The Puzzled Heart Read Free Page B

Xerox copier room that, as you will vividly remember, I ran in that dreary law school. I hadn’t seen her since I left there, but suddenly she turned up, offering me a job in a detective agency. The agency was to consist of Toni and me, and if it worked out, in a year or so I would be a partner. Of course I looked at Toni with some bemusement as she laid out this proposition. We were meeting in the office Toni had hired for her new undertaking. It was small and looked exactly like a private detective’s office, my idea of which, perhaps like Toni’s, had come from movies and TV shows about male detectives. There were two desks, two chairs besides the desk chairs, a rather grubby window, and a filing cabinet. One of the desks boasted a notebook computer, a telephone, and a fax machine. The other seemed to be waiting, hopefully I thought, for its occupant to arrive.” Harriet paused to smile sympathetically at Kate before continuing.
    “What really astonished me most about the whole business was Toni’s looks—well, not so much her looks as her clothes and makeup. When I had known her at the law school, she had been thin and rather gawky, dressed always in jeans and, depending on the weather, either a T-shirt or a sweatshirt, both oversize. She now looked like something they might feature in one of those magazines devoted to fashion and the way to get yourself up if you want everyone to look at you with either admiration or horror. I wascertainly looking at Toni. Her thinness had become elegance. Her clothes, even to my ignorant eye, were smashing in their expensive simplicity; they, together with her makeup and hairstyle, managed to convey simultaneously a come-on and a don’t-mess-with-me message. The whole getup was staggering.
    “ ‘Like it?’ Toni said. ‘I’ve done myself over. This is a power suit, in case you didn’t know.’ ‘I didn’t,’ I said.
    “ ‘Of course
you
mustn’t feel guilty,’ Toni said, seeing me dismayed at the fact that I hadn’t changed an iota. ‘I want you to look just like you look. That’s part of the point of my offer—the way you look, your age, your cleverness, the way you handled all those frightful law school professor bullies, the fact, as you so often pointed out, that nobody even sees old women, let alone is able to describe them. All that’s what I want. How about it?’
    “Well, what did I have to lose? An adventure is an adventure. I even quoted her a poem I’d recently come upon by Sharon Barba called ‘The Cycle of Women’:
    Until she rises as though from the sea
not on the half-shell this time
nothing to laugh at
and not as delicate as he imagined her
a woman big-hipped, beautiful, and fierce.
    “I wanted to add
old
in that last line, but it’s not my poem. Still, that was me: big-hipped, old, and fierce.
    “So we settled down to be a detective agency. Itwas clear from the beginning that we were the perfect pair of operators. Toni got their attention and I worked where their attention wasn’t. We followed errant wives, husbands and lovers, and missing children. That part was pretty grim; they were mostly teenagers who didn’t want to go home when found, but at least the parents and the child were forced to talk to one another, which often hadn’t happened much before.” Here Harriet paused for another look at Kate, who smiled weakly, attempting reassurance.
    Harriet continued. “Toni insisted we each have a licensed handgun. I refused, hating guns, but in the end I agreed, figuring I could always stash the thing in my capacious purse and never use it. I was wrong about that. We were hired by a boyfriend to tag along, unseen of course, with a young woman jogger who insisted on running just at dawn. I said I didn’t think we undertook bodyguard work, but Toni said she ran anyway, and if the guy paid our rates, why not? So Toni ran when the girlfriend ran, and it’s very likely that her being in sight and looking as though she could be carrying a