Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  I had come in looking for a notice of a memorial service. I guess I’d heard the real thing.

  I did have one more stop, just to confirm my suspicions, but that would take an instant.

  Which left me a few minutes leeway for my own work.

  But the Sub-Authority was watching me. Maybe not every moment but … Would he realize I had solved this case? I couldn’t take the chance.

  I followed the man in brown through the lobby door into the Down elevator. I got out in one of those faux-marble lobbies, followed the man out to the sidewalk, and found myself, as I’d suspected, in midtown New York.

  Sleet was pelting down, so thick I could barely see in front of me. It bounced off the sidewalk and the inadequate women’s pumps, men’s leather shoes, ubiquitous running shoes. People turned up collars, reached in pockets in hopeless search for gloves. Clearly this day had started out many degrees warmer. These days were the worst, the ones that made you understand why people moved to the suburbs where their cars stood waiting for them. To a one, these people were shivering.

  But not me. Death does have its advantages.

  Pedestrians raced past me, sliding on the slick sidewalk. A man scraped my side with his briefcase. A woman grazed my nose with her elbow as she raised a manila file over her head in vain effort to save her hair.

  I had to get out of there. But where to? Movie theater—across the street!

  I ran in front of a double-parked truck and was nearly picked off by a car squeezing around it. Invisibility has its drawbacks. And what’s the point of being dead if you can’t even fly high enough to clear traffic! The only comfort I could take, I thought as I plopped gratefully in a theater seat, was that cars might hit me but they weren’t going to kill me. In any case, I was safe now.

  It was a moment before I realized I couldn’t just sit here. I might be out of the way of the pedestrians, but safe I was not. Not from the Sub-Authority. He’d know the difference between investigating and watching—what was on the screen? The Return of Raffles the black letters on the gray-white background announced, as the opening credits rolled—watching an old black-and-white movie about a cricket-loving thief. Not much could be farther from Tasha Pierce. Or me, for that matter.

  Was I sure about that? I wasn’t. In fact … But I couldn’t stay here a sitting duck for the Sub-Authority.

  I edged out of the theater, pinballing my way between the rushing workers, smacking into the wall, rebounding into a nun, bouncing back into a fat man with an umbrella. Enough! I lowered my head, hunched my wings forward, and steered through the stampede, oblivious to whom I tossed where.

  And when I spotted glass doors, I didn’t worry about what reaction viewers would have to their opening “by themselves.” I yanked one open and flung myself in.

  Into, it turned out, the lobby of the Hotel Melbourne. I tossed myself into an empty stuffed chair amid the decorative wrought-iron railings that separated each clutch of chairs. Wrought iron was at the top of walls, too. And while the chair had the heavy look of a British men’s club and the carpet was oriental, there were enough palm trees around to suggest the South Seas.

  Ah, the Hotel Melbourne.

  This would do fine as a place to gather my thoughts, make my plan. And a gin and tonic would hit the spot. I raised my hand for the waiter.

  It was only after three waiters passed without a glance that it occurred to me how distracted I was. I lowered my invisible hand.

  A waiter put down his tray of drinks by the four men and women in the next chair cluster. I reached over and grabbed the nearest glass, and then with a scintilla of good sense, moved behind one of those potted palms to drink it. Who knows what liquor traveling down the esophagus of an invisible dead person would look like? Maybe it would be invisible too. Maybe.

  “Where’s my drink?” a woman who could have been Tasha Pierce’s emotional double demanded of the waiter. “It was a Singapore Sling.”

  Suddenly I was aware of my feet. They felt light. Ominously light. As if they were merely grazing the top of the oriental rug. The soft brush of it tickled them. I tensed. I knew that light-footed sensation. The pull from the Other Side. Desperately, I grabbed a red book off the table next to me and ran for the door, zigzagging as if I was avoiding gunfire.

  The street was still packed, but this lime my momentum, coupled with fear, hoisted me over the pedestrians and across the street in two leaps. I raced back inside Tasha Pierce’s building, checked the information listing, and pushed onto the Up elevator, smacking two startled executives against the back wall. The red book dropped to the floor, landing partially behind one of the men’s feet. Raffles was all I could see of the title. Before I could make a grab for it, I was out the door at 3, and into Tasha Pierce’s health club.

  Women in bright blue and green sports bras and tights with sports briefs over them, or shimmery red leotards with matching headbands, sat poised on Nautilus machines, pushing the black-padded machine arms toward each other. Others straddled pads with their thighs, grunting softly as they forced the pads together on one machine, apart on another. The carpet was a red plaid, the walls yellow. Everything in the place screamed, Faster! All around me women panted, grunted; weights lifted and banged down, shaking the floor like a 6.0 on the Richter scale.

  But for the first time since I’d left Selwyn Industries I was relaxed. Here I had legitimate reason to be—getting the final piece of Tasha Pierce’s puzzle. I started across the floor.

  But my feet were lighter!

  “No,” I yelled. “Not yet!”

  Headbanded heads swiveled toward me.

  Could I be heard down here? I looked around, unnerved, but the heads had turned not toward me, but toward the treadmill. Just where I was heading myself. I moved faster, but the tug was stronger. I grabbed the railing on the side of the treadmill. Behind me someone was calling, “Jennifer, treadmill! Jennifer, you’re next on the list for the treadmill.”

  A woman jumped on the treadmill and started the belt, ignoring the call from the sign-up sheet. She had the mill; possession is nine tenths of the law; Jennifer be damned. In a bright green Lycra unitard, she ran on the moving belt, glancing down at the machine’s changing display: time elapsed, mileage covered, speed, on the rib-high digital display shelf. A towel hung over the bar on the front of the display shelf, and she almost pulled it loose as she bent, still in stride, to grab her water bottle from the shelf below.

  The Sub-Authority’s pull was fierce. My feet were off the ground. I grabbed the machine’s side bar-railing and held on for dear life.

  “Jennifer! Treadmill!”

  “I’m Jennifer,” a gray-haired, remarkably un-Jennifer-looking woman said bewilderedly as she eyed the occupied treadmill.

  My hands slipped. Life, dear or otherwise, was no longer mine.

  “So?” Tasha Pierce demanded. We were in front of the courtroom door. “Who’s the bastard who killed me?”

  “I could tell you,” I said, still catching my breath. That pneumatic suction’s a killer. “But I think this is one case where they’ll let us roll the tape. Right?” I said, aiming my demand at the Sub-Authority.

  In an instant I was standing beside Tasha Pierce watching a tape of two women panting on treadmills and one gathering her belongings and stepping off the third machine; it was so real, I could have been in the health club.

  I thought of the epitaphs Tasha Pierce’s co-workers had given her, ending with: “Smothered in her towel.”

  The tape grabbed my attention. Tasha Pierce let the health club door bang after her. She ran in, pulling her blouse over her head, slowing to unbutton her skirt and let it drop to the floor, around her untied running shoes. Now in standard health club attire, she put her clothes in her tote bag and made a beeline for the untenanted treadmill, ignoring the sign-up list and the sign posted at the end of the treadmill. With awe-inspiring speed, she plopped the tote bag at the end of the treadmill behind her, the water bottle on the lower shelf, set her Walkman an
d magazine on the display deck, draped the towel over the bar, and turned on the machine.

  The woman on the next treadmill muttered, “Sign-up sheet!” but by that time Tasha had her earphones in place and her tape blaring traveling music. Without a glance, she pushed Faster and the belt picked up speed. She was past the power-walking stage and into the jog.

  The woman next to her stepped off her machine, adjusted her turquoise unitard, and tapped Tasha’s shoulder.

  Tasha hit Faster.

  The woman shrugged, checked the list, and called out: “Annie, treadmill!”

  To Tasha, the deceased Tasha next to me, I said, “You knew you’d cut in line, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, sure. Look, I’ve got half an hour to be in and out of the gym. I don’t have time to wait while every housewife and secretary climbs on the treadmill before me.”

  I shook my head. If they’re not remorseful up here, where?

  On the screen the turquoise-clad woman wandered off camera but we could still hear her call, “Annie, treadmill! Annie!”

  On her own treadmill, the not yet dead Tasha ran at sprint rate. The water bottle shimmied on the lower shelf; the magazine quivered on the display deck; with each step Tasha’s knees hit the hanging towel. Sweat ran down her forehead, glistened on her shoulders, coated her back. Her legs moved faster. And faster.

  She stopped pushing the Faster button.

  But the machine continued to pick up speed.

  For a minute she seemed not to notice. She was running full-out.

  “Couldn’t bring yourself to admit it was going too fast for you, huh?” I asked, unkindly.

  She didn’t interrupt her rapt watching to answer.

  On screen she hit slower. The machine speeded up. Her face was red, sweat soaked her headband, poured down her back. She was panting in split-second breaths. The treadmill belt was snapping with speed. Sparks came off the sides. She couldn’t keep up. Her feet fell farther and farther back away from the read-out deck. She grabbed for the bar.

  Missed.

  Her shoelace caught under the treadmill; it knocked her forward. Her arms flailed; her head hit the bar. The Walkman and magazine flew off the display deck, onto the belt, and smacked up against her tote bag at the far end. The caught shoelace pulled her leg crooked; she grabbed again for the bar, caught the towel by mistake, dropped it, as she fell, twisting to the racing belt.

  Here the tape slowed almost to slow motion and we watched the towel clump at the end of the belt, catching the Walkman. We watched Tasha fall, her head hit the radio, the belt thrust her face tighter and tighter into the wadded towel. She flung her arm out, trying to get purchase, but her hand fell on the slippery magazine, caught at the outer edge of the towel. The big, heavy water bottle flew off the shelf, delivering the final blow.

  The women around her were standing around wide-eyed. But if they had any impetus to help her, the sparks flying off the machine kept them at bay.

  The videotape speeded up. I had assumed it would end there. It had covered all I’d gleaned of the case, but it continued while they pulled her dead body off the machine, while an employee tried CPR as another called 911, while the medics carried Tasha out. Then the employee who had given the CPR turned to the stunned exercisers and shook her head. “We posted a sign that the machine was out of order,” she said in plaintive annoyance. “It was right at the end of the treadmill. She couldn’t have missed it.”

  “She chose to ignore it,” a woman muttered.

  “We called every treadmill ‘regular,’” the employee insisted. “I phoned her office myself, early this morning. I left a message to call us.” She shook her head. “She just never called back.”

  Tasha Pierce was given her final chance to accept forgiveness for ail concerned. In her case “all concerned” was, of course, only her.

  I found myself back in the beige hallway. I stomped down it. I was only an employee, a cog in the greater set of wheels, but, dammit, I had done the work on this case and it was a petty bureaucratic move on the Sub-Authority’s part to shift me out of the courtroom before Tasha made her decision. Maybe my whole detecting shtick was just for his perverse amusement. I stomped harder, not that it had any effect on the spongy carpet.

  Raffles, I thought, trying to distract myself. The Melbourne Hotel, a Singapore Sling, and The Return of Raffles. No, just Raffles. What could all that have to do with me and my demise? Had I been a thief who traveled to Melbourne and Singapore? A witty, debonair Raffles-like cricketer? If so, death had really changed me.

  I paced more slowly down the hall. And back again.

  The Perfect Crime. Raffles, Melbourne, and Singapore.

  I paced.

  Perfect crime. Singapore, Melbourne Hotel, Raffles.

  And back.

  After the fifteenth circuit I gave up in disgust, and as much to spite the Sub-Authority as to appease myself I flung open the first forbidden door I came to.

  There stands Tasha Pierce, hand on phone receiver, foot tapping.

  That didn’t surprise me. What startled me were the words coming from the phone: “Yes, this is the Authority’s office.”

  The Authority’s office! No one gets through to the Authority. You don’t just pick up the phone and call the Boss! If He took calls from everyone who felt they had a problem, the poor Entity would be swamped. No one calls Him direct—not popes, not bodhisattvas, not heads of the altar guild.

  But there is Tasha Pierce, brash as life, shouting into the receiver: “I’m being detained here. I need to speak to Him right now.”

  “Certainly, Ms. Pierce. He’s away from the altar right now, but I’ll give Him your message and He’ll call you right back.”

  “Yeah, right!” she snarls, and bangs down the receiver. “I should live so long!”

  It doesn’t occur to Tasha Pierce that the Boss doesn’t blow off supplicants. The Authority does not lie. But we all judge by our own standards.

  She will, of course, fume, holler, rage, until she grabs the phone and again demands to speak to Him, slams down the receiver again, stalks off again, fumes … Eternally.

  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, as they so sex-istly say.

  I shut the door on Tasha Pierce and glided slowly down the corridor. The walls seemed not so much off-white as gray, the carpet not spongy but swampy. I had failed. It wasn’t my fault my investigation hadn’t helped Tasha Pierce, but it hadn’t helped me either. I was no closer to getting myself out of here than before. I had failed. I could picture the Sub-Authority’s flabby form bent over in laughter, his pear-shaped posterior, spread across his chair as he penned a report on my transgression. How soon would he convince the Boss to shove me in the elevator and hit Down?

  Up here there’s no place to hide. I trudged on down the corridor. I was almost to the end when I realized: the Perfect Crime, in the Raffles Hotel! In Singapore!

  I had died in Singapore! The perfect crime, my crime, had been committed in Singapore!

  I half ran, half flew to the courtroom lobby to find a newly dead traveler in need of a detective.

  HELGA ANDERLE is the editor of the first international women crime writers anthology and has been vice president of the AIEP (the international association of crime writers) since 1993. She worked for international organizations, as well as in journalism, before becoming a writer. Anderle has been published in literary magazines and anthologies from Australia to Mexico. She lives in Vienna, Austria, with her family.

  Saturday Night Fever

  Helga Anderle

  Translated from the German by Tobe Levin

  S not dangled from the chestnut vendor’s nose. In suspense, I waited for the man to sniffle or wipe it away with his sleeve. Too late! The drop had grown, lost its grip, and sailed through the air, landing on the crisp slices of potato sizzling on the grill. The cook shoveled them into a paper horn, sprinkled salt over them, and, before I could open my mouth, the innocent customer ahead of me had already imbibed a hearty port
ion. I let the change I’d already counted out tinkle back into my pocket and turned away, disgusted. My craving for french fries had vanished. Normally I would have smiled about the little scene, but at the moment I had no sense of humor, thinking only about viruses and flu.

  It was ten-twenty, Saturday evening, typical November weather: everything so gray-on-gray that you couldn’t even groove on your own depression. A night that seemed made for the long overdue physical tune-up: sauna, massage, new polish on fingers and toes, cucumber slices on forehead and cheeks, maybe even the crossword puzzle from Zeit magazine—and then straight into the sack for beauty sleep before midnight, done without for God knows how long. Instead, I found myself hanging out on a drafty street corner for twenty minutes, my feet killing me, waiting for some shit photographer. Supposedly, intelligent reporters exist, but I’ve never met one. At our paper we have such duds that I even let a machine make my passport photos. I hoped they weren’t dumping someone like Fiwonka on me, the worst of the bunch. Just looking at him gave me the creeps! Battle fatigues, military boots, headband, three-day beard, and the collected gold of Montezuma on his hairy macho chest. Matching his outfit he drove around in an open Land Rover even with the mercury hitting minus, like he thought Vienna was somewhere in the jungles of ’Nam. You could just barf. Not that I’d rather have Molny a.k.a. the vacuum cleaner. What magic he performs at press buffets! Before you know it the canapés, cake, sandwiches, anything edible vanishes into his cellophane-lined suit pockets. It doesn’t matter that he’s already as fat as a sumo wrestler and earns three times as much as I do in my third year as an editor with a union contract.

  It really burns my ass the way those bozos pocket the cash for click-clicking a little, while we writers eat our brains out on the brink of starvation. Not to mention the fact that a female doesn’t have an easy time of it, up against the chauvinist pigs in the press room. Far and wide not a shimmer of light. Okay, the old farts are full of little stories from the good ole days of typesetting, can be as charming as Maurice Chevalier. In reality they are as misogynistic as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer put together and on the whole thoroughly convinced that the progress of women means the end of the newspaper business.