Women on the Case

by Sara Paretsky

  She made an impatient gesture. “They always send some useless person from their publicity department. They refuse to believe my life is in danger. Of course, this is the last book I’ll do with Gaudy: my new contract with Delia Destra Press calls for a personal bodyguard whenever I’m on the road. But right now, while I’m promoting the new one, I need protection.”

  I ignored her contract woes. “Your life is in danger? What have you written that’s so controversial? An attack on Mother Teresa?”

  “I write crime novels. Don’t you read?”

  “Not crime fiction: I get enough of the real stuff walking out my door in the morning.”

  Macauley gave a self-conscious little laugh. “I thought mine might appeal to a woman detective like yourself. That’s why I chose you to begin with. My heroine is a woman talk-show host who gets involved in cases through members of her listening audience. The issues she takes on are extremely controversial: abortion, rape, the Greens, in one of them she protects a man whose university appointment is attacked by the feminists on campus. She’s nearly murdered when she uncovers the brainwashing operation the feminists are running on campus.”

  “I can’t believe that would put you in danger—feminist-bashing is about as controversial as apple pie these days. Sounds like your hero is a female Claud Barnett.”

  Barnett broadcast his attacks on the atheistic, family-destroying feminists and liberals five days a week from Chicago’s WKLN radio tower. The term he’d coined for progressive women—femmunists—had become a much-loved buzzword on the radical right. Claud had become so popular that his show was syndicated in almost every state, and rerun at night and on weekends in his hometown.

  Macauley didn’t like being thought derivative, even of reality. She bristled as she explained that her detective, Nan Carruthers, had a totally unique personality and slant on public affairs.

  “But because she goes against all the popular positions that feminists have persuaded the media to support I get an unbelievable amount of hate mail.”

  “And now someone’s threatening your life?” I tried to sound more interested than hopeful.

  Her blue eyes flashing in triumph, Macauley pulled a letter from her handbag and handed it to me. It was the product of a computer, printed on some kind of cheap white stock. In all caps it proclaimed, YOU’LL BE SORRY, BITCH, BUT BY THEN IT WILL BE TOO LATE.

  “If this is a serious threat you’re already too late,” I snapped. “You should have taken it to the forensics lab before you fondled it. Unless you sent it yourself as a publicity stunt?”

  Genuine crimson stained her cheeks. “How dare you? My last three books have been national best sellers—I don’t need this kind of cheap publicity.”

  I handed the letter back. “You show it to the police?”

  “They wouldn’t take it seriously. They told me they could get the state’s attorney to open a file, but what good would that do me?”

  “Scotland Yard can identify individual laser printers based on samples of output but most U.S. police departments don’t have those resources. Did you keep the envelope?”

  She took out a grimy specimen. With a magnifying glass I could make out the zip code in the postmark: Chicago, the Gold Coast. That meant only one of about a hundred thousand residents, or the half-million tourists who pass through the neighborhood every day, could have mailed it. I tossed it back.

  “You realize this isn’t a death threat—it’s just a threat, and pretty vague at that. What is it you’ll be sorry for?”

  “If I knew that I wouldn’t be hiring a detective,” she snapped.

  “Have you had other threats?” It was an effort to keep my voice patient.

  “I had two other letters like this one, but I didn’t bring them—I didn’t think they’d help you any. I’ve started having phone calls where they just wait, or laugh in a weird way or something. Sometimes I get the feeling someone’s following me.”

  “Any hunches who might be doing it?” I was just going through the motions—I didn’t think she was at any real risk, but she seemed the kind who couldn’t believe she wasn’t at the forefront of everyone else’s mind.

  “I told you.” She leaned forward in her intensity. “Ever since Take Back the Night, my fourth book, which gives a whole different look at rape crisis centers, I’ve been on the top of every femmunist hitlist in the country.”

  I laughed, trying to picture some of my friends out taking potshots at every person in America who hated feminists. “It sounds like a nuisance, but I don’t believe your life is in as much danger as, say, the average abortion provider. But if you want a bodyguard while you’re on Claud Barnett’s show I can recommend a couple of places. Just remember, though, that even the Secret Service couldn’t protect JFK from a determined sniper.”

  “I suppose if I’d been some whiny feminist you’d take this more seriously. It’s because of my politics you won’t take the job.”

  “If you were a whiny feminist I’d probably tell you not to cry over this because there’s a lot worse on its way. But since you’re a whiny authoritarian there’s not much I can do for you. I’ll give you some advice for free, though: If you cry about it on the air you’ll only invite a whole lot more of this kind of attention.”

  I didn’t think contemporary clothes lent themselves to flouncing out of rooms, but Ms. Macauley certainly flounced out of mine. I wrote a brief summary of our meeting in my appointments log, then put her out of mind until the next night. I was having dinner with a friend who devours crime fiction. Sal Barthele was astounded that I hadn’t heard of Lisa Macauley.

  “You ever read anything besides the sports pages and the financial section, Warshawski? That girl is hot. They say her contract with Delia Destra is worth twelve million, and all the guys with shiny armbands and goosesteps buy her books by the cord. I hear she’s dedicating the next one to the brave folks at Operation Rescue.”

  After that I didn’t think of Macauley at all: a case for a small suburban school district whose pension money had been turned into derivatives was taking all my energy. But a week later the writer returned forcibly to mind.

  “You’re in trouble now, Warshawski,” Murray Ryerson said when I picked up the phone late Thursday night.

  “Hi, Murray: good to hear from you, too.” Murray is an investigative reporter for the Herald-Star, a one-time lover, sometime rival, occasional pain-in-the-butt, and even, now and then, a good friend.

  “Why’d you tangle with Lisa Macauley? She’s Chicago’s most important artiste, behind Oprah.”

  “She come yammering to you with some tale of injustice? She wanted a bodyguard and I told her I didn’t do that kind of work.”

  “Oh, Warshawski, you must have sounded ornery when you turned her down. She is not a happy camper: she got Claud Barnett all excited about how you won’t work for anyone who doesn’t agree with your politics. He dug up your involvement with the old abortion underground and has been blasting away at you the last two days as the worst kind of murdering femmunist. A wonderful woman came to you, trembling and scared for her life, and you turned her away just because she’s against abortion. He says you investigate the politics of all your potential clients and won’t take anyone who’s given money to a Christian or a Republican cause and he’s urging people to boycott you.”

  “Kind of people who listen to Claud need an investigator to find their brains. He isn’t likely to hurt me.”

  Murray dropped his bantering tone. “He carries more weight than you, or maybe even I, want to think. You may have to do some damage control.”

  I felt my stomach muscles tighten: I live close to the edge of financial ruin much of the time. If I lost three or four key accounts I’d be dead.

  “You think I should apply for a broadcast license and blast back? Or just have my picture taken coming out of the headquarters of the Republican National Committee?”

  “You need a nineties kind of operation, Warshawski—a staff, including a publicist. Yo
u need to have someone going around town with stories about all the tough cases you’ve cracked in the last few years, showing how wonderful you are. On account of I like hot-tempered Italian gals I might run a piece myself if you’d buy me dinner.”

  “What’s a nineties operation—where your self-promotion matters a whole lot more than what kind of job you do? Come to think of it, do you have an agent, Murray?”

  The long pause at the other end told its own tale: Murray had definitely joined the nineties. I looked in the mirror after he hung up, searching for scales or some other visible sign of turning into a dinosaur. In the absence of that I’d hang on to my little one-woman shop as long as possible.

  I turned to the Herald-Star’s entertainment guide, looking to see when WKLN (“The voice of the Klan,” we’d dubbed them in my days with the public defender) was rebroad-casting Barnett. I was in luck: he came on again at eleven-thirty, so that night workers would have something to froth about on their commute home.

  After a few minutes from his high-end sponsors, his rich, folksy baritone rolled through my speakers like molasses from a giant barrel. “Yeah, folks, the femmunists are at it again. The Iron Curtain’s gone down in Russia so they want to put it up here in America. You think like they think or—phht!—off you go to the Gulag.

  “We’ve got one of those femmunists right here in Chicago. Private investigator. You know, in the old stories they used to call them private dicks. Kind of makes you wonder what this gal is missing in her life that she turned to that kind of work. Started out as a baby-killer back in the days when she was at the Red University on the South Side of Chicago and grew up to be a dick. Well, it takes all kinds, they say, but do we need this kind?

  “We got an important writer here in Chicago. I know a lot of you read the books this courageous woman writes. And because she’s willing to take a stand she gets death threats. So she goes to this femmunist dick, this hermaphrodite dick, who won’t help her out. ’Cause Lisa Macauley has the guts to tell women the truth about rape and abortion, and this dick, this V.I. Warshawski, can’t take it.

  “By the way, you ought to check out Lisa’s new book. Slaybells Ring. A great story which takes her fast-talking radio host Nan Carruthers into the world of the ACLU and the bashing of Christmas. We carry it right here in our bookstore. If you call in now Sheri will ship it right out to you. Or just go out to your nearest warehouse: they’re bound to stock it. Maybe if this Warshawski read it she’d have a change of heart, but a gal like her, you gotta wonder if she has a heart to begin with.”

  He went on for thirty minutes by the clock, making an easy segue from me to the First Lady. If I was a devil, she was the Princess of Darkness. When he finished I stared out the window for a time. I felt ill from the bile Barnett had poured out in his molassied voice, but I was furious with Lisa Macauley. She had set me up, pure and simple. Come to see me with a spurious problem, just so she and Barnett could start trashing me on the air. But why?

  II

  Murray was right: Barnett carried more weight than I wanted to believe. He kept on at me for days, not always as the centerpiece, but often sending a few snide barbs my way. The gossip columns of all three daily papers mentioned it and the story got picked up by the wires. Between Barnett and the papers, Macauley got a load of free publicity; her sales skyrocketed. Which made me wonder again if she’d typed up that threatening note herself.

  At the same time, my name getting sprinkled with mud did start having an effect on my own business: two new clients backed out midstream, and one of my old regulars phoned to say his company didn’t have any work for me right now. No, they weren’t going to cancel my contract, but they thought, in his picturesque corpo-speak, “we’d go into a holding pattern for the time being.”

  I called my lawyer to see what my options were; he advised me to let snarling dogs bite until they got it out of their system. “You don’t have the money to take on Claud Barnett, Vic, and even if you won a slander suit against him you’d lose while the case dragged on.”

  On Sunday I meekly called Murray and asked if he’d be willing to repeat the deal he’d offered me earlier. After a two-hundred-dollar dinner at the Filigree he ran a nice story on me in the Star’s “Chicago Beat” section, recounting some of my great past successes. This succeeded in diverting some of Barnett’s attention from me to Murray—my so-called stooge. Of course he wasn’t going to slander Murray on the air—he could tell lies about a mere mortal like me, but not about someone with a big media operation to pay his legal fees.

  I found myself trying to plan the total humiliation of both Barnett and Macauley. Let it go, I would tell myself, as I turned in the bed in the middle of the night: this is what he wants, to control my head. Turn it off. But I couldn’t follow this most excellent advice.

  I even did a little investigation into Macauley’s life. I called a friend of mine at Channel 13 where Macauley had once worked to get the station’s take on her. A native of Wisconsin, she’d moved to Chicago hoping to break into broadcast news. After skulking on the sidelines of the industry for five or six years she’d written her first Nan Carruthers book. Ironically enough, the women’s movement, creating new roles for women in fiction as well as life, had fueled Macauley’s literary success. When her second novel became a best seller, she divorced the man she married when they were both University of Wisconsin journalism students and started positioning herself as a celebrity. She was famous in book circles for her insistence on her personal security: opinion was divided as to whether it had started as a publicity stunt, or if she really did garner a lot of hate mail.

  I found a lot of people who didn’t like her—some because of her relentless self-promotion, some because of her politics, and some because they resented her success. As Sal had told me, Macauley was minting money now. Not only Claud, but the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and all the other conservative rags hailed her as a welcome antidote to writers like Marcia Muller or Amanda Cross.

  But despite my digging I couldn’t find any real dirt on Macauley. Nothing I could use to embarrass her into silence. To make matters worse, someone at Channel 13 told her I’d been poking around asking questions about her. Whether by chance or design, she swept into Corona’s one night when I was there with Sal. Sal and I were both enthusiastic fans of Belle Fontaine, the jazz singer who was Corona’s Wednesday night regular headliner.

  Lisa arrived near the end of the first set. She’d apparently found an agency willing to guard her body—she was the center of a boisterous crowd that included a couple of big men with bulges near their armpits. She flung her sable across a chair at a table near ours.

  At first I assumed her arrival was just an unhappy coincidence. She didn’t seem to notice me, but called loudly for champagne, asking for the most expensive brand on the menu. A couple at a neighboring table angrily shushed her. This prompted Lisa to start yelling out toasts to some of the people at her table: her fabulous publicist, her awesome attorney, and her extraordinary bodyguards, “Rover” and “Prince.” The sullen-faced men didn’t join in the raucous cheers at their nicknames, but they didn’t erupt, either.

  We couldn’t hear the end of “Tell Me lies” above Lisa’s clamor, but Belle took a break at that point. Sal ordered another drink and started to fill me in on family news: Her lover had just landed a role in a sitcom that would take her out to the West Coast for the winter and Sal was debating hiring a manager for her own bar, the Golden Glow, so she could join Becca. She was just describing—in humorous detail—Becca’s first meeting with the producer, when Lisa spoke loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear.

  “I’m so glad you boys were willing to help me out. I can’t believe how chicken some of the detectives in this town are. Easy to be big and bold in an abortion clinic, but they run and hide from someone their own size.” She turned deliberately in her chair, faked an elaborate surprise at the sight of me, and continued at the same bellowing pitch, “Oh, V.I. Warshawski! I hope you do
n’t take it personally.”

  “I don’t expect eau de cologne from the sewer,” I called back heartily.

  The couple who’d tried to quiet Lisa down during the singing laughed at this. The star twitched, then got to her feet, champagne glass in hand, and came over to me.

  “I hear you’ve been stalking me, Warshawski. I could sue you for harassment.”

  I smiled. “Sugar, I’ve been trying to find out why a big successful gal like you had to invent some hate mail just to have an excuse to slander me. You want to take me to court I’ll be real, real happy to sort out your lies in public.”

  “In court or anywhere else I’ll make you look as stupid as you do right now.” Lisa tossed her champagne into my face; a camera strobe flashed just as the drink hit me.

  Fury blinded me more than the champagne. I knocked over a chair as I leapt up to throttle her, but Sal got an arm around my waist and pulled me down. Behind Macauley, Prince and Rover got to their feet, ready to move: Lisa had clearly staged the whole event to give them an excuse for beating me up.

  Queenie, who owns the Corona, was at my side with some towels. “Jake! I want these people out of here now. And I think some cute person’s been taking pictures. Make sure she leaves the film with you, hear? Ms. Macauley, you owe me three hundred dollars for that Dom Pérignon you threw around.”

  Prince and Rover thought they were going to take on Queenie’s bouncer, but Jake had broken up bigger fights than they could muster. He managed to lift them both and slam their heads together, then to snatch the fabulous publicist’s bag as she was trying to sprint out the door. Jake took out her camera, pulled the film, and handed the bag back to her with smile and an insulting bow. The attorney, prompted by Jake, handed over three bills, and the whole party left to loud applause from the audience.