rather have old furniture, chipped paint, and economic uncertainty than European vacations, retirement funds, and a home in the suburbs.
At the entrance to my family’s home/business, you will find four mailboxes that read, from left to right: Spellman, Spellman Investigations (we’ve only had one mail carrier who routinely differentiated between the two), Marcus Godfrey (my father’s long-lived undercover name), and Grayson Enterprises (a dummy business name that our firm uses for lighter cases). There are also two or three PO boxes around the Bay Area that the business sustains when more camouflage is necessary.
Once inside the Spellman home, you come upon a staircase that winds up to the second level, where all three bedrooms are located. To the right of the staircase is a door with a hanging sign that says SPELLMAN INVESTIGATIONS . The door is locked during all nonbusiness hours. Left of the staircase is the entrance to the living room. A threadbare couch with a worn zebra-skin pattern once provided the centerpiece to the room. Now it is an unassuming brown leather sofa. Mahogany furniture orbits the couch—each piece would qualify as an antique, but neglect has diminished their value. The only change the room has seen in the last thirty years (other than the couch) is the replacement of the wood-paneled Zenith TV (circa 1980) with a twenty-seven-inch flat-screen that my uncle bought after a very rare, but successful, day at the racetrack.
Behind the living room is the kitchen, which extends into a modest dining room with still more neglected antiques. While I’m still downstairs, I should unlock the door to Spellman Investigations.
My family’s office sits on the ground level, in a location that would be called the den in any other home. Four secondhand teacher’s desks (the beige metal variety) form a perfect rectangle in the center of the office. Thirty years ago there was only one computer—an IBM—atop my father’s desk. Now there is a PC on each of the four and a communal laptop in the closet. There are half a dozen file cabinets in an assortment of colors (also secondhand) encircling the room. Other than the industrial-size paper shredder and dusty blinds, that’s pretty much it. Files are sometimes stacked two feet high on each desk. Scraps from the shredder are scattered about the floor. The room smells of dust and cheap coffee. The door at the far end of the room leads down to the basement, where all interrogations take place. David used to claim that the basement was the best place in the house to do homework, but I wouldn’t know about that.
THE FAMILY BUSINESS
D avid and I began working for Spellman Investigations when we were fourteen and twelve, respectively. While I had already made a name for myself as the difficult child, my status as employee redeemed many of my other less-than qualities. I suppose it surprised no one that, generally speaking, I took well to breaking the rules of society and invading other people’s privacy.
We’d always begin in the trash. That was routinely the first job assigned to the Spellman children. Mom or Dad (or the off-duty cop du jour) would pick up refuse from a subject’s residence (once the trash is left out for the sanitation department, it is considered public property and legal to appropriate) and drop it at the house.
I’d put on a pair of thick, plastic dishwashing gloves (and occasionally a nose clip) and sift through the garbage, separating the trash from the treasures. My mother gave precisely the same instructions to all of us: bank statements, bills, letters, notes, you keep; anything that was once edible or contains bodily fluids, you trash. I often considered these instructions incomplete. You’d be surprised how many things fall into the none of the above category. Garbology often made David violently ill, and by the time he was fifteen, he was pulled off this assignment altogether.
The year I turned thirteen, my mother taught me how
At the entrance to my family’s home/business, you will find four mailboxes that read, from left to right: Spellman, Spellman Investigations (we’ve only had one mail carrier who routinely differentiated between the two), Marcus Godfrey (my father’s long-lived undercover name), and Grayson Enterprises (a dummy business name that our firm uses for lighter cases). There are also two or three PO boxes around the Bay Area that the business sustains when more camouflage is necessary.
Once inside the Spellman home, you come upon a staircase that winds up to the second level, where all three bedrooms are located. To the right of the staircase is a door with a hanging sign that says SPELLMAN INVESTIGATIONS . The door is locked during all nonbusiness hours. Left of the staircase is the entrance to the living room. A threadbare couch with a worn zebra-skin pattern once provided the centerpiece to the room. Now it is an unassuming brown leather sofa. Mahogany furniture orbits the couch—each piece would qualify as an antique, but neglect has diminished their value. The only change the room has seen in the last thirty years (other than the couch) is the replacement of the wood-paneled Zenith TV (circa 1980) with a twenty-seven-inch flat-screen that my uncle bought after a very rare, but successful, day at the racetrack.
Behind the living room is the kitchen, which extends into a modest dining room with still more neglected antiques. While I’m still downstairs, I should unlock the door to Spellman Investigations.
My family’s office sits on the ground level, in a location that would be called the den in any other home. Four secondhand teacher’s desks (the beige metal variety) form a perfect rectangle in the center of the office. Thirty years ago there was only one computer—an IBM—atop my father’s desk. Now there is a PC on each of the four and a communal laptop in the closet. There are half a dozen file cabinets in an assortment of colors (also secondhand) encircling the room. Other than the industrial-size paper shredder and dusty blinds, that’s pretty much it. Files are sometimes stacked two feet high on each desk. Scraps from the shredder are scattered about the floor. The room smells of dust and cheap coffee. The door at the far end of the room leads down to the basement, where all interrogations take place. David used to claim that the basement was the best place in the house to do homework, but I wouldn’t know about that.
THE FAMILY BUSINESS
D avid and I began working for Spellman Investigations when we were fourteen and twelve, respectively. While I had already made a name for myself as the difficult child, my status as employee redeemed many of my other less-than qualities. I suppose it surprised no one that, generally speaking, I took well to breaking the rules of society and invading other people’s privacy.
We’d always begin in the trash. That was routinely the first job assigned to the Spellman children. Mom or Dad (or the off-duty cop du jour) would pick up refuse from a subject’s residence (once the trash is left out for the sanitation department, it is considered public property and legal to appropriate) and drop it at the house.
I’d put on a pair of thick, plastic dishwashing gloves (and occasionally a nose clip) and sift through the garbage, separating the trash from the treasures. My mother gave precisely the same instructions to all of us: bank statements, bills, letters, notes, you keep; anything that was once edible or contains bodily fluids, you trash. I often considered these instructions incomplete. You’d be surprised how many things fall into the none of the above category. Garbology often made David violently ill, and by the time he was fifteen, he was pulled off this assignment altogether.
The year I turned thirteen, my mother taught me how
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