Start Reading #5
I try entering codes on the keypad of the safe. Once. Twice. No luck. I stand there looking at it, trying to see if any of the numbers on the keypad are more faded than others. Hard to say. I remember the piece of paper I found: safe. Is this what he meant, if he meant anything at all?
“Dad,” I say out loud to no one. “What the hell is this room?”
I have the sense of being watched, turn slowly, lift my eyes. There. A camera mounted in the far corner of the room. I stare into its blinking red light. Is someone watching me through that camera?
The phone begins to ring again. My heart starts to drum.
I turn the light out and exit the room, make sure the door is locked, vein pulsing in my throat.
Back upstairs, I call Lenny. Because nothing surprises him.
“I think maybe you didn’t know your dad very well,” says Lenny after I’ve told him everything, between his phlegmy coughing spasms.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Our favorite thing to say to each other.
Another coughing jag. I wait.
“So the way I see it, you have a choice,” he says when he’s recovered himself.
“Kill the camera, unplug the phone, sell the guns, and clean out all evidence of whatever was going on there. You take the money your father left you, go back to your life, and forget it, forget him. Go on a cruise or some shit. Let him take all his secrets and lies to the grave.”
I don’t answer.
He coughs again. “He either killed himself, or someone killed him. So—obviously nothing good going on there.”
I’m about to object that I really don’t think my father would kill himself, certainly not poison himself.
“Or,” he says. I hear the flick of his lighter, then a sharp exhale. About five years ago I gave up on suggesting that he might quit smoking. “The next time the phone rings, you answer.”
“Or I track his phone.”
“Not alone,” he says quickly. “That’s one-oh-one: Never go anywhere without backup. Certainly not out into the middle of the woods, where no one can hear you screaming.” Lenny is no fan of nature either. “Only idiots in the movies and on television do that. Got that, Rae?”
I’m staring at the pulsing blue dot on my dad’s computer screen.
“Hey,” says Lenny. “Are you sure you’re safe there?”
Am I safe on this isolated property with a mysterious ringing phone and a camera watching me in a secret room in the basement?
I’m armed. Let’s just say I’m no longer one of those liberals squeamish about guns. So there’s that. I know how to take care of myself.
With him still on the phone, I walk the house, make sure all the doors and windows are locked, that I’m alone here.
“My advice?” says Lenny. “Walk away.”
A younger Lenny would already be in the car on his way here.
But his COPD and a heart condition have him in an assisted living community in Riverdale, where I visit him once a week at least. He hasn’t driven in years.
I helped him sell his East Village building.
Between that and his pension, he’s comfortable—more than comfortable.
Amelia thinks of him as a grandfather; he spends the holidays with us.
He’s like the mayor of Active Horizons, always helping this one or that one, participating in all the activities he can.
“You know as well as I do sometimes there are no answers. Some people, some things, they stay lost. Maybe we don’t need to know everything. We’ve learned that lesson the hard way, right?”
“You’re right,” I lie.
A beat. An inhale and long exhale.
“So what are you going to do?”
“Like you say. Clean up. Take what he left me. Come back to the city.”
He’s quiet for a second; either he’s disappointed, or he doesn’t believe me.
“Good,” he says finally. “Friday is bingo night.”
“I’ll be there.”
Before I even hang up, I check the Glock I keep in a special concealed carry pocket in my purse, then put it in a shoulder holster that I don under my black puffer jacket. Jeans. Doc Martens. Hair back tight, black wool cap. My action outfit.
I grab my father’s laptop, map the route to his phone on mine, turn out all the lights in the house, and get in my car. I head north, toward the location in the woods.
PI work in general is pretty dull. It’s a lot of sitting and waiting, watching.
The backbone of the business is insurance fraud investigation.
Insurance companies have deep pockets, and it’s cheaper for them to pay investigators to root out fraudsters than it is to pay out claims. Also, vehicle repossession pays well.
Not the actual repossession, but finding the vehicle, which is easier than ever with tracking technology.
Then there’s infidelity, another cash cow.
People pay a lot to catch their spouse cheating, especially rich people with prenups.
An unintended consequence of the work is that you often see people at their worst, their most desperate, their angriest. It can color your perception of the world if you’re not careful. You can forget that not everyone is trying to game the system, steal, or cheat.
Another Lenny-ism: There are very few criminal masterminds.
Meaning that most people who do bad things are broken, desperate, traumatized, addicted, or afraid.
And a lot of them are not very smart—just saying.
Which is probably not very PC but, in my experience, is true.
Like the guy out on workers’ comp for a back injury sustained during work on a construction site.
He throws a party, a backyard barbecue, for his family, and I catch him on film winning the limbo contest. Or the woman who meets her lover at the beach house owned by her husband’s parents, which is wired with security cameras that I am easily able to hack and monitor from my car to provide high-quality video to my client.
Or the guy who reports his pickup truck, on which he’s three payments behind, stolen.
Then hides it in his grandmother’s garage and covers it with a tarp.
But he doesn’t realize there’s a tracking device in his car from the bank because he was a high-risk borrower.
There’s a look—a kind of sad, afraid dawning—that folks get when you catch them. I will say that I take no satisfaction in that whatsoever. I feel bad for people. I really do. Being far from perfect myself, I get it. We fuck up. All the time.
I’m thinking about this as the second hour passes.
In my car, I use a pair of night vision binoculars to watch the house that I didn’t see on Google Earth. Maybe the image was outdated, or perhaps the structure was hidden by the tree cover.
I am far enough away not to be seen, pulled into the shoulder, close to the trees, on the unmarked rural road that turned sharply off the main thoroughfare.
It’s a kind of winding drive to what looks like one of those higher-end prefab homes.
Nice enough, cutting a sleek modern line in the trees, but flimsy maybe. Like a strong wind might carry it off.
It’s not one of the abandoned places where we used to party. It certainly doesn’t look like a meth lab; there’s no telltale chemical odor. But I suppose it’s possible that a normie exterior hides a kitchen where poison is being cooked.
Poison.
My father’s blue dot pulses on his laptop screen, which I’m operating with my hot spot.
This is basic technology, Find My and Google Earth, available to everyone these days.
But in general PI work has become very high tech.
And I have all the toys. It would be fun, if the outcomes weren’t usually so fucking depressing.
The house is dark, has been as long as I’ve been sitting here.
There’s a pole barn, no garage. There is no parked vehicle visible.
It’s late now, after midnight. So maybe whoever lives here—the redhead?
—is sleeping. Or not here at all. I don’t know anything about her, if she has a vehicle.
If I take this further, maybe I’ll try to social engineer my way into the security department of the hospital, see if I can talk my way into looking at surveillance footage of the day I returned my father’s call and talked to a stranger.
Maybe she was there that day, standing over him at his bedside.
I use a device I have to scan for unsecured camera signals from inside the house.
But nothing comes up. There’s a Wi-Fi network, but my father’s usual passwords don’t work for that.
I did not see this house or property among any of his deeds.
So, whose place is this? And why do they have his phone—on, charged, and trackable?
Some possible reasons: ignorance, carelessness, stupidity. Someone at the hospital stole my father’s phone, forgot to disable location services, or didn’t know they had to do that in order not to be tracked? They’re using the phone until it gets turned off. That’s probably the most likely scenario.
Less likely but also possible: Someone is trying to lure me to this location.
My father’s hidden room—the safe, the guns.
It’s possible that whoever has his phone killed him and didn’t get what they were after.
I think back to the brief, mysterious phone conversation, turning it over in my head.
She certainly didn’t have to answer my call, but she did.
She urged me to come see my father. Maybe she wants something from me, whoever she is. But what?
Lenny is a fan of the razors. Occam’s razor: The simplest explanation is the most likely.
Jung’s razor: If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences, and then infer the motivation.
Hanlon’s razor is a special favorite: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
As for me, I think life and people are a bit more complicated. It’s a very male thing to assume the shortcut is the right path to the truth. The scenic route—though longer, perhaps harder—has nuances that might yield a deeper understanding. Assuming that’s what you’re after.