The Best of Sisters in Crime (4 page)

The rain still
looked miles away.

Mel felt as if
he could ride all night. Except that his eyes were gritty, the first sign that
he’d better start looking for a likely place to spend the night. He wasn’t one
to sleep under the stars, not if he could find a ceiling.

Tess directed
her sister to stack the rolls of toilet paper underneath the bathroom window on
the first floor of Jane Baum’s house. The six rolls, all white, stacked three
in a row, two high, gave Tess the little bit of height and leverage she needed
to push up the glass with her palms. She stuck her fingers under the bottom
edge and laboriously attempted to raise the window. It was stiff in its coats
of paint.

“Damn,” she
exclaimed, and let her arms slump. Beneath her feet, the toilet paper was
getting squashed.

She tried again,
and this time she showed her strength from lifting calves and tossing hay. With
a crack of paint and a thump of wood on wood, the window slid all the way up.

“Shhh!” Mandy
held her fists in front of her face and knocked her knuckles against each other
in excitement and agitation. Her ears picked up the sound of a roaring engine
on the highway, and she was immediately sure it was the sheriff, coming to
arrest her and Tess. She tugged frantically at the calf of her sister’s right
leg.

Tess jerked her
leg out of Mandy’s grasp and disappeared through the open window.

The crack of the
window and the thunder of the approaching motorcycle confused themselves in
Jane’s sleeping consciousness, so that when she awoke from dreams full of
anxiety—her eyes flying open, the rest of her body frozen— she imagined in a
confused, hallucinatory kind of way that somebody was both coming to get her
and already there in the house.

Jane then did as
she had trained herself to do. She had practiced over and over every night, so
that her actions would be instinctive. She turned her face to the pistol on the
other pillow and placed her thumb on the trigger.

Her fear—of
rape, of torture, of kidnapping, of agony, of death—was a balloon, and she
floated horribly in the center of it. There were thumps and other sounds
downstairs, and they joined her in the balloon. There was an engine roaring,
and then suddenly it was silent, and a slurring of wheels in her gravel drive,
and these sounds joined her in her balloon. When she couldn’t bear it any
longer, she popped the balloon by shooting herself in the forehead.

In the driveway,
Mel Brown heard the gun go off.

He slung his leg
back onto his motorcycle and roared back out onto the highway. So the place had
looked empty. So he’d been wrong. So he’d find someplace else. But holy shit.
Get the fuck outta here.

Inside the
house, in the bathroom, Tess also heard the shot and, being a ranch child,
recognized it instantly for what it was, although she wasn’t exactly sure where
it had come from. Cussing and sobbing, she clambered over the sink and back out
the window, falling onto her head and shoulders on the rolls of toilet paper.

“It’s the
sheriff!” Mandy was hysterical. “He’s shooting at us!”

Tess grabbed her
little sister by a wrist and pulled her away from the house. They were both
crying and stumbling. They ran in the drainage ditch all the way home and flung
themselves into the barn.

Mandy ran to lie
beside the little blind bull calf. She lay her head on Flopper’s side. When he
didn’t respond, she jerked to her feet. She glared at her sister.

“He’s dead!”

“Shut up!”

Cissy Johnson
had awakened, too, although she hadn’t known why. Something, some noise, had
stirred her. And now she sat up in bed, breathing hard, frightened for no good
reason she could fathom. If Bob had been home, she’d have sent him out to the
barn to check on the girls. But why? The girls were all right, they must be,
this was just the result of a bad dream. But she didn’t remember having any
such dream.

Cissy got out of
bed and ran to the window.

No, it wasn’t a
storm, the rain hadn’t come.

A motorcycle!

That’s what she’d
heard, that’s what had awakened her!

Quickly, with
nervous fingers, Cissy put on a robe and tennis shoes. Darn you, Janie Baum,
she thought, your fears are contagious, that’s what they are. The thought
popped into her head: If you don’t have fears, they can’t come true.

Cissy raced out
to the barn.

Back to table of
contents

With the
introduction of Sharon McCone in
Edwin
of the Iron Shoes
in 1977, Marcia Muller
opened the floodgates for the modern woman detective. Appearing in 19 novels,
Sharon has left her position with All Soul’s Legal Cooperative to become an
independent investigator, stretching herself to meet the challenges. The
results are exciting.
Wolf
in the Shadows
won an Anthony and was
nominated for a Shamus and an Edgar,
The
McCone Files
won an Anthony for Best Short
Story-Collection, and Marcia herself was given a Life Achievement Award from
Private Eye Writers of America in 1993. In her most recent outing,
Both Ends of the Night
,
Sharon (like Marcia) learns of the pleasures and the risks of
small-plane flight.

In “All the
Lonely People, “ Sharon, with typical humor and sharp wit, puts herself on the
roster of a dating service to solve a crime.

“Name, Sharon
McCone. Occupation … I can’t put private investigator. What should I be?” I
glanced over my shoulder at Hank Zahn, my boss at All Souls Legal Cooperative.
He stood behind me, his eyes bemused behind thick horn-rimmed glasses.

“I’ve heard you
tell people you’re a researcher when you don’t want to be bothered with stupid
questions like ‘What’s a nice girl like you. . .’”

“Legal
researcher.” I wrote it on the form. “Now— ‘About the person you
are seeking.’ Age—does not matter. Smoker—does not matter. Occupation—does not
matter. I sound excessively eager for a date, don’t I?”

Hank didn’t
answer. He was staring at the form. “The things they ask. Sexual preference.”
He pointed at the item. “Hetero, bi, lesbian, gay. There’s no place for ‘does
not matter.’”

As he spoke, he
grinned wickedly. I glared at him. “You’re enjoying this!”

“Of course I am.
I never thought I’d see the day you’d fill out an application for a dating
service.”

I sighed and
drummed my fingertips on the desk. Hank is my best male friend, as well as my
boss. I love him like a brother—sometimes. But he harbors an overactive
interest in my love life and delights in teasing me about it. I would be
hearing about the dating service for years to come. I asked, “What should I say
I want the guy’s cultural interests to be? I can’t put ‘does not matter’ for
everything.”

“I don’t think
burglars
have
cultural
interests.”

“Come on, Hank.
Help me with this!”

“Oh, put film.
Everyone’s gone to a movie.”

“Film.” I
checked the box.

The form was
quite simple, yet it provided a great deal of information about the applicant.
The standard questions about address, income level, whether the individual
shared a home or lived alone, and hours free for dating were enough in
themselves to allow an astute burglar to weed out prospects—and pick times to
break in when they were not likely to be on the premises.

And that
apparently was what had happened at the big singles apartment complex down near
the San Francisco-Daly City line, owned by Hank’s client, Dick Morris. There
had been three burglaries over the past three months, beginning not long after
the place had been leafleted by All the Best People Introduction Service. Each
of the people whose apartments had been hit were women who had filled out the
application forms; they had had from two to ten dates with men with whom the
service had put them in touch. The burglaries had taken place when one renter
was at work, another away for the weekend, and the third out with a date whom
she had also met through Best People.

Coincidence, the
police had told the renters and Dick Morris. After all, none of the women had
reported having dates with the same man. And there were many other common
denominators among them besides their use of the service. They lived in the
same complex. They all knew one another. Two belonged to the same health club.
They shopped at the same supermarket, shared auto mechanics, hairstylists, dry
cleaners, and two of them went to the same psychiatrist.

Coincidence, the
police insisted. But two other San Francisco area members of Best People had
also been burglarized—one of them male—and so they checked the service out
carefully.

What they found
was absolutely no evidence of collusion in the burglaries. It was no
fly-by-night operation. It had been in business ten years—a long time for that
type of outfit. Its board of directors included a doctor, a psychologist, a
rabbi, a minister, and a well-known author of somewhat weird but popular
novels. It was respectable—as such things go.

But Best People
was still the strongest link among the burglary victims. And Dick Morris was a
good landlord who genuinely cared about his tenants. So he put on a couple of
security guards, and when the police couldn’t run down the perpetrator(s) and
backburnered the case, he came to All Souls for legal advice.

It might seem
unusual for the owner of a glitzy singles complex to come to a legal services
plan that charges its clients on a sliding-fee scale, but Dick Morris was
cash-poor. Everything he’d saved during his long years as a journeyman plumber
had gone into the complex, and it was barely turning a profit as yet. Wouldn’t
be turning any profit at all if the burglaries continued and some of his
tenants got scared and moved out.

Hank could have
given Dick the typical attorney’s spiel about leaving things in the hands of
the police and continuing to pay the guards out of his dwindling cash reserves,
but Hank is far from typical. Instead he referred Dick to me. I’m All Souls’
staff investigator, and assignments like this one— where there’s a
challenge—are what I live for.

They are, that
is, unless I have to apply for membership in a dating service, plus set up my
own home as a target for a burglar. Once I started “dating,” I would remove
anything of value to All Souls, plus Dick would station one of his security
guards at my house during the hours I was away from there, but it was still a
potentially risky and nervous-making proposition.

Now Hank loomed
over me, still grinning. I could tell how much he was going to enjoy watching
me suffer through an improbable, humiliating,
asinine
experience. I smiled back— sweetly.

“‘Your sexual
preference.’ Hetero.” I checked the box firmly. “Except for inflating my income
figure, so I’ll look like I have a lot of good stuff to steal, I’m filling this
out truthfully,” I said. “Who knows—I might meet someone wonderful.”

When I looked
back up at Hank, my evil smile matched his earlier one. He, on the other hand,
looked as if he’d swallowed something the wrong way.

My first “date”
was a chubby little man named Jerry Hale. Jerry was
very
into the singles scene. We met at a bar in
San Francisco’s affluent Marina district, and while we talked, he kept
swiveling around in his chair and leering at every woman who walked by. Most of
them ignored him, but a few glared; I wanted to hang a big sign around my neck
saying, “I’m not really with him, it’s only business.” While I tried to find
out about his experiences with All the Best People Introduction Service, plus
impress him with all the easily fenceable items I had at home, he tried to
educate me on the joys of being single.

“I used to be
into the bar scene pretty heavily,” he told me. “Did all right too. But then I
started to worry about herpes and AIDS—I’ll let you see the results of my most
recent test if you want—and my drinking was getting out of hand. Besides, it
was expensive. Then I went the other way— a health club. Did all right there
too. But goddamn, it’s
tiring.
So then I joined a bunch of church groups—you meet a lot of horny
women there. But churches encourage matrimony, and I’m not into that.”

“So you applied
to All the Best People. How long have you—?”

“Not right away.
First I thought about joining AA, even went to a meeting. Lots of good-looking
women are recovering alcoholics, you know. But I like to drink too much to make
the sacrifice. Dear Abby’s always saying you should enroll in courses, so I
signed up for a couple at U.C. Extension. Screenwriting and photography.”