Becca Whitley had taken her own sweet time in coming to check out her inheritance. One of the tenants in the apartment house, Marie Hofstettler, a very old woman who was one of my favorite clients, had told me the same lawyer who’d hired me to clean the halls had been collecting the rent for the past few months. And Deedra had told me that when her lease had expired her rent had gone up.
“I know I’ve been slow to get to Shakespeare to see to settling Uncle Pardon’s estate,” the blond said, chiming in on my thoughts in a way that focused my wandering attention firmly. I looked at her directly for the first time. She was narrow-faced, with strong but scaled-down features. The deep tan was freckled. Her eyes were a bright I-wear-blue-contacts sapphire, and heavily made up. She also wore candy-pink lipstick and lined her lips with a darker shade. The effect stopped short of vampiric; but it was definitely predatory.
Becca Whitley was saying, “I had a divorce to settle in Dallas, and an apartment to clean out.”
“So you’re moving to Shakespeare?” I asked, hardly able to conceal my amazement. I took in her long mane of Lady
Clairol hair, and the cone-shaped breasts bulging at her gi, and thought she would surely stir the local roosters up. Marshall was strutting around practically wiggling his crest and crowing. No wonder tonight he’d spared me most of those wounded looks he’d been casting me the past two weeks. I had to repress an impulse to snort.
“I think I’ll just live in Uncle Pardon’s apartment, at least for now,” Becca Whitley was saying. “It’s so convenient.”
“I hope Shakespeare isn’t too quiet for you after such a big city,” I said. I realized that when I thought about Marshall’s interest in Becca Whitley, the pang I felt was very small, almost negligible, which was only right.
“Oh, I’ve lived in Austin, which is really just a big town,” Becca said. “But the past few months I’ve been in Dallas, and I couldn’t stand the traffic and the pressure. See, I just got divorced, and I need a new life for myself.”
“Any children?” Janet asked hopefully. She’d come up behind me.
“Not a one,” our newest Shakespearean responded happily. “Just too busy, I guess.”
Marshall was trying to conceal his relief just as hard as Janet was trying to conceal her chagrin.
“I’ve been cleaning the apartment halls since Pardon died,” I said. “Do you want me to keep on, or have you made other plans?”
“I expect I’ll be doing it,” Becca said.
I nodded and gathered my things together. The extra money had been pleasant, but working late on Saturday hadn’t.
Our sensei was still telling Becca how much we wanted her to come back to class as Janet and I bowed at the door on our way out.
“Screw her,” Janet said quietly and viciously after we’d reached the parking lot.
It seemed to me it wouldn’t be too long before Marshall tried to do just that, and Carlton, longtime most eligible bachelor in Shakespeare, had seemed interested, too.
I liked Janet pretty well, and I could see she was chagrined at the sexy and striking Becca Whitley’s appearance and Marshall’s obvious approval. Janet had been waiting for Marshall to notice her for a couple of years.
“She’ll never last in Shakespeare,” I told the disappointed woman. I was surprised to hear my own voice.
“Thanks, Lily,” Janet said, sounding equally surprised. “We’ll have to wait and see.” To my amazement, she gave me a half-hug before unlocking her Trooper.
When I came in through the kitchen door, I could hear my television. Claude was parked in the double recliner watching a football game. He looked unnervingly at home. He waved a casual hand when I called “Hello,” so I didn’t hurry as I showered and dressed. When I emerged, once again made up and polished, Claude was in the kitchen drinking a glass of iced tea.
“What do you think of your new landlady?” I asked.
“The Whitley woman? Looks like a raccoon, don’t she, with all that eye makeup?” he said lazily.
I smiled. “Ready to eat?” I asked.
Soon we were driving toward Montrose, the nearest large town. It lay west and slightly north of Shakespeare, and it was the retail hub for many small towns like Shakespeare. Montrose, which boasted a population of around forty thousand year-round, more during college sessions, was where Shakespeareans went when they didn’t want to make the somewhat longer northeast drive to Little Rock.
I’d never been enthusiastic about Montrose, a town which could have been dropped anywhere in the United States without its visitors knowing the difference. Montrose had no character; it had shopping. There were all the usual fast-food places and all the usual chain stores, and a five-screen movie-plex, and a Wal-Mart Super Center. In my view, the main attractions of Montrose were its superior library, its one good independent bookstore, and perhaps four fairly good non-chain restaurants. And a couple of decent chain ones.
In the months I’d been seeing Marshall, I’d spent more time in Montrose than I had in the four years I’d lived in Shakespeare. Evenings at home had little charm for Marshall.
We’d tried every restaurant, sat through Jackie Chan and Steven Seagal movies, visited every sporting goods store to compare their prices to Winthrops‘, and done our weekly shopping at the Super Center.
This evening, Claude suggested a movie. I almost agreed out of courtesy. But remembering the uncomfortable hours with Marshall, I admitted, “I really don’t like going to the movies.”
“That so?”
“I don’t like sitting with a lot of strangers in the dark, having to listen to them shift around and rattle paper and talk. I’d rather wait until it comes out on video and see it at home.”
“Okay,” he said. “What would you like to do?”
“I want to eat at El Paso Grande and go to the bookstore,” I said.
Silence. I looked over at him out of the corners of my eyes.
“What about Catch the Wave and the bookstore?” he countered.
“Done,” I said, relieved. “You don’t like Tex-Mex?”
“Ate there last week when I had to come to Montrose to the courthouse.”
As we waited on our order in the seafood restaurant, Claude said, “I think Darnell Glass’s mother is going to bring a civil suit against the Shakespeare Police Department.”
“Against the department?” I asked sharply. “That’s unfair. It should be against Tom David.” Tom David Meicklejohn, one of Claude’s patrolmen, had long been on my black list, and after the Darnell Glass incident, he’d moved to the number-one spot.
Suddenly, I wondered if this was the real reason for the flowers, the evening out: this conversation.
“Her lawyer’s also naming Todd Picard. You think you could remember the timing just once more?”
I nodded, but I heaved an internal sigh. I was reluctant to recall the warm black night of The Fight. I’d been interviewed and interviewed about The Fight: That’s what all the Shakespeareans called it. It had taken place in the parking lot of Burger Tycoon, a locally owned hamburger place that competed valiantly with Burger King and McDonald’s, which were both down Main Street a piece.
I’d only come in on the crisis, but I’d read and heard enough later to flesh out what I’d actually seen.
Darnell Glass was sitting in his car in the Burger Tycoon parking lot, talking to his girlfriend. Bob Hodding, trying to pull into the adjacent parking space, hit Glass’s rear bumper. Hodding was white, sixteen years old, a student at Shakespeare High School. Glass was eighteen and in his freshman year at UA Montrose. He had just made the first down payment on his first car. Not too surprisingly, when he heard the unmistakable grinding crunch of the two bumpers tangling, Glass was enraged. He jumped out of his car, waving his hands and shouting.
Hodding was instantly on the offensive, since he knew the reputation of the young man whose car he’d just hit. Darnell Glass had attended the Shakespeare schools until he enrolled in college, and had a reputation as a bright and promising young man. But he was also known to be aggressive and hair-trigger sensitive in his dealings with white peers.
Bob Hodding had been raised with a Confederate flag flying in front of his house. He remembered Glass overreacting to situations at the high school. He wasn’t afraid, since he had three of his buddies in his car, and he wasn’t about to apologize in front of them, or admit his driving had been less than adequate.
A couple of witnesses told Claude later, privately, that Hodding pushed every emotional button he possibly could to further enrage Darnell Glass, including a jibe about Glass’s mother, a junior high school teacher and well-
