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Suburban Madness

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Blue Moon is owned by a chatty Rubenesque woman named Bobbi Bacha who wears long black or purplish dresses with granny boots and talks in such a cheerful, singsong voice that people who call her for the first time often mistake her for a teenager. The 43-year-old is not exactly a portrait of the hard-boiled detective: She always keeps a stack of decorating magazines in her car in case she needs something to read during stakeouts. Because she wants her clients to feel at home when they visit, she has given her offices a distinctly feminine touch, lining the walls with serene photographs of the moon, placing long-vined potted plants and small, gurgling fountains next to the windows, and burning cinnamon candles on her and her employees' desks. To soothe her clients' nerves, she serves them Constant Comment hot tea, never coffee.

Bobbi understands that marriage is an often flawed and disastrous institution. The daughter of a Galveston police officer, she began working as a secretary at a private investigative firm in the early eighties after her husband, her high school sweetheart, left her for another woman. After a second failed marriage, she began working nights for another private investigator to keep food on the table for her three children. Occasionally, when no baby-sitters were available, her children sat in the back seat of the car doing their homework or leafing through comic books while Bobbi tailed cheating spouses. She was good. After word got around about her lying under a dining room table with a tape recorder to catch a wealthy married man with another woman, she had full-time job offers from many of the dozen or so private-detective agencies in the Houston area. But sensing an opportunity to make her own mark in the mushrooming southern suburbs, she opened Blue Moon Investigations in 1995, taking out large ads in the area Yellow Pages with the headline "Need a Clue? Call Blue."

Today, her business is thriving. On the various days that I visited with her, she was involved in the case of a wife wanting to know if the "thera-stress consultant" that her buttoned-down insurance executive husband was visiting was actually a massage-parlor prostitute, a husband wondering if his wife was having sex inside the family Suburban with cowboys she was meeting at a country-western bar, and an astronaut's wife who thought her husband was making out with a secretary on his lunch break at the NASA complex. She has 38 assistant investigators, most of whom are younger women who work part-time, doing surveillance jobs at night after spending their day taking college classes or toiling away as schoolteachers, executive assistants, or salesclerks. Bobbi admits she prefers female investigators—"I think we are so much more naturally observant," she says—but she does want people to know she's an equal opportunity employer. Her chief investigator, Jeff Moore, is a former male stripper. And when Bobbi is overbooked, she gets her third husband, Lucas, a brainy Boeing engineer, to do surveillance work for her, despite the fact that he's a bit of a Mr. Magoo who at restaurants will often circle the dining room a couple of times on his way back from the restroom because he's forgotten where his table is located.

On the afternoon of January 27, 1999, Bobbi was about to leave the office when the phone rang. A man named Chuck Knight told her that he needed someone that evening to watch his wife, Julie, and her best friend, Gail Bridges. Chuck and his wife lived one neighborhood away from Gail and her husband, Steve, and the two couples were good friends. They went to the same church, Bay Harbor United Methodist. Their boys played on the same soccer team. They drank champagne together every New Year's Eve at the Knights' house. But for the past year, Chuck said, neighbors had started coming to him and Steve, asking why Gail and Julie spent so much time together—going to lunch, taking tennis lessons, sitting around at one or the other's homes—while the husbands were away at work. Chuck said he began to have suspicions himself after watching Julie and Gail hugging and, he says, fondling each other when the two couples went out to dinner. The more time passed, and the more their marriages soured, the more Chuck and Steve thought they realized what was going on: Their wives must be lesbians. Chuck told Bobbi that he and Steve would be watching the children that evening so their wives could go shopping at the Baybrook Mall for a couple of hours and that he wanted the two of them followed. According to Bobbi's notes, Chuck said to her, "But I bet they will go to a hotel. Or they might just pull over on the side of a highway to do their business. Gail has a boob job, and my wife will not be able to wait to touch those puppies."

Bobbi sighed. She had promised her husband and children that she would get home early to fix dinner, and all of her investigators were already booked. But she did not want the male-owned-and-operated Turman and Associates, her chief competitor in the suburbs, to get Chuck's business if she turned it down. She took his credit card number over the phone—Blue Moon charges $55 an hour, with a four-hour minimum, for a surveillance job—and she drove over to the Knight house in the Harbor Park subdivision of League City, where she waited for Gail and Julie to drive off in Gail's Navigator.

Out came Julie, a curvy blonde with startlingly blue eyes, wearing blue jeans and a red Tommy Hilfiger top. Out came Gail in blue jeans and a pink top. The two women drove to the mall and visited a few stores, with Bobbi following at a safe distance. When they lingered at a Nine West shoe store, Bobbi walked in and sat near them, trying on shoes, including a pair of stiletto heels. Meanwhile, the two women swapped stories, laughing loudly, before finally heading back out of the mall, driving through a McDonald's for soft drinks, and going home.

The next day, Bobbi told Julie's husband, Chuck, that they had acted like Wilma and Betty from the Flintstones and that there was nothing at all lesbianlike about their behavior. The only time they got physically close, she said, was when their heads briefly moved toward each other in the car.

According to Bobbi, Chuck asked her to "inflame" that part of the report and make it seem worse than it was. (Chuck says he never asked Bobbi to inflame anything, nor did he refer to Gail's breasts as "puppies.") "Mr. Knight, you do know that women are different than men?" asked Bobbi in response. (Besides her ability to hide in closets and sneak onto hotel room balconies, Bobbi also likes to think of herself as a kind of therapist who can help her clients better understand human behavior.) "Even if two women kiss or hug, it doesn't mean they are sexually active with one another. Not at all." Chuck hung up, and so Bobbi filed the case away and turned to her next piece of business.

Then, in mid-July 1999, Julie and Gail showed up at her office. As they sipped hot tea, they told Bobbi that they had both filed for divorces from their husbands within a week of one another, and they went into all the standard horror stories about bad husbands that Bobbi had heard thousands of times. Among their complaints was that their husbands had been threatening to expose them in court as lesbians, which they said was preposterous. They thought their spouses might be using the lesbian tactic to force them into agreeing to out-of-court settlements that would leave them with less than their fair share of the community property.

Julie said she wanted her husband tracked to see what he might be hiding. (Gail backed out of hiring Bobbi at the last minute, saying she wanted to try to keep the peace between her and Steve during their divorce.) Bobbi had one of her investigators tail Chuck, who began noticing that he was visiting the house of a friend down the street and that another woman was showing up at that house about the same time. Then Bobbi's investigator caught Chuck and this other woman flying off to Tampa, Florida, for a weekend trip. The woman was Laurie Wells, a part-time baton-twirling instructor and the wife of Steve Wells, a respected suburban remodeling contractor. When Bobbi brought in Julie and Gail to deliver her report, the two women's mouths dropped open. The three women and their husbands had once been good friends. Gail had met Laurie at a Lamaze class and then invited her to Bay Harbor Methodist.

Before too long, all three couples—the Knights, the Bridgeses, and the Wellses—were finalizing their divorces, and it was not pretty. The spouses kept trooping off to court with accusations of all sorts of misbehavior, sexual and otherwise. They got into shouting matches at the mall and left threatening messages on each other's voice mail. Julie found her house vandalized, which she blamed on Chuck and Laurie and Steve Bridges. Chuck occasionally followed Julie in his car. During one episode, Julie claims he stuck his middle finger out of his driver's side window while she stuck a camera out of her sunroof, snapping photos of him to show to a divorce judge. And in one of the more heated court skirmishes, Gail and Julie accused Chuck and Steve of taping their phone calls and then splicing the conversations together so that the two wives would appear to be swapping sexually suggestive comments about such activities as eating ice cream. After Julie and Gail paid a visit to the district attorney's office, both men were indicted on felony charges of illegal wiretapping. (Charges against Steve were later dropped, but charges against Chuck are still pending.)

By late last year, everyone was officially divorced. Chuck and his new girlfriend, Laurie Wells, both of whom had gotten little property in their divorces, moved into a small apartment together. Steve Wells had full custody of the Wellses' two girls, in part because Laurie had called him and said she was going to teach the children to hate him, a phone call that he taped and later played before a judge. In her divorce settlement, Julie got full custody of her and Chuck's two children, but she was continually returning to court to ask for protective orders against Chuck, who she claimed was stalking and harassing her and the children. As for Gail, she got custody of the two youngest children while Steve got custody of the eldest. She and the two kids moved into a smaller house nearby, and then Gail got a job at Space Center Orthodontics.

IF THERE WAS ONE MAN who did not seem likely to get involved in an affair, it was David Harris. "I'm not exaggerating this. He just didn't look twice at another woman," one of his co-workers told me. He was a little vain—he wore a toupee to keep up his looks—but he was never the kind of guy who wanted to go out drinking with his buddies or flick the channel over to HBO to watch Real Sex when his wife wasn't in the bedroom. He and Clara were devoted members of Shadycrest Baptist Church, where David played the drums in a contemporary Christian soft-rock group, the Colemans, providing the backbeat on such songs as "Sing Hallelujah" and "You Make Me Complete."

David had been divorced before, though infidelity reportedly had not been the cause of the breakup. His wife claims that she left him because he had been too focused on his career. After his marriage to Clara, his career had indeed taken off. Besides building his own practice, in which he was putting braces on hundreds of kids and some adults, including Bobbi Bacha's husband, Lucas, he had purchased seven other dental practices in the area and put together a management team to staff and supervise them. By 2001 his income was skyrocketing. He was clearing as much as $35,000 a month from Space Center Orthodontics alone, and he bought a piece of land in a more upscale shopping area so that he could build an enormous, six-thousand-square-foot new office. Once the building was finished, Clara was going to move her practice there so they could be closer. When his daughter, Lindsey, who worked at Space Center Orthodontics in the summer, told him that her goal in life was to become an orthodontist too, he told her that there would always be an office available for her to come work with him.

Why, then, after having built such a life for himself, did he want to put it into play? Some of David's friends wonder if he felt a typical middle-aged need to shake up his daily routine. They think he was at that place in life where the attention of a new woman was suddenly tantalizing. He had, after all, been telling his friends that he sometimes felt unappreciated by Clara, who was consumed with the children and with her own business. On the other hand, some of the women in his office believe he simply fell under the sexual spell of a woman they think was clearly out to snag him. "I remember watching Gail bend down in front of David to get some papers out of a filing cabinet," one woman told me. "But instead of bending at the knees, like everyone else, she bent at the waist so that her butt would stick up. And I thought, 'Uh-oh.'"

Around Space Center Orthodontics, it is hard to find someone who does not think that Gail saw David as her ticket back to the lifestyle to which she was once accustomed. But Gail's closest friends said that for the first several months she worked there, she never said a word to them about feelings she might have had for the orthodontist. Obviously, they said, attention from any man must have felt good to Gail, who had been embroiled for so long in a vicious divorce and who couldn't go to church or her children's school without people whispering that she was a lesbian. And, they admitted, Gail could be cute around a guy, turning on her high-school-cheerleader personality. But none of them really believed that she would get into an affair, until Gail began to mention that David was taking her to lunch. She told them that he had confided to her that he was staying in his marriage only for his business and the children. Then she told them that David had said he loved her.

No one from David's circle believes that the orthodontist was really in love with her. "If anything, he was infatuated with her for a while, nothing more," said a close friend who asked not to be identified. "He was never going to leave his wife."