Casebook (19 page)

“When will the pens come in?” the lady asked.

“Two weeks. Maybe three,” the guy said. “What kind of cell phone do you have?”

She took it out of her purse and showed him. A blue Nokia.

“You can do it on your phone.” I looked at Hector.
Some salesman
all right.

“Would the pen have a better-quality recording?” she tried.

“Gonna be about the same.”

Hector looked at me.
Man
.

“You probably don’t need anything,” he said. “If you think your husband’s cheatin’ on you, he’s probably cheatin’.” Even we could see that that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. When she looked down, her face bent. She was pretty that way.

I wondered if Eli really was guilty of something. Hector thought so. But of what?

The lady tied the belt of her coat tighter and left without buying anything.

I told the guy about the device from RadioShack that we’d heard about at FLAGBTU.

“Sound is probably better on that. ’Cause it hooks directly into the line. These’ll pick up the area noise. But they’re camouflage. Just depends what you need.”

Hector seemed disappointed. And we had a long way back. By the time we got home, supper was over. My mom looked like she was going to be mad, so we had to say we’d already eaten at Hector’s. A lie like Eli’s, I thought. Except he had had dinner when he said he hadn’t. We hadn’t eaten and said we had. And I was hungry.

Then Hector and I each had a setback. FLAGBTU sponsored a doctor from Cedars-Sinai to speak about sexual preference. After his talk, Hector went up and asked him what kind of medicine he practiced.

“I’m an endocrinologist. This isn’t my field. I’m here as Casey’s dad.” Casey was a kid I hadn’t talked to in FLAGBTU. A freshman.

Hector said, “Well, we know someone who had brain surgery
for a pituitary tumor. But he doesn’t have a scar. Is that possible? They didn’t even shave his head. He still has his hair.”

“It’s not really brain surgery. The pituitary gland is below the brain; it’s separate. Those pituitary tumors aren’t usually dangerous.”

“But wouldn’t they have had to shave his head?”

“No, it’s endoscopy. They go in through the nose.”

I had to keep myself from smiling.

But then I got mine. After the doctor left, people stayed to sort clothes. Maude, who’d appointed herself secretary, said, “Bad news. We’re not allowed to sell anything that competes with school-licensed vendors. Only homemade food. Like a bake sale.”

Where
was
Eli, anyway? I had a better feeling about him now that the scar question was settled in his favor. I wondered why it was taking him so long to move. I didn’t want him here necessarily yet, but for all the talk of wedding rings, I hadn’t seen him much this year. That night I asked the Mims if he was coming for the holidays. I was thinking of lights again. But our roof on this house wasn’t pointed. Lights wouldn’t look as good flat.

The Mims said she didn’t know. Eli’s cat was sicker. I hadn’t remembered it was sick.

“He has a cat?” Boop Two asked.

“He and his wife did. The cat of the marriage. He’s in Wisconsin now, nursing it.”

On a call I’d listened to long ago, he’d said that the cat was the great unrequited love of his life. “Oop,” my mom had said. “And I thought I was that.” He’d answered, “I’m hoping you’ll be the great requited love, sweetie.”

“Doesn’t he have a dog, too?” Boop One asked.

“Why does she get to have both?” Boop Two said.

“Well, their son lives with her, and so I suppose it’s nice for him to have his pets.”

We were quiet then. Of course, the only pet we had was nocturnal and mine. Gal slept most of the day. This year I’d spent more time in my room, and so I knew her habits.

46 • The Yellow Pages Detectives

If
x + y =
3 and
x – y =
5, then
x
²
–
y
²
=

A. 4

B. 8

C. 15

D. 16

E. 64

Boop One pushed her pencil so hard it made a hole in the paper. She bit the end of her hair. I grabbed the pencil and started working, but Boop Two skidded in, squinted at the problem, and said “Fifteen” before I finished. I checked. It worked.

“How did you just do that?”

She shrugged. She didn’t know.

Friday nights, Hector reread Sherlock Holmes out loud to study induction techniques. But I didn’t care just then if Eli was a spy or a bum. Hector’s rabid suspicion took away mine. I just wanted to haul my grades up to where they belonged. Hector was doing way better without working at all. He wanted to buy the RadioShack device. I balked at spending the money. We could always just hook up the extension again. What was the difference, really? But Hector figured out the difference: I had to be here to pick up the receiver and listen in real time for that old phone to work. The RadioShack thing digitally recorded. Late one Friday night, we heard rustling in the garage. In the barely lit cavern, I found my mom and Eli bent over our old bikes.

“Hey, Miles, do you know where the pump is?” the Mims asked.

I found it in a cobwebby corner, in a box we still hadn’t unpacked from our old house.

“He probably wouldn’t like pink,” she said, yanking out Boop One’s old bike. They settled on Boop Two’s Sting-Ray with the banana seat. The Mims asked me to fill its tires. She knelt down to wipe the fenders with paper towels. Then Eli shook his head. “Maybe I don’t have to rub it in her face at Christmas,” he said. “I’ll just buy him one.”

My mom straightened up. “Whatever you think.”

The Boops didn’t know their old bike had been almost donated to a kid they’d still not met. I was glad Eli didn’t take it. I always liked that banana seat. And was there anything the Mims wouldn’t give him? She’d saved her favorite of my outgrown clothes. She had a bagful waiting clean and folded by the door, my childhood red hiking boots on top. In our old house she’d kept that stuff in the basement in a trunk for our kids. I didn’t like her robbing my future son.

Hector looked up from Sherlock Holmes when I returned. “Have you noticed discrepancies in Eli’s stories?” Talking about this with Hector was way better than being scared alone. The only thing was, once Hector got going, I couldn’t slow him. And by now, I’d pretty much decided I’d made up most of the bad stuff. I remembered when I’d jumped up to tap that guy’s shoulder; he’d turned around and wasn’t Eli.

I couldn’t think of discrepancies. Only small things I might have remembered wrong. Once, he’d told my mom he married his wife because
she
wanted to, that he knew he wasn’t in love. Other times, he sounded more patient with his younger self.
We’d started this relationship we both wanted and I was going to England …
The facts weren’t different, really, it was the way he said them. But that was probably normal.

“Think harder.” Sometimes Hector drove me bat-shit.

The main discrepancy concerned Eli’s wife’s geographic location when his mother died.
Where was Jean?
my mom had asked him, and he’d said,
That was the question. Where
was
Jean?
Which made it sound like she wasn’t
there
, where his mother died, in an
apartment in Montclair, New Jersey. Another time, though, he was talking about cleaning out his mother’s place after. Jean went home to Wisconsin for the holidays. He couldn’t go. He was in no shape for Christmas. Which sounded like Jean actually
had
been there when his mother died but then left.
Is that what you meant when you said Jean wasn’t there?
the Mims asked. She was coaxing him to the truth, feeling around for it in a bag full of things she couldn’t see. He’d murmured
Mm-hmm
. Maybe she’d broken his code and could decipher him.

He’d said his wife had wanted a baby. He said that having a kid was like
You dig a hole to fill a hole
. He said if they had to have a kid, he’d wanted to adopt. But his wife researched and found all these problems with adopted kids.

Hector shot me a look. You couldn’t say a thing like that in our school. Our class had three adopted kids. We’d been taught to believe that adopting was noble. And we did believe that. I still do.

But then, a different time, Eli had been talking airily about if his mother had lived; then, he said, he would have had children earlier. Because there would have been a purpose. But how did that jibe with digging a hole to fill a hole, and if his wife was still a virgin, how could they have, even if he wanted to? When his wife
had
a baby he didn’t like it. Back when they were married, his wife had asked the Mims to talk him into loving it.

“Varlet,” Hector said. “Feckless mountebank.”

“It’s getting so I need a dictionary to be your friend.”

The next morning we biked to RadioShack. The thing wasn’t thirty dollars, like the kid had said in FLAGBTU. Forty-nine with California’s steep taxes. And then, when we got it home, it took a long time to set up. We had to hook the recorder to the place the phone line came into our house. We couldn’t find that. I wasn’t going to ask my mom. I’d have to get Esmeralda to show me, but she wouldn’t come for a while. So we prowled around, with no success. Three weeks later, Esmeralda led me.
The back of the basement. Here. Phone and electric
. I snuck down and used the knife my mom peeled
cantaloupe with to shred off the plastic on the wire ends. I twisted the copper strands together and sealed the joint with duct tape.

But then it worked. And after all that, we heard only bits of things.

Why don’t you just sleep here?

I’m not sure that’s the best thing for your children
.

We did it once. They didn’t mind. I loved that night
.

I know, sweetie. I loved that night, too
.

The problem seemed to be cell phones. We were hearing the ends of conversations. They’d talk for an hour, and when her juice ran out, she’d call him back on the landline. We seemed to have always just missed the best part.

Sweetie, if you had a deformity that didn’t get in the way of the relationship, if you had a limp or if you were missing a leg, that would be fine. That wouldn’t prevent our having a relationship. But this does
.

“What’s
this
?” Hector asked.

“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “She forgot his birthday that time.”

“So, she forgot his birthday. Does that prevent their having a
relationship
?”

“Not more than his wife not having sex.” But then I remembered my dad screaming beyond the tennis courts. “Maybe sex isn’t that important, though.”

“I think it is,” Hector said.

“No offense, dude, but how would you know?”

“Movies. Books. That woman in Pasadena, did she have both legs?”

“Of course. Anyway, that wasn’t Eli, I’m pretty sure.”

Our landline seemed to be getting worse. It carried a ticking sound, sometimes bad enough that the Mims said,
I’ll call you back on my cell
.

I love you so much
, we heard him whisper once. Then nothing else. Just breathing. I turned it off before any sex talk started. I’d still never told Hector that.

We had finals for the first time, and this year’s grades, I kept remembering, would go on our permanent records. Hector pulled A’s out of thin air. A bad premonition sunk into me, of a frozen, menial future.

I woke up hearing my mom and Sare moving in the kitchen. Boop One had called my dad the night before; he’d driven over and taken them both. Her crying worked, sometimes.

IT’S MUCH EASIER TO PROVE SOMETHING YOU ALREADY KNOW IS TRUE
was on the blackboard.

I put my bagel in the toaster and went to sit at my spot by the heating vent.

“…  Not just that they do something but that they do it with care,” I heard Sare say. “I mean, we put our best into this.”

The toaster dinged, and I skidded in on socks. They had the Christmas assembly line going. Baskets covered every counter. In each, they’d put a red-netted bag of walnuts, a jar of quince jelly, and now they were baking little loaves of pumpkin bread. After the baskets were full, they’d wrap them with red cellophane and raffia. Boop One hated our homemade baskets. “You’re supposed to give a candle,” she complained.

“Do you have the yellow pages?” Hector asked. “I’m buying you a present.” Then he found what he wanted on that flimsy paper, the one time in my entire life that I saw anyone
let their fingers do the walking
. He called three private investigators. Two agreed to meet us that very day. The first was far away in a neighborhood Hector thought would make him be cheap. On bikes, it took us almost an
hour to get there. The old building had three traffic schools, Jewish Social Services, and him. We knocked on number 207.

“Who is it?”

“You don’t know us,” I said. The door creaked open to a square room with a nine-foot American flag covering the far wall and a suit in dry-cleaner plastic hanging on the back of the knob. I had to lift a Dopp kit from the chair before sitting on it, and I tipped over a bar of deodorant at my feet. A toothbrush and razor stuck out from a pencil jar. The guy’s hair was shaved on the sides, like Eli’s, though this guy’s was light brown. There was a picture of him in a Marine uniform. He stood up to shake our hands. He was wearing shorts and had the meatiest calves I’d ever seen. Like two footballs.

“What can I do for you?”

“We’re not sure.” Hector and I looked at each other.

“I thought I saw someone,” I said finally.

“Saw someone what?” The detective stole glances at a sandwich, mayonnaisey egg salad oozing out onto its wax paper on the desk.

“It was my mom’s boyfriend. He lives in DC, but I thought I saw him here.”