Tremaine saw the Crown Vic go right down a side street, but he wanted the guy to think he’d lost him. So Tremaine conspicuously and quickly drove straight past the turn the Crown Vic had taken. Tremaine didn’t even look down the street, just drove, fast, and straight ahead. Gunning it.
Tremaine pulled into a driveway two stop signs down from the street where the Crown Vic had turned. He tucked the Cutlass behind a camper and waited. He got 155
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out of his car and stood, looking through the front windows of the camper, at the street the Crown Vic had taken and he had not. Five minutes later, the Crown Vic pulled out from the very road it had gone down. It went left, away from where Tremaine was hiding. He gave it some time, got in the Cutlass, and pulled back on the road, following the Crown Vic. Now, the silver sedan was in his sights, up there about half a mile in front of him.
Tremaine stayed back, nice and careful, following the Crown Vic as it pulled onto National, then ducked into some back roads, then onto Barrington. Tremaine watched, keeping lots of cars between them, as the car pulled over into a little dirt lot that flanked a big park.
The park consisted of a big green field that was split up into some softball fields, some soccer fields, and a picnic area. Tremaine could see it now from where he was parked, on a side street three blocks away from the dirt lot and the park and the Crown Vic.
He watched the young guy get out of his car and walk over to one of the picnic tables and sit down. Tremaine took the keys out of the Cutlass. Then he reached down to the passenger-side floorboard and grabbed the knife that had been pulled on him and Nina the other night at the beach.
Tremaine got out of the car.
He walked the three blocks, quickly and quietly, and now he was on the grass of the park, nearing the picnic table where the guy was sitting. The guy’s back was to Tremaine, who was moving slowly now, being careful and silent, like a cat. Like Darryl. Tremaine watched the guy pull out his phone and start dialing.
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The light noise of the park, soccer players, softball players, Frisbee throwers, allowed Tremaine to get closer, closer, closer, right behind him now, without the guy hearing him.
Just as the guy finished dialing, Tremaine, standing directly behind him, raised the knife high in the air and slammed it down into the picnic table, right in front of the guy.
The guy jerked—startled—and dropped his phone.
Tremaine grabbed the cell and looked at the number the phone was calling: Tyler Wilkes. Tremaine ended the call and turned off the phone.
Tremaine walked around the picnic table and sat down across from the guy. The guy looked at Tremaine, then moved his eyes to the knife that was between them, standing straight up, blade an inch deep in the table. The guy looked, in this moment, like a scared animal, very wary of even moving and very aware of his every movement.
“How long you been a P.I.?” Tremaine said.
The young guy with the dark hair and the bad skin didn’t answer.
Tremaine said, “Come on. I know you’ve been following me. You came to my trailer park, to the airport, you watched me take pictures of the L.A. Stone trucks . . . How long you been a P.I.?”
“Not long.”
“You work on your own or for a firm?”
“Firm.”
“I was a simple tailing job, so you got the gig?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m going to make your job easy for you.”
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The young guy didn’t say anything. He was still a little scared, a little caught off guard. But he motioned with his eyes for Tremaine to continue.
Tremaine said, “Tyler Wilkes is in some serious trouble with some very serious people. A guy named Paul Spinelli, to be exact. Remember that name, Tyler will know who I’m talking about. Tyler wasn’t sure exactly why I came to talk to him in the first place. He wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk to him about a guy named Roger Gale or a cement company called L.A. Stone. You know about L.A. Stone; you watched me take pictures of the trucks. We’ve already discussed that. Right now, Tyler’s probably convinced I’m looking into the cement company. Tell him he’s wrong.
Tell him I’m looking into both. And tell him not to talk to anyone about this until I contact him. I’ll be contacting him soon.”
Tremaine looked at the young guy, the young P.I., and said, “You get all that?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
Tremaine got up, leaving the young guy sitting at the picnic table looking blankly at his surroundings. At a softball game, a soccer game, a knife standing straight up.
Tremaine went home and looked up the offices for L.A.
Stone. He found them, in Culver City, near all the furniture stores, between Venice and Washington. Then he searched around online for a picture of Paul Spinelli. Found that, too.
The next day, Tremaine drove to the front of the L.A.
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men, to Tremaine’s astonishment, were actually wearing designer sweat suits. Not Spinelli, though, not the Shark.
The Shark wore a suit. Wonder if it’s a shark-skin suit? The Shark in a shark-skin suit. Tremaine stayed in his car for an hour and a half, until Spinelli and the two men returned to the building.
Tremaine drove home.
The next day, at five till one, Tremaine pulled the Cutlass into the exact same spot it had been in the day before, right in front of the L.A. Stone offices.
At one, Spinelli and the same two men exited the building. Tremaine watched them and said aloud, “Good. The Shark is like me. Likes to have lunch at the same time every day.”
Tremaine drove home.
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Tremaine knocked on Marvin Kearns’s door. This time, he was home, Tremaine could hear him in there. Marvin opened the trailer door and Tremaine said, “I need a favor.”
“Enter, Mr. Tremaine,” Marvin said.
Tremaine entered Marvin’s trailer and, as always, mar-veled at the walls festooned with Bruce Lee posters.
“Have a seat, my friend,” Marvin said. Tremaine did.
“Let me say in advance that it will be my pleasure to assist the great Donald Tremaine in whatever endeavor you request that I indulge in. Ever since you pulled me out of the ocean that day, my death imminent, MY DEATH
IMMINENT, I have felt like I owed you one. It will be my pleasure to return the gesture.”
B O D Y C O P Y
Tremaine had taken Marvin surfing one winter day when the waves were big and the ocean was a little angry.
Marvin, a decent surfer, had been pulled over the falls and was really struggling. Leash: snapped. Board: nowhere in sight. Tremaine grabbed him, pulled a cramp out of his calf, and swam him to safety. Marvin constantly told Tremaine he owed him one. Things Marvin enjoyed, like taking care of Lyle, didn’t count. Marvin wanted to really return the gesture. Tremaine didn’t feel like Marvin owed him anything. But even if he had, he wouldn’t need to use that favor now, because this was about a case, and he knew Marvin would want to help. This request was pretty big, though—
so, Tremaine figured, two birds with one stone.
Tremaine said, “This is actually about a case, Marvin.”
“Superior,” he said.
“You’ve often offered to help me.”
“I have.”
“But this is a big favor, so this takes care of the one you owe me, too.”
“I’m listening.”
“You’re an actor, right?”
“I am.”
“I want to hire you to do a gig, an acting gig.”
“Done.”
The next day, Tremaine told Marvin he was going to pick him up around noon for his acting gig. Marvin didn’t know who he was going to perform for, didn’t ask. But Tremaine told him anyway, a man by the name of Tyler Wilkes and a man by the name of Paul Spinelli.
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Tremaine had things to do before picking up Marvin.
He wanted to talk to Wendy Leahy again. So he grabbed the L.A.
Times
, got in the Cutlass, and drove down to L.A.
Shape, and parked outside the building. It was only 8:45, he was going to wait until nine to go in.
During about two of the fifteen minutes he spent waiting—he didn’t have his stopwatch for an exact time—he did the Jumble. klabn to blank, cheen to hence, biveal to viable, and hupsty to typhus, then finally, aneevlyh to heavenly.
Camping under the stars can be this: heavenly.
During the other thirteen minutes, he thought about what he was going to say to Wendy Leahy. About how he had come to the conclusion that he
needed
to talk to her again.
During his time as a private investigator, Tremaine had discovered something that he believed to be true. This was: Sometimes your subconscious makes decisions for you.
Sometimes, when you’re thinking about something really hard, your subconscious begins to take the information that you’ve compiled and make conclusions on its own. It begins to connect A to B, and B to C, and C to D, then D back to A, and so on and so forth. Then it deposits the information it has collected into your conscious mind. It gives you a little gift. Out of nowhere. An idea pops into your head. Just like that. Boom. Hey, where’d that come from?
Tremaine believed it was very important to examine these gifts and to treat them with the utmost respect. To listen to them. He believed your subconscious mind was just as valid, if not more, than your conscious mind. It’s 162
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alive, it’s relevant, and, Tremaine had come to learn with regard to the field of private investigation, it’s right a lot of the time.
Sometimes he listened to his subconscious doing something as simple and stupid as the Daily Jumble. He wouldn’t
try
to solve the puzzle; he’d just look at it, and, just like that, the unscrambled word would appear. Like magic, almost. Who figured it out? The conscious Donald Tremaine didn’t. He was barely even thinking about it.
Other times, Tremaine’s subconscious told him more important things, things that pertained to his professional life. It was, indeed, his subconscious that told him to come talk to Wendy Leahy. It gave him an idea he wanted to share with her.
At nine, Tremaine called Wendy, and she, open as ever, had told him to come on over. This time, being an old pro, Tremaine just walked by the receptionist, through the gym, past a grunting man or two, and down the hallway where her office was. Sure enough, the place was packed.
Don’t these people have jobs?
Wendy Leahy greeted Tremaine with a smile. She said,
“So, what’s up? I’m telling you, there’s not much else to say, unless you want the bedroom details.” She giggled at her own comment, flirting in a way with the P.I. standing in front of her.
“No, I don’t want the bedroom details,” Tremaine said.
“I just have a question for you.”
Wendy Leahy gave him a look like, okay, go ahead.
Tremaine said, “You didn’t have an affair with Roger Gale, did you?”
Wendy Leahy stared at Tremaine. She didn’t speak for 163
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what seemed like an eternity, but was probably closer to ten seconds. She fidgeted behind her desk, and then said,
“It depends on your definition of ‘affair.’ What I told you happened, happened.”
“Wendy, the man is dead, and you’re not going to get into any kind of trouble for what you tell me. It stays here.
Remember, if you’re protecting him, you’re not just protecting a guy who’s dead. You’re protecting a guy who was murdered. Somebody out there took another person’s life.
And if I’m going to find out who did it, I need to know the truth.”
She didn’t respond.
Then Tremaine said something he didn’t want to say.
He said, “You’re not a suspect.”
This of course made her feel like she was one. Instilled a little fear in her. Her eyes opened a bit, changing her face, the way it looked. Tremaine was almost amazed at how the brain’s reaction to something could alter one’s physical appearance.
“It’s hot in here,” she said. “Can we go out into the courtyard?”
Tremaine and Wendy Leahy sat in a pretty, tree-lined courtyard that was between the building L.A. Shape was in and the parking deck next door.
Wendy said, “Roger Gale did come to look at the gym and I did have an immediate fondness for him. And we did become friends, sort of.”
“What do you mean?”
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“I mean I got to know him a little when he asked me to do him the favor.”
Tremaine waited for her to go on.
“He told me his wife suspected him of having an affair.
I guess he worked late a lot and sometimes even spent the night at the office. Then he told me that he wasn’t having an affair, but that his wife wouldn’t let it die, and had even hired a private investigator to follow him around. He said his plan was just to pretend that he was having an affair, get caught, then promise to stop, just to get it over with.
Just to get the notion out of his wife’s head. He kept saying his wife was obsessed, and that he couldn’t convince her that she was wrong. He’d given up trying. So, he was going to admit guilt to something he wasn’t guilty of.”
“To make her think she’d caught him. And inspired him to end it,” Tremaine said.
“Yeah.”
“What did he offer you for going along with it?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
She looked at Tremaine with guilt in her eyes. She said,
“I was broke, it seemed pretty harmless.”
“And when you found out he was murdered?”
“I talked to my brother—we’re really close—and he said, well, to change the story now would seem crazy. You know, tell the cops that Roger had paid me five thousand dollars to
say
we had an affair? It would sound nuts. Who knows who Roger had told that we’d actually had one? We figured it would be better just to stick with the original story. That the affair was real. Because, you know, if the cops couldn’t solve the case, then suddenly I’m this woman 165