Rick Moody - The Diviners

The stakeout continues in this way until one of the detectives, the one not reading the tabloids, announces that the sister of the suspect is now on the move. He uses the code agreed upon earlier, “The worm has turned.” The sister of the suspect is now leaving her East Village address, she is slamming the front door of the walk-up behind her, proceeding west, and so the detectives stir like ravens in a dead tree. That is, the detectives abandon their vehicle, and each brings a doughnut. It is Sunday, and the detectives would normally have the day off, but they are concerned that the suspect, the older brother of the young woman currently under surveillance, may have fled the metropolitan area to points unknown. The sister may be the only credible link to the suspect.

There will be observation of the movements of the sister of the suspect, in the event that the sister makes known the whereabouts of the suspect.

The sister of the suspect, according to reports, is, it should be noted, “very attractive,” and is wearing “leather pants” on the day in question. It’s another day of steady drizzle. Nonetheless, the detectives hasten westward, following the sister of the suspect at some remove. What they know: The sister is an employee of a boutique film production company, which boutique has made a number of films that the detectives have not seen. The boutique film production company hires out work to the very messenger company at which the suspect in the assault case previously worked. A connection has therefore been established, between suspect and sister, first in the identical surnames of these two persons. Second, this connection was verified in a quick data search of credit and medical records, confirming that the suspect has been both a failed graduate student and a client of a variety of mental health professionals. He is, in fact, “bipolar,” or manic-depressive, whatever the current terminology is. According to the detectives, it is established that the suspect has a history of mental illness, and this is likely to be material to a jury trial, especially in view of the fact that the assault incident is being prosecuted as an attack without motive.

The detectives have leaked this information to the press.

They know, and the knowledge is bittersweet, that both the suspect and his sister, the woman currently under surveillance, are adoptees. They know that the children were adopted, some years apart, by white parents, though both the suspect and his sister are African American, and to the detectives this is a sorrowful part of the investigation because one of the detectives, while educated in the city college system, is himself from the projects. The projects speak through him, and the projects are with him, and there is no shaking off the projects, which are an engine of African American identity in this city. He knows: When you take a black kid out of the neighborhoods and you put this black kid in the white neighborhoods, this kid will be like a duck raised by geese. And in this instance, the adoptive parents are church folk. The father is a minister of some kind, and the mother is a psychologist. The suspect and his sister were adopted and they were raised up in New England. The detectives also happen to know the names of the natural parents of the two children, and they know that one of these children was born in Chicago and one in Las Vegas. They surmise that the two siblings are as close as natural siblings because they are two supererogatory kids. Later there was a natural sibling, a white baby, born to the formerly barren mother. This is why they think the suspect will contact his sister. He can’t do otherwise. They want to be there when it happens.

The sister of the suspect proceeds up Avenue A at a brisk clip past a Mexican joint. Mexican food in NYC is almost always a disappointment. Nevertheless, the detectives duck inside this establishment briefly and throw away their tabloids, inhale cilantro and tomatillos, wait for a suitable interval, and then they exit and continue the surveillance. The detectives continue west on Eighth Street, passing examples of a genus that doesn’t seem to exist in any other neighborhood, the men and women wearing black leather jackets, all of them with dyed black hair, all of them with various piercings, all come to the region around St. Mark’s Place. The sister of the suspect, picking up the pace further, makes a right-hand turn at the cube sculpture, a known squatter and runaway hangout, past the still unpalatable Kmart franchise, first of its type in the city. To what destination would the “very attractive” sister of the suspect be bound? Might she be making for the cheap hairstylists of Fourteenth Street? For the extremely large music and media store nearby? Is she going to kill time in the park, reading some tome? Or perhaps she is bent upon the farmers’ market? Not possible. No farmers’ market on Sunday.

It is the best of all outcomes for the detectives. They have eaten little but doughnuts since the stakeout began. They could not have hoped for this, for how the sister of the suspect passes through the threshold of a restaurant in the Union Square neighborhood, a restaurant beloved by the detectives, a restaurant that is, yes, “model owned and operated.” Indeed, the restaurant, which was once a run-down Greek American coffee shop, is painted a nauseating teal on the outside and is notorious for attracting only the most delectable of feminine examples, each of them over six feet and with legs of limitless majesty. The detectives do not seek out such places. They are made of sterner stuff. They will stake out the Fulton Fish Market if required, they will stake out mortuaries in the outer boroughs. But if their work brings them to the former coffee shop, they will allow themselves a moment of bedazzlement as the hostess takes them to their table, a table where their concealed audio recorder can pick up some of the conversation at the next booth, the booth that currently contains the sister of the suspect and a certain coworker from the film company known as Means of Production, namely Jeanine Stampfel. Born: Scottsdale, Arizona, July 15, 1976. Educated: University of Arizona, BA, in English. Moved to New York City: 1998. Lives: Upper West Side.

The detectives settle on entrées as follows: media noche and paillard of chicken. They each order a mochaccino beverage. Then they eat and listen. Christmas lights festoon the walls. Synthetic hits of the nineteen-eighties throb on the sound system.

“It’s. . I. . just thought, you know. I, uh,” Annabel Duffy replies. The detectives have missed the opening of the exchange. However, exact transcription of the remaining conversation follows: “I mean. It’s stupid that we never get together at all. We’re. . I mean, working together in the same office and everything. We should be. . And especially with all the pressure that this—”

“Television thing —”

“Yeah,” Annabel Duffy replies. A waitress saunters by, and the detectives begin to speak to the idea that there are secret affiliations between these women who don’t eat enough food. Look at that waitress. It’s as if they recognize one another or something. They are morphological kin. They are like greyhounds. And they are exchanging secret signals about what might be eaten without danger of caloric intake.

“I don’t know what to think. I hate television, know what I mean? I don’t even want to work there if we’re just going to be thinking up television shows.”

“I don’t even have one. A TV. I mean, I have one, I guess, but I don’t have it on very much. No cable or anything. I watch what’s that show the —”

Stampfel mentions the name of a certain show, and this show is not as audible as might be wished, and yet, using the most up-to-date digital editing tools, the detectives will later be able to surmise that Stampfel mentioned a popular television show about a pack of werewolves, The Werewolves of Fairfield County. By night, suburbanites are transformed into baying, lonely lycanthropes, and so forth. It’s a program that the detectives have not seen, though they have heard it is very popular among the young, for nearly four seasons now. In four years, many things can befall a lycanthrope. Meteor showers, droughts, floods, spontaneous forest fires, suburban sprawl, the complete elimination of nature, mad love. Such things make for ratings, which make for syndication.