I had to straighten up the locker room, of course, and though it made me sick to do so, I had to pick up the card Mandy had thrown at me. While I was refolding the towels and placing them in the resurrected rack, I pictured many gratifying ways to make Mandy pick up her own card. By the time I had to take my place beside Byron again, I was in at least an equitable mood.
“What happened to Mandy?” he asked casually, taking a moment away from his absorbed fascination with his own face reflected in the gleaming counter. “She took outta here like a scalded cat.”
I couldn’t tell him she’d been stealing. That would jettison the whole idea. But I could tell him something else. “I had to take her membership card,” I said, even more seriously and quietly than normal.
He goggled with curiosity. “What? Why?”
I was drawing a blank.
“Did she… make a pass at you?” Byron supplied his own scenario. I could practically see the steam coming out of his ears. “Did she actually… was she actually doing something? In the shower?”
I wasn’t supposed to disclose Jack’s business arrangement with Mel Brentwood. I looked away, hoping to indicate embarrassment. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said truthfully. “It was really ugly.”
“Poor Lily,” Byron said, laying his hand on my shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “You poor girl.”
Was he blind?
Biting the inside of my lips to keep from snarling, I managed to indicate to Byron that I wanted to go work out, and he let his hand trail off my shoulder while I went to the leg press. After I’d warmed up and put the first set of forty-fives on, I dropped down into the sleigh-type seat and placed my feet against the large metal plate. Pushing up a little to relieve the pressure, I flipped the prop bars outward, and let the plate push my knees to my chest. I pushed, and felt everything tighten in a surprisingly relaxing way as I exhaled. Legs to chest, inhale. Legs out straight, exhale. Over and over, until the set was done and I could add another pair of forty-fives.
Toward the end of my workout, I realized I should be feeling proud that I had successfully completed my first assignment as a private investigator. Somehow, television and the film industry had not prepared me for the mundane satisfaction of detecting a thief. I hadn’t gotten to run after anyone waving a gun; the police hadn’t threatened me; Mel Brinkman hadn’t tried to sleep with me. Could it be I had been misled by the media?
As I pondered this, I noticed that Byron had been so anxious to start spreading the “news” about Mandy that he’d actually gotten the glass spray out and begun cleaning some of the mirrors that lined the gym walls. This brought him into murmuring distance of some of his cronies and the many sideways glances at me were a clear indication that my brush with Mandy was being mythologized.
At least I’d gotten some good workouts, being on this job. I wondered how long Mel would want me to work after this; this might be the last time I’d have to come to Marvel Gym.
Jack picked me up at the end of my shift. I was so glad to see him it made me feel almost silly. Jack is about five foot ten, his hair is still all black, and his eyes are hazel. He has a scar, a very thin one-a razor scar-running from the hairline close to his right eye down to his jawline. It puckers a very little. He has a narrow, strong nose and straight eyebrows. He’s been a private detective since he got urged to resign from the Memphis Police Department about five years ago.
“I like the outfit,” he said, as we walked to his car.
“In this heat, I feel like one big smell,” I said. “I want to shower and put on something cotton and loose.”
“Yes, ma’am. You just happy to see me, or did something interesting happen at the gym?”
“A little bit of both.”
When we were in the car and on our way back to Shakespeare, the town where I’ve lived for five years, I began to tell Jack about my day. “So it was Mandy Easley all along,” I concluded. “I guess I found myself a little disappointed.”
“You just want to catch Byron doing something,” Jack said. I turned, huffing in exasperation, in time to catch the amused curl of his lips flatten out into a serious expression.
“Being a stupid jerk isn’t a jailable offense,” I admitted.
“Jails wouldn’t be big enough,” Jack agreed.
“What will happen now?”
“I’ll call Mel when we get home.”
While Jack was on the phone, I peeled off the nasty unitard and dropped it in the hamper. The shower, in the privacy of my own bathroom, cramped as it was, was just as wonderful as I had anticipated. Drying off was sheer bliss. I fluffed up the wet blond curls that clung to my head, I checked to make sure I’d gotten my legs very smooth, and I put on a lot of deodorant and skin cream before I came out to join Jack. He was putting steaks in a marinade. We didn’t eat much beef.
“Special occasion?”
“You caught your first thief.”
“And you’re going to congratulate me with dead cow?”
He put down the pan and eyed me with some indignation. “Can you think of a better way?”
“Ah… yes.”
“And that would be?”
“You’re slow on the uptake today,” I said critically, and took off my robe.
He caught on right away.
We’d returned to Shakespeare too late to attend karate class, so later that night we took a walk. Jack had spent most of the day sitting down, and he wanted to stretch before bed.
“Mel says thanks,” Jack told me, after we’d been clipping along for maybe twenty minutes. “I think he’ll call us again if he has any problems. You did a good job.” He sounded proud, and that lit an unexpected glow somewhere in my chest.
“So, what next?” I asked.
“We’ve got a workman’s comp job I’m sure you can handle,” Jack said. “I get a lot of that kind of case.”
“The person is claiming he can’t work any more?”
“Yeah. In this case, it’s a woman. She fell on a slippery floor at work, now she says she can’t bend her back or lift anything. She lives in a small house in Conway. It can be hard watching a house in some neighborhoods, so you may have to be creative.”
That was not the adjective that sprang to my mind when I thought of my abilities, so I felt a little anxious.
“I’ll need a camera, I’m assuming.”
“Yes, and lots of time fillers. A book or two, newspapers, snacks.”
“Okay.”
We paced along for a few more minutes. A familiar car went by, and I said, “Jack, there’s my counselor. And her husband, I think.”
We watched the beige sedan turn the corner onto Compton. That was the way we’d planned to go, too, and when we rounded the same corner, we saw the car had stopped in front of an older home. It was built in a style popular in the thirties and forties, boxy and low with a broad roofed porch supported by squat pillars. Tamsin and the man with her had already left their car, and he was at the front door. She was standing slightly behind him. Under the glare of the porch light, I could see he was partially bald, and big. The clink of keys carried across the small yard.
Tamsin screamed.
Jack was there before I was. He moved to one side as I caught up, and I saw that there was a puddle of blood on the gray-painted concrete of the porch. I cast my gaze from side to side, saw nothing that could have produced it.
“There,” Jack said, still one step ahead of me.
Following his pointing finger, I saw there was a squirrel hanging from a branch of the mimosa tree planted by the porch. The heavy scent of the mimosa twined with the hot-penny smell of blood.
Since I didn’t have a bird feeder or fruit bushes, I happened to like squirrels. When I realized the squirrel’s throat had been cut and the little animal had been hung on the tree like an out-of-season Christmas ornament, I began a slow burn.