A few minutes later, I stood there as she pulled away in the Porsche. Saturday was just another workday for Marsha, although she did allow herself the luxury of going in late. She’d been on her way to the morgue when I pulled into the parking lot.
I sat in my own car, gazing out into the parking lot and wishing for a brief moment that I smoked. There’s something about smoking and pensiveness that seemed to go hand in hand. But my one experience with tobacco as a child had rendered me so helplessly and violently ill that I’d never touched the awful stuff again.
I was adrift, ready to get back into the world after my long hibernation, but still estranged from it. With little else to do, I drove downtown to my small office on the top floor of the shabby building that was almost doomed to fall to the developers. It was only a matter of when, not if.
My mind ran in circles. The thought of Marsha being in real trouble was something so foreign to me that it was ungraspable, like going to the doctor for a routine checkup and being told you have six months to live.
I always figured it’d be me, not her. Marsha was right, of course. Without even really being aware of it, I’d begun skirting the fringes of polite society years ago. As one by one the connections to my yuppie past life disappeared, a more urban-frontier quality to my life had emerged. The people I’d only written about as an ostensibly objective journalist years before were now integral parts of my life: small-time hustlers, repo men, bounty hunters, massage parlor employees, table dancers, struggling country music wannabes, kooks, wackos, and lunatics. I was no longer an observer.
I was one of them.
That must have seemed quite strange to someone like Marsha, with the Green Hills condo and the Porsche and the designer clothes and the credit cards. I hadn’t realized we’d become so different.
I looked around my office, at the dark, dull paneling, the peeling linoleum floor, the window that looked out on a back alley and a rusty fire escape. There was a musty, mildewed smell about the place. The overhead lighting was harsh, unforgiving.
I could leave it all behind, I thought. There were still a few connections I could get to. I could get a haircut, charge a new suit, type up a résumé, probably have a job in PR or as a corporate flack in a matter of days. Maybe thirty, forty grand a year, with health insurance and vacation days. I could rent a nicer apartment, pop for some new wheels. Start living like a middle-class American again. Or that guy who wanted to hire me as an investigator for the insurance company—what’s his name? The one who promised a company car, a nice office with carpet and stuff, and a twentysomething secretary to screen my calls and get my coffee.
Hell, it doesn’t matter. I can’t go back. Wouldn’t even if I could. Once you’ve had a taste of shitting in the woods and howling at the moon, it’s hard to go back to being somebody’s house pet.
So I jogged the bills into a neat stack, then organized them by temperature. Hottest fires get put out first. I had just figured out that if I held off on the electric bill another few days, I could pay the phone bill and my month’s back rent. Which meant I was only, technically, about ten days behind on my office. I’d also heard that if you put a check in the mail, but “forgot” to sign it, that’d buy you a few days as well. They wouldn’t cut your power. But if they sent the check through and the bank took it, it’d bounce higher than Bill Gates’s tax bracket.
I was pondering the profound ethical implications of going for it, when all of a sudden there was a knock at my door. I looked up, confused.
Now you have to understand, I don’t get a whole lot of drop-in business at my one-man agency. Some detective agencies are high profile, practically a walk-in clinic for people with cheating spouses or bosses whose employees are ripping them off. You got a cold, you go to a doc-in-the-box; you need pictures of your husband with his mistress, you stop by the dick-in-a-box.
That’s not my style, though. So when a knock comes to my door, it generally takes me by surprise. I wondered if it was the landlord, coming by to dun me for the back rent. So what, I thought I’d decided to mail him a check anyway. I eased out of my chair and opened the door.
A tall woman with a face full of tastefully done makeup stood in front of me. I pegged her at midforties, a couple of years older than me, although I’m not always good at guessing ages. She wore an expensive dress with a designer shoulder bag draped over a thin, yet not too thin, right shoulder. Her hair was jet black, precisely coiffed, and her eyes were so brilliantly blue they had to be tinted contacts.
“Is this the Denton Agency?” she asked, like she’d expected something more. Her voice seemed anxious, but that’s to be expected. First visits to a private detective were frequently anxiety-producing.
“Yes, I’m Harry Denton,” I said, staring at her and trying to remember where I’d seen her face. “Please, come in.”
There was a stack of file folders on my visitor’s chair, but I managed to shuffle it over to my desk and offered her a seat.
“I’m Victoria Reed,” she said.
“Pleased to meet you, Ms. Reed. Can I offer you something? Herbal tea?” I asked as she sat down. I had a coffee maker with hot water perking on top of my filing cabinet. “I’ve got, let’s see, some—”
“No, thank you,” she said. She fidgeted with her shoulder bag, trying to find a comfortable place on her lap.
“How can I help you?” I asked as I sat down across from her. I reached for my pen and a legal pad, then wrote the date, time, and her name at the top.
She wrapped her hands together in a ball and wrung them. Her hands were thin, the bones almost visible beneath her pale skin. “This is a little difficult,” she said.
“I understand. My clients wouldn’t need me if they weren’t in some kind of distress.”
She smiled. “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Denton.”
“Please, call me Harry.”
“Okay, Harry. This is still difficult. And I would never have come here if I weren’t sure that my husband was cheating on me.”
My heart sank. Bloody hell!
One thing, though: These cases do pay the bills. And I had plenty of those. My mind raced as I thought of how badly I needed the money, but also of how distracted I was.
“Tell me all about it,” I said.
“I got your name from my friend, Barbara Monroe. You helped her out last year. She went through a painful divorce. Her husband ran off with his administrative assistant, a twenty-two-year-old blonde. Anyway, Barbara said I could trust you.”
I remembered the case, but barely. No big deal, really, but then you can never convince clients of that and probably shouldn’t try. It had taken about six hours to track the husband and his bimbette to a chalet in Gatlinburg. I figure the pictures of them together in the hot tub—sans bathing suits—had gotten Barbara about another fifty grand in the settlement.
“Yes, I remember Ms. Monroe. Of course, I can’t talk about her case, you know.”
That seemed to reassure her. “My husband is Robert Jefferson Reed,” she said after a moment. “Perhaps you’ve heard of him.”
I thought for a couple of seconds. Yeah, it did ring a bell, but where had I …? Then I remembered back a few days: the old lady in the Kroger checkout line, and how I came to see the book.
I snapped my fingers. “Life’s Little Maintenance Manual! I thought you looked familiar. You guys were in the Sunday magazine supplement a couple weeks ago.”
“Yes.” She nodded her head sadly. “The happy family with the devoted husband and father who makes a fortune dishing out family-values-based wisdom.”
I made a note, then looked back at her. “I gather the reality is somewhat different.”
Her eyes filmed over. “Maybe if this were the only time, it wouldn’t be so bad.”
Her head fell forward. “Mrs. Reed,” I said, my voice low, soothing. “Can you tell me who it is your husband is seeing?”
She snuffled, then nodded her head. But when she tried to speak, her voice caught. I reached across my desk and grabbed a box of tissues. She snatched a couple and held them to her nose.
“A year ago he had to hire a secretary. When the book came out, the phone calls and the correspondence were so bad, he could have spent the rest of his life just typing letters and returning calls.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “Sudden fame, all that attention.”
She raised her head back up. “It’s not what people imagine. The life is very stressful, although in a good way, if that’s what you want.”
“So your husband had to have some help?”
“He put an ad in the paper, and this … this girl answered it. She was a college student, had just graduated from Vanderbilt. Twenty-two or so—maybe a little older. I don’t really know.”
“What’s her name?”
Victoria Reed curled her lip, as if she were being forced to repeat a vulgarity. “Margot,” she sniffed. “Margot Horowitz.”
I scribbled the name down. “Go on.”
“Anyway, it’s almost textbook from then on. My husband moved his office to our farm in Williamson County. Claimed it was quieter there and he just couldn’t get any work done at home. So the two of them were out there working. Alone.”
“He worked at home before then?” I asked.
“After he was fired from the stockbrokerage.”
“Your husband was a stockbroker before he became a writer?”
“Oh, a stockbroker, an investment planner, an officer for a mortgage company. R.J.’s bounced from one job to another his whole adult life. He’s never gone without work for very long, and he’s always made a decent living. It’s just that no matter where he was, he thought he was too good to be there.
“I suppose that’s even true of our marriage,” she added as an afterthought.
I felt for her, maybe because I’d had a marriage go under. It’s no damn fun.
“May I ask a very personal question, Victoria?”
She shifted uncomfortably. “I suppose so.”
“Do you still love your husband?”
She stared at me as if I’d burst out with a string of Aramaic. “I—yes, I—of course I love my husband.”
“And you want the marriage to survive?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess so.”
I set the legal pad down on my desk. “Then go home,” I said, thinking, You dumb ass, this is a paying customer! “Go home and forget about this. Try to get him into counseling if you want. Go see a marriage and family therapist. Confront him if you have to. But don’t sic me on him. It’ll only cause you more pain.”
She thought for a moment “No, I have to know. I have to know.”
“Okay,” I said, resigned. “If that’s the way you want it. You seem like a nice lady. But if you want me to do this, I will. There is one stipulation.”
“Yes?”
“There is the possibility this could get quite expensive, in addition to painful. I charge seventy-five dollars an hour plus expenses. If I have to travel outside the city overnight, I get a minimum twelve-hour day.”
She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out her checkbook. “That’s no problem. How much of a retainer do you require?”
Damn, I’m thinking, isn’t there any way I can dissuade this lady?
“My usual is ten hours, plus two-fifty for expenses. An even thousand. It’ll be credited to your account with any unused part returned.”
“Fair enough.” She wrote out a check and handed it to me.
“I don’t suppose I’ll need a picture of your husband,” I said. “I can check any drugstore paperback rack. But it would help to have a picture of this Horowitz woman.”
She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a crumpled snapshot. “This was taken at our summer party last year at the farm,” she explained.
In the picture, a group of people in T-shirts and shorts hovered around a Jacuzzi, next to a keg of beer in a washtub, wet plastic glasses cocked in salute. In the center, Robert Jefferson Reed stood with his arms around two women. He looked a bit like Robert Redford, only more windblown and with a slight paunch. On his right, Victoria Reed looked cramped and uncomfortable in the crook of his arm. But if the young woman on his left were pressed in any closer to him, they’d have to surgically separate the two of them.
Margot Horowitz was tanned and dark, short and compact, with a close-trimmed bob of a haircut. She was painfully young, and he was glaringly middle-aged.
And if a camera can capture lust in a casual snapshot, this one did.
“I’ll need your home address,” I said, sliding the photograph onto my desk, “as well as the address for the farm. Do you own any other homes?”
“There’s the apartment in Manhattan. They were there last week. He did the Today show and took her along.”
She dictated the addresses to me. Their home was in Brentwood, a fashionable and expensive area. The farm was farther out from town, in a part of the county that was equally well-off, just more rural. Both were located in Williamson County, which has the highest per capita income in the state and one of the highest in the country.
“Where is he now?” I asked. “Still out of town?”
“No, they got back Thursday. He told me he was going to be working down at the farm for a few days and that I shouldn’t bother him. Last night I called the farm around ten and didn’t get an answer. On a hunch, I called Margot’s apartment.”
“And?”
“No answer there either. I think they’re down at the farm,” she said, her lips tight as she spoke. “My guess is they were either in the pool or—”
She hesitated. “Already in bed.”
I scribbled another note. This was shaping up as a no-brainer, quick down-and-dirty money. And, I thought, the very reason Marsha wanted me out of her life. She didn’t want her child to be raised by a guy who took pictures of people having illicit sex.
“Just one last question,” I said. She raised an eyebrow. “If your husband has done this before—been unfaithful, I mean—then why now? Why are you just now coming to see a private investigator?”
“Two reasons,” she offered. “First, until my husband wrote this book, there was never anything worth going after. If I divorce him now, there’s enough there to make sure I won’t wind up working in the typing pool.”
“I appreciate your honesty,” I said. “What’s the second reason?”
Her lower lip curled inward and she caught an edge of it on an incisor. Then her mouth opened.
“R.J.’s had affairs before, but this is the first time I’ve ever thought he might actually leave me.”
“So you want to strike first, right?”
She nodded.
“You’re sure you want to go through with this?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay, I’ll get back to you in a few days. I assume you want the usual pictures, videotape, whatever.”
“Whatever it takes,” she said, then sighed deeply.
“There’s always the chance you’ll be wrong,” I said.
Her hands tightened around the shoulder bag and then she stood up. “Anything’s possible, but my husband’s infidelities are legion among our close friends. I wouldn’t put this, or much of anything else, past him.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll draw up a contract and have it ready for you Monday. It’s standard boilerplate, just outlining the terms I’ve already explained.”
“Fine. When can you get on this, Harry?”
“Quickly,” I answered. “If they’re together at the farm this weekend, then this is probably the best opportunity to get what we need. But I still hope you’re wrong. I’m always happy to get paid for proving people aren’t cheating on their spouses.”
I didn’t bother to tell her that in all my attempts, that had never happened.
“I hope you’re right,” she said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small brown envelope about the size of a cigarette pack. “Just in case, here’s a spare key to the house and the code to the burglar alarm.”
After she left, I pocketed the envelope and sat back down at my desk, fervently fingering the check, which had only Victoria’s name on it I figured it came from a private account I lived cheaply; the thousand dollars would just about get me caught up. Might even leave a little left over for a movie—or dinner somewhere besides Mrs. Lee’s.
I studied the snapshot. Everyone so happy, so well-off, so healthy. So much ugly subtext. All this from a guy who wrote things like: “Never let a day go by without telling your spouse you love him (her).”
“Oh, well,” I said out loud. “At least it’ll be over quick.” Simple adultery trackdowns, complete with pics and film at eleven, rarely take more than a few days. Just another simple case of a man out screwing around on his wife, complicated only by the fact that a considerable amount of money and fame was involved. Still simple, though. In and out quickly, then back to the more immediate problem in my life: damage control.
Boy, was I wrong. Some damage control.