The Secret Baker
He was the guy you took with you to a bar in case there was a fight. He was the first
in a long line of peasant stock to go to college, on a full, two sport athletic
scholarship. His parents came over on the boat, and forever spoke with strong
accents, one Irish, one Cockney. After a string of odd jobs he joined the FBI, and
worked vice and organized crime out of the Manhattan office. He was written up in
the newspaper for chasing a mafia guy down the street, in a blizzard, then tackling
and arresting him after a brief scuffle. The article embarrassed him. He never
spoke about the work.
When the federal agency bureaucracy got too much for him, he quit and bought a
private detective agency in Stamford, Connecticut, which he expanded and
developed into a multi-million-dollar security company. He was gentle at home, but
he had a look I saw a couple of times, one that said, to whoever he was facing, "Go
ahead, I'm ready," which stopped men in their tracks. I never saw him throw a
punch; he didn't need to. He was extremely generous, and a loving father. The earth
was better those days he walked on it.
*
I started working for my dad as a licensed private investigator when I was eighteen.
If my father had been a baker, I suppose I would have worked for that period of my
life making pies and cakes. Instead, I shadowed shadowy people, working to
uncover their secrets.
But even that’s too romantic. What I mostly did was the investigative grunt work for
lawyers and headhunters. I sat in a company car on surveillance for endless hours,
waiting for a door to open. Then, maybe, following the subject’s car. I spent a lot of
time in musty courthouses, searching through records, then dictated reports back in
the office, using the driest, most utilitarian language possible. I did
“neighborhoods”—knocking on the doors of people who lived next to someone
being considered for a high-level position. Once, I directed a long, complex, boring
investigation into the personal history of a bank employee who was suspected of
embezzling. I took surreptitious pictures of a husband kissing his mistress on the
slopes of a ski resort in Montreal, while he was supposedly on a business trip. In
each case the object was exposure—to discover and document what insects would
scatter when I lifted up the rock covering a life.
*
I can say this: those movies where someone is tailing a car in Manhattan are
phony—it’s impossible, unless you’re suicidal, or Mario Andretti. The job was less
like the breakneck car chase beneath the elevated in Manhattan in French
Connection, and more like Gene Hackman in another scene of the same movie,
watching his subject through the window of an expensive restaurant, the French
drug dealer delicately eating oysters while Hackman sucked down a steaming cup of
coffee and stamped his feet against the cold.
These days, I suppose, with smart phones and social media, a lot of stuff is right out
there for the taking, if you know how to find it. The field must have changed
enormously. On the other hand, people today are less trusting than they were then.
In those days all I had to do was pretend to be interested and kind and well
intentioned, and people would tell me the most god-awful sleaze about their
neighbor, or former employee. I admit, I enjoyed that playacting. I enjoyed teasing
out the kind of information sufficient to ruin a career, or a marriage. I was, God help
me, good at it.
*
Then there were the special jobs my father would send me on. Since I was young
and long haired, I was his go-to guy for finding kids who had run away from home.
There was a lot of that in the early seventies. I tended to have more sympathy with
the kid than the parents, so I generally did a half-assed job; I don’t remember ever
really locating anyone. But I’m sure the leads I discovered did in some way help the
parents. And I don’t know how to feel about that.
Another time our company was hired to do special security for a circus that was
playing at Madison Square Garden. I liked that gig—four of us (my father used
mostly ex-cops, and me) alternated shifts for the duration of the run, sleeping in a
cheap, cramped hotel room in Times Square. I don’t remember exactly what we
were there to protect. What I do remember is witnessing the elephants waking
up—maybe twenty of them, all in a row—the unforgettable, enormous sounds and
sights of their morning shits and pisses.
*
Once I was doing a neighborhood in a severely down-market apartment building in
New Haven. I should have known something was off when I knocked on the door
and a guy wearing a wife beater sprinkled with unidentifiable red stains answered
the door, and invited me in. When I started asking him my client’s standard
questions the wifebeater stopped me and said, “You’re not a cop, are you?” I said No
no and showed him my private investigator ID again and this time he took it from
my hand and studied it a long time, then let it just sort of casually fall from his hand
to the floor between us. When I bent to pick it up, he turned and fished something
out of a bureau drawer which, when I stood up and he turned back to me I saw was
a 9mm Glock. Then, he started in on a rant about cops—how much he hated them,
how cops had made all his life a living hell, how if a cop came into the room at that
very minute he would shoot him without hesitation. He gesticulated wildly as he
spoke and wandered around the room, the Glock a mute but demonic extension of
his gestures. When he at last was quiet he was staring at me wild-eyed, a fleck of
spittle on his chin. And then, in a soft and gentle tone, I started talking. I gave the
most eloquent monologue; I amazed myself. I understood what he meant, I said,
there was no love lost between me and cops either, I ran into them in my line of
work all the time and I found them to be nasty, cynical shitheads, sadistic bastards
of low intelligence who were drawn to policing by the promise of authority over
others. The cops I’d known misused that authority and enjoyed the supposed power
it gave them, to mistreat and abuse. I had been in trouble with them myself several
times, I said, and nothing good ever came from any encounter I ever had with the
chota, the pigs, the 5-0, the badge. As I spoke I edged toward the door and finally
said all right, brother, I think I have all I need, I’m going to bounce, you take care,
and I handed him one of my cards and added, “Let me know if there’s ever anything
you need.” And then, without hurry I opened the door to the hallway and nearly
bowed, or maybe I actually did. Only when I had gotten down the three flights of
stairs and hit the street when it was, really, no longer necessary, did I begin running
to my parked car.
*
At the time I didn’t realize how interesting other people would find what I did for a
living. If I had I would have brought it up earlier and more frequently with the
women I dated. It might have helped implement my bad intentions. There was a lot
of that, in my twenties—a decade I spent wandering around, bumping into people. I
hurt myself, and many others. I was lost. But the job, to me, was just working in
dad’s shop. It was baking pies, cakes, and loaves of bread.