Spygirl by Amy Gray Page A

on whowould be attending a dinner party. My empathy for her had hardened into an angry piece of coal in my stomach, which was stoked to incandescence every time I even thought about her. A week later, I quit my job.

NINE             
    One thing is, to be a spy, you have to rely on your hunches.
    —WOODY ALLEN, “THE WHORE OF MENSA”
If This Guy's Who He Says He Is, I'll Eat My Own Asshole
    “Don't mix business with pleasure.” George told me that. In the case of the Three-Ring Wedding Bandit, the two were impossible to separate.
    George was doing some preliminary research for a wedding planner, the friend of a friend of a former employee. He was heard cackling across the office, “Ha! If this guy's who he says he is, I'll eat my own asshole.” I'm certain none of us wanted to see that happen.
    As George explained when he called me over to give me the case, he'd been doing this stuff for twelve years and he knew when he was dealing with a criminal, and this guy the wedding plannerhad called him about was the real thing. But even though he could tell me that and even impart his suspicions to the client, what we acted on had to be entirely based on what we
knew
in evidence, not just on what we suspected.
    George had been approached by Goldie Gabriel, a grande dame in the cutthroat New York wedding industry. An hour after George debriefed me, we paid a call to Goldie. “Oh my gawd!” she exclaimed when George and I came into her office, which was upholstered in a potpourri of throw pillows, each in a different pattern and color scheme from the sofa's side cushions, as well as from the balloon curtains, with their separately upholstered valences. “Yoor adoorable! I love this—don't you love this? I love this!” She wrung her hands together with excrescent energy and kissed George and me hello, saying, “I can't believe there are real private investigators here—This is so
wild,”
pointing us out to her barefoot, long-haired assistant, Paul, as if to say, “Who woulda thunkit?” Paul scratched his disarrayed, curly black tresses and shuffled around his desk, smiling at her familiar histrionics.
    Goldie took us into her office, which looked like a war zone of competing English floral patterns. At the center of this cacophony of climbing roses and ranunculus on balloon curtains, envelopes, and wallpapering, Goldie held court. She explained that she'd been approached by a couple a few days before to “do an event,” which she'd been doing for fifteen years, by the way, and she'd never had doubts like this before. It became clear that Goldie possessed a highly attuned cultural barometer in which the combination of a no-carat ring and a six-figure flower budget was “lunacy,” forgoing the use of a private caterer in a loft space was “borderline,” and a stipulation that “money is no object”—no matter how rich the client—is cause for calling the local investigator, which is just what she did.
    “There is nobody,
nobody
so rich that money is no object. I don't care if you're the Sultan of Brunei; even he has a budget, and let me tell you, the richer they are, the
cheaper
they are.” Goldie imparted this with the hushed tone of someone divulging a grave but certain truth. The groom-to-be and object of Goldie's misgivings was older. He looked forty-five, she said, even though he said he was only thirty-eight. The bride-to-be said she was twenty-seven, and probably was. There was no ring, and he'd said they were in such a rush that he'd given her one of those gold-plate cubic zirconium artificial Tiffany settings that you could get at any good pawnshop for $200. “That was naawt normal,” Goldie declared. “I don't care how rushed you are; when I see a rich older guy like that and a young woman like that I expect a
rock
on her finger and nothing less. I'm not saying rich people won't skimp on some fronts, because they definitely will. But …” She threw her hands out as if to indicate all