TODD FIELDING CAUGHT HIMSELF BEFORE HE WOULD HAVE otherwise tumbled over backward in the “bloody piece of shit” office chair, which, along with a cheap fiberboard desk, he’d rented when he opened T. X. Fielding Investigations Inc. three years earlier.
“First thing I do is move out of this dump, get a better office, and buy real furniture,” he said aloud, although no one else was in the room. He took a deep breath and tried to adhere to his dear old mum’s advice about not counting his chickens before they hatched, but it wasn’t happening.
Fielding’s real middle name was Paul, but he thought the X looked sexier than T. P. Fielding Investigations. In spite of that crackerjack marketing, business had not exactly boomed out of his tiny Chinatown office above a dry-cleaning business on Mott Street, the chemical smells of which permeated every corner of the room. Most months, he had to beg the building owner for “just a wee bit more time” to pay the rent. However, that is about to change, he thought gleefully.
A native of Wales, he’d come to the United States fifteen years earlier as a student of the French Culinary Institute with the intention of becoming a world-class sous chef. However, he’d developed a double-barreled habit of cocaine and late-night parties followed by several days of sleeping it off, and he’d wound up getting kicked out of school for poor attendance and falling asleep in class.
He’d since worked a variety of menial jobs, such as short-order cook, bellhop, and theater usher. Then, one day, he’d seen an advertisement, “Learn to Be a Private Investigator,” in the back of the Village Voice, and he’d liked the thought of the “glamorous and exciting career” the ad for PI Schools Inc. promised. It had also helped that the ad featured a photograph of a good-looking man in a tuxedo standing protectively in front of a beautiful, well-dressed woman with partially exposed cleavage.
The “school” had turned out to be a one-man operation run by a former NYPD detective named Mike Machovoe, who, as Fielding later discovered using his newfound technical abilities, had been forced out of the department for rolling drug dealers. Machovoe, reeking of stale alcohol and cheap cigars, had taught the two-week course in the basement of a Boys Club in Brooklyn. It had cost Fielding and his five classmates $250 for instruction covering legal and liability issues, the restrictions placed on PIs as private citizens (“No, you cannot go Magnum P.I., waving a gun around and arresting bad guys”), the requirements for licensing in New York (essentially the intelligence to fill out forms), and certain basic “investigative techniques,” such as “the lost art of clandestine surveillance,” “tailing” (practiced by taking turns following other students about on the streets without being spotted), and how to testify in court.
There had been an evening spent learning basic hand-to-hand combat but—to Fielding’s disappointment—no firearms training. “Most of you jokers would just shoot your asses off, so leave the gunplay to the professionals.” On the final day of class, a friend of Machovoe, another cop who’d been drummed out of the force and now sold “high-tech electronic surveillance and recording equipment you will need,” had been given the floor to demonstrate his products and take orders.
Fielding had spent the next month’s rent and then some on gadgets, found a cheap office, hung out his sign, and waited for the fun to begin. Unfortunately, what little there was of the “glamorous and exciting career” mostly consisted of trying to catch insurance scammers and getting the goods on “targets” who were suspected of cheating on their spouses, boyfriends, and girlfriends.
Wealthy clients went to one of the big Midtown firms with dozens of PIs and all the best resources. He was lucky to get clients who could pay him better than he’d made taking tickets for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. However, there were more perks as a PI. Although admittedly going to seed a bit as he approached his fortieth birthday, he had certainly used his British accent to bang some of his less discerning clients, mostly women who hired him to follow their philandering men and jumped into bed with him to get even.
Sex was a nice side perk, but it didn’t go very far toward paying the rent to his landlord, a Vietnamese guy named Tran Vinh Do. However, he wasn’t about to turn down a roll in the sack when the young blonde he was now waiting for had first entered his office a couple of weeks earlier. She was definitely a step up from the usual clientele, with a chest that looked as if her shirt had been stuffed with pillows, two bowling balls for an ass, and lips that looked as if they could suck a tennis ball through a hose. He’d also noted that she was wearing a lot of expensive jewelry, and her clothes definitely weren’t off the rack at Macy’s. She even smelled like sex and money.
He’d tried flirting with Sherry Maxwell at that first meeting. But she wasn’t interested in anything except whether her boyfriend, one Jim Williams, address Fifty-sixth and Fifth Avenue, was seeing other women.
“You will be discreet?” Maxwell had asked. “I wouldn’t want him to know. But a girl’s got to protect herself; there are a lot of female vultures out there who’d like to pounce on my guy.”
Fielding had assured her that her secret was safe with him. “I’d take a bullet before I’d give you up,” he’d said dramatically. “I’ve done it before. I don’t like to talk about it much, but I was with Special Forces over in the U.K.” He’d hoped the lie about his military background, which was nonexistent, would get her steamed up a bit. But again, she’d ignored him and asked how much it would cost.
Fielding had done a quick assessment of the jewelry and clothes and then said, “My retainer is ten . . . fifteen thousand dollars, which covers my expenses—all carefully itemized, of course—and gets us started. For you, because you look like a nice person, I’ll take ten up front and the other five after I do my first stakeout; if we have to go from there, my hourly rate is a hundred fifty. Of course, you will want to know the extent of his philandering—though, personally, I think he’d be a fool to cheat on a great-looking woman like yourself—so it might be necessary to gather evidence over a period of time, just to be sure that something that looks bad isn’t totally innocent.”
Maxwell had frowned. “That’s a lot of money.”
Worried that he might have scared her off, he’d quickly said, “I know it sounds like a lot, but you might not realize how dangerous this sort of thing is. You probably don’t know this—it’s the sort of thing we professionals, meaning PIs and the cops, keep to ourselves—but more police officers are shot and killed responding to domestic disturbances than any other call they respond to. And private investigators, such as myself, don’t even have the protection of a badge.”
“I don’t think he’s dangerous,” Maxwell had replied. “He’s just a banker.”
“It’s always the guys you least expect who go off when cornered,” Fielding had said, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “Do you know if he carries a gun?”
The young woman had blinked as if she’d never even considered the possibility, then shaken her head. “I can’t imagine Jim with a gun. He can be a little gruff with me sometimes, but he’s not violent.” She’d leaned toward him and whispered. “To be honest, he’s a little wimpy around other men.”
Fielding had held up his hands in mock surrender. “Just trying to be careful. You never know what will push even a ‘wimpy’ man into violent behavior. Love is a powerful emotion, and I’ve personally seen it turn a mouse into a lion. I hope I won’t have to disarm him in order to protect you or myself. But that’s why my fees might seem a bit excessive.”
Maxwell had thought about it and nodded. “I thought about using one of the big firms in Midtown,” she said. “But Jimmy knows everybody who’s anybody, so I chose you.”
Fielding had let the slight pass and smiled. “You’d be paying a lot more for those ‘department store’ agencies without the personal attention I give to my clients, which is why I keep the number of clients at a manageable level.”
Barely able to contain his avarice when she wrote him a check for ten thousand dollars, Fielding had accepted it and tossed it into the center drawer of his desk as though he received such largesse on a daily basis. “Now, I’m going to need you to tell me everything about Jim. I can’t do my job if you hold back. I’m afraid that means I’m even going to need to know some of the details of your sex life; if he’s into anything particularly kinky, it could be important.”
Unfortunately for his prurient interest, Williams’s sexual interests were pretty vanilla and not particularly geared toward keeping his girlfriend satisfied. Disappointed, he’d asked her what caused her to be suspicious.
“Well, he’s always on the telephone, but he doesn’t want me to hear him and goes into his office,” Maxwell had said. “He leaves the house at all kinds of strange hours, telling me it’s business. But what does a banker do at two in the morning?”
Fielding had tilted his head and heaved a sigh as if he didn’t want to have to break it to her. “It doesn’t sound good. He’s showing all the classic signs of a philanderer—secretive behavior, mysterious phone calls, odd hours, and suspicious routines. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, shall we? There could be another explanation.”
Fat chance, he’d thought as Sherry Maxwell smiled weakly and nodded, though her eyes had brimmed with tears. But maybe a few in flagrante photographs of her boyfriend would warm up this ice queen, so he’d put on his most understanding face and pushed a box of tissues across the desk to her.
“This is the toughest part of the job,” he’d said, “watching innocent hearts get broken. But better to know than to wonder, and better to know now than waste your youth on a man who might not deserve you.”
Fielding had stood up and walked over to a locked file cabinet, which he opened with more flair than it deserved, and stood looking inside for a moment as though deep in thought. He’d then looked over his shoulder at the young woman and asked, “How many cars does he drive?”
Maxwell had shrugged. “He has a dozen but only keeps two in the city, a sedan and a Porsche.”
Fielding had nodded and pulled out two black boxes the size of cigarette packs. “These are state-of-the-art GPS tracking devices. With these little puppies, I don’t need to worry about keeping him in my line of sight while he’s driving and risk being spotted. They are equipped with very powerful magnets, and I would like you to place one of these under each car, doesn’t matter where, so long as it’s metal. But first, you need to flip this little switch here to activate it.”
He’d then told her to give him a call anytime Jim Williams was about to leave on one of his mysterious business trips. “Obviously, I don’t want to follow him twenty-four/seven, at least not right away—again, we don’t want to be spotted—so we pick and choose our moments.”
The first moment had come the past Saturday evening, when Sherry Maxwell had called him to say that Jim had been making mysterious telephone calls all afternoon. “Then I was walking past his office when he thought I was watching television, and I heard him say he would ‘be there at ten.’ And I just know he was talking to a woman, but he told me he was meeting one of his guy friends for drinks. He’s leaving in a half hour.”
After that, it had been easy to jump into his own car, an older-model Ford sedan, to follow Jim Williams on the Hutchinson River Parkway into Westchester County to the ritzy burg of Purchase. There he’d almost blown it when the GPS device said his target had stopped, and he’d decided to drive by and check out the lay of the land.
As he’d approached the dark sedan, Fielding saw at the last moment that Jim Williams was still in the car, looking up the street at a gated mansion. He’d picked up his cell phone and pretended to talk to someone as he passed his target. After driving around a corner, he’d parked his car and got out with his small digital camera.
As nonchalantly as possible, he’d walked back and crossed the street to where he could see the target’s car. After a few minutes, a man who appeared to be in his mid-thirties, dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt, had emerged from the gate leading to the driveway and walked off on the sidewalk in the opposite direction. He’d noted that Jim Williams had paid particular attention to the other man.
Fielding had been surprised when Williams didn’t immediately go up to the house but instead waited nearly an hour before he got out of his car and walked up to the gate. He’d reached forward to press what Fielding assumed was the intercom button.
Aha, Fielding had thought. Caught you, you dirty bugger. My, but you are the cautious type, waiting for the husband to be long gone before you go make a cuckold of him.
After Williams had been let in, Fielding crept up to the gate, using everything he knew about the art of clandestine surveillance. Peeking around the corner, he’d seen his quarry at the door and begun taking photographs. He couldn’t have been more pleased when a woman answered and let Williams in. There’s an easy five thousand more in the bank, he thought, with many billable hours to come gathering more dirt on the wanker.
He’d decided not to wait for Williams to leave, as he wanted to stretch out the time he spent milking this cash cow. Instead, he’d crept back to his car and called Sherry Maxwell as he made his way back to the city.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” he’d said, then held the cell phone away from his head when her first scream nearly shattered his eardrum.
“That fucking bastard!” she’d screeched, but then started sobbing loudly.
“Now, now,” he’d said, concerned that she might confront her boyfriend before he’d had a chance to make much money off her or get into her pants. “There could be an innocent explanation. I did not see any physical contact. Just suspicious behavior. I took photographs. Why don’t you come down to the office Monday, and I’ll show them to you—maybe you’ll recognize the woman as just a friend—and then we’ll chat about what to do next.”
Maxwell had sobbed a bit longer but then agreed to come to the office Monday morning.
Now, sitting on his crappy chair in his crappy little office that smelled like dry-cleaning fluids, Fielding sighed. It had been a mistake to ask her to come to the office that day. He’d wanted the remaining five thousand due for his retainer before she changed her mind, but that was before he’d seen the newspaper on Tuesday morning. Or more to the point, the photograph of the front of the house he’d been at Saturday night, only now with police crime-scene tape across the gated drive.
On Monday, he’d shown Sherry the photographs of her boyfriend being invited into the home in Purchase by a beautiful woman. “Her name is Michelle Oakley, a divorcee who apparently likes entertaining more than one man a night,” he’d said with a knowing leer.
Sherry had nodded and burst into tears. “I’ve been faithful,” she’d cried, sniffing and reaching for the box of tissues. “I’ve given him everything he wants, and I try to make a nice home for him. I would have made a good wife.”
“There, there,” Fielding had said, coming around and sitting on the desk in front of her. “All is not lost, my dear. He just believes that he can have his cake and eat it, too. Maybe you just need to show him that you’re on to his tricks and that he stands a good chance of losing you if he doesn’t quit his tomfoolery.”
The young woman had wagged her head back and forth. “I don’t know that he would care,” she’d said sadly. “He only says he loves me when I’m naked.”
I’m sure of that, Fielding had thought, but said, “My dear ol’ mum used to say, ‘Men are bound to wander if you don’t put up a fence. It’s their nature.’ But first, I think you need something a little more solid before you confront him. Now that I know where he’s shacking up, I should be able to get the proof you need to hold his toes in the fire. And if for some reason, it doesn’t work out after that . . .” He’d inched a little closer on the desk. “I’m always here if you need a shoulder to cry on.” He’d given her what he thought of as his most winning smile. “Part of that personal service I told you about at T. X. Fielding Investigations Inc.”
It had taken Maxwell a moment to realize what he was intimating, but then she’d wrinkled her nose as though offended by some smell. “Not in a million years,” she’d said in a voice that could have withered plastic flowers. She’d handed him another check for five thousand dollars, picked up the envelope holding the printouts of the photographs, and got up. “Get me that proof,” she’d said, and stomped out as best she could in four-inch heels.
Realizing that he’d been within a lewd suggestion of blowing the last portion of his retainer and whatever hours he could get away with, Fielding had counted himself lucky. Until Tuesday, when he saw the newspaper and realized that he should have waited to tell his client about her boyfriend; that way, he wouldn’t have had to bring her in on his little plot to blackmail Jim Williams.
At first, when he read that the police had arrested a suspect on Monday, he’d assumed that it was Jim Williams who’d been taken into custody. But when Sherry Maxwell called that evening to ask if there was an update, he’d realized someone else was being blamed. He’d followed the case and saw that some guy named Warren Bennett had been arrested and indicted for murder.
Poor bastard, he’d thought, guessing that Bennett was the man he’d seen leave Oakley’s house at a little after nine. He knew that Williams was the last man to see Michelle Oakley alive. But Warren Bennett wasn’t filthy rich, and Williams was.
Sometimes those are the breaks, he thought now as the buzzer on his intercom went off, meaning someone was at the street-level door leading up to his office. “T. X. Fielding Investigations Inc.,” he said.
Fielding was still kicking himself, because if he hadn’t been so needy about the five thousand and hadn’t told Maxwell about Williams’s whereabouts, he could have pulled off the blackmail by himself with no one the wiser. But now he was going to have to talk her into going along with the plan.
Then again, maybe she’d see him a little differently. And why not? he thought. Her boyfriend had lied to her about where he was going Saturday night, and then, according to what he’d read in the papers he’d had sex with Michelle Oakley before killing her. Let’s see what she thinks about me when I tell her that I’m going to make the two of us very, very rich . . . and she can get even with the bastard at the same time.
“It’s me,” Sherry Maxwell’s voice said over the intercom.
Fielding smiled. This was going to be a piece of cake.