Chapter 8: Suburbia

Jefferson Drive oozed affluence. So did the neighbouring thoroughfares bearing the great man’s name; Road, Avenue, Gardens and Chase. There wasn’t a Jefferson Street – possibly that had been considered too common; redolent of the inner urban area. Perish the thought. This was a modern high-specification development. I was looking at new wealth. If you have it, flaunt it. Old money tends to cower behind boxwood and laurel. There wasn’t a hedge or fence in sight here.

Maybe my view is a little offbeat. I’ve never owned a house and don’t want to. At the time, my place was a room in a small hotel, above fleabag status but far from pretentious. It wasn’t cheap, but the outlay bought convenience. I didn’t have to mow lawns, seek tradespeople or appliance repairers, fill and empty washing and drying machines or wonder how to keep up with Mr and Mrs Nextdoor. Also, if pressed, I could have upped stakes and at a pinch got everything I valued into a suitcase and my RAF kitbag. Yes, that’s right – I gave a chunk of my life to the Royal Air Force. Incidentally, if anyone in that outfit is reading this, I’m not sure I was entitled to keep the said item of luggage, so sue me if you like. And further by the way – this is like a letter with a PS and a PPS – why do we call these things luggage? Isn’t that what’s inside them? Or are the contents effects’? All right, I’m confused.

You may have noticed that the odd vestige of my formative years in Britain spills over into my language here and there. Well, the US hasn’t yet planed away all my edges. I like baseball, but still prefer cricket when I can get it. I also agonise over such things as whether to double consonants when extending certain words, to offer er’ or re’ endings in other cases, to sneak up on the American public with practise as a verb corresponding to practice as a noun, and so on. This is stressful work. I’m aware of the pitfalls and try for mid-Atlantic, but the effort is enough to give one a split personality.

Now back to base. The residents of the Jefferson development were mostly thrusting types, fast-tracking their way to the top or to burnout. I wondered how many of them would, over the next five years, sit facing a solemn character, talking quietly but firmly about the need for downsizing, or whatever euphemism would be fashionable at the time – terminology changes so quickly, doesn’t it? People don’t want to talk about axing jobs – too brutal. Better to cut them, shed them or perhaps best of all, lose them. Who retrieves them, and is it a case of finders, keepers?

What do you do when you have a sky-high mortgage, payments on a couple of classy cars – maybe also a boat – and are told that the music has stopped and you have no seat? I didn’t know, still don’t, and with good luck never shall. I’ve always existed rather monastically, so the difference between my way of life and basic survival is virtually unnoticeable. If a fellow keeps his possessions to a minimum, he’s a poor target for thieves, and anyway he won’t mind too much if he loses the lot. Should anyone break into my place, he – most burglars are male – will very likely tiptoe out after leaving me a little something on the nightstand. May I suggest a ten-dollar minimum? Perhaps Ben Franklin had it right when he said that if a man puts the contents of his purse into his head, nobody can take the results away from him. So, I was able to contemplate this luxury development without a trace of envy. Also, not identifying too closely with clients helps to maintain the objectivity a PI needs.

The phone call that brought me out of my burrow that bright summer morning had come shortly after my nominal starting time of nine o’clock – just as well that I was only two minutes late – and had intruded on a thought process which started about an hour earlier, when I was listening to the radio while getting dressed. A fellow was talking about something called the Golden Ratio, which is 1.618:1. I learned that this point crops up in various areas of life, including otherwise seemingly unrelated fields. Among other things, it was stated that if one constructs a rectangle of these proportions, it conforms to an ideal perspective, in that if the ratio gets much lower, the shape looks like an attempted square that doesn’t quite make it, whereas if it is significantly higher, the resultant figure appears too elongated. Apparently, many buildings have been erected on the basis of these supposedly perfect dimensions. It’s a question of dividing a figure so that the smaller part is to the larger as the larger is to the whole. I hope you don’t mind this little aside.

My destination was about halfway along the Drive; thirty-six houses in all, eighteen on either side, facing each other with what seemed to me like a kind of suppressed bellicosity. Maybe I was wrong – I’ll admit to being somewhat impressionable. The lots were around an acre each, the frontages, excepting the corner ones, of fifty yards or so. Considering that the whole Jefferson estate had been built in less than two years, both architecture and construction were, I thought, remarkably good. There was a mix of styles, but nothing jarring. The houses were all two-storey jobs of, I guessed, well over three thousand square feet each, their main common feature being that the facades were uniformly about forty yards from the sidewalk. Regulations, no doubt.

I arrived at ten a.m. and parked in the road outside number twelve, noting that in the whole length of Jefferson Drive, no other vehicle had been left that way. Perhaps it wasn’t allowed, but being the nonconformist type, I didn’t care. Furthermore, I felt that where there was a sensible choice, it was better to walk up to a house, rather than motor to the front door. Something to do with assessing the aura, I reckoned.

It seemed that my prospective client was a maverick. This was the only house in sight that had a true garden, rather than a lawn. The others had nothing but manicured turf and the odd tree to distract a viewer’s gaze from the dwellings. This place had grass too – shaved to putting green standard – but there were wide, thickly planted borders, inside which were three large, diamond-shaped flower-beds. What do they do when the blooms wilt, I asked myself. A private investigator should know things like that.

I strolled along the drive, thinking that relative to some of the neighbours, the owner had economised a little in this respect. Widthwise, the surface would have been hard-pressed to accommodate a combine harvester.

Normally, I don’t care too much about my appearance, but I remember that on the day in question I was well turned out – blue and white houndstooth jacket, new beige slacks, white shirt, red knitted tie and tan brogues. I looked quite dapper. Or so I thought until I saw the gardener. This unlikely lad was resplendent in a dark-blue chalk-stripe suit and gleaming black shoes. He was kneeling on a felt pad and doing something workmanlike with a trowel. I never saw anything more incongruous.

As I approached the improbable retainer, he turned to face me. I’d already noticed that the seams of his jacket were barely holding out against the heft pushing at them. Now he showed me shoulders from here to there and a chest no harpoon could have got through. His face completed the picture. He was, as the nineteenth-century novelists might have put it, of simian aspect. If we all come from the apes, his journey had, I guessed, been shorter than average. It might have been my imagination, but as he turned, I seemed to get a glimpse of something bulky under the left armpit. “You want somethin’?” he grunted.

I gave him my disarming smile. “I have an appointment with Mrs Berg,” I said, “but I don’t mind admiring your work in passing. Nice blooms. What are they?”

Nobody could have accused the Bergs – I’d assumed there was a Mr – of being unpatriotic. The flower beds were, from top to bottom, red, white and blue, the borders planted in rows of the same colours. Apeman pointed his trowel at the mass of red. “Patagonias,” he said, grinning slyly.

I matched him, smile for smile, but was suspicious. “And the white ones?”

“Euphoniums.”

“And the blue ones?”

“Bassoonias. You through now?”

His words demanded a riposte. “What have you got at the back?” I said. “Trombones?” Alas, the repartee appeared to be wasted on my interlocutor, who stood gawking – maybe he’d just learned his few lines. I ambled off to meet the chatelaine.

The front door was not quite big enough to admit a bus. It was reached by three steps, which I tackled in sprightly manner. I negotiated the first two well enough, but came to grief on the top one, falling forwards in front of the iron-studded oak. Cloth tore as my left knee scraped along the concrete. Damn, only a week’s wear and already I would need an invisible mending job. Did we have the necessary practitioners in this great country? You may be pleased to learn that I found one – the elderly tailor I’ve mentioned elsewhere, who worked right underneath my office.