Beware Beware (4 page)

It was almost eight in the evening when Jamie went home, and as I sat in my car outside his house, my mind circled in a miserable funk of self-evaluation. When he reemerged fifteen minutes later, I rolled my eyes and wondered where he was going to dinner.

He walked toward his car with a slump in his step, hands hooked into his pockets, shoulders raised. He got in and smoked a cigarette, and then he was on the move.

We drove at the speed limit, crossed town to a house in Encino, where Jamie pulled up to an intercom and entered through an electric gate. The street was quiet, a wealthy, suburban street, and most of the house was walled away from view. I parked behind an empty car on the other side of the street and waited.

There was something promising here, a break from his pattern. Jamie had no family in Los Angeles, and his friends were unlikely to live in a mansion, even if it was in the valley. He'd driven across town on some errand, and if I paid attention, I thought I might find something interesting.

Ten minutes later, the gate opened and his car nosed out, spilling poor light on gray asphalt. I let him leave the street and caught up to him on the on-ramp to the 101.

The Monday-night traffic was light, and I kept him at the edge of my vision for the whole stretch of the freeway. There were a few other cars on our commute, falling before and behind me for miles. When Jamie signaled to exit, I followed, not far behind. One car signaled between us.

It was a white Audi A4 with a scuffed bumper, and it drove steadily between me and Jamie, all the way home.

We drove for a good mile and a half off the freeway before I conceded that it could be following Jamie. I thought, for a moment, that it might be following me, but it never made an effort to fall behind me or stay out of my sight.

I didn't see it leave the house in the valley, but I hadn't been paying close attention to other cars at that point. If this person was tailing Jamie, odds were good that he'd started at or near that house.

When Jamie pulled up at his apartment, the Audi slowed down and cleaved to the curb a half block away. I drove past, trying hard not to drop my pace. I got a brief look at the man in the driver's seat—a Latino man in his late twenties or early thirties, sitting alone. It was hard to know for sure from my split-second glimpse, but I thought he was staring right at Jamie, who was sitting in his car with the engine off.

The man didn't seem to notice me as I circled the block and drove back onto Jamie's street, hanging back far enough to avoid raising suspicion. Or so I hoped. The white Audi was still there, presenting, to my eyes, a predatory gleam. I smirked—I had no real standing to make that judgment.

After another minute, Jamie left his car. Detecting his presence, a light turned on in the driveway, showing him in outline like the lone figure on a stage. He slouched as he approached the door, then cast a casual gaze behind him. If he'd meant to check if anyone was watching him, he didn't do a great job. His survey was too fast, not paranoid enough. On one shoulder, he carried a black backpack I hadn't noticed before.

Not ten seconds after Jamie went inside, the white Audi started up. I followed it back onto the 101, and when it exited at White Oak, I knew exactly where it was going. Even so, I tailed it to the Encino mansion, where the man in the Audi buzzed in at the gate, identifying himself over the intercom. I sped away and called Daphne on the way home.

*   *   *

Jamie's Monday night adventure reenergized me, and I spent the next two weeks observing him, on Daphne's request. I developed something of a routine, stopping in the office every morning and following Jamie from around eleven to eleven each day. I spent a lot of time in my car. I got a lot of reading done, and I spent hours talking to Daphne, mostly right before bed. Some nights we had a drink over the phone while she filled me in on Jamie's behavior from her end.

“He's buttering me up now,” she told me one night. “He's been calling every day, asking, ‘Baby, how was your day?' and ‘How's your painting going?' like there's nothing more important in the world.”

She laughed, and I laughed with her. “Well, good. If he knows he's in trouble, maybe he'll stay on his best behavior.”

“Oh yeah, he knows he did wrong. He sent me roses yesterday. He
only
sends flowers to say sorry. Some men are like that, I guess.”

“Sure,” I said. “So you've forgiven him for now?”

“I'm not giving him the boot quite yet. I feel a little more relaxed now that you're on him.”

Jamie's weekdays were no less social than his weekends. He spent time working at Joe Tilley's, but outside of those hours he kept himself busy fluttering across the streets of Los Angeles, hanging out with good-looking people in handsome venues.

But over the course of two weeks' surveillance, I'd come to the conclusion that Jamie's life was not all brunches and beers and trips to the beach. I had to give Daphne's speculations a fair hearing.

After his errand in Encino, a number of people dropped by his house at odd hours throughout the week, a whole string of guests, male and female, ranging widely in age, None stayed for longer than half an hour, and everyone left with a look of self-conscious hurry, stepping so fake cool I could almost see their chilly sweats, hear their guilty whistles as they bustled with full pockets to their cars. The same pattern repeated the second week, complete with another Monday night visit to the same house in the valley. It seemed likely that Jamie was slinging something. If he was a coke addict, it might as well be coke, and probably everything lower on the pyramid.

The white Audi reappeared twice, once on a Friday, when Jamie was on his way to work, and once again on Monday, when he visited the valley. I ran the car's plates and found that it belonged to a fifty-year-old woman in North Hollywood named Guadalupe Perez. She was not the driver.

Daphne didn't know who he was, either. “Some lowlife, probably. A new friend, maybe. I hardly know anything about my boyfriend that you don't tell me.”

“Do you want me to find out more about this guy? He kind of worries me.”

“Yeah, me, too,” she said, and I heard her take a long swallow of her wine. “Keep on Jamie, though, and if this driver tries to hurt him, you can intervene.”

“I'll engage him in hand-to-hand combat.” I poured more rye into my glass.

I hoped Jamie wasn't actually dealing drugs, and that if he was, he wasn't attracting undue attention. Maybe it was his dopey boy face, or just the soothing pull of continuous familiarity. Maybe it was just the small debt of a parking space on a miserable day. He was my first target who appeared to be a halfway decent human being, and I recognized, with a little shock at my sentimentality, that I was growing fond of him. I wanted him to keep his nose clean and prosper, for both his and Daphne's sakes.

If it didn't look like Daphne was right on the money, I might have disliked her for putting me on Jamie's tail. I had a duty to clients to respect their wishes, their privacy, to heed their instructions while they paid for my services. I had no such duty to like them. In fact, most of the people who walked into Lindley & Flores were despicable in at least a few ways, defined by jealousy or scheming on top of the normal spectrum of personality flaws. But Daphne, as they say, was different. She wasn't paranoid or angry or even overreaching. We got along.

We talked intermittently throughout each day, and she called me every night before her East Coast bedtime, usually after she'd talked to Jamie. I issued a full report of my day's findings, of Jamie's movements and interactions, more often than not with Jamie's front door in my field of vision. I gave her my impressions, facts first, hunches second, sprawling speculations if and when she prodded. We analyzed together, and when we were done with my report, she gave me hers. I listened, and I listened well.

Somewhere in those hours of shop talk, we found room to get to know each other. We found small things we had in common, not least of all a shared interest in detective fiction—she'd always wondered what it would be like to hire a private investigator. My work for her was intensely personal, both of us knew, so there was a built-in closeness there, a sharing of secrets and problems, the polite restraint of recent acquaintance cut away like an opaque smear of fat. I even told her a fair amount about myself, narrated some of the worst events of my life in calm, stoic tones while my heart pumped loudly with pain and a release like pleasure.

For two weeks of quiet surveillance, I gave my whole life to the follies and misadventures of this strange, dysfunctional couple. I let them seep into my thoughts and lay claim to my emotions. I should have known then, that was never a good idea.

 

Three

On the Thursday of my second week of surveillance, I followed Jamie from his apartment to Joe Tilley's house, where he swapped his car for the yellow Ferrari and played the chauffeur right back to The Roosevelt Hotel. They checked in a little after 8:00.

I valeted my car, killed time in the lobby, and took my ticket to the valet stand a half hour later. I asked the parking attendant if I could grab something out of my car, and he gave me my keys and directed me to a lot across the street. It was an ugly parking structure, plain and grimy in a way antithetical to The Roosevelt's nostalgic glamor. The yellow Ferrari stood out like a brand-new lemon in a litter box.

I snapped a picture on my phone and sauntered back to the hotel for a leisurely drink. I called it a night after one. I had a feeling they weren't leaving for a while.

When Daphne called, I was getting ready for bed, nearing the end of my last rye before brushing my teeth. I moved fast to pick up my phone, and I realized with a pathetic pang that I'd been waiting for her call for the better part of the night.

“He never called,” she said.

I glanced at a wall clock. It was rounding midnight. “I was afraid of that.”

“What is he doing, Song?”

“Last I saw he and Tilley checked in at The Roosevelt.”

“Goddammit. What an asshole.” Her voice was soft, exhausted.

“You don't sound surprised.”

“I can't say I am. What do you think I should do?” she asked.

“You mean right now or in the larger sense?”

“Should I just dump him?”

“I don't know, Daph. Do you really want to keep paying me to follow him around, though?” I smiled, and felt a little tipsy. “I mean, I'm not going to tell you not to, but I don't know if I would if I were you.”

“Just a little longer. I want proof he can't deny. And besides, he could be in some shit, you know? What does Jamie know about dealing drugs? He's a doofus. He might get himself killed.”

“You want to fix him up? Save him from the whirlpool and towel him clean? I mean, come on, you know how that story goes. You've tried already. You won't change him.”

She sighed. “I need another drink. Will you have one with me?”

I shook the half-melted ice cubes in my little glass. They made a lonely, musical sound. “Sure.”

When we hung up the phone, it was almost three in the morning. The sun might have risen in New York. She didn't want to talk about Jamie, so we talked about everything else instead. I had three more ryes and went to bed, spent and close to laughing.

*   *   *

I woke up late Friday and drove back to The Roosevelt in the afternoon. I parked on the street a half block away and walked straight into the valet lot to find the Ferrari, unmoved since the day before. For the third time in two weeks, I made myself comfortable in the Roosevelt's lobby. It was four o'clock when I sat down with my first drink. I decided to stick around until I got hungry, then check back in the next day. I had a feeling Jamie and Joe weren't going anywhere.

I was contemplating a second drink when my phone rang.

“Song.” Daphne was breathing hard. “Jamie needs your help.”

“What? What's going on?”

She sniffled, and a sound came out of her like lips parting against a humid room. “I told him you were in the lobby. He called me panicking and I told him he had a friend there.”

For a second, I felt caught, even minorly betrayed. Then I remembered—despite all the time we'd spent together, Jamie had no idea who I was until this hour. He had as much reason to expect my loyalty as he did a wedding invite from the Queen of England.

“Okay, what's going on?”

“Something … happened. Jamie's going to come down and get you in a minute, okay? He'll explain everything.” She started to cry freely. “Song, I'm so glad you're there.”

I barely had time to protest the cut connection before Jamie Landon pinged out of an elevator, alone. There was something uncertain and fragmented about his gait, like I was watching him on a bad Internet connection. He was so clearly agitated I could almost hear him twitching across the lobby.

He flitted his eyes around the room. I stood up, bent at the waist, and got my arm into position for a tentative blind-date wave. I had my fingers curled in a limp, motionless paw when he saw me and approached. He stopped walking and stared at the floor when he saw me move toward him.

“Hi, Jamie. Song. What's going on?” I asked. He didn't offer me a hand, but raised his oblique shuddering eyes to meet mine.

I felt his gaze descend on my skin like a nervous sweat. I'd spent almost two weeks with Jamie, but this was the closest I'd come to him, including that brief meeting in that other life. His face almost startled me in such high definition. A pretty face, boyish and compelling, with full lips stained a berry pink. I saw now that he'd peeled off layers of flaky skin, exposing the soft unaccustomed flesh underneath. He had light brown eyes with dark brown borders that made them pop like a tiger's, and these were open wide, manic, with a clouded light dancing in huge ink-pot pupils. They beamed desperation.