While Other People Sleep Read online

  “In serious need of something. Her curiosity about you struck me as unnatural. She peppered me with questions which, of course, I declined to answer. And then the camerawoman I generally use came up and said a potential backer for the Hawaiian project wanted to meet me, and I never saw the bogus McCone again.”

  “I don't like this one bit. What if she'd gotten drunk and made a spectacle of herself? I have a hard enough time not making a spectacle of my self—cold sober.”

  “Well, if it'll ease your mind any, she was well behaved and attractive. Your reputation's untarnished, at least in the film community.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Your body type. Nice features, the most distinctive being large eyes and a mouth that tipped down at the corners. Black hair like yours, in a very similar shoulder-length style. Expensive dress—teal-blue silk knit, clingy.”

  “And I don't suppose you were able to get her real name?”

  “I asked; she sidestepped the question. What d’ you think of this?”

  “A silly prank, probably nothing more than what she said it was. No harm done, and yet…”

  “Yes,” Glenna said, “and yet. That's exactly why I thought you should know about her.”

  4:11 A.M.

  The red digits on my clock radio told me that only six minutes had passed since I last checked the time. I pulled my down comforter higher, snuggled my head deep into the pillows, and shut my eyes. In seconds they popped open. I stared at the ceiling; as a last resort, I'd bore myself to sleep.

  Cold tonight, and the sheets had felt damp when I first crawled into bed. Into an empty bed, as Hy was at his ranch in Mono County. He'd vowed not to budge from there until he finished briefing himself for an upcoming fact-finding trip to various South American clients of Renshaw and Kessell International, the corporate security firm in which he was a partner. Or until Valentine's Day, Friday.

  Not that either of us was sentimental about February 14. In fact, we agreed that it was chiefly a conspiracy among the purveyors of greeting cards, candy, and flowers. The first year we were together we'd felt honor bound to observe the day, and had ended up giving each other the exact same risqué card. The next year he'd been out of the country and sent flowers—coals to Newcastle, since a single rose from him had arrived without fail at my office every Tuesday morning since we'd met. Finally we gave up and took to exchanging cards and gifts whenever the spirit moved us, rather than confining romance to a single day.

  However, my friend and operative Rae Kelleher and my former brother-in-law Ricky Savage were still in the throes of romantic delirium, having only been together since the previous summer, and they were celebrating their first Valentine's Day in style. They'd invited a bunch of us to an evening that would begin with cocktails at Palomino in Hills Plaza, progress to one of the city's newest and best restaurants for dinner, and culminate in a flurry of nightclubbing all over town. Dressing up and riding in a limo and ordering extravagantly—all of it on Ricky's credit card, where it wouldn't so much as make a dent in the country-and-western superstar's finances—was more than even Hy and I could resist. And then we'd have the weekend to recuperate before he left for South America on Sunday night.

  I tried to concentrate on the weekend's prospects, but my earlier conversation with Glenna Stanleigh kept overriding all other thoughts. A woman had impersonated me at a party. A woman who knew private details of my life, who exhibited an unnatural interest in me.

  Why?

  Who was she?

  Determinedly I channeled my mind to work. Two new cases today, both of them premaritals—singles wanting to investigate the people they were seeing. I'd noticed an upsurge in that type of job over the past year, and while I wasn't completely comfortable with many of the cases, I couldn't afford to pass up the business.

  The first client, Jeffrey Stoddard, said that his “old lady” took a lot of business trips, and he was pretty sure she was playing around on him while on the road; they were supposed to get married next month, but if what he suspected was true, the wedding would be off. The second client, Bea Allen, a stockbroker, was seriously considering a marriage proposal, but before she said yes, she wanted a complete background workup on her suitor; he claimed to be heir to a fortune, but he was so cheap that she found the claim suspect. He might be after her money, in which case she'd probably marry him anyway but insist on a prenuptial agreement.

  Every week we were hired for at least one premarital—and no wonder, considering the paranoid nature of contemporary society. Sadly, in many situations the paranoia is justified; negotiating the tricky maze of human relationships is at best a scary business. We prey on each other: for money, status, power, and sex. We lie to those closest to us: about our backgrounds, prospects, dreams, and sexual histories. The latter is the most frightening of all; with the spread of AIDS, one evening of carelessness can destroy our lives.

  So in the end we eavesdrop and follow—or we hire agencies like mine to do our dirty work.

  Paranoia.

  Yeah, McCone, that's what's making you stare at the ceiling at—now—4:34 in the morning. Paranoia about a woman at a party whose name tag claimed she was you.

  Thursday

  Catch!” I tossed the file on the Bea Allen investigation at Mick Savage.

  My tall blond nephew reached up from where he lounged in his swivel chair, feet propped on the wastebasket, and made a great one-handed catch.

  “You've missed your calling as an outfielder,” I told him.

  “Nah, I put the talent to use in better ways.” He was making an off-color allusion to his relationship with Charlotte Keim, another of my operatives.

  I didn't respond to his conversational gambit, just got down to business. “I need a preliminary background check on this subject ASAP.”

  He opened the file and scanned the sheets stapled inside. “How soon is ASAP?”

  “You call it.”

  “Fifty-five minutes, in your office.”

  “See you there.”

  “If I'm early, you spring for lunch.”

  “Deal.”

  What had begun as a game with us—him naming the amount of time it would take him to come up with what I needed, and me making concessions if he finished the work in a shorter period—had proved to be a particularly effective way of motivating him.

  I left his office—which was also a storage room for the books, files, and spare furniture that neither I nor Anne-Marie Altman and Hank Zahn could find room for—and went along to the more spacious one occupied by Rae Kelleher and Charlotte Keim. Rae was in the field on a retail-pilfering job, but Charlotte sat at her computer, gazing fixedly at the screen as she moved the mouse. She didn't hear me come in, and when I got closer I saw she was playing solitaire.

  “Put the eight of hearts on the seven of spades,” I said.

  She jumped and swiveled around, face coloring as she realized I'd caught her. Keim was a petite, curly-haired brunette in her mid-twenties—too worldly for nineteen-year-old Mick, some would say, if they didn't know my precocious nephew. But Mick had been raised in a showbiz milieu and sometimes made me feel like an innocent; he was more than a match for Charlotte.

  She tried to cover by going on the offensive. “So you've finally got something for me. Good thing, because I've been goosey as hell.” Whenever she was excited or embarrassed, the Texas accent she'd worked to lose ever since leaving Archer City surfaced—as well as what I'd come to think of as her Texas-isms.

  “Yeah, it's a premarital.” I handed her the folder. “And it involves some traveling.”

  “Cool.”

  “Subject's leaving this afternoon for L.A. Don't worry, though; it's only an overnight trip, so you'll be back here for Valentine's Day. If you get something concrete there, we'll wrap it up. If not, you'll be going to Chicago on Monday.”

  She nodded, studying the file.

  I headed for my office and another stack of paperwork, envying her.

  Mick sat d
own across the desk from me in fifty minutes, laden with a stack of downloaded documents, and prepared to give me an oral report.

  “I want to have lunch at Miranda's,” he announced, referring to our favorite waterfront diner. “A burger and some onion rings don't sound too bad.”

  “We didn't set a dollar limit; how come you're not after a more upscale place?”

  “I like Miranda's. Plus we're gonna get enough upscale with Dad and Rae on Friday.”

  “True. So what've you got for me?”

  “Well, this was the original no-brainer. The dude is so rich and old-money that he's probably got a closet full of tuxes and a garage full of Mercedeses. The bucks go back to Gold Rush days, when his great-great-granddaddy and some other robber barons got together and decided to rip off practically everybody. It's all there in that stuff from Forbes and the Journal of California History.”

  I paged through it, nodded. “Go on.”

  “Okay, real estate is his thing. Office parks, shopping centers, condo complexes, and a big chunk of land smack in the middle of the Nevada desert that ain't never gonna be worth nothin’ nohow. The deal is, the guy's got so much money it'll never run out, but he's unlucky as hell.”

  “How so?”

  “I'll give you one example, you can read about the rest. He's got this office park in Milpitas. About a year ago one of his tenants, a Nigerian cab company, declared war on the Arab sanitary-supply service and the Cuban package-delivery firm. Seems they were tossing their trash in the Nigerians’ Dumpster. Insults were exchanged, trash was dumped at each other's doors, and it all ended up in a shoot-out in the parking lot. The Nigerians won, but then they got busted, and the guy was out three tenants.”

  “International intrigue, no less.”

  “You got it. Anyway, from here on out the news gets worse. Dude's done time in the bin—nice private hospital for the outrageously insane. What put him there was holding his ex-wife out a seventeenth-story window at the Beverly Wilshire and threatening to drop her unless she gave him custody of the kids. An LAPD negotiating team put a stop to that caper. And there're indications that lunacy goes at a fast trot throughout the entire family.”

  “Poor Bea Allen!”

  “Yeah. If you want my opinion, the client should either marry him and keep the knives locked up or run like hell. Whatever, she should definitely stay out of the parking lots at his office parks.”

  At four-thirty I was sitting in the armchair by the arching window at the end of the pier, watching the bay vista grow increasingly gloomy as the rain pelted down. A sudden heavier spate thundered onto the roof, and I glanced up, looking for leaks. None so far.

  A tap at the door. I looked around and saw Neal Osborn standing there. Neal was Ted Smalley's significant other: a tweedy, rumpled, bearded, bespectacled secondhand bookseller whose thinning ginger-colored hair frequently stood up in peaks because he finger-combed it while perusing the tomes in his Polk Street store. Neal had once confessed to me that he would rather crawl through somebody's dusty garage or attic in pursuit of a rare first edition than do almost anything else on earth; frequently Ted, also a book lover, joined him on those forays.

  “Hey, there,” I said. “If you're looking for Ted, he left early for a dental appointment.”

  Neal came all the way into the office. “I know. Actually, it's you I'm looking for.”

  “Oh? Well, pull up a chair.”

  He moved one over by mine and sat.

  “So what's on your mind?” I asked.

  “I need to talk to you about Ted. Have you noticed that he's been behaving strangely the past few weeks?”

  “I have, and it's getting worse. Yesterday he worked himself into a state of complete indecision over which model of copier to buy. He insisted on my help, even though I can't change the toner in our old one, and went on and on about this feature versus that feature. We'd get it all decided, and then he'd say, ‘But maybe we should reconsider …’ It wasn't like him at all.”

  “What else?”

  “Well, he's been distracted and very short with everybody. On Monday, Rae told him he was being bitchy, and he said, ‘Why don't you just come right out and call me a bitchy fag?’ None of us knows where that was coming from; nobody's sexuality has ever been an issue around here.”

  “D’ you have any idea what's causing this behavior?”

  I shook my head. “One day, maybe three or four weeks ago, he came in here with some letters for my signature, and I sensed he wanted to talk to me about something but didn't quite know how to get started. I'm afraid I wasn't encouraging, either; I was in the middle of a complicated report that the client was picking up within the hour, so I put him off, told myself I'd talk with him later. But then I forgot, and by the time I thought to approach him, he put me off.”

  “Those're the same kinds of things I've noticed. I've asked him what's wrong several times, and he denies there's a problem. But there is: Most of the time it's as if he's thinking of something other than what we're talking about. And he's taken to calling me at the store for no particular reason—four or five times a day, yet. A lot of the time he's not where he says he's going to be, or when.”

  I reviewed the possibilities. “Do you think he's cheating on you? Or that he thinks you're cheating on him?”

  “No. In either case, he'd bring something like that right out in the open. It's the nature of our relationship.”

  “What about drugs? When a person's as irritable as Ted, you've got to consider the possibility.”

  “I've considered it, as well as other physical problems.”

  We both fell silent, our eyes meeting. The unspeakable lay between us: AIDS.

  “No,” Neal said after a moment, “that's one thing we can rule out. He'd tell me immediately, so I could get tested.”

  Yes, he would. Nothing angered Ted more than infected people who put others at risk. “Well, maybe it's just … some weird phase he's going through.”

  “I wish I could believe that, but I can't.” He hesitated. “What I was wondering, Shar … Could you look into it, on an informal basis?”

  “You want me to investigate Ted ?” It seemed an extreme solution to what was, after all, a purely personal problem.

  “Not really, but maybe you could observe him, try to talk with him. You know what to look for, how to ask questions.”

  “I don't know, Neal. Ted's watched me operate for a lot of years; he might guess what I was doing, and that would put a strain on our friendship.”

  Neal ran long fingers through his unruly hair. “I understand what you're saying, but … Okay, there's more. Ted's not just short-tempered and strange. He's afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Yeah, I can feel it. Sometimes I wake up at night and … You know how you can lie in the dark and know the other person's awake, even if he breathes regularly?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, almost every night I wake up and realize Ted's awake too. But if I say something, he pretends not to be. He's thinking, thinking hard, and there's a feeling of fear in the room.”

  I was silent, remembering times when I'd felt that kind of fear in a dark room.

  “Has anything unusual happened to Ted recently that might account for this?” I asked.

  “Not that he's told me. Up to now, ours has been a somewhat staid and boring household—not that that's necessarily a bad thing. You get into your forties and you start to appreciate a life where the biggest event is a signal-jumper almost running you down in the crosswalk.”

  “Ted was almost run down?”

  “No, me. Crossing to the parking garage from the store last week. No big deal; it's a wonder that on any given day Polk Street isn't littered with maimed pedestrians. So how about it, Shar—will you see what you can find out about all this?”

  I considered. The behavior Neal described and I'd observed certainly was strange for a man who had always been among the most consistent and levelheaded people I knew. And Ted was my frie
nd as well as my employee; whatever he was going through, I wanted to be there for him. There, if need be, in spite of him.

  “Okay,” I said, “what I can do is observe him more closely for a day or two. If that doesn't give me some idea of what's going on with him, I may have to establish a surveillance.”

  “One other thing I wish you'd do …” Neal hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  “I … I've actually snooped through his things, mainly looking for evidence of drug use, but I realized I don't know what to look for. Would you?”

  “Go through your apartment?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Now I hesitated. Prying into Ted's personal effects struck me as going too far. But then I caught the worried look on Neal's face, and a memory from my college days that I'd largely suppressed came to mind.

  One of the residents of the rambling old house on Berkeley's Durant Avenue that I'd shared with an ever-changing group of fellow students had been a woman called Merrily Martin. When she first moved in, the carefree, somewhat ditzy blonde was living proof of a name being destiny, but within six months she became moody, irritable, depressed, and withdrawn. Hank Zahn, who also lived there at the time, suspected drug use and argued that we ought to search her room; I contested the notion hotly, citing Merrily's right to privacy, and Hank gave in. Several weeks later we found Merrily dead in bed of a heroin overdose; a suicide note on the nightstand asked, “Why didn't any of you help me?”

  I'm still a champion of the individual's right to privacy, but I've never again put it ahead of a friend's welfare.

  “Okay,” I said to Neal, “it's one possible way to find the answer quickly.”

  “Thanks.” He took out a case and removed one of the keys. “Here. I've got a spare in the car.”

  I took it and tucked it in my pocket. “Are the two of you coming to Rae and Ricky's Valentine's Day celebration?”

  He nodded.

  “Then if I don't find anything at the apartment, I can check him out tomorrow night and decide where to go from there.”