G. G. Fickling’s Honey West were male wish-fulfillment fantasies not to be taken seriously; Fran Huston’s Nicole Sweet in The Rich Get It All (1973) was an attempt at a more realistic character but was actually the work of a man (Ron S. Miller) using an androgynous pseudonym; and the first of the wave of female-by-female private eyes, Maxine O’Callaghan’s Delilah West, appeared in print in a 1974 short story but not in a novel until 1980.
Sharon McCone did not return for a second case until Ask the Cards a Question (1982), the same year her two most famous female p.i. colleagues, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone and Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, made their debuts, but has averaged about a book a year since. McCone differs from most earlier private eyes in other ways than gender: she is not the traditional loner but part of an organization, the All Souls Legal Cooperative, and her professional and personal relationships with her colleagues are important to her. This leads to Muller’s other and more subtle distinction: she was one of the pioneers of the now-general practice of equipping the series sleuth with a large
supporting cast of friends, family, and co-workers that recur from book to book. Unfortunately, few of the writers who have adopted this practice are able to do it as well as Muller does.
In 1992 she married novelist Bill Pronzini, with whom she has collaborated on three novels, beginning with Double (1984), in which McCone shares an investigation with Pronzini’s Nameless Detective; a short-story collection, many anthologies, and the valuable reference volume 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction (1986). Muller has also written series about two amateur detectives, museum curator Elena Oliverez, who appeared in The Tree of Death (1983) and two subsequent novels, and art security consultant Joanna Stark, the first of whose three appearances was The Cavalier in White (1986).
Among Muller’s honors is a 1993 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. Appropriately, “Wild Mustard,” one of the earliest Sharon McCone short stories, comes from the PWA’s first anthology, The Eyes Have It (1984).
The first time I saw the old Japanese woman, I was having brunch at the restaurant above the ruins of San Francisco’s Sutro Baths. The woman squatted on the slope, halfway between its cypress-covered top and the flooded ruins of the old bathhouse. She was uprooting vegetation and stuffing it into a green plastic sack. “I wonder what she’s picking,” I said to my friend Greg. He glanced out the window, raising one dark-blond eyebrow, his homicide cop’s eye assessing the scene. “Probably something edible that grows wild. She looks poor; it’s a good way to save grocery money.” Indeed the woman did look like the indigent old ladies one sometimes saw in Japantown; she wore a shapeless jacket and trousers, and her feet were clad in sneakers. A gray scarf wound around her head. “Have you ever been down there?” I asked Greg, motioning at the ruins. The once-elegant baths had been destroyed by fire. All that remained now were crumbling foundations, half submerged in water. Seagulls swam on its glossy surface and, beyond, the surf tossed against the rocks. “No. You?” “No. I’ve always meant to, but the path is steep and I never have the right shoes when I come here.” Greg smiled teasingly. “Sharon, you’d let your private eye’s instinct be suppressed for lack of hiking boots?” I shrugged. “Maybe I’m not really that interested.” “Maybe not.” Greg often teased me about my sleuthing instinct, but in reality I suspected he was proud of my profession. An investigator for All Souls Cooperative, the legal services plan, I had dealt with a full range of cases—from murder to the mystery of a redwood hot tub that didn’t hold water. A couple of the murders I’d solved had been in Greg’s bailiwick, and this had given rise to both rivalry and romance.
In the months that passed, my interest in the old Japanese woman was piqued. Every Sunday that we went there—and we went there often because the restaurant was a favorite—the woman was scouring the slope, foraging for…what?
One Sunday in early spring, Greg and I sat in our window booth, watching the woman climb slowly down the dirt path. To complement the season, she had changed her gray headscarf for bright yellow. The slope swarmed with people, enjoying the release from the winter rains. On the far barren side where no vegetation had taken hold, an abandoned truck leaned at a precarious angle at the bottom of the cliff near the baths. People scrambled down, inspected the old truck, then went to walk on the concrete foundations or disappeared into a nearby cave.
When the waitress brought our check, I said, “I’ve watched long enough; let’s go down there and explore.”
Greg grinned, reaching in his pocket for change. “But you don’t have the right shoes.”
“Face it, I’ll never have the right shoes. Let’s go. We can ask the old woman what she’s picking.”
He stood up. “I’m glad you finally decided to investigate her. She might be up to something sinister.”
“Don’t be silly.”
He ignored me. “Yeah, the private eye side of you has finally won out. Or is it your Indian blood? Tracking instinct, papoose?”
I glared at him, deciding that for that comment he deserved to pay the check. My one-eighth Shoshone ancestry—which for some reason had emerged to make me a black-haired throw-back in a family of Scotch-Irish towheads—had prompted
Greg’s dubbing me “papoose.” It was a nickname I did not favor.
We left the restaurant and passed through the chain link fence to the path. A strong wind whipped my long hair about my head, and I stopped to tie it back. The path wound in switch-backs past huge gnarled geranium plants and through a thicket. On the other side of it, the woman squatted, pulling up what looked like weeds. When I approached she smiled at me, a gold tooth flashing.
“Hello,” I said. “We’ve been watching you and wondered what you were picking.”
“Many good things grow here. This month it is the wild mustard.” She held up a spring. I took it, sniffing its pungency.
“You should try it,” she added. “It is good for you.”
“Maybe I will.” I slipped the yellow flower through my buttonhole and turned to Greg.
“Fat chance,” he said. “When do you ever eat anything healthy?”
“Only when you force me.”
“I have to. Otherwise it would be Hershey bars day in and day out.”
“So what? I’m not in bad shape.” It was true; even on this steep slope I wasn’t winded.
Greg smiled, his eyes moving appreciatively over me. “No, you’re not.”
We continued down toward the ruins, past a sign that advised us:
CAUTION! CLIFF AND SURE AREA EXTREMELY DANGEROUS PEOPLE HAVE BEEN SWEPT FROM THE ROCKS AND DROWNED
I stopped, balancing with my hand on Greg’s arm, and removed my shoes. “Better footsore than swept away.”
We approached the abandoned truck, following the same impulse that had drawn other climbers. Its blue paint was rusted
and there had been a fire in the engine compartment. Everything, including the seats and steering wheel, had been stripped.
“Somebody even tried to take the front axle,” a voice beside me said, “but the fire had fused the bolts.”
I turned to face a friendly looking, sunbrowned youth of about fifteen. He wore dirty jeans and a torn T-shirt.
“Yeah,” another voice added. This boy was about the same age; a wispy attempt at a moustache sprouted on his upper lip. “There’s hardly anything left, and it’s only been here a few weeks.”
“Vandalism,” Greg said.
“That’s it.” The first boy nodded. “People hang around here and drink. Late at night they get bored.” He motioned at a group of unsavory-looking men who were sitting on the edge of the baths with a couple of six-packs.
“Destruction’s a very popular sport these days.” Greg watched the men for a moment with a professional eye, then touched my elbow. We skirted the ruins and went toward the cave. I stopped at its entrance and listened to the roar of the surf.
“Come on,” Greg said.
/> I followed him inside, feet sinking into coarse sand that quickly became packed mud. The cave was really a tunnel, about eight feet high. Through crevices in the wall on the ocean side I saw spray flung high from the rolling waves at the foot of the cliff. It would be fatal to be swept down through those jagged rocks.
Greg reached the other end. I hurried as fast as my bare feet would permit and stood next to him. The precipitous drop to the sea made me clutch at his arm. Above us, rocks towered.
“I guess if you were a good climber you could go up, and then back to the road,” I said.
“Maybe, but I wouldn’t chance it. Like the sign says…”
“Right.” I turned, suddenly apprehensive. At the mouth of the tunnel, two of the disreputable men stood, beer cans in hand. “Let’s go, Greg.”
If he noticed the edge to my voice, he didn’t comment. We walked in silence through the tunnel. The men vanished. When
we emerged into the sunlight, they were back with the others, opening fresh beers. The boys we had spoken with earlier were perched on the abandoned truck, and they waved at us as we started up the path.
And so, through the spring, we continued to go to our favorite restaurant on Sundays, always waiting for a window booth. The old Japanese woman exchanged her yellow headscarf for a red one. The abandoned truck remained nose down toward the baths, provoking much criticism of the Park Service. People walked their dogs on the slope. Children balanced precariously on the ruins, in spite of the warning sign. The men lolled about and drank beer. The teenaged boys came every week and often were joined by friends at the truck.
Then, one Sunday, the old woman failed to show.
“Where is she?” I asked Greg, glancing at my watch for the third time.
“Maybe she’s picked everything there is to pick down there.”
“Nonsense. There’s always something to pick. We’ve watched her for almost a year. That old couple is down there walking their German Shepherd. The teenagers are here. That young couple we talked to last week is over by the tunnel. Where’s the old Japanese woman?”
“She could be sick. There’s a lot of flu going around. Hell, she might have died. She wasn’t all that young.”
The words made me lose my appetite for my chocolate cream pie. “Maybe we should check on her.”
Greg sighed. “Sharon, save your sleuthing for paying clients. Don’t make everything into a mystery.”
Greg had often accused me of allowing what he referred to as my “woman’s intuition” to rule my logic—something I hated even more than references to my “tracking instinct.” I knew it was no such thing; I merely gave free rein to the hunches that every good investigator follows. It was not a subject I cared to argue at the moment, however, so I let it drop.
But the next morning—Monday—I sat in the converted closet that served as my office at All Souls, still puzzling over the woman’s absence. A file on a particularly boring tenants’ dispute lay open on the desk in front of me. Finally I shut it and clattered down the hall of the big brown Victorian toward the front door.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” I told Ted, the secretary.
He nodded, his fingers never pausing as he plied his new Selectric. I gave the typewriter a resentful glance. It, to my mind, was an extravagance, and the money it was costing could have been better spent on salaries. All Souls, which charged clients on a sliding-fee scale according to their incomes, paid so low that several of the attorneys were compensated by living in free rooms on the second floor. I lived in a studio apartment in the Mission District. It seemed to get smaller every day.
Grumbling to myself, I went out to my car and headed for the restaurant above the Sutro Baths.
“The old woman who gathers wild mustard on the cliff,” I said to the cashier, “was she here yesterday?”
He paused. “I think so. Yesterday was Sunday. She’s always here on Sunday. I noticed her about eight, when we opened up. She always comes early and stays until about two.”
But she had been gone at eleven. “Do you know her? Do you know where she lives?”
He looked curiously at me. “No, I don’t.”
I thanked him and went out. Feeling foolish, I stood beside the Great Highway for a moment, then started down the dirt path, toward where the wild mustard grew. Halfway there I met the two teenagers. Why weren’t they in school? Dropouts, I guessed.
They started by, avoiding my eyes like kids will do. I stopped them. “Hey, you were here yesterday, right?”
The mustached one nodded.
“Did you see the old Japanese woman who picks the weeds?”
He frowned. “Don’t remember her.”
“When did you get here?”
“Oh, late! Really late. There was this party Saturday night.”
“I don’t remember seeing her either,” the other one said, “but maybe she’d already gone by the time we got here.”
I thanked them and headed down toward the ruins.
A little farther on, in the dense thicket through which the path wound, something caught my eye and I came to an abrupt stop. A neat pile of green plastic bags lay there, and on top of them was a pair of scuffed black shoes. Obviously she had come here on the bus, wearing her street shoes, and had only switched to sneakers for her work. Why would she leave without changing her shoes?
I hurried through the thicket toward the patch of wild mustard.
There, deep in the weeds, its color blending with their foliage, was another bag. I opened it. It was a quarter full of wilting mustard greens. She hadn’t had much time to forage, not much time at all.
Seriously worried now, I rushed up to the Great Highway. From the phone booth inside the restaurant, I dialled Greg’s direct line at the SFPD. Busy. I retrieved my dime and called All Souls.
“Any calls?”
Ted’s typewriter rattled in the background. “No, but Hank wants to talk to you.”
Hank Zahn, my boss. With a sinking heart, I remembered the conference we had had scheduled for half an hour ago. He came on the line.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Uh, in a phone booth.”
“What I mean is, why aren’t you here?”
“I can explain—”
“I should have known.”
“What?”
“Greg warned me you’d be off investigating something.”
“Greg? When did you talk to him?”
“Fifteen minutes ago. He wants you to call. It’s important.”
“Thanks!”
“Wait a minute—”
I hung up and dialed Greg again. He answered, sounding rushed. Without preamble, I explained what I’d found in the wild mustard patch.
“That’s why I called you.” His voice was unusually gentle. “We got word this morning.”
“What word?” My stomach knotted.
“An identification on a body that washed up near Devil’s Slide yesterday evening. Apparently she went in at low tide, or she would have been swept much farther to sea.”
I was silent.
“Sharon?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“You know how it is out there. The signs warn against climbing. The current is bad.”
But I’d never, in almost a year, seen the old Japanese woman near the sea. She was always up on the slope, where her weeds grew. “When was low tide, Greg?”
“Yesterday? Around eight in the morning.”
Around the time the restaurant cashier had noticed her, and several hours before the teenagers had arrived. And in between? What had happened out there?
I hung up and stood at the top of the slope, pondering. What should I look for? What could I possibly find?
I didn’t know, but I felt certain the old woman had not gone into the sea by accident. She had scaled those cliffs with the best of them.
I started down, noting the shoes and the bags in the thicket, marching resolutely past the wild mustard toward the abandoned truck.
I walked all around it, examining its exterior and interior, but it gave me no clues. Then I started toward the tunnel in the cliff.
The area, so crowded on Sundays, was sparsely populated now. San Franciscans were going about their usual business, and
visitors from the tour buses parked at nearby Cliff House were leery of climbing down here. The teenagers were the only other people in sight. They stood by the mouth of the tunnel, watching me. Something in their postures told me they were afraid. I quickened my steps.
The boys inclined their heads toward one another. Then they whirled and ran into the mouth of the tunnel.
I went after them. Again, I had the wrong shoes. I kicked them off and ran through the coarse sand. The boys were halfway down the tunnel.
One of them paused, frantically surveying a rift in the wall. I prayed he wouldn’t go that way, into the boiling waves below.
He turned and ran after his companion. They disappeared at the end of the tunnel.
I hit the hard-packed dirt and increased my pace. Near the end, I slowed and approached more cautiously. At first I thought the boys had vanished, but then I looked down. They crouched on a ledge below. Their faces were scared and young, so young.
I stopped where they could see me and made a calming motion. “Come on back up,” I said. “I won’t hurt you.”
The mustached one shook his head.
“Look, there’s no place you can go. You can’t swim in that surf.”
Simultaneously they glanced down. They looked back at me and both shook their heads.
I took a step forward. “Whatever happened, it couldn’t have—” Suddenly I felt the ground crumble. My foot slipped and I pitched forward. I fell to one knee, my arms frantically searching for a support.