Сьюзен Стрейт - Orange County Noir

“Carl, can you meet me tomorrow morning for breakfast?”

The head of park security, former FBI, wanted to eat with me?

“Carl, are you still there?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Yeah you’re still there, or yeah you’ll meet me?” he asked.

“Why do you want to have breakfast with me, Jeffrey?”

“Look, I know you were good at your job, Carl.”

I did my job but I don’t know that I was actually good at it. I only know that I showed up every day.

“Have you found employment yet?” Jeffrey asked.

“I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire,” I said, a lie.

“I may have a job for you, Carl.”

“Me? Why?”

After a moment of silence: “Maybe I feel a little guilty about the way it went down with you, Carl.”

Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.

What the hell did I have to lose?

We met the next morning at a Carl’s Jr. across the street from the main library on Harbor Boulevard and Broadway, three miles north and a world away from the park. He chose the place. Fast food didn’t seem like much of a gesture toward reconciliation. Was the Carl’s Jr. a play on my name? There were plenty of tourist joints around the park that served better breakfasts. And there were restaurants near the stadium and diners and cafés farther east in Orange or Tustin where park employees often went to escape the crowds and to enjoy food that was less generic than tourist fare. I asked myself what Sherlock Holmes would have made of Jeffrey’s wanting to meet here and I arrived at this: the Carl’s Jr. at Harbor and Broadway was a place we’d likely not be seen by anybody who knew either of us (most of the patrons and some of the employees didn’t even speak English). Only three miles from the park, we were virtually guaranteed of being strangers to anyone we might meet.

In this, I was right.

But it was the last time I’d be right for a long while.

I parked my Camry next to Jeffrey’s SUV.

He sat at an inside booth, nursing a coffee and browsing the morning paper. He grinned when he saw me and extended his hand to shake without sliding out of the booth to stand. “Morning, Carl.” He was dressed “resort casual,” khakis, loafers, monogrammed golf shirt. The face of his expensive wristwatch was black and of a width and diameter about half that of a hockey puck. I’d come in my suit and tie, which felt ridiculous in a Carl’s Jr. But this was a job interview, wasn’t it? And my Aunt Janice always said that one can never be overdressed, either for church or for a business meeting.

I slid into the booth across from Jeffrey. “So what’s this all about?”

“Maybe you want to get yourself a coffee and a roll before we get started,” he said, folding away his newspaper.

I was hungry (after all, this was supposed to be breakfast) so I did as he suggested.

“Well, that ought to fill you up,” Jeffrey said when I returned with my tray.

A coffee, orange juice, jumbo breakfast burrito, and side of hash browns... Why not? This wasn’t a Weight Watchers meeting! But Jeffrey looked at my tray like it was piled with fresh, steaming shit. He couldn’t resist putting on superior airs. I’d seen it in my days at the park. Fine, he was Ivy League. Then Quantico. Good for him. But what kind of former undercover agent is constitutionally unable to conceal his smugness at least some of the time?

“I’d like to engage your assistance,” he said.

“What?”

“It’s about my wife.”

I put down my breakfast burrito.

Jeffrey leaned toward me over the Formica tabletop. He smelled of expensive cologne, which mixed strangely with the greasy odors from the breakfast foods. He pushed my tray toward the napkin dispenser against the wall and tapped his fist on my forearm, a “man’s man” gesture of intimacy. I fought the impulse to pull away.

“You’re a good man, Carl,” he said. “I knew it even when I was letting you go, but I had no choice.”

“Yeah?”

“Look, I know damn well that corporate policy and fear of litigation should never trump a man’s twenty years of good service,” he continued. “But you’ll have to trust me that I had no choice. Do you trust me, Carl?”

It was actually twenty-three years, but I didn’t correct him. “Would I be here otherwise, Jeffrey?”

“Good.” He leaned back into his side of the booth.

I picked up the breakfast burrito and took a bite, unsure of what else to do.

“I want to employ you as a private detective,” he said.

Once again I put the burrito down. “Me?”

He nodded.

“Why?” I asked.

“I need you to shadow my wife.”

“Oh? I see. But still... why me?”

“It’s a delicate job, Carl.” He lowered his voice. “Look, I’m well known in law-enforcement circles. You understand that. Every city in this county has its own little chief of police, but just as there’s only one park, one citadel, there’s only one me. So I can’t go to a regular agency. You know that the park expects only the most respectable behavior from its top employees. And also from their wives...” He looked to me for some kind of response.

“Oh, right.”

“I need to know the truth about her. But I can’t allow anything unsavory to ever get out. Understand, Carl?”

“Sure.”

He looked around the Carl’s Jr. When he was sure nobody was paying us any attention, he removed from his front trousers pocket a roll of cash held together with two rubber bands. He set it on the tabletop and then slid it across like a shuffleboard disc into my lap. “It’s two grand, all in twenties,” he said. “It’ll get you started on the job.”

I hadn’t held so much cash in my hand at one time since my vacation in Bangkok (where cash passes out of your hand instead of into it).

“I need your help, Carl,” he said, his expression suddenly strained.

They sure as hell didn’t teach this at Quantico, I thought. It turns out the bastard was as pathetic a human being as the rest of us. (Or so I believed at the time.) Anyway, I admit I enjoyed his muted anguish. But I was clever enough not to show it. “Okay, Jeffrey. I’ll help you.”

He removed a reporter’s notebook from his back pocket and gave it to me. “You got a pen?”

I patted my shirt pocket. No pen.

He gave me a Bic.

“You might want to note down what I’m about to tell you,” he said.

“Right.” I flipped the pad open. Just like that I was a private eye.

Jeffrey’s wife Melinda was thirteen years his junior. They had no children together, though on weekends Jeffrey’s four young daughters from two previous marriages occasionally visited their home, which was located near the golf course on a quiet cul-de-sac in Anaheim Hills. It was a million-and-a-half-dollar property. Melinda held no job, but kept busy with volunteer work at the children’s hospital in Orange. She worked out on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at a Pilates studio on Imperial Highway and on Tuesdays and Thursdays with a private trainer (female) at the twenty-four-hour fitness club. Her body was well toned. She drove a two-year-old, leased Mercedes E-class and her blond hair was just the right shade for her skin color, just the right length for her bone structure. She got her manicures, pedicures, and facials at a salon on Lakeview that was run by a Vietnamese woman named Tran, and she shopped for groceries at the Vons Pavilions in the Target shopping center on Weir Canyon Road. She rarely ventured off the hill to the flats of Anaheim, which were generally too seedy for one of her refined sensibilities. In conversation at the tennis club she poked fun at the park and all it stood for, assuming a position of cultural superiority, even though it was the park that provided her husband with the means to keep her in luxury. She seemed a predictable third wife for a man like Jeffrey. No surprise there. What’s funny is that you might not suspect a woman like her would also appeal to a man like me, but after shadowing her for just a day or two, I found myself becoming very fond of her, despite her superficialities, her arrogance, and the fact that, quite literally, she didn’t know I existed.