The Gentlemen's Hour

42

The small shop is a creepy little place in a strip mall in Mira Mesa, its customer base being a few actual PIs, a lot of wannabes, hard-core paranoids, and not a few of the grassy-knoll, wrap-your-head-in-tinfoil-the-government-is-attacking-you-with-gamma-rays set who won’t buy off the Internet because the CIA, FBI, Homeland Security, and Barbara Bush are all tracking their downloads. The store usually is filled with a lot of browsers who just like electronic gadgets and cool spy shit.

And there’s a lot of cool spy shit in there—bugs, listening devices, cameras that look like anything other than cameras, computer cookie devices, computer anticookie devices, computer antianticookie devices . . .

Boone finds his first item: a LiveWire Fast Track Ultrathin Real-Time GPS tracking device. It’s a black box about 21/2 inches square, with a magnet attachment. He picks up a ten-day battery to go with it, then looks for the next item on his mental list.

The Super Ear BEE 100 Parabolic is a nasty and effective piece of intrusive work, a cone-shaped listening device capable of picking up a conversation from a good city block away. Boone picks out a compatible digital recorder with the appropriate cord and plug-in, and decides that he has what he needs for the job. He already has the camera—it came with the basic Private Investigator Starter Kit along with the cynicism, a manual of one-liners, and a saxophone sound track.

He walks up to the counter and says to the clerk, “You talk to me in Vulcan, I’m puking on your floor.”

“Hey, Boone.”

“Hey, Nick,” Boone says. When Nick isn’t working, he’s playing Dungeons and Dragons. It’s just the way it is. Boone hands Nick two credit cards, one his business, the other personal, and asks Nick to run the tracker and the listening device separately. He’ll toss a little time onto his hourly billing to cover the cost of the Super Bee and hopefully Dan will never have to find out about it.

It’s a little sleazy, but it’s really for Dan’s protection. He hasn’t asked Boone for audio evidence of his wife’s alleged infidelity, but Boone’s going to get it anyway, even though it creeps him out.

What usually happens is that the wronged party confronts the cheater (“I had you followed by a private investigator”) and the guilty spouse just gives it up. But every once in a while the philandering partner goes the “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it” route, just stonewalls and denies it all, which puts both the PI and his client into a bad situation.

(Get a group of PIs in a bar after a few stiff pops and they’ll tell you some beauties, the responses ranging from the simple

“Nu-unnnh”

—that is, it just didn’t happen—all the way to Boone’s personal favorite, “She’s an event planner and we were working on your birthday party. Surprise, honey!”)

Most people don’t want to believe that their loved one is cheating on them, some of them so desperately that they’ll jump at any out. Even showing them photos or video of their beloved going into and out of a house or hotel room won’t do it, because they’ll cling to the flimsiest excuses. One that seems to be really popular lately is “We’re just emotional friends.”

Emotional friends. You gotta love the phrase. The rationale is that the cheatee hasn’t met the cheater’s emotional needs, so he/she had to go “outside the relationship” to feel “emotionally validated.” So the cheatee is asked to believe that their loved one and the other man/woman spent the hour in the motel or the night in the house just talking about their feelings, and the desperate cheatee goes for it.

Unless you have a tape of the spouse working out more physical feelings. The grunts, the moans, the heavy breathing (“What, honey, you were planning my party at the

gym

?”), the sweet whispered nothings, are the collective, cliché smoking gun, but no decent PI wants to lay that on an already hurting spouse unless he has to.

So what you do is record the main event and stick it away somewhere unless or until you absolutely have to pull it out. You don’t tell the client that you have it, because most of them can’t resist the temptation to listen to it, even though you advise them against it.

But you have it if you need it. It’s for your client’s protection and your own.

So Boone puts the eavesdropping technology on his own card so Dan doesn’t see the expense, ask about it, and end up with the sounds of his wife’s illicit lovemaking on his mental playlist.

Nick runs the item across the scanner and says, “You got the software for this?”

“Hang hooked me up.”

“Cool,” Nick says. “This new version of this tracker? You can set it for one-, five-, or ten-second blings, it has a motion alarm and a detachable motion alert. And it keeps a record of every place the vehicle goes. One eighty-one and sixty-three cents, please.”

Boone pays cash, takes the receipt, and gets out of there before he has to listen to a conversation about how the Venusians are systematically injecting truth serum into your Quaker Instant Oatmeal packages.

He’s back in the parking lot when two guys come up to him and one of them sticks a gun in his ribs.