Copyright © 1991 by Sara Paretsky and Martin H. Greenberg

“My dear, you are a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own.”

The Angel in the House spoke these words to Virginia Woolf when Woolf first tried to write for publication. The Angel was a phantasm, but its speech crystallized all the voices Woolf had heard from childhood on, telling her that women should never have a mind or wish of their own. Woolf says she struggled with this Angel for years, trying to kill it so that she could find her own voice. “She died hard,” the artist reports. “Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

Women have been wrestling with that Angel for many centimes. It is a difficult phantom to overpower because it speaks in so many voices and with so much authority behind it. In some cases the authority is quite specific. John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay, wrote in 1645 that the poet Anne Hopkins “has fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason,… by occasion of giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books.” He added that “if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women… she had kept her wits.”

This kind of authority, this active pressure to keep women doing “such things as belong to women,” made it difficult for women to join the ranks of storytellers. Of course, we all look admiringly at the poet Sappho-all except the Athenian men who destroyed much of her work because she was praised more highly than their favorite Pindar. And we see the Lady Murasaki, the eleventh-century creator of the first novel, whose father-recognizing her talent-lamented she had not been born a boy. She only had the minor hurdle of learning to write by secretly looking over her brothers’ shoulders-her lamenting father had forbidden her direct education.

By 1700 we find more than one woman writer per century, but to see a continuous chain of female storytellers we can look back only two hundred years. During those two centuries women struggled hard for the right to be published and read. In the nineteenth century they often wrote under men’s names to gain an audience-Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell for the Bronte sisters; George Eliot for Mary Ann Evans; and George Sand for Lucie Dupin Dudevant. George Sand wrote most of her enormous oeuvre at night, starting work at two or three in the morning after finishing with the management of her large household or her numerous lovers. And it is only in this century that we find enough women writing that we no longer see ourselves as odd, or worry, like the seventeenth-century poet Anne Finch, that the masculine art of poetry is making us crabbed and unwomanly.

In some cases, women struggling to express themselves faced a bombardment of wholesale anger-furious reviews, social ostracism, public excoriation-so intense that they stopped writing. Kate Chopin experienced this reaction after publishing The Awakening in 1899. The anger against her was so intense that she wrote nothing else for publication. She died five years later at the age of fifty-three, broken by the forcible silencing of her voice.

Edna Pontellier, the heroine of The Awakening, married, with two children, leaves her husband in order to paint-and in so doing falls in love with a younger man. She commits suicide in the end, but this fate did not exonerate her or her creator, either in 1900 or today. Over and over reviewers have castigated Chopin for Edna’s “selfishness.” In 1970 George Spangler condemned Chopin for Edna’s “ruthless determination to go her own way” that is “disturbing, even alienating.”

Contrast Chopin’s fate, and that of her heroine, with Goethe and Faust. At the end of a long life of debauchery Faust “ist gerichtet, ist gerettet”-he is judged and saved-a fate his creator, who glorified his own numerous seductions in poems and journals, no doubt expected for himself. Do any biographers of Goethe take him to task for “selfishness” or find Faust “disturbing, even alienating”? The strong expression of sexual desire is not just condoned in the male hero-it makes him more heroic.

In a woman that desire is a sign at best of selfishness, at worst of psychosis. The character Glenn Close plays in Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest, shows that we still find female sexuality-outside of marriage, and specifically married maternity-so shocking and debasing that the character must be deranged. And as with Chopin’s Edna Pontellier, the only fitting end for Alex Forrest is death.

It is the struggle to find a voice, to kill the Angel, to figure out what women really want, what our stories really are, that absorbs the energy of many women writers. The voices that tell us we can’t do it, or we shouldn’t do it, continue to blare at us. They may be loud and raucous, like Norman Mailer, addressing International PEN a few years ago while head of PEN USA, and saying that it isn’t possible for women to write as well as men. It’s not hard to imagine what threat women present to Mailer’s vision of his masculinity that drives him to insist that you “have to have balls” to write well; it is hard to understand why an organization dedicated to freeing imprisoned writers should elect him president.

Mailer’s statements are so extreme that many people laugh at him, but he’s far from alone in pushing down women’s voices. Other people merely express themselves more softly. Women who write strong, even angry stories are no longer told that they are “unwomanly” or “selfish.” Today, as Carolyn Heilbrun points out, we hear that we are “shrill,” “strident,” or, worst of all, feminists. We also find most women excluded from the sacred mystical canon that Allan Bloom, Mortimer Adler, and others keep firing. And a Chicago area critic recently explained that feminists by definition cannot write great books.

In addition to needing considerable courage even to tell stories, we women have also had to figure out what our stories are. The image of ourselves as inconstant, duplicitous, stupid, illogical, using our bodies to seduce and subvert men is such an ancient, ingrained part of our tradition, reinforced in fairy tales, epics, history, that to counteract these images by telling women’s stories makes for very heavy work. Writers as different as George Eliot and Virginia Woolf suffered from migraines brought on by the stress of this work and the self-doubts that come from countering so widely accepted an authority.

It was Virginia Woolf who first clearly spelled out the central problem of the female artist: the conflict between her interior vision and the expectation that she subordinate that vision to her perceived primary role as a self-sacrificing angel.

Just being able to articulate this problem was an important step toward resolving it, But many women artists-including the crime writercontinue to experience stress in taking their own visions seriously. Agatha Christie, who wrested total artistic control for production from her publishers in the twenties, and whose residuals brought in over a million pounds a year at her death, often told reporters that she regarded herself as a wife first, a writer second. One should take this statement seriously: as a sign not of poor-mouthing, but of internal conflict between her success and what she thought her womanly role should be.

In writing mysteries, women for many years created primarily male heroes: Sayers with Wimsey, Tey with Grant, Marsh with Alleyn. When the detectives were women, they were women who did not upset male stereotypes. Jane Mar-pie is everybody’s elderly spinster aunt, essentially asexual. While sharp and perceptive, she uses her insights to shore up the patriarchal society in which she lives and operates on its fringes rather than as a professional crime investigator. Lady Molly of Scotland Yard was a bit more daring, but Baroness Orczy assures us repeatedly that Lady Molly never lost her feminine daintiness. Dorothy Sayers created a complex character in Harriet Vane, but could not allow her-or the female dons of Shrewsbury-to solve their own problems. They fester in an environment of fear and mutual suspicion for almost a year before Peter Wimsey arrives. He is able to see through the situation at a glance and in a matter of days resolves the problem for them.

Since Sayers created Harriet Vane sixty years ago women have developed active careers in many spheres. In 1878 the U.S. Supreme Court barred women lawyers because of their “natural timidity and delicacy.” Now we have a woman Justice. When I started my first book twelve years ago, Chicago women were fighting for the right to be homicide detectives and patrol officers instead of matrons at the women’s jails. Today ten percent of the force is female. We don’t think twice about seeing women on the beat, in the courtroom, the operating room, or other exciting arenas.

It’s because we see women doing so much that the horizons of our fiction have expanded. We can create heroines who act independently without guilt-not Jane Marples, or even Harriet Vanes-but Kate Fansler, Sharon McCone, or Kinsey Millhone, who are all present in this anthology. And our unmarried women can have affairs without needing to kill themselves afterward, or turning out to be villains like Brigid O’Shaughnessy or Chandler’s Dolores Gonzalez.

Does that make this group of writers better than Sayers? By no means. Nor in terms of craft and talent does she have many equals today. But what we do have is the freedom to present an independent woman hero without fear of excoriation.

Kate Chopin, the Brontes, and other pioneers made it passible for us to believe in the female artist. They turned publishing into a routine, accessible, acceptable business-they obviated the need to publish under the cloak of an anonymous lady, as Austen had to, or under a man’s name, as Sand and Eliot felt compelled to. Sayers, Woolf, and others, taking advantage of this ease of publication, made us start thinking about what a genuine woman’s voice might be.

Twenty-five years ago Amanda Cross delighted readers with Kate Fansler in In the Final Analysis. Kate, professional, witty, feminine, took over where Dorothy Sayers left Harriet Vane: she could solve her own problems. She could investigate and resolve a murder. She could have a warm and wonderful lover but stand apart from him. Cross presented the hero we’d been waiting for all our lives.

What began as a trickle of strong women a quarter of a century ago-with Christy Oper working a New York Transit Authority beat, followed by Cordelia Gray doing an Unsuitable Job for a Woman-has grown into a great outpouring of women’s stories. Marcia Muller gave us Sharon McCone in Edwin of the Iron Shoes in 1977. Five years later Sue Grafton and I flung Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski on an unsuspecting world; English PI Anna Lee joined us at the same time. Since then the number of interesting women heroes has grown past counting. They range from the private eyes to Julie Hayes in Dorothy Salisbury Davis’s books, whose efforts to find her own strength mirror the struggles many American women have gone through in the last twenty years.

This book gathers together a sample of what women have to say about women in the final decade of our century. The collection begins with Liza Cody’s story “Lucky Dip.” Being homeless and on the street are issues that we all worry about. Cody goes beyond worry to show us through Crystal’s eyes what that life is really like. A street girl, Crystal is presented without gloss or sentimentality. The horrors she witnesses, and how she copes with them, may chill you, but will also give you food for serious thought.

The collection ends with another young girl in a different situation. Emma, in Dorothy B. Hughes’s “That Summer at Quichiquois,” is trying to sort out the passions of the adults around her. This haunting story shows us many different ways to view people, passion, and even forensic evidence.

Between Cody and Hughes we see women struggling with a range of problems. Nancy Pickard takes a new look at jealousy and possessiveness in “The Scar.” The New Zealand setting is unusual and arresting, but the feelings, brought to life with delicate realism, have been with us for thousands of years. Private eyes Kinsey Millhone, Sharon McCone, Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, and Lònia Guiu solve cases that are far from conventional. Famous amateurs like Jemima Shore, Julie Hayes, and Kate Fansler are here. Along with these professional crime solvers are mothers, grandmothers, battered wives, social workers, and Barbara Wilson’s startling story about one of the world’s most revered dead poets. We have the debut of Carolyn Wheat’s new hero, New York Transit cop Maureen Gallagher, whose struggles with sobriety and authority are as important as the torched subway bums she fights for.

Mary Wings’s “Kill the Man for Me” is guaranteed to provoke late-night discussions: how far is it permissible to go in seeking justice or revenge? And if her solution shocks you, ask yourself if you were also offended by Charles Bronson in Death Wish.

The one thing these stories have in common is the message that there is no one way to view women. Nor is there one way women see themselves. What we have all learned in the last three hundred and fifty years is that the reading and writing of books are “such things as belong to women.”

LIZA CODY is the winner of a Creasey Award for her very popular Anna Lee series of mysteries and has also been nominated for the Edgar. Her rich novels featuring private eye Anna include Under Contract Sad Company, Dupe, Head Case, and Stalker, while Rift is a stunning novel of suspense set in East Africa, She makes her home in England.

He was sitting against a bit of broken wall, looking almost normal. I could see him because of the full moon. It was a lovely moon with wispy clouds like old lady’s hair across its face.

I watched the man for a couple of minutes, but he didn’t move. Well, he wouldn’t, would he? I could see he didn’t belong-he was far too well dressed-and I wondered how he got there. This is not a part of the city men dressed like him go.

He had not been dead long. You could tell that at a glance because he still had his shoes on. If you die here you won’t keep your shoes for ten minutes. You won’t keep your wallet for ten seconds, dead or alive.

With this in mind I had a quick look, right and left, for anyone lurking in the shadows. If I’d seen anyone bigger than me, I’d have stayed where I was. Moon shadows are blacker than hearses, and I knew I wasn’t the only one out that night. But in the Trenches only the big are bold, and someone big would have been rummaging in the remains already. So I hopped out from behind my pile of rubble and made a run for it.

I reached him in no time at all and grabbed his left lapel. Seven out of ten men are right-handed, and the chances are seven to three anything valuable will be in a left-hand inside pocket. I took a swift dip and came up with the winnings.

By now I could hear stirrings-a snap of rotten wood, a slide of brick dust. I flicked his watch off his wrist and almost in the same motion made a dive into his jacket pocket. Then I got on my toes and legged it.

I legged it out of the Trenches completely, because, although there are plenty of places to hide, the people I wanted to hide from know them as well as I do. The Trenches are useful as long as it’s only the law you want to avoid. Robbing a corpse isn’t nice, and I didn’t want to take all that trouble only to be robbed myself.

It was just a quick jog to the High Street. On the way I stopped under a street lamp to look at what I had in my hand. The wallet was fat snakeskin, the watch was heavy gold, and the loose change was all pound coins and fifty-pence pieces. For once in my short life I’d struck oil.

All the same you don’t break old habits for the sake of one lucky dip, and when I saw all those plump taxpayers doing their late Christmas shopping on the High Street, I stuck out my hand as usual.

“Got any spare change, please?” I said, as always. “For a cup of tea. For a bed for the night. For a hot meal.”

And as always they coughed up like princes or told me to get myself a job. It was nice that night. I perform best when there’s no pressure, and by the time I’d worked my way down to the station, I’d made a nice little pile. But it doesn’t do to loll around and count your takings in public, so I jumped a tube to Paddington.

My sister has this room in Paddington. She lives in Camberwell with her boyfriend, so this room’s just for business. I don’t trust my sister’s boyfriend, but I do trust my sister, up to a point, which was why I went to her business address. You may meet all sorts of funny blokes there, but you won’t meet her boyfriend, and that suits me. It suits him, too, if you want to know the truth: he doesn’t like me any more than I like him.

When we first came down to the city, Dawn and me, we relied on each other; we didn’t have anyone else to turn to. But after she took up with him and he set her up in business, she didn’t need me like she used to, and we drifted apart.

The trouble with Dawn is she always needs a man. She says she doesn’t feel real without one. Feeling real is important to Dawn so I suppose I shouldn’t criticize. But her men have been nothing but a disappointment. You could say I’m lucky to have an older sister like Dawn: she’s an example to me. I’d rather die than turn out like her.

Still, she is my sister, and we’ve been through a lot together. Especially in this last year when we came down to the city together. And before that, when our mum kicked us out, or rather, kicked Dawn out because of the baby. And after that when Dawn’s boyfriend kicked Dawn out because of the baby.

I have never been hungrier than I was last year trying to look after Dawn. She lost the baby in the end, which was a bit of a relief to me. I don’t know how we would have managed if she’d had it. I don’t think she would have coped very well either. It’s much harder to get a man when you’ve got a little baby to look after.

Anyway, that’s all in the past, and now Dawn has business premises in Paddington.

I waited outside until I was sure she was alone, and then I went up and knocked on the door.

“Crystal!” she said when she opened the door. “What you doing here? You got to be more careful-I might’ve had company.”

“Well, you haven’t,” I said. And she let me in, wrinkling her nose and pulling her kimono tight. I don’t like that kimono-it’s all hot and slippery. Since she got her hair streaked, Dawn has taken to wearing colors that would look all right on a tree in autumn but turn her hard and brassy.

“Gawd,” she said, “you don’t half look clatty. Can’t you get your hair cut? That coat looks like it’s got rats living in it.”

I took the coat off, but she didn’t like the one underneath either.

“What a pong,” she said.

“I had a wash last week,” I told her. “But I would like to use your bathroom.” I wanted somewhere private to look at what I’d got off the dead man.

“You can’t stop around here,” she said, worried. “I got someone coming in half an hour.” She looked at her watch.

I sat in her bathroom and looked at the dead man’s watch. It had Cartier written on the face, and it really was proper gold. Quality, I thought, and felt a bit sad. By rights a man with a watch like that shouldn’t end up in the Trenches without a stitch on. Because that’s how he’d be by now, pale and naked in the moonlight. Nobody would recognize him without his coat and suit and shoes. He’d just look like anyone. We’re into recycling in the Trenches.

To cheer myself up I looked at his wallet, and when I counted up I found I had 743 pounds and 89 pence. And I couldn’t use half of it.

Imagine me trying to change a fifty-pound note! There’s a chance in a million a cat with cream on his whiskers milked a cow, but that’s good odds compared to the chance I’d come by a fifty-quid note honestly. I couldn’t even pop the watch. One look at a watch like that and any honest pawnbroker would turn me in. A dishonest one would rip me off quick as a wink. Either way the watch was no good for me.

I borrowed my sister’s toothbrush and had a fast swipe with her deodorant before I joined her again. You never know when you’re going to find clean water next so it pays to make use of what there is.

“Do me a favor, Crystal,” she said, when she saw me. “Bugger off before you frighten the horses.”

“Brought you a Christmas present,” I said and handed her the watch.

“You’re barmy, Crystal.” She stared at the watch like it was a spider in her bed. “Who’d you nick this off?”

“I never,” I told her. “I found it.” And it was true because the feller was dead. It wasn’t as if it was his property because there wasn’t a him anymore for it to belong to. When you’re dead you’re gone. And that’s final. Dead men don’t own watches.

Even with a Christmas present, Dawn wouldn’t let me stop for the night. It’s a funny thing, if I hadn’t had 743 pounds, 89 pence in my pocket, I wouldn’t have wanted to. If it had just been the 89 pence, I’d’ve been quite happy sleeping out.

But having things is dangerous. Having things makes you a mark. It’s like being pretty. If you don’t believe me, look at Dawn. She’s pretty and she’s been a mark from the time she was eleven. Being pretty brought her nothing but trouble. She’s always had to have someone to protect her. I’m glad I’m not pretty.

There’s a hospital down the Harrow Road so I went there. I couldn’t decide what to do, so I sat in Casualty till they chucked me out. It’s a pity there aren’t more places you can go and sit in at night to have a quiet think. It’s hard to think on the hoof, and if you are cold or hungry, thinking is not on your mind at all.

It seemed to me, after a while, that the best place to go was where I slept last night. Some might say it was a daft idea to go back to a place that was rousted, but I thought if the police had been there last night, it would be deserted tonight.

Twenty-seven Alma-Tadema Road is a condemned house. They say it’s unsafe. There are holes in the roof and holes in the floors, but it is perfectly safe if you are sober, tread carefully, and don’t light fires. That was what went wrong last night: we had a couple of winos in, and one of them got cold just before daybreak.

When I got there, I saw that they had nailed more boards across the front door and downstairs windows. I could get in, but it would take time. There were still people up and about so, to be on the safe side, I would have to come back later if I wanted more than a few minutes’ kip.

I walked on past and went down to the Embankment. It is quite a long walk, and by the time I got there I was hungry. Actually, I’m hungry all the time. Dawn says she thinks I must have worms and I probably do, but mostly I think it’s just my age. Someone like Bloody Mary does almost as much walking as I do, but she doesn’t seem to need half the fuel. She stopped growing years ago.

There are a lot of women like Bloody Mary, but I mention her because she was the one I picked up on the Embankment that night, huffing and puffing along with her basket on wheels.

“Oh, me poor veins,” she said, and we walked on together. I slowed down a bit so she could keep up.

“There’s a stall open by the Arches,” she said. “Couldn’t half murder a cuppa.”

She used to sing in the streets-walk up and down Oxford Street bellowing “Paper Moon” with her hand held out-but after a bad dose of bronchitis last year her voice went.

At the Arches I got us both a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich.

“Come into money, Crys?” Johnny Pavlova asked. It is his stall and he has a right to ask, because now and then when there’s no one around to see, he gives me a cup free. As he always says, he’s not a charitable institution, but catch him in the right mood and he’ll slip you one like the best of them.

All the same it reminded me to be careful.

“Christmas,” I said. “They were feeling generous down the High Street.”

“Down the High Street?” he said. “You ain’t been on that demolition site, have you? I heard they found this stiff bollock-naked there this evening.”

“Did they?” I said as if I couldn’t care less. “I didn’t hear nothing. I was just working the High Street.”

I went over and sat with Bloody Mary under the Arches. Johnny Pavlova doesn’t like us hanging too close round his stall. He says we put the respectable people off their hot dogs.

“Will you look at that moon,” Bloody Mary said, and she pulled her coats tight.

It was higher in the sky now and smaller, but there was still a good light to see by.

“Where you kipping tonight, Crystal?” she asked. I knew what she meant. A moon like that is a freezing moon this time of year.

Just then, Brainy Brian came slithering in beside us so I didn’t have to answer. He was coughing his lungs out as usual, and he didn’t say anything for a while. I think he’s dying. You can’t cough like that and live long. He used to go to college in Edinburgh, but then he started taking drugs and he failed all his exams. He did all right down here in the city because to begin with he was very pretty. But druggies don’t keep their looks any longer than they keep their promises. Now he’s got a face like a violin and ulcers all over his arms and legs.

When he recovered his breath he said, “Share your tea, Crystal?”

We’d already finished ours so we didn’t say anything for a while. But Brian was so sorry-looking, in the end I went to get another two, one for him and one for Bloody Mary. While they were sucking it up I slipped away.

“Watch yourself, Crys,” Johnny Pavlova said as I went by. He gave me a funny look.

The first thing you do when you break into a house is find another way out. A good house has to have more than one way out because you don’t want to go running like the clappers to get out the same door the Law is coming in.

The house on Alma-Tadema Road has a kitchen door through to the garden. I loosened the boards on that before lying down to sleep. I also made sure I had the snakeskin wallet safe.

I had made the right decision: there was no one but me there. A heap of damp ashes marked the spot where the winos had lit their fire, and they blew in little eddies from the draught. Otherwise nothing stirred.

I went over the house collecting all the paper and rags I could find to build myself a nest, then I curled up in it and shut my eyes.

Nighttime is not the best time for me. It’s when I can’t keep busy and in control of my thoughts that bad memories and dreams burst out of my brain. It’s hard to keep cheerful alone in the dark, so I need to be very, very tired before I’ll lie down and close my eyes. Sometimes I say things over and over in my head until I get to sleep-things like the words of a song or a poem I learned at school-over and over so there’s no spare room in my brain for the bad stuff.

That night I must have been very tired because I only got part of the way through “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” when I dropped off. Dawn used to play that song all the time when we were still living at home. She played it so often it used to drive me up the wall. But it is songs like that, songs I didn’t even know I’d learned the words to, that help me through the night nowadays.

The next thing I knew someone was coughing. I opened my eyes but it was still dark, and there was this cough, cough, cough coming my way. Brainy Brian, I thought, and relaxed a bit. It’s something you have to watch out for-people coming up on you when you’re alone in the dark.

“It’s cold,” he said when he found me. “It’s hard, hard cold out there.” He crawled into my nest. I was quite warm and I didn’t want to leave but I knew his coughing would keep me awake,

“Give us a cuddle, Crystal,” he said. “I got to get warm.”

“Shove off,” I said. His hands remind me of a fork. Some people do it to keep warm. Not me. I’ve seen too much and I want to die innocent.

He started coughing again. Then he said, “You got any dosh, Crystal?”

“Enough for a tea in the morning,” I said. I really did not want to go. It was one of my better nests and it didn’t seem fair to give it up to Brian.

“They’re looking for you,” he said. “Someone saw you in the Trenches.”

“Not me,” I said. “Who saw me?”

“You know that little kid?” he said. “Marvin, I think he’s called. Well, they hurt him bad. He said he saw you.”

“Who wants to know?” I sat up.

“Lay down,” he said, “I got to get warm.” He grabbed me and pulled me down, but he didn’t start anything so I kept still.

After a while he said, “Johnny Pavlova says you got dosh. They asked him too.”

I waited till he finished coughing. Then I said, “Who’s asking? The Law?”

“Not them,” he said. He knew something, I thought. And then I thought, he talked to Johnny Pavlova, he’s talked to Marvin, and Marvin saw me in the Trenches. Maybe Brian talked to whoever is looking for me.

I said, “Did they send you, Brian? Did they send you to find me?”

He doubled over, coughing. Later he said, “You don’t understand, Crystal. I got to get some money. I lost my fixings, and I haven’t scored for days.”

So that was that. I left him and went out the kitchen way. Brian was right-it was hard cold outside. And I was right, too-having things makes you a mark. I dumped the snake-skin wallet in the garden before I climbed over the fence. And then I climbed right back and picked it up again. Dumping the wallet wouldn’t stop anyone looking for me. Not having it would be no protection. Marvin didn’t have it and he got hurt. I wondered why they picked on Marvin to clobber. Perhaps he got the dead man’s shoes, or his coat. Perhaps they saw a little kid in a big thick coat and they recognized the coat.

No one ever looked for me before. There was no one interested. I thought maybe I should run away-somewhere up north, or maybe to the West Country. But when I ran away the first time, it was me and Dawn together. And it was difficult because we didn’t know the city. It took us ages to get sorted.

I thought about it walking down the road. The moon had gone and the sky had that dirty look it gets just before day. My nose was runny from the cold and I was hungry, so I went to the Kashmir takeaway. The Kashmir is a good one because it has a bin not twenty paces away. What happens is that when the pubs close a lot of folks want an Indian takeaway, but because they’ve been drinking they order too much and chuck what’s left over in this bin. I’ve had breakfast there many times. The great thing about a Kashmir breakfast is that although the food is cold by the time you get it, the spices are still hot, and it warms you up no end. From this point of view Indian food is the best in the city.

I felt much more cheerful after breakfast, and I found a lighted shopwindow with a doorway to sit in. It was there I had a proper look at the wallet. Before, at Dawn’s business premises, I only counted the money and redistributed it in the pockets of my coats. Now I studied the credit cards, library cards, and business stuff.

These are not things I am normally interested in. I can’t use them. But this time, it seemed to me, the only way out of trouble was to give them back. The dead man in the Trenches might be dead but he was still dangerous.

His name was Philip Walker-Jones. He belonged to a diners club, a bridge club, and a chess club. He had two business cards-Data Services Ltd. and Safe Systems Plc. He was managing director twice over, which seemed quite clever because both companies had the same address in Southwark Road. Southwark Road is not far from where I found him. Maybe he walked out of his office and died on the way to the station. But that didn’t explain what he was doing in the Trenches. Nobody like him goes in the Trenches.

I thought about Philip Walker-Jones sitting in the moonlight against the broken brickwork. He had looked as if he’d just sat down for a bit of a breather. But he wasn’t resting. He was dead. There wasn’t a mark on him that I could see. It didn’t look as if anyone had bumped him-he was just sitting there in all his finery. Quite dignified, really.

Little Marvin would have been there watching like I was, and probably a few others too-waiting to see if it was safe to take a dip. We were wrong, weren’t we?

I didn’t want to go back too close to the Trenches, but if I was going to give the wallet back I had to. It was too early yet for public transport so I started walking. A good breakfast does wonders for the brain, so while I was walking I went on thinking.

I didn’t know anything about data and systems except that they sounded like something to do with computers, but I do know that dining, bridge, and chess are all things you do sitting down. Philip Walker-Jones didn’t have any cards saying he belonged to a squash club or a swimming club, and if he spent all that time sitting down, maybe he wasn’t very fit. If he wasn’t very fit, and he started to run suddenly, he could have had a heart attack.

It was a satisfying bit of thinking that took me down to the river without really noticing. Crossing over, it occurred to me that computers, bridge, and chess were things that really brainy people did, and in my experience brainy people all wear glasses and don’t run around much. A really brainy man would not go running into the Trenches after dark, unless he was being chased. A scared, unfit man running in the Trenches would have no bother getting a heart attack. Easy.

The wind off the river was sharp and cold, but it wasn’t the only thing making me shiver. Because if Philip Walker-Jones had a reason to be scared to death, so did I.

Give the rotten wallet back, I thought, and do it double quick Say, “Here’s your money, now leave me be.” And then do a runner, I’m good at that.

I stopped for a pint of milk to fuel up. And I went through my pockets to find some of the fifty-pound notes, which I stuffed back in the wallet to make it look better.

I felt quite good. I had made my plan and it was almost as if I didn’t have the wallet anymore. It was as good as gone, and by the time I reached Southwark Road I wasn’t bothering much about keeping out of sight. It was daylight now and there were other people in the streets, and cars on the roads, and as usual no one seemed to notice me.

All the same, I gave the Trenches a miss. I walked down Southwark Road bold as brass looking at numbers and signs. And when I found one that read Safe Systems Plc, I walked right up to the door.

It was a new door in an old building, and it was locked. Perhaps it was too early. Not having a watch myself, I don’t keep track of office hours. I stood there wondering if I should hike on to the station where there’s a clock and a cup of tea, and just then the door opened from the inside. It gave me such a fright I nearly legged it. But the person opening the door was a young woman, and usually women don’t give me much trouble. This one had red rims to her eyes and a really mournful expression on her face. She also had a nasty bruise on her cheekbone that made me think of Little Marvin.

She said, “Where do you think you’re going?” She wasn’t friendly but she looked as if she had other things on her mind.

“Safe Systems Plc,” I said.

“What do you want?” she said. “The office is closed. And haven’t you ever heard of a thing called soap and water?”

“I’ve got something for Safe Systems,” I said, and held out the wallet.

“Jesus Christ!” she said and burst into tears.

We stood there like that-me holding the wallet and her staring at it, crying her eyes out.

At last, she said, “I don’t want it. Take it away.” And she tried to slam the door.

But I stuck my foot in there. “What do I do with it?” I said.

“Lose it,” she said, and because I wouldn’t let her close the door, she went on, “Look, you silly little cow, don’t you come near me with that thing. Drop it in the river-you can give it to Steve for all I care. I’m finished with all that.”

She started banging the door on my foot so I hopped back. The door crashed shut and she was gone.

I was so surprised I stood there gawping at the door and I didn’t see the big feller coming up behind until he dropped a hand on my shoulder.

“You the one they call Crystal?” he said from a great height.

“Not me,” I said. “Never heard of her.” I got the wallet back under my top coat without him noticing.

“What you doing at that office then?” he said, not letting go.

“The lady sometimes gives me her spare change,” I said, and watched his feet. It’s no good watching their eyes. If you want to know what a bloke’s going to do, watch his feet. The big man’s feet were planted. I did not like him knowing my name.

“What is your name then?” he said.

I nearly said, “Dawn,” but I bit it off just in time.

“What?” he said.

“Doreen,” I said. “Who’s asking?” If he was Steve, I would give him the wallet and run.

“Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex,” he said. It was even worse than I thought. Now even the Law knew my name. It made me sweat in spite of the cold.

“I’ve got a few questions for you,” he said, and he tightened his hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t know anything,” I said. “What about?”

“About where you was last night,” he said. “And who you saw.”

“I never saw nothing,” I said, really nervous.

“Course you didn’t,” he said. “Come on. I’ll buy you breakfast and then we can talk.” And he smiled.

Never, never trust the Law when it smiles.

None of this had ever happened to me before. If you must know, I’ve hardly ever talked to a policeman in my life. I’m much too fast on my feet.

“Where do you live, Crystal?” he said, starting to walk.

“The name’s Doreen,” I said, and tried to get out from under the big hand.

“Where do you live… Doreen?” he said.

The thing you have to know about the Law is that they ask questions and you answer them. You’ve got to tell them something or they get really upset. It’s the same with social workers. If they want an answer, give them an answer, but keep the truth to yourself. I told Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex the address of a hostel in Walworth.

He was walking us in the direction of the Trenches, and I didn’t want to go there. So I said, “I’ve had my breakfast and I ought to go because I’ve got an appointment with my social worker.”

It was a mistake because then he wanted to know who my social worker was and what time I had to be there. Lies breed. It’s much better if you don’t talk to the Law because then you can keep to the truth.

After a while he said, “Aren’t you a bit young to be living on your own… Doreen?”

“I’m eighteen,” I said. I felt depressed. I hadn’t spoken one honest word to the man since he dropped his big hand on my shoulder. Well, you can’t, can you? I talked to a social worker once and she tried to put Dawn and me in care. Never again. They would have split us up and then Dawn would never have found herself a man. Say what you like about Dawn’s boyfriend, but he did set her up in business, and she does make good money. She feels real. No one can feel real in care.

We were right next to the Trenches by now. For a change it looked completely deserted-no winos, no bonfires, none of us picking through the rubbish dumped there in the night. It’s just a big demolition site, really, but since no one is in any hurry to build there, it’s become home to all sorts of people.

Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex stopped. He said, “We found a body in there last night.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t see the bit of wall the dead man had been sitting by, but I knew where it was.

“Yes,” he said, as if he was thinking about something else. “Stripped clean, he was. When it comes my turn I’d like to be somewhere no one can get their thieving hands on me.”

I was still watching his feet, and now even his boots looked as if they were thinking about something else. So I took off.

I broke clear of his hand. I dodged between two people passing by and hopped over the wire. Then I dropped down into the Trenches.

It was the last place I wanted to be, but it was the only place I could go.

I heard him come down behind me, and as I ran through the rubble I could feel his feet thudding on the ground. He was awfully fast for a big man.

“Stop!” he yelled, and I kept running. This way, that way, over the brickwork, round the rubbish tips, into cellars, up steps. And all the time I could hear his feet and his breath. I couldn’t get free of him.

I was getting tired when I saw the drain. I put on one more sprint and dived head first into it. It was the only thing I could think of to do. It was the only place he couldn’t come after me.

It was the only place I couldn’t get out of.

I know about the drain. I’ve been in there before to get out of the wind, but it doesn’t go anywhere. There is a bend about ten yards from the opening, and after that it’s very wet and all stopped up with earth.

Anyway, like it or not, I dived straight in and crawled down. There wasn’t much room even for me. I had to get all the way to the bend before I could turn round.

It was totally dark in the drain. There should have been a circle of light at the opening, but Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex had his head and shoulders wedged in it.

He said, “Don’t be a fool, Crystal. Come out of there!” His voice boomed.

“Look, I only want a chat,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

He wasn’t going to hurt me as long as I stayed in the drain and he stayed out of it.

“Come and get me,” I said. I would have felt quite cheerful if it hadn’t been so dark and wet.

“I don’t know what you think you’re up to, Crystal,” he said, “But you’re in a lot of trouble. I can help you.”

I nearly laughed. “I don’t know any Crystals,” I said. “How can you help me?”

“You’ve got enemies,” he said. “The bloke who died had the same enemies. You took something off him and now they’re looking for you. They’re rough people, Crystal, and you need my help.”

“I don’t know any dead blokes,” I said. “I didn’t take anything. What am I supposed to have nicked?”

“You’re wasting my time,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “Then I’ll go.” There wasn’t anywhere to go, but I didn’t think he’d know that.

“Wait,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere till you’ve heard what I have to say.” He fell silent. It was what I always thought. You tell them things. They’d rather eat worms before they tell you something back.

After a bit he said, “You still there?”

“I’m still here,” I said. “But not for long. I’m getting wet.”

“All right,” he said. “You won’t understand this but I’ll tell you anyway. The dead bloke was a systems analyst.”

“What’s one of them?” I asked.

“He was a computer expert.” Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex sighed. I could hear it from my end of the drain, Sound travels in a drain.

“He wrote programs for computers. He debugged programs. But most of all he wrote safe programs.” He sighed again.

“This doesn’t mean anything to you,” he said. “Why don’t you just come out of there like a good girl and give me the number.”

“What number?” I said. He was right. I didn’t understand. I was very confused. I thought I was in trouble because I’d taken the wallet. I tried to give it back but the woman wouldn’t take it. That was confusing. Whoever heard of anyone not taking money when it was offered.

“It doesn’t matter what number,” he said, sounding angry. “This bloke, this Philip Walker-Jones, he worked for some very funny types. These types don’t keep their dealings in books or ledgers anymore. Oh no. They stick them on computer tape, or discs where your average copper won’t know how to find them. It’s all bleeding high tech now.”

He sounded very fed up, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I was in a drain out of reach, or because he didn’t understand high tech any more than I did.

Just then I heard footsteps, and someone said, “What you doing down there, boss?”

“Taking a bleeding mudbath,” Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex said. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Did you lose her, then?” the other voice said.

“Course not. This is a new interview technique. Orders from on high: ‘Do it in a bleeding land-drain.’” He sounded so down I almost laughed.

“Are you still there?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Good-bye.” And I scrambled into the bend of the pipe and pulled my knees up to my chest so that I couldn’t be seen.

“Shit!” Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex said. “You’ve scared her off, you bleeding berk.”

I could hear him heaving and cursing, and then he said, “You’d better give me a pull out of here, Hibbard.”

There was some more heaving and cursing, and then I heard his voice from further off saying, “Where does this bleeding drain come out?”

“Buggered if I know, boss,” Hibbard said. “Could be the river for all I know.”

“Well, bleeding go and look,” Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex said. “And if you find her don’t lose her or I’ll have you back in uniform quicker than you can say ‘crystal balls.’”

“You sure you had the right one?” Hibbard said. He sounded reluctant to go tramping around the Trenches looking for the other end of a drain.

“You saw the description-there can’t be two like her.”

I didn’t like the way he said that, and I didn’t like the way he made fun of my name. I was freezing cold and soaked through, but I wasn’t going to come out for anyone with that sort of attitude.

So that’s where we stayed, him outside in the Trenches and me scrunched up at the end of the drain waiting for him to give up and go away. Sometimes he shone a torch in-to keep himself busy, I suppose. But I stayed stone-still and never made a sound.

Sometimes he paced up and down and muttered foul language to himself. He reminded me of our mum’s boyfriend when he thought I’d pinched something off him. We were all at it in those days. He’d pinch things out of our mum’s handbag and Dawn and me pinched things off him. We used to hide under the stairs, Dawn and me, while he raged around swearing he’d leather the lights out of us. Sometimes I’d hide from the truant officer too.

I’m used to hiding. All it takes is a bit of patience and a good breakfast in your belly. Don’t try it somewhere wet and cold, though-that calls for real talent and I wouldn’t recommend it to beginners.

At one stage Hibbard came back. He didn’t sound half so cocky now.

“She’ll be long gone,” he said. “I can’t find where this thing comes out”

“It’s got to come out somewhere,” Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex said. “Use your radio. Get more bodies. Make a bleeding effort.”

He stayed where he was, and I stayed where I was.

Another time, Hibbard said, “Why don’t we get in the Borough Engineers to dig this whole fucking site up and be done with it?”

And another time Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex said, “Comb the bleeding area. She could’ve dropped it or stashed it.” He was sounding cold and tired too.

“All this for a bleeding number,” he said. “And if we don’t get it our whole case goes down the bleeding bog. Why couldn’t the silly sod pick somewhere else to pop his clogs?”

Hibbard said, “Why are we so sure he had it on him? And why are we so sure she’s got it now?”

“We know he had it because he was bringing it to me,” Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex said. “And we know she got it because she swiped his wallet. We’ve got everything else back except that, and unless he had the number tattooed to his bleeding skull under his bleeding hair that’s where it is.”

“Couldn’t he have just had it in his head?” Hibbard said. “Remembered it.”

“Twenty-five bleeding digits? Do me a favor. He said it was written down and he said I could have it. You just want to go indoors for your dinner. Well, no one gets any dinner till I get that kid.”

So we all sat there without our dinners. Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex made everyone go hungry for nothing. Because I didn’t have any number twenty-five digits long.

But it’s no use worrying about what you don’t have, especially when what really worries you is what you might get. I was worried I might get pneumonia. If you get sick you can’t feed yourself. If you can’t feed yourself you get weak, and then either the officials grab you and put you in a hospital, or you die. I’ve seen it happen.

And I’ll tell you something else-a very funny thing happened when I got out of the drain. Well, it wasn’t a thing, and it didn’t really happen. But I thought it did, and it really frightened me.

I became an old woman.

It was when I looked round the bend and couldn’t see the circle of light at the end of the drain. I strained my ears and I couldn’t hear anything moving out there. And suddenly I thought I’d gone deaf and blind.

I tried to move, but I was so stiff with cold it took me ages to inch my way along to the opening. I didn’t care if Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex caught me. In fact I called out to him, and my voice had gone all weak and husky. I wanted him to be there, if you can believe that. I actually wanted him to help me, see, because I thought I’d gone blind, and I was scared.

But he wasn’t there, and it was dark and teeming down with rain. And I couldn’t straighten up. My back was bent, my knees were bent. There was no strength in my legs. I couldn’t have run if they’d set the dogs on me.

I was an old woman out there in the darklooking at the puddles in the mud, shuffling along, bent over. And I thought about Bloody Mary and the way she is first thing of a morning. There are some of them even older than she is who never have to bend over to look in dustbins because that’s the shape they always are.

Of course I come to my senses soon enough. I got my circulation back and I rubbed the stiffness out of my legs. And I knew it was truly dark. I hadn’t gone blind. But I did not stop being scared.

Even standing upright I felt helpless. Even with 743 pounds, 89 pence on me. The Law was after me. The bastards who beat up Little Marvin were after me. And I had nowhere to go. I was sick and old, and I needed help. What I needed, I thought, was a mark of my own.

Once having thought that, I became a little more cheerful. Not a lot, mind, because I hadn’t had anything to eat since that curry before daybreak, and being hungry brings on the blues like nothing else can. But I pulled myself together and went looking for my mark.

I didn’t know her name, but I knew where to find her. It was up the other end of the northern line. I couldn’t have walked it that night, not for love nor money. So I caught the tube to Chalk Farm, and I hung around outside one of those bookshops.

I thought I had her once, but she tightened her grip on her shopping and hurried away. It was a mistake I put down to hunger. Usually I don’t go wrong on middle-aged women.

But I saw her at last. She was wearing a fawn-colored raincoat and a tartan scarf. She had a green umbrella and she was struggling with her Christmas shopping.

I said, “Carry your bags for you, missus?”

She hesitated. I knew her. She’s the one who has her handbag open before you even ask. She doesn’t give you any mouth about finding a job or spending money on drink. She just looks sort of sorry and she watches you when you walk away.

She hesitated, but then she gave me a bag to carry. Not the heaviest one either. She’s nice. She wants to trust me. At least she doesn’t want to distrust me. I knew her. She was my mark.

She said, “Thank you very much. The car is just round the corner.”

I followed her, and stood in the rain while she fumbled with her umbrella and car keys. I put her bag in the boot and helped her with the other one.

She looked at me and hesitated again. Not that she’d dream of going off without giving me something. This one just wants to find a polite way of doing it.

She said, “Well, thanks very much,” and she started to fumble in her handbag again. I let her get her money out, and then I said, “I don’t want your money, missus, thanks all the same for the thought.”

She said, “Oh, but you must let me give you something.”

I just stood there shaking my head, looking pitiful.

“What is it?” she asked, with that sorry expression on her face.

It was the crucial time. I said. “I’ve got some money, missus, but I can’t spend it.” And I held out one of the fifty-pound notes.

She looked at the money and she looked at me.

I said, “I know what you’re thinking. That’s why I can’t spend it. I want to get some decent clothes because I can’t get a job looking like this. But every time I try they look at me like I stole the money and they go to call the Law. No one trusts people like me.”

She went on looking first at me and then at the money, and said, “I don’t mean to sound suspicious, but where did you get a fifty-pound note?”

“A nice lady give it to me,” I said. “She must’ve thought it was a fiver. She was a really nice lady because no one’s ever given me a fiver before. But when I went in to buy a cup of tea and some chips, the man went to call the Law and I saw she must have made a mistake.”

“I see,” she said.

“You don’t,” I said. “Having this money is worse than not having anything.”

“I can see that,” she said. “How can I help?”

I had her. “Please, missus,” I said. “Please help me spend it. All I want’s a good coat and some shoes. There’s a charity shop just round the corner and I been hanging around for ages but I can’t bring myself to go in on my own.”

She was good as gold, my lady mark. She bought me a big wool coat for only a couple of quid and she talked to the women in the shop while I looked for jeans and jerseys.

It was all quality stuff and probably it was all donated to the charity by women like her. They don’t give any old rubbish to charity. And I’ll tell you something else-my lady mark was having the time of her life. It was like a dream come true to her. Someone really and truly wanted her help with something she approved of. She didn’t have to worry I was spending her money on drink or drugs because it wasn’t her money and I was there under her nose spending it on warm clothes.

Even the women behind the counter had a sort of glow on them when I came out from behind the racks with my arms full. She’d probably told them my story in whispers when my back was turned. And that was why I really had needed her help. Because those nice ladies behind the counter would have chased me out if I’d gone in on my own. They’d have been afraid I’d pinch their charity.

It was still coming down in buckets when we left the shop. This time it was me carrying all the bags.

I was about to go when she said, “Look, don’t be insulted, but what you need is a hot bath and somewhere to change.” She said it in a rush as if she really was afraid of hurting my feelings.

“I live up the hill,” she said. “It won’t take any time at all.”

“Nah,” I said. “I’ll get your car seats all dirty.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Please.”

And I thought, why not? She deserved the satisfaction.

She ran me a hot bath and squirted loads of scented oil in. She gave me her shampoo and a whole heap of clean towels. And then my lovely lady mark left me alone in her bathroom.

I swear she had tears in her eyes when I came out in my new clothes.

“Crystal,” she said, “you look like a new person.” This was just what I wanted to hear.

“You look quite like my own daughter when she was younger,” she said. Which was a good thing because the Law and the bastards who beat Marvin up weren’t looking for someone who looked like my lady mark’s daughter. And no one would bat an eyelash if she had a fifty-pound note. My lady mark’s daughter would not turn into an old woman who had to bend over to root around in dustbins.

And nor, I thought, would I, if I could help it.

She cooked me eggs and potatoes for my tea, and when I left she gave me a fiver and her green umbrella.

It was a shame really to have pinched her soap. But you can’t break old habits all at once.

She even wanted to give me another ride in her car. But I wouldn’t let her. She was a lovely lady, but I didn’t think she’d understand about Dawn. Lovely ladies don’t.

I could give lessons about what to do when you find your mark, and the last one would be-don’t push your luck. Because if you push your luck and let them take over, they start giving you what they think you need instead of what you want. If my lady mark knew too much about Dawn and what was really going on, she’d have got in touch with the Social Services all over again. And far from being a lovely lady she’d have turned into an interfering old cow.

I was doing her a favor, really. I’m sure she’d rather be a lovely lady than an interfering old cow.

No one who saw me knocking at Dawn’s door in Padding-ton would have known I’d spent all day down a drain. Dawn didn’t.

“’Struth, Crystal,” she said when she opened up. “You look like one of those girls from that snob school up the hill from ours.”

I knew what she meant and I didn’t like it much. But I was lucky really. I’d caught her at a slack time when she was just lying around reading her comic and playing records. And now I was all clean and respectable, she didn’t mind if I sat on her bed.

“You still need your hair cut,” Dawn said.

She got out her scissors and manicure set, and we sat on her bed while she cut my hair and did my nails. Dawn could be a beautician if she wanted. The trouble is she’d never stand for the training and the money wouldn’t be enough. She’s used to her creature comforts now, is Dawn.

It was a bit like the old days-Dawn and me together listening to records, and her fiddling with my hair. I didn’t want to spoil it but I had to ask about the watch.

Because when I was in the lovely lady’s bathroom I’d had another search through Philip Walker-Jones’s wallet.

Dawn said, “What about the watch?” And she rubbed round my thumb with her little nail file.

“It was real gold,” I said, to remind her. “Your Christmas present.”

“I can’t wear a man’s watch,” she said. Dawn likes to be very dainty sometimes.

“Where is it?” I said.

“You want it back?” she asked. “Fine Christmas present if you want it back.”

I looked at her and she looked at me. Then she said, “Well, Crystal, if you must know, I was going to give it to my boyfriend for Christmas.”

“It wasn’t for him,” I said. “It was for you.”

“A man’s watch?” she said, and laughed. “I was going to get his name engraved on the back. ‘Eternal love, from Dawn.’ But there wasn’t room. There were all these numbers on the back, and the man at the jewelers said I’d lose too much gold having them rubbed down.”

“Hah!” I said. I felt clever. Because all it takes is some good hot food to help you think. And it had come to me in a flash just after I’d put down my last mouthful of egg and potato.

I said, “Bet there were twenty-five of them.”

“Loads of numbers,” she said. She put the nail file back in her manicure set.

“If you must know, Crystal,” she said, “I popped it. And I bought him a real gold cigarette lighter instead.”

And she gave me the pawn ticket.

She hadn’t got much for a solid gold watch. Dawn isn’t practical like I am, so the pawnbroker cheated her. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t her watch in the first place, and besides, it would cost me less to get back. If I wanted it back.

Poor Dawn. She needs me to take care of her. She doesn’t think she does because she thinks her boyfriend’s doing it. She’s not like me. She doesn’t want to look after herself. That’s not her job. And if I told her what I’d been through today to solve my own problems she’d say I was a fool.

But look at it this way-I’d given Detective Sergeant Michael Sussex the slip. I’d dressed up so he wouldn’t know me again if I ran slap-bang into him. Nor would Brainy Brian. So he couldn’t finger me to the bastards who beat up little Marvin. I’d had a bath and I’d had eggs and potatoes for my tea. I had enough money to sleep in a bed for as many nights as I wanted. And now I had the watch.

Or I could have it any time I wanted. But it was safer where it was. I still didn’t know why the number was so important but I was sure it would be worth something to me sooner or later.

I saw Dawn looking at me.

“Don’t get too cocky, Crystal,” she said. “You might look like a girl from the snob school, but you’re still just like me.”

That’s how much she knew.

Regarded as the person most responsible for introducing the new, realistic, and modem woman detective, MARCIA MULLER has three exciting series characters-Sharon McCone, in Eye of the Storm and others; Joanna Stark, in There Hangs the Knife and others; and Elena Oliverez in powerful novels like The Tree of Death. These three characters all exhibit a keen ability to understand themselves as well as their suspects. Ms. Muller lives in Sonoma, California.

Amorfina Angeles was terrified, and I could fully empathize with her. Merely living in the neighborhood would have terrified me-all the more so had I been harassed by members of one of its many street gangs.

Hers was a rundown side street in the extreme southeast of San Francisco, only blocks from the drug- and crime-infested Sunnydale public housing projects. There were bars over the windows and grilles on the doors of the small stucco houses; dead and vandalized cars stood at the broken curbs; in the weed-choked yard next door, a mangy guard dog of indeterminate breed paced and snarled. Fear was written on this street as plainly as the graffiti on the walls and fences. Fear and hopelessness and a dull resignation to a life that none of its residents would willingly have opted to lead.

I watched Mrs. Angeles as she crossed her tiny living room to the front window, pulled the edge of the curtain aside a fraction, and peered out at the street. She was no more than five feet tall, with rounded shoulders, sallow skin, and graying black hair that curled in short, unruly ringlets. Her shapeless flower-printed dress did little to conceal a body made soft and fleshy by bad food and too much childbearing. Although she was only forty, she moved like a much older woman.

Her attorney and my colleague, Jack Stuart of All Souls Legal Cooperative, had given me a brief history of his client when he’d asked me to undertake an investigation on her behalf. She was a Filipina who had emigrated to the states with her husband in search of their own piece of the good life that was reputed to be had here. But as with many of their countrymen and -women, things hadn’t worked out as the Angeleses had envisioned: first Amorfina’s husband had gone into the import-export business with a friend from Manila; the friend absconded two years later with Joe Angeles’s life savings. Then, a year after that, Joe was killed in a freak accident at a construction site where he was working. Amorfina and their six children were left with no means of support, and in the years since Joe’s death their circumstances had gradually been reduced to this two-bedroom rental cottage in one of the worst areas of the city.

Mrs. Angeles, Jack told me, had done the best she could for her family, keeping them off the welfare rolls with a daytime job at a Mission district sewing factory and nighttime work doing alterations. As they grew older, the children helped with part-time jobs. Now there were only two left at home: sixteen-year-old Alex and fourteen-year-old Isabel. It was typical of their mother, Jack said, that in the current crisis she was more concerned for them than for herself.

She turned from the window now, her face taut with fear, deep lines bracketing her full lips. I asked, “Is someone out there?”

She shook her head and walked wearily to the worn recliner opposite me. I occupied the place of honor on a red brocade sofa encased in the same plastic that doubtless had protected it long ago upon delivery from the store. “I never see anybody,” she said. “Not till it’s too late.”

“Mrs. Angeles, Jack Stuart told me about your problem, but I’d like to hear it in your own words-from the beginning, if you would.”

She nodded, smoothing her bright dress over her plump thighs. “It goes back a long time, to when Benny Crespo was… they called him the Prince of Omega Street, you know.”

Hearing the name of her street spoken made me aware of its ironic appropriateness: the last letter of the Greek alphabet is symbolic of endings, and for most of the people living here, Omega Street was the end of a steady decline into poverty.

Mrs. Angeles went on, “Benny Crespo was Filipino. His gang controlled the drugs here. A lot of people looked up to him; he had power, and that don’t happen much with our people. Once I caught Alex and one of my older boys calling him a hero. I let them have it pretty good, you bet, and there wasn’t any more of that kind of talk around this house. I got no use for the gangs-Filipino or otherwise.”

“What was the name of Benny Crespo’s gang?”

“The Kabalyeros. That’s Tagalog for Knights.”

“Okay-what happened to Benny?”

“The house next door, the one with the dog-that was where Benny lived. He always parked his fancy Corvette out front, and people knew better than to mess with it. Late one night he was getting out of the car and somebody shot him. A drug burn, they say. After that the Kabalyeros decided to make the parking space a shrine to Benny. They roped it off, put flowers there every week. On All Saints Day and the other fiestas, it was something to see.”

“And that brings us to last March thirteenth,” I said.

Mrs. Angeles bit her lower lip and smoothed her dress again.

When she didn’t speak, I prompted her. “You’d just come home from work.”

“Yeah. It was late, dark. Isabel wasn’t here, and I got worried. I kept looking out the window, like a mother does.”

“And you saw…?”

“The guy who moved into the house next door after Benny got shot, Reg Dawson. He was black, one of a gang called the Victors. They say he moved into that house to show the Kabalyeros that the Victors were taking over their turf. Anyway, he drives up and stops a little way down the block. Waits there, revving his engine. People start showing up; the word’s been put out that something’s gonna go down. And when there’s a big crowd, Reg Dawson guns his car and drives right into Benny’s space, over the rope and the flowers.

“Well, that started one hell of a fight-Victors and Kabalyeros and folks from the neighborhood. And while it’s going on, Reg Dawson just stands there in Benny’s space acting macho. That’s when it happened, what I saw.”

“And what was that?”

She hesitated, wet her lips. “The leader of the Kabalyeros, Tommy Dragón-the Dragon, they call him-was over by the fence in front of Reg Dawson’s house, where you couldn’t see him unless you were really looking. I was, ’cause I was trying to see if Isabel was anyplace out there. And I saw Tommy Dragón point this gun at Reg Dawson and shoot him dead.”

“What did you do then?”

“Ran and hid in the bathroom. That’s where I was when the cops came to the door. Somebody’d told them I was in the window when it all went down and then ran away when Reg got shot. Well, what was I supposed to do? I got no use for the Kabalyeros or the Victors, so I told the truth. And now here I am in this mess.”

Mrs. Angeles had been slated to be the chief prosecution witness at Tommy Oragón’s trial this week. But a month ago the threats had started: anonymous letters and phone calls warning her against testifying. As the trial date approached, this had escalated into blatant intimidation: a fire was set in her trash can; someone shot out her kitchen window; a dead dog turned up on her doorstep. The previous Friday, Isabel had been accosted on her way home from the bus stop by two masked men with guns. And that had finally made Mrs. Angeles capitulate; in court yesterday, she’d refused to take the stand against Dragón.

The state needed her testimony; there were no other witnesses, Dragon insisted on his innocence, and the murder gun had not been found. The judge had tried to reason with Mrs. Angeles, then cited her for contempt-reluctantly, he said. “The court is aware that there have been threats made against you and your family,” he told her, “but it is unable to guarantee your protection.” Then he gave her forty-eight hours to reconsider her decision.

As it turned out, Mrs. Angeles had a champion in her employer. The owner of the sewing factory was unwilling to allow one of his long-term workers to go to jail or to risk her own and her family’s safety. He brought her to All Souls, where he held a membership in our legal-services plan, and this morning Jack Stuart had asked me to do something for her.

What? I’d asked. What could I do that the SFPD couldn’t to stop vicious harassment by a street gang?

Well, he said, get proof against whoever was threatening her so they could be arrested and she’d feel free to testify.

Sure, Jack, I said. And exactly why hadn’t the police been able to do anything about the situation?

His answer was not surprising: lack of funds. Intimidation of prosecution witnesses in cases relating to gang violence was becoming more and more prevalent and open in San Francisco, but the city did not have the resources to protect them. An old story nowadays-not enough money to go around.

Mrs. Angeles was watching my face, her eyes tentative. As I looked back at her, her gaze began to waver. She’d experienced too much disappointment in her life to expect much in the way of help from me.

I said, “Yes, you certainly are in a mess. Let’s see if we can get you out of it.”

We talked for a while longer, and I soon realized that Amor-as she asked me to call her-held the misconception that there was some way I could get the contempt citation dropped. I asked her if she’d known beforehand that a balky witness could be sent to jail. She shook her head. A person had a right to change her mind, didn’t she? When I set her straight on that, she seemed to lose interest in the conversation; it was difficult to get her to focus long enough to compile a list of people I should talk with. I settled for enough names to keep me occupied for the rest of the afternoon.

I was ready to leave when angry voices came from the front steps. A young man and woman entered. They stopped speaking when they saw the room was occupied, but their faces remained set in lines of contention. Amor hastened to introduce them as her son and daughter, Alex and Isabel. To them she explained that I was a detective “helping with the trouble with the judge.”

Alex, a stocky youth with a tracery of moustache on his upper lip, seemed disinterested. He shrugged out of his high school letter jacket and vanished through a door to the rear of the house. Isabel studied me with frank curiosity. She was a slender beauty, with black hair that fell in soft curls to her shoulders; her features had a delicacy lacking in those of her mother and brother. Unfortunately, bright blue eyeshadow and garish orange lipstick detracted from her natural good looks, and she wore an imitation leather outfit in a particularly gaudy shade of purple. However, she was polite and well-spoken as she questioned me about what I could do to help her mother. Then, after a comment to Amor about an assignment that was due the next day, she left through the door her brother had used.

I turned to Amor, who was fingering the leaves of a philodendron plant that stood on a stand near the front window. Her posture was stiff, and when I spoke to her she didn’t meet my eyes. Now I was aware of a tension in her that hadn’t been there before her children returned home. Anxiety, because of the danger her witnessing the shooting had placed them in? Or something else? It might have had to do with the quarrel they’d been having, but weren’t arguments between siblings fairly common? They certainly had been in my childhood home in San Diego.

I told Amor I’d be back to check on her in a couple of hours. Then, after a few precautionary and probably unnecessary reminders about locking doors and staying clear of windows, I went out into the chill November afternoon.

The first name on my list was Madeline Dawson, the slain gang leader’s widow. I glanced at the house next door and saw with some relief that the guard dog no longer paced in its yard. When I pushed through the gate in the chain link fence, the creature’s whereabouts quickly became apparent: a bellowing emanated from the small, shabby cottage. I went up a broken walk bordered by weeds, climbed the sagging front steps, and pressed the bell. A woman’s voice yelled for the dog to shut up, then a door slammed somewhere within, muffling the barking. Footsteps approached, and the woman called, “Yes, who is it?”

“My name’s Sharon McCone, from All Souls Legal Cooperative. I’m investigating the threats your neighbor, Mrs. Angeles, has been receiving.”

A couple of locks turned and the door opened on its chain. The face that peered out at me was very thin and pale, with wisps of red hair straggling over the high forehead; the Dawson marriage had been an interracial one, then. The woman stared at me for a moment before she asked, “What threats?”

“You don’t know that Mrs. Angeles and her children have been threatened because she’s to testify against the man who shot your husband?”

She shook her head and stepped back, shivering slightly-whether from the cold outside or the memory of the murder, I couldn’t tell. “I… don’t get out much these days.”

“May I come in, talk with you about the shooting?”

She shrugged, unhooked the chain, and opened the door. “I don’t know what good it will do. Amor’s a damned fool for saying she’d testify in the first place.”

“Aren’t you glad she did? The man killed your husband.”

She shrugged again and motioned me into a living room the same size as that in the Angeles house. All resemblance stopped there, however. Dirty glasses and dishes, full ashtrays, piles of newspapers and magazines covered every surface; dust balls the size of rats lurked under the shabby Danish modern furniture. Madeline Dawson picked up a heap of tabloids from the couch and dumped it on the floor, then indicated I should sit there and took a hassock for herself.

I said, “You are glad that Mrs. Angeles was willing to testify, aren’t you?”

“Not particularly.”

“You don’t care if your husband’s killer is convicted or not?”

“Reg was asking to be killed. Not that I wouldn’t mind seeing the Dragon get the gas chamber-he may not have killed Reg, but he killed plenty of other people-”

“What did you say?” I spoke sharply, and Madeline Dawson blinked in surprise. It made me pay closer attention to her eyes; they were glassy, their pupils dilated. The woman, I realized, was high.

“I said the Dragon killed plenty of other people.”

“No, about him not killing Reg.”

“Did I say that?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t imagine why. I mean, Amor must know. She was up there in the window watching for sweet Isabel like always.”

“You don’t sound as if you like Isabel Angeles.”

“I’m not fond of flips in general. Look at the way they’re taking over this area. Daly City’s turning into another Manila. AD they do is buy, buy, buy-houses, cars, stuff by the truckload. You know, there’s a joke that the first three words their babies learn are ‘Mama, Papa, and Serramonte.’” Serramonte was a large shopping mall south of San Francisco.

The roots of the resentment she voiced were clear to me. One of our largest immigrant groups today, the Filipinos are highly westernized and by and large better educated and more affluent than other recently arrived Asians-or many of their neighbors, black or white. Isabel Angeles, for all her bright, cheap clothing and excessive makeup, had behind her a tradition of industriousness and upward mobility that might help her to secure a better place in the world than Madeline Dawson could aspire to.

I wasn’t going to allow Madeline’s biases to interfere with my line of questioning. I said, “About Dragón not having shot your husband-”

“Hey, who knows? Or cares? The bastard’s dead, and good riddance.”

“Why good riddance?”

“The man was a pig. A pusher who cheated and gouged people-people like me who need the stuff to get through. You think I was always like this, lady? No way. I was a nice Irish Catholic girl from the Avenues when Reg got his hands on me. Turned me on to coke and a lot of other things when I was only thirteen. Liked his pussy young, Reg did. But then I got old-I’m all of nineteen now-and I needed more and more stuff just to keep going, and all of a sudden Reg didn’t even see me anymore. Yeah, the man was a pig, and I’m glad he’s dead.”

“But you don’t think Dragón killed him.”

She sighed in exasperation, “I don’t know what I think. It’s just that I always supposed that when Reg got it it would be for something more personal than driving his car into a stupid shrine in a parking space. You know what I mean? But what does it matter who killed him, anyway?”

“It matters to Tommy Dragón, for one.”

She dismissed the accused man’s life with a flick of her hand. “Like I said, the Dragon’s a killer. He might as well die for Reg’s murder as for any of the others. In a way it’d be the one good thing Reg did for the world.”

Perhaps in a certain primitive sense she was right, but her offhandedness made me uncomfortable. I changed the subject. “About the threats to Mrs. Angeles-which of the Kabalyeros would be behind them?”

“All of them. The guys in the gangs, they work together.”

But I knew enough about the structure of street gangs-my degree in sociology from UC Berkeley hadn’t been totally worthless-to be reasonably sure that wasn’t so. There is usually one dominant personality, supported by two or three lieutenants; take away these leaders, and the followers become ineffectual, purposeless. If I could turn up enough evidence against the leaders of the Kabalyeros to have them arrested, the harassment would stop.

I asked, “Who took over the Kabalyeros after Dragón went to jail?”

“Hector Bulis.”

It was a name that didn’t appear on my list; Amor had claimed not to know who was the current head of the Filipino gang. “Where can I find him?”

“There’s a fast-food joint over on Geneva, near the Cow Palace. Fat Robbie’s. That’s where the Kabalyeros hang out.”

The second person I’d intended to talk with was the young man who had reportedly taken over the leadership of the Victors after Dawson’s death, Jimmy Willis. Willis could generally be found at a bowling alley, also on Geneva Avenue near the Cow Palace. I thanked Madeline for taking the time to talk with me and headed for the Daly City line.

The first of the two establishments that I spotted was Fat Robbie’s, a cinderblock-and-glass relic of the early sixties whose specialties appeared to be burgers and ehicken-in-a-basket. I turned into a parking lot that was half-full of mostly shabby cars and left my MG beside one of the defunct drive-in speaker poles.

The interior of the restaurant took me back to my high school days: orange leatherette booths beside the plate glass windows; a long Formica counter with stools; laminated color pictures of disgusting-looking food on the wall above the pass-through counter from the kitchen. Instead of a jukebox there was a bank of video games along one wall. Three Filipino youths in jeans and denim jackets gathered around one called “Invader!” The Kabalyeros, I assumed.

I crossed to the counter with only a cursory glance at the trio, sat, and ordered coffee from a young waitress who looked to be Eurasian. The Kabalyeros didn’t conceal their interest in me; they stared openly, and after a moment one of them said something that sounded like “tick-tick,” and they all laughed nastily. Some sort of Tagalog obscenity, I supposed. I ignored them, sipping the dishwater-weak coffee, and after a bit they went back to their game.

I took out the paperback that I keep in my bag for protective coloration and pretended to read, listening to the few snatches of conversation that drifted over from the three. I caught the names of two: Sal and Hector-the latter presumably Bulis, the gang’s leader. When I glanced covertly at him, I saw he was tallish and thin, with long hair caught back in a ponytail; his features were razor-sharp and slightly skewed, creating the impression of a perpetual sneer. The trio kept their voices low, and although I strained to hear, I could make out nothing of what they were saying. After about five minutes Hector turned away from the video machine. With a final glance at me he motioned to his companions, and they all left the restaurant.

I waited until they’d driven away in an old green Pontiac before I called the waitress over and showed her my identification. “The three men who just left,” I said. “Is the tall one Hector Bulis?”

Her lips formed a little “O” as she stared at the ID. Finally she nodded.

“May I talk with you about them?”

She glanced toward the pass-through to the kitchen. “My boss, he don’t like me talking with the customers when I’m supposed to be working.”

“Take a break. Just five minutes.”

Now she looked nervously around the restaurant. “I shouldn’t-”

I slipped a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and showed it to her. “Just five minutes.”

She still seemed edgy, but fear lost out to greed. “Okay, but I don’t want anybody to see me talking to you. Go back to the restroom-it’s through that door by the video games. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”

I got up and found the ladies’ room. It was tiny, dimly lit, with a badly cracked mirror. The walls were covered with a mass of graffiti; some of it looked as if it had been painted over and had later worked its way back into view through the fading layers of enamel. The air in there was redolent of grease, cheap perfume, and stale cigarette and marijuana smoke. I leaned against the sink as I waited.

The young Eurasian woman appeared a few minutes later. “Bastard gave me a hard time,” she said. “Tried to tell me I’d already taken my break.”

“What’s your name?”

“Anna Smith.”

“Anna, the three men who just left-do they come in here often?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Keep pretty much to themselves, don’t they?”

“It’s more like other people stay away from them.” She hesitated. “They’re from one of the gangs; you don’t mess with them. That’s why I wanted to talk with you back here.”

“Have you ever heard them say anything about Tommy Dragón?”

“The Dragon? Sure. He’s in jail; they say he was framed.”

Of course they would claim that. “What about a Mrs. Angeles-Amorfina Angeles?”

“… Not that one, no.”

“What about trying to intimidate someone? Setting fires, going after someone with a gun?”

“Uh-uh. That’s gang business; they keep it pretty close. But it wouldn’t surprise me. Filipinos-I’m part Filipina myself, my mom met my dad when he was stationed at Subic Bay-they’ve got this saying, kumukuló ang dugó. It means ‘the blood is boiling.’ They can get pretty damn mad, ’specially the men. So stuff like what you said-sure they do it.”

“Do you work on Fridays?”

“Yeah, two to ten.”

“Did you see any of the Kabalyeros in here last Friday around six?” That was the time when Isabel had been accosted.

Anna Smith scrunched up her face in concentration. “Last Friday… oh, yeah, sure. That was when they had the big meeting, all of them.”

“All of them?”

“Uh-huh. Started around five thirty, went on a couple of hours. My boss, he was worried something heavy was gonna go down, but the way it turned out, all he did was sell a lot of food.”

“What was this meeting about?”

“Had to do with the Dragon, who was gonna be character witnesses at the trial, what they’d say,”

The image of the three I’d seen earlier-or any of their ilk-as character witnesses was somewhat ludicrous, but I supposed in Tommy Dragon’s position you took what you could get. “Are you sure they were all there?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And no one at the meeting said anything about trying to keep Mrs. Angeles from testifying?”

“No. That lawyer the Dragon’s got, he was there too.”

Now that was odd. Why had Dragon’s public defender chosen to meet with his witnesses in a public place? I could think of one good reason: he was afraid of them, didn’t want them in his office. But what if the Kabalyeros had set the time and place-as an alibi for when Isabel was to be assaulted?

“I better get back to work,” Anna Smith said. “Before the boss comes looking for me.”

I gave her the twenty dollars. “Thanks for your time.”

“Sure.” Halfway out the door she paused, frowning. “I hope I didn’t get any of the Kabalyeros in trouble.”

“You didn’t.”

“Good. I kind of like them. I mean, they push dope and all, but these days, who doesn’t?”

These days, who doesn’t? I thought. Good Lord.…

The Starlight Lanes was an old-fashioned bowling alley girded by a rough cliff face and an auto dismantler’s yard. The parking lot was crowded, so I left the MG around back by the garbage cans. Inside, the lanes were brightly lit and noisy with the sound of crashing pins, rumbling balls, shouts, and groans. I paused by the front counter and asked where I might find Jimmy Willis. The woman behind it directed me to a lane at the far end.

Bowling alleys-or lanes, as the new upscale bowler prefers to call them-are familiar territory to me. Up until a few years ago my favorite uncle Jim was a top player on the pro tour. The Starlight Lanes reminded me of the ones where Jim used to practice in San Diego-from the racks full of tired-looking rental shoes to the greasy-spoon coffeeshop smells to the molded plastic chairs and cigarette-burned scorekeeping consoles. I walked along, soaking up the ambience-some people would say the lack of it-until I came to lane 32 and spotted an agile young black man bowling alone. Jimmy Willis was a left-hander, and his ball hooked out until it hung on the edge of the channel, then hooked back with deadly precision. I waited in the spectator area, admiring his accuracy and graceful form. His concentration was so great that he didn’t notice me until he’d finished the last frame and retrieved his ball.

“You’re quite a bowler,” I said. “What’s your average?”

He gave me a long look before he replied, “Two hundred.”

“Almost good enough to turn pro,”

“That’s what I’m looking to do.”

Odd, for the head of a street gang that dealt in drugs and death. “You ever hear of Jim McCone?” I asked.

“Sure. Damned good in his day.”

“He’s my uncle.”

“No kidding.” Willis studied me again, now as if looking for a resemblance.

Rapport established, I showed him my ID and explained that I wanted to talk about Reg Dawson’s murder. He frowned, hesitated, then nodded. “Okay, since you’re Jim McCone’s niece, but you’ll have to buy me a beer.”

“Deal.”

Willis toweled off his ball, stowed it and his shoes in their bag, and led me to a typical smoke-filled, murkily lighted bowling alley bar, He took one of the booths while I fetched us a pair of Buds.

As I slid into the booth I said, “What can you tell me about the murder?”

“The way I see it, Dawson was asking for it.”

So he and Dawson’s wife were of a mind about that. “I can understand what you mean, but it seems strange, coming from you. I hear you were his friend, that you took over the Victors after his death.”

“You heard wrong on both counts. Yeah, I was in the Victors, and when Dawson bought it, they tried to get me to take over. But by then I’d figured out-never mind how, doesn’t matter-that I wanted out of that life. Ain’t nothing in it but what happened to Benny Crespo and Dawson-or what’s gonna happen to the Dragon. So I decided to put my hand to something with a future.” He patted the bowling bag that sat on the banquette beside him. “Got a job here now-not much, but my bowling’s free and I’m on my way.”

“Good for you. What about Dragon-do you think he’s guilty?”

Willis hesitated, looking thoughtful. “Why you ask?”

“Just wondering.”

“… Well, to tell you the truth, I never did believe the Dragon shot Reg.”

“Who did, then?”

He shrugged.

I asked him if he’d heard about the Kabalyeros trying to intimidate the chief prosecution witness. When he nodded, I said, “They also threatened the life of her daughter last Friday.”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Wish I could of seen that. Kind of surprises me, though. That lawyer of Dragón’s, he found out what the Kabalyeros were up to, read them the riot act. Said they’d put Dragón in the gas chamber for sure. So they called it off.”

“When was this?”

“Week, ten days ago.”

Long before Isabel had been accosted. Before the dead dog and shooting incidents, too. “Are you sure?”

“It’s what I hear. You know, in a way I’m surprised that they’d go after Mrs. Angeles at all.”

“Why?”

“The Filipinos have this macho tradition. ’Specially when it comes to their women. They don’t like them messed with, ’specially by non-Filipinos. So how come they’d turn around and mess with one of their own?”

“Well, her testimony would jeopardize the life of one of their fellow gang members. It’s an extreme situation.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

Jimmy Willis and I talked a bit more, but he couldn’t-or wouldn’t-offer any further information. I bought him a second beer, then went out to where I’d left my car.

And came face-to-face with Hector Bulis and the man called Sal.

Sal grabbed me by the arm, twisted it behind me, and forced me up against the latticework fence surrounding the garbage cans. The stench from them filled my nostrils; Sal’s breath rivaled it in foulness. I struggled, but he got hold of my other arm and pinned me tighter. I looked around, saw no one, nothing but the cliff face and the high board fence of the auto dismantler’s yard. Bulis approached, flicking open a switchblade, his twisty face intense. I stiffened, went very still, eyes on the knife.

Bulis placed the tip of the knife against my jawbone, then traced a line across my cheek. “Don’t want to hurt you, bitch,” he said. “You do what I say, I won’t have to mess you up.”

The Tagalog phrase that Anna Smith had translated for me-kumukuló ang dugó-flashed through my mind. The blood is boiling. I sensed Bulis’s was-and dangerously high.

I wet my dry lips, tried to keep my voice from shaking as I said, “What do you want me to do?”

“We hear you’re asking around about Dawson’s murder, trying to prove the Dragon did it.”

“That’s not-”

“We want you to quit. Go back to your own part of town and leave our business alone.”

“Whoever told you that is lying. I’m only trying to help the Angeles family.”

“They wouldn’t lie.” He moved the knife’s tip to the hollow at the base of my throat. I felt it pierce my skin-a mere pinprick, but frightening enough.

When I could speak, I did so slowly, phrasing my words carefully. “What I hear is that Dragón is innocent. And that the Kabalyeros aren’t behind the harassment of the Angeleses-at least not for a week or ten days.”

Bulis exchanged a look with his companion-quick, unreadable.

“Someone’s trying to frame you,” I added, “Just like they did Dragón.”

Bulis continued to hold the knife to my throat, his hand firm. His gaze wavered, however, as if he was considering what I’d said. After a moment he asked, “All right-who?”

“I’m not sure, but I think I can find out.”

He thought a bit longer, then let his arm drop and snapped the knife shut. “I’ll give you till this time tomorrow,” he said. Then he stuffed the knife into his pocket, motioned for Sal to let go of me, and the two quickly walked away.

I sagged against the latticework fence, feeling my throat where the knife had pricked it. It had bled a little, but the flow already was clotting, My knees were weak and my breath came fast, but I was too caught up in the possibilities to panic. There were plenty of them-and the most likely was the most unpleasant.

Kumukuló ang dugó. The blood is boiling…

Two hours later I was back at the Angeles house on Omega Street. When Amor admitted me, the tension I’d felt in her earlier had drained. Her body sagged, as if the extra weight she carried had finally proved to be too much for her frail bones; the skin of her face looked flaccid, like melting putty; her eyes were sunken and vague. After she shut the door and motioned for me to sit, she sank into the recliner, expelling a sigh. The house was quiet-too quiet.

“I have a question for you,” I said. “What does ‘tick-tick’ mean in Tagalog?”

Her eyes flickered with dull interest. “Tiktík.” She corrected my pronunciation. “It’s a word for detective.”

Ever since Hector Bulis and Sal had accosted me I’d suspected as much.

“Where did you hear that?” Amor asked.

“One of the Kabalyeros said it when I went to Fat Robbie’s earlier. Someone had told them I was a detective, probably described me. Whoever it was said I was trying to prove Tommy Dragón killed Reg Dawson.”

“Why would-”

“More to the point, who would? At the time, only four people knew that I’m a detective.”

She wet her lips, but remained silent.

“Amor, the night of the shooting, you were standing in your front window, watching for Isabel.”

“Yes.”

“Do you do that often?”

“… Yes.”

“Because Isabel is often late coming home. Because you’re afraid she may have gotten into trouble.”

“A mother worries-”

“Especially when she’s given good cause. Isabel is running out of control, isn’t she?”

“No, she-”

“Amor, when I spoke with Madeline Dawson, she said you were standing in the window watching for ‘sweet Isabel, like always.’ She didn’t say ‘sweet’ in a pleasant way. Later, Jimmy Willis implied that your daughter is not… exactly a vulnerable young girl.”

Amor’s eyes sparked. “The Dawson woman is jealous.”

“Of course she is. There’s something else: when I asked the waitress at Fat Robbie’s if she’d ever overheard the Kabalyews discussing you, she said, ‘No, not that one.’ It didn’t register at the time, but when I talked to her again a little while ago, she told me Isabel is the member of your family they discuss. They say she’s wild, runs around with the men in the gangs. You know that, so does Alex. And so does Madeline Dawson. She just told me the first man Isabel became involved with was her husband.”

Amor seemed to shrivel. She gripped the arms of the chair, white-knuckled.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” I asked more gently.

She lowered her eyes, nodding. When she spoke her voice was ragged. “I don’t know what to do with her anymore. Ever since that Reg Dawson got to her, she’s been different, not my girl at all.”

“Is she on drugs?”

“Alex says no, but I’m not so sure.”

I let it go; it didn’t really matter. “When she came home earlier,” I said, “Isabel seemed very interested in me. She asked questions, looked me over carefully enough to be able to describe me to the Kabalyeros. She was afraid of what I might find out. For instance, that she wasn’t accosted by any men with guns last Friday.”

“She was!”

“No, Amor. That was just a story, to make it look as if your life-and your children’s-were in danger if you testified. In spite of what you said early on, you haven’t wanted to testify against Tommy Dragón from the very beginning.

“When the Kabalyeros began harassing you a month ago, you saw that as the perfect excuse not to take the stand. But you didn’t foresee that Dragón’s lawyer would convince the gang to stop the harassment. When that happened, you and Isabel, and probably Alex, too, manufactured incidents-the shot-out window, the dead dog on the doorstep, the men with the guns-to make it look as if the harassment was still going on.”

“Why would I? They’re going to put me in jail.”

“But at the time you didn’t know they could do that-or that your employer would hire me. My investigating poses yet another danger to you and your family.”

“This is… why would I do all that?”

“Because basically you’re an honest woman, a good woman. You didn’t want to testify because you knew Dragón didn’t shoot Dawson. It’s my guess you gave the police his name because it was the first one that came to mind.”

“I had no reason to-”

“You had the best reason in the world: a mother’s desire to protect her child.”

She was silent, sunken eyes registering despair and defeat.

I kept on, even though I hated to inflict further pain on her. “The day he died, Dawson had let the word out that he was going to desecrate Benny’s space. The person who shot him knew there would be fighting and confusion, counted on that as a cover. The killer hated Dawson-”

“Lots of people did.”

“But only one person you’d want to protect so badly that you’d accuse an innocent man.”

“Leave my mother alone. She’s suffered enough on account of what I did.”

I turned. Alex had come into the room so quietly I hadn’t noticed. Now he moved midway between Amor and me, a Saturday night special clutched in his right hand.

The missing murder weapon.

I tensed, but one look at his face told me he didn’t intend to use it. Instead he raised his arm and extended the gun, grip first.

“Take this,” he said. “I never should of bought it. Never should of used it. I hated Dawson on account of what he did to my sister. But killing him wasn’t worth what we’ve all gone through since.”

I glanced at Amor; tears were trickling down her face.

Alex said, “Mama, don’t cry. I’m not worth it.”

When she spoke, it was to me. “What will happen to him?”

“Nothing like what might have happened to Dragón; Alex is a juvenile. You, however-”

“I don’t care about myself, only my children.”

Maybe that was the trouble. She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions-and in the end doing them irreparable harm.

There were times when I felt thankful that I had no children. And there were times when I was thankful that Jack Stuart was a very good criminal lawyer. This was a time when I was thankful on both counts. I went to the phone, called Jack, and asked him to come over here. At least I could leave the Angeles family in good legal hands.

After he arrived, I went out into the gathering dusk. An old yellow VW was pulling out of Benny’s space. I walked down there and stood on the curb. Nothing remained of the shrine to Benny Crespo. Nothing remained to show that blood had boiled and been shed here. It was merely a stretch of cracked asphalt, splotched with oil drippings, Uttered with the detritus of urban life. I stared at it for close to a minute, then turned away from the bleak landscape of Omega Street.

DOROTHY DAVIS’s first crime novel was The Judas Cat, published in 1949, Since that time she achieved an enviable reputation for her ability to write novels and stories with both believable rural and urban settings. Her more than twenty novels include at least four that have been nominated for the Edgar Award and she was made a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1984. Most critics consider A Gentle Murderer to be her best novel, and one of the best crime novels of the post-World War II era.

Over the ring of the doorbell came the cry, “Help me, Julie… Let me in!”

Julie, out of bed before she was rightly awake, pulled on her robe and ran, barefoot, to the front of the shop. It was half-past one in the morning. She unbolted the door and opened it on the latch. Her upstairs neighbor, Rose Rodriguez, was shivering in a silvery dress that glowed in the stark Manhattan street light. Julie let her in, then bolted the door and lighted a lamp.

“I don’t know where Juanita is. She’s not in her bed. I thought maybe she comes to you?”

Julie shook her head. “Sit down while I get my slippers.”

The chair creaked with its burden. In the years Julie Hayes had occupied the shop, the ground floor apartment on West 44th Street, Mrs. Rodriguez had put on weight. Her one child, Juanita, had grown from a string bean to puberty with a sudden promising beauty.

Mrs. Rodriguez pointed at the row of dolls when Julie returned. They sat on a table, their backs against the wall. “They are Juanita’s, no?”

“We’ve been mending them,” Julie said. “Now tell me what’s with Juanita?”

“It’s boys. I know it’s boys.”

You ought to know, Julie thought. It was apparent Mrs. Rodriguez had just returned from an evening out. Her husband wouldn’t know about it. Juanita would. Julie was not a great hater, but she would have been hard put to find a kind word for the woman now twisting off the flashy rings from her fingers. “Where do you think she is? Let’s start with that.”

“She wants to go to her friend Elena’s for supper. I say okay, but you be home by nine o’clock. The whole holiday weekend and she hasn’t done her homework.”

“Did she come home?”

“Julie…” The woman’s face became a mask of contrition. “She has a very good father but not so good mother. You know?”

Julie ignored the ploy for sympathy. “Isn’t it possible she tried to call you? To ask if she could stay overnight? And then stayed anyway when she couldn’t reach you?”

“She knows better. Papa will not give permission. He will kill me…” The woman began to sob.

“Stop that!” Julie shouted. “Let’s call her friend’s house right now.”

“You know her number, Julie?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t even know her name except Elena.”

“Then you can’t do anything till morning. I can call the police…”

“No. No police. They come and ask questions.”

“Yeah.”

Mrs. Rodriguez brushed away green tears. Her mascara was running. “You are right. She stays with Elena, I think. That’s what I tell Papa if he looks and sees she’s not in her bed. A wild man.”

“First thing in the morning, call the school. Ask for the principal. Whoever you get, find out Elena’s last name, her phone number…”

The woman laid her hand on Julie’s. “Please, will you call? Say it’s for me, Señora Rodriguez. Say I don’t speak very good English. That’s the truth, no?”

“Mrs. Rodriguez…”

“Please, you call me Rose. We are friends, no?”

Julie could not go back to sleep. She listened for Juanita’s father to come home from work, a tired, bemused man who moonlighted on a second job while his wife moonlighted in her fashion. Juanita had grown up a silent, angry child who beat her dolls and pulled off their arms and legs. Now she and Julie were putting them together again with glue and heavy thread, a Christmas project for the really poor. It had taken Julie a long time to make her smile, then laugh, to make her see the dolls as little Juanitas. A lot of her own angry childhood had gone into the making.

Mr. Rodriguez came home. Julie waited for the explosion, the reverberations of which would run through the building. But none came. The woman would have persuaded him the child was asleep in her bed. Julie sat up and phoned the local precinct. The only complaints involving children were drug related: downtown bookings, parents contacted.

“How about the prostitutes-any young ones?” The wildest possibility.

“They’re all young-and as old as Magdalene,” the desk sergeant said. Then: “This wasn’t a sweep night, Julie.”

Nothing came of inquiries to the local hospitals.

Julie lay back and thought about when she had last seen the youngster. Late afternoon yesterday. Probably when she was coming home to ask permission to go to Elena’s. What was she wearing besides the red, white, and green streamers? Julie couldn’t remember. The Italian colors were for the Columbus Day Street Fair. Nor could she remember Juanita’s ever mentioning Elena. She was only beginning to make friends. So, thank God for Elena. Sleep finally came.

The girl opened her eyes. She seemed to be dreaming of waking up, but she had to be still asleep. She was lying in a huge, strange bed under a blanket with her clothes on. The room was dark except for a patch of gray light in the ceiling. Curled up on her side, her thumb in her mouth, she stared at the light. It looked more like a sheet floating up there, but the flickering lights of a plane appeared and moved quickly out of sight again. She heard the roar go away. It was a skylight in the ceiling, something she had seen only in a movie.

She tried to wake up. She bit her thumb, and when it hurt she knew that she was already awake. Then she remembered what had happened to her before the sleep: the woman and a man in the dirty lobby of an old theater where she had gone to see the puppets. At the fair the woman had told her about them and promised to show her how they worked. She had wanted to learn how to make puppets and how to make them act. The woman said she was a natural. She and Julie might even use the dolls and make their own puppet show. But there weren’t any puppets, and she knew the minute the door had closed behind her that she should never, never have gone there. The woman grabbed her and covered her mouth when she started to scream; the man held her legs and roped them together, then knocked them out from under her, sat on her, pinned her arm down, and must have stuck a needle in her. The place in the hollow of her arm hurt now when she touched it. She distinctly heard him say, “Five minutes.” She tried to scratch and bite. The man swore at her and the woman said, “For Christ’s sake, Danny, do you want her looking like a battered child?” Her memory stopped right there. Now the important thing was she had to go to the bathroom.

She inched her way to the edge of the bed in the direction she was facing. Something white stood on the floor a few feet from the bed-a bucket, she made out after a few seconds of study. She would have to use it, and maybe that was what it was there for. She crawled to it. It seemed safer to stay close to the floor. She wondered if her shoes were in the bed but didn’t think so. She squatted over the bucket but nothing happened. While she waited she made out the shapes of some scary figures on the other side of the bed-a lot of chalky white people just standing. They seemed to be moving toward her. She tried to cry out, but couldn’t, and her legs were shaking. She was sure she was going to fall. She managed not to, and the figures didn’t come round the bed. They weren’t even moving. Statues? If that was what they were, could one of them be the Blessed Virgin? “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” She heard her own voice mumbling the prayer, then the beginning trickle of her water, then the gush, noisy in the pail.

She had just finished when the door opened behind her and sent a splash of light across the room. The man came in and lit a lamp on a table near the door.

“Figured out what that was for, did you? You’re a smart girl.”

She made no sound or move.

“Get back into bed and stay there till she brings your breakfast. I don’t want you messing round the studio. Do you know what a studio is? It’s where artists work.”

If she ran for the door, what would happen? He was too close to it and she couldn’t run. She couldn’t even move. Only her heart bumped inside her.

“Did you hear me? Into bed!”

“No,”

He grinned at her and took the hypodermic needle from his pocket.

She lunged, stumbling, toward the bed.

The guidance counselor, Dr. Alverez, sent Elena Cruz back to her classroom. Julie used the counselor’s phone to call Mrs. Rodriguez and tell her the news was not good. “You’d better waken your husband and then call the police, nine one one. Juanita did not go to Elena’s house at all last night. Elena was at her aunt’s house for dinner. In other words, Juanita has been missing since you last saw her. You simply must call the police.”

“Julie, please!” The woman’s voice rose hysterically.

“I’ll call you later,” Julie said and hung up.

The counselor was watching Julie with an appraising eye. “You know, don’t you, you’re the best thing that ever happened to Juanita.”

“Doesn’t help much now, does it?”

“If there’s anyone she’ll get in touch with it’s you.”

“So if I don’t hear from her, where is she? What’s the worst possibility you can think of, doctor?”

The counselor gave an enormous sigh. “That she was abducted. But if she was, she must have set herself up for it willingly-the lie about dinner at Elena’s.”

“Her mother thinks it’s all about boys,” Julie said.

“I wish it were. Ridiculous of me to say that, but the boys are a lot more interested in Juanita than she is in the boys.”

“Do you know what her home situation is like?”

Alverez nodded. “Her father works long hours. Whatever her mother does while he’s away, Juanita’s ashamed of it.”

“She usually stops at my place on the way home if I’m there. Yesterday she didn’t. I just happened to see her go by. I think she’d been to the street fair. If you’d ask her class-mates whether anyone saw her-where and what time-it would be great. When I went out not long after I saw her, I found a flyer stuck in my mail drop. Now I wonder if she put it there. Maybe. You try to think of everything. This was about a rally of the West Side women to close up the porn shops in the neighborhood.”

Alverez smiled. “Well, I can tell you this: If there’s a budding feminist in the sixth grade, it’s Juanita Rodriguez.”

“Take a bite, honey, or I’ll eat it. Didn’t your mother ever say, If you don’t eat it, I will’?”

Juanita did not answer. She was sitting at the table, the big woman between her and the door. It was daylight, but the room was lighted mostly by long tubes in the ceiling. There weren’t any windows except the one in the roof. The man, Danny, was poking around among the statues and moving some boxes. There were paintings, too, one on a three-legged stand and others stacked on their sides. Danny wasn’t doing anything, only moving things around. With his little eyes and skinny moustache he didn’t look to her like an artist.

The woman broke off a piece of the Danish, touched Juanita’s tight lips with it, and then ate it herself. Her fingernails were like dabs of blood, her mouth a red smear. Even her hair was red. She was as old as Mama, a lot older than Julie. Everybody would be looking for her, but where would they look? Papa would shout and whack her mother. Then he’d cry.

“Take some coffee, Juanita. It won’t hurt you, I promise.”

“You promised there were puppets.” Her first words except for the “No” to the needle.

“We do make puppets.”

The man gave a bark of laughter.

“Shut up, Danny. And you’re not supposed to touch any of their things back there. It’s in the agreement.”

“Fuck the agreement.”

“Don’t you talk like that in front of her,” the woman shouted.

“What in hell is going on with you, Dee?”

“Why don’t you go out and look for what you’re supposed to be looking for?”

“Because it’s nine A.M. and nothing’s open yet.” He came out from among the statues and stopped at the table. “The lights in here are no damn good for us. We should’ve known that.”

“Then get some that are! Honest to God, Danny, you’re in New York City.”

“Don’t hassle me, Dee. You’re the one jumped the gun, though I’m damned if I see why. Little Miss Perfect here.” He caught a handful of Juanita’s hair and pulled her head back-not roughly, but not gently either. He looked at her from her eyes to as far down as he could see and then let go. He poked his finger at the woman’s face. “Just don’t get too fond of her. She’s a puppet, remember.”

Julie, after several phone calls, reached an organizer of the antiporn rally. She promised an item in the Our Beat column and then told of the missing youngster. “It’s a long shot, but if you were handing out flyers at the street fair yesterday, I wonder if you saw her.”

“I wasn’t there myself, but there was an incident at the fair that might have involved your young person. Let me give you the number of Sue Laughlin. You mustn’t take her literally if she makes it sound like gang rape, That’s just Sue.”

A chorus of infant and toddler voices rang through Julie’s conversation with Sue Laughlin. “I thought the girl was older-sixteen, maybe. And she did volunteer. Anyway-shut up, Jamie. Can’t you see Mommy’s on the phone?-anyway, she was handing out our flyers when this gang of young jocks started to tease her-’What’s pornography, Juanita?’ That sort of thing.”

“Did they call her by name? It’s important.”

“How would I know her name if they hadn’t? Then one of them snatched the flyers from her and they all clowned around throwing them into the air. And what did she do? She grabbed an umbrella from a concession stand and began thrashing the mischief out of them.”

Gang rape, Julie thought.

“They ran off and the guy selling the umbrellas tried to make her buy the one she’d taken. I was going to say something, but a woman who’d been watching the whole thing said she’d buy the umbrella.”

“Did you know the woman?”

“No. I don’t think she’s from the neighborhood. There were hundreds of people, you know.”

Julie felt herself tighten up. “Did she speak to Juanita?”

“I couldn’t say for sure. I just wasn’t paying attention after that.”

“Could you describe the woman?”

“A big, solid woman, well dressed but flashy, too much makeup, red hair…”

Julie reached Detective Russo at precinct headquarters with her bits of information. Dominic Russo and she were old friends so he could say frankly that he would give it what time he could, but from her parents’ report the youngster sounded like a runaway. The case would go to Missing Persons within twenty-four hours. “We’ll give out her description at roll call and put it on the bulletin board. But you know how many kids hit the streets every day.”

“Yeah.”

“Most of them come home in a day or two.”

“Some don’t ever. I’ll keep in touch, Dom.”

“Don’t I know that,” he said.

Julie went upstairs to see the Rodriguezes as soon as they got home. Juanita’s father was sitting in the kitchen, his head in his hands. He looked up at her when she laid her hand on his shoulder. His eyes were wet. “Why she do this to us? Why?”

Julie, to reassure them of the girl’s resourcefulness, told them how Juanita had confronted the boys who were taunting her. Mrs. Rodriguez turned and stormed at her husband, “Men are pigs. You’re all pigs!” It ought to have been funny, Julie thought, but it wasn’t.

Juanita sat on the bathroom stool in a silk robe that was much too big for her. She had taken a shower she hadn’t wanted and washed her hair on the woman’s command. She hadn’t wanted to take off her clothes, but she was afraid the woman might make her, and might come into the bathroom with her. She hadn’t done that. She only made Juanita hand out her jeans, jacket, and sweat shirt, her bra, panties, and socks. She hadn’t seen her sneakers since they brought her here.

She knew now that this was a loft. The bathroom was fancy-new. So was the kitchen, which didn’t have any doors. The living room ran all the way from the studio-the room with the big bed and the statues-to what must be the front of the building. Street noises seemed to come from there, and there must be a very big window with heavy curtains covering it. Threads of light showed at the top and at the floor. A Castro convertible bed, where they must have slept, was open. The woman, who said she must call her Dee, told her the big door was to the elevator and was kept locked. Juanita was pretty sure there had to be a fire escape. But where?

“Come out now, Juanita. I want to fix your hair.”

“Could I have my clothes, please?”

“You’ll get dressed later. Come on now.”

She went out to where the woman motioned her into a chair in front of a mirror. “Can’t I get dressed before he comes back?”

“First I want to do up your hair.” Dee had a dryer in hand. “Little dark pom-poms might be nice. You could look Japanese. Like a geisha girl.”

“Please. I hate this.” Juanita tugged at the robe.

“Just be patient. You’re going to have beautiful new clothes.”

Dee blow-dried her hair to where she could work with it, making little round buns she fastened and then let loose, then fashioned again. “Very pretty, my little geisha.”

Juanita’s fear was getting bad again. She almost wished the man would come. They might have another fight, a long one. When her mother and father fought, she could run away and hide. Where could she run and hide here? She’d make a dash for the big window and pound on it. She would jump up and down. But people would point and laugh and wouldn’t do anything. Unless the man came and tried to give her the needle and she fought him right there in the window. Maybe then,

“A penny for your thoughts.” Dee smiled at her in the mirror and then looked at herself. “How I wish I was young like you again.”

“Don’t let him stick the needle in me anymore.”

“Over my dead body.”

Juanita felt a little more secure and tried once more, “Couldn’t I have my clothes back now?”

“No, dear. I’ve already put them in the garbage disposal.”

In the early afternoon, with the help of Vendor Licensing and Traffic Control, Detective Russo located the Greystone Puppets truck. It was impounded in the Twelfth Avenue lot for illegal parking overnight. According to the gatekeeper, the owner had arrived early that morning, but without enough money to pay both fine and storage. He was due back within the hour. Otherwise he’d owe the city another hundred dollars for storage. Julie took what money she had in the house and waited outdoors for the squad car to pick her up. Where she had used to carry a pocketful of coins for blind beggars and street musicians, she now carried dollar bills for the homeless.

She and the two precinct officers Russo had commandeered examined the truck. It was locked up tight, but that didn’t mean much, given its condition. As one of the cops said, it was hard to tell what breed it was. They could see the skeleton of a stage set on a platform that probably rolled out onto the tailgate. There was a trunk marked COSTUMES and some painted scenery scaled to the stage. But no puppets.

Very soon a little man with a wisp of a moustache, hollow cheeks, and great melancholy eyes, came up lugging a duffel bag. He showed the cops his receipt from the city. “I had to hock my puppets. They’re my kids! My goddam living.”

“I’ll help you if you can help me,” Julie said. She didn’t look as though she had much to help with, in sneakers and raincoat. But as soon as she started to describe Juanita she was in charge. She soon had the puppeteer wagging his head. He remembered the girl, all right. “She kept asking me questions-did I make the puppets myself, did I make them out of old dolls. Could she make them. She wanted to know where I was going next. ‘Florida,’ I says. ‘I don’t want them to catch cold.’ When she saw I was putting her on-the saddest look I ever saw.” Then he was jolted aware. “She’s come up missing?”

“Since five o’clock last night.”

“I was there on the street till ten. But listen: there was this woman I thought at first was the kid’s mother. She was telling her about puppets. I was changing the act, see. I got three different acts…”

Julie waited out his setting the scene. One of the cops activated a pocket recorder.

“Somewhere in there I got the idea this dame was a con artist. I don’t mean I thought it exactly. It just crossed my mind. She was like playing to me too. That’s what kept the youngster interested. She watched to see if I was interested. That kid’s no fool. The redhead was telling about this old theater she was renovating and how she was collecting puppets that could make like singers…”

“Where? Did she say where it was?”

“No, ma’am. Not to me, she didn’t, and I’ll tell you this, she knew about as much about puppets as I know about King Tut. But that’s where I lost touch. I got a hand puppet that’s my buddy. Whenever we get enough people around, Andy and I pass the hat. It’s a living. I guess you could call it a living.”

“What else about Juanita?”

He shrugged. “One minute they were there, gone the next. That’s how it is when you’re playing the street.”

The police pressed him for a description of the redheaded woman. Then Julie asked him if he thought the theater she spoke about might be a real place.

“Could be.”

“Nearby?”

Again he shrugged. Then: “I don’t think that kid would go with her anyplace she couldn’t walk to.”

A buzzer signaled Danny’s return. While the elevator groaned its way up, Juanita glanced toward the heavily draped window at the front of the loft. Dee clamped her fingers around the girl’s wrist. “Don’t you even think of it! Do you want to get killed?”

Juanita, still in the silken robe, gathered it tighter in front of her. It didn’t have any buttons. She tried not to see herself in the mirror because it wasn’t really her. Dee had made her up to look oriental. But she watched in the mirror for the elevator’s arrival. When it stopped, Dee had to unlock the door to let Danny in. He took the key from her and locked it again.

“So?” Dee wanted to know.

He didn’t answer. He came near and stared at Juanita in the mirror. He made a face like he was going to throw up. “What’ve you done to her? And what in hell is she doing out of the studio?”

“We needed a bath.”

“Then we need another bath. She looks like a midget’s whore.”

“Fun-nee. Did you get what you went for?”

“No. The answer is no. Dee, she’s supposed to look like an angel. That’s why you fell in love with her.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“I got a contact. That’s all I got and I’m going to go see him as soon as you and I straighten some things out.”

“Danny, how much time do you think we have?”

“Maybe we don’t have any. This town ought to be the best. But it’s the worst yet. Get her inside there so we can talk.”

Confined again in the studio, Juanita put her ear to the frame of the door, then to the keyhole. Then she lay down on the floor and tried to hear from under the door, but only the sound of their voices reached her, going away as though to the front of the building. A new sound startled her until she realized it was her stomach growling. She’d promised Dee she would eat. She knew Dee liked her. That’s what made Danny mad. But there wasn’t any food. Dee looked in the cupboards and the fridge. How could they live someplace with no food in the house? They didn’t live here. It was like a hotel, only it was a loft they rented. Their suitcases were on the floor, open, with clothes falling out of them. They’d rented from an artist, which was why Danny wasn’t supposed to touch anything in the studio.

She sat on the edge of a chair and wound her feet around its legs. The dressing gown smelled of perfume and sweat. She wished they’d start fighting again so she could hear them. If they didn’t have any time, would they go away and leave her locked in this room with the bucket and the big bed? She hated beds more than most things. Her mother and father fought a lot about beds, and her mother had boyfriends she didn’t think Juanita or Papa knew about. Papa didn’t. She did. She knew that was why her mother let her go when she said she was going to Elena’s. She had a date with a boyfriend. Juanita thought of the kids getting on her about the flyers-“What’s pornography, Juanita? how come you know so much about it?” She knew it was dirty pictures, but she wasn’t going to say it to them. She felt herself going sick again, scared. She tried to think of Julie. Julie would really try to find her. Maybe she’d find the puppet man. He could tell her about Dee. But what else? She hadn’t seen Danny before she walked into the old building with the hand-painted sign on the door: PUPPET SHOW INSIDE. Julie walked a lot and she might find it.

Juanita began to walk then, too. Round and round the room she went, barefoot, the silk gown dragging the floor. Finally she entered the alcove where the statues stood around like people at a funeral. There were other things, half-finished bodies, heads. She recognized the smell of clay. Tools and brushes and tubes of paint lay on a table. There was a painting on a three-legged stand, and other paintings were stacked in racks. This was where Danny wasn’t supposed to touch anything. She came on several camera cases then, and something rolled up with metal legs sticking out. There were two flat boxes with straps that were marked FILM. These things belonged to Danny, she felt sure, not to the artist. Danny said the light wasn’t any good. He was going to take her picture, and he wanted her to look like an angel. That didn’t sound like Danny. She’d have thought he would want her to look like a whore.

Julie was in luck when she reached the Actors Forum. A session had just ended. Nobody there knew much about pup-pets, but when she’d given the actors and apprentices the story, most of them volunteered to organize a street-by-street search of old West Side buildings in which a puppet theater might now be playing or where appropriate renovation might be under way. They would all go first to precinct headquarters and coordinate with the police. “Mind you,” Julie cautioned, “the real puppeteer said the woman didn’t know anything about puppets. It was probably a story made up to lure the youngster. She’s eleven years old and she’s pretty. What else can I tell you?”

“We’ll find her, sister,” Nuba Bradley, a tall, black actor who seemed to have grown three inches with the current hair style, bent almost in two to kiss her cheek.

Reggie Bauer hung back to talk to Julie while the others got under way. Slight, blond, and brittle, Reggie knew New York society from the Bowery to the bridge tables; these were where, it was said, he made enough money to support himself as an actor. “You don’t think for a minute it’s got anything to do with puppets, do you?”

Julie waited,

“Do you want my scenario?”

“Not if it’s too far out. Of course, I want it.”

“Kid porn.”

“What does that mean?” She knew well enough. Or thought she did, but she hoped it wasn’t so.

“Child pornography. The lady was shopping for innocence, the real thing. In the meantime, either she’s got a partner for her or somebody’s out there looking for an experienced young dude to match her up with.”

Julie didn’t question him on his expertise. She thought she knew how he came by it. Except that Reggie was gay. The thought must have shone through her eyes. He said, “A lot of it’s faked, you know, especially the pleasure.”

“How would they find a boy like that? Where?”

“Through somebody in the business, Somebody knows somebody who likes boys. A certain amount of trust is involved in the transaction.”

“Oh, my God,” Julie said. “Maybe I know someone myself.”

Juanita stood beneath the skylight and turned around slowly. On tiptoe she could see what looked like the top of a barrel. Bringing one of the chairs to stand on, she could see that it was a water tower. She could see other buildings and a lot of sky. She could also see where water leaked in around the skylight. If she could get up there, she might be able to push the window out.

She went back to the door and listened. She couldn’t hear anything except faraway car horns and the rumble of the city much as it sounded when she was home alone in the daytime. Maybe they’d both gone out. Maybe they’d already gone and left her. And left the camera and everything? She didn’t think so. She wasn’t going to let them photograph her without her clothes on. Not unless he used the needle again. This time she’d kick it out of his hand or kick him where she knew it would hurt most. “Over my dead body,” Dee had said. But Dee was afraid of him too.

She took the painting off the three-legged stand. Even if she could step on the stand, it wouldn’t be high enough. Again she listened at the door. They’d gone out to lunch, she decided, and Dee would bring back something for her. It had to be after lunchtime. As quietly as she could she pulled the table under the skylight. The stand just fit on top of it. The dressing gown made it hard for her to climb, and she knew it was going to get in her way if she got high enough to try to move the window. But it had pockets. She found a paint-smeared knife and a chisel, which she pocketed. She also took a hammer and tied it around her waist with the sash of the robe. She tried not to think of Danny, but in spite of herself she imagined him unlocking the door just as she stepped from the chair onto the table. She began to melt again with fear.

“No!” she cried aloud without meaning to. She waited. Nothing happened. She could not climb up on the stand. The ledge she wanted to step onto was too high. She pulled the chair up onto the table, but in doing it she nudged one of the legs of the stand and the whole thing clattered to the floor. Not a sound came from the other side of the door. This time, after she’d set up the stand and placed the chair beneath it, she boosted herself up without tumbling the works. She waited and listened. There were sounds she hadn’t heard before in the building, noise like heat coming up in the pipes, machinery sounds that might be the elevator. But it never seemed to arrive. Her heartbeat was too loud to hear much else. She made it safely up onto the chair. She could see the twin towers of the Board of Trade Buildings. She was in lower Manhattan. SoHo. Of course: where the artists were. She got one foot sidewise onto the ledge and tested to see if it would hold her. It seemed to, but when she tried to lift the other foot the stand wobbled and collapsed. She missed the chair and fell and, flailing, brought the chair down after her. Before she knew whether or not she was hurt, Dee threw open the door and came running to her. Juanita tried to pull the robe close around her.

“I wouldn’t’ve believed it! He was right, I shouldn’t’ve left you alone. Let me look at your face.” On her knees, Dee examined her face, touched her eyes, nose, lips. “Say ouch if it hurts.”

Juanita determined not to say ouch no matter how much it hurt. She managed to loosen the hammer and tie the sash around her. Dee felt down her arms and pulled the robe open to see her middle. Juanita closed it again. She knew there would be bruises where she’d hit the table, but she didn’t make a sound when Dee touched the sore spots.

Dee got to her feet and pulled the girl up. “You’re lucky in more ways than one, you little fool. Let’s put these things back where they were. I promise I won’t tell Danny if you promise to do what you’re told from now on. Promise me?” She gave the girl a shake.

Juanita was trying not to cry. She did hurt, but she forced a big smile and nodded what could be taken for a promise. She had lost the chisel on the way down, but she could feel the knife stuck deep in the pocket of the robe.

Julie stopped at the shop to see if any message had come through her service. Most of the calls pertained to business. She put them on hold. Several Women Against Pornography members had joined the neighborhood search. Mrs. Rodriguez had called twice. Julie ran upstairs. The woman had heard nothing. Her husband had gone to the police station to wait. There were a lot of Perdidas in her lamentation.

Julie walked the four blocks to Kevin Bourke’s electrical shop on Eighth Avenue. Mr. Bourke was one of the first people she’d met after moving into the shop. He loaned a friend of hers some lamps to help decorate it. He had lived in the neighborhood all his life, he attended St. Malachy’s where the Catholic actors went, supported the Irish Theater, and looked a bit like Sean O’Casey, whose plays he admired fervently. He had been in trouble when Julie met him, on the complaint of a boy who turned out later to have been a prostitute. Julie might not have been so direct if her mission had been less urgent.

Mr. Bourke looked at her sadly over the top of his rimless glasses. “I’ll not waste your time asking why it was me you came to. Do you know how many years I’ve been in therapy to amend that fall from grace?”

“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 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?”

“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.”

“You might feel better if you got out.”

“I’ll feel better when I get out of New Zealand.”

But he softened the cynicism by winking at his son.

The beautiful little girl with the scar was at the park again that day. Jean watched the child and her own son-the two outsiders-tentatively greet each other and then happily play together.

“I’m Zachary David Williams.”

“I’m Angela Susan Jones.”

“What happened to your face?”

“How come you talk so funny?”

“I’m a United States for American!”

“Race you to the slide, Zachary!”

Several times Jean tried to catch the eye of the woman who accompanied Angie, but she never succeeded in doing it. The woman, short, stouter, older, and more solemn-looking than the other mothers, kept her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on her charge. After a while Jean gave up the effort of making a friend for herself and pulled her book on the history of New Zealand out of her purse. Skipping the chapter on Maori art, in which she wasn’t particularly interested, she turned quickly past pictures of wood carvings that looked like Alaskan totems and thumbed to the chapters about modern-day New Zealand.

“… Greek and Italian restaurants are enormously popular.…”

She was happy that Zachary had found a pal. It was still an effort not to stare at Angie’s face, but Jean noticed that the other people in the park rarely did, as if they were used to seeing the child there. Soon, lost in photographs of spectacular scenery, lulled by the music of her own child’s screams and giggles, Jean nearly forgot about it herself.

“Mom,”

She looked up into Zach’s face.

“I’m cold, Mommy.”

“Well, no wonder, look at the time! I’ve been lost in my book. Where’d your little friend go?”

“Angie went home.”

Jean smiled tenderly to see the expression of loss in his eyes. “You have really made a good friend, all this long way from our own home, haven’t you?”

“Come back tomorrow, Mommy?”

“Yes, I promise.”

And they did return to the park every day they remained in Wellington, until it was time to leave for the fjords and glaciers of the south island.

But when they had to say good-bye to Angela for the last time, Zachary and his little friend couldn’t seem to grasp that they would never see each other again. Jean knelt down on the ground beside them and explained over and over that Zachary and his mom and dad had to leave, and they wouldn’t be able to come back to the park.

But Zach said, “We come tomorrow, Angie!”

“No, darling, we won’t be able to do that.”

“Yes!” He shouted at his mother. “Park! Yes!”

“Shh, Zachy, here’s what we’ll do.” Jean grabbed her purse and took out a scrap of paper and a pen. “I’ll write down our name and address and give it to Angie, so maybe someday she can write to you, okay?”

“We come to park,” Zach said stubbornly.

Jean gave the scrap of paper to Angela, who grabbed it and stuffed it into the pocket of her little skirt. “Good-bye, Angie.” Jean ached to kiss the child’s scarred cheek; instead, she touched her fingers gently to the curly blond hair and then to the other, perfect, cheek. When Angie smiled, her wide, pretty mouth and her haunting almond eyes turned up sweetly at the corners.

“Angie!”

From her park bench, the woman called.

Angie hugged her friend, and then ran off, waving and shouting, “See you! See you tomorrow, Zach!”

Zach argued with his mother about anything and everything all the way down the path to the hotel. Finally his fury turned to tears. Then he cried so inconsolably, and for so long, that Jean began to worry and to feel grateful they were leaving so the separation of the two little friends wouldn’t be any harder than it already was.

“Honestly, Lyle,” Jean whispered to her husband that night in bed. Zach was asleep, and breathing noisily through his tear-clogged nose, in the single bed across the room from their double. “You’d think this was that Maori legend I read about, the one where Rangi and Papa were separated by Tane.”

“Do I know these people?” Lyle whispered back.

“Rangi was sky father, Papa was earth mother, and Tane was their son, and they were all together in the primordial darkness. But Tane was also the god of the forests, and so he had to push his parents away from him in order to create night and day so that his forests could grow. The story was that Rangi the sky father was so grief stricken at being separated from Papa the earth mother that his tears filled her with oceans and lakes.”

“So it’s old Rangi’s fault that we couldn’t drive down here from Chicago?”

“I feel so sorry for Zach! I’ll swear, trying to explain why he won’t ever see Angie again is like trying to explain death to a four-year-old. He doesn’t understand that it’s permanent, and that she’s gone forever from his life.”

“I need that Tane fellow,” Lyle muttered into his pillow, “to separate me permanently from New Zealand before this hotel separates me permanently from my money.” “Oh, good night, you!”

But Jean was wrong-the separation wasn’t permanent.

When Zachary was ten, he received a postcard from Angela Susan Jones in Wellington, New Zealand. The front of the card had a photograph of the playground in the Botanic Gardens, and she’d circled the tallest slide with a red, indelible marker.

“Do you remember?” it said on the back. “I put your address in a secret place and saved it all these years. Will you please, please, please write back to me?”

She had signed it, “I still love you. Angle,” and printed her address.

Zachary wrote back.

When Zachary was twenty-four and in the second year of medical school at the University of Chicago, he announced to his parents the specialty he intended to pursue.

“I’ll be a plastic surgeon,” he said.

“Good, maybe you can take a few tucks in my wallet,” his father joked. “It’s feeling loose and flabby after putting you through med school.”

But Jean, who had never before heard her son mention any special interest in plastic surgery, was surprised and a little puzzled by his decision.

During the last year of Zachary’s medical residency, he told Lyle and Jean that “the little girl from Wellington” was coming to Chicago to stay with him for a visit.

“Do you remember her, Mom?”

“You’ve written to Angie all these years, honey?”

“Yeah, didn’t I ever tell you?”

“No, but I should have guessed.”

A day later, she called her son back.

“Zach, are you hoping to fix Angie’s scar? Is that why she’s coming? Is that why you decided to be a plastic surgeon?”

“Sure,” he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion. “I’m going to take a look at it, and see what I can do.”

“Does Angie know this?”

“Of course, Mom, we planned this together a long time ago. We’ve always known she’d come up here, and I’d become a doctor, and we’d fix her face.”

“Zach, what caused that scar?”

“I don’t know,” he said matter-of-factly, “because Angie doesn’t know. Her mother told her it happened when she was a baby, before she was adopted. She doesn’t have any memory of it.”

“Angie’s adopted?”

An image flitted through Jean’s mind, a memory of a silent woman of about Jean’s age, sitting alone on a park bench, her hands folded in her lap, watching the little girl.

“You don’t care, do you, Mom?”

“Of course not, honey.”

But as Jean hung up the phone from talking to her son, she felt chilled and frightened by something she couldn’t identify at first. And then she realized that it was this… obsession… there was no other word for it… this obsession of his that unnerved her, this fixation on a little girl he’d met twenty-five years earlier. No, she corrected herself, this obsession of theirs, Zach’s and Angie’s, too.

“Since they were four years old!” she exclaimed to Lyle.

“So? It’s romantic” he said. “I think it’s nice.”

“You do?”

“Sure. At least it’s one good thing to come out of that awful trip to New Zealand. Relax.”

CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN is a professor of English at Columbia University and the author of such scholarly books as Writing a Woman’s Life and Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women. But it is as Amanda Cross, author of the very popular Kate Fansler mysteries, that she is known to hundreds of thousands of devoted readers. Kate debuted in In the Last Analysis in 1964.

At the time of Professor Beatrice Sterling’s arraignment, she had never set foot in a criminal court. As a juror, a duty she performed regularly at the close of whatever academic year she was called, she had always asked to serve in the civil division. She felt too far removed from the world of criminals, and, because of her age (and this was true even when she was younger, referring as it did more to the times in which she had been born than to the years she had lived), too distanced from the ambience of the criminal to judge him (it was almost always a him) fairly. She was, in short, a woman of tender conscience and unsullied reputation.

All that was before she was arrested for murder.

Like most middle-class dwellers in Manhattan, therefore, she had never been through the system, never been treated like the felon the DA’s office was claiming her to be. It is a sad truth that those engaged in activity they know to be criminal, shoddy business practices, drug dealing, protection rackets, contract killings, have quicker access to the better criminal lawyers. Those unlikely to be accused of anything more serious than jaywalking often know only the lawyer who made their will or, at best, some pleasant member of a legal firm as distant from the defense of felons as from the legal intricacies of medieval England. Beatrice Sterling’s lawyer was a partner in a corporate law firm; long married to a woman who had gone to school with Beatrice, he had some time ago agreed to make her will as a favor to his wife. His usual practice dealt with the mergers or takeovers of large companies; he had never even proffered legal advice to someone getting a divorce, let alone accused of murder. There was not even a member of his firm knowledgeable about how the criminal system worked at the lower end of Manhattan, next door though it might have been to where their elegant law firm had its being. The trouble was, until her arraignment, neither Beatrice nor her sister considered any other lawyer. It is always possible that with the best legal advice in the world, Beatrice would still have been remanded, but as it happened, she never had any chance of escaping rides to and from Riker’s Island in a bus reinforced with mesh wiring, and incarceration in a cell with other women, mostly drug dealers and prostitutes. By that time Beatrice was alternately numb or seized with such rage against the young woman she was supposed to have murdered that her guilt seemed, even to her unhappy corporate counsel, likely.

Professor Beatrice Sterling was accused of having murdered a college senior, a student in a class Beatrice had been teaching at the time the young woman was found bludgeoned to death in her dormitory room. The young woman had hated Beatrice; Beatrice had hated the young woman and, in fact, every young woman in that particular class. She would gladly, as she had unfortunately mentioned to a few dozen people, have watched every one of her students whipped out of town and tarred and feathered as well. She had, however, insisted that she had not committed murder or even laid a finger on the dead girl This counted for little against the evidence of the others in the class who claimed, repeatedly and with conviction, that Beatrice had hated them all and was clearly not only vicious but capable of murder. The police carried out a careful investigation, putting their most reliable and experienced homicide detectives on the case. These, a man and a woman, had decided that they had a better than even case against the lady professor, and, since the case might become high profile, got an arrest warrant and went to her apartment to arrest her and bring her into the precinct.

It is possible, even at this stage, to avoid being sent to jail, but not if the charge is murder in the second degree (first degree murder is reserved for those who kill policepersons). Those accused of minor misdemeanors are issued a Desk Appearance Ticket and ordered to appear in court some three or four weeks hence. (Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, but such a choice was not offered to Beatrice, who would certainly have appeared anytime she was ordered to). She was allowed one phone call, which she made to her sister to ask for a lawyer, a wasted call since the sister, whose name was Cynthia Sterling, had already called the corporate lawyer husband of Beatrice’s school friend. Beatrice was told by the woman detective that it could be anywhere from twenty-four to seventy-two hours until her arraignment and that probably no lawyer could get to her until a half hour before that occurred. Men who go through the system are held during this period in pens behind the courtrooms. Since there are, in the Manhattan criminal system, no pens for women, Beatrice was held in a cell in the precinct. The system happened at that time to be more than usually backed up-and it was usually backed up-so she was not taken directly to Central Booking at One Police Plaza, police headquarters for all the boroughs and Central Booking for Manhattan, until two days had passed.

Neither Beatrice nor her sister Cynthia had ever married, and a more unlikely pair to become caught in the criminal system could not easily be imagined. As Beatrice in jail alternated between numbness and rage, weeping and cold anger, Cynthia came slowly, far too slowly as she later accused herself, to the conclusion that what she needed was help from someone who understood the criminal system. Beatrice’s school friend’s husband was useless: less than useless, because he did not know how little he knew. A knowledgeable lawyer could not now save Beatrice from her present incarceration and all the shame and humiliation connected with it; but he or she might be able to offer some worthwhile, perhaps even practical, advice.

We all know more people than we at first realize. Cynthia could have sworn that she knew no one connected with law enforcement or criminal defense even four times removed. She forced herself to sit quietly, and upright, in a chair, calming herself in the manner she had read of as recommended for those undertaking meditation in order to lower then-blood pressure. She sat with her feet flat on the floor, her back straight to allow a direct line from the top of her head to the base of her spine, and in this position she repeated, as she thought she remembered from her reading, a single word. Any one-syllable word, if simple relaxation as opposed to religious experience were the aim, would suffice. She chose, not without some sense of irony, the word “law.” Faith in law was what, above all, she needed. Slowly repeating this word with her eyes closed and her breathing regular, she bethought herself, as though the word had floated to her from outer space, of Angela Epstein.

Cynthia, after continuing her slow breathing and word repetition for a few seconds out of gratitude, contemplated the wonders of Angela Epstein. She had come to Cynthia’s office only a week or two ago to say hello. Could fate, were there any such thing, have whispered in her ear? Cynthia was the dean in charge of finances at a large, urban college quite different from the elite suburban institution in which Beatrice taught. In that capacity, Cynthia had, in the past, been able to put Angela Epstein in the way of fellowship aid, and Angela, unlike the greater number of her kind, had continued to be grateful. Finding herself in the area of her old college, she had stopped in to greet Cynthia, to thank her for her past help, and to tell Cynthia about her present life. What Angela did-it was something in the investment line-Cynthia could not precisely remember, but a sentence of Angela’s echoed, like the voice of a guardian angel in a legend, in Cynthia’s postmeditation ears: “I’m living with a wonderful guy; he’s a public defender, and he loves what he does. It’s great to live with someone who loves what he does, and who does good things for people caught up in New York’s criminal system; between us, we can afford a loft in Manhattan.”

From Information, Cynthia got the number of Angela Epstein. Here, as it was night, she got a message machine. She left as passionate a request for Angela to call back as she could muster; indeed, passion quivered in every syllable. But if Angela and lover had retired at midnight, they might not return her call until morning, perhaps not until they returned from work the next day. Cynthia decided-rather, she was seized by a determination-to go and visit Angela herself at that very moment. Perhaps she would not get in; perhaps she would be mugged in the attempt. But with Beatrice behind bars, any action seemed better than no action. She pictured herself banging on the door of their loft until allowed entrance and the chance to plead. She dressed hurriedly, descended to the street, commandeered a taxi, and told the driver to take her to the Lower East Side, insisting over his protests that that was indeed where she wanted to go.

“This time of night, you gotta be outta your mind.”

It occurred to Cynthia, even in the midst of her distracted determination, that she had not been driven by an old-fashioned cabdriver for a very long time indeed. He was American, old, shaggy, and wonderfully soothing.

“I have to go now,” she said. “Please. Take me.”

“It’s your funeral, literally. I’m telling you. I wouldn’t be out on the streets myself this time of night, except it’s my nephew’s cab; my nephew’s having a baby in the hospital with his wife. It takes two to have a baby these days, I mean to have it, not to start it, if you see what I mean. Me, I drive only by day.”

“I see,” Cynthia said, blessing him for beginning to drive.

“He’s working his way through law school, drives a cab at night. These days, in this city, you don’t need to be a lawyer, you need to hire one, and a doctor too while you’re at it, I tell him. So he’s crazy, so you’re crazy. You’re not buying drugs, I hope?”

Cynthia assured him that she was not. Was meditation like prayer? Was it answered like prayer? First the name had come to her, then this wonderful cabdriver. Could another miracle happen, that they would hear her pounding on the door and let her in and listen to her story?

Another miracle happened, though not quite that way. As she emerged from the taxi, a couple approached her. They looked at her oddly; she was not, it was to be assumed, a usual type to be seen in this neighborhood at this hour. The couple had also emerged from a taxi, even now departing.

“Dean Sterling!” someone shouted. It was Angela Epstein. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I’m looking for you,” Cynthia said, suddenly unbelievably tired, worn out by all the sudden good fortune that had come her way.

“So ya gonna pay me, or ya forgot and left your purse at home?”

Cynthia came to her senses, apologizing to the cabdriver and the astonished young couple. She reached into her purse and gave the cabdriver a large bill. “For you and your nephew and the baby,” she said. “You are wonderful.”

“You too,” he shouted, taking off with a screech of tires. Cynthia had meant to beg him to return, but she merely shrugged. It was Angela Epstein’s young man upon whom she now turned her full attention.

“You are a public defender, you understand the criminal system?” she said, as though he might deny it and turn out to be something wholly useless.

“Yes,” he said, taking her arm. “Are you in trouble? Why don’t we go upstairs and talk about it?” Over her head, for he was a tall young man, he gave Angela a quizzical look; she made soothing gestures and rushed ahead to open the building door, peering about to see that there were no dangerous types lurking.

“I’m afraid I don’t even know your name,” Cynthia said.

“My name’s Leo,” he said. “Leo Fansler. What’s yours?”

“Cynthia Sterling. My sister Beatrice Sterling is in jail, accused of murder. And I’m afraid they won’t even let her out on bail; that seemed to be the only coherent statement I could get out of the lawyer I called. Will you help us?”

“I’ll try,” Leo Fansler said.

They got her settled on the couch with a cup of tea and a blanket over her legs because the loft was chilly. Besides, they wanted to do all the easy things they could think of to help her. She had always appeared to Angela as a woman of such power and efficiency, but she now looked the very picture of distraction and disarray, rather-Leo later said to Angela-like the White Queen. (Leo had to explain who the White Queen was. “You’ve read everything,” Angela lovingly accused him. “Not really,” he answered. “I just lived for a time with a literary aunt.”)

At last Cynthia managed to tell Leo, in answer to his questions, with what her sister was charged, when she had been arrested, whether or not the detectives had had a warrant, and whether she had yet been arraigned. He tried, as gently as possible, to keep her from telling him the whole story from the very beginning, “Not yet,” he said. “I’ll find out from your sister; I’ll talk to her, I’ll get the whole story, believe me. But right now all I want to know is where she is, and what’s already happened in court.”

Cynthia made a noble attempt to be as coherent as possible. To her infinite relief, Leo understood her, interpreted her vague answers, knew what to do,

“Do you know when the arraignment is?” he asked, “Did they tell you, or her?”

“Probably tomorrow, but they can’t be sure.”

“Okay. I’ll be there,” Leo said. “Her lawyer will try for bail at the arraignment, but probably won’t get it. The chances are she’ll be remanded, and we’ll try again; we may do better upstairs at the felony arraignment. But if she does get bail for a murder charge, it may be in the neighborhood of a million dollars. Can you raise that much? There are bondsmen…”

“I’ll raise it,” Cynthia said. “The lawyer already spoke to me about that. The one who doesn’t know anything. I think he talked about money because that’s all he knows anything about. We’ll mortgage our apartment. It’s very valuable. It’s worth over a million now, though it wasn’t when we moved in thirty years ago.”

“It takes a while to get a mortgage, even a loan,” Leo said, more to himself than her. “I’m going to call you a taxi now; the company will send one if we offer double. Otherwise they avoid this neighborhood at night. You go home and try to get some rest. Meet me in the public defender’s office on Centre Street across from the courthouse tomorrow morning at nine. Can you manage that?”

“I could take her,” Angela said. “I could be late to work.”

“I’ll find it,” Cynthia said. “Please, you’ve done enough. I’ll meet you there.”

“Get off the subway at Chambers Street. Then ask someone the way. Don’t take a taxi; you’ll be stuck in traffic for hours.”

“I’ll be there,” Cynthia said. “Poor Beatrice. I’ll be there. You will let me convince you she’s innocent.”

“Tomorrow, or maybe even later. The important thing is, you’ve got someone on your side who knows the system. That’s all you have to think about right now. I’m going to try to get you another lawyer for the trial. I know it’s impossible, but try not to worry too much.”

Cynthia arrived at the public defender’s office at nine o’clock. She saw no reason to tell Leo, who came out to the reception desk to meet her, that she had set out at seven, and wandered around the confusing streets of lower Manhattan for at least an hour, until a truck driver finally gave her proper directions. Leo led her off to his office, hung up her coat, sat her down, and tried to tell her what had happened so far.

“Where is Beatrice now?” Cynthia asked, before he began.

“Probably on her way in from Central Booking. We haven’t much time, so you must listen.”

“I am listening,” Cynthia said, drawing together all her powers of attention. The time for action had come.

“All right,” Leo said. “She was arrested and taken to your precinct, where pedigree information, name, address, and so on, are taken, and a warrant check is made, that is, to see if she is wanted on any other cases. I know, I know, but we’re talking about the system here, not your sister. As you’ll see when we go to court, most of those arrested have records, and quite a number do not have an address, so she’s ahead on that count. The detectives will have questioned your sister extensively, and we can only pray she had the sense not to say anything at all. Any statement she made upon arrest can and will be read out at her arraignment,”

“It all seems very unfair,” Cynthia said, “taking advantage of people when they’re upset.”

“That’s exactly the point. And even hardened criminals rarely know enough to shut up. I don’t know how long she was held in the precinct-I’ll find out-out it was as long as they had to wait before Central Booking was ready to process more bodies.” Leo ignored the fact that Cynthia had closed her eyes and gone white. He kept on talking to bring her around. “Her prints were then faxed to Albany, where they are matched by computer against all other prints in the state. The result is a rap sheet, which in your sister’s case will be encouragingly blank. I assume she has no record.” He looked at Cynthia, who nodded certainly. “That’s good news for our side when it comes to pleading for bail,” Leo said.

“The reason she’s now in jail is because the system was backed up; they had to go to the DA’s office for a complaint to be drawn up, and because she had to be interviewed by the Criminal Justice Agency.” Leo noticed that Cynthia was beginning to look faint. “Hold on,” he said. “We’re almost finished with this part. She’s got a CJA sheet-for Criminal Justice Agency,” he added, as faintness was now joined by bewilderment. “Everyone in court, the judge, the DA, your sister’s lawyer, will use that sheet. It gives her years at her address, her employment, length of employment, and so on. That’s going to help your sister, because she’s obviously been a responsible member of the community with a good employment record and a steady address. We’re waiting now until all these papers reach the court. We’ll try for bail at the arraignment, but don’t be hopeful. On a murder charge like this, she’ll almost certainly be remanded at arraignment.”

“Will you be at the arraignment arguing for her bail?”

“I can’t be,” Leo said. “She’s not eligible for legal aid. But I’ve got her a lawyer, a woman I went to law school with. She’s first-rate, she has worked for the DA, she knows what she’s doing, she’s smart, and above all, she’ll understand where your sister’s coming from. She’s already gone to the court to be ready to meet with your sister when she’s brought in from Central Booking to the arraignment. That’s the whole story. Are you okay for now?”

“Will they put her in a cell when she gets here?”

“No, Women aren’t put into pens. She’ll sit on a bench with other women prisoners at the front of the courtroom. She’ll go into a booth there to talk to her lawyer. We’re going over there now; you’ll see the setup.”

“Will she see me?”

“Yes. But you mustn’t try to talk to her or to reach her. Sally, that’s her lawyer, will tell her about what you’ve done so far, including finding me. Ready? Here’s your coat. Let’s go.”

“Don’t you need a coat?”

Leo shook his head. Nothing, he thought, would keep a woman from noticing he didn’t wear a coat racing around the courts; no man would ever notice it. It had something to do with female nurturing, Angela would say.

“Do you think you could walk down six flights,” he asked, “because the elevators take forever? Good. We’re off.”

There was a lot happening at the court. Cynthia saw the judge, the DAs, and men in white shirts with guns who Leo said were court officers; they carried the papers between the lawyers and the judge. When Beatrice was brought in front of the judge, holding her hands behind her, Cynthia thought she would weep and never stop. She couldn’t hear what any of them said, except for the DA who spoke loud and clear: “The people are serving statement notice. Defendant said: ‘I didn’t kill her. I loathed her but I didn’t kill her. I couldn’t kill anyone.’ No other notices.”

Cynthia looked with agony at Leo.

“Never mind. Not exactly inculpatory. It’s always better to shut up, but a protest of innocence is not the worst. Listen now; Sally’s asking for bail. The DA asked that she be remanded-sent to jail while awaiting trial. Sally’s answering.”

“With all due respect, your honor, the ADA’s position, while predictable, takes no account of my client’s position in the community. The case is not strong against my client; the major evidence is circumstantial. We have every intention of fighting this case. My client not only has no record, but is a long-honored professor in a well-established and well-known institution of higher education. She has been a member of the community and has lived at the same address for many years. There can be no question of my client’s returning. We ask that bail be set sufficient to insure that return, but not excessive. My client is a woman in her late fifties who is innocent and intends to prove it.” There was more, but Cynthia seemed unable any longer to listen. Leo had said there was little hope for bail at this point. She tried to send thought waves of encouragement and support to Beatrice, but the sight of her back with her hands held together behind her was devastating.

The judge spoke with-Cynthia might have felt under other circumstances-admirable clarity. “The defendant is remanded. Adjourned to AP-17, January sixth, for grand jury action.”

That was that. Beatrice was led away, and Cynthia wept.

“It won’t be too long,” Leo said, trying to find some words of comfort. “The law does not allow anyone to be kept more than one hundred forty-four hours after arrest without an indictment. And now she has a lawyer who knows what she’s doing, and who will, with any luck, get bail for her after her felony arraignment upstairs. You go home and try to be ready to raise it. At least a million; that’s a guess, but probably a good one. Can you get home all right?” Cynthia looked at where Beatrice had been, but she was gone. She saw the booths, like confessionals, she thought, where Beatrice might have talked to her lawyer before Leo had brought her. But Leo hurried her out; he was already late for another hearing in another court.

Later Leo and Sally met for lunch in a Chinese restaurant on Mulberry Street. Sally was not encouraging. “Am I sure she didn’t do it? No, I’m not sure, so what is a jury going to make of her? Talk about reasonable doubt: I’d have less doubt if I saw the cat licking its lips before an empty birdcage. Leo, my love, my treasure, take my advice: start thinking about a plea in this case. She’ll get eight and a third to twenty-five if she’s maxed out on a manslaughter plea, with parole after eight and a third. Otherwise, we’re talking fifteen to life. Think of Jean Harris.”

“Jean Harris shot her lover.”

“That’s more excusable than bludgeoning to death a twenty-year-old girl.”

“What happened exactly?”

“According to the DA? The girl was found dead in her dormitory room on a Saturday night. The dormitory was close to empty, and no one saw anything, except some boy on his way out who saw an old lady, and picked Professor B out of a lineup. A hell of a lot of good her corporate lawyer did her there. Professor B says she was home; sister away at some institutional revel. Every one of the girl’s friends has testified that Professor B hated her, though only slightly more than she hated the other girls in ha’ seminar. Something to do with women’s studies, more’s the pity.”

“That’s all the DA’s got?”

“An eyewitness, a lack of other suspects, and Professor B’s prints all over the girl’s notebook. Even Daphne’s friends admit she went rather far in goading the old lady, but that hardly excuses murder. It’s not as though we’re dealing with the battered woman’s syndrome here. That’s how it is, Leo. We’ll have to plead her out.”

FAYE KELLERMAN’s series featuring Rina Lazarus and close friend Sergeant Peter Decker of the Los Angeles Police Department, including The Ritual Bath, Sacred and Profane, Milk and Honey, and her latest, Day of Atonement, usually incorporate Judaic themes, and have attracted a large audience. A recent novel, The Quality of Mercy, is a work of gripping suspense set in Elizabethan times. Ms. Kellerman and her author husband live in Southern California.

Because he’d hung around long enough, Malibu Mike wasn’t considered a bum but a fixture. All of us locals had known him, had accustomed ourselves to his stale smell, his impromptu orations and wild hand gesticulations. Malibu preaching from his spot-a bus bench next to a garbage bin, perfect for foraging. With a man that weatherbeaten, it had been hard to assign him an age, but the police had estimated he’d been between seventy and ninety when he died-a decent stay on the planet.

Originally they’d thought Malibu had died from exposure. The winter has been a chilly one, a new arctic front eating through the god-awful myth that Southern California is bathed in continual sunshine. Winds churned the tides gray-green, charcoal clouds blanketed the shoreline. The night before last had been cruel. But Malibu had been protected under layers and layers of clothing-a barrier that kept his body insulated from the low of forty degrees,

Malibu had always dressed in layers even when the mercury grazed the hundred-degree mark. That fact was driven home when the obituary in the Malibu Crier announced his weight as 126. I’d always thought of him as chunky, but now I realized it had been the clothes.

I put down the newspaper and turned up the knob on my kerosene heater. Rubbing my hands together, I looked out the window of my trailer. Although it was gray, rain wasn’t part of the forecast and that was good. My roof was still pocked with leaks that I was planning to fix today. But then the phone rang. I didn’t recognize the woman’s voice on the other end, but she must have heard about me from someone I knew a long time ago. She asked for Detective Darling.

“Former detective,” I corrected her. “This is Andrea Darling. Who am I talking to?”

A throat cleared, She sounded in the range of middle-aged to elderly. “Well, you don’t know me personally. I am a friend of Greta Berstat.”

A pause allowing me to acknowledge recognition. She was going to wait a long time.

“Greta Berstat,” she repeated. “You were the detective on her burglary? You found the men who had taken her sterling flatware and the candlesticks and the tea set?”

The bell went off and I remembered Greta Berstat. When I’d been with LAPD, my primary detail was grand theft auto. Greta’s case had come my way during a brief rotation through burglary.

“Greta gave you my phone number?” I inquired.

“Not exactly,” the woman explained. “You see, I’m a local resident and I found your name in the Malibu Directory-the one put out by the Chamber of Commerce? You were listed under Investigation right between Interior Design and Jewelers.”

I laughed to myself. “What can I do for you Ms…”

“Mrs. Pollack,” the woman answered. “Deirdre Pollack. Greta was over at my house when I was looking through the phone book. When she saw your name, her eyes grew wide and my-oh-my did she sing your praises, Detective Darling.”

I didn’t correct her this time. “Glad to have made a fan. How can I help you, Mrs. Pollack?”

“Deirdre, please.”

“Deirdre it is. What’s up?”

Deirdre hemmed and hawed. Finally, she said, “Well, I have a little bit of a problem.”

I said, “Does this problem have a story behind it?”

“I’m afraid it does.”

“Perhaps it would be best if we met in person?”

“Yes, perhaps it would be best.”

“Give me your address,” I said. “If you’re local, I can probably make it down within the hour.”

“An hour?” Deirdre said. “Well, that would be simply lovely!”

From Deirdre’s living room I had a one-eighty-degree view of the coastline. The tides ripped relentlessly away at the rocks ninety feet below. You could hear the surf even this far up, the steady whoosh of water advancing and retreating. Deirdre’s estate took up three landscaped acres, but the house, instead of being centered oil the property, was perched on the edge of the bluff. She’d furnished the place warmly-plants and overstuffed chairs and lots of maritime knick-knacks.

I settled into a chintz wing chair; Deirdre was positioned opposite me on a loveseat. She insisted on making me a cup of coffee, and while she did I took a moment to observe her.

She must have been in her late seventies, her face scored with hundreds of wrinkles. She was short with a loose turkey wattle under her chin, her cheeks were heavily rouged, her thin lips painted bright red. She had flaming red hair and false eyelashes that hooded blue eyes turned milky from cataracts. She had a tentative manner, yet her voice was firm and pleasant. Her smile seemed genuine even if her teeth weren’t. She wore a pink suit, a white blouse, and orthopedic shoes.

“You’re a lot younger than I expected,” Deirdre said, handing me a china cup.

I smiled and sipped. I’m thirty-eight and have been told I look a lot younger. But to a woman Deirdre’s age, thirty-eight still could be younger than expected.

“Are you married, Detective?” Deirdre asked.

“Not at the moment.” I smiled.

“I was married for forty-seven years.” Deirdre sighed. “Mr. Pollack passed away six years ago. I miss him.”

“I’m sure you do.” I put my cup down. “Children?”

“Two. A boy and a girl. Both are doing well. They visit quite often.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “So… you live by yourself.”

“Well, yes and no,” she answered. “I sleep alone but I have daily help. One woman for weekdays, another for weekends.”

I looked around the house. We seemed to be alone and it was ten o’clock Tuesday morning. “Your helper didn’t show up today?”

“That’s the little problem I wanted to tell you about.”

I took out my notebook and pen. “We can start now if you’re ready.”

“Well, the story involves my helper,” Deirdre said. “My housekeeper. Martina Cruz… that’s her name.”

I wrote down the name.

“Martina’s worked for me for twelve years,” Deirdre said. “I’ve become quite dependent on her. Not just to give me pills and clean up the house. But we’ve become good friends. Twelve years is a long time to work for someone.”

I agreed, thinking: twelve years was a long time to do anything.

Deirdre went on. “Martina lives far away from Malibu, far away from me. But she has never missed a day in all those years without calling me first Martina is very responsible. I respect her and trust her. That’s why I’m puzzled even though Greta thinks I’m being naive. Maybe I am being naive, but I’d rather think better of people than to be so cynical.”

“Do you think something happened to her?” I said.

“I’m not sure.” Deirdre bit her lip. “I’ll relate the story and maybe you can offer a suggestion.”

I told her to take her time.

Deirdre said. “Well, like many old women, I’ve acquired things over the years. I tell my children to take whatever they want but there always seem to be leftover items. Discards. Old flower pots, used cookware, out-of-date clothing and shoes and hats. My children don’t want those kinds of things. So if I find something I no longer need, I usually give it to Martina.

“Last week, I was cleaning out my closets. Martina was helping me.” She sighed. “I gave her a pile of old clothes to take home. I remember it well because I asked her how in the world she’d be able to carry all those items on the bus. She just laughed. And oh, how she thanked me. Such a sweet girl twelve years she worked for me.”

I nodded, pen poised at my pad.

“I feel so silly about this,” Deirdre said. “One of the robes I gave her… it was Mr. Pollack’s old robe, actually. I threw out most of his things after he died. It was hard for me to look at them. I couldn’t imagine why I had kept his shredded old robe.”

She looked down at her lap.

“Not more than fifteen minutes after Martina left, I realized why I hadn’t given the robe away. I kept my diamond ring in one of the pockets. I have three different diamond rings-two of which I keep in a vault. But it’s ridiculous to have rings and always keep them in a vault. So this one-the smallest of the three-I kept at home, wrapped in an old sock and placed in the left pocket of Mr. Pollack’s robe. I hadn’t worn any of my rings in ages, and being old, I guess it simply slipped my mind.

“I waited until Martina arrived home and phoned her just as she walked through her door. I told her what I had done and she looked in the pockets of the robe and announced she had the ring. I was thrilled-delighted that nothing had happened to it. But I was also extremely pleased by Martina’s honesty. She said she would return the ring to me on Monday. I realize now that I should have called my son and asked him to pick it up right at that moment, but I didn’t want to insult her.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Deirdre said, grabbing my hand. “Do you think I’m foolish for trusting someone who has worked for me for twelve years?”

Wonderfully foolish. “You didn’t want to insult her,” I said, using her words.

“Exactly,” Deirdre answered. “By now you must have figured out the problem. It is now Tuesday. I still don’t have my diamond and I can’t get hold of Martina.”

“Is her phone disconnected?” I asked.

“No. It just rings and rings and no one answers it.”

“Why don’t you just send your son down now?”

“Because…” She sighed. “Because I don’t want him to think of his mother as an old fool. Can you go down for me? I’ll pay you for your time. I can afford it.”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“Wonderful!” Deirdre exclaimed. “Oh, thank you so much.”

I gave her my rates and they were fine with her. She handed me a piece of paper inked with Martina’s name, address, and phone number. I didn’t know the exact location of the house, but I knew the area. I thanked her for the information, then said, “Deirdre, if it looks like Martina took off with the ring, would you like me to inform the police for you?”

“No!” she said adamantly.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Even if Martina took the ring, I wouldn’t want to see her in jail. We have too many years together for me to do that.”

“You can be my boss anytime,” I said.

“Why?” Deirdre asked. “Do you do housekeeping too?”

I informed her that I was a terrible housekeeper. As I left, she looked both grateful and confused.

Martina Cruz lived on Highland Avenue south of Washington-a street lined by small houses tattooed with graffiti. The address on the paper was a wood-sided white bungalow with a tar paper roof. The front lawn-mowed but devoid of shrubs-was bisected by a cracked red plaster walkway. There was a two-step hop onto a porch whose decking was wet and rotted. The screen door was locked, but a head-size hole had been cut through the mesh. I knocked through the hole but no one answered. I turned the knob and, to my surprise, the door yielded, screen and all.

I called out a “hello,” and when no one answered, I walked into the living room-an eight-by-ten rectangle filled with hand-me-down furnishings. The sofa fabric, once gold, had faded to dull mustard. Two mismatched chairs were positioned opposite it. There was a scarred dining table off the living room, its centerpiece a black-and-white TV with rabbit ears. Encircling the table were six folding chairs. The kitchen was tiny, but the counters were clean, the food in the refrigerator still fresh. The trash hadn’t been taken out in a while. It was brimming over with Corona beer bottles.

I went into the sole bedroom. A full-size mattress lay on the floor. No closets. Clothing was neatly arranged in boxes-some filled with little-girl garments, others stuffed with adult apparel. I quickly sifted through the piles, trying to find Mr. Pollack’s robe.

I didn’t find it-no surprise. Picking up a corner of the mattress, I peered underneath but didn’t see anything. I poked around a little longer, then checked out the backyard-a dirt lot holding a rusted swing set and some deflated rubber balls.

I went around to the front and decided to question the neighbors. The house on the immediate left was occupied by a diminutive, thickset Latina matron. She was dressed in a floral print muumuu and her hair was tied in a bun. I asked her if she’d seen Martina lately, and she pretended not to understand me. My Spanish, though far from perfect, was understandable, so it seemed as if we had a little communication gap. Nothing that couldn’t be overcome by a ten-dollar bill.

After I gave her the money, the woman informed me her name was Alicia and she hadn’t seen Martina, Martina’s husband, or their two little girls for a few days. But the lights had been on last night, loud music booming out of the windows.

“Does Martina have any relatives?” I asked Alicia in Spanish.

“Ella tiene una hermana pero no sé a donde vive.”

Martina had a sister but Alicia didn’t know where she lived. Probing further, I found out the sister’s name-Yolanda Flores. And I also learned that the little girls went to a small parochial school run by the Iglesia Evangilica near Western Avenue. I knew the church she was talking about.

Most people think of Hispanics as always being Catholic. But I knew from past work that Evangelical Christianity had taken a strong foothold in Central and South America. Maybe I could locate Martina or the sister, Yolanda, through the church directory. I thanked Alicia and went on my way.

LADY ANTONIA FRASER, a London resident, is the widely heralded author of several best-selling biographies of notable British figures, including Mary, Queen of Scots; Royal Charles; and Cromwell. To millions of mystery readers she is known as the creator of Jemima Shore, television interviewer and capable detector of criminals. Ms. Shore has appeared in more than ten adventures to date, including A Splash of Red, The Wild Island, and Oxford Blood, as well as in a collection of stories, Jemima Shores First Case.

The moment the door was shut behind her, the man put the security chain across it. Then he ordered Jemima Shore to take her clothes off. All of her clothes.

“But you can leave your shoes on, if you like. They’re pretty.”

Jemima found that the sheer unreality of the situation prevented her from taking in what he was saying. She could hear the words, all right; the man was standing right beside her, his breath on her cheek-although he was not in fact breathing particularly heavily. They were about the same height: his eyes, very widely set, the color of glossy chestnuts, were level with hers.

The man’s hair was dark, very thick, and quite long and shaggy; they were so close that she could see one or two silver threads in the dark mass. He had a moustache, side-burns, and soft dark down on his cheeks; that was what gave him a Mediterranean look. His accent, however, faint but discernible, she could not place. He wore a clean white T-shirt with some kind of logo on it, and jeans. The broad shoulders and the heavy arms revealed by the contours of the T-shirt gave an impression of considerable physical strength. In spite of his calm breathing, Jemima was aware that he was sweating slightly.

She was carrying a large green Chanel-type handbag of quilted leather slung over her shoulder by two gilt chains. The man took the bag from her and put it carefully on the king-size bed that dominated the hotel room. The curtains were drawn and the lamp by the bed was lit, although it was in fact only eleven o’clock in the morning.

The man repeated his command: “Take off your clothes.” He added “I want to get to know you.”

It was idiotic, thought Jemima: the previous television program she had worked on had actually been about rape. During that period she had spoken to at least a dozen victims-of widely differing ages-on the subject. The words she had heard most frequently went something like this: “You just don’t understand what it’s like… Helplessness… If it’s never happened to you… Until it’s happened to you…”

Naturally, she had never sought to argue the point. Her intention, as an investigative television reporter, had been to present her evidence as sympathetically but candidly as possible in order to illustrate just that gulf: between sufferers and the rest, however well intentioned. The program about rape had been the last in a series of which the overall title had been Twice Punished: it had concentrated on the tragic social aftereffects of certain crimes.

“Helplessness… You just don’t understand… Until it happens to you.” Now it seemed Jemima was going to find out for herself the truth of those sad, despairing cries. Rather too late for her program. Ironically enough. And she had a feeling she was going to need all the sense of irony (or detachment) she could hang on to in the present situation. And then something more.

“Take off your clothes,” the man said for the third time. “I want to get to know you.” He was still not hurried or breathing heavily; only the slight perspiration on his upper Up betrayed any kind of agitation. Jemima now guessed him to be Moroccan or Algerian, maybe even Turkish; his actual use of English was more or less perfect.

“Who are you? And where is Clemency Vane? I have come to interview Clemency Vane.” Jemima decided the best course was to ignore the ludicrous, frightening command altogether and attempt in some way to gain a mastery of the situation. She was glad to find that her own voice was absolutely steady even if she, unlike the man himself, was panting a little. She found that she was also able to manage a small, sweet, composed smile, the one the viewers loved, because Jemima generally went to demolish the recipient of that sweet smile-some pompous political leader perhaps-politely but totally.

“Clemmie”-he accented the last syllable just slightly-“is not here. I have come instead. Now you will take off your clothes, please. Or…” He paused as if to consider the situation in a rational manner, “I could perhaps take them off for you. But you would probably prefer to do it yourself.”

The man bent forward and undid the loose drawstring tie at the neck of Jemima’s cream-colored jersey dress. His hands, like his shoulders, were large and muscular; they were covered with dark hair, the nails, Jemima noticed automatically, were very clean, as if scrubbed, and well kept. He undid the first pearl button and made as if to touch the second; then he drew back.

This is where I scream, thought Jemima. Argument stops here. There must be somebody in earshot in this damn barn of a hotel

“Don’t touch me, please,” she said aloud. “And I must tell you that whoever you are, my camera crew are due to arrive in this room in exactly one minute; they took the next lift.”

“Oh, don’t be frightened.” The man ignored her remark about the camera crew, which was in itself a worrying sign-since it was in fact quite untrue. Jemima doubted whether at this precise moment anyone in the world knew exactly where she was, not even Cherry, her faithful P.A. at Megalith Television.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “Even if you scream”-he had clearly read her mind-“I shall not hurt you, only silence you with this.” For the first time Jemima realized the man was carrying a large white scarf or cloth on his arm. “But please do not scream. There would be no point, I think, since both the rooms near us are empty, and the maid is far away.”

The man hesitated, then he led Jemima quite gently but firmly in the direction of the large bed. They both sat down. That brought her-possibly-within reach of her green handbag; but what kind of weapon was a soft quilted-leather handbag, however large? The man gazed at her earnestly with those wide-apart brown eyes.

“I have seen you on television, Jemima, I think you’re very beautiful, and you’re intelligent too. I like that very much. You’ll find I really appreciate your intelligence when we get to know each other better. Women should cultivate their intelligence so as to be of interest to men. How can a stupid woman be of any interest to a man? Education is very important for women. In order to help their man.”

Now that the man was talking, almost rattling along, poking his face close to hers, talking at manic speed but not attempting otherwise to touch her or her clothing in any way, the best plan seemed to be to keep him at it.

The education of women! A bizarre subject to discuss, perhaps, under the present circumstances, but one on which Jemima did at least have strong views-if not precisely these views.

“You’re absolutely right,” she agreed, her tone still resolutely equable, resisting the temptation to adjust the loose tie and button of her dress.

On the subject of education, would it be a good plan or a very bad plan-to reintroduce the subject of Clemency Vane? Her captor-for such he was-either knew her or knew of her. As it was, one could indeed fruitfully talk about the education of Clemency Vane and at some length, in view of what had happened to her following that education. Had the missing Clemency been actually present in the hotel room where she promised to be, Jemima herself would have shot off some pertinent questions on the subject: even if she would have recorded the answers in her own well-trained memory (and not as yet with a camera crew). Clemency had asked for her to take no notes and certainly not use a tape recorder at these preliminary interviews. And Jemima, who at this stage was committed to nothing, Clemency having made all the running herself, had nothing to lose by agreeing to her terms.

Clemency Vane was a convicted criminal who had recently been released from prison, where she had spent something over five years on a charge of drug dealing. It was an odd case. Nobody seemed to know quite where all the money had gone: some really large sums had vanished. Jemima remembered that the original sentence had been for eight years and that Clemency had been released for good behavior: it had certainly been a strong sentence for a first offender. On the other hand the proved details of Clemency Vane’s drug dealing were pretty strong too. And it was undeniably dealing: no question of a desperate addict merely trying to service her own expensive habit. Quite apart from the fact that she had pleaded “guilty.”

The oddness lay in the hint of political background to it all, a hint that mysteriously and totally disappeared when the case came to be tried and the “guilty” plea was entered, What was the country concerned? Jemima tried to remember. Red Clemmie? Blue Clemmie? Green Clemmie? Not the latter presumably in view of the drug dealing. Since none of this had finally been proffered by the defense at her trial, temporarily the name of the country eluded her, which was ridiculous. But she would have reminded herself of all the details of the case beforehand if Clemency Vane’s summons to an interview in the anonymous barn of a West London hotel had not come so peremptorily to her this morning. That had altered their previous more-long-term arrangements.

“No, it can’t wait. I thought it could when I spoke to you originally. But now it can’t.”

Santangela. That was it. Santangela: one of those little states, whose precise connection with drug traffic, antidrug traffic measures, nationalism, and anti-imperialism was so difficult to establish even for those who were keenly interested. Which most Britons, and Jemima was no exception, frankly were not. That was the hint of political background that had come and then mysteriously gone away. After all, shortly after Clemency Vane was imprisoned, there was a successful revolution in Santangela in any case; so the whole situation had changed. Santangela: where exactly was the place? Latin America? Central America? South America? It was ridiculous to be so ignorant about sheer geography, which was after all a matter of fact. But then that was Europe-centered Britain-including Jemima Shore-for you.

Jemima looked at the man again. Not a Moroccan, an Algerian, or a Turk, then, but a Santangelino? If that was what its nationals were called, as she seemed to remember they were. More vagueness, she ruefully admitted. All the same, for the first time her gaze was inquisitive, not challenging and self-protective. A Santangelino. Somehow connected to Clemency Vane’s drug charge, once deemed in some way political, then all of a sudden quite apolitical, just criminal. What she was not yet in any way clear about as yet was exactly how Clemency and her drugs fitted into Jemima’s current series. She had been wondering that ever since Clemency Vane had made the first contact. But there seemed plenty of time to find out.

Jemima’s new series-very much at the planning stage-was tentatively entitled For the Love of the Cause. It concerned the rival claims of public campaigning and private life. She had already made various soundings concerning it and had had one or two preliminary interviews with dedicated campaigners of various sorts-including one with a man who, very much against Jemima’s own beliefs, wanted to bring back capital punishment but whose wife opposed him, To her irritation, she was failing to turn up sufficient numbers of “strong women” who fitted this particular bill; they existed, all right, but preferred to keep their private lives and/ or disputes to themselves. Jemima sympathized, of course, but remained professionally irritated…

Then Clemency Vane telephoned out of the blue. Jemima herself would certainly never have thought of a reformed-one hoped-drug dealer in connection with this series. Yet Clemency’s original call, fielded by Cherry, indicated that this area of conflict was what she wished to discuss. Various other calls followed, guarded conversations, all on the telephone, with Jemima herself, with no direct information offered absolutely pertinent to the program, yet a good deal of talk about the principles involved. Love and duty, their rival demands, and so forth.

They had met only once; as now, in a hotel, an anonymous block in a different part of London; as now, the summons had come suddenly, giving Jemima little time to prepare.

“I can get away now,” Clemency Vane had said. “Please come.” And Jemima, to the sound of a few protests about work load from Cherry, had gone.

For Clemency Vane’s appearance, Jemima had been dependent on the numerous newspaper and television news images: the strong features, particularly the nose, which might be described kindly as patrician, otherwise as beaky; the circular tinted glasses that added a somewhat owlish look; and the pretty, softening halo of blond curly hair at her trial. In fact Clemency was darker than Jemima had expected, or perhaps the blond hair had been allowed to darken in prison; as it was, her hair, also much straighter, was scraped back, and her face behind the circular tinted glasses-they at least were familiar-virtually devoid of makeup. You got the impression of someone deliberately rendering herself unattractive, or at least unappealing; gone was the feminine softness of the prisoner on trial.

At the same time Clemency was quite tiny physically; that, along with her cultivatedly plain appearance, was another surprise. Well, you never really knew about people from their newspaper photographs, did you? That was one certain rule. Even television could be oddly delusive about size and scale.

It was still a strong face, despite the unexpectedly small scale of it all. A strong face: and a strong character too, judging from the evidence yielded up by the trial.

“I need to find out about you,” Clemency had said at this meeting. She spoke quite abruptly, dragging on her cigarette. She had smoked throughout the interview, stubbing out each cigarette with fury when it was about halfway finished. “I need to know if I can trust you.” Her attitude was certainly not conciliatory: defiant if anything. But she was also nervous.

“As it happens, you can trust me.” Jemima was prepared to be patient. “But I hope you will find that for yourself. With time. That’s the best way. I’m in no hurry about this series: we’ve only just started to research it, as a matter of fact. For the Love of the Cause. It’s a fascinating topic but a tricky one. I need to get exactly the right people-”

“That piece in the paper-the woman spy in love with an Israeli-”

“Ah, you saw that. I wondered. Premature, I’m afraid. She won’t talk to us. Too much conflict already about what she did for love-”

“I, too, did it for love,” Clemency said, interrupting her. “You could say that I, too, gave up everything for love.” She was busy stubbing out yet another of those wretched cigarettes, and she did not look at Jemima as she spoke.

“You mean there was a man involved?” Jemima spoke tentatively. Clemency’s nervousness was perhaps not surprising under the circumstances but quite marked all the same, including this sudden out-of-the-blue request for a face-to-face interview. She had no wish to frighten her off at this stage.

“Correct. There was a man.” Clemency pulled on her cigarette with increasing ferocity and then once again stubbed it out.

“That didn’t come out at the trial.”

“I didn’t want it to. I pleaded ‘guilty’ and that was that.”

“Is he still involved? Or rather, are you still involved with him? You were in prison a long time. Or is it over? Is it this love-versus-duty question of the woman spy and the Israeli you mentioned when you first contacted me? Is that what we might talk about on the program?”

Jemima realized too late that she had posed too many questions too quickly. An obstinate closed expression on Clemency Vane’s face warned her of her mistake.

“I don’t want to say anything more at the moment. You must understand: there are problems.” And Clemency declined to explain any further, sharply and inexorably. That was all Jemima was left with-until the summons this morning.

So there was a man involved. And this was him? Was Jemima now looking at the man for whom Clemency-product of a privileged education, showered with worldly advantages by her doting parents, clever enough to achieve university, achieve anything she wished, in truth-had thrown it all away? Infatuation was a fascinating subject. One woman’s infatuation was another woman’s poison… Take this man. Very strong physically, perhaps-she hoped not to find out-and certainly quite handsome… this was the man for whom a privileged English girl had wasted five years of her life. This Santangelino without even a name…

“My name is Alberto,” he said to her with a smile-his first smile, and that might be a good sign, might it not? Once again, however, he had apparently read her thoughts-not such a good sign, that.

“First of all you will take off all these clothes. Even the shoes now. Then we will know each other better. And perhaps we will love each other.” Alberto put both his big hands on her shoulders as though he were measuring her for something.

“Shouldn’t we get to know each other first?” Jemima spoke in the most reasonable tone she could muster. She must at all costs, she knew from studying such things, humor him: she must not arouse his violence, his hostility, give him that psychological impetus he needed to transform the situation from polite parleying to physical action. It was the feeling of helplessness that was so terrible, just as she had been told so many times.

And perhaps we will love each other. For God’s sake, it wasn’t the stripping that mattered! Jemima had a beautiful body, or at least had been assured of it enough times to lack self-consciousness on the subject. She had no particular feeling about nudity and privacy either, sunbathing topless or even naked when it seemed right without giving much thought to the subject. The exposure of her body, however disagreeable the demand in this secret claustrophobic context, was not the point. But to love each other!

How near, for example, was the hotel telephone? Looking round, she saw the telephone was on the far side of the bed. Her eye then fell on an ashtray with stubs in it. That gave her an inspiration. It was worth a try: even for a dedicated non-smoker like herself

“Could you let me have a cigarette first, please? Then I promise…”

Alberto hesitated. Finally he said: “I have no cigarettes.”

Jemima gazed again at the stubs. Half-smoked. In spite of herself, she found she was trembling. And her voice shook when she spoke. She had not realized before how much she had been counting-subconsciously-on Clemency’s arrival to interrupt them, somehow save her. Clemency Vane was after all the one person in the world who really did know where she was.

Jemima looked at the bathroom door. It was closed. She had not really thought about it, but now the blank door had a sinister look. “What’s happening here? Is she-wait a minute-is she still here? Is this a plot?”

Alberto smiled again. Jemima, her fear rising, decided that his smile was not after all a good sign.

“A plot? Yes, you could call it that,” he said. “A plot to get to know you. You thought it was your plot with your silly program about love and duty-even an intelligent woman like you, with your fine education, can be a little silly sometimes. But it was not your plot. It was our plot!”

“Clemency knows about this,” exclaimed Jemima. “Well, she must. How else did you know I was coming? Listen, Clemency’s here. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Don’t you understand? Clemency would do anything for me. She’s my woman. The drugs, everything, prison, that was all for me. And now she has brought you here for me. She set you up for me.

“Clemmie told me to come here,” he went on with that strange horrible exhilaration. “She laughed, yes, she laughed at you, for thinking that she would take part in your stupid program.”

He was becoming vehement again but apparently unaware of what he was doing as the grip on her arm tightened.

“I’m a strong man, you see, the kind of man women love; women love to support and help men like me. Clemency knew that. ‘Strong man,’ she said, ‘you get to know Jemima Shore then, if you want, get to know Jemima Shore if you like, because during all those years you never knew anything really about me. And now you never will. Poor Alberto, you will never know me.’”

Alberto’s hand loosened again, and his voice too had changed subtly as though he were imitating Clemency herself. Her abrupt rather scornful tones. There was a silence between them.

You will never know me. But it was Alberto who had said that, quoting Clemency, not Jemima. It was Alberto himself, imitating Clemency.

“She did do it all for me, didn’t she?” He was questioning Jemima now; there was something pathetic about him, despite his fierceness and the strong hands that still held her prisoner.

But then that temporary glimpse of something pathetic was quite gone. Alberto started to pull at Jemima’s clothes. The beige jersey dress came off quite easily, or would have done so, but the very violence of his actions hindered him, those scrubbed strong hands seemingly frustrated by his own haste.

I must not struggle, thought Jemima desperately, I must not even scream. I know what to do, I must be passive, I must endure, I must survive. Otherwise he’ll kill me. Now she was in her silk petticoat and the man was panting horribly, sweating much more. He began to talk, gabble: “Women, you like this, this is what you really want, bitches, traitors…” He talked on, and then half hissed, half shouted at her: “You I’m really going to possess-”

In spite of herself Jemima lost control. The careful passivity went. She began to struggle in Alberto’s grip, to shout at him.

“Even if you killed me”-having raped me was the unspoken phrase, for still she did not wish to pronounce the words, in spite of everything-“even if you killed me, and especially if you killed me, you would not get to know me. You would not possess me.”

Alberto stopped. He still held her. Now they were both sweating, panting.

“She said that, Clemency.” But before Alberto spoke the words, Jemima knew the truth, understood suddenly and clearly what had been implicit all the time. What had been done for love. Once long ago. And once only recently.

“Alberto-” She spoke more strongly now. “Release me. Then let me go into the bathroom.”

“No. It’s not right.” Some of the power was waning in him, the passion. Jemima felt it. Her own increased.

“She’s there. Clemmie,” he added in a low voice.

“I-I want to see her,” said Jemima.

“There’s nothing you can do.”

“You must let me go in there. There may be something I can do.”

Alberto shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said.

“Listen, for God’s sake-”

“It’s too late. It was already too late when you arrived here.” Now the force she had felt in him was totally extinguished. She was in command. In command as Clemency Vane had once been-had been until the very end.

“I followed her here,” he went on. “I knew she was stealing out to come and see you. I pleaded with her when I got here. I knew she was trying to leave me, that she was getting frightened of what I might do to her. She found me so violent, so demanding after she came out of prison. She said sex didn’t interest her. She never ever wanted to make love with me. She said I bored her.”

Alberto began to sob convulsively.

“Then when I pressed her more, she said she never loved me in the first place. She did it all for the cause. Yet I helped her, I protected her. She wouldn’t listen. The money was needed then, she said, so she did what she had to do. Now it was not. Santangela was safe. And she would tell the world why she did it all-not for me, but for the country, the cause.”

He sobbed more terribly.

For love. Clemency’s words came back to her. You could say indeed that I gave up everything for love. Dry, wry, defiant words. But for love of the cause, not the man.

Jemima jumped up and Alberto did not even try to stop her. She pulled on her dress and he made no move to stop that either. She went into the little clean white hotel bathroom, saw the shower, the bright pristine towels on the rail, not very big towels and an unremarkable beige color-it was that kind of hotel. All the towels were clean and untouched except one: that was the towel draped inadequately over the body of Clemency Vane lying in the bath.

The towel left her face exposed, or perhaps Alberto had not wished to cover it. Certainly he had not closed Clemency’s eyes: they stared at Jemima, sightless and bulging, above the purpled discoloration of her face, the mouth, and the tongue. There was no sign of what Alberto had used to strangle her-but the memory of his strong, black-haired, well-tended, well-scrubbed-afterward, muscular hands came back to her. The hands that had held her, Jemima. And tried to know her, as in the end they had never known Clemency Vane.

“I told you it was too late,” Alberto said from the bedroom. He had not moved. “You can go away now,” he added, in a remote voice as though the subject no longer interested him. “I shan’t harm you. Go. It’s nothing to do with you anymore.”

Much later, back at the Megalith office about seven o’clock, Cherry said to Jemima with that cheerfulness she maintained even toward the end of the office day: “Where were you this morning? There were quite a few calls. You left a message saying you were out seeing that woman, what’s her name, the drug runner who did it all for love, the persistent one who kept ringing up about the new program. But you never left me a number. Did you see her?”

“I saw her,” said Jemima. Later she would tell Cherry, of course, as she told her everything, and later still everyone would probably know. But not just now.

“Was there anything in it for the program?” inquired Cherry. “She was so sure she could help us.”

“No, after all, nothing in it for the program.”

“Ah, well,” said Cherry comfortably. “You never really know about people, do you?”

Jemima Shore agreed.

Like Marcia Muller, JULIE SMITH is a California-based writer (Berkeley) and has given us three splendid series detectives-Rebecca Schwartz, a lawyer with clients in deep trouble; Skip Langdon, an officer with the New Orleans Police Department; and Paul McDonald, a mystery writer with considerable personal experience in things criminous. The fact that Ms. Smith is a former journalist may help account for the rugged realism of her writing.

Cursing the inventors of pantyhose, June weddings, and Southern tradition, Skip took the arm of the freckle-faced young usher and walked down the damn aisle. Her pantyhose swished as her thighs touched. The skinny little usher made her feel like a freak. He was about five six; Skip was six feet and Junoesque. (Or that was one way to put it; other ways were less polite.)

“Aren’t you Skip Langdon? I remember you from Icebreakers.”

Icebreakers. Seventh-grade subscription dances. The kid’s face at twelve popped into focus: “Rhett Buchanan-not again!”

The usher giggled and dropped her off. They had been a terrible mismatch as junior high dancing partners and they still were. As far as Skip was concerned, she was mismatched with everyone and everything in New Orleans-maybe she’d come back to “work out” something. Who knew? It was a weird thing; she knew she didn’t fit in, had never fit in, probably never would fit in, but when she’d decided to become a cop, she also knew she had to do it in New Orleans. She didn’t know why, it was just that way.

The success of the exercise had yet to be determined. Uptown New Orleans, where Skip had grown up despite her daddy’s Mississippi beginnings, seemed to her as ingrown-and as stifling-as any town in West Virginia. But it looked as if once you’d graduated from McGehee’s and pledged Kappa, you were part of the equation even if you were a six-foot female cop from Mars-one of the gang whether you liked it or not. Frequently she hated it-at the moment, for instance.

The congregation stood for the wedding march. Clouds of clashing floral perfumes engulfed Skip, and she felt her left shoe begin to rub a blister on her heel. The soft gray pumps were new, to go with the lilac suit she’d probably never wear again.

The bride, darling Weezee Rounsaville, flashed thousands of dollars of wondrous white at her admirers. Skip knew for a fact from Alison Gaillard, who had made her come to this carnival of silliness in the first place, that Weezee’s daddy had practically gone into hock to pay for his little girl’s “cosmetic dentistry”; the standard straightening wasn’t good enough for a future queen of Comus.

But the investment had paid off handsomely. Mardi Gras queens were a dime a dozen; marrying Aubrey Delacroix was a stellar achievement. Aubrey had dark, Creole good looks and several million dollars.

As for the bride, darling Weezee looked like an anemic angel-the white wispy hair, milk-white skin, and pouty lips style of beauty. Absolutely ethereal in ivory satin. If that train were any longer, Skip thought, they’d have to call it the Chattanooga Choo-Choo.

The congregation sat The minister mentioned why they were there: “To join together,” etc., etc.

Damn! There was her egregious brother Conrad, king of the “suppies” (Southern Urban Pains in the butt). This was his sort of thing, not hers. What was she doing here? Pleasing Alison Gaillard, that was what-it had become almost a career with her.

“If any of you,” intoned the minister, “can show just cause why they may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else forever hold your peace.”

That part tended to wake Skip up. She always sat up straighter, half wishing for someone to accept the invitation and liven up the proceedings.

Something banged at the rear of the sanctuary. Before she had time to turn, something else banged at the front. A figure burst from a door to the left, a man dressed in black, watch cap on head, stocking over face. He was holding a metal object at his side-a handgun? Automatically, she reached for her purse, her.38. But… damn! She hadn’t brought it. It wouldn’t fit into the leather envelope Alison had talked her into. Never again! Never, never never! Shit!

She ground her teeth in agony, watching the man raise the gun.

“I can show just cause.” The voice came not from him, but from the rear of the church. “The groom’s dead.”

The man in black fired, fired again. Skip couldn’t tell if Aubrey was hit. The best man, standing next to him, lifted off his feet and fell against him, knocking him backward, blood gushing onto his white shirt.

Over Weezee’s screams, the bridesmaids’ screams, all the screams in Creole hell, the voice from the rear spoke again. “Everyone stay where you are. Anybody move and I waste the place.”

Skip turned. The man in the back also was dressed in black, also wore a stocking. He was pointing an Uzi. The shooter joined him, “Count to ten,” said the speaker, and they were out the door.

Skip was halfway down the aisle before a round of gunfire tore through the heavy air of the afternoon. A warning. Now the aisle was filling up. Should she try to get to the victims? No. A doctor would go, maybe half a dozen. That was the kind of crowd it was.

“Police! Let me through! Police!”

She might as well have been reciting “Hail Marys” for all the good it did her.

Alison Gaillard caught up with her, tugged at her elbow. She had on a peach-colored dress and straw hat with matching floaty band, like some caricature of a Southern belle in a rum ad-Try some of this in your Scorpion, Talk about deadly! Except the woman in the ad would be running barefoot on a beach instead of teetering on heels that were more like stilts. And she wouldn’t have tears welling in her china-blues. “Oh, Skippy, not Aubrey!”

Oh, Alison, not this crap!

Skip thought it. But she said, “Get me through this crowd, will you?”

Alison had the right shoes for it. Some might have kicked ass; Alison wasted insteps. Sailing past the injured, Skip finally made it outside. It was June 30, last chance for a June wedding, but the weather was more like August. Humid and still. Air you practically had to swim through. She felt her suit wilt as she ran to the curb, getting there just in time to watch a gray car turn the corner.

A maverick breeze caught Alison’s hatband; it fluttered artistically. “Nobody ever thought Buddy Carothers meant it. I mean, everybody says they’re gon’ kill their girl friend’s new flame.”

“Alison, hold it. Weezee dumped someone for Aubrey?”

“There was a big scene at the Twelfth Night Revelers-didn’t you hear about it?”

Skip shook her head. The revelers held their ball on the night in question, which meant the big scene would have been almost six months earlier. Plenty of time for tempers to cool.

“Buddy said he’d kill Aubrey on his wedding day. Who knew he meant it?”

Skip heard sirens. Good. Someone had thought to call the police. But for the moment she was the sole representative thereof. She went back inside, made her way to the front and found Aubrey well, standing outside a small crowd shaking their heads around the fallen best man. Three doctors had tried to help him. They told her, in that Southern way that simultaneously celebrates euphemism and false piety, that there was “nothing they could do for him.”

They also told her he was Aubrey’s father Noel, the Delacroix patriarch and head of the shipping company the family had founded.

She called homicide and returned quickly to help the uniformed officers who’d be the first to arrive. Since it was a Saturday, it was a while before the detectives came-when they did there was good news and bad news. The two who turned up were Joe Tarantino, a prince of a guy in Skip’s book, and Frank O’Rourke, who had personal problems and liked to make Skip his personal scapegoat.

“Hey, Skip,” said Joe. “You a witness?”

“Hello, Langdon,” said Frank. “Tried Weight Watchers yet?”

She gave them her Buddy Carothers gossip, made herself useful taking statements, and in the end succeeded in behaving in so puppylike a fashion that Joe asked if she wanted to take a ride over to Buddy’s.

O’Rourke was outraged: “She can’t investigate. She’s a witness!”

Joe only shrugged, “So maybe she can ID the guy,”

Buddy lived in half a double shotgun up near Carrollton, A small gray car parked outside could have been the one Skip had seen at the church. But Buddy didn’t answer the door. It opened when Frank tried it. The three looked at each other and shrugged, all knowing they shouldn’t enter, all agreeing they were going to.

It was clammy and dark inside. They built these old places to stay cool no matter how hot it got, and the AC was on as well. Skip shivered.

There was no one in the living room. All was quiet. But they found a heavy-breathing lump under a sour sheet on the bed. Beer bottles were everywhere, and a half-drunk bottle of bourbon on the floor hadn’t been reclosed. The bedroom reeked. A.38 lay on a nearby dresser. Skip sniffed the barrel. Recently fired.

Stuffed into Buddy’s closet, thrown on the floor in a heap, were one pair of black jeans, one black turtleneck, and half a pair of pantyhose, all slightly sweat-soaked. They’d stink when they dried out, but not as much as the rest of the setup, Skip thought. She didn’t like the open door.

The lump didn’t move, didn’t hear a thing, or else Buddy had taken acting lessons. The two men finally shook him awake enough to read him his rights.

Buddy’s story was that he’d been drunk for two days because the woman he loved was getting married. He didn’t own a.38 or a black outfit. He’d had a visitor the day before, a Jehovah’s Witness, maybe-something like that; he’d opened the door, talked to the person, and closed it, maybe locking it, maybe not.

Skip could almost buy the case against him. Buddy had done the shooting, with the accomplice doing the talking because Buddy’s voice was known. The accomplice had dropped Buddy off and driven away in the gray car. Buddy had faked the whole drunk number, even down to his blood alcohol level, just by drinking fast. He might have even had a heat on at the church, which would explain his poor marksmanship.

But if he hadn’t really been drunk-if the binge was a cover-then why leave the evidence lying around? And was there some other reason the accomplice had done the talking? Perhaps because the shooter was a woman?

It wasn’t her problem; it was homicide’s. The next thing she knew about it was what The Times-Picayune said in the morning: Buddy’d been booked. What the hell. If he was innocent, it would come out. It just wasn’t her problem.

It had rained that night and the weather was fresher. It was 7:00 A.M. on a beautiful summer day and she had the only walking beat in the city, one of the most gorgeous urban walks in the country. V.C.D. was her district, the Vieux Carré to other New Orleanians-the French Quarter to people “from away.”

Louis Two-Nose caught her on Bourbon, just above Canal, and dragged her over to Iberville where no one could see them. “Whereyat, Skip?”

“How you makin’ it, Louis?” She didn’t know how old he was. Fifty, maybe; or maybe thirty-five. A complex design covered his face, pinky-red, going to purple on his namesake honker. Today he wore a Band-Aid on his forehead, probably from a fall. He needed dental work and about a barrel of leafy green vegetables. And a month at the Betty Ford Cento’. He spoke in the Bronx-sounding patois uptown people call “yat.” Killer fumes came with the words.

“I heard somepn’ I thought you could use. Dey got da wrong man on da church murda.”

“What makes you say that?”

“A conversation I heard.”

Skip waited.

“You interested?”

She shrugged.

“I heard dese two guys settin’ up da hit.”

“What two guys?”

He looked astonished. “I don’ know. I never seen ’em before.”

“What’d they look like, Louis?”

“One black, one white.”

She waited,

“Couldn’t look at ’ em close. Didn ’t want ’em to know I was listenin’.”

“How do you know the white guy wasn’t the one we got?”

“Well, he was da ex, right? You wouldn’t hafta hire him to hit his own woman. Don’ make sense.”

“So the black guy was hiring the white guy.”

Louis nodded.

“Louis, I’m losing my patience. What’d he say?”

“He was drawin’ da church, Talkin’ about a side door where da white dude could come in, and how his partner could come in t’ru the front and cover da congregation. Dem was da words caught my attention-’cover da congregation.’ Ya don’ hear dat kinda talk every day.”

“Damn you, Louis! Why didn’t you call me then? Did you ever think of trying to stop the thing?”

“I didn’ know dey was settin’ up a hit. For all I knew dey was actors in a play.”

“Okay, okay,”

“See, I only caught on after I heard about it.”

“Louis, you know what this means, don’t you?”

“Skip, it’s a good tip-ain’t it a good tip? Come on, Skip… it’s worth somepn’, ain’t it? Gotta be worth somepn’.” Desperation was coming out of his pores along with last night’s Thunderbird.

“Not yet it’s not. Come on, Louis.”

She took him to Joe Tarantino in homicide and left him there, first slipping him a couple of bucks for when they let him go. Joe would him show him pictures of white dudes and black dudes and also arrange a lineup with Buddy in it. Louis would be sorry he’d ever brought up the subject. Oh, well, Skip thought-I’ll give him a few more bucks tomorrow.

She went back to her district and called Joe at 3:00 P.M., when her working day was over. Louis hadn’t recognized anyone and Joe was sorry, but he and Frank just couldn’t buy Louis’s story-he knew Skip knew Buddy, maybe was a friend of his, but they thought it was a good bust.

Well, hell. It was her problem now-Louis Two-Nose might be a drunk, and an unreliable one, but he had neither the brains nor the initiative to make up a story like that.

She traded her uniform for the lilac suit and headed for the Delacroix place, cursing Louis’s oversized proboscis and the messes he stuck it into.

The Delacroix family lived on Audubon Place, a short ribbon of elegance that had never had a moment’s competition for the street, in its way as glaring an anachronism as New York’s Gramercy Park-it was a private street, with a guard and a gatehouse.

Everyone who’d ever curried a moment’s favor with the Delacroix would be there today, expressing sympathy and drinking. Skip knew her name would get her in; her father the social climber was family doctor to half the old families in town. But once there and asking questions, she might get thrown out-it had happened before.

Fortunately, Alison was there. Nobody was going to mess with Skip with her sponsor around. Alison had been one of her Kappa sisters during her brief and unsuccessful tour of Sophie Newcomb. They’d barely spoken then, but now that Skip was back in town and so delicious an oddity as an officer of the law, Alison couldn’t be stopped.

She was determined to show Skip off. Or save her soul Or maybe make a lady out of her. Skip couldn’t begin to figure it out. All she knew was, Alison was always getting her invited to things-like Weezee Rounsaville’s wedding-and making her go.

And why was Skip such a wimp she couldn’t say no to some uptown version of a Jewish mother? Because Alison was a truly great source of information.

Not all criminals came from the lower echelons, as Skip had learned quite early in her career. She was the department expert on the uptown crowd and she owed her expertise largely to Alison. (And, she admitted grudgingly, to her dork of a brother, though his payoff was cheaper-he thought she fixed his parking tickets. What she really did was pay them herself and put in for informants’ fees.)

“Love that suit, Skippy. Did Buddy confess or anything?”

Skip smiled. “I’m surprised you don’t know, Gossip Goddess.” Quickly, so Alison wouldn’t press her, she changed the subject. “Listen, I know Aubrey and his mother, but they might not remember me. Could you reintroduce me?”

“I don’t see Aubrey-come to think of it, I don’t see Weezee either. Maybe they’re having a private moment of grief.” Her eyebrow went up and so did the corners of her mouth. “There’s Clarice over there.”

Aubrey’s mother was tall, thin, nervous. She looked self-absorbed and unfriendly. Closer, Skip saw that her eyes were bright angry dots, periods punctuating a face in which all the lines pointed downward. Skip doubted if she’d smiled twice in her life. She wondered about the anger in her eyes-it could have been there because Clarice had just lost her husband, because Aubrey had taken a few minutes off, any number of things. Skip thought it was simply her habit. Clarice stared at her as if she were a maggot, perhaps a potato bug-something loathsome you could squash.

“You’re Don Langdon’s daughter, aren’t you?”

Skip nodded. “I don’t know if you know I’m with the police department now. I wonder if we could talk a moment?”

“I really don’t think that would be appropriate.”

“Aubrey may still be in danger.”

Skip thought fear flickered on her face, but maybe it was just calculation. “Frankly, I don’t see how. You people have made an arrest, haven’t you?” Her voice was belligerent.

“We want to be sure we have the right man.”

“Are you implying my son has enemies?”

He certainly has at least one. “Of course not. We’re just completing our investigation.”

“I really think you’d better leave.”

“Could I talk to Aubrey first?”

“I think you’d better just go. Alison, dear, would you escort Miss Langdon?”

“But, Clarice-”

“Get this woman out of my house.”

So much for Skip’s fantasies of protection. As Clarice turned away, Alison only sighed. “Tarantula-woman strikes again. Sorry you had to be the victim, but if it’s any comfort, you won’t be the only one. She usually gets two or three a day.”

“You know what just occurred to me? Aubrey isn’t dead and his dad is.”

“Well now, that is a brilliant deduction.”

“Maybe she’s not a tarantula-maybe she’s a black widow.”

Alison laughed. “Had him killed for his money? What’s the point? To run away with her lover? Who’d have Clarice?”

Skip’s mind was reeling, contemplating its own stupidity. Aubrey might or might not have had enemies, but rich, powerful Noel Delacroix was bound to have had dozens-perhaps some in his own family. She wished she knew who stood to inherit.

“Is Aubrey an only child?”

“Why, no.” Alison looked as if she’d just realized she’d been as obtuse as Skip, “There’s Gina. She’s about our age, Where in hell is Gina? And where was she yesterday?”

“Who?”

“Aubrey’s sister Gina. Comes from Regina.” She pronounced both words with long “I’s.” “Isn’t it obscene? She had a bad drug problem a few years ago. Dropped out of school, I think, I haven’t seen her in years. Come to think of it, none of the Delacroix ever mentions her,”

They were nearly at the door now. “Who’d know the story on Gina?”

“Cammy, I guess-the maid.” Alison snapped her fingers. “Tante Adelle and Tante Tay-Tay, Great-aunts-Noel’s father’s sisters.” Her head swiveled. “They were here a while ago…”

The two aunts lived in a house on Prytania, Adelle was a widow and Tay-Tay a “maiden lady,” if such females still existed. They were napping when Skip arrived, having probably had a drop or two at their late nephew’s. She was let in by a maid who acted the perfect hostess while the aunts pulled themselves together. But Skip declined her offer to sit, preferring to prowl, looking at pictures and books,

Adelle appeared first, still smoothing a hastily donned knit skirt over the mono-buttock a girdle makes. She stood erect, had shoulder-length black hair with a white streak in it. Her mouth was a little tight for Skip’s taste.

“Adelle Gibert,” she said. “You’re Don Langdon’s daughter, aren’t you?”

Once Skip had hated to admit it, had longed to be known for herself and not her family, but that wasn’t the way New Orleans was made.

“Sit down,” said Adelle. “I hear Tay-Tay,” So did Skip-unless a rhino was charging; lampshades shook as the floor vibrated. Tay-Tay entered the room with the air of one who owns the parish, possibly the state; someone used to authority. Skip had a flash: retired schoolteacher.

She was a large lady-gray-haired, deep-bosomed, grandmotherly, wearing shorts that showed varicose veins and a T-shirt that couldn’t quite do its work-she had a solid line of bust to go with Adelle’s mono-butt. She looked as if she could give a flying flirt,

“Octavia Delacroix.” Without further ceremony, she plopped into a needlework rocker. “How can we help?”

“I was wondering about Aubrey’s sister.”

Adelle’s eyebrows went up. “Gina? Gina?” Horrified.

Tay-Tay was placid. “Poor little Gina. What about her?”

“I wondered if you know where she is.”

Adelle sat in censorious silence. Tay-Tay smiled. “Well, I guess we’re gon’ be awhile. Something cool, Miss Langdon? Or should I say Officer?”

“How about Skip?”

“And you must call me Tay-Tay. Or Tante Tay-Tay if you like. Everyone else does.” Skip felt engulfed by the warmth of her. She’d probably taught first or second grade, let the kids crawl up in her lap. “I’ll speak to Leeanna.”

When she had left, Adelle said, “Gina’s a very lovely girl, Miss Langdon. I can’t think where you’re going with this.”

Tay-Tay’s heavy step announced her return. She said, “I guess you noticed she wasn’t at the wedding. You think she could have been one of those black figures… that’s it, isn’t it?”

“I have to ask, that’s all.”

“Well, she wasn’t. She’s not even in town. Gina’s estranged from the family. Her daddy never had a moment’s time for her after he found out she had a drug problem. Threw her out of the house when she was eighteen.”

“Tay-Tay!”

“Adelle, she’s gon’ find out anyway. Might as well be from somebody that loves Gina.” She turned back to Skip. “Who wouldn’t take drugs with those two for parents?”

“I’ve met Clarice.”

“Well, Noel was… a Delacroix. Staunch churchmen, the whole lot of them.”

A little too staunch, Skip gathered.

“Anyway, next thing you know Gina got pregnant and he still refused to help her. Even when the baby was born. The good news is, she quit using, for the baby’s sake.” She smiled. “Darlin’ little Heather. Cutest thing old Tante Tay-Tay ever saw in her life.”

Adelle said, “We tried to help her, but Noel found out.”

“Is she disinherited? Do people still do that?”

Leeanna arrived with a tray of iced tea. Overhearing, she snorted. Adelle’s lips drew together again.

But Tay-Tay laughed. “Well, it’s pretty hard, in this state, but it can be done. You’re looking at two of the only…”

“Tay-Tay, I beg you!”

“Adelle, for heaven’s sake. Everybody knows the story. What are you being so silly about?”

Skip made her face a polite blank.

“Adelle tells it herself at parties-or used to before everyone in New Orleans had heard it three times. You know about forced heirship?”

Skip shook her head, mystified.

“Well, Louisiana’s the only state in the union that’s got it-you can’t cut a child completely out of the will, except in twelve very unusual circumstances. Or let’s say eleven of those and one that’s all too usual. Which is how Adelle got caught. When she was fifteen-a minor, you see-she ran away and got married.”

Adelle said, “Damn the Delacroix and all they stand for!”

“Hear, hear!” said Tay-Tay, raising her iced tea glass. Skip suspected she was still a little high from whatever she’d been drinking at the wake. “They don’t even, cut their wives in any more than they have to. The bulk of Noel’s estate will go to Aubrey, you watch. Clarice will get a house-though certainly not the one on Audubon Place-and just enough to live on, and Gina will get the fourth required by law. A bitter pill for Noel-she wouldn’t even get that if it weren’t for us. We’ve schooled the girl very carefully in the art of forced heirship-we’re experts. She always made sure she contacted him at least once every two years-if she hadn’t, she could have been disinherited. That’s one of the twelve ways, and incidentally one of the three our father got us on.”

“Both of you are disinherited?”

“Absolutely. And all because of our dear brother Charles. Now deceased.” Tay-Tay looked delighted about that. “You see he was the one who told Daddy he could do it and how-he was the lawyer in the family.”

“And the one who stood to get the entire estate.”

Adelle sniffed. “That’s what Daddy wanted anyway. The name male chauvinist was invented for Delacroix.”

Tay-Tay was enjoying herself. “They got me two ways, but one of them was fraudulent. A child can be disinherited if he hits a parent. Daddy and Charles claimed I hit Daddy when he told Adelle he was going to do it to her-but really, I only threw a vase. Anyway, after it all happened we never spoke to either of them again. Not even knowing that was one of the twelve grounds.”

“What are the other grounds?” Skip knew, as did everyone in Louisiana, that the state’s famous Napoleonic Code was eccentric, but this was such a preposterous twist she was fascinated.

“Oh, what are they, Adelle?”

Addle held her tongue.

“Let’s see,” said Tay-Tay. “Refusing to ransom a parent is one. And accusing a parent of a capital crime. Except high treason, that is, because that’s your duty. My personal favorite is refusing to take care of a parent who’s become insane. How would you prove he was competent to make a will?” She turned serious. “I’m sorry. It isn’t funny-I’m just used to it. To get back to our lovely family, Adelle has a little money from her late husband and I have my pension, but we’ve had to depend on Noel’s good nature for a house to live in.”

Adelle snorted. “His whims, you mean. Clarice bullied Noel into giving us this one only because it would have looked bad if we’d had to find a hovel somewhere.”

“He didn’t give it to us, Adelle.”

“He let us live here. So that’s why we couldn’t help Gina, have her come live with us, when she needed it. He wouldn’t permit it.”

“Do you have her address?”

Adelle thought they shouldn’t give it to her, but Tay-Tay prevailed. Softly, on the way out, she apologized for her sister’s coldness: “She’s just upset about Aubrey. The wedding being ruined and all.”

Gina lived in Baton Rouge and worked at a drug abuse counseling center. Skip caught her at home, her eyes red, her hair slightly dirty. She didn’t look as if she’d slept.

Skip made sympathy sounds.

Gina blew her nose. “I’m crying because I couldn’t go to my own father’s house today. The day after he died.”

“You were forbidden to?”

“No. I couldn’t bring myself to. Mama’s Catholic too. They both thought I was a sinner that couldn’t be forgiven.”

And a social embarrassment.

The apartment was tiny, furnished with Goodwill bargains, every surface covered with the toys, clothes, and supplies of a five-year-old. Heather herself was watching an old black-and-white TV, there being barely any room in the place to do anything else.

“I gather you weren’t at the wedding either. Why not just defy your parents and go?”

That started a fresh flood of tears: “Aubrey didn’t invite me.” She shrugged. “He did what Daddy wanted.”

Skip was trying to figure out what could make a man like Noel tick-a man so heartless, so rigid, so out of sync with contemporary mores, when Gina said: “It’s a Delacroix tradition. Hating women.”

There was a bitter edge to her voice. “They even gave me a name that sounds like vagina. ‘Generic female here; don’t bother naming it.’ Have you met my mother?”

“Yes.”

“My grandmother was just like her. Their mothers are bitches, they marry more bitches, and they keep on hating women. But they’re so mired in Catholic tradition they never admit to themselves what their wives are. To them all women are either Mary or Mary Magdalene. And Mary is never a bitch. So they spend their lives getting pushed around by these female storm troopers and pretend they’re in control by being tyrants about money.”

“You seem to have thought this out.”

“You would have, too, in my shoes. I don’t think you could possibly know how pathological my family is.”

Skip thought of her own family. “I don’t know-”

“Look at this.” Gina handed her a letter:

Dear Regina,

This is to let you know that on July 1, 1990, the Louisiana law on forced heirship will change. On that day and afterward, children twenty-three and over can be disinherited. Enclosed please find a copy of the will I will sign that day.

“My God!”

“My daddy was a real sweetheart, wasn’t he? It wasn’t enough to do it, he had to make damn sure I knew about it.”

“He was killed June 30.”

“I guess that makes me an heiress, huh? Now I can move to a real house and go back to school.” She blew her nose. “Ain’t life grand?”

Her lips moved a little, to no apparent end. Skip thought she’d tried a smile but just couldn’t manage it.

“Gina, I have to ask you. Where were you Saturday afternoon?”

“Drowning my sorrows.”

You and Buddy Carothers.

“I was with a girl friend, Alicia Ravenel, and we were in a bar called The Glass Menagerie. I think quite a few people would remember. I was making a spectacle of myself.”

Skip stayed late in Baton Rouge, visiting The Glass Menagerie (drinks in glasses animal-shaped), and calling on Alicia Ravenel.

The alibi checked out.

The case against Buddy Carothers was looking better. But if he did it, where did the black man come in? Had he been the man with the Uzi? He hadn’t had a black accent. And Louis Two-Nose had been very clear about it: the black man had been the one doing the hiring, and he’d hired two men, the one in the bar and “his partner,” who’d cover the congregation. Had Buddy sent a friend to hire a thug for him? Had Gina?

Skip called all the numbers in Buddy’s address book and even consulted her least favorite source, her brother Conrad, who knew everyone even a little bit socially important. No one had ever seen Buddy speak with any black person who wasn’t a servant or a bellman. The reason they could be so sure was he was a notorious racist.

As always in these situations, Skip wished she’d gotten it together and learned to meditate. She felt the need to focus her mind. She couldn’t see how Noel’s timely death (considering his letter) could be a coincidence. But if Gina had had him killed, why show Skip the letter? And who was the black man? She knew only two black people involved with the Delacroix family-Noel’s maid Cammy and Leeanna; but there must be others.

She phoned Alicia Ravenel, Gina’s boss, and friends of Gina’s whose names she’d gotten from Alicia. She also called Alison, who made a few calls of her own. That afternoon she found herself visiting a man named Raybon Broussard.

After that, she dropped in on the aunts. This time they both wore white slacks, Adelle’s elegant, Tay-Tay’s the sloppy kind with drawstring waist. Adelle had pulled her hair back against the heat; she looked younger and a little vulnerable. Tay-Tay worked on a needlepoint pillow.

“I talked to Raybon today.”

Tay-Tay looked up in alarm. “Oh, no! Leeanna-”

Adelle said, “I’ll send her to the store.”

When she returned, Skip saw that her color had gone. Raybon was Leeanna’s son.

“He’s sweating,” said Skip, “and not because his AC’s on the blink. He’s one of the most scared young men I’ve seen lately.”

“Has something gone wrong with his parole? I don’t think I can take it if that boy has to go back to prison.” Tay-Tay looked ready to cry. “There’s no harm in Raybon, no harm at all.”

“Armed robbery-”

“He was just a baby. Why, he’s still a baby-won’t be twenty-one till January.”

Adelle said, “Tay-Tay never forgets his birthday. I sometimes think she loves Raybon better than Gina.”

“That’s not true, Adelle, and you know it. I love all my children just the same.”

Skip was sure she’d been right about Tay-Tay-she had to have been a teacher. “He must love you too,” she said. “He’s trying really hard to protect you. But it’s not going to work. I have the name of the man he sent you to.”

She didn’t, though. Not yet. Raybon had been a challenge. He was frightened, all right, which was how she knew she was on the right track. But fear didn’t loosen his tongue any. She’d had to tell him Tay-Tay had already confessed to get him talking-and then he’d only said one thing and it wasn’t enough for an arrest. But she was hoping hard.

“What on God’s earth are you talking about?”

“He says it wasn’t you who called him.”

Adelle started to speak: “I had to tell him it was for Tay-Tay.”

Skip stopped her. “Not yet. I have to Mirandize you.”

Adelle nodded stoically. Her color was better; she’d probably gotten a jolt of adrenaline.

“What’s happening?” Tay-Tay was panicked, looked as if her world was falling apart. And it was, thought Skip, feeling for her. When she’d read Adelle her rights, Skip asked if she wanted to waive them.

“Oh, hell, yes. I want to talk, and I don’t want some stuffy lawyer in here clamming me up.”

She might be a murderer, but Skip liked her spirit. She saw now that Adelle was no stiff-lipped Sunday school teacher; she’d seemed uptight because she’d been under the biggest stress of her life.

“Adelle, no.”

“Hush up, Tay-Tay. Don’t you see what she’s doing? She’s blackmailing me. If I talk, Raybon gets off.”

Skip said, “I can’t make any deals.”

“But this way you won’t take him to some horrible interrogation room and badger him, will you? Because I’m going to give you what you need, and tell you flat-out that he didn’t have the least idea what it was all about. He just gave me a name, that’s all. Wouldn’t take a penny for it. Thought he was doing a favor for Tay-Tay. That’s how I got him to cooperate.”

She spoke directly to Skip, avoiding her sister’s eye. “Gina called in tears about the letter-absolutely hysterical, poor little baby. Anyway, Tay-Tay wasn’t home and I made up my mind not to tell her about it. I just made my plans. I told Raybon Tay-Tay had a problem and I wanted to solve it for her. I asked him to give me the name of a very bad man, someone from prison. I think he thought I wanted to scare somebody because he didn’t give me a murderer. But his friend knew some Italians. I had to pay him five thousand dollars for the introduction; the Italians cost twenty apiece. Did you know it was so cheap to hire hit men?”

“That’s all the money you have in the world!” Skip noticed Tay-Tay had changed the subject, unable yet to face what had happened.

“Gina will help me. I know she will.”

She was getting a glazed look now. But Tay-Tay was snapping back to reality, taking it in.

“Adelle, murder. You did murder!”

“Poor little Heather-my heart just sank every time I saw that child in that tiny little crackerbox.” Her bland face wore a look Skip had seen in court: a judge pronouncing sentence. “Somebody had to get this family back on track.”

“But the wedding-why poor Aubrey’s wedding?”

For the first time Adelle smiled. “I thought we needed a ritual murder,”

Horror replaced the shock on Tay-Tay’s gentle face. She spoke as if explaining it to herself. “You’re crazy, Adelle. You’re really mad.”

“That’s right, little sister. I’m really mad. But not crazy-mad.” She paused and took a breath for maximum volume. “I’m furious!”

Skip thought little Heather probably heard her aunt up in Baton Rouge.

BARBARA WILSON is the author of several novels and a collection of short stories. In addition to the Pam Nilsen series, Murder in the Collective, Sisters of the Road, and The Dog Collar Murders, she has recently published Gaudi Afternoon, the first mystery to feature London-based translator Cassandra Reilly. Barbara Wilson is the cofounder of Seal Press in Seattle.

It started gradually. Here and there on London streets new blue plaques that might have been placed there by the authorities, if the authorities had been reasonably literate, and unreasonably feminist, began to appear. At 22 Hyde Park Gate the enamel plaque stating that Leslie Stephen, the noted biographer, had lived here was joined by a new metal plate, much the same size and much the same color, which informed the passerby that this was where writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell had spent their childhoods. Over in Primrose Hill the plaque that read that Yeats had once been resident in this house was joined by a shiny new medallion gravely informing us that Sylvia Plath had written the poems in Ariel here before committing suicide in 1963.

Above the blue plaque at 106 Hallam Street, the birthplace of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another one appeared to emphasize that poet Christina Rossetti had lived here as well. The plate at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which recorded that Sigmund Freud had passed the last year of his life here, was joined by a new one telling us that Anna Freud had passed forty-two years at this address. A medallion to Jane Carlyle, letter writer, joined that of her famous husband Thomas at 24 Cheyne Row, and a plaque telling us about Fanny Burney, author of Evelina and other novels, appeared above that describing Sir Isaac Newton’s dates and accomplishments on the outside of a library in St. Martin’s Street.

The appearance of these blue plaques was at first noted sympathetically, if condescendingly, by the liberal newspapers and a certain brave editor at The Guardian was bold enough to suggest that it was high time more women writers who had clearly achieved “a certain stature” be recognized. The editor thus managed to give tacit approval to the choice of authors awarded blue plaques and to suggest that the perpetrators had gone quite far enough. “We wouldn’t want blue plaques on every house in London, after all.”

But the plaquing continued, heedless of The Guardian’s pointed admonition, to the growing excitement of many and the consternation of quite a few. Who was responsible and how long would it go on? Would the authorities leave the plaques up or bother to remove them? Apparently they had been manufactured out of a lighter metal than the original plaques, but instead of being bolted to the buildings, they had been affixed with Super Glue. Some residents of the buildings were delighted; other inhabitants, in a conservative rage, defaced the medallions immediately.

The next blue plaques to go up were placed on houses previously unrecognized as having been the homes of women worth remembering and honoring. A plaque appeared outside the house in Maida Vale where authors Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain had shared a flat for several years. A similar plaque commemorating the relationship of poets H.D. and Bryher appeared in Knightsbridge. Mary Seacole, a Victorian black woman who had traveled widely as a businesswoman, gold prospector, and nurse in the Crimean War and who had written an autobiography about her life, was honored on the wall of 26 Upper George Street off Portman Square, as was Constance Markievicz, many times imprisoned Irish Republican, who was the first woman elected as a member of the British Parliament (though she refused to take her seat in protest over the Irish situation), and who was born in Westminster on Buckingham Street. Of course, my friends in the progressive backwater of East Dulwich were delighted when Louise Michel, the French Revolutionary Socialist and Communard, was honored with a plaque, and those of us who are interested in printing and publishing were quite thrilled when a plaque appeared at 9 Great Coram Street, home in the 1860s to Victoria Printers, which Emily Faithfull set up in order to train women as printers and where she published Britain’s first feminist periodical.

The list could go on and on, and it did. You would have thought the authorities would be pleased. New tourists flocked to obscure neighborhoods, guidebooks to the new sites proliferated, tours were organized; handwritten notes appeared on walls suggesting plaques; letters to the editor demanded to know why certain women hadn’t been honored. Other letters criticized the manner in which only bourgeois individuals were elevated and suggested monuments to large historical events, such as Epping Forest, where Boudicca, the leader of the Celts, fought her last battle with the Romans in A.D. 62, or the Parliament Street Post Office, where Emily Wilding Davison set fire to a letter box in 1911, the first suffragist attempt at arson to draw attention to the struggle for women’s rights. One enterprising and radical artist even sent the newspapers a sketch for a “Monument of Glass” to be placed on a busy shopping street in Knightsbridge, to commemorate the day of March 4, 1912, when a hundred suffragists walked down the street, smashing every plate glass window they passed.

The Tory and gutter papers were naturally appalled by such ideas and called for Thatcher (whom no one had thought to plaquate) to put a stop to the desecration of London buildings and streets. Vigilant foot patrols were called for and severe penalties for vandalization were demanded.

This then was the atmosphere in which the news suddenly surfaced that the grave of a famous woman poet had been opened and her bones had gone missing.

As it happened, the small village in Dorset where the poet had been buried was also the home of a friend of mine, Andrea Addlepoot, once a writer of very successful feminist mysteries, back when feminist mysteries had been popular, and now an obsessive gardener and letter writer. It was she who first described the theft to me in detail, the theft that the London papers had hysterically headlined: POET’S GRAVE VANDALIZED.

My dear Cassandra,

By now you have no doubt heard that Francine Crofts “Putter” is no longer resting eternally in the small churchyard opposite my humble country cottage. My first thought, heretically, was that I would not miss her-meaning that I would not miss the hordes of visitors, primarily women, primarily Young American Women, who had made the pilgrimage to her grave since her death. I would not miss how they trampled over my tender flowers, nor pelted me with questions. As if I had known the woman- As if anyone in the village had known the woman.

And yet it is still quite shocking, and everyone here is in an uproar over it.

You of course realize that the theft is not an isolated action but only the latest in a series of “terrorist acts” (I quote Peter Putter, the late poet’s husband) perpetrated on the grave, and most likely not totally unrelated to the unchecked rememorializing of London and surrounding areas. (Discreet plaquing is one thing, but I really could not condone the defacing of Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral. Surely “In Memory of Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the late Reverend George Austen, formerly Rector of Steventon,” says everything necessary. There was no reason on earth to stencil onto the stone the words “Author of Pride and Prejudice and other novels.”)

These “terrorist acts” consisted of the last name, “Putter,” in raised lead lettering, being three times chipped off from the headstone. The headstone was repaired twice but the third time Mr. Putter removed the headstone indefinitely from the grave site. That was over a year ago and it has not been reerected, which, despite what you might think, has not made my life any easier. I cannot count the number of times that sincere young women have approached me as I stood pruning my roses and beseeched me, most often in fiat American accents, to show them the unmarked grave of Francine Crofts.

Never Francine Putter or Francine Crofts Putter.

For Francine Crofts was her name, you know, even if at one time she had been rather pathetically eager to be married to the upcoming young writer Peter Putter and had put aside her own poetry to type his manuscripts. Francine Crofts is the name the world knows her by. And, of course, that’s what Putter cannot stand.

I know him, you must realize. Although his boyhood was long, long over by the time I moved here (after the enormous financial success, you recall, of Murder at Greenham Common), his parents Margery and Andrew and sister Jane Fitzwater-the widow who runs the local tearoom, and who has a penchant for telling anyone who will listen what a shrew Francine was and what a saint dear Peter-still live in the large house down the road that Peter bought for them. This little village represents roots for Peter, and sometimes you’ll see him with one or another young girlfriend down at the pub getting pissed. When he’s really in his cups he’ll sometimes go all weepy, telling everyone what a raw deal he’s getting from the world about Francine, It wasn’t his fault she died. He really did love her. She wasn’t planning to get a divorce. They were soul mates.

It’s enough to make you vomit. Everybody knows what a cad he was, how it was his desertion of her that inspired Francine’s greatest poetry and the realization that he wasn’t coming back that led to her death. It’s hard to see now what she saw in Putter, but, after all, he was younger then, and so was she. So were we all.

But Cassandra, I’m rambling. You know all this, I’m sure, and I’m equally sure you take as large an interest in the disappearance of Francine’s bones as I do. Why not think about paying me a visit for a few days? Bring your translating work, I’ll cook you marvelous meals, and together we’ll see-for old times’ sake-whether we can get to the bottom of this.

When I arrived at Andrea’s cottage by car the next day, she was out in her front garden chatting with journalists. As usual she was wearing jeans and tall boots and a safari hat. In spite of her disdain for Americans, she was secretly flattered when anyone mentioned that she, rangy and weathered, looked a bit like the Marlboro man. At the moment she was busy giving quotes to the journos in her usual deep, measured tones:

“Peter Putter is an insecure, insignificant man and writer who has never produced anything of literary value himself, and could not stand the idea that his wife was a genius. He drove her to… Oh, hello, Cassandra.” She broke off and took my bag, waving good-bye to the newspaper hacks. “And don’t forget it’s AddlePOOT-not PATE, author of numerous thrillers… Come in, come in.” She opened the low front door and stooped to show me in. “Oh, the media rats. We love to hate them.”

I suspected that Andrea loved them more than she hated them. It was only since her career had slipped that she’d begun to speak of them in disparaging terms. During the years that the feminist thriller had been in fashion, Andrea’s name had shone brighter than anyone’s. “If Jane Austen were alive today and writing detective stories, she would be named Andrea Addlepoot,” gushed one reviewer. All of her early books-Murder at Greenham Common, Murder at the Small Feminist Press, Murder at the Anti-Apartheid Demonstration-had topped the City Limits Alternative Best Seller lists, and she was regularly interviewed on television and in print about the exciting new phenomenon of the feminist detective.

Alas, any new phenomenon is likely to be an old phenomenon soon and thus no phenomenon at all. It never occurred to Andrea that the feminist detective was a bit of a fad and that, like all fads in a consumer culture, its shelf life was limited. Oh, Andrea and her detective, London PI Philippa Fanthorpe, had tried. They had taken on new social topics-the animal rights movement, the leaky nuclear plants on the Irish Sea-but the reviews were no longer so positive. Too “rhetorical,” too “issue-oriented,” too “strident,” the critics wrote wearily, and Andrea Addlepoot’s fortunes declined. In the bookstores feminist mysteries were replaced with the latest best-selling genre: women’s erotica.

And Andrea, who had never written a sex scene in her life, retired for good to Dorset.

“Cassandra, it’s shocking how this is being reported,” she announced as we sat down in the tiny parlor. She took off her safari hat and her gray curls bristled. “Peter Putter is here giving interviews to the BBC news every few hours. And now the Americans have gotten in on it. Cable News Network is here and I’ve heard Diane Sawyer is arriving tomorrow.”

“Well, Francine Crofts was born in America,” I said. “And that’s where a lot of her papers are, aren’t they?”

“Yes, everything that Putter couldn’t get his hands on is there.”

“I read somewhere that he destroyed her last journal and the manuscript of a novel she was working on.”

“Oh, yes, it’s true. He couldn’t stand the idea of anything bad about himself coming to the public’s attention.”

“Any chance he could have removed the bones himself?” I asked.

Andrea nodded. “Oh, I would say there’s a very good chance indeed. All this rowing over her headstone has not been good publicity for our Peter Putter. It puts him in a bad light, it keeps bringing back the old allegations that he was responsible in great measure for Francine’s death. It’s quite possible, I think, that he began to read about the appearance of all these new blue plaques and thought to himself, ‘Right. I’ll get rid of the grave entirely, blame it on the radical feminists and there’ll be an end to it.’ I’m sure he’s sorry he ever thought to bury the body here in the first place and to put ‘Putter’ at the end of her name. But he can’t back down now, so the only solution was to arrange for the bones to disappear.”

“I don’t suppose we could go over to the graveyard and have a look?”

Andrea peered out her small-paned front window. “We’ll go when it’s quieter. Let’s have our tea first.”

We had our tea, lavish with Devonshire cream and fresh scones, and then Andrea went off for a brief lie-down, and I, left to my own resources in the parlor, went to the bookcase and found the volume of Crofts’s most celebrated poems.

They struck me with the same power now as they had when I read them twenty years ago, especially the poems written at the very end, when, translucent from rage and hunger, Francine had struck out repeatedly at the ties that bound her to this earth and that man. Even as she was starving herself to death in the most barbaric and self-punishing way, she still could write like an avenging angel.

Around five, when the autumn mists had drifted down over the small village in the valley, Andrea roused herself and we walked across the road to the tiny churchyard of St. Stephen’s. The small church was from the thirteenth century and no longer in use; its front door was chained and padlocked. The churchyard was desolate as well, under the purple twilight sky, and covered with leaves that were damp with rain. It was enclosed on all sides by a low stone wall and shielded by enormous oaks. We went in through the creaking gate. The ground was trampled with footprints, and many of the graves were untended.

I could barely see my feet in front of me through the cold, wet mist, but Andrea led the way unerringly to a roped-off hole. There had been no effort to cover the grave back over, and the dirt was heaped hastily by the side.

It had the effect of eerie loneliness and ruthless desecration, and even Andrea, creator of the cold-blooded Philippa Fanthorpe, seemed disturbed.

“You can see they didn’t have much time,” she murmured.

Suddenly we heard a noise. It was the gate creaking. Without a word Andrea pulled me away from the grave and around the side of the church. Someone was approaching the site of the theft, a woman with a scarf, heavy coat, and Wellington boots. She stood silently by the open grave a moment. And then we heard her begin to cry.

One of the fastest rising stars of mystery fiction, SUSAN DUNLAP has created three memorable detectives-Berkeley-based Jill Smith, in novels like Diamond in the Buff; PI Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, who works out of San Diego in books like Rogue Wave; and the only meter reader sleuth in history, Vejay Haskell, in the wonderfully named (and wonderful) The Last Annual Slugfest. Ms. Dunlap makes her home in Albany, California.

“The thing I like most about being a private investigator is the thrill of the game. I trained in gymnastics as a kid. I love cases with lots of action. But, alas, you can’t always have what you love,” Kiernan O’Shaughnessy glanced down at her thickly bandaged foot and the crutches propped beside it.

“Kicked a little too much ass, huh?” The man in the seat beside her at the Southwest Airlines gate grinned. There was an impish quality to him. Average height, sleekly muscled, with the too-dark tan of one who doesn’t worry about the future. He was over forty but the lines around his bright green eyes and mouth suggested quick scowls, sudden bursts of laughter, rather than the folds of age setting in. Amid the San Diegans in shorts and T-shirts proclaiming the Zoo, Tijuana, and the Chargers, he seemed almost formal in his chinos and sports jacket and the forest green polo shirt. He crossed, then recrossed his long legs and glanced impatiently at the purser standing guard at the end of the ramp.

The gate 10 waiting area was jammed with tanned families ready to fly from sunny San Diego to sunnier Phoenix. The rumble of conversations was broken by children’s shrill whines and exasperated parents barking their names in warning.

“We are now boarding all passengers for Southwest Airlines flight twelve forty-four to Oakland, through gate nine,”

A mob of the Oakland-bound crowded closer to their gate, clutching their blue plastic boarding passes.

Beside Kiernan the man sighed. But there was a twinkle in his eyes. “Lucky them. I hate waiting around like this. It’s not something I’m good at. One of the reasons I like flying Southwest is their open seating. If you move fast you can get whatever seat you want.”

“Which seat is your favorite?”

“One-B or one-C. So I can get off fast. If they ever let us on.”

The Phoenix-bound flight was half an hour late. With each announcement of a Southwest departure to some other destination, the level of grumbling in the Phoenix-bound area had grown till the air seemed thick with frustration, and at the same time old and overused, as if it had held just enough oxygen for the scheduled waiting period, and now, half an hour later, served only to dry out noses and to make throats raspy and tempers short.

The loudspeaker announced the Albuquerque flight was ready for boarding. A woman in a rhinestone-encrusted denim jacket raced past them toward the Albuquerque gate. Rhinestones. Hardly diamonds, but close enough to bring the picture of Melissa Jessup to Kiernan’s mind. When she’d last seen her, Melissa Jessup had been dead six months, beaten and stabbed, her corpse left outside to decompose. Gone were her mother’s diamonds, the diamonds her mother had left her as security. Melissa hadn’t been able to bring herself to sell them, even to finance her escape from a life turned fearful and the man who preferred them to her. It all proved, as Kiernan reminded herself each time the memory of Melissa invaded her thoughts, that diamonds are not a girl’s best friend, that Mother (or at least a mother who says “don’t sell them”) does not know best, and that a woman should never get involved with a man she works with. Melissa Jessup had done all those things. Her lover had followed her, killed her, taken her mother’s diamonds, and left not one piece of evidence. Melissa’s brother had hired Kiernan, hoping that with her background in forensic pathology she would find some clue in the autopsy report, or that once she could view Melissa’s body she would spot something the local medical examiner had missed. She hadn’t. The key that would nail Melissa’s killer was not in her corpse, but with the diamonds. Finding those diamonds and the killer with them had turned into the most frustrating case of Kiernan’s career.

She pushed the picture of Melissa Jessup out of her mind. This was no time for anger or any of the emotions that the thought of Melissa’s death brought up. The issue now was getting this suitcase into the right hands in Phoenix. Turning back to the man beside her, she said “The job I’m on right now is baby-sitting this suitcase from San Diego to Phoenix. This trip is not going to be ‘a kick.’”

“Couldn’t you have waited till you were off the crutches?” he said, looking down at her bandaged right foot.

“Crime doesn’t wait.” She smiled, focusing her full attention on the conversation now. “Besides, courier work is perfect for a hobbled lady, don’t you think, Mr.-uh?”

He glanced down at the plain black suitcase, then back at her. “Detecting all the time, huh?” There was a definite twinkle in his eyes as he laughed. “Well, this one’s easy. Getting my name is not going to prove whether you’re any good as a detective. I’m Jeff Siebert. And you are?”

“Kiernan O’Shaughnessy, But I can’t let that challenge pass. Anyone can get a name. A professional investigator can do better than that. For a start, I surmise you’re single.”

He laughed, the delighted laugh of the little boy who’s just beaten his parent in rummy. “No wedding ring, no white line on my finger to show I’ve taken the ring off. Right?”

Admittedly, that was one factor. But you’re wearing a red eit Since it’s nowhere near Christmas, I assume the combination of red belt and green turtleneck is not intentional. You’re color-blind.”

“Well yeah,” he said buttoning his jacket over the offending belt. But they don’t ask you to tell red from green before they’ll give you a marriage license. So?”

“If you were married, your wife might not check you over before you left each morning, but chances are she would organize your accessories so you could get dressed by yourself, and not have strange women like me commenting on your belt.”

“This is the final call for boarding Southwest Airlines flight twelve forty-four to Oakland at gate nine,”

Kiernan glanced enviously at the last three Oakland-bound passengers as they passed through gate 9. If the Phoenix flight were not so late, she would be in the air now and that much closer to getting the suitcase in the right hands. Turning back to Siebert, she said, “By the same token, I’d guess you have been married or involved with a woman about my size, A blonde.”

He sat back down in his seat, and for the first time was still

“Got your attention, huh?” Kiernan laughed. “I really shouldn’t show off like that. It unnerves some people. Others, like you, it just quiets down. Actually, this was pretty easy. You’ve got a tiny spot of lavender eyeshadow on the edge of your lapel. I had a boyfriend your height and he ended up sending a number of jackets to the cleaners. But no one but me would think to look at the edge of your lapel, and you could have that jacket for years and not notice that.”

“But why did you say a blonde?”

“Blondes tend to wear violet eyeshadow.”

He smiled, clearly relieved.

“Flight seventeen sixty-seven departing gate ten with service to Phoenix will begin boarding in just a few minutes. We thank you for your patience.”

He groaned, “We’ll see how few those minutes are.” Across from them a woman with an elephantine carry-on bag pulled it closer to her. Siebert turned to Kiernan, and giving her that intimate grin she was beginning to think of as his look, Siebert said, “You seem to be having a good time being a detective.”

The picture of Melissa Jessup popped up in her mind. Melissa Jessup had let herself be attracted to a thief. She’d ignored her suspicions about him until it was too late to sell her mother’s jewels and she could only grab what was at hand and run.

Pulling her suitcase closer, Kiernan said, “Investigating can be a lot of fun if you like strange hours and the thrill of having everything hang on one maneuver. I’ll tell you the truth-it appeals to the adolescent in me, particularly if I can pretend to be something or someone else. It’s fun to see if I can pull that off.”

“How do I know you’re not someone else?”

“I could show you ID, but, of course, that wouldn’t prove anything.” She laughed. “You’ll just have to trust me, as I am you. After all, you did choose to sit down next to me.”

“Well, that’s because you were the best-looking woman here sitting by herself.”

“Or at least the one nearest the hallway where you came in. And this is the only spot around where you have room to pace. You look to be a serious pacer.” She laughed again. “But I like your explanation better.”

Shrieking, a small girl in yellow raced in front of the seats. Whooping gleefully, a slightly larger male version sprinted by, He lunged for his sister, caught his foot on Kiernan’s crutch and sent it toppling back as he lurched forward, and crashed into a man at the end of the check-in line, His sister skidded to a stop. “Serves you right, Jason. Mom, look what Jason did!”

Siebert bent over and righted Kiernan’s crutch. “Travel can be dangerous, huh?”

“Damn crutches! It’s like they’ve got urges all their own,” she said. “Like one of them sees an attractive crutch across the room and all of a sudden it’s gone. They virtually seduce underage boys.”

He laughed, his green eyes twinkling impishly. “They’ll come home to you. There’s not a crutch in the room that holds a crutch to you.”

She hesitated a moment before saying, “My crutches and I thank you.” This was, she thought, the kind of chatter that had been wonderfully seductive when she was nineteen. And Jeff Siebert was the restless, impulsive type of man who had personified freedom then. But nearly twenty years of mistakes-her own and more deadly ones like Melissa Jessup’s-had shown her the inevitable end of such flirtations.

Siebert stood up and rested a foot against the edge of the table. “So what else is fun about investigating?”

She shifted the suitcase between her feet, “Well, trying to figure out people, like I was doing with you, A lot is common sense, like assuming that you are probably not a patient driver. Perhaps you’ve passed in a no-passing zone, or even have gotten a speeding ticket.”

He nodded, abruptly.

“On the other hand,” she went on, “sometimes I know facts beforehand, and then I can fake a Sherlock Holmes and produce anything-but-elementary deductions. The danger with that is getting cocky and blurting out conclusions before you’ve been given evidence for them.”

“Has that happened to you?”

She laughed and looked meaningfully down at her foot. “But I wouldn’t want my client to come to that conclusion. We had a long discussion about whether a woman on crutches could handle his delivery.”

“Client?” he said, shouting over the announcement of the Yuma flight at the next gate. In a normal voice, he added, “In your courier work, you mean? What’s in that bag of your client’s that so very valuable?”

She moved her feet till they were touching the sides of the suitcase. He leaned in closer. He was definitely the type of man destined to be trouble, she thought, but that little-boy grin, that conspiratorial tone, were seductive, particularly in a place like this where any diversion was a boon. She wasn’t surprised he had been attracted to her; clearly, he was a man who liked small women. She glanced around, pleased that no one else had been drawn to this spot. The nearest travelers were a young couple seated six feet away and too involved in each other to waste time listening to strangers’ conversation. “I didn’t pack the bag. I’m just delivering it.”

He bent down with his ear near the side of the suitcase. “Well, at least it’s not ticking.” Sitting up, he said, “But seriously, isn’t that a little dangerous? Women carrying bags for strangers, that’s how terrorists have gotten bombs on planes.”

“No!” she snapped. “I’m not carrying it for a lover with an M-1. I’m a bonded courier.”

The casual observer might not have noticed Siebert’s shoulders tensing, slightly, briefly, in anger at her rebuff. Silently, he looked down at her suitcase. “How much does courier work pay?”

“Not a whole lot, particularly compared to the value of what I have to carry. But then there’s not much work involved. The chances of theft are minuscule. And I do get to travel Last fall I drove a package up north. That was a good deal since I had to go up there anyway to check motel registrations in a case I’m working on. It took me a week to do the motels, and then I came up empty,” An entire week to discover that Melissa’s killer had not stopped at a motel or hotel between San Diego and Eureka. “The whole thing would have been a bust if it hadn’t been for the courier work.”

He glanced down at the suitcase. She suspected he would have been appalled to know how visible was his covetous look. Finally he said, “What was in that package, the one you delivered?”

She glanced over at the young couple. No danger from them. Still Kiernan lowered her voice. “Diamonds. Untraceable. That’s really the only reason to go to the expense of hiring a courier.”

“Untraceable, huh?” he said, grinning. “Didn’t you even consider taking off over the border with them?”

“Maybe,” she said slowly, “if I had known they were worth enough to set me up for the rest of my actuarial allotment, I might have.”

“We will begin preboarding Southwest Airlines flight seventeen sixty-seven with service to Phoenix momentarily. Please keep your seats until preboarding has been completed.”

She pushed herself up and positioned the crutches under her arms. It was a moment before he jerked his gaze away from the suitcase and stood, his foot tapping impatiently on the carpet. All around them families were hoisting luggage and positioning toddlers for the charge to the gate. He sighed loudly. “I hope you’re good with your elbows.”

She laughed and settled back on the arm of the seat.

His gaze went back to the suitcase. He said, “I thought couriers were handcuffed to their packages.”

“You’ve been watching too much TV.” She lowered her voice. “Handcuffs play havoc with the metal detector, The last thing you want in this business is buzzers going off and guards racing in from all directions. I go for the low-key approach. Always keep the suitcase in sight. Always be within lunging range.”

He took a playful swipe at it. “What would happen if, say, that bag were to get stolen?”

“Stolen!” She pulled the suitcase closer to her. “Well, for starters, I wouldn’t get a repeat job. If the goods were insured, that might be the end of it. But if it were something untraceable”-she glanced at the suitcase-“it could be a lot worse.” With a grin that matched his own, she said, “You’re not a thief, are you?”

He shrugged. “Do I look like a thief?”

“You look like the most attractive man here.” She paused long enough to catch his eye. “Of course, looks can be deceiving.” She didn’t say it, but she could picture him pocketing a necklace carelessly left in a jewelry box during a big party, or a Seiko watch from under a poolside towel. She didn’t imagine him planning a heist, but just taking what came his way.

Returning her smile, he said, “When you transport something that can’t be traced, don’t they even provide you a backup?”

“No! I’m a professional. I don’t need backup.”

“But with your foot like that?”

“I’m good with the crutches. And besides, the crutches provide camouflage. Who’d think a woman on crutches carrying a battered suitcase had anything worth half a mi-Watch out! The little girl and her brother are loose again.” She pulled her crutches closer as the duo raced through the aisle in front of them.

“We are ready to begin boarding Southwest Airlines flight number seventeen sixty-seven to Phoenix. Any passengers traveling with small children or those needing a little extra time may begin boarding now.”

The passengers applauded. It was amazing, she thought, how much sarcasm could be carried by a nonverbal sound.

She leaned down for the suitcase. “Preboarding, That’s me.”

“Are you going to be able to handle the crutches and the suitcase?” he asked.

“You’re really fascinated with this bag, aren’t you?”

“Guilty.” He grinned, “Should I dare to offer to carry it? I’d stay within lunging range.”

She hesitated.

In the aisle a woman in cerise shorts, carrying twin bags, herded twin toddlers toward the gate. Ahead of her an elderly man leaned precariously on a cane. The family with the boy and girl were still assembling luggage.

He said, “You’d be doing me a big favor letting me preboard with you. I like to cadge a seat in the first row on the aisle.”

“The seat for the guy who can’t wait?”

“Right, But I got here so late that I’m in the last boarding group. I’m never going to snag one-B or one-C. So help me out, I promise,” he said, grinning, “I won’t steal.”

“Well… I wouldn’t want my employer to see this. I assured him I wouldn’t need any help. But…” She shrugged.

“No time to waver now. There’s already a mob of preboarders ahead of us.” He picked up the bag. “Some heavy diamonds.”

“Good camouflage, don’t you think? Of course, not everything’s diamonds.”

“Just something untraceable?”

She gave him a half wink. “It may not be untraceable. It may not even be valuable.”

“And you may be just a regular mail carrier,” he said, starting toward the gate.

She swung after him. The crutches were no problem, and the thickly taped right ankle looked worse than it was. Still, it made things much smoother to have Siebert carrying the suitcase. If the opportunity arose, he might be tempted to steal it, but not in a crowded gate at the airport with guards and airline personnel around. He moved slowly, staying right in front of her, running interference. As they neared the gate, a blond man carrying a jumpy toddler hurried in front of them. The gate phone buzzed. The airline rep picked it up and nodded at it. To the blond man and the elderly couple who had settled in behind him, Kiernan, and Siebert, he said, “Sorry, folks. The cleaning crew’s a little slow. It’ll just be a minute.”

Siebert’s face scrunched in anger. “What’s ‘cleaning crew’ a euphemism for? A tire fell off and they’re looking for it? They’ve spotted a crack in the engine block and they’re trying to figure out if they can avoid telling us?”

Kiernan laughed. “I’ll bet people don’t travel with you twice.”

He laughed. “I just hate being at someone else’s mercy. But since we’re going to be standing here awhile, why don’t you do what you love more than diamonds, Investigator: tell me what you’ve deduced about me.”

“Like reading your palm?” The crutches poked into her armpits; she shifted them back, putting more weight on her bandaged foot. Slowly she surveyed his lanky body, his thin agile hands, con man’s hands, hands that were never quite still, always past ready, coming out of set “Okay. You’re traveling from San Diego to Phoenix on the Friday evening flight, so chances are you were here on business. But you don’t have on cowboy boots, or a Stetson. You’re tan, but it’s not that dry tan you get in the desert. In fact, you could pass for a San Diegan. I would have guessed that you travel for a living, but you’re too impatient for that, and if you’d taken this flight once or twice before you wouldn’t be surprised that it’s late. You’d have a report to read, or a newspaper. No, you do something where you don’t take orders, and you don’t put up with much.” She grinned. “How’s that?”

“That’s pretty elementary, Sherlock,” he said with only a slight edge to his voice. He tapped his fingers against his leg. But all in all he looked only a little warier than any other person in the waiting area would as his secrets were unveiled.

“Southwest Airlines flight number seventeen sixty-seven with service to Phoenix is now ready for preboarding.”

“Okay, folks,” the gate attendant called. “Sorry for the delay.”

The man with the jittery toddler thrust his boarding pass at the gate attendant and strode down the ramp. The child screamed. The elderly couple moved haltingly, hoisting and readjusting their open sacks with each step. A family squeezed in in front of them, causing the old man to stop dead and move his bag to the other shoulder. Siebert shifted from foot to foot.

Stretching up to whisper in his ear, Kiernan said, “It would look bad if you shoved the old people out of your way.”

“How bad?” he muttered, grinning, then handed his boarding pass to the attendant.

As she surrendered hers, she said to Siebert, “Go ahead, hurry. I’ll meet you in one-C and D.”

“Thanks.” He patted her shoulder.

She watched him stride down the empty ramp. His tan jacket had caught on one hip as he balanced her suitcase and his own. But he neither slowed his pace nor made an attempt to free the jacket; clutching tight to her suitcase, he hurried around the elderly couple, moving with the strong stride of a hiker. By the time she got down the ramp the elderly couple and a family with two toddlers and an infant that sucked loudly on a pacifier crowded behind Siebert.

Kiernan watched irritably as the stewardess eyed first Siebert, then her big suitcase. The head stewardess has the final word on carry-on luggage, she knew, With all the hassle that was involved with this business anyway, she didn’t want to add a confrontation with the stewardess. She dropped the crutches and banged backward into the wall, flailing for purchase as she slipped down to the floor. The stewardess caught her before she hit bottom. “Are you okay?”

“Embarrassed,” Kiernan said, truthfully. She hated to look clumsy, even if it was an act, even if it allowed Siebert and her suitcase to get on the plane unquestioned. “I’m having an awful time getting used to these things.”

“You sure you’re okay? Let me help you up.” The stewardess said. “I’ll have to keep your crutches in the hanging luggage compartment up front while we’re in flight. But you go ahead now; I’ll come and get them from you.”

“That’s okay. I’ll leave them there and just sit in one of the front seats,” she said, taking the crutches and swinging herself on board the plane. From the luggage compartment it took only one long step on her left foot to get to row 1. She swung around Siebert, who was hoisting his own suitcase into the overhead bin beside hers, and dropped into seat 1-D, by the window. The elderly couple was settling into seats 1-A and 1-B. In another minute Southwest would call the first thirty passengers, and the herd would stampede down the ramp, stuffing approved carry-ons in overhead compartments and grabbing the thirty most prized seats.

“That was a smooth move with the stewardess,” Siebert said, as he settled into his coveted aisle seat.

“That suitcase is just about the limit of what they’ll let you carry on. I’ve had a few hassles. I could see this one coming. And I suspected that you”-she patted his arm-“were not the patient person to deal with that type of problem. You moved around her pretty smartly yourself. I’d say that merits a drink from my client.”

He smiled and rested a hand on hers. “Maybe,” he said, leaning closer, “we could have it in Phoenix.”

For the first time she had a viscerally queasy feeling about him. Freeing her hand from his, she gave a mock salute. “Maybe so.” She looked past him at the elderly couple.

Siebert’s gaze followed hers. He grinned as he said, “Do you think they’re thieves? After your loot? Little old sprinters?”

“Probably not. But it pays to be alert.” She forced a laugh. “I’m afraid constant suspicion is a side effect of my job.”

The first wave of passengers hurried past. Already the air in the plane had the sere feel and slightly rancid smell of having been dragged through the Altera too many times. By tacit consent they watched the passengers hurry on board, pause, survey their options, and rush on. Kiernan thought fondly of that drink in Phoenix. She would be sitting at a small table, looking out a tinted window; the trip would be over, the case delivered into the proper hands; and she would feel the tension that knotted her back releasing with each swallow of scotch. Or so she hoped. The whole frustrating case depended on this delivery. There was no fallback position. If she screwed up, Melissa Jessup’s murderer disappeared.

That tension was what normally made the game fun. But this case was no longer a game. This time she had allowed herself to go beyond her regular rules, to call her former colleagues from the days when she had been a forensic pathologist, looking for some new test that would prove culpability. She had hoped the lab in San Diego could find something. They hadn’t. The fact was that the diamonds were the only “something” that would trap the killer, Melissa’s lover, who valued them much more than her, a man who might not have bothered going after her had it not been for them. Affairs might be brief, but diamonds, after all, are forever. They would lead her to the murderer’s safe house, and the evidence that would tie him to Melissa. If she was careful.

She shoved the tongue of the seat belt into the latch and braced her feet as the plane taxied toward the runway. Siebert was tapping his finger on the armrest. The engines whirred, the plane shifted forward momentarily, then flung them back against their seats as it raced down the short runway.

The FASTEN SEAT BELT sign went off. The old man across the aisle pushed himself up and edged toward the front bathroom. Siebert’s belt was already unbuckled. Muttering, “Be right back,” he jumped up and stood hunched under the overhead bin while the old man cleared the aisle. Then Siebert headed full-out toward the back of the plane. Kiernan slid over and watched him as he strode down the aisle, steps firmer, steadier than she’d have expected of a man racing to the bathroom in a swaying airplane. She could easily imagine him hiking in the redwood forest with someone like her, a small, slight woman. The blond woman with the violet eyeshadow. She in jeans and one of those soft Patagonia jackets Kiernan had spotted in the L.L. Bean catalog, violet with blue trim. He in jeans, turtleneck, a forest green down jacket on his rangy body. Forest green would pick up the color of his eyes and accent his dark, curly hair. In her picture, his hair was tinted with the first flecks of autumn snow and the ground still soft like the spongy airplane carpeting beneath his feet.

When he got back he made no mention of his hurried trip. He’d barely settled down when the stewardess leaned over him and said, “Would you care for something to drink?”

Kiernan put a hand on his arm. “This one’s on my client.”

“For that client who insisted you carry his package while you’re still on crutches? I’m sorry it can’t be Lafite-Rothschild. Gin and tonic will have to do.” He grinned at the stewardess. Kiernan could picture him in a bar, flashing that grin at a tall redhead, or maybe another small blonde. She could imagine him with the sweat of a San Diego summer still on his brow, his skin brown from too many days at an ocean beach that is too great a temptation for those who grab their pleasures.

“Scotch and water,” Kiernan ordered. To him, she said, “I notice that while I’m the investigator, it’s you who are asking all the questions. So what about you, what do you do for a living?”

“I quit my job in San Diego and I’m moving back to Phoenix. So I’m not taking the first Friday night flight to get back home, I’m taking it to get to my new home. I had good times in San Diego: the beach, the sailing, Balboa Park. When I came there a couple years ago I thought I’d stay forever. But the draw of the desert is too great. I miss the red rock of Sedona, the pines of the Mogollon Rim, and the high desert outside Tucson.” He laughed. “Too much soft California life.”

It was easy to picture him outside of Show Low on the Mogollon Rim with the pine trees all around him, some chopped for firewood, the ax lying on a stump, a shovel in his hand. Or in a cabin near Sedona lifting a hatch in the floorboards.

The stewardess brought the drinks and the little bags of peanuts, giving Jeff Siebert the kind of smile Kiernan knew would have driven her crazy had she been Siebert’s girlfriend. How often had that type of thing happened? Had his charm brought that reaction so automatically that for him it had seemed merely the way women behave? Had complaints from a girlfriend seemed at first unreasonable, then melodramatic, then infuriating? He was an impatient man, quick to anger. Had liquor made it quicker, as the rhyme said? And the prospect of unsplit profit salved his conscience?

He poured the little bottle of gin over the ice and added tonic. “Cheers.”

She touched glasses, then drank. “Are you going to be in Phoenix long?”

“Probably not. I’ve come into a little money and I figure I’ll just travel around, sort of like you do. Find someplace I like.”

“So we’ll just have time for our drink in town then?”

He rested his hand back on hers. “Well, now I may have reason to come back in a while. Or to San Diego. I just need to cut loose for a while.”

She forced herself to remain still, not to cringe at his touch. Cut loose-what an apt term for him to use. She pictured his sun-browned hand wrapped around the hilt of a chef’s knife, working it up and down, up and down, cutting across pink flesh till it no longer looked like flesh, till the flesh mixed with the blood and the organ tissue, till the knife cut down to the bone and the metal point stuck in the breastbone. She pictured Melissa Jessup’s blond hair pink from the blood.

She didn’t have to picture her body lying out in the woods outside Eureka in northern California. She had seen photos of it. She didn’t have to imagine what the cracked ribs and broken clavicle and the sternum marked from the knife point looked like now. Jeff Siebert had seen that too, and had denied what Melissa’s brother and the Eureka sheriff all knew-knew in their hearts but could not prove-that Melissa had not gone to Eureka camping by herself as he’d insisted, but had only stopped overnight at the campground she and Jeff had been to the previous summer because she had no money and hadn’t been able to bring herself to sell the diamonds her mother had left her. Instead of a rest on the way to freedom, she’d found Siebert there.

Now Siebert was flying to Phoenix to vanish. He’d pick up Melissa’s diamonds wherever he’d stashed them, and he’d be gone.

“What about your client?” he asked. “Will he be meeting you at the airport?”

“No. No one will meet me. I’ll just deliver my goods to the van, collect my money, and be free. What about you?”

“No, No one’s waiting for me either. At least I’ll be able to give you a hand with that bag. There’s no ramp to the terminal in Phoenix. You have to climb down to the tarmac there. Getting down those metal steps with a suitcase and two crutches would be a real balancing act.”

All she had to do was get it into the right hands. She shook her head. “Thanks. But I’ll have to lug it through the airport just in case. My client didn’t handcuff the suitcase to me, but he does expect I’ll keep hold of it.”

He grinned. “Like you said, you’ll be in lunging range all the time.”

“No,” she said firmly. “I appreciate your offer, Jeff; the bag weighs a ton. But I’m afraid it’s got to be in my hand.”

Those green eyes of his that had twinkled with laughter narrowed, and his lips pressed together. “Okay,” he said slowly. Then his face relaxed almost back to that seductively impish smile that once might have charmed her, as it had Melissa Jessup. “I want you to know that I’ll still find you attractive even if the bag yanks your shoulder out of its socket.” He gave her hand a pat, then shifted in his seat so his upper arm rested next to hers.

The stewardess collected the glasses. The plane jolted and began its descent. Kiernan braced her feet. Through his jacket, she felt the heat of his arm, the arm that had dug that chef’s knife into Melissa Jessup’s body. She breathed slowly and did not move.

To Kiernan he said, “There’s a great bar right here in Sky Harbor Airport, the Sky Lounge. Shall we have our drink there?”

She nodded, her mouth suddenly too dry for speech.

The plane bumped down, and in a moment the aisles were jammed with passengers ignoring the stewardess’s entreaty to stay in their seats. Siebert stood up and pulled his bag out of the overhead compartment and then lifted hers onto his empty seat. “I’ll get your crutches,” he said, as the elderly man across the aisle pushed his way out in front of him. Siebert shook his head. Picking up both suitcases, he maneuvered around the man and around the corner to the luggage compartment.

Siebert had taken her suitcase. You don’t need to take both suitcases to pick up the crutches. Kiernan stared after him, her shoulders tensing, her hands clutching the armrests. Her throat was so constricted she could barely breathe. For an instant she shared the terror that must have paralyzed Melissa Jessup just before he stabbed her.

“Jeff!” she called after him, a trace of panic evident in her voice. He didn’t answer her. Instead, she heard a great thump, then him muttering and the stewardess’s voice placating.

The airplane door opened. The elderly man moved out into the aisle in front of Kiernan, motioning his wife to go ahead of him, then they moved slowly toward the door.

Kiernan yanked the bandage off her foot, stepped into the aisle. “Excuse me,” she said to the couple. Pushing by them as Siebert had so wanted to do, she rounded the corner to the exit.

The stewardess was lifting up a garment bag. Four more bags lay on the floor. So that was the thump she’d heard. A crutch was beside them.

She half heard the stewardess’s entreaties to wait, her mutterings about the clumsy man. She looked out the door down onto the tarmac.

Jeffrey Siebert and the suitcase were gone. In those few seconds he had raced down the metal steps and was disappearing into the terminal. By the time she could make it to the Sky Lounge he would be halfway to Show Low, or Sedona.

Now she felt a different type of panic. This wasn’t in the plan. She couldn’t lose Siebert. She jumped over the bags, grabbed one crutch, hurried outside to the top of the stairs, and thrust the crutch across the hand rails behind her to make a seat. As the crutch slid down the railings, she kept her knees bent high into her chest to keep from landing and bucking forward onto her head. Instead the momentum propelled her on her feet, as it had in gymnastics. In those routines, she’d had to fight the momentum; now she went with it and ran, full-out.

She ran through the corridor toward the main building, pushing past businessmen, between parents carrying children. Siebert would be running ahead. But no one would stop him, not in an airport. People run through airports all the time. Beside the metal detectors she saw a man in a tan jacket. Not him. By the luggage pickup another look-alike. She didn’t spot him till he was racing out the door to the parking lot.

Siebert ran across the roadway. A van screeched to a halt. Before Kiernan could cross through the traffic, a hotel bus eased in front of her. She skirted behind it. She could sense a man following her now. But there was no time to deal with that. Siebert was halfway down the lane of cars. Bent low, she ran down the next lane, the hot dusty desert air drying her throat.

By the time she came abreast of Siebert, he was in a light blue Chevy pickup backing out of the parking slot. He hit the gas, and, wheels squealing, drove off.

She reached toward the truck with both arms. Siebert didn’t stop. She stood watching as Jeffrey Siebert drove off into the sunset.

There was no one behind her as she sauntered into the terminal to the Sky Lounge. She ordered the two drinks Siebert had suggested, and when they came, she tapped “her” glass on “his” and took a drink for Melissa Jessup. Then she swallowed the rest of the drink in two gulps.

By this time Jeff Siebert would be on the freeway. He’d be fighting to stay close to the speed limit, balancing his thief’s wariness of the highway patrol against his gnawing urge to force the lock on the suitcase. Jeffrey Siebert was an impatient man, a man who had nevertheless made himself wait nearly a year before leaving California. His stash of self-control would be virtually empty. But he would wait awhile before daring to stop. Then he’d jam a knife between the top and bottom of the suitcase, pry and twist it till the case fell open. He would find diamonds. More diamonds. Diamonds to take along while he picked up Melissa Jessup’s from the spot where he’d hidden them.

She wished Melissa Jessup could see him when he compared the two collections and realized the new ones he’d stolen were fakes. She wished she herself could see his face when he realized that a woman on crutches had made it out of the plane in time to follow him to point out the blue pickup truck.

Kiernan picked up “Jeff’s” glass and drank more slowly. How sweet it would be if Melissa could see that grin of his fade as the surveillance team surrounded him, drawn by the beepers concealed in those fake diamonds. He’d be clutching the evidence that would send him to jail. Just for life, not forever. As Melissa could have told him, only death and diamonds are forever.

MARY WINGS’s amateur detective Emma Victor has solved two cases to date-She Came Too Late and She Came in a Flash, novels that have been published in England, Japan, Spain, Germany, and Holland as well as in the United States. After living in the Netherlands for seven years, Ms, Wings moved to San Francisco where she now works as a graphic designer.

“It was okay,” you said after the first time we’d made love. You said it very neutrally as if you’d been talking about the weather. Or snowflakes. Or cornflakes. “It was okay.” “Nobody’s ever told me that before,” I joked. You were lying next to me saying, “It’s no big deal. No big deal to say, ‘It’s okay.’”

You leaned up on your elbow. I traced your collarbone with my eyes. You tried tracing my eyes with your eyes.

“It’s our first time,” you said, “We need to learn some more things about each other.” Your voice was warm, instructive. Of course, you’d been in practice a long time. Or so they had said.

“Sure!” I crowed. “Learn some more things. Discourse about intercourse! Sex as perception,” I burbled at you. “Sure!” But I also knew that you were telling me that we had a future. I laughed in the darkness. I would get what I wanted. And I would get you.

Later I would tell you that when I made love with you, the memories of former lovers abandoned all claim upon my body. I told you I was free.

We curled up together and fell asleep. The next day we would be stuck in gridlock traffic for three hours. On the way home.

I joined in the sighs of relief when you spoke at public gatherings. You’d summarize, make the contradictions manageable. We’d been anxious. You’d satisfy us. One of them came to a lecture once. But it wasn’t a problem. You were attentive to me at these gatherings. You’d ruffle my hair. I was a portrait by your side. You’d let me know with the slightest of gestures at the end of a publicly spoken phrase that you were, in fact, only speaking to me. Of course, all you told anyone was what they wanted to hear. Pure pap.

Except this morning when you said, after we’d come out of the shower, “Don’t you ever comb your hair?”

And then I remembered, that’s what you used to tell them.

You were laughing, “What did your parents ever do to you?” You were hardly exasperated at all. And I’d spilled the garbage bag on the floor for the third time that week. I was on the floor too.

I was watching Jackson the terrier make pesto sauce paw prints the color of avocado. She was making them on the rug of desert tan. I was crying. And I was tan. We were all tan. We lived in Los Angeles.

“What did your parents ever do to you?” you repeated. But you knew better than I did what my parents had done to me. You’d been my shrink. You’d been theirs too.

You’d never thought about advertising. Not that I’d ever suggest it. But I’d asked Mr. Geramus, the neighbor to the north of us, for tennis doubles. Then he asked you to join the agency. I knew he would.

It was autumn and you said your soul had been searched. You said yes. But later you didn’t seem too happy to me.

And the first time you did it you felt really bad. It was the loss of control. You were so devastated it was easy to want to comfort you. And eventually you let me.

Later you didn’t even comment when I spent extra time at the mirror powdering my bruise.

They had bought me oil-based foundation. It’s better because it doesn’t run with the sweat, they told me. And always follow up with matte powder.

Then it was Christmastime and the agency had fired you right before having to give you your Christmas bonus. Your old shrink circle had laughed when you said you were going into advertising. Marketing, you’d called it. They’d envied your salary, and now they were triumphing over your unemployment.

Yes, your old shrink circle had shrunk, but we were going to one of those parties anyway.

Mrs. Watkin, the neighbor to the south of us, peered out her window as we walked down the driveway in our festive holiday attire. You always opened the door for me, and this time you had to. And we always wore our safety belts,

We floated in with a liquor delivery. If I was very quiet it was because my arm hurt. But it was one more bond between us. It was our private story about how you’d lost control and I’d given it back to you by forgiving you.

As the people floated by, faces talked about auto insurance, termites, weekend resort prices. Those subjects would latch on to other topics and become health care, roach motels, and freeway ramps. But you knew and I knew that you’d come damned close to breaking my arm last night. The throbbing and swelling of that arm filled up the whole room for me; the pain devoured hours of small talk generated by holiday anxieties and large quantities of hard liquor.

And I knew that next time I’d make enough noise, near a south window, that the neighbor would call the cops.

Patrol Officer Laura Deleuse:

The call was a 418-DV on Del Mar Drive. Domestic violence. In a neighborhood that is usually just domestic.

All assaults used to be lumped together as 418s, now we sort out the DVs. Makes it easier for the people at the university to study the statistics. These calls are never my favorites. The worst are the “hold me back” couples. When you arrive on the scene, they really go out of control. Because they know that now that you’re there, nothing really bad is going to happen.

But, of course, this wasn’t the story with these folks. We pulled up to Malibu lighting, alarm systems, and bleached oak designer fencing. Of course, the husband with the big excuse opened the door. The sobbing wife would be in the background somewhere. This would take application of social skills. I thought I’d done all that on my dinner date last night.

I explained that a neighbor phoned, complaining about noise. I asked him the usual questions: “What’s happened here?” “Has there been an accident?” “Is someone hurt?” (That scared him.)

He mumbled some polite denials.

“Who else is at home? Where’s your wife? May I see her, please?”

He invited us in, opening the door too quickly, too widely, as if to say, “What do you think this is, a torture chamber?”

What it was was a sea of chintz upholstery and a woman with a cut above her eye sinking into it. She had long hair and short legs. Her hair was pulled up in a complicated chignon (not a hair-pulling fight, apparently) and her feet were curled up underneath her. A fresh fire crackled on the grate of a marble fireplace.

I squinted my eyes, looking at that cut, but when her husband glanced at her she turned her face away. The skin is so delicate there, I thought, if you get hit, your cheekbone can actually cause a tear in the skin. I looked over at my partner Kevin. His eyes were roaming the room; there were no weapons or anything that could be construed as a weapon lying around. But these days a fist is enough to cause corporal injury and can be regarded as a weapon in court.

“What can I do for you?” she asked, and as I approached she uncurled her legs and bent over to poke at the fire, which was beginning to smolder. She fumbled with the iron, the only sign of nervousness.

She was wearing stockings without a snag or run. She kept her face averted from me, although she had given me a good enough look when I’d first come in. But other than that she didn’t act like your usual humiliated upper-middle-class victim.

What a difference from the scene I’d visited last week. Basically a couple trying to tear each other to shreds. The technique of separating them and defusing the fight wouldn’t be necessary here. When that couple made eye contact, it set them to spitting-spitting!-at each other.

This woman, in her stocking feet, poking at the fire, with the husband nervously shifting his weight from side to side, was a different setup altogether. But the reason I was there was that phone call, and the cut above her eye. As in all these cases, I had to get her alone.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions; could we speak privately?”

She nodded and slipped on her black pumps, which were neatly paired by the skirt of the sofa. She led me down a hallway into a phony English library setup, with leather books and leather furniture. We settled into wing chairs, but I didn’t want to be too comfortable. I didn’t want her to be too comfortable either.

“I assume there’s some sort of injury here.” I pointed with my pencil to the cut beneath her eye.

“You assume correctly, I fell down the stairs.” Her tone was too measured, I thought; this woman was too smart not to know that that is the cliché. She was almost throwing it in my face.

“I’ve never seen an eye cut like that from a fall down stairs, ma’am, A blow to the face is usually what causes this sort of thing.” I could hear irritation in my voice. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

I sighed. What a waste of my time and the taxpayers’ money. And the laws have changed in California too. Used to be they’d have to press charges. Hire a lawyer. Still hubby would get out the same night. Now all we have to do is get her to admit that he hit her and we can cool his heels in jail, at least overnight, until he can get before a judge. But this woman wasn’t going to help herself out.

“You sure about that? If you can just confirm that he hit you-that’s all you have to do-”

“He didn’t.”

“And the bruise on your arm?”

She looked down and moved the skin on her upper arm around to see a purple spot. She looked surprised. She hadn’t noticed it. So maybe she just wasn’t even feeling pain.

“Must have happened on the stairs.”

“Looks a few days old.”

She shrugged.

I shrugged. “That’s all, I guess.”

Later I thought, maybe if my social skills had been better I could have charmed the words out of her. But now I was getting hungry. Kevin and I were helping each other out with our diets. I wondered who would try and talk whom out of the late-night salad bar this time.

We stood up and walked back into the living room. She had her head tilted up high, but not with the pride of the humiliated or the pain of a broken jaw, I liked the tilt of her head and something else, some strength I couldn’t place. Or maybe she was just crazy.

I watched her eyes settle upon her husband as we walked into the room, and saw how much space she chose to put between them. She’s not afraid of him, I thought. Maybe she did fall down the stairs, It didn’t matter anymore.

Kevin had a crush on the hamburger joint waitress with great repartee and I was dating a paramedic with awesome social skills. That’s the way it was with night work. Your society becomes waitresses at all-night restaurants, nurses, lap dancers, paramedics, and criminals. Couples with Malibu lighting were the exception.

Kevin and I made our polite good-byes and went back to the car to call in and write up a report.

“My feeling is, we won’t have to go back there again tonight.”

“I’ve never seen a DV so calm after the storm.”

“If everybody’s so copacetic, what can you do? I’ll bet that guy doesn’t ever have to be up before the judge.”

But what I was thinking was, I hope he doesn’t cut her up into little tiny pieces either.

We settled on hamburgers and drove to a neon-lighted, late-night part of town.

They were right. Things got much easier after that. It became so simple to fuck up. I not only burned your shirts when I ironed them, I developed a cowering posture, lowering my eyes that darted only over to your shoe soles. And I knew that as things became worse for you, as the pressure started to mount, you’d beat me.

But you were dependent upon me. I was the only thing you could control in your life. Or so you thought. You had no idea how out of control you really were!

I went to several doctors, under assumed names, but I never wore sunglasses. I looked them straight in the face. And I introduced memorable topics with the receptionist at every appointment.

Of course, I had to show some kind of escalation. But I wasn’t about to rent slasher films for your at-home video entertainment (besides, I was afraid the video places would have receipts). But I didn’t know how to time it. It was like taking a wishbone and pulling on it, hoping that it would break in the right place. The place that would be in my favor. And that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to get broken anymore.

But I didn’t know then how easy it would be, once I’d remembered what they’d told me.

When I showed them the photos (probably not admissible in court, but nevertheless interesting), it was emotionally upsetting for them. To see the photos. The pictures traced bruises with bilious yellow centers that blossomed into purple and black. Or red welts, like bars across my back. It brought back memories that were not pleasant for them. And they expressed sympathy for me. They encouraged me to finish the work soon.

I knew I would get all the elements right. It was Christmas again (I’d disconnected the heater in your car) and you were worried about losing the rather menial lectureship that you had finally landed. After you arrived, with nearly frostbitten fingers (I’d hidden your gloves), I arranged for my cousin to stop by, blow marijuana smoke in your face, shout loudly at you some story about a sports victory, and slap you on the back.

We were having a dinner party (read potential job prospect) and I lied to you about the arrival time of our guests. So you were caught off guard when they came half an hour early. I managed to bum the roast anyway.

Later I made insipid comments and quite frequently had no opinion at all (although four times I managed to contradict you over matters at hand: the brand of the oven, the age of Alexander Dubcek, and the cost of pouring a cement patio last summer). You bickered with me publicly until you remembered where you were and with whom. You were hating me really good by the time your no-longer-potential employer left.

Patrol Officer Laura Deleuse:

It’s easier to take on a violation of a restraining order. These women don’t want to be hassled and have made their demand public record. They don’t cover up for someone that’s causing them corporal injury.

I put personal interest in carrying out violation of restraining orders. One particular weasel was calling a woman twenty times a day at her work. Her boss had sympathy for her, but after a few months it was getting seriously in the way of business. What could he do? She was going to lose her job.

I got to know her, going over there and taking reports quite often. She had a daughter and two kittens. Two kittens! She was just trying to raise her kid, a working mom, and here was some jerk ruining her life. Hanging on her doorbell. Standing outside her window at night. And the stupid bastard had his timing down right. She’d call the station, but he never lingered more than three or four minutes after she’d noticed him. We can’t make it in less than five minutes and he knew it. He was always gone before we made the scene.

So who hasn’t known somebody pretty unstable, even gotten involved with them? You only really find out when you try and pull away. There’s not too much you can do. Get a restraining order.

But if somebody wants to harass you, make your life miserable, if that somebody is making that his career, even with bodyguards there’s not much to be done. But a restraining order is the only way to start.

That’s why I really wanted to get this particular weasel. She called and said he was calling her from a pay phone. He said that he was watching her, that he could see her from where he was. In between calls she reached the dispatch unit, and I just drove up to that lighted booth, recognized him from a mug shot, threw him on the hood, cuffed him up, and case closed.

This particular woman had great documentation; that’s what I tell them all. Write it down: where it happened, when, what was said, how many times he rang the doorbell, whatever. Few think to do that. First of all you don’t want to believe that this person in your life has turned out to be crazy. Then you just want them to go away. It doesn’t inspire you to play secretary.

So when the 418-DV at Del Mar Drive came up again, I wasn’t happy. I was going to get the cold shoulder and the short stockinged legs all over again. But I didn’t have any choice after the anonymous tip from the neighbor had been received.

After the first visit, such types would usually learn to keep their voices to a provocative growl. But this growl had had quite different consequences.

We walked up the Malibu-lighted path. I rang the bell. This time it wasn’t the husband with the big excuse. It was the wife with a little gun.

It hung off her hand like ripe fruit. The elegant chignon had come apart, and hair was falling off her shoulders, pointing in all directions; a ratty knot was caught behind her left ear. Her stocking had been ripped; on one leg it hung nearly down to her ankle, beige cobwebs covering her foot.

She didn’t turn her head to avoid my glance this time. Her face told of a pummeling that was physically painful to see. And the front of her blouse. I took the gun from her; it was easy-it just fell into my hand.

An acrid whiff of gunpowder was in the air, and we ran into the house. We ran past the chintz L-shaped sofa, past the library (a wing chair was overturned), and into the kitchen. We looked down the stairs. He was lying at the bottom.

I ran down to check his pulse, stepping around a pool of sticky blood surrounding his big back. A knife lay close by his side, a large German meat knife.

Even without a pulse (excluding gray matter, or maggot face as even the coroner calls it, and oh, yes, decapitation) we can’t make a death call. Even paramedics can’t pronounce a 187, death on the scene, without pretty obvious physical decomposition. This guy was going to get an ambulance like every other dead citizen,

I wondered which paramedic would be on duty tonight. Dinner dates had stopped because my social skills apparently weren’t up to snuff (meaning her friends didn’t like me). I didn’t like to think her elitism was so compelling. The payoff was still some great compliments I’d garnered.

I went back upstairs and started cuffing our suspect. She was compliant, but I was still glad when it was over and I didn’t have to sort of hold hands with her. She was talking the whole time too. “He pushed me down the stairs,” she was saying. “He threatened me. I had the gun. He laughed. He said I didn’t have the nerve. And he came closer and closer.”

Kevin wasn’t asking her any questions, and spontaneous statements are admissible in court. Didn’t sound like she was incriminating herself in any event. I sat her down and recited Miranda to her anyway. Self-defense would be the case made for her, no doubt. I wondered when the court date would come up and how sleepy I’d be, having to get up in the middle of the day. I remembered the details of my first visit to Del Mar Drive. I remembered how my social skills were never up to snuff. I didn’t feel good about seeing her months earlier, immune to pain, denying that anything had happened to her. So maybe this was the natural consequence, but why did I have to see it, on my beat, tonight? I could just guess which paramedic would be showing up too.

I called the supervisor on the radio; the sergeant would make notifications. The on-call homicide inspector and the on-call photographer would come, and I’d go to the hospital with her, for a quick checkup before she got booked on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice.

After I’d shot you (it was so easy-you came after me like Attila the Hun, rattling your saber, roaring epithets), I felt so relieved. It was simple to pull that trigger. I aimed for your heart, but I think I ended up shooting you in the head. Your body actually fell on me (I’d run to the bottom of the stairs, “away from you” as I’d explain later). So there you were, staining my silk blouse with your blood and gray matter, pinning me to the floor.

I pushed you off me, keeping hold of the gun. I waited a few minutes, standing over you, looking at your back, not believing that I wouldn’t have to follow your orders anymore, not believing you were actually dead, and knowing that this sort of shock response would be the most believable to the police. Later they’d take me to the hospital (I think I had a broken rib) and then to the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice (I’d done my homework; I knew just what would happen to me).

I would explain to them how the fight started in your study. I would say that I grabbed the gun there, but actually I had already gotten it that afternoon. I wasn’t going to take any chances when I finally had you ready with rage.

But the story began almost a year ago, my dear. When you, the doctor, at my most vulnerable and trusting moment (I had thought I was losing my mind), had sat next to me on the couch and caressed me, talking to me about trust and transference!

Since you were my only reality check at the time, I was pretty disconcerted. I ran out of your office. After a few days I decided that my reality check deserved to be researched.

It was only later that I decided on revenge.

Public records revealed that you had been arrested once on charges of assaulting a woman you were living with; but she dropped charges. I remembered the name of the building receptionist who had left shortly after I started treatment. She was somewhat bitter over sexual misconduct on your part and mentioned that you had gone out with one of your former patients. I got her name and called her.

And then there was your first wife, a woman perhaps even angrier than I was. You’d never abused your doctor-client privilege with her, but I found out after interviewing her personally that she had suffered mental and physical torment before getting out of the marriage with no alimony and the minimum of child support. You were late with the checks too. She didn’t know about the distraught ex-client who had you arrested but later dropped charges. But she did know about the whole life insurance policy you’d taken out at thirty, when your practice was booming, when you were making five, even pushing six digits a year. And I knew that an insurance policy more than two years old was incontestable to the beneficiaries, which at the moment included your son. And could include a new wife.

As we talked it over, your former wife and I, we decided to call your other former patient. The one who had suffered the broken jaw and the cracked ribs when she suggested she’d turn you in to the Board of Medical Quality Assurance. And that’s when we all agreed. We weren’t going to turn you in. We were going to turn you over.

Patrol Officer Laura Deleuse:

I hate going to court. I hate standing up in front of people. And I hated remembering that night.

I had to sit through a bunch of testimony for the defense before my turn came up. Seems the guy had beaten up a woman who was an ex-client, and there was an ex-wife who had some gruesome stories. Locked her in a closet while he beat the kid. Public humiliation, rape, we got to hear it all. And a chorus line of doctors attesting to the multifarious wounds of the defendant. It didn’t make me want to get up and go to work the next day either.

So it was open and shut. With him coming down the stairs at her like that, imminence wasn’t even a remote improbability. But that’s not why I didn’t want to remember that night. It was the paramedic who strolled up the driveway, hung out waiting for the photographer, and pretty much ignored me, walking right past me like I was a tree. I got her out of earshot, when she was busy inspecting her manicure, and said, “Hi, remember me? The one you had an affair with last week.”

“Yeah.” She looked up, and some kind of recognition played across her face. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I was there.”

Sometimes her social skills weren’t too good either.

Do I have any regrets? No. Well, maybe only one. I was a bit hasty in organizing our victory lunch. Lee, your ex-wife, was there, and Rachel, the girl friend (she’s not only going to get her jaw fixed, she’s going for a facelift, and a Ph.D. in media studies). Lee and I always wanted to learn Italian, so we’ll buy a villa on Capri (we chose one already, through an estate agent). You see, what we didn’t count on was that “accidental death” clause that includes self-defense and awards a double policy. We’ve well endowed every charity that remotely tugged on our heartstrings.

I was a bit worried about being hasty with the luncheon. After all, we were supposed to have set eyes on each other only in court. And there we were, chatting away like old friends (after all, they’d seen me through bruises, and beatings, fixed me up-and sent me back). We were drinking champagne, high on the knowledge of total financial security for life, jubilant that we’d done it ourselves (we’d never had a conflict about the split either) when I saw her. That police officer, She was behind a pillar, lunching, in fact, with the sour-faced paramedic that had scooped up the gray matter around your head. I did something I’d never done before. I looked her straight in the eye and raised my champagne glass to her. She spotted me and her eyes swept with mounting recognition across the faces of my luncheon companions. I saw her process the whole thing; she seemed to freeze. But then slowly she turned her back (the whole time I was thinking about my research, double indemnity, double jeopardy, and insurance companies that are not mandated to recollect), and as she turned around I saw what was in her hand. A champagne glass, and she raised it toward me.

The cases of police detectives Carlos Cruz and Jay Goldstein have entertained readers for several years, and such excellent novels as A Single Stone, A Case of Loyalties, and Primary Target are among the best books of their type. The last-named combines an excellent puzzle with strong political commentary. In addition, MARILYN WALLACE is the editor of the very successful Sisters in Crime series of anthologies. Ms. Wallace resides in San Anselmo, California.

If I weren’t Rico’s mother and if I didn’t live 3,000 miles away, I probably would have reacted differently to Catherine’s two-sentence note, and to the invitation. Someone slipped this under the gallery door. What do you make of it? her curlicued scrawl asked.

The note was paper-clipped to an invitation to the opening of Porterfield’s, her new art gallery on West 51st Street. Thursday, December 4. Seven to nine P.M. Meet the artists, etc. I was familiar with the text not only because Rico was one of the artists but because my New York office, Happenings East, was coordinating the event.

It wasn’t until I turned the invitation over to look at the image on the other side, a montage portrait of the three artists each standing in front of one of their paintings, that I noticed a gash running from the right edge in toward the center of the card. It cut right across the picture of Rico. The edge of the cut appeared to be smeared with dried blood.

Dried blood? Surely I was imagining that.

Like my attempts to persuade him to finish his undergraduate studies, any implied threat would only make Rico-full of promise, so damned stubborn-more determined to pursue painting. My shudder of fear was his frisson of excitement. So what else was new?

I showed the card to David. After twenty-five years of marriage, we still count on each other to put a new spin on things. He held it close to the light, touched his finger to the cut.

“Why don’t you call Rico and see what he thinks? I’d guess it’s probably just a tear, a coffee stain, nothing to get worked up about.” He kissed my cheek; he seemed more concerned about my worrying than he was about Catherine’s note.

I granted the possibility that someone had slipped the note under the gallery door, that it had caught on a splinter, that perhaps coffee or something-wine, paint-had been spilled on it. But my anxiety level continued to rise as I dialed Rico’s number and listened to the phone ring and ring, unanswered.

I’ve never been very good at waiting and that seemed to be all I could do: wait for Rico to answer the phone, wait for Thursday when David and I were scheduled to fly to New York for the opening. David was just starting a four-night piano gig at Yoshi’s and couldn’t get away earlier.

By nine o’clock, despite David’s calm assurances, I had convinced myself that my New York staff needed my help. After all, the final mailing had to be done, the wine and hors d’oeuvres ordered, the work hung. I turned over the details of the California events to my Happenings West staff and bought a night-flight ticket from SFO to JFK.

I sat by the window, watching for those staccato glitters of light that are the small towns of nocturnal America. I tried to occupy my mind with one of Monk’s atonal melody lines that resolves itself three bars later than I always expect it to, and with keeping the plane in the air by the strength of my will.

After a while, convinced that the plane would be fine on its own, my mind was free to tend to other things. I thought about my friend Catherine. After struggling for twenty years to gain critical or commercial recognition for her own paintings, she had given up. A mother for the first time at forty-two, she spent a year at home with Michael before she decided that if she couldn’t paint, at least she would make a place for herself in the art world and open a gallery.

Images of Rico kept intruding. I remembered the moment I first held him and looked at his red, wrinkled fade and knew that my most difficult task as the mother of this miracle would be to learn how to let him go. I pictured his delight when he uncurled his fingers from mine and took three steps on his own. I recalled the pained confusion when he found out that two of his seventh-grade friends forgot to ask him to go to the movies with them.

Somewhere over Nebraska, I demoted the torn invitation to a prank perpetrated by some bored art-scene crisis junkie. No one would want to hurt Rico-why should they? I put on the earphones and let the jazz channel distract me the rest of the way across the continent.

The gray mist that hung over the city welcomed me home, the light so familiar that I wanted to embrace it. I headed for the first cab in the long yellow line and got in. Murray Feldman, number 3905467, nodded when I gave him Catherine’s Brooklyn address. I needed to hear what she thought before I laid my mother-worries on Rico. The cab careened into the Kennedy exit maze.

“Take the Van Wyck to Atlantic Avenue,” I said.

Murray grumbled and pulled into the proper lane and I closed my eyes, happy to be cm the ground.

Sooner than I expected, the cab turned left onto Tenth Street and pulled to the curb in a squeal of brakes, I squinted to see the meter through the dingy plastic shield.

“That’s twenty-four and sixty-eight,” the cabbie said. “If you’da took the subway, you coulda bought a new pair of glasses,”

I love New York.

I peeled a ten and a twenty from the roll in my wallet and waved away Murray’s change. He flashed me his best you-ain’t-a-bad-tipper-for-a-broad smile.

“Hey, you have a nice day, lady,” he said with enthusiasm,

I groaned. The city was deteriorating, losing its old abrasive edge. At least Park Slope, a neighborhood of brown-stones and gaslights and brave little window boxes, hadn’t changed much. Even though David and I moved to California two years earlier, I had insisted on keeping the Happenings East office open. Brooklyn still felt like home.

Brooklyn is a state of mind. Ask Walt Whitman or Marianne Moore. A genuine Brooklyn soul doesn’t last too long without forsythia in March, egg creams in July, and the minimum daily requirement of unidentified particulate matter blowing into your eyes in October.

Catherine, more a creature of the ether than of Brooklyn, met me at the door. Without makeup, her dark eyes and her springy brown curls made her look particularly vulnerable. We exchanged hugs and niceties in the entry foyer, its oatmeal-colored walls lined with Japanese artifacts. I purposely kept my back to her husband’s collection of Samurai swords. I would wait until we were comfortable-in the kitchen, where we told all our secrets-to ask about the slashed invitation.

Michael led the way down the hall. He had a sixteen-month-old’s round-faced, squat-legged chubbiness and looked somehow already bigger than Catherine, who was still exotically small. No one has ever accused me of being willowy, but I can still shop the outlets for size-ten samples. Still, Catherine is the one friend who makes me feel like a Valkyrie in full armor. That hadn’t changed in twelve years, nor had her questions.

“Do you ever sabotage yourself, Gina?” She spoke in a whisper, as though saying it aloud would make some negative reality more tangible.

Catherine always had questions. I used to think of it as a sign of some mild mental disorder, a dementia inquisitas manifesting itself in an inability to follow the rules of normal conversation. Then I discovered that I enjoyed looking for answers to give her. I even, quite consciously at some point, started to ask Catherine-questions myself.

“You didn’t tamper with that invitation just to get some free publicity for the gallery, did you?” I hadn’t slept much; that thought must have crept up when my mental censors were off duty. Maybe this was how Catherine lived all the time.

She made a face. “Your office can manage better publicity than that. Did you come out early because of that invitation? I mean, I’m glad you’re here and happy you’re working on the event, but I think you’re overreacting, Gina. I guess I was a little worried at first but now it seems, I don’t know, silly.” She held out a half sandwich, tiny moon shapes scalloping the crust edge, about at Michael’s mouth level, and he pulled her hand down to take a bite.

When he was a toddler, Rico had settled for nothing less than holding the sandwich in his own dimpled hands.

“Rico’s age is enough to get some good press. Featured in a major gallery at twenty-two. Patrick says they’ll call him a wunderkind.” She laughed, a small sound, and licked grape jelly from her fingers. “I asked him if he slipped that invitation under the gallery door, and he looked at me like I had finally lost my mind. I believe him. About not doing it, I mean.”

Did she mean Rico or Patrick? Before I could ask, she wrinkled her nose and said, “I don’t have enemies and I doubt that Rico does. It’s probably not a threat at all.”

“Maybe you’re right. But why was the invitation stained only along that slash?”

With a shrug and a noisy sigh, Catherine sat in the rocking chair and folded her hands in her lap, Madonna becalmed.

I drank my coffee and remembered that April day, seven months earlier, when Catherine and I sat on the steps in front of her brownstone, hands wrapped around mugs of hot coffee. We had pretended that the sun was warm, but it was our friendship that felt so good.

“Did you ever wish Rico would disappear,” Catherine had said, “just be unborn? I mean not ever have been born.”

A real Catherine-question.

“Not once. Not ever,” I said, unable to entertain the notion of no Rico. The stone steps felt cold, hard.

“I stopped painting when I got pregnant.” Her dark eyes had looked into my very heart as though she were asking me to change something. “Rico will never have to face that.”

Now, as I sat in her kitchen, I wondered whether she would blame Michael, later, secretly, for this transformation from painter to purveyor of paintings.

Michael plopped himself at her feet and she reached down and stroked his cheek. “The gallery has to work. The rest isn’t enough for me,” she said. The silver gleam of the sky framed by the window behind her hurt my eyes.

“Not enough how… intellectually?… emotionally?” I asked.

She was quiet; Catherine’s pauses took some getting used to. It was her timing, I had learned. Not my fault, just her way.

“I want to soar. I don’t soar at home.”

Catherine wanted a poet to play his words in accompaniment to her rapture, to join her in freedom from the law of gravity.

“Aren’t things good with you and Patrick?” I had meant to ask her if she soared in her marriage. It hadn’t come out that way.

“Staying home, I don’t get much, you know, stimulation during the day. At first, when I told him my idea-about the gallery-Patrick said he wanted me to stay home with Michael for a few more years.” Her face was lost behind those wild curls. “But then he changed his mind. Just like that. He’s even financing the first twelve months.”

“That sounds good.” Almost too good, I thought. Patrick indulged this whim too readily and helped Catherine give up on herself as a painter. “So when the gallery opens, you’ll be happy.”

Catherine stood, stretched on her toes, and reached both arms up, her fingers pointing. I expected her to lift off the ground and float to the ceiling, to beat her wings against the window until someone opened it and let her out to catch the smoky November wind moving among the city’s spires.

“Mostly,” she said. “I guess, mostly.”

I left Catherine’s and wheeled my suitcase down the street. Just a tear… nothing to get worked up over, David had said. I think you’re overreacting, Catherine had told me. Probably they were right and I had fixed on this for some mother-reason born of my struggle to let my son live his own life. Surely Rico would consider my worries proof of a relapse into the role of overprotective mother with an overactive imagination.

He was, after all, a grown-up, a man whose dark hair, long-lashed brown eyes, broad shoulders, and narrow hips are attractive to women. His natural reserve gives way easily to his genuine interest in people. He keeps himself in cadmium yellow by working at a record store called Riffs, shelters neighborhood strays, likes old movies, and returns library books on time.

He’s good but not perfect,

What he hasn’t yet acquired, even after two years in New York, is an everyday instinct for self-preservation. He lives mainly on salami and Mallomars and would never buy a new toothbrush unless his old one fell into the toilet. He rides the subway at all hours, falls in and out of love with The Most Terrific Woman several times a year, and is determined to be a painter and not acquire any credentialed, marketable skills.

We all have our blind spots, and I had to allow Rico his and keep mine from getting in his way. I resolved not to mention the slashed, stained picture.

I set my bag in front of the grillwork gate, pressed the buzzer, looked through the just-below-street-level window. Inside, a Tiffany table lamp glowed in the midday pallor. Ribbons of light fell to the floor through a jungle of foliage. In lieu of paying rent to David and me, Rico has been restoring the three-level brownstone to its original Victorian glory. He calls the jungle room “the conservatory.” Shades of Colonel Mustard. The room was empty.

The tips of my fingers curled toward my palms in an attempt to get warm. The cold bit at my toes through the thin leather of my pumps, which had been fine for the 71 degrees I’d left in California.

Then Rico’s face appeared in the window, his expression leaping from wariness to surprise and finally settling into a broad smile. I hoped he would still be smiling in fifteen minutes.

I hugged him; his face felt good against my chilled cheek. He smelled good. When he pulled back, I noticed a scrap of toilet paper stanching a shaving cut on his jaw.

I suppressed a shudder and began. “I tried to call last night but you weren’t home and Riffs was closed. I didn’t decide I was coming until late. About nine. California time.” So much for urbane patter.

He set my suitcase beside the hall table, a spindly-legged affair sporting a drop cloth covered with plaster dust. “You could have had Dad call me or something. I know this is your house, but you said you’d give me some notice. I didn’t expect you until Thursday.”

It was a lame excuse. Clearly, I had lost some ground in the struggle to let go. “I’m sorry for the lack of warning.”

On cue, a rumpled little redhead wrapped in a wrinkled terry-cloth robe appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Mom, this is Laura. She plays keyboards for the Rompettes. Laura, this is my mom, Gina Capobella.”

Laura smiled and said hello and disappeared. Another of his women-we’d discussed safe sex since he was fifteen but maybe we needed a little brushup talk about safe relationships.

He hung my coat on a brass hook in the hall and we went into the kitchen. His mouth was tight, his shoulders up around his ears. He lit a burner on the stove and set a teakettle over the flame, In the tense silence, I heard my own breathing and the pounding water filling the upstairs bathtub.

“I hope Laura’s not in any hot water,” I said, emphasizing the key phrase as I pointed at the ceiling, in the general direction of the bathroom.

Rico’s face was blank, his silence stony. He was turning down the invitation to our old game.

“I hope she’s not in too deep,” I said, giving it one last try.

The corners of his mouth edged into a smile. “She’s prepared to sink or swim on her own,” he said. “She’ll talk about it when she’s ready to come clean.”

We both grinned, but I knew that punning our way to familiar ground was only a start. Rico had lived in this house on his own since his twentieth birthday, two years ago. It was peremptory to claim territorial prerogatives on such short notice; I really should have tried harder to call. “Maybe you could think of my being here as a double-reverse empty-nest syndrome,” I offered.

“You’ve been reading Good Housekeeping again. That’s dangerous.” He lifted a serrated knife out of its slot and cut a French bread in half.

“Very funny. Listen, I’m quiet in the mornings and I might even be persuaded to make you some bracciola,” I smiled sweetly.

“Home cooking and word games can’t make everything all right, Mom.”

It’s good when your kid keeps you honest. Reminds you that you’ve done a decent job of it. Knife in hand, he hugged me and then set to piling turkey, cheese, lettuce, mustard, and mayo on the bread. He sawed through the huge tower with a knife, then scooped the sandwiches onto plates and carried them to the table. “Does this visit have anything to do with Catherine? She’s seemed a little weird or something the past couple of days.”

“She desperately wants the gallery to be a success. I thought it would put her at ease if I was here.” Every word true, but sins of omission would surely be my undoing. They felt too much like getting away with something.

“She’s more anxious about the gallery than I thought.” Concern for my friend-his friend, too-creased his brow.

What a face. Not only a mother could love it.

“It’s been so hard on her, trying to make it as a painter. She’s giving up her dreams. Don’t you think”-What? That he should give up before he’s given it a try? What are you trying to tell your child?-“that she’s entitled to be a little weird?”

Rico didn’t answer.

“Enough water for me to have some tea?” Rico’s friend, her face scrubbed and sparkling but her hair still a wiry auburn tangle, stood in the doorway. The terry-cloth robe had been traded for jeans, a citrus-green turtleneck, and a tattered purple sweater that looked big enough for her to hold a party in.

Rico wiggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, then disappeared into the pantry and emerged with a teabag dangling between two fingers. “Almond Sunset for you, my lovely.”

“You two look just like each other.” The girl made a circle of her thumb and forefinger and held it up to her right eye, closing her left eye as though she were looking through a lens. “I’d recognize you anywhere. Not just from the pictures but because your mouth is so much like Rico’s and your eyes. It’s neat.” She put one hand in her lap, propped her head on the other fist, and watched Rico prepare the tea.

“What kind of music do the Rompers play?” I envisioned a band for the Sesame Street set. Somehow this pretty, sleepy woman didn’t seem the type, but maybe the small ruby stud in her left nostril gave the wrong impression.

“Rompettes. Ska.” Laura smiled benignly at my blank look. “You know, kind of like world beat or reggae. We’re not very good, but my boyfriend is making a documentary about us. He’s studying filmmaking. NYU, graduate level.”

Rico’s back was to me; this was a little confusing. Her boyfriend?

“Interesting,” I said. Rico looked over his shoulder and smiled. Interesting was a long-shared code for judgment temporarily deferred.

“He got very intense a couple of weeks ago. Watching me like he was framing every action for a scene-it made me nuts. So I came here and got my mother to promise not to tell him where I was. With the unlisted phone here, I don’t even have to talk to him unless I want to. The quiet feels… healing, I guess you’d say in California. Rico was terrific to offer me a place.” She got up and stood behind Rico, massaging his shoulders.

So she was another of his strays, not a romantic relationship at all.

“I never met her boyfriend,” Rico said as he set the teapot on the table, “but she swears he’s handsomer than me.”

“Well, he is. Anyway, you can’t compare dark and dashing with blond and brooding.” Laura stared at her crimson-tipped nails and then arranged her face in a smile. “Are you staying long?” she asked me.

I told her I would be in Brooklyn until the day after the gallery opening. The three of us sipped our tea and talked about friends and school, the art scene, and old neighbors. Rico showed me the five paintings he’d be exhibiting at Porterfield’s. They were abstract, with the suggestion of a face serving as the focal point for each. “This one’s a self-portrait,” he said pointing to the largest canvas.

I balanced my swelling pride with the desire to shield him from the frustrations of being a painter. Catherine and Patrick were doing things right with the gallery, Rico said, except that Patrick got stuck in traditional thinking sometimes-but what else could you expect from someone whose family had lived in the Hudson Valley since Rip Van Winkle went to sleep? She needed someone like that, I said, to gaze at her fondly while she explored her place in the arts.

By Thursday morning I had sublimated any leftover worries about Rico with vast and unnecessary expenditures of energy. Despite the presence of my willing and competent staff, I took care of everything personally: I hired the harpist, selected the champagne, calculated the number of hors d’oeuvres, tested the lighting, and called my media contacts. Only a few times during those hectic days did I catch myself staring at Rico, memorising the details of his face, the angle of his cheekbones, the ridge of his jaw, the clear, taut skin.

Only one last detail to settle-what to wear.

“Do you like this one better?” I swirled into the kitchen with what I hoped was the grace of a runway model. In the bulky gray suit with the leather trim, I felt more like a 747.

“No contest. The white jumpsuit. My boyfriend says white is the ultimate sophistication. He wants me to wear white all the time. He says it enhances inner purity.” Laura wrinkled her nose, tugged at the collar of her houndstooth jacket, pulled down the sleeve of her cinnamon-and-nutmeg striped jersey. “Maybe wear the green silk. I like what it does for your eyes.”

That sounded nice. “What about you, Rico? You’re the star. What are you wearing?” I asked.

Rico, who had become involved with a cleaver, garlic, celery, and bok choy, said through his gritted teeth, “I’ve done okay dressing myself for the past two years, Mom. I’ll figure out something.”

That told me.

“Mothers are supposed to care about these things, Rico.” Laura gave Rico’s cheek a pinch before she turned to me. “If you wear the silk, you need some outrageous earrings. I’m going to see my boyfriend before I go to the opening, so remind me before I leave and I’ll lend you mine.”

Did she mean the safety pins or the Christmas ornaments? I was saved from a reply by the insistent shrill of the doorbell.

I unlocked the inner door. A blast of arctic air swept into the vestibule as I opened the grill work gate. Shivering, I moved aside to let a grape-colored woolen bundle step in.

Catherine’s face was barely visible between the wool beret and the scarf pulled up around her nose. Her eyes warned that this was not a simple social call.

“Come into the kitchen and stand by the stove,” I said.

She didn’t budge. With her gloved hand she reached into her coat pocket and handed me an envelope. “Someone slipped this under the gallery door early this morning. I just found it.”

I opened the envelope and pulled out a folded page from the New York Post entertainment section. Great-they were doing a piece on the gallery. Not the Times, to be sure, but maybe after the opening… I unfolded the page. Rico’ face, centered in front of one of his paintings, stared up at me, A slash outlined in reddish brown sliced through the page. Dried blood or cranberry juice, it hardly mattered; the intent was clear enough.

“This doesn’t feel like a prank, Catherine. Someone is sending a message that they intend to hurt Rico.”

“Or me. Or the gallery.” Her eyes downcast, she jammed her hands into her pockets. “Rico’s not the only possible target. And no, I don’t know anyone who thinks Rico cheated them out of a place in the show. Patrick already asked me that.”

Exasperated with her self-indulgence and fearful for Rico, I sent her home and called Frankie Fretelli, an old friend with an NYPD desk job. If I brought along some Johnnie Walker Black instead of art gallery white wine, Frankie said, he’d come to the opening and keep an eye on things. David would be there too, if the weather didn’t delay his flight. We’d all keep our eyes open.

Now, despite my neat avoidance of the subject, Rico would have to be told. I could no longer convince myself that it was just a prank. Perhaps professional jealousy was the poison here. How many times had Catherine pointed out how young Rico was? Other artists, embittered after years of struggle, might also resent Rico’s success.

The delicious smell of vegetables sizzling in sesame oil filled the kitchen. Rico stirred them, then grated fresh ginger into the wok.

“Was that Catherine? I thought I heard her voice but it sounded kind of funny.”

Time to plunge in. Lettuce begin, I thought. “She’s worried. She, uh…” Orange you going to tell him? I demanded of myself. “She found a newspaper article. Slipped under the galleiy door. A picture of you and one of your paintings. It was cut and the edge was stained with something that looked like dried blood.”

Rico dribbled tamari over the vegetables and I went on. “That’s the second time. The first was eight days ago. It looks like someone is threatening you, Rico.”

He set the wooden stirrer on the stove. “Me? Who would threaten me?”

His bewilderment was genuine. I hated asking him to think the way I’d been thinking, off and on, for the past week, but I had to. “Another artist, maybe? Someone whose girl you stole? Someone you had an argument with at the record store?”

With each suggestion he shook his head. “None of the above. Listen, I get to have my first gallery opening once in my life. And nobody-no nameless enemy, no one playing jokes-nobody is going to keep me from enjoying it.”

He smiled at me and stopped just short of admonishing me to do the same.

It was ten after five when the taxi deposited me at the curb in front of the gallery. Fat snowfiakes drifted lazily to the ground, dusting everything with a sugary whiteness. No wind, temperature hovering near thirty. If I could let go of the nagging anxiety that had kept me company all afternoon, the weather might even feel festive.

I pushed open the door and surveyed the gallery.

The minifioods cast an even, untinted light on the paintings. White movable walls, arranged with enough angles to keep the space from feeling predictable, carried attention to the paintings rather than to the room itself. False modesty aside, Catherine and I had done a superb job of hanging this show and of placating artists’ egos, sensitive to such questions as which was the better wall and what critics would see first when they entered the gallery.

Rico’s large canvases, those faces emerging from abstract swirls of strong, clear colors, hung at the far end of the room. To the left of the door, a profusion of tiny paintings-florals a la O ’Keeffe but signed Siandra-dotted the wall. On the right, Ken Artie’s monochromatic, detailed landscapes of New England scenes served as somber balance. The total effect was stunning.

“Hello. Anybody here?” I called.

“I’ll be out in a moment.”

The voice was exactly as I remembered, a rich baritone, a little haughty but approachable, redolent of old money and Harvard.

I brushed the snow from my hair and peeled off my gloves, took off my coat, and shook it.

“Very fetching. You look like a Mary Cassatt, high-necked demure dress, dark eyes.” Patrick was tall, golden-haired, and polished; if he had been bald, he would have resembled an Oscar statuette wearing a gray wool suit.

“Thanks. I think. How do you like it?” I said, sweeping my arm to take in the whole room.

A flicker of something I didn’t understand shone in his eyes. “You’ve both done a fine job of it,” he said. “Fine.”

I gathered my coat and walked toward the small rear office, thinking about faint praise and damning myself for not pursuing my uneasiness over his feelings about the gallery. “Catherine’s a little nervous about tonight,” I said as I deposited the Johnnie Walker in a desk drawer. “She’s done a wonderful job. She has some terrific artists.”

“Even if you do say so yourself.” His voice was flat.

When I walked back into the gallery, he was standing in front of one of Rico’s paintings, arms crossed against his chest, the habitual skeptic’s pose. His head was tilted; considering that he was a corporate attorney, his hair curled toward his collar in an almost decadent way.

The man had taste. This was the painting on the invitation, the one in the newspaper. Catherine and Rico had chosen carefully; it was the best work Rico had ever done. The painting surged with compressed power that swept the eye to the upper left quadrant where a web of magenta lines delineated eyes, nose, mouth, and a spidery jumble of hair amid the gradations of blue and gray. If I squinted, it really did resemble Rico. Particular about titles, he had called it Feature This.

“I’m terribly old-fashioned,” Patrick said, stepping back from the canvas. “I believe that paintings should be of recognizable things, that music should have a melody one can hum, and that books should tell a story.”

And that women belong in the kitchen and the bedroom? I wondered. “Well, then it’s a good thing Catherine has such an eclectic trio of artists. Something for everyone, you might say.”

“Old-fashioned doesn’t mean ineducable. Maybe someday I’ll get the point of these paintings.” Patrick’s smile made him look less like the portrait of a disapproving Mather paterfamilias-Cotton, not Jerry-and more like someone my friend Catherine might fall in love with. “Anything I can do to help?” he asked.

“Thanks, but it’s all under control. Bound to be surprises-there always are-but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing to do now.”

Patrick’s gaze swept the room. “How about if I dice up this meat?” he said as he held up a crusty, wrinkled Italian salami.

“The caterer would kill me if I let anyone else touch her food.” The knife lay on the table, gleaming fiercely in the light. I wanted to hide it, throw it away.

The door swung open and the harpist and her unwieldy burden stumbled in. I pointed her to a corner to practice and busied myself with checking artists’ statements, price lists, champagne glasses, half listening as she brought David’s composition to life. The music was solid, lithe, fanciful, substantial; the notes flew around the room or marched, as the theme changed.

I couldn’t wait to see David. I shifted some of my anxiety to concern about his plane landing in the snow, pushed away the imagined sight of Rico’s face with a raw scar running down his cheek, left my worries in one corner of my mind while I attended to the problem of the three cases of Chablis that had arrived instead of the champagne I’d ordered.

By six forty-five, the caterer’s assistant had replaced the wine, everything else was in order, and I was holding David’s hand. His tumbled hair glistened with snow and his smile as the music spilled from the harp thrilled me nearly as much as his whispered description of how he intended to make up for lost time.

I had just finished telling him about this morning’s slashed newspaper when the door flew open and Catherine hurried in, stomping her feet and rubbing her hands.

“This is terrible. No one’s going to come out in this weather. The press will be covering the first snow of the season and the opening will be a flop. The whole thing is a terrible idea, and the critics are going to crucify me.” She shrugged out of her coat, mumbling all the way to the back room.

In fact, it had crossed my mind that the weather might keep some people away. I wondered if our correspondent would show up. Unless he (she?) was already here.

“Nonsense. The same reporters don’t cover snow and gallery openings, you know that. The guest list is loaded with people with a personal interest in you, the artists, or being seen at the new and happening place. And tonight, my dear, this is it.”

Catherine tried not to smile. “You really think so?”

“I’m sure of it.” Patrick took her in his arms. “You look wonderful. Your artists are marvelous and Porterfield’s is going to be a success.”

So supportive for someone who just a while ago told me how much he favored traditional values, at least in art and music.

Just then the door tinkled and a round woman swathed in a rainbow of gauzy stuff, a gold turban wound around her head, undulated toward the coat rack. “Cath-er-ine,” she purred. “The ten of pentacles in the future spot! I did a reading on the gallery and that’s what it said. Pentacles! Money, money, money. The tarot never lies.” She blew on her fingers and frowned. “Isn’t it cold in here?”

The thermostat was set for seventy but the red temperature indicator pointed to sixty. This was one of those things that ages an event coordinator beyond the mere passage of time. Like the broken water pipe outside the Central Park tent where four elephants were waiting for their cue in the benefit performance of Aïda, this was something I had to fix.

I soon discovered that the only piece of electrical equipment not on a circuit breaker was the furnace. By the time I found a fuse, installed it, and then made the necessary repairs to my dress and makeup, the party was well under way.

I scanned the bright, noisy crowd for Rico. A man in a dark suit and white shirt nodded to me: one of Frankie’s NYPD buddies, no doubt. Any others would be easy to spot, too. The invited guests dressed along a fashion continuum from Hell’s Angels chic to Kamali slouch, with hardly any room for Brooks Brothers, faux or vrai.

I finally spotted Rico on the other side of the room. I would not transmit my worries to him. I would not, tonight of all nights, be the hovering, overprotective mother. I would not ruin this celebration.

The lighting and the harp music and the tinkle of glasses and conversation were festive; I couldn’t help smiling as Rico, elegant in a camel-colored sweater and dark slacks, walked through the crowd toward me.

“You want a name tag? How about ‘Capobella’s Mother’?” Rico, his arm around David, grinned down at me. Frankie Fretelli stood nearby, clutching his glass half filled with amber liquid.

“A chiaroscuro mom in a rocking chair? No, thanks.” I hugged Rico, a little longer than he would have liked but a little shorter than would have pleased me. He was beautiful, radiating pleasure from his smile, from his perfect, unmarred skin. “The paintings look wonderful,” I whispered as I kissed his cheek and squeezed his arm.

“Thanks. So do you.” He kissed me back; then a leather-skirted lady appeared, slipped her arm through his, and led him into a thicket of well-wishers in the middle of the floor. Frankie stuck close behind him.

“You’re Rico’s friend?” A blue-eyed, platinum-haired, classically handsome young man stood beside me. A smile crinkled his face. In his right hand he held a champagne flute. The cast on his left arm was cradled in a sling, as fresh and white as his shirt and the scarf around his neck.

“How did you know?”

“I saw the two of you talking.” He shifted his arm.

I nodded; I would make pleasant talk with this fellow and not pursue Rico, with my eyes, all over the room. “I hope you’re not left-handed and not a painter.”

“I’m not a painter. I’m an aficionado. A particular fan of Rico’s.” He sipped from the champagne glass. “Can I get you some?”

“Thanks, no.” I craned my neck to look for David’s tousled head, which should have been towering above the crowd. I caught Catherine’s eye; she beamed back a message of gratitude.

“So Rico’s living with his girlfriend now, right? They must be really serious about each other. I mean, to be living together.” The young man’s gaze flitted around the room, resting for microseconds here and there. Then he turned to look at me; his eyes were blue, intense, and direct.

The conversation had taken a decidedly personal turn. “What did you say your name was?”

“Peter. Peter Webster.”

Harp music wafted through the din; the angel with blond hair and a cast on his arm grinned at me, but before I could say anything, Rico materialized at my right side. His worried eyes scanned the crowd. “You see Laura yet? I thought she’d be here by now.”

“She’ll be here soon,” I assured him. Now I could worry about her, too. I expected that Laura, who had seemed almost as excited about the opening as Rico, would have been here an hour ago. His leather-clad lady called his name and he winked at me and walked away.

He hadn’t said a word to this supposed friend standing beside me. Not even hello.

“You’ve known Rico a long time?” I smiled because it seemed the thing to do.

“We’ve got a mutual friend,” he said, his pale face expressionless. “You’re his mother aren’t you?”

My smile this time was genuine. “It shows, doesn’t it?”

“Since Rico came into my life, I can’t work, can’t concentrate.”

Before I could ask why, he turned and was gone, maneuvering through the crowd to the large silver coffee urn.

He’d said he was a fan. But he never really said a fan of the paintings. It was Rico himself. He had a crush on Rico, and Rico, trying to discourage Peter, was ignoring him.

I stepped back to let someone pass and almost bumped into Catherine. “The Times critic told someone that Rico is a-quote-bright new talent-unquote,” she said. “I really am soaring.” And she drifted away, not quite on the ground.

The crowd should have been thinning but, apparently reluctant to go out into the snow, they continued to pick over the last crumbs of pat£ and drain the last sips of wine. Rico was at my side again, beaming as the front door flew open. “There’s Laura. I wonder how things worked out with her boyfriend. She was going to tell him that she’s ready to start seeing him again.”

Snow swirling around her head, Laura waved and stepped inside. Rico went to greet her.

I let out my breath and relaxed. The evening was almost over. David was here, Laura was here, and no one had tried to cut Rico’s face. Rico and Laura swept toward the champagne table. As I followed their progress, I noticed the young man, Peter what’s-his-name, standing with his back to Rico’s largest canvas.

Sling knotted at his neck, Peter held his good arm up. His thumb and forefinger closed into a circle and he held the circle up to his eye. As though he were looking through a lens.

As Laura had, that first morning I met her.

Her filmmaker boyfriend.

He was neither admirer nor art aficionado. His questions now made sense, not like Catherine-questions at all, but attempts to trick me into offering him information to confirm his suspicions.

I was half a room away. Peter backed up, two large steps, his fingers still held to his eye like a make-believe camera.

The air, vibrating with chatter and laughter and harp music, parted as I pushed my way toward Peter.

A glint of light caught an object in his right hand. A silver pen, perhaps, or a cigarette lighter. Or a knife.

He took a step toward one of Rico’s paintings, arm raised.

“Stop!” I screamed as I pushed past three people who stood frozen between me and Peter.

I was two steps away when Peter’s arm came down, dragging the knife across a corner of the canvas. I could almost hear the image-face scream, could almost feel the ooze of warm blood and fluid leak through the rent cloth. Peter pulled the knife out and raised his arm again.

I grabbed his elbow and slid my hand down to his forearm. I dug my thumb into the soft inner flesh of his wrist. The knife clattered to the floor and I snatched it up.

“What are you doing?” I snapped.

Someone took the knife from me. Frankie clamped his beefy hand on Peter’s good arm.

“I was evening the score,” Peter said, his body slack as Frankie led him toward the door. “A little suffering. A little pain. For both of them. For the hurt I feel every time I think of them together.” His misplaced jealousy and those sad, beautiful eyes filled his twisted angel-face.

Shocked and pale, Rico put his arm around me. “My painting… I’m glad you…” He shook his head and drew me closer; we watched Laura run to Peter.

Tears spilled over onto her cheeks when Peter shrugged away from her touch. Poor girl, all she had wanted was some quiet.

I turned away from her pain and found myself staring at the square white card beside the painting. In neat letters, dark and clear, it announced the title of the painting: Feature This.

The self-portrait.

Rico’s face had been slashed.

“Mom, it’s a pretty small rip,” Rico said, examining the canvas, “Don’t get all torn up about it. You stopped him just in the nick of time.”

I didn’t feel at all casual but I joined the old game anyway. “Maybe someday what happened tonight will seem like just another slice of life.”

Rico hugged me a good, long time and then smiled sadly. “I wonder if it’s always like this out here on the cutting edge.”

Born in South Africa, GILLIAN SLOVO has lived in England since she was twelve, A journalist and television producer, she has written several excellent mystery novels featuring London-based Kate Baeier, including Morbid Symptoms and Death by Analysis.

I was in the middle of doing my accounts when the doorbell rang. Or, to be more accurate, my accounts were in the middle of doing me. The center column was being cooperative: it was the ones either side of it that were making trouble.

The bell sounded again. I ignored it: I didn’t feel like visitors, and besides, I’d just made a momentous decision. I’d decided to compromise-a few pence to the left subtracted from the right would achieve the proper balance. It wasn’t entirely on the level, but if the customs and excise noticed, all they would learn was what they must already know-namely, that I couldn’t add to save my life.

“The door was open,” a timid voice said.

Frowning at the distraction, I looked toward the door. My eyes came to rest not on a face but on a wide patent-leather belt. I shifted my gaze upward.

The man in front of me was huge-nearer to seven than to six feet-with a body to match. He was made to be noticed, and he flaunted the fact. He had shaved his head clean, and his bald pate shone a deep black against the rest of his clothes. It was quite an outfit-his three-piece suit was tailored to fit his broad frame and sewed from all colors of the rainbow, a broad silver tie nestled under the garish waistcoat, and a pair of shining black shoes that seemed to go on forever had silver buckles the size of my hands. I gulped.

“The door was open,” he said again.

The voice was not only small but melodic with it. On the principle that there was no point in antagonizing giants, even ones with ingratiating voices, I threw a smile his way. My neck hurt with the effort of twisting so I stood in an attempt to equalize the distance. He strode toward me.

The man was big, real big, and close up he towered above me. There was no point in competing. I sat.

“Can I help you?” I asked. Good, I thought, my voice sounds normal.

He smiled, and the long gray-brown scar that ran the full length of his left cheek smiled with him. He lowered himself onto the chair in front of me and planted two huge fists on my desk. I backed away and hit the wall with my head. I rubbed it surreptitiously.

“I hope you can help,” he said.

I turned the rub into an encouraging nod and waited. I was ready for anything.

“I want you to find somebody for me,” he said. “Name of Thelma.”

Something clicked in my head, so tangibly that I bet I lost a hundred thousand brain cells making the connection. Got it in one, I thought. Smiling cynically, I leaned my chair against the wall and stretched my legs out so that my feet landed on the desk, right in the middle of my accounts book. My only regret was that I didn’t have a cigarette to hang out of the side of my mouth and complete the impression.

“And what’s your name?” I asked, “Moose, by any chance?”

He looked puzzled. “Moose?” he thought about it a bit. “No, Martin. Martin Malloy.”

I smiled again, and this time the cynicism was not an act. “That figures,” I said.

He leaned across and shifted my feet to the right, uncovering the columns of numbers. His thick index finger pointed at the center row.

“But this doesn’t,” he said. “You’ve inverted one of those numbers, there in the middle. Easily done.”

I returned my legs to the ground and pulled the book nearer to me, meaning to close it. But I couldn’t help looking at where his finger had once been, and I couldn’t help seeing that he was right. I frowned.

He grinned almost by way of apology. “I’m good at figures,” he explained. “Always have been. And I learned to read upside down when I was inside.”

“You’ve been in prison, then,” I stated.

He nodded.

“And this Thelma put you there.”

His brow creased, and I remembered his size and the scar that creased in its redness on his cheek. He was no longer doing an impression of the genial giant: I had angered him. I pulled at the telephone wire, edging the instrument closer to me.

“Thelma didn’t put me there,” he said. “In fact, if anybody got me out, it was Thelma.” He glared at me. “I don’t like people who say bad things about Thelma,” he concluded.

With a supreme effort of will I fixed his eyes with mine, I kept looking at him while I nudged the receiver off the phone and let it drop on my lap. I rested my hand on the headless phone, thanking the heavens that I now had digital dialing. His frown deepened.

“Tell me more,” I said in a voice that was more fear than fake. I hit the first nine on the phone while I tried to work out whether I could manage to make a successful break for the door.

In one effortless motion he reached across the desk and pulled the receiver from my lap. He put it down on the desk. He stretched across again.

He put a finger on one of the buttons and pressed it down.

“That makes two nines,” he said. “You’ve only got to dial one more and you’re connected. Go ahead, I won’t stop you.”

The brain cells were going fast by now. It was a dare, I thought; he’d get me before my first cry for help. He was toying with me, and probably enjoying it. And yet what option did I have? I was isolated and alone, up in my grimy office in the center of London. A cry for help wafting to the street would be cause for a quickening of pace rather than investigation. I had no choice: without the phone, I had no line to the world.

I lifted my hand slowly as the seconds expanded. I could try it, I thought, and maybe I’d succeed. My hand began to shake.

“I’m really a gentle guy,” he said slowly, watching that hand. “My size militates against me, but I wouldn’t harm a fly. Certainly not a woman, that’s for sure.”

“And what’s that?” I asked, using the poised finger to point at his scar. “Shaving accident?”

He shrugged, and I saw how the rocks in his shoulders bulged. “Prison’s a rough place,” he said. “It makes you or it breaks you.”

“And it made you?”

“Thelma made me,” he said. “That’s why I want to find her.”

We were both back in fiction land. I replaced the receiver on the phone and breathed out. I no longer felt scared, only foolish-a foolishness tinged with anger. He was a pro, I thought, a real good actor, and I might as well face the fact that he had me. He and whoever had sent him-and I had a good idea as to who that was. Well, all I had to do was get rid of him, finish my accounts, close the office for perhaps the last time, and then be free to wreak my own kind of revenge.

But I’d do it subtly, I thought. I reached into the top drawer of my desk and pulled out a pad. As a heading I chose the name M. MALLOY. I underlined it: it looked better that way. On the next line I inscribed the name THELMA in block capitals.

“Parsons,” he said. “Thelma Parsons.”

“A dancer?” I asked without looking up.

“A social worker,” he said. He blinked. “But she did like to dance. She showed me pictures of herself when she was a kid. All dressed up in a white tutu, she was.”

Social worker, I wrote, failed ballet dancer.

“Thelma never failed at anything,” he said loudly. It was the first time he had raised his voice.

I smiled placatingly. It took two to tango, I thought, and I was finally in step. I wasn’t going to break my rhythm for any fake display of righteous anger by a giant gullible enough to involve himself in one of Sam’s pranks.

“Why don’t you tell me the whole story?” I suggested.

He leaned back in the chair. It creaked. He frowned and began to toy with the gold watch fob that was attached to his waistcoat. “Thelma liked to visit me in prison,” he began. “She turned me on to books.”

I glanced up and my eyes strayed to my accounts.

He laughed, or at least I think that was what described the creaking that issued from his big mouth. “Not those kind,” he said, “I always had a knack with them. That’s what got me into trouble in the first place. No, Thelma revealed the world of literature to me.”

Social worker reforms con by opening his eyes to the joys of the nineteenth century, I wrote.

“Modern literature,” he said loudly.

I gulped. I kept forgetting that he could read upside down.

“It changed my whole world view,” he continued. “Opened new horizons. I want to be able to thank her, not in the claustrophobia of prison, but in the real world. In the free world.”

Free world, I thought, more like anticommunist modern literature, then.

“So go round to her office and thank her,” I said.

He shook his head unhappily. “She’s left her job,” he said. “She was never happy with it, it cramped her style, she said, and now she’s had the courage to leave. They won’t tell me where she went-they don’t do that on principle in case some ex-con has a grudge against them.”

“And you want me to find her?” I stated.

“That’s it,” he said, delighted that the slow pupil had finally caught on.

“And then you will thank her.”

He nodded. He reached a fist into a pocket of his garish plaid suit. Here comes the punch line, I thought.

He placed a piece of paper in front of me, right side up. On it was written the name Thelma Parsons along with an address in Islington.

“That’s where Thelma used to work?” I asked.

For reply he reached once more into his pocket. Ahaa, I thought, here it comes.

I was wrong again. In front of me, dead in front, he placed a wad of new bank notes. I stared at him, and he smiled. I picked up the notes and felt their crispness.

“Two hundred and fifty pounds,” he said. “Retainer.”

“Is that what they said it would cost?” I asked.

“They?” He frowned, I resolved in future not to aggravate the scar. “It’s a guess,” he continued. “Your retainer plus something toward expenses. Give me a record when you finish, and I’ll settle up with you. I’m good at figures, you know.”

I didn’t say anything, and he had finished as well. I watched as he stood up and began to stride to the door.

“I suppose that you’ll be in touch with me rather than leaving me your address,” I said.

He turned. “That’s right,” he said. “Circumstances have conspired to make me a bit of an itinerant at the moment.” He waved a hand in my direction before turning away again, “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

“One more thing,” I called just as he had bent his head down far enough to fit. “Ever read any Chandler?”

“No, I haven’t,” he replied without bothering to look back. “And my reading days are over. I only want to thank Thelma and then I can get on with my life.”

They were conveniently seated around the kitchen table when I arrived, all three of them, the ones I had decided were guilty. Sam was doing what he liked best-explaining in layperson’s terms a particularly neat solution to the latest space-time continuum problem-while Anna and Daniel were doing what they did best-pretending to understand.

Into this cozy scene I strolled. I took a swig from the half bottle of Bells I’d picked up on the way.

“Bad day?” Sam asked.

I shoved the bottle into my jacket pocket. It bulged in the linen, but you can’t have everything. At least I was suitably crumpled, I thought. I shook my head.

“Great day,” I said, “I was having problems balancing the books, but Moose solved that for me.”

They looked at one another, and the first hint of a doubt insinuated itself into my mind. They were giving a good impression of confusion, I thought, but then I discarded the thought. Anna and Daniel must surely have picked up some tips from the actors they directed, and as for Sam, well, he’d learned impassivity from years of teaching aspirant Nobel winners.

I changed tack, I reached into my bag, pulled out the wad of money, and threw it at them. It landed just where I had wanted it to, plum in Sam’s lap. Both Anna and Daniel stretched across the table to get a better look.

“Nice crisp notes,” Daniel commented. “Did this Moose rob a bank?”

“Maybe Sam did,” I said. “Let’s ask him.”

Sam looked at the notes in that abstracted way he had. “Moose,” he said speculatively. “The Big Sleep?”

“Farewell, My Lovely,” Daniel said impatiently. “I thought mathematicians were literate these days.”

Sam opened his mouth to defend himself. I decided that it was time to stop playing.

“I know you think I should give up the business,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I was coming to the same conclusion myself. But sending a nine-foot Moose to my office is not what I call a subtle hint. Nor is it funny.”

This time there was no mistaking the confusion in their eyes. I knew them well, these three, and they knew me. They wouldn’t, I thought, continue the game this far. Would they?

“Except he said his name was Martin,” I told them in a voice that was no longer so certain. “Martin Malloy. Looking for Thelma,”

They glanced briefly at one another, but they didn’t speak. I saw Anna’s eyes come to rest on my jacket pocket. The concern in her eyes spoke of her innocence, spoke of all their innocence. I gulped, took the whiskey out, walked to them, and deposited it on the table. I pulled myself a chair and sat heavily on it.

“I better start again,” I said.

I told them all about it, each piece of stinted dialogue, and by the time I had finished I was sure they weren’t involved. Which left me with a problem. A big one.

“So who sent him?” I asked.

They had no answer to that, and neither did I. Like most individuals I knew people who didn’t like me, and I knew people I didn’t like, but they could hardly be called enemies. Not the kind who would go to such elaborate lengths to hoax me-never mind produce 250 crisp new ones to aid them.

“Any dissatisfied clients?” Daniel asked.

No disatisfied clients-no clients at all, come to think of it.

“So what are you going to do?” Anna’s voice broke into my reverie.

I drew myself up straight as if I had already made the decision that was only then forming in my brain.

“Investigate,” I answered. “Find Thelma. What else can I do?”

“What if the money’s stolen?”

I shrugged. “I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” I said. I picked up the bottle of Bells and dropped it lightly into the dustbin. “Let’s celebrate with a real whiskey,” I said, “now that I’m no longer filing for a divorce from the lot of you.”

I was nicely oiled by the time I arrived at Tony’s Golders Green office.

Street Times was peopled by hacks like Tony who’d wakened up one day to the realization that their ulcers were never going to get any smaller. A few of them got together and decided that if they were going to start developing bosses’ diseases, they might as well be their own bosses. They’d started a London-based magazine that-now in its middle age-no longer tried to compete for the youth market. In a way, I suppose, they were one of the few remaining relics of the sixties although they had long since grown away from nostalgia or angst and had settled, instead, for what they could do in a world grown increasingly hostile.

Their new offices were, however, not exactly friendly. Workaday would be a better description, sited between a Dorothy Perkins and a grimy solicitor, with a smell courtesy of Grodzinski, the baker, giving the only hint of atmosphere. I made a mental note to pick up a sliced rye and some cheese Danish as I located Tony in his glass cubicle. His shirt sleeves, I observed, were held up by rubber bands.

“Still preserving the image,” I commented.

Tony glanced up from his computer and shot what, for him, approximated a smile.

“Bloody kid bit the buttons off,” he said.

“And how is she?”

This time the smile was definite. “Great,” he gushed. Catching himself, he ran a hand through his mousey brown hair. “For a monster. Want a coffee?”

“If it comes with a Danish,” I said.

Tony frowned. “They make them by machine now,” he said, “in some warehouse out in Bromley. The smell’s bottled to give us the impression that the good old days are still with us.”

“m pass then,” I said. I perched myself on the edge of his desk and peered around in an attempt to read his screen. “Impressive symbols,” I said. “Street Times going postmodernist?”

Tony moved the screen away. “Accounts,” he said curtly. He didn’t need to say more; I knew all about accounts. Which brought me to my business.

“Name of Martin Malloy mean anything to you?” I asked.

Tony yawned. “I’m losing my knack,” he said. “You’re no longer even bothering with the foreplay.” He yawned again. “You used to at least pretend to be giving me something in exchange for my gems of information,” he explained, “but since we’ve been exiled to the Green, I suppose you think I come cheap.”

I shrugged. “Nothing much to offer,” I said. “Business is slow.”

“Slow to get off the ground, or slow to die?”

“The latter.”

“Well, in that case,” Tony said. He hit a cue on his keyboard and the machine began to whir. “Bloody noisy, this new technology,” he said. “Now let’s see if the data base moved with us.” He typed fast with two fingers. “Malloy,” he said out loud. “Martin, Mr.”

I waited while he squinted his eyes at the screen, and then, a few seconds later, he hit a key and the bytes of information stopped rolling. “Thought I remembered him,” Tony said. “An interesting case, Martin Malloy.”

So he actually existed, I thought-interesting indeed.

“Martin, aka ‘Mouse,’ Malloy,” Tony offered.

“Mouse?”

“A reference to his size. Never met him, but apparently he’s on the big side.”

“You could say that.”

“And Mouse as well on account of the fact that he never talked to the cops.” Tony’s eyes scanned rapidly down the screen. “Malloy’s a genius with numbers,” he said. “When his face first hit the front pages, the gutter press got excited and tried to pin an idiot-savant label on him. He wouldn’t play ball, so they dumped him.”

“What was their interest in the first place?” I asked.

“Malloy was associated with some East End hoods,” Tony answered, “part of a crack gang-you know the scene-New York comes to London. The word was that the police picked the Mouse up in an attempt to get him to finger the big men. He didn’t, and someone started to kick up a stink about habeas corpus. The cops eventually got themselves out of trouble by persuading the inland revenue to charge him with tax evasion.”

“Tax evasion?”

Tony grinned. “Modern, innit? The case against him was weak, but all the jury saw was a giant, and a black giant to boot, who refused to talk. They threw the book at him. Sad, really, although by the sounds of his physique, he’d have no trouble in jail.”

I thought about the scar and wondered. “Any woman involved?” I asked.

Tony hit another key. “Not that I can see.” He rolled the screen on again and then, finding nothing, wiped it clear. “Want me to check this out further?”

“If you have the time.”

Tony yawned again. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll be in touch if…” He didn’t finish the sentence: he started up on his computer again. That was it, no good-bye, he had done with me. It wasn’t personal-Tony never was one for social niceties, and I knew he’d contact me if he found anything of interest. And besides, who was I to stand between a man and his collective’s accounts? I left him to them.

Or tried to. I’d forgotten how much Tony liked to hold his conversations in transit. “Kate,” he called when I was almost at the door.

I turned.

“Maybe you should let the business die,” he said.

I shrugged and left.

I spent the evening on my own-alone, that is, so long as you don’t count my alto. I counted it, I’d just had the whole thing resprung, and I spent a few hours rediscovering both its range and my limitations.

I usually played to get away from work, but this time I failed. An image of a man they called the Mouse kept weaving its way through the blues I played. I saw him as he stood there in my office, his bright clothes, contrasting with those sad eyes, a man with no home trapped for tax evasion. I was beginning to feel sorry for him-sorry that I had treated his visit as a hoax, sorry that I hadn’t asked him more. That, I thought, was why I liked the job-and why I would miss it so much when I was forced to close. It wasn’t often that you get the opportunity to meet giants who want to thank their social worker for introducing them to literature. Thelma must be quite a woman, I thought-certainly more trusting than I. I should have been more friendly; I should have tried harder.

I shook my head, moved the beat up tempo to fit with my version of South African township jazz, and put a brake on my regrets. Thelma, if she existed, was the social worker, not me. I would try and find her, that’s all I could do. I had enough troubles of my own, I had the business to worry about.

Without noticing I slipped back into the blues.

It was hot when I got up, the kind of heat that visits London once every thirteen years. I opened the wardrobe in the hall, the one where I stored the clothes I never got a chance to wear, and stared at the uninspiring choices. In the end I decided to go for broke, fitted myself out in a tight black cotton skirt and flimsy pink T-shirt, threw a pair of thonged sandals on my feet, and took a jacket for protection from the vagaries of the English climate.

The flimsy pink number was already showing signs of wilting when I arrived at the address Martin Malloy had given me. What’s more, it clashed with my destination.

The building was plum in the middle of the Arsenal, a cheerful item if ever I saw one. It was round and squat, and red and yellow-a low thing in the middle of a long row of detached gray brick. A kind of eighties version of a sixties domed tent, it was part of the council’s attempt to decentralize its services in order to benefit the community.

The community, consisting mainly of women and children, who were crowded into a big room with narrow slanted windows, did not look impressed. I can’t say I blamed than: the place was hot and, although cheerful, downright uncomfortable. When I asked for the duty social worker, I was told to take a seat. I gingerly lowered myself into a red plastic item that, bolted to the floor, resembled a bucket with large holes.

“Gets to your bum after an hour or two,” said the woman to my left.

“Our Johnny got stuck in one once,” said the woman to my right. “Had to get the fire brigade to cut him out. They blamed me, of course.” She reached over and slapped her Johnny, who seemed to be making a second bid for fire brigade fame.

“Miss Baeier,” a voice called.

I was shown into a small cubicle of a room, airless and lit by fluorescent, in which stood two chairs, a table, and a woman in her early thirties. She smiled at me from her seat and gestured to the second one. When I sat, I could hardly see her for the mound of papers piled in front of her.

She shifted to the right, pulled a manila file from the pile, and opened it. It was, I saw, lined with blank paper. She frowned, turned to her side, dug into a bag that could have doubled as a haversack and that hung on the back of her chair, and pulled out a biro. I saw that it was doing extra work as an advert for sausages. She used the pen to transfer my name from the slip I had filled in onto the first sheet of paper.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I’m trying to find someone,” I said.

The woman glanced up sharply, saw that I wasn’t joking, and shut the file with a bang. “Ms. Baeier,” she said clearly, “we are not all-powerful. We have strict guidelines to which we always adhere. I can tell you, without needing to check, that we draw the line at tracing missing persons. You might care to try the police-we never have much luck with them, but don’t let that stop you.” The lines in her face belied the aggression in her voice: she looked too tired to have only just started work.

I smiled at her. “Bad morning?”

She half returned my smile. “The worst,” she said. “Except for yesterday and tomorrow.”

“I won’t waste your time then,” I said, “I’m looking for a Thelma Parsons.”

A look of alarm crossed the woman’s face, a flash of response quickly concealed as she ducked behind the pile of papers. When she reemerged, she had gone bland again: I wondered whether I’d been imagining the sheer panic that had cut through her fatigue. She raised an eyebrow.

“Thelma was a social worker,” I continued, “based here once. Hated the job as much as you all do and managed to escape. She’s an old friend of mine. I was hoping you could help me find her.”

It was weak and I knew it. Marlowe would have done better. But then I wasn’t Marlowe, was I? I was just a private detective in a land that didn’t like detectives, and a woman, not a man.

But then, I thought brightly, as her face seemed to soften at the mention of my friendship with Thelma, neither was this woman a reluctant witness with something to hide-just an overworked social worker fighting the disillusionment that seemed to come with the job these days. Maybe it would work.

It didn’t. “We never release addresses of former employees,” she said. “Nor, for that matter, of current employees.” She was good at her job, but not good enough. Her eyes were narrowed, beaming hostility, contradicting her seeming unconcern.

I opened my mouth to try again, but she shook her head in the general direction of the door, dismissing me with a determined finality. She discarded the manila file and began her way through the one underneath, I got the message: I left,

My way out was blocked by a woman who thrust a small child toward me,

“Here, do me a favor and watch him for a second,” she said. “Got to change the baby, and those chairs are useless.” She was a pro: she sped down the corridor with yelling infant in arms. I looked down at the abandoned child.

He was a cute enough item if you managed to ignore the effluent issuing from his nose. I couldn’t ignore it, so I took a tissue from my bag and moved it downward. He was out of range before the tissue had even a chance of reaching his face.

I recognized him. “Johnny?” I asked.

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and nodded sullenly. I smiled. A gift from heaven, I thought, snot and all.

“How’d you like to earn fifty pence?” I asked.

Visibly he sized me up. “A pound,” he said.

“Seventy pence?”

“A quid or nuffing,” he said firmly. He folded his small arms together and stood there, facing me, his feet planted stubbornly on the ground.

I knew when I was beaten. I knelt down beside him and explained what I wanted. He nodded. When I had finished, he held out his hand, palm up. Into it I placed a pound coin that rapidly disappeared into his pocket. Then he nodded again.

As agreed, I walked away from him until I had rounded the comer. Then I waited.

Nothing happened. I waited some more-still nothing. I’ve been had I thought. Maybe Tony’s right, I’m no detective. Then suddenly, from around the corner, issued a scream, a bloodcurdling scream, the likes of which I had never before had the privilege of hearing. Once it came, paused, and then once again.

It worked like a dream. I heard a door open and a woman, my woman, call out, “What the hell’s going on?”

She got another scream for a reply and some words this time. “My brovver,” Johnny screamed. “My brovver, he’s stuck.”

“Oh save me,” the woman muttered,

Johnny screamed again.

“All right, all right,” she said. “I’ll get him out. Just do me a favor and stop screaming, will you?”

They rounded the comer at a brisk pace, Johnny leading, the woman following. As they passed me, Johnny let out another yell and the woman quickened her pace, giving him a push as she did so.

I walked fast in the opposite direction, running when I had rounded the corner. I opened the door of her office and stumbled over to her chair. I grabbed her bag and began to rifle through it, one ear on the commotion outside.

It was a bottomless chasm I faced and a messy one at that. I pulled things out at random. The screaming had stopped and I heard the sound of a slap. I had little time left.

The bag was incredible. I dug deep, throwing out old Kleenex, keys, a plethora of credit cards (social workers must be better paid these days, I thought), and the occasional half-eaten nut. None of the contents fitted my preconception of what should be there. I dug again.

I was on the verge of giving up when I found what I’d been looking for-an address book, small and black. Except I was probably too late. I heard footsteps outside.

I opened the book to the P section. No Parsons there. The footsteps were coming closer.

I turned to the T section. And there it was, the name Thelma, no surname, just Thelma. Except it did me no good because underneath the name was a blank piece of paper, stuck on, tight. I know it was tight because I tried to get it off. No luck: I heard a rustling outside the door. So I did what I had to. I pulled the page out, shoved the book along with the rest of the garbage back into the bag, threw the bag over the chair, and ran for the door. I collided with her there.

“Forgot my pen,” I said. “One day I’ll forget my head.” The anger in her face faded. “Tell me about it,” she muttered before closing the door on me.

In a workers’ café across the road I sat over a cup of milky hot water masquerading as tea and stared at the stolen page. There was no way I could remove the covering blankness. I’d tried again and all I’d managed to do was to tear a corner off it.

I turned the paper over. I could see the writing there, faint and inviting, but still indecipherable. I held the page up to the light and it became clearer but still incomprehensible. Well, it would be, I thought. It’s backward.

I left my tea to its own devices and went to the toilet. I held the back of the page up to the scratched mirror above the basin-again the writing appeared, but still illegibly. I got a pen out of my bag and, holding the paper up to the exposed bulb, I slowly started to trace the lines that I could see.

It took a long time, but I managed it in the end. And when I’d finished, I could see, in writing that was not mine, an address, clearly written.

My tea was still waiting for me. I put some coins beside it and left them all to their own devices.

Thelma lived in a small terraced house almost opposite the football ground. Hers was in the middle of a row of look-alikes, all built from dingy gray brick, with lace curtains covering small square windows, low front gardens whose walls could never hold back the tide of litter from the fans, and dark-red-stained front steps that would once, in another age, have been daily scrubbed.

I stood on the steps and rang her bell. I got no response, no sound at all. I rang again but again without luck. I turned to go and it was then that, out of the corner my eye, I saw a portion of the dingy lace twitch. I waited but still nothing happened. I got the message. I turned away and walked back to my car, climbed in, rewed it ostentatiously, and drove off. I drove around the block and then returned to her street, parking a few doors down, away from the lace curtain. I switched off the engine and waited.

It was two hours before anything happened. I concentrated mostly on my business or lack of it. I sat and I boiled and I wondered what I was doing, trapped in my own car on a sunny day, watching the minutes tick by and the money diminish, waiting for a fictional Thelma to make a move so I could report back to the fantastic Mouse. Tony was right, I thought, and Sam as well-it was time to move on, time to reenter the real world.

My hand was on my car keys, ready to switch on and leave, when I heard the footsteps. I ducked down, landing heavily on the floor. I strained my neck as I peered through the side mirror. It was her, all right, the woman from Thelma’s old office, walking briskly down the pavement. She crossed in front of my car, so close that I could almost smell the anxiety emanating from her, and walked purposively up to Thelma’s door.

It was opened almost immediately and kept open. I saw a hint of blue, but otherwise my social worker concealed her protagonist from me. For protagonists they obviously were: I didn’t need to hear their conversation to guess that it was ugly-I could see it in the gestures of the social worker, in the hard set of her back, in the way she reached into her bag and flung something toward the door, in the way she walked away, and in the bang that sounded as the door closed.

I crouched down as she passed by me, but I needn’t have bothered. She walked fast and angrily, lost in a world of her own making, muttering to herself. At one point she stopped and hit herself-quite literally hit herself on the head with the flat of her hand. I heard the sound of the blow from twenty yards away.

She started up again, and only when she had turned the corner did I get out of my car. I ignored the front of the house and instead walked round the block, counting houses until I reached Thelma’s back gate. I pressed against it and it yielded slightly. One long push was enough to break the lock.

I made my way down the narrow path, past the overflowing dustbin and the small outhouse that must once have been the house’s only toilet until I reached the kitchen door. I put my hand on the doorknob, and it opened as if it had been waiting for me. I stepped in.

I found myself in a kitchen that stank of neglect, Dishes were piled on both sides of the sink, unwashed and uncleared. On the floor stood two saucers, one with the dregs of old milk, the other piled high with cat food. Plants wilted on the windowsill, geraniums that instead of enjoying the sun were being finished off by it.

And yet it was not a kitchen that I would ever have described as poor. It was packed with consumer durables, with microwaves, coffee percolators, automatic juicers, stainless steel knives, still wrapped and shining, and a variety of food processors of the latest design. An ideal home gone mad, I thought, as I walked through the room and into the hall.

I was faced with the choice of two doors that opened onto the narrow corridor, and I chose the one at the front, the one from which the lace curtain movement had originated. I found myself in a small room, dirty but tastefully furnished. There was one person in it, a woman in her middle thirties, clad in jeans and a low-slung silk blouse, her thin blond hair hanging weakly down the sides of her long face. She was standing by a small antique maple desk, staring at something on it.

She turned and saw me as soon as I entered, but otherwise she didn’t move. Her face did, but not her body. On that pale face, a gamut of emotions crossed-displays of shock, of fear, and finally of a kind of resignation.

“What are you doing here?” she asked dully.

“The door was open,” I said. “The back door.”

“Have you got a warrant?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I’m not the police,” I said. I watched as the resignation turned to slow anger.

“Well, in that case,” she said, “I’ll call them.” She reached across the desk for the phone and picked up the receiver. But the movement seemed to have exhausted her. She stood still, holding it and staring at me. “What do you want?” she asked. The anger was replaced with despair.

I walked over and looked behind her. On the desk, I saw, were pieces of paper, scrawled with writing. There was some tracing paper there too, askew on one piece of the writing, but when she saw my eyes light on it she brushed against it, catapulting it to the floor. She stared at me defiantly.

“My name’s Kate Baeier,” I said. “I’m a private detective. A man called Martin Malloy hired me to find you.”

“Martin?” Her voice rose and she repeated it. “Martin?”

“You used to visit him in prison,” I said.

Her face cleared as she remembered and then it disintegrated again, not in fear, this time, but rather in hilarity. The laughter came slowly at first, from deep inside her, surfacing as a giggle but soon transformed into near hysteria. I stood and waited as she laughed in my face, laughed and laughed until the tears streamed down her cheeks.

Gradually the laugh subsided. She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the back of one hand. She looked at me and giggled again, controlling herself only by looking away.

“A private detective,” she muttered. “You’re not for real.”

I shrugged. “Martin wants to see you,” I said.

“Well, he can’t.” Her words had a final ring to them.

“He just wants to thank you,” I explained.

The look she threw me was one of pure contempt, not for me, I thought, but for Martin.

“Gimme a break,” she said.

“To thank you for opening up the world of fiction to him.”

She looked as if she was going to laugh again, and I didn’t really blame her. Put like that, it sounded ridiculous. If I hadn’t met Martin Malloy, I too would have laughed.

And Thelma had met Martin. She didn’t laugh. She smiled but not in mirth.

“He taught me something too,” she said in a voice that was pure malice. “The dumb bastard.”

I didn’t know until then how much I had cared, how much I wanted to deliver to Martin Malloy what he had requested. I acted without thinking. First, I saw the tracing paper on the floor with new eyes, with eyes that were looking at a mirror, then I took in the writing on the desk, and then I acted. I quickly moved behind her and wrenched open a drawer. She was too surprised to prevent me, and we both watched as it tumbled to the floor, spilling its contents. She flung herself on them, but too late to stop me from confirming what I had already guessed.

“Fraud,” I said. “That’s what it is.”

From the floor she looked up at me, surrounded by small pieces of plastic, her eyes flashing anger. I remembered the social worker’s bag, and the visit that she had just paid, and I remembered the goods in the kitchen. It made sense.

“Credit card fraud,” I said, thinking out loud. “The tracing paper is how you copy the signatures.”

She was down but not out, no longer vulnerable, in a way. She glared up at me. “So what are you going to do about it?” she shot.

I didn’t answer and she didn’t need me to.

“Nothing,” she said, “You’re the do-gooder type, aren’t you? I should know, I’ve tried that game. It gets you nowhere.”

“Except the occasional thanks,” I commented.

“Don’t give me that,” she said. “Thanks never buttered any bread. I’ve met enough Martin Malloys in my time, I don’t need to meet any more. A casualty of the system, that’s all he is, a well-meaning idiot without a chance. He even gave me tips on how to forge signatures, until he realized that my interest was more than academic. Then he had the cheek to lecture me, as if I was the one who had been jailed. Well, I’ve served my own kind of time, I’m free now. I don’t owe anybody anything; I don’t owe Martin Malloy the time of day. I can tell you…”

I knew she was right; she could have told me. She looked set to go on for a good few hours. I didn’t need to listen. I walked out of the room, through the hall, opened the front door, and stepped into the bright sunshine. I left the door open, hoping that some of the air would flow in. I wasn’t optimistic.

Martin Malloy turned up two days later. I was in my office waiting for him. I had nothing else to do but wait, and I couldn’t shake off the feeling of uselessness that had settled on me ever since I’d met Thelma.

I’d left the door open and he didn’t bother to ring the bell this time. He just arrived in my office, a huge man with a surprisingly light tread.

“Did you find her?” he asked.

I nodded.

When he smiled, his face opened up like an exotic flower that the scar did nothing to spoil. “When can we meet?” he asked.

I stood up. “She doesn’t want to see you,” I said.

I don’t know what I expected-fury, sorrow, violence even, but all I got was a vague look of disappointment. He nodded and made as if he were about to go. But then he changed his mind.

“Is Thelma all right?” he asked.

Wrong-footed, I didn’t know how to answer. I looked into those warm brown eyes and I shivered. I remembered the sight of that smile, and I knew that I didn’t want to disappoint it

“She’s fine,” I lied. “Just busy.”

I should have known better: Malloy was no fool.

“Don’t try and kid me,” he said, and his voice was as hard as his body. “Don’t treat me like a child.”

I sat down. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have pretended. Thelma is far from fine. She’s involved in some kind of credit card fiddle,” I paused. “And I’m not sure she’s doing too well.” I finished quickly, feeling somehow that I had betrayed someone. I looked away, out the window and at the faultless blue sky.

“Anything I could do to help?” he asked. “She helped me, you know.” His voice was sad.

I shook my head and looked at him again. “I’m not sure-” I started.

But he was lost in his own thoughts, and he spoke them out loud. “I knew it was something stupid,” he said. “I tried to tell her that people like us just don’t win. I thought if I was no longer behind bars, she would listen to me.”

I remembered what Thelma had said about him, and I couldn’t help myself. “She’s a bitch,” I snapped. “Beyond saving.”

“Don’t say that,” he said. “She’s just confused. Nobody’s beyond saving.”

I nodded in recognition of sentiment rather than in agreement with the meaning. I reached into my desk and pulled out his money, the money that I had not yet touched.

“It didn’t take me long,” I said, “You’re due some back.”

He looked at me and smiled, but his smile was no longer open. “Keep it,” he said airily. “There’s plenty more where that came from. Payment for keeping my trap shut. Guilt money for doing hard time.” His face softened. “I knew Thelma was desperate,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to thank her. I thought if somebody, anybody, told her how much she’d done for them, it might give her hope. I guess I was too late.”

I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

He hadn’t finished.

“Did you get somebody to look for me?” he asked.

I nodded.

“My landlord chucked me out,” he said. “You should have known nobody wants to house a convict. Especially one who looks like me. Why did you do it?”

I felt I owed him the truth and so I gave it to him. “Because I wasn’t sure you really existed,” I said.

He nodded, to himself rather than me. “I feel sorry for your type, you know,” he said, again almost as if to himself. “I came to literature late, but there’s one thing I can do that you can’t. I can distinguish between fact and fiction.”

I shrugged and I looked at him, at this huge man, dressed this time in gold threads that shimmered when he moved. I smiled. “It’s not always easy,” I said.

He saw my look and he returned my smile. He strode over to me, enfolded one of my hands in his big paws, and clasped it, “Nice to have met you, Kate Baeier,” he said. He let go of my hand. “Can I give you one last piece of advice?”

“How can I refuse?”

“Open the windows,” he said. “Let the sun shine in. Breathe the air.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He shrugged and looked at me, “A balance sheet isn’t everything,” he said. “I should know, I’m good at numbers. Business will pick up. You’re good at your job-you found Thelma, didn’t you?”

He left the room as quietly as he had arrived. I climbed on my chair so I could watch him in the street, but somehow I missed his exit.

I was in the right position, so I took his advice.

I opened the windows.

It was difficult, but I managed.

MARGARET MARON’s books featuring the New York Police Department’s Sigrid Harald are both complex mysteries and intense character studies. Harald appears in over half a dozen books to date, including such notable works as Corpus Christmas and One Coffee With. Ms. Maron lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“And Deborah judged Israel at that time.”

An inaudible ripple of cognizance swept through the congregation as the pastor of Bethel Baptist Church paused in his reading of the text and beamed down at us.

I was seated on the aisle near the front of the church, and when Barry Blackman’s eyes met mine, I put a modest smile on my face, then tilted my head in ladylike acknowledgment of the pretty compliment he was paying me by his choice of subject for this morning’s sermon. A nice man but hardly Christianity’s most original preacher. I’d announced my candidacy back in December, so this wasn’t the first time I’d heard that particular text, and my response had become almost automatic.

He lowered his eyes to the huge Bible and continued to read aloud, “And she dwelt under the palm tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel in Mount Ephraim; and the children of Israel came up to her for judgment.”

From your mouth to God’s ear, Barry, I thought.

Eight years of courtroom experience let me listen to the sermon with an outward show of close attention while inwardly my mind jumped on and off a dozen trains of thought. I wondered, without really caring, if Barry was still the terrific kisser he’d been the summer after ninth grade when we both drove tractors for my oldest brother during tobacco-barning season.

There was an S curve between the barns and the back fields where the lane dipped past a stream and cut through a stand of tulip poplars and sweetgum trees. Our timing wasn’t good enough to hit every trip, but at least two or three times a day it’d work out that we passed each other there in the shady coolness, one on the way out to the field with empty drags, the other headed back to the barn with drags full of heavy green tobacco leaves.

Nobody seemed to notice that I occasionally returned to the barn more flushed beneath the bill of my baseball cap than even the August sun would merit, although I did have to endure some teasing one day when a smear of tobacco tar appeared on my pink T-shirt right over my left breast. “Looks like somebody tried to grab a handful,” my sister-in-law grinned.

I muttered something about the tractor’s tar-gummy steering wheel, but I changed shirts at lunchtime and for the rest of the summer I wore the darkest T-shirts in my dresser drawer.

Now Barry Blackman was a preacher man running to fat, the father of two little boys and a new baby girl, while Deborah Knott was a still-single attorney running for a seat on the court bench, a seat being vacated against his will by old Harrison Hobart, who occasionally fell asleep these days while charging his own juries.

As Barry drew parallels between Old Testament Israel and modem Colleton County, I plotted election strategy. After the service, I’d do a little schmoozing among the congregation-

Strike “schmoozing,” my subconscious stipulated sternly, and I was stricken myself to realize that Lev Schuster’s Yiddish phrases continued to infect my vocabulary. Here in rural North Carolina schmoozing’s still called socializing, and I’d better not forget it before the primary. I pushed away errant thoughts of Lev and concentrated on lunch at Beulah’s. For that matter, where was Beulah and why weren’t she and J.C. seated there beside me?

Beulah had been my mother’s dearest friend, and her daughter-in-law, Helen, is president of the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They were sponsoring a meet-the-candidates reception at four o’clock in the fellowship hall of a nearby Presbyterian church, and three of the four men running for Hobart’s seat would be there too. (The fourth was finishing up the community service old Hobart had imposed in lieu of a fine for driving while impaired, but he really didn’t expect to win many MADD votes anyhow.)

Barry’s sermon drew to an end just a hair short of equating a vote for Deborah Knott as a vote for Jesus Christ. The piano swung into the opening chords of “Just as I Am,” and the congregation stood to sing all five verses. Happily, no one accepted the hymn’s invitation to be saved that morning, and after a short closing prayer we were dismissed.

I’m not a member at Bethel, but I’d been a frequent visitor from the month I was born; so I got lots of hugs and howdies and promises of loyal support when the primary rolled around. I hugged and howdied right back and thanked them kindly, all the time edging toward my car.

It was starting to bother me that neither Beulah nor J.C. had come to church. Then Miss Callie Ogburn hailed me from the side door, talking sixty to the yard as she bustled across the grass.

“Beulah called me up first thing this morning and said tell you about J.C. and for you to come on anyhow. She phoned all over creation last night trying to let you know she’s still expecting you to come for dinner.”

That explained all those abortive clicks on my answering machine. Beulah was another of my parents’ generation who wouldn’t talk to a tape. I waited till Miss Callie ran out of breath, then asked her what it was Beulah wanted to tell me about J.C.

“He fell off the tractor and broke his leg yesterday, and he’s not used to the crutches yet, so Beulah didn’t feel like she ought to leave him this morning. You know how she spoils him.”

I did. J.C. was Beulah’s older brother, and he’d lived with her and her husband Sam almost from the day they were married more than forty years ago. J.C. was a born bachelor, and except for the war years when he worked as a carpenter’s helper at an air base over in Goldsboro, he’d never had much ambition beyond helping Sam farm. Sam always said J.C. wasn’t much of a leader but he was a damn good follower and earned every penny of his share of the crop profits.

Although I’d called them Cousin Beulah and Cousin Sam till I was old enough to drop the courtesy title, strictly speaking, only Sam Johnson was blood kin. But Beulah and my mother had been close friends since childhood, and Beulah’s two children fit into the age spaces around my older brothers, which was why we’d spent so many Sundays at Bethel Baptist.

When Sam died seven or eight years ago, Sammy Junior took over, and J.C. still helped out even though he’d slowed down right much. At least, J.C. called it right much. I could only hope I’d feel like working half days on a tractor when I reached seventy-two.

A former journalist, SHELLEY SINGER is the author of the popular Jake Samson/Rosie Vicente mysteries. The latter sleuth is almost certainly the only carpenter detective in the history of the genre. They have starred in such excellent novels as Free Draw, Full House, Spit in the Ocean, Samson’s Deal, and Suicide King. Ms, Singer lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The woman spoke slowly in a deep voice edged with tears; the message she left on the office answering machine was concise. She needed help. Her husband had been murdered. Would I please call her?

The name, Wittles, sounded familiar, I glanced through that morning’s San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune and found brief follow-up stories in both. Of course. Alan Wittles. The Berkeley attorney who’d been shot to death in his living room a couple of nights before. Signs of a break-in, the papers said. I had to wonder-didn’t the dead man’s wife have anything better to do with her money than pay a private investigator for a job the police were already doing?

Still, I dialed the number she’d left on the tape. While the phone rang, I thumbed quickly through the phone book to verify that the number actually belonged to her and not to some stray lunatic who’d seen her name in the paper. The call was legitimate; I found Alan and Julia Wittles in the book, at the right number and at a very right address.

She answered with her name, as though she were an upscale clothing store.

“This is Barrett Lake,” I told her. “I’m returning your call to Broz Investigations. How can we help you?”

“Oh, yes. Thank you for calling back quickly. But I’d rather talk to Mr. Broz himself.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Broz isn’t available. He’s left me in charge.” Very impressive. I didn’t tell her I was an apprentice, working out my term under Tito’s license. She hesitated for a good ten seconds.

“You’re a woman.”

“Yes. I am.” I was a little surprised that a proper Berkeley matron would be caught dead expressing what sounded like unfeminist thoughts, but she redeemed herself.

“All right. Good. That might be even better. I’d like you to come over right away so we can talk. So you can get started and clear this all up.”

Not so fast, I told myself. “Perhaps first you could tell me a bit more about what you want me to do for you.”

She sighed and spoke in her slow, soft way. “My husband was shot to death here. At home. Three nights ago.”

“Yes. I know. I’m sorry. But aren’t the police working on the case?”

“They are.” Did I have a point, her tone of voice was asking.

“Well, we don’t like to compete with the Berkeley police. They have resources-”

“Oh, they never catch anyone. They’re busy. They have too much to do. Please, just come over here and talk to me about it. I know you can help me.”

Ridiculous, I thought. If anyone could find a homicidal burglar, it would be the police. But she sounded so desperate, and so unhappy.

I glanced at the work sheet on Tito’s desk. According to him, I didn’t have anything to do that day-nothing, really, to be in charge of-except stick around in case something showed up.

And here was a poor, sad woman in obvious distress, certainly needing someone’s help. Wasn’t that the whole point? Besides making a living? Even Tito the semipractical admitted he had thought I was a natural for the investigating business the first time he came to my apartment and saw the suit of armor in the entry.

He enjoys my romantic delusions, and I enjoy the ones he says he doesn’t have.

I told Julia Wittles I was on my way.

The house was about $750,000 worth of stucco and Spanish tile in the upper Elmwood section, one of Berkeley’s best. I noticed a man sitting in a car parked across the street, an ordinary-looking car with a long radio aerial. Were the police with her now? I headed for the door, up a terra-cotta walk flanked by two large palm trees. When I pressed the bell button, I heard a chord sound somewhere deep inside; the door opened almost immediately.

The woman and I appraised each other. We were about the same height, five seven or so, the same age-early forties-and the same build, a bit on the thin side. But her coloring was much lighter. My French and Chippewa ancestors are more dominant genetically than the Minnesota Swedes, but all her material came from northern Europe. She had pale blond hair, long and fine, pale blue eyes, and pale skin. She also had a limp handshake, but I thought that had more to do with environment than heredity.

The day was hot; the house was cool. The entry hall, two stories high with a sweep of staircase leading to a gallery, was bright and airy, but in the living room the windows were heavily curtained. The only light came from the far end of the room, a good thirty feet away, where a young man dressed in T-shirt and jeans, standing in the bright sun of the patio, was working on the open French doors. From inside the dark room I watched him turn away and walk a couple of paces through the sunlight to a toolbox lying on the patio stones.

“This is the room where it happened,” she said. “Make yourself comfortable, I’ll get us some iced tea.” She disappeared through a swinging door. I glanced around in the dimness-nice fireplace, hardwood floor. As for the furnishings, though, my mother would have said they were “different.” A tactful condemnation. Except for a couple of overstuffed couches that looked like relatives of the Pillsbury Doughboy, the furniture was flimsy-looking and looked as though it had been painted gaudily by children.

My possible client returned with two glasses and two coasters on a tray and placed the tray on the red-white-and-green coffee table between the couches,

“This is a very lovely house, architecturally,” I said.

She smiled, a radiant smile of white teeth against pale lips. An ivory woman.

“Thank you, Would you like to see more of it?” She was eager, happy. To refuse would have been almost cruel. Clearly she wanted to postpone talking about what had happened to her husband.

She led me first to the dining room, a large, light expanse furnished with a gigantic table, eight chairs, a sideboard, and two smaller cupboards. The table was a simple rectangle, soft edged, carved from hard, reddish wood. The chairs were more free form, with blob-shaped solid wood backs. The sideboard matched the table. I had seen furniture like this once before, at a gallery show of handmade pieces. Each of the chairs, I knew, cost several hundred dollars. The prices of the table and sideboard I did not even want to think about. The two smaller cupboards looked like some of the pieces I had seen in the living room. Here, in the bright uncurtained dining room, I recognized the style. There are a couple of shops in the Bay Area that specialize in amazingly expensive Southwest-style handmade furniture. Some of it is charming, bright, and whimsical, even if it doesn’t seem to stand quite right on its legs. But some of it goes beyond artistic whimsy to artist’s joke, and the two small cupboards in Julia Wittles’s dining room fit into that last category. They were particularly rickety versions of that genre, or school, or whatever they were calling it. Both were covered with crude shapes painted in bitingly sharp primary colors. One of them had little tin cutouts of coyotes, or maybe wolves, tacked to the wood above the open shelves.

“Those cupboards were made by Ian Feather,” she said, “a very famous artist who lives in Taos.” I nodded and smiled. “It took months to get them, months.”

After demonstrating that the cupboard doors actually opened, she led me upstairs to a master bedroom and bath, both of which had a bit too much brass for my taste. The quilt on the bed, though, was a beautiful geometric creation in blues and greens.

“The quilt was made in 1905 by a woman in Nebraska, a farmer’s wife,” she said. “It was in that quilt show at the art museum in San Francisco? About five years ago?”

“Interesting,” I said politely. My compassion was slipping away. I was beginning to feel restless. I have always disliked guided museum tours.

As she led me through the rest of the upstairs, lovingly pointing out skylights, alcoves, and window seats, and telling me where and how she had acquired each piece of furniture, I thought about how much it had all cost. This woman had spent more on furniture than I’d earned in half my twenty-year teaching career.

“I do love this house so much,” she said, as we trailed down the stairs again. “I’ve dedicated my life, these past eight years, to decorating it, to setting off its beauty properly.”

“Certainly,” I said, as we walked into the kitchen, “everything you have is unique.”

“Exactly. That was the effect I wanted. Everything is perfect. Just the way I wanted it.” The kitchen was basic California modern, with a greenhouse window and a center island stove top, a big fireplace, and lots of redwood and copper-all the things you see in the magazines dentists buy for their waiting rooms.

“You mentioned eight years,” I said. “Is that how long you’ve lived here?”

We were back in the living room at last. I took a long swallow of my reclaimed iced tea and sat on one of the soft couches.

“Yes. That was when I married Alan and moved in. His first wife had done the house in Victorian. It didn’t work at all.”

“Was he divorced?”

“No, she died. Years before I met him. They bought the house together. It was theirs. And then it was his. And then it was ours. And now”-she sighed-“it’s mine.”

I didn’t like sitting on the couch, after all. I felt as though it might begin to digest me. I moved to an unpadded wooden chair and placed my coaster, and then my tea, on the foot-square, red-and-white-paint-spattered table beside me. I was relieved when the table didn’t collapse.

“Now,” I said, “we need to talk about your husband’s death. Although I know how difficult that must be for you.”

She dropped her head, drawing her hand across her forehead.

“It is.”

“You say it happened in this room. I take it the intruder broke in through those doors?”

I nodded toward the French doors. The young blond man was reaching up toward the top of the doorframe with a screwdriver. As he stretched, his T-shirt rode up to expose a hairless expanse of muscular stomach.

“Yes. You find him and I’ll identify him, and we can get this whole thing over with once and for all. I saw him. I saw him running away. But the police haven’t asked me to a single lineup yet.” She made it sound like they’d neglected to invite her to tea.

“Let’s back up just a little bit, Ms. Wittles. You were here when it happened?”

“I was upstairs. I heard Alan shout, and then I heard all these terrible noises-furniture crashing, yelling-and then a gunshot. I ran downstairs, and there was this man, standing over Alan with a gun, the patio doors open, furniture everywhere, and Alan lying on the floor. The man looked at me, dropped the gun, and ran back out the door.”

A power tool whined. I followed her gaze as she looked anxiously toward the light. The carpenter was running a belt sander up the side of the door.

“Oh, no!” she shouted, waving at him, catching his eye. He turned off the sander and looked at her quizzically. “The dust is coming into the house.” He nodded thoughtfully and began to take the door off its hinges.

I turned back to Julia Wittles. “He dropped the gun? He didn’t shoot at you?”

“No. He dropped it. It was Alan’s gun. And the killer was wearing gloves. Did I say that?”

“No. And you saw him clearly enough to identify him.” She nodded. I glanced back toward the doorway. The carpenter had removed the door and was carrying it across the patio in the sunshine. Everything out there, the stones, the shrubs, the man himself, looked warm and bright. I turned back to Julia Wittles, the sad-faced woman sitting across from me in the cool dimness.

I concentrated on that face.

“Where was your husband when you found him?”

“On the rug in front of the fireplace.”

There was no rug in front of the fireplace. She anticipated my next question.

“It’s at the cleaners.”

“So what must have happened, then, is that your husband caught this man breaking in, and went to get his gun. Where did he keep it, usually?”

She pointed to a small blue desk near the patio doors. “In there, always.”

“Okay. So he grabbed his gun, but there was a struggle…?”

“Yes, that’s what I think. There was a struggle, the burglar got the gun, and shot him.”

“The room must have been a mess,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but everything looked so perfectly tidy now, every piece just so, every rug straight and lint free, the hardwood floor mirrorlike where there was light to reflect. I couldn’t quite imagine this room tossed around.

She frowned at me, studied my face for a moment. “It was. And poor Alan, lying there.” She dropped her head into her hands for a moment, sat up straight again, and took a deep breath.

“And you gave the police a description of the man. Did they do one of those drawings from your description?”

“We tried to do that, but I wasn’t very good at it. But I’d know him if I saw him. And I’m sure you could find him down in West Berkeley, where all the bums are, down on San Pablo or Sacramento.”

“You say you think the police aren’t working on the case.”

“Oh, they’re working on it, I suppose. But they certainly haven’t asked me to identify anyone.”

“I think they’re working on it. I think there’s a plainclothesman parked across the street right now. Have they been watching the house?”

Her small mouth dropped open, her eyes widened. She stared at me. We were both silent for a moment. Out on the patio the power sander whined,

“They’re going to try to blame me,” she said, shaking her head. “Isn’t that what they always do? Blame the spouse? You have to help me. We can go down to San Pablo together. I’ll point him out to you.” She was gripping the mushy arm of her couch, her voice rising.

I was getting a pain in my right temple. I rubbed it. “Why do you think the police are after you?”

“People know we’ve been having problems.”

“What kinds of problems were you having?”

“He wanted a divorce. Did I show you the conservatory? I had it added to the house last year. Would you like to see it?”

Her eyes were pleading. She was like a lost kitten, sitting demurely, prettily, tail wrapped around her paws, hoping to please.

No, I thought. No more museum tours, no more digressions. We needed to stick to the subject, which was getting more complicated.

“Possibly later. He wanted to divorce you?”

“Yes. And make me leave the house.”

“Wasn’t it legally half yours, community property?” Had she signed some sort of prenuptial agreement?

“Yes, I suppose so, but he wouldn’t have let me have it. He would have sold it. He said it was his home, his and Marsha’s, His first wife.”

“But you’d get half the money,”

“That’s not enough. I wouldn’t get this house. I wouldn’t get enough to buy one like it.”

“Did you talk to a lawyer about all this?”

“No. No, Alan was a lawyer. All the lawyers I knew were his friends. I couldn’t fight him legally. I wouldn’t have known how.” Her voice had risen in pitch again, high and breathless and soft. She sounded startlingly like Marilyn Monroe. Like an echo out of the past, bouncing around the room. I wanted to scream at her: Where had she been for the past three decades?

She was watching me warily. “We need another glass of tea,” she said, and fled to the kitchen with our glasses.

I got up and walked to the square of sunlight, crossed the flagstones to where the young man stood, screwdriver in one hand, a new lock in the other. The French door he’d removed rested across a pair of sawhorses.

I couldn’t even bring myself to flirt with him.

“Was there a lot of damage to the doors?” I asked.

He smiled at me. “No. Hardly any. The wood was barely marked. The burglar pried real gently until the lock gave way. Must have taken a long time. And the bolts top and bottom”-he pointed at the top of the door with his screwdriver-“they weren’t shot, so there wasn’t anything broken there. Not bad at all.”

“Thank you.”

He looked at me oddly. Yes, I thought, you’re very pretty and very charming and you have a sweet smile, and you’re not used to women staring at you dully and walking away. Sorry.

Julia Wittles was standing at the coffee table, waiting for me. The tea glasses were full again.

“Well, what are you going to do?” she demanded.

I went to the big front windows and pulled open the drapes. Then I turned on a few lamps.

“Tell me how the furniture was that night, when you came into the room.”

She pointed out various pieces and described their positions, although she said she couldn’t remember exactly in all cases. A couch was overturned. One chair was on its back near the entry door. “And some of the tables were thrown around the room, and that rug and that one were out of place.”

“And that’s how it was when the police came?” She nodded. I examined the chair that had been displaced, turning it over, looking at it carefully. I looked at the coffee table, the end tables.

“Where was this?” I asked, touching the small red-and-white-spattered table.

“Over there.” She pointed to a spot near the kitchen door, some fifteen feet away. I crossed the room and studied the floor. Then I went back to the table, took a deep, compassion-expelling breath, and gave it a good kick. Julia Wittles yelled. The table shot up, hit the floor, and skidded a few feet, coming to rest about where she had pointed. I walked over to it, gingerly, because I’d hurt one of my toes.

The floor had a new, shallow, six-inch scratch with a flake of blue paint in it. The previously pristine table now had one loose leg and one chipped corner.

She came to stand beside me. I didn’t look at her.

“I hope that wasn’t one of your favorite pieces,” I said. She didn’t answer. “None of this furniture has a scratch on it. The only scratch on the floor is the one I just made. Did you think the police were complete idiots?”

“You’re smarter than they are.”

“Even if they had called you in for a lineup, you know, you might have picked someone they knew couldn’t be guilty. Sometimes they put cops in them.”

She moved across the room, standing just two feet from me. Her eyes were red, and the fine wrinkles around them deepened as she stared into mine, trying, I suppose, to read my mind. “You’re not going to help me.”

“You need a lawyer.” And a doctor or two.

The carpenter was back at the doorframe again, reinstalling the door. She turned to watch him.

“I don’t want to do that,” she said. “I don’t like lawyers.”

Millions of mystery readers love mystery bookstores, and CAROLYN G. HART has given them and the bookstore owners someone to cheer for-Annie Laurence, whose own store is the base for exciting and intellectually stimulating cases in such books as A Little Class on Murder, Something Wicked, and Death on Demand Ms. Hart lives in Oklahoma City.

Annie Laurance Darling willed the telephone to ring.

But the undistinguished garden-variety black desk telephone remained mute.

Dammit, Max could at least call!

The more she thought about it, the more she wished that she had gone. Of course, it was undeniably true that Ingrid wasn’t available to mind the bookstore, but it wouldn’t have been a disaster to close for a few days in November. She didn’t let herself dwell on the fact that Saturday had been her best fall day ever. She’d sold cartons of the latest by Lia Matera, Nancy Pickard, and Sara Paretsky.

But there was Max, off to Patagonia and adventure. And here she was, stuck in her closed bookstore on a rainy Sunday afternoon with nothing to do but unpack books and wonder if Max had managed to spring Laurel. Even Laurel should have known better than to take up a collection for Amnesty International in the main hall of the justice ministry in Buenos Aires! A tiny worm of worry wriggled in Annie’s mind. She knew, of course, that her husband was absolutely capable, totally in command, unflappable, imperturbable. Annie snapped the book shut and bounced to her feet. But oh, sweet Jesus, who knew what kind of mess Laurel had-

The phone rang.

Annie leaped across the coffee area and grabbed up the extension behind the coffee bar. She didn’t bother saying “Death on Demand.” The finest mystery bookstore on the loveliest resort island off the coast of South Carolina wasn’t open.

“Hello.” She tried not to sound concerned. But maybe if she caught a jet tonight-

“Maxwell Darling.” The tone was peremptory, cut-through-to-the-bone direct.

Annie’s shoulders tensed. She immediately recognized the dry, crackly voice that rustled like old paper. What did Chastain, South Carolina’s most aristocratic, imperious, absolutely impossible old hag, want with Annie’s husband?

“Miss Dora, how are you?” Annie could remember her manners even if some others could not. Annie could imagine the flicker of irritation in Miss Dora’s reptilian black eyes.

“No time to waste. Get him to the phone.”

“I wish I could,” Annie snapped.

“Where is he?”

“Patagonia.”

A thoughtful pause on the other end, then a sniff. “Laurel, no doubt.” The old lady’s voice rasped like a rattlesnake slithering across sand as she disgustedly pronounced the name of Max’s mother.

“Of course,” Annie groused. “And I darn well should have gone. He might need me. You know how dangerous it is in Argentina!”

A lengthening pause, freighted with emanations of chagrin, malevolence, and rapid thought.

“Well, I’ve no choice. You’ll have to do. Meet me at one-oh-three Bay Street at four o’clock.”

Annie’s eyes narrowed with fury. Miss Dora was obviously the same old hag she’d always been. And just who the hell did she think she was, ordering Annie to-

“A matter of honor.” The phone banged into the receiver.

Annie stalked down the storm-dark street, the November rain spattering against her yellow slicker. Clumps of sodden leaves squished underfoot. The semitropical Carolina Low Country was not completely immune to winter, and days such as this presaged January and February. Annie felt another quiver of outrage. Why had she succumbed to the old bat? Why was she even now pushing open the gate and starting down the oystershell path to 103 Bay Street?

The aged, sandpapery voice sounded again in her mind: A matter of honor.

The sign to the right of the front door hung unevenly, one screw yielding to time and weather. An amateur had painted the outstretched, cupped hands, the thumbs overlarge, the palms lumpy. The legend was faded but decipherable: HELPING HANDS.

Annie was almost to the steps of the white frame cottage when she saw Miss Dora standing regally beneath the low spreading limbs of an ancient live oak. Annie was accustomed to the gnomelike old lady’s eccentric dress-last-century bombazine dresses and hats Scarlett would have adored-but even Annie was impressed by the full gray cloak, the wide-brimmed crimson hat protecting shaggy silver hair, mid the ivory walking stick planted firmly in front of high-topped, black leather shoes.

A welcoming smile tugged at Annie’s lips, then slid to oblivion as Miss Dora scowled and thumped the stick, “You’re late. The carillons play at four o’clock.”

“Carillons?”

A vexed hiss. “Gome, come. We’ll go inside. Wanted you to hear the carillons. It’s too neat, you know. The shot at precisely four o’clock. Know it must have been then. Otherwise somebody would have heard.” Thumping stiffly to the door. Miss Dora scrabbled in her oversize crocheted receptacle. “No one’s taking Constance’s character into account. Not even her own brother! Blackening her name. A damnable lie.” She jammed a black iron key into the lock.

As the door swung in, Miss Dora led the way, a tiny, limping figure. She clicked on the hall light, then regarded Annie with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. “Would do it myself.” she muttered obscurely. “But sciatica. With the rain in November,”

The parchment face, wrinkled with age, also held lines of pain, Annie almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

The stick swished through the air. “A dependency, of course. Small. Cramped, Cold floors in the winter, Constance had no use for her own creature comforts. Never gave them a thought. Sixty years she took care of the poor and the helpless here in Chastain, Everybody welcome here.” The rasp muted to a whisper. “And may her murderer burn in hell,”

The hair prickled on the back of Annie’s neck. She looked around the dimly lit, linoleum-floored hallway. Worn straight chairs lined both sides of the hall. Near the door, turned sideways to allow passageway, sat a yellow pine desk.

The stick pointed at the desk. “Manned by volunteers, ten A.M. to four P.M., every day but Sunday, Emma Louise Rammert yesterday. You’ll talk to her.”

The calm assumption irritated Annie, “Look, Miss Dora, you’re taking a lot for granted. I only came over here because you hung up before I could say no. Now, I’ve got things on my mind-”

“Murder?”

Annie fervently hoped not. Surely Max and Laurel were safe! Max had promised to be careful He was going to hire a mercenary, fly in to the secret airstrip, hijack Laurel from her captors (a potful of money always worked wonders, whatever the political persuasion), and fly right back out. Oh, hell, she should have gone! What if he needed her?

“Oh, who knows?” Annie moaned.

“Don’t be a weak sister,” the old lady scolded. “Asinine to fret. He’ll cope, despite his upbringing.” A thoughtful pause. “Perhaps because of it. Any event, you’ve work to do here.” The cane pointed at a closed door. “There’s where it happened.” The rasp was back, implacable, ice hard, vindictive.

The old lady, moving painfully, stumped to the door, threw it open, turned on the light.

“Her blood’s still there. I’m on the board. Gave instructions nothing to be disturbed.”

Annie edged reluctantly into the room. She couldn’t avoid seeing the desktop and the darkish-brown splotches on the scattered sheets of paper. The low-beamed ceiling and rough-hewn unpainted board walls indicated an old, lean-to room. No rugs graced the warped floorboards. An unadorned wooden chair sat behind the scarred and nicked desk. In one corner, a small metal typewriter table held a Remington-circa 1930.

Gloved fingers gripped Annie’s elbow like talons. The walking stick pointed across the room.

“Her chair. That’s the way the police found it.”

Propelled by the viselike grip, Annie crossed the few feet to the desk and stared at the chair. The very unremarkable oak chair. Old, yes. But so was everything in the room. Old, with a slat missing.

The ivory stick clicked against the chair seat. “No pillow. Constance always sat on a pillow. Bad hip. Never complained, of course. Now, you tell me, young miss, Where’s that pillow? Right at four o’clock and no pillow!”

Annie was so busy wondering if Miss Dora had finally gone around the bend-which would be no surprise to her, that was for sure-that it took her a moment to realize she was “young miss.”

Annie slanted a sideways glance.

Miss Dora hunched over her stick now, her gloved hands tight on the knob. She stared at the empty chair, her lined face sorrowful. “Sixty years I knew Constance. Always doing good works. Didn’t simper around with a pious whine or a holier-than-thou manner. Came here every day, and every day the poor in Chastain came to her for help. No electricity. They came here. Husband beat you, son stole your money, they came here. A sick child and no food. They came here.”

A tear edged down the ancient sallow cheek. “I used to tell her, ‘Constance, the world’s full of sorrow. Always has been. Always will be. You’re like the little Dutch boy at the dike.’”

The old lady reached out a gloved hand and gently touched the straight chair. Then the reptilian eyes glittered at Annie. “Know what Constance said?”

“No,” The dark little room and the blood-spattered desk held no echo of its former tenant. This was just a cold and dreary place, touched by violence.

“Constance said, ‘Why, Dora, love, it’s so simple. “I was hungry and you gave me meat, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you took me in. Naked, and you clothed me; I was sick, and you visited me; I was in prison and you came unto me.” ’ ”

Beyond the dry whisper was an echo of a light and musical voice.

Miss Dora’s stick cracked sharply against the wooden floor. She stared at Annie with dark and burning eyes. “A woman,” she rasped, hard as stone against stone, “who saw her duty and did it. A woman who would never”-the cane struck-“never”-the cane struck-“never”-the cane struck-“quit the course.”

Annie reached for the telephone, then yanked her hand back. Dammit, she dreaded making this call. Miss Dora had almost persuaded her yesterday afternoon. Indeed, Constance Bolton’s life did argue against her death. Annie studied the picture Miss Dora had provided of a slender, white-haired woman in a navy silk dress. Constance Bolton looked serious, capable, and resourceful, a woman accustomed to facing problems and solving them. Her wide-set brown eyes were knowledgeable but not cynical; her mouth was firm but not unpleasant. Stalwart, steady, thoughtful-yes, she had obviously been all of these and more. Yet-Annie glanced down at the poorly reproduced copy of the autopsy report on Constance Maude Bolton, white, female, age seventy-two-the answer seemed inescapable, however unpalatable to Constance Bolton’s friends. Annie hated to destroy Miss Dora’s faith. But facts were facts.

She dialed in a rush.

“Here.”

“Miss Dora, this is Annie. I’m at the store. Listen, I got a copy of the autopsy report on Miss Bolton.” Annie took a deep breath. “She was sick, Miss Dora. Dying. Bone cancer. She hadn’t told many people, but she knew. Her doctor said so. And there were powder burns on her hand.”

Gusts of polar wind could not have been colder than Miss Dora’s initial silence. Then she growled, “Doesn’t matter, young miss. Get to work. Think.” The receiver thudded with the same force as the cane had struck the floor in that dingy office. “Never-never-never quit the course.”

Annie slammed down her own receiver and glared at the phone, then jumped as it rang again.

“Death on Demand.”

“The pillow,” Miss Dora intoned. “The pillow, young miss. The pillow!” And the receiver banged again.

Annie jumped to her feet and paced across the coffee area. Agatha, the bookstore’s elegant and imperious black cat, watched with sleepy amber eyes.

“Dammit, Agatha, the old bat’s going to drive me crazy!”

Agatha yawned,

“Unreasonable, ill-tempered, stubborn”-Annie stopped at the coffee bar and reached for her mug-“but not stupid, Agatha.”

As she drank the delicious French roast brew, Annie stroked Agatha’s silky fur and thought about Miss Dora. Irascible, yes. Imperious, yes. Stupid, no. “And about as sentimental as an alligator. So if she knows in the depth of her creaky bones that Constance Bolton wasn’t a quitter, where does that leave us?”

If it wasn’t suicide, it had to be murder.

How could it be?

Powder burns on her right hand. Constance Bolton was right-handed. A contact wound-star-shaped-to the right temple. Bone cancer. And the gun-Annie returned to her table and riffled through the police report-the gun had been identified by Miss Bolton’s housekeeper, Sammie Calhoun. A.32 caliber revolver, it had belonged to Constance Bolton’s late brother, Everett. It had, as long as Sammie worked there, lain in the bottom drawer of the walnut secretary in the library. She had seen the gun as recently as late last week.

The fact that this gun had been brought from Miss Constance’s home was another pointer to suicide.

But-if she had been murdered-the use of that gun sharply circumscribed the list of possible killers.

It had to be someone with access to the bottom drawer of that walnut secretary.

Suicide? Or murder?

On the one hand, terminal illness, powder marks, a contact wound, a gun brought from home.

On the other hand, Miss Dora’s unyielding faith in her friend’s character and a missing pillow.

Annie sipped at her coffee. A pillow. There didn’t seem to be any reason-She thumped the mug on the counter and clapped her hands. Of course, of course. It could only have been done with a pillow. And that explains why the murder had to occur at four o’clock when the carillons sounded It wouldn’t have been necessary to mask a single shot But it was essential to mask two shots. Oh, my God, the old devil was smart as hell!

Annie pictured the dingy room and Constance sitting behind the desk. A visitor-someone Constance knew well, surely-standing beside the desk. The movement would have been snake-quick, a hand yanking the pistol from a pocket, pressing it against her temple and firing. That would have been the moment demanding swiftness, agility. Then it would have been a simple matter, edging the pillow from beneath her, pressing her hand against the gun and firing into the pillow. That would assure the requisite powder residue on her hand. The stage then was set for suicide, and it remained only to slip away, taking the pillow, and, once home, to wash with soap and water to remove the powder marks upon the killer’s hand.

Oh, yes, Annie could see it all, even hear the tiny click as the door closed, leaving death behind.

But was there anything to this picture? Was this interpretation an illusion born of Miss Dora’s grief or the work of a clever killer?

Annie could hear the crackly voice and behind it the musical tones of a good woman.

“I was hungry…”

By God, nobody was going to get away with the murder of Constance Bolton! Not if Annie could help it!

A Brooklyn-based attorney, CAROLYN WHEAT naturally has a criminal lawyer, Cass Jameson, as her series detective, Cass has solved cases in at least two wonderful books, Where Nobody Dies and Dead Man’s Thoughts. The latter novel was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk. The words burned my memory the way Irish whiskey used to burn my throat, only there was no pleasant haze of alcohol to follow. Just bitter heartburn pain.

It was my first night back on the job, back to being Sergeant Maureen Gallagher instead of “the patient.” Wasn’t it hard enough being a transit cop, hurtling beneath the streets of Manhattan on a subway train that should have been in the Transit Museum? Wasn’t it enough that after four weeks of detox I felt empty instead of clean and sober? Did I have to have some rookie’s casually cruel words ricocheting in my brain like a wild-card bullet?

Why couldn’t I remember the good stuff? Why couldn’t I think about O’Hara’s beefy handshake, Greenspan’s “Glad to see ya, Mo,” Ianuzzo’s smiling welcome? Why did I have to run the tape in my head of Manny Delgado asking Captain Lomax for a different partner?

“Hey, I got nothing against a lady sarge, Cap,” he’d said. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s just that if there’s one thing I can’t stand…” Et cetera.

Lomax had done what any standup captain would-kicked Delgado’s ass and told him the assignment stood. What he hadn’t known was that I’d heard the words and couldn’t erase them from my mind.

Even without Delgado, the night hadn’t gotten off to a great start. Swinging in at midnight for a twelve-to-eight, I’d been greeted with the news that I was on Graffiti Patrol, the dirtiest, most mind-numbing assignment in the whole transit police duty roster. I was a sergeant, damn it, on my way to a gold shield, and I wasn’t going to earn it dodging rats in tunnels or going after twelve-year-olds armed with spray paint.

Especially when the rest of the cop world, both under- and aboveground, was working overtime on the torch murders of homeless people. There’d been four human bonfires in the past six weeks, and the cops were determined there wouldn’t be a fifth.

Was Lomax punishing me, or was this assignment his subtle way of easing my entry back into the world? Either way, I resented it. I wanted to be a real cop again, back with Sal Minucci, my old partner. He was assigned to the big one, in the thick of the action, where both of us belonged. I should have been with him. I was Anti-Crime, for God’s sake. I should have been assigned-

Or should I? Did I really want to spend my work nights prowling New York’s underground skid row, trying to get information from men and women too zonked out to take care of legs gone gangrenous, whose lives stretched from one bottle of Cool Breeze to another?

Hell, yes. If it would bring me one step closer to that gold shield, I’d interview all the devils in hell. On my day off.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk.

What did Lomax think-that mingling with winos would topple me off the wagon? That I’d ask for a hit from some guy’s short dog and pass out in the Bleecker Street station? Was that why he’d kept me off the big one and had me walking a rookie through routine Graffiti Patrol?

Was I getting paranoid, or was lack of alcohol rotting my brain?

Manny and I had gone to our respective locker rooms to suit up. Plain clothes-and I do mean plain. Long Johns first; damp winter had a way of seeping down into the tunnels and into your very blood. Then a pair of denims the Goodwill would have turned down. Thick wool socks, fisherman’s duck boots, a black turtleneck, and a photographer’s vest with lots of pockets. A black knit hat pulled tight over my red hair.

Then the gear: flashlight, more important than a gun on this assignment, handcuffs, ticket book, radio, gun, knife. A slapper, an oversize blackjack, hidden in the rear pouch of the vest. They were against regulations; I’d get at least a command discipline if caught with it, but experience told me I’d rather have it than a gun going against a pack of kids.

I’d forgotten how heavy the stuff was; I felt like a telephone lineman.

I looked like a cat burglar.

Delgado and I met at the door. It was obvious he’d never done vandal duty before. His tan chinos were immaculate, and his hiking boots didn’t look waterproof. His red plaid flannel shirt was neither warm enough nor the right dark color. With his Latin good looks, he would have been stunning in an L.L. Bean catalogue, but after ten minutes in a subway tunnel, he’d pass for a chimney sweep.

“Where are we going?” he asked, his tone a shade short of sullen. And there was no respectful “Sergeant” at the end of the question, either. This boy needed a lesson in manners.

I took a malicious delight in describing our destination. “The Black Hole of Calcutta,” I replied cheerfully, explaining that I meant the unused lower platform of the City Hall station downtown. The oldest, darkest, dankest spot in all Manhattan. If there were any subway alligators, they definitely lurked in the Black Hole.

The expression on Probationary Transit Police Officer Manuel Delgado’s face was all I could have hoped for. I almost-but not quite-took pity on the kid when I added, “And after that, we’ll try one or two of the ghost stations.”

“Ghost stations?” Now he looked really worried. “What are those?”

This kid wasn’t just a rookie; he was a suburbanite. Every New Yorker knew about ghost stations, abandoned platforms where trains no longer stopped. They were still lit, though, and showed up in the windows of passing trains like ghost towns on the prairie. They were ideal canvases for the aspiring artists of the underground city.

I explained on the subway, heading downtown. The car, which rattled under the city streets like a tin lizzie, was nearly riderless at 1:00 A.M. A typical Monday late tour.

The passengers were one Orthodox Jewish man falling asleep over his Hebrew Bible, two black women, both reading thick paperback romances, the obligatory pair of teenagers making out in the last seat, and an old Chinese woman.

I didn’t want to look at Delgado. More than once I’d seen a fleeting smirk on his face when I glanced his way. It wasn’t enough for insubordination; the best policy was to ignore it.

I let the rhythm of the subway car lull me into a litany of the AA slogans I was trying to work into my life: EASY DOESIT. KEEP IT SIMPLE, SWEETHEART. ONE DAY AT A TIME. I saw them in my mind the way they appeared on the walls at meetings, illuminated, like old Celtic manuscripts.

This night I had to take one hour at a time. Maybe even one minute at a time, My legs felt wobbly. I was a sailor too long from the sea. I’d lost my subway legs. I felt white and thin, as though I’d had several major organs removed.

Then the drunk got on. One of the black women got off, the other one looked up at the station sign and went back to her book, and the drunk got on.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a woman drunk.

Copyright © 1991 by Sara Paretsky and Martin H. Greenberg

EYE OF A WOMAN: Introduction copyright © 1991 by Sara Paretsky

LUCKY DIP by Liza Cody copyright © 1991 by Liza Cody

“FULL CIRCLE” by Sue Grafton copyright © 1991 by Sue Grafton

BENNY’S SPACE by Marcia Muller copyright © 1991 by Marcia Muller

THE PUPPET by Dorothy Salisbury Davis copyright © 1991 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

THE SCAR by Nancy Pickard copyright © 1991 by Nancy Pickard

MURDER WITHOUT A TEXT by Amanda Cross copyright © 1991 by Carolyn Heilbrun

DISCARDS by Faye Kellerman copyright © 1991 by Faye Kellerman

GETTING TO KNOW YOU by Antonia Fraser copyright © 1991 by Antonia Fraser

A MATCH MADE IN HELL by Julie Smith copyright © 1991 by Julie Smith

THEFT OF THE POET by Barbara Wilson copyright © 1991 by Barbara Wilson

DEATH AND DIAMONDS by Susan Dunlap copyright © 1991 by Susan Dunlap

KILL THE MAN FOR ME by Mary Wings copyright © 1991 by Mary Wings

THE CUTTING EDGE by Marilyn Wallace copyright © 1991 by Marilyn Wallace

LOOKING FOR THELMA by Gillian Slovo copyright © 1991 by Gillian Slovo

DEBORAH’S JUDGMENT by Margaret Maron copyright © 1991 by Margaret Maron

A MAN’S HOME by Shelley Singer copyright © 1991 by Shelley Singer

HER GOOD NAME by Carolyn G. Hart copyright © 1991 by Carolyn G. Hart

GHOST STATION by Carolyn Wheat copyright © 1991 by Carolyn Wheat

WHERE ARE YOU, MONICA? by Maria Antonia Oliver copyright © 1991 by Maria Antonia Oliver. Translation copyright © 1991 by Kathleen Mclnnery

SETTLED SCORE by Sara Paretsky copyright © 1991 by Sara Paretsky

THAT SUMMER AT QUICHIQUOIS by Dorothy B. Hughes copyright © 1991 by Dorothy B. Hughes