Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or to the pale skinny man in the mirror.

  “Two days, Ron,” I said. “You have two days to tell her, or else I will.”

  I flagged a cab and went straight to the airport. No trouble changing the tickets. Fly first class, they give you leeway.

  Dee called late the next night, woke me from a sound sleep. I suppose Ron will always be her lead guitar.

  Miss Gibson arrived via messenger. I’ve stroked her, held her, but I can’t bring myself to play her. I try, but something keeps me mute. When I touch the strings, finger a chord, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of awe.

  Maybe fear. With that precious battered guitar in hand, I guess I’m scared that I’ve come as close to the magic as I’ll ever get.

  SUSAN GEASON lives in Sydney, Australia, where she is the literary editor of the Sun-Herald newspaper. Her first three novels featured private investigator Syd Fish, with journalist Lizzie Darcy, the heroine of “Green Murder,” as best mate and invaluable source. Her latest suspense novel, Wildfire, featuring homicide detective and psychologist Rachel Addison, and set against the cataclysmic bushfires of January 1994, has just been published by Random House.

  Green Murder

  Susan Geason

  L ike all big cities, Sydney is also a small town, so I wasn’t surprised to run into Margo Daniels at a fund raiser for a women’s research library. Margo and I had attended a girls school that made no secret of its ambition to produce Australia’s first female prime minister. As New South Wales’s minister for the environment and one of only three women in Cabinet, Margo was the most obvious contender.

  A plodder with good political instincts masquerading as character, Margo had ended up head girl. I, on the other hand, had narrowly escaped expulsion for attitudinal problems. Neither of us has changed much. I’d been quietly gleeful when Margo had dropped out of an arts degree to marry a good Catholic boy, but five children later she’d completed a law degree and entered politics. You can’t keep a good woman down—or an egomaniac.

  Over glasses of chardonnay, we circled each other warily.

  “How’s the environment?” I asked, knowing full well the portfolio was in chaos. Only a week back, thousands of outraged middle-class voters had marched on the airport to protest against noise from a new runway, and any minute now, loggers might blockade Parliament House with their trucks to protect their traditional right to destroy the state’s old-growth forests.

  “I’m dealing with it by calling it a baptism of fire,” she said, and I liked her a little more. “What’s happened to you?”

  “I’m on sabbatical,” I said. Panicked by my thirty-seventh birthday, I’d negotiated a year’s leave of absence from my newspaper to write a book about a controversial media magnate. I was bogged down in research and terminally bored, but Margo didn’t need to know that.

  “I miss your pieces in the Herald,” she said.

  “You’re kidding me!”

  She laughed. “I didn’t always agree with you, but I never found you unfair. Besides, you were quite useful to me sometimes when I needed leverage against the troglodytes in Cabinet.”

  Margo’s generosity gave me a twinge of guilt for the jokes I’d made about her in the past, but as remorse is useless unless it leads to a change of heart and I had no desire to reform, I ignored it.

  “How do you do it all?” I asked.

  “I had nannies when the kids were small, and now I’ve got a housekeeper, a mother and two sisters whom I shamelessly exploit, and a husband who’s a workaholic too.”

  “What if he gets midlife crisis and bails out with his secretary?”

  “In some ways it would be a relief,” she said, in a rare moment of candor. “I wouldn’t have to feel so guilty about neglecting him.”

  But I’d been hogging one of the movement’s stars, and a gym-honed, besuited young woman interrupted to do some networking. “Good luck, Margo,” I said.

  “My old dad used to say you make your own luck,” she replied. She’d live to eat those words.

  I awoke a week later to the news that the body of Margo Daniels’s press secretary, David Valentine, had been found in an inner-city park. No mention was made of the well-known fact that Green Park was a notorious homosexual beat, probably because of the victim’s political connections.

  I’d come across David Valentine through my work, and though I’d assumed he was gay, I never saw any proof. Consequently, I’d put him down as one of those homosexuals who are terrified of exposure, deep in the closet. His caution was understandable: Margo Daniels, his boss, was noted—notorious, in homosexual circles—for her advocacy of family values and her tough line on crime.

  “Can’t stay away from it, can you?” said Chrissie Wilmot, one of the Herald’s crime reporters, when I rang her for the juicy details. “It looks like the usual Saturday night gay bashing. Did you know Valentine was homosexual?”

  “I suspected it, but I would never have thought he’d risk his career for a rent boy. What’s Margo Daniels saying?”

  “Maintaining radio silence so far. Doubtless we’ll get a media release expressing her deep sadness at the untimely death of a trusted and valued employee and decrying the breakdown of standards in a society where a citizen can be struck down while going about his lawful business in a public place.”

  We laughed. As soon as I’d put the phone down, it rang again.

  “Miss Darcy,” said a breathy female voice, “the minister would like to speak to you.”

  “Which minister?”

  The young woman was flummoxed for a moment. “The minister for the environment, of course. Mrs. Daniels.”

  “Okay,” I said, nonchalantly, pulse racing, curiosity aflame.

  “Lizzie?”

  “Margo.”

  “I assume you’ve heard about David.”

  “Of course. It’s terrible. You must be upset.”

  Margo’s protestations of shock and disbelief were as unconvincing as mine: her sympathy lay entirely with herself. Her mind was on damage control.

  “Lizzie, I don’t want to sound cold-blooded, but David’s death has left me in a hole. I can’t function without a press secretary with these airport protests going on.”

  Assuming she was asking me to recommend someone, I racked my brains for competent journalists with sufficient political wit to navigate the minefield of state politics without getting their legs blown off. I mentioned a name, but it seemed she wanted me.

  “Just for a couple of weeks until I can fill the position permanently,” she promised.

  The offer was like the scent of smoke to an old fire horse. I was constitutionally incapable of resisting the lure of a political murder, but knowing how politicians despise the needy, I played hard to get, finally allowing myself to be won over by an appeal to our shared history.

  I slept badly that night. I have no illusions about politics. Years ago, I’d done a stint on the staff of a federal politician and had quickly mastered the arts of the positive spin and the strategic leak, and had begun playing politics as a game, a game I had to win at any cost. Then I’d heard myself, in a meeting, demolishing the argument of a lobby group I had once belonged to, realized what I’d become, and handed in my resignation.

  But I’d lost faith in my book and had long ceased to believe the half-truths journalists tell to convince themselves they haven’t wasted their lives breaking the news while other people make it. I wanted to get close to the levers of power again. As I tossed and turned, I told myself that age and wisdom would protect me from temptation, and that I could not refuse an old friend’s cry for help. It was half true: Margo certainly needed a good operator on her team. Once the media started gunning for her, the hyenas in her own party would begin to circle.

  Qualms quelled, buttoned into my best and only suit, I presented myself at Margo’s office on the city’s North Shore the next day. First stop was the office of Maureen Noonan, Margo’s personal assistant, a large, attract
ive, fortyish woman with an air of quiet authority.

  Maureen introduced me to my new colleagues, who responded coolly. Like all ministers’ offices, Margo’s was a shark nursery, stocked with would-be politicians and bureaucrats on the make. Margo’s minders made it clear they had opposed my appointment and were suspending judgment until I proved myself. One way or another. If it was supposed to frighten me, it didn’t work: the atmosphere reminded me of every newspaper office I’d ever worked in.

  It took me ten minutes to work out that all this professional poise masked a state of barely suppressed panic. If David Valentine’s murder scuttled Margo’s career, they’d all go down with the ship.

  Eventually Maureen turned me over to Abigail Huntley, Margo’s assistant press secretary, who’d been keeping the propaganda machine ticking over in David Valentine’s absence. Bottle blond, brittle, and far too thin, Abigail quickly inducted me and dumped a stack of pressing files on my desk.

  “I’ll field the phone inquiries till you’ve gotten across the files,” she said, and fled.

  I read files till my eyes crossed, then knocked out a bunch of media releases. Free to snoop, I set about mapping the power lines.

  Margo’s chief executive officer, Rowan Sherwood, was now top dog. I’d run into him around the traps and had found him pompous, devious, and utterly ruthless. A political mercenary, he’d been one of the few ministerial staffers to survive the last change of government. A man to watch. Today Sherwood seemed tense and jumpy. Shocked by David’s death, or just worried about the political fallout?

  When I went in to his office for a briefing, he looked up from a file and said: “Margo must have flipped her lid, letting a snoop like you in here.”

  “I’m delighted to see you, too, Rowan,” I said, itching to slap his supercilious mug.

  He pursed his lips. “Just watch your step. If there are any leaks from this office, we’ll know who to blame.”

  It was pure provocation. We both knew any gossip about Margo’s business would be professional suicide for me. Before I could return the insult, his phone rang, and he turned his back and began to talk. I got up to leave, but before I could make my escape, he put his hand over the receiver and said: “You’ll find the Queen of Macquarie Street a hard act to follow.”

  No love lost there.

  A little later, I saw him buttonhole Lindsay Groenewegen, the deputy director of the Environment Protection Authority, as he came out of Margo’s office and engage him in a serious tête-à-tête. It must have been bad news, because Groenewegen left looking grim.

  As the day wore on, I set about ingratiating myself with my new colleagues, laying on the sympathy with a trowel. I discovered that David Valentine had been too reserved to be popular; that Abigail Huntley was widely regarded as a bitch; that Rowan Sherwood was cordially detested but feared; and that the parliamentary assistant, Ted Simms, liked a drink.

  They also told me that Margo ruled the place with an iron hand, forbidding backbiting, complaining, and long faces, and refusing to listen to excuses. Several people repeated her mantra: “Don’t come to me with problems; come to me with solutions.” Margo, it seemed, inspired respect rather than devotion.

  To a person, however, Margo’s minders agreed that Maureen Noonan was the power behind the throne. The way they described her, Maureen had the logistical skills of a general, the tact of a diplomat and the unflappability of an air traffic controller. She had an encyclopedic memory and never lost track of a piece of paper or an item of gossip. Discreet as a boulder, sharp as an ax blade, she never had to raise her voice to get what she wanted. Even the cynics invoked her name with awe.

  I caught myself thinking that the day she lost Maureen’s support would be a sorry day indeed for Margo.

  In what little time I had between phone calls from reporters maddened by the whiff of a sex scandal, I tried to chart the informal networks in the office. Though I would have expected the policy staff to stick together, the two researchers—Evelina Villanelle and Sean Kelly—were colleagues rather than friends; Evelina and Abigail Huntley seemed close but gave Rowan Sherwood a wide berth; the departmental liaison officers, evidently feeling marooned in enemy territory, stuck together, and the support staff didn’t socialize with the professionals because they couldn’t talk about anything but politics.

  The only odd note was the apparent alliance between Rowan Sherwood and Ross Harvey, the EPA liaison man. On the surface, they couldn’t have been more different. Sherwood was a BMW-driving, well-tailored yuppie who occasionally appeared in the social columns with a federal politician’s daughter; whereas Harvey was a typical sedentary public servant, about thirty-five, going to seed, who appeared to own only one suit, a shiny-seated number he’d probably worn to his confirmation. In pride of place on his desk was a photo of a chubby wife, two fair little girls, and a boy in a wheelchair. Perhaps the two men shared an interest in stamps, or racing pigeons.

  Exhausted, I crawled home about seven o’clock, poured myself a drink, and slumped down in front of the television. On a current affairs program, a journalist hinted heavily at a sex angle in David Valentine’s death. As the item finished, the phone rang: it was Margo.

  “Did you see that?” she asked, no chitchat, no preamble. “What should I do?”

  “If you’re absolutely certain he wasn’t gay, you could come out and quash the speculation; otherwise, you’re stuck with sad but puzzled. Whatever you do, though, you’re going to be accused of hypocrisy before this is over.”

  Her voice rose. “I hired David because he was the best in the business. How was I supposed to know he was gay? What am I supposed to do, run checks on people’s sex lives? And anyway, just because I believe in families, it doesn’t mean I have to discriminate against homosexuals.”

  “I’ll come up with a form of words for you first thing tomorrow morning,” I said.

  Realizing she’d been told to pull herself together, Margo subsided. “Thanks for coming aboard, Lizzie. It means a lot to me.”

  I put down the phone thoughtfully, and tried to translate Margo’s tirade. I couldn’t decide if she’d known David was gay and decided to take the risk, or if she had been too naive to sense his sexual orientation.

  Day two began with a crisis over a lost departmental file dealing with an application to extend a toxic chemicals plant. After we’d turned the place upside down to no avail, Maureen buzzed me and asked me to pop in.

  “Could you do us a favor?” she said.

  Us, I thought. So Maureen gives orders for Margo.

  “The only place we haven’t looked for the Sharrock file is David Valentine’s apartment. I wondered if you’d mind going out there and having a look for it.”

  I’m not superstitious, but this felt a bit like grave robbing. I hesitated.

  “Rowan’s out, and I thought the others would find it too upsetting,” said Maureen. It had been an order, not a request.

  “He often took files home?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. And Margo asked him to have a look at the Sharrock file a few days ago because the local rag has started a campaign against the plant. They reckon it’s too close to a new residential development.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Bondi Beach. Here, I’ve written down the address for you.”

  “How am I going to get in, Maureen?”

  “I’ve spoken to the police, and they’re sending a key over.”

  Game, set, match, Maureen Noonan.

  While I waited for the key, I made myself a cup of coffee and went out into the courtyard to sneak a smoke, all government offices being smoke free these days. Abigail Huntley was there already, talking to one of the researchers, Sean Kelly, a thin, slightly stooped nerd with a scraggy scientist’s beard and watchful brown eyes behind heavy glasses.

  “Margo’s so upset …” Abigail was saying. Seeing me, she stopped guiltily.

  “Were David and Margo close?” I asked.

  Abigail hesitated, then deci
ded the question was innocuous. “In some ways. Nobody really got close to David, but if Margo wanted any dirty work done, she always got him to do it. He was very discreet.”

  “What sort of dirty work?”

  They exchanged a look. “It was just a figure of speech,” said Abigail.

  “David was closer to Maureen, actually,” said Sean Kelly.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, they used to shut themselves in Margo’s office when she was out and gossip and laugh,” said Abigail. “Thick as thieves, they were. Quite frankly, I don’t know what she saw in him.”

  She turned on her heel and left. Watching her go, Sean Kelly smirked and said: “Abby was just jealous; she wanted his job. If I were you, I’d watch my back. That’s a very ambitious lady.”

  Later, armed with a key delivered by a nervous and ridiculously young police officer, I drove out to Bondi. Feeling like a burglar, I unlocked the door to David Valentine’s flat and went in. It was stale and stuffy, so I threw open the windows, letting in an expensive view of the beach and the roar of the surf and traffic. David had good taste: parquet floors, minimal furniture, a couple of arresting Aboriginal paintings, a wall of books, and a sophisticated sound system. But there was no sign of a file in the eerily tidy living room.

  I had no excuse to go into David Valentine’s bathroom, but that didn’t stop me: the desire to peer into people’s medicine cabinets is coded into the human DNA. Alongside the usual patent medicines were several packs of condoms, and on a glass shelf, five expensive bottles of aftershave stood, lined up like hussars. It looked as if David Valentine had a sex life, but with whom?

  I got the answer from a photograph album I found in the top drawer of the bedside table. It was filled with shots of David with a slightly built, fair, attractive younger man, whose name, according to the inscriptions on the back of the pictures, was Heath.

  Needing a surname, I dialed the automatic number marked Heath on David’s phone. An answering machine told me Heath Robertson wasn’t available to take my call and asked me to leave a message, but I declined to do so.