The Best Private Eye In Texas
Electronic bugs, infra-red film, gigolos, and 38's aren't all a private detective needs—but they help.
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The strawberry blonde hair betrays country antecedents and the long, finely wrought legs still retain the muscle tone of seven years desultory ballet lessons back in Lufkin. Katherine is 25, a fashion model who looks like a small-busted Ann-Margaret, high school cheerleader come to the city, bringing with her a bluesy rural looseness and a casual approach to personal relations that tends strongly in the direction of nymphomania, a penchant her husband finds, well, disconcerting. He wants a divorce, but he wants child custody and an easy settlement with it, and he figures Dudley Bell can help get them.
Thursday night, not late. Katherine is in her weekly group therapy session, six floors up in a blacked out office building on Buffalo Speedway. Through the 12X binoculars you can see her from half a mile off, therapeutically rapping away in confident security. Casey is a mile to the north in an MG, connected to Dudley by two-way walkie-talkie, prepared to follow her if she leaves in that direction; Dudley is facing south; those are her only options.
Dudley is in a rented car, the only kind he will drive; he used to have a white El Dorado with police antennae until it proved too noticeable in one case. During the day he often uses motorcycles—"best damn things for surveillance you ever saw"—carrying a few spare shirts and helmets: a quick stop, new shirt and helmet, and you've got a whole new person on your tail.
Whenever warranted he uses airplanes: "You can loop around all day drinking beer and follow someone all over the state of Texas and they'll never know it." At night you press fluorescent tape into the rain gutters of the followee's car and circle them like an airborn bloodhound, dropping below the FAA's 1,000 foot minimum altitude to catch quick turns down wooded side streets.
She's late coming out, and the cars have been sitting three hours now. Dudley has given no signs of impatience, sipping Dr. Pepper and chain smoking Marlboro's, peering through the glasses toward the parking lot and the office. "You hafta get used to sittin' still for a long time when you're on a stakeout. I had to sit in a damn car for 59 hours one time, taking No Doz to stay awake and pissin' in bottles. Damn car was fulla empty cans and sandwich wrappers. If you just get outta the car for five minutes to go to the john, you might lose your subject." Wait some more. Turn on the radio a little bit, drum fingers on dash board. Another smoke, one more Dr. Pepper—tedium. Peter Gunn never had to put up with this. Watch the passing cars. Look up twice a minute to search through the binoculars for the green Camaro in the parking lot. ..."I've sat like this in supermarket parking lots, y'know, and you'd be surprised at the things you'll see. You can spend three hours at night in any shopping center parking lot in this town and see ten couples drive up separately and leave together."
"Here she comes," screeches through the walkie-talkie. From the hedge-bounded church parking lot down the street Casey can see the door. "Subject is getting into car…can't see the license plates from here but it looks like hers…nobody with her…looks like subject turning this way …coming this way, I've got her…"
"Eight-six-seven, this is four-five-six, keep on her, we'll be along in a minute." The rented Cadillac rockets out of the parking lot, wheeling crazily across three lanes of traffic to make the illegal U-turn, boredom left behind with the empty cans of Dr. Pepper.
"Entering the Southwest Freeway, going west…" The Cadillac flashes past red lights like so many telephone poles, clipping eighty, hitting the freeway at ninety, weaving now across five lanes of cars, back and across, looking for openings, hundred and ten," Exit at Chimney Rock.…" She drives like a country girl on Saturday night, hauling ass, no turn signals. "Turning south on Chimney Rock.…"
"Eight-six-seven, hit your taillights." Two tiny red dots on a small car a mile ahead flash off-on, off-on, "Have you in sight, pull off, we'll take it now.…" Casey and Dudley trade off, trading later again and once again, following the green Camaro deep into the dark sterile suburbs that sprawl endlessly to the south and west of Houston. If she stops for a red light her nearest tail pulls over, two hundred yards back, turns off his lights and into a side street, waiting for her to move again. If she makes a light and it flips to red, no matter, truck on through, eighty miles an hour down parallel side streets.
She ends up at an apartment. More waiting, addresses and license plate numbers to check, names to learn. It will go on like this for a week or more, waiting for a pattern to develop, a Schedule of Adultery. Casey will follow her on other nights, together with other part-time assistants, policemen moonlighting for extra cash. Easy job. Dudley is on it tonight because it's the first day on Katherine's case and he wants to get a feel for it. It's the first night of what will become total surveillance, the end of philandering freedom.
By Wednesday of the next week they have a pattern of sorts: Hot Blood. The night before, Katherine had gone to another apartment, gotten stoned and made it with two men simultaneously while Casey, who was getting $30 an hour to observe all this cuckholding, was cranking on a camera from outside a window. The stage was set for Phase Two, the adoption of one lawyer's First Maxim: "When you've got a big divorce case, hire a gigolo."
(Another digression, this time into the male chauvinism of police terminology: In the public mind, the word "gigolo" conjures up notions of suave Italians squiring lonely and elderly female tourists around the Via Veneto, as much a Mediterranean public service as a crafty way to earn a living. By contrast, the designation "whore" is a sharply pejorative one, carrying images of musty back rooms and dark alley perversions. In reality, they are but the male and female versions of the same general animal, offering the same services in the same manner, the only difference being that the male is a somewhat scarcer breed and commands a vastly higher price. Dudley employs both.)
Robert is a gigolo. He combines all of those assets that women find attractive—tall, dark and handsome, quick-minded, cool-headed and a good lover, a slight touch of lustful nastiness—into a powerful woman-killing package, a heady inducement to adultery for even the most faithful of wives. He works as a bartender, lives well, and is a friend of Dudley's; he free-lances as a gigolo more by inclination than profession, an easy way of picking up some spare change; his attentions to Katherine will earn him $2,000.
On Thursday Robert wanders into the office where Katherine is working. He's lost, he says, wants to use the phone. Sure, she answers, glands firing already. He calls, party isn't there, will call back in 20 minutes, so he waits. They chat. Twenty minutes later the call comes, he leaves. With a date for the weekend. Gigolos earn their wages.
The next day, Katherine's husband is in Dudley's office to hear the tape from a phone conversation between his wife and Robert. A stubby, owlish little man who patently had no business marrying so high-powered a wench in the first place, he is a thirtyish, wealthy investment broker who emits the high-pitched karmic whine of a man whose nerves are riding the jangling edge of breakdown. He talks tough, macho, about his wife, how he hates her anyway and has wanted rid of her for a long time, all the while eating downers and nervously lighting two cigarettes at the same time; one can hear the contradictions colliding in his head, sense the ulcer germinating in his belly. He shakes hands with Robert, wanly telling him that he hopes he'll enjoy it. He manages a dirty joke and swallows a smile. Robert, still earning his money, says it's a dirty business and he isn't looking forward to it. In a supreme test of masochism, husband listens to wife describing to another man the pleasure she intends for him—"I'm gonna ride you, dragon-slayer, you're gonna be King"—and the husband laughs. Then he swallows another Valium and wanders aimlessly out.
Next afternoon, frantically. Katherine has broken another date and wants to go out tonight. Now, honey. Rush, "Go out and rent a car for this stupid tool, he can't pick up a classy chick in that wreck of his…get him a Riviera "Off to Motorola for some gear, find the cameras, rent a video recorder. Oh, Jesus, and film, get some film. Out to Robert's to rig up the house. Get the room-mate out of the way. Okay, where's the bedroom? where's that other microphone?
Robert leaves at eight to go pick up Katherine; he'll take her to dinner, then they'll go boogeyin', come back to the house about midnight to smoke some dope and Get It On. Performance. There are two bathrooms adjoining the bedroom and one has been blocked off, the medicine cabinet removed and a hole cut in the wall. On the other side, in the bedroom, a poster has been placed over the hole and camouflaged (had time allowed, it would have been one-way glass); the bed has been turned to the most photogenic angles, infra-red bulbs installed, microphones hidden and wires laid under the rug. In the bathroom, craning through the slot in the wall, is a tripod for the Sony TV camera (closed-circuit video) and the 8mm. movie camera; the tape recorders are tested out, levels found and light meters read. Almost ready, a few last touches: Move a couple chairs and an ice chest full of Dr. Pepper into the bathroom, wrap anything that might prove noisy with towels, test the volume on the stereo so it won't drown out bedridden grunting and such, hide everything that doesn't belong there. Empty out the ashtrays…straighten out the bed. Wait again. Casey will call when they leave to come to the house. Waiting now, nervous energy forcing hurried searches for anything forgotten or done wrong. Test everything again. Bounce around on the bed to make sure the creaking springs come through on the tape.
Casey calls, they're coming! Scramble. Lock the door, turn off the lights. Into the bathroom, bolt it, turn off the light…wait…You hear the door rattling as they come in, small talk in the living room. Get her a drink. Dudley has the earphones on, straining into the monitors to hear conversations in the living room ("Christ, what if she wants to do it in the living room where there aren't any cameras.") Robert turns on the stereo, at a pre-tested level that will muffle the sound of the movie camera without obscuring all that grunting, puts on enough records to last for hours.
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