Copyright © 1994 by Marcia Muller
All rights reserved.
Mysterious Press books are published by
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First eBook Edition: April 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56160-0
Contents
Copyright Page
Touchstone
Part One: San Francisco
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Touchstone
Part Two: Lost Hope, Nevada
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Part Three: Monora, Pennsylvania
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Touchstone
Part Four: Northern California
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Touchstone
The Critics Are Raving About Marcia Muller, Sharon Mccone, And Wolf In The Shadows
SHARON MCCONE MYSTERIES BY MARCIA MULLER
TILL THE BUTCHERS CUT HIM DOWN
WOLF IN THE SHADOWS
PENNIES ON A DEAD WOMAN’S EYES
WHERE ECHOES LIVE
TROPHIES AND DEAD THINGS
THE SHAPE OF DREAD
THERE’S SOMETHING IN A SUNDAY
EYE OF THE STORM
THERE’S NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF
DOUBLE (with Bill Pronzini)
LEAVE A MESSAGE FOR WILLIE
GAMES TO KEEP THE DARK AWAY
THE CHESHIRE CAT’S EYE
ASK THE CARDS A QUESTION
EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES
For Kit, Arthur, and Tiffany Knight
Thank you’ns
Thanks also to
Marcie Galick, for organizing me Jerry Kennealy, for bringing McCone into the computer age Suzanne Rampton, for yet another piece of her life Patricia Wallace, for fine-tuning on Nevada Collin Wilcox, again, for his aviation expertise
Oh! didn’t he ramble ramble?
He rambled all around
In and out of the town,
Oh didn’t he ramble ramble.
He rambled till the butchers cut him down.
From Oh, Didn’t He Ramble
by Will Handy
Touchstone
July 4
I made the best decision of my life on a high meadow in California’s White Mountains, where I’d gone to watch for the wild mustangs.
At least watching for mustangs was what I planned to do when I declined to ride into Big Pine with Hy to pick up some supplies. But now that I was nestled in a drift of dry wheat-colored grass at the base of a dead-looking bristlecone pine, I realized that once again my sight had turned inward. Decision time, I thought. Middle-of-your-life crossroads, important stuff. Make the right choice and it’s golden; make the wrong one—
I didn’t want to think about that.
Lately too much thinking had been my chronic ailment. Sixteen days of relaxing about as far from civilization as I could get should have cured me, but instead I’d picked and prodded at my current problem—charging it from one side, sneaking up on it from another. All to no good purpose; the problem remained a stubborn, inert lump in the exact center of my psyche.
I burrowed down into the grass, sniffing its bitter fragrance. It rustled around me and tickled my face. Above me the pine’s branches creaked in a light breeze; I glanced up and saw bursts of green at their very tips. Not dead, just faking it.
Lulled by the whisper of the tall grass, I leaned against the pine’s rough trunk. Closed my eyes. And began obsessing some more.
Decide, I told myself. You’re going home in a few days. For God’s sake, just make your decision.
When I opened my eyes some moments later, I was looking a wild mustang straight in the face. He stood not five feet away, pale mane blowing in the breeze, head down, long roan neck stretched to its limits as he studied me. His soft brown eyes met mine, and he blinked. Clearly I was the most curious animal he’d ever come across in his meadow.
For a few seconds he continued to stare, nostrils quivering. Then he snorted, as if to tell me that he found humans not nearly as impressive as we find ourselves. With a shake of his head he wheeled about and ran, kicking up his hooves, tail and mane streaming proudly—a shining, free creature.
And then the solution to my problem came so clearly that I jumped up, wheeled about, and ran too. Ran through high grass, kicking up my heels; leaped over fallen branches, laughing. Ran till I was breathless and fell on my back, panting. Lay there and laughed some more—really giving the mustang something to tell his herd about.
* * *
When Hy got back to our borrowed cabin some two hours later, I was sitting on the raised hearth, my hands wrapped around a glass of wine, a big grin on my face. My lover set the box of groceries on the rough pine table and studied me, stroking his droopy mustache. He’d pretty much stayed off the subject of my decision these past sixteen days—as I’d stayed off the subject of some plans he was making—but now his curiosity got the better of him.
“You decided,” he said.
I nodded.
“You’re going to cut loose and go out on your own.”
I nodded again.
“Good choice.”
His words swelled the happy bubble in my chest. I grinned more widely, deciding not to tell him just yet about the part of my scheme that made it perfect.
Hy took a bag of ice from the grocery box and began dumping it into the cooler. “You must’ve known I’d like the idea.”
“Well, yes. But it’s good to actually hear you say so. Your opinion’s kind of … an acid test for me.”
“I call it a touchstone. Black siliceous rock. Metallurgists use it to test the purity of gold or silver.” He hesitated, arranging beers on top of the ice, then added, “You’re my touchstone, too.”
There was an uncharacteristic shyness in his tone that made my eyes sting. I blinked and busied myself with lighting the fire I’d earlier laid on the hearth. When I finished, I turned and asked, “So, Ripinsky, this decision of mine—is it silver or is it gold?”
Hy raised a beer bottle in a toast. “It’s gold, McCone. Pure gold.”
Part One
San Francisco
August
One
“Are you sure this’ll clear the bank?” Ted Smalley, All Souls’s office manager, held the check that I’d just handed him up to his desk lamp and squinted at it.
I folded my arms and tried to look severe.
“Do I know this person?” he asked himself. “She looks like the old Sharon, in spite of the haircut. She talks like her, too. But McCone Investigations? A separate business checking account? Rent for an office suite? Pretty strange stuff, if you ask me.”
“Not nearly as strange as what’s going on upstairs in those rooms that you dignify with the word ‘suite.’ “As if to support my statement, an enormous crash resounded at the front of the big Victorian’s second floor. I winced.
Ted rolled his eyes toward the ceiling.
In the long-unused cubbyhole next to my office, a Pacific Bell woman was in
stalling lines for my new phone, fax machine, and computer modem. Jack Stuart, the co-op’s criminal law specialist, and Hank Zahn, my former boss, had just gone up there to remove my chaise longue and place it in Jack’s van. I wasn’t sure whether the crash had to do with the chaise, which Jack had agreed to transport to my house, or my forty-seven-hundred-dollar Apple computer and laser printer, but if one had to be sacrificed, I’d just as soon it was the well-loved but not nearly so costly piece of furniture.
Before I could run up there and check, Jack’s blue-jeaned posterior appeared on the stair landing; he was hunched over and gripping the chaise as he inched backwards. In spite of my anxiety over the crash, I took a moment to admire the coop’s acknowledged hunk from this vantage. Ted, the sly devil, noticed and winked. I winked back.
Next Hank appeared at the other end of the chaise, red-faced and scowling. Halfway down the stairs he began performing a series of odd maneuvers that looked as though he’d developed a severe case of Saint Vitus’ dance. I watched in alarm, then realized he was trying to push up his thick horn-rimmed glasses, which had slipped dangerously low on his nose; as he passed Ted and me, I reached out and returned the glasses to their proper position. Hank smiled gratefully.
“What fell?” I asked.
“Not to worry.”
“What fell?”
Jack said, “One of those stupid rabbit bookends you keep on your desk. It broke.”
“Oh.” I swallowed hard. The “stupid rabbit bookends” had come from Gump’s and cost a minor fortune, even five years ago when a former boyfriend had given them to me for Christmas. Well, I still had one. …
A little over a month ago in that high mountain meadow, my plan to establish my own firm and rent office space from All Souls had seemed a stroke of genius—a way of turning down a slightly expanded job as head of their newly formed Investigative Services department while maintaining my connection to the people who for me were more like an extended family than coworkers. But now after weeks of negotiations and reams of legal documents and licensing and bonding applications, to say nothing of a steady stream of outgoing checks, I was beginning to think I’d been quite mad. Still, I was sure that once established, I’d be better off independent of the coop and certainly better off keeping my distance from Renshaw and Kessell International, the high-tech, ethically bankrupt security firm whose offer of a lucrative position as field investigator had been my other alternative. I’d always have a soft spot for RKI, however: the cash bonus they’d given me last July, prompted by my saving them from a disastrous situation, had put McCone Investigations in business.
I glanced at my watch. Nearly eleven. The chaise was out of my office in time to make space for the new sofa and chair that were to be delivered any minute.
Ted must have sensed that I felt a little down, because he said, “I bet I can glue the rabbit back together so you’ll never notice it’s been broken.”
“Thanks.” I smiled fondly at him. He’s such an odd combination of aesthete and hardheaded administrator—a goateed gentleman who favors old-fashioned dress and quotes Latin in the course of routine conversations and who also controls a staff of close to a hundred and keeps northern California’s largest legal-services plan on track with seemingly effortless efficiency. And now he was laying claim to a talent for repairing broken treasures.
“By the way,” he added, “somebody’s waiting for you in the parlor.”
I glanced over there, saw no one. “Who?”
He checked a scratch pad on his desk. “T. J. Gordon. Said you know him.”
The name wasn’t familiar. I moved closer to the archway and peered into the room. A man in dark blue business attire stood in the window bay, hands clasped behind him as he contemplated the street.
I blinked. Sucked in my breath. “Suitcase,” I said softly.
“What?” Ted asked.
I shook my head, staring.
T. J. Gordon—Telford Junius Gordon, according to his driver’s license—had gone by the nickname Suitcase for as long as I’d known him. I hadn’t given him so much as a thought in more than fifteen years.
Those years hadn’t changed him much. His five-foot-seven frame was still scrawny; his narrow shoulders still slumped; his dark brown hair, now shot with gray, still rose in a cowlick at the crown and flopped limply onto his high forehead. The expensive-looking suit might have been tailor-made, the watch that he now glanced impatiently at might have been a Rolex, but something told me that not too far beneath the civilized facade lurked the Suitcase Gordon of old.
As I stepped into the parlor, he heard me and turned. His gray eyes moved shrewdly over me, and he nodded, as if my appearance matched up to some private expectation. His sharp-featured face was relatively unlined; when he smiled, I found he still reminded me of a friendly rodent. He bent and picked up a handsome leather briefcase that sat on the floor next to his equally handsome shoes, and the past came rushing back to me.
In the old days on the U.C. Berkeley campus it would have been a suitcase he picked up—one of the ancient brown-striped cardboard variety that went everywhere with him. It would have been crammed full of whatever he was peddling at the time: marijuana, term papers on an infinite variety of subjects, amphetamines, false identification, purloined copies of upcoming exams, blank airline tickets, manuals of legal tips for protesters, lists of safe houses for revolutionaries. He’d billed himself as an itinerant purveyor of prefab scams, schemes, and perhaps even dreams, with something for everyone in the shabby suitcase that had earned him his nickname.
Suits, as we came to call him, was a frequent fixture at the big old house on Durant Avenue that I shared with a fluctuating group of other students, including Hank Zahn and his now wife Anne-Marie Altman. He’d suddenly appear on the doorstep, just in from southern California or the East Coast or the Midwest, and we’d find ourselves providing him with food and drink and a place to crash. In return Suits would hand out samples of whatever he was currently selling and regale us with tales of events on campuses in such far-flung places as Boston, Ann Arbor, Boulder, and Austin. Then he’d go about his business, scurrying around Berkeley in his hunched, furtive way, suitcase in hand. One day he’d simply be gone, giving no forewarning and offering no explanation.
As Suits came toward me now, I wondered what he had in that briefcase. And I had a suspicion that I was going to find out fairly soon.
“Lookin’ good, Sherry-O,” he said, setting the case on the coffee table and holding out his arms for a hug.
Sherry-O! I couldn’t believe I used to let him call me that. Smiling weakly, I stepped into his embrace. My body felt stiff and wooden; I extricated myself quickly.
Suits’s thin lips still held a smile, but now it was … sarcastic? No, ironic. Why?
He said, “Read in the Examiner about you opening your own firm. Good going.”
A reporter friend had done a long profile of me for last Sunday’s business section. “Thanks,” I said. “Please, sit down.”
Suits shot his cuff and looked at his watch again. A Rolex all right. “Can’t. I’ve got a meeting downtown in twenty-four minutes, so I’ll cut to the reason I’m here. I want to hire you.”
“To do what?”
“We’ll have to talk about that later. I spent damn near half an hour waiting for you.”
The remark reminded me of his less-than-endearing habit of making criticisms at inopportune moments. Social graces were not within the realm of his talents. “You could have called for an appointment,” I said tartly.
“Uh-uh. Given our history, it was better to just show up.”
“Our history?”
“Well, I did dump you.”
“You what?”
He seemed startled by my response. Then he glanced around as if he was afraid someone might be eavesdropping. “You know, after that Halloween party. I slunk out of town the next morning. Felt guilty about it for years, but that’s the way it had to be. I wasn’t ready to settle down, not then
.”
“Halloween party? Oh …” Now I remembered what he was talking about, but his revisionist version of “our” history struck me as truly remarkable.
One wine- and dope-saturated night in the late seventies I’d lost all reason and allowed Suits to crawl into my bed. The next morning I woke horrified at what I’d done and relieved to find him gone. On his subsequent visit to campus I avoided him, and within six months I’d fallen in love—or so I thought at the time—and moved in with my new boyfriend. The disgraceful episode with Suits was relegated to the corner of my mind reserved for extreme lapses in judgment, and eventually forgotten.
Apparently not so for him, though—the man who had “dumped” me and “slunk out of town” in order to avoid further romantic entanglement!
He was watching me anxiously, no doubt hoping for absolution. I felt a nasty urge to set the record straight, but quickly suppressed it. No need to rehash an ancient and irreconcilable difference of opinion. No need to bruise his male pride at this late date. Besides, the man was here to hire me.
“Well,” I said after pretending to give his words serious consideration, “you probably saved us both a lot of grief by leaving town. God knows, I wasn’t ready to settle down then, either. Never have been.”
He nodded, obviously relieved. “So what do you say, Sherry-O? Will you take on an old friend as a client?”
“Suits, I need to know more about the case before I can say.”
He glanced at his watch again. “Later, okay? We’ll talk later.”
“When?”
“Two o’clock.” He reached into his inside pocket, took out a business card, and handed it to me. “The address where I’m living is on the back. You be on time.” Then he moved toward the door, glancing from side to side, shoulders hunched, in an odd scampering gait that was vintage Suitcase.
Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (v5) (epub) Page 1