A Woman’s Eye

by Sara Paretsky

  “I wouldn’t have come to you at all if I knew anyone else to go to.”

  “You’re not alone, and I’d rather have you remember than most of those who do. Thank God, I’ll soon be an old man.”

  Julie thought he already was.

  “I wish I could help you, Julie, but I’ve not been hospitable to that kind of visitor for a long time.”

  “I understand and I’m sorry I came, Mr. Bourke.”

  Mercifully, a customer entered the shop and she could get away. She plunged out the door and almost collided with a street person who stepped back to admire the window he had cleaned of a car illegally parked at the curb. What could he see, she wondered, the windows all blacked out. She glanced back at the license plate-California. All that sunshine they wouldn’t let in the windows.

  Juanita ate. Ordinarily she loved Chinese food, but now she could hardly swallow. She had a plan. It came out of the daydreams she often made up about Julie and herself. Dee, she could see, was getting nervous. She walked back and forth waiting for Juanita to finish eating. She stopped and threw a lot of clothes that were lying about into one of the suitcases. She listened for the elevator. She looked at her watch. She was waiting to change Juanita’s hairdo. The pompoms had come undone when she tumbled off the table. Danny didn’t want her to look like a geisha girl anyway. Dee wouldn’t tell her what a geisha girl was. She knew what an angel was, but she didn’t feel like one of them either.

  Dee came close and looked at the plate. “Starved, weren’t you?”

  “Dee, I don’t like Danny. Do you?”

  The woman gave a surprised laugh. “Not always.”

  “Are you married to him?”

  “We’re partners. Does that answer your question?”

  “You just live together, right?”

  “Right. If you’ve had enough to eat, go sit in front of the mirror.” Dee took the plate to the sink and scraped and rinsed it.

  Juanita sat on the bench at the dressing table and drew the robe tightly around her. She watched Dee approach, drying her hands on a dish towel. “Why don’t you split from him? I mean, everybody does it. My mother and father talk about it all the time.”

  “Stop talking so much and go wash your face. You got some dirt on your cheek.”

  The dirt was a sore spot. Juanita saw that her plan wasn’t going to work, but she had to try anyway. She didn’t have any other. “Dee, what if you and I ran away before he gets back? He’s mean to you, too. I’ll bet he beats up on you, right? Couldn’t we go someplace and make a real puppet show?”

  Dee folded her arms and looked down at her for a long time. “Don’t you ever want to see your parents again?”

  “Not really.” She gave her shoulders a shrug.

  “You’re a conniving little bitch, Juanita. Did you think I’d fall for a line like that? Get up and take off the robe.”

  “No.” The knife was in the pocket. “I don’t want to take it off, please.”

  Dee came up behind her and tried to wrench the robe from her shoulders. Juanita clung to the lapels. But when she could hold on no longer, she wriggled round on the bench and swung at Dee with all her might. The red hair leaped off the woman’s head and plopped on the floor like a bird’s nest. Juanita jumped for the wig and ran with it to the front of the loft. She tried to get through the heavy curtains, but Dee was too close. She threw herself at the girl and brought her to the floor.

  Julie was near despair when she got home. Reggie Bauer’s scenario could be due entirely to his own aberration. Great. But if that were so, what to do next? Once more she checked in with her service. A call had come from Nuba Bradley of the Actors Forum. They had found a sign saying PUPPET SHOW INSIDE. A homeless person was incorporating the sign into his wind shelter. A building-by-building search was under way. Julie called Detective Russo. He confirmed the search and the discovery of a pair of sneakers that could belong to the missing subject. “You might as well know the worst,” Russo summarized. “They’re bringing in a squatter from the building across the way. He watched two people load something into a station wagon about eight o’clock last night. We’ll try to improve his memory, but all there is so far-a black wagon. Even the windows looked black to him.”

  Julie phoned Kevin Bourke. The line was busy. She had left his place only ten minutes before and had not even taken off her coat. She ran back to and up Eighth Avenue. A cabbie pulled alongside her and tapped his horn. She signaled that she wanted him, but kept on running. She could see the black car at the curb outside Bourke’s shop. Not a cop in sight, not even a meter maid.

  Mr. Bourke stepped out of the shop with the customer, who looked at his watch and poked a cautionary finger at Bourke. He strode to the wagon and pushed the street person out of his way. When he drove off, the cabbie took over the spot.

  “I tried to call you,” Bourke said. “You’d have known what I meant.”

  “I got a bead on him,” the cabbie said as Julie jumped in. The wagon turned left at the stoplight. The late afternoon traffic was building. On Ninth Avenue it was at a crawl. The wagon stayed near the middle lane; the cabbie, to be sure the car he followed didn’t opt for the Lincoln Tunnel, kept to the fire lane himself.

  Julie made a note of the California license number and asked the driver if he couldn’t radio a message to the police.

  “No, ma’am. I’m a gypsy. I don’t have that intercom stuff. But don’t you worry none, he ain’t going to get away.”

  But he almost did get away, slipping into a tunnel lane and then spurting out of it instead of turning west. He ran the light and went free while the westbound traffic closed in ahead of Julie’s cab,

  “He sure drives California style,” the driver said. “What’re you after him for?”

  “I’m pretty sure he helped kidnap an eleven-year-old girl,”

  The cabbie shot out on the orange light and within four blocks of progressive lights was headlights-to-back-bumper with the wagon. “I’ll ram him if you want me to.”

  “For God’s sake, no. I want to see where he’s going.”

  At Fourteenth Street the wagon made a couple of starts in the wrong direction before taking off down Hudson. Now Julie was afraid he’d know the cab was following him. At Bleecker and Bethune he came to a full stop at the playground gate.

  “Keep going,” Julie said.

  But the driver in the wagon rolled down his window and signaled. The cabbie stopped alongside him.

  “How in hell do I get to Houston Street from here?” He pronounced it like a Texan.

  “Follow me,” the cabbie said, and then to Julie as he led the way through the Greenwich Village maze, “See my point?”

  The cabbie crossed Houston, a one-way street going west at that point, and signaled the wagon. But the wagon turned east, the wrong way.

  The cabbie swore and ran two lights to get back on Houston by way of Sixth Avenue where Houston was two-way by then. They kept their distance as the wagon slowed down at every intersection, the driver looking for his street. He turned in at Wooster. But Wooster, they discovered when they got there, was blocked this side of Prince Street. A movie shooting there? So where were the trailers, where were the cops? The cops loved movies. Julie overpaid the cabbie and took her chances on foot. She knew SoHo pretty well.

  She soon spotted the black wagon parked tight against a high wire fence midbloek. The driver was wriggling across the front seat to get out on the passenger side. He went to the back and unloaded a couple of high-wattage lamps and a reflector. Could be they were on rental from Mr. Bourke. The man started up the street with them on the opposite side to the crowd. Julie stayed on the crowd’s side, but at the fringe. At last the distant wail of approaching police. Two things happened at once: the man set down the lamps and reflector and, ignoring the crowd, took out his keys to unlock a door, and the crowd let out a collective cry, “Look! Look!”

  Julie looked. A woman was dancing nude in the third-floor picture window. Not dancing, but jumping
up and down, flailing her arms, and not a woman. It was Juanita.

  Julie plunged across the street, waving to the girl and calling out, “Juanita!”

  Some of the crowd moved with and past her. Interpreting for themselves, they caught hold of the man, pushed him from one to another, and pulled at his clothes. The multi-locked loft door swung open. The redheaded woman took a step into the street, then tried to retreat inside the building again. When no one else took hold of her, Julie lunged and grappled her to the ground. The crowd loved it. The police came finally, swinging their nightsticks to disperse the crowd.

  Julie and Juanita rode home in the chief inspector’s car after they had stopped at One Police Plaza, to swear out the necessary complaints. There were things Juanita would not or could not talk about-mostly her fear and what she’d imagined might happen to her, but she liked to tell the action parts, especially how, when Dee had chased and caught her, she clung to the front window drapes and brought them down on top of Dee and her. By the time Dee had found her wig, Juanita was dancing in the window. Oh, yes, she insisted, she was dancing.

  In time, police across the country fleshed out the chronicle of Dee and Danny, a horror story. They would arrive in a city, sublet quarters, recruit local talent, film, and move on. They supplied a flourishing market in underground cassettes. The true horror was not only in their corruption of the innocent, but in the despair in which they left the corrupted. These unfortunates rarely went home again and almost never broke their silence on the street.

  A winner of the Anthony, Macavity, and American Mystery awards, NANCY PICKARD is a native midwesterner, residing in Fairway, Kansas. Her Jenny Cain novels, including I.O.U., Bum Steer, Dead Crazy, Generous Death, Say No to Murder, and Marriage Is Murder, have made her one of the fastest rising stars in the mystery field.

  THE SCAR

  Nancy Pickard

  The reason Jean Williams took her son to the Botanic Gardens every day they were in Wellington, New Zealand, was that her husband was in such a lousy mood that she wanted to get out of the hotel and far away from him.

  “I’m taking Zach to the park,” Jean announced on the second morning of Lyle’s sulk. Lyle had acquired an upper respiratory infection while they were up north in Auckland, and that accounted for some of his mood. But the truth was that coming to New Zealand on this vacation was Jean’s dream, not his; Lyle wanted to visit only Australia, and it would be another ten days before they flew there. New Zealand, he complained, was too expensive and too cold, and he hated driving on the “wrong” side of the road. “But it’s so beautiful,” Jean said. “So is Alaska,” he griped, “and we wouldn’t have to spend a fortune to get there.”

  Well, if he was going to pout, Jean decided, she’d take Zach and they’d explore on their own. There was no point in ruining the trip for all of them. So she said, with more enthusiasm than she really felt, “Let’s go, Zach!”

  “I wanna go to a playground,” Zach informed her.

  That was no surprise. Only four years old, Zachary wasn’t big on museums, art galleries, and guided tours. Zach was big on swings and slides and “roundy-rounds.” Jean felt locked up and closed in and wanted to spend the day outside anyway.

  “Right, mate,” she said, mimicking an Australian accent and making her little boy laugh.

  “Right, mate!” Zach shouted, and off they went, holding hands.

  The main entrance to the famous Wellington Botanic Gardens lay directly across from their hotel, but Jean followed the advice of a tour book and hired a taxi to drive them to the entrance at the top of the park.

  “It’s a long and beautiful walk down,” the book said, “but a long and exhausting walk up. In the middle, exactly where adults will want to sit down and take a breather, there’s a charming playground the little ones will love.”

  The guidebook was right on all counts.

  “Two slides!” Zachary squealed when he saw the playground.

  “Wow. Go for it, Sweetpea. I’ll be on that bench under that big tree over there.”

  He raced at breakneck speed down the path toward the playground equipment while Jean held her breath, watching him. When he reached the first slide safely, without falling to his chubby bare knees, Jean walked over to the wooden bench and sat down.

  Big tree, she thought, mocking herself. She peered up into its branches. Some botanist I’d make. Big green tree Maybe it’s labeled. She looked down at its roots, where a label did indeed inform her it was a Metrosideros umbellata (myrtle) (rata). Rata was probably the Maori word for it, she guessed. The Maoris, Jean knew from her reading if not from ever actually having seen one, were the Polynesians who still inhabited New Zealand after more than a thousand years.

  She dug out of her purse the paperback history of New Zealand she had brought with her to read while Zach played. Opening it, she glanced up again through the branches of the myrtle (big green) tree at the clear and sunny New Zealand sky. She sighed happily and then looked down and thumbed to the page where she had last stopped reading about the Maoris: “… tribe and family were all-important Every aspect of life was bound together and ruled by principles such as tapu (sacredness), mana (spiritual authority), and mekutu (sorcery). …”

  “Mommy! Look at me, Mommy!”

  Zachary waved to her from atop the tallest slide. Jean, who had been thirty-eight years old when she had him, her first and only child, felt her heart lurch at the sight of him, so high. But she only smiled and mouthed up at her son: “Wow.” He waved furiously, all wrist action, then swooshed down, landing with a thump on his bottom instead of on his feet. Jean watched him decide whether to cry and run back to her, or to laugh and run back to the ladder. When he laughed, she relaxed and returned to her reading.

  “‘… the Maori,’ wrote Captain James Cook in his journal, ‘have some arts among them which they execute with great judgement (sic) and unwearied patience.…”

  “Look at me, Mommy!”

  “I’m looking!”

  She also looked around her at the other mothers and children. The women, in their sleeveless cotton blouses and their flowered cotton skirts that clung to their slim legs, were almost uniformly pretty and blond, but it was the New Zealand children who took Jean’s breath away. So blond, so tanned in this summer month, so blue-eyed and milk-fed and gorgeously healthy looking. Pakehas. From her book Jean had learned that was the Maori word for the invading Europeans. Maori, on the other hand, meant “normal.” She decided she’d never seen so many beautiful children all in one place. And the prettiest one of all was a little blond beauty swinging by herself.

  Jean stared, unable to take her eyes from the child, who looked about Zach’s age, and whose deeply tanned skin dramatically set off the blue of her almond eyes and her curly blond hair. When the beauty hopped down from the swing and ran toward the slide where Zachary played, Jean continued to stare.

  “Angle!”

  The little girl named Angie turned toward the woman calling her. At the sudden sight of the other side of the child’s face, Jean gasped and then tried to hide her shock by coughing and looking quickly away. An appalling scar ran down the left side of that exquisite face. As the little girl ran toward the woman who had called to her, Jean glanced at her again, not wanting to stare but unable to look away.

  The scar bisected the child’s left cheek.

  It started just below the outer edge of her left eye, curved under the eyeball, then cut back through the middle of the cheek, finally curving down and under her chin, below the outer edge of her mouth. The scar was deep and as startlingly pink as the hibiscus flowers in the park.

  “Oddly enough,” Jean told Lyle that night at dinner, “the scar didn’t detract from her beauty. I know this sounds strange, but the poignancy of it, the, I don’t know, the sadness of it, somehow enhanced her beauty. At least, for me.”

  “Car accident, do you think?”

  “I hope so,” Jean said.

  Her husband looked startled. “What?”
<
br />   “I mean, at least that might be an innocent explanation of how she got it.”

  “Oh, you mean, maybe it was-”

  With a sharp nod of her head toward Zachary, Jean stopped Lyle from actually saying the words “child abuse,” although that was what she herself feared. Still, Wellington wasn’t Chicago, and New Zealand wasn’t the United States. Her guidebooks called it a family-oriented country, for both pakeha and Maori.

  As Jean ate her lamb chops and browned potatoes, she thought about the woman who had called the girl away from her play. Who was she to the girl? An older mother, like Jean herself? An aunt? A baby-sitter, perhaps, or maybe even a grandmother?

  At the park, the woman, the only one there who had looked as old as Jean, had taken the child’s hand and together they had walked away from the playground, heading back up the hill toward the top of the park. Jean had stared after them, feeling like weeping. She had glanced back toward the slide and was surprised to see that Zachary, too, was staring after the beautiful, scarred little girl.

  Over dessert, she teased, “You liked her, didn’t you, Zach?”

  “I love her,” the little boy said solemnly.

  Lyle’s sulk deepened at breakfast the next morning, mainly, it seemed to Jean, because he couldn’t abide the British custom of serving cooked tomatoes along with the fried eggs. And the bacon wasn’t real bacon at all, he complained, it was ham. And didn’t the New Zealand newspapers realize there were other parts of the world besides the South Pacific?

  “Zach wants to go to the park again,” Jean said.

  “Swings, Daddy!”

  Lyle managed a smile for his son and then a rueful version of it for his wife, one that told her he knew he was being a gramp but that he couldn’t help it. “Have fun.” He coughed a couple of times. “I’m going back to bed. This damned hotel’s so expensive, I don’t want to miss a minute of it.”