Shakespeare's Trollop (14 page)

I spared a moment to wonder why a law-enforcement officer was being so forthcoming with speculation.

“She wasn't pregnant,” I muttered.

He shook his heavy head. “Nope. And she'd had sex with someone wearing a condom. But we don't know if it was necessarily the killer.”

“So you think maybe he couldn't do it, and she enraged him?” But that kind of taunting didn't seem in Deedra's character. Oh, how the hell did I know how she acted with men?

“That's possible. But I did talk with a former bedmate of hers who had the same problem,” Deputy Emanuel said, amazing me yet again. “He said she was really sweet about it, consoling, telling him next time would be okay, she was sure.”

“That wouldn't stop some men from beating her up,” I said.

He nodded, giving me credit for experience. “So that's still a possibility, but it seems more unlikely.”

Emanuel paused, giving me plenty of eye contact. He had no interest whatsoever in me as a woman, which pleased me. “So,” he concluded, “we're back to the question of why anyone would do in Deedra if it wasn't over some sexual matter? Why make it look like the motive was sex?”

“Because that makes so many more suspects,” I said. Emanuel and I nodded simultaneously as we accepted the truth of that idea. “Could she have learned something at her job? The county clerk's office is pretty important.”

“The county payroll, property taxes…yes, the clerk's office handles a lot of money and responsibility. And we've talked to Choke Anson several times, both about how Deedra was at work and about his relationship to her. He looks clear to me. As far as Deedra knowing something connected to her job, something she shouldn't know, almost everything there is a matter of public record, and all the other clerks have access to the same material. It's not like Deedra exclusively…”

He trailed off, but I got his point.

“I'm going to tell you something,” I said.

“Good,” he responded. “I was hoping you would.”

Feeling like this betrayal was a necessary one, I told him about Marlon Schuster's strange visit to Deedra's apartment.

“He had a key,” I said. “He says he loved her. But what if he found out she was cheating on him? He says she loved him, too, and that's why she gave him a key. But did you ever find Deedra's own key?”

“No.” Emanuel looked down at his enormous feet. “No, never did. Or her purse.”

“What about you and Deedra?” I asked abruptly. I was tired of worrying about it.

“I wouldn't have touched her with a ten-foot pole,” he said, distaste making his voice sour. “That's the only thing I have in common with Choke Anson. I like a woman who's a little more choosy, has some self-respect.”

“Like Marta.”

He shot me an unloving look. “Everyone else in the department thinks Marlon did it,” Deputy Emanuel said quietly. He leaned back against his car, and it rocked a little. “Every single man in the department thinks Marta's blind for not bringing her brother in. They're all talking against her. You can't reason with 'em. He was the last to have her, so he was the guilty one, they figure.”

So that was the reason Emanuel was confiding in me. He was isolated from his own clan. “Marlon was with Deedra Saturday night?” I asked.

The deputy nodded. “And Sunday morning. But he says he didn't see her after he left to go to church on Sunday. He called her apartment several times, he says. And her phone records bear that out.”

“What calls did she make?”

“She called her mother,” Clifton Emanuel said heavily. “She called her mother.”

“Do you have any idea why?” I asked, keeping my voice soft, because it seemed to me Clifton was about to pull the lid back on top of his loquacity, and I wanted to get everything I could out of him before the well ran dry.

“According to her mother, it was a family matter.”

That lid was sliding shut.

“About Jerrell fooling around with Deedra before he dated Lacey?”

His lips pursed in a flat line, Clifton gave an ambiguous movement of his head, which could mean anything. The lid was down now.

“I'm gonna go,” I said.

He was regretting talking to me now, the luxury of speculating with another skeptical party forgotten, the fact that he was a lawman now uppermost in his mind. He'd talked out of school and he didn't like himself for it. If he hadn't been so enamored of Marta Schuster, if he'd been in good standing with his fellow deputies, he'd never have said a word. And I saw his struggle as he tried to piece together what to say to me to ensure my silence.

“For what it's worth,” I said, “I don't think Marlon killed her. And rumor has it that yesterday Lacey told Jerrell to move out.”

Deputy Emanuel blinked and considered this information with narrowed eyes.

“And you know those pearls?”

He nodded absently.

I inclined my head toward the branch where they'd dangled.

“I don't think she would have thrown them around.” The pearls had been bothering me. Clifton Emanuel made a “keep going” gesture to get me to elaborate. I shrugged. “Her father gave her that necklace. She valued it.”

Clifton Emanuel looked down at me with those fathomless black eyes. I thought he was deciding whether or not to trust me. I may have been wrong; he may have been wondering if he'd have a hamburger or chicken nuggets when he went through the drive-through at Burger Tycoon.

After a moment of silence, I turned on my heel and went down the road, all too aware that he was staring after me. I didn't get that uneasy feeling with Deputy Emanuel, that prickling-at-the-back-of-the-neck feeling that some people gave me; the feeling that warned me that something sick and possibly dangerous lurked inside that person's psyche. But after our little conversation I was sure that Marta Schuster was lucky to have the devotion of this man, and I was glad I was not her enemy.

 

On my way into town, I was thinking hard. Now more than ever, it seemed to me—and I thought that it seemed to Clifton Emanuel, too—there was something phony about the crime scene in the woods. Though Deputy Emanuel had run out of confidence in me before we'd run out of conversation, he too had seemed dubious about the scenario implied by the trappings left at the scene.

At my next job, Camille Emerson's place, I was lucky enough to find the house empty. I was able to keep thinking while I worked.

That implied scenario: though I'd gone over it with Emanuel, I ran it again in my head. Deedra and a flame go out to the woods in Deedra's car. The flame gets Deedra to strip, which she does with abandon, flinging her clothes and jewelry everywhere.

Then a quarrel occurs. Perhaps the man can't perform sexually, and Deedra taunts him (though Emanuel had testimony and I agreed that such taunting was unlike Deedra). Maybe Deedra threatens to tell the flame's wife, mother, or girlfriend that Deedra and the flame are having sex, period. Or possibly the flame is just into rough sex, killing Deedra in a fit of passion. But would that tie in with the catastrophic blow that stopped her heart?

I was so tired of thinking about Deedra by that time that the last explanation tempted me. I didn't want to think Deedra's death was anything more than passion of one kind or another, passion that had gotten fatally out of hand.

But as I finished dusting the “collectibles” on Camille Emerson's living-room shelves. I caught sight of myself in the mantel mirror. I was shaking my head in a sober way, all to myself.

The only injury Deedra had sustained, according to every source, was the killing blow itself. I knew all too well what rough sex was like. It's not one blow or act or bit of brutality, but a whole series of them. The object of this attention doesn't emerge from the sex act with one injury, but a series of injuries. The bottle insertion had happened after Deedra was dead. Therefore, I realized, as I carried a load of dirty towels to the laundry area, that little nasty, contemptuous act was no more than window dressing. Maybe the equivalent of having the last word in a conversation.

That said something about the person who'd performed the insertion, didn't it? I covered my hand with a paper towel and pulled a wad of bubble gum off the baseboard behind the trashcan in the younger Emerson boy's room.

So, we had someone strong, strong enough to kill with one blow. The blow was probably purposeful. Evidently, the person had
meant
to kill Deedra.

We had someone who despised women. Maybe not all women, but women in some way like Deedra. Promiscuous? Attractive? Young? All of the above?

We had someone who had no regard for human life.

And we had someone clever. When I turned it over in my mind yet again, I could see that the staging was successful if you didn't really know Deedra. Deedra wouldn't throw things around like that, even if she were stripping for someone, which I could very well imagine her doing. Even then, she might sling a blouse, but it would land on something that wouldn't tear or dirty it. She wouldn't toss her pearls around. And the woods…no, she wouldn't do that in the woods! Where was the lap robe or blanket for the lovers to lie on? Why ask Deedra to strip if the goal was a quick screw in the backseat of the car?

I concluded that whoever'd killed Deedra hadn't thought anything at all about her character, had only known facts: that she was promiscuous and biddable. He hadn't thought of her fastidiousness about her surroundings, hadn't thought about her care for her possessions, the care that had never extended to cover her own body.

As I closed the Emersons' door behind me, I realized that now I knew much more than I had this morning. What to do with it, how to make it work for me, was still mysterious. These pieces of knowledge were not evidence to which anyone else would give credence, but at least Clifton Emanuel had listened. I was relieved to know he had been wondering, as I had been, if the whole scene in the woods was a setup.

A setup to serve what purpose?

Okay, the purpose had to be, as the deputy and I had hinted to each other in our conversation, to misdirect. The scene had been staged to make it appear that Deedra had been killed for a sexual reason; therefore, if the scene was false, Deedra had
not
been killed because she was sexually active.

She had been killed because…she worked at the county clerk's office? She was Lacey Dean Knopp's daughter? She was the granddaughter of Joe C Prader? She was easily led and promiscuous, so she was an easy target? I'd hit a mental wall.

It was time to dismiss Deedra from my thoughts for a while. When I was sitting in my kitchen at noon, that was easy.

My house felt empty and bleak without Jack in it. I didn't like that at all. I ate lunch as quickly as I could, imagining him riding back to Little Rock, arriving at his own apartment. He'd return his phone messages, make notes on the case he'd just finished, answer his E-mail.

I missed him. I seemed to need him more than I ought to. Maybe it was because for so long I had done without? Maybe I valued him more deeply because of what I'd gone through all those years ago? I saw Jack's faults; I didn't think he was perfect. And that didn't make a bit of difference. What would I do if something happened to Jack?

This seemed to be a day for questions I couldn't answer.

At karate class that night, I wasn't concentrating, which called down a scolding from Marshall. I was glad we didn't spar, because I would've lost, and I don't like to lose. Janet teased me as I tied my shoes, accusing me of being abstracted because I was pining for Jack. I managed to half-smile at her, though my impulse was to lash out. Allowing thoughts of a man to disrupt something so important to me was…I subsided suddenly.

It would be quite natural. It would be normal.

But picturing Jack in the shower wasn't what had distracted me. I'd been thinking of Deedra—her face in death, her positioning at the wheel of her red car. I didn't know what I could do to help her. I had done all I could. I finished tying my shoes and sat up, staring across the empty room at Becca, who was laughingly instructing her brother in the correct position of his hands for the
sanchin dachi
posture. She motioned me to come over and help, but I shook my head and gathered the handles of my gym bag in my fist. I was ready to be by myself.

 

After I got home I resumed the task of scanning Deedra's tapes, since I had promised Marlon that if I found the one that featured him I would give it to him. I found myself feeling a little sick at the idea of him keeping a video of him having sex with a woman now dead, but it was none of my business what he did with it. I disliked Marlon Schuster, though that was maybe stating my feeling for him too strongly. It was more accurate to say I had no respect for him, which was quite usual for me. I had found nothing in him to like except his tenderness for Deedra. But that was something, and I had made him a promise.

I almost dozed off as I looked at the videos. I found myself looking at things I'd never seen before: talk shows, soap operas, and “reality” shows about ambulance drivers, policemen, wanted criminals, and missing children. After viewing a few tapes I could predict what was coming next, her pattern. It was like an up-ended time capsule for the past couple of weeks in television land. When I'd transferred the videotapes into a box, the most recent ones had ended up on the bottom.

Most of the videos weren't labeled—the ones she'd already watched, I guessed. The labeled ones had abbreviations on them that only gradually began to make sense to me. I discovered that “OLTL” meant
One Life to Live
and that “C” meant
Cops
, while “AMW” was
America's Most Wanted
, and “Op” was
Oprah
.

After I'd scanned maybe ten of the tapes, I found the one of Marlon and Deedra. I only watched a second of it, enough to confirm the identity of the couple. (That was all Marlon needed, to get a tape of Deedra with another man.) I put the tape aside with a discreet Post-It.

Since I'd started the job, I kept on with it out of sheer doggedness. I was able to weed out one more home movie—Deedra and our mailman, in partial uniform. Disgusting. All the other videos seemed to contain innocuous television programming. When I got to the bottom, I realized that I could match these shows with the synopses in Jack's old magazine. These were things Deedra had taped during the week before she died. There was even an old movie Deedra had taped on Saturday morning at the end of one tape.

Deedra had had at least two tapes with previous Saturday night shows on them in her film library. She'd taped the same pattern of shows each weekend. So where was the tape from last Saturday night? She hadn't died until Sunday; she'd been alive when Marlon had left her Sunday morning, he'd said. Even if I didn't want to believe Marlon, she'd talked to her mother at church, right? So where was the Saturday night tape?

It was probably an unimportant detail, but unimportant details are what make up housecleaning. Those details add up. A shiny sink, a neatly folded towel, a dustless television screen; this is the visible proof that your house has been labored over.

I was beginning to get a rare headache. None of this made sense. I could only be glad I wasn't on the police force. I'd be obliged to listen to men tell me day after day about their little flings with Deedra, their moments of weakness, their infidelities. Surely watching a few seconds of homemade porn was better than that, if I was still obliged to clean up after Deedra in some moral way.

It was a relief when the phone rang.

“Lily!” Carrie said happily.

“Mrs. Dr. Friedrich,” I answered.

There was a long pause over the line. “Wow,” she breathed. “I just can't get used to it. You think it'll take people a long time to start calling me Dr. Friedrich?”

“Maybe a week.”

“Oh boy,” she said happily, sounding all of eighteen. “Oh, boy. Hey, how are you? Anything big happen while we were gone?”

“Not too much. How was Hot Springs?”

“Oh…beautiful,” she said, sighing. “I can't believe we have to go to work tomorrow.”

I heard a rumble in the background.

“Claude says thanks for standing up for us at the courthouse,” Carrie relayed.

“I was glad to do it. Are you at your house?”

“Yes. We'll have to get Claude's things moved soon. I told my parents about an hour ago! They'd given up hope on me, and they just went nuts.”

“What do you and Claude need for your wedding present?” I asked.

“Lily, we don't need a thing. We're so old, and we've been set up on our own for so long. There's not a thing we need.”

“Okay,” I said. “I can see that. What about me cleaning Claude's apartment after he gets his stuff out?”

“Oh, Lily, that would be great! One less thing we have to do.”

“Then consider it done.”

Carrie was telling Claude what I proposed, and he was objecting.

“Claude says that's too much on you since you clean for a living,” Carrie reported.

“Tell Claude to put a sock in it. It's a gift,” I said, and Carrie giggled and gave him the message.

“Lily, I'll see you soon,” she said. “Oh, Lily, I'm so happy!”

“I'm glad for both of you,” I said. Sooner or later, someone would tell Carrie about the fire, and she'd chide me for not telling her myself. But she didn't need to come down from her cloud of happiness and be retroactively worried about me. Tomorrow she'd be back at work and so would Claude. The lives of a doctor and a chief of police are not giddy and irresponsible.

The next morning I found myself wondering why I hadn't heard from Lacey. She'd wanted me to work some more in the apartment. Her marriage crisis must have changed her agenda, and I wasn't surprised. I worked that morning after all. The gap caused by losing Joe C as a client was filled when Mrs. Jepperson's sitter called to ask me to come over.

Mrs. Jepperson was having a lucid day, Laquanda Titchnor told me all too loudly as she let me in. Laquanda, whom I held in low regard, was the woman Mrs. Jepperson's daughter had had to settle for when better aides had all been employed.

Laquanda's greatest virtues were that she showed up on time, stayed as long as she was supposed to, and knew how to dial 911. And she talked to Mrs. Jepperson, rather than just staring at the television silently all day, as I'd seen other babysitters (of both the young and the elderly) do. Laquanda and Birdie Rossiter were sisters under the skin, at least as far as their need to provide commentary every moment of every day.

Today Laquanda had a problem. Her daughter had called from the high school to tell her mother she was throwing up and running a fever.

“I just need you to watch Mrs. Jepperson while I run to get my girl and take her to the doctor,” Laquanda told me. She didn't sound very pleased I was there. It was clear to both of us we weren't exactly a mutual admiration society.

“So go,” I said. Laquanda waited for me to say something else. When I didn't, she pointed out the list of emergency numbers, grabbed her purse, and hightailed it out the kitchen door. The house was still clean from my last visit, I noticed, after I cast a glance in the master bedroom at the sleeping lady. For something to do, I gave a cursory scrub to the bathroom and kitchen surfaces. Laquanda always did the laundry and dishes (what little there was to do) in between monologues, and Mrs. Jepperson was bedridden and didn't have much occasion to litter the house. Her family visited every day, either her daughter, her son, their spouses, or any of the eight grandchildren. There were great-grandchildren, too, maybe three or four.

After I'd written a brief list of needed supplies and stuck it to the refrigerator (the granddaughter would pick it up and take it to the store) I perched on the edge of Laquanda's chair set close to the bed. She'd carefully angled it so she could see the front door, the television, and Mrs. Jepperson, all in a single sweeping glance.

I'd thought Mrs. Jepperson was still asleep, but after a minute she opened her eyes. Narrowed by drooping, wrinkled lids, her eyes were dark brown and cloudy, and since her eyebrows and eyelashes were almost invisible she looked like some old reptile in the sun.

“She's really not so bad,” Mrs. Jepperson told me, in a dry, rustling voice that increased her resemblance to a reptile. “She just talks to keep her spirits up. Her job is so boring.” And the old woman gave a faint smile that had the traces of a formidable charm lingering around the edges.

I couldn't think of any response.

Mrs. Jepperson looked at me with greater attention.

“You're the housecleaner,” she said, as if she'd just slapped a label on my forehead.

“Yes.”

“Your name is…?”

“Lily Bard.”

“Are you married, Lily?” Mrs. Jepperson seemed to feel obliged to be social.

“No.”

My employer seemed to ponder that. “I was married for forty-five years,” she said after a pause.

“A long time.”

“Yep. I couldn't stand him for the last thirty-five of them.”

I made a strangled noise that was actually an attempt to stifle a snort of laughter.

“You all right, young woman?”

“Yes ma'am. I'm fine.”

“My children and grandchildren hate me talking like this,” Mrs. Jepperson said in her leisurely way. Her narrow brown eyes coasted my way to give me a close examination. “But that's the luxury of outliving your husband. You get to talk about him all you want.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Here I am, talking,” she said undeniably. “He had an eye for other women. I'm not saying he ever actually did anything about it, but he looked aplenty. He liked stupid women.”

“Then he made a mistake.”

She laughed herself, after a second of thinking that through. Even her laughter had a dry and rustling sound. “Yes, he did,” she said, still amused. “He did right well in the lumber business, left me enough to last out my lifetime without me having to go teach school or do some other fool thing I wasn't meant to do. 'Course, I had to run the business after he died. But I already knew a lot, and I learned more right smart.”

“I guess you know who owns all the land hereabouts, since you were in lumber.” It occurred to me I had a valuable source of information right here in front of me.

She looked at me, a little surprised. “I did. I used to.”

“You know Birdie Rossiter, widow of M. T. Rossiter?”

“Audie Rossiter's daughter-in-law?”

“Right. Know where she lives?”

“Audie gave them that land. They built right off of Farm Hill Road.”

“That's right.”

“What about it?”

“There's a few acres of woods right outside the city limits sign, just south of the road.”

“Hasn't been built on yet?” Mrs. Jepperson said. “That's a surprise. Less than half a mile past the city limits, yes?”

I nodded. Then, afraid she couldn't make that out, I said, “Yes.”

“You want to know who that belongs to?”

“Yes, ma'am. If you know.”

“You could go the county clerk's office, look it up.”

“It's easier to ask you.”

“Hmm.” She looked at me, thinking. “I believe that land belongs to the Prader family,” she said finally. “Least, it did up until maybe five years ago.”

“You were working up till then?” I figured Mrs. Jepperson was in her late eighties.

“Didn't have nothing else to do. I'd make those men I hired ride me around. Let 'em know I was checking on what they were doing. You can believe I kept them on their toes. They need to keep on earning money for those worthless great-grandchildren of mine.” She smiled, and if I needed another clue that she didn't really think her great-grandchildren were worthless, I got it then.

“Joe C Prader owns that land?”

“Sure does, if I remember correctly. He lets his family and friends hunt on it. Joe C's even older'n me, so he may not have any friends left. He didn't have a whole lot to start with.”

Mrs. Jepperson fell asleep without any warning. It was so alarming that I checked her breathing, but she was fine as far as I could tell. Laquanda came in soon afterward and checked on the old lady too. She'd dropped her daughter off at home with instructions to take some Emetrol and ginger ale and go to bed.

“She okay while I was gone?” Laquanda asked.

“Fine. We had a conversation,” I reported.

“You? And Miz Jepperson? I wish I coulda heard that,” Laquanda said skeptically. “This lady knows everything, and I mean everything, about Shakespeare. At least about the white folks, and a lot of the blacks, too. But she doesn't share it, no sir. She keeps her mouth shut.”

I shrugged and gathered my things together. If I'd asked her about old scandals and personalities, I wouldn't have gotten the same cooperation I'd gotten in asking about land. Land was business. People weren't.

When I got back to my house to eat lunch, I had a message on my answering machine from Becca. She'd thought of a couple of bills that would come due while she was gone, and wanted to leave checks with me to cover them. After I'd eaten a tuna sandwich, brushed my teeth, and checked my makeup, I still had thirty minutes until my next appointment, so I decided to oblige.