Marcia Muller: McCone And Friends

Gordon Tillis cleared his throat. “This strikes me as a good example of how we all rely too heavily on appearances in forming our opinions of people. Not a good practice; it’s too easy to jump to the wrong conclusion.”

Sam looked down, shuffling his feet. “Uh, I hope you ladies won’t hold this against me,” he said after a moment. “I’d still like to fly you up to the valley.”

“Fine with us,” Angie replied.

“Speaking of that-”I glanced at my watch “-isn’t it time you got going?”

Gordon and I walked out onto the field with them. The two men preflighting the Piper next to Sam’s plane cast admiring glances at Angie and Melissa, and I was surprised when one of them winked at me. When we got to the Cessna, I snapped my fingers and said, “Oh, there’s something I want to check, just out of curiosity. May I see the paperwork Sam gave you for this flight, Gordon?”

Sam frowned, but Gordon, as prearranged, handed the folder to me. I opened it to the weight-and-balance calculation that a pilot always works up in order to know the best way to arrange the passengers and their baggage.

“Uh-huh,” I said, “fuel, pilot…Sam, you’ve really got to stop eating that junk food! Passengers one and two, plus purses and briefcases. Additional baggage stowed aft. Hmmm.”

“Just get to the point.” Sam said, glancing around nervously.

“In a minute.” I slipped inside the Cessna and checked the rear compartment. One bag of takeout. One large bag of takeout.

Sam was leaning in, reaching for my arm.

“Golden Arches?” I asked.

“KFC. Leave it!”

I picked it up. Heavy KFC.

“Sam,” I said, “you really ought to go on a diet.”

After the DEA agents who had been hanging around the Piper with their warrant had opened the take-out containers full of cocaine and placed Sam under arrest, Gordon, Angie, Melissa and I slowly walked back to Wide Horizons in subdued silence.

“What I don’t understand,” Gordon finally said, “is why he always entered the stuff he was carrying on the weight-and- balance.”

“To cover himself. He knew if you caught him stowing any package he hadn’t entered, you’d start watching him. But why he put down the accurate weight for the bag is beyond me. Nobody would believe he could eat that much for lunch-even with his weight problem.”

Gordon sighed. “And here I thought Sam was just getting fat because of bad eating habits, when all the while he was eating too well on his profits from drug running.”

I grinned at him. “Widening his horizons at the expense of Wide Horizons,” I said.

There are some days that just ought to be called off. Mondays are always hideous: The trouble starts when I dribble toothpaste all over my clothes or lock my keys in the car and doesn’t let up till I stub my toe on the bed stand at night. Tuesdays are usually when the morning paper doesn’t get delivered. Wednesdays are better, but if I get to feeling optimistic and go to aerobics class at the Y, chances are ten to one that I’ll wrench my back. Thursdays-forget it. And by five on Friday, all I want to do is crawl under the covers and hide.

You can see why I love weekends.

The day I got assigned to the Boydston case was a Tuesday.

Cautious optimism, that was what I was nursing. The paper lay folded tidily on the front steps of All Souls Legal Cooperative-where I both live and work as a private investigator. I read it and drank my coffee, not even burning my tongue. Nobody I knew had died, and there was even a cheerful story below the fold in the Metro section. By the time I’d looked at the comics and found all five strips that I bother to read were funny, I was feeling downright perky.

Well why not? I wasn’t making a lot of money, but my job was secure. The attic room I occupied was snug and comfy. I had a boyfriend, and even if the relationship was about as deep as a desert stream on the Fourth of July, he could be taken most anyplace. And to top it off, this wasn’t a bad hair day.

All that smug reflection made me feel charitable toward my fellow humans-or at least my coworkers and their clients-so I refolded the paper and carried it from the kitchen of our big Victorian to the front parlor and waiting-room so others could partake. A man was sitting on the shabby maroon sofa: bald and chubby, dressed in lime green polyester pants and a strangely patterned green, blue and yellow shirt that reminded me of drawings of sperm cells. One thing for sure, he’d never get run over by a bus while he was wearing that getup.

He looked at me as I set the paper on the coffee table and said, “How ya doin’, little lady?”

Now, there’s some contention that the word “lady” is demeaning. Frankly, it doesn’t bother me: when I hear it I know I’m looking halfway presentable and haven’t got something disgusting caught between my front teeth. No, what rankled was the work “little.” When you’re five foot three the word reminds you of things you’d just as soon not swell on-like being unable to see over people’s heads at parades, or the little-girly clothes that designers of petite sizes are always trying to foist on you. “Little,” especially at nine in the morning, doesn’t cut it.

I glared up the guy. Unfortunately, he’d gotten to his feet and I had to look up.

He didn’t notice I was annoyed; maybe he was nearsighted. “Sure looks like it’s gonna be a fine day,” he said.

Now I identified his accent-pure Texas. Another strike against him, because of Uncle Roy, but that’s another story.

“It would’ve been a nice day,” I muttered.

“Ma’am?”

That did it! The first-and last-time somebody had gotten away with calling me “Ma’am” was on my twenty-eighth birthday two weeks before, when a bag boy tried to help me out of Safeway with my two feather-light sacks of groceries. It was not a precedent I wanted followed.

Speaking more clearly, I said, “It would’ve been a nice day, except for you.”

He frowned. “What’d I do?”

“Try ‘little,’ a Texas accent, and ‘ma’am!”

“Ma’am are you all right?”

“Aaargh!” I fled the parlor and ran up the stairs to the office of my boss, Sharon McCone.

Sharon is my friend, mentor, and sometimes-heaven help me-custodian of my honesty. She’s been all those things since she hired me a few years ago to assist her at the co-op. Not that our association is always smooth sailing: She can be a stern taskmaster and she harbors a devilish sense of humor that surfaces at inconvenient times. But she is always been there for me, even during the death throes of my marriage to my pig-selfish, perpetual-student husband, Doug Grayson. And ever since I’ve stopped referring to him as “that bastard Doug,” she’s decided I’m a grown-up who can be trusted to manage her own life-within limits.

That morning she was sitting behind her desk with her chair swiveled around so she could look out the bay window at the front of the Victorian. I’ve found her in that pose hundreds of times: sunk low on her spine, long legs crossed, dark eyes brooding. The view is of dowdy houses across the triangular park that divides the street, and usually hazed by San Francisco fog, but it doesn’t matter: whatever she’s seeing is strictly inside her head, and she says she gets her best insights into her cases that way.