Sara Paretsky: Blacklist

As I got my bearings, I whistled under my breath: the original owners had done things on a grand scale. Besides the mansion itself, the property held a garage, stables, greenhouse, even a cottage, which I assumed was for the staff who tended the grounds-or would tend the grounds if someone could afford to have the work done. The estate agent wasn’t putting much into maintenance-an ornamental pond, which lay between the mansion and the outbuildings, was clogged with leaves and dead lilies. I even saw a carp floating belly-up in the middle. A series of formal gardens was overgrown with weeds, while no one had mowed the meadows for some time.

The neglect, and the number of buildings, was oppressive. If you were grandiose enough to buy such a place, how could you possibly take care of it? Circling each building, trying to see if there were holes in foundations or windows, looked overwhelming. I squared my shoulders. Whining doubles the job, my mother used to say when I balked at washing dishes. I decided to work from smallest to largest, which meant inspecting the cottage first.

By the time I’d finished prying at windows, balancing on fence posts to see if any of the roof glass of the greenhouse was broken, and making sure that the doors to the stables and garage were not just secure, but showed no recent signs of tampering, it was past noon. I was hungry and thirsty, but dark still comes early the first week in March. I didn’t want to waste daylight searching for food, so I grimly set about circling the house.

It was an enormous building. From a distance it looked graceful, vaguely Federal in design, with its slender columns and square facades, but all I cared about was four floors’ worth of windows, doors at ground level on all four sides, doors leading off upper-level balconies-a burglar’s paradise.

Still, all the windows on the two lower floors held the telltale markers of a security system. I checked some on the ground floor with a meter, but didn’t see anyplace where the current was interrupted.

People did come onto the land: beer bottles, the silver foil from potato chip bags, crumpled cigarette packs, the inevitable condom, told their tales. Maybe Ms. Graham was only seeing local kids looking for privacy.

I was debating whether to shinny up the pillars to check the balcony doors when a squad car pulled up. A middle-aged cop came over to me at an unhurried gait.

“You got some reason to be out here?”

“Probably the same one you do.” I waved my meter toward the house. “I’m with Florey and Kapper, the mechanical engineers. We heard some woman thinks little green men are hovering around here in the night. I’m just checking the circuits.”

“You set something off in the garage,” the cop said.

I smiled. “Oh, dear: I was trying brute force. They warned us against that at IIT, but I wanted to see if someone could actually lift those doors. Sorry to bring you out here for nothing.”

“Not to worry: you saved me from our eighty-third call to look at suspicious mail.”

“It’s a hassle, isn’t it,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask for my ID. “I’ve got friends in the Chicago PD who feel stretched to the limit these days.” “Same out here. We’ve got the reservoir and a bunch of power stations we have to keep an eye on. It’s about time the FBI nailed this anthrax bastard-we waste an unbelievable amount of manpower, responding to hysterical calls about letters from old Aunt Madge who forgot to put her return address on the envelope.”

We hashed over the current situation the way everyone did these days.

Police forces were badly affected, because they had to gear up for incalculable terror attacks and couldn’t keep up with their local crime loads. Drive-by shootings, which had dropped to their lowest level in decades, had jumped in the last six months.

The cop’s cell phone rang. He grunted into it. “I’d better be going. You okay out here?”

“Yeah. I’m taking off, too. Place looks clean to me, except for the usual garbage-” I pointed a toe at an empty cigarette wrapper near the foundation. “I don’t see how anyone could be using the place.”

“You find Osama bin Laden in the attic, give me a call: I could use the extra credit.” He waved good-bye and got back into his squad car.

I couldn’t think of anything else to look for, and, anyway, it was getting too dark to see clearly. I walked to the edge of the gardens, where they faded into a substantial woods, and looked up at the house. From here I could see the attic windows, but they presented a blank face to the sky.

I had to go through various security checkpoints to reach Geraldine Graham. Anodyne Park was a well-gated community, with a guard at the entrance who wrote down my license plate number and asked my business before phoning Ms. Graham for permission to let me enter. As I snaked along the curved road that suburban developers relish, I saw that the complex was bigger than it appeared from the outside. Besides the town houses, apartment buildings and a nursing home the size of a small hospital, it held a little row of shops. Several golfing quartets, undeterred by the dreary weather, were leaving their carts outside a bar at the edge of the shops. I ran into a grocery store designed like an Alpine chalet for a bottle of overpriced water and a banana. Getting my blood sugar up would help me interview my client’s mother.

When she opened the door, I was disconcerted: Geraldine Graham looked so much like her son that I could almost believe it was Darraugh in the doorway dressed in rose silk. She had his long face and prominent nose and eyes of the same frosty blue, although hers were clouded now with age. The only real difference was her hair: over the years Darraugh’s blond has bleached to white; hers was dark, a white-streaked nut-brown that owed nothing to a bottle. She held herself as ramrod straight as her son. I pictured her mother tying her to a Victorian backboard which she then passed on to Darraugh.

It was only when Geraldine Graham moved away from the doorway and the light caught her face that I saw how deeply lined it was. “You’re the young woman my son sent out to see who is breaking into Larchmont Hall, eh?” She had the high fluting voice of deep age. “I wondered whether that policeman was going to arrest you, but you seemed to talk your way out of it. What made him arrive?”

“You were watching me, ma’am?”

“The hobbies of the elderly. Peeping through windows, prying into locks. Although I suppose my hobby is your livelihood. I’m making a cup of tea. I can offer you one. Or I have bourbon: I know detectives are used to stronger beverages than tea.”

I laughed. “That’s only Philip Marlowe. We modern detectives can’t drink in the middle of the day: it puts us to sleep.”

She moved down the short hallway to her kitchen. I followed and felt a stab of envy when I saw the double-door refrigerator and the porcelain cooktop. My own kitchen was last remodeled two tenants back. I wondered what it would cost to install an island cooktop like this one, with sleek electrical burners that looked painted into the surface. Probably two years of mortgage payments.

Ms. Graham saw me staring and said, “Those are designed to keep the old from burning down the house. They turn off automatically if there’s no pan on them, or after some minutes if you haven’t set a special timer. Although we’re told the old should burn and rave at the end of day.”

When she slowly pushed a small stepladder into position to reach her tea bags, I moved forward to help. She waved me off with a brusqueness like her son’s.

“Just because I’m old and slow doesn’t mean the young and swift need muscle me away. My son keeps wanting to install a housekeeper here so I can vegetate in front of the television or behind my binoculars. As you can see, we’d be tripping over each other all day in this tiny space. I was glad to give up all that nonsense when I moved out of the big house. Housekeepers, gardeners, you can’t take a step without consulting someone else’s feelings and timetables. One of my old maids comes every day to tidy and prepare meals-and to make sure I haven’t died in the night. That’s enough intrusion.”