Five Fortunes Read Online Free PDF Page A

something to do with it. But we have an agency in L.A., and one in San Diego.
    We’re thinking about a third one, maybe San Francisco.”
    “Do you have a specialty?”
    “No, we do everything. But we only hire women.”
    “Really!”
    “Of course. They’re more curious, and more patient. As a matter of fact, we only hire big fat women.”
    Rae shouted with delight.
    “I’m serious,” said Carter. “Nobody looks at fat women, they can go anywhere. They can sit for hours in a hotel lobby, nobody hits on them. Nobody wonders what they’re doing there.”
    “And how on earth do you locate big fat women detectives?”
    24 / Beth Gutcheon
    “We train them. We’re beating the applicants off with sticks.
    Everyone wants to work for us, and nobody ever quits.”
    “Have you ever hired men?”
    “We did at first. But the women are so good at it. Also, I don’t like my people to carry guns. Lot of men have a problem with that.”
    “But isn’t it dangerous? To do what you do, without a gun?”
    “I think it’s more dangerous with one. But no one has to agree with us. If they don’t, they can work for someone else.”
    “I think I’d like to apply for a job,” said Rae, “if you open an office in San Francisco.”
    “You’re not really fat enough, but I can use a good operative in your age range,” said Carter. “For instance, can you tell me—what’s going on with this one?”
    “Which one?” asked Rae. She was on board immediately, ready to be trained.
    “This one right ahead of us, on the left.” She indicated Laurie.
    They both watched as the redhead talked and gestured with her hands. Laurie listened, nodding from time to time. Once she laughed.
    Sometimes she shook her head and clucked in sympathy.
    “Something terrible has happened to her,” said Carter.
    “You don’t mean the redhead?” Rae wanted her to mean the redhead, because she knew the answer, at least partly; she’d heard it last night in the steam room. It started with an alleged fibroid tumor the size of a cantaloupe.
    “No, the other one. There’s something in the way she holds her shoulders, and something around the eyes…and besides, she looks familiar to me. Not to you?”
    “I don’t think so…”
    They walked in silence, both now watching Laurie. They were approaching The Cloisters again, coming in from a new direction, one that took them across a parched arroyo. It made a striking con-trast with the green of the lawns and a lettuce field in the distance.
    It gave the place the look not so much of an oasis, which it was, but of a wizard zone like the Emerald City.
    They’d caught up with Laurie and the redhead. The redhead was Five Fortunes / 25
    exclaiming “Diverticulitis! Excuse me? And I was about to have a hysterectomy?” Laurie shook her head as if to say, What a world.
    “Can you believe this?” Glenna Leisure (as her tag said) turned to provide Rae and Carter with an update on the conversation. “Hysterectomy, said the first one, drugs, said the second one, diverticu-litis, said the third. Know what it was?”
    “What?”
    “Ruptured appendix. Ruptured, fucking, excuse my Latin, appendix! I was in the hospital for a month. My husband wanted to sue, but I said, forget it, give the money to me, not the lawyers, I’m going to The Cloisters.”
    “I hope they paid for your hospital bill,” said Carter.
    “You bet the farm they paid, and you should have seen the bill.
    This thick…I could have died. I almost did.” As Glenna went on, Rae and Carter both noted Laurie pulling quietly away from them.
    She came to a divergent path leading across a courtyard and toward the bedrooms instead of back to Saguaro, and with a little apologetic wave, she left them. Rae glanced at Carter, and saw that this was exactly what Carter had expected. Carter watched Laurie go with a professional curiosity. Something was going on, and she wondered what it was. Rae watched Laurie go with a mother’s heart. That kind young