cell phone seven times, but to no avail. The less likely they were to come, the more Vic seemed to sneer. The only thing worse than basking in his glare, I thought, would be sitting here so long that Vic actually started to like us.
“At least being stood up by two hot celebrities is cooler than just being stood up by some guy.” But I knew Skye had never been stood up before in her life, and she seemed to have trouble getting her head around it.
“Hey! Let's take some photo-booth pictures,” Skye suggested, springing back to life. Barmacy had a grimy photo machine in the back that we'd tumbled into on various drunken nights. When Skye pulled the curtain back, there was a primly dressed woman sitting there, except for her blouse, which was completely unbuttoned and her breasts fully exposed.
“Oops! Sorry!” Skye looked at me, mouth covered in horror and amusement as she pushed the curtain closed.
“What the fuck was that?”
“I. Don't. Know.” Then the curtain was swished open again and the woman smiled broadly at us. Her boobs were now concealed under a loose silk peasant blouse.
“Sorry about that, guys!” she said lightly, leaning out.
“That's okay,” Skye squeezed out, still stricken. She mouthed “Whooooa!” to me.
“I love to come here and take my picture.” The woman had a thick New York accent and mascara flaking onto her dusted cheeks.
“Yeah,” I said, nodding like I really knew what she meant. The Photo Booth Porn Star Lady opened a book on her lap, to reveal hundreds of photo-booth shots of her torso, her makeup better arranged in some than in others. “I come heya once a week. I've been takin’ booth photographs for seventeen years.” She giggled. “I like to see how my body changes. My boobs have started to sag, ya know what I mean?”
Unfortunately, we did. She may have noticed we were a little freaked, because she flipped through her photographic growth chart cursorily and excused herself after giving us some tips on lighting. “The uppa left bul
b is out. They just put a new orange background in—whateva you do, don't wear blue. You'll look dead.”
We thanked her and piled into the booth. “Holy shit. Did that just happen?” Skye said, cradling her temples.
“I feel like we should wipe this down with Windex first,” I lamented.
“I know.” The pictures came out funny. In the first one we both looked like we were just slapped, and in the last three there are tears running down our faces from laughing, our mascara crumbling down our cheeks just like that lady's, a record of a crime in progress, in four parts.
A Bad Egg
It turned out that even though Egghead had left no credit trails in Kansas, he was named as the plaintiff in a lawsuit in Johnson County District Court in Kansas during the time period we were looking for. He was the plaintiff, and the case was filed against a processed-cheese manufacturer that owned a company he had worked at before developing his billion-dollar-revenue-producing mock egg batter with no required refrigeration and an appetite-killer shelf life of two years. The catch? The courthouse had physically lost the complaint. All it contained was a dismissal order showing that the matter, which was coded as “contract-related,” was dismissed four months after the first filing. I called several executives at the Icky Cheese company, who were tight-lipped, but I finally happened on a sweet and slightly surprised HR representative named Lois who, at the very least, didn't tell me to go kiss off.
“Oh, you're calling about Mr. Caruso,” she said, in a tone that indicated sweetness masking familiarity masking suspicion. “I'll be honest with you, Lois,” I said, adopting a hushed manner of shared secrecy. “My clients are concerned about this situation. They know he didn't part on good terms with your company, and, frankly, they don't know why. They are on the verge of a major deal with Caruso, but it would put their minds very much at ease if they could find out what happened here, Lois.” Repeating a person's name was a Sol technique, one he really pushed. I noticed he did it around the office, too, except he had pet names for people, like “Fuck Stick” or “Chump Change” or “Dick Squad.” I wasn't sure if I was doing it too much. It also reeked of Dale Carnegie to me. But I wanted to win friends.
Lois was waffling. “Well, you know we have a policy here of not speaking about former employees, and of course I can't violate that …” (I heard Sol's words to us that morning: “Let people speak. They want to. This is that HR lackey's chance to shine—for the first time, someone gives a shit what they think about what's going on.”) “Um-huh.” I bit my lower lip.
“But I can tell you that he didn't leave of his own volition.”
Booyah!
I tried to play it cool. “I see. Now, Lois, if I were to draw conclusions from that, I might assume that his job performance was sub-par, perhaps.”
“Well,” Lois let drop, “I suppose I could also say that he was hired about two months before he was supposed to start, and he never did start. He was fired before he started, basically.”
What the fuck did that mean? I was trying to think about instances when friends of mine had lost jobs before they even started them. I knew Ben was once fired from a job at a local Providence television station when, about an hour after hiring him, the supervisor reread his résumé and noticed that there was an unfortunate embellishment on it. He had already listed himself as having worked there.
“Was he dishonest about his working past, Lois?”
“No, not really. But let's say all new employees are subject to a company orientation, and Mr. Caruso was found to be unfit for the environment we'd like to maintain here. But that's really all I can say.” The phone was rustling like she was about to close out on me, and I could not let that happen.
“Lois, I completely understand. I'm not going to ask you any more questions. Let's just say that I might draw the conclusions that he was found to be engaged in prohibited behavior, maybe drug use, or, um, sexual behavior. Would that be accurate?” I could practically hear Lois blush.
Long silence. “Well, the latter would be correct.” Boom. “Lois, I just want to make sure we understand each other. Was Mr. Caruso maybe harassing a fellow employee in a sexually inappropriate way?”
“Well, it was inappropriate in that way, but it wasn't directed at anybody, umm, in particular. If I'm making myself clear.”
This was getting very interesting. “Lois,” I said, “I'm going to use a euphemism that might make this more comfortable—might I assume that Mr. Caruso was caught pulling the pud on company property?” I really hoped Lois had a teenage son, and I wouldn't have to get any more graphic—or technical. She conceded, but added, “My name is Lourdes, by the way.”
Not good. Definitely a big fuckup. But I pushed forward. I wanted to be clear. “You mean, like Madonna's baby?” She laughed and said yes and before I blew it any more I squeezed out, “You should feel very good about this, ma'am,” and got off the phone.
When I went to deliver the good news to George he was on the phone, so I left him a note. Sometimes the Agency tries to get pictures of subjects just for identity-verification, and in the glossy attached in my case file Mr. Caruso even looked like a pervert. I attached his greasy mug to a note that said, “George, he pulled a Pee-wee in a bathroom stall at work. Go figure.”
My razor-sharp interrogation skills did not go unheeded. Eventually, George came to find me. I was sitting at my desk, where I'd been anxiously facing him for the past four days, and he threw me a bone. “Gray—I spoke to the client about that case. Thanks for not fucking it up.” I felt my face go rosy. Our client ended up confronting Mr. Caruso about it, and he copped to the sullied truth. The clients went through with the deal anyway.
The Naked Truth
Having been warned about the Halloween party since practically the day I was hired at the Agency I was expecting to be impressed. Nothing prepared me for it.
I waited until the eleventh hour—the day before Halloween— to pick out my costume, which I found by accident while walking to the subway after work. A brown suede and macramé halter top beckoned from the window of a thrift store called Grandma's Attic. I immediately conjured Cher and ran inside. The halter top was fifty-eight dollars, eighteen dollars over my entire Halloween budget, but I figured I didn't have time to be frugal at this point, since otherwise I had no costume to wear. I bought a long black wig and some brown leather bell-bottoms to match. I had some giant white plastic clip-on hoops from my dress-up days, and I wore some old platforms to seal the deal.
That day, Wendy, Renora, and I had to buy plastic cauldrons for candy and apple-bobbing. The largest costume-rental company in New York was next door to our building. Around Halloween, the lines of people seeking costumes snaked out the door around the block, but Tommy, our fixit guy, let us in by the back entrance. The place looked like the scene of a gruesome slaughter in the dressing room of an L.A. child star. It was swarming with pushy girls grading their boyfriends, as well as a chorus of grim reapers and cackling dwarfs. “Eww,” Wendy whined. After we had arranged our witchy pots artfully, and I went to Cassie's to get dressed for the party, because, as usual, she didn't want to show up alone.
By the time I finished applying my fake lashes and putting bronzer all over my body, I barely recognized myself. I just needed the Sonny to my Cher, which really wasn't going to happen between now and later, so I'd asked Cassie to come. She was a 1970s prom queen, but her Salvation Army-bought silver pumps broke on the way down the stairs to meet me, and she had an identity crisis.
“Va-va-voom! You look like a hot piece of 1975 ass.” She had on a gorgeous lavender polyester disco dress with a swishy pleated skirt and puffy three-quarter-length sleeves. The dress had silver zig-zags across the waist. Then I noticed she looked like she was about to puke. “What's the matter?’
“I can't wear this! I only have one heel,” she wailed.
“Why don't you try on some other shoes?” I suggested.
“They don't match!”
Eventually, after much coaxin
g, she wore some black shoes she'd bought for a black-widow costume the year before.
Noah and Renora were on the decorating committee. All the furniture had been moved into the conference room. The entire loft was festooned with cobwebs, although, it occurred to me, many of these might not be decorations.
Everybody seemed to choose characters they already resembled, somewhat. Wendy was exercise guru Jane Fonda, after her teen-princess era and before she was a billionaire's wife. Her span-dex bodysuit with its deep V-neck and stripes were set off by a pair of silver hand-knit legwarmers. Other girls gathered around to admire her impeccable rendition, completed by sweatbands around her wrists and head.
“I'm so into these legwarmers,” she said to me, panting as she pumped her arms in the air as part of her aerobic-dancing routine. “I'm gonna wear them all the time. They're so comfortable!”
“Honey you already wear legwarmers all the time,” I pointed out.
Wielding a cane and a pipe, Linus approached us. He had shaved the top of his head and dyed the rest of his hair gray.
“Who am I?” he asked.
“I don't know … an old man.”
“Amy, Amy Amy” he muttered, shuffling away from me. “That's obvious. But which one?”
“What are you, Rain Man?” It turned out he was Carl Jung.
Renora was a sexy romance novel cover girl. She'd bought C cup saline boob enhancers (they're called Curves), and stuffed herself into a tight and flouncy green velvet ball gown. She had a curly brown appliqué attached to her short hair. “Where's your Romeo?” I asked.
“Shhh.” She pulled me aside. “I'm a little disturbed by his costume,” she whispered. “I feel like he's really eighty years old.”
“It is a little too good,” I agreed. We watched as Linus stumbled by with Gus, dressed as a Hell's Angel; Evan, who was looking freaky as Gene Simmons in full ceremonial dress; and Nestor, who was Gonzo from the Muppets.
