Casebook (22 page)

“Keep your money. I’ll run a few checks. I’ve got the software. Most of these databases don’t have fees. Plus you’ve got me curious. More will be revealed.”

See?
Hector looked at me. People always did want to help Hector. I wasn’t the only one. Why did the PI bother with us? Hector didn’t wonder, and the attention felt natural, even to me, although we’d rarely gotten it before. That was the thing about attention when it finally came: it never seemed amazing. It felt, if anything, maybe just a little
late
. We mostly stayed under the radar at school. Ben Orion didn’t have kids; that was pretty obvious. He wasn’t married, he said when I asked him. He grinned.
Not yet
.

Then he complained about women. “This younger generation now is so antipolice.”

“But you’re not a cop.” That was Hector’s way of reconciling the fact that we were antipolice, too.
^*

“I was a reserve officer. You go through the academy; you just don’t get paid. Five months. Twenty hours a week. You learn all the criminal justice stuff. Self-defense. Firearms. Driving a police car on wet tracks.”

“Do you have a gun?” I asked.

“I do.”

“What kind?”

“Glock nine millimeter.”

“Have you ever used it?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve never had to use it. If I’m going out at night, I’ll have it in the car with me. But I got a whole lecture the other night from these two girls at R+D Kitchen. They hate cops. And all those same people love the firemen. Everyone loves the firemen.”

^*
Though not nearly as antipolice as we would get. Then it was just style. The substance(s) came later
.

49 • Not Looking

But I didn’t google for Eli’s middle name. I didn’t ask the Mims in what state he filed divorce papers. I tried to forget the whole thing and stay on the lit, apparent side of my life. The rest had been my twisted imagination, I decided. Hector asked me about it a few times, and I blew him off.

All that spring, I strained toward simple pop melodies: I kept my earbuds in, listening to
Pet Sounds
while my mom and Sare complained in the kitchen. Simon’s dad had enrolled in a pastry-making
class, Sare said. Now he baked all the family’s desserts. “
That’s
the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

These were notes I’d heard all my life.

They lowered their voices to talk about Philip. Marge had gotten him a class to teach through UCLA extension. He was really trying to finish his dissertation now, the Mims said. He’d started running with Marge, but she’d hired a trainer anyway. Philip was offended; he couldn’t believe what the guy charged. “But the trainer gives me little head rubs when he stretches me out!” Marge had told my mom. Sare asked if Kat still had the boyfriend the kids hated. My mom said yes, but she didn’t know why they hated him so much. Even I thought they hated him too hard.

Marge had asked my mom to collaborate with her on a complex system model. The math of crime. My mom had said she’d try it. She’d never worked with someone else like that before. She thought it would be good to talk to someone about the steps, though. It might help her confidence.

I heard them like a chorus.

And tennis started again. On April 1 I poured fake blood in the bathtub and lay head askew. The Mims came to find me because I was late for school and yanked open the shower curtain.

Once, Hector was over when Sare said, “Is it my imagination or is Eli coming less?”

“The cat’s still sick,” the Mims said. “I think it’s dying.”

“Can’t it hurry up?” Sare said.

The Mims didn’t laugh.

I knew Hector’s expressions. Sometimes it was hard to believe what I thought, without him seeping through. I started to sit at the big tables at lunch, so I wouldn’t be alone with him. I invited other guys, too, Friday nights, but in the few years since we’d had the Jocular Rabid Rabbits’ blowouts we’d become less popular. The other guys went to malls now where they met up with girls and they didn’t invite us along.

I found Boop Two curled up on the floor. “What’s up? You okay?” I nudged her with my shoe.

“I finished a book, and they didn’t even notice or get me anything.”

“Well, they probably noticed.”

“You ask Daddy. He couldn’t even guess the name of the book.”

What could I say? She was probably right. “I’ll give you something,” I offered.

“That’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have anything I want.”

“Yeah, I do, come here.” I pointed to my shelves. “You can pick any book.”

“They’re all too hard for me.” She looked like she was about to fall off a cliff, so I opened a Coke can I’d bought from an online spy shop and took out a twenty.

“Really?” she said. “Thanks.”

That save reinforced my already-strong belief in the universal language of money.

At my dad’s house, I found another letter slid under his modernist wall-sized glass doors late at night. After Holland, we never met the women he dated or even learned their names. But he took us out to dinner with guys he worked with.

“These are the stages of a Hollywood career,” he said while we studied the tall menus.

Who’s
Harrison Ford?

Get me
Harrison Ford!

I want someone
like
Harrison Ford.

Get me a
young
Harrison Ford!

Who’s Harrison Ford?

He said his career was at the
Get me a
young
Harrison Ford
stage. One of the other guys had to go in for a pitch on a thick book. The producer had had it for years; he’d never read it, but kept it around because it was the perfect size for calf stretches.

My mom answered the phone. “We’re just sitting down to dinner, may I take a message?” If she’d been a dog with ears that shot up, it couldn’t have been more obvious: the pedophile terror. She asked, trying to sound offhand, “Who’s Ben Orion?”

“A guy at our school.” It was the first lie that big I ever told her.

I was furious at Hector. How did the guy get my number? Hector must have called him without telling me. “We can’t have a detective!” I yelled at him. “There isn’t even anyplace he can call us back without getting me in trouble. We don’t have money!” Hector thought maybe we could give him Dylan Land’s number. Dylan Land was a kid who had two cell phones because his parents gave him everything he wanted. Maybe he’d lend us one.

“Your parents are divorced, man!” Dylan told us in school. “They owe you guys phones. You go to a psychologist, tell him you’re getting a divorce, and the first thing they’ll say is
Get the kid a cell phone
. Your parents probably went to divorce shrinks.”

“I highly doubt it,” Hector said.

I tried that on my dad Monday night, his night. I said, “You owe me a cell phone.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said. My dad made a point of not spoiling us. And except when it was convenient for him, he really didn’t. Hector knew better than to try Philip. Philip thought cell phones were one of the many things wrong with the modern world.

When tennis got rained out, I sat in Dr. Sally’s waiting room again, reading my homework as the Grateful Dead crooned in my ears. I remembered how I’d once heard the two women giddy, laughing as they plotted to placate Eli, when he was in such a hurry. When did that stop? Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe I just wasn’t letting myself listen. I didn’t believe that, though. Something had changed. For a long time, I hadn’t wanted Eli to move in—not yet. I’d been not wanting it, not wanting it, and then
poof:
all of a sudden, he was gone.

Because his cat was sick.

The guy with shoulder-length gray hair who sat at the desk in Neverland Comics offered me a summer job. I told my dad on his night. He stood up from the table and made a call, then returned, saying, “Your mother and I have decided it isn’t a good idea.”

They were actually insane. When I pressed him, he said, “It’s not the healthiest environment. I’ve seen a lot of lone, sad-looking men in there.” He actually used the word
lone
. I had to call Hector. In eighth grade, Hector had dragged around saying,
I’m a lone lorn creature. And everything goes contrary with me
.

“What are you laughing about, Miles?” my dad said.

I knew how this would go. When my mom picked me up, they talked for a long time, standing up in his kitchen.

“You’re such homophobes. I mean, come on, guys, I’m fifteen years old. No men at Neverland are going to
molest
me. I can politely decline.”

“Well, we didn’t mean only men,” my mom fumbled. “You could be approached by a woman, too.”

This was so lame.

“And this woman, what would her measurements be?” I rounded my hands over my chest. My mom started laughing. She couldn’t help herself. But they still said no.

Finally, Hector ambushed me. “Eli
James
Lee. November tenth, 1963. I found him in the American Academy of Sciences. Now we just need the divorce state.”

I felt a headache starting, a small pulsing growth at the back of my neck. “Can we give this a rest? We’re leaving in a week.” For the first time, Hector was going to my camp. Last November, we’d put down that we wanted the same cabin, but now I yearned to be by myself, with guys I didn’t know. “We might even see Eli,” I added. Every year, one parent and I flew east, stayed overnight, then rented a car and drove up to Maine. This year was her turn. She’d probably invited Eli along.

The next morning, my camp stuff was spread out over the kitchen floor. The Mims stood checking off a list.

I felt poignant for life passing. A Boop swung outside on the tire. Summer came full on, and even in our happiness, all of us home, there was a quality of waiting. The Mims’s contentment rested on a belief that Eli was coming, coming with a dog, coming with time for family walks after dinner.
You and your family romance
. Could she go our whole lives like this, waiting, believing in something sweet? Was it so different from all those people who went to church once a week and maintained a precarious faith in heaven? I didn’t know. I really didn’t know. My eyes hurt on the back, inside my head.

I still had that message from Ben Orion I hadn’t returned. As the Mims ironed labels into my T-shirts, I said, “You know how I put down to be in the same cabin with Hector? I kind of want to be on my own now.”

“Don’t you think he might need you, his first year there?”

I assured her Hector was fine, and she made the call.
^*1

But even while I was avoiding Hector and the PI, I harassed her. Why was I busting her balls? I’d always been a know-it-all. Now I didn’t want to know and hated not knowing and took it out on her. I asked if we were going to see Eli in the East, and it turned out that he didn’t plan to be home. He was bringing his son
here
on vacation.

I picked a fight between them; I knew, because I heard part of it. “But I told you the dates months ago,” she said. “Why did you plan your trip for then?” It was true: he knew her schedule. He’d memorized
my
schedule, for crying in the bucket. Unlike certain fathers.

Eli told her it was the equinox, and he loved that, he loved that light. That was when he’d wanted to take his son to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. So we’d miss him in both the East and California.