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. On another case, a woman hired us 24/7 to protect her and her property from a sister who she feared was trying to kill her. The dramatic climax of this surreal episode came when Uncle Felix and his large  entourage arrived from Bolivia for a holiday visit. The sisters stood to claim a sizable inheritance from their uncle, but not if he became aware of their battle-to-the-death over his late brother’s estate. The ladies got their act together, like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, staging a magnificent family dinner for Thanksgiving. But it ended, as though scripted by Oscar Wilde, with Uncle Felix getting food poisoning. He never found out why there were detectives in the house at all hours, since the sisters both feared they might get written out of his will. For me, the strangest part of the job was having to sleep on the couch each night facing in only one direction, never the other. In the private detective business, like any other, one always tries to bend to the whim of the client.

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Sydney Seminar

There are still some seats left at the Hidden Pivot in Sydney on December 2-3, so please let me know ASAP if you’re interested in attending.  You can  request a registration form and further details by clicking here.