The Adventures of a Small-Town Sleuth

When word leaked out that MiSchelle McMindes (rhymes with finds), a licensed private investigator and a seven-year resident of Pendleton, Oregon, was posing for a Playboy pictorial, the letters column of the local daily, the East Oregonian—which had run a front-page story about her—got the predictable protest mail from Falwell followers. The story even made the news in big-city Portland, 200-plus miles west. "Will Playboy 'Strip' Away Pendleton's Image?" an Oregonian headline inquires. Responds MiSchelle, an attractive, articulate 29-year-old native of Nebraska: "No way." To understand what the fuss is about, it helps to put Pendleton in perspective. It's the kind of place, as the adage has it, "where the men are men and the women are glad of it." Its chamber of commerce claims it's "not the old West, not the new West—the real West." Stroll down Main Street on a Saturday and you'll meet an eclectic mix of cowboys, Indians, doctors, lawyers, even an occasional merchant chief. The town's money, most of it, comes from the surrounding land: rolling hills that nurture wheat, peas, cattle, sheep and pine trees. During one week in mid-September each year, the place explodes in the heady blend of dust, horse sweat, whiskey and excitement that heralds the Pendleton Round-Up, one of the country's top rodeos. For the other 51 weeks, this community of 14,500 inhabitants and 32 churches is fairly calm. That may change if MiSchelle's pictorial sets Pendleton on its 107-year-old ear. Frankly, though, she expects the citizenry of her adopted home town to take it in stride.

The reactions I'm hearing from people," MiSchelle told us, "are 'We're real proud of you' and 'When is your issue coming out? We can't wait.'" How she came to be in Playboy is a story in itself. After being approached by a photographer who represented himself as a scout for a Playboy feature on female private eyes, MiSchelle wrote to our Chicago offices to check him out. Associate Photography Editor Michael Ann Sullivan read the letter, called MiSchelle and said, "We've never heard of this guy, but the idea sounds great. Are you interested?" MiSchelle was. So was Richard Fegley, a genuine Playboy Contributing Photographer. The results you see here. MiSchelle came to her field by a roundabout route. She'd majored in music and theater in Nebraska and California, then took seminars in counseling at the Menninger Foundation. A job with a mental-health program, Independent Living, drew her to Pendleton.

After three years with Independent Living, MiSchelle decided she wanted to live independently and start her own business. "I had done some volunteer work with rape victims, during the course of which I met several attorneys," she says. "One suggested I might be a good investigator." It took a bank loan, hard work refinishing floors and stripping brick walls to renovate her office space and a year of pounding pavements before her firm, Northwest Investigators, took off; "but once I convinced some attorneys that I had the moxie to do the job, word of mouth just spread. Now I can pretty much pick and choose what cases I'll accept." Nearly all are referrals from attorneys, who may ask her to conduct surveillance on accident victims suspected of fraudulent workmen's-compensation claims, pose as a store clerk to smoke out a shoplifting employee or locate and interview witnesses to a traffic mishap. "If you don't do it right," MiSchelle says, "you can scare away potential witnesses or make them hostile."

Off the job, MiSchelle enjoys life to the hilt. On the ranch where she lives with wheat farmer Morrie McCormmach, she gardens and raises standard poodles. In town, she has scores of friends. "I love the small-town feeling here, the fact that I can walk to the bank, the post office, do a little shopping and be back in my office in 15 minutes. Or I can go for a beer after work, and people just sit down in the booth next to me and start telling stories. And where else but a town like Pendleton could you go into a bar and find real cowboys talking like real cowboys do on TV?" There's more to it, she adds. "People here are intelligent; they go to concerts and plays and keep up on contemporary issues. We're not just a bunch of hicks." What about the down side of small-town life—its lack of privacy? MiSchelle laughs. "Well, if you really want to go on a rip and tear, you can always get out of town, go and be anonymous somewhere."