Death is Semisweet (7 page)

“Oh, I’m sure they’re all in the back, oiling up their bodies. I wouldn’t want to bother her. They get nervous, just like us actors,” Joe said with authority. “Let’s sit down.”

It was then that Heaven noticed the Foster’s Chocolate banner, hanging above the door they had just come in. “Foster’s Chocolate, the Athlete’s Friend,” the banner proclaimed. “Boy, every place you look, there’s Foster’s,” she said.

Joe went right over to a big fishbowl of various Foster’s Chocolate bars that was on a table by the doors leading in and out of the gym. “Well, it is their fiftieth anniversary. This is a pretty slick tie-in, because body builders are secret chocolate junkies. Kathy told me that.” He grabbed several wrapped confections. “I love the cashew and caramel turtles.”

Heaven poked around and came up with a green foil package. “I like these, the Mint Dreams. Mint stuff like marshmallow fluff covered with milk chocolate. Really disgusting and wonderful.”

Heaven and Joe started toward the bleachers, stuffing their candy in their coat pockets. But they didn’t get very far.

Loud voices were the first clue something was going on. They were coming from the locker room area, but soon the doors to that area opened up and the yelling, along with the people doing the yelling, spilled out onto the gym floor. The crowd, having come for a show, perked up, heads turned toward the noise like they were at a tennis match.

“Uh-oh. It’s my friend Kathy. Come on,” Joe said and started across the gym.

Someone from the club started following him. “You can’t wear those shoes on the gym floor,” they shouted. Joe had on some Prada boots with thick soles. He paid no attention to the admonition, making a beeline for the trouble. Heaven, however, took the route around the playing floor and still got there in time to get the drift of what was going on.

“I know you’re behind this, you bitch,” a women Heaven assumed to be Joe’s friend was yelling. She assumed this because Joe had grabbed hold of the woman’s arm. “This is a ridiculous allegation. I’m the mother of two, for God’s sake.”

Kathy, if Heaven was correct about it being Kathy, was a masculine-looking woman. Probably in her mid-forties, she did not have a pretty face; it was worn and leathery from too much sun. Still, she was attractive, very neat, very buffed, blond hair cut short, arms bulging beneath her T-shirt. It was impossible to tell if she had nice eyes because right now they were black and glittering with anger. The woman she was yelling at was in a robe, her hardened body gleaming with oil that would now have to be replaced. She too, had short blond hair, but was slightly younger, shorter and slimmer than Joe’s friend.

“I guess the doctors will tell us if that’s possible,” the younger woman said with a sneer.

Another woman, fully dressed and with a worried look on her face and a clipboard in her hand, stepped between the two contestants. “Let’s be calm, here. Kathy, this will not keep you out of the finals on Sunday. You have enough points already. Just keep the appointment tomorrow and everything will be fine.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’m going to your fucking appointment. But this is not over. Not by a long shot. You’re all a bunch of jealous, backbiting—”

“Kathy, come with us,” Joe said quickly and took his friend by the arm, turning her around and starting toward the door.

Heaven lagged behind Joe and Kathy. She watched the official and the alleged troublemaker put their heads together. The clipboard lady was attempting to calm the younger contestant, who seemed near tears. Then, as the clipboard woman walked away, the younger woman did a curious thing, at least Heaven thought it was curious. She took a Mint Dream—Heaven would have recognized that green foil from fifty yards away—out of her robe pocket, unwrapped it and started eating it, looking around to see if anyone was watching her. Even under the threat of being seen eating a Mint Dream at a body building exhibition, the solace of chocolate was just too strong. Heaven wondered if men secretly ate Snickers bars when they were upset.

Heaven caught up with Joe and Kathy just as they’d retrieved Kathy’s coat from the locker room. “I told Kathy we’d just go over to the café and have a drink,” Joe said, looking at Heaven for support.

“Kathy, I’m Heaven Lee. What happened back there?”

Kathy stuck her hand out to shake Heaven’s. “Kathy
Hager, glad to meet you. Sorry about all this. It was nice of you to come with my buddy here.” She punched Joe’s arm like a jock, then turned back toward Heaven. “Someone, and I know it was that bitch back there, put in a protest questioning my gender. I have to go tomorrow and prove I’m not a man.”

Heaven was momentarily speechless. She had a terrible impulse to laugh. She repressed this inappropriate reaction and offered what she could. “You’re right, Joe. A drink on me at the café. We’re only a few blocks away. Why don’t you ride with your friend and I’ll go back by myself.”

In just a few minutes, Heaven, Joe and Kathy Hager were sitting at the bar, clinking their glasses full of Herradura margaritas together. “To Kathy, who will be the body building champ of Kansas City on Sunday,” Joe said, trying hard to lift the pall off the evening.

“The woman body building champ,” Kathy said tersely.

“Kathy, does this happen often, that someone’s gender would come into doubt?” Heaven asked. “I know nothing about your sport, so I’m sorry if that’s a stupid question.”

Kathy shook her head. “The only time I can remember hearing about a gender protest was in ’99 in England. It was a runner, I think. I remember she was a mother, too.”

“What will they do?” Joe asked.

“At the doc’s?” Kathy replied. “A blood test and a physical exam. It’s just fuckin’ embarrassing, is what it is. This town is full of egomaniacs.”

Heaven assumed Kathy was a butch lesbian but maybe she wasn’t. Not every masculine woman was, and Kathy had just mentioned her children. Heaven felt slightly
ashamed that she had gone for an easy categorization. “How long have you been body building?”

“At least ten years. My partner, I had the same relationship for twenty years, was in the sport and she got me interested.”

Joe quickly broke in. “Heaven, Kathy’s partner died of breast cancer last year.”

“I’m sorry.” Heaven decided she could ask about the kids now, since Kathy was willing to talk personally. “What about your kids? Were you married to a man or did you adopt with your partner?”

“No, I was married to Gene Hager for eight years and both the girls are his, both born before I turned twenty. We lived back East, in Philadelphia. My girls loved Courtney though. They have been real good about my change of lifestyle.”

“How did you get from Philadelphia to Kansas City?”

“Jobs. Now I teach at UMKC. American history. Courtney”—Kathy had trouble saying her name and gulped— “worked in the business world,” she said vaguely.

Heaven didn’t want to ask any more painful questions about this woman’s dead lover. Kathy had had enough grief tonight, accused of trying to sneak in a body building contest she wasn’t equipped for. Heaven was thinking about how hard it would be to tell Iris something like Kathy had told her daughters.
“Hi, girls, I’m a lesbian now.
” She wondered what the daughters’ sexualities were; Kathy must have read her thoughts.

“Both of my daughters are wonderful and supportive. They’re both married to men—one lives in Baltimore, and one in Omaha. I’ve got three grandkids,” she said proudly.

Heaven thought of her own five marriages. “It’s amazing how much our kids will accept from us, isn’t it? I’ve
been married five times and have one daughter. She just went on loving me, no matter what stupid stuff I did.”

“So, what happens at these body building contests?” Joe asked, trying to avoid anymore maudlin mothers’ confessional between the two women.

Kathy was willing to explain. “Well, the judges award points for arms, back, leg and thigh together, calves, hamstrings, traps, overall body and best poser. You can win several of the categories and still not get best overall. And the crowds are very fickle. They get behind someone almost every season and when you have the crowd, it really helps you pose better.”

Heaven hadn’t seen enough to tell if Kathy had the crowd this season or not. She didn’t have to wait long to know.

“This year, little miss nosy bitch Jane is their favorite. I can’t figure it. She’s so serious, she comes off angry on stage. I don’t find that attractive at all.”

Joe and Heaven were at a loss as to how to make Kathy feel better. Heaven signaled the bartender. “One more for the road, Tony.”

“Oh look, it’s snowing,” Joe said, clapping his hands with glee.

The windows in the front of the restaurant revealed lots of wet snowflakes coming down like crazy. “I have to go look. I love 39th Street when it snows,” Heaven said and went toward the front door. “You guys visit. Kathy, I know this will all turn out all right. Go to that doctor and show ’em your stuff.”

Thirty-ninth Street was right in the middle of Kansas City, about halfway between downtown and the Plaza. It was a part of town generally left to the marketplace to decide its fortune, never receiving big government handouts for rehab. The storefronts were always rented,
some to trendy businesses, some to old-fashioned businesses like Sal’s and the hardware store and the tattoo parlor. A faction of the newer store owners would rather not have had a tattoo parlor in their midst. Heaven didn’t mind it. She liked it that 39th Street was driven by what people wanted and needed in their lives, not by some fancy developer’s ideas of what people wanted.

The big medical center six blocks away dictated that the neighborhood had affordable housing, cafés and bars and things like a Laundromat and a dry cleaners for the med students, and also florists for people to frequent before they visited their sick relatives.

Sal’s Barbershop was a fixture. Heaven couldn’t imagine 39th Street without Sal’s.

Quite a few contemporary restaurants, like Café Heaven, had sprung up on 39th Street, the rents still making it affordable to open there if you weren’t a national chain.

Right now, at ten at night, even though several businesses, including Café Heaven, were open and full of people, the street was silent in that way that snow can make a cityscape silent.

No cars had muddied the snow-covered pavement with tire marks yet.

Everything sparkled.

Absorbing the hustle and bustle of the day, camouflaging the mundane ugliness of chipped paint and graffiti and dog poop, the snowflakes had transformed a Plain Jane street into Cinderella.

Heaven slipped out the front door of the restaurant and danced down the middle of 39th Street for a minute, all by herself, making big figure eights in the fresh snow in her Italian high-heeled boots.

O
liver Bodden sat in Junior Foster’s office, nonchalantly reading the paper. Junior walked in, his hands full of papers, and glowered when he saw Oliver. “You still here?” Junior said tersely.

“I think you and Claude are right to have your offices down here at the plant,” Oliver said, ignoring the other man’s rudeness. “I took a look around and I think I found a space that will be a perfect little nook for me.”

Junior snorted. “That’s what the operations foreman tells me. Said you told him to start drawing up some plans. Since when is a thousand square feet considered a little nook?”

Oliver folded the paper carefully and looked around the room. “I would think any amount of space would be fine with you, just to get me out of your own rather spacious office.”

“Funny you never mentioned needing an office before this,” Junior said as he made piles on his desk of photocopies and file folders. “’Course there were lots
of things you didn’t mention.” He suddenly slumped down into his chair, sitting hard, forlorn with the realization of what a mess he’d made.

Oliver smiled at the other man’s pain. Foolish fellow to take this all so personally. He stood up and buttoned his suit jacket, today a Saville Row navy worsted with a tiny red stripe, and automatically straightened his tie, red with a small blue pattern. “Are you ready for the big press conference tomorrow?”