Love Dicks

The case opened like this: A woman came to the Nick Harris Detective Bureau & Academy in Van Nuys, California, where Milo Speriglio is director in chief. The client was attractive, 30ish, rich, divorced, childless, worried. "It's about my boyfriend," she said. Then she told what she knew about Salvatore.

Now I'm standing in front of Salvatore's apartment with Speriglio. He knocks on the door. We hear footsteps inside. He knocks again. "Who's that?" a female voice asks.

Speriglio whispers to me, "Say something. A woman usually opens a door for another woman." So I lean forward and say my name and, right on cue, she cracks the door and peers out.

"We're looking for Salvatore," Speriglio says. "You're his wife, right?" he asks.

"Si."

"Mona, right?" He has done his homework.

"Si."

And we're in. For the next 20 minutes, Speriglio does his number and I listen, fighting the urge to blurt out, "Your husband's playing hide the pepperoni and we know where!" But I can't, because Speriglio and I are spies in the house of love.

•

An estimated 20,000 single people hired detectives last year to check out lovers—up from almost none a decade ago. Like Salvatore's squeeze, most of the clients were college graduates, financially secure women who had taken their share of dead-end rides up lovers' lane. Each year, it seems, that road becomes more treacherous. Where once lovers feared heartache, they now risk AIDS. Unless you marry your high school sweetheart, how much can you know about your lover's past? Tiptoeing into the Nineties, graying boom babes and their single brethren are scared—racing the clock, protecting their loot and perhaps gambling with their lives.

Who ya gonna call?

"People come to my office for the first time and go, 'Gee, is this going to be like Magnum, P.I.?' " says Thomas Martin, of Martin Investigative Services in Orange, California. "I have to tell 'em, 'Sorry, the reality of it is a lot closer to Columbo.' "

Sam Spade may have chased his leads up dark alleys and into dingy gin mills, but the new generation of sleuths lets its fingers do the walking. Computer networks and acres of microfilmed files have taken most of the shoe leather out of the trade, particularly the new boom business of background investigations. Beginning with as little as your paramour's name, a desk-bound Columbo can tap into billions of bytes of information and produce a report that includes everything from phone numbers and current and previous addresses to auto registrations, marriage licenses, divorce-court depositions, employment records, tax liens, credit history and civil and criminal judgments. All that for as little as $100 to $500. Some cases—like Italian stallion Salvatore's—may require the more costly procedure of surveillance. But for about 90 percent of all background checks on lovers, a data spelunk is all that's necessary.

A lot of singles want to know if their partners have AIDS.

"I tell 'em, I have no magic computer that can tell me where your sweetie's been sleeping," says Martin, who, like other detectives, ranks medical records among the toughest to plunder.

It's easy enough to find out if a boyfriend is unfaithful. A few choice hours of surveillance will usually yield an episode in the Adventures of Mr. Zipper. And it might not take even that, according to Ed Pankau, head of the Texas-based Intertect detective (continued on page 190)Love Dicks(continued from page 104) agency. "If you want to know if a man is having an affair, you just wait until he goes out of town and stays in a hotel. He'll eat in the restaurant, have a couple of drinks, then go back to his room and make two phone calls—one to the honey and one to the wife. The next day, you call the hotel and say, 'This is Miss Smith with the ABC Company. I want to verify the charges on our employee's phone bill....' Simple," Pankau says. "They give you the numbers and you see who he called."

Martin handled about 300 love spy cases last year—ten times the number he investigated in 1985—and it gave him a new appreciation for feminine intuition in matters of the heart and lower organs. "Of the women who ask us to do a background check just to make sure everything's OK, usually they walk away very happy, very satisfied, no problems," he says. "Of the women who want us to find out if their partner is fooling around, ninety-seven percent are, and the other three percent are, too; we just don't catch 'em. It's uncanny. Women know."

If AIDS has raised the stakes in the dating game, it has also changed the rules. Nick Beltrante, of D.C.-based Beltrante & Associates, says almost all of his clients requesting background checks want to know if their lovers are sleeping around. Same old story—with a new denouement. "They say they suspect their boyfriend is seeing someone else, but they're not that concerned unless he's having casual relations," says Beltrante. "They want to know, is he going to bars and picking up anyone he meets? The subject is health, not sex."

Sometimes the subject is money.

Joan, a 38-year-old office manager, is a petite brunette with sky-blue eyes, a musical laugh and a biological clock ticking like Big Ben. She met Steven at a party in a friend's home. He was tall, dark and "gorgeous," she says. She fell in love.

Steven told Joan he worked in PR for local hotels. When they started dating, he had plenty of spending money. Gradually, as the weeks piled into months, he was coming up short. "It was little things at first," Joan says. "He needed some new shirts for a business trip, or he'd want to take some clients to dinner at a real nice place and could I pay? He'd say, 'My money will be coming through soon.' That kind of thing." So she paid. She paid for shirts and dinners. Then she paid for suits and rental cars. Then airline tickets. And then, one day, he was gone.

When Joan met the man she now lives with, she was still working off $50,000 in debts from her two-year binge with Steven. Once burned, she shied into detective David Mollison's office to get a background check on her new suitor.

"I was so suspicious at that point, I figured the detective was jerking me off, too," Joan says, laughing. "I was like, oh, this guy just comes right out front with it. Gimme a hundred bucks!"

Mollison, founder of Coastal Operations Group in Casselberry, Florida, gave Joan a clean report card on her new lover. He also tapped his computer keyboard until he found a paper trail to con man Steven. "He said we could probably find him and press some kind of charges," Joan says, "but I don't know. I feel like that's over and done. In a way, I guess I must have known what was going on, but I just wanted to believe in him."

•

We've all spied in the name of love. Not the zoom lens, wire-tap, cloak-and-dagger kind of spying—not the stuff from the movies. Even the pros seldom ever resort to that. But how about glancing in snookums' Week at a Glance to see what's booked for Saturday night? Hasn't your hand ever dipped into a coat pocket for an address book? Or rifled the receipts on a desktop? What about the medicine chest at hot cakes' place—you checked for an extra toothbrush, didn't you? And you would have noted if he had a diaphragm case next to the Q-Tips, or if she kept a bottle of Brut with her Lady Bics. That's only natural. After the first few mindless mattress thrashes, we're all looking for clues.

"What I tell people is, Come to me before you get in deep in the relationship," says Martin. "It'll save you a lot of grief, a lot of time and a lot of money. It's so much easier."

Consider the case of Ralph, an insurance adjuster in Boston, 45 years old, married for the second time. He hired a detective to check the probate records before he married his second wife, "but I wasn't going to admit that," Ralph says. "I mean, she wasn't the problem."

The problem was Ralph's first wife. They had met on a blind date and married within months. He was 25 years old, she was 20.

"I loved her," Ralph says. Then he amends quietly, "I thought I loved her."

One night, a couple of years after they wedded, Ralph and his wife went to an awards banquet. During cocktail hour, as he introduced her to his colleagues, he noticed something odd.

"This one guy from the office seemed to be really staring at my wife—I could just kind of feel it—and when he came up and I introduced them, she became uncomfortable. She went through a little change. I could see it in her eyes."

At work the next day, Ralph confronted the guy. "He said he didn't want to accuse my wife of anything, but he thought he knew her from Montreal. He said he used to go to this place in Montreal where they had exotic dancers...."

When he cooled down, Ralph called detective Robert Simmons. Three weeks and $3500 later, Ralph had the skinny on the missus.

"The report said she was a dancer in the club, and she was helping herself to liquor between shows, and she'd been a prostitute up there, too. The whole deal. Her hair was a different color, but she used her own name, and her own Social Security number, so that proved it. That Social Security number proved it."

Ralph says it took him a week to get up the nerve to confront his wife. When he did, "she admitted everything. She said times had been rough. She said she started dancing when she was seventeen and the money was good, but she stayed longer than she'd wanted to. She said she wanted to tell me about it but just never did."

Ralph moved out, filed for divorce, quit his job. "I didn't think I'd ever get married again," he says. "I didn't want children, so what was the point? It's not that I don't trust people because of what happened, but I didn't want to go through all that again and find out my wife was somebody I didn't even know."

•

He says, "I can't give you my phone number, because I'm working undercover for the DEA."

She says, "You're the only one."

He says, "I'm with the CIA and I move to a different safe house every week."

She says, "I'm a virgin."

You'd be hard put to devise a pickup, come-on or plea the love spies haven't heard. Pankau says he or one of the 65 agents who work for him hears the DEA and CIA lines "at least once a week. Those are real popular."

Speriglio heard the virgin line recently from a single guy who ordered a background check on his fiancée. "She told him she was a virgin, and she's twenty-eight years old. Then they had sex and she said she was pregnant." Speriglio pauses. "That's pushing it, don't you think?"

Martin, who actually was a DEA agent before he hung his shingle, says, "Listen to this. This happens a lot. A woman comes in here and says, 'I'm in love with this guy. We've been dating for two years. He's always over at my house. I've never been to his house. Does he have an address?' " Martin slaps a meaty fist against his forehead for emphasis. "I go, 'Look, lady, I'll give you this for free: The guy's married. OK? You don't even need me. Get outa here. Goodbye!' I mean, how stupid can you be?"

Another line tossed around liberally is an old standard: "Will you marry me?" That's what Salvatore said to the wealthy divorcee who hired Speriglio. Here's what happened: Barbie from Brentwood, as we'll call her, met Sal at a party. He spoke broken English and she spoke phrase-book Italian. They talked and shortly thereafter made an international love connection. Sal had the kind of body you see in museums cast in bronze—the kind of body they build at Gold's Gym in Venice, California, where he worked out daily, or out on the beach, where he played paddle tennis. Barbie swooned. They began to date. When Barbie wanted to see Sal, she called him on his car phone or his pager. When Sal wanted money for "investments," Barbie paid. She didn't have his home number and had never been to his apartment, but that didn't bother her much until Sal proposed. Then she went to the Nick Harris Detective Bureau & Academy for a background check.

In a photograph Barbie gave the detectives, Salvatore sits on the edge of a bed wearing pink boxer shorts and a Cheshire-cat smile. The calf muscles and biceps bulge. His hennaed hair flows onto his bronze shoulders. One hand disappears in the folds of the rumpled bed sheets.

•

We don't know if Sal is home the day we cruise his neighborhood, past his apartment house, up the alley, around the block again. Speriglio parks on a cross street, where his car can't be seen from Sal's front porch. Since the day Barbie came to Speriglio's office, a staffer has run a data search that came up with the address. A little legwork on the part of another agent established that Sal lived with an attractive woman named Mona. We don't know if she is his sister, girlfriend, wife or accomplice.

It's Sunday afternoon and the streets are quiet. After a few minutes, Speriglio looks up and smiles. "Let's be reporters," he says. He points at the pad and pen in my lap. "You've got the props."

He tells me how we'll play it—we're with such-and-such news agency, working on a story about paddle tennis. We have a tip that Salvatore is an international paddle-tennis star and we want to ask a few questions. What does Salvatore make of the competition in California? Is the paddle-tennis scene here the same as in Italy? Does he like the beaches? Is it like home?

"Hot story, Milo."

"I know, I know. Who cares about some Italian playing paddle tennis at Venice Beach? But just watch," he says. "It'll fly."

And it does—on the wings of Speriglio's jackpot guess that sleepy-eyed Mona, who answers the door, is, in fact, Salvatore's wife. Once we're in, we're home.

As for our "interview," it couldn't have been easier. "Do you play paddle tennis, too?" Speriglio begins, as all good reporters do, giving the subject a chance to talk about herself. Mona is groggy and she doesn't know much English, but Speriglio is as cool as a sea breeze. He uses his real name and tosses in a couple of Italian words, for good measure. He compliments her on how fit she looks and her lovely tan. Ever so slowly, the talk turns to Salvatore. How long has he been in the U.S.? When did she arrive? How long have they been married? Did they have any bambini? Mona's eyes shift from Speriglio to me and back a few times. She seems to understand less and less English the longer we stay. At one point, she leans back against the couch and crosses her arms over her stomach.

"Why you come here?" she asks.

A few minutes later, we're back on the street. We now know that Salvatore has been in the U.S. for a year and Mona arrived three months ago—about the time her husband met Barbie. They have been married for three years. They have no children. Mona is headed home within weeks and Sal is leaving a few months later. For the record, Mona says there was no such thing as paddle tennis in Italy, but Sal was a squash champion.

As we turn the corner and walk to the car, out of sight of Salvatore and Mona's front door, Speriglio plugs a cigarette into his mouth.

"Case closed," he says.