2

“Corie,” my mom said. “You know fahr better than I whether or not you’re crazy.” Much of the time, she spoke with a touch of a British accent. A stranger might think she somehow took living in Queens on a literal level, but her speech was more like what the upper-class characters on the soaps use. And in fact, at the peak of her acting career, my mom, Margo Weber (her maiden name), had played the wellborn wife of a nouveau riche billionaire for half a season in 1997 on Days of Our Lives. She was killed off when her TV husband, fleeing to his mistress, floored his Lamborghini and ran her over as she was on her knees, inspecting the perennial garden. After Days, she did get cast in occasional gigs on TV shows filming in New York, but most of her work was now in commercials, especially the ones you see on local cable, ads filled with anguish: Is there any way to get the shine back on my porcelain tile?

“It’s just that I worry that maybe I took one quirk this guy has, Pete, and embellished because …” The end of my sentence drifted away.

“Sweetheart,” she said and paused, making that word an important idea. “Why would you suddenly start embellishing?” She rested an elbow on the table and set her chin on the tip of her thumb. “You’re not the one given to overstatement. That’s my role.”

“True.”

We smiled at each other across the table in a tight corner of the kitchen in my parents’ apartment. My mom had found it, a small Formica-topped rectangle with chrome legs, on a sidewalk awaiting the garbage truck, schlepped it home, a tour de force for someone who’d weighed around 105 pounds most of her adult life. Anyway, a couple of years before midcentury style became hip, she’d gotten my dad to build diner seats to go with the table. Then, armed with her staple gun, she upholstered the banquettes in some squeaky fabric from the fifties—a design of pink apples on an orange field—cute, albeit sticky in summer. She’d turned a tiny apartment kitchen into something you might see in a Times real estate section photo-essay, “Forecast: Getting Cool in Queens.”

“So Corie,” she went on, “what would be your reason”—she swept her hand outward from her heart, a grand gesture, theaterese for motivation—“for thinking this Pete person is concealing … whatever?”

“Well, you were the one who said I’m not given to fabrication. I guess it’s some kind of instinct combined with law enforcement experience.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Instinct? Well, you’ve always had a gift for seeing beneath the surface.”

“It’s not such a gift,” I said. “Most surfaces are pretty transparent if you look hard enough.”

Her dusty rose–glossed lips edged up into a smile. “Transparent to you, Corie. Give yourself some credit.” My mom’s eyes and high cheekbones slanted upward at the same angle, so when she smiled, you barely saw the blue of her eyes—just cheeks and a ruffle of lashes.

She leaned against the back of the banquette and folded her slender arms under her teeny breasts. Like so many film and TV actors, she was a scaled-down version of a regular human. Not in height, but so small boned that sitting across the table from her I felt (as I often did) a little like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon: the how-Mom-looked-at-thirty-eight balloon. We had the same hair—blonde brown—same blue eyes, same heart-shaped face. Except I was an inflated version of her. Not fat, though being the sort of balloon I was, I didn’t taper in at the waist as she did. At least my boobs blew up nicely.

“Most of the time,” she went on, “people fall back on ‘I trust my gut’ when they have no idea why they do what they do or want to justify some theory. ‘My instinct told me such and such.’” She chuckled, her throaty laugh, the one that to me was like a diamond-shaped traffic warning: REMINISCENCES AHEAD. “I remember one summer I was up in Williamstown. The actor playing Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, on the spur of the moment, during the actual performance, she got the word from her gut to start staggering.” She slid off the banquette to stagger for me, though the kitchen wasn’t a very large stage.

Of course I’d heard this one before. I knew my mom’s book, Delightful Show Business Anecdotes, by heart. That was okay. I could give her a charmed smile here and there, shake my head at the follies of theater folk, yet think about other things. Like Pete Delaney. Or second-guess myself thinking so much about him at all?

I was in Queens that morning because I drove through it into Manhattan once or twice a week to meet with assorted agents at the firms I scouted books for. They claimed they were truly interested in contemporary Arabic fiction. Truthfully? Not most of them. What they really craved was a blockbuster like Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner: some of the major deal-making agents seemed peeved when I pointed out Kite wasn’t translated from Arabic and that it had been written in English by an Afghan American whose original language had been Farsi. Aside from the agents, I’d have an occasional meeting with an Arabic-to-English translator or get together with some critic who reviewed books for Arab American websites and publications. Most of the time, I then drove downtown to my best friend Wynne’s afterward. We’d case the stores or galleries and then have dinner.

But I hardly ever drove to Manhattan without detouring to my parents’ apartment building in Forest Hills. It was less than a mile from Grand Central Parkway, so in addition to their visits to Long Island, I was able to see my parents on my own at least once a week.

My mom, dad, and I had always been a threesome. It surprised us all when, at thirty-five, I married Josh and adopted Eliza. Not that they weren’t happy about the marriage, though we were all a little taken aback that at a time other women were settling, I’d come up with such a winner.

They’d become in-laws and grandparents within four months of my telling them: “Hey, I started going out with, believe it or not, a nice guy. A federal judge of all things. Totally not a stiff. Ridiculously good looking. Used to be a major litigator in a big firm. Except then his wife died and he wanted more time to be with his kid, which tells me he’s got good instincts.”

My mom, of course, was smitten the first time she met Josh. At some point, she took me aside and whispered: “My God! A Barrymore of a profile! And did you know he has a subscription to the Manhattan Theatre Club? And he saw the BAM production of The Iceman Cometh, the one I was so mad about!”

My dad, Dan Schottland, retired NYPD detective, got over his suspicions of Josh’s smoothness quicker than I thought he would, though maybe that was due to his being insanely relieved I was finally getting married. Or it could have been that he’d called a couple of his former colleagues, a.k.a. drinking buddies, who obliged him by doing a fast background check and told him to stop acting like a fucking lunatic. Joshua Geller might be charming and disturbingly solvent, but not to worry: He was a federal judge with a good reputation. Absolutely legit. “Nice guy,” my dad mumbled to me after their third meeting.

“Do you think there’s some underlying reason you’re … I wouldn’t call it obsessing,” my mom was saying. “But is there something about him that unsettles you? Maybe he reminds you of an old boyfriend?” She slid out of the banquette and for a second I thought she was about to do an improv: her being me wincing at a the sight of a man, then recognizing he resembled oversalivating Ricky in tenth grade. Instead, she merely opened the fridge and took out a bowl of plums arranged as if it were ready to pose for a still life. Then she set down small plates, knives, forks, and small cloth napkins. She’d mastered fruit etiquette for her Days of Our Lives role. Then she sat back down and waved benignly: Have a plum. I grabbed a dish towel to put over my shirt and took a big red one.

She chose the smallest of the plums, one of the golden kind, and took a bite that was more like a nip.

“No old boyfriends,” I said. “It’s just when I turned in my badge, I didn’t turn in my curiosity about people who seem off.” To cover up what I knew she’d take as snarkiness, I told her about a manuscript I was reading, a novel about the widow of a banker in Ammon.

“Sounds good!” she said, then told me at length about Ruby Dee’s life after Ossie Davis died: “They were more equals. Partners actually. Do you know their ashes are mingled in an urn”—she blinked to clear her tears—“and it’s inscribed: IN THIS THING TOGETHER.”

I plucked a plum from the bowl on the table and wandered into my ex-bedroom, now a TV room, where my dad was ensconced in his oxblood-colored leather recliner. He was watching what was probably his third episode of Luther that morning. Since his retirement five years earlier, he’d devoted his life to nodding, shaking his head, or smacking his hand on his forehead as he watched cop shows. My mom once confided: “The only thing standing between your father and lunacy is Netflix.”

Cautiously, so he wouldn’t accidentally hit the Fast-Forward button, he pressed Pause. Reassured, he was able to greet me. “Hey kiddo! How are you doing?”

“Good!” I said with the suburban brightness that was common to all but the moribund in Shorehaven. “How are you doing, Dad?”

“Fair to middling.” To my ear, his response was in the nonworrisome range. There were times when the flatness of my dad’s voice did scare me, when it sounded like some primitive version of computer-generated speech. “So what’s new at the zoo?” he asked.

“Nothing much. Josh has an insider trading trial next week, so he’s swamped with pretrial motions.”

He shook his head, while managing a small smile. “Amazing what passes for crime in your husband’s world,” he said. Having been on the homicide, robbery, and sex crimes squads while a cop, he viewed white-collar criminals as arrogant though harmless jerks in Hermès ties who deserved to be charged a thousand dollars an hour by some high-level litigator, get slammed by a guilty verdict, then bashed by the federal sentencing guidelines. “Eliza okay?”

“She hasn’t become a teenage pain in the butt yet.”

“Good,” he said, with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. My dad was six foot two and had once weighed two hundred pounds, so his voice still had some of the resonance some might confuse with heartiness. It wasn’t lack of heart; he really did love Eliza. It was just that he had been deflating for years, since 9/11. Every New York cop had his or her story from that time. My dad’s was that his partner of seventeen years was killed when the North Tower of the World Trade Center was hit.

Or maybe Dan Schottland had just been an accident waiting to happen, and seeing his city shattered by terrorists along with Mickey Soong’s death simply let out the inner melancholic who’d been lurking beneath the sardonic cop’s exterior.

“Eliza’s volunteering at the town animal shelter,” I added. “She fell in love with the place when we adopted Lulu.” (Lulu was our lump of a mutt, black with a dashing white mustache. She’d been abandoned, but after twenty-four hours of cowering under a small desk in the kitchen, she emerged, probably to get me to stop lying on the floor close by and singing “Hush Little Baby.”)

“Good,” he said. “I like when kids get off their ass.”

We then had that kind of awkward moment that occurs between two close relatives who can’t find anything more to say to each other. But at least I could fall back on shoptalk: ex-FBI to ex-NYPD. Well, not shop exactly, but I gave him all my suspicions, which amounted only to Pete Delaney having what seemed to me an excessive interest in his car and in new cell phones. “Maybe it was a mistake, joining the lunch group,” I said. “Except I really didn’t know anyone in town. Now I can’t get out of it, so with this Pete thing, it could be I’m creating a scenario to keep myself from bolting. Wallowing in faux intrigue.”

“What’s with the ‘faux’ crap? And why can’t you get out of it?” he asked.

“How?”

“I don’t know, Corie.” His words came out slowly, as if he didn’t quite have the energy for conventional impatience. But he seemed to think he owed me something. Plus he was never comfortable when I was playing what he called the “Boo-hoo, it’s my own fault” game. He dragged his feet off the ottoman and motioned for me to sit down. He was realizing this wasn’t going to be a simple “Hiya, kiddo” exchange but an actual conversation that might last four or five minutes. “Why not tell the lunch people, ‘I don’t got the time’?” I shook my head. Josh had suggested I leave, too, though with more upscale grammar.

“Hey, Dad,” I said. “Let’s be wildly athletic and go for a walk, talk.” Now he shook his head, as in: This is where I draw the line. I got Luther on Pause. “Come on. It’ll make Mom happy and, not that I’m going to tell her where we’re headed, but we’ll go to Schmidt’s, have a beer.” Not my idea of 11:30 a.m. hydration, but at least he seemed tempted.

“Why don’t we drive?” he asked.

It was only a ten-, maybe fifteen-minute walk to the old German bar, just past the outskirts of Forest Hills, so I told him no, I needed to stretch my legs. Reluctantly, he changed to an overly hip pair of sneakers, black with a slash of teal, a Mom online shopping coup. Then off we went.

It was mid-May, and after a cold spring, the world had finally warmed and turned decisively green, though Queens Boulevard—six lanes of buses, trucks, and cars flanked by packed-tight stores, saplings debilitated from carbon monoxide poisoning, looming apartment buildings, and aggressive pedestrians—could not be recommended for its bucolic delights. But to get to Schmidt’s Biergarten in middle-class Richmond Hill, we headed south through Forest Hills Gardens, an old-time, upscale enclave of private houses, heavy on the Tudor, old trees, and, even now, some old money.

“Hell of a hike for a glass of fucking Finkbräu,” my dad said, not the kind of father who believed in watching his language. I’d always been his pal, not his little princess. “But okay, it’s nice out. I’ll give you that.”

“So tell me about this Delaney character. Is it just the car business with him? You’re thinking it’s weird because a normal guy wouldn’t go to such lengths to keep an eye on a Jeep, even an expensive one?” He ducked to avoid a low branch of some big-ticket tree with gray-green leaves. “It’s not that weird. Don’t you know by now that people who are pretty normal can have a chunk of their lives in which they’re crazy? This guy’s behavior is just a little kooky. In theory it might get attention from someone in law enforcement but only because it’s repetitive. If he was really ape shit but in private, doing God knows what, but otherwise average, you’d never have a clue.”

“So you think that’s what it is? Just a guy who’s maybe wrapped up in Jeeps in a slightly unhealthy way?” I shrugged, even though I remembered it annoyed him. In my teens, he’d say, Stop with the shrugging, for chrissakes. What’ve you got a voice for? Talk. Say yes, no, I don’t know.

“Well?” he asked me. “You got something else to offer?” My dad’s arms had gotten thinner since his retirement. His biceps, instead of pressing against the short sleeves of whatever sport shirt he wore on his days off, now hung loosely, sallow, growing hairless.

I mumbled, “I don’t think so,” the way someone under arrest would when being questioned by a tough detective before her lawyer arrived. I turned away from him—though I had nothing to hide—and looked at the houses. So different from the Forest Hills I’d grown up in, which was a nice neighborhood with the occasional sickly tree, but mostly aging apartment houses that looked weary from standing erect decade after decade. Too middle class to be ripe for gentrification, too inoffensively designed to amuse. I hadn’t noticed its dullness growing up because all I wanted to do was hang with my friends, and only a couple of them lived in the Gardens. Queens Boulevard or Boulevard Haussmann: who gave a fuck?

But this part of Forest Hills (once “restricted” from Jews, people of color, conspicuous Catholics) still had the atmosphere of a forties movie in which well-to-do Americans talked in that upper-class Franklin Roosevelt way. The houses we passed were definitely as grand as some of the discreetly showy homes in the suburbs: leaded glass, turrets, along with brass knockers so elaborate they could be on the front door of Windsor Castle. WASP heaven.

What they lacked in Queens was the land to go with a grand house. That didn’t stop the owners from landscaping as if, instead of a five-thousand-square-foot plot, they had five acres. Ground cover with minuscule pink flowers abutted a silken carpet of lawn shaded by those noble trees. The trees themselves were encircled by large-leafed shade plants and flowers. Clipped bushes spread out to provide the dark green frame for what could almost be botanical prints. Flanking the front doors, giant terra-cotta pots held topiary trees and more ivy than Princeton, though that was just a guess as I’d never been to Princeton. I’d once dated a guy who’d gone there who laughed too loud at movies, which was enough for me to call the whole thing off. I guess that also explains how come I couldn’t find someone I wanted to marry till I was thirty-five.

“Corie, kiddo, you into real estate these days?”

“No. Sorry, I got distracted.”

“So get undistracted.” He seemed to be tiring. His pace slowed and a moment later he was standing still on the narrow strip of grass between sidewalk and street.

“Okay,” I said, managing a cooperative smile, hoping that whatever it was that he’d asked me to focus on would pop back into my mind so I could respond in a way that would energize him.

“Oh right! You wanted to know what else I had on Pete Delaney, beyond Jeep watching.”

I may have given him a minuscule nudge, but mostly he started walking on his own again. “Yeah.”

Maybe neurons abhor a vacuum, which could explain why an image of our lunch meetings popped up. It filled the empty space in my head. “At our lunches, after about five minutes, all of us turn off our phones and put them on the table, facedown. It’s a tradition from before I joined the group.”

“You turn them off? They don’t vibrate or anything?”

“No, because that would mean sneaking peeks at who was calling or texting. We shut them down. The idea is that one of the things you have to learn to do when you’re self-employed is be a decent boss to yourself, allow yourself some time off from constant digital demands. Personally, I think they’d be better off with the phones out of sight, but that’s their rule. Anyway, there we are, seven of us around the table, with our phones above the plate. If there’s an emergency, a husband or wife or whoever can call the restaurant, ask to speak to so-and-so in the group.”

“Okay.”

“So even before I noticed him always checking out his car, I had this mental picture of the group as a group. You know how when you go to someplace regularly, you’ll notice that all of a sudden the restaurant is folding the napkins into fancy triangles on the plate when before they were rectangles under the fork?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’m not from the big napkin noticers.”

“But you would notice that something had changed, wouldn’t you? I mean, even if you’re not into table settings, you have a cop’s sense of ‘somethings different here.’”

“Right. I’m more geared toward seeing people looking different than they did before or changes in behavior. A guy’s drinking Stoli instead of beer, some blabby woman turns quiet.”

“So sometime last winter, right around Christmas, because the memory includes those pine tree droopy things, garlands, I realize something’s changed. Pete’s phone. He’d gone from an ancient flip phone to a smartphone. No big deal. I didn’t think, Ooh a new phone. Just a tiny detail.”

“You didn’t notice what kind it was?” my dad asked. He didn’t sound exactly intrigued, but at least he wasn’t dismissing me out of hand.

“No. It was facedown, plus it might have had some kind of protective cover on it. No distinguishing characteristics. It was probably black. I think all the guys in the group have black phones.”

“So? Could it have been a Christmas present?”

“It could have been. He seems to like variety, phone-wise.”

“What do you want me to say, kiddo? ‘Highly significant!’?”

“Sure. Want to say it?”

“No.”

The houses were getting smaller now. Still Tudors and colonials but shrinking to middle-class size. The landscaping was mostly grass and newly planted impatiens—a flower even I could recognize. “I’m really not saying it’s highly significant, just that it may have some import. Why does a guy keep changing phones?”

“Corie, you’re asking why a guy changes phones. That’s climbing up a tree with a hundred branches, and you know and I know that’s no way to start an investigation.”

Just as I was trying to look cool with criticism, I tripped over a seam in the sidewalk where one piece of pavement had been pushed up by a tree root, then did an awkward line dance to get walking again. “Come on, Dad, I’m not starting an investigation. I’m just curious: talking it out with you.”

“What’s with you?” he demanded. “Where’s your sense of balance?”

“I tripped over a damn tree root.”

“You still deal with dangerous people sometimes. If a suspect turns on you—”

“I’m contract now. Ninety percent of the work I do for them, I’m sitting in a monitored room at New York headquarters.”

“So fuck the other ten percent?”

When I was fifteen, my dad decided that learning to break someone’s nose together would be a great father-daughter bonding experience. So we took classes in krav maga, a self-defense technique with some combative moves developed for the Israeli army. In the nineties my dad had met a crazy guy from Haifa who was training NYPD SWAT team members. There was a sign in the gym that said—in both English and Hebrew—IF YOU FINISH YOUR OPPONENT, YOU FINISH THE FIGHT. We continued going to classes for years, until 9/11.

“I still go to Bazak’s place every once in a while,” I told him. “Come to think of it, not since I got married. No time. But whenever I went, he always asked for you.” He bumped his knuckles against his heart, as in: I’m touched. “I still do the balance exercises, believe it or not. And the squats, push-ups, stretches on the days I don’t run.”

“Some people change phones. Some keep them forever,” he said. “The ones who change could be techies, right? There’s some stupid saying about boys and toys, so maybe he likes to have some brand-new shiny thing to play with. And couldn’t he be a flake who keeps losing his phone? You said Mr. Whosis—”

“Pete.”

“Okay, Pete designs things like boxes for takeout and all that. It’s also possible one of his clients deals with phones, gives him a big break on price. Or if he’s involved in something criminal, he could still be behind the times technologically. Maybe he thinks if you switch phones every once in a while, no one will be able to trace you.”

“Conceivable.”

“If he has a girlfriend,” my dad said, “he could be worried the wife hired a detective who could geolocate him. He tells her he’s playing poker with the boys. But it’s the Hotbed Motor Inn that pops up on the investigator’s screen.”

“I don’t see Pete having a girlfriend. From what I know about him, which admittedly isn’t much, he’s a family guy.”

“Grow up, kiddo. You think guys with barbecue aprons don’t fuck around?”

“I know. Fortunately, Josh wouldn’t be caught dead in a barbecue apron. Ergo, proof he’s faithful.”

“He’s not going anywhere. He’s crazy about you. He’s a one-woman man. Even the first wife—”

“Dawn,” I said.

“From the pictures, Dawn looked like a skinny marink who could never let go of her tennis racket, but okay, from everything you say, Josh loved her. And now he loves you. He doesn’t cat around. But a lot of guys love their wives and still step out. Means nothing to them: it’s like they got phlegm and they clear their throat.”

“Love your imagery.”

“Thanks. So back to this Pete. He could be switching phones, switching numbers, to keep from being followed. Most likely by a suspicious wife, but who the hell knows. Could he be getting dunned by a collection agency for bills he owes?”

“I have no idea. He has a really nice car. He doesn’t seem impoverished or anything. Actually, I think he’s doing nicely. At least from what everybody says.”

“Maybe he’s looking at his Jeep all the time because he’s worried about it getting repossessed?” my dad asked.

“I doubt it. If he was trying to avoid a repo guy, he wouldn’t establish a pattern of behavior, coming to the same restaurant every Wednesday at twelve thirty.”

“Well, it could be changing phones is a pattern of behavior, too. He likes all the bells and whistles. Maybe he’s looking for the best picture quality so he can watch Mets games or porn when he’s sitting on the pot. The point of it is, Corie, these hundred branches. You can’t climb them all.”

“I know. So talking about trees and branches: Do you think I’m barking up the wrong tree with this Pete thing?”

“Kiddo, all you’ve got is one case of slightly unusual behavior: him choosing the same seat to keep his eye on the car. But I gotta tell you, even that’s questionable. He could just be a creature of habit. Come early, stick to the same chair he had the first time he came to the restaurant.” My dad made a lip-smacking sound, but then I realized it had nothing to do with Pete Delaney; we were less than two blocks from Schmidt’s and he was thinking about a stein of Finkbräu.

“So you think I should drop it?” I asked. “Get a life?”

“Or own it. You know how to investigate.”

“Not the way you do. Once I became a special agent, mostly all I did was documents and emails for senior agents. Then I got moved to the burqa detail, interrogating women who couldn’t be alone with a guy, but that was mostly interviews. Same in New York when I was on the Joint Terrorism Task Force, except there I did men, too. My boss said I could make anyone talk.”

“Want to know what I think?” my dad asked, not that he waited for an answer. “Look, you can read your fiction and regular books in Arabic. Let that be your business. Enjoy your family. Have a baby, not that I’m pushing or anything. But if you want to find out about this Pete guy, no reason you can’t do that, too. You got the chops for it. Get off your ass.”