Trail of the Spellmans Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR TRAIL OF THE SPELLMANS

  “Lisa Lutz’s Spellman books are always hilarious, but Trail of the Spellmans reminded me how serious funny books can be. As precocious as the Spellman kids have always been, they’re only now really coming of age and the result is, yes, hilarious, but also tender and melancholy and full of hard-won wisdom. This one’s going to stay with readers for a long time.” —LAURA LIPPMAN, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE TESS MONAGHAN SERIES

  MORE PRAISE FOR EDGAR AND MACAVITY AWARD NOMINEE LISA LUTZ AND HER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SPELLMAN SERIES

  “The most hilariously dysfunctional family since the Royal Tenenbaums.”

  —MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE

  “This is one of the best comic novels I’ve ever read.”

  —THE GLOBE AND MAIL

  “The love child of Dirty Harry and Harriet the Spy . . . whip-smart sass.” —PEOPLE

  “Delightful.” —USA TODAY

  “Fun and irreverent.” —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  One smart mouthed writer.” —DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK)

  “A series that keeps getting better and better.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “Lie back and enjoy this tale of intergenerational gumshoe mayhem.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  FOR THE FIRST TIME

  in Spellman history, Isabel Spellman, PI, might be the most normal member of her family. Mom has taken on an outrageous assortment of extracurricular activities—with no apparent motive. Dad has a secret. Izzy’s brother and sister are at war—for no apparent reason. And her niece keeps saying “banana” even though she hates bananas.

  That’s not to say that Izzy isn’t without her own troubles. Her boyfriend, Henry Stone, keeps wanting “to talk,” a prospect Isabel evades by going out with her new drinking buddy, none other than Gertrude Stone, Henry’s mother.

  Things aren’t any simpler on the business side of Spellman Investigations. First, Rae is hired to follow a girl, only to fake the surveillance reports. Then a math professor hires Izzy to watch his immaculate apartment while he unravels like a bad formula. And as the questions pile up, Izzy won’t stop hunting for the answers—even when they threaten to shatter both the business and the family.

  In Trail of the Spellmans (Document #5), LISA LUTZ has delivered another knockout adventure in what Library Journal has deemed a “side-splitting series.” This quirky and hilarious family of sleuths provides entertainment for days, and Izzy’s uncommon, unforgettable, undeniably addictive voice leads the way. In addition to writing the Spellman series, Lutz is also the coauthor of Heads You Lose, written with David Hayward.

  Visit Lisa at www.lisalutz.com

  Become a fan at Facebook.com/lisalutz.author

  Follow Lisa @lisalutz

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  • THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS•

  JACKET DESIGN BY JACKIE SEOW

  JACKET ILLUSTRATION BY NOMA BAR

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 SIMON & SCHUSTER

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  The Spellman Files

  Curse of the Spellmans

  Revenge of the Spellmans

  The Spellmans Strike Again

  Heads You Lose (with David Hayward)

  Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Spellman Enterprises, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition February 2012

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lutz, Lisa.

  Trail of the Spellmans : document #5 / Lisa Lutz.—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Women private investigators—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3612.U897T73 2012

  813’.6—dc23

  2011032509

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-0812-0

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-0814-4 (ebook)

  Thank you for purchasing this Simon & Schuster eBook.

  Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Simon & Schuster.

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  Contents

  SURVEILLANCE REPORT: VIVIEN BLAKE

  PART I: SURVEILLANCE

  CHAPTER 1: THE MAN IN THE LIBRARY

  CHAPTER 2: THE WOMAN IN THE NAVY-BLUE RAINCOAT

  CHAPTER 3: THE GIRL WITH THE RAP SHEET

  CHAPTER 4: FILLING IN THE BLANKS

  CHAPTER 5: THE DEMETRIUS EFFECT

  CHAPTER 6: THE GOPHER, THE EAGLE, THE TORTOISE, AND THE WEASEL

  CHAPTER 7: WALTER PERKINS

  CHAPTER 8: DOMESTIC DISTURBANCES

  CHAPTER 9: SIBLING CONFLICT #157

  CHAPTER 10: THE AVOIDANCE METHOD(TM)

  CHAPTER 11: THE WEEKLY SUMMIT

  CHAPTER 12: EDWARD SLAYTER

  CHAPTER 13: TRAPPED . . . AGAIN

  CHAPTER 14: KING, QUEEN, CASTLE, HORSE

  CHAPTER 15: THE FOURTH WALL

  CHAPTER 16: THE IDLE CEO

  CHAPTER 17: SUNDAY-NIGHT DINNER #48

  CHAPTER 18: PAPERWORK

  CHAPTER 19: BAD DETECTIVE

  CHAPTER 20: INTERSECTION

  PART II: THE WALL

  CHAPTER 21: BRICK BY BRICK

  CHAPTER 22: RECREATIONAL SURVEILLANCE

  CHAPTER 23: SHELTER FROM THE STORM

  CHAPTER 24: THE MORNING AFTER

  CHAPTER 25: AFTER THE FLOOD

  CHAPTER 26: HOME

  CHAPTER 27: GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER?

  CHAPTER 28: MEG COOPER/MARGARET SLAYTER

  CHAPTER 29: UNKNOWN CALLER

  CHAPTER 30: THE GRAMMY SPELLMAN EFFECT

  CHAPTER 31: THE SCARLET B

  CHAPTER 32: THE BERNIE PROJECT AND OTHER MISCELLANEOUS ACTIVITIES

  CHAPTER 33: BACK ON PLANET SPELLMAN . . .

  CHAPTER 34: BLAME IT ON PUCCINI

  CHAPTER 35: INSIDE JOB

  CHAPTER 36: THE CONVERSATION

  CHAPTER 37: LOST IN TRANSLATION

  CHAPTER 38: BERNIEGATE

  CHAPTER 39: EDWARD SLAYTER VS. CHARLIE BLACK

  CHAPTER 40: A CHINK IN THE ARMOR

  CHAPTER 41: SURVEILLANCE REPORT: VIVIEN BLAKE

  PART III: RUINS

  CHAPTER 42: THE TREE INCIDENT

  CHAPTER 43: MORE EVIDENCE

  CHAPTER 44: SMOKE FUMES

  CHAPTER 45: HOW TO NEGOTIATE EVERYTHING

  CHAPTER 46: OLD HABITS

  CHAPTER 47: GENETICS 101

  CHAPTER 48: DRIVING MRS. SPELLMAN

  CHAPTER 49: THE BLAKE FAKE

  CHAPTER 50: TAXI DRIVER

  CHAPTER 51: THE PORTRAIT OF DORA MAAR

  CHAPTER 52: THE LAST SUPPER1

  CHAPTER 53: GOOD-BYE, WALTER<
br />
  CHAPTER 54: $$ JUSTICE 4 MERRI-WEATHER $$ AND A FEW OTHERS

  CHAPTER 55: GOOD-BYE, GRAMMY

  CHAPTER 56: THE SPARROW FLEES THE NEST

  CHAPTER 57: HIDING OUT

  CHAPTER 58: PROPOSITIONS

  CHAPTER 59: THE COUP

  CHAPTER 60: FALLOUT

  TWENTY-ONE

  APPENDIX

  AFFIDAVITS AGAINST BERNIE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SURVEILLANCE REPORT: VIVIEN BLAKE

  I do my job. I watch. I take notes. I snap pictures and record video. I document subjects’ activities through a filter of twenty years of disassociation. I don’t judge. I don’t manipulate the evidence. I simply report my findings to the client. The client can use the information however they see fit. At least that’s the line I feed them. But the truth is always a murkier business.

  November 2

  2330 hrs

  Female subject, 5’5”, 125 lbs, dark brown hair, wearing blue jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt over a dark green military jacket, exits a San Francisco apartment building at Twenty-sixth and Noe. She walks east down the street, scanning the parked cars. She presses a remote key and looks for a flash of headlights. A BMW winks in the distance. Female subject spins in a circle, checking her perimeter; approaches car; gets inside; and starts the engine. She drives east down to South Van Ness Avenue and makes a left turn, stopping on the corner of Seventeenth and South Van Ness at the establishment of Oscar’s Auto. Subject drives vehicle into covered garage. Unable to establish a visual on subject for fifteen minutes.

  2345 hrs

  Subject and an unknown male (midforties, heavyset, wearing blue mechanic’s jumpsuit with the Oscar’s Auto logo embroidered on the breast pocket) exit the office of establishment. They approach a tow truck with the same logo painted on the side. Subject slips an unidentifiable object into her pocket and jumps into a truck with unknown male. Investigator follows subject vehicle to a liquor store. Unknown male enters the store and leaves three minutes later with a large brown bag (about the size of a six-pack of beer).1

  The tow truck returns subject to the residence on Twenty-sixth Street where she was previously seen exiting. Subject rings the buzzer. (Could not establish unit number.) Female subject then enters the building and all visual contact is lost.

  The preceding events would appear innocent enough to the naked eye, but let me enlighten you as to what the naked eye missed just a few hours earlier that evening: Female Subject met the owner of the BMW in a bar; Female Subject was not of legal drinking age; Female Subject was not the owner of the vehicle taken to Oscar’s repair shop. Finally—and how could you know this?—Oscar’s Auto is a well-known chop shop, doing an arthritic limbo under the radar of the law. Subject, based on my three weeks of surveillance, was a regular menace to society, masquerading as a high-achieving coed.

  My phone rang just as I was about to end the surveillance and head home. The caller ID said “The Tortoise.” Someone had been tampering with my phone.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “I don’t know, Dad.” For the record, I wasn’t withholding information. I really didn’t know.

  “I’m tired of always being alone in the house.”

  “You’re not alone.”

  “Other than You Know Who.”

  “Why doesn’t You Know Who have a nickname yet?” I asked.

  “I think we’re going with ‘You Know Who’ as a nickname.”

  “Kind of messes with our animal theme, don’t you think?”

  “Sometimes you got to break protocol.”

  “True,” I said. I couldn’t have agreed more.

  “I’m lonely.”

  “Sorry to hear that, Mr. Tortoise.”

  “And I hate my nickname. I should be able to come up with my own.”

  “Did you call for a chat?”

  “Dinner did not go over very well.”

  “The roast?” I asked.

  “Inedible.”

  “And that’s something coming from you. Did Mom blame me?”

  “No, she took full responsibility.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Origami or pie making, I don’t remember.”

  “Those are two very different things, Dad.”

  “Any action tonight?”

  Silence.

  “Are you there?” Dad said. I could hear him tapping his finger on the phone, like it was an old transistor radio.

  “I thought we were no longer sharing information.”

  “Only on cases we’re working separately. So, any action?” Dad repeated.

  “Not unless you consider studying or watching TV—or both—action.”

  “Good. Can you drop by the house on your way back? I need the surveillance camera for tomorrow.”

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “You know better than to ask questions like that.”

  I waited outside the Noe Valley apartment for another five minutes, gathering my thoughts. Female subject peered out of the window, checking the empty street, and then defenestrated herself, hanging from the window frame and dropping four feet to the ground. She then sauntered down the street in the direction of her apartment, just over a mile away.

  After my conversation with the Tortoise, I made a quick U-turn and watched female subject through my rearview mirror. I had to ask myself whether I was doing my job or if I was an accessory after the fact.

  At home, I found my father staring at a stack of paperwork that had to be filed. Filing always made him sad, borderline depressed, and since he thought he’d seen the end of those days, to have them return only stoked his sadness. He pressed the intercom button when he saw me.

  “The Gopher has landed,” he said.

  “I really wish you’d stop that,” I said.

  “I can’t,” he helplessly replied.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “The Eagle2 is on the tarmac.”

  “It’s just pathetic,” I muttered as I left the room.

  The Eagle was indeed on the tarmac (or the couch, as it is commonly known), watching the evening news.

  On the drive to Spellman headquarters I debated, as I have over the last three months, how much information I should divulge. I’m a spectacular liar (“magician of the truth” is the new phrase I’m working with). I’ve studied deception enough to know the universal tells, and I can embody honesty to virtually anyone, except a member of my family. With them I have to turn my behavior inside-out, assume a liarlike demeanor at all times—toss in sarcasm with the truth. A salad of honesty and deception is the only way I can get away with an untruth. My point is that I was planning on lying to my parents about the evening’s events and there is a particular way to go about it.

  “Did the Sparrow flee the nest at all this evening?” my mother asked, staring at the evening news.

  The Sparrow did indeed flee the nest, and another nest, and then she stole a car. With the right delivery, I could both manage a lie and have it read like the truth.

  “Not unless you count a study break of grand theft auto,” I sarcastically replied.

  “Write it up,” said Mom. “I think it might be time to tell the Blakes that this surveillance is merely a drain on their bank account.”3

  “Maybe we wait just a little bit longer,” I replied.

  “Why?” my mother asked suspiciously. “That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “It’s finals week. She could be distracted.”

  I fetched a beer from the fridge and sat down on the couch next to my mom.

  “Don’t forget to write the report,” Mom said. “It’s always better to do it when it’s fresh in your mind.”

  “‘Subject remained in her apartment for five hours studying.’” I spoke as if into a tape recorder. “It shouldn’t take very long to type that up.”

  Silence finally set in.

  Television is the perfect anecdote for unwanted conversation. I don’t kn
ow how humans ever survived without it.

  After a few bars of the grating evening-news theme song, an earnest middle-aged man related a story about a brutal triple-murder-followed-by-suicide in Vallejo. He looked appropriately grave for two full seconds and then turned to his female counterpart.

  She nodded, furrowed her brow, and said, “A tragedy . . . And now, I believe we have some breaking news about the tree sitters in Berkeley.”

  The camera shifted to the image of a khaki-and-windbreaker-clad newscaster in front of the oak grove on the UC Berkeley campus. Over the hum of protesters and bullhorns, the newscaster shouted into the microphone.

  “For a week now, tree sitters working in shifts have lived on the three-hundred-year-old oak tree in protest of a campus development project that would require the trees’ removal. Negotiations began last week but have stalled . . . University officials are once again at odds with the environmental activists who have proven to be worthy adversaries in the past . . .”

  Just then my father entered the room and planted himself next to me on the couch. “You have to admire their dedication,” he said.

  “I want to know when they use the restroom,” my mother said.

  “That’s what the bucket is for,” I said.

  The newscaster continued his report. “. . . The tree sitters have managed to maintain a constant vigil by working in shifts. In the middle of the night there was a changing of the guards, when the police were called away by a disturbance in the sculpture garden . . .”

  The camera panned over to one of the grand old oaks and closed in on the tree sitter du jour. The reporter continued. “Currently the police are trying to find a safe and peaceful way to end the standoff. We will keep you posted on the latest developments.”

  The news cut to an Ivory Soap commercial. My mother picked up her cell phone, pressed number three on her speed dial, and waited until the voice mail kicked in.

  “Rae. This is your mother calling. Get the hell out of that tree right now!”

  Part I

  SURVEILLANCE

  (September)

  THE MAN IN THE LIBRARY

  For reasons that will forever remain a mystery, my sister scheduled the client meeting at the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library—specifically, the government section, which is low traffic, offering privacy for a new client intake. The file was left on my desk with all the relevant details, including the time and place of the meeting and a brief description of the client: male, five feet eleven, brown hair, brown eyes, fortyish, average in every way (apparently his own description). The only other detail in the newly minted file was the client’s contact information and his name: Adam Cooper.