Shakespeares Counselor

Page 20

  "They'll pay. You'll get a percentage, like any trainee. "

  I felt deep relief. Now, I could feel better about having quit my cleaning jobs.

  "Let's go eat lunch," Jack said. He turned off his computer after saving what he'd been working on. "We're meeting Roy and Aunt Betty. "

  I tried to be pleased about having lunch with Jack's friends, but I just didn't know the two older detectives well enough to take a personal pleasure in their company. I'd met them both before, and talked to them on the telephone several times.

  As we were led to their table in the Cracker Barrel (a favorite of Roy's) I spied Aunt Betty first. With her fading brown hair, nice business suit, and sensible shoes, Elizabeth Fry certainly did look like everyone's favorite aunt. She had the kind of slightly wrinkled, well-bred, kindly face that inspires universal trust. Betty was one of the best private detectives in the Southeast, Jack had told me.

  At the moment, Betty was telling Roy some story that had him smiling. Roy doesn't smile a lot, especially since his heart attack. Though he has a sense of humor, it leans toward the macabre.

  When I sat across from him, I could look Roy right in the eyes. He's not tall.

  "Hey," I said.

  Betty leaned over to pat my hand, and Roy looked stricken. "Hey, baby, you feelin' okay?" He reached over with one of his stubby hands and patted the same place Betty had. "Thelma and me, we're sorry. " Thelma was Roy's wife, to whom he was devoted.

  Of course, Jack had told them about the miscarriage. I should have expected that.

  "I'm feeling much better," I said, trying very hard not to sound cold and stiff. I failed, I could see, by the glances Roy and Aunt Betty exchanged. Personal exchanges with near strangers in public places are just not my thing, even though I knew I was being a pill. I made a tremendous effort. "I'm sorry, it's hard to talk about. " That was truer than I'd realized, because I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. I grabbed up a menu and began trying to focus on it. It persisted in being blurry.

  "Lily caught Beth Crider this morning," Jack said. I knew he was diverting them, and from their hasty exclamations I could tell they were glad to be diverted. I recovered, after a minute or two, and was able to look pleasant, if nothing else.

  I had my back to the entry, so I couldn't see what made Roy stiffen and look angry a moment or two after we'd ordered. "Crap," he said under his breath, and his eyes flicked to my face, then back over to Jack. "Trouble coming," he said, a little more audibly.

  "Who is it?" Jack asked, sounding as though he were afraid he already knew the answer.

  "Her," Aunt Betty said, her voice loaded down with significance.

  "Why, it's the private detective table, isn't it?" said a voice behind me, a youngish woman's voice with a Southern accent so heavy you could have used it to butter rolls. "My goodness me, and I wasn't invited along. But who have we here, in my old place?" A navy-and-beige pantsuit, well packed, twitched by me, and I looked up to see a pretty woman, maybe a couple of years my senior, standing by the table. She was looking down at me with false delight. The perfect makeup and honey-colored shoulder-length tousled hair were designed to distract attention from a nose that was a little too long and a mouth that was a little too small.

  "You are just too precious," said this sleek newcomer. I don't believe anyone had called me "precious" in my life, even my parents. "Let me introduce myself, since Jack seems to have lost his tongue. His wonderful tongue. " She gave me a roguish wink.

  Well, well, well. I didn't dare to look at Jack. I wavered between amusement and anger.

  Roy said, "Lindsey, this is Lily. Lily, Lindsey Wilkerson. "

  I nodded, not extending my hand. If I shook with her, some of my fingers might come up missing. You don't often meet people who will lay an unattractive emotion out on the table like that. Showing your hand so clearly is a big mistake.

  "Dear old Betty, how you been doing?" Lindsey asked.

  "Fine, thank you," said 'dear old Betty,' her voice as weathered as old paint. "And I hear you're flourishing on your own. "

  "I'm paying the rent," Lindsey said casually. She was carrying a leather handbag that had cost more than two of my outfits, which mostly come from Wal-Mart. Her beautiful shoes had two-inch heels, and I wondered how she walked in them. "Lily, how do you like working under Jack?"

  I shrugged. She was about as subtle as a rattlesnake.

  "You watch out, Lily, Jack's got himself a reputation for fooling around with his co-workers," Lindsey warned me with mock concern. "Then he just leaves 'em high and dry. "

  "Thanks for the advice," I said, my voice mild. I could feel Jack relax prematurely.

  "Where'd he find you?" she said. Her southern Arkansas accent was beginning to grate on my nerves. "You" comes out "yew," and "where'd" was awful close to "whar'd. "

  Not under the same rock he found you, was my first, discarded answer. I exercised my option of not speaking at all. I looked into her eyes, instead. She began to shift from pump to pump, and her nasty smile faded.

  But she rallied, as I'd been willing to bet she would.

  "Jack," she said, leaning over the table right in front of me, "I need to come by your place and pick up some clothes I left there. "

  Her throat was exposed, right in front of me. I felt my fingers stiffen into Knife Hand. At the same time, the part of my brain that hadn't lost its temper was telling me that it's not right to hurt someone just because she's a bitch.

  "I don't believe I have anything of yours," Jack said. From the corner of my eyes I could see his hands clenching the edge of the table. "And I don't live in that apartment any more. "

  She hadn't known that. "Where'd you move to?"

  "Are you a detective, too?" I asked.

  "Why, yes, honey, I sure am. " She straightened up, now that she knew I'd had a good time to look at her impressive cup size.

  "Then you can find out. " She would also find out we were married.

  "Listen, bitch. . . " she leaned back down toward me, extending a pointing finger. People around us were beginning to stop eating in order to listen.

  My hand darted up, quick as an arrow, and I seized her hand and dug my thumb into the pit between her thumb and first finger. She gasped in pain. "Let go of me!" she hissed. After a second's more pressure, I did. Tears had come into her eyes and she stood there nursing her hand until she understood that she had become ridiculous, and then she did what she had to do - she walked away.

  Aunt Betty and Roy began talking about something else right away, and the other diners went back to their own concerns, leaving Jack and me in a sort of cocoon. I picked up a long-handled spoon and stirred my iced tea. It was too weak. I like tea that's something more than colored water.

  "Uh, Lily," Jack began, "listen, I. . . "

  I made a chopping motion with my hand. "Over and done. "

  "But she never meant - "

  "Over and done. "

  Later, when Aunt Betty and I were discussing a recent court verdict, I heard Roy ask Jack if I'd really meant it when I'd said we'd never talk about Lindsey again.

  "Absolutely," Jack's voice somewhere between amused and grim.

  "That's a woman in a million," Roy said, "not wanting to hash over every little thing. "

  "You said it. " Jack didn't sound totally delighted.

  Later, when we'd eaten, paid, and gone back to Jack's car, we found a long scratch down the paint. I looked at Jack and raised my eyebrows.

  "Yeah, I figure it was her," he said. "Vindictive is her middle name. Lindsey Vindictive Wilkerson. "

  "Will this be the end of it?"

  "No. " He finally looked me in the eyes. "If Betty and Roy hadn't been there, maybe. But she got beat, and in front of witnesses she cares about. "
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  "If she keeps this up," I told him, "she'll be sorry. "

  Jack gave me a look. But at length, his troubled face gave way to a smile. "I have no doubt of that," he said, and we went back to the office for the afternoon. He filed, and I cleaned. He gave me another lesson on the computer, and a lecture on billing procedures. As a kind of treat for Jack, on our way back to Shakespeare we stopped at Sneaky Pete's, one of Jack's favorite businesses. Jack wanted to report to Pete on the success of the panda-bear camera.

  As was often the case, Pete's was empty of customers but crammed with goods. Most of the store's income came from a stock of high-end cameras and home security systems, but Pete Blanchard had founded the shop with the idea that you could buy any sort of expensive electronic surveillance device there.

  Pete Blanchard hadn't made up his mind about me yet, and I wasn't sure what to think of him, so our conversations tended to be tentative and oblique. Mostly, I was content to watch Jack prowl around and have fun, but Pete seemed to feel it was his duty to entertain me while Jack shopped. The fact that Jack seldom bought anything didn't seem to bother Pete. He'd known Jack for several years, and he liked him.

  Every time I'd seen him, Pete had been wearing the same sort of clothing. He wore a golf shirt and khakis and Adidas. He seemed to have several versions of this outfit, but he liked it and that was what he wore. I could respect that. A former cop, Pete had probably had trouble fitting into a patrol car; he had to be six foot four or five. His mustache and hair were graying, but his toffee-colored skin had few wrinkles, and I couldn't begin to guess his age.

  This particular afternoon, Pete's son was working in the store. A college student who picked up some money wherever he could, Washington Blanchard considered himself much smarter than his father and vastly more sophisticated. Jack had told me he just hoped Wash, as the young man was called, would learn better before too long. Otherwise, in Jack's opinion, someone was likely to sock Wash in the mouth. Jack had had a gleam in his eye that had said the sight wouldn't be unwelcome.

  Though I hadn't noted it on my calendar that morning, today had apparently been designated as Pick a Fight with Lily Day. Most men are put off by me. I just don't seem, I don't know, womanly or something. Especially if they know what happened to me. A small sampling of men, the ones that are sick, are turned on by that very same thing. Wash Blanchard was a member of that small group.

  While Pete showed Jack a pair of glasses that took pictures, Wash asked me questions about the woman who'd been murdered in Tamsin Lynd's office. That death had made the Little Rock paper mostly due to its bizarre circumstances. Little Rock as a whole seems to try to forget there's anything south of it in the state.

  I hadn't checked this morning to see if Gerry McClanahan's death had made the paper, but I figured it hadn't, since it had occurred so late. At any rate, Wash didn't bring it up, so neither did I.

  Wash wanted to know if I'd known the health center murder victim.

  "No. "

  "There can't be that many women in Shakespeare, Lily. "

  "I didn't know her. "

  "What was she doing in that building, I wonder. The paper didn't make that clear. "

  "She was coming to attend an evening self-help group. "

  Wash was astonished. He said, "How do you know that?"

  I shrugged, sorry I'd said anything at all.

  "Did you see her?" he said. Wash had the usual prurient desire to hear secondhand about blood and death. If he'd ever happen to see it close up, he'd lose that in a jiffy.

  "Yes. "

  "What did she look like? Was she really impaled?"

  I looked longingly at the door.

  "Don't talk to me any more," I said. I began to look at a rack of cameras, the kind that did everything but snap their own buttons. That was my kind of camera. I liked photographs, as aids to memory and as art, but I was not interested in taking them myself.

  "Because I'm black? Huh?" And there he was, right in front of me again, determined to bother me. It's like people don't understand English, sometimes.

  "It doesn't have a thing to do with your skin. It has to do with your obnoxious character," I said, my voice still under control but inevitably rising.

  Big Pete interposed. I felt the presence of Jack behind me.

  "Something wrong, here?" Pete was trying to sound calm.

  "She's treating me like trash, ignoring me and calling me names," Wash said, though his voice was not as full of righteous wrath as it might have been.

  "I can't imagine Lily doing that," Pete said.

  Explaining. People always want you to explain. I yearned to walk out speechlessly, but this was one of Jack's favorite places.

  "I don't care to discuss crime scenes and how this woman died. The woman who was killed in Shakespeare. "

  Pete stared at his son. "Wash, you want to talk about dead bodies, remind me to show you some pictures of things I saw in Viet Nam. "

  "You got pictures, Dad?" Wash sounded stunned and happy.

  " 'Scuse us, Jack, Lily. Wash and I got some talking to do. "

  Jack and I left in a hurry.

  I tried to figure out if I needed to apologize to Jack, but no matter how I looked at it, this little run-in was not my fault. However, Jack wasn't talking, and I wondered if he was angry.

  "It's really weird, isn't it," he said suddenly. "You'd think nice people like Pete and Marietta, his wife, would have such great genes their kids couldn't turn out bad. And then, look at Wash. He has to learn every lesson over and over, lessons he shouldn't even have to be taught. Things he should know by . . . instinct. "