“I don’t do autopsies,” I said, and my voice was too hard and angry. Deedra had been so quick to have consensual sex that it would be hard to even theorize she’d been raped unless there was a lot of damage, I was sure. Maybe the insertion of the bottle covered up damage from another source? Maybe it indicated the man couldn’t perform normally?
And maybe it was just a gesture of contempt.
Becca told him, not unkindly, “You know, Marlon, that Deedra had lots of friends.” Her tone made it clear what kind of friends Deedra had had.
“Yes, I know. But that had changed, she told me it had. Because of me. Because she really loved me and I really loved her.”
I believed that like I believed Becca’s hair was really blond. But everyone should have some illusions… well, maybe other people. I felt about a million years old as I sighed and nodded at Marlon Schuster. “Sure,” I said.
“You have to believe me,” he said, suddenly on fire. He straightened on Becca’s chair, his eyes flashed, and for the first time I could see what Deedra had seen, the passion that made the boy handsome and desirable.
Becca said, “She told me that.”
We both stared at her. Becca looked quite calm and matter-of-fact as she went on. “The last time I talked to Deedra, she told me she’d finally met someone she cared about, someone she thought she could love.”
Marlon’s face became radiant with relief and pride. Seeing a chance to act, I silently extended my hand and he put the key in it without thinking. I slid it out of sight, and he didn’t say a word of protest.
A couple of minutes later, he left the apartment a happier man than he’d entered it. He’d been told not to worry about the video he and Deedra had made, he’d had the key removed so he no longer had that guilt weighing on him, and he’d had the ego-stroking consolation that his latest love had also loved him, enough to change her life for him.
Who wouldn’t feel good?
“Did you make all of that up?” I asked Becca when the door had closed behind Marlon.
“Mostly,” she admitted. “The last time I talked to Deedra, she was still complaining about the rent going up. But when I said something about seeing Marlon real often, she did say that she’d decided to be monogamous for a while.”
“I wouldn’t think she’d know that word,” I said absently.
“Well, maybe she didn’t use the term ‘monogamous,’ but that’s what she meant.”
“When was that, Becca?”
“I know exactly when that was, because the police asked me over and over. It was Saturday afternoon. We were both bringing in groceries at the same time.”
“Who was here that weekend?”
“They asked me that, too. Your friend the chief of police spent the weekend over at his fiancйe's. The Bickels were out of town, too, at their mother’s in Fayetteville.” Daisy and Dawn Bickel were twin sisters who worked at junior management level, Daisy at the local branch of a big chain of clothing stores and Dawn at Goodnight Mattress Manufacturing. “Terry Plowright was gone Saturday, to a monster truck rally somewhere on the other side of Little Rock. He didn’t get in ‘til about one in the morning and as far as I could tell he slept most of Sunday. He lives right across from me. That’s the first floor.”
I nodded.
“The upstairs front apartment by Deedra’s is vacant. The one across the stairwell from her is a woman who works at Wal-Mart, and she was working most of the weekend-at least Sunday, I know, and I think some hours on Saturday. And the other front apartment is Tick Levinson, and you know how he is.”
“How he is” was alcoholic. Tick was still managing to turn up to work at the local paper, where he was a pressman, but if there wasn’t a dramatic intervention, Tick wouldn’t be doing that in a year.
“So out of those, who do you think had anything to do with Deedra?”
“Well, Terry, for sure. He had a lot to do with her, real often. But I don’t think either of them took it to heart,” Becca said slowly. “Terry just isn’t serious about anything besides cars and trucks. He loves being single. I don’t think the Bickel twins even speak-even spoke-to Deedra, besides hello. Claude… well, you know, actually I think Claude might have visited Deedra once or twice, if you get my drift.”
I could not have been more surprised. I was sure my face showed it.
I was disgusted, too.
“You know how men are,” Becca said dryly.
I did, for sure.
“But from what Deedra said, I think it was a long time ago, maybe after he first moved back to Shakespeare from Little Rock. Before he kind of knew what was what. Right after his divorce.”
Still.
“Anyway, nothing recent. And Tick? I don’t think Tick lusts after anything but the next bottle, you know? You ever see him coming down the stairs after the weekend, trying to go to work? It’s grim. If he smoked, I’d worry about being burned up in our beds.”
That was only sensible.
“And before you ask me just like the cops did, I didn’t see any strangers around that weekend, but that’s not to say there weren’t any. Everyone’s got their own key to the outside doors.” Those doors were locked at ten at night, after which the residents used their own keys.
“Speaking of keys,” Becca said suddenly, and went to the desk by the door. She opened the top drawer, pulled out a key. “Here’s the outside door key for when Anthony and I go on our trip.”
I put it in my pocket and stood to leave as Anthony came in. He’d been to Stage, where one of the Bickel twins worked, I could see from his bag. He’d bought a lot of clothes. Getting excited about his trip, I guess.
“Where are you-all going?” I asked. I was trying to be polite.
“Oh, who can tell!” Becca laughed. “We might go to Mexico, we might go to the Dominican Republic! If we really like someplace, we might just stay there.”
“You’d sell up here?”
“I think that’s a possibility,” Becca said, more soberly. “You gotta admit, Lily, I’m a fish out of water here.”
That was true enough.
“Becca needs to see the world,” Anthony said proudly.
They sure were excited. The idea of travel wouldn’t make me happy at all, but I could tell Becca was ready to leave town. She’d never really been at home in Shakespeare.
I went home to find a baffled Jack squatting by the television, two stacks of tapes to his right. “Lily, would you like to tell me where you got these tapes?” he growled, staring at the episode of The Bold and the Beautiful unfolding on the screen. “Some of these are homemade porn, and some of them are
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I explained about Deedra and about my desire to help by getting the tapes out of the apartment.
“I think you better tell me the whole story about Deedra from the beginning, all over again,” he said. “Wasn’t she that girl with no chin who lived across the upstairs hall from me?”
The previous fall, Jack had rented an apartment when he was working in Shakespeare undercover, on a job.
“Yep, that was Deedra,” I told him. I sighed. The girl with no chin. What a way to be remembered. I began telling Jack, all over again, about finding Deedra in her car- the call of the bobwhite, the silence of the forest, the gray dead woman in the front seat of the car.
“So, how long had she been dead?” Jack asked practically.
“In the newspaper article, Marta is quoted as saying she’d been dead for somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four hours.”
“Still got the paper?” Jack asked, and I went to rummage through my recycle bin.
Jack stretched out on the floor, pretty much filling my little living room, to read. I recalled with a sudden start that he was moving in with me, and I could look at him as much as I liked, every day. I didn’t have to fill up with looking so I could replay it while he was gone. And he’d be taking up just as much space, much more often. We had a few bumps in the road ahead of us, for sure.
