(LB2) Shakespeare's Landlord

by Charlaine Harris

  The panic didn’t come.

  My mouth moved against Marshall’s, welcoming. He slid closer, his legs going under mine until I lifted mine to wrap around him, my feet resting on the bench behind him. My arms went around his back and his hands were behind my back, pressing me to him.

  Maybe it was the unexpectedness of it, maybe it was the unthreatening setting, or maybe it was because I had known Marshall as a friend first, but suddenly what had been so difficult became easy and urgent.

  Marshall’s hand lifted my T-shirt over my head. He had already seen the scars: I didn’t have that moment to fear. I pulled off his tank top, my hands shaking. His tongue moved in my mouth. My hands ran over his torso for the first time. He pulled up my athletic bra and my breasts popped out; his tongue found a new target. I made an anguished little sound as a part of me I’d thought was atrophied came surging back to life. My hands conveyed my urgency, and after a moment, I stood, still straddling the bench, to work down my spandex shorts. He kissed my stomach as I stood before him, and then his mouth slid lower. In seconds, I rested one knee on the bench and turned to take my shorts off, and I heard cloth rustling in the darkness. Then bars of light fell across Marshall’s heavily muscled bare body. In a few moments, Marshall was kneeling at the end of the bench while I lay back on it, filled with him, and the words he was whispering made me very happy, and everything worked beautifully.

  Chapter 7

  I WOKE UP CHEERFUL, A CONDITION SO RARE, I DIDN’T even recognize it for a few minutes. I stretched in the bed, feeling a little sore in a most unusual way for me. Since I had had such a good workout the day before (and I smirked to myself when I thought that), I decided to do some push-ups at home rather than trek in to Body Time. I turned on the coffeepot and went into the room with the punching bag, then hit the floor and did fifty quick ones. I showered quickly and pulled on some loose-cut jeans and a T-shirt, my ordinary working clothes.

  I have never figured out how other women think they are going to fight—or clean house—in skintight jeans.

  After retrieving my paper, I sat down for some cereal and coffee. I was conscious all the time of being extraordinarily relaxed and pleased, a mood so unusual, I hardly knew how to handle it.

  I caught myself beaming out the kitchen window at the lovely morning. It’s truly amazing what a good screw can do for your outlook, I thought. And it wasn’t just the wonderful physical sensation; it was the successful completion of the sex act without a panic attack or a wave of revulsion for my partner.

  I found myself wondering if Marshall would call me that day. What would happen at class tonight? I crushed those thoughts ruthlessly. It had been what it was, good sex, nothing more. But boy, it sure was nice to remember.

  I glanced at my watch, then reluctantly gathered up my portable caddy of cleaning materials and rags to set out for the first job of the day, Deedra Dean’s apartment.

  Deedra is supposed to be at work by eight, but today she was still getting ready when I knocked on the door before using her key. This wasn’t the first time Deedra’d been late.

  She had hot curlers in her hair and a black lace slip on her body. Marcus Jefferson was coming out of his door as Deedra opened hers, and Deedra made sure he got a good look at the slip. I stepped in and turned to shut the door, catching a good look at Marcus’s face as I did so. He looked a little…disgusted—but excited.

  I shook my head. Deedra stuck her tongue out at me as she flounced back to her bathroom to finish her face. I had to make a great effort not to slap her cheek in the hope of knocking some sense into her head; there must be some intelligence rattling around in there, since Deedra is able to hold down a job where she actually has to perform work.

  “Lily!” she called from the bathroom as I stared grimly around the chaos of the apartment. “Are you a racist?”

  “No, Deedra, I don’t believe I am,” I called back, thinking pleasurably of Marshall’s ivory body. “But you’re just playing—you’re not serious about Marcus. And sleeping with a black man is still such a delicate thing that you really have to be serious about him to take the crap you’re going to be handed.”

  “He’s not serious, either,” Deedra said, peeking out for a minute, one cheek pink and the other its natural white.

  “Well, let’s do something totally meaningless,” I muttered, and began to pile up all the magazines and letters and bills scattered over the coffee table. I paused in midact. Was I the pot calling the kettle black? No, I decided with some relief, what Marshall and I did had some meaning. I’m not sure what yet. But it meant something.

  I went about my business as though Deedra wasn’t there, and I certainly wished she wasn’t. Deedra hummed, sang, and chattered her way through the rest of her toilette, getting on my nerves to an incredible degree.

  “What do you think will happen to us now that Pardon’s dead?” Deedra asked as she buttoned up her red-and-black-striped dress. She slid her feet into matching pumps simultaneously.

  “You’re the third person to ask me what the fate of the apartment building will be,” I said testily. “How should I know?”

  “Why, Lily, we just figure you know it all,” Deedra said matter-of-factly. “And you never tell; that’s the nice thing about you.”

  I sighed.

  “Now, that Pardon, what a son of a bitch,” Deedra said in the same tone. “He sure was a pain to me. Always hovering, always asking me how my mama was, as if I needed reminding she’s paying my rent for me. Always saying how nice it was I was dating so-and-so, if it was anybody white and professional, lawyer or doctor or bank president. Trying to scare me into living right.”

  I would have tried that, too, if I’d thought it would work, I admitted to myself. Deedra was able to be flippant about Pardon Albee now that he was dead, but she’d been deathly afraid at the very idea of his searching her apartment the last time I’d talked to her.

  The final button secured, Deedra went back to the bathroom mirror to add the finishing touches to her elaborately tousled blond hair.

  She began in her nasal voice: “When I went to pay my rent Monday afternoon”—I jerked to attention—“I was going to have to plead with that old fart to keep his mouth shut about Marcus. He was asleep on the couch, though.”

  “What time was that?” I called, trying to sound casual.

  “Ahm…four-thirtyish,” Deedra said abstractedly. “I left work for a few minutes. I forgot to take him a check at lunchtime, and you know how he was about being paid by five.” I walked down the hall so I could see her reflection in the mirror. Deedra was redefining an eyebrow.

  “Did the apartment look okay?”

  “Why, did you clean his, too?” Deedra said curiously, throwing down the eyebrow pencil. She began moving quickly to gather things up now that her face and hair were perfected. “Actually, the couch with its back to the door was pushed out of place. You know, it was on rollers. One end of it was touching the coffee table, and the throw rug in front of it was all rumpled up.”

  “You stepped in and had a good look, huh?”

  Deedra stopped dead in the act of reaching for her purse on the table by the door. “Hey, wait a minute,” she said. “Hey, Lily, I just went inside the room when he didn’t answer my knock. I thought maybe he was in the back of his apartment, since the door was unlocked. You know he was always home on rent day, and I thought it would be a good day to talk to him. I should have known better. It had already been a shitty day—my car wouldn’t start, my boss shouted at me, and then on my way back to work I almost hit the camper. But anyway, I thought I heard a sound in the apartment, so I opened the door, and there he was, out like a light. So I left my check on the desk, since I saw some there already, and I tried to talk loud to wake him up a couple more times, but then I left.”

  “He wasn’t asleep,” I said. “He was dead.”

  Deedra’s mouth fell open, obscuring her minimal chin entirely.

  “Oh no,” she whispered. “I never thought…I
just assumed he was asleep. Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.” Though how to reconcile that with Tom O’Hagen’s story—the rumpled rug, the couch sitting askew, but no body, an hour or more earlier—I couldn’t fathom.

  “You have to tell the police this,” I said as Deedra continued to stand there in a stupor.

  “Oh, I already did,” Deedra said absently. “But they didn’t tell me—Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “So that’s why he didn’t hear me. And I was talking real loud.”

  “And did you tell them why you wanted to talk to Pardon?”

  A glance at her tiny gold watch lit a fire under Deedra.

  “Hell no! I just said I went down there to pay the rent.” Deedra grabbed her keys, then glanced at herself once more in the big mirror over the couch. “And don’t you tell, either, Lily Bard! They don’t need to know anything about my personal life.”

  I had a lot to ponder after Deedra was out the door.

  Pardon Albee’s body had been on the couch of his apartment at four-thirty, give or take fifteen minutes. It hadn’t been there at three. But at three, when Tom saw it, the room was disarranged, the door left ajar, as though a struggle had taken place.

  Where had the body been in the hours before I had watched it being trundled across the street into the arboretum?

  I gathered up my cleaning things when Deedra’s apartment looked habitable again, then locked the door behind me carefully. I didn’t want to hear any more accusations like Deedra’s last week. I went down the stairs slowly to the O’Hagens’. Cleaning their apartment would use up the rest of my Friday morning.

  Jenny answered my knock, so I knew she’d had the two o’clock to ten o’clock shift at Bippy’s the night before. After closing, the O’Hagen on night duty usually got home by eleven or twelve and slept in the next morning, while the other one had to get up at five o’clock to make the six o’clock opening. Shakespeare is a town that rises early and beds early.

  Jenny has red hair and freckles, a flat chest, and wide hips, and she dresses well to camouflage those features. But today in her flowered bathrobe, she was not aiming to impress me. Jenny likes to regard me as part of the furniture, anyway. After saying hi indifferently, Jenny plopped back in her recliner and lit a cigarette, her eyes returning to a talk show I had never thought of watching.

  Jenny was the only person I’d seen in the past five days who was acting completely normal.

  The O’Hagens do their own laundry, but Jenny and Tom hate cleaning their kitchen, not too surprising when you consider they manage a restaurant. So I almost always have plenty to load in the dishwasher, sometimes what I estimate to be a whole week’s worth, and the garbage is always full of microwave meal trays and heat-and-eat cans. It also isn’t too surprising, I figure, that they don’t want to cook when they are home.

  Jenny ignored me utterly as I moved around the apartment, to the point of not reacting at all when I took everything off the TV tray table set up next to the recliner and dusted the tray, putting its contents back in pleasing order afterward. I hate Jenny’s cigarette smoke; she is the only client I have who smokes, I realized with a little surprise.

  The phone rang after I’d been working an hour. I heard Jenny pick it up and turn down the volume on the television set. Without trying, I heard Jenny murmur into the receiver for a few minutes, then thunk it back in its cradle.

  I had worked my way back to the master bedroom, where I changed the sheets in a flash and snapped the bedspread back into order. I dumped the ashtray on Jenny’s side of the bed (red hair on that pillow) and was walking around the bed to empty Tom’s ashtray when Jenny appeared in the doorway.

  “Thanks for backing up Tom,” she said abruptly.

  I glanced up, trying to read the round freckled face. All I could see was reluctance. Jenny didn’t like feeling beholden.

  “Just told the truth,” I said, dumping the butts into the garbage bag and wiping out the ashtray. I replaced it with a little clunk on the bedside table. I spied a pencil on the floor, stooped to pick it up, and dropped it in the drawer of the bedside table.

  “I know Tom’s story sounded a little funny,” Jenny said tentatively, as though she was waiting for my reaction.

  “Not to me,” I said crisply. I scanned the bedroom, couldn’t spot anything I’d missed, and started out the door to the second bedroom, which the O’Hagens had fitted up as an office. Jenny stepped back to let me pass.

  I’d tucked the corner of the dust cloth into my belt as I finished the bedroom. Now I whipped it out and began dusting the office. To my surprise, Jenny followed me. I glanced at my watch and kept on working. I was due at the Winthrops’ by one, and I wanted to have something for lunch before I got there.

  The glance wasn’t lost on Jenny. “Keep right on working,” she said invitingly, as though I wasn’t already. “I just wanted you to know we appreciate your remembering correctly. Tom was relieved he didn’t have to answer any more questions.”

  One had occurred to me during the morning. In the normal course of things, it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to ask Jenny, but I was fed up with Jenny alternately ignoring me and following me around.

  “So, did the police ask him what he was doing coming down the stairs from the other apartments, when he lives on the ground level?” I asked. I had my back to Jenny, but I heard a sharp intake of breath that signaled shock.

  “Yes, Claude did, just now,” Jenny said. “He wanted to ask Tom about that, since Tom hadn’t mentioned that earlier.”

  I could see why Claude Friedrich would think of asking, since his own apartment was on the second floor, opposite Norvel Whitbread’s.

  “And what did Tom say?”

  “None of your business,” flashed Jenny.

  Now, this was the familiar Jenny O’Hagen.

  “Guess not,” I said. I ran the dust cloth over the metal parts of the rolling chair behind the desk.

  “Well…” Jenny trailed off, then turned and marched into her bedroom, closing the door behind her firmly.

  She emerged just as I finished cleaning—which I did not exactly consider a coincidence—clad in a bright green camp shirt and gray slacks.

  “It looks great, Lily,” Jenny said without looking around. So she’d reverted to the new Jenny. I preferred the familiar rude Jenny; at least then I knew where I stood.

  “Um-hm. You want to write me a check now, or mail it to me?”

  “Here’s the money in cash.”

  “Okay.” I wrote a receipt, tucked the money in my pocket, and turned to leave.

  I could feel Jenny moving up behind me, and I spun quickly, to discover she was much closer.

  “It’s okay!” Jenny said hastily, backing up. “I just wanted to tell you that Tom wasn’t doing anything wrong on the second floor, okay? He was up there, but it was okay.” To my amazement, Jenny looked red around the eyes and nose, as though she was about to cry.

  I hoped that Jenny wouldn’t actually weep; I would not pat Jenny O’Hagen on the back.

  Evidently, Jenny felt the same way. “See you next week,” she said in a clogged voice.

  I shrugged, picked up my caddy of cleaning materials, and left. “Good-bye,” I said over my shoulder, to prove I was not uncivil.

  I’d closed the door briskly behind me as if I intended to leave the building at my usual clip. But I stopped and looked up and down the hall. There was no one in sight; I could hear no movement in the building. It was about noon on a Friday, and aside from the Yorks and Mrs. Hofstettler, everyone should be at work.

  It had occurred to me that the closet under the stairs (where Pardon kept odds and ends like extra lightbulbs and the heavy-duty vacuum for the halls) would have been an excellent temporary resting place for Pardon’s wandering corpse.

  And it just so happened I had a key.

  Pardon himself had given it to me three years before, when he’d taken the only vacation I could remember. He’d gone to Ca
ncún with a bus tour made up mostly of other Shakespeareans. While he’d been gone, I’d had the job of cleaning the halls and the glass panels in the back door, making sure the parking lot was clear of garbage, and channeling all the residents’ complaints to the proper repairman. Pardon had given me the key then, and he had never asked for its return, perhaps anticipating more package tours in his future.

  But all his fussing about his health had proved to have some basis, finally, when a specialist in Little Rock had told Pardon his heart actually had some small problem. Pardon had sworn off tours forever, for fear he’d have some kind of crisis in a foreign place, and he never tired of showing people his Cancún photos and telling them of his near brush with death.

  I’d marked all the keys entrusted to me with my own code. If they were stolen, I didn’t want the thief to be able to get into my clients’ homes and offices. The code I used was not sophisticated: I just went down to the next letter of the alphabet, so the key to the closet of Shakespeare Garden Apartments had a little strip of masking tape on it with the initials THB in heavy black ink.

  I tossed my key ring up and caught it with my right hand while I debated whether to look or not.

  Yes, I decided.

  The disappearance and reappearance of Pardon’s body, and its ultimate disposal in the park via my cart, had opened a vein of curiosity and anger in me. For one thing, it revealed unexpected depths in one of the people I saw often—for I didn’t think it possible that the killer could be someone other than an apartment resident.

  I didn’t know I’d reached that conclusion until I had the key in the lock and was turning it.

  I looked inside the large closet. It opens facing the hallway, and since it conforms to the rise of the staircase, it is much higher at the left end than the right. I reached up for the long string that hangs down from the bare bulb overhead. Just as my hand touched it, a voice spoke behind me.

  “What you looking for, Miss Lily?”

  I gasped involuntarily, but in a second, I recognized the voice. I turned around to face Claude Friedrich.