Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  Douglas passed them as he drove off the ferry. They were intent upon their conversation. The Ferris wheel and carousel did not exist for them. Nor did Douglas and his blue Mercedes, which was just as well. He didn’t particularly want to be seen.

  He parked just off the beach, in a lot where fifteen minutes cost a quarter. He pumped in four. He armed the car and headed west toward Main Street, a tree-shaded lane some sixty yards long that began at a faux New England restaurant overlooking Newport Harbor and ended at Balboa Pier, which stretched out into the Pacific Ocean, gray-green today and unsettled by roiling waves from a winter Alaskan storm.

  Number 107-B Main was what he was looking for, and he found it easily. Just east of an alley, 107 was a two-story structure whose bottom floor was taken up by a time-warped hair salon called JJ’s—heavily devoted to macramé, potted plants, and posters of Janis Joplin—and whose upper floor was divided into offices that were reached by means of a structurally questionable stairway at the north end of the building. Number 107-B was the first door upstairs—JJ’s Natural Haircutting appeared to be 107-A—but when Douglas turned the discolored brass knob below the equally discolored brass nameplate announcing the business as COWLEY AND SON, INQUIRIES, he found the door locked.

  He frowned and looked at his Rolex. His appointment was for twelve-fifteen. It was currently twelve-ten. So where was Cowley? Where was his son?

  He returned to the stairway, ready to head to his car and his cellular phone, ready to track down Cowley and give him hell for setting up an appointment and failing to be there to keep it. But he was three steps down when he saw a khaki-clad man coming his way, sucking up an Orange Julius with the enthusiasm of a twelve-year-old. His thinning gray hair and sun-lined face marked him at least five decades older than twelve, however. And his limping gait—in combination with his clothes—suggested old war wounds.

  “You Cowley?” Douglas called from the stairs.

  The man waved his Orange Julius in reply. “You Armstrong?” he asked.

  “Right,” Douglas said. “Listen, I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “None of us do, son,” Cowley said, and he hoisted himself up the stairway. He nodded in a friendly fashion, pulled hard on the Orange Julius straw, and passed Douglas in a gust of aftershave that he hadn’t smelled for a good twenty years. Canoe. Jesus. Did they still sell that?

  Cowley swung the door open and cocked his head to indicate that Douglas was to enter. The office comprised two rooms: one was a sparsely furnished waiting area through which they passed; the other was obviously Cowley’s demesne. Its centerpiece was an olive-green steel desk. Filing cabinets and bookshelves of the same issue matched it.

  The investigator went to an old oaken office chair behind the desk, but he didn’t sit. Instead, he opened one of the side drawers, and just when Douglas was expecting him to pull out a fifth of bourbon, he dug out a bottle of yellow capsules instead. He shook two of them into his palm and knocked them back with a long swig of Orange Julius. He sank into his chair and gripped its arms.

  “Arthritis,” he said. “I’m killing the bastard with evening primrose oil. Give me a minute, okay? You want a couple?”

  “No.” Douglas glanced at his watch to make certain Cowley knew that his time was precious. Then he strolled to the steel bookshelves.

  He was expecting to see munitions manuals, penal codes, and surveillance texts, something to assure the prospective clients that they’d come to the right place with their troubles. But what he found was poetry, volume after volume neatly arranged in alphabetical order by author, from Matthew Arnold to William Butler Yeats. He wasn’t sure what to think.

  The occasional space left at the end of a bookshelf was taken up by photographs. They were clumsily framed, snapshots mostly. They depicted grinning small children, a gray-haired grandma type, several young adults. Among them, encased in Plexiglas, was a military Purple Heart. Douglas picked this up. He’d never seen one, but he was pleased to know that his guess about the source of Cowley’s limp had been correct.

  “You saw action,” he said.

  “My butt saw action,” Cowley replied. Douglas looked his way, so the PI continued. “I took it in the butt. Shit happens, right?” He moved his hands from their grip on the arms of his chair. He folded them over his stomach. Like Douglas’s own, it could have been flatter. Indeed, the two men shared a similar build: stocky, quickly given to weight if they didn’t exercise, too tall to be called short and too short to be called tall. “What can I do for you, Mr. Armstrong?”

  “My wife,” Douglas said.

  “Your wife?”

  “She may be …” Now that it was time to articulate the problem and what it arose from, Douglas wasn’t sure that he could. So he said, “Who’s the son?”

  “What?”

  “It says Cowley and Son, but there’s only one desk. Who’s the son?”

  Cowley reached for his Orange Julius and took a pull on its straw. “He died,” he said. “Drunk driver got him on Ortega Highway.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Like I said. Shit happens. What shit’s happened to you?”

  Douglas returned the Purple Heart to its place. He caught sight of the graying grandma in one of the pictures and said, “This your wife?”

  “Forty years my wife. Name’s Maureen.”

  “I’m on my third. How’d you manage forty years with one woman?”

  “She has a sense of humor.” Cowley slid open the middle drawer of his desk and took out a legal pad and the stub of a pencil. He wrote ARMSTRONG at the top in block letters and underlined it. He said, “About your wife …”

  “I think she’s having an affair. I want to know if I’m right. I want to know who it is.”

  Cowley carefully set his pencil down. He observed Douglas for a moment. Outside, a gull gave a raucous cry from one of the rooftops. “What makes you think she’s seeing someone?”

  “Am I supposed to give you proof before you’ll take the case? I thought that’s why I was hiring you. To give me proof.”

  “You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have suspicions. What are they?”

  Douglas raked through his memory. He wasn’t about to tell Cowley about trying to smell up Donna’s underwear, so he took a moment to examine her behavior over the last few weeks. And when he did so, the additional evidence was there. Jesus. How the hell had he missed it? She’d changed her hair; she’d bought new underwear—that black lacy Victoria’s Secret stuff; she’d been on the phone twice when he’d come home and as soon as he walked into the room, she’d hung up hastily; there were at least two long absences with insufficient excuse for them; there were six or seven engagements that she said were with friends.

  Cowley nodded thoughtfully when Douglas listed his suspicions. Then he said, “Have you given her a reason to cheat on you?”

  “A reason? What is this? I’m the guilty party?”

  “Women don’t usually stray without there being a man behind them, giving them a reason.” Cowley examined him from beneath unclipped eyebrows. One of his eyes, Douglas saw, was beginning to form a cataract. Jeez, the guy was ancient, a real antique.

  “No reason,” Douglas said. “I don’t cheat on her. I don’t even want to.”

  “She’s young, though. And a man your age …” Cowley shrugged. “Shit happens to us old guys. Young things don’t always have the patience to understand.”

  Douglas wanted to point out that Cowley was at least ten years his senior, if not more. He also wanted to take himself from membership in the club of us old guys. But the PI was watching him compassionately, so instead of arguing, Douglas told the truth.

  Cowley reached for his Orange Julius and drained the cup. He tossed it into the trash. “Women have needs,” he said, and he moved his hand from his crotch to his chest, adding, “A wise man doesn’t confuse what goes on here”—the crotch—“with what goes on here”—the chest.

  “So maybe I’m not wise. Are you going to help me out or n
ot?”

  “You sure you want help?”

  “I want to know the truth. I can live with that. What I can’t live with is not knowing. I just need to know what I’m dealing with here.”

  Cowley looked as if he were taking a reading of Douglas’s level of veracity. He finally appeared to make a decision, but one he didn’t like because he shook his head, picked up his pencil, and said, “Give me some background, then. If she’s got someone on the side, who are our possibilities?”

  Douglas had thought about this. There was Mike, the poolman who visited once a week. There was Steve, who worked with Donna at her kennels in Midway City. There was Jeff, her personal trainer. There were also the postman, the FedEx man, the UPS driver, and Donna’s too youthful gynecologist.

  “I take it you’re accepting the case?” Douglas said to Cowley. He pulled out his wallet from which he extracted a wad of bills. “You’ll want a retainer.”

  “I don’t need cash, Mr. Armstrong.”

  “All the same …” All the same, Douglas had no intention of leaving a paper trail via a check. “How much time do you need?” he asked.

  “Give it a few days. If she’s seeing someone, he’ll surface eventually. They always do.” Cowley sounded despondent.

  “Your wife cheat on you?” Douglas asked shrewdly.

  “If she did, I probably deserved it.”

  That was Cowley’s attitude, but it was one that Douglas didn’t share. He didn’t deserve to be cheated on. Nobody did. And when he found out who was doing the job on his wife … Well, they would see a kind of justice that Attila the Hun was incapable of extracting.

  His resolve was strengthened in the bedroom that evening when his hello kiss to his wife was interrupted by the telephone. Donna pulled away from him quickly and went to answer it. She gave Douglas a smile—as if recognizing what her haste revealed to him—and shook back her hair as sexily as possible, running slim fingers through it as she picked up the receiver.

  Douglas listened to her side of the conversation while he changed his clothes. He heard her voice brighten as she said, “Yes, yes. Hello … No … Doug just got home and we were talking about the day.…”

  So now her caller knew he was in the room. Douglas could imagine what the bastard was saying, whoever he was: “So you can’t talk?”

  To which Donna, on cue, answered, “Nope. Not at all.”

  “Shall I call later?”

  “Gosh, that would be nice.”

  “Today was what was nice. I love to fuck you.”

  “Really? Outrageous. I’ll have to check it out.”

  “I want to check you out, baby. Are you wet for me?”

  “I sure am. Listen, we’ll connect later on, okay? I need to get dinner started.”

  “Just so long as you remember today. It was the best. You’re the best.”

  “Right. Bye.” She hung up and came to him. She put her arms round his waist. She said, “Got rid of her. Nancy Talbert. God. Nothing’s more important in her life than a shoe sale at Neiman-Marcus. Spare me. Please.” She snuggled up to him. He couldn’t see her face, just the back of her head where it reflected in the mirror.

  “Nancy Talbert,” he said. “I don’t think I know her.”

  “Sure you do, honey.” She pressed her hips against him. He felt the hopeful but useless heat in his groin. “She’s in Soroptimists with me. You met her last month after the ballet. Hmm. You feel nice. Gosh, I like it when you hold me. Should I start dinner or d’you want to mess around?”

  Another clever move on her part: he wouldn’t think she was cheating if she still wanted it from him. No matter that he couldn’t give it to her. She was hanging in there with him and this moment proved it. Or so she thought.

  “Love to,” he said, and smacked her on the butt. “But let’s eat first. And after, right there on the dining room table …” He managed what he hoped was a lewd enough wink. “Just you wait, kiddo.”

  She laughed and released him and went off to the kitchen. He walked to the bed where he sat, disconsolately. The charade was torture. He had to know the truth.

  He didn’t hear from Cowley and Son, Inquiries, for two agonizing weeks during which he suffered through three more coy telephone conversations between Donna and her lover, four more phony excuses to cover unscheduled absences from home, and two more midday showers sloughed off to Steve’s absence from the kennels again. By the time he finally made contact with Cowley, Douglas’s nerves were shot.

  Cowley had news to report. He said he’d hand it over as soon as they could meet. “How’s lunch?” Cowley asked. “We could do Tail of the Whale over here.”

  No lunch, Douglas told him. He wouldn’t be able to eat anyway. He would meet Cowley at his office at twelve forty-five.

  “Make it the pier, then,” Cowley said. “I’ll catch a burger at Ruby’s and we can talk after. You know Ruby’s? The end of the pier?”

  He knew Ruby’s. A fifties coffee shop, it sat at the end of Balboa Pier, and he found Cowley there as promised at twelve forty-five, polishing off a cheeseburger and fries with a manila envelope sitting next to his strawberry milkshake.

  Cowley wore the same khakis he’d had on the day they’d met. He’d added a panama hat to his ensemble. He touched his index finger to the hat’s brim as Douglas approached him. His cheeks were bulging with the burger and fries.

  Douglas slid into the booth opposite Cowley and reached for the envelope. Cowley’s hand slapped down onto it. “Not yet,” he said.

  “I’ve got to know.”

  Cowley slid the envelope off the table and onto the vinyl seat next to himself. He twirled the straw in his milkshake and observed Douglas through opaque eyes that seemed to reflect the sunlight outside. “Pictures,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got for you. Pictures aren’t the truth. You got that?”

  “Okay. Pictures.”

  “I don’t know what I’m shooting. I just tail the woman and I shoot what I see. What I see may not mean shit. You understand?”

  “Just show me the pictures.”

  “Outside.”

  Cowley tossed a five and three ones onto the table, called, “Catch you later, Susie,” to the waitress and led the way. He walked to the railing, where he looked out over the water. A whale-watching boat was bobbing about a quarter mile offshore. It was too early in the year to catch sight of a pod migrating to Alaska, but the tourists on board probably wouldn’t know that. Their binoculars winked in the light.

  Douglas joined the PL Cowley said, “You got to know that she doesn’t act like a woman guilty of anything. She just seems to be doing her thing. She met a few men—I won’t mislead you—but I couldn’t catch her doing anything cheesy.”

  “Give me the pictures.”

  Cowley gave him a sharp look instead. Douglas knew his voice was betraying him. “I say we tail her for another two weeks,” Cowley said. “What I’ve got here isn’t much to go on.” He opened the envelope. He stood so that Douglas only saw the back of the pictures. He chose to hand them over in sets.

  The first set was taken in Midway City not far from the kennels, at the feed and grain store where Donna bought food for the dogs. In these, she was loading fifty-pound sacks into the back of her Toyota pickup. She was being assisted by a Calvin Klein type in tight jeans and a T-shirt. They were laughing together, and in one of the pictures Donna had perched her sunglasses on the top of her head the better to look directly at her companion.

  She appeared to be flirting, but she was a young, pretty woman and flirting was normal. This set seemed okay. She could have looked less happy to be chatting with the stud, but she was a businesswoman and she was conducting business. Douglas could deal with that.

  The second set was of Donna in the Newport gym where she worked with a personal trainer twice a week. Her trainer was one of those sculpted bodies with a head of hair on which every strand looked as if it had been seen to professionally on a daily basis. In the pictures, Donna was dressed to work out—nothin
g Douglas had not seen before—but for the first time he noted how carefully she assembled her workout clothes. From the leggings to the leotard to the headband she wore, everything enhanced her. The trainer appeared to recognize this because he squatted before her as she did her vertical butterflies. Her legs were spread and there was no doubt what he was concentrating on. This looked more serious.

  He was about to ask Cowley to start tailing the trainer when the PI said, “No body contact between them other than what you’d expect,” and handed him the third set of pictures, saying, “These are the only ones that look a little shaky to me, but they may mean nothing. You know this guy?”

  Douglas stared with know this guy, know this guy ringing in his skull. Unlike the other pictures in which Donna and her companion-of-the-moment were in one location, these showed Donna at a view table in an oceanfront restaurant, Donna on the Balboa ferry, Donna walking along a dock in Newport. In each of the pictures she was with a man, the same man. In each of the pictures there was body contact. It was nothing extreme because they were out in public. But it was the kind of body contact that betrayed: an arm around her shoulders, a kiss on her cheek, a full body hug that said, Feel me up, baby, ’cause I ain’t limp like him.

  Douglas felt that his world was spinning, but he managed a wry grin. He said, “Oh hell. Now I feel like a class-A jerk.”

  “Why’s that?” Cowley asked.

  “This guy?” Douglas indicated the athletic-looking man in the picture with Donna. “This is her brother.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. He’s a walk-on coach at Newport Harbor High. His name is Michael. He’s a free-spirit type.” Douglas gripped the railing with one hand and shook his head with what he hoped looked like chagrin. “Is this all you’ve got?”

  “That’s it. I can tail her for a while longer and see—”