MY DAUGHTER ANGIE was at the kitchen table, ignoring the buttered toast I’d put in front of her and fiddling with one of her nails instead, when her cell phone started chirping. She dug it out of her purse, looked at the display, and said, “Shit, my stalker.”
I made some coffee. I really needed some coffee. It had been nearly five o’clock when I’d fallen into bed, and even then I’d had a hard time sleeping. I’d nodded off around six, and now it was eight, and I’d been up half an hour, so do the math. I was hoping coffee would help, but was not particularly hopeful.
All I wanted to do was crawl back into bed, but it had been my plan originally to head into the paper with Sarah when she went in, and this particular week that happened to be around eight-thirty.
“I can’t believe he’s calling me this early,” Angie said. “Bad enough having a stalker. I have to get an early-bird stalker.” The phone had rung six, seven times now, but I’d lost track, since I was counting out eight spoonfuls of fine-grind Colombian into the coffeemaker. Finally, the ringing stopped. “Now he’ll leave me a message,” she sighed, brushing back some of the blond locks that had fallen across her face.
Her brother Paul, who at sixteen is two years younger than Angie, had his back to her as he looked into the fridge, but he’d been listening. “Five bucks says he phones the house next,” he said as he struggled to get a yogurt from the back of the fridge without moving the milk and pickles and orange juice that blocked the way.
Angie took one bite of her cold toast. “Last night he phoned me five times. I never did answer it. So then I have to listen to all his creepy messages. ‘How are you? I was just thinking about you. Why don’t you give me a call? Do you want to get together?’ Uh, I don’t think so.”
Paul, his head still in the fridge, said, “You’re so hard on everybody.”
I spilled the last spoonful of coffee before I could get it into the filter, and scooped it to the edge of the counter and into my other hand. I went to toss it into the wastebasket we keep under the sink, when I noticed a glass bottle sitting on top. It was an empty Snapple bottle that earlier, according to the label, had had apple juice in it. “Hey,” I said. “Who’s tossing Snapple bottles in the regular garbage?”
Angie was still shaking her head over her unwanted phone call and Paul was peeling off the top of the yogurt container. I glared at him. He was the one who liked apple juice.
“We have a recycling box,” I reminded everyone, taking out the Snapple bottle, which had its metal cap screwed back on it. “Glass bottles, tin cans, plastic-that all goes into the box, not into the garbage. Are we interested in saving the planet or not?”
“I could go either way,” Angie said.
“Is there, like, some Most Irritated Dad contest going on we don’t know about?” Paul asked.
“I didn’t get home till five,” I said.
Paul, putting on his concerned face and adopting his mock-parent voice, said, “Maybe if you got to bed in good time, you wouldn’t be so grumpy in the morning.”
I ignored that and walked through the kitchen to the small alcove by the back door, where we keep the blue plastic baskets that hold glass and cans and newspapers for the recycling pickup. I dropped the Snapple container into the one reserved for bottles and cans, making it the only item there.
Sarah was coming into the kitchen as I returned, and Paul was bringing her up to speed. “Angie has a stalker.”
Sarah said, “Huh?”
“The thing is,” Paul said, “I think Angie actually likes him. He’s mysterious.”
“Fuck you,” Angie said to her brother.
“Hey,” I said. “Come on.”
Sarah let out a breath. “You got coffee going?” she asked me. I pointed.
Paul said, “And Dad’s in training for the Irritable Olympics. Those are our main headlines this morning.”
“Two days ago,” Angie said, “I run into him at Starbucks. I’m there with my friends, we’re getting ready to go, and he walks in, like he’s my best friend, and he’s Mr. Oh-So-Perfect Gentleman, helping me on with my coat, handing me my purse.”
“Who are we talking about?” Sarah asked. Good question, I thought. I might have gotten around to it eventually. A trained journalist, that’s me.
“Trevor Wylie,” she said. The name didn’t register with me immediately. Switching gears, Angie said, “Am I going to be able to get a car tonight?”
After waiting in line behind Sarah, I poured myself a cup of coffee, added some cream, spooned in two sugars. Sarah already had that morning’s Metropolitan in her hand and was scanning the front-page headlines, looking to see whether any of the stories she’d promoted at the newsroom’s budget meeting the night before had made it to the front page.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “They didn’t put the dead skateboarder on front. How many sixty-year-old skateboarders are there? He was sixty. That’s what makes it news. Assholes.”
“Hello?” Angie said. “I need a car tonight? Is anyone there?”
Sarah looked over her paper at me, and I looked at her. Without actually saying anything, we had entered consultation mode. We were asking each other, Do you need a car? And are we going to let her have a car?
“Why do you need a car?” Sarah asked.
Angie sighed, the I-told-you-this-before sigh, and said, “Remember, I’ve got all these evening lectures, and it’s a lot easier, and safer, coming home if I’ve got the car instead of taking the subway.”
“Oh yeah,” said Sarah.
“I mean, you’re the ones who freak out about me taking the subway at night, so if you don’t want me to get raped, you should let me have the car.”
No pressure there.
Our kitchen phone rang. “That’ll be him,” Paul said. “Betcha anything. He figures your cell is off or something.”
“Don’t answer it!” Angie said.
Paul looked over at our wall-mounted phone so he could read the call display. How he could see it from where he stood, without binoculars, was beyond me. “Shit, nope. I was wrong.”
Now that Paul was satisfied this call was not Angie’s stalker, he made no moves to actually answer the phone.
“So who is it?” Sarah snapped.
“Paper,” Paul said.
“Could you get it?” Sarah said, considering that Paul was two steps away while his mother was on the other side of the kitchen.
I took a long sip of coffee, let the warmth run down my throat. Caffeine, do your thing.
Paul grabbed the receiver. “Yeah? Sec.” He handed the phone to his mother-“I told you it was for you,” he said-as she strode across the hardwood kitchen floor, the newspaper scrunched into one hand.
“I was sure it was going to be him,” Angie said, her body relaxing as though she’d dodged a bullet.
“Who is this guy again?” I asked her. “Who’s phoning you?”
“I just told you.”
“Tell me again. I wasn’t taking notes earlier.”
“Trevor Wylie.”
“Isn’t that Paul’s old friend? The one with the zits?”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Sarah said into the receiver. “I filled in for him last night. He’s still sick?”
“You’re thinking of Trey Wilson,” Paul said defensively. “He’s the one with a face looked like a pizza. Trevor Wylie’s got a very pretty face, doesn’t he, Angie?”
“Shut up. He wouldn’t even know me if he wasn’t running errands for you.”
“What errands?” I asked.
“He showed up at our high school end of last year,” Paul said, ignoring the question. “He’s this total loner kid, with the long trenchcoat, thinks he’s Keanu Reeves from The Matrix. Even wears the shades. Speaks in two-word sentences. Must have flunked a couple of times, like, he must be twenty. Moved from out west or something, don’t even think he has any parents. Like, out here. And he’s a total computer nut, and he’s helped me totally reformat my computer.”
“He’s twenty and still at high school?”
“Last year. If he goes to college next year, maybe he’ll pick Mackenzie, and he and Angie can commute together.”
Angie gave him her best death stare.
“And why didn’t they use the skateboarder on page one? Who’s idiotic call was that?” Sarah wanted to know.
“So, is he dangerous, this guy?” I said, sipping some more coffee. I was trying to be casual about it, working to keep the panic out of my voice.
“He’s fine,” Angie said.
“I mean, I don’t think he’s going to shoot up the school or anything,” Paul said, thinking that I’d find that reassuring. “But he really is a computer genius. I think he spends his spare time inventing viruses. You know when the Hong Kong stock market or something crashed? I think he did that. And the MyDoom virus? I’m betting that was him. His dad’s some software king, makes bazillions of dollars, but now that Trevor’s living on his own, I’m guessing this is his way to get back at his old man, to cripple the Internet or something.”
“Where do you get this information?” I asked.
Paul shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Sarah hung up. “I have to stay late again tonight. I’ve got to run the meeting again. Bailey’s still gone.” Bailey was her boss, the city editor. “I was hoping to get tonight off, since they’ve got me going to this retreat later in the week.”
“Retreat?” I said.
“Maybe I should write everything down for you,” Sarah said. “You know, department heads, other management types from circulation and advertising, we all get together off-site and brainstorm about how to make the paper better and how we can all work as a team, improve employee relations, make everyone feel part of the process, and we draft some list of goals, then come back to the paper and forget it ever happened.”
“Does that mean I can’t get the car?” Angie said. “I have to have a car.”
We only had the one, an aging Toyota Camry. Before we moved back into the city, from Oakwood, we had a second car. Out in the suburbs, where there were no subways or decent bus lines, you couldn’t survive with just one vehicle. But our Honda Civic came to a grisly end one night (Sarah and I very nearly did as well, but that’s a long story, and I’ve already told it), and we opted not to replace it once we’d sold our house and returned to our old neighborhood.
We bought a house a few doors down from our former one, on Crandall, a couple of blocks from the subway and connecting streetcars, and we’d been managing with one car for some time now. Paul’s high school was within walking distance, but in the last few weeks Angie had started college, in town, and, as she’d just reminded us, a few of her classes were in the evening. That meant a walk of several blocks in the dark to catch the subway home, and Sarah was almost as paranoid as I on this issue. We wanted Angie walking alone at night as little as possible.
“What time do you finish?” Sarah asked.
Angie thought. “Eight? Eight-thirty?”
Sarah said, “You take the car, swing by the paper on the way home and pick me up.”
“Then I can’t hang out with anyone after,” Angie said. “I was thinking of getting a coffee with someone after the lecture.”
“Who?”
“Someone. I don’t know.” She got all sullen. “Anybody.”
Which of course meant someone in particular. Sarah said, “You want a car, you pick me up.”
“Jeez, fine, I’ll pick you up. I just won’t make any friends at college at all. I’ll go to school, come home, leave it to the people who live on campus to have lives.”
I wanted to steer the conversation in another direction, not only because I hated family arguments, but because my head was pounding. “What’s the class tonight?” I asked.
“Some psych-sociology male/female studies thing,” she said. “I have to do some research paper for, like, ten days from now. About why men are so weird.”
“Interview your father,” Sarah offered.
“And I need five dollars for parking,” Angie said.
Sarah sidled up to me as she put in some toast. I said to her, quietly, “Maybe it’s time to think about getting another car.”
“I can’t have this discussion now,” she said.
“We’re having these kinds of problems every day,” I said.
I squeezed out of the way as she got some strawberry jam out of the fridge. This kitchen was about half the size of the one in our house out in the suburbs, and quarters were close. “We can’t afford another car now,” Sarah said. “We’ve got Angie’s tuition, a mortgage-”
The phone rang again. I grabbed it instinctively, not thinking to look at who the caller was, and already had the receiver in my hand when Angie started to shout “Don’t answer it!”
But she cut herself off as I brought the phone to my ear, the mouthpiece exposed. Angie mouthed to me, “I’m not here!”
“Hello?” I said. At this point, I looked at the call display and saw “Unknown name/Unknown number.”
“Hi. Is Angie there?” Very cool. You could almost tell, over the phone, that he had to be wearing sunglasses.
“Can I take a message?” I said.
“Is she there?”
“Can I take a message?” I repeated.
A pause at the other end. “Who’s this?”
Now I paused. “This is her father.”
Angie raised her hands up, rolled her eyes, mouthed, “Jeez!”
“Oh,” he said. “You wrote that book.”
That caught me off guard. “Yeah, I did. I wrote a few.”
“SF stuff.”
“That’s right.”
“About the missionaries.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I like that kind of shit. You see The Matrix movies?”
“Yes,” I said.
“First one was great, the other two sucked ass.”
I said, “Do you want to leave a message for Angie?”
Angie, in a loud, angry whisper: “I. Am. Not. Here!”
“Tell her Trevor called.” And he hung up.
“God,” I said, taken aback by the abrupt end to our conversation. “What an asshole.”
“What did he want?” Angie said. “What were you talking about?”
“He was asking if I’d seen The Matrix, and if I was the guy who wrote that book, about missionaries.”
“Did he say anything about me?”
“Just wanted me to tell you he called. You think he read my book?”
Paul, finishing his yogurt, said to Angie, “I think he wants to enter your matrix.”
Angie gave him the finger. On her way out of the kitchen she said again that she needed five dollars to pay for parking at Mackenzie that evening. Sarah dug a bill out of her purse and handed it over.
The kitchen emptied out. Paul left for high school, Sarah went up to our room to finish getting ready for work. Angie, who didn’t have a class until midmorning, was in her room, probably fuming about what it was like to live with Third World parents who only had one car.
Sarah and I got into the car. I rode shotgun. We worked out a quick plan, that I’d drive the car home later in the day so that Angie, who was going to return home by way of public transit after her midday class, would have a car for going back to school in the evening. Every day, it was like planning the raid on Entebbe.
As was usually the case when Sarah was behind the wheel, we were attracting the finger from a cross section of motorists as she moved from lane to lane, tailgated, failed to signal. Sarah was what you might call an aggressive driver. The people in the other cars might be more likely to call her a maniac.
“They call it rush hour for a reason,” Sarah said, shaking her head as she got past those slowpokes and got some more in her sights. “How’d it go last night?”
I told her.
Her jaw dropped and she looked over at me. “This other detective, he’s dead? These guys, the ones you and this Lawrence Jones character were waiting for, they killed him?”
“It may just have been because he was short. They might not have seen him when they were backing up.”
“Fuck. Did you call the desk?”
The city desk. “Yes,” I said. “They said they’d call Cheese Dick and send a photog.” Dick Colby, The Metropolitan’s police reporter, who smelled like old havarti. The paper’s editors might trust me to write a profile of Lawrence Jones, but a breaking news story, you couldn’t leave that to some writer from the features team. The desk would want the story covered by someone who could turn it in in under a week.
“So this thing, it really will turn into a decent feature,” Sarah said. The editor in her had taken over. Sooner or later, it might occur to her that if these guys could kill one detective, they could just as easily kill another, particularly one I was hanging out with.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “What if they’d shown up at the store you guys were staking out?”
“I’m sure we’d have been fine,” I said. “Lawrence seems to know what he’s doing.”
“So they killed this Miles Diamond,” Sarah said. “Did they also rob the store?”
“Pretty much cleaned it out of Hugo Boss and Versace and-”
“It’s a ch sound. It doesn’t rhyme with ‘face.’ ”
“Okay, so I’m not familiar. It’s not the Gap.”
Sarah, in the middle of cutting off a Mustang, said, “Yeah, well, you haven’t even seen the inside of a Gap in years. You could use some sprucing up, some new clothes.”
“I sure won’t be buying them at Brentwood’s. It’s very expensive Italian suits, designer stuff, silk ties, you get the picture.”
“You’re right. That doesn’t sound like your kind of place.”
“It’s Lawrence’s, though. Nice dresser. Why do gay guys always dress better?”
Sarah scowled. “You might be surprised to learn that there are heterosexual men who know how to look good in clothes. Does he never go by Larry?”
“No. It’s Lawrence Jones, Private Eye.” I used my TV announcer voice.
“So, you got enough to write this piece? You’ve got color, there was the incident last night.”
“You promised me a week. I’m going back out with him tonight, this’ll be night three.”
Now Sarah looked apprehensive. “You’ve probably got enough already.”
“Look, don’t worry, I’m perfectly safe.”
At which point Sarah swerved from the middle to the inside lane to avoid a green Cutlass. “Jesus,” she said. “Was he going slow or what?”
Now Sarah was taking the off-ramp that would lead us down to the Metropolitan building. The ramp was designed as a single lane, but Sarah was trying to squeeze along the inside, so close to a Mazda that if she put her window down she could hand the guy a coffee. I kept jamming my right foot into the floorboards, figuring if I shoved hard enough I could stop the car. There were a lot of things that made me feel anxious.
I said, “Do we have any jazz CDs?”
“I hate jazz,” Sarah said. There wasn’t a CD player in the Toyota; it was too old to have come equipped with one. But at home, she often slipped a disc into the stereo. Rock, lots of seventies stuff, Neil Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival. “Why you asking about jazz?”
“No reason.”
This was a new wrinkle to our relationship, this business of having Sarah as my boss. Well, one of my bosses. At a newspaper, you had so many, it was hard to keep track. This was my first experience working for the same person with whom I slept. I had been back working at a newspaper for almost a year now, after spending a few years writing commercially unsuccessful science fiction novels. Okay, the first one did reasonably well, which had given me the confidence to quit a salaried job and write fiction full-time. But as most people who write fiction understand, unless they happen to be Tom Clancy, or a former president penning his memoirs, you can’t support a family and pay a mortgage without a regular job. And I was back at one.
The Metropolitan offered me a feature-writing position. Given my experience, coupled with the fact I’d written four novels, the editors in charge seemed to feel I had graduated beyond the level of general assignment. To my surprise, and Sarah’s, they put me among the stable of city feature writers who reported to her. Although she wouldn’t admit this to me, I’d heard through the newsroom grapevine that she’d fired off a memo to the managing editor, Bertrand Magnuson, expressing some concern, something along the lines of “I can’t get him to do anything I say at home, so what makes you think I can do it here?”
The problem was, the newsroom has a long history of people who sleep together-spouses, and non-spouses, and a few spouses with non-spouses-being thrown into the mix together, and Sarah’s superior probably wrote her back with a note consisting of three letters-“DWI”-which in the Metropolitan newsroom meant “deal with it.”
Moving on, I said, “You know about this Trevor Wylie kid?”
Sarah thought a moment. “The one calling Angie? Not much. He the one had a face like a pizza?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t know anything.”
“I just don’t like the sounds of this guy.”
“Has he done anything?”
“He’s calling Angie all the time, shows up where she is, like maybe he’s following her.”
“You mean, like when you were interested in me?”
“I just don’t like him. You should talk to Angie, find out more about this guy, tell her to be careful.”
“You talk to her.”
“I think she’s still mad at me, over the Pool Boy incident.”
“Yeah, well, who can blame her. I can’t believe Harley didn’t give you a prescription. You ask me, you need to be on something.”