(LB2) Shakespeare's Landlord

by Charlaine Harris

  THREE DAYS AGO, my past life had been a secret, or so I’d thought.

  Now Claude Friedrich knew about my misfortunes. I’d told Marshall. Who else knew?

  The life I had so carefully constructed was falling apart. I tried to find something to hold on to.

  And I recognized, once again, the bleak truth: There was nothing but myself.

  I searched the house. I talked to myself the whole time, telling myself that after it was searched and safe, I would finish cleaning it, and I did. It was a tremendous relief to leave the house and return to my own. I called Helen Drinkwater at work and told her that on my drive to work, I’d seen a suspicious man at the edge of the yard.

  “I think you shouldn’t leave it unlocked even for the fifteen minutes before I come,” I said. “So either I have to get there while you’re there, or you need to give me a key.” I could feel the woman’s suspicions coming over the phone line, along with a tapping sound. Helen Drinkwater was tapping her teeth with a pencil. Mrs. Drinkwater doesn’t actually like to see me; she just likes to enjoy the results of my having been there. Before this morning, that had suited me just fine.

  “I guess,” she said finally, “you better come earlier, Lily. You can just wait in the kitchen until we leave.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said, and hung up.

  The vicious game played with me today would not be repeated. I lay down on my bed and thought about the incident. It could be that the intruder had not known I could hear the little sound of the boards creaking; perhaps he’d just anticipated that I’d start down the stairs at some later time and find the cuffs and gun. Of course the intruder hadn’t planned on any kind of confrontation; that was plain from the way he’d rabbited out the back door. But somehow, it made a difference whether or not the intruder had intended me to be aware of his presence before he left the house.

  I would have to think about it. Maybe ask Marshall.

  And that brought me upright on the bed instantly. I slapped myself on the cheek.

  Marshall was on the edges of my life; he had probably left it completely after our conversation the night before. I won’t start to think of him as part of my life, I promised myself. He’ll go back to Thea. Or he’s completely gone off me, since I told him about the scars. Or his common sense will tell him he doesn’t need someone like me.

  After that, I swore off thought for the day. I ate a hasty sandwich, then left the house.

  I have two clients on Thursday afternoons, and I felt it had been a very long day when I left the last one, a travel agent’s office, at six-thirty. The last thing in the world I wanted to see was Claude Friedrich at my doorstep.

  You’d think he has the hots for me, I thought sardonically.

  I parked the car in the carport and walked around to the front door instead of entering by the kitchen door, as I usually did.

  “What do you want?” I asked curtly.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Not very polite today, are we?”

  “I’ve had a long day. I don’t want to talk about the past. I want my supper.”

  “Then ask me in while you fix it.” He said this quite gently.

  I couldn’t think of what to do, I was so surprised. I wanted to be alone, but I would sound peevish if I told him to go away—and what if he didn’t?

  Without answering, I unlocked the door and walked in. After a minute, he walked in behind me.

  “Are you hungry or thirsty?” I said, fury just underneath the words.

  “I’ve had my supper, but I’d appreciate a glass of tea if you have some,” Friedrich rumbled.

  Alone in the kitchen for a moment, I put my arms on the counter and rested my head on them. I heard the big man’s footsteps sauntering through my spotless house, pausing in the doorway of my exercise room. I straightened and saw that Friedrich was in the kitchen, watching me. There was both sympathy and wariness in his face. I got a glass out of the cabinet and poured him some tea, plonking in some ice, too. I handed it to him wordlessly.

  “I’m not here to talk about your past. I’ve had to check up on everyone connected to Pardon, as you can understand. Your name rang a bell…. I remembered it, from the newspapers. But what I’m here to talk about today…a client of yours was in to see me,” Friedrich said. “He says you can verify his story.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “Tom O’Hagen says he came in from playing golf on his day off, Monday, at about three o’clock.”

  He waited for my reaction, but I had none to give.

  “He says that he then went over to Albee’s apartment to pay his rent, found the apartment door ajar, looked inside, and saw that the area rug was rumpled up, the couch pushed crooked, and no one answered his call. He left his rent check on the desk right inside the door and left.”

  “So you’re thinking Pardon may already have been dead at three o’clock.”

  “If Tom’s telling the truth. You’re his corroborating witness.”

  “How so?”

  “He says he saw you going into the Yorks’ apartment as he came down the stairs.”

  I thought back, trying hard to remember a perfectly ordinary day. I hadn’t known until I was coming home from my night walk that it would be a day I needed to remember in detail.

  I closed my eyes, attempting to replay that little stretch of time on Monday afternoon. I’d had the bag in my hand with the supplies the Yorks had wanted me to put in their apartment, anticipating their return. No, two bags. I’d had to put them down to fish out the right key—poor planning on my part. I remembered being peeved at my lack of foresight.

  “I didn’t hear anyone walking across the hall, but I did hear someone coming down the stairs, and it may have been Tom,” I said slowly. “I was having trouble getting the right key separated from the bunch on my key chain. I went in the Yorks’ place, put down the bags…put some things in the refrigerator. I left the other things out on the kitchen counter. I didn’t need to water the asparagus plant because it was still very wet, and the shades in the bedroom were already open—I usually open them for the Yorks—so I left.” I replayed locking the door, turning to leave….

  “I did see him! He was walking away from Pardon’s apartment to go to his own and he was hurrying!” I exclaimed, pleased with myself. Tom O’Hagen isn’t my favorite person, but I was glad I was able to verify his story, at least to some extent. If it had been Tom I’d heard coming down the stairs, and then I’d seen him again leaving Pardon’s in the two or three minutes I’d spent in the Yorks’ apartment, surely he wouldn’t have had time to kill Pardon. But why would Tom have been upstairs? He has a ground-floor apartment. Deedra? Nope. She’d been at work.

  “I hear you know Marshall Sedaka,” Friedrich said abruptly.

  The comment was so unexpected that I actually looked at him directly.

  “Yes.”

  “He was down to the station this morning, talking to Dolph Stafford. Dolph tells me he inherits that business now that Pardon Albee’s dead. Pardon had a lot of irons in a lot of fires.”

  I raised both hands, palms up. What of it?

  “No one here knows much about Marshall,” Friedrich commented. “He just blew into town and married Thea Armstrong. No one could figure out why some man hadn’t snatched Thea up years ago, her being so pretty and smart. Marshall got lucky, I figure. Now I hear he’s moved out of the house, got himself a little rental place on Farraday.”

  I hadn’t known where Marshall was living. Farraday was about three blocks away. I reached in the refrigerator, got out a container of soup I’d made over the weekend, and put it in the microwave.

  It was a long two minutes until the timer beeped. I propped myself against the counter and waited for the police chief to go on.

  “Pardon Albee was killed by one hard blow to the neck,” Friedrich observed. “He was struck first on the mouth, and then got a crushing blow to the throat.”

  I thought of how strong Marshall is.

  “So you’re thinki
ng,” I said as I ladled soup into a bowl, “that Marshall dumped Thea for me and killed Pardon Albee so he’d own his business, now that he doesn’t have Thea’s twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year salary from SCC?”

  Friedrich flushed. “I didn’t say that.”

  “That’s the only point I can grasp from all this. Could you tell me any other implication I might have missed?” I stared at him for a long moment, my eyebrows raised in query. “Right. Now, here’s something real. Investigate this.” I held out the handkerchief, plain white, with a design of white stripes of different widths running around the border. Inside the handkerchief were the bumpy shapes of the gun and the handcuffs.

  “You want to tell me about this?” Friedrich said.

  Briefly and, I hope, unemotionally, I described what had happened at the Drinkwaters’ that morning.

  “You didn’t call us? Someone was in the house with you and you didn’t call us? Even if you were all right, what if they took something of Mel and Helen’s?”

  “I’m sure nothing was taken. I know everything in that house, and nothing was out of order. Nothing was rummaged through, or moved out of place, no drawers left open.”

  “You’re assuming that these items were left by someone who knows about what happened to you in Memphis.”

  “Isn’t that a logical assumption? I know you’ve found out. Have you told anyone?”

  “No. It wasn’t my business to do that. I did call the Memphis Police Department a couple of days ago. Like I said, I remembered where I’d heard your name—after I thought about it awhile. I’ve got to say, I’m kind of surprised you didn’t change it.”

  “It’s my name. Why would I change it?”

  “Just to avoid anyone recognizing it, wanting to talk about what happened.”

  “For a while, I thought about it,” I admitted. “But they’d already taken enough away from me. I wanted to keep at least my name. And then…it would have been like saying I had done something wrong.” And I glared at Friedrich in a way that told him clearly he was not to comment. He sipped his tea thoughtfully.

  I wondered if Pardon had known the truth about my past. He’d never even hinted as much to me, but he had been a man who liked to know things, liked to own a little piece of the people around him. If Pardon had known, surely he would have hinted around to me. He wouldn’t have been able to resist it.

  “So, did the Memphis police send you a report of some kind, something on paper?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “They faxed me your file.” He put his hand to his pocket, asked me if he could smoke his pipe.

  “No,” I said. “Where’d you leave the fax?”

  “You think someone at my office has spread this around? You yourself haven’t told anyone in this town about what happened to you?”

  I lied. “I haven’t told anyone. And whoever left these on the steps at the Drinkwaters’ house knows I got raped, and knows the circumstances. So the knowledge had to come from your office, as far as I can tell.”

  Claude Friedrich’s face darkened. He looked bigger, tougher, mean. “Lily, maybe someone has known since you moved here. Maybe they’ve just had the good taste not to mention it to you.”

  “Then they lost their good taste with a bang,” I said. “You need to go. I have to work out.”

  He took the handkerchief, handcuffs, and gun with him when he left. I was glad not to have them in my house anymore.

  NORMALLY, I DON’T work out on Thursday nights, especially when I’ve already gone to Body Time in the morning. But the day had been one long accumulation of fear and anger, interrupted by the boredom of everyday work. I needed to do something to relax my shoulders, and the punching bag didn’t appeal to me. I wanted weights.

  I pulled on a pink spandex shorts and bra set, covered it with a flowered T-shirt, grabbed my workout bag, and drove to Body Time. Marshall doesn’t work on Thursday nights, so I wouldn’t have the emotional strain of seeing him while he was still trying to digest what I’d told him.

  Derrick, the black college student who picks up the slack for Marshall in the evenings, waved a casual hand as I came in. The desk is to the left of the front door, and I stopped there to sign in before going over to the weight benches, unzipping my gym bag as I walked. There were only a couple of other people there, both serious bodybuilders, and they were doing leg work on the quad and calf machines and the leg press. I knew them only by sight, and after returning my nod, they ignored me.

  The rest of the building was dark—no light in Marshall’s office, the doors closed on the aerobics/karate room.

  I stretched and did some light weights to warm up, then pulled on my weight-lifting gloves, padded across the palm and with the fingers cut off at the knuckle. I pulled the Velcro straps tight.

  “Need me to spot?” Derrick called after I’d done three sets. I nodded. I’d done twenties, thirties, and forties, so I got the fifty-pound dumbbells from the rack and sat on one of the benches, lying down carefully with a dumbbell in each hand. When I felt Derrick’s presence at my head, I checked my position. The dumbbells were parallel with the floor and I was holding them down at shoulder level. Then I lifted them up and in until they met over me.

  “All right, Lily!” Derrick said. I brought the dumbbells down, then back up, fighting to maintain my control. Sweat popped out on my face. I was happy.

  By the sixth repetition, the lift had begun to be a struggle. Derrick gripped my wrists, helping me just enough to enable me to complete the move. “Come on, Lily, you can do it,” he murmured. “Push, now.” And my arms rose yet another time.

  I put the fifties on the rack and got the fifty-fives. With a great deal of effort, I lay down on the bench and struggled to lift them; the conventional wisdom at the gym is that the first time is the hardest, but in my experience, if the first time is really difficult, it’s likely all the succeeding lifts will be tough, too. Derrick held my wrists as my arms ascended, loosened his grip as my arms came down. I lifted the fifty-fives six times, my lips pulled back from my teeth in a snarl of concentrated effort.

  “One more,” I gasped, feeling that treacherous exhaustion creeping through my arms. I was so focused on making my lift that until the dumbbells were triumphantly in the air, I didn’t realize that the fingers helping me were ivory, not black.

  I held the lift until my arms collapsed abruptly. “Going down!” I said urgently. Marshall moved back from the bench, and down came the weights, though I managed to stop short of dropping them from a height. I made a controlled drop, letting my bent arms hang down either side of the bench and releasing the dumbbells so they hit the rubber mat without rolling.

  I sat up and swung around astride the bench, so pleased with my set that I overcame the anxiety of seeing Marshall for the first time after my true confessions session. Marshall was wearing what I thought of as his working clothes, a tank top and exotically patterned muscle pants from the line of exercise clothes clients could order through the gym.

  “What happened to Derrick?” I asked, reaching for my gym bag to extract my pink sweat towel.

  “I’ve been cruising all over town looking for you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Have you been here all evening?”

  “No. I got here…oh, thirty or forty minutes ago.”

  “Where were you before that?”

  “At my house,” I said, an edge coming into my voice. If anyone had been asking but Marshall, I would have refused to answer. The big room was very quiet. For the first time, I noticed that we were alone.

  “Where’s Derrick?” I asked again.

  “I sent him home after your fifty set. Was anyone at your house?”

  I stared at him while I patted my chest and face dry.

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “Lily, about an hour and a half ago, someone came in Thea’s back door while she was in the living room and left a dead rat on the kitchen table.”

  “Yuk,” I said in disgust. �
�Who on earth would do something like that?” Suddenly, the dime dropped. “You think—” I was so outraged, I was sputtering for words, and my hands tightened into fists.

  Marshall sat astride the other end of the bench; he reached over to put a finger to my lips. “No,” he said urgently. “Never, I never thought so.”

  “Then why the questions?”

  “Thea…she has this…”

  I’d never heard Marshall flounder before. He was acutely embarrassed.

  “Thea thinks I did it?”

  Marshall looked at the blinds drawn over the big front window, closed for the night. “She thinks it might be you,” he admitted.

  “Why?” I was bewildered. “Why on earth would I do something like that?”

  A flush spread across Marshall’s cheeks.

  “Thea has this idea that we’re separated because of you.”

  “But Marshall…that’s just crazy.”

  “Sometimes Thea is—crazy, I mean.”

  “Why would she think that?”

  Marshall didn’t answer.

  “You can go back and tell Thea—or I will be more than glad to do it myself—that I had an unwelcome visit from the chief of police, at my home, until right before I left to come here. So I have what you might call a golden alibi.”

  Marshall drew a breath of sheer relief. “Thank God. Now maybe she’ll leave me alone.”

  “So explain. Why would she think you two separated because of me?”

  “Maybe I mentioned your name once too often when I was talking about karate class, or people who work out here.”

  Marshall’s eyes met mine. I swallowed. I was suddenly, acutely, aware that we were alone. I could never remember being alone with Marshall before, truly alone in an empty building. He reached out and flicked the light switch, leaving us only in the light that came through the blinds from the street. It fell in stripes across his face and body.

  We were still sitting astride the bench, facing each other. Slowly, giving me plenty of time to get used to the idea, he leaned forward until his mouth touched mine. I tensed, expecting the flood of panic that had marked my attempts to have a close relationship with a man during the past few years.