Love Spies : Who’re L.A. Lovers Gonna Call to Check Out a Cheatin’ Heart?

It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your lover is?

Or, for that matter, who this person is?

Once, in a smaller, safer America, a commitment was sealed with a stolen kiss on a porch swing and validated by a swain’s statement of his intentions to his girl’s father.

Today, a relationship may begin with a classified advertisement--”Beautiful blond professional, funny, bright, no children, seeks upscale, successful lifetime mate”--and end in disillusionment or tragedy.

Increasingly, men and women are hiring private investigators to check up on their significant others, to find out if the person is married, wanted by the law, a drug dealer or user, an all-around fraud, or maybe at high risk for AIDS.

In a city like Los Angeles, says private investigator John T. Lynch, “people can make mistakes very easily. In the small communities, almost everybody knows everybody else or very quickly can find out about them. In the large communities, you have a lot of nice people--and a lot of bad people.”

In a matter of hours, an investigator, using computer technology, can run a background check. It is not unusual, Lynch says, to learn for example that “Mr. Right,” a charming big spender, is in reality “bankrupt, had maybe 30 traffic tickets one year, was fired from his last three jobs, is driving a car owned by an ex-girlfriend who sold it to him but he never made the first payment. There’s a lot of bad news out there.”

Spying on one’s lover is nothing new. But stories such as Ed McMahon’s recent decision to seek a divorce--the tabloid headlines have reported that the “Tonight Show” sidekick recently hired a private investigator to snoop on his wife, Victoria, and learned she had been carrying on with a Beverly Hills cop--apparently have made more people wonder about their own relationships, about things that just don’t add up.

Milo Speriglio, director in chief of Nick Harris Detectives, says, “The last couple of years there have been more (requests) than ever” for what his firm discreetly calls “premarital backgrounds.”

He says he is now investigating “a man with four different IDs, four Social Security numbers, four driver’s licenses . . . nothing matches except the date of birth.” His client married this man about a month ago.

“He was supposed to be a multimillionaire,” he explains, and had persuaded his bride to lend him $80,000--pocket money--until his funds could be transferred from the East Coast. She grew suspicious.

“He’s a con artist,” the detective learned. “He’s still married to someone in the Midwest. We found no record of a divorce.”

Lynch has seen cases where “women have embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars. They didn’t get a nickel. It went to the boyfriend, who was just a common thief. They’re so much in love with this guy and they believe all that baloney. He’s spending it on other women or throwing it away over the bars looking for new conquests.”

Others who seek out a detective express concern about whether the person they’re dating might have a criminal record or might be seeing someone else on the sly. “A lot of times a client wants to know if there are any children which he may have to be supporting,” Speriglio says.

He adds, “The ever-growing problem is whether or not a person’s ever been in contact with someone with AIDS.”

AIDS has raised concerns about a lover’s former life style, investigator Jamin Paris Stone says. “A wealthy businessman meets a really nice girl. He just wants to find out if she has a boyfriend and, if she does sleep around, with how many other people?”

What can private investigators do in such cases? They may be able to get medical information, find out about hospital admissions, get insurance data.

To determine the person’s social habits, detectives might conduct a surveillance--what is euphemistically called a “peace of mind investigation.”

In marital or dating relationships today, Speriglio says, “approximately 50% of all people cheat.”

He recalls one memorable surveillance: “A woman hired us to follow her husband. She wanted to see if he was having her followed because she was having an affair with a priest.”

Photographs, obtained in public places with telephoto lenses, often are the proof of an indiscretion. Loose-lipped acquaintances are another source. Says Speriglio, “You’re always going to find one talkative neighbor in any neighborhood.”

Some sleuths, both do-it-yourselfers and professionals, have acted on their suspicions by tapping into a lover’s telephone answering machine after figuring out the code.

In many cases of infidelity, Lynch says, a woman client learns that her husband’s new playmate is her best friend.

The polygraph, or lie detector, is sometimes the detective’s best friend. Speriglio recalls “the man and his girlfriend who came to our office to have a polygraph taken. Before they got on the machine, they both confessed to having affairs.”

“Find Anyone Fast!” reads Stone’s classified ad in a local magazine.

“There’s a big call out there” for domestic sleuthing, he says. Cheating has taken on a new dimension: People in a relationship want to make sure their partner is “not sleeping around with AIDS. Everyone’s a little bit worried.”

Deceit between lovers is hardly a phenomenon unique to big cities--”These things happen in Bismarck, N.D.,” he observes--but Los Angeles attracts the rich and powerful, and “if they’re rich and powerful, people find out who they are and throw themselves at them.”

He tells of one client, a very wealthy, very handsome man who was concerned because his woman friend would disappear for days.

“Once he followed her,” Stone says, “and found out she was getting on a plane, going to Denver, switching planes, coming back, having an affair in L.A., getting back on the plane and going to Denver. She would make up friends in Denver she was visiting. It was always Denver.”

Lynch tells of a woman, a partner in a 41-year marriage, who asked to have a surveillance put on her husband, whom she suspected of an affair. It turned out he was using a somewhat common ruse: “He’s supposed to be returning from a trip on Tuesday. Actually, he returns on Monday and the lady meets him at the airport . . . they just put their arms around each other like two kids out of school.” Tailed by a detective, the lovebirds drove in her car to her address. “We saw him leave the next day,” Lynch says. “He was picked up by a cab.”

What did it cost the wife to have her worst fears confirmed? About $1,200, based on a rate of $60 an hour for each of two agents. A simple background check might be $200. (A sign of the times: Some private eyes can now fax background information to a client and charge it to a credit card.)

Sometimes, of course, it is the man in a relationship who grows suspicious.

“He may want her checked,” Lynch says, “to determine whether she’s actually going to Cleveland or spending the weekend with her mother or whatever.”

The lonely often are targets of people with something other than amour on their minds. Especially vulnerable, Lynch says, are young widows: “They find some irresponsible creep who has the time and he has no job and has nothing to lose. He wants to move in and hang up his hat and have a nice home. The first thing you know, his name is on the deed to the house. Maybe he has six previous marriages that he never had to divulge.”

Unfortunately, says Lynch, most people simply aren’t cautious enough.

“They don’t think along those lines. Joe is so nice, Bill is so nice. The man could be a murderer. He could have been three times in the pen. Some of these people are very charming, but dangerous.”

With minimal data--name, address, occupation, date of birth, Social Security number--an investigator can usually find out quickly who a person is, where he’s from, whether he’s single. Even if everything he has told a woman is untrue, Lynch says, there are ways. “If you can find a set of fingerprints, the prints will come up with the right name eventually.”

If someone calls a private eye to find out if a wife or girlfriend is having an affair, “there’s a 90% chance” the caller’s suspicions are true, Stone says.

Actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered, allegedly by a man who obtained her address from a private investigator. Is there information detectives should withhold from clients?

Lynch and other investigators emphasize that, as a matter of policy, reputable investigators will not give out an address, but rather will offer to deliver a message to the person sought.

Says Lynch, “If someone has to come to a private investigator just to get an address, the investigator would have to be very hungry to take (the case).”

A private eye with dubious credentials can be worse than none at all. Lynch tells of one investigator who sent a woman client a written report to her residence. The mail was opened by her husband, who “just went berserk, grabbed a gun and shot her, killed her.”

Clients should not expect TV-style action when they hire a private eye.

“We don’t fly around in a helicopter,” Lynch says, “and we don’t get in a gunfight. We don’t have a 75-m.p.h. chase down Broadway. When I look at a private eye show on TV, I say, ‘Well, it’s been on for three minutes and I’ve seen three criminal violations’ ” by the hero.

Closer to reality might be a lonely stakeout at a home where a tryst is suspected to be taking place. Possibly the first surveillance will fizzle--the subject who was supposed to be working late was, indeed, working late. But several nights later--Bingo! He dines with a girlfriend, then spends three hours at her apartment.

Says Lynch, “You don’t suspect they were in there to read the funny papers.”

He recalls a night when three private investigators from three agencies showed up at one motel staking out three different clients.

Speriglio has another motel story. A woman cheating on her husband denied any wrongdoing when caught--”She claimed she was there knitting sweaters for the Red Cross.”

HOW TO CATCH A CHEATER Private investigators interviewed for the accompanying story say there are times to become suspicious of a spouse or lover in a relationship, such as: When strange coincidences are explained away with, “You wouldn’t believe this but . . . “ When a partner suddenly changes to a new cologne and buys more youthfully styled clothes. When a partner is away from home more often than usual, often at predictable times, “working” overtime. When you start receiving hang-up phone calls. When your sex life at home becomes less active. When the family bank account starts dipping erratically. When you find the passenger seat belt of the car has been adjusted bigger or smaller. When your lover or spouse explains away new trinkets, love gifts from another, as “on a whim” purchases. When a partner slips away from family holiday gatherings to make furtive phone calls. When plans are frequently changed with explanations like, “My parents are coming to town and they want me to have dinner with them.” When cigarettes with lipstick traces appear in the ashtray of his car.