Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  Of course, there was no mention in the papers, or anywhere else, of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting.

  II

  Everyone has many associations with a flower—the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower—lean forward to smell it—maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking—or give it to someone to please them.

  —Georgia O’Keeffe

  About a week after our trip to Hana I took a stroll through downtown Lahaina one morning. It had been an old whaling village and a few structures remained from that period. There were a few lovely wooden arcades and a big old house where the Christian missionaries had lived, recording their astonishment at the ways of the Hawaiians, who seemed to enjoy singing and dancing, especially unclothed, as often as possible.

  I stopped now outside a gallery window to look at some flower paintings. Many of the galleries in Lahaina catered to tourists of the lowest common denominator and featured canvases of unbelievable awfulness, which depicted mystical underwater scenes—dolphins frolicking amid schools of parrot fish and Moorish idols, and in the background the submerged towers of Atlantis.

  But the watercolors displayed in this window were different: small, modest, exquisite. There was hibiscus the color of coral and rose, lying on a yellow tablecloth; a ginger plant with the cobalt sea in the background; and finally, the single petal of a plumeria flower, unfurling off the page, softly shirred at the edges, dark at the center, leading you into its heart. I thought, if these aren’t too expensive, perhaps I’ll buy one for Claudie. She had been so shaken by the whole experience with Donna Hazlitt that she had hardly come out of her room for days. She had told the police several times about the phone call, but it was clear they were not planning to take her information into much account.

  I stepped inside the door and immediately a woman came forward from between two of the small paintings. She was in her thirties, with a smooth bronze tan and soft, lingering brown eyes. Her hair was sun-bleached past blond to something closer to a light lemon cream. Her teeth were startlingly white when she spoke, in a deeper voice than I’d been expecting, but a voice that fit with how she looked, attractively roughened by the elements.

  “Can I help you?”

  I told her I might be interested in buying one of the paintings.

  “Great!” she said, and couldn’t help beaming like a child. “I painted them!”

  Her name was Susan Waterman and she was just watching the gallery for the morning while the owner did some errands. They hadn’t sold any yet, so it was thrilling that it would happen while she was here. This was her first show. She was actually a botanist at an experimental growing station run by the University of Hawaii.

  In the end, overwhelmed by her bubbling gratitude, I bought two paintings, one for Claudie and one for Luisa. They weren’t cheap. Susan also persuaded me to have lunch with her tomorrow at her studio, where I could look at her latest work and see her garden.

  Claudie was strangely quiet when I first gave her the package, wrapped up with the label of the gallery stickered on the outside. But she admired the painting.

  “I hope you didn’t spend too much, Cassandra.”

  I was afraid to tell her, and said only, “Got it for a song. It’s her first show. Susan Waterman. She’s a botanist. She invited me over for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Leave it to Cassandra,” Luisa teased. “If there is a woman to be found, Cassandra will be having lunch with her.” She had embraced me violently when I gave her her package.

  Claudie looked as if she was going to say something, but then excused herself, telling us she had a headache.

  “I’m sorry,” said Luisa. “I think she is, how do you say, crushed out on you. It hurts her feelings that you are going to lunch with someone else.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Claudie is definitely not crushed out. You know she’s been upset since the Hana incident. And anyway, it’s only lunch.”

  Susan Waterman lived in a small house outside Lahaina that seemed surrounded by flowering plants, protea, birds-of-paradise, crab’s claw ginger. Inside, the walls were covered with sketches and paintings, and on a table was a copy of Georgia O’Keeffe’s One Hundred Flowers.

  “I’m a great fan of hers,” said Susan. “But it’s hard to paint a flower without being influenced by her. Women painted flowers for centuries and it was considered terribly feminine and safe, and then O’Keeffe comes along and makes you see everything differently by putting flowers in the foreground and enlarging them so that they push the boundaries of the painting.”

  On the cover of the book was a great white flower, one of the jimsonweeds from the Southwest. “Don’t you have these too?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “The name in Hawaiian is Kikania-Haole.”

  “Doesn’t haole mean white person?”

  Susan laughed. “Yes. Though haole used to mean any troublesome foreigner. Maybe that’s how it got attached to jimsonweed.”

  “You’d hardly think of it as a weed,” I said.

  “That’s the marvel of O’Keeffe,” said Susan. “She makes you see. The critics said her flowers were sexual. O’Keeffe said, don’t be silly. But they do give you that feeling, a really powerful, self-revelatory eroticism. The petals both explore and close off entry to the inner core.”

  Underneath her tan, Susan blushed. “I admire O’Keeffe so much. She didn’t seem to need anybody else. Not like me. I’m always getting mixed up in love affairs, in relationships that are bad for me. Right now, I’m in the midst of deciding to break up and go back to being on my own. To really try to be independent.” She fixed me with soft brown eyes that implored me to rescue her from this fate.

  “Independence is my middle name,” I said. “I’ve always been independent myself.”

  She looked disappointed, but tried again. “For me, being independent would mean being financially stable, so I could paint full-time. But unless I strike it rich—or find a sugar girlfriend—I’m afraid that’s out of the question.”

  “Your current girlfriend … ?”

  “… misrepresented herself badly.” Susan smiled. “But enough about me. Tell me what it’s like to be a world traveler and translator.”

  “Well, I couldn’t really support myself without my trust fund,” I began, just for the pleasure of seeing the infinitely sweet expression that came into Susan’s eyes.

  That evening when Claudie had gone out to see her therapist and Luisa and I were back to quarreling bitterly over the translations of tiny three-letter words, the doorbell rang. When I answered it I found a woman on the doorstep. Before she could speak, Luisa called, “Hallo, Nell. Claudie isn’t here.”

  “I’m not looking for Claudie.”

  She wasn’t tall, but she was athletic-looking. Her tanned face had a drooping sort of sneer that some might find attractive. Her eyes were blue, a little bloodshot around the iris. She looked about forty, and she looked angry.

  “What the hell were you doing with my girlfriend at her place this afternoon?”

  “Susan? Your girlfriend?” I stammered. “I bought two of her paintings yesterday. She invited me to lunch, that’s all.” I was certainly not going to mention those melting brown eyes or the lingering kiss Susan had given me on my departure. I stepped back from the doorway, recalling some karate moves. Luisa was, unfortunately, a total physical coward, so it was no good expecting help from her.

  But Nell didn’t raise her fists, only her voice. “This is Claudie’s way of getting back at me,” she said. “I know it. She wanted Susan for herself, and when she couldn’t get her, she recruited you.”

  “Listen, sit down,” I said. “Have a glass of water. There’s been some terrible misunderstanding. Luisa and I are translating a book, and I thought a flower painting would be a nice present for her. I bought one for Claudie too because she’s been so hospitable. Do you think Claudie would have sent me to your gallery on purpose? If you’re not on good terms why would she want to give you business?”r />
  For a couple of seconds Nell, considering this, didn’t say anything. Then she looked into the room and saw Susan’s two framed watercolors propped up against the mantel. Before we could stop her, she’d lifted them up, one after the other, and smashed them, glass and all, on the sharp back of a metal lamp. The delicate pinks and yellows of the hibiscus and plumeria were ripped to shreds.

  “You’ll get a refund check in the morning,” Nell said, and slammed the door as she left.

  I was speechless, but Luisa seemed almost admiring. “That kind of passion is common in Uruguay,” she said. “You don’t see it much in the United States. All those anger management classes.”

  “She’s crazy,” I said.

  “No,” said Luisa. “She’s jealous.”

  III

  The sorceresses of Greek mythology—Hecate, Circe—knew well the narcotic, stimulant and deadly effects of this plant, and Linneaus gave it the Latin name Atropa after the Greek Goddess of the Underworld Atropos, who cut the thread of life.

  —Dietrich Frohne

  I slept on my suspicions overnight and the next morning took Claudie off for a walk along the beach. “Is there any possibility,” I said point-blank, “that Nell murdered Donna Hazlitt?”

  Claudie’s hair blew in a straight line back from her forehead. She didn’t say of course not; she said, “Not the Nell I know. But then, she didn’t turn out to be the Nell I knew in the end.”

  “What made you think of her?”

  “That phone call with Mrs. Hazlitt. You remember I said she started in the middle talking about this painting. I’m embarrassed to say I just assumed that she was probably senile, and that she somehow thought we’d already met. But afterward it occurred to me, maybe she did really talk to someone about the painting.”

  “And that someone might have been Nell?”

  “Our old business cards have both the gallery number and my home number. I kept the house, Nell took the gallery. If Mrs. Hazlitt used the old business card, she might have called Nell the first time, and then tried the home number the second and gotten me.”

  “But why would Nell kill her to get the painting? Did she want the painting that badly? She must realize she can’t sell the painting now; you’d know.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Claudie, staring at the flat blue sea, “that she might have done it for Susan.”

  So the tangled story came out. How Susan had appeared in their lives, first claiming to be in love with Claudie, and then when Claudie told her she would leave Nell, saying that she was happy to share. How that sharing turned into Nell’s falling in love with Susan, violently in love, and leaving Claudie.

  “Susan doesn’t really seem like such a femme fatale,” I said conservatively, though I remembered the eager touch of her lips on mine.

  “She’s not at all,” said Claudie. “She’s more like a puppy dog that you think you’re playing with, and all of sudden you realize it has wrapped the leash around your legs so you can’t move.”

  She shook her black hair. “And I wasn’t even in love with her the way Nell is. Nell is absolutely obsessed with her.”

  I thought of Susan’s telling me how her girlfriend, soon to be ex-girlfriend, had misrepresented herself.

  “So you think Nell wanted to give her the painting to show her how much she cares? Or to ensure their financial future?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Cassandra. I lay awake at night, wishing the whole thing had never happened. That poor old woman; she was so excited about her discovery.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “They don’t even believe in the painting; why should they believe that Mrs. Hazlitt was murdered because of it?”

  I decided to take Susan up on her invitation to drop by “anytime,” but I made sure her car wasn’t in the drive first. The little house was locked, but that was no problem for a credit card carrier like myself. I slipped the card in the door and was in in a second. It was the middle of the afternoon and I assumed she was at work. Hopefully it wouldn’t take long.

  But of course, looking for a flower painting in a studio full of flower paintings was harder than it looked. Over and over I thought, Yes! Then, No … There were copies of O’Keeffe paintings, sketches, and watercolors in great piles. Over and over the same creamy white flowers, close-up an-gel’s trumpets, or jimsonweed, or belladonna or Kikania-Haole, whatever you wanted to call it.

  After two hours I had to give up on finding the painting. But I had found something more important perhaps: a scrap of paper in a book called Poisonous Plants by Dietrich Frohne, marking an entry on Datura. This was the botanical name of the jimsonweed in the United States, the thorn apple in Britain, the Kikania-Haole in Hawaii. It was a member of the nightshade family, which also included red peppers, potatoes, and belladonna, to which the jimsonweed was closely related. Datura seeds had long been used in India for suicide and murder. Criminals used extracts of the seeds to knock out railway passengers and rob them. The term “jimson” came from Jamestown, where the weed had led to a mass poisoning in 1676 that effectively wiped out the colony. Taken orally, the datura seeds caused great thirst and a terrible flushing of the skin. They caused the victim to thrash around and pick randomly at imaginary objects in the air. Further hallucinations followed, then coma and death.

  Of course datura was not all bad. Atropine came from the belladonna plant, and was useful in dilating the pupil of the eye.

  Susan could easily have answered the phone at the gallery and gone to Mrs. Hazlitt’s house. She, not Nell, knew the poisonous effects of plants. She, not Nell, would have known how to recognize an O’Keeffe painting. She, not Nell, had a financial motive. She wanted to paint full-time.

  I left Susan’s house with the book under my arm and went straight to the police station.

  A year later, months after the trial was finally over and Susan Waterman acquitted for lack of more than circumstantial evidence, I got a letter from Claudie.

  By that time I was in Indonesia, staying with my old friend Jacqueline Opal, who had suddenly and enthusiastically taken up a spot in an all-women’s gamelan orchestra and was spending all her time bonging away on melodious drums. I had more or less forgotten about my Hawaiian trip (and was avoiding letters from Luisa that quibbled about adverb placement in the proofs of her novel), but Claudie’s opening brought it all back:

  “They apprehended her at the Honolulu Airport, trying to smuggle out the O’Keeffe painting. She confessed everything. How she’d answered the phone at the gallery and talked with Mrs. Hazlitt that first time. The next day when she called Mrs. Hazlitt, she realized the woman had already gotten in touch with me. She raced over to her house that night, frantic that I’d get the painting and she wouldn’t. That’s when she found out about her eye condition and saw the bottle of atropine in the medicine cabinet. She knew something about atropine because she’d just gotten over an eye infection herself, and her doctor had told her that atropine was poisonous. She made up some story about having heard about Echinacea and got Mrs. Hazlitt to offer her some and to take her dose at the same time, from the wrong bottle. She didn’t realize it would be such a horrible death, but then, she wasn’t there to see it. She had managed to persuade Mrs. Hazlitt to let her take the painting that night. That’s why there was no sign of breaking and entering.

  “Susan doesn’t really blame you, Cassandra, for making her go through the trial and everything. The important thing, she says, is that Nell was caught. Nell says she needed the money because her gallery was failing without me. As usual, she blames everyone else but herself, me for making her business fail, Susan for wanting to break up with her. Nell wanted Susan to be accused of murder so that she would turn back to Nell for support!

  “We don’t care now. Susan came to live with me last month and this time, I think it’s going to work. She’s quit her job and I’m supporting her. It’s so important for her to paint full-time. As for the O’Keeffe painting—oh, it’s lovely, an earlier version o
f ‘Belladonna—Hana (Two Jimson Weeds).’ One of the flowers has a visible green center. The other has its core hidden, so that your eye is drawn deeper and deeper inside.

  “The next time you come to Hawaii you’ll have to be sure and see it.”

  SARA PARETSKY’s private eye V.I. Warshawski helped to define the “new” female sleuth in modern American crime fiction. Since her first appearance, in Indemnity Only in 1982, V.I. has starred in seven other novels and in a collection of short stories. Sara Paretsky and her creation both live in Chicago.

  Publicity Stunts

  Sara Paretsky

  I

  “I need a bodyguard. I was told you were good.” Lisa Macauley crossed her legs and leaned back in my client chair as if expecting me to slobber in gratitude.

  “If you were told I was a good bodyguard someone didn’t know my operation: I never do protection.”

  “I’m prepared to pay you well.”

  “You can offer me a million dollars a day and I still won’t take the job. Protection is a special skill. You need lots of people to do it right. I have a one-person operation. I’m not going to abandon my other clients to look after you.”

  “I’m not asking you to give up your precious clients forever, just for a few days next week while I’m doing publicity here in Chicago.”

  Judging by her expression, Macauley thought she was a household word, but I’d been on the run the two days since she’d made the appointment and hadn’t had time to do any research on her. Whatever she publicized made her rich: wealth oozed all the way from her dark cloud of carefully cut curls through the sable protecting her from February’s chill winds and on down to her Stephane Kelian three-inch platforms.

  When I didn’t say anything she added, “For my new book, of course.”

  “That sounds like a job for your publisher. Or your handlers.”

  I had vague memories of going to see Andre Dawson when he was doing some kind of baseball promotion at Marshall Field. He’d been on a dais, under lights, with several heavies keeping the adoring fans away from him. No matter what Macauley wrote she surely wasn’t any more at risk than a sports hero.