A Private Investigater Named Zach

There’s all sorts of good that can come out of bringing others into something – personal trainers, and executive coaches, high school teachers and parents of toddlers.  Sometimes you just need someone else to set the boundaries, show you the way, remind you that your best is better than what you settle for.

That’s what I thought I was getting into when I hired Zach.  Really I was.  The idea of a private investigator gets all tied up in shady deals and cheating and snooping where your nose doesn’t belong.  But I thought that by having an outsider take a look at things and bring me real data, a reality test really, that I could take this thing to a higher plane.

The problem was not just that I was deluding myself.  Yes, I was looking for an excuse, a substantiated reason to turn this thing on its head.  But even so, cooler heads may have prevailed and all that if Zach hadn’t been who he was.  If he hadn’t been the kind of person who, having witnessed a wrong, or at least something that looked like a wrong given the info he had access to, couldn’t rest until it was made right.  Probably being a PI wasn’t a very good career choice for him, but the roads he did and didn’t take are a different story.  I got the Zach I got, and that has made all the difference.

It was a cold February day when I first went to his office.  It felt so scripted, the damsel in distress on one side of a cheap metal desk, the gumshoe on the other.  Except Zach was no Humphrey Bogart, although he did have the looks.  He couldn’t have been more than 30, with a thin sheen of cool barely masking an almost painful eagerness to be helpful.  He was the nephew of a neighbor, the kind of person you hire when being a good member of the community is more important than getting the job done.

I didn’t have much to tell him.  Looking back on it, that’s probably why I didn’t try to find someone with more experience; it would have been embarrassing to admit how little I knew to someone who was asking all the right questions.  I knew instinctively that Zach would take the crumbs that were all I had to offer and act as if my job were done – he’d have it covered from here.  I needed that sense of reassurance, no matter how falsely it rang.  That was it really – the thing that led to all the bad decisions I made from there.  Having asked him from the start to shoulder far more than was his to bear, I felt responsible to make it up to him somehow.  When he started to care, more than just caring on principle because he felt it was the thing to do, but really care, as if his understanding of the world and good and evil and the meaning of life all depended on this, I was already beholden to him in a currency I had never intended to spend.

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