The clear patterns are well integrated, concise. One detail leads neatly to another. I tend to distrust them; simplicity of structure can hide falsehood. The chaotic patterns interest me more. One crack intersects another, then leads to a third, a tenth, a hundredth. If I allow my thoughts to flow freely along those cracks, a truth may appear.
It's not easy to give myself over to that kind of mental meandering. There's the compulsion to manipulate, create order where none really exists. Or to throw everything into greater chaos and destroy something of value.
In these late-night hours I try to match my actions to my thought processes. I move about my home—or wherever else I might be—slowly and deliberately. I pour a cup of coffee or a glass of wine carefully, without spilling a drop. I sip measuredly. But my thoughts surge onward.
As they gain speed, the thoughts meld with emotion. Then there's no stopping the process. A conclusion lies ahead—but who's to tell if it's true or false? A conclusion I may have to stake my life upon—and who's to judge its validity?
Not I.
The hours while other people sleep are a fragile balance between truth and falsehood, a time when the scales may tip either way.
T
he faces around the old oak table in the conference room my agency shared with Altman & Zahn were attentive and solemn: Rae, Charlotte, Mick. Ted sat a little apart, tension and weariness evident in his face and posture. I'd just finished explaining that both he and I had serious problems that needed the entire agency's attention, and now I handed Rae three sets of fact sheets that Ted and I had worked up this morning, detailing his situation. She took one, passed the rest on.
For a moment I flashed back to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours I'd spent at this table when it stood by the kitchen window in All Souls Legal Cooperative's big Victorian; back before the poverty-law firm began its inevitable decline, many of us had frequently gathered there to share triumphs or miseries, to play poker or Monopoly. Sitting at it today reminded me that things hadn't changed all that much since those times; I still had people in my life whom I could count on.
I said, “Those sheets give dates and details of some horrifying incidents in Ted's life over the past month, but before you read them, he's going to outline the situation for you.” I motioned to him that he had the floor.
He hesitated briefly, then shrugged as if he was letting go of something that wasn't important anymore. Cleared his throat and said, “Why do I feel like I ought to announce, ‘Hi, my name's Ted, and I'm an asshole’? Well, that's what I've been this last month. I've hurt a lot of feelings around here, and I'm sorry. The whole thing started when I came home from work one day and found a folded slip of paper with Neal's name on it stuffed into our mailbox. Normally I wouldn't’ve read it, but it flipped open and I saw the word ‘faggot.’ So I took a look. Only one sentence: ‘Why don't you die of AIDS, faggot?’ ”
Rae and Charlotte groaned, and Mick muttered, “Some gay-bashing bastard!”
“Yeah. I decided to ignore it, threw the note out, and didn't tell Neal about it. The bookstore isn't doing well, the IRS is auditing him, and I didn't want him to have to worry about some homophobe on top of everything else. The notes kept coming, though—uglier each time. Finally I filched his mailbox key so he wouldn't see them.
“When you read those fact sheets, you'll see it's obvious that the person's been watching us, following Neal, waiting for the opportunity to harm him. So I started watching our building and following Neal, too. After all, I work for an investigative agency. Even though I'm only the office manager, I should've been able to find out who it was—right?” He shook his head. “Wrong. I didn't accomplish anything except using up a lot of gas and time and working myself into a weird state, which you all paid the price for. Neal, too.” His lips twisted wryly. “Poor guy: for his birthday three weeks ago I gave him a series of karate lessons, thinking that they'd at least make him more fit to defend himself. He
hated
the first two lessons.”
I looked around at the others; they saw no humor in the situation. Rae was furiously scribbling notes on the back of the fact sheet. Charlotte's and Mick's expressions had grown increasingly grim.
“Anyway,” Ted went on, “after a week and a half of notes, a phone call came. Luckily, I picked up, and the guy thought I was Neal. He said, ‘Don't go to the cops or tell that private eye your faggot boyfriend works for about me, or somebody's gonna die.’ Sounds melodramatic, I know, but something in his voice convinced me he meant it.”
Mick asked, “Anything familiar about his voice?”
“No, it was muffled, obviously disguised.”
“But definitely male?”
“Yeah.”
“Somebody you know, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
Rae looked up from her notes. “At that point, why didn't you just tell Neal what was going on?”
“Because by then I was in too deep. I'd hidden things from him, lied; I was afraid it would permanently damage our relationship if he found out. I did think about going to the police, but crimes involving gays always seem to be assigned low priority. A couple of times I came close to telling-Shar, but I just couldn't make myself do it.”
Rae nodded. “Were there more phone calls?”
“Almost every night, after Neal got home from the store. I took to hovering around the phone, snatching it up as soon as it rang. When I had to go out and he was there alone, I'd unplug the thing. The situation kept getting worse: somebody tried to run Neal down in front of the bookstore; a disgusting Valentine's Day gift showed up in our apartment. So I called a guy I'd met a while back and bought an unregistered handgun off him. And busted a glass door firing at somebody who climbed onto our balcony Saturday night. Neal was freaked that I had the gun and called Shar. I panicked, thinking that the guy who'd been outside might see her arrive and carry out his death threat. And then it came out that Neal had asked Shar to look into my weird behavior nearly two weeks ago.” He laughed mirthlessly. “She's been following me while I've been following Neal, who's being followed by—”
“Hey, Ted,” I said, “it's okay.”
He shook his head, rubbing his hands over his face. “Now that I'm talking about it, it all seems so surreal.”
Rae quickly steered the conversation back to a businesslike level. “So what's the status on the situation now?”
When Ted didn't answer, I replied, “Not very good, I'm afraid. Saturday night, Ted told both Neal and me to leave the apartment. He thought if we were together no harm would come to either of us, it turns out. But on Sunday morning Neal took off to think things over, and nobody knows where he went. Then yesterday evening the guy called Ted, said he knew where Neal was, and he bet he could get to him first.”
Ted said, “I'd been calling around to friends and acquaintances all day, trying to locate him, but I'd gotten nowhere. I didn't know whether to believe the guy or not, but I was convinced the situation had turned critical. So I decided to finally confide in Shar, ask for her help. When I did, she called the police and had them put out a pickup order on Neal, so he could be taken into protective custody. And we decided to bring you three in on both our problems right away.”
Rae exclaimed, “Jesus, Ted, you should've come to all of us right away! Or at least before you went and bought a handgun.”
“I know, but at first I thought I could handle the situation. And later I was too ashamed.”
“Ashamed?”
“Yeah, because I'd messed up so badly. Because I
couldn't
handle it.”
“Well, you silly faggot!”
For a moment everybody in the room tensed as Rae and Ted locked eyes. Then, simultaneously, the two of them burst out laughing. Ted gave her the finger. She responded in kind. Old buddies who, at All Souls, had regularly shared popcorn and beer and late-night movies on TV, were mending fence in their own peculiar fashion.
Mick asked, “So how do we proceed? Are the police investigating this?”
“In a way,” I said.
“Which means we'd better get on it.”
“Yes. I'm going to head up the investigation, but I'm putting the entire agency on it as well. After we talk about my problem, I want to hold a brainstorming session to develop a strategy on how to nail this scumbag. Any questions?”
“Yeah,” Mick said, “what
is
your problem?”
“I'm being stalked and impersonated. I also couldn't bring myself to tell anybody about the situation, except to ask a few legal questions of Hank and talk with the police. My reason was similar to Ted's: I was ashamed I couldn't handle it by myself. Tough private investigator, got a reputation to live up to. Couldn't ask for help, not me.”
Questions flew, and I answered them while Ted passed out the fact sheets on my situation. By the time everybody had skimmed them they were coming up with various strategies, none of which fit my plan.
“Hold on,” I said. “Here's what I want to do: First we work on Ted's problem, combine resources to wrap that up. Then I intend to take a leave of absence from running the agency; I'll turn day-to-day operations over to Rae and put all my time and energy into identifying and nailing my own scumbag.”
“Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute!” Keim exclaimed. “We go full tilt after whoever's bothering Neal, but
you
go it alone?”
“Not exactly. But we can't afford to stop servicing our regular clients, or to turn down new ones. The woman's trying to ruin me personally; let's not allow her to bring the agency down as well. I'll bring all of you in on it whenever I need you, and I'll keep you posted, but the actual field investigation will be done by me.”
I paused, looking at each of them in turn. “I want this woman
bad.
She's all mine.”
During our brainstorming session we decided that Ted and Neal's building was the logical place to start our investigation. We'd talk to the other tenants, ask if any of them had seen a suspicious person or witnessed any unusual activity. And also examine their responses and the subtexts of our conversations, in case one of them was the perpetrator. Ted said that we ought to get permission from the building manager, Mona Woods, so I called for an appointment with her and, a couple of hours later, set off for Plum Alley.
According to Ted, Mona Woods was in her late seventies, but if so, she was living testimony to age often being a matter of mind-set; when I met her at three that afternoon, she'd just returned from swimming laps at her health club. She looked me over with lively curiosity as we settled into chairs in her comfortable living room.
“So you're the woman Ted works for,” she said. “He speaks of you fondly—and often. This business with Neal that you explained on the phone is very distressing. How can I help?”
“First I'd like to ask you a few questions about the building. I looked at the mailboxes when I arrived. It would be difficult to slip anything inside without a key. Does anyone besides you have duplicates?”
“No one that I know of.”
“What about duplicate keys to the apartments?”
She shook her head.
“Let's talk about the tenants. Ted says one may be gay.”
“Well, there's a lesbian couple. But Ted and Neal are the first openly gay couple to move into the building in the six years I've been manager. The other tenants are three single men, two single women, three married couples. I don't know much about them personally.”
“Have any of them exhibited signs of homophobia?”
Mrs. Woods thought, pursing her lips. “Well, it's not a prejudice one openly displays to an acquaintance. Not in this city. People here are often not what they seem.”
And that didn't apply only to matters of sexual orientation. “I'd like to ask your permission for my staff and me to question the tenants. If one of them is the person who's threatening Neal, our presence here may force his hand.”
“Certainly. Of course, it's up to them as to whether they agree to talk with you.” She gave me a list of tenants and showed me to the door, pausing there, her face grim. “You know,” she said, “we San Franciscans pride ourselves on being such a tolerant people, but that's not really true.”
She was correct. All you have to do is drive around the city and you see dozens of pockets of self-interest. The gays in the Castro, the Chinese and Russians in the Richmond, the wealthy in Pacific Heights, the blacks in Hunters Point, the Catholics in their various dioceses, the Vietnamese in the Tenderloin. And then there are the homeless, the developers, the cults, even the bicyclers, for God's sake. Nothing wrong with healthy self-interest; it's how we make a better world for ourselves and our children. But when it starts to infringe upon others’ rights, the structure of a society begins to crumble.
One of my biggest fears is that it's crumbling already, right here and now.
With such cheerful thoughts on my mind, I met with my staff in the conference room at five o'clock, and we split up the list of tenants. I would take the lesbian couple and the single men; Rae would take the single women and one of the couples; and together, because Mick had little interviewing experience, he and Charlotte would take the remaining married couples. The interviews, barring complications, were to be completed by this time tomorrow. In the meantime I'd asked RKI to put a security guard on Ted's apartment.
After the others went their respective ways, I remained at the table in the gathering gloom for a while. Instead of depressing me, the encroaching darkness had an intoxicating effect, and as night became total I felt a rush of pleasure that was almost sexual. With any luck, I'd soon be free to move through the city in search of the woman who was stealing my identity piece by piece.
I'd soon be free to take back my life.
N
eal and Ted?” Karen Cooper said. “They're nice guys. We don't socialize all that much, but they've helped us out now and then—stuff like feeding the cat and watering the plants when we're on vacation.”
“People in this building respect each other's privacy,” her partner, Jane Naylor, added, “but everybody's pleasant. I can't imagine one of the tenants threatening Neal like that.”