A year ago, when I was still in L.A., Claire had called me from Oregon and said, "How's business?"
"The same," I told her. "Being a starving investigator is a lot like being a starving screenwriter, but without the glamour."
She laughed. "You ought to move up here, Maddie. Eugene has crime, too, but the air is cleaner."
"Move to the Mossbelt?" I said. "To a small town? Small towns are what I moved away from."
"Eugene isn't a small town. It's a small city."
"A small city. Great. I can have boredom and anonymity."
"You'll eat better. I can get fresh greens every day."
"Be still my heart."
"Think about it, Maddie. I miss you."
That was a sweet thing to say, though sweet hardly ever gets to me unless you're talking actual chocolate. So I didn't think seriously about moving north until my landlord boosted my rent by half. Then I started a line of thought that ended at this table in the Café Zenon, where Claire was spearing a bit of salad and saying, "Springfield! Maddie, I can't believe I got you to move up here only to see you living in Springfield! It's so shabby!"
A lot of people in Eugene have this attitude about the town on their eastern flank. And the truth is, Springfield and Eugene are worlds apart. "Springfield I understand," I told her. "Fundamentalists, loggers, pulp mill workers, K-Mart. It's an old style extraction town where everything is drawn in straight, unimaginative lines. Eugene is..."
I looked out the rain-spattered window of the Zenon, searching for words to describe the town. It was a crazy mix. The buildings on the mall were new, or old with expensive face lifts. This end of the mall was all about bank buildings, development money. A few blocks away, there was a public square with its Saturday Market for organic produce, tarot readings, tie-dyed merchandise smelling faintly of marijuana. Blocks from there was the hangout of the mall rats, body-pierced goth types. Most were throwaway kids whose parents didn't want them; others were middle class teens who thought life on the street was romantic in a dirt and leather sort of way. Then a transition back to money: a software company and the parking garage that the city built for it in some sort of sweetheart deal, or so some of the locals said. Eugene was also a college town with its share of Political Correctness and troglodyte fraternities.
"I haven't figured out how things work here," I told Claire. "It makes me edgy."
"What do you mean?" She balanced a hazelnut on her fork. "Things work here the same as everywhere. People are people."
"Towns aren't the same. Think about L.A. Los Angeles is all about being discovered. I mean, that's what you and I were doing there, right?" I opened my purse, tapped a True out of the pack. "What's the deal with this town? Do the tree huggers and old hippies own the town's soul? Or is it the bankers?"
"We don't have tree huggers," Claire said. "We have tree sitters. And the bankers are all from California." Lowering her voice, she said, "You might not want to go around telling people that you're from California."
"I'm not. You know that. And where I am from is nobody's business."
"You've changed your license plate already, right?"
"All my contacts are in L.A., Claire. I'll probably be driving down for work every so often. For a while, I'm a resident of both states."
"Maddie, change your license plate!"
"What, you're telling me that wandering gangs of Oregon natives go around vandalizing cars with California plates?"
"It happens."
"Oh, come on."
She looked at my unlit cigarette. "You can't smoke in here. This is a Breathing Only restaurant."
"You chose it to torture me." I looked wistfully at the sidewalk tables where one lone smoker sat. His coffee steamed. One hand clutched his coat lapels to keep the wind out, and in his other hand he held a cigarette. A soldier of nicotine braving the elements. Good man.
I said, "So what's a tree sitter?"
"There are protesters who rope themselves into trees to keep them from being logged."
"In the forests, you mean?" I pictured vast landscapes of fir trees bearing protesters like tie-dyed fruit. It seemed unlikely.
"Yeah, sometimes, I think," Claire said. "But I'm talking about protesters in the city. Back when the parking garage was being built, we had tree sitters right here, downtown, trying to save the trees on that lot. The police pepper-sprayed them and used tear gas on bystanders. It was a mess. The cops still have a black eye."
"Moorish Beef," the waitress said, setting my entree before me. Actually, what I'd asked for was steak, plain and simple. This was as close as the Zenon could come. Angus top sirloin on a skewer, served with mutabbal. I didn't know what mutabbal was, but I could tell it was vegetables. I offered it to Claire.
She said, "It's the only edible thing on your plate."
"And it's all yours." I sliced into the meat. It glistened red. Usually I have to cook a steak myself to get it this rare.
"Animal fat is going to kill you, Maddie."
"Nonsense. Genghis Khan ate nothing but milk and blood, and he conquered half the world."
"But look at him now," Claire countered. "He's dead!"
"You know I always celebrate with steak when I land a case."
"A case? You've got work already? How?"
"A prospective case, anyway. I took out an ad in the Weekly."
"So what's it about?"
"Claire, I haven't had a full interview with the client yet, and I couldn't tell you anyway. There's a reason for calling myself a private investigator."
She pouted. "I thought we were friends."
"We are friends. You can even have a bite of my steak."
"Yuck."
I lowered my voice. "The case has to do with raccoons," I said.
"Raccoons?"
"Shh. That's all I can say. Keep it to yourself."
"Oh, come on! You've got to tell me more than that."
"Sorry, Claire." I smiled. If she was going to torture me with a non-smoking restaurant, I had my ways of getting even.
)
Maddie gets away from the Hollywood grind to handle a burglary case in Oregon: A set of irreplaceable photo negatives have been stolen from a photographer's studio in Eugene, where they were commissioned by a small art gallery run by the wife of a local land developer. Although the crime scene has been overrun by the photographer's pet racoons, Maddie suspects that some exposure to local politics may develop into a clue to the burglar's identity.
