A Woman’s Eye

by Sara Paretsky

  The man in front of me was huge-nearer to seven than to six feet-with a body to match. He was made to be noticed, and he flaunted the fact. He had shaved his head clean, and his bald pate shone a deep black against the rest of his clothes. It was quite an outfit-his three-piece suit was tailored to fit his broad frame and sewed from all colors of the rainbow, a broad silver tie nestled under the garish waistcoat, and a pair of shining black shoes that seemed to go on forever had silver buckles the size of my hands. I gulped.

  “The door was open,” he said again.

  The voice was not only small but melodic with it. On the principle that there was no point in antagonizing giants, even ones with ingratiating voices, I threw a smile his way. My neck hurt with the effort of twisting so I stood in an attempt to equalize the distance. He strode toward me.

  The man was big, real big, and close up he towered above me. There was no point in competing. I sat.

  “Can I help you?” I asked. Good, I thought, my voice sounds normal.

  He smiled, and the long gray-brown scar that ran the full length of his left cheek smiled with him. He lowered himself onto the chair in front of me and planted two huge fists on my desk. I backed away and hit the wall with my head. I rubbed it surreptitiously.

  “I hope you can help,” he said.

  I turned the rub into an encouraging nod and waited. I was ready for anything.

  “I want you to find somebody for me,” he said. “Name of Thelma.”

  Something clicked in my head, so tangibly that I bet I lost a hundred thousand brain cells making the connection. Got it in one, I thought. Smiling cynically, I leaned my chair against the wall and stretched my legs out so that my feet landed on the desk, right in the middle of my accounts book. My only regret was that I didn’t have a cigarette to hang out of the side of my mouth and complete the impression.

  “And what’s your name?” I asked, “Moose, by any chance?”

  He looked puzzled. “Moose?” he thought about it a bit. “No, Martin. Martin Malloy.”

  I smiled again, and this time the cynicism was not an act. “That figures,” I said.

  He leaned across and shifted my feet to the right, uncovering the columns of numbers. His thick index finger pointed at the center row.

  “But this doesn’t,” he said. “You’ve inverted one of those numbers, there in the middle. Easily done.”

  I returned my legs to the ground and pulled the book nearer to me, meaning to close it. But I couldn’t help looking at where his finger had once been, and I couldn’t help seeing that he was right. I frowned.

  He grinned almost by way of apology. “I’m good at figures,” he explained. “Always have been. And I learned to read upside down when I was inside.”

  “You’ve been in prison, then,” I stated.

  He nodded.

  “And this Thelma put you there.”

  His brow creased, and I remembered his size and the scar that creased in its redness on his cheek. He was no longer doing an impression of the genial giant: I had angered him. I pulled at the telephone wire, edging the instrument closer to me.

  “Thelma didn’t put me there,” he said. “In fact, if anybody got me out, it was Thelma.” He glared at me. “I don’t like people who say bad things about Thelma,” he concluded.

  With a supreme effort of will I fixed his eyes with mine, I kept looking at him while I nudged the receiver off the phone and let it drop on my lap. I rested my hand on the headless phone, thanking the heavens that I now had digital dialing. His frown deepened.

  “Tell me more,” I said in a voice that was more fear than fake. I hit the first nine on the phone while I tried to work out whether I could manage to make a successful break for the door.

  In one effortless motion he reached across the desk and pulled the receiver from my lap. He put it down on the desk. He stretched across again.

  He put a finger on one of the buttons and pressed it down.

  “That makes two nines,” he said. “You’ve only got to dial one more and you’re connected. Go ahead, I won’t stop you.”

  The brain cells were going fast by now. It was a dare, I thought; he’d get me before my first cry for help. He was toying with me, and probably enjoying it. And yet what option did I have? I was isolated and alone, up in my grimy office in the center of London. A cry for help wafting to the street would be cause for a quickening of pace rather than investigation. I had no choice: without the phone, I had no line to the world.

  I lifted my hand slowly as the seconds expanded. I could try it, I thought, and maybe I’d succeed. My hand began to shake.

  “I’m really a gentle guy,” he said slowly, watching that hand. “My size militates against me, but I wouldn’t harm a fly. Certainly not a woman, that’s for sure.”

  “And what’s that?” I asked, using the poised finger to point at his scar. “Shaving accident?”

  He shrugged, and I saw how the rocks in his shoulders bulged. “Prison’s a rough place,” he said. “It makes you or it breaks you.”

  “And it made you?”

  “Thelma made me,” he said. “That’s why I want to find her.”

  We were both back in fiction land. I replaced the receiver on the phone and breathed out. I no longer felt scared, only foolish-a foolishness tinged with anger. He was a pro, I thought, a real good actor, and I might as well face the fact that he had me. He and whoever had sent him-and I had a good idea as to who that was. Well, all I had to do was get rid of him, finish my accounts, close the office for perhaps the last time, and then be free to wreak my own kind of revenge.

  But I’d do it subtly, I thought. I reached into the top drawer of my desk and pulled out a pad. As a heading I chose the name M. MALLOY. I underlined it: it looked better that way. On the next line I inscribed the name THELMA in block capitals.

  “Parsons,” he said. “Thelma Parsons.”

  “A dancer?” I asked without looking up.

  “A social worker,” he said. He blinked. “But she did like to dance. She showed me pictures of herself when she was a kid. All dressed up in a white tutu, she was.”

  Social worker, I wrote, failed ballet dancer.

  “Thelma never failed at anything,” he said loudly. It was the first time he had raised his voice.

  I smiled placatingly. It took two to tango, I thought, and I was finally in step. I wasn’t going to break my rhythm for any fake display of righteous anger by a giant gullible enough to involve himself in one of Sam’s pranks.

  “Why don’t you tell me the whole story?” I suggested.

  He leaned back in the chair. It creaked. He frowned and began to toy with the gold watch fob that was attached to his waistcoat. “Thelma liked to visit me in prison,” he began. “She turned me on to books.”

  I glanced up and my eyes strayed to my accounts.

  He laughed, or at least I think that was what described the creaking that issued from his big mouth. “Not those kind,” he said, “I always had a knack with them. That’s what got me into trouble in the first place. No, Thelma revealed the world of literature to me.”

  Social worker reforms con by opening his eyes to the joys of the nineteenth century, I wrote.

  “Modern literature,” he said loudly.

  I gulped. I kept forgetting that he could read upside down.

  “It changed my whole world view,” he continued. “Opened new horizons. I want to be able to thank her, not in the claustrophobia of prison, but in the real world. In the free world.”

  Free world, I thought, more like anticommunist modern literature, then.

  “So go round to her office and thank her,” I said.

  He shook his head unhappily. “She’s left her job,” he said. “She was never happy with it, it cramped her style, she said, and now she’s had the courage to leave. They won’t tell me where she went-they don’t do that on principle in case some ex-con has a grudge against them.”

  “And you want me to find her?” I stated.
r />   “That’s it,” he said, delighted that the slow pupil had finally caught on.

  “And then you will thank her.”

  He nodded. He reached a fist into a pocket of his garish plaid suit. Here comes the punch line, I thought.

  He placed a piece of paper in front of me, right side up. On it was written the name Thelma Parsons along with an address in Islington.

  “That’s where Thelma used to work?” I asked.

  For reply he reached once more into his pocket. Ahaa, I thought, here it comes.

  I was wrong again. In front of me, dead in front, he placed a wad of new bank notes. I stared at him, and he smiled. I picked up the notes and felt their crispness.

  “Two hundred and fifty pounds,” he said. “Retainer.”

  “Is that what they said it would cost?” I asked.

  “They?” He frowned, I resolved in future not to aggravate the scar. “It’s a guess,” he continued. “Your retainer plus something toward expenses. Give me a record when you finish, and I’ll settle up with you. I’m good at figures, you know.”

  I didn’t say anything, and he had finished as well. I watched as he stood up and began to stride to the door.

  “I suppose that you’ll be in touch with me rather than leaving me your address,” I said.

  He turned. “That’s right,” he said. “Circumstances have conspired to make me a bit of an itinerant at the moment.” He waved a hand in my direction before turning away again, “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  “One more thing,” I called just as he had bent his head down far enough to fit. “Ever read any Chandler?”

  “No, I haven’t,” he replied without bothering to look back. “And my reading days are over. I only want to thank Thelma and then I can get on with my life.”

  They were conveniently seated around the kitchen table when I arrived, all three of them, the ones I had decided were guilty. Sam was doing what he liked best-explaining in layperson’s terms a particularly neat solution to the latest space-time continuum problem-while Anna and Daniel were doing what they did best-pretending to understand.

  Into this cozy scene I strolled. I took a swig from the half bottle of Bells I’d picked up on the way.

  “Bad day?” Sam asked.

  I shoved the bottle into my jacket pocket. It bulged in the linen, but you can’t have everything. At least I was suitably crumpled, I thought. I shook my head.

  “Great day,” I said, “I was having problems balancing the books, but Moose solved that for me.”

  They looked at one another, and the first hint of a doubt insinuated itself into my mind. They were giving a good impression of confusion, I thought, but then I discarded the thought. Anna and Daniel must surely have picked up some tips from the actors they directed, and as for Sam, well, he’d learned impassivity from years of teaching aspirant Nobel winners.

  I changed tack, I reached into my bag, pulled out the wad of money, and threw it at them. It landed just where I had wanted it to, plum in Sam’s lap. Both Anna and Daniel stretched across the table to get a better look.

  “Nice crisp notes,” Daniel commented. “Did this Moose rob a bank?”

  “Maybe Sam did,” I said. “Let’s ask him.”

  Sam looked at the notes in that abstracted way he had. “Moose,” he said speculatively. “The Big Sleep?”

  “Farewell, My Lovely,” Daniel said impatiently. “I thought mathematicians were literate these days.”

  Sam opened his mouth to defend himself. I decided that it was time to stop playing.

  “I know you think I should give up the business,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I was coming to the same conclusion myself. But sending a nine-foot Moose to my office is not what I call a subtle hint. Nor is it funny.”

  This time there was no mistaking the confusion in their eyes. I knew them well, these three, and they knew me. They wouldn’t, I thought, continue the game this far. Would they?

  “Except he said his name was Martin,” I told them in a voice that was no longer so certain. “Martin Malloy. Looking for Thelma,”

  They glanced briefly at one another, but they didn’t speak. I saw Anna’s eyes come to rest on my jacket pocket. The concern in her eyes spoke of her innocence, spoke of all their innocence. I gulped, took the whiskey out, walked to them, and deposited it on the table. I pulled myself a chair and sat heavily on it.

  “I better start again,” I said.

  I told them all about it, each piece of stinted dialogue, and by the time I had finished I was sure they weren’t involved. Which left me with a problem. A big one.

  “So who sent him?” I asked.

  They had no answer to that, and neither did I. Like most individuals I knew people who didn’t like me, and I knew people I didn’t like, but they could hardly be called enemies. Not the kind who would go to such elaborate lengths to hoax me-never mind produce 250 crisp new ones to aid them.

  “Any dissatisfied clients?” Daniel asked.

  No disatisfied clients-no clients at all, come to think of it.

  “So what are you going to do?” Anna’s voice broke into my reverie.

  I drew myself up straight as if I had already made the decision that was only then forming in my brain.

  “Investigate,” I answered. “Find Thelma. What else can I do?”

  “What if the money’s stolen?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” I said. I picked up the bottle of Bells and dropped it lightly into the dustbin. “Let’s celebrate with a real whiskey,” I said, “now that I’m no longer filing for a divorce from the lot of you.”

  I was nicely oiled by the time I arrived at Tony’s Golders Green office.

  Street Times was peopled by hacks like Tony who’d wakened up one day to the realization that their ulcers were never going to get any smaller. A few of them got together and decided that if they were going to start developing bosses’ diseases, they might as well be their own bosses. They’d started a London-based magazine that-now in its middle age-no longer tried to compete for the youth market. In a way, I suppose, they were one of the few remaining relics of the sixties although they had long since grown away from nostalgia or angst and had settled, instead, for what they could do in a world grown increasingly hostile.

  Their new offices were, however, not exactly friendly. Workaday would be a better description, sited between a Dorothy Perkins and a grimy solicitor, with a smell courtesy of Grodzinski, the baker, giving the only hint of atmosphere. I made a mental note to pick up a sliced rye and some cheese Danish as I located Tony in his glass cubicle. His shirt sleeves, I observed, were held up by rubber bands.

  “Still preserving the image,” I commented.

  Tony glanced up from his computer and shot what, for him, approximated a smile.

  “Bloody kid bit the buttons off,” he said.

  “And how is she?”

  This time the smile was definite. “Great,” he gushed. Catching himself, he ran a hand through his mousey brown hair. “For a monster. Want a coffee?”

  “If it comes with a Danish,” I said.

  Tony frowned. “They make them by machine now,” he said, “in some warehouse out in Bromley. The smell’s bottled to give us the impression that the good old days are still with us.”

  “m pass then,” I said. I perched myself on the edge of his desk and peered around in an attempt to read his screen. “Impressive symbols,” I said. “Street Times going postmodernist?”

  Tony moved the screen away. “Accounts,” he said curtly. He didn’t need to say more; I knew all about accounts. Which brought me to my business.

  “Name of Martin Malloy mean anything to you?” I asked.

  Tony yawned. “I’m losing my knack,” he said. “You’re no longer even bothering with the foreplay.” He yawned again. “You used to at least pretend to be giving me something in exchange for my gems of information,” he explained, “but since we’ve been exiled to the Green, I
suppose you think I come cheap.”

  I shrugged. “Nothing much to offer,” I said. “Business is slow.”

  “Slow to get off the ground, or slow to die?”

  “The latter.”

  “Well, in that case,” Tony said. He hit a cue on his keyboard and the machine began to whir. “Bloody noisy, this new technology,” he said. “Now let’s see if the data base moved with us.” He typed fast with two fingers. “Malloy,” he said out loud. “Martin, Mr.”

  I waited while he squinted his eyes at the screen, and then, a few seconds later, he hit a key and the bytes of information stopped rolling. “Thought I remembered him,” Tony said. “An interesting case, Martin Malloy.”

  So he actually existed, I thought-interesting indeed.

  “Martin, aka ‘Mouse,’ Malloy,” Tony offered.

  “Mouse?”

  “A reference to his size. Never met him, but apparently he’s on the big side.”

  “You could say that.”

  “And Mouse as well on account of the fact that he never talked to the cops.” Tony’s eyes scanned rapidly down the screen. “Malloy’s a genius with numbers,” he said. “When his face first hit the front pages, the gutter press got excited and tried to pin an idiot-savant label on him. He wouldn’t play ball, so they dumped him.”

  “What was their interest in the first place?” I asked.

  “Malloy was associated with some East End hoods,” Tony answered, “part of a crack gang-you know the scene-New York comes to London. The word was that the police picked the Mouse up in an attempt to get him to finger the big men. He didn’t, and someone started to kick up a stink about habeas corpus. The cops eventually got themselves out of trouble by persuading the inland revenue to charge him with tax evasion.”

  “Tax evasion?”

  Tony grinned. “Modern, innit? The case against him was weak, but all the jury saw was a giant, and a black giant to boot, who refused to talk. They threw the book at him. Sad, really, although by the sounds of his physique, he’d have no trouble in jail.”

  I thought about the scar and wondered. “Any woman involved?” I asked.

  Tony hit another key. “Not that I can see.” He rolled the screen on again and then, finding nothing, wiped it clear. “Want me to check this out further?”