Chapter 13

The only thing more tedious than surveillance is reading about it. People have said that police work is mostly boredom, with occasional moments of sheer terror – which isn't a bad description, as I know from my two years as a cop. Watching someone is the same, minus the terror. If I weren't patient I'd never make it as a PI, because you've got to have patience to sit around doing nothing for hours at a time.

It helps to enjoy looking at stuff. I like seeing how the clouds move across the sky, the way paint flakes off the curb at a bus stop, the pattern of cracks in a stucco wall, the movement of ants around an old banana peel. I'd already started developing an observant eye as a kid, because if you walk alone in the desert you'd better know where you are and how to get to water, or back home. You've got to pay attention to where you put your feet and hands, because carelessness in that regard is what leads to most snake bites. In high school, my budding poetic efforts required observation, and being a cop helped still further. Between all that, and working as a PI for 20 years, I've learned to observe things. Most people go through life never noticing anything – in Sherlock Holmes' words, they see but they do not observe. I don't count the steps up to a door, or how many seconds it takes the elevator in my office building to get up or down, but I see things that most people apparently pass right by.

So hanging around the building where Jacob Bestwick worked I wasn't as bored as I might have been. I got to know the alley behind the building – I like the "back of the house" anyway; it's usually more interesting than the front, as I learned in Dallas while doing some work for a hotel – and the timing of the bus service and where the pigeons preferred to roost in that area, and other things that probably people who passed through every day didn't know.

I still got bored. But boredom is an occupational hazard, and I lived with it. At lunch Bestwick went to the same place he'd gone the day before, and so did I. And then I went to check out where he lived, knowing that he'd be back at work after he ate. According to Cinda it was an apartment off of Tramway Boulevard not far from Tramway Road. If he liked to ride the tram he was in walking distance of it, assuming he was still in the same apartment – and assuming he cared to walk a mile or two uphill. If he wasn't I could find out where he was – I had his license plate number, and a source in the Motor Vehicle Department.

As I drove over I had the Latest Greatest Straitest Hits CD going. Berlin was fine, but I was in a George Strait mood and that album's got some of my favorite Strait music on it. I sang along with "Carrying Your Love With Me," thinking of Cecelia. George sings every love song as though it's to his wife, and I take it as though it's from me to my wife. I do indeed carry her love with me everywhere I go. I got a better bargain from the marriage than she did – I'm merely mediocre in appearance and character, while she's the best woman on earth, in every category.

I was brazen at the apartment complex. I could hardly pretend to be someone else, not in my standard clothes – the bullrider hat alone would prevent me from acting like I was someone else. I wasn't trying to hide anyway. Again the principle of deterrence applied: If I could by simply poking around prevent Bestwick from pestering Cinda, I'd be doing my job.

I went straight to the apartment that Cinda'd named – well, once I found it, I went straight to it. I'd been by the complex umpteen times, but never had occasion to go onto the property until now. I've been detecting in Albuquerque since 1992, but there are still parts of town I've never worked in. Not working more than I want to has something to do with that, I suppose.

I knocked on the door, but no one answered, which was what I would expect if it were still Bestwick's place. I peeked in around the curtains, but couldn't see anything interesting. It was an upstairs apartment so there was no way to go around back and see if anything looked interesting. I tried neighboring apartments, beginning with the next door neighbors. In a period of about two hours I found that it was indeed still Bestwick's apartment, and that no one had anything bad to say about him. Specifically no one knew – or at least no one was willing to admit to knowing, and I happened in this case to believe that they didn't know – that he was stalking his ex-wife. Several of the neighbors indeed didn't know he'd once been married, which didn't surprise me given how people move around. I've been in the same house for 11 years, but not everyone has roots that deep – as I know from experience, for before I met Cecelia I'd moved from California to Oklahoma to Texas to New Mexico, and had lived in two different apartments in Albuquerque.

I drove away from the complex in the late afternoon with that line of thought in my head. There are times when I miss California so much it hurts. I'd love to move back there. But my life is here, now – my wife, my daughter, and the places we've loved together. I may someday move back, though not to the place where I grew up; we visit that place every year in high summer, but it's part of the Mojave National Preserve now and moving there isn't an option. I'd bought that place in 1993, the year before the government established the Preserve – and the year before I met Cecelia. For that matter she'd bought the house on Wisconsin the year before I moved to Albuquerque. We'd both made choices in isolation that, when we wound up married, worked out perfectly for us together. I can't doubt God's sovereignty, not when it's been so evident in my life.

When I was done at Bestwick's apartment complex I ran over to Cinda's place, dropping straight down Tramway all the way to Central, and then turning off of Central on Dorado. She wasn't home yet – I hadn't expected her to be – so I scribbled out a note letting her know I was still on the job and slipped it under her door.

While I was in the area and loose, I went back over to Dorado and down to Piru, and dropped in on Letty Ramirez, who had become our friend last year during the course of a particularly painful case. Maybe it's because my own marriage is so strong, or because we almost didn't make it at first, but seeing someone else's marriage come apart always hurts me. Letty's had come apart in one of the few cases where the blame is all on one side, and I'd helped her find her husband who'd run off – not very far, as it turned out. Somewhere in there she'd become a friend, and when she came to pieces I brought her home, where she wound up Cecelia's friend too.

She's doing great now – she dates occasionally, and she's got a clearer view of her ex-husband than she used to. And she no longer kicks herself for not seeing through the consummate acting job he did; he's something of a sociopath and they put Hollywood actors to shame when they want to pretend to be real human beings.

She made me some tea, and we talked a bit in her huge tiled dining room – her ex-husband had money, and she'd taken him for the house and some decent change in the divorce, which wasn't hard since New Mexico is a community property state, and all the evidence was against him. If it had ever come to divorce with me and Cecelia I'd have insisted that I take only what I'd brought to the marriage, but I had fully supported Letty's efforts. Davey Goldfarb had done her wrong in a major way, and she deserved what she got in the decree.

Time went faster than I thought it did, as always happens when I'm enjoying myself, and finally Letty had to shuffle me off to Buffalo – or toward home, which was closer anyway. She gave me a kiss on the cheek, and then another one for Cecelia, and I was on my way.

When I got home Cecelia wasn't back yet from picking Darlia up at school. The school's a pretty fair piece from home – up on Paseo del Norte, where land was plentiful and cheap when the school was starting up, though it's getting pretty fashionable these days – and there aren't any easy ways to get there from here, nor yet the other way around. And if Cecelia took Darlia out for a Coke or an ice cream cone or some other snack before coming home it wouldn't be unusual. We don't spoil our daughter, but we don't make her live like an ascetic either.

I had some studying to do, so I headed for my study. As I stood in the doorway I knew Cecelia was right – we had to do something. I can live with a certain amount of clutter, but it was getting to where it was more and more difficult to know where which books were, for I had no more shelf space and no really viable place to put more. When we'd gotten married my library had been considerably smaller, for I'd had to make it fit into the constraints of a one bedroom apartment – and fairly frequent moves. Between 1986, when I'd left home, and 1994, when I'd met Cecelia, I'd had three major moves from city to city, and a few more within-the-city moves. At that, I probably ought to count moving in with Tina Morales after I graduated from high school, even though I don't think of that as a move since I kept some stuff at Tony and Anna's place until I moved to Oklahoma. But since I moved into the house in April of 1995 I've not moved an inch, and things had accumulated. Somehow we were going to have to give me more space – or reduce my library, which wasn't going to happen. I might not have read more than a fraction of my books, but I use all of them to some degree ... and anyway commentaries aren't precisely reading material, though I have in fact read chunks of Matthew Henry, and Calvin's commentaries, and of Spurgeon's sermons and the sermons on Romans by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and I've gone all the way through two separate systematic theologies – the three-volume job by Charles Hodge, and James P. Boyce's one-volume work.