“Poisoning?” Mom blinked up at me. “Yes, this is terrible too. But the worst part of all—the poor man died fifteen minutes too soon. He never heard Tebaldi sing the Vissy darty.”
And Mom began to hum softly.
THE MODERN ERA
DETECTIVE: SHARON MCCONE
ALL THE LONELY PEOPLE
Marcia Muller
ALTHOUGH SELDOM ACKNOWLEDGED FOR ITS SIGNIFICANCE, the publication of Marcia Muller’s (1944– ) Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977 was a pivotal point in the history of American detective fiction. The novel introduced Sharon McCone, the first female private eye character written by a woman. McCone wasn’t a sidekick, didn’t inherit the agency, and didn’t need to be rescued by a man when the going got tough. A few years later, Sue Grafton (who described Muller as “the founding mother of the contemporary female hard-boiled private eye”) and Sara Paretsky followed in Muller’s footsteps, becoming household names with their bestselling novels.
Muller was born in Detroit and earned a B.A. in English and an M.A. in journalism from the University of Michigan, but after her move to San Francisco, she set almost all her books in the Bay Area. The region is an integral part of her work, especially the McCone series, which numbers more than thirty novels and numerous short stories. Muller’s other series characters include Elena Oliverez, a Mexican-American art expert; Joanna Stark, an art and alarm security consultant for museums; and Carpenter and Quincannon, detectives in nineteenth-century San Francisco; that series is cowritten with her husband, Bill Pronzini, a prolific mystery writer best known for his Nameless Detective series.
McCone worked her way through college doing security work for a department store, liked it, and decided to make it a career, joining All Souls, a San Francisco legal co-op, as an investigator, where she worked for many years, mainly on cases that involved social issues, before opening her own agency.
Muller was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2005 and given “The Eye” by the Private Eye Writers of America in 1993, both for lifetime achievement.
“All the Lonely People” was originally published in Sisters in Crime, edited by Marilyn Wallace (New York, Berkley, 1989).
All the Lonely People
MARCIA MULLER
“NAME, SHARON MCCONE. Occupation…I can’t put private investigator. What should I be?” I glanced over my shoulder at Hank Zahn, my boss at All Souls Legal Cooperative. He stood behind me, his eyes bemused behind thick horn-rimmed glasses.
“I’ve heard you tell people you’re a researcher when you don’t want to be bothered with stupid questions like ‘What’s a nice girl like you…’ ”
“Legal researcher.” I wrote it on the form. “Now—‘About the person you are seeking.’ Age—does not matter. Smoker—does not matter. Occupation—does not matter. I sound excessively eager for a date, don’t I?”
Hank didn’t answer. He was staring at the form. “The things they ask. Sexual preference.” He pointed at the item. “Hetero, bi, lesbian, gay. There’s no place for ‘does not matter.’ ”
As he spoke, he grinned wickedly. I glared at him. “You’re enjoying this!”
“Of course I am. I never thought I’d see the day you’d fill out an application for a dating service.”
I sighed and drummed my fingertips on the desk. Hank is my best male friend, as well as my boss. I love him like a brother—sometimes. But he harbors an overactive interest in my love life and delights in teasing me about it. I would be hearing about the dating service for years to come. I asked, “What should I say I want the guy’s cultural interests to be? I can’t put ‘does not matter’ for everything.”
“I don’t think burglars have cultural interests.”
“Come on, Hank. Help me with this!”
“Oh, put film. Everyone’s gone to a movie.”
“Film.” I checked the box.
The form was quite simple, yet it provided a great deal of information about the applicant. The standard questions about address, income level, whether the individual shared a home or lived alone, and hours free for dating were enough in themselves to allow an astute burglar to weed out prospects—and pick times to break in when they were not likely to be on the premises.
And that apparently was what had happened at the big singles apartment complex down near the San Francisco–Daly City line, owned by Hank’s client, Dick Morris. There had been three burglaries over the past three months, beginning not long after the place had been leafleted by All the Best People Introduction Service. Each of the people whose apartments had been hit were women who had filled out the application forms; they had had from two to ten dates with men with whom the service had put them in touch. The burglaries had taken place when one renter was at work, another away for the weekend, and the third out with a date whom she had also met through Best People.
Coincidence, the police had told the renters and Dick Morris. After all, none of the women had reported having dates with the same man. And there were many other common denominators among them besides their use of the service. They lived in the same complex. They all knew one another. Two belonged to the same health club. They shopped at the same supermarket, shared auto mechanics, hairstylists, dry cleaners, and two of them went to the same psychiatrist.
Coincidence, the police insisted. But two other San Francisco area members of Best People had also been burglarized—one of them male—and so they checked the service out carefully.
What they found was absolutely no evidence of collusion in the burglaries. It was no fly-by-night operation. It had been in business ten years—a long time for that type of outfit. Its board of directors included a doctor, a psychologist, a rabbi, a minister, and a well-known author of somewhat weird but popular novels. It was respectable—as such things go.
But Best People was still the strongest link among the burglary victims. And Dick Morris was a good landlord who genuinely cared about his tenants. So he put on a couple of security guards, and when the police couldn’t run down the perpetrator(s) and backburnered the case, he came to All Souls for legal advice.
It might seem unusual for the owner of a glitzy singles complex to come to a legal services plan that charges its clients on a sliding-fee scale, but Dick Morris was cash-poor. Everything he’d saved during his long years as a journeyman plumber had gone into the complex, and it was barely turning a profit as yet. Wouldn’t be turning any profit at all if the burglaries continued and some of his tenants got scared and moved out.
Hank could have given Dick the typical attorney’s spiel about leaving things in the hands of the police and continuing to pay the guards out of his dwindling cash reserves, but Hank is far from typical. Instead he referred Dick to me. I’m All Souls’ staff investigator, and assignments like this one—where there’s a challenge—are what I live for.
They are, that is, unless I have to apply for membership in a dating service, plus set up my own home as a target for a burglar. Once I started “dating,” I would remove anything of value to All Souls, plus Dick would station one of his security guards at my house during the hours I was away from there, but it was still a potentially risky and nervous-making proposition.
Now Hank loomed over me, still grinning. I could tell how much he was going to enjoy watching me suffer through an improbable, humiliating, asinine experience. I smiled back—sweetly.
“ ‘Your sexual preference.’ Hetero.” I checked the box firmly. “Except for inflating my income figure, so I’ll look like I have a lot of good stuff to steal, I’m filling this out truthfully,” I said. “Who knows—I might meet someone wonderful.”
When I looked back up at Hank, my evil smile matched his earlier one. He, on the other hand, looked as if he’d swallowed something the wrong way.
* * *
—
My first “date” was a chubby little man named Jerry Hale. Jerry was very into the singles
scene. We met at a bar in San Francisco’s affluent Marina district, and while we talked, he kept swiveling around in his chair and leering at every woman who walked by. Most of them ignored him, but a few glared; I wanted to hang a big sign around my neck saying, “I’m not really with him, it’s only business.” While I tried to find out about his experiences with All the Best People Introduction Service, plus impress him with all the easily fenceable items I had at home, he tried to educate me on the joys of being single.
“I used to be into the bar scene pretty heavily,” he told me. “Did all right too. But then I started to worry about herpes and AIDS—I’ll let you see the results of my most recent test if you want—and my drinking was getting out of hand. Besides, it was expensive. Then I went the other way—a health club. Did all right there too. But goddamn, it’s tiring. So then I joined a bunch of church groups—you meet a lot of horny women there. But churches encourage matrimony, and I’m not into that.”
“So you applied to All the Best People. How long have you—?”
“Not right away. First I thought about joining AA, even went to a meeting. Lots of good-looking women are recovering alcoholics, you know. But I like to drink too much to make the sacrifice. Dear Abby’s always saying you should enroll in courses, so I signed up for a couple at U.C. Extension. Screenwriting and photography.”
My mouth was stiff from smiling politely, and I had just about written Jerry off as a possible suspect—he was too busy to burglarize anyone. I took a sip of wine and looked at my watch.
Jerry didn’t notice the gesture. “The screenwriting class was terrible—the instructor actually wanted you to write stuff. And photography—how can you see women in the darkroom, let alone make any moves when you smell like chemicals?”
I had no answer for that. Maybe my own efforts at photography accounted for my not having a lover at the moment….
“Finally I found All the Best People,” Jerry went on. “Now I really do all right. And it’s opened up a whole new world of dating to me—eighties-style. I’ve answered ads in the paper, placed my own ad too. You’ve always got to ask that they send a photo, though, so you can screen out the dogs. There’s Weekenders, they plan trips. When I don’t want to go out of the house, I use the Intro Line—that’s a phone club you can join, where you call in for three bucks and either talk to one person or on a party line. There’s a video exchange where you can make tapes and trade them with people so you’ll know you’re compatible before you set up a meeting. I do all right.”
He paused expectantly, as if he thought I was going to ask how I could get in on all these good eighties-style deals.
“Jerry,” I said, “have you read any good books lately?”
“Have I…what?”
“What do you do when you’re not dating?”
“I work. I told you, I’m in sales—”
“Do you ever spend time alone?”
“Doing what?”
“Oh, just being alone. Puttering around the house or working at hobbies. Just thinking.”
“Are you crazy? What kind of a computer glitch are you, anyway?” He stood, all five-foot-three of him quivering indignantly. “Believe me, I’m going to complain to Best People about setting me up with you. They described you as ‘vivacious,’ but you’ve hardly said a word all evening!”
* * *
—
Morton Stone was a nice man, a sad man. He insisted on buying me dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant. He spent the evening asking me questions about myself and my job as a legal researcher; while he listened, his fingers played nervously with the silverware. Later, over a brandy in a nearby bar, he told me how his wife had died the summer before, of cancer. He told me about his promise to her that he would get on with his life, find someone new, and be happy. This was the first date he’d arranged through All the Best People; he’d never done anything like that in his life. He’d only tried them because he wasn’t good at meeting people. He had a good job, but it wasn’t enough. He had money to travel, but it was no fun without someone to share the experience with. He would have liked to have children, but he and his wife had put it off until they’d be financially secure, and then they’d found out about the cancer….
I felt guilty as hell about deceiving him, and for taking his time, money, and hope. But by the end of the evening I’d remembered a woman friend who was just getting over a disastrous love affair. A nice, sad woman who wasn’t good at meeting people; who had a good job, loved to travel, and longed for children….
* * *
—
Bob Gillespie was a sailing instructor on a voyage of self-discovery. He kept prefacing his remarks with statements such as, “You know, I had a great insight into myself last week.” That was nice; I was happy for him. But I would rather have gotten to know his surface persona before probing into his psyche. Like the two previous men, Bob didn’t fit any of the recognizable profiles of the professional burglar, nor had he had any great insight into how All the Best People worked.
* * *
—
Ted Horowitz was a recovering alcoholic, which was admirable. Unfortunately he was also the confessional type. He began every anecdote with the admission that it had happened “back when I was drinking.” He even felt compelled to describe how he used to throw up on his ex-wife. His only complaint about Best People—this with a stern look at my wineglass—was that they kept referring him to women who drank.
* * *
—
Jim Rogers was an adman who wore safari clothes and was into guns. I refrained from telling him that I own two .38 Specials and am a highly qualified marksman, for fear it would incite him to passion. For a little while I considered him seriously for the role of burglar, but when I probed the subject by mentioning a friend having recently been ripped off, Jim became enraged and said the burglar ought to be hunted down and shot.
* * *
—
“I’m going about this all wrong,” I said to Hank.
It was ten in the morning, and we were drinking coffee at the big round table in All Souls’ kitchen. The night before I’d spent hours on the phone with an effervescent insurance underwriter who was going on a whale-watching trip with Weekenders, the group that god-awful Jerry Hale had mentioned. He’d concluded our conversation by saying he’d be sure to note in his pocket organizer to call me the day after he returned. Then I’d been unable to sleep and had sat up hours longer, drinking too much and listening for burglars and brooding about loneliness.
I wasn’t involved with anyone at the time—nor did I particularly want to be. I’d just emerged from a long-term relationship and was reordering my life and getting used to doing things alone again. I was fortunate in that my job and my little house—which I’m constantly remodeling—filled most of the empty hours. But I could still understand what Morton and Bob and Ted and Jim and even that dreadful Jerry were suffering from.
It was the little things that got to me. Like the times I went to the supermarket and everything I felt like having for dinner was packaged for two or more, and I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to have over to share it with. Or the times I’d be driving around a curve in the road and come upon a spectacular view, but have no one in the passenger seat to point it out to. And then there were the cold sheets on the other side of the wide bed on a foggy San Francisco night.
But I got through it, because I reminded myself that it wasn’t going to be that way forever. And when I couldn’t convince myself of that, I thought about how it was better to be totally alone than alone with someone. That’s how I got through the cold, foggy nights. But I was discovering there was a whole segment of the population that availed itself of dating services and telephone conversation clubs and video exchanges. Since I’d started using Best People, I’d been inundated by mail solicitations and found that the array of services available to singles was astonis
hing.
Now I told Hank, “I simply can’t stand another evening making polite chitchat in a bar. If I listen to another ex-wife story, I’ll scream. I don’t want to know what these guys’ parents did to them at age ten that made the whole rest of their lives a mess. And besides, having that security guard on my house is costing Dick Morris a bundle that he can ill afford.”
Helpfully Hank said, “So change your approach.”
“Thanks for your great suggestion.” I got up and went out to the desk that belongs to Ted Smalley, our secretary, and dug out a phone directory. All the Best People wasn’t listed. My file on the case was on the kitchen table. I went back there—Hank had retreated to his office—and checked the introductory letter they’d sent me; it showed nothing but a post-office box. The zip code told me it was the main post office at Seventh and Mission streets.
I went back and borrowed Ted’s phone book again, then looked up the post office’s number. I called it, got the mail-sorting supervisor, and identified myself as Sharon from Federal Express. “We’ve got a package here for All the Best People Introduction Service,” I said, and read off the box number. “That’s all I’ve got—no contact phone, no street address.”
“Assholes,” she said wearily. “Why do they send them to a P.O. box when they know you can’t deliver to one? For that matter, why do you accept them when they’re addressed like that?”
“Damned if I know. I only work here.”
“I can’t give out the street address, but I’ll supply the contact phone.” She went away, came back, and read it off to me.
“Thanks.” I depressed the disconnect button and redialed.
A female voice answered with only the phone number. I went into my Federal Express routine. The woman gave me the address without hesitation, in the 200 block of Gough Street near the Civic Center. After I hung up I made one more call: to a friend on the Chronicle. J. D. Smith was in the city room and agreed to leave a few extra business cards with the security guard in the newspaper building’s lobby.
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 144
