“What's this?” He hurried over to the bushes with her.
“Toby, I'll keep him here. You go find that Englishman, Sebastian Blue.”
Toby turned partly away from her as the bus driver struggled to his feet. “Oh, I don't think we need Blue.”
“Of course we need him! He's from Interpol, and so am I.”
“That's interesting to know,” Toby said. “But I already suspected it.” He turned back toward her and now she saw the gun in his hand. “Don't make a sound, my dear, or you'll end up the way Gretchen and Otto did.”
“I – ”
“Tie her up, Gunter,” he told the driver. “And gag her. We'll stow her in the luggage compartment and take her along for security.”
Laura felt rough hands yank her wrists behind her. Then, suddenly, the parking area was flooded with light from overhead. Toby whirled and fired a shot without aiming. There was an answering shot as the bus driver dropped her wrists and started to run. He staggered and went down hard.
“Drop the gun, Toby,” Sebastian called out from beyond the spotlights. “We want you alive.”
Toby Marchant hesitated, weighing his chances, and then let the gun fall from his fingers.
It was some time later before Laura could get all the facts out of Sebastian Blue. They were driving back to the airport, after Toby Marchant had been turned over to the local police and the bus driver rushed to the hospital. “How did you manage to get there in the nick of time?” she asked him. “I didn't tell you of my suspicions about the tour buses.”
“No, but you didn't have to. I had my own suspicions of Toby, and I was watching him. I saw him meet the driver and get the gold bar from its hiding place. When I saw him point the gun at you, I switched on the overhead lights and then the shooting started. Luckily for us both, Toby had no idea how many guns were against him, so he chose to surrender.”
“But how did you know Toby was involved in the smuggling?”
“I didn't, but I was pretty sure he'd committed both murders, which made him the most likely candidate.”
“He killed Otto Dolliman in that locked room? But how?”
“There's only one way it could have been done, ruling out secret passages and invisible men. Remember that scratch along the shaft of the trident? Toby entered the office prior to Dolliman's arrival, removed the trident from the statue of Neptune, and thrust the shaft of it through the wire grating on the window. Remember, the window itself was open a few inches. Thus, the pronged head of the trident was inside the office, but the shaft was sticking out the window.
“Toby then got Otto to enter the office on some pretext – probably telling him to phone for urgent supplies of some sort – left the house, walked around the cobblestone path just outside, and positioned himself at the window. Perhaps Dolliman saw the trident sticking through the grillework and walked over to investigate. Or perhaps Toby called him to the window, pretending to find it like that. In either event, as Dolliman reached the window, Toby drove the trident into his stomach, killing him. He then pushed the shaft all the way through the wire grillework, so the trident remained in Dolliman's body and made it appear that the killer must have been in the room with him.”
“But why did he want to kill him in a locked room?”
“He didn't. He was just setting up an alibi for himself, since we saw him leave Dolliman alive. He couldn't forsee that we'd remain outside the door and hear Dolliman's dying gasps. You see, once I figured out the method, Toby had to be the killer. We'd seen him come out of that office ourselves. And the killer had to be in the office prior to the killing to push the trident through the screen. He couldn't have it sticking out the window for long, risking discovery, so he had to lure Dolliman back to his office.
“That was where Toby made his big mistake. When we surprised him coming out of the office, he had to act as if he was frantically seeking Dolliman to tell him something. Later, when I asked what it was all about, he had to come up with a good lie. He said he'd told Dolliman he caught Hilda going through Gretchen's things. I suspect that was true, and that it involved your friend Frederick, the guide, but Helen Dolliman later told me her husband had discussed the matter with her.”
“Which meant,” Laura said, “he must have told Dolliman about it much earlier.”
“Exactly. Early enough for Dolliman to discuss it with his wife. And if Toby lied about the reason for luring Dolliman to his office, it figured that he also prepared the trident and killed him with it.”
“What about Gretchen?”
“She wanted out of the gold smuggling, so he had to kill her – she knew too much. I suppose Dolliman was suspicious that Toby killed her, so Dolliman had to die, too. Either that, or Dolliman discovered that Toby was now using the tour buses to smuggle the gold out of Switzerland.”
“But I thought we decided Toby couldn't have done it because he was still on stage when Gretchen went through the trap door to her death. Don't tell me we have another impossible crime?”
Sebastian shook his head. “Not really. Our mistake was in jumping to the conclusion that the killer was waiting for her. Actually, Toby went downstairs after the act was over and killed her then. I suppose he swung the sword at her in jest, just as he did on stage, only this time it was for real. She wouldn't even have screamed when she saw it coming at her.”
“How awful!”
“But what about you? How did you tumble to the fact the tour buses were being used?”
Laura shrugged. “Partly intuition, I suppose. We figured the gold was still leaving the country, and not by plane. It just seemed a likely method. Tour buses cross boundary lines all the time, and they're not usually searched too carefully.”
They came in sight of the airport and Sebastian said, “I imagine Paris will look good to you after this. Or did you enjoy playing Medusa?”
She grinned and held up the wig with its writhing snakes. “I brought it along as a souvenir. Just so we'll know the whole thing wasn't a myth.”
Marcia Muller
(1944 – )
Marcia Muller's series private investigator, Sharon McCone (who first appeared in 1977 in Edwin of the Iron Shoes), generally flies and detects solo. However, throughout more than eighteen novel–length cases and more than a dozen short stories (most of which are collected in the 1995 Anthony Award–winning The McCone Files), McCone has amassed a large cast of ongoing series characters, the details of whose lives frequently are difficult for Muller to keep track of. One of the foremost of these ongoing characters is McCone's assistant, Rae Kelleher, who was introduced in There's Something in a Sunday (1989). At first Kelleher is a young, insecure woman with a disordered life, but in later books she matures into a confident, capable investigator and finally takes a pivotal role in the 1996 novel The Broken Promise Land. In this, the second story narrated by Kelleher, Sharon McCone assigns her to a particularly obnoxious client, then finds herself enlisted by Rae to assist in a daring rescue.
Sharon McCone was the first of a vast number of contemporary American female private investigators. She began her career with the now–defunct All Souls Legal Cooperative, a San Francisco–based organization having its roots in the 1970's poverty law movement. In her fifteenth novel–length case, Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (1994), McCone went out on her own, establishing her agency while retaining office space in the co–op's Victorian, but she was soon to relocate to a renovated pier on the city's waterfront. McCone – who can alternately be compassionate, intuitive, highly professional, somewhat pompous, and exceedingly stubborn – has investigated cases set against such backgrounds as the aviation industry (Both Ends of the Night, 1997), the country music scene (The Broken Promise Land, 1996), terrorist bombings (A Wild and Lonely Place, 1995), and the ecology movement (Where Echoes Live, 1991), and is possibly the first of the current crop of female investigators to earn her private pilot's license. In 1993 the Private Eye Writers of America gave her creator their Life Achievement Award in recognition of her co
ntribution to the genre.
THE HOLES IN THE SYSTEM
RAE KELLEHER AND SHARON McCONE
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 1996
There are some days that just ought to be called off. Mondays are always hideous: The trouble starts when I dribble toothpaste all over my clothes or lock my keys in the car and doesn't let up till I stub my toe on the bedstand at night. Tuesdays are usually when the morning paper doesn't get delivered. Wednesdays are better, but if I get to feeling optimistic and go to aerobics class at the Y, chances are ten to one that I'll wrench my back. Thursdays – forget it. And by five on Friday, all I want to do is crawl under the covers and hide.
You can see why I love weekends.
The day I got assigned to the Boydston case was a Tuesday. Cautious optimism, that was what I was nursing. The paper lay folded tidily on the front steps of All Souls Legal Cooperative – where I both live and work as a private investigator. I read it and drank my coffee, not even burning my tongue. Nobody I knew had died, and there was even a cheerful story below the fold in the Metro section. By the time I'd looked at the comics and found all five strips that I bother to read were funny, I was feeling downright perky.
Well, why not? I wasn't making a lot of money, but my job was secure. The attic room I occupied was snug and comfy. I had a boyfriend, and even if the relationship was about as deep as a desert stream on the Fourth of July, he could be taken most anyplace. And to top it off, this wasn't a bad hair day.
All that smug reflection made me feel charitable toward my fellow humans – or at least my coworkers and their clients – so I refolded the paper and carried it from the kitchen of our big Victorian to the front parlor and waiting–room so others could partake. A man was sitting on the shabby maroon sofa: bald and chubby, dressed in lime green polyester pants and a strangely patterned green, blue, and yellow shirt that reminded me of drawings of sperm cells. One thing for sure, he'd never get run over by a bus while he was wearing that getup. He looked at me as I set the paper on the coffee table and said, “How ya doin', little lady?”
Now, there's some contention that the word “lady” is demeaning. Frankly, it doesn't bother me; when I hear it I know I'm looking halfway presentable and haven't got something disgusting caught between my front teeth. No, what rankled was the word “little.” When you're five foot three the word reminds you of things you'd just as soon not dwell on – like being unable to see over people's heads at parades, or the little–girly clothes that designers of petite sizes are always trying to foist on you. “Little,” especially at nine in the morning, doesn't cut it.
I glared at the guy. Unfortunately, he'd gotten to his feet and I had to look up. He didn't notice I was annoyed; maybe he was nearsighted. “Sure looks like it's gonna be a fine day,” he said.
Now I identified his accent – pure Texas. Another strike against him, because of Uncle Roy, but that's another story.
“It would've been a nice day,” I muttered.
“Ma'am?”
That did it! The first – and last – time somebody had gotten away with calling me “ma'am” was on my twenty–eighth birthday two weeks before, when a bagboy tried to help me out of Safeway with my two feather–light sacks of groceries. It was not a precedent I wanted followed.
Speaking more clearly, I said, “It would've been a nice day, except for you.”
He frowned. “What'd I do?”
“Try `little,` a Texas accent, and `ma'am`!”
“Ma'am, are you all right?”
“Aaargh!” I fled the parlor and ran up the stairs to the office of my boss, Sharon McCone.
Sharon is my friend, mentor, and sometimes – heaven help me – custodian of my honesty. She's been all those things since she hired me a few years ago to assist her at the co–op. Not that our association is always smooth sailing: She can be a stern taskmaster and she harbors a devilish sense of humor that surfaces at inconvenient times. But she's always been there for me, even during the death throes of my marriage to my pig–selfish, perpetual–student husband, Doug Grayson. And ever since I've stopped referring to him as “that bastard Doug” she's decided I'm a grown–up who can be trusted to manage her own life – within limits.
That morning she was sitting behind her desk with her chair swiveled around so she could look out the bay window at the front of the Victorian. I've found her in that pose hundreds of times: sunk low on her spine, long legs crossed, dark eyes brooding. The view is of dowdy houses across the triangular park that divides the street, and usually hazed by San Francisco fog, but it doesn't matter; whatever she's seeing is strictly inside her head, and she says she gets her best insights into her cases that way.
I stepped into the office and cleared my throat. Slowly Shar turned, looking at me as if I were a stranger. Then her eyes cleared. “Rae, hi. Nice work on closing the Anderson file so soon.”
“Thanks. I found the others you left on my desk; they're pretty routine. You have anything else for me?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” She smiled slyly and slid a manila folder across the desk. “Why don't you take this client?” I opened the folder and studied the information sheet stapled inside. All it gave was a name – Darrin Boydston – and an address on Mission Street. Under the job description Shar had noted “background check.”
“Another one?” I asked, letting my voice telegraph my disappointment.
“Uh–huh. I think you'll find it interesting.”
“Why?”
She waved a slender hand at me. “Go! It'll be a challenge.”
Now, that did make me suspicious. “If it's such a challenge, how come you're not handling it?”
For an instant her eyes sparked. She doesn't like it when I hint that she skims the best cases for herself – although that's exactly what she does, and I don't blame her. “Just go see him.”
“He'll be at this address?”
“No, he's downstairs. I got done talking with him ten minutes ago.”
“Downstairs? Where downstairs?”
“In the parlor.”
Oh, God!
She smiled again. “Lime green, with a Texas accent.”
“So,” Darrin Boydston said, “did y'all come back down to chew me out some more?”
“I'm sorry about that.” I handed him my card. “Ms. McCone has assigned me to your case.”
He studied it and looked me up and down. “You promise to keep a civil tongue in your head?”
“I said I was sorry.”
“Well, you damn near ruint my morning.”
How many more times was I going to have to apologize?
“Let's get goin', little lady.” He started for the door.
I winced and asked, “Where?”
“My place. I got somebody I want you to meet.”
Boydston's car was a white Lincoln Continental – beautiful machine, except for the bull's horns mounted on the front grille.
I stared at them in horror.
“Pretty, aren't they?” he said, opening the passenger's door.
“I'll follow you in my car,” I told him.
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
As I got into the Ramblin' Wreck – my ancient, exhaust–belching Rambler American – I looked back and saw Boydston staring at it in horror.
Boydston's place was a storefront on Mission a few blocks down from my Safeway – an area that could do with some urban renewal and just might get it, if the upwardly mobile ethnic groups t're moving into the neighborhood get their way. It shared the building with a Thai restaurant and a Filipino travel agency. In its front window red neon tubing spelled out THE CASH COW, but the bucking outline below the letters was a bull. I imagined Boydston trying to reach a decision: call it the Cash Cow and have a good name but a dumb graphic; or call it the Cash Bull and have a dumb name but a good graphic; or just say the hell with it and mix genders. But what kind of establishment was this? My client took the first available parking space, leaving me to fend for myself. Whe
n I finally found another and walked back two blocks he'd already gone inside.
Chivalry is dead. Sometimes I think common courtesy's obit is about to be published too. When I went into the store, the first thing I noticed was a huge potted barrel cactus, and the second was dozens of guitars hanging from the ceiling. A rack of worn cowboy boots completed the picture.
Texas again. The state that spawned the likes of Uncle Roy was going to keep getting into my face all day long. The room was full of glass showcases that displayed an amazing assortment of stuff: rings, watches, guns, cameras, fishing reels, kitchen gadgets, small tools, knickknacks, silverware, even a metronome. There was a whole section of electronic equipment like TV's and VCR's, a jumble of probably obsolete computer gear, a fleet of vacuum cleaners poised to roar to life and tidy the world, enough exercise equipment to trim down half the population, and a jukebox that just then was playing a country song by Shar's brother–in–law, Ricky Savage. Delicacy prevents me from describing what his voice does to my libido.
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