The Best of Sisters in Crime Read Online Free PDF Page A

renters and Dick Morris. After all, none of the women had
reported having dates with the same man. And there were many other common
denominators among them besides their use of the service. They lived in the
same complex. They all knew one another. Two belonged to the same health club.
They shopped at the same supermarket, shared auto mechanics, hairstylists, dry
cleaners, and two of them went to the same psychiatrist.
    Coincidence, the
police insisted. But two other San Francisco area members of Best People had
also been burglarized—one of them male—and so they checked the service out
carefully.
    What they found
was absolutely no evidence of collusion in the burglaries. It was no
fly-by-night operation. It had been in business ten years—a long time for that
type of outfit. Its board of directors included a doctor, a psychologist, a
rabbi, a minister, and a well-known author of somewhat weird but popular
novels. It was respectable—as such things go.
    But Best People
was still the strongest link among the burglary victims. And Dick Morris was a
good landlord who genuinely cared about his tenants. So he put on a couple of
security guards, and when the police couldn’t run down the perpetrator(s) and
backburnered the case, he came to All Souls for legal advice.
    It might seem
unusual for the owner of a glitzy singles complex to come to a legal services
plan that charges its clients on a sliding-fee scale, but Dick Morris was
cash-poor. Everything he’d saved during his long years as a journeyman plumber
had gone into the complex, and it was barely turning a profit as yet. Wouldn’t
be turning any profit at all if the burglaries continued and some of his
tenants got scared and moved out.
    Hank could have
given Dick the typical attorney’s spiel about leaving things in the hands of
the police and continuing to pay the guards out of his dwindling cash reserves,
but Hank is far from typical. Instead he referred Dick to me. I’m All Souls’
staff investigator, and assignments like this one— where there’s a
challenge—are what I live for.
    They are, that
is, unless I have to apply for membership in a dating service, plus set up my
own home as a target for a burglar. Once I started “dating,” I would remove
anything of value to All Souls, plus Dick would station one of his security
guards at my house during the hours I was away from there, but it was still a
potentially risky and nervous-making proposition.
    Now Hank loomed
over me, still grinning. I could tell how much he was going to enjoy watching
me suffer through an improbable, humiliating, asinine experience. I smiled back— sweetly.
    “‘Your sexual
preference.’ Hetero.” I checked the box firmly. “Except for inflating my income
figure, so I’ll look like I have a lot of good stuff to steal, I’m filling this
out truthfully,” I said. “Who knows—I might meet someone wonderful.”
    When I looked
back up at Hank, my evil smile matched his earlier one. He, on the other hand,
looked as if he’d swallowed something the wrong way.
    My first “date”
was a chubby little man named Jerry Hale. Jerry was very into the singles scene. We met at a bar in
San Francisco’s affluent Marina district, and while we talked, he kept
swiveling around in his chair and leering at every woman who walked by. Most of
them ignored him, but a few glared; I wanted to hang a big sign around my neck
saying, “I’m not really with him, it’s only business.” While I tried to find
out about his experiences with All the Best People Introduction Service, plus
impress him with all the easily fenceable items I had at home, he tried to
educate me on the joys of being single.
    “I used to be
into the bar scene pretty heavily,” he told me. “Did all right too. But then I
started to worry about herpes and AIDS—I’ll let you see the results of my most
recent test if you want—and my drinking was getting out of hand. Besides, it
was expensive. Then I went the other