adopted town. There were still taboos, plenty of them, probably several of which I wasn’t even conscious. But there were also blacks in managerial positions, blacks who owned comfortable homes. Several clubs and one church were integrated. The public school system seemed to be functioning with little friction, and Lanette Glass was only one of many black teachers.
The habits and prejudices of over a century weren’t going to vanish overnight, or even in thirty years; and I’d always felt that progress, quiet and slow, was being made.
I wondered now if I’d been in a fool’s paradise. I had assumed that my approval of this change was shared by most people of both races, and I still thought so. But something evil was slithering through Shakespeare, had been for months.
Perhaps three weeks after Darnell Glass had been killed, Len Elgin had been found shot dead in his Ford pickup, on a little-traveled country road just within the city limits. Len, a prosperous white farmer in his fifties, was a genial and intelligent man, a pillar of his church, father of four, and an avid reader and hunter. Len had been a personal friend of Claude’s. Failure to solve Len’s murder had been eating at Claude, and the rumors that spread like wildfire had made handling Len Elgin’s death investigation even more delicate.
One school of thought had Elgin being killed in retaliation for the death of Darnell Glass. Of course the guilty parties, in this version, would be black extremists, even as Glass’s death was ascribed to white extremists.
Another rumor had it as fact that Len was being unfaithful to his wife, Mary Lee, with the wife of another farmer. According to this rumor, the murderer was either Mary Lee, the other farmer (who was named Booth Moore), or Moore’s wife Erica. Those who accused Erica were assuming that Len had terminated their relationship.
Somehow the fight-The Fight-in the Burger Tycoon parking lot had triggered all this.
We were all losing our sense of community; we were subdividing into groups not only by race but by the degree of our intensity of feeling about that race. I thought about the ugly scrawl on Deedra’s car. I thought about Tom David Meicklejohn’s scarcely concealed glee that September night in the parking lot. I remembered glimpsing, through the windows of the limousine following the hearse, Mary Lee Elgin’s face as the funeral cortege passed by. And then, banal in its wrong-headedness, but no less vicious for its banality, the sheet of blue paper under Claude’s windshield wiper.
Surely it was stretching credulity to think that Del Packard’s death in the gym was totally unrelated to the deaths of Darnell Glass and Len Elgin. How could three men be done to death in a town the size of Shakespeare in a space of two months and the killings all be mysterious? If Darnell Glass had been knifed behind a local bar during a fight over a girl, if Len Elgin had been shot in Erica Moore’s bed, if Del had been in the habit of lifting alone and maybe had some undiagnosed physical weakness…
I was making another circuit by the apartments. I looked up at Claude’s window, thinking sadly about the man inside. Would I change my mind about what I’d said, given another chance? I was genuinely fond of Claude, and grateful to him, and he had a lot on his shoulders.
But that was his chosen job. And Darnell Glass’s death had taken place in the county, so that investigation was Sheriff Marty Schuster’s headache. I didn’t know too much about the sheriff, except that he was good at politicking and was a Vietnam veteran. I wondered if Schuster could calm the rising storm that was rattling Shakespeare’s windows.
I had to walk another hour before I could sleep.
Chapter Four
I woke up and looked out at sheets of rain, a chilly autumnal gray rain. I’d slept a little late since I’d had such a hard time getting to bed the night before. I’d have to hurry to make it to Body Time. Before I dressed, I poured myself a cup of coffee and drank it at the kitchen table, the morning paper unopened beside me. I had a lot to think about.
I worked out without talking to anyone. I drove home feeling a lot better.
I showered, dressed, put on my makeup, and fluffed my hair.
I wondered if the black-haired man had been out walking in the night, too.
As my car lurched slowly along the driveway that led to the back of the small Shakespeare Clinic, an uninspiring yellow brick office structure dating from the early sixties, I was betting that Carrie Thrush would be working today.
Sure enough, Carrie’s aging white Subaru was in its usual place behind the building. I used my key and called “Hi!” down the hall. Carrie’s clinic was depressing. The walls were painted an uninspiring tan and the floors were covered with a pitted brown linoleum. There wasn’t enough money yet for renovation. The doctor had massive debts to pay off.
Carrie’s answer came floating back, and I stepped into the doorway of her office. The best thing you could say about Carrie’s office was that it was large enough. She did a lot of scut work herself, to save money to pay back the loans that had gotten her through med school. The doctor was in black denims and a rust-red sweater. Carrie is short, rounded, pale, and serious, and she hasn’t had a date in the two years since she’s come to Shakespeare.
For one thing, she’s all too likely to be interrupted in any free time she might manage. Then, too, men are intimidated by Carrie’s calm intelligence and competence. At least that was what I figured.
“Anything interesting happen this week?” she asked, as if she wanted to take her mind off the heap of paper. She shoved her brown chin-length hair behind her ears, resettled her glasses on her snub nose. Her beautiful brown eyes were magnified many times by the lenses.
“Becca Whitley, the niece, is living in Pardon’s apartment,” I said, after some thought. “The man who’s taken Del Packard’s place at Winthrop Sporting is living in Norvel Whitbread’s old apartment. And Marcus Jefferson moved out in a hurry after the Deedra Dean car-painting incident.” I’d seen the U-Haul trailer attached to Marcus’s car the morning before.
“That was probably a good move,” Carrie said. “Sad though that state of affairs is.”
I tried to think of other items of interest. “I ate out in Montrose with the chief of police,” I told her. Carrie hungered for something frivolous after being a sober, God-like decision-maker all week.
“Is that the niece everyone was talking about, the one he left everything to?” Carrie had fastened on the first item. But she would get around to all of them.
I nodded.
“What’s she like?”
“She’s got long blond hair, she wears heavy makeup, she works out and takes karate, and she probably features in the wet dreams of half the guys she meets.”
“Smart?”
“Don’t know.”
“Has she rented out Marcus’s apartment yet? A lab tech at the hospital is looking for a place to live.” Shakespeare had a tiny hospital, perpetually in danger of being closed.
“I don’t think the dust has had time to settle on the windowsill yet. Tell the lab tech to get on down there and knock on the apartment to the rear right.”
“So what’s with the chief? He show you his nightstick?”
I smiled. Carrie had a ribald sense of humor. “He wants to, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“He’s been hanging around you for months like a faithful hound, Lily. Cut him loose or give in.”
I was reminded yet again of how much people in a small town knew about you even when you tried to keep your life private.
“He’s cut loose as of last night,” I said. “I just enjoy his company. He knows that.”
“Do you think you can be comfortable with him now?”
I thought of a quick answer and a longer truer one. I sat down in one of the two patient chairs and said, “It was possible until Claude started talking about the Darnell Glass lawsuit.”
“Yeah, I hear Mrs. Glass is talking to a lawyer from Little Rock about bringing a suit. You’d be a witness, huh?”
