There are a few things in this world I have no patience with: clients who don't pay, women who cheat on their husbands, and husbands who put up with their wives cheating on them.
Unfortunately, in my line of work, I deal with a shitload of all three. I'm a private detective.
I make one exception to my list: I put up with a cheating woman if I'm the guy she's cheating with. I don't do that too often, but I have done it. I'm not proud of it, I guess, but I'm not ashamed, either. There are some women out there who are going to cheat, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. They might as well cheat with me.
I handle a lot of cases about infidelity. It's a specialty, you might say. After a while the cases all started to look the same. But one came in last week that was different.
The case involved an old client who, years earlier, had stiffed me my fee until I got tired of it and grabbed him by the lapel and pushed him up against the wall. I told him who was who and what was what and read him the riot act in three languages upward, downward, and backward. He paid after that. You don't mess with Sonny Biggs – that's me -- over money.
Myron Hansfield was the client's name. He'd inherited a lot of wealth from his old man, a bigwig in the local real estate business, and somehow he'd managed to hold on to his money despite having, from what I could see, no obvious talent and no force of personality whatsoever. Myron put the sniv in sniveling and the milque in milquetoast.
He had hired me several years earlier when he thought an employee was swindling him. The employee was clever, and it was a long, complicated job, but we finally caught the SOB and turned him over to the cops. I even managed to get most of Myron's money back. Myron was a client, and I always do my best for my clients, even when they're limp-wristed sissy men like Myron. The final fee was a big one, and when I finally pressured him into paying it and he forked over the dough I had to admit I was feeling somewhat better about Myron. But only somewhat. I wasn't too disappointed when the matter was done. It was years until I saw him again, and all during that time I never missed him. Seeing guys like him with that kind of money is a constant reminder that the world is a shit shed out of toilet paper.
Last week, Tuesday morning, I saw him again standing outside my office door when I was on my way to work. He was turned away from me looking at my name etched on the door: Sonny Biggs, P.I., Inc.
"Hello, Myron," I greeted him with no warmth. "Social visit? Or business?"
"Business, I'm afraid, Mr. Biggs," he said. "My . . . ." I interrupted him before he could finish.
"Call me Sonny, Myron. You know that."
I opened the door and ushered him in. We walked into my personal office and closed the door. I sat at my desk and kicked my heels up and he slumped in the rickety wooden chair on the other side. His thin, spineless body seemed to twist and collapse on itself in the chair. He was pathetic.
But, still, he was rich. And I could always use more money.
I looked at his face and his eyes were red and his face was splotchy. Shit, he'd been drinking and crying. My respect for him, low already, disappeared like steam over bad coffee.
"O.K., Myron," I said to him. "Spill it. What's going on and what do you want me to do?"
"Sonny, I think my wife is having an affair."
To say that did not surprise me would be an understatement. There's a certain kind of man, a man with money and no guts, that attracts a certain kind of woman, a woman that knows that once she's got the man's money she can do whatever she wants and the man's not going to do a damn thing about it. And Myron was that certain kind of man.
He laid a color photo of a hot blonde woman on my desk. His hand was shaking. Really, I was not going to be able to take much more of Myron. I glanced at the photo but I knew everything I needed to know by looking at his face.
"So what do you want, Myron? Stakeout? Photos? Stained clothing?" I stared hard at him across the desk for what seemed like a very long time. I stayed quiet while Myron obviously was trying to suppress the snuffling sounds welling up from his spindly chest.
Myron finally spoke up.
"I just need to know, Sonny. I need to see, see the proof. I'm not sure what I'm going to do."
That's because you're not a man, Mr. Hansfield, I was thinking to myself. But I didn't say it.
"O.K., Myron. I think I've got the picture. Let me handle this. It will take three days. I'll meet you again on Friday. Lunchtime."
"So soon?" he said. "How can you know you'll be done by then?"
"Myron, I know where you live. I know what she looks like. And I know what I'm doing."
"Do you need a retainer?" he asked me.
"No, Myron, I know you're good for it this time. We'll settle up when it's all over."
I saw him out the door quickly. I wanted to get him out of my sight before I couldn't control the urge to slap him. That would be bad client development, as they say.
It didn't take me long to figure out how I was going to handle this. I handle these cases all the time, and I've got a routine. Stakeout, tracking devices, zoom lenses – I've got it all.
I did what I had to do the next couple of days, and, sure enough, by Thursday afternoon I knew I was ready to meet my client. We made an appointment for noon the next day.
Friday morning I stopped as I always do at my favorite diner before getting to work. I had my usual breakfast, the way I liked it: eggs runny, bacon greasy, coffee black as tar.
Two hours later I was at my desk, putting the last touches on the proof I had in a manila envelope, big block letters HANSFIELD CASE stamped on the front, when my secretary Vera showed Myron in. He limped over to the chair in his fancy shoes and thin-shouldered suit and sat down.
He quivered. He'd known what was coming, and he'd had three days to prepare for it, and still he shook like a baby in the hands of a psychotic day care provider.
Finally, he steadied himself enough to speak. "Was I right?" he asked.
"Yes, Myron, you were right. Your wife is having an affair."
"Oh God!" he cried and his mouth opened wide and let out a sob. I wanted to stuff the red paperweight, sitting on my desk and shaped like a '66 Mustang convertible, into that big open mouth, but I didn't.
"It's Wilson, isn't it" he asked. "Goddamn Wilson. My project manager, beside me all these years. He always had an eye for Svetlana. I could tell. Was it him?"
"Myron, listen to me," I said to him. It was rough for him; I knew that. He was a contemptible, spineless little shit, but he was my client. He had rough news coming to him, and it was my job to make it go down without him heaving it back up all over my Pledge-shined mahogany desktop.
"I have evidence, Myron," I explained to him in my best explaining voice. "It's solid evidence. It's good evidence. But you don't close the case until you've got all the pieces in the puzzle. You understand?"
He looked at me. There were a lot of things in that look: betrayal, fear, uncertainty. Understanding wasn't one them.
"No. I don't," he said.
"Myron, what I'm trying to tell you is this. There's one more thing that has to be done here. One more step to take before I can close this case. A man like me has a reputation. A code. I'm not going to make an accusation of cheating against a person until I've done everything I have to do. And there's one more thing to do here. We need to go see your wife. Right now."
Myron's twitchy face at that moment was a pasty, damp battlefield between one side that didn't like my advice and another side that didn't want to contradict me. Fortunately, the side that didn't want to cross me won.
"O.K., if you say so, Mr. --- Sonny. I'm not sure why you want to do that, but if you say so we can."
"I do say so," I said. "Right now."
I was up and on my way to the door before he could change his mind.
"You drive, Myron," I said.
Myron had a nice car, I'll give him that. A Mercedes sedan. He couldn't drive worth anything, but it didn't matter. I didn't say much to him on the way to his house, 15 minutes away. He didn't say much, either, at first. Then, five minutes from the house, he let loose.
"Sonny, I don't know if I can do this. What are we going to tell her? What's she going to say? I don't know if I can stand it."
You can stand it a hell of a lot better than me pushing you out the car door, I thought, but I didn't say it. Or do it.
"Myron, you don't need to say anything until I tell you to," I said. "I'll do the talking. I know what to say. You just take your cue from me."
I didn't have to do too much more of this sort of thing because by that time Myron had pulled into the driveway of his house. It was a big house. He pulled up to the front. We got out. We walked to the door, him in front, me behind.
"It's your house, Myron," I said. "You don't have to knock. Let's surprise the missus."
We went in. We started walking toward the kitchen. Before we got there, out of the kitchen doorway popped Svetlana.
There are some damn fine women in this town, but not a lot of them as fine as Svetlana. She looked like she'd just walked off the pages of a pinup magazine. A thick mane of wild blonde hair. Eyes of blue flame. Full cherry lips. A figure that made hourglasses blush, and legs that made dancers weep. And she was showing a lot of her figure, too, because at that very moment Mrs. Myron Hansfield was wearing an ice-blue satin chemise and four-inch heels, and she had an opened champagne bottle in one hand and two champagne flutes in the other. It was obvious she'd been expecting something, or someone, but we were not it, or him.
Her mouth made the most perfect O I'd ever seen on a human face. And I've seen some good ones.
