Edgar Poe - The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

Chee opened the door and stood in it, looking back. Wells was taking his pyjamas out of his suitcase. "So what advice do you have for me? What can you tell me about my witch case?"

"To tell the absolute truth, Chee, I'm not into witches," Wells said. "Haven't been since I was a boy."

"But we don't really have a witch case now," Chee said. He spoke earnestly. "The shoes were still on, so the skin wasn't taken from the soles of his feet. No bones missing from the neck. You need those to make corpse powder."

Wells was pulling his undershirt over his head. Chee hurried.

"What we have now is another little puzzle," Chee said. "If you're not collecting stuff for corpse powder, why cut the skin off this guy's hands?"

"I'm going to take a shower," Wells said. "Got to get my Begay back to L. A. tomorrow."

Outside the temperature had dropped. The air moved softly from the west, carrying the smell of rain. Over the Utah border, over the Cococino Rim, over the Rainbow Plateau, lightning flickered and glowed. The storm had formed. The storm was moving. The sky was black with it. Chee stood in the darkness, listening to the mutter of thunder, inhaling the perfume, exulting in it.

He climbed into the truck and started it. How had they set it up, and why? Perhaps the FBI agent who knew Begay had been ready to retire. Perhaps an accident had been arranged. Getting rid of the assistant prosecutor who knew the witness would have been even simpler-a matter of hiring him away from the government job. That left no one who knew this minor witness was not Simon Begay. And who was he? Probably they had other Navajos from the Los Angeles community stealing cars for them. Perhaps that's what had suggested the scheme. To most white men all Navajos looked pretty much alike, just as in his first years at college all Chee had seen in white men was pink skin, freckles, and light-coloured eyes. And what would the impostor say? Chee grinned. He'd say whatever was necessary to cast doubt on the prosecution, to cast the fatal 'reasonable doubt,' to make-as Wells had put it-the U. S. District Attorney look like a horse's ass.

Chee drove into the rain twenty miles west of Kayenta. Huge, cold drops drummed on the pickup roof and turned the highway into a ribbon of water. Tomorrow the backcountry roads would be impassable. As soon as they dried and the washouts had been repaired, he'd go back to the Tsossie hogan, and the Tso place, and to all the other places from which the word would quickly spread. He'd tell the people that the witch was in custody of the FBI and was gone forever from the Rainbow Plateau.

Marcia Muller has won her way into the record books of detective fiction as the creator of the first well-known, fully licensed, totally believable, hard-boiled female private investigator. While Muller has used two other women sleuths, both amateurs, Sharon McCone remains her best-known creation.

Muller was born in Detroit and studied English and journalism at the University of Michigan before moving to California, where she worked on the staff of Sunset magazine, as an interviewer in San Francisco for the University of Michigan 's Institute of Social Research, and as a partner in Invisible Ink, a consulting service for writers.

Although Maxine O'Callaghan introduced a female private eye, Delilah West, in a 1974 short story, Muller's first McCone mystery, «Edwin of the Iron Shoes,» published in 1977, is credited with establishing conventions for such characters that are still observed today. Muller provided her sleuth with a family of characters that includes professional associates at the All Souls Legal Cooperative in San Francisco. She also endowed her with a sense of humour, a mission to see justice prevail, and a concern for the powerless. Many of McCone's cases arise from problems faced by people whom she knows personally, and they take place in notably realistic settings, generally in California. The verbal skills-in particular, the interviewing expertise-that McCone employs are very significant to solving her cases, making verbal acuity another strength emulated by later writers.

Muller's two other series characters are Elena Oliverez, curator at the Museum of Mexican Arts in Santa Barbara, and Joanna Stark, who heads an art security firm. The books in which these characters appear often focus on secrets of the past that affect the present.

In addition to producing fiction, Muller is an accomplished critic and anthologist having collaborated on a dozen books, including three detective novels written with her husband, Bill Pronzini. In «Double,» for instance, the story is told in alternating chapters from the points of view of Muller's McCone and Pronzini's detective, Nameless.

«Benny's Space» provides an excellent illustration of Muller's technique: McCone's confident personality emerges; the problem she confronts is contemporary; the sociology of the neighbourhood is genuine; the dialogue rings true; and, despite the brevity the form requires, Muller's quick sketches bring even the secondary characters so fully to life that the reader is truly moved by their circumstances.

Amorfina Angeles was terrified, and I could fully empathise with her. Merely living in the neighbourhood would have terrified me-all the more so had I been harassed by members of one of its many street gangs.

Hers was a rundown side street in the extreme southeast of San Francisco, only blocks from the drug – and crime – infested Sunnydale public housing projects. There were bars over the windows and grilles on the doors of the small stucco houses; dead and vandalised cars stood at the broken curbs; in the weed-choked yard next door, a mangy guard dog of indeterminate breed paced and snarled. Fear was written on this street as plainly as the graffiti on the walls and fences. Fear and hopelessness and a dull resignation to a life that none of its residents would willingly have opted to lead.

I watched Mrs. Angeles as she crossed her tiny living room to the front window, pulled the edge of the curtain aside a fraction, and peered out at the street. She was no more than five feet tall, with rounded shoulders, sallow skin, and graying black hair that curled in short, unruly ringlets. Her shapeless flower-printed dress did little to conceal a body made soft and fleshy by bad food and too much childbearing. Although she was only forty, she moved like a much older woman.

Her attorney and my colleague, Jack Stuart of All Souls Legal Cooperative, had given me a brief history of his client when he'd asked me to undertake an investigation on her behalf. She was a Filipina who had emigrated to the states with her husband in search of their own piece of the good life that was reputed to be had here. But as with many of their countrymen and women, things hadn't worked out as the Angeleses had envisioned: first Amorfina's husband had gone into the import-export business with a friend from Manila; the friend absconded two years later with Joe Angeles's life savings. Then, a year after that, Joe was killed in a freak accident at a construction site where he was working. Amorfina and their six children were left with no means of support, and in the years since Joe's death their circumstances had gradually been reduced to this two-bedroom rental cottage in one of the worst areas of the city.

Mrs. Angeles, Jack told me, had done the best she could for her family, keeping them off the welfare rolls with a daytime job at a Mission district sewing factory and night-time work doing alterations. As they grew older, the children helped with part-time jobs. Now there were only two left at home: sixteen-year-old Alex and fourteen-year-old Isabel. It was typical of their mother, Jack said, that in the current crisis she was more concerned for them than for herself.