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 runkled 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 4:30, 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 had 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
