Bad Guys (13 page)

“It can wait. Actually, meet me at the doughnut place around ten-thirty. I’ll be in the Buick again. They managed to get a new window in it this afternoon.” And he hung up.

Shit. He couldn’t tell me now? My daughter’s being dogged by some potential nutcase and he wants to tell me the details later?

I considered phoning him back, then held off. He was doing this as a favor, no charge, so I didn’t feel I had the right to get pushy. But he had something on the kid, that much was for sure, which only strengthened my resolve to be proactive. By the time I saw Lawrence tonight, I might have a bit of information to share about Trevor Wylie myself.

There wasn’t all that much to do to prepare for the job I was about to undertake in the hours before I joined Lawrence at Brentwood’s men’s store. He’d explained to me that the most important item for any would-be private detective about to go out on a stakeout was a bottle to pee in.

I stepped into the little mudroom we have between the kitchen and the back door, where we keep our two blue recycling boxes: one for bottles and cans and one for newspapers. There was, in the box for bottles and cans, nothing but the glass Snapple apple juice bottle I’d dropped in there the morning before. There was clearly more work to be done to make this family environmentally conscious.

I leaned over and grabbed the bottle. The screw-on cap was still attached, so it would do. I was ready to go on my first stakeout.

IT WAS JUST AS WELL that Sarah had left for her retreat by the time I’d gotten back home with Angie. I don’t quite know how I would have explained what I was about to do. Given the recentness of the Pool Boy incident, not very well.

“Where you off to?” Sarah asks.

“Oh, just going to tail Angie wherever she goes, see if that Trevor kid really is stalking her.”

“Well, you just have a nice time, okay?”

The truth is, Sarah would have viewed such a plan as intrusive. An invasion of privacy. Wrongheaded. Difficult to justify, even for concerned parents.

Okay, perhaps.

But that was not what this was about. This was not about finding out what my daughter was up to. This was about finding out what Trevor Wylie was up to. And it made the most sense to follow Angie to find that out. I didn’t need to know what Trevor Wylie did every minute of the day. I just wanted to know whether he was targeting Angie.

Of course, I could have been up-front with her. I could have told her my plan. I could have explained to her that she should just go about her business as she normally would, that I didn’t care in the least what she was up to.

But being up-front presented a number of problems. Angie, who was now a young woman, might be of the view that having her father trail her cramped her style, and persuading her otherwise might present something of a challenge. The smartest thing, I decided, was to deal with this on my own. See what was going on. And, depending on what transpired, be up-front later if certain decisions had to be made. Like, for one, calling the cops about Trevor Wylie if he proved to be an actual threat.

About half an hour after I’d brought her home, Angie came bounding down the stairs. She’d touched up her makeup, brushed her hair, changed her clothes. She looked, I’d have to say, quite beautiful, and like most fathers, I have mixed feelings about having a beautiful daughter. There’s pride, and then there’s the business of not being able to sleep at night.

“I’m heading out in a couple of minutes,” she told me. I was in the family room off the kitchen, sitting in the recliner, watching the news, drinking some coffee. Doing my nonchalant thing. Doing it very well.

“Uh, actually, so am I,” I said, sensing the time had come to launch Operation Trevor, and stood up out of the chair. “I might as well take off now, too.”

I grabbed my jacket from the closet. I’d already tucked the Snapple bottle into a pocket, making it bulge out conspicuously. “Where you off to?” Angie asked.

“I just got a few things to do, and I’m meeting up with Lawrence, that detective I’m writing about, in a little while.”

“What’s in your pocket?” she asked, noticing the huge lump in my jacket.

“Just bringing a bottled water, something to drink in case I get thirsty,” I said.

Paul appeared in the front hall as I was about to leave. “Where you going?”

“I just told your sister. I’m doing a couple of things, then meeting up with Lawrence Jones.” The guilt I felt at not being totally honest with my son was offset by the six-pack of beer hidden in the backyard, I suspected, specifically for him. Trevor was doubtless old enough to buy booze, and was probably helping Paul get some.

Paul and I would definitely be having a chat about this. But not now. I had more pressing matters to deal with. I had a job to do. I was heading out into that dark night, a kind of Philip Marlowe, a private eye, going it alone against the forces of—

Enough.

“What if I need a ride tonight?” Paul asked. “Angie’s going out, you’re going out, Mom’s not here, there’s no car.”

I pulled out my wallet and handed him a twenty. Paul looked at it in his hand, not sure whether to believe his eyes. “If you run into a jam, grab a cab,” I said.

“A cab?” Paul said. “An actual cab? What if I end up not going out tonight?”

“Then you can give me the twenty back.”

Paul nodded quickly. “Well, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be going out.”

“Can I have the Virtue?” Angie asked, calling out from the kitchen. I glanced out and saw that it was at the end of the drive, blocking the Camry. I didn’t want to take the time to switch cars around.

“I’m taking it tonight,” I said.

“Aww. It’s got the sunroof.”

I said goodbye, got in the Virtue, moved the Snapple bottle from my jacket pocket to the cup holder, and slipped the key into the ignition. I turned it forward.

Whir whir.

What the? I turned the key again.

Whir whir.

What the hell was this? My new car didn’t want to start? I turned the key a third time, and it proved to be my lucky attempt. The engine turned over. It was, I told myself, just a fluke. I backed down the drive and headed south on Crandall. Once I was out of sight of the house, I tromped on the accelerator, although in a hybrid, that didn’t accomplish a lot. The car took its own time getting up to speed, making me anxious about circling the block in time to see Angie pull out.

But I managed to get around the block with a few seconds to spare before the Camry, with Angie at the wheel, backed out onto Crandall and headed south. Good, good, I thought. Everything was going okay. I was pumped. I was getting into it. At one point, I realized I’d been saying “Hello, shweetheart” under my breath unconsciously. But that was Sam Spade, wasn’t it, from
The Maltese Falcon
? Not Philip Marlowe.

I’d have to check that later.

What I didn’t know, until Angie reached the end of the street and turned right, was that the left brake light was out on the Camry. Not good, but at the same time, as it got darker, it would make it easier to spot the car as I attempted to maintain some distance between us.

The other thing I quickly realized, not ever having driven behind Angie, was that Angie was not very good at remembering to signal. She’d made a right at the bottom of Crandall without putting on her turn indicator. And a mile or so further along, when she made a left, she forgot again.

I was going to have to talk to her about this. Just as soon as I could figure out how to tell her I’d been in a position to notice. I blamed Sarah for this. Angie’s disregard for the rules of the road had to be a genetic thing.

In addition to watching Angie, I was watching all the cars around her, in particular the black Chevy Lawrence and I had seen Trevor Wylie leave in earlier. So far, no sign of him.

The Camry turned onto Elmdale, home to a long block of coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, boutiques catering to the eclectic. I held back as the one Camry brake light came on and Angie began cruising the street slowly, evidently looking for someplace to park. I pulled over into a no-parking zone close to the curb, figuring I could idle there long enough to find out what she planned to do. A Jeep Wagoneer, a Mazda, then one of those new Mini Coopers drove past, and I did a quick study of each of the drivers, on the off chance that Trevor might be behind the wheel of something different. Two women, and an older guy, in the Cooper, trying to cure his midlife crisis.

Angie tried to parallel park at an open curb spot, but even from where I was sitting, it looked like a tight fit. She gave it a couple of tries, then went further up the street, where she found another, larger opening. This time, she slipped right in. Nice parking job, I thought. Way better than when we practiced it together prior to her final driving test.

She came back up the street on the sidewalk, in my direction, and I suddenly realized I needed an exit strategy to avoid being spotted. Could I back up and maneuver around the corner? I’d be trying to back right into traffic. If she got all the way up to the corner, where I was idling, she’d see me for sure.

But she stopped in front of a coffee shop, glancing up at the sign. Then a young man came out the front door, his arms wide in greeting. He was maybe twenty, with thick black hair, about a week’s worth of scraggly beard, nearly six feet. Dressed in jeans and a brown leather jacket, trim with a solid upper body, like he played a sport, football maybe, or hockey.

Angie spread her arms as well, and then they had their arms around each other, and Angie angled her head up to his, and he bent his head down and kissed her. But this was not some quick, hey-how-are-you kiss, but a long, lingering embrace. Fifteen, twenty seconds, easy. They pulled apart long enough to look into each other’s eyes, and then they kissed again.

Oh man.

I guess I hadn’t really considered the implications of following my own daughter. It had never been my intention to witness something like this. I wanted to be able to make myself disappear, to transport myself out of there. Anything to make myself less uncomfortable, less scummy. It was one thing peeking in on your little girl when she was playing with her dolls in her bedroom, and quite another observing her with a member of the opposite sex in a moment of intimacy.

I looked away, at the clock dashboard, at the cars going by, at just about anything but my daughter locking lips with this young man.

Maybe, if I hadn’t been overwhelmed with shame and felt the need to look away, I might have missed seeing Trevor Wylie drive past my car in his black Chevrolet.

ANGIE AND HER BOYFRIEND disentangled themselves from each other—it seemed to take some effort, I thought—and slipped into the coffee shop as Trevor Wylie’s black Chevy drove past. The car continued slowly up the street, rumbling a bit, exhaust spewing from the tailpipe.

“You little bastard,” I muttered under my breath. I pulled away from the curb and fell in behind Trevor.

He turned right at the next stop sign, then three more rights, and we were going past the coffee shop again. The Camry was still parked on the street. We did that loop, Trevor and I, three times, until finally a large enough spot opened up for Trevor to back his long Chevy into it. I waited for him to get fully into the spot, then drove by, trying very hard not to look over. Now I did another loop of the block on my own, and when I came around again, Trevor was still in the car, looking half a block ahead at the coffee shop.

I weighed my options.

My first instinct was to pull up alongside Trevor, box him in, get out of my car and haul him out of his car and beat the shit out of him.

Then I considered whether to pull up alongside Trevor, box him in, put down the window and strike up a conversation. “Hey, Trevor, what brings you down here?” See what he had to say for himself. See whether he could, on the spot, come up with some convincing lie.

Possibly.

But suppose he denied following Angie down here? What was I going to do, exactly? And what if, in the middle of this confrontation, Angie and this leather-jacketed player from the tonsil hockey league emerged from the coffee shop and witnessed this exchange? And who’d have a lot of explaining to do then?

So I drove by Trevor and did another slow turn around the block. This time, another spot had opened up, this one close to the corner, half a dozen cars behind Trevor, which was perfect. I could park here, keep an eye on both Trevor and the front door of the coffee shop. I slipped into the spot. It was fully dark now, and I felt fairly anonymous sitting in the car, watching people stroll by on the sidewalk.

Okay, how about this, I thought. I walk up, open the passenger door of Trevor Wylie’s car, slip in, close the door. Have a frank and open exchange of ideas.

It was a plan with some merit. It might put a little fear into him, even though Trevor didn’t act like a kid who was easily intimidated. But to be caught on his little stakeout, by the father of the girl he was stalking, well, wouldn’t that mess up his shorts a bit? If the roles were reversed, I knew it would scare the living shit out of me.

It must have taken me close to twenty minutes to decide this was the way to go, and I had my hand on the door handle and was just about to pull it when Angie and this guy—who, even without knowing a great deal about him I could tell was not right for her—come back out of the coffee shop.

They chatted for a while on the sidewalk. Angie rested her hand on his elbow, and her head was nodding up and down enthusiastically, and then he reached up and brushed some of Angie’s hair back over her shoulder, and I could see her head lean, ever so slightly into his hand, beckoning it.

I felt sort of, I don’t know . . . what’s the word I’m looking for here? Slimy? Yes, that will do. And a bit queasy, too.

“Just say goodbye, come on, let’s get this show on the road,” I said.

They kissed again, not quite as long this time, thank God, and stood back from each other, and Angie slung the strap of her purse up over her shoulder, made a small waving gesture, and so did the guy, and then he turned and started walking up the street in my direction, and Angie headed back the other way, toward the Camry.