And it wasn't even me he was supposed to be watching.
When my stepfather and his first wife were getting divorced, it got ugly for awhile. So ugly, in fact, that she had him followed by a private eye. (They later reconciled and remained friends until her death.) He and my mother, childhood friends who'd lost touch for 30 years and then reconnected, had recently started dating. (My stepfather and his first wife were no longer living together by then, and it was all over but the legal wrangling.)
She was in New York, we were in New Jersey, and when the soon-to-be-ex wanted to find out what my future stepfather was doing, she hired a PI firm in New York.
It was pretty easy to figure out what a car with New York plates was doing cruising our neighborhood all of the time.
My favorite incident was the time that, one evening, one of the PI's was parked across the street from our house. At night. Wearing sunglasses. I, who was the only one home that evening, happened to walk down the driveway to take out the trash, and spotted him. He spotted me at the same time, and quickly pulled up a newspaper to hide his face. Any chance he had of fooling me about his reason for being there was thwarted when I noticed the newspaper was upside down.
I walked up to his car and tapped on his window. He opened it, looking as innocent as a man in sunglasses at night time reading a newspaper upside down can look.
"Are you lost?" I inquired as brightly as a 16-year-old can inquire. "I know the area pretty well, and I can give you directions."
He mumbled something and started the car and began to pull away, though not before I noticed he had a gun in a shoulder holster peeking out from his coat.
I walked up the driveway and hid behind a bush. Sure enough, he pulled up again a few minutes later.
I eased back into the house and called the police, telling them that there was a man with a gun parked across the street from our house in a car with New York plates. Less than five minutes later, a police car pulled up behind my observer. Watching from the house I couldn't hear the conversation, but the PI was VERY animated and, it appeared, upset.
They both left in the police car for the police station where, as it turned out, the New York PI had no license to carry a gun in New Jersey. I later learned that the police took the gun and told the man that his boss could come down from New York to retrieve it at his convenience. They MAY have also suggested that he find a better place to park than our neighborhood.
Apparently he did, because I never saw him again. It's possible that his change of parking place coincided with a change in his employment status. But I'm just guessing.
