#or should i say DUCK gumshoe

[kotofeden]

Okay, so I was tyding my tags, and made a typo writing dick gumshoe

Comment from my friend didn’t make it any better, so thank them for abomination bellow

[abluescarfonwaston]

Marshallworth but its fake dating. Miles is sick to death of going to Von Karma parties and having everyone and their grandmother tell him he really should be seeing someone already- a good woman really makes the man you know. Trying to set him up with themselves/their daughters/their granddaughters (or perhaps themselves dearie. You seem like the sort who knows the value of older... things)

He collapses into the breakroom table over it one monday. Complaining to the only person in the office who is friendly with him aside from Gumshoe- Neil Marshall. Neil jokingly suggests he could be Miles date to those parties and chase off his suitors. Miles, who just read every fake dating fic in the Magisteel community Shoots straight up and says Yes. We should.

They go to the first party. Miles is tense AF. Neil sticks next to him and is graceously introduced as “Miles Boyfriend” to everyone they meet. The women all size him up with murder in their eyes and for the first time in Neil’s life he wonders if his unbeatable streak will end in his untimely demise at one of their hands. No one is deterred.

Miles leaves the party FUMING mad. It didn’t work! Neil apologizes. Those gals really are crazy. Miles says ‘They saw through us! They knew it wasn’t real! We need to step it up!!!” Neil stares at him because he really doesn’t think that was the problem frankly.

Miles says he was too tense when Neil touched him so he demands to practice holding hands, causally touching, and then - in a moment that will live in Neils dreams forever - making out. Pushes Neil into the couch and kisses him breathless. They go out on dates to practice and build up alibis. Edgeworth brings him a lunch the day he forgets to pack one and is the ‘perfect’ partner.

They go to a wedding out of the city. When they get to their room its a single bed. Neil offers to see if they have any doubles left because clearly something got mixed up in the booking. Miles says he requested a single. Couldn’t have anyone thinking they slept in SEPARATE beds. Neil offers to get a cot or even just sleep on the floor. Miles won’t hear it. What if someone came in and saw? They’d think they were Fighting and that WILL NOT DO.

They sleep in the same bed. Neil is consumed by feelings and confusion. Is this real? Is this still the bit? Is hhis soft heart getting jerked around on a lead like Jake said? Then Miles cries out in his sleep. He doesn’t know why but he’s softly calling his name and tucking him close. Miles slips back under without waking and Neil wakes up almost on top of Miles like a blanket. He’s So self conscious the whole wedding and blushes every time Miles kisses him or asks him if he’s alright and gets him a water because ‘you look flush Neil.’ He flees into the bouquet toss crowd to steady his rapidly beating heart.

Catches it.

By the time he stumbles back to the table Miles is already asking the others on the proper procedure for engagements and where to buy rings. Neil baps him on the head with the flowers and gives a tight laugh. ‘lets not get ahead of ourselves there pardner’. (We’re still FAKE dating for all I know after all!) Miles studies him with something approaching confusion before nodding. Asks when their alone if he’s done something wrong. He has been trying his best to be the perfect partner.

“I don’t want the perfect partner! I just want You to be my partner! For real! Not this fake pretend where I don’t even know if this is anything more than a mental game for you on how to score the most ‘dating’ points!”

Miles is quiet for so long Neil nearly packs up to catch a bus home. “I don’t like hiking. Being affectionate at the office makes me nauseous and I have a worse time sleeping in the same bed because I constantly worry about disturbing you.” grabs his arm. Ducks his head. “And i thought if I was the perfect partner you would find no reason to leave me.”

“Oh. Oh pardner.”

Then they’re real dating. Things get softer and worse and messier and better all at the same time if not quite at once. And they were almost Very Very happy.

[setzappersto-pew]

Holy Puns, Batman!

We all know and love the plentiful puns in Holy Musical B@man!, so I took the liberty of writing down all the puns or play on words. Was it a waste of time? Perhaps...but here it is nonetheless. The vast majority of puns were said by the villains, specifically Sweet Tooth, played by the wonderful Jeff Blim in his electric debut StarKid performance! 

First up is all the candy puns, as those are the most fun! Unless otherwise noted, all puns were said by Sweet Tooth. Of the 46 listed, there are 36 that had a corresponding candy pulled; I have put those candies in bold. 

"Well well well. Looks like you guys are up to your old Twix!"

"The Joker was a sucker!"

"It's been quite the Spree, hasn't it?"

"More like the peanut gallery"

"Kidnap the mayor and ransom him off for 100 Grand?"

"How many licks does it take to kill you?" [reference to Tootsie Pop, with which Sweet Tooth kills Chilly Willy]

"Now quit your Snickering...” 

“...you Airheads."

"We've got a bat in our belfry, and if we ever want it to be Pay Day..."

"See, divided we rogues are just Runts...” 

“...but together we pack a Sour Punch.”

"Sorry Batman, but I'm no Gusher." - Penguin

"Godiva good plan."

"Haven't you and Batman enjoyed my latest batch of M&Ms? Murder and Mayhem, there they are."

"Aren't you a Smartie?"

"You're the one who's nutty if you think I'm going to the nut house, my Almond Joy Wonder."

"Bout time we candy coated this Robin's breast red!" - Joe

"We're gonna tear out your Jelly Belly!" - Gob

"You're not going anywhere, Miss Dawes. Gob, stop her [Gobstopper]."

“I'm the only jawbreaker around here." - Robin

"Hand me my Bazooka, Joe." [Bazooka Joe brand gum]

"And I thought I was a gumshoe!" - Robin [gumshoe is another word for detective]

"Your sugar high is over, Sweet Tooth. And you're right about to crash; into Arkham Asylum, that is. Get ready to trade your Peppermint Patty for a padded cell." - Robin

"Doesn't Candy here look good enough to eat? She's my little Sugar Baby!"

"Yeah, and he's my SweeTart!" - Candy

[Miss, did he hurt you?] "No. It felt like a Kiss." - Candy

"What do you say, S.T.? Should we kill him Now or Later?" - Candy

"I have plans for this little Chiclet."

"Take 5, boys!"

"Candy, be a Dove and tell my troops to advance on Gotham Square."

"It's gonna be a Hot Tamale in the old town tonight!"

"The Boy Wonder Ball!"

"Poor Robin. He risks his life trying to be Gotham's Lifesaver..."

"I've devised a little, a little Whatchamacallit, a death trap!"

"Feast your eyes on this: my nuclear Warhead!" [this isn’t a candy pull, but it is still visualized with a prop]

"It's going to be quite the Fun Dip!"

"Skittle me this: will Gotham forsake its heroes, or will its heroes forsake Gotham?"

"So unless Batman betrays you all and shows up at Gotham Square to save his little Nerd..."

"That's the sound of chaos Good & Plenty."

"What are these little Dots?"

"Do it, you Dum Dums!"

"Oops! Butterfingers!"

"Now he's Red Hot!"

"I'm gonna Crunch you in two." - Batman

"Oh come on, Batman. Gimme a break!" [Kit Kat]

"I've got one last treat for you Batman, and it's a real Whopper!"

I’m going to list the rest of the puns by who said them or at whose expense they were said, i.e. what the theme of the pun is.

Catwoman

"Enough pussyfooting, Penguin, and let's get the meeting started meow, shall we? “

“We better catnip this thing in the bud before that mouse with wings sends us all to the pound"

"I hate to let the cat out of the bag, but your two theme is a cat-astrophe!"

"What a positively purr-fect plan!"

"Oh hiss and vinegar, what are we supposed to do meow?"

Mr. Freeze

"Well, isn't this a cool crowd. It is so ice to see you all again."

"Because of Batman, my operations have been put on ice. My assets are frozen."

"Snow way!”

Poison Ivy

"I've been uprooted."

“Leave.”

Scarecrow

"He's giving me an awful fright!"

Penguin

General bird/penguin words like “chick”, “tweets”, “flipper”, “ruffle my feathers”, etc.

"You're a lame duck, and you know it!"

"I'm cock of the walk around here!"

“Fly the coop!"

"Let's get this jailbird back to the cuckoo's nest!" - Robin

Two Face

Every sentence that man says has “two”, “second”, “double”, etc., but they’re not really puns...he’s just staying on brand. So am I going to write down his entire monologue? Nah.

"Two Face, you deuce-bag!" - Poison Ivy

"Get your broke ass out of here, Two Face." - Mr. Freeze

Egghead

"Alright, you turkeys...yeah, egg-cellent!"

"Hey, what the deviled was that?"

"Scramble!"

"We heard you were hatching a scheme, Egghead" "But we've cracked the case!" "It's over" "Yeah, over-easy" - Batman and Robin

Calendar Man

"Now it's time to March to your death!"

"Looks like today's not your lucky day.” 

“Boxing Day is comin’ early!”

“I'm gonna punch you weaklings into next month.”

“Come at me, you April Fool!"

"Calendar Man, Your days are numbered!" - Batman

Honorable Mention

Sluggers and Matches, the gangsters played by Nico Ager and Jim Povolo, say this:

"We got lots more racketeerin' to do, yeah yeah yeah!" 

"Then it's a good thing I brought...my racket."

[tabletopontap]

Get Ready, Gumshoes!

 There are two new board games coming out this year with a detective theme that I’m excited to talk about.  Both games made my “Most Anticipated” list for the year.  Both attempt to blend cardboard with modern technology, although they go about it in different ways.  Both are cooperative play.  Both are rated for ages 14+ according to boardgamegeek.com (BGG), but that’s where the similarities end.

Of the two, right now I’m more interested in Chronicles of Crime.  This is reflected in where the two games landed on my initial “Most Anticipated” list (spoilers: #3 vs. #7).  Unlike the other game I’m going to discuss, this one doesn’t come from a veteran board game designer, nor from a well-known publisher, as far as I can tell.  Designer David Cicurel has primarily worked with video games in the past.  Although board games and video games are different, both require solid mechanisms to be enjoyable, so I have high expectations for this game.  The publisher is Lucky Duck Games, which previously released Vikings Gone Wildand a card game version of the digital app, Fruit Ninja (Fruit Ninja card game was also co-designed by David Cicurel).  This game supports 1-4 players with an estimated play time of 1 hour to an hour and a half.  In this game, players are investigators trying to catch the criminal in the shortest time possible.  The game involves using an app and virtual reality glasses.  The game doesn’t require you to use VR, but I think it’s the most exciting part!  Players will look at scenes in the app looking for clues.  It reminds me of a hidden objects game mashed up with an escape room.  Finding the right objects to further investigate in each scene in the app reminds me of Mask of Anubis or Mask of Moai; if you haven’t heard of these games, don’t worry about it.  They’re virtually impossible to get in the U.S. (pun intended).  The time pressure reminds me of real-time escape games, such as the Unlock series.  I don’t know why this one intrigues me more than the other crime themed game.  Maybe it’s because there’s more information out on it already, including a Rahdo Runs Through YouTube video.  The VR just looks so cool!  I also like the shorter playing time.  It’s difficult to get longer games to the table, even if they’re fun to play.          

Now let’s take a look at Detective: A Modern Crime Boardgame.  This game has pedigree behind it.  Ignacy Trzewiczek (known for Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, Imperial Settlers, and First Martians: Adventures on the Red Planet) has teamed up with an unfamiliar designer, Przemyslaw Rymer.  The game publisher is Portal Games.  The game supports 1-5 players and the estimated playing time ranges from 90 minutes to 3 hours.  This game blends traditional board game elements with an online component.  Players act as investigators working for government agency, ANTERES, and are given login credentials to access an online database that holds case file information.  Data includes a list of suspects, witness details, and documentation pertaining to arrests and trials linked to the current crime being investigated.  To me, the game’s description hints that some of the clues may point to other websites, or at least information that can be looked up online.  I might be reading too much into it, but my suspicions come from this line, “Players are free to use the investigation manual, ANTERES database, and any other online resources they may find to help them solve the case.”  This game currently has a price advantage over Chronicles of Crime, costing only $35 for pre-order via Miniature Market vs. $49 for CoC with the VR glasses (and if you’re going to buy the game, surely you’ll want the VR glasses).

The BGG forum is already blowing up with a debate about whether or not this should be considered a board game, due to the heavily integrated online content.  I will say that I don’t have a problem with integrating board games with modern technology.  In fact, I feel that app versions of certain board games are more fun to play.  Apps can cut out the not-so-fun aspects of gaming, such as tedious upkeep, as well as enhance games.  Some examples where app functionality can improve games include, but are not limited to: randomizing card draw (instead of players constantly reshuffling their decks), keeping track of scoring across multiple categories, adding thematic music, and acting as a timer for real-time games.  Apps can also allow all players to actually play a game, as was the case with Alchemists; without the app, one player had to be the reference manual for looking up which potion type resulted from mixing two ingredients.  This tangential rant is my way of saying that I’m a supporter of physical board games mixing with online/technological components, as long as it makes sense and is done well.  That point is probably obvious, since I’m excited about the two games mentioned in this post.

[mehlsbells]

My upbringing was starkly black and white, everything strictly categorised as sin and acceptable, allowed and not. The massive ‘sin: not allowed’ category swallowed everything in legalism and immutable consequences. I fell in love with noir partly because it has no such hangups.

I savoured noir’s evocative language and sexual undercurrent. I learned to believe exposing repressive authority and dirty deeds was valiant even if ultimately futile, and justice could be delivered even when corrupt systems stymied it. The hardboiled detective attracted me from every angle, and I dreamed of both being and fucking the daring mystery-solving, smoking, drinking, dame-bedding wiseass. The detective archetype is dangerously appealing; stalwart antiheroes holding to their personal code while all around them people sold their souls for a bottle of scotch, a land deed, a tempting woman or a hard man. Terribly tragic, and as such, terribly romantic.

Like a suspect in a smoky dive bar, what constitutes ‘loyalty’ in noir is hard to pin down, but while most supporting characters treat loyalty as a purchasable, expendable, flexible commodity, [anti]heroes Spade and Archer, Gittes and Dewitt, Mars and Hammer, et al. hold fiercely to their personal definitions thereof. These ideals often keep them from working with a partner, as they can’t find others who share their notions longer than a book’s opening chapters, a film’s first act. Sometimes, in a twisted blessing, their partner gets murdered before committing betrayal. (‘Committing betrayal.’ What a cruel grammatical construction.)

Fairly unique among their set, Charleses Nick and Nora manage loyalty and happiness to and with each other, but not only does their teasing openly relay insecurities in everyone outside their connubial circle, their origin story is shot through with loyalty conundrums. The crux of The Thin Man revolves around characters leveraging Nick’s allegiance to an old friend to make Nick and Nora investigate a suspicious death/disappearance, similar to the relationship between Marlowe and Terry Lennox in The Long Goodbye.

Marlowe: You didn’t have much choice, huh? So you used me. Lennox: Hell, that’s what friends are for.

Many noir tales examine murder, corruption, lost love, incest, power, grasping for companionship in sex and booze and partners. Few are so nakedly about friendship, loyalty, and the unique betrayal they set you up for as The Long Goodbye. As the game Lennox and Marlowe play in their first scene tells us, all Marlowe’s relationships are games of liar’s poker he’ll lose. The only question is: sooner, or later?

The film’s opening involves the great Philip Marlowe cajoling his hungry cat to eat first a concoction of cottage cheese and raw egg, then generic cat food. The two mewl, mumble and scratch in their understanding standoff. The film ends with Marlowe coolly justifying shooting his once-friend because Lennox indirectly killed the cat. Everything between is a meditation on loyalty.

As best exemplified in Nick and Nora Charles, noir understands relationships featuring fidelity and comfortable insults are the ones which really matter, so the snarky–sweet caring–codependent way Marlowe and hungry cat banter intentionally evokes true friendship. Altman called that opener important and Marlowe’s relation to his cat commentary on friendship: no matter how hectic his life, Marlowe is concerned the cat eats, whether the cops scare him, if he’s lost in LA’s mean streets.

Like most of his genre, Marlowe is destined to traverse the criminal underworld, continually learning the hard way he’s more loyal to friends, clients, even his constantly stoned neighbours, than they to him. He can’t bring himself to act on his cynicism until he’s burnt, and is a lost soul not because he’s dumb or drugged – he turns down even his neighbours’ hash brownie – but because he can’t find anywhere to put his trust.

Though they harass him and he blusters against their threats and handcuffs, Marlowe’s relationship with the cops is his most stable. He despises their work, they hate and stymie him, but at least he knows where he stands. Everywhere else is shifting sand and empty promises, golden and glittering by daylight, cold and dangerous at night. Under it all play morphing renditions of “The Long Goodbye,” refrains evolving and fading as quickly as relationships, adding atmosphere as Los Angeles underworld characters succour the detective and each other until betrayal becomes convenient.

As he searches for answers in mysteries and others, Marlow smokes to dull the pain – take a shot every time he strikes his match on a new surface, you’ll be drunk before the halfway point. Elliot Gould’s physicality superbly conveys Marlowe’s hurt and insecurity, shambling gait literalising existentially unsure footing.

Altman’s shots and Zsigmond’s cinematography also expose Marlowe’s mental state. The beautiful police station tracking shot puts us in Marlowe’s gumshoes, showing his strain as he attempts to sort through the mountain of information, theories, and grief he’s been buried under. The long dolly across the grounds of the clinic has a similar effect, moving first methodically, then more frenetically as Marlowe’s frustration builds. Exposition of addresses and phone numbers unroll with slow camera movements over long takes, revelling in the acting’s stillness, taking a less usual route than montages to make the viewer feel Marlowe’s tedium and loneliness.

The odyssey is wrapped in perfectly exposed beach scenes, daytime sands yellow-tinged and California to their core, nighttime painted deep blacks and grainy red with Eileen’s dress the only spot of yellow. Doubled imagery and symbols of duplicity abound, the most striking of which involve the beach. First we see Marlowe in the glare off Wades’s window, projected between quarrelling lovers as they snipe at each other. Later, in the same window, Eileen is shown two-faced as she and Marlowe talk while her husband charges suicidally into the inky sea.

The whole film is a gorgeous depiction of our ugliest impulses, and Altman is the perfect director for it. Through various lenses and genres, Altman’s work examines intimacy and pain which can be leveraged by only those closest to us. Noir’s peripheral characters are who many of Altman’s other films center: desperate, impotent men; disloyal lovers; marriages on the verge; frustrated humans performing drastic acts. The Long Goodbye digs into side stories many noirs don’t unless impacting the protagonist directly: Farewell, My Lovely is more concerned with Marlowe’s relationship to the women in his path than the women themselves; American Gigolo hardly contains a conversation Julian Kaye isn’t in; Evelyn’s relationships in Chinatown mostly evolve when Jake is around to observe, and he’s around almost every frame. Some of The Long Goodbye’s more virulent events or breakdowns happen while Marlowe is out of the picture, or listening to nothing but crashing waves.

Altman is interested in examining these stories for their own sake, and shows it by examining side characters with the reflections motif, too. Zsigmond uses Eileen’s windshield brilliantly to reflect her facade as Marlowe chases her through the streets. The stoned hippy neighbours are introduced surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows, one dancing with herself in the mirrored glass. The gate-guard-slash-impression-artist is reflected in Harry’s shiny car sidepanels, a symbol of security who pretends to be many other people, then shows himself more trustworthy than people pretending to be someone they’re not.

The guard also displays The Long Goodbye’s wicked sense of humour, along with the horny lookout whose ogling of stoned half-naked neighbour women allows Marlowe to sneak away. There’s the slapstick of Harry swinging haplessly on the gate trying clamber over as he imagines a detective should. Marlowe plants a sloppy handprint on the interrogation cell two-way mirror, then paints his face with fingerprint ink, cops impotent to stop his clowning. The guard dog fetching her owner’s stick from the waves has a twisted hilarity to it.

Which brings us, as the film continually does, back to loyalty. Relationships with animals are throughout: besides his cat, Marlowe nervously banters with the guard dog and talks as cheerfully as a damned man can to strays lying in the road. Ultimately animals’ loyalty – even only to the hand that feeds and then betrays them, pictured perfectly with mounted ducks – is still stronger than that of everyone else in his life, and loyalty is important to him.

If only I’d recognised earlier how much my identifying with pulp heroes was due to my own sense of loyalty, deservedness of recipients be damned. “Their cynicism exactly stems from their compassion, [their] hardness is a scar tissue of a heart they can’t stop the world from breaking over and over.” I weirdly admired Marlowe hoping against hope, believing those he loves once, then again. You know what they say about fools.

Marlowe: Nobody cares but me. Lennox: Well that’s you, Marlowe. You’ll never learn, you’re a born loser.

The Long Goodbye is Chandler’s most personal work. “You writers have your own special way of describing, don’t you?” is the movie acknowledging this sure as Chandler’s book commented on his deep insecurities, ideals, and philosophies. (The film references the book many times, including the face-bandaged man as a nod to Book Terry’s extensive plastic surgery.) Roger Ebert said in his original review, “The private eye as a fiction device was essentially a way to open doors; the best novels of Chandler and the others are simply hooks for a cynical morality.” Like Inherent Vice, the criminal underworld is alluring backdrop and murder the smaller mystery behind the real question of whether the detective can uphold his personal code in a world where ‘a man is only as good as his word’ simply means most men are no good. The real question, the crux and heart of the matter, is Will they keep clinging to that code? Why do we keep falling for those who throw us over?

The thing about franchised noir detectives is, as characters or story properties, they can’t fundamentally change. They solve mysteries, their settings are updated from 50s to 70s to aughts to 2019, they jadedly swear they’ll never trust again, they may seem to learn their lesson. But in the end the stories reset. Sure as sunset and the next story, they get let down, used, double-crossed, stung, only to begin again when the next sultry shadow darkens their door. Once again they give their loyalties to a friend in need, a dame with legs up to there. Once again the dames and mates evaporate; or worse, explicitly sell our fallible hero upriver, relying on said hero’s tragically loyal personal code to prevent retaliation.

We’ve all had those dames and mates. We’ve all sworn to never love again, only to willingly set ourselves up for more heartbreak. People who mean what they say only so long as they feel like it. Family who love you so long as you’re meekly in line. Dames who say “I love you” in the night and “I’m leaving you” in the morning. Business partners who call you family until it’s more expedient not to be. Friends who say forever but mean for as long as you’re fun, and you’re no fun when you’re stumbling through a haze of pain or grief. Homme fatales who sell you out when a better offer comes in. Lovers who are loyal while you do exactly what they want.

In the first of two crucial scenes which start placidly before exploding into brutal violence, thug Marty gives a speech to/about his girlfriend Joanne. “Delicate and sweet . . . I love you. I do. . . . The single most important person in my life.” Ah, love, the highest form of loyalty.

Then he hits her across the face with a glass bottle.

Do we feel sorry for her? is the same question Tarantino asks in Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood when Brad Pitt’s Cliff smashes sadistic Sadie’s face with a can of dog food. The blow to Joanne’s face is lighter and unprovoked, but though her crimes are lighter, her madonna-like framing is window dressing. She blithely enjoys fruits of Marty’s torture, murder, and extortion, knowing her flippery is bought with blood money. (Her blow’s aftereffects are visually replicated by Jake’s bandages in Chinatown – directed by Polanski, who is depicted in Once Upon A Time, making these films a Möbius strip of themes, imagery, period, and settings.)

In different ways, Joanne and Sadie establish The Long Goodbye and Once Upon a Time‘s cruel worlds, where psychopaths and rich ruthless men get their way. Both center men with drinking and smoking habits, a dubious past, and a personal moral code. Marlowe and Cliff fight against the establishment, for themselves and their friends. Though they don’t believe in innocence, they want to believe people exist whose souls at least aren’t as dark as the rest of ours. Within their morality is loyalty; Cliff to Rick Dalton, Marlowe to Terry or at least the idea of him: “Terry Lenox was my friend you motherfucker . . . you don’t deserve to be alive you fuckin’ pig.” Rick and Terry don’t return the loyalty, yet Cliff and Marlowe can’t help themselves. It’s their code.

The Long Goodbye ending Ebert calls “off the wall” I see as wish fulfilment, same as Once’s. In the film Terry gets justice delivered by Marlowe, Bracket’s screenplay ‘fixing’ the book’s injustice. Altman revels in this playground where disloyalty equals death and real world consequences are momentarily suspended for a warped fairy tale ending.

The final shot is reminiscent of Holly Martins waiting on a tree-lined boulevard in The Third Man, another film featuring a man unendingly loyal to a death-faking friend who didn’t deserve such fidelity. The Long Goodbye’s last shot brings yellow in again, reminding us of Eileen’s dress, the faded sun on the beach, letters and pledges of friendship aged and brittled by time. Only here, Marlowe’s the one walking away, getting as happy an ending as one can hope for in noir.

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Lennox blindsided Marlowe, then called him a fool for expecting others to do what he would in keeping his word. Pulp detectives are thrown under the bus or off a cliff with the shrugged excuse along the lines of “I knew you were tough enough to survive” or “sorry, you were just collateral damage.” Given enough time, “I threw you under the bus to save myself” becomes “It was the best option for both of us” becomes “you survived and are better for learning this lesson, you should be thanking me!” This essay draws parallels to Marlowe and Veronica Mars’ getting run over because of their clinging to loyalty, “an anchor that binds.”

But every detective also has their breaking point, the point at which they say the rules have been violated enough to justify them taking matters into their own hands. 

Marlowe: I have two friends in the world. One is a cat. The other is a murderer.

Is loyalty its own reward? Chandler’s book seems to argue it is, but Marlowe shooting his once-friend in the film argues something else. Grown and free of the romanticised prism Younger Me viewed Marlowe through, do I believe Chandler’s ending or Brackett’s?

The teenager who first read Chandler’s book would choose idealism: be true to your code, give your loyalty, those who turn on you will get what they deserve while you can keep the moral high ground. Even with grim answers in front of me, maybe I’d make like Marlowe, clinging stubbornly to loyalty disavowed by its recipient, or keeping myself preoccupied searching for answers and other mysteries.

While I want to hold to those ideals still, what are movies for if not to show us what we really want, wish-fulfilling our basest instincts? Watching now, I can’t help but savour that moment Marlowe tosses his cigarette, reaches into his waistband, and coolly shoots the man who treated his loyalty as commodity.

For #Noirvember, I wrote about the concept of loyalty in noir in general, and "The Long Goodbye" in particular. My upbringing was starkly black and white, everything strictly categorised as sin and acceptable, allowed and not.

[kidsviral-blog]

The Heartbreak And Confusion Of A 19-Year Missing Child Case

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/the-heartbreak-and-confusion-of-a-19-year-missing-child-case/

The Heartbreak And Confusion Of A 19-Year Missing Child Case

As if losing a child to kidnapping wasn’t horrifying enough, ineffective law enforcement agencies and predatory private investigators only add to the confusion and pain. Deana Hebert’s long, maddening search for her daughter — and the ex-husband who took her — may be the rule, not the exception.

We’re sitting in a rented Kia minivan, watching a house. We’ve been at it for hours, just staring, and nothing has happened. No one has come in or out, nobody has even walked by. It’s amazing how little can transpire on a sunny Sunday in January on a suburban cul-de-sac in San Bernardino County, California. When the rare car turns down the street, I hold my breath before it inevitably turns into a neighboring driveway.

View this image ›

Private investigator Monique Lessan in her home office Photograph by Chris Tuite for BuzzFeed

I’m sitting alongside Monique Lessan, a private investigator hired to find Bianca Lozano, a 21-year-old woman who was abducted by her father, Juan Lozano, 19 years ago. The house we’ve been ogling is an otherwise unremarkable, well-tended beige two-story in a neighborhood of similar-looking dwellings in Fontana, a parched, charmless city 50 miles east of Los Angeles. It belongs to Juan’s cousin “Pablo” (his name has been changed to maintain the integrity of the investigation), whose identity Lozano has been using for years as he’s eluded detection, living in Mexico with Bianca. Lessan’s theory — or one of her many theories — is that Juan and/or Bianca could be in the house today. As she told me yesterday, “It’s my feeling these two have crossed the border and are back in the U.S.”

At the moment, though, there’s no sign of anyone. Three cars are parked in front and Lessan has jotted down the corresponding license plate numbers, but none have moved in the three hours since we got here. We’re in the backseat, partially obscured by the tinted windows — “If we sit in front, it looks suspicious,” Lessan says — studying photos of Lozano and Bianca so we’ll be able to recognize them should we spot them.

That’s all Lessan is hoping for today. She’s considered simply knocking on the door, but ultimately decided doing so could “burn” her — if Lozano isn’t there, Pablo might tip him off, and then Lozano would go even deeper underground.

Lessan has been a licensed investigator for 21 years but hardly fits the traditional gumshoe profile. She’s a woman in a field dominated by men and has never worked in law enforcement or the military. From the minute I meet her, she’s warm and chatty. She’s slender, with long black hair, and today is wearing a black T-shirt, tight jeans, and sunglasses. Her words tend to tumble out in a stream-of-consciousness rush, and she’s prone to darting from subject to subject. Often these digressions slingshot the conversation back to Lessan’s favorite subjects: She hosts a weekly internet radio show devoted to discussing UFO sightings, the Illuminati, weather modification, and the like. On the ride out to Fontana, she casually, almost dismissively, explained how a small group of families, including the Rothschilds, the Clintons, the Bushes, and the Windsors, run the world, and that Dwight Eisenhower shook hands with aliens in 1954.

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Deana and Bianca Courtesy of Deana Hebert

Lessan has been working on this case since August 2013, and she represents something of a Hail Mary in this nearly two-decade-long search. Bianca’s mother, Deana Hebert, whose Twitter handle is @missingbianca, has exhausted all of her resources and enlisted anyone and everyone she can — the police, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the DA’s office, the Mexican Consulate, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, her congressman, multiple private investigators, several lawyers, family members, friends, volunteers — to look for her daughter. That they’ve all failed says as much about the slapdash, numbingly bureaucratic — if well-intentioned — system we have in this country for finding long-term missing children as it does about anything else. As Hebert put it, “Nobody wants to be responsible for anything in this case. Nobody wants to be in charge. It’s just me pushing and pushing.”

If you were a parent whose daughter was abducted, how much would you pay for her safe return? Even the most well-meaning PIs must navigate the murky moral quandary of what is appropriate to charge a desperate parent to deliver the very thing in the universe they hold most dear. A friend of Hebert’s paid to hire Lessan — the third PI who’s been on the case — and right now this house in Fontana is her only viable lead. If we see either Lozano or Bianca today, the plan is to call Hebert so she can fly out from Texas to meet the fully grown woman she hasn’t seen since she was her 20-month-old toddler, and to contact Lessan’s friend who works as an investigator for Homeland Security, who could arrest Lozano.

As morning turns to afternoon, Lessan’s getting antsy. She begins to consider going against her original instinct and knocking on that front door — there’s a yearning to do something, anything, to make the time spent feel like it wasn’t a total waste. Just as she’s on the verge of going to the door and potentially ruining six months of investigation, she catches a break: Girl Scouts. Walking down the street are two young girls and a mother, pulling a wagon behind them, going door to door selling cookies.

We duck down in the van’s backseat as the Girl Scouts pass by. They ring Pablo’s doorbell, wait, then begin to walk away, when the door opens. A little girl, about 6 or 7 years old, stands in the doorway. Soon after, a woman who looks to be her mother comes out. Then a third woman emerges, and walks out onto the driveway to inspect the wagon. The third woman has dyed, red-tinged hair and looks to be in her late teens or early twenties.

Lessan crawls toward the front of the minivan and snaps photos of the unfolding scene. From our vantage point, about 20 yards away, this third woman bears a resemblance to some of the photos of Bianca that have been found over the years on various social networking sites.

“Could that be her?” I ask Lessan.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe.”

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Images of Bianca, including two digital simulations by the National Center For Missing And Exploited Children Courtesy of Deana Hebert and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Every year, 200,000 children in the United States are abducted by a family member. Or maybe it’s 350,000. Or 2,000. In truth, no one really knows. The last year a study was done by the Justice Department was 1999. It claimed an estimated 1.3 million kids went missing that year and that 203,900 of those were taken by a family member. Those stats have been regurgitated for 15 years, and while there are significant questions as to how accurate they were back then, they’re certainly next to useless a decade and a half later. (A Justice Department spokesperson says there is a new report in the works, but it’s not expected to be published for at least a year.)

The FBI tracks annual crime statistics and reported that in 2013, 462,567 children went missing. Of those, 2,310 were abducted by a noncustodial parent. This is a number that, according to FBI statistics, has remained relatively static going back to at least 2007. It’s also a number rendered mostly worthless by the methodology behind it: When missing persons reports are filed by law enforcement, specifying the cause of the disappearance is optional.

“Missing person entries are made primarily by the local law enforcement agency shortly after the missing person report is made,” Stephen Fischer Jr., chief of multimedia productions in the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, explains in an email. “Having the correct name, date of birth and basic physical description is the primary concern. While the circumstances surrounding the incident will be collected as the investigation moves forward, the missing person entry will often not reflect this data.”

This partially accounts for the enormous discrepancy between the FBI’s count and the Justice Department’s 1999 research. Still, nearly half those 2013 missing child reports did specify a cause, so following that logic, the number of children abducted by a family member each year falls somewhere between 4,620 and 203,900. Maybe. Robert L. Snow, a retired captain with the Indianapolis police who has written multiple books about kidnapping, thinks even the DOJ’s study undercounts parental abductions.

“People don’t realize that a lot of abductions, particularly family abductions, are never reported,” he says. “People don’t want to air their dirty laundry. I have found research that says it could be as high as 350,000 parental abductions a year. … That’s why there’s so much apathy. No one realizes how big a problem this is.”

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Elizabeth Smart Getty Images

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Jaycee Dugard Carl Probyn / AP Photo

This is pretty much how it goes when it comes to missing children in America. Despite huge amounts of sensationalistic coverage lavished on a few rare cases — Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Dugard, etc. — for the most part, hardly anyone is paying attention. This is especially true of parental abductions, which everyone agrees — terrible stat-keeping notwithstanding — are far more common than the classic “stranger-danger” kidnapping most parents live in mortal fear of. (The 1999 DOJ study counted a grand total of 115 of these so-called “stereotypical kidnappings” that year.)

According to Snow, most parental abductions tend to get resolved pretty quickly. In a percentage of these cases — again, who knows exactly what percentage — the parent is merely a few hours late returning with the child. In others, a call from the police or a lawyer threatening harsh consequences resolves the situation. Sometimes, the abductor has the intent to stay gone but no real plan, and authorities track him or her down in a matter of hours or days. It’s when days become weeks, months, and even years that whatever systems we have in place seem to break down completely.

When the abductor leaves the country, the situation grows even more complicated. The Hague Abduction Convention, a 1980 treaty that has been agreed to by 92 countries, including the U.S. and Mexico, sets guidelines for the return of children kidnapped across international borders, but, in reality, even many countries that have signed it don’t comply with it.

“When you go to a foreign country, an American warrant doesn’t mean much,” says Snow. “A lot of times you can’t get the local authorities to cooperate. A lot of countries are of the opinion that children are better off being raised in their country than in the United States. The U.S. can try to put pressure, but they don’t have much leverage. They’re not going to cut off aid or start a war over one child.”

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Courtesy of Deana Hebert

Deana Hebert was worried the minute her then-husband walked out the door with their daughter. The couple were in midst of an ugly divorce, and Lozano had arrived on a Friday in April in 1995 to pick up Bianca for the weekend. Hebert was living with her parents in a small house in Baytown, a Houston suburb, and their custody arrangement meant Bianca spent most of the time with her. Lozano had her on Wednesdays and every other weekend.

Hebert was born and raised in Baytown, and Lozano had moved there from Monterrey, Mexico, when he was a child. They were an odd couple: He was 6-foot-2 and 300 pounds; she was 5-foot-5, 100 pounds, and five years younger. These days, with all that’s happened, Hebert has trouble remembering what first drew them together. “I guess he made me laugh,” she says. They dated for about two years and married a month before Bianca was born, when Hebert was just 21. Lozano lost his job, leaving Hebert the family’s sole breadwinner. He grew moody and eventually abusive toward Hebert.

“He was so scary,” she says. “He’s like Jekyll and Hyde. He can be so sweet and then so extreme opposite. If I’d stayed I would’ve ended up dead.” She and Bianca moved into her parents’ house, and she filed for divorce.

Every time Lozano came to pick up Bianca, it was an ordeal. One Wednesday in January, Lozano got rough and dragged Hebert outside. She called the cops and filed charges for assault, but their custody arrangement remained unaltered.

That Friday in April, Hebert sensed something was wrong. With Lozano scheduled to appear in court for the assault, their already troubled relationship was near its lowest point. Although Lozano and Bianca weren’t due to return until Sunday evening, Hebert was on edge the whole weekend. When he didn’t show up at 6 p.m., as agreed to, she was sure they weren’t coming back. Her mother tried to reassure her.

“My mom goes, ‘You know how they run late. He’s playing games. He’s probably going to tell you he had to change her diaper.’” She sighs. “I said, ‘No. They’re gone.’ And I was right.”

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Photograph by Chris Tuite for BuzzFeed

It’s two days after the Fontana stakeout, and Lessan and I are driving, talking about the case — specifically why and how Bianca and Juan Lozano would be in the U.S. at the moment. Lessan had texted the photo of the red-haired woman outside the house to Hebert, who couldn’t say definitively whether it was her daughter or not but seemed inclined to think it wasn’t. Lessan suddenly gasps so loudly that I’m sure she’s stumbled upon a case-breaking revelation.

“Chemtrails!” she says, pointing out the front windshield.

She motions toward the lines of airplane exhaust crisscrossing the blue sky, and launches into a conspiracy-laced diatribe about their nefarious origins. Part of me wonders if her willingness to question conventional wisdom makes her a good detective — she says she first got the idea to start searching Southern California for Lozano after a psychic told her he was in Los Angeles. Then she found Lozano’s cousin in Fontana.

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Photograph by Chris Tuite for BuzzFeed

At the moment, we’re on our way to Burbank, where she has an appointment at a production company that’s looking to make a reality show about a private investigator who finds missing children. In a shockingly bright lime-green office, a producer shoots video of Lessan on his iPhone while asking questions like, “What’s your daily schedule like?” and “Do you carry a gun?”

The reality of Lessan’s daily routine involves phone calls, database searches, and sitting for hours on end in parked cars more than it does high-speed chases or knocking down doors. Her rate normally ranges from around $3,000 up front for a local abduction case to a minimum of $10,000 for an international one, not including expenses. As a case progresses, costs escalate. She tries to cut her rates as much as she can in order to accommodate a client’s financial situation but has to be careful not to get into a position where she can’t even cover her own costs.

“On this trip, I’m making very little money,” she tells me. “They don’t have any more to pay me.” But having come as far as she has, she wants to see it through. “I told them I have to do these last parts. I can’t quit now. I feel like I’m really getting somewhere, but I also feel like it’s just like water falling through my fingers.”

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Facebook: Nina-Suarez-seguimos-buscandote

Hebert made all the calls you’d expect her to in the hours and days after her daughter’s 1995 kidnapping. Lozano’s parents. Her lawyer. The police. The FBI. As the weeks turned to months and eventually years, a dizzying number of government agencies got involved: Besides the Baytown Police Department and the FBI, an incomplete list includes the U.S. Marshals Service, the Harris County district attorney’s office, the State Department, the Mexican Consulate, and the Department of Homeland Security.

“What I found is that the agencies don’t communicate with each other,” she says. “So any information I got, I’d make sure I sent it to the DA’s detective, Baytown police, FBI, the congressman’s office. I was the hub.”

Managing the investigation into her daughter’s abduction while simultaneously trying to mourn the loss was not ideal, but during the first year or two she was grateful in some ways to have something to do. For a while, she clung to the belief that the man she once married would eventually come to his senses and bring Bianca back. “I still remember feeling like, Oh, this is going to blow over,” she says.

It didn’t. Her divorce was finalized. After a year or so, the trail was cold. Soon, Hebert was out of money, out of ideas, and trying to figure out how to go on living when her main reason for doing so had been replaced by a giant, unfathomable void.

“I was so busy at first, involved in everything, and then all of a sudden everything just stopped,” she says. “I didn’t know how to grieve. I just put everything in a compartment in my head and kind of left it there.” But she eventually realized if she didn’t want to live out her days as the empty shell she felt like, she had to start filling them with something. “Being in my twenties and being single, it was hard when you’d meet somebody and they’d say, ‘Oh, do you have kids?’ Sometimes it was easier just to say no, because when you tell some people that your child was kidnapped, they say, ‘Oh, OK,’ and just go on with the conversation. Then some people freak out and start crying like you’ve dropped a bomb on them.”

Eventually she met someone else and got remarried in 1999. She had another child, a boy, two years later.

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Hebert with her son. Courtesy of Deana Hebert

“My son, he’s 12 now, but when he was 4, we decided to tell him he had a sister that was missing,” she says. “I remember our son saying, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?’” She laughs. “I’m thinking, You wanted me to tell you when you were 2?”

Through it all, Hebert kept searching, mostly on her own, for Bianca. She scoured the internet for any signs of her or Lozano. The month after Bianca disappeared, she had sued Lozano’s parents, who she believes have been helping him, and at one point won a $2.2 million judgment, though after several years and various appeals, a retrial was ordered and Hebert, her parents, and her attorney made the decision not to go forward. Years later, she tried to repair relations with his family in the hopes that they could facilitate Bianca’s return. Nothing worked.

“There’s two different parts of me,” she says. “There’s one part that’s Bianca’s mom, searching and doing all these things, and there’s the other part that goes on with life and tries to do normal things. But nothing has ever replaced her.”

In 2009, 14 years after Bianca’s initial disappearance, Hebert turned to her congressman, Pete Olson, for help, and met Kimberli Reed, who was Olson’s director of casework at the time. They forged an immediate bond: In 2002, Reed had had her own children literally snatched from her in a parking lot by her estranged husband. It took five months for her to track them down, and a year before she was granted full custody.

“I know what I went through for five measly months,” says Reed. “I have no idea what it would be like to go through this for all this time. It’s amazing she hasn’t gone insane.”

By the time Reed met Hebert, the investigation into Bianca’s whereabouts had deteriorated to the point where it could hardly even be called an investigation.

“It was dead,” says Reed. “There were probably seven or eight years in there that no one was doing anything, except for Deana. Baytown PD had totally written it off. Harris County district attorney’s office had washed its hands of it. The State Department had closed the case. There wasn’t a notice or a flag put into Homeland Security for Juan. Mexico knew nothing about the case.”

Reed took up the cause, and “for the next four years,” she says, “I literally spent every day searching for Bianca.” She tried to use her clout at the congressman’s office to knock heads together at various government agencies. In 2009, she helped convene a roundtable meeting that included representatives of the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Harris County DA, the Mexican Consulate, and the Mexican attorney general’s office, with a representative from the State Department conferenced in on the phone. She asked if anyone could contact and question Lozano’s family.

“All of them looked at Deana and me and said, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’” Reed recalls. The Mexican representatives told her they did not consider Lozano a criminal because Bianca is his daughter. The FBI said that its hands were tied because it had no jurisdiction in Mexico. The State Department staffer said it couldn’t do anything and made clear that once Bianca turned 18 and was no longer a missing child but a missing adult, the department wouldn’t work the case at all.

“Everyone kept saying, ‘We can’t do anything until we locate her, and we can’t locate her so we can’t do anything,’” says Reed. Even if it did manage to find Lozano, the Harris County DA wasn’t even sure if it would extradite him.

A warrant for Lozano’s arrest was eventually issued in the U.S., and a few years ago Interpol, which tracks fugitives across international borders, put him on a watch list. At one point, Hebert discovered that if she could pinpoint Lozano in Mexico, U.S. marshals were authorized to bring him back to the U.S. and arrest him. But the Marshals Office told her it wouldn’t, “because the original warrant was filed by the FBI, and the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Office [wouldn’t] work together,” Hebert tells me.

“There were certain detectives in certain agencies that have been very dedicated,” she continues. “Other times, I try to get in touch about something and don’t hear from them for months. I know they’re busy, they’re on other things, this is an old case, but it’s just frustrating. It would be nice to have one central agency that only worked on missing children’s cases.”

According to Snow, this is a key failing of the current system. “No one really takes responsibility for abducted children,” he says. “It’s a criminal offense, but there’s no specific agency meant to take these cases.” Even within the agencies that end up saddled with kidnapping cases, there’s a distinct lack of expertise. “In Indianapolis, we’ve got a huge police department, 1,500 officers,” says Snow. “We’ve got no abduction unit. Very few police departments have a unit specifically trained for this. It just goes to a general officer and he handles this like he handles other cases. So that officer has very little experience and training in it.”

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Photograph by Chris Tuite for BuzzFeed

The Department of Homeland Security’s San Diego office is in a modern downtown office building a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean. Lessan is there to meet with her friend, Maurice Wrighten, who works as an investigator in the cybercrimes division. Lessan has known him for 15 years, and he seems willing to help but isn’t certain exactly how. From a manila folder, she pulls out a copy of a Mexican ID card: It’s Lozano’s picture but Pablo’s name and information, and Lozano used it to get a job in Mexico a few years ago. She then pulls out two birth certificates. One is a copy of Bianca’s legitimate American one; the other is a Mexican one that Lessan has uncovered, with an alias, “Fabiola Suarez Elizondo,” a birth date of more than a year earlier, and Pablo listed as the father.

Wrighten studies the documents. One of the many complications of Bianca’s case is that although she was abducted as a child, she’s now 21. Technically, she’s an adult, making her own decisions. Since Bianca’s broken no laws herself, Wrighten can’t really investigate her.

Lozano is a different story. Wrighten says the identity fraud is a way in, but “if he’s using a fake Mexican ID in Mexico, that has nothing to do with us. He’s not breaking any U.S. laws.” As long as he’s in Mexico, he’s beyond the reach of Homeland Security. He looks again through the manila file.

“There might be a way I can do this, but I can’t tell you how right now,” he says. He promises to be back in touch. As Wrighten walks us to the door, Lessan thanks him and asks, almost pleadingly, “What do you think?”

He nods. “There’s hope.”

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The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children is the one entity that seems best positioned to step into the breach and bring order to all this chaos. Although the NCMEC is ostensibly an independent nonprofit, it gets considerable funding — $67 million in 2014 — from the federal government. Opinions on its effectiveness vary wildly. Reed says that the NCMEC is “completely inept.”

“All they do is run a website, create fliers, and that’s it,” she says. And when newer photos of Bianca were found, getting it to update the fliers proved an ordeal. “The entire time I was with the congressman’s office, they essentially did nothing. ‘She’s on our website,’ ‘We have flyers out there,’ was all they’d do.” (A recent check of Bianca Lozano’s profile on the NCMEC website had an updated photo, but in one spot it misstates the date of her disappearance by 17 years.)

On its website, the NCMEC claims to have helped recover over 199,000 children since its founding in 1984, with a recovery rate of 97%. When I spoke to Bob Lowery, vice president of the NCMEC’s Missing Children Division, he said the actual number now is closer to 98% or 99%. Some question these figures, noting that the NCMEC takes credit for “helping” to recover children in cases it had virtually no involvement in. In some cases, these children were never actually missing (merely reported so by a panicky parent), or were returned by a noncustodial parent within hours of being reported. Critics of the NCMEC say it overstates its usefulness to justify its federal funding, and in doing so distorts public perception about the nature of the problem.

When I spoke to Marc Klaas, who founded the KlaasKids Foundation to aid in the recovery of missing children after his own daughter, Polly, was abducted and murdered back in 1993, he launched, unprompted, into a bitter condemnation of the NCMEC.

“I’ve got a real beef with these characters,” he says. “They don’t really go in the field. They don’t really get involved in any except the high-profile cases. They’ve done more to harm the missing child — I don’t want to call it an industry, but missing child nonprofit organizations — than any other single entity out there. They work very hard to make sure every dollar involved in missing children goes directly to them. They don’t share any resources whatsoever, and I can tell you from personal experience they’ll go out of their way to undermine anybody that might threaten their position. … They’re just guys in the middle vacuuming up money. I loathe the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and think missing kids would be better served if they didn’t exist.”

Lowery, not surprisingly, takes issue with these portrayals.

“Those are misinformed impressions about the National Center’s work,” he says. “The work here in the Missing Children’s Division is much more comprehensive than simply creating a poster and distributing it. … All our teams are former law enforcement or social services with a great deal of experience in finding children. We do extensive case analysis work, we work social media, we have law enforcement partners in our building working side by side with us, so when leads come in that need law enforcement activity right away, we’re getting it.”

There are dozens of other nonprofits that focus on recovering missing children, though sorting the merely well-intentioned from those actually well-equipped to help can be tricky (never mind the ones devoted mostly to collecting donations, including the Committee for Missing Children, Operation Lookout National Center for Missing Youth, and Find the Children, three of the 50 worst charities in the country, according to an investigation by the Tampa Bay Times and the Center for Investigative Reporting).

A few years after Bianca went missing, Hebert met with Mark Miller, founder of the American Association for Lost Children, a nonprofit that, according to its website, conducts “hands-on investigations, while traveling in and outside the country performing surveillance and undercover work searching for and rescuing missing children.” Hebert says Miller convinced another mother whose own children were missing to date one of Lozano’s cousins in order to try to get information on Lozano’s whereabouts.

“After a few dates, in the throes of whatever they were in the middle of, she confessed that she was working for Miller and the whole thing blew up in her face,” Hebert says. Later, when Hebert was organizing a concert to raise money for her continuing search efforts, she got into a dispute with Miller over what percentage of the proceeds would go to his organization. In the end, she says, “I don’t really know a lot of what he did or didn’t do working on Bianca’s case.”

(When contacted, Miller says that he encourages all parents to “be on our team,” and help out with cases other than their own. He contends that although the other mother blew their cover, she did help procure useful information. He also insists that the money he wanted Hebert to donate to his charity was going to directly fund her case. According to Miller, the foundation spent thousands of dollars on Hebert’s case and she “never donated one penny to the charity.”)

With both government agencies and nonprofits often creating more confusion than they alleviate, many parents turn to private investigators. Unfortunately, the world of PIs is possibly even more opaque. Licensing varies from state to state, and in most cases doesn’t seem particularly rigorous. According to Lessan, the main advantage a licensed investigator has over an unlicensed one is a badge. “To be honest,” she says, “people don’t know that there’s no difference.”

Given this landscape, it’s not surprising that nightmare stories of PIs ripping off parents are legion. In 2009, an investigator in Arizona was indicted on five counts of wire fraud relating to charges that he created a fake abducted child recovery company, Delta International, which collected huge fees from parents and delivered virtually nothing in return. Gus Zamora, an ex–Army Ranger whose renown for recovering children abducted internationally has garnered him features on Dateline and in The Atlantic, has also been accused, multiple times, of defrauding parents.

Hebert first hired a PI based in Houston a few months after Lozano absconded with Bianca. She says she traveled to Mexico four times with this investigator, who insisted he’d seen Bianca while doing surveillance down there for her.

“We were going to go down there again, rent a plane, hire these guys with guns, kidnap my daughter, and bring her back,” says Hebert. But she wasn’t too confident in this plan, and was running out of money. Around the same time, she met Don Feeney, an ex–Delta Force commando working in private security consulting, who’d helped retrieve kidnapped children before. She decided to spend the last $10,000 she could get her hands on — money that her mother had to borrow from Hebert’s grandparents — to pay Feeney to follow up on the earlier investigator’s information. “They came back and said, ‘This is not your daughter and not your ex-husband. You would’ve been in a world of trouble if you’d kidnapped that girl and tried to come back here with her.’ It was crazy.”

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In April 2013, Hebert finally caught a break. A man got in touch via a Facebook page she’d set up, telling her that his sister Norma had had a baby with Lozano, whom she knew as “Pablo.” She had lived with him and Bianca — whom she knew as “Nina” — in Monterrey, Mexico, but Lozano was abusive, and now Norma was on the run from him. She’d begun to grow suspicious about his past, and after finding the Facebook page Hebert had set up, was concerned Lozano would kidnap her own son, so she took the boy and went into hiding.

In a series of conversations Hebert and a Spanish-speaking friend had with Norma’s brother and father, Hebert began hearing the first details of her daughter’s life, most of them heartbreaking: Bianca had been told that her mother died during childbirth. She lived in fear of her father. She had no idea she was a U.S. citizen and didn’t even know her real name. She was diabetic, played the guitar, and although she had no formal education, took classes at a music school in Monterrey.

“I desperately wanted to talk to Norma because she’s the only person I know that knows my daughter,” says Hebert. But Norma’s family kept her hidden, fearing for her and her son’s safety. Still, working off these leads, Hebert and Reed found a Russian pen pal of Bianca’s named Natalia, who told them they thought Lozano monitored all of Bianca’s online communication. Around this time, Hebert was also directed to some short YouTube clips of her daughter playing guitar.

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“That was when I saw her for the first time in 18 years,” says Hebert. “I knew it was her. I’ve seen thousands of pictures of other girls and people would say, ‘Don’t you think this looks like her?’ And I’d say, ‘No. I know it’s not.’ Then I saw this girl and I knew it was her.”

Bianca’s music school friends told Hebert that Bianca had abruptly withdrawn from the school earlier in the year and left town with her father. Nobody had heard from her since. Still, this new information provided the investigation with a momentum it had been lacking for years.

By this time, Reed no longer worked in the congressman’s office, but as she puts it, “I still couldn’t let it go.” She approached a few staffers in other congressional offices, “people I’d known for years, and asked them point blank, ‘Can you please help us?’ No one would help.”

Hebert and Reed made calls, and tried to get any of the various federal, state, and local agencies they’d been working with to take this new information and renew the investigation with vigor.

“It was out of sheer frustration that my husband and I decided we were going to hire our own PI with our own money,” says Reed. “That’s what led us to Monique.”

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Photograph by Chris Tuite for BuzzFeed

Two days after our visit to the Homeland Security office in San Diego, Lessan and I are back in Fontana, staring at that house once again. Hebert has mostly dismissed the possibility that the red-haired woman we saw here days earlier could be her daughter but believes if we talk to Pablo, he might have some clues as to where Lozano and Bianca might be. Lessan wanted to wait to see what Wrighten came up with, and still worries that if she confronts Pablo, he’ll immediately call Lozano with the information. But as Hebert put it during a three-way call with Reed and Lessan the night before, “What’s he going to tell Juan? That I have an investigator? I think he knows that from what we’ve put on Facebook. We’re not going to be any worse off than we are now.”

It’s late afternoon and the plan is to wait until Pablo gets home from work, then knock on the door. If he doesn’t slam it in our faces, Hebert has given us a letter for him that explains her plight. So we wait. And wait. One of the women we saw the other day — short, ponytail, late thirties or early forties — arrives home and goes inside. We wait some more. It’s now almost 7 p.m. and getting dark outside. Where is Pablo? We discuss the possibilities. Maybe he works from home. Maybe he’s unemployed. Maybe he’s out with friends. Time isn’t on our side. Waiting any longer as it gets darker is going to make an already tense doorway confrontation all the more unsettling. Lessan decides it’s time.

She knocks on the door and a female voice from the other side asks, “Who is it?”

“This is Monique. I just wanted to show you something.”

The door opens to reveal the woman with the ponytail, presumably Pablo’s wife. Lessan flashes her private investigator license and explains that we are looking for Pablo, but refuses to explain why. Pablo’s not home, we’re told, but will be soon. The woman asks if Lessan would like to leave a message for him.

“I can just wait,” says Lessan. “I prefer to talk to him, actually.”

“OK,” the woman says warily. “I’ll let him know.” Then she closes the door.

So the wait continues, now on the sidewalk in front of the house. We debate whether Pablo will ever come home tonight, what he’ll say if he does, and how long we can stand around out here on a Wednesday night before someone calls the cops.

By the time Pablo pulls up it’s past 8 p.m. We walk toward him in his driveway, just as his wife comes out the front door again. Lessan introduces herself and asks if we can come inside to show him some information. He looks at us the way you would look at any two strangers who just accosted you in your driveway on a dark Wednesday night insisting, somewhat frantically, that they wanted to come into your house. Lessan presses the case, asking again if we can just come inside for a minute. Pablo and his wife don’t look wary anymore, they look downright scared.

Lessan changes tack and tries to hand Pablo the letter Hebert wrote for him. He recoils from the envelope as if it was radioactive, and mumbles something about not knowing what legal implications might come with accepting the letter. I offer to read it aloud. Nobody objects, so I do.

The letter explains Hebert’s entire agonizing, Kafkaesque, two-decade-long ordeal — the kidnapping, the identity theft, the fruitless searching, the pain of not knowing. It seems to settle the moment. Pablo and his wife look stunned. Lessan asks if she can show them some documentation right here in the driveway. We move under an outdoor floodlight and she lays out the same documents she showed Wrighten on the hood of the family’s car, building the case, piece by piece.

When she’s done, Pablo shakes his head. He hasn’t seen his cousin Juan Lozano since they were kids. He doesn’t know anything about the kidnapping. He didn’t even know he had been married or had kids. He saw Lozano’s parents last year when they came to California for a funeral, but other than that, he’s had hardly any contact with that branch of the family in decades. He expresses a willingness to help find out where his cousin is, but quite sensibly, seems most concerned with the fact that Lozano — an international fugitive — is running around using his identity.

It’s possible that Pablo is lying about all this, and that Lozano and Bianca are hiding in the house right behind us, but I don’t think so. Standing here in the driveway, he and his wife don’t look like accessories to an international abduction. They look like shell-shocked parents. Lessan thanks them for their time, and Pablo promises to get in touch once he’s talked to some of his family.

Back in the minivan, Lessan phones Hebert and Reed. As she drives and talks, she’s emotional, buzzing with adrenaline. She offers a blow-by-blow account of the evening, pausing every few seconds to take a deep breath, and concludes that it went very well.

“He wants to help,” she says, exhaling deeply. “He was very concerned. He wouldn’t give us his phone number but said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to make some calls and get in touch with you.’ I’m glad at his response. Hopefully something will come out of it.”

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For a long time, nothing does. For months, there’s no word from Pablo, nothing of note from Wrighten, and after the momentary excitement in Fontana, the investigation has settled back into low gear. There’s no more money for Lessan. All the leads from Norma have been chased down and come to nothing.

In late March, I call Hebert and ask how she’s feeling about the state of the search. “It’s the same old thing — another dead end,” she says. “We spent all this money, and yeah, we made contact with the cousin, but he hasn’t done anything. I don’t know if he’s ever interested in helping.” She sighs. “Everything I do turns up nothing, so I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t let myself get too excited about anything because honestly I can’t handle it anymore. I’m at the point where — I’m not done, but it’s getting to be too much.”

Then in May, Pablo calls. He’s apologetic for not getting in touch sooner, but as Hebert puts it, “He was shocked and felt kind of violated. … He has had to process it on his own.” He suggests the outlines of a possible deal: If Hebert drops the charges against her ex-husband, maybe Lozano would allow Bianca to return to the U.S. and be reunited with her. Hebert immediately agrees. Pablo says they’d need the agreement in writing.

Hebert emails the Harris County assistant district attorney, who makes clear this isn’t something they normally do — “She said, ‘We don’t negotiate with felons. This is not justice’” — but they’ll make an exception. Hebert sends the letter to Pablo, and for the first time in a very long time, she allows herself a measure of optimism.

“Who knows what this is going to turn into, but I have a little hope this is going to work out,” she says. I tell her that it seems like a smart move for Lozano. Whatever his situation in Mexico might be right now, having to keep hawkish watch over a 21-year-old woman is hardly the same as doing so with a young girl. That can’t be much of a life for him. Perhaps he wants out.

“That’s what I think,” she says. “Everybody I’ve talked to says, ‘He’s stupid if he doesn’t do this. He’ll be free.’” She’s thought a lot about what a reunion with her daughter might actually be like. They haven’t seen each other in nearly 20 years. Her daughter has no memory of her. They’d effectively be strangers. Would Bianca move in? Would she call her “Mom”? Who knows, but if nothing else, she’d know the truth.

“Her friends [at music school] told me her dream was to be an American citizen and play music here,” she says. “Everything in her life is a lie: her name, her birthday, her dad’s name, where he came from. … It’s got to be a terrible life. She could have so much if she came here.”

For the next few days, there are droplets of news. An uncle of Lozano’s believes the deal is a good idea and will try to talk to his sister — Lozano’s mom — about it. Other family members apparently agree.

Then for a month, there’s little word at all. Finally, Pablo calls Lozano’s mom himself but can’t reach her. He sends a letter to Lozano’s sister that goes unanswered. When I speak to Hebert in mid-June, she’s frustrated.

“I don’t know why they’re dragging their feet,” she says. “Maybe they don’t want to tell Bianca. I’m not sure how you tell someone their entire life is a lie.”

Two more months pass and I call to get an update. Hebert sighs deeply. “I haven’t heard from them at all,” she says. “I think it’s going to fizzle out.”

She sounds as low as I’ve heard her. After all this — not just these recent events, but years of struggle with cops, private detectives, federal agencies, a congressman, Mexican authorities, nonprofits, volunteers, friends, family, acquaintances, and yes, journalists, with those who were helpful and those who weren’t, dealing with a system seemingly incapable of marshaling its best resources to grapple with a problem that should be solvable — Hebert finds herself no closer to getting her daughter back than she was in 1995. She hasn’t exactly lost hope, but having been through so much with so many people, at the moment, she’s feeling very much alone.

“The thing is about stories like this, people will see it, read it, maybe post it on Facebook, but then they move on with their lives,” she says. “And I’m sitting back here waiting for my daughter to show up.”

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Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/djpeisner/how-the-19-year-search-for-bianca-lozano-explains-the-chaos

[abluescarfonwaston]

I love the trope "You idiot, (insert name) loves you" and said person walks in. Especially with Ace Attorney.

Okay I know this took like two months but Love you Aramanna! This might not be exactly what you mentioned but I hope you enjoy Edgeworth repeatedly having to be told someone loves him and them finally getting on their own!

“And when I left Larry and Phoenix were waiting for me at the gate. But it had been half an hour so I don’t know why they waited.”

“Hm.” Father hummed like he already suspected the answer but wasn’t ready to give it to him. “Did they say why when you got there?”

“Larry just complained about how long it took.”

Jeez there you are. That took forever. Let go!

“And Phoenix just smiled and started talking about last night’s episode.”

“So they waited for you?”

He’d already said that! “I didn’t ask them to!”

“Well. It sounds like they wanted to walk home with you.” Father smiled and took another bite of dinner. “Isn’t that what the evidence suggests?”

He stared at his own meal. “… But why?”

Father’s brow knit inward. Had he made him sad? “Because they’re your friends Miles. And they like you.”

“Oh.”

 He peered into the kitchen where Hannah, one of the maids, was cleaning Franziska’s knuckles.

She sat on the chair all puffed up with pride despite the rip in her dress and scratch on her face.

“And then I bit him.”

Hannah tittered. “That was quite brave Frau Franziska.”

It wasn’t brave it was foolish! Those boys were My age!

“That should prove an invaluable lesson to them.” She lifted her chin and preened. “No one messes with my little brother.”

His fingers dug into the doorframe. Why? Why do you care? It’s not like they weren’t right.

“Yes, you love Herr Edgeworth very much.”

He ducked further behind the frame. Face red. What?

He heard nothing but the pounding of his heart in his ears for several long moments.

Then a timid, “You won’t tell Papa about this, right?”

“Of course not Frau Franziska. Of course not.”

 He woke up in a hospital bed.

Detective Gumshoe snored next to him in an awful hospital chair.

“Ah! You’re awake. Good we were starting to worry.” A nurse told him. He jerked his head over to look at her.

“What happened?”

“Hmm.” She grabbed his chart from the foot of his bed. “You passed out during that earthquake a few hours ago. Hit your head on the way down. You’ve been unconscious since, although the doctors think that might be in part due to exhaustion.”

Hours. He looked at the dark sky outside. Okay. He hadn’t missed court.

That was the important part.

The detective continued to chainsaw snore next to him.

“Why is he here?”

She blinked. Looked down at Gumshoe. “Your friend? He brought you in. Hasn’t left your side for a moment. Should… Should we have made him leave?”

“… No. That’s fine. I was just wondering.”

Her expression eased. “He seems to care about you a great deal.”

“… Apparently.”

 He settled into the chair, careful not to touch the sticky counter top. Frowned and took another large sip of his beer. “I just don’t get it!” He admitted slamming the glass back down. “Why was he so upset?!”

Larry grinned at him. Threw an arm around his shoulder and ruffled his hair with his free hand. “Because he worries about you Edgey.”

He glared at Larry. Shifted away from his hand.

Knew that what he said was true.

“… But why?”

Larry chugged the last of his can and tucked his head into the crock of his neck. “Who know? Maybe he loves you.”

His shoulders went ridged. The can crinkled in his hands. “What could you possibly mean by-”

A snore cut him off.

Larry’s head was heavy on his shoulder. Somehow instantly asleep.

He sighed and called a cab.

 “-Across the Atlantic?!”

He froze at the hospital room door. Wright broke into a coughing fit.

“Are you high Larry? What are you talking about?!”

“What?! Hey man I’m just telling you what he told me! Fifteen hours on a plane – that’s what he said!”

“You must be half asleep. Come over here and let me wake you up!”

“Hey no!” Larry yipped and something clattered. “I’m just being a good friend and letting you know!”

“Letting me know what? That you’re a lying bastard?”

“That Edgey loves you man!”

He let go of the door handle.

Shoved his hands in his pockets. Hurried down the hall before he could hear Wrights reply.

He’d seen Wright’s strange behavior when it came to Iris. Iris’ own strange behavior in turn.

No need to hear the rejection in Wright’s own voice.

 “… I don’t know why he even asked me to come.”

“Huh? Because he thinks you’re brilliant!”

He could barely hear Wright and Kay’s hushed conversation. He sunk heavier into the couch cushion and willed himself back to sleep.

“You’re that man. Come on Mister Wright he loves you!” She chuckled at Wright’s sputtering. “You’d have to be a ‘foolish fool’ not to see that!”

Wright groaned. “Do not bring Franziska into this.”

The cushion was soft. He was warm. Soon. He’d get up soon.

“She’d tell you the same thing too.”

A blanket was pulled over his shoulders. And slumber claimed him once more.

 “You idiot.” He clasped Wright’s hand in his and collapsed into the chair next to the hospital bed. “You need to be more careful.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever, I mean I’m still alright! What’s a little strain right?”

“Don’t make that awful pun at me Wright.”

Phoenix laughed at him. “Oh come on you know you love me.”

“Of course I do.” He assured the bedsheets. Wright’s hand still clenched in his.

His stomach flipped as soon as it registered what he’d admitted. He pulled away.

Phoenix’s hand stopped him. Squeezed his back just as firm.

“Yeah. Yeah I do too.”

[abluescarfonwaston]

I love you

@aramanna sent me a prompt like many months back that I think turned into They’re Idiots your Honor. But here’s the other wip it caused. 4 Times someone has to tell Edgeworth he’s loved, two times someone told Phoenix Edgeworth loved him, and one time they both admitted it.

“And when I left Larry and Phoenix were waiting for me at the gate. But it had been half an hour so I don’t know why they waited.”

“Hm.” Father hummed like he already suspected the answer but wasn’t ready to give it to him. “Did they say why when you got there?”

“Larry just complained about how long it took.”

Jeez there you are. That took forever. Lets go!

“And Phoenix just smiled and started talking about last night’s episode.”

“So they waited for you?”

He’d already said that! “I didn’t ask them to!”

“Well. It sounds like they wanted to walk home with you.” Father smiled and took another bite of dinner. “Isn’t that what the evidence suggests?”

He stared at his own meal. “… But why?”

Father’s brow knit inward. Had he made him… sad? “Because they’re your friends Miles. And they like you.”

“Oh.”

He peered into the kitchen where Hannah, one of the maids, was cleaning Franziska’s knuckles.

She sat on the chair all puffed up with pride despite the rip in her dress and scratch on her face.

“And then I bit him.”

Hannah tittered. “That was quite brave Frau Franziska.”

It wasn’t brave it was foolish! Those boys were My age!

“That should prove an invaluable lesson to them.” She lifted her chin and preened. “No one messes with my little brother.”

His fingers dug into the doorframe. Why? Why do you care? It’s not like they weren’t right.

“Yes, you love Herr Edgeworth very much.”

He ducked further behind the frame. Face red. What?

He heard nothing but the pounding of his heart in his ears for several long moments.

Then a timid, “You won’t tell Papa about this, right?”

“Of course not Frau Franziska. Of course not.”

 He woke up in a hospital bed.

Detective Gumshoe snored next to him in an awful hospital chair.

“Ah! You’re awake. Good we were starting to worry.” A nurse told him. He jerked his head over to look at her.

“What happened?”

“Hmm.” She grabbed his chart from the foot of his bed. “You passed out during that earthquake a few hours ago. Hit your head on the way down. You’ve been unconscious since, although the doctors think that might be in part due to exhaustion.”

Hours. He looked at the dark sky outside. Okay. He hadn’t missed court.

That was the important part.

The detective continued to chainsaw snore next to him.

“Why is he here?”

She blinked. Looked down at Gumshoe. “Your friend? He brought you in. Hasn’t left your side for a moment. Should… Should we have made him leave?”

“… No. That’s fine. I was just wondering.”

Her expression eased. “He seems to care about you a great deal.”

“… Apparently.”

 He settled into the chair, careful not to touch the sticky counter top. Frowned and took another large sip of his beer. “I just don’t get it!” He admitted slamming the glass back down. “Why was he so upset?!”

Larry grinned at him. Threw an arm around his shoulder and ruffled his hair with his free hand. “Because he worries about you Edgey.”

He glared at Larry. Shifted away from his hand.

Knew that what he said was true.

“… But why?”

Larry chugged the last of his can and tucked his head into the crock of his neck. “Who knows? Maybe he loves you.”

His shoulders went ridged. The can crinkled in his hands. “What could you possibly mean by-”

A snore cut him off.

Larry’s head was heavy on his shoulder. Somehow instantly asleep.

He sighed and called a cab.

 “-Across the Atlantic?!”

He froze at the hospital room door. Wright broke into a coughing fit.

“Are you high Larry? What are you talking about?!”

“What?! Hey man I’m just telling you what he told me! Fifteen hours on a plane – that’s what he said!”

“You must be half asleep. Come over here and let me wake you up!”

“Hey no!” Larry yipped and something clattered. “I’m just being a good friend and letting you know!”

“Letting me know what? That you’re a lying bastard?”

“That Edgey loves you man!”

He let go of the door handle.

Shoved his hands in his pockets. Hurried down the hall before he could hear Wrights reply.

He’d seen Wright’s strange behavior when it came to Iris. Iris’ own strange behavior in turn.

No need to hear the rejection in Wright’s own voice.

 “… I don’t know why he even asked me to come.”

“Huh? Because he thinks you’re brilliant!”

He could barely hear Wright and Kay’s hushed conversation. He sunk heavier into the couch cushion and willed himself back to sleep.

“You’re that man. Come on Mister Wright he loves you!” She chuckled at Wright’s sputtering. “You’d have to be a ‘foolish fool’ not to see that!”

Wright groaned. “Do not bring Franziska into this.”

The cushion was soft. He was warm. Soon. He’d get up soon.

“She’d tell you the same thing too.”

“The ‘foolish fool’ part maybe.”

A blanket was pulled over his shoulders. And slumber claimed him once more.

 “You idiot.” He clasped Wright’s hand in his and collapsed into the chair next to the hospital bed. “You need to be more careful.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever, I mean I’m still alright! What’s a little strain right?”

“Don’t make that awful pun at me Wright.”

Phoenix laughed at him. “Oh come on you know you love me.”

“Of course I do.” He assured the bedsheets. Wright’s hand still clenched in his.

His stomach flipped as soon as it registered what he’d admitted. He pulled away.

Phoenix’s hand stopped him. Squeezed his back just as firm.

“Yeah. Yeah I do too.”