Of course, it was far more complicated and demanded more skill than he would ever let on. But boiled down, the modern private detective was a digital information whore.
“Got a picture of me?”
“You’re a redhead. California Drivers License #N65748699,” read Woody. “See you got a birthday coming up, too. Don’t forget to renew.”
“I’m soooooo impressed. But I’ll bet with all the databases and stuff you still can’t tell what’s in a girl’s heart.”
“Biggest mystery to me is does the carpet match the curtains.”
“Does the carpet what?”
“Match the curtains,” repeated Woody.
Stumped, the sweet-but-slow Amy June asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, the picture says you’re a redhead...”
Woody listened to the vacuum of sound coming from the other end of the phone line. If it weren’t for the sound of her phony-baloney fingernails scraping the handset as she covered the mouthpiece, he would have thought she had hung up on him.
“Amy June?”
“You know, I just asked my girlfriend what you meant and she said you’re sexually harassing me.”
“Do you know what I meant?”
“No. I still don’t get it.”
“If you don’t get it,” asked Woody, “Then how can I be sexually harassing you?”
“But what’s it mean?”
“So what about the email?” asked Woody, instantly bored. All the fun had been wrung from the conversation. That and bobbyfisherking7362 was gonging again.
“Your email said to call,” reminded Woody. “So here I am.”
“Somebody just throw somethin’ cold on you?”
“Icy Big Gulp,” said a flattened Woody. “What do you got?”
“Somethin’ you didn’t get.”
“Impress me.”
“Your Stew Raymo?”
“What about him?”
“Didn’t come up as an alias cuz it’s not.”
“What was it, then?”
“A partial,” she said. “Old correction files that never transferred so good. Happens every so often. Lopped birth dates, criminal codes. I’ve seen murder ones turned into aggravated assault.”
“So...?”
“Stew Raymo, aka Stewart Raymond. No middle name or initial.”
Bobbyfisherking7362 had conceded the chess brawl and was upping the ante for a new game. These were money games that Woody played with half his brain tied behind his back. The board was already reset and Woody was IM-ing his opponent in an attempt to quadruple the bet.
“You want the file or what?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Woody. “Can you send me a PDF?”
“Can you send me a dozen roses?”
“On the way.”
“Hey, wait,” she said. “I just got it... The carpet thing.”
“Two dozen,” said Woody, sparked and re-engaged. “And I’ll sign it, ‘with affection from Justin Timberlake.’”
From Ben’s Simi Valley home, his average commute time to his Burbank office was forty minutes. No short haul for a man who, if he had chosen, could have run his consulting business from the converted room above his garage. But Ben liked the locals-only feel of Burbank. It was, at its heart, a factory town, lazily clinging to the eastern slope of the San Fernando Valley. And though its own city fathers dubbed it the Media Capitol of the World—home to NBC Television, Universal Studios, ABC-Disney, and Warner Brothers—its true roots were in aviation. Starting in World War II, hundreds of thousands of men and women had been employed in Lockheed’s Burbank factories—factories Ben had since walked through as a safety consultant—designing and assembling military aircraft from the P-38 to the U-2 spy plane to the more recent F-117 Nighthawk.
To Ben, Burbank was blue-collar and homey and near perfect. If it weren’t for the damned parking at his office. The underground lot had originally been designed for a maximum of fifteen cars. How and who the hell had upped the number to twenty-two cars was a mystery. So double-parking was a daily ballet. The eleven tenants divided the spaces both equally and unequally. Everybody had two spaces. But who was double-parked and who was blocked always depended on the time of day and willingness (or not) for people to get along, exchange keys, or trust one another when moving someone else’s car.
For Ben, the politics of the building’s parking situation was too much for him to stomach. Not to mention his certainty that in a 7.0 plus Richter earthquake the parking lot would be pancaked in a heartbeat. So Ben chose the game of street parking. There were always plenty of spots available—only the streets were metered for one and two hours. Success depended on running downstairs to feed the meter before the city parking enforcers stuck him with a ticket.
“Parked on the street?” asked Josie of her boss. Ben was barely halfway inside the door. That’s how Josie said hello in person.
“And good morning to you, too.”
“Late morning. Gimme the time and I’ll feed the meter,” offered Josie.
“Thanks, but I’ll feed the lollipops,” said Ben, briefly recalling the last time he had left her in charge of dropping coins into the meter. As great as Josie was, her best asset was also her number one liability. Time management. Josie could get so deep in her research that she would lose track of the clock. And that had cost Ben nearly two hundred dollars in parking tickets.
Still, Josie kept on offering every day Ben stuck his head through the door.
“Sure about that? I got lotsa quarters.”
“Let’s work the bulletin board,” smiled Ben, happy as hell to be back in a controlled environment. Pushing into his official inner sanctum, Ben was calmed by the warmth of the space. Slightly larger than the outer office where Josie had a desk, Ben’s office had three walls of old pine paneling painted in a slightly burnt orange hue called Barrier Reef. And though Ben had never been Down Under, he liked both the name and the way his framed set of black and white family photos popped against the color of a rich autumn sunset. The entire wall was peppered with pictures of Alex and her three girls. A former client had dubbed it “Ben’s Constellation of Love.”
On the paneling behind the old library table Ben used as a desk was a bulletin board. Opposite were a leather couch, a chair, and a simple oak coffee table where Josie would set up shop when Ben was in the office.
The fourth wall sported a large floor-to-ceiling window hung with vertical louvers. As much as Ben didn’t care for the louvers, they were part of the original building design and removing them would have been a breach of the lease agreement.
Rules were meant to be followed.
There was the usual routine. While Josie set up her laptop and notes on the coffee table, Ben would put his feet up on the desk and log in to the Internet. He would casually browse emails and a variety of news and information sites while Josie orally worked through the phone sheet, new client profiles, and outstanding consulting reports that demanded Ben’s once-over or approval. She would leave the payments due file for last, knowing that clients who didn’t pay their bills in a timely manner would slightly rile her usually unflappable boss.
In their late-morning session, Josie would simply read, recite, and comment as she saw fit. Ben would interrupt when he had something to add. Sometimes his comments would be acute and to the point. Other times Ben would free-associate into any number of safety concerns, personal or otherwise. Josie would never forget the time Ben rattled on endlessly about knives and other sharp objects within the reach of curious toddlers. And though there was little data to support his fear, Ben couldn’t bear to be in proximity of a child near something as benign as a butter knife.
“General Machine and Electro,” said Josie, working from her new client file. “They are assemblers of everything from industrial generators to heating grills.”
“What kind of grills?”
“The plug-in kind,” she said. “The ones that get all orangey-red.”
“You kno
w how much power those pull?” remembered Ben. “Way back when, in my other life, we had this little house with hardly any furniture. Heater was busted. So I went to a hardware store and bought one of those little units for every room. Number one, the house was pre-war and had zero insulation. Number two, you should’ve seen my power bill the next month. And Daddy didn’t have the dough to pay it.”
“Oh, dear. What did Daddy do?”
Ben laughed.
“Sara took a temp job with Accountemps. She was seven months pregnant and answering phones for some dubious CPA group. She would come home and complain. Called them all Certified Public Assholes.”
Josie was wise not to press for more information. When Ben would say, “Way back when in my other life,” it was his code way of referring to his first family. His wife and twin girls. All tragically destroyed in a long-ago home invasion robbery. Weird. She couldn’t remember Ben having ever having called his first wife, Sara, by name. Once or twice, when Ben wasn’t in the office, Josie had trolled the LexisNexis database for more information. All that she had discovered was the coroner’s report and a blurb from the Los Angeles Times’ police blotter. That was plenty enough for Josie. Her boss had a deep wound inside. From that wound he had transformed himself into a human miracle, she thought. A man who had taken the horror from his life and built it into a safe little niche.
Ben had indeed moved on.
Josie continued, “General’s thinking of starting an assembly plant in Compton.”
“Tax break deal?”
Josie nodded. Ben was briefly ahead of her. California and the Feds had created a new set of enterprise zone tax breaks as an inducement for manufacturing companies to invest in the not-so-business-friendly state.
“Guy who called said they were on the bubble after going through AQMD and Environmental Regulators.”
AQMD was shorthand for the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Since 1980 they had been trying to clean up Southern California’s famously smoggy air. In Ben’s mind, the AQMD was slowly winning the war, making it safer for children to wind themselves on the local atmosphere.
“Okay, I got it. Wants to know if OSHA regs are going to put them out of Compton,” finished Ben. “Did you send them our rate sheet?”
“Uh huh. But they wanna know if you’re negotiable.”
“You told them no.”
“Of course. But their guy said he was sure you and he could work something out. Something about a quality bonus if they decide to move ahead with the plant.”
Inducement bonus, thought Ben, rolling his eyes. Assholes. They only wanted to engage Ben if he could grease the wheels between the company and the state safety cops. Maybe show them some cost saving short cuts.
Josie understood the situation as much as her boss. She knew how Ben would respond. He would say either, “pass” or “be polite, but say no.” Still, it was her job to pitch the job. It was Ben’s choice to swing or not. But Josie had already made the note to call the company back and deliver the bad news. Good for Ben, she would say to herself. Her boss was picky and had an actual backbone.
All she needed was Ben’s official word.
So she waited. Patiently hunched at the couch, knees together, elbows pinned to her side, those danger nails quietly tapping out the punk tune in her head on the coffee table’s top. When enough time had passed, she looked up at Ben. What she saw wasn’t at all what she had expected. Ben had a way of turning into something Josie liked to call “the man on pause”—momentarily tuning her out while reading an email or online article. None of the moments lasted long. Ben would resume by saying, “What’s next?” or “Where were we?”
But this wasn’t the man on pause. This was her boss—Ben—stony and as if holding his breath. His eyes were wider than normal, unblinking while fixed on his computer screen. Then, for just the briefest moment—maybe two seconds—Ben swiveled to the window, let his eyes reach infinity, rubbed his face, and returned to his monitor. Josie thought she saw him swallow hard, and confirmed it when he gulped again. But this time, something caught in his windpipe and he began convulsing with coughs.
“You okay?” asked Josie, rising to help.
Ben didn’t answer. He put a hand to his chest, held still for a moment, then continued with that uncontrollable cough.
“I’ll get you some water.” Josie sprung to the outer office. The mini fridge behind her desk was always stocked with soda pop and bottled water. She grabbed a 500 milliliter bottle of Fiji and sped back to Ben. As Josie gave the cap a quick twist, hearing the familiar snap of breaking safety plastic, she also heard Ben croaking between hacks.
“I’m okay,” Ben said. “Just...”
Ben looked up to find Josie was stuck in the doorway, water bottle at the ready. She was frowning at him with conditional concern. As if she wanted to help but was afraid to cross some invisible boundary.
“Seriously,” said Ben. Something just went down the wrong way. “Here. Gimme the water and let’s pick this up later.”
“You’re sweating,” she remarked. “You getting sick?”
“Maybe,” he said.
Josie handed Ben the water and he thanked her. Next, she gathered up her notes and laptop and returned to her desk.
“Mind closing...” Ben had meant to add “the door.” But Josie understood, anyway, softly clicking the door behind her like a mother trying not to wake a sleeping child.
The central air kicked in, sending an overhead wash of cold air through Ben. It instantly mingled with his sweat and gave him a shudder. At least he was alone. Nobody to see him drowning in his moment of abject fear.
Yet the face continued to stare back at him. It was a JPEG image attached to a concise email from Woody Brown. The picture, large enough to fill most of the screen, was a color mug shot of the one and only Stew Raymo—or Stewart Raymond if Ben could have gathered enough of his wits to actually read the attached note.
The image itself was scanned and faded, depicting a thinner, mullet-haired version of Stew only six days after turning twenty-seven years old. One could imagine the stubble surrounding the thin smile on Stew’s face was leftover from a birthday bender that had ended with his arrest. The eyes of the criminal appeared drained and resigned to whatever punishment lay ahead.
It was hardly the picture of the affable man Ben had met only hours earlier. Ben had shaken Stew’s hand. The hearty grip had been nothing more than that, giving back not so much as a twelve-volt tingle.
The coffee and muffin in Ben’s stomach were mingling, rising fast. He spun in his chair and slipped to the floor, thrusting his head into a freshly lined garbage pail, vomiting everything.
Nightmares.
Stew Raymo hated nightmares and the lost sleep that followed after one had invaded his slumber. Nightfuckers, he came to call them after first hearing the word during one of his two adolescent incarcerations. And they had plagued him ever since. He lay awake after disconnecting from the bad dream, reoriented himself, rolled over and over, and almost constantly checked the bedside clock. It was only eleven minutes past two in the morning. He knew that trying to fall back asleep would be useless. So he slipped from bed, careful not to wake Pam.
The hardwood floors he had installed felt smooth and perfect to his bare feet. A great wood product, he thought. That baked-on, factory finish was loads better and more durable than the old-fashioned, sand-and-varnish styles some homeowners demanded. Cheaper, too. Thank God for progress.
After peeing, Stew padded along through his usual post-nightmare route. Back corridor, dining room, kitchen, fridge, snack. Then he turned himself into a big lump in front of his big flat-screen, high-def TV. While flipping channels, he touched his gut. He had gained nearly four inches on his waist since Pam had started to turn his office into “the baby’s room.” Gone were the treadmill, flat bench, and free weights Stew used to heft into the wee hours. He used to fight back against the nightmares with sweat and heavy reps until he ached. He would finish with
a half pack of smokes and a long walk to the corner pie shop for a cup of coffee and slice of sweet cornbread. Sure, there was a twenty-four hour gym that was close enough to walk to. But he hadn’t yet found the charm in all that high-tech equipment lined up in modern health clubs.
And he had recently quit smoking “for the baby.”
What fuckin’ baby?
Pam wanted the baby something bad. And who the hell was Stew to deny her? She was pushing thirty years old and his instincts were telling him that it was either gain a baby or lose the wife. What the fuck? Stew had thought. He sure as shit would be a better daddy than his own.
The nightmare was sticking to him. Fifteen minutes, a guzzled Sprite and a half-eaten pastrami sandwich later, even the big screen TV couldn’t wash it away. Not that Stew could remember exactly what had made the nightmare so freaking disturbing. It was more like an icy reflex. As if he had woken up, swaddled in cling wrap, his muscles aching to break some invisible constraint. That and this image he couldn’t shake—three amorphous human figures, their clear, elastic skin bursting with a dizzying electronic snow like television static.
Stew’s ears were plugged, too. After a dozen forced yawns, he stood, pinched his nose and gently blew, hoping that a change in atmosphere might clear them. His ears remained stopped up. Possibly a head cold, he thought, just before settling back into the sofa. He clicked the remote to DirecTV channel 605, The Golf Channel.
All for the baby.
Screw it, he decided. If he couldn’t run the treadmill and lift free weights, damn if he was going to give up cigarettes.
It took him two minutes to dress, brush his teeth, and hit the sidewalk. He was walking fast. It was one block east to the lights of Laurel Canyon Boulevard, then two blocks south to the 7-11 where a reunion pack of Marlboros was waiting for him.
Ah. Cigarettes, coffee, and hot cornbread.
Then he thought of that inspector guy from OSHA. His name was Benjamin Something or Something Benjamin. He had a snapable neck. Prison had taught Stew to size up every new man the instant he entered his immediate vicinity. Since then, he divided men into two categories. Men whose necks Stew could snap in two. And men with whom he should keep peace.
The Safety Expert Page 6
