Bill Shepherd wasn’t the kind of guy to take being cheated. He’d cheat, of course, and smile winningly in your face while doing it, but God help you if you cheated him.
Bill’s wife Janell was a beautiful woman, younger than Bill by about 8 years. She was his “trophy” of a successful year-long campaign of high-pressure romancing and truth-bending. They had married three years ago, and it wasn’t long before Janell realized that she was there primarily to serve as arm-decoration for Bill’s many business dinners and dealings, and to provide bedtime entertainment when Bill came home from out-of-town business trips.
But Janell wasn’t stupid – only faithful. She tried very hard to make the marriage work, to make it into what she had thought it was going to be. Unfortunately, that never happened. So, Janell turned off her mind and heart while enduring Bill’s attentions in bed, and instead found comfort in volunteering and taking classes at the local community college.
“Where the hell are you going now?” Bill asked in an aggrieved tone. His perpetually reddened face grew to a deeper shade.
Janell tied back her hair with an elastic scrunchy that matched her turquoise-blue warm-up suit. Her sapphire eyes regarded Bill steadily as she zipped up the jacket and slung her purse over her shoulder. “You know that on Tuesdays and Thursdays I go to the gym for aerobics, Bill. Why do you always have to ask?” Her tone was tired, not with the exhaustion of physical exertion but from constantly being on the defensive.
“Hmmph! You look great now – don’t know why you think you need to go and sweat with all those fat women, anyway.” As she turned away to pick up her keys, he slapped her backside proprietarily, and she stiffened. He never noticed, of course. In his mind she was his property – why shouldn’t he smack her butt if he wanted to?
She took a deep breath. “Well, you want me to stay looking good, don’t you? Then I need to keep doing the aerobics,” she answered as she opened the door. “I’ll be back in time to fix dinner,” she said and without another look closed the door behind herself.
Bill watched Janell through the window as she walked to her little red Miata. Damn, he thought, she looks good! He grinned as he thought of all the work it had taken to get her. He must’ve spent almost $500 on flowers over the year he had worked on her, and twice that much on jewelry. But it was only money, and more than compensated by having her to walk beside him when he went to an important business dinner or event. The customers always commented on how beautiful she was, and how lucky he was. He snorted. Luck had nothing to do with it. It was all in how one played the game.
Bill looked at his watch. She’d be gone for at least two hours, if she held to her normal pattern. Good. That gave him time to spin over to Celine’s apartment and see her for a while. Janell was beautiful, but Celine… well, Celine was an animal in bed, and did stuff he didn’t dare ask Janell to do. He called her on the cell phone – as he expected, she was happy to hear from him. He grabbed his keys and headed out the door.
Janell spent just as much time as Bill had anticipated. She warmed up on the treadmill, then did her low-impact aerobics, spent time with the Nautilus equipment and finally sat in the sauna for 20 minutes before going home. Bill wasn’t there when she got in, so she showered and changed, and fixed dinner. About the time it was ready to put on the table, she heard Bill’s Corvette drive up and enter the garage.
Bill was irritable, and a little drunk. When he got to Celine’s place, she was happy to see him, alright – but she was “at that time of the month” as she phrased it, and didn’t want to do anything fun. He had been really annoyed, and they got into an argument, so he left and went over to The Dark Duck, one of his favorite bars. He stayed longer than he’d anticipated, and the traffic was murder coming home. When he walked in, Janell was putting serving dishes on the table.
He regarded her warily. “Thought you were going to your exercise class. You don’t look like you have been working out – you look and smell more like you’ve been on a date!” Bill went to the bar and fixed himself a drink, scotch and soda.
Janell turned and looked at him thoughtfully. “And I thought you were going to be here when I got home. You look and smell like you’ve been to a bar!” She returned to preparing the table for dinner, pouring glasses of water to drink.
Bill’s alcohol-numbed brain, never the most sensitive of organs, didn’t feel the barb in her comment. But he did watch her from behind, enjoying the view. His frustrated desires with Celine rose to the top of the bubbling cauldron that was his mind. He sidled up behind Janell and pressed himself against her, his hands groping and squeezing her breasts.
Janell jumped and dropped one of the glasses of water. It shattered on the Italian-tiled floor, water and bits of broken glass flying everywhere.
“Hey, hey!” he crooned into her ear, “No need to get so excited you drop everything! We have lots of time to play around, baby!”
Janell whirled, knocking Bill off balance, and stood there glaring at him. “I’m not excited, Bill! I’m tired, and I’m hungry, and I’m NOT in the mood for ‘playing around’ with you!” She grabbed a towel from a drawer and threw it down on the puddle, then sidestepped both the broken glass and Bill to get to the table and sit down. Bill simply stood there at first, but then his frustration burst out.
“Well, damn, excuse me! Just because I want to make love to my woman, what’s wrong with that?” Janell ignored him, slapping food into her plate with a vengeance, and Bill’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the problem, Janell? Getting your needs satisfied somewhere else? Like maybe at that damned gym, with one of those young personal trainers?” From the back he saw her stiffen and stop all motion, then shake her head and resume eating. He walked around to look at her face, multiple scotch-and-sodas clouding his judgment.
“Is that what it is, huh? You stepping out on your old husband with one of those young, tanned athletic types?” His blood pressure was rising; he could feel it, but he didn’t want to stop. No one suspects guilt in others as much as the guilty one himself. “Answer me, Janell!” he roared, and slapped the fork holding a bite of mashed potatoes out of her hand, the silverware clattering to the floor and the glob of potatoes smacking against the wall and sticking there.
Janell stood up then, dropping her napkin in the middle of the table. Her eyes were snapping, the blue now of an electrical arc. “How dare you accuse me! You’re drunk, Bill, and I’m not going to put up with being swung at, yelled at, or with your attitude.” She went to the door, grabbing her jacket and purse as she did. “The food’s on the table. If you have an appetite, eat some. I just lost my appetite.” The door slammed behind her as she left, and he heard her little sports car roar away down the street.
Bill ignored the food, draining the last of his drink, then fixed himself another. The bitch IS cheating on me, he thought in fury. Why else would she act like that? Why else would she turn me down for sex? He gulped down another swallow of the Glenlivet, then went into his home office and dug up the phone directory. He flipped through it clumsily, spilling a little of his drink. Finally he found the section he wanted, and called the first listing his eyes could focus on.
“Dallas and Coogan, Private Investigators,” the male voice on the other end answered.
“You do investigations of women who are cheating on their husbands?” Bill asked, his voice thick with the effects of the drinks.
On the other end of the phone, Brendan Coogan sighed. “Sir, can I have your name so we can have a more civil conversation?”
“Oh, sorry… the name’s Bill Shepherd. What’s your name?” Bill asked, not sounding at all sorry.
“Brendan Coogan. I’m one of the partners of the firm. Now, to answer your question, Mr. Shepherd, we do take on cases involving the shadowing and investigation of spouses who are suspected of straying.”
Bill snorted, then took another sip of his drink. “What do I have to do to get the process started? I think my wife is cheating on me.”
“Mr. Shepherd, because of the potential for unwarranted invasion of privacy, we require that you come to the office in person to show identification and sign some papers to get the process started, as well as requiring a retainer fee.” Coogan leaned back in his chair as he explained this for probably the 10,000th time to an upset and suspicious husband or wife. Most of the time it cooled their blood down to know they had to sign papers and pay a retainer. But obviously Mr. Shepherd wasn’t in a mood to cool down.
“Is 9:00 AM too early to come by tomorrow?”
“No, sir, that will be just fine. Bring with you a picture of your wife, at least two forms of ID, and a major credit card to pay the retainer.”
“Not cash?”
Coogan sighed again. “No, sir. We don’t like to keep cash around the office. Plus, credit cards just make it all more businesslike, don’t you think?”
Bill grumbled into his drink, but admitted this was true. They hung up. After that Bill didn’t eat anything, but he did consume several more drinks, amounting to over half a bottle of scotch and about a half-pint of soda. So, when Janell came home around 10:30, Bill was snoring in his recliner, the uncapped bottle of Glenlivet sitting on the floor beside him. After she recapped the bottle and tossed an afghan across Bill, she left him and went up to bed alone. To be sure she stayed that way for the night, she jammed a chair under the doorknob, although by the look of him Bill probably wouldn’t be awake any time soon.
The next morning, Janell got ready to leave for her stint volunteering at the elementary school as a tutor. She saw that Bill was still in his recliner, although the afghan had slid most of the way to the floor. She fixed him a cup of coffee and went over to stand beside him.
“Bill? Bill, wake up,” she said in a moderately soft voice. No response. She repeated herself more loudly, shaking his shoulder as she did so. “Bill! Wake up, I have to leave.” As he pried his eyes open, she handed him the cup of coffee. “I’m due at the elementary school in twenty minutes. Here’s some coffee. Wake up. Oh, and there are some aspirin on the kitchen counter.” She left him grimacing, blinking and trying to sip the coffee without spilling it on himself.
Bill looked at his watch and yelped. It was ten minutes to eight. He rushed into the bathroom, showered, shaved with a minimum number of cuts and scrapes, and dressed for his appointment with the private investigator. After jumping into his car and roaring through town, he made it to the parking lot of the address at 9:05. He rushed into the office door marked “Dallas & Coogan”, and sat down in a small waiting room with six-month-old magazines and scratchy 70s rock playing from a clock radio on a table in the corner. He sat there fidgeting for a while, then got up and knocked on the inner door marked “Private”.
In a few moments the door was opened by a tall, angular man with red hair. His mouth seemed to be in a half-smile, and his green eyes held humor, too. Before Bill could introduce himself, the man stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Brendan Coogan. You are Bill Shepherd.” It was said as a statement, not a question. Bill shook his hand, and Coogan ushered him into a short hallway, then to a small office. Coogan sat down behind a desk, and waved Bill to a small, hard wooden chair.
“Now, first of all, did you bring the required ID and major credit card, Mr. Shepherd?” Coogan asked.
“Yeah, I have them right here,” Bill answered, patting his breast pocket.
“Good. Now, what makes you think your wife is cheating on you?”
Bill broke into a tirade about spending so much time away from home, not wanting to have sex, insulting him, and so forth, and Coogan sat there looking at him, nodding occasionally. Finally, Bill ran out of steam.
Coogan said quietly, “Are you cheating on her?”
Bill’s face grew redder, and he seemed to swell up. He began, “What do you… I didn’t come here to talk about… what I’m doing is none of your business… I’m hiring you to find out about…” but he spluttered to a stop. Coogan continued to look at Bill, staring into his eyes until finally Bill ducked his head and said, “Well, maybe I do step around a little bit, but I’m a traveling businessman! I need to have some sort of relief from the stress and, besides, she hasn’t been wanting to have sex as often.” He looked up again, defiantly. “What difference does it make?”
Coogan shrugged. “To me personally? None. But it helps me to know a little bit about the home situation, and helps me to figure out what her motives may be, which can assist in figuring out if she is cheating on you, and with whom.” He made a few notes on a pad of paper, then returned his attention to Shepherd. “How far do you want me to go?”
Bill frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Do you want me to just check up on her schedule, see if she is going where she says she is, or do you want me to dig into her expenditures, follow her around constantly, videotape her, that sort of thing? Everything has a cost,” he explained.
Bill reached into his jacket and brought out his driver’s license, his passport and a Visa card. He dropped them on the table. “Give it the full treatment,” he said. “I want to nail her ass to the wall.”
When Bill Shepherd left Coogan’s office, Brendan sat there for a little while, thinking. Probably, if this jerk’s wife was stepping out on him, she had good reason – at least, based on what Brendan had seen of Shepherd so far. A real prize, he was. Coogan turned to his PC and began the work of tracking the comings, goings and expenditures of Mrs. Janell Shepherd of 225 Galapagos Lane.
The information Mr. Shepherd had given him about his wife’s schedule and habits would be very valuable in shadowing her. So, Brendan pulled together his required equipment and got into his dark green Blazer with the deeply tinted windows, and went over to the street that ran by Farrell Elementary School to wait for Mrs. Shepherd to leave there.
Coogan used the face-only photo Shepherd had given him to identify his target, and nodded as she got into the red Miata whose license plate matched the one he had retrieved earlier. The car pulled out, and within seconds, Coogan was following her, keeping back most of the time, occasionally pulling out and passing her for a block or two, then slipping back in behind her. Her trip took her by the grocery store and the library, both for innocent trips. When she left the library, however, her trail led to a small restaurant in the suburbs, on the opposite side of town from her home.
Changing to a different jacket and glasses, Coogan followed her into the restaurant, sitting with his back to her where he could observe her with the small mirrors built into his glasses. But no one joined her. She just had a cup of hot tea and a croissant, sitting and reading one of the books she had checked out at the library. Shortly she got up and went to the restroom, and he quickly went over to check the title of the book. “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Kushner. He quickly returned to his table and paid his tab, shaking his head. Outside in his Blazer, he waited for her to leave the restaurant, and unobtrusively followed her to her home.
This same pattern of tailing, observing and recording the observations continued for two weeks. As far as he could see, this woman was almost saintly – she volunteered her time at an elementary school and a senior citizens’ center, she worked out to stay fit, and she was taking classes in creative writing at the community college. Once he managed to get inside the house with a key provided by Mr. Shepherd, and was amazed at the neatness, the lack of dust bunnies, and so forth. There were no dalliances, no intrigues, no clandestine meetings. He shook his head. Something was wrong here. So, the next morning, he changed his focus.
He began to tail Mr. Bill Shepherd, recording with a camera, and pen and paper, the places he went and the people he saw. Many of his local trips were legitimate business contacts. But a good number of them were less than sterling. In the course of a little more than a week, Shepherd was with three different women at three different hotels – and this was while he was at home, not on a business trip. One of the women was familiar to Coogan. She was a known prostitute, and had been a source of good information more than once.
Coogan started to explore the finances. He was not surprised to find that Shepherd had two credit card accounts that went to a post office box instead of to his home address, as well as two bank accounts with substantial amount of cash in each – both of which also sent their statements to the post office box.
But even though he was now convinced that Mr. Shepherd was the one who was totally unfaithful to the marriage vows, and not his wife, Coogan continued to occasionally follow Mrs. Shepherd. However, it had become more personal. He began by dropping in at the same restaurants where she liked to enjoy a cup of coffee and relax. He would speak to her as he went to the coffee urn or to get a napkin. Then, one day he sat down with her and they talked about the book she was reading. It was all very innocent, and obviously Janell was not on the make, but Coogan began finding that he looked forward to those little meetings.
After about two weeks of this, and of putting off Bill Shepherd’s increasingly annoying phone calls, his client walked into his office at 1:00 in the afternoon. He had obviously been drinking, and he angrily slammed both of his hands down on the detective’s desktop.
“Look, you pathetic SOB, you said you would find out if my wife was cheating on me! So far, you keep saying she isn’t. But I know she is! Now, are you going to get me the evidence I need or not?” Shepherd’s face was livid, and the veins stood out in his neck as he leaned threateningly over the desk. But Brendan was unfazed. He stood and looked Shepherd in the eye.
“You have my reports, Mr. Shepherd. I said I would find out if your wife was cheating on you, and I have verified that, to the best of my knowledge, she is faithful to you. She does her volunteering, she works out, she goes to the library, and she indulges herself a couple of times a week at a restaurant, but that’s all. She’s not having an affair, and that’s all there is to it.” Brendan’s face lacked the smile it usually wore, but he spoke calmly. “You, on the other hand, seem to have a great deal of trouble keeping your pants up and sleeping in your own bed.”
Shepherd stood bolt upright at this statement. “Have you been investigating me?” he thundered. “I hired you to investigate my wife, you incompetent fool! I’ll have your license for this!”
But Brendan was unmoved by this. He turned and took a sheet of paper from a folder. “This is a copy of the agreement you signed when you hired me, Mr. Shepherd. In it, you authorized me to make any investigations into members of the household as I saw fit to resolve the case. You, sir, are a member of the household. You gave me permission to investigate you, as well as your wife, when you signed this.”
Shepherd snatched the paper out of Brendan’s hands, and wadded it into a ball, throwing it into Brendan’s face. It bounced off him without any effect.
“Fine, you conniving bastard! I know I can find another peeper who’ll get the information I need, even if he has to make it up! And then I’ll be able to divorce that bitch without losing my shirt!” Shepherd turned on his heel and jerked open the door to the office, slamming it shut as he left. Brendan stood there behind his desk, thinking. He heard the roar of the Corvette’s engine, and the squeal of tires as Shepherd left the parking lot of their offices.
That afternoon, Brendan and Janell had a great conversation about poetry and moral relativism, over coffee and muffins at the Bread Factory. Afterwards Janell left to read books to a couple of folks that would be waiting for her at the Senior Center. When she returned to her home at 7:00 that night, there was a police car waiting for her, with two solemn-looking officers in it.
When they met her at her door, the senior one of the two said, “Mrs. Shepherd, I’m afraid we have some bad news for you. Your husband was killed about two hours ago, outside…” But at that point she fainted.
When she came around, she was inside the house and lying on her sofa. The female police officer was with her, as well as a paramedic. “Wha… what happened?” she asked, then gasped as she remembered. “My God! You said Bill was killed! What happened?” She looked from one police officer to the other.
The senior one cleared his throat. “Mrs. Shepherd, I’m sorry. Your husband was shot and robbed over on Talleyrand Street, in the Clemenceau area. We have yet to locate any eyewitnesses.”
Janell twisted her hands in her lap. “Clemenceau? What was he doing over there? We don’t know anyone on Talleyrand Street – that’s not a very good part of town!”
The two police officers looked at each other, and the female police officer spoke this time. “Mrs. Shepherd, we believe he was with – or had been with – a prostitute. We questioned people in the area, and there was one there, a Celine Placina, who said he had been with her. She is a known prostitute, Mrs. Shepherd.” Janell’s eyes were growing wider. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Shepherd, but she said he had been a regular customer of hers. That must be why whoever shot and robbed him knew where he would be, because he had been there quite often.” She reached out and took Janell’s hand in her own, squeezing it.
Janell was shaking her head slowly, ignoring the policewoman’s gesture of compassion. Finally she stopped and looked up at them both. “And he was accusing me of being unfaithful, when I never have been!”
The policewoman cleared her throat. “Mrs. Shepherd, I must tell you that you should also go as soon as possible and have yourself tested for STDs, since you could have been exposed to them by your husband’s activities.”
Janell nodded mutely, then said, “I understand. I’ll schedule it for tomorrow afternoon. Thank you, thank you for telling me. I know it must have been difficult.”
The two of them stood to leave. “If you need anything at all, or need to talk to someone, please call this number. It’s staffed 24/7.” The policewoman handed her a business card for Victim Advocacy, and the two officers left her sitting on the sofa. The paramedic had already cleared away his things and left. Now, Janell was alone with her thoughts. She looked down at the card.
Funny. Twice in the same day she had been given a card by someone, and told if she needed to talk to somebody, just to call that number. She sat looking at the recliner where Bill always sat, and put the card from the policewoman on the sidetable. She reached for her purse and got out the other card, and called the number on it with her mobile phone.
“Brendan? This is Janell.” There was a catch in her voice. “Oh, Brendan, I need to talk to someone – I need to be with someone. Can you come over here? Yes, to my house. You can? Oh, thanks so much! Bye.” She broke the connection. Thank God she had managed to meet Brendan lately. He was so understanding – he seemed to know all about her before she said anything at all!
The End
Copyright @2005 Tony Burton All Rights Reserved