Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  “Nah. Forget it. Jesus, I sure feel dumb.” Douglas ripped the photographs into confetti. He tossed this into the water where it formed a mantle that was quickly shredded by the waves that arced against the pier’s pilings. “What do I owe you, Mr. Cowley?” he asked. “What’s this dumb ass got to pay for not trusting the finest woman on earth?”

  He took Cowley to Dillman’s on the corner of Main and Balboa Boulevard, and they sat at the snakelike bar with the locals, where they knocked back a couple of brews apiece. Douglas worked on his affability act, playing the abashed husband who suddenly realizes what a dickhead he’s been. He took all Donna’s actions over the past weeks and reinterpreted them for Cowley. The unexplained absences became the foundation of a treat she was planning for him: the purchase of a new car, perhaps; a trip to Europe; the refurbishing of his boat. The secretive telephone calls became messages from his children who were in the know. The new underwear metamorphosed into a display of her wish to make herself desirable for him, to work him out of his temporary impotence by giving him a renewed interest in her body. He felt like a total idiot, he told Cowley. Could they burn the damn negatives together?

  They made a ceremony of it, torching the negatives of the pictures in the alley behind JJ’s Natural Haircutting. Afterward, Douglas drove in a haze to Newport Harbor High School. He sat numbly across the street from it. He waited two hours. Finally, he saw his youngest brother arrive for the afternoon’s coaching session, a basketball tucked under his arm and an athletic bag in his hand.

  Michael, he thought. Returned from Greece this time, but always the prodigal son. Before Greece, it was a year with Greenpeace on the Rainbow Warrior. Before that, it was an expedition up the Amazon. And before that, it was marching against apartheid in South Africa. He had a resume that would be the envy of any prepubescent kid out for a good time. He was Mr. Adventure, Mr. Irresponsibility, and Mr. Charm. He was Mr. Good Intentions without any follow-through. When a promise was due to be kept, he was out of sight, out of mind, and out of the country. But everyone loved the son of a bitch. He was forty years old, the baby of the Armstrong brothers, and he always got precisely what he wanted.

  He wanted Donna now, the miserable bastard. No matter that she was his brother’s wife. That made having her just so much more fun.

  Douglas felt ill. His guts rolled around like marbles in a bucket. Sweat broke out in patches on his body. He couldn’t go back to work like this. He reached for the phone and called his office.

  He was sick, he told his secretary. Must have been something he ate for lunch. He was heading home. She could catch him there if anything came up.

  In the house, he wandered from room to room. Donna wasn’t at home—wouldn’t be home for hours—so he had plenty of time to consider what to do. His mind reproduced for him the pictures that Cowley had taken of Michael and Donna. His intellect deduced where they had been and what they’d been doing prior to those pictures being taken.

  He went to his study. There, in a glass curio cabinet, his collection of ivory erotica mocked him. Miniature Asians posed in a variety of sexual postures, having themselves a roaring good time. He could see Michael and Donna’s features superimposed on the creamy faces of the figurines. They took their pleasure at his expense. They justified their pleasure by using his failure. No limp dick here, Michael’s voice taunted. What’s the matter, big brother? Can’t hang on to your wife?

  Douglas felt shattered. He told himself that he could have handled her doing anything else, he could have handled her seeing anyone else. But not Michael, who had trailed him through life, making his mark in every area where Douglas had previously failed. In high school it had been in athletics and student government. In college it had been in the world of fraternities. As an adult it had been in embracing adventure rather than in tackling the grind of business. And now, it was in proving to Donna what real manhood was all about.

  Douglas could see them together as easily as he could see his pieces of erotica intertwined. Their bodies joined, their heads thrown back, their hands clasped, their hips grinding against each other. God, he thought. The pictures in his mind would drive him mad. He felt like killing.

  The telephone company gave him the proof he required. He asked for a printout of the calls that had been made from his home. And when he received it, there was Michael’s number. Not once or twice, but repeatedly. All of the calls had been made when he—Douglas—wasn’t at home.

  It was clever of Donna to use the nights when she knew Douglas would be doing his volunteer stint at the Newport suicide hotline. She knew he never missed his Wednesday evening shift, so important was it to him to have the hotline among his community commitments. She knew he was building a political profile to get himself elected to the city council, and the hotline was part of the picture of himself he wished to portray: Douglas Armstrong, husband, father, oilman, and compassionate listener to the emotionally distressed. He needed something to put into the balance against his environmental lapses. The hotline allowed him to say that while he may have spilled oil on a few lousy pelicans—not to mention some miserable otters—he would never let a human life hang there in jeopardy.

  Donna had known he’d never skip even part of his evening shift, so she’d waited till then to make her calls to Michael. There they were on the printout, every one of them made between six and nine on a Wednesday night.

  Okay, she liked Wednesday night so well. Wednesday night would be the night that he killed her.

  He could hardly bear to be around her once he had the proof of her betrayal. She knew something was wrong between them because he didn’t want to touch her any longer. Their thrice-weekly attempted couplings—as disastrous as they’d been—fast became a thing of the past. Still, she carried on as if nothing and no one had come between them, sashaying through the bedroom in her Victoria’s Secret se-lection-of-the-night, trying to entice him into making a fool of himself so she could share the laughter with his brother Michael.

  No way, baby, Douglas thought. You’ll be sorry you made a fool out of me.

  When she finally cuddled next to him in bed and murmured, “Doug, is something wrong? You want to talk? You okay?” it was all he could do not to shove her from him. He wasn’t okay. He would never be okay again. But at least he’d be able to salvage a measure of his self-respect by giving the little bitch her due.

  It was easy enough to plan once he decided on the very next Wednesday.

  A trip to Radio Shack was all that was necessary. He chose the busiest one he could find, deep in the barrio in Santa Ana, and he deliberately took his time browsing until the youngest clerk with the most acne and the least amount of brainpower was available to wait on him. Then he made his purchase with cash: a call diverter, just the thing for those on-the-go SoCal folks who didn’t want to miss an incoming phone call. No answering machine for those types. This would divert a phone call from one number to another by means of a simple computer chip. Once Douglas programmed the diverter with the number he wanted incoming calls diverted to, he would have an alibi for the night of his wife’s murder. It was all so easy.

  Donna had been a real numbskull to try to cheat on him. She had been a bigger numbskull to do her cheating on Wednesday nights because the fact of her doing it on Wednesday nights was what gave him the idea of how to snuff her. The volunteers on the hotline worked it in shifts. Generally there were two people present, each manning one of the telephone lines. But Newport Beach types actually didn’t feel suicidal very frequently, and if they did, they were more likely to go to Neiman-Marcus and buy their way out of their depression. Midweek especially was a slow time for the pill poppers and wrist slashers, so the hotline was manned on Wednesdays by only one person per shift.

  Douglas used the days prior to Wednesday to get his timing down to a military precision. He chose eight-thirty as Donna’s death hour, which would give him time to sneak out of the hotline office, drive home, put out her lights, and get back to the hotline before the next
shift arrived at nine. He was carving it out fairly thin and allowing only a five-minute margin of error, but he needed to do that in order to have a believable alibi once her body was found.

  There could be neither noise nor blood, obviously. Noise would arouse the neighbors. Blood would damn him if he got so much as a drop on his clothes, DNA typing being what it was these days. So he chose his weapon carefully, aware of the irony of his choice. He would use the satin belt of one of her Victoria’s Secret slay-him-where-he-stands dressing gowns. She had half a dozen, so he would remove one of them in advance of the murder, separate it from its belt, dispose of it in a Dumpster behind the nearest Vons in advance of the killing—he liked that touch, getting rid of evidence before the crime, what killer ever thought of that?—and then use the belt to strangle his cheating wife on Wednesday night.

  The call diverter would establish his alibi. He would take it to the suicide hotline, plug the phone into it, program the diverter with his cellular phone number, and thus appear to be in one location while his wife was being murdered in another. He made sure Donna was going to be at home by doing what he always did on Wednesdays: by phoning her from work before he left for the hotline.

  “I feel like dogshit,” he told her at five-forty.

  “Oh, Doug, no!” she replied. “Are you ill or just feeling depressed about—”

  “I’m feeling punk,” he interrupted her. The last thing he wanted was to listen to her phony sympathy. “It may have been lunch.”

  “What did you have?”

  Nothing. He hadn’t eaten in two days. But he came up with “Shrimp” because he’d gotten food poisoning from shrimp a few years back and he thought she might remember that, if she remembered anything at all about him at this point. He went on, “I’m going to try to get home early from the hotline. I may not be able to if I can’t pull in a substitute to take my shift. I’m heading over there now. If I can get a sub, I’ll be home pretty early.”

  He could hear her attempt to hide dismay when she replied. “But Doug … I mean, what time do you think you’ll make it?”

  “I don’t know. By eight at the latest, I hope. What difference does it make?”

  “Oh. None at all, really. But I thought you might like dinner …”

  What she really thought was how she was going to have to cancel her hot romp with his baby brother. Douglas smiled at the realization of how nicely he’d just unhooked her little caboose.

  “Hell, I’m not hungry, Donna. I just want to go to bed if I can. You be there to rub my back? You going anywhere?”

  “Of course not. Where would I be going? Doug, you sound strange. Is something wrong?”

  Nothing was wrong, he told her. What he didn’t tell her was how right everything was, felt, and was going to be. He had her where he wanted her now: she’d be home, and she’d be alone. She might phone Michael and tell him that his brother was coming home early so their tryst was off, but even if she did that, Michael’s statement after her death would conflict with Douglas’s uninterrupted presence at the suicide hotline that night.

  Douglas just had to make sure that he was back at the hotline with time to disassemble the call diverter. He’d get rid of it on the way home—nothing could be easier than flipping it into the trash behind the huge movie theater complex that was on his route from the hotline to Harbour Heights where he lived—and then he’d arrive at his usual time of nine-twenty to “discover” the murder of his beloved.

  It was all so easy. And so much cleaner than divorcing the little whore.

  He felt remarkably at peace, considering everything. He’d seen Thistle again and she’d held his Rolex, his wedding band, and his cuff links to take her reading. She’d greeted him by telling him that his aura was strong and that she could feel the power pulsing from him. And when she closed her eyes over his possessions, she’d said, “I feel a major change coming into your life, not-David. A change of location, perhaps, a change of climate. Are you taking a trip?”

  He might be, he told her. He hadn’t had one in months. Did she have any suggested destinations?

  “I see lights,” she responded, going her own way. “I see cameras. I see many faces. You’re surrounded by those you love.”

  They’d be at Donna’s funeral, of course. And the press would cover it. He was somebody after all. They wouldn’t ignore the murder of Douglas Armstrong’s wife. As for Thistle, she’d find out who he really was if she read the paper or watched the local news. But that made no difference since he’d never mentioned Donna and since he’d have an alibi for the time of her death.

  He arrived at the suicide hotline at five fifty-six. He was relieving a UCI psych student named Debbie who was eager enough to be gone. She said, “Only two calls, Mr. Armstrong. If your shift is like mine, I hope you brought something to read.”

  He waved his copy of Money magazine and took her place at the desk. He waited ten minutes after she’d left before he went back out to his car to get the call diverter.

  The hotline was located in the dock area of Newport, a maze of narrow one-way streets that traversed the top of Balboa Peninsula. By day, the streets’ antique stores, marine chandleries, and secondhand clothing boutiques attracted both locals and tourists. By night, the place was a ghost town, uninhabited except for the new-wave beatniks who visited a dive called the Alta Cafe three streets away, where anorexic girls dressed in black read poetry and strummed guitars. So no one was on the street to see Douglas fetch the call diverter from his Mercedes. And no one was on the street to see him leave the suicide hotline’s small cubbyhole behind the real estate office at eight-fifteen. And should any desperate individual call the hotline during his drive home, that call would be diverted onto his cellular phone and he could deal with it. God, the plan was perfect.

  As he drove up the curving road that led to his house, Douglas thanked his stars that he’d chosen to live in an environment in which privacy was everything to the homeowners. Every estate sat, like Douglas’s, behind walls and gates, shielded by trees. On one day in ten, he might actually see another resident. Most of the time—like tonight—there was no one around.

  Even if someone had seen his Mercedes sliding up the hill, however, it was January dark and his was just another luxury car in a community of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, BMWs, Lexuses, Range Rovers, and other Mercedes. Besides, he’d already decided that if he saw someone or something suspicious, he would just turn around, go back to the hotline, and wait for another Wednesday.

  But he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. He didn’t see anyone. Perhaps a few more cars were parked on the street, but even these were empty. He had the night to himself.

  At the top of his drive, he shut off the engine and coasted to the house. It was dark inside, which told him that Donna was in the back, in their bedroom.

  He needed her outside. The house was equipped with a security system that would do a bank vault proud, so he needed the killing to take place outside where a peeping Tom gone bazooka or a burglar or a serial killer might have lured her. He thought of Ted Bundy and how he’d snagged his victims by appealing to their maternal need to come to his aid. He’d go the Bundy route, he decided. Donna was nothing if not eager to help.

  He got out of the car silently and paced over to the door. He rang the bell with the back of his hand, the better to leave no trace on the button. In less than ten seconds, Donna’s voice came over the intercom. “Yes?”

  “Hi, babe,” he said. “My hands are full. Can you let me in?”

  “Be a sec,” she told him.

  He took the satin belt from his pocket as he waited. He pictured her route from the back of the house. He twisted the satin around his hands and snapped it tight. Once she opened the door, he’d have to move like lightning. He’d have only one chance to fling the cord around her neck. The advantage he already possessed was surprise.

  He heard her footsteps on the limestone. He gripped the satin and prepared. He thought of Michael. He thought of her toge
ther with Michael. He thought of his Asian erotica. He thought of betrayal, failure, and trust. She deserved this. They both deserved it. He was only sorry he couldn’t kill Michael right now too.

  When the door swung open, he heard her say, “Doug! I thought you said—”

  And then he was on her. He leapt. He yanked the belt around her neck. He dragged her swiftly out of the house. He tightened it and tightened it and tightened it and tightened it. She was too startled to fight back. In the five seconds it took her to get her hands to the belt in a reflex attempt to pull it away from her throat, he had it digging into her skin so deeply that her scrabbling fingers could find no slip of material to grab on to.

  He felt her go limp. He said, “Jesus. Yes. Yes.”

  And then it happened.

  The lights went on in the house. A mariachi band started playing. People shouted, “Surprise! Surprise! Sur—”

  Douglas looked up, panting, from the body of his wife, into popping flashes and a video camcorder. The joyous shouting from within his house was cut off by a female shriek. He dropped Donna to the ground and stared without comprehension into the entry and beyond that the living room. There, at least two dozen people were gathered beneath a banner that said SURPRISE, DOUGIE! HAPPY FIVE-FIVE!

  He saw the horrified faces of his brothers and their wives and children, of his own children, of his parents, of one of his former wives. Among them, his colleagues and his secretary. The chief of police. The mayor.

  He thought, What is this, Donna? Some kind of joke?

  And then he saw Michael coming from the direction of the kitchen, Michael with a birthday cake in his hands, Michael saying, “Did we surprise him, Donna? Poor Doug. I hope his heart—” And then saying nothing at all when he saw his brother and his brother’s wife.

  Shit, Douglas thought. What have I done?

  That, indeed, was the question he’d be answering for the rest of his life.

  AMEL BENABOURA was born in 1966 in Algeria, and started to write at a very young age. She has written three crime novels, all of which have been published in France to critical acclaim. Several of her stories have also been published in Czechoslovakian and German. This is her first story to be published in the United States. She lives in Algeria with her husband and two children.