(LB2) Shakespeare's Landlord (16 page)

“Almost,” he admitted. “But you would’ve been down first.”

“Not so,” I argued. “The diaphragm blow would’ve doubled you over and you would’ve missed my neck.”

“But the blow would’ve landed somewhere,” he argued back, “and the force would have knocked you backward. Admittedly, after you had already hit me…” His voice trailed off and we looked at each other sheepishly.

“Maybe,” I said, “I’m not the only person who has trouble carrying on a ‘normal’ conversation?”

“You’re right. This is probably pretty weird.”

Very carefully, as though we were covered with thorns, we eased into each other’s arms.

“Relax,” whispered Marshall. “Your neck muscles are like wires.”

I tentatively laid my head on his shoulder. I turned my mouth into his neck. “What I’m going to do,” I said gently, “is take the doll to the police department, tell them where I found it, and go home. When I get there, I’ll call you. You’ll come get me. We’ll eat at your place, and then we’ll do good things together.”

His hand massaged my neck. “I can’t get you to reverse the order?”

“I’ll see you soon,” I promised, then slid from his arms and got in the car, stowing the grotesque doll on the seat beside me. I drove to the police department, which is housed in a former drugstore a couple of blocks from the center of town. There was only one police car in the parking lot, a dark blue city of Shakespeare car with a big number 3 on the side.

Tom David Meiklejohn was sitting inside, his feet propped up on a desk. He had an RC Cola in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Tom David, whom I know by sight, is good-looking in what I think of as a honky-tonk way. He has short, curly hair, bright, mean eyes flanking a sharp nose, and thin lips, and he dresses western on his days off. He’d been sleeping with Deedra around last Christmas, and during that month or two I’d seen him go in and out of the Garden Apartments regularly.

Tom David had been married at the time to a woman as hard-edged as he was, or so one travel agent had told another as I was cleaning their office. A few months later, I had seen the Meiklejohns’ divorce notice in the local paper.

Now, Tom David, whom I’d observed patrolling many times during my night prowls, was slowly looking me up and down, making a show of trying to figure out my all-white outfit.

“Going to a pajama party?” he asked.

So much for courtesy to the public he serves, I reflected, though I’d anticipated as much. Not every policeman was a Claude Friedrich. Friedrich might make mistakes, but he didn’t mind admitting them.

“This was left on my car outside of Body Time,” I said briefly, and deposited the doll on the desk in front of his feet. I’d wrapped it in a paper towel from a roll in my housekeeping kit. Now I spread the towel open.

Tom David gradually uprighted himself and put the RC Cola down. He stubbed out his cigarette, staring at the Ken doll.

“That’s ugly,” he said. “That’s real ugly. Did you see anyone around your car?”

“No. I was in Body Time for over an hour. Anyone could have pulled into the parking lot, put the doll on my car, and pulled out without anyone seeing them. Not many people there tonight—most people don’t work out on Friday evenings.”

“You were at that martial arts class that Marshall Sedaka runs?”

There was something about the way he said Marshall’s name…not just distaste but also personal dislike. I went on full alert.

“Right.”

“He thinks he’s tough,” Tom David remarked. There was a cold light in his mean, bright eyes. “Orientals think they can order women around like they was sheep or something.”

I raised my eyebrows. If anyone thought of women as interchangeable parts, it was Tom David Meiklejohn.

“Sedaka see this?”

“Yes,” I said.

“He have a chance to put it on your car? You two have any personal relationship?”

“He didn’t have a chance to put it on my car. He was inside Body Time when I got there, and he left after I did.”

“Listen, I’m the only one here right now, and when Lottie comes back with her McNuggets, I gotta go on patrol. You want to come back in tomorrow and make a statement?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll try fingerprinting this, and we’ll see what happens.”

I nodded and turned to go. As my hand touched the door, Tom David said abruptly, “I guess you
would
be interested in self-defense.”

I could feel the color draining from my face.

I looked out through the glass door into the darkness.

“Any woman should be interested in self-defense,” I said, and walked out into the night.

I drove home tense with rage and fear, thinking of the bloody-eyed Ken doll, thinking of Tom David Meiklejohn mulling over what had happened to me with his buddies over a few beers. I had found the source of the leak in the police department, I was pretty sure.

I parked the car where it belonged, unlocked the back door, and threw everything but my keys and my driver’s license into the house. Those I stuck in my T-shirt pocket, where they made a strange bulge over my breast. I had to walk. It was the only thing that would help.

The street was deserted at the moment. It was about 9:00
P.M.
The night was much warmer than it had been the last time I walked, the humidity high, a precursor of the dreadful hot evenings of summer. It was fully dark, and I drifted into the shadows of the street, padding silently along to pass through the arboretum. Marshall’s house on Farraday was not far. I didn’t know the number, but I would see his car.

It relaxed me, moving through the night invisibly. I felt more like the Lily who had had a stable existence before the murder of Pardon Albee. Then, my only problem had been the sleepless nights, which came maybe twice a week; other than that, I’d had things under control.

Standing concealed in the undergrowth of the arboretum, I waited for a car to pass on Jamaica Street, so I could steal across.

I hadn’t considered my route at all, but now sheer curiosity led me to drift toward the house Marshall had up until recently called home. There is very little cover on Celia Street, which is one of modest but spruce white houses with meticulously kept yards. I planned my approach. It was earlier than I usually walked, and there were more people on the move, which in Shakespeare isn’t saying a hell of a lot—a car would pass occasionally, or I would see someone come out of his house, retrieve something from a pickup or jeep, and hurry back inside.

In the summer, children would be playing outside till late, but on this spring night, they all seemed to be inside.

I worked my way down the street, trying to be unobtrusive but not suspicious, since there were people still up and active. It was not a workable compromise. I’d rather be seen than reported, so I moved at a steady pace rather than drifting from one cover to another. After all, I was wearing white, hardly a camouflage color. Still, no one seemed to notice me, and curtains up and down the little street were uniformly drawn against the dark.

I only saw the police car when I was directly opposite Marshall’s former home. It was parked up against Thea’s next-door neighbor’s hedge, which divides their yards from the street to the back of the lot. The cruiser was pulled right up behind a car that I assumed must be Thea’s, which looked dark red or brown in the dim light of the streetlamp. So it didn’t exactly seem the driver was paying an official visit; in fact, I concluded, Tom David Meiklejohn, whose car number 3 was parked in the driveway, was inside chitchatting with the rat-plagued Mrs. Sedaka, while he was supposed to be patrolling the streets of Shakespeare to keep them safe for widows and orphans.

Instead, it seemed Tom David Meiklejohn was personal bodyguard to one about-to-be-divorcée.

I had a fleeting desire to make yet one more anonymous phone call to Claude Friedrich, before I reflected that not only would that be sneaky and dishonorable but also that a possible relationship between Thea and Tom David was none of my business.

I began moving again, ghosting silently down the dark, quiet street, thinking hard as I passed from shadow to shadow.

In five minutes, I was on Farraday. Marshall’s car was parked in the gravel driveway of the house on the corner, a little house smack in the middle of a small lot needing a great deal of yard work. The rental was definitely a step down from Celia Street.

I wondered if it had been hard for Marshall to leave the Sedaka house in Thea’s possession.

The porch light was glowing yellow, but I continued on through the yard and around to the back door, my eyes adapting quickly to the darkness. I rapped three times, hard, and heard Marshall’s quick footsteps.

“Who’s there?” he asked. He’s not a man who likes surprises, either.

“Lily.” He opened the door quickly. I went up the step and into the house. And despite what he had said about having an evening of conversation, the minute the door shut, his arms went around me and his mouth found mine. My hands snaked underneath his T-shirt, eager to touch his body again.

I did not have time to marvel at my ability to have sex without fear; I did not have time to wonder if what I was doing was wise, since I carried burdens enough for two, and Marshall was not exactly an unencumbered man. But we did take a moment for protection this time, and I hoped we wouldn’t pay for our previous stupidity.

AFTERWARD, IT WAS
hard to feel the limitations of my own skin, to feel myself shrinking back into the mold in which I’d cast myself before I’d come to Shakespeare. For the first time in years, it felt confining rather than comfortable.

And yet, as I looked around Marshall’s Spartan bedroom—the queen-sized mattress and box spring on a frame, no headboard or footboard; a dresser clearly retrieved from someone’s attic; a thrift store night table—I felt uneasy at being out of my own home. In many months, I hadn’t been in anyone’s house except to clean it.

We’d been lying together quietly since making love, my back to his front, his arm around me. Every now and then, Marshall would kiss my neck or stroke my side. The intimacy of the moment both excited and threatened me.

“You know Thea is seeing someone else,” I said quietly.

If he wanted to get divorced, he needed to know that. If he wanted to reconcile with Thea, he needed to know that.

“I thought so,” he said after a long moment. “Do you know who it is?”

“What will you do if I tell you a name?” I turned over to face him, automatically reaching down for the sheet to cover my scars. Before he answered, he took the sheet, pulled it back down, and kissed my chest.

“Don’t hide from me, Lily,” he whispered.

My hands twitched with the effort I was making not to grab the sheet. Marshall moved even closer to me so that his body covered the scars, and I gradually relaxed against him.

“Are you thinking I might track him down and beat him up for Thea’s honor?” he asked after letting enough time pass to let me know he didn’t consider Thea’s affair a personal thing.

“I don’t know you well enough to know what you would do.”

“Thea is a hometown sweetheart, because she’s pretty and she was born and bred here. She knows when to act charming and sunny. She’s good with children. But the people you won’t find talking about Thea with this exaggerated awe are the men she’s dated for a while—the men she’s dated long enough to go to bed with.”

I pulled back a little to look at Marshall’s face. He looked as if he had a bad taste in his mouth.

“Lily, by the time I came to town, Thea had run through the few locals she felt were worthy of her. She could tell, I think, that people were starting to wonder why pretty, sweet Thea couldn’t seem to form a lasting relationship with anyone, so she dated me and married me quickly. I didn’t go to bed with Thea before I married her. She said she wanted to wait and I respected that, but I found out after maybe a month, that was just because she didn’t want me to back out like other men had.”

“She doesn’t like sex?” I asked hesitantly. I should be the last one to criticize a woman who had problems dealing with men.

Marshall laughed in an unamused way. “Oh, no. She likes it. But she doesn’t like it like we do it,” and his hand ran down my back, caressed my hips. “She likes to do…sick things, things that hurt. Because I loved her, I tried to oblige, but it ended up making me feel bad. Sad.”

Degraded, I thought.

“Then she decided she wanted a baby, and I wondered if that might save our marriage, so I tried to oblige. But I’d lost my interest by then, and…I couldn’t.” This cost Marshall a great deal to say. “So she called me names and taunted me, only in private, only when no one else could hear. Not because she cared about me, but because she didn’t want anyone else to know she was capable of saying those things. Going home was like going to hell. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I haven’t had sex in six months, Lily, but that wasn’t the worst of it, not by a long shot. So here I am, in this dump, wondering how to file for divorce without Thea taking my business away from me.”

I had no response to his money worries. I have very little available cash myself because I am saving strenuously against the day when I have to have a new car, or a new roof, or any of the sudden catastrophic expenses that can wipe out a one-income household. But at least all my finances, good or bad, are dependent on me and me only. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I had to give half of my business away to someone who had found pleasure in degrading and humiliating me.

“Tom David Meiklejohn.”

His eyes had been focused far away, staring past my shoulder at a bleak vista. Now he looked at me.

“The cop.” His dark eyes stared into mine. I gave a tiny nod. “I’ll bet she loves the handcuffs,” he said.

I tried not to shrink at the thought of a woman handcuffed, but my breath came out in a little whine that drew Marshall’s attention to me instantly. “Don’t think of it, Lily,” he said quietly. “Don’t think of it; think of this.” And his hand slid gently between my legs, his mouth found my breast, and I did indeed think of other things.

“Marshall,” I said afterward, “if you hadn’t noticed, I wanted to tell you I have absolutely no complaints about your virility.” He laughed a little, breathlessly, and for a while we dozed together.