The Best of Sisters in Crime (5 page)

My mouth was
stiff from smiling politely, and I had just about written Jerry off as a
possible suspect—he was too busy to burglarize anyone. I took a sip of wine and
looked at my watch.

Jerry didn’t
notice the gesture. “The screenwriting class was terrible—the instructor
actually wanted you to write stuff. And photography—how can you see women in
the darkroom, let alone make any moves when you smell like chemicals?”

I had no answer
for that. Maybe my own efforts at photography accounted for my not having a
lover at the moment. . . .

“Finally I found
All the Best People,” Jerry went on. “Now I really do all right. And it’s
opened up a whole new world of dating to me—eighties-style. I’ve answered ads
in the paper, placed my own ad too. You’ve always got to ask that they send a
photo, though, so you can screen out the dogs. There’s Weekenders, they plan
trips. When I don’t want to go out of the house, I use the Intro Line—that’s a
phone club you can join, where you call in for three bucks and either talk to
one person or on a party line. There’s a video exchange where you can make
tapes and trade them with people so you’ll know you’re compatible before you
set up a meeting. I do all right.”

He paused
expectantly, as if he thought I was going to ask how I could get in on all
these good eighties-style deals.

“Jerry,” I said,
“have you read any good books lately?”

“Have
I . . .
what?”

“What do you do
when you’re not dating?”

“I work. I told
you, I’m in sales—”

“Do you ever
spend time alone?”

“Doing what?”

“Oh, just being
alone. Puttering around the house or working at hobbies. Just thinking.”

“Are you crazy?
What kind of a computer glitch are you, anyway?” He stood, all five-foot-three
of him quivering indignantly. “Believe me, I’m going to complain to Best People
about setting me up with you. They described you as ‘vivacious,’ but you’ve
hardly said a word all evening!”

Morton Stone was
a nice man, a sad man. He insisted on buying me dinner at his favorite Chinese
restaurant. He spent the evening asking me questions about myself and my job as
a legal researcher; while he listened, his fingers played nervously with the
silverware. Later, over a brandy in a nearby bar, he told me how his wife had
died the summer before, of cancer. He told me about his promise to her that he
would get on with his life, find someone new, and be happy. This was the first
date he’d arranged through All the Best People; he’d never done anything like
that in his life. He’d only tried them because he wasn’t good at meeting
people. He had a good job, but it wasn’t enough. He had money to travel, but it
was no fun without someone to share the experience with. He would have liked to
have children, but he and his wife had put it off until they’d be financially
secure, and then they’d found out about the cancer. . . .

I felt guilty as
hell about deceiving him, and for taking his time, money, and hope. But by the
end of the evening I’d remembered a woman friend who was just getting over a
disastrous love affair. A nice, sad woman who wasn’t good at meeting people;
who had a good job, loved to travel, and longed for children. . . .

Bob Gillespie
was a sailing instructor on a voyage of self-discovery. He kept prefacing his
remarks with statements such as, “You know, I had a great insight into myself
last week.” That was nice; I was happy for him. But I would rather have gotten
to know his surface persona before probing into his psyche. Like the two
previous men, Bob didn’t fit any of the recognizable profiles of the
professional burglar, nor had he had any great insight into how All the Best
People worked.

Ted Horowitz was
a recovering alcoholic, which was admirable. Unfortunately he was also the
confessional type. He began every anecdote with the admission that it had
happened “back when I was drinking.” He even felt compelled to describe how he
used to throw up on his ex-wife. His only complaint about Best People—this with
a stern look at my wineglass—was that they kept referring him to women who
drank.

Jim Rogers was
an adman who wore safari clothes and was into guns. I refrained from telling
him that I own two .38 Specials and am a highly qualified marksman, for fear it
would incite him to passion. For a little while I considered him seriously for
the role of burglar, but when I probed the subject by mentioning a friend
having recently been ripped off, Jim became enraged and said the burglar ought
to be hunted down and shot.

“I’m going about
this all wrong,” I said to Hank.

It was ten in
the morning, and we were drinking coffee at the big round table in All Souls’
kitchen. The night before I’d spent hours on the phone with an effervescent
insurance underwriter who was going on a whale-watching trip with Weekenders,
the group that god-awful Jerry Hale had mentioned. He’d concluded our
conversation by saying he’d be sure to note in his pocket organizer to call me
the day after he returned. Then I’d been unable to sleep and had sat up hours
longer, drinking too much and listening for burglars and brooding about
loneliness.

I wasn’t
involved with anyone at the time—nor did I particularly want to be. I’d just
emerged from a long-term relationship and was reordering my life and getting
used to doing things alone again. I was fortunate in that my job and my little
house—which I’m constantly remodeling—filled most of the empty hours. But I
could still understand what Morton and Bob and Ted and Jim and even that
dreadful Jerry were suffering from.

It was the
little things that got to me. Like the times I went to the supermarket and
everything I felt like having for dinner was packaged for two or more, and I
couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to have over to share it with. Or the times I’d
be driving around a curve in the road and come upon a spectacular view, but
have no one in the passenger seat to point it out to. And then there were the
cold sheets on the other side of the wide bed on a foggy San Francisco night.

But I got
through it, because I reminded myself that it wasn’t going to be that way
forever. And when I couldn’t convince myself of that, I thought about how it
was better to be totally alone than alone
with
someone. That’s how
I
got through the cold, foggy nights. But I was discovering there was
a whole segment of the population that availed itself of dating services and
telephone conversation clubs and video exchanges. Since I’d started using Best
People, I’d been inundated by mail solicitations and found that the array of
services available to singles was astonishing.

Now I told Hank,
“I simply can’t stand another evening making polite chitchat in a bar. If I
listen to another ex-wife story, I’ll scream. I don’t want to know what these
guys’ parents did to them at age ten that made the whole rest of their lives a
mess. And besides, having that security guard on my house is costing Dick
Morris a bundle that he can ill afford.”

Helpfully Hank
said, “So change your approach.”

“Thanks for your
great suggestion.” I got up and went out to the desk that belongs to Ted
Smalley, our secretary, and dug out a phone directory. All the Best People wasn’t
listed. My file on the case was on the kitchen table. I went back there—Hank
had retreated to his office—and checked the introductory letter they’d sent me;
it showed nothing but a post-office box. The zip code told me it was the main
post office at Seventh and Mission streets.

I went back and
borrowed Ted’s phone book again, then looked up the post office’s number. I
called it, got the mail-sorting supervisor, and identified myself as Sharon
from Federal Express. “We’ve got a package here for All the Best People
Introduction Service,” I said, and read off the box number. “That’s all I’ve
got—no contact phone, no street address.”

“Assholes,” she
said wearily. “Why do they send them to a P.O. box when they know you can’t
deliver to one? For that matter, why do you accept them when they’re addressed
like that?”

“Damned if I
know. I only work here.”

“I can’t give
out the street address, but I’ll supply the contact phone.” She went away, came
back, and read it off to me.

“Thanks.” I
depressed the disconnect button and redialed.

A female voice
answered with only the phone number. I went into my Federal Express routine.
The woman gave me the address without hesitation, in the 200 block of Gough
Street near the Civic Center. After I hung up I made one more call: to a friend
on the
Chronicle.
J. D. Smith was in the city room and
agreed to leave a few extra business cards with the security guard in the
newspaper building’s lobby.

All the Best
People’s offices took up the entire second floor of a renovated Victorian. I
couldn’t imagine why they needed so much space, but they seemed to be doing a
landslide business, because phones in the offices on either side of the long
corridor were ringing madly. I assumed it was because the summer vacation
season was approaching and San Francisco singles were getting anxious about
finding someone to make travel plans with.

The receptionist
was more or less what I expected to find in the office of that sort of
business: petite, blond, sleekly groomed, and expensively dressed, with an
elegant manner. She took J. D.’s card down the hallway to see if their director
was available to talk with me about the article I was writing on the singles
scene. I paced around the tiny waiting room, which didn’t even have chairs.
When the young woman came back, she said Dave Lester would be happy to see me
and led me to an office at the rear.

The office was
plush, considering the attention that had been given to decor in the rest of
the suite. It had a leather couch and chairs, a wet bar, and an immense
mahogany desk. There wasn’t so much as a scrap of paper or a file folder to
suggest anything resembling work was done there. I couldn’t see Dave Lester, because
he had swiveled his high-backed chair around toward the window and was
apparently contemplating the wall of the building next door. The receptionist
backed out the door and closed it. I cleared my throat, and the chair turned
toward me.

The man in the
chair was god-awful Jerry Hale.

Our faces must
have been mirror images of shock. I said, “What are
you
doing here?”

He said, “You’re
not J. D. Smith. You’re Sharon McCone!” Then he frowned down at the business
card he held. “Or is Sharon McCone really J. D. Smith?”

I collected my
scattered wits and said, “Which are you— Dave Lester or Jerry Hale?”

He merely stared
at me, his expression wavering between annoyance and amusement.

I added, “I’m a
reporter doing a feature article on the singles scene.”

“So Marie said.
How did you get this address? We don’t publish it because we don’t want all
sorts of crazies wandering in. This is an exclusive service; we screen our
applicants carefully.”

They certainly
hadn’t screened me; otherwise they’d have uncovered numerous deceptions. I
said, “Oh, we newspaper people have our sources.”

“Well, you
certainly misrepresented yourself to us.”

“And you
misrepresented yourself to
me!”

He shrugged. “It’s
part of the screening process, for our clients’ protection. We realize most
applicants would shy away from a formal interview situation, so we have the
first date take the place of that.”

“You yourself go
out with
all
the women who
apply?”

“A fair amount,
using a different name every time, of course, in case any of them know each
other and compare notes.” At my astonished look he added, “What can I say? I
like women. But naturally I have help. And Marie”—he motioned at the closed
door— “and one of the secretaries check out the guys.”

No wonder Jerry
had no time to read. “Then none of the things you told me were true? About
being into the bar scene and the church groups and the health club?”

“Sure they were.
My previous experiences were what led me to buy Best People from its former
owners. They hadn’t studied the market, didn’t know how to make a go of it in
the eighties.”

“Well, you’re
certainly a good spokesman for your own product. But how come you kept
referring me to other clients? We didn’t exactly part on amiable terms.”

“Oh, that was
just a ruse to get out of there. I had another date. I’d seen enough to know
you weren’t my type. But I decided you were still acceptable; we get a lot of
men looking for your kind.”

The “acceptable”
rankled. “What exactly is my kind?”

“Well, I’d call
you . . . introspective. Bookish? No, not exactly. A little offbeat? Maybe
intense? No. It’s peculiar . . . you’re peculiar—”

“Stop right
there!”

Jerry—who would
always be god-awful Jerry and never Dave Lester to me—stood up and came around
the desk. I straightened my posture. From my five-foot-six vantage point I
could see the beginnings of a bald spot under his artfully styled hair. When he
realized where I was looking, his mouth tightened. I took a perverse delight in
his discomfort.