A Woman’s Eye

by Sara Paretsky

  Skip made sympathy sounds.

  Gina blew her nose. “I’m crying because I couldn’t go to my own father’s house today. The day after he died.”

  “You were forbidden to?”

  “No. I couldn’t bring myself to. Mama’s Catholic too. They both thought I was a sinner that couldn’t be forgiven.”

  And a social embarrassment.

  The apartment was tiny, furnished with Goodwill bargains, every surface covered with the toys, clothes, and supplies of a five-year-old. Heather herself was watching an old black-and-white TV, there being barely any room in the place to do anything else.

  “I gather you weren’t at the wedding either. Why not just defy your parents and go?”

  That started a fresh flood of tears: “Aubrey didn’t invite me.” She shrugged. “He did what Daddy wanted.”

  Skip was trying to figure out what could make a man like Noel tick-a man so heartless, so rigid, so out of sync with contemporary mores, when Gina said: “It’s a Delacroix tradition. Hating women.”

  There was a bitter edge to her voice. “They even gave me a name that sounds like vagina. ‘Generic female here; don’t bother naming it.’ Have you met my mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “My grandmother was just like her. Their mothers are bitches, they marry more bitches, and they keep on hating women. But they’re so mired in Catholic tradition they never admit to themselves what their wives are. To them all women are either Mary or Mary Magdalene. And Mary is never a bitch. So they spend their lives getting pushed around by these female storm troopers and pretend they’re in control by being tyrants about money.”

  “You seem to have thought this out.”

  “You would have, too, in my shoes. I don’t think you could possibly know how pathological my family is.”

  Skip thought of her own family. “I don’t know-”

  “Look at this.” Gina handed her a letter:

  Dear Regina,

  This is to let you know that on July 1, 1990, the Louisiana law on forced heirship will change. On that day and afterward, children twenty-three and over can be disinherited. Enclosed please find a copy of the will I will sign that day.

  “My God!”

  “My daddy was a real sweetheart, wasn’t he? It wasn’t enough to do it, he had to make damn sure I knew about it.”

  “He was killed June 30.”

  “I guess that makes me an heiress, huh? Now I can move to a real house and go back to school.” She blew her nose. “Ain’t life grand?”

  Her lips moved a little, to no apparent end. Skip thought she’d tried a smile but just couldn’t manage it.

  “Gina, I have to ask you. Where were you Saturday afternoon?”

  “Drowning my sorrows.”

  You and Buddy Carothers.

  “I was with a girl friend, Alicia Ravenel, and we were in a bar called The Glass Menagerie. I think quite a few people would remember. I was making a spectacle of myself.”

  Skip stayed late in Baton Rouge, visiting The Glass Menagerie (drinks in glasses animal-shaped), and calling on Alicia Ravenel.

  The alibi checked out.

  The case against Buddy Carothers was looking better. But if he did it, where did the black man come in? Had he been the man with the Uzi? He hadn’t had a black accent. And Louis Two-Nose had been very clear about it: the black man had been the one doing the hiring, and he’d hired two men, the one in the bar and “his partner,” who’d cover the congregation. Had Buddy sent a friend to hire a thug for him? Had Gina?

  Skip called all the numbers in Buddy’s address book and even consulted her least favorite source, her brother Conrad, who knew everyone even a little bit socially important. No one had ever seen Buddy speak with any black person who wasn’t a servant or a bellman. The reason they could be so sure was he was a notorious racist.

  As always in these situations, Skip wished she’d gotten it together and learned to meditate. She felt the need to focus her mind. She couldn’t see how Noel’s timely death (considering his letter) could be a coincidence. But if Gina had had him killed, why show Skip the letter? And who was the black man? She knew only two black people involved with the Delacroix family-Noel’s maid Cammy and Leeanna; but there must be others.

  She phoned Alicia Ravenel, Gina’s boss, and friends of Gina’s whose names she’d gotten from Alicia. She also called Alison, who made a few calls of her own. That afternoon she found herself visiting a man named Raybon Broussard.

  After that, she dropped in on the aunts. This time they both wore white slacks, Adelle’s elegant, Tay-Tay’s the sloppy kind with drawstring waist. Adelle had pulled her hair back against the heat; she looked younger and a little vulnerable. Tay-Tay worked on a needlepoint pillow.

  “I talked to Raybon today.”

  Tay-Tay looked up in alarm. “Oh, no! Leeanna-”

  Adelle said, “I’ll send her to the store.”

  When she returned, Skip saw that her color had gone. Raybon was Leeanna’s son.

  “He’s sweating,” said Skip, “and not because his AC’s on the blink. He’s one of the most scared young men I’ve seen lately.”

  “Has something gone wrong with his parole? I don’t think I can take it if that boy has to go back to prison.” Tay-Tay looked ready to cry. “There’s no harm in Raybon, no harm at all.”

  “Armed robbery-”

  “He was just a baby. Why, he’s still a baby-won’t be twenty-one till January.”

  Adelle said, “Tay-Tay never forgets his birthday. I sometimes think she loves Raybon better than Gina.”

  “That’s not true, Adelle, and you know it. I love all my children just the same.”

  Skip was sure she’d been right about Tay-Tay-she had to have been a teacher. “He must love you too,” she said. “He’s trying really hard to protect you. But it’s not going to work. I have the name of the man he sent you to.”

  She didn’t, though. Not yet. Raybon had been a challenge. He was frightened, all right, which was how she knew she was on the right track. But fear didn’t loosen his tongue any. She’d had to tell him Tay-Tay had already confessed to get him talking-and then he’d only said one thing and it wasn’t enough for an arrest. But she was hoping hard.

  “What on God’s earth are you talking about?”

  “He says it wasn’t you who called him.”

  Adelle started to speak: “I had to tell him it was for Tay-Tay.”

  Skip stopped her. “Not yet. I have to Mirandize you.”

  Adelle nodded stoically. Her color was better; she’d probably gotten a jolt of adrenaline.

  “What’s happening?” Tay-Tay was panicked, looked as if her world was falling apart. And it was, thought Skip, feeling for her. When she’d read Adelle her rights, Skip asked if she wanted to waive them.

  “Oh, hell, yes. I want to talk, and I don’t want some stuffy lawyer in here clamming me up.”

  She might be a murderer, but Skip liked her spirit. She saw now that Adelle was no stiff-lipped Sunday school teacher; she’d seemed uptight because she’d been under the biggest stress of her life.

  “Adelle, no.”

  “Hush up, Tay-Tay. Don’t you see what she’s doing? She’s blackmailing me. If I talk, Raybon gets off.”

  Skip said, “I can’t make any deals.”

  “But this way you won’t take him to some horrible interrogation room and badger him, will you? Because I’m going to give you what you need, and tell you flat-out that he didn’t have the least idea what it was all about. He just gave me a name, that’s all. Wouldn’t take a penny for it. Thought he was doing a favor for Tay-Tay. That’s how I got him to cooperate.”

  She spoke directly to Skip, avoiding her sister’s eye. “Gina called in tears about the letter-absolutely hysterical, poor little baby. Anyway, Tay-Tay wasn’t home and I made up my mind not to tell her about it. I just made my plans. I told Raybon Tay-Tay had a problem and I wanted to solve it for her. I asked him to give me the name of a very
bad man, someone from prison. I think he thought I wanted to scare somebody because he didn’t give me a murderer. But his friend knew some Italians. I had to pay him five thousand dollars for the introduction; the Italians cost twenty apiece. Did you know it was so cheap to hire hit men?”

  “That’s all the money you have in the world!” Skip noticed Tay-Tay had changed the subject, unable yet to face what had happened.

  “Gina will help me. I know she will.”

  She was getting a glazed look now. But Tay-Tay was snapping back to reality, taking it in.

  “Adelle, murder. You did murder!”

  “Poor little Heather-my heart just sank every time I saw that child in that tiny little crackerbox.” Her bland face wore a look Skip had seen in court: a judge pronouncing sentence. “Somebody had to get this family back on track.”

  “But the wedding-why poor Aubrey’s wedding?”

  For the first time Adelle smiled. “I thought we needed a ritual murder,”

  Horror replaced the shock on Tay-Tay’s gentle face. She spoke as if explaining it to herself. “You’re crazy, Adelle. You’re really mad.”

  “That’s right, little sister. I’m really mad. But not crazy-mad.” She paused and took a breath for maximum volume. “I’m furious!”

  Skip thought little Heather probably heard her aunt up in Baton Rouge.

  BARBARA WILSON is the author of several novels and a collection of short stories. In addition to the Pam Nilsen series, Murder in the Collective, Sisters of the Road, and The Dog Collar Murders, she has recently published Gaudi Afternoon, the first mystery to feature London-based translator Cassandra Reilly. Barbara Wilson is the cofounder of Seal Press in Seattle.

  THEFT OF THE POET

  Barbara Wilson

  It started gradually. Here and there on London streets new blue plaques that might have been placed there by the authorities, if the authorities had been reasonably literate, and unreasonably feminist, began to appear. At 22 Hyde Park Gate the enamel plaque stating that Leslie Stephen, the noted biographer, had lived here was joined by a new metal plate, much the same size and much the same color, which informed the passerby that this was where writer Virginia Woolf and painter Vanessa Bell had spent their childhoods. Over in Primrose Hill the plaque that read that Yeats had once been resident in this house was joined by a shiny new medallion gravely informing us that Sylvia Plath had written the poems in Ariel here before committing suicide in 1963.

  Above the blue plaque at 106 Hallam Street, the birthplace of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, another one appeared to emphasize that poet Christina Rossetti had lived here as well. The plate at 20 Maresfield Gardens, which recorded that Sigmund Freud had passed the last year of his life here, was joined by a new one telling us that Anna Freud had passed forty-two years at this address. A medallion to Jane Carlyle, letter writer, joined that of her famous husband Thomas at 24 Cheyne Row, and a plaque telling us about Fanny Burney, author of Evelina and other novels, appeared above that describing Sir Isaac Newton’s dates and accomplishments on the outside of a library in St. Martin’s Street.

  The appearance of these blue plaques was at first noted sympathetically, if condescendingly, by the liberal newspapers and a certain brave editor at The Guardian was bold enough to suggest that it was high time more women writers who had clearly achieved “a certain stature” be recognized. The editor thus managed to give tacit approval to the choice of authors awarded blue plaques and to suggest that the perpetrators had gone quite far enough. “We wouldn’t want blue plaques on every house in London, after all.”

  But the plaquing continued, heedless of The Guardian’s pointed admonition, to the growing excitement of many and the consternation of quite a few. Who was responsible and how long would it go on? Would the authorities leave the plaques up or bother to remove them? Apparently they had been manufactured out of a lighter metal than the original plaques, but instead of being bolted to the buildings, they had been affixed with Super Glue. Some residents of the buildings were delighted; other inhabitants, in a conservative rage, defaced the medallions immediately.

  The next blue plaques to go up were placed on houses previously unrecognized as having been the homes of women worth remembering and honoring. A plaque appeared outside the house in Maida Vale where authors Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain had shared a flat for several years. A similar plaque commemorating the relationship of poets H.D. and Bryher appeared in Knightsbridge. Mary Seacole, a Victorian black woman who had traveled widely as a businesswoman, gold prospector, and nurse in the Crimean War and who had written an autobiography about her life, was honored on the wall of 26 Upper George Street off Portman Square, as was Constance Markievicz, many times imprisoned Irish Republican, who was the first woman elected as a member of the British Parliament (though she refused to take her seat in protest over the Irish situation), and who was born in Westminster on Buckingham Street. Of course, my friends in the progressive backwater of East Dulwich were delighted when Louise Michel, the French Revolutionary Socialist and Communard, was honored with a plaque, and those of us who are interested in printing and publishing were quite thrilled when a plaque appeared at 9 Great Coram Street, home in the 1860s to Victoria Printers, which Emily Faithfull set up in order to train women as printers and where she published Britain’s first feminist periodical.

  The list could go on and on, and it did. You would have thought the authorities would be pleased. New tourists flocked to obscure neighborhoods, guidebooks to the new sites proliferated, tours were organized; handwritten notes appeared on walls suggesting plaques; letters to the editor demanded to know why certain women hadn’t been honored. Other letters criticized the manner in which only bourgeois individuals were elevated and suggested monuments to large historical events, such as Epping Forest, where Boudicca, the leader of the Celts, fought her last battle with the Romans in A.D. 62, or the Parliament Street Post Office, where Emily Wilding Davison set fire to a letter box in 1911, the first suffragist attempt at arson to draw attention to the struggle for women’s rights. One enterprising and radical artist even sent the newspapers a sketch for a “Monument of Glass” to be placed on a busy shopping street in Knightsbridge, to commemorate the day of March 4, 1912, when a hundred suffragists walked down the street, smashing every plate glass window they passed.

  The Tory and gutter papers were naturally appalled by such ideas and called for Thatcher (whom no one had thought to plaquate) to put a stop to the desecration of London buildings and streets. Vigilant foot patrols were called for and severe penalties for vandalization were demanded.

  This then was the atmosphere in which the news suddenly surfaced that the grave of a famous woman poet had been opened and her bones had gone missing.

  As it happened, the small village in Dorset where the poet had been buried was also the home of a friend of mine, Andrea Addlepoot, once a writer of very successful feminist mysteries, back when feminist mysteries had been popular, and now an obsessive gardener and letter writer. It was she who first described the theft to me in detail, the theft that the London papers had hysterically headlined: POET’S GRAVE VANDALIZED.

  My dear Cassandra,

  By now you have no doubt heard that Francine Crofts “Putter” is no longer resting eternally in the small churchyard opposite my humble country cottage. My first thought, heretically, was that I would not miss her-meaning that I would not miss the hordes of visitors, primarily women, primarily Young American Women, who had made the pilgrimage to her grave since her death. I would not miss how they trampled over my tender flowers, nor pelted me with questions. As if I had known the woman- As if anyone in the village had known the woman.

  And yet it is still quite shocking, and everyone here is in an uproar over it.

  You of course realize that the theft is not an isolated action but only the latest in a series of “terrorist acts” (I quote Peter Putter, the late poet’s husband) perpetrated on the grave, and most likely not totally unrelated to the unchecked rememor
ializing of London and surrounding areas. (Discreet plaquing is one thing, but I really could not condone the defacing of Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral. Surely “In Memory of Jane Austen, youngest daughter of the late Reverend George Austen, formerly Rector of Steventon,” says everything necessary. There was no reason on earth to stencil onto the stone the words “Author of Pride and Prejudice and other novels.”)

  These “terrorist acts” consisted of the last name, “Putter,” in raised lead lettering, being three times chipped off from the headstone. The headstone was repaired twice but the third time Mr. Putter removed the headstone indefinitely from the grave site. That was over a year ago and it has not been reerected, which, despite what you might think, has not made my life any easier. I cannot count the number of times that sincere young women have approached me as I stood pruning my roses and beseeched me, most often in fiat American accents, to show them the unmarked grave of Francine Crofts.

  Never Francine Putter or Francine Crofts Putter.

  For Francine Crofts was her name, you know, even if at one time she had been rather pathetically eager to be married to the upcoming young writer Peter Putter and had put aside her own poetry to type his manuscripts. Francine Crofts is the name the world knows her by. And, of course, that’s what Putter cannot stand.

  I know him, you must realize. Although his boyhood was long, long over by the time I moved here (after the enormous financial success, you recall, of Murder at Greenham Common), his parents Margery and Andrew and sister Jane Fitzwater-the widow who runs the local tearoom, and who has a penchant for telling anyone who will listen what a shrew Francine was and what a saint dear Peter-still live in the large house down the road that Peter bought for them. This little village represents roots for Peter, and sometimes you’ll see him with one or another young girlfriend down at the pub getting pissed. When he’s really in his cups he’ll sometimes go all weepy, telling everyone what a raw deal he’s getting from the world about Francine, It wasn’t his fault she died. He really did love her. She wasn’t planning to get a divorce. They were soul mates.