Taste of Life

by Sara Paretsky

  Also by Sara Paretsky

  Critical Mass

  Breakdown

  Body Work

  Hardball

  Bleeding Kansas

  Fire Sale

  Blacklist

  Total Recall

  Hard Time

  Ghost Country

  Windy City Blues

  Tunnel Vision

  Guardian Angel

  Burn Marks

  Blood Shot

  Bitter Medicine

  Killing Orders

  Deadlock

  Indemnity Only

  Brush Back

  Taste of Life

  Sara Paretsky

  INTERMIX

  New York

  INTERMIX

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 1989 by Sara Paretsky

  Excerpt from Brush Back copyright © 2015 by Sara Paretsky

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  INTERMIX and the “IM” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  ISBN: 9780451487988

  “Taste of Life” previously appeared in Brush Back, published by Signet.

  InterMix eBook edition / January 2017

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Sara Paretsky

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Taste of Life

  Excerpt from Brush Back

  About the Author

  Daphne Raydor worked in the bookkeeping department at Rapelec, Inc. Her capacity for work—her appetite for it— was insatiable. In January when accountants go mad closing previous years’ books, Daphne flourished. She worked best in the night’s dark hours, comparing ledgers and totting up columns with greedy delight.

  Everyone at Rapelec loved Daphne in January. Helen Ellis, the petite, arrogant assistant controller, stopped to flatter Daphne on her plant arrangements or her perfume. Carlos Francetta, the budget director, lavished Latin compliments on her. Flowers appeared on her desk, and chocolates.

  In February, these blandishments disappeared and Daphne lived alone behind her barricade of ferns for another eleven months. She was smart, she was willing, and she was capable. But she was also very fat. She was so fat that she had to make all her own clothes: no store carried garments in her size. Her walk was slow. She gasped for breath after climbing a short flight of stairs. Daphne lived on the first floor of a three-story walk-up. By the time she carried her groceries up one staircase and into her kitchen, she had to collapse for forty-five minutes to recover her breath.

  Daphne was an excellent cook. She could make elaborate French dinners, including elegantly decorated pastries. Food and wine were both so outstanding that Helen, Carlos and other staff members would accept her dinner invitations. They would exclaim at their hostess, who barely touched her food: how could she be so fat, when she scarcely ate? After they left, Daphne would pull another four portions from the oven and devour them.

  Daphne ate constantly. Elegant French dinners she reserved for company. She shopped almost daily, at five different supermarkets so that no one would see the volume of food she purchased. She had chocolate cookies tucked into a corner of the couch, bags of potato chips at her bedside and in the bathroom. The freezer and refrigerator were always overloaded. Some food rotted and had to be thrown out, but Daphne consumed a lot more. She brought home packages of frozen hors d’oeuvres and ate them while they thawed. She kept frozen pizzas under her bed and ate them raw. She slipped chocolate into drawers and closets. She was never more than three steps from some nourishing little snack.

  Daphne’s present condition was especially sad to those who had known her as an elfin child. What had happened to her? Family friends blamed Sylvia Raydor.

  Twenty years ago, Sylvia’s face appeared regularly on the covers of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. She was one of the top ten models in the country and could pick her jobs. When Daphne was born, Sylvia delighted in photographs—hovering sentimentally over a white-clad infant, blowing a sad kiss to baby and nurse from the railing of the QE II—which only enhanced her popularity.

  But as Daphne moved from infant seats to kindergarten, she became an encumbrance to Sylvia. If the child was growing up, the mother must be aging. And worse, friends—former friends—commented often on Daphne’s angelic beauty. Photographers tried to bring her into the child-model business. Others prophesied a beauty that would far outshine Sylvia’s, for it had a sweetness to it lacking in the mother.

  Sylvia began force-feeding her daughter (“Mummy won’t love you if you don’t eat all of this.” “But, Mummy, I’m not hungry!” “Then Mummy will have to shut you in your room and leave you by yourself. She can’t be with you if you hurt her feelings.”) until Daphne weighed close to three hundred pounds.

  As for Sylvia, she hardened into a still-beautiful, if somewhat lacquered, jet-setter. She did a good business in television commercials (the housewife in the wildly successful Greazout detergent campaign) but was considered too brittle for magazines. She jetted to Minorca for the winter, spent spring in Paris, summered in the temperate zones off La Jolla, and generally alighted on Daphne’s Chicago doorstep for a fleeting display of maternity in mid-October. (“Daphne, my pet! Darling, how do you manage to stay so fat! I eat and eat and can’t put on an ounce!”) Usually she had a young escort in tow, flattered by Sylvia’s beauty and sophistication, yet contriving to make her appear a trifle old.

  Daphne longed for love. She tried to satisfy her dreams with novels, beauty magazines (carefully cutting out Sylvia’s face the few times it still appeared) and daydreams of an impossibly romantic character. And while she read, or dreamed of herself slim and desirable, she ate: a pound of pork chops with French fries, a chocolate layer cake and a quart of ice cream. And later a few pretzels and potato chips with beer. And so to bed.

  • • •

  One winter a young man joined Rapelec’s accounting department. He had a type of serious youthful beauty and was very shy. Daphne’s fat, and her vulnerability, struck a responsive chord in Jerry. After thinking the matter over for several weeks, he waited until they were both alone at the end of the day and asked her to go to a movie with him. Daphne, whose dreams had been filled with Jerry’s fine-etched features, at first thought he was making fun of her. But he persisted and she finally agreed to go.

  The first terrifying date took place in March. By May, Jerry and Daphne were lovers and Daphne had lost thirty-seven pounds. In September, she bought her first shop-made garment in eight years. A size twenty, to be sure, but a delirious occasion for her. In October, she and Jerry signed a lease together on Chicago’s north side. That was where Sylvia found them some ten days later.

  “Daphne, darling! Why didn’t you let me know you were moving? I’ve searched everywhere for you, and finally! Your genius of a secretary dug up your address for me!”

&n
bsp; Daphne muttered something that a charitable listener could interpret as delight at seeing her mother. Sylvia eyed Jerry in a way that made him blush uncomfortably. “Introduce me to your friend, darling,” she cried reproachfully. Daphne did so, reluctantly, and then muttered that they were going to paint cabinets, and didn’t paint always make Sylvia sick?

  “You don’t want to paint the first night your mother is in town,” Sylvia said archly, inviting Jerry to compare mother with daughter, indeed pausing for the expected remark (“You can’t be her mother—if anything she looks older than you!”). Jerry said nothing, but blushed more than ever.

  “Why, you two babies,” Sylvia finally said. “Anyone would think I’d found you out in some guilty secret. Instead, here you are setting up house in the most delightful way. Let’s go over to Perroquet to celebrate!”

  “Thanks, Sylvia, but I—I guess I’m not hungry and these cabinets do need painting.”

  Sylvia cried out some more, drew the embarrassed Jerry into the conversation—“You must be making this goose of a daughter perfectly miserable, Jerry: she’s never lost her appetite in all the years I’ve known her”—and finally dragged them off to Perroquet, where she ordered for all of them and pouted when Daphne refused several courses. “If you were a model, darling, one could understand. But you can eat whatever you feel like.”

  Back home, Daphne burst into tears. How could Jerry love her, as fat as she was, and why didn’t Sylvia drop dead? Jerry consoled her, but uneasily. And back in her suite, Sylvia could not rest. Daphne happy and in love? Impossible. Daphne thin? Never!

  Sylvia’s courtship of Jerry was long and difficult. She postponed her winter plans and stayed in Chicago, hosting parties, making a splash at all the society events, getting Jerry to escort her when Prince Philip hosted a dress ball at the British consulate.

  Daphne watched wretchedly, hopeless and unable to act. She began eating again, not at her previous levels, but enough to put ten pounds back on by Thanksgiving.

  Jerry, too, was miserable and unable to cope with Sylvia. He dreaded her summons, yet could not refuse it. The night finally came when he did not return to the apartment.

  Desolate, Daphne sat up in bed waiting for him. By three, it was clear that he wasn’t coming home. She began to eat, consuming the roast she had prepared for their dinner and what little other food they had—for her sake they didn’t stock much.

  As soon as the stores were open, Daphne went to the nearest grocery and bought as much as she could carry. Returning home, she dropped two heavy bags in the middle of the living room and sat down to eat. She did not take off her coat, nor bother to call her office. She ate a dozen sweet rolls, a cherry pie, and two pizzas. She was working her way through a box of chips with dip when Sylvia appeared.

  Sylvia stopped in the middle of the room. “What on earth are you doing here? I was sure you would be at work.”

  Daphne got clumsily to her feet. She looked at Sylvia, furiously angry, yet feeling passive and remote. She wanted to cry, to eat a pound of chocolates, to throw Sylvia out the window, yet she only stood. Finally she spoke. Her voice sounded so far away that she wondered if she’d said the words aloud and repeated herself. “What are you doing here, Sylvia? Get out.”

  Sylvia laughed. “Oh, I came to get Jerry’s clothes—he didn’t want to come himself—felt awkward, poor thing.”

  Daphne followed her into the bedroom. “You can’t have Jerry’s clothes,” she whispered. “I want them myself.”

  “Oh, do be reasonable, Daphne: Jerry won’t be coming back. Why he ever wanted a fat lump like you I don’t know, but at least it gave me a chance to meet him, so I suppose it was all to the good.” As she spoke, Sylvia began pulling drawers open, impatiently pawing through jeans and T-shirts.

  “You can’t take his clothes,” Daphne whispered hoarsely, pulling at Sylvia’s arm.

  “Buzz off now, Daphne, and finish your cookies,” Sylvia snapped, slapping her across the face.

  Daphne screamed in rage. Scarcely knowing what she was doing, she picked up the dressing table lamp and began pounding Sylvia’s head with it. Sylvia fell against the dressing table and at last lay crumpled on the floor, dead long before Daphne stopped screaming and hitting her.

  Finally Daphne’s rage subsided. She collapsed on the floor by Sylvia’s body and began to cry. Jerry would never come back to her. No one would ever love her again. She wanted to die herself, to eat and eat until she was engulfed by food. Mechanically, methodically, still weeping, she lifted Sylvia’s left arm to her mouth.

  Keep reading for an excerpt from Brush Back,

  A Washington Post Best Mystery of 2015.

  Available now!

  I didn’t recognize him at first. He came into my office unannounced, a jowly man whose hairline had receded to a fringe of dark curls. Too much sun had baked his skin the color of brick, although maybe it had been too much beer, judging by those ill-named love handles poking over the sides of his jeans. The seams in the faded corduroy jacket strained when he moved his arms; he must not often dress for business.

  “Hey, girl, you doing okay for yourself up here, aren’t you?”

  I stared at him, astonished and annoyed by the familiarity.

  “Tori Warshawski, don’t you know me? I guess Red U turned you into a snob after all.”

  Tori. The only people who called me that had been my father and my cousin Boom-Boom, both of them dead a lot of years now. And Boom-Boom’s boyhood friends—who were also the only people who still thought the University of Chicago was a leftist hideout.

  “It’s not Frank Guzzo, is it?” I finally said. When I’d known him thirty years and forty pounds ago, he’d had a full head of red-gold hair, but I could still see something of him around the eyes and mouth.

  “All of him.” He patted his abdomen. “You look good, Tori, I’ll give you that. You didn’t turn into some yoga nut or a vegan or something?”

  “Nope. I play a little basketball, but mostly I run the lakefront. You still playing baseball?”

  “With this body? Slow-pitch sometimes with the geriatric league. But my boy, Frankie Junior, Tori, I got my fingers crossed, but I think he’s the real deal.”

  “How old is he?” I asked, more out of politeness than interest: Frank always thought someone or something was going to be the real deal that made his fortune for him.

  “He’s fifteen now, made varsity at Saint Eloy’s, even though he’s only a freshman. He’s got a real arm. Maybe he’ll be another Boom-Boom.”

  Meaning, he could be the next person to make it out of the ’hood into some version of the American dream. There were so few of us who escaped South Chicago’s gravitational pull that the neighborhood could recite our names.

  I’d managed, by dint of my mother’s wishes, and my scholarships to the University of Chicago. My cousin Boom-Boom had done it through sports. He’d had seven brilliant seasons with the Blackhawks until he injured his ankle too badly for the surgeons to glue him back in any shape to skate.

  When Boom-Boom and Frank hung out together, Frank hoped he’d be a real deal, too, in baseball. We all did—he was the best shortstop in the city’s Catholic league. By the time I started law school, though, Frank was driving a truck for Bagby Haulage. I don’t know what happened; I’d lost touch with him by then.

  Frank had left me for Betty Pokorny when we were all in high school. Her father had owned Day & Night Bar & Grill. When the mills were running three shifts, no matter what time you got off or went on, you could get steak and eggs with a boilermaker.

  When Betty started smirking at me in the high school hallway, I’d been heartbroken for a few weeks, but my dad told me that Frank wasn’t right for me, that I was looking for love in all the wrong places because Gabriella had died a few months earlier. He’d been right: it had been years since I’d thought about either Frank or Betty.

 
Looking at Frank this morning, in his ill-fitting jacket and uneasy fidgeting, he seemed vulnerable and needy. Let him imagine that hearing about Betty could cause me a pang or two.

  “How are Betty’s folks?” I asked.

  “Her ma passed a few years back, but her dad is still going strong, even without the bar—you know they had to shut that down?”

  “Someone told me,” I said. Day & Night had followed the mills into extinction, but by then I was so far removed from the neighborhood that I hadn’t even felt Schadenfreude, only a vague pity for Frank.

  “Her dad, he keeps busy, he’s handy with tools, builds stuff, keeps the house from falling over. I guess you don’t know we moved in with him when, well, you know.”

  When they got married, I guessed. Or maybe when Stella went to prison. “What did you do about your place on Buffalo?”

  “Ma kept it. My dad’s insurance or something let her make the payments while she was in Logan. I looked in on it once a week, made sure nothing was leaking or burning, kept the rats and the gangbangers from moving in. Ma says she owns it clear and free now.”

  “She’s out?” I blurted.

  “Yeah. Two months ago.” His heavy shoulders sagged, further stressing the shoulders in the jacket.

  Annie Guzzo had been three years younger than me and I was finishing my junior year of college when she died. I counted in my head. I guess it had been twenty-five years.

  South Chicago was a neighborhood where violence was routine, ordinary. Stella Guzzo had grown up in a hardscrabble house herself and shouting and hitting were her main modes of functioning. We all knew she hit her daughter, but what turned people’s stomachs was that Stella had beaten Annie to death and then walked up to St. Eloy’s to play bingo. Not even my aunt Marie, Stella’s chief crony, stood up for her.

  “I never made those marks on my girl,” Stella protested at the trial. “They’re lying about me, making me look bad because I was trying to get Annie to see the facts of life. Annie was fine when I left the house.”