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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780312183622 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/1998 |
| Edition description: | 1 ED |
| Pages: | 276 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.49(h) x 1.04(d) |
About the Author
Jack Olsen is the author of thirty books published in fourteen countries. A former bureau chief for Time, he has written for Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, People, Paris Match, and Reader's Digest. He has won the National Headliners Award, citations for excellence from Columbia and Indiana Universities, three Edgar Award nominations, and the 1990 Edgar for Doc: The Rape of the Town of Lovell. He lives on an island in Washington's Puget Sound with his wife and two children.
Read an Excerpt
1
An Easy Touch
FAY FARON ALWAYS answered her phone with a cheery “Rat Dog Dick!” even though she was well aware that some of her callers would gladly garrote her and feed her to the crabs off Pier 45. When she’d first established her one-woman detective agency, she tried answering in a businesslike contralto to create the impression that she employed a receptionist, but a friend complained that she sounded like a table dancer.
This morning’s caller was Ken Chan, her lawyer and favorite client, asking if she could drop into his office on busy Union Street to discuss an assignment. “No big deal,” he added.
“I’m halfway there,” Fay said. You could never tell what Chan meant by “no big deal.” On one of his cases she’d ended up chasing rustlers in the Arizona desert, earning a year’s supply of flank steak for herself and Beans, her Rastafarian dog and confidant.
ONE GOOD THING about Ken Chan, she reminded herself as she climbed into the rattly old car she called the Frog Prince, he’s quick pay, unlike some other lawyers. She was $68 delinquent on her veterinary bill and a week or two behind on less important accounts like electricity and telephone. Some of her clients hadn’t paid up in years, but she would rather skate naked across the Union Square ice rink than dun a customer. She considered herself a relaxed and forgiving soul, lighthearted, playful, famous among her friends as an easy touch for men, women, dogs, cats, gerbils, lizards and goldfish. It was one of the reasons she was usually broke.
THE SESSION IN Chan’s small third-floor office wasn’t five minutes old before she realized that this would be a simple research job—no tricks, false closets or mirrors. The client was an Anglo-Russian expatriate named Hope Victoria Beesley who believed she was being hustled out of several hundred thousand dollars by an odd-jobs worker whose name abruptly appeared on her property deed as co-owner. Chan said that the elderly widow’s house was worth $500,000 and stood out from its Sunset District neighbors by virtue of the sheen on its lustrous green roof. The inside was so lavishly decorated that the place had been featured in Better Homes and Gardens alongside rococo old mansions from Nob Hill and Pacific Heights.
“What’s the guy’s name?” Fay asked, pencil poised above the legal-size yellow paper that she customarily used to take notes. She was acutely aware that other investigators utilized minicassette tape recorders resembling Fig Newtons; she planned to buy one when she caught up on her bills or at the turn of the millennium, whichever came first.
“Teeny,” she heard Chan answer. “Danny Teeny. A big guy. The client says he looks like a beached sea elephant. See what you can find on him, will you, Fay?”
She asked how to spell the name. Despite a high IQ and prodigious verbal acuity, as shown in her weekly newspaper column “Ask Rat Dog” and other published and unpublished writings, Fay had never heard a name she couldn’t misspell or mispronounce. “God gave you so much, dear,” a teacher had told her in childhood. “He just didn’t give you spelling.”
Chan said, “T-E-N-E.”
“Odd name,” said the PI. “That’ll make things easier. How many T-E-E-N-Es can there be?”
“Two E’s,” he reminded her. “T-E-N-E. How much time do you need?”
Fay asked herself, Why are lawyers always in a hurry? She collected her notes, zipped her down vest from Eddie Bauer over her flowered print dress from Laura Ashley, smiled sweetly and said, “Will yesterday be soon enough?”
HASTENED TO THE GRAVE. Copyright © 1998 by Jack Olsen. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.