On a magnificent fall day, over lunch at Sam's in Tiburon, I spent as pleasant an afternoon as I can recall, reminiscing with my old partner in crime-solving, Kyle Rimdahl, and his helper Dorothy Jansizian. In the early 1990s, we worked together for the late Hal Lipset, the celebrated San Francisco private eye. Kyle took over the operational side of the business when Hal died some years ago, and Dorothy, a human archive, stayed on to assist Kyle. Hal's files stretched back to the 1940s, and Dorothy, who began working for Lipset Service in 1971, has a nearly photographic recall of every case logged over the last 35 years. Far from crime-solving, Kyle and I spent many hours doing surveillance work that was more Laurel-and-Hardy than Sherlock-and-Watson. Much of the time, sitting in a car for hours on end, our chief concern was not so much uncovering evidence of moral turpitude as it was figuring out how to take a pee without blowing our cover. One time, we were hired by a surgeon to tail his wife, whom he suspected of having an affair. We lost her when she drove into a Chinatown garage, only to learn later that she had decided to surprise him by showing up at his office to take him to lunch. The surgeon evidently slipped away from the table for long enough to call our boss and, in a panic, request that he call off his sleuths, whose services were costing him $150 an hour. Gay Bath-House The gay bath-house surveillance was probably low ebb, and you don't want to know the details. We did this ongoing job for the health department, which for reasons that became clear to me at the start, could not find anyone in its own ranks to take the assignment.
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