Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  He’d first come to her storefront operation because he’d had forty minutes to kill prior to his yearly prostate exam. He dreaded the exam and the teeth-grating embarrassment of having to answer his doctor’s jovial, rib-poking “Everything up and about as it should be?” with the truth, which was that Newton’s law of gravity had begun asserting itself lately to his dearest appendage. And since he was six weeks short of his fifty-fifth birthday, and since every disaster in his life had occurred in a year that was a multiple of five, if there was a chance of knowing what the gods had in store for him and his prostate, he wanted to be able to do something to head off the chaos.

  These things had all been on his mind as he spun along Pacific Coast Highway in the dim gold light of a late December afternoon. On a drearily commercialized section of the road—given largely to pizza parlors and boogie board shops—he had seen the small blue building that he’d passed a thousand times before and read PSYCHIC CONSULTATIONS on its hand-painted sign. He’d glanced at his gas gauge for an excuse to stop and while he pumped super unleaded into the tank of his Mercedes across the street from that small blue building, he made his decision. What the hell, he’d thought. There were worse ways to kill forty minutes.

  So he’d had his first session with Thistle McCloud, who was anything but what he’d expected of a psychic since she used no crystal ball, no tarot cards, nothing at all but a piece of his jewelry. In his first three visits, it had always been the Rolex watch from which she’d received her psychic emanations. But today she’d placed the watch to one side, declared it diluted of power, and set her fog-colored eyes on his wedding ring. She’d touched her finger to it, and said, “I’ll use that, I think. If you want something further from your history and closer to your heart.”

  He’d given her the ring precisely because of those last two phrases: further from your history and closer to your heart. They told him how very well she knew that the prodigal son business rose from his past while his deepest concerns were attached to his future.

  With the ring now in her closed fist and with her eyes rolled upward, Thistle stopped the four-note humming, breathed deeply six times, and opened her eyes. She observed him with a melancholia that made his stomach feel hollow.

  “What?” Douglas asked.

  “You need to prepare for a shock,” she said. “It’s something unexpected. It comes out of nowhere and because of it, the essence of your life will be changed forever. And soon. I feel it coming very soon.”

  Jesus, he thought. It was just what he needed to hear three weeks after having an indifferent index finger shoved up his ass to see what was the cause of his limp-dick syndrome. The doctor had said it wasn’t cancer, but he hadn’t ruled out half a dozen other possibilities. Douglas wondered which one of them Thistle had just now tuned her psychic antennae onto.

  Thistle opened her hand and they both looked at his wedding ring where it lay on her palm, faintly sheened by her sweat. “It’s an external shock,” she clarified. “The source of upheaval in your life isn’t from within. The shock comes from outside and rattles you to your core.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Douglas asked her.

  “As sure as I can be, considering the armor you wear.” Thistle returned the ring to him, her cool fingers grazing his wrist. She said, “Your name isn’t David, is it? It was never David. It never will be David. But the D, I feel, is correct. Am I right?”

  He reached into his back pocket and brought out his wallet. Careful to shield his driver’s license from her, he clipped a fifty-dollar bill between his thumb and index finger. He folded it once and handed it over.

  “Donald,” she said. “No. That isn’t it, either. Darrell, perhaps. Dennis. I sense two syllables.”

  “Names aren’t important in your line of work, are they?” Douglas said.

  “No. But the truth is always important. Someday, Not-David, you’re going to have to learn to trust people with the truth. Trust is the key. Trust is essential.”

  “Trust,” he told her, “is what gets people screwed.”

  Outside, he walked across the Coast Highway to the cramped side street that paralleled the ocean. Here he always parked his car when he visited Thistle. With its vanity license plate DRIL4IT virtually announcing who owned the Mercedes, Douglas had decided early on that it wouldn’t encourage new investors if anyone put the word out that the president of South Coast Oil had begun seeing a psychic regularly. Risky investments were one thing. Placing money with a man who could be accused of using parapsychology rather than geology to find oil deposits was another. He wasn’t doing that, of course. Business never came up in his sessions with Thistle. But try telling that to the board of directors. Try telling that to anyone.

  He unarmed the car and slid inside. He headed south, in the direction of his office. As far as anyone at South Coast Oil knew, he’d spent his lunch hour with his wife, having a romantic winter’s picnic on the bluffs in Corona del Mar. The cellular phone will be turned off for an hour, he’d informed his secretary. Don’t try to phone and don’t bother us, please. This is time for Donna and me. She deserves it. I need it. Are we clear on the subject?

  Any mention of Donna always did the trick when it came to keeping South Coast Oil off his back for a few hours. She was warmly liked by everyone in the company. She was warmly liked by everyone period. Sometimes, he reflected suddenly, she was too warmly liked. Especially by men.

  You need to prepare for a shock.

  Did he? Douglas considered the question in relation to his wife.

  When he pointed out men’s affinity for her, Donna always acted surprised. She told him that men merely recognized in her a woman who’d grown up in a household of brothers. But what he saw in men’s eyes when they looked at his wife had nothing to do with fraternal affection. It had to do with getting her naked, getting down and dirty, and getting laid.

  It’s an external shock.

  Was it? What sort? Douglas thought of the worst.

  Getting laid was behind every man-woman interaction on earth. He knew this well. So while his recent failures to get it up and get it on with Donna frustrated him, he had to admit that he was feeling concerned that her patience with him was trickling away. Once it was gone, she’d start looking around. That was only natural. And once she started looking, she was going to find or be found.

  The shock comes from outside and rattles you to your core.

  Shit, Douglas thought. If chaos was about to steamroller into his life as he approached his fifty-fifth birthday—that rotten bad luck integer—Douglas knew that Donna would probably be at the wheel. She was thirty-five, four years in place as wife number three, and while she acted content, he’d been around women long enough to know that still waters did more than simply run deep. They hid rocks that could sink a boat in seconds if a sailor didn’t keep his wits about him. And love made people lose their wits. Love made people go a little bit nuts.

  Of course, he wasn’t nuts. He had his wits about him. But being in love with a woman twenty years his junior, a woman whose scent caught the nose of every male within sixty yards of her, a woman whose physical appetites he himself was failing to satisfy on a nightly basis … and had been failing to satisfy for weeks … a woman like that …

  “Get a grip,” Douglas told himself brusquely. “This psychic stuff is baloney, right? Right.” But still he thought of the coming shock, the upset to his life, and its source: external. Not his prostate, not his dick, not an organ in his body. But another human being. “Shit,” he said.

  He guided the car up the incline that led to Jamboree Road, six lanes of concrete that rolled between stunted liquidambar trees through some of the most expensive real estate in Orange County. It took him to the bronzed glass tower that housed his pride: South Coast Oil.

  Once inside the building, he navigated his way through an unexpected encounter with two of SCO’s engineers, through a brief conversation with a geologist who simultaneously waved an ordnance survey map and a report
from the EPA, and through a hallway conference with the head of the accounting department. His secretary handed him a fistful of messages when he finally managed to reach his office. She said, “Nice picnic? The weather’s unbelievable, isn’t it?” followed by “Everything all right, Mr. Armstrong?” when he didn’t reply.

  He said, “Yes. What? Fine,” and looked through the messages. He found that the names meant nothing to him, absolutely nothing.

  He walked to the window behind his desk and looked at the view through its enormous pane of tinted glass. Below him, Orange County’s airport sent jet after jet hurtling into the sky at an angle so acute that it defied both reason and aerodynamics, although it did protect the delicate auditory sensibilities of the millionaires who lived in the flight path below. Douglas watched these planes without really seeing them. He knew he had to answer his telephone messages, but all he could think about was Thistle’s words: An external shock.

  What could be more external than Donna?

  She wore Obsession. She put it behind her ears and beneath her breasts. Whenever she passed through a room, she left the scent of herself behind.

  Her dark hair gleamed when the sunlight hit it. She wore it short and simply cut, parted on the left and smoothly falling just to her ears.

  Her legs were long. When she walked, her stride was full and sure. And when she walked with him—at his side, with her hand through his arm and her head held back—he knew that she caught the attention of everyone. He knew that together they were the envy of all their friends and of strangers as well.

  He could see this reflected in the faces of people they passed when he and Donna were together. At the ballet, at the theater, at concerts, in restaurants, glances gravitated to Douglas Armstrong and his wife. In women’s expressions he could read the wish to be young like Donna, to be smooth-skinned again, to be vibrant once more, to be fecund and ready. In men’s expressions he could read desire.

  It had always been a pleasure to see how others reacted to the sight of his wife. But now he saw how dangerous her allure really was and how it threatened to destroy his peace.

  A shock, Thistle had said to him. Prepare for a shock. Prepare for a shock that will change your world.

  That evening, Douglas heard the water running as soon as he entered the house: fifty-two-hundred square feet of limestone floors, vaulted ceiling?, and picture windows on a hillside that offered an ocean view to the west and the lights of Orange County to the east. The house had cost him a fortune, but that had been all right with him. Money meant nothing. He’d bought the place for Donna. But if he’d had doubts about his wife before—born of his own performance anxiety, growing to adulthood through his consultation with Thistle—when Douglas heard that water running, he began to see the truth. Because Donna was in the shower.

  He watched her silhouette behind the blocks of translucent glass that defined the shower’s wall. She was washing her hair. She hadn’t noticed him yet, and he watched her for a moment, his gaze traveling over her uplifted breasts, her hips, her long legs. She usually bathed—languorous bubble baths in the raised oval tub that looked out on the lights of the city of Irvine. Taking a shower suggested a more earnest and energetic effort to cleanse herself. And washing her hair suggested … Well, it was perfectly clear what that suggested. Scents got caught up in the hair: cigarette smoke, sautéing garlic, fish from a fishing boat, or semen and sex. Those last two were the betraying scents. Obviously, she would have to wash her hair.

  Her discarded clothes lay on the floor. With a hasty glance at the shower, Douglas fingered through them and found her lacy underwear. He knew women. He knew his wife. If she’d actually been with a man that afternoon, her body’s leaking juices would have made the panties’ crotch stiff when they dried, and he would be able to smell the afterscent of intercourse on them. They would give him proof. He lifted them to his face.

  “Doug! What on earth are you doing?”

  Douglas dropped the panties, cheeks hot and neck sweating. Donna was peering at him from the shower’s opening, her hair lathered with soap that streaked down her left cheek. She brushed it away.

  “What are you doing?” he asked her. Three marriages and two divorces had taught him that a fast offensive maneuver threw the opponent off balance. It worked.

  She popped back into the water—clever of her, so he couldn’t see her face—and said, “It’s pretty obvious. I’m taking a shower. God, what a day.”

  He moved to watch her through the shower’s opening. There was no door, just a partition in the glass-block wall. He could study her body and look for the telltale signs of the kind of rough lovemaking he knew that she liked. And she wouldn’t know he was even looking, since her head was beneath the shower as she rinsed off her hair.

  “Steve phoned in sick today,” she said, “so I had to do everything at the kennels myself.”

  She raised chocolate Labradors. He had met her that way, seeking a dog for his youngest son. Through a reference from a veterinarian, he had discovered her kennels in Midway City—less than one square mile of feedstores, other kennels, and dilapidated postwar stucco and shake roofs posing as suburban housing. It was an odd place for a girl from the pricey side of Corona del Mar to end up professionally, but that was what he liked about Donna. She wasn’t true to type, she wasn’t a beach bunny, she wasn’t a typical southern California girl. Or at least that’s what he had thought.

  “The worst was cleaning the dog runs,” she said. “I didn’t mind the grooming—I never mind that—but I hate doing the runs. I completely reeked of dog poop when I got home.” She shut off the shower and reached for her towels, wrapping her head in one and her body in the other. She stepped out of the stall with a smile and said, “Isn’t it weird how some smells cling to your body and your hair while others don’t?”

  She kissed him hello and scooped up her clothes. She tossed them down the laundry chute. No doubt she was thinking, Out of sight, out of mind. She was clever that way.

  “That’s the third time Steve’s phoned in sick in two weeks.” She headed for the bedroom, drying off as she went. She dropped the towel with her usual absence of self-consciousness and began dressing, pulling on wispy underwear, black leggings, a silver tunic. “If he keeps this up, I’m going to let him go. I need someone consistent, someone reliable. If he’s not going to be able to hold up his end …” She frowned at Douglas, her face perplexed. “What’s wrong, Doug? You’re looking at me so funny. Is something wrong?”

  “Wrong? No.” But he thought, That looks like a love bite on her neck. And he crossed to her for a better look. He cupped her face for a kiss and tilted her head. The shadow of the towel that was wrapped around her hair dissipated, leaving her skin unmarred. Well, what of it? he thought. She wouldn’t be so stupid as to let some heavy breather suck bruises into her flesh, no matter how turned on he had her. She wasn’t that dumb. Not his Donna.

  But she also wasn’t as smart as her husband.

  At five forty-five the next day, he went to the personnel department. It was a better choice than the Yellow Pages because at least he knew that whoever had been doing the background checks on incoming employees at South Coast Oil was simultaneously competent and discreet. No one had ever complained about some two-bit gumshoe nosing into his background.

  The department was deserted, as Douglas had hoped. The computer screens at every desk were set to the shifting images that preserved them: a field of swimming fish, bouncing balls, and popping bubbles. The director’s office at the far side of the department was unlit and locked, but a master key in the hand of the company president solved that problem. Douglas went inside and flipped on the lights.

  He found the name he was looking for among the dog-eared cards of the director’s Rolodex, a curious anachronism in an otherwise computer-age office. Cowley and Son, Inquiries, he read in faded typescript. This was accompanied by a telephone number and by an address on Balboa Peninsula.

  Douglas studied both for the space
of two minutes. Was it better to know or to live in ignorant bliss? he wondered at this eleventh hour. But he wasn’t living in bliss, was he? And he hadn’t been living in bliss from the moment he’d failed to perform as a man was meant to. So it was better to know. He had to know. Knowledge was power. Power was control. He needed both.

  He picked up the phone.

  Douglas always went out for lunch—unless a conference was scheduled with his geologists or the engineers—so no one raised a hair of an eyebrow when he left South Coast Oil before noon the following day. He used Jamboree once again to get to the Coast Highway, but this time instead of heading north toward Newport where Thistle made her prognostications, he drove directly across the highway and down the incline where a modestly arched bridge spanned an oily section of Newport Harbor that divided the mainland from an amoeba-shaped portion of land that was Balboa Island.

  In summer the island was infested with tourists. They bottled up the streets with their cars and rode their bicycles in races on the sidewalk around the island’s perimeter. No local in his right mind ventured onto Balboa Island during the summer without good reason or unless he lived there. But in winter, the place was virtually deserted. It took less than five minutes to snake through the narrow streets to the island’s north end where the ferry waited to take cars and pedestrians on the eye-blink voyage across to the peninsula.

  There a stripe-topped carousel and a Ferris wheel spun like two opposing gears of an enormous clock, defining an area called the Fun Zone, which had long been the summertime bane of the local police. Today, however, no bands of juveniles roved with cans of spray paint at the ready. The only inhabitants of the Fun Zone were a paraplegic in a wheelchair and his bike-riding companion.