Private Investigations

Chapter 22 of Lady Slipper Farm and the Summer People, a Serial Novel by Holly Nadler

In earlier chapters: Actress Chichi Taten is in a hate/hate end-of-marriage with rakish movie star, Nick Diehl. In legal haggling, Chichi won their apartments at One Hyde Park and The Dakota in New York, but Nick garnered their Chilmark house and the jewel-in-the-crown, Vineyard friends and parties. But nothing can stop Chichi. If she’s not crashing the first high-profile party of the season by roaring in on a Harley, she’s turning on her biggest weapon: her irresistible charm. Is it real? Is it acting? Or is it, as Nick maintains, mental illness? 

Lori White had almost completely forgotten she’d placed a quirky business ad in the local yellow pages over two years ago:

'Private Investigations, prompt & discrete; no official licensure, but this amateur detective has read 1000s of mystery novels from M.C. Beaton to Robert B. Parker.'

Truly, the whole thing had been a goof, coming out of a night at The Lamppost with the gals from the rental agency. Gwyn had mentioned a cop she was dating who moonlighted as a P.I.

Mandy had said, “How much work could there be for a private detective on the island? Where the biggest crime is falling out of your dinghy after one too many Rolling Rocks?”

Gwyn said, “My cop friend told me there’re always people wondering who their significant other is shagging. Or is it wondering ‘whom’ their significant other is shagging?”

Mandy said, “When in doubt, go with ‘whom’. It makes you sound more educated.”

Gwyn, the Wharton Business School grad pointed out, “Unless you really are educated.”

Lori’s pert face with its fringe of brown curls glanced over her tankard of beer. “I’ve always wanted to be a private dick!”

Some fun was had over the jargon, but a plan was hatched for Lori to place an ad in the telephone book. Kris had pointed out that you needed a license to operate as a private investigator. Lori countered that if she admitted right in the ad that no such license existed, then no way was she breaking the law.

“I’ll betcha not a single fed in the world ever calls to question my bona fides!”

She’d been correct about that. On the other hand, neither, ever, had a single customer called to hire her services. Until last Tuesday. The woman herself had certainly entered into the spirit of the enterprise by meeting Lori at the tucked-away bar on the back side of the Sandbar Grill. She was dressed in jeans, a canvas camo jacket, huge black sunglasses, and a skull-enveloping blue cotton scarf.

It wasn’t until Lori and the client had plunged into ten minutes of intense conversation that Lori realized why the woman had bothered to cover up with such scrupulosity: It wasn’t only because her mission was sensitive, it was because she happened to be a famous actress. Lori recognized her by her voice and certain facial tics – her head cocked, a close-mouthed grin adding dimples to her cheeks – that she’d long exhibited on stage and screen.

It was Chichi Tatem.

And now they were meeting again, a week later, at the same backdoor bar facing a Laundromat and a moped rental dealership.

Lori’s heart was heavy because this job had turned out to have all sorts of ethical ramifications, plus a possible betrayal of friends. Yeesh! As she slid onto a stool beside the once-again heavily wrapped-up actress, with Lori pulling a notebook from her handbag, she rued the misbegotten day she’d placed that ad for a P.I. firm, even though, at the time, it had seemed like a totally nifty extra cap to place on her head, in a resort where everyone worked at extra-cap jobs, save for those who’d moved here with trust funds, may they fry to a crisp in hell . . .

“So you followed him?” asked Chichi in a breathless tone.

Lori, who wore sunglasses herself to obscure her expression, nonetheless had to hold back from rolling her eyes. Of course she had followed him. That part of the job had been a piece of cake.

Chichi had given her directions to the house she and Nick Diehl had bought a few years back. It was down a winding lane in the Makoniki area on the heavily wooded northwest shore. She followed a rutted dirt road, turning right at a small sculpture of flat stones, then another right where this smaller and still more rutted road forked, then left at a sign that read ‘lost’, then another sign and an even narrower, bumpier road with a sign that declared, ‘more lost’. Typical Vineyard, the message being, ‘You can just go screw yourself before you ever find this millionaire’s house.’

On the first day of her surveillance detail, Lori waited in her crummy old tan Toyota, parked in a thicket of scrub oaks behind the ‘lost’ sign. Her client had told her Mr. Diehl would be driving a fancy green retro car called something like a “Boogaty,” but instead Lori had spotted the insanely handsome movie star in a battered red pickup truck with a landscaper’s decal along the side. Good for him. Somewhere in his garage that Boogaty baby was stashed away, but he knew better than to flash it around like the motor equivalent of bling.

During her first two days on the job, Lori was reminded of what all her favorite writers of detective novels could never over-state: Stake outs and tailing could bore the living daylights out of the gumshoe. And in the real world, no fun stuff broke up the tedium. No bullets whizzed over her head. She received no visits from thugs who threatened to pound her into the pavement unless she backed off the case, at which point she could chase them away with wise-cracks and a couple of tae kwon do chops.

In actuality, Lori White could crack wise with the best of them, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe included, but she had never taken a single martial arts class. The best she could hope for would be a fox trot back-flip that could knock the doofus sideways, should he be standing just so, and if she wore heels instead of – oh, forget about it!

The truth was, following Nick Diehl around (after the hours of waiting for him in the thicket of shrub oak as she ate an egg salad sandwich and half a bag of Oreos, and read back issues of all the magazines she could cop from the nice librarians at the West Tisbury library, all she discovered was that he shopped at the down island Cronig’s, was performing some DIY work on his house that involved stops at plumbing outlets and lumber yards and then, whoa Nellie! . . . on the third day, he rolled his truck down the road off Tea Lane in Chilmark to Lady Slipper Farm.

It was all in Lori’s notebook, all of it gleaned as she peered through binoculars from the single hilltop on the property: On the third, fourth, and fifth day, the man who earned four million dollars per picture (she read this in People Magazine), was helping Sam turn over the back five acres by taking turns with the farm’s aged John Deere tractor pulling some whirly-giggy thing that made giant ziti designs in the soil.

He rough-housed with the seven dogs who seemed to love him almost as much his younger fawning femme fans.

He helped both Sam and Nandika fill up the truck with everything they could gather for the farm-stand: tin buckets of salad greens, beets, potatoes, onions, radishes – it was all right there in Lori’s notebook, not that she thought her client required this detailed an accounting. But still. It was her first private dicking job, so she figured she needed to go that extra distance, especially considering the lack of bullets and bad dudes showing up to distract her.

And then on the sixth day she hit pay dirt, but it wasn’t the pay dirt she ever would have wanted or expected, had she been able to put in her own personal request for the pay dirt her client apparently craved.

“I know he’s seeing someone!” Ms. Tatem had wailed, wiping away tears behind her black shades. “He can never go a minute without female company!”

Clearly this woman suffered one of those cases of divorce ambivalence: Much as she herself wanting nothing further to do with him, she wasn’t ready to give him up to another. Or she still loved him. Well, who wouldn’t?!

On day six, Mandy – Lori’s own dear friend and office mate! -- and Nick Diehl met outside the kitchen door of Lady Slipper Farm. Nick had taken an elaborate basket from the passenger seat of his truck, along with a blue and white gingham picnic blanket that some thoughtful and exquisitely tasteful caterer had presumably provided.

Lori noticed that Mandy had shed the denim overalls and muck boots she’d worn earlier that morning during her swob-down of the barn. Now she had on a peasant blouse and a long skirt. She even looked as if she’d showered and shampooed her tumble of luxurious amber hair that reminded so many people of Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell. (Yeah, yeah, Lori knew there was some fancier name for the painting).

Lori squinted through binoculars from a good hundred-yard distance, and she could almost smell the mint-and-rosemary shampoo her friend Mandy sold in dandy little bottles in gift stores around the island and at her own farm stand.

None of those details was entered into the notebook.

She continued to ‘enjoy’, if she could use such a word, a decent view of Mandy and Nick, with the pixie pig Albert snuggling up behind, as they settled the blanket under the shade of an ancient poplar tree which spread its long, droopy, sad branches over the Lady Slipper pond.

And that’s when Lori packed up her notepad, binoc’s, and the remains of her smoked turkey sandwich on pumpernickel, and decided the P.I. business was not for her.