Page 5
Maybe Joe C could be propped on a bench on the square to amuse any soul who happened by. He could give a daily report on the state of his bowels.
"China Belle's daughter is dropping her off in a few minutes," Joe C informed me. "Is my tie crooked?"
I straightened from putting on the fitted sheet. I suspected he'd been eyeing my ass. "You're okay," I said unenthusiastically.
"China Belle's quite a gal," he said, trying to leer.
"You creep," I said. "Mrs. Lipscott is a perfectly nice woman who wouldn't go to bed with you if you owned the last mattress on earth. You stop talking dirty. "
"Oooh," he said, in mock fear. "Bully the old man, why dontcha. Come on, darlin', make old Joe C feel good again. "
That did it.
"Listen to me," I said intently, squatting before him. He put his cane between us, I noticed, so he hadn't completely ruled out the fact that I might retaliate.
Good.
"You will not tell me about your body functions. Unless you're dripping blood, I don't care. You will not make sexual remarks. "
"Or what? You're going to hit me, a man in his nineties who walks with a cane?"
"Don't rule it out. Disgusting is disgusting. "
He eyed me malevolently. His brown eyes were almost hidden in the folds of skin that drooped all over him. "Calla wouldn't pay you, you go to hit me," he said in defiance.
"It'd be worth losing the pay. "
He glared at me, resenting like hell his being old and powerless. I didn't blame him for that. I might feel exactly the same way if I reach his age. But there are some things I just won't put up with.
"Oh, all right," he conceded. He looked into a corner of the room, not at me, and I rose and went back to making up the bed.
"You knew that gal that got killed, that Deedra?"
"Yes. "
"She was my great-granddaughter. She as loose as they say?"
"Yes," I said, answering the second part of the question before the first had registered. Then I glared at him, shocked and angry.
"When I was a boy, it was Fannie Dooley," Joe C said reminiscently, one gnarled hand rising to pat what was left of his hair. He was elaborately ignoring my anger. I'd seen a picture of Joe C when he was in his twenties: he'd had thick black hair, parted in the middle, and a straight, athletic body. He'd had a mouthful of healthy, if not straight, teeth. He'd started up a hardware store, and his sons had worked there with him until Joe Jr. had died early in World War II. After that, Joe C and his second son, Christopher, had kept Prader Hardware going for many more years. Joe C Prader had been a hard worker and man of consequence in Shakespeare. It must be his comparative helplessness that had made him so perverse and aggravating.
"Fannie Dooley?" I prompted. I was not going to gratify him by expressing my shock.
"Fannie was the town bad girl," he explained. "There's always one, isn't there? The girl from a good family, the kind that likes to do it, don't get paid?"
"Is there always one?"
"I think every small town's got one or two," Joe C observed. "Course it's bad when it's your own flesh and blood. "
"I guess so. " At my high school, a million years ago, it'd been Teresa Black. She'd moved to Little Rock and married four times since then. "Deedra was your great-granddaughter?" I asked, surprised I'd never realized the connection.
"Sure was, darlin'. Every time she came around to see me, she was the picture of sweetness. I don't believe I ever would have guessed. "
"You're awful," I said dispassionately. "Someone's going to push you off your porch or beat you over the head. "
"They's always going to be bad girls," he said, almost genially. "Else, how's the good girls going to know they're good?"
I couldn't decide if that was really profound or just stupid. I shrugged and turned my back on the awful man, who told my back that he was going to get gussied up for his girlfriend.
By the time I'd worked my way through the ground floor of the old house, whose floors were none too level, Joe C and China Belle Lipscott were ensconced on the front porch in fairly comfortable padded wicker chairs, each with a glass of lemonade close to hand. They were having a round of "What Is This World Coming To?" based on Deedra's murder. There may have been a town bad girl when they were growing up, but there'd also been plenty to eat for everyone, everyone had known their place, prices had been cheap, and almost no one had been murdered. Maybe the occasional black man had been hung without benefit of jury, maybe the occasional unwed mother had died from a botched abortion, and just possibly there'd been a round of lawlessness when oil had been discovered. . . but Joe C and China Belle chose to remember their childhood as perfect.
I found evidence (a filtered butt) that Joe C had once again been smoking. One of my little jobs was to tell Calla if I found traces of cigarettes, because Joe C had almost set the house afire once or twice by falling asleep with a cigarette in his hands. The second time that had happened, he'd been unconscious and his mattress smoldering when Calla had happened to drop by. Who could be smuggling the old man cigarettes? Someone who wanted him to enjoy one of his last pleasures, or someone who wanted him to die faster? I extricated the coffee mug he'd used as an ashtray from the depths of his closet and took it to the kitchen to wash.
I wondered if the old house was insured for much. Its location alone made it valuable, even if the structure itself was about to fall down around Joe C's ears. There were businesses now in the old homes on either side of the property, though the thick growth around the old place made them largely invisible from the front or back porch. The increased traffic due to the businesses (an antique store in one old home and a ladies' dress shop in the other) gratified Joe C no end, since he still knew everyone in town and related some nasty story about almost every person who drove by.
As I was putting my cleaning items away, Calla came in. She often timed her appearance so she'd arrive just as I was leaving, probably so she could check the job I'd done and vent her misery a little. Perhaps Calla thought that if she didn't keep an eye on me, I'd slack up on the job, since Joe C was certainly no critic of my work (unless he couldn't think of another way to rile me). Calla was a horse of a different color. Overworked (at least according to her) at her office job in the local mattress-manufacturing plant, perpetually harried, Calla was determined no one should cheat her any more than she'd already been cheated. She must have been a teenager once, must have laughed and dated boys, but it was hard to believe this pale, dark-haired woman had ever been anything but middle-aged and worried.
"How is he today?" she asked me in a low voice.
Since she'd passed her grandfather on her way in, and he was loudly in fine form, I didn't respond. "He's been smoking again," I said reluctantly, since I felt like a spy for telling on Joe C. At the same time, I didn't want him to burn up.
"Lily, who could be bringing him cigarettes?" Calla slapped the counter with a thin white hand. "I've asked and asked, and no one will admit it. And yet, for someone who can't go to the store himself, he seems to have unlimited access to the things he's not supposed to have!"
"Who visits him?"
"Well, it's a complicated family. " Though it didn't seem complicated to me, as Calla began to explain it. I knew already that Joe C had had three children. The first was Joe Jr. , who had died childless during World War II. The second boy, Christopher, had been the father of Calla, Walker, and Lacey. These three were the only surviving grandchildren of Joe C. Calla had never married. Walker, now living in North Carolina, had three teenage children, and Lacey had Deedra during her first marriage.
Calla's aunt (Joe C's third child), Jessie Lee Prader, had married Albert Albee. Jessie Lee and Albert had had two children, Alice (who'd married a James Whitley from Texas, moved there with him and had two children by h
im) and Pardon, who had been the owner of the Shakespeare Garden Apartments. When Pardon had died, he'd left the apartments to Alice Albee Whitley's children, Becca and Anthony, since the widowed Alice had herself died of cancer two years before.
The final complication was Joe C's sister, Arnita, who was much younger than Joe C. In the way of those times, the two babies their mother had had between them had died at birth or in infancy. Arnita married Howell Winthrop and they became the parents of Howell Winthrop, Jr. , my former employer. Therefore, Joe C's sister was the grandmother of my young friend Bobo Winthrop and his brother, Howell III, and his sister, Amber Jean.
"So you, Becca Whitley and her brother, and the Winthrops are all related," I concluded. Since I was cleaning the kitchen counter, I had been gainfully employed while listening to this long and fairly boring discourse.
Calla nodded. "I was so glad when Becca moved here. I was crazy about Alice, and I hadn't gotten to see her in so many years. " Calla looked wistful, but her mood changed abruptly. "Though you see who owns a whole building, who ended up in the mansion, and who's sitting in the house that's about to be zoned commercial," she said sourly. Becca had the rent income, the Winthrops were wealthy from the lumber yard, the sporting goods store, and oil, while Calla's little house was sandwiched between an insurance office and small engine repair service.
There was no response to that. I was mostly indifferent to Calla, but I felt sorry for her some days. Other days, the resentment that was a cornerstone of her character grated at me, made me ornery.
"So, they all come around," she said, staring out the kitchen window, the steam from her cup of fresh coffee rising in front of her face in a sinister way. I realized for the first time that the day had become overcast, that the darkness was reaching into the room. Like lawn furniture, Joe C and China Belle had to be brought in before they blew away or got wet.
"Great grandchildren - Becca Whitley, all painted up; Deedra, in her slutty dresses . . . Joe C just loved that. And the great-nieces and -nephews - Howell III, asking can he help by mowing the yard . . . like he'd ever mowed his own yard in his life. "
I hadn't realized Calla was quite this bitter. I turned around to look at the older woman, who almost seemed to be in a spell. I needed to go get the old people in, or else rouse Calla to do it. Thunder rumbled far away, and Calla's dark eyes scanned the sky outside, looking for the rain.
Finally she slid her gaze toward me, cold and remote.
"You can go," she said, as distant as if I'd tried to claim relationship to Joe C myself.
I gathered my paraphernalia and left without another word, leaving Calla to handle the business of relocating her grandfather and his girlfriend all by herself.
I wondered if Calla was glad of Deedra's death. Now there was one less person to come by, one less painted woman to titillate the old man and rob Calla of her possible inheritance.
Chapter Four
The sheriff was talking to Lacey Dean Knopp. Lacey, barely into her fifties, was a lovely blond woman with such an innocent face that almost everyone instantly wanted to give her his or her best manners, most conscientious opinion, hardest try. When I'd first met Lacey, the day she'd hired me to clean Deedra's apartment, that innocence had irritated me violently. But now, years later, I pitied Lacey all the more since she'd had farther to come to meet her grief.
The sheriff looked as though she'd slept only an hour or so for two nights in a row. Oh, her uniform was crisp and clean, her shoes were shiny, but her face had that crumpled, dusty look of sheets left too quick. I wondered how her brother Marlon was looking. If Marta Schuster had been thinking clearly, she'd deposited the grief-stricken young man away from public scrutiny.
"We're through in there," she was telling Lacey, who nodded numbly in response. Marta gave me the thousand-yard stare when I leaned against the wall, waiting for Lacey to give me the word to enter.
"Lily Bard," Marta said.
"Sheriff. "
"You're here for what reason?" Marta asked, her eyebrows going up. Her expression, as I perceived it, was disdainful.
"I asked Lily," Lacey said. Her hands were gripping each other, and as I watched, Lacey drove the nails of her right hand into the skin on the back of her left hand. "Lily's going to help me clean out my daughter's apartment," Lacey went on. Her voice was dull and lifeless.
"Oh, she is," the sheriff said, as though that was somehow significant.
I waited for her to move, and when she got tired of pondering, she stepped aside to let us in. But as I passed her, she tapped my shoulder. While Lacey stood stock still in the living room, I hung back and looked at the sheriff inquiringly.
She peered past me to make sure Lacey was not listening. Then she leaned uncomfortably close and said, "Clean out the box under the bed and the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in the second bedroom. "
I understood after a second, and nodded.
Lacey hadn't registered any of this. As I closed the apartment door behind me, I saw that Lacey was staring around her as though she'd never seen her daughter's place before.
She caught my eyes. "I never came up here much," she said ruefully. "I was so used to my house being 'home,' that's where I always felt Deedra belonged. I guess a mother always thinks her child is just playing at being a grown-up. "
I'd never felt so sorry for anyone. But feeling sorry for Lacey wasn't going to help her. She had plenty of pity available, if she wanted it. What she needed was practical help.
"Where did you want to start?" I asked. I could hardly march into the bedrooms to start looking for whatever Marta Schuster had wanted me to remove.