Spygirl (28 page)

Since the Cake debacle, I was stung by my memories of Evan. They'd faded into grainy low-resolution obscurity until a day in early October when I went over to his desk to get a case file, trying not to look him in the eye. It all came flooding back. Oh, the horror!

“Hey” I said, trying to focus on anything but his eyes.

“Miz Gray. How are you?” He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms behind his head. “Did you do anything fun this weekend?” Shit! Don't look in his eyes. I kept thinking of zebra stripes and the echoing sound of his voice onstage asking the audience, “Who's your daddy? I said, who's your daddy?”

My eyes widened. “Nope, not really.” Long pause.

“And you?”

“Not really” he said, leaning back into his desk. “I got laid, though.”

All I could think was, play along and run. “So. Any new cases for me?”

“In fact I do have something,” he said. “I think it's a good one. Can you handle it?”

I rolled my eyes. “What do you think?”

“Nope. Well, that's too bad, I didn't think so.”

“C'mon, Pringle, tell me about the case!”

“Actually, it's pretty nasty, but Gray, you can handle it.” Egg-licious, my subject company, was the largest manufacturer of nondairy imitation egg products in the Northwest. Gag me. The Case of the Rotten Egghead was under way.

The phone rang in time to save me from the eggy monotony of my case. I picked it up. “Hello? Hello?” I said. But the line was dead. “Fuck this phone system,” I said, cursing audibly. A minute later the message light was flashing. “Hi, hon, it's Skye. You won't believe what happened to me! Call me! Now!”

When I called her back, she sounded breathless. “I'm being stalked by David Blaine.”

I was racking my brain. “The—magician?”

“Yes!” Skye was a magnet for weirdos. She was a magnet, period. She was the perfect mix of gorgeous and totally wacko. Even though she was six feet tall, she had been doing ballet since the age of three and, we joked, subsisted on peaches, tomatoes, water, and flower petals, so she was slender and lithe. Once she went on a date with Chuck Scarborough, the 5:00 news anchor on the local NBC
station in New York, who was thirty-one years her senior. She also had a fling with a famous Israeli actor when she was visiting a friend in Tel Aviv, at a Jewish camp for guilty Jewish Americans. She had dated innumerable cute boys in college, too, but this was her first mega-celebrity as much as a magician can be a celebrity, even if he did have a prime-time special on Fox.

“I was walking down the street and I heard some guy calling, ‘Hey baby’ and so of course I just kept walking, and he said it a few more times and I ignored it.” For women living in New York, catcalling is a part of the fabric of the daily soundscape that we ignore, along with the screams of children on the subway, the moaning of panhandlers and drunks, the booming soapbox preachers, the squealing teenagers and boomboxes and sirens and honking and car alarms and buses braking and fenders crunching and rubber burning. So when Skye said this, I completely understood. In many neighborhoods, my neighborhood in Brooklyn included, the catcalling is so pervasive that any acknowledgment might leave the door open for further harassment. We steel ourselves, and try to look bored and mean, while still trying to stay attractive and well dressed for the guys we really want to notice us, the guys who would never ever call to us on the subway. “How come the only guys that tell me I'm beautiful are construction workers?” a friend of mine once whined.

“So finally this guy runs up to me and he says, ‘Stop, I want to show you something, it's magic,’ so of course I stopped.” She was hooked. He pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket, asked her to think of one, and pulled it out of the deck, to her wide-eyed shock. He did two more tricks and asked her for her phone number (she gave him the one for her cell phone). He then put her in a taxi and give the driver $20.

“He said, ‘Take her wherever she wants to go,’ ” she said, giggling.

“To the driver?”

“Yep.”

“That's wild.” I thought for a minute. “What if you'd been going to New Jersey?”

“Well, I told him I was just going to West Fourth, so …”

She went uptown to her parents’ house on the West Side, and when she got home there were already two logged calls on her cell phone from him, but no messages. Twenty minutes later the phone rang, and he was begging to see her that night.

“ ‘Please, please, please,’ ” she repeated. “I said I was busy.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, but he asked what I was doing and I said I had a meeting so he said call me after your meeting and I said I would. But I didn't, and then he called me at one-thirty in the morning.”

“No!”

“Yes! And all he said was, ‘Hey sexy, what are you wearing?’ ”

“Eeewww. That's so pathetic.”

“I know. I said I was sleeping and to call me later, and so he called me at nine-thirty in the morning.”

“What?”

“And he said, ‘You've been a very bad girl because I wanted to see you yesterday and I didn't get to and now you have to make it up to me.’ ”

“Jesus. What a nut job.”

“I know. He's called me ten times. But luckily he's leaving tonight for a monthlong European tour, so I won't have to worry about it anymore.”

“Yeah,” I said. Only in Skye's universe is this business as usual. “So, are you gonna see him?”

“I wanted to do a profile of him in my book, but it seems like that's not really what he's interested in, which is too bad.”

She agreed to call me back again if he hassled her any more.

I read some summary news and gleaned a sense of what Egg-licious was about, how they were funded, who their clients were. The case seemed pretty clean, to my chagrin. It was probably a one-pager. I was both disappointed and loaded for bear. I was blood-hungry I wanted burnt CEO for dinner. So I gave it one more look before I handed the case in; I went over all my notes and a few articles I had only skimmed before.

I was almost ready to present the case to George when I came across a news item that pricked my interest: Mr. Egghead had moved to Kansas for a while in the late eighties and worked at a computer-consulting firm, something that was missing from every other biography of him I'd read so far. I took the article to George, who was working at his desk.

“What?” George doesn't like to look at people. Especially his employees. It's a callous but effective mind game that weeds out the bullshit, which is exactly what he wants. Unfortunately, it still made me nervous, so I stuttered a bit and generally sounded stammering and unintelligible. I think I even called him “Sir” at the end, and I noticed a kind of bemused flicker pass over his face. All the while he continued typing on his computer, staring directly at the screen in front of him and maintaining the most astonishing composure, registering nothing of what I was saying. “So, I think we should do court searches in Kansas as well?”

George pulled his usual duck-and-dodge, not even acknowledging my presence by looking at me. He deadpanned, “Are you telling me or asking me? ” I wasn't sure. I wanted to be doing whatever he wanted me to be doing. Telling you, asking you. My mother, my sister.

“I'm, um, asking you?” I realized as I was doing it that I was
asking him
if I was asking him. “Why the fuck are you asking me?”

One strike. “If you think we should do it, tell me why. You have to make the case to
me
, one way or the other.
I
get to listen.” The issue, I gathered, was money. Some court records were available for a limited period of time online or in databases, but the rest of the searches had to be done manually, by court record researches we farmed out, and they were very expensive. We only did manual searches in areas where we knew our subjects had lived.

I pleaded my case that Egghead hadn't been anywhere near Kansas, according to any published reports supplied by our client or found by us, and that, with the case as clean as it appeared to be, this was at the very least an opportunity to show our commitment to diligence on the matter. I got the green light.

I had to solicit Vinny's help getting the litigation. “Hiya, Amy. What kan I dew you fawr? ”

“Vinny can you help me out with the network setup?” Gus had snuck up behind us, and he winked at me and whispered, “You gotta just tell him to shut up.” An hour later, Vinny dropped the goods off on my desk, with a note that said, “Would you like to get a steak dinner at Luger sometime?” Ugh.

That night I took a sleeping pill, had a bath, and put on my softest jammies. I was dozing off in bed when the phone rang. Terror-stricken, I sat up in my bed. “Hello? ” “Amy, it's Skye.” “Hi.”

“Okay, I really need your help. DeeBee is leaving tonight at one for London, but he wants to get a drink, and I was thinking if
I could just sketch him and use it for the book, it would be really cool.”

“Wait—what? Who?”

“DeeBee—it's David Blaine's nickname.”

“Okay, Little Miss Insider.”

“So he says, ‘Please, come meet me.’ But I don't want to go alone, and he said he'd bringing his friend Leo.”

“Do you think it's … Leonardo?”

“I think so, but I'm not sure. But you have to come with me. Please. They're meeting at the bar at Spy in an hour.”

“I don't even think Leonardo is cute.”

“I know. Me neither. It's a business thing. I need you for moral support and/or protection.”

“Okay, but I have to get dressed, and it'll take a while to get there on the subway.”

“You're the best ever.”

“I know I am.”

Now, fully awake, I was faced with a crisis about what to wear to our double date with DeeBee and Leo. I knew they were probably assholes anyway, and I would be the baby-sitting, less-desirable chaperone, but I couldn't help at least wanting to
try
to look attractive.

Skye and I met at Barmacy a dive about five blocks north of Niagara and equally seedy. It was an old pharmacy space (hence the name) and the owners had kept old medical-equipment boxes and dusty bottled serums and medicines along the perimeter of the bar.

“Whaduyya want?” the bartender asked.

Behind the glass there was one cough syrup that Skye and
I had always coveted. Belladonna was now an illegal over-the-counter syrup that had been a cure-all in the fifties and was loaded with morphine. My dad's parents would give it to him as a little boy.

“How about a swig of the old belladonna?” I asked.

The bartender, Vic, who was pierced in six places on his face, just stared at me, unamused. I noticed that he had two tattooed vines running up his neck that turned into spitting snakes by his ear. “Two Vicious Vaccines,” Skye said, leaning in front of me. He grunted something and walked away.

What does Vicious Vic have up his ass? I wondered.

Luckily, the special house concoction was served in syringes and administered by waitresses whose too-tight nurse uniforms glittered starkly against their Betty Page bobs. If I never saw Vic's punctured face again it would be too soon. We shot up and sat at the bar for an hour, suffering the occasional dead glare from Vic. After an hour, Skye's hyperactive babble slowed to an occasional mutter, and then silence.

She tried DeeBee's cell phone seven times, but to no avail. The less likely they were to come, the more Vic seemed to sneer. The only thing worse than basking in his glare, I thought, would be sitting here so long that Vic actually started to like us.

“At least being stood up by two hot celebrities is cooler than just being stood up by
some guy.”
But I knew Skye had never been stood up before in her life, and she seemed to have trouble getting her head around it.

“Hey! Let's take some photo-booth pictures,” Skye suggested, springing back to life. Barmacy had a grimy photo machine in the back that we'd tumbled into on various drunken nights. When Skye pulled the curtain back, there was a primly dressed woman sitting there, except for her blouse, which was completely unbuttoned and her breasts fully exposed.

“Oops! Sorry!” Skye looked at me, mouth covered in horror and amusement as she pushed the curtain closed.

“What the
fuck
was that?”

“I. Don't. Know.” Then the curtain was swished open again and the woman smiled broadly at us. Her boobs were now concealed under a loose silk peasant blouse.

“Sorry about that, guys!” she said lightly, leaning out.

“That's okay,” Skye squeezed out, still stricken. She mouthed “Whooooa!” to me.

“I love to come here and take my picture.” The woman had a thick New York accent and mascara flaking onto her dusted cheeks.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding like I really knew what she meant. The Photo Booth Porn Star Lady opened a book on her lap, to reveal hundreds of photo-booth shots of her torso, her makeup better arranged in some than in others. “I come heya once a week. I've been takin’ booth photographs for seventeen years.” She giggled. “I like to see how my body changes. My boobs have started to sag, ya know what I mean?”