Someone Always Knows by Marcia Muller Page B

picked up for me. Unless he was involved in a dangerous situation…
    Stop it, McCone! He’s in D.C. at the request of the government.
    Well, maybe there is something to worry about after all. Our government…
    Why did I always feel like a miscreant whenever the government invaded my life? I paid my taxes on time; I voted faithfully, although I wasn’t sure what good it did; I even contributed—minimally—to my candidates’ campaigns. But there it was, that guilty, hunted feeling.
    Time to get going. But why? It was the day of rest, as my adoptive mother called it.
    Thinking of Ma reminded me of my entire family—now that is a confusion. My birth mother, Saskia Blackhawk, is a nationally known attorney and advocate for Indian rights who lives in Boise, Idaho. My birth father, Elwood Farmer, is a prominent painter who lives in the Flathead Reservation in Montana. I have a half sister, Robin Blackhawk, in law school at UC Berkeley—my alma mater—and a half brother, Darcy Blackhawk, a deeply disturbed man whose whereabouts vary according to whatever institution his current doctors think will give him the best treatment.
    Saskia was unmarried and unable to support me when I was born, so she allowed Ma and Pa, relatives on my maternal grandmother’s side, to adopt me. In those days people weren’t as open about adoptions as they are now, so I grew up thinking I was their natural child, my very different appearance a genetic “throwback” to my Shoshone grandmother. It was an act of kindness on Pa’s part to leave me the documents that helped me discover my real heritage.
    Something thumped downstairs on the front steps. The Chronicle . I could wallow in that for a while. I tossed on a warm robe and went down to grab it and start the coffeepot. But it wasn’t the Chron .
    It was Jill Starkey’s rag, The Other Shoe .
    I didn’t subscribe to it. What was it doing here—and two days late at that?
    With foreboding, I unrolled it and looked at the front page.
    Main headline: “Seafood, Anyone?”
    Local private eye Sharon McCone and her husband, Hy “Mr. Mysterious” Ripinsky, have egg on their faces—or is it clam chowder?
    The recent renovation of the façade of the vintage M&R building on New Montgomery Street involves a sculpture by the famed and talented (???) Flavio St. John of Rome, Italy. A giant clamshell by St. John that is suspended over the building’s classic entryway attests to the low-level taste currently prevalent in our city—
    I screamed in rage and threw the offending newspaper across the room. The hideous little troll had struck again! I wanted to storm over to her shabby offices on Market Street and throw her butt out the window. No, I wanted to throttle her with my bare hands. How about torturing her first? Yeah, that was it! Matches, pins, needles…too bad I didn’t know more about waterboarding—
    “Starkey…shit…argh…” The cats were standing in the doorway to the kitchen, staring at me as if I’d gone insane. I silenced myself before I could make any more ridiculous noises.
    The worst thing about this situation was that I couldn’t get my hands on the troll because it was Sunday.
    Sundays I’m always on call in case any of my operatives need me, and sometimes I drop into the office. I feel the need to check on everybody’s progress; besides, my appearing on the scene tends to energize whatever operatives are working that shift. But mainly I prefer to dedicate the weekends to Hy—if he’s in town—and when he’s not to leisurely activities: trips to the Marin County Farmers Market; long drives in the country; brunch at a favorite restaurant and then a nap; matinees of movies I missed the first time around.
    But all I could bring myself to do today was browse through the Chron —when it finally arrived—and rattle around the house, trying, as Elwood Farmer often said, “to assemble my thoughts.” Every attempt collapsed like a structure made of pick-up sticks. I kept