Authors: Lisa Lutz
A
bout a week or so after I had coffee with Maggie, she left a message on my voice mail asking me whether I had looked into her breached credit report. I immediately raced over to the Spellman offices and ran her report. As you probably know, credit reports are tagged every time there’s a credit inquiry. The tags are most often from lenders or landlords, and my hope was that if I saw the tag, I would be able to prove who was checking Maggie’s credit.
Her credit was excellent, in case you were wondering. Less than 5 percent average balance on her credit cards and only two inquiries in the past year. No liens, no bankruptcies, no dirt whatsoever. Whoever looked was disappointed. The “whoever” was ALLCORP Corp. Yes, it is a redundant name. A little joke of my father’s when he created the dummy company to use whenever our investigations required a credit inquiry. Most people don’t keep track of their credit reports, and this tiny tag from something that sounds legitimate would most likely go unquestioned.
As I’d predicted, the culprit in the mini Maggie investigation was Rae. She must have pulled the report before I stepped in to mediate. It was typical fare for my sister; she wanted dirt on her archenemy du jour. I phoned her just to confirm.
“Rae, were you investigating Maggie?”
“A little bit,” Rae replied nonchalantly. “You know, before the negotiation. We’re getting along much better now.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
I didn’t mention this to Maggie right away, fearing that the mere mention of another attack from my sister might bring about another battle. However, a few days later, whatever was simmering had been removed from the burner and tossed in the bin.
My sister has the ability to make friends and enemies with the flip of a switch. About a week after my initial negotiation with Henry, Rae, and Maggie, I received a phone call from Henry asking for my assistance.
When I arrived, Maggie and Rae were seated on Henry’s couch, watching a movie.
“I’m bored,” Rae announced.
“Give it time,” Maggie replied.
“When is it going to get funny?” Rae asked.
I circled behind Henry’s couch and, to my surprise, discovered that my sister and Maggie were watching
The Pink Panther
(the original 1963 version, of course).
“We need better snack food,” Maggie said, wisely.
“Something salty,” Rae said. Inspector Clouseau, speaking to a colleague, spun around a globe in his office and then leaned on it for support, crashing to the floor.
“I just don’t get it,” Rae said in response to the brilliant on-screen pratfall.
I turned to Henry, hoping for an explanation.
“What’s going on here?”
Henry pointed at Rae—seated on his couch—as if she were in the midst of committing a criminal act.
“I can’t get her to leave.”
“Have you asked?”
“I can’t ask because I’m not speaking to her.”
“Please don’t tell me that you asked me all the way over here to tell Rae to leave.”
Maggie checked the cupboard. “No chips,” she said. “Only pretzels made from spelt. What has enriched flour
1
ever done to you?” she then said as she tossed the bag back into the cupboard with a look of distaste on her face.
“Maggie won’t relay messages,” Henry replied to my question, ignoring Maggie’s. He then turned to the sink and began washing the three dishes that remained.
Maggie shoved Henry out of the way and grabbed the sponge and plate from his hands.
“Stop it now! I’ll do my own dishes,” she said with mock indignation.
Henry spun around and spotted Rae putting her feet up on the coffee table. Briefly abandoning his vow of silence against my sister, he shouted, “Rae, get your feet off the coffee table!”
Rae removed her feet and said, “Oh, so
now
you’re talking to me.”
“Isabel, I don’t want her here all day watching movies,” Henry said. “And how is it possible that she’s never seen
The Pink Panther
?”
Maggie placed a clean dish on the rack and asked me, “Were you raised by wolves?”
“That’s one way to look at it,” I replied, but that wasn’t the full story.
The Pink Panther franchise is hands-down my father’s favorite canon in film.
2
But no one likes to watch movies with Dad because of his habit of interacting with the TV. Dad has most of the Pink Panther films memorized, and so he likes to perform different roles, depending on his mood. Maggie finished washing the last dish in the sink and made a silent show of it to Henry to be certain that he registered her accomplishment. She then slipped on her shoes and coat.
“I’ll go to the store,” Maggie said. “Keep watching, Rae. I’ve seen these films at least ten times each.”
“What a complete waste of time,” said Henry.
“Keep your opinions to yourself,” Maggie replied.
“I’ll walk with you,” I said to Maggie. “I could use the air.”
Once outside, it was my plan to inform Maggie of the results of my investigation. I was reluctant to mention it to her since a week had passed without incident. But Maggie had other topics on her mind that day.
“Sometimes he drives me crazy. Always hanging up my sweaters and putting my shoes by the door. All those stupid household rules.”
“Just ignore them. That’s what I do.”
From my perspective, the silence that followed was an awkward one, but I couldn’t speak for her. To be honest—which I’m not all that often, or at least not to the extent that I’m about to be, so do me a favor and don’t expect this kind of honesty in the future—the whole Maggie/Henry relationship was hard on me. The fact that my sister was now making friends with Maggie was even harder. Sure, on some level it made everyone’s life easier, but it also made their relationship (Maggie and Henry’s) seem more permanent. The hardest part of all was that I liked Maggie. I tried not to, but I did. No matter how I turned the situation around in my head, the only solution was for me to get over Henry.
And so, right then and there, I got over him. That was it. I was moving on. Perhaps you don’t believe me. But seriously, I was over him. Like that.
“Nice job solving the Rae situation,” I said, breaking the silence and the debate going on inside my head.
“I learned to speak her language,” Maggie replied.
“Cash, television, and junk food?”
“That’s it.”
I hopped around a puddle and then stepped over a single tennis shoe and a bra.
“What happens on these streets when I’m asleep?” Maggie asked.
“You do not want to know,” I replied.
“Your shoe falls off and you don’t notice? You decide one shoe is enough?”
“Maybe you find a better pair of shoes,” I suggested.
“But why is there only one?”
“The other is probably kicked in a drain somewhere.”
“One of many possibilities,” she said, seeming distracted by much more than used personal items.
Then it was time to break it to her. “It was Rae,” I said. “The person who ran the credit check and asked the weird questions was Rae. Premeditation, of course. You’ve got nothing to worry about now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Aren’t you relieved?” I asked.
“No, actually. I’m not,” Maggie said, furrowing her brow and looking more than concerned.
“Why not?” I inquired.
“Rae may have been behind the phone calls and credit check, but now I’m being followed, or at least I think I’m being followed. Maybe not. I’m not sure,” Maggie said, sounding as if she was beginning to doubt her sanity.
“What kind of car?” I asked, already cataloguing the family vehicles.
“I think an SUV one time and the other time a gray sedan. It was at night. I could only see headlights, really. Rae only drives your mother’s Honda, right?”
It wasn’t Rae. That was obvious. Suddenly Maggie’s troubles seemed more troubling.
“Have you received any threats?”
“Nothing like that. Not yet, at least.”
“Do you have any idea who it might be?” I asked, happy to refocus my mental energy.
“Not exactly. But I defend a lot of criminals, so the suspect pool is deep,” Maggie replied.
“The next time something happens, give me a call. In the meantime,
try to come up with a list of potential suspects from your client base and maybe we’ll start looking into them.”
“Thanks, Isabel. Let’s keep this between you and me, if you know what I mean,” Maggie said. Translation: Don’t tell Henry.
“No problem.”
Maggie and I returned to Stone’s residence equipped with an afternoon’s worth of movie-watching junk food. I decided to join in on the rest of the film festival since I couldn’t think of anything better to do that day. Plus, I really enjoyed the look of disappointment on Henry’s face when he realized that he could not enforce the Reading Rule
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on a party including two full-grown adult women. Four hours later (revisiting
The Pink Panther
and
A Shot in the Dark
reaffirmed my opinion that the latter is far superior; Rae agreed, being particularly fond of Clouseau’s houseboy, Kato
4
), as my eyes adjusted to something other than a television screen, Henry pulled a wool coat from his closet.
“You left this here last week,” he said, handing it to me.
“Thanks,” I replied, looking it over.
“A couple of the buttons were about to come loose,” he said. “I fixed them.”
Indeed he did. I turned to Maggie when Henry was out of earshot. “That, my friend, is how it is done.”
Four hours after Henry’s original phone call, I accomplished the task originally asked of me: I extracted Rae from his residence.
On the ride home (Rae had taken the bus to Henry’s place), Rae turned to me with an oddly apologetic expression.
“I like Maggie,” Rae said. “There, I said it. I’m sorry. But I can’t help it. She’s just my kind of person.”
“I like her, too,” I replied.
“You do?”
“She’s great. What’s not to like?”
“I’m confused,” said Rae. “Aren’t you jealous? Because Mom says you got a thing for Henry.”
“First of all, Rae, you keep that to yourself or I will make your life a living hell. And second of all, sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to.”
“I don’t know about that. Things usually work out exactly the way I want them to,” Rae said with more conviction than you could possibly imagine.
A
s I exited David’s house to make my shift at the Philosopher’s Club, two men approached, one in a suit and tie and the other in a cardigan over a button-down shirt. Both were well groomed and appeared professional, except the man in the cardigan wore an extremely flashy pinky ring, which I found distracting and incongruous.
Pinky Ring Guy did the talking.
“Hi there. Is David home?”
“Are you a friend of his?” I asked.
“I’d say we’re friends,” Pinky Ring Guy said, although he didn’t sound all that friendly. “Are you David’s friend?”
“I’m his sister,” I coldly replied. Something wasn’t right about these guys, especially the one with the pinky ring. Actually, I had no business forming an opinion about the suited guy, since he hardly spoke. I could fault him for the company he kept, however.
“I didn’t know David had a sister,” Pinky Ring Guy said.
“You must not know him very well. Listen, I got to run. Is there something I can do for you?”
“Know when David will be back?”
“Nope,” I replied.
“Tell him Joe’s looking for him.”
“Joe who?” (Always try to get a last name.)
“He’ll know,” Apparently Joe said. “Nice meeting you, sweetheart.”
The two suspicious gentlemen walked away, although they appeared, oddly, to be on foot, making it impossible to take down a license plate. On my way to the Philosopher’s Club I left a detailed message for David on his voice mail. And then I killed the rest of the afternoon serving drinks and concocting theories about my brother’s relationship with Apparently Joe. Until my dad walked in, that is.
I served Dad his usual glass of middling red wine and waited for him to file some kind of verbal complaint against me. Instead, he picked up a discarded newspaper and pretended to read it. I knew he was pretending because his eyes met only the headline. Eventually he put down the newspaper and spoke.
“One of Rae’s instructors accused her of cheating on the practice SAT. And another teacher supported her accuser,” Dad said, seeming genuinely troubled.
“On what grounds?”
“That Rae is a mediocre student and nothing in her academic history would support her having scored that high.”
“How does someone even cheat on the PSATs anymore? And why cheat on a test that’s just a trial run for the real thing?”
“I don’t know. They think she’s clever enough to cheat with her access to surveillance gadgets, but not smart enough to score in the ninety-fifth percentile.”
“What does Rae say?”
“Nothing. She won’t confirm or deny.”
“What do you mean she’s not confirming or denying?”
“It’s hard to explain,” my dad replied, although he did try to paraphrase some of Rae’s reactions to the accusations. But it’s probably best if you hear it from the source. I’ll get to that shortly.
After my dad finished his wine, he slipped five dollars on the counter and said, “You want to have lunch next week, Isabel?”
“Why?” I asked.
“No reason.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Seriously, Isabel. I’m just asking you to lunch.”
“There’s got to be an angle.”
“Forget it. Have a nice evening, Izzy.”
Dad left. An hour later Rae arrived. I served her a ginger ale and tried to get to the bottom of the situation.
“Did you cheat on the SATs?”
“The PSATs,”
1
she corrected me.
“Answer the question.”
“Where are you getting your information?”
“Dad.”
“Interesting,” Rae replied.
“So?” I asked, leading once again back to the original question.
“I’m sorry. Where were we?”
“Why have you been accused of cheating?”
“Why is anyone ever accused of anything?”
“Why are you talking like this?”
“Like what?” she replied.
Out of frustration, I resorted to an ultimatum. “If you don’t answer my question, I’m going to ask you to leave.”
Rae finished her drink in a single gulp and left a dollar on the bar.
“Don’t expect a tip,” she said as she made her exit.
An hour later my mother called on her cell phone. In the most venomous tone, she said, “The next time your father asks you to lunch, you say yes.” Then she hung up on me.
The rest of the day I had only one thought in my mind:
Is this really my life?