Trail of the Spellmans

by Lisa Lutz

  “My class is over at five. Five thirty?”

  I looked at my watch. Only an hour to kill before my reckoning with Walter. “I’ll see you then,” I replied. I drove to Walter’s apartment and found his bathtub on a slow drip. But there was no stopper in the tub and therefore no flood. The lock on the door had not been tampered with, and no footprints could be found on the pristine shag rug. In fact, I had developed a keen sense of Walter’s carpet-raking pattern (as opposed to mine) and could easily determine that no one had entered his home since he left that morning.

  I raked myself a path to Walter’s couch and picked up an art book on the coffee table. I cracked the spine, realized it hadn’t been opened before, and put it back in its place. I phoned Mr. Slayter to be sure he remembered the events of the previous afternoon and the instructions I had given him. He reminded me that his disease had not progressed very far. Although, when we hung up, he said, “Good-bye, Bella.” I didn’t bother correcting him.

  Then I telephoned Vivien Blake and called in a favor. With all the hassle she had caused me and the lost hours I couldn’t bill on doctored reports, I figured she owed me one.

  “Do you have a decent digital camera?” I asked.

  “It takes video, too,” Vivien replied.

  “You need a disguise,” I said.

  “Oh, I have that,” she confidently replied. “You want a blonde or a redhead?”

  “A blonde. Definitely.1

  “I don’t know the time yet, but it usually happens on Wednesdays.”

  “No problem,” Vivien replied.

  Then I heard the key in the door.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said.

  Walter entered and smiled hesitantly. “Isabel, so nice to see you in the flesh.”

  “That’s usually how you see a person.”

  “Right.”

  “Do you want to sit down?”

  “Can I make you a cappuccino first?” he asked.

  I thought this might be my last perfect cup of Walter cappuccino, so I agreed. Then I waited for twenty minutes while he brewed the flawless beverage. He even made a little four-leaf-clover design in the froth. I almost regretted what I was about to do. Almost.

  Walter took a seat next to mine and managed to ignore the sock treads he’d left behind. “Drink it while it’s hot,” he said.

  I took a sip.

  “How is it?”

  “Excellent, as always,” I replied.

  “You look like you have something on your mind, although I’m not sure what you’d look like if you had nothing on your mind.”

  I took another sip of coffee and put it on the coffee table. Walter picked up the coffee and slid a coaster underneath. It was a glass table. They don’t need coasters, I hear, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Why have you been lying to me, Walter?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I first started working for you, I was checking on nothing. You thought something was on fire, but it wasn’t; you thought you’d left a faucet dripping, but you hadn’t; maybe an electrical cord was plugged in, but it was unplugged, or the window was ajar, but you only open your windows twice a week to clear the air—and you only do that in the morning when the air is freshest. For two months I entered your home to check if anything was amiss, and nothing was ever amiss. Then, suddenly, things start to go wrong. Bathtubs overflow, footprints are left on the carpet, electrical appliances are mysteriously plugged in, and toast is made. Around that time I got a series of phone calls from your ex-wife.”

  “Sasha called you?”

  “Yes. She gets your phone bill and saw you dialing this number repeatedly. She called it and heard a female voice and assumed that you had moved on.”

  “I see,” said Walter. “She never told me.”

  “Your wife had a key, as you admitted, so I came to the logical conclusion. That is, until I confronted your wife.”

  “You spoke to Sasha?”

  “I did.”

  “You should have mentioned that.”

  “Maybe, but I needed to understand what was going on.”

  “And what’s going on?” Walter nervously asked.

  “Honestly, Walter, I don’t know. All I know is that your ex-wife isn’t doing this to you, and no stranger is, either. I surveilled your house one night when you didn’t know it and nobody came or left—except one elderly neighbor—and when you returned home, you called me because something else was amiss. So there is only one conclusion I can draw: You’re doing this to yourself. The next logical question is, why?”

  “Let me explain,” Walter said, inching closer to me on the couch.

  “Please do.”

  “I worry all the time. Never a day goes by that I don’t think something has gone wrong and I needed your help.”

  “And I did what you asked. But then you started sabotaging yourself.”

  Walter remained silent.

  “You flooded your own bathroom, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Walter replied, staring at the raked carpet.

  “You made toast?”

  “I did.”

  “How did you manage the power outage?”

  “I phoned PG&E while you were vacuuming your trunk.”

  “But why?”

  “I started to worry that if nothing ever happened, if nothing was ever out of place, perhaps you’d quit or suggest I hire a student or pass me along to someone else or tell me to get help again.”

  “Eventually, I might have suggested you hire a student. They work for cheap and there are probably a few who have a serious case of OCD.”

  “But I didn’t want that,” Walter said. “I wanted your help and so I figured I had to keep you engaged in the problem. And then sometimes you would come over when I was here, not at the campus, and I liked that. And I wanted to see you more. And I really liked that date we went on when we followed your sister.”

  “It wasn’t a date, Walter.”

  “We could go on a date, maybe. Couldn’t we? I know about your boyfriend.”

  “How do you know about that?” I said.

  “It’s obvious. You’re all wrinkled and buttons are missing and you’re sad and you weren’t like that before.” Walter inched closer to me on the couch. His hand hovered above my knee. “Anyway, that doesn’t matter.”

  “No, it doesn’t matter, Walter,” I curtly replied. His hand shifted back to his own leg. “I’m sorry. But I need to be firm here. Our relationship is professional and will remain that way. Unfortunately, I don’t think I should be your primary contact anymore.”

  “I think you’d be good for me.”

  “You can’t even get in my car, Walter.”

  “You could get a new car.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t feel the same way.”

  “I see. Well, that’s different. I’m sorry to hear that,” Walter calmly replied.

  He remained seated on the couch but seemed a bit stunned.

  “I understand what it’s like to be lonely,” I said. “And I know that you have challenges that perhaps some other people don’t have. I still believe that you should seek professional help, but in the meantime my mother can check on things while you’re at work. She is a very small, clean woman who will leave things just so. It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Walter.”

  I held out my hand. Walter shook it limply.

  “I guess this is good-bye,” he said.

  “Good-bye, Walter.”

  $$ JUSTICE 4 MERRI-WEATHER $$ AND A FEW OTHERS

  Shortly before Thanksgiving, David finally broke the news to Maggie about what Rae had done. He also explained his reluctance to retaliate based on his own youthful exploitation of his baby sister. Since Maggie didn’t have any comparable guilt, she relished the chance to enact punitive measures against Rae and followed her instincts. But still, adjusting to my family had taken its toll at times. Something about the sheer insanity of the banana debacle left Maggie with a slightly queasy feeling in her gut
. What other Spellman skeletons would one day come out to haunt her? One evening when David was trying to undo the damage done, giving Sydney a thorough lesson on all the common fruits, Maggie knocked on the door to the in-law unit and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Over drinks at a nearby watering hole—one with some sort of logging theme, which seemed incongruous in their tony neighborhood—we drank beer and traded intelligence on all of the current Spellman matters.

  Maggie, despite everything, was representing Rae in the tree-hugging case—though one did have to wonder how ardently she was fighting for her, since Rae got forty-five hours of community service. And not the country club kind. My sister would be wearing an orange reflective vest and cleaning up debris on the side of the highway. I asked Maggie if the punishment fit the crime and Maggie shrugged her shoulders ambivalently. We briefly touched on the subject of Fred and Rae and whether he had taken her back; Maggie said that as far as she knew they were still negotiating.

  We then began to brainstorm about D’s afternoon excursion with Grammy.

  “It’s not possible that they’re becoming friends, right?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maggie said. “We were talking the other day about his case and I asked him about his excursion with Ruth and he immediately changed the subject.”

  “You were talking about his case?” I asked. Suddenly the Grammy Spellman element was far less intriguing. Maggie and I had been instrumental in D’s release from prison and we were the first to suggest he file a lawsuit against the DA for malicious prosecution. The money could never compensate for the years he was incarcerated, but it could certainly improve the time he had left. But after tangling with the legal system for so many years to garner his release, D couldn’t bear the idea of setting foot in a courtroom as a free man. But later on, there were other factors influencing his decision. Maggie suggested that Mabel was one of them.

  Questions then flooded my mind. “What does Mabel have to do with it?”

  “He felt that a lawsuit would be time-consuming and interfere with their relationship.”

  “But he’s only been seeing her a little while.”

  “Six months.”

  “That long? Wow. He’s better than I thought,” I said, genuinely impressed.

  “He’s learned from the best,” Maggie replied.

  “I assume Mabel knows D was in prison?”

  “He told her on their first date.”

  “It doesn’t make sense that D wouldn’t want justice. I understand it could be time-consuming . . .”

  “I think he wanted to see if Mabel was able to like a rehabilitated ex-con. Not a man who spent years wrongly incarcerated and could potentially receive a windfall for his ordeal.”

  “Has he come to a conclusion yet?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said. “He dropped by my office last week and we’re currently drafting a complaint.”

  “Have you met her?” I asked. “Mabel.”

  “Briefly. We’ve tried to invite them over for dinner, but he has always politely declined.”

  “He’s hiding us because we embarrass him,” I said.

  “Can’t say I blame him,” Maggie replied. “You’re all nuts.” She knocked back the rest of her drink.

  “You want another?” I asked.

  “Definitely,” Maggie replied.

  I approached the bar and ordered another round of two beers and two shots of whiskey.

  We both downed our shots and then silence set in. The kind of silence that precedes nonsilence. Well, I suppose all silences are like that. But this was one of those deliberate pauses intended as a conversational palate-cleanser to move on to another subject.

  “I saw Henry’s car parked out front the other night,” Maggie said.

  “He brought it by for an oil change. You know he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty.”

  “Still don’t want to talk. Got it,” Maggie said.

  “There is something I would like to talk about.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a legal thing.”

  “Not what I had in mind, but go ahead.”

  “Based on the Spellman company structure at this point, can I be fired?”

  The following day, Demetrius broke the news to the family about his pending lawsuit. We celebrated with Crack Mix and champagne. Then D and I decided to take a drive. We felt it was important that Rae hear the news, but we wanted to provide it to her in the right context, at a place where she couldn’t gloat or celebrate.

  Mom found out where the orange chain gang would be picking up litter that afternoon, and D and I got on the 101 South. When we found my sister and her probation cohorts, we pulled the car onto the shoulder and snapped several photos. At first Rae tried to hide her face, but eventually she approached the car, tripping on the hem of her orange jumpsuit. They don’t make those things for Rae-size people, so she looked more like a child playing dress-up in a hazmat suit. It was a glorious sight.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” she asked.

  “We have some good news we wanted to share,” I said.

  “What?” Rae impatiently replied.

  “I’ve decided to file a civil suit for my wrongful incarceration,” D said.

  “I knew you’d come around eventually,” Rae said. “I’d like to think I had a little something to do with your decision.”

  “You didn’t,” D replied. “But we thought you should know.”

  Just then the foreman, or whatever the orange-wrangler is called, told Rae to get back to work.

  Rae sighed deeply and headed back to the group, dragging her trash bag in her wake.

  “See,” I said. “You can’t be smug in an orange reflective vest.”

  D took one more photo, just to make sure we had an album’s worth, and then we took the scenic route home. I asked D what he hoped for in the future; his plan was startlingly clear: a wife, kids, and maybe one day he’d open his own restaurant or bakery. Then he returned the question.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  GOOD-BYE, GRAMMY

  The next morning, when I arrived at the office, Demetrius and Grammy were out again.

  I looked at my watch.

  “What Morgan Freeman1 film is playing at nine thirty in the morning?” I asked.

  “They took FourPete to the dog groomer,” Mom replied as she scurried around the office, tidying up. “Empty the wastebaskets, please.”

  “Is a VIP coming in?”

  “Just the Blakes,” Mom said. “I didn’t like the way she was studying our debris the last time she was here.”

  Dad showed up a few minutes later, gathered all the paperwork on his desk into one messy pile, put it in a box, and shoved it under his desk. The doorbell rang and my mother led the Blakes into the office and pulled out two chairs beside her desk. I sat back and watched as my mother guided the out-take meeting and my father provided backup with carefully timed head-nods.

  They offered the Blakes a complete set of the Vivien Blake surveillance reports2 (falsified, yes, but the subject’s activities were also falsified, so I considered it a wash) and provided sound parental and professional advice to the couple:

  “Your daughter is behaving like a typical coed. She has friends. She goes to a few parties. Sometimes she stays out too late, and sometimes she’s at home on a Saturday night, studying. Her GPA is 3.7; she doesn’t have any warrants for her arrest; she has not been seen participating in any illegal activities; she doesn’t own a vehicle, so there are no traffic violations to consider; and she appears to the naked eye to be happy and well adjusted. We believe that there is no reason to continue this investigation and hope that you feel confident in letting your daughter go about her life on her own now. Our professional opinion is that it is in everyone’s best interest to refrain from any further investigation of Vivien. We hope that we’ve been helpful.”

  The Blakes appeared relieved by the information that they received, and as far as my parents coul
d tell, they were cautiously optimistic about their daughter’s future. They seemed willing to forgo any further invasion of privacy.

  That didn’t mean our invasion of privacy was over. My mother gave Mrs. Blake the genetics file compiled by Rae and explained that one of her most observant investigators noticed that certain genetic markers were inconsistent.

  Mrs. Blake’s first response was incomprehension, so alarmed was she by the sudden change of topic. But then she looked at the file, passed it to her husband, and asked my mother what the meaning of all this was.

  “Our investigator noticed that your daughter is most likely adopted,” Mom said. “Vivien is an extremely intelligent young woman. She probably figured it out on her own. It might be time to come clean.”

  The Blakes sat frozen for a few moments, taking in the information. Mr. Blake cleared his throat several times, as if he’d lost his voice; Mrs. Blake visibly paled and her hands trembled a bit as she placed the file into her handbag. The couple slowly got to their feet, thanked my parents for their work, paid the final bill, but never responded to my mother’s last suggestion. I phoned Vivien out of courtesy to let her know her shadow was officially over.

  “It was fun while it lasted,” she said.

  “How’s that other thing going?” I asked.

  “I should have something for you very soon,” she said. “And do you have anything for me?”

  “Still working on it,” I replied.

  A few days later, when I returned to the Spellman compound, several suitcases were clustered by the front door. My mother was using her inhaler like a scuba diver with an oxygen mask, but there was a calm glow on her face that I hadn’t seen in, well, exactly six weeks and four days. Demetrius and my father were lugging one of those old, boxy twenty-seven-inch televisions out to a pickup truck parked in the driveway.

  “This brings back memories,” D said.3

  “Be careful of your back,” Grammy said to my dad as she watched nervously. “You’re not a young man anymore.”

  “Yes, Mom, I’m aware of that. It would be nice if you didn’t tell me that every single day.”