Spygirl True Adventures from My Life As a Private Eye

ONE Everyday life is the greatest detective story ever written. Every second, without noticing, we pass by thousands of corpses and crimes. Franz Kafka Money Over Broke-Ass Bitches This is written on the wall in the stairwell of my new office building. It's my first day at work, but instead of thinking about that I'm thinking about this comment. "Who are these broke-ass bitches?" I'm thinking about those broke-ass bitches, and won- dering who's spending money on them and pissed off about it when I see a two-hundred-or-so-pound guy storming down the stairwell at me. Close up, his face is red and scarred-looking. Rivulets of busted blood vessels spread all around his nose and chin, even in his eyes, which look like they're crying red, and tributaries seem to be spreading down the creases in his face to his gullet. I duck down into the corner of the winding stairs below more graffiti written in blood-colored ink that says stranger things have happened. "Unlikely," I say out loud. I had arrived on the first morning of my first day in a close-fitting Italian gray flannel suit that hadn't fit well since I'd bought it on sale at Daffy's two years earlier. Being nervous is an excellent diet. In the last several weeks I'd lost the five or six pounds that I'd accumulated since the last time I was this nervous. I'd spent fifteen minutes in the lobby of my new building, pushing the up arrow on the elevator until Tommy the Building Super and All-Around Troubleshooter came and got me. It was 8:50 a.m. No one else was at work yet. "It ain't working. Follow me, sweetheart." Tommy winked and led me outside, across an icy sidewalk, where we reentered on the other side of the building. He pulled on a huge steel arm to open the service elevator. Nothing happened. A few more tugs on the cargo winch yielded nothing, so he took me back past the elevator and unlocked the stairwell. "Go on up, honey." The office was on the fifth floor. As far as stairwells go, this one was particularly rank-smelling and sketchy. Years of people taking pisses and treacherous flights down these stairs had left a sticky patina on the wood floors. After the red-faced bull of a guy blazes past, I sit down on the stairs to catch my breath. I realize my Starbucks latte is sideways across my Italian woolwrapped lap. From a few floors above me, I hear what sounds like the approach of another desperate character. The sound grows louder. Boom. Thud. Crack. "Mutherfucker" muttered. Boom, boom, boom. BOOM! Bounding past me, red-faced, is my new boss, George, holding a baseball bat, wearing no shirt, and Tevas. He jumps over the five steps I'm sitting on and keeps on going. "Hey, Gray," he mutters on his way down. Following him down minutes later are Evan, Gus, and Wendy. They are investigators in my new office. They're all out of breath and grayish-looking. Everyone else is late for work; as I later learn, they always are. "You picked a great first day," Evan says, smiling. "What's going on?" I demand, standing up as my empty latte cup primly rolls off my lap and down the stairs. Was this the disgruntled subject of an investigation come to exact revenge? What had I done with myself? A Short Runway to a Sure Death At the same time I was preparing with half an eye to start my new job as a private investigator, with the rest of my attention I was planning for the end of the world. On New Year's Eve, 1999, two days after I'd accepted my new gumshoe assignment, I roamed New York City's icy streets with an exhilaration that canGray, Amy is the author of 'Spygirl True Adventures from My Life As a Private Eye', published 2003 under ISBN 9780812971521 and ISBN 0812971523.