PART ONE
1
I never meant to be a private eye.
The whole thing, in fact, was my accountant's idea. A tax dodge. Half a joke. A few years ago I made some money. Made it the modern American way: by sheer dumb luck, doing work I hated, on a silly product that only made life more trivial and more annoying. I took the dough—not a lot of dough, but enough to live on for the rest of my life if I wasn't an asshole about it—and moved full-time to Key West.
I'd had a funky little house there for years. Wood frame, shady porch, tiny pool that took up most of a backyard choked with thatch and bougainvillea. Vacation house. Daydreaming about that place, the time I'd eventually spend there, got me through a lot of crappy afternoons in my stupid office up in Jersey. Now I wanted to really make it home.
So I told my accountant to free up some cash. "I'm renovating. Building an addition."
"You're putting in an office," he informed me.
"Office? Benny, I'm retired."
"Bullshit you're retired. What are you, forty-four?"
"Forty-five."
"Forty-five you don't retire. Forty-five you have a crisis and change careers."
"There's no crisis, Benny. I'm putting in wine storage, a music room, and a hot tub."
He raised his hands to fend off the information. "You never told me that," he said. "It's an office and it'll save you thousands. Tens of thousands. Plus your car becomes deductible."
I made the mistake of keeping silent for a moment. Call me cheap. I shouldn't have even thought about it, but the idea of saving tens of thousands made me pause.
"Become a Realtor," Benny suggested. "Everyone down there becomes a Realtor, right?"
I'd dealt with Realtors in my life. "I'd rather shoot myself," I said.
"Shoot yourself," he muttered, then started free-associating. "Tough guy. Humphrey Bogart. Hey, call yourself a private eye."
"Don't be ridiculous."
He quickly fell in love with his idea. "Ya know," he said, "there's a lot of advantages. Private corporation. One employee: you. You get a gun—"
"Benny, cut it out."
"—get a license—"
"How you get a license?"
"Florida?" he said. "Probably swear you haven't murdered anybody in the last sixty, ninety days."
"Benny, I don't wanna be a private eye."
He paused, blinked, and looked somewhat surprised. "Schmuck! Did I say you have to be a private eye? I said we're calling you a private eye. You'll get some business cards, put a listing in the phone book—"
"Commit fraud—"
"What fraud? You're committing failure. Look, the government allows three years' worth of losses. By then we've depreciated the work on the house, the car lease has expired—"
Well, the whole thing was preposterous—and I guess I kind of like preposterous. Having an amusing thing to say at parties, occasionally in bars. Something incongruous and intriguing. So on my tax returns, at least, I became a private eye. Pete Amsterdam, sole proprietor, doing business as Southernmost Detection, Inc.
That was two and a half years ago. I have a license somewhere in a drawer, and a gun I've never fired rusting in a wall safe. Until very recently, thank God, I hadn't had a single client. Three, four times a year someone calls me up, usually on some sordid and depressing matrimonial thing. I lie and say I'm too busy; for some reason the potential client apologizes and quickly gets off the phone, like I'll charge him for my precious time. My only worry has been that the IRS might come snooping around to see if I was legit. This has been a sporadic but uncomfortable concern, since, for me, feeling legit has never come that easy anyway.
But in the meantime the house improvements came out beautiful, suited me to a T. I'm divorced. I live alone. I guess I'm a little eccentric. Mainly it's that I don't pretend to care about the things that most people pretend to care about. The news. What's on television. The outside world. I have a small, tight core of things that still can hold my interest; I arrange my life as simply and neatly as I can around those things, and the rest just sort of passes me right by. I like wine. I like music. I like tennis. After that the list grows pretty short.
Must sound meager to people who live in places where everyone is busy and engaged and avidly discusses what's in the theaters or the paper. But Key West isn't like that. Key West is a place to withdraw to, a retreat without apology or shame. And you learn things from the place where you live. One of the things Key West teaches is that disappointment and contentment can go together more easily than you would probably imagine.
So I've been more or less content down here. Tan, reasonably fit, generally unbothered. I do what I want and, better still, I don't do what I don't want. Which includes being a private eye. In fact, two and a half years into this fraud of a vocation, I'd practically forgotten I was listed in the phone book.