Shakespeare’s Champion

Chapter One

I grumbled to myself as I slid out of my Skylark, Marshall’s keys clinking in my hand. Since I made my living doing favors for people, it hardly seemed fair to be doing a favor for free this early in the morning.

But this fall a flu epidemic was scything its way through Shakespeare. It had crept into the Body Time gym enclosed in the body of my friend Raphael Roundtree. Raphael had coughed and sneezed in karate class after working out in the weights room, neatly distributing the virus among almost all the Body Time clientele, with the exception of the aerobics class.

And me. Viruses don’t seem to be able to abide in my body.

When I’d dropped by Marshall Sedaka’s rented house even earlier that morning, Marshall had been at that stage of the flu where his greatest desire was to be left alone to his misery. So fit and healthy that he took sickness as an insult, Marshall was a terrible patient; and he was vain enough to hate my seeing him throw up. So he’d thrust the keys to Body Time into my hand, slammed the door, and yelled from behind it, “Go open! Tanya’s coming after her first class if I can’t get anyone else!”

I’d been left with my mouth hanging open and a handful of keys.

It was my day to work at the Drinkwaters’ house. I had to be there between 8:00 and 8:15, when the Drinkwaters left for work. It was now 7:00. Tanya, a student at the nearby Montrose branch of the University of Arkansas, might get out of her first class at 9:00. That would put her arrival time at somewhere around 9:40.

But Marshall was sometimes my lover and also sometimes my workout partner; and he was always my sensei, my karate instructor.

I’d blown air out of my mouth to make the curls at my forehead fluff, and driven out to Body Time. I’d decided I’d just unlock the gym and leave. The same people came every morning, and they could be trusted to work out alone. Most days, I was one of them.

Marshall’s almost incoherent appeal for help had come when I had been dressing to leave for the gym, as a matter of fact, and I was already in my sweats. I could go to work at the Drinkwaters’ as I was, though I hated beginning my earning day without having showered and put on makeup.

I don’t like breaks in my routine. My job depends on the clock. Two and a half hours at the Drinkwaters’ house, a tenor fifteen-minute gap, another house; that’s my day and my income.

Body Time is in a somewhat isolated position on the bypass that swerves around Shakespeare, allowing speedier access from the south to the university at Montrose. Marshall’s gym has a large graveled parking lot and big plate-glass windows at the front, which are covered by Venetian blinds lowered at six on winter afternoons, four in the summer. There was already a car in the parking lot, a battered Camaro. I expected to see some impatient enthusiast waiting in its front seat, but the car was empty. I walked over, cast a cursory look over the car’s clean interior. It told me nothing. I shrugged, and crunched across the gravel in the chilly, pale early morning light, fumbling through Marshall’s keys. As I sorted through them to find the one marked FD for front door, another vehicle pulled up beside mine. Bobo Winthrop, eighteen and chock-full of hormones, emerged from his fully equipped Jeep.

I clean for Bobo’s mother Beanie. I have always liked Bobo despite the fact that he is beautiful, smart enough to scrape by, and has everything he has ever expressed a wish for. Somehow Bobo had charmed his way into Marshall’s good graces, probably by working out on as demanding a schedule as Marshall himself. When Bobo had decided to start college in nearby Montrose, Marshall had finally agreed to hire the boy to work a few hours a week at Body Time.

Since Bobo isn’t hurting for money, I can only figure his job motivation is getting to ogle many women of all ages in form-fitting outfits and getting to see all his friends, who naturally all have memberships in Body Time.

Bobo was running his fingers through his floppy fair hair by way of grooming. He said groggily, “Whatcha doin‘, Lily?”

“Trying to find the right key,” I said, with a certain edge to my voice.

“This is it.” A long finger attached to a huge hand nudged one key out of the cluster. Bobo gave a jaw-cracking yawn.

“Thanks.” I put the key in the lock, but as I did I felt the door move a little.

“It’s unlocked,” I said, hearing my voice come out sharp. I was now really uneasy. The back of my neck began to prickle.

“Del’s already here. That’s his car,” Bobo said calmly. “But he’s supposed to lock the front door when he’s here by himself. Marshall’s gonna be mad.”

The gloom in the big room was pronounced. Shades still closed, all lights off.

“He must be in the tanning bed,” Bobo said, and kept going across the room as I flipped on the central panel of lights with one hand. I reached for the ringing phone with the other.

“Body Time,” I said sharply, my eyes ranging from side to side. Something smelled wrong.

“I was able to get Bobo after you left,” Marshall said weakly. “He can stay, Lily. I don’t want you to miss work. Oops. Gotta…” He slammed down the phone.

I’d almost told Marshall something was wrong. But that would have been pointless, worrying him until I found out what was making the skin of my neck crawl.

I’d only switched on the central panel of lights, so the sides of the big room were still dark. Bobo had begun turning on lights and opening doors in the rear of the building. So I was by myself when I noticed the man lying on the bench in the far left corner.

I didn’t for one minute think he was asleep, not with the barbell across his neck. His arms were dangling awkwardly, his legs spraddled. There was a stain. There were lots of stains.

I was scrabbling at the switch plate behind me, trying not to take my eyes off that still figure, when Bobo came from the hall that led to Marshall’s office, the tanning beds, and the karate and aerobics room.

“Hey, Lily, you like Natural Morning Zap Tea? I didn’t see Del, but I found this bag in Marshall’s office…”

My fingers located the light switch for the left side of the room, and as Bobo looked to see what I was staring at, I flicked it up.

“Aw, shit,” said Bobo. We both stared at what was lying on the bench. We could see it all too clearly now.

Bobo scuttled sideways until he was behind me, looking over the top of my head. He put his hands on my shoulders, more to keep me firmly between him and It than to comfort me. “Aw… shit,” he said again, gulping ominously. Just at that moment, Bobo came down hard on the “boy” side of eighteen.

I had already encountered two nauseated males and it wasn’t even seven o’clock.

“I’ve got to go check,” I said. “If you’re going to throw up, go outside.”

“Check what? He’s dead as a doornail,” said Bobo, his big hands anchoring me firmly on his side of the service counter.

“Who is it, you reckon? Del?” Possibly I was stalling.

“Yeah, from the clothes. That’s what Mr. Packard was wearing last night.”

“You left him here by himself?” I asked as I began walking over to the body on the bench.

“He was doing chest when I left. He had his own key, to lock up. Marshall had told me that was okay. And Mr. Packard said he had a spotter coming,” Bobo said defensively. “I had a date, and it was closing time.” Bobo’s voice got stronger and angrier as he saw he was going to have to justify leaving Del alone in the gym. At least he didn’t sound nauseated anymore.

I finally got to the corner. It had been a long journey. Before I got there, I took a deep breath, held it, and bent over to check Del’s wrist. I had never touched Del alive, and I didn’t want to do it now that he was dead, but if there was any chance there was a spark of life left…

His skin felt strange, rubbery, or it might have been my imagination. The smell was not my imagination, nor was the lack of pulse. To make absolutely sure, I held my big watch in front of Del’s nostrils. There were trails of dried blood running from them. I bit my lip hard, forced myself to hold still a moment. When I pulled my arm back to my side, the watch face was clear. I found myself backing up for the first two feet, as if it would be irreverent or dangerous to turn my back on poor Del Packard. I hadn’t been scared of him when I’d been able to talk to him. It was absurd to be nervous around him now. But I had to tell myself that several times.

I picked up the phone again and punched in some numbers. I looked up at Bobo while I waited for the ring. He was staring at the body in the corner with a horrified fascination. Perhaps this was the first dead person he’d ever seen. I reached over and patted the back of his big hand, lying on the counter. He turned it over and clutched my fingers.

“Umhum,” rumbled a deep voice at the other end of the line.

“Claude,” I said.

“Lily,” he said, warm and relaxed.

“I’m at Body Time.” I gave him a minute to switch gears.

“Okay,” Claude said cautiously. I could hear a creaking of bedsprings as the big policeman sat up in bed.

Maybe if I took this step by step it wouldn’t be so bad? I glanced over at the still figure on the bench.

No way to ease up to this. I’d just plunge right in.

“Del Packard is here, and he got squashed,” I said.

I did make it to my first job on time, but I was still in my workout sweats, and still barefaced. So I was uncomfortable, and disinclined to do more than nod by way of greeting Helen and Mel Drinkwater. They weren’t chatty people either, and Helen didn’t like to see me work; she just liked seeing the results. She’d been giving me hard looks, since September when I’d been sucked into a notorious brawl in the Burger Tycoon parking lot-but she hadn’t said anything, and she hadn’t fired me.

I’d decided that she’d passed the point of most concern. Her pleasure in a clean house had outweighed her misgivings about my character.

Today the Drinkwaters went out their kitchen door at a pretty sharp clip, each sliding into a car to begin his/her own workday, and I was able to start my usual routine.

Helen Drinkwater doesn’t want to pay me to do a total cleaning job on the whole house, which is a turn-of-the-century two-story. She pays me for two and a half hours, long enough to change the sheets, do the bathrooms and kitchen, dust, gather up the trash, and vacuum. I do a quick pickup first because it makes everything easier. The Drinkwaters are not messy, but their grandchildren live just down the street, and they are. I patrolled the house for scattered toys and put them all in the basket Helen keeps by the fireplace. Then I pulled on rubber gloves and trotted up to the main bathroom, to start scrubbing and dusting my way through the house. No pets, and the Drinkwaters washed and hung up their clothes and did their own dishes. By the time I rewound the cord on the vacuum cleaner, the house was looking very good. I pocketed my check on the way out. Helen always leaves it on the kitchen counter with the salt shaker on top of it, as if some internal wind would blow it away otherwise. This time she’d anchored down a note, too. “We need to pick a Wednesday for you to do the downstairs windows,” said Helen’s spiky handwriting.

Wednesday is the morning I reserve for unusual jobs, like helping with someone’s spring cleaning, or doing windows, or occasionally mowing a yard. I looked at the calendar by the phone, picked two Wednesdays that would do, and wrote both dates on the bottom of the note with a question mark.

I deposited the check in the bank on my way home for lunch. Claude was walking up my driveway when I arrived.

Chief of Police Claude Friedrich lives next door to me, in the Shakespeare Garden Apartments. My small house is a little downhill from the apartments, and separated from the tenants’ parking lot by a high fence. As I unlocked my front door, I felt Claude’s big hand rubbing my shoulder. He likes to touch me, but I have put off any more intimate relationship with the chief; so his touches have to have a locker-room context.

“How was it after I left?” I asked, walking through the living room to the kitchen. Claude was right behind me, and when I turned to look up at him he wrapped his arms around me. I felt the tickle of his mustache against my face as his lips drifted across my cheek to fasten on a more promising target. Claude was my good friend but he wanted to be my lover, too.

“Claude, let me go.”

“Lily, when are you going to let me spend the night?” he asked quietly, no begging or whining in his voice because Claude is not a begging or whining man.

I turned sharply so my face was to the refrigerator. I could feel the muscles in my neck and shoulders tighten. I made myself hold still. Claude’s hands dropped to his sides. I got out some leftover dishes and opened the microwave, moving slowly, trying not to show my agitation with jerky gestures.

When the microwave was humming, I turned to face Claude, looking up at his face. Claude is in his mid-forties, ten years or more older than I, and he has graying brown hair and a permanent tan. After years of working in dark corners of Little Rock and dark places in people’s hearts, Claude has a few wrinkles, deep and decisive wrinkles, and a massive calm that must be his way of keeping sane.

“Do you want me?” he asked me now.

I hated being backed into a corner. And there wasn’t a simple answer to the question.

He touched my hair with gentle fingers.

“Claude.” I enjoyed saying his name, unlovely as it was. I wanted to lay my hands on each side of his face and return his kiss. I wanted him to walk out and never come back. I wanted him not to want me. I had liked having a friend.

“You know I’m just used to living my own life,” was what I said.

“Is it Sedaka?”

Oh, hell. I hated this. Marshall and I had been dating and bedding for months. Under Claude’s scrutiny, I grew even more tense. Without my conscious direction, my hand crept under the neck of my sweatshirt, rubbing the scars.

“Don’t, Lily.” Claude’s voice was gentle, but very firm. “I know what happened to you, and it doesn’t make me feel anything except admiration that you lived through it. If you care about Sedaka I’ll never say another word. From my point of view, you and I’ve been happy in the times we’ve spent together, and I’d like an extension.”

“And exclusive rights?” I met his eyes steadily. Claude would never share a woman.

“And exclusive rights,” he admitted calmly. “Till we see how it goes.”

“I’ll think,” I forced myself to say. “Now, let’s eat. I have to go back to work.”

Claude eyed me for a long moment, then nodded. He got the tea from the refrigerator and poured us each a glass, put sugar in his, and set the table. I put a bowl of fruit between our places, got out the whole-wheat bread and a cutting board for the reheated meat loaf. As we ate, we were quiet, and I liked that. As Claude was slicing an apple for himself and I was peeling a banana, he broke that comfortable silence.

“We sent Del Packard’s body to Little Rock,” he told me.

“What do you think?” I was relieved at the change of topic.

“It’s hard to say what might have happened,” Claude rumbled. He had the most comforting voice, like distant thunder.

“Well, he dropped the bar on himself-didn’t he?” I hadn’t been particularly friendly with Del, but it wasn’t bearable to think of him struggling to get the bar back up to the rack, failing, all by himself.

“Why was he there alone, Lily? Sedaka was so sick I couldn’t figure out what he was telling me.”

“Del was training for the championships at Marvel Gym in Little Rock.”

“The poster, right?”

I nodded. Taped to one of the many mirrors lining the walls at Body Time, there was a poster giving the specifics of the event, with a picture of last year’s winners. “Del competed last year, in the men’s middleweight division, novice class. He came in second.”

“How big a deal is this?”

“To a novice bodybuilder, pretty big. Del had never been in a competition before he got second place at Marvel Gym. If he’d won this year-and Marshall thought he had a chance- Del could’ve gone on to another competition, and another, until he entered one of the nationals.”

Claude shook his big head in amazement at the prospect. “Is ‘posing’ like the swimsuit part of Miss America?”

“Yes, but he’d be wearing a lot less. A monokini, like a glorified jockstrap. And he’d have removed his body hair…”

Claude looked a little disgusted. “I wondered about that. I noticed.”

“He’d been working on his tan. And he’d grease up for the competition.”

Claude raised his eyebrows interrogatively.

“I don’t know what they use.” I was getting tired of this conversation. But Claude was circling his hand in a gesture that meant. “Amplify.”

“You have a series of poses you go through, to emphasize the muscle groups.” I rose to give Claude a demonstration. I turned my body a little sideways to him, fisted my hands, arched my arms in pumped-up curves. I gave him the blank eyes and small smile that said, “Look how superior my body is. Don’t you wish you were me?”

Claude made a face. “What’s the point?”

“Just like a beauty contest, Claude.” I resumed my seat at the table. “Except the focus is on muscular development.”

“I saw the poster of last year’s winners. That woman was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Claude said, wrinkling his nose.

“Marshall wanted me to enter.”

“You’d do that?” he asked, horrified. “That gal looked like a small pumped-up man with boobs slapped on.”

I shrugged. “I don’t want to spend the time training. It takes months to get ready for a competition. Plus, I’d have to camouflage all the scars, which I think would be impossible. But that was what Del wanted to do, train and compete. Develop himself to his full potential, was the way he put it.” I’d watched Del stare at one of his muscles for a good five minutes, wrapped up in his own reflection to the exclusion of the other people in the gym.

“I think I could have lifted what he had on the bar,” Claude said, a question in his voice. He rinsed off the plates and put them in the dishwasher. “It came to two hundred ninety pounds.”

I thought Claude was flattering himself, though I didn’t say so out loud. Claude seemed to have a fair body, but he did not exercise and hadn’t as long as I’d known him. “Bodybuilding isn’t exactly like competitive weight lifting,” I said. “Training for a competition, some people use somewhat lower weights and lots of reps, rather than really heavy weights and a few reps. That was probably Del’s highest weight.”

“Reps?” Claude said cautiously.

“Repetitions.”

“Would he be lifting so much by himself? Del wasn’t that big a man.”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” I admitted, retying my New Balances. “Del was so careful of himself. He wouldn’t risk pulling a muscle or getting any injury this close to the competition. Surely he had a spotter. He told Bobo he was expecting someone.”

“What’s a spotter?” demanded Claude.

“A spotter is a buddy,” I said, having to define a term so familiar to me I’d forgotten a time I hadn’t known it. “A workout partner. If you don’t have someone to spot for you, you would have to ask whoever was working at the gym…” I could tell from Claude’s frown that I wasn’t being precise. “It’s someone who stands there while you’re doing the hardest part of your workout. That person is there to act as your safety net: hand you the weights, or the bar, take them when you’ve finished your set, cheer you on, grab your wrists if they start to weaken.”

“So you won’t drop the weights on yourself.”

“Exactly. And to help you do those last few you need to finish your set.”

“Example.”

“Like if I was doing forty-fives, and that was my top capability or close to it, I’d lie down on the bench holding the dumbbells, and the spotter would stand or kneel at my head, and when I was pushing the weights up, if my arms started to shake, the spotter would grab my wrists and help me keep them steady.”

“Forty-fives?”

“Two forty-five-pound dumbbells. Some people lift using the bar and adding weights, some people use different-weighted dumbbells. I happen to prefer dumbbells. Del liked the bar. He thought he got better chest development.”

Claude looked at me thoughtfully. “You’re telling me you can lift ninety pounds with your hands?”

“No,” I said, surprised.

Claude looked relieved.

“I can lift a hundred ten or a hundred twenty.”

“You.”

“Sure.”

“Isn’t that a lot? For a woman?”

“In Shakespeare it is,” I said. “At one of the bigger city gyms, probably not. You’d have a bigger pool of weight trainers.”

“So how much would a man serious about training be able to do?”

“A man about Del’s build, under six feet, about one hundred seventy? After intense training, I guess he’d be able to lift maybe three hundred twenty pounds, more or less. So you can see strength wasn’t Del’s sole goal, though he was very strong. He wanted exceptional muscular development, for the look of it. I just like to be strong.”

“Hmmm.” Claude thought about the difference. “So you knew Del?”

“Sure. I saw him almost every morning at Body Time. We weren’t particularly friendly.” I was wiping off the table, since I had to go to work in ten minutes.

“Why not?”

I thought about it while I rinsed out the dishrag. I wrung it and folded it neatly and draped it over the divider between my sinks. I stepped across the hall to the bathroom, washed my hands and face, and slapped on a little makeup for my self-respect. Claude leaned against the kitchen doorframe to watch. He was waiting for an answer.

“Just… nothing in common. He was from here, had lots of family, dated a hometown girl. He didn’t like blacks, he didn’t like the Notre Dame football team, he didn’t like big words.” That was as close as I could come to explaining.

“You think enjoying living in a small town is wrong?”

I hadn’t meant this to be an analysis of my worldview.

“No, not at all. Del was a good guy in some ways.” I looked at my face, put on some lipstick, shrugged at my reflection. Makeup didn’t change the face underneath it, but somehow I always felt better when I’d used it. I washed my hands and turned to look at Claude. “He was harmless.” Right away I wondered what I meant. But I was too taken aback by the expression on Claude’s face to think it through right then.

Claude said, “I’ll tell you something strange, Lily. There weren’t any fingerprints on that bar where there should have been. There should have been lots, where a man would normally grip the bar. Del’s should have been on top. But there weren’t any. There were just smears. And you know what, Lily? I don’t think you’d put on your makeup in front of me if you had any serious interest in me.”

He stopped at the front door to deliver his parting shot. “And, I’d like to know, if Del Packard was in the gym by himself, how he turned out the lights after he died.”

It was a day that had started out worst and moved up to merely rotten.

I was cleaning in a spirit of anger, and the results were not harmonious. I dropped papers, got paper cuts when I picked them up, slammed the toilet lid down so hard that a box of Kleenex plummeted from a flimsy rattan shelf in the travel agent’s bathroom, vacuumed up a few pushpins at the base of the bulletin board, and developed a full-blown hatred for the poster of a couple on the deck of a cruise ship because they looked so simple. They looked like they could say, “Gee, we really get along well. Let’s go to bed together!” and it would actually work.

I was glad this was my last job of the day. I locked the door behind me with a sigh of relief.

On my way home, I detoured to Marshall’s dumpy rented house. He’d offered me a key when we began “seeing” each other, but I had refused. So he had to stagger to the door to let me in, and stagger right back to the ancient plaid couch he’d scrounged from a friend when he’d separated from his wife. I put his Body Time key ring on the equally dilapidated coffee table, and went to sit on the floor near him. Marshall was sprawled full length and obviously felt lousy. But he wasn’t groaning, and his fever was down, I thought as I touched his forehead.

“Can you eat yet?” I asked, not knowing what else I could do for him.

“Maybe some toast,” he said in a pitiful voice that sounded very odd issuing from his extremely muscular throat. Marshall is one-quarter Chinese. He has skin that’s just between pink and ivory, and his eyes and hair are dark. His eyes have a bit of a slant, just a hint. Other than that, he’s Caucasian, but since he’s a martial arts teacher he enjoys emphasizing the Oriental fraction of his heritage.

“Please,” he added, even more pitifully, and I laughed.

“Mean,” he said.

I got up and found his whole-wheat bread and waved a butter knife over it, toasted it dry, and brought it to him with some water.

He sat up and ate every crumb.

“You’re going to live.” I took the plate from him and carried it to the sink. I would coddle him to the extent of loading his dishwasher, I decided.

Afterward I returned to sit by the couch. He’d slid down to his original position. He took my hand.

“I guess I will live,” he admitted, “though for a few hours I didn’t want to. And finding out about Del, God! Who would have thought Del would be dumb enough to drop a weight on his neck?”

“I don’t think he did.” I told Marshall about the lack of fingerprints on the bar, about the light that should have been on.

“You think the spotter dropped the bar on Del by accident and then panicked?”

I shrugged.

“Hey, you don’t think someone killed Del on purpose? Who would do that?”

“I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know if this is possible… but if you felt a crushing weight on your neck and you knew you would die if it stayed there, and you were a grown healthy man, wouldn’t you fight to heave it off?”

“If I wasn’t killed instantly, I’d try as hard as I could,” Marshall said grimly. “If you’re saying someone held the bar down, who would be cruel enough to do that?”

I shrugged again. In my opinion, any number of people had that capacity for cruelty, even if they hadn’t discovered it in themselves yet, and I told Marshall that. I just couldn’t understand why anyone would indulge that cruelty by killing harmless, thickheaded Del Packard.

“You’re cold sometimes, you know?” Marshall had said that more than once lately. I looked at him sharply. This cold woman had gotten her butt out at six in the morning to open his business.

He went on. “Maybe Del was seeing someone else’s wife- that got Len Elgin killed-or maybe Lindy got mad at his training so much.”

“Del was too self-involved to go to the trouble of sneaking around,” I said. “And if you think Lindy Roland can lift fifty pounds, let alone close to three hundred, you better find another job.”

“That’s right, the one who dropped the weight had to be able to lift it first,” Marshall said thoughtfully. “Who do we know that can lift that much?”

“Almost anyone we know that works out regularly could lift that. Especially the men. Maybe I could, if I had to.” But I said the last part doubtfully. It would take a mighty surge of adrenaline.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t kill Del.”

I could kill a man-I had killed a man-but I didn’t think I could do it unprovoked. I began mentally reviewing the list of regular weight lifters at Body Time.

“I can think of at least twelve and I’ve only been trying for a minute or two,” I said.

“Me, too,” Marshall said, and sighed. “Aside from feeling sorry for Del and his folks and Lindy, this isn’t going to be good for business.”

“Who’s cleaning up the mess?” I asked.

“Would you…”

“No.”

“Maybe the cleaning service from Montrose?”

“Phone them,” I said.

He looked at me accusingly. “You’re being cold about this.”

I felt a surge of irritation. There was that accusation again.

Marshall wanted me to yoke myself with him and his interests as though we were a permanent couple.

I wasn’t willing.

I shifted my shoulders under my T-shirt, rolling the muscles in an effort to relax. I reminded myself once again that Marshall was ill. I slid my hand from his.

“Marshall,” I said, keeping my voice quiet and even, “if you wanted warm-fuzzy you came to the wrong woman.”

He laid his head back against his pillow and laughed. I made myself think of his having thrown up all night and some of the morning. I made myself remember an especially good time we’d had in that bed I could glimpse through his open bedroom door. There were several to choose from.

He’d been my sensei, my karate teacher, for four years now. We’d become friends. Then Marshall had left his terror of a wife, Thea. After that we’d shared a bed from time to time, and some good hours of companionship. Marshall was capable of moments of great compassion and sensitivity.

But as our relationship progressed, I’d discovered Marshall expected me to change, and swiftly; expected all my edges to be rounded off by that lust, companionship, compassion, and sensitivity… all my peculiarities to be solved by the fact that I had a steady guy.

Since having a steady guy, having Marshall, was nice in many ways, I found myself wishing it worked that way. But it didn’t.

As I said a brief good-bye and left for home, I felt gloomy and restless. I’d rebuffed Claude, who was a proud man; now I was considering parting from Marshall. I couldn’t read my own signals, but I could tell it was time for a change.

During the week after Del Packard’s death, my life went according to routine once more.

I didn’t catch the flu.

A woman who specialized in cleaning up crime scenes drove to the gym from Little Rock. She expunged the mess Del’s passing had left. The gym reopened and Marshall resumed running it and teaching karate. He rearranged the workout equipment and mixed the bench Del had died on in with the others, so no one could say it was haunted, or try to reenact the crime.

I went to karate class, and I worked out. But I went to my home alone instead of to Marshall’s after karate, contrary to my recent practice. Though Marshall looked a little angry and a little hurt as I wished him a good evening, he also looked a little relieved. He didn’t ask me to explain myself, which was a pleasant surprise.

I didn’t see Claude Friedrich. It took me a couple of days to register that I wasn’t running into him and he wasn’t dropping in for lunch, and after that it took me a couple more to decide that this was by design, his design. I missed Claude’s company, but I didn’t miss the pressure of his desire.

And I lost clients. Tom and Jenny O’Hagen, who’d lived next door to me in the Shakespeare Garden Apartments, moved to Illinois to manage a larger Bippy’s. I wasn’t too concerned at the opening in my schedule. I had a standby list. I began calling. The first two potential clients fobbed me off with a lame excuse, and I could feel the worry start somewhere in my gut. Ever since the Burger Tycoon parking lot fight, I’d been concerned that my clientele would drop off.

The third family had found another maid, so I crossed them off. The woman who answered at the fourth number said she and her husband had decided to get divorced, and she would be doing her own cleaning. Another X. The fifth name on the list was Mookie Preston. After puzzling over the entry, I remembered that when Ms. Preston had called me a couple of months before, she’d said she’d just moved to Shakespeare. When I called her, she sounded delighted to hear that I could work for her on Friday mornings. She was renting a house, and she wanted longer than the hour and a half I’d given the O’Hagen apartment.

“Why don’t I work from ten to twelve on Fridays?” I was trying to imagine why a young single woman would need me for that long.

“We’ll see,” said the rich fruity voice. “I’m a little messy.”

I’d never laid eyes on Mookie Preston, but she sounded… eccentric. As long as her checks were good, I didn’t care if she raised catfish in the bathtub and wore a Barney the Dinosaur costume.

When I went to Body Time Thursday morning, I found Bobo sitting behind the counter to the left of the entrance. He looked as dispirited as an eighteen-year-old can look. I pitched my gym bag into an empty plastic cubicle, one of fifteen stacked against the east wall, after extracting my weight-lifting gloves. They were looking very shabby, and I knew I’d have to have a new pair soon; another item for my already tight budget. I began to pull them on, eyeing Bobo as I circled my wrists with the straps and Velcroed them tightly. Bobo stared back. He was even sitting depressed: shoulders sagging, hands idle on the counter, head sagging on his neck.

“What?” I asked.

“They’ve questioned me twice now, Lily,” he said.

“Why?”

“I guess the detective thinks I had something to do with Del getting killed.” He took a gulp of a repulsive-looking protein mixture that was the craze among the younger workout crowd. I wouldn’t have touched it with a ten-foot pole.

“How come?”

“Del worked for my dad.”

Among his many financial pies, Bobo’s father, Howell Winthrop, Jr., owned the local sports/exercise equipment/marine supplies store. Del had worked there, mostly in the exercise equipment and exercise clothing department, though he’d had to know enough about hunting and fishing to sell all the other products Winthrop Sporting Goods carried. Del himself had told me all about it at excruciating length when I’d been buying my punching bag.

“So do a lot of people in town,” I observed.

Bobo looked at me blankly.

“Work for your dad.”

Bobo grinned. It was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. He was really a lovely boy.

“Yeah, but Mr. Jinks seems to think that I decided Del knew something that would ruin Dad’s business, so either I thought of killing him or Dad told me to.”

“Because you were the last one to see him here?” Dedford Jinks is a detective on the little Shakespeare police force.

Bobo nodded. “Someone told the chief, who told Mr. Jinks, that when people didn’t bring their own spotters, they asked the staff to spot for them. Which, naturally, would be me.” He silently held out his plastic cup of goop. With a shudder, I shook my head.

I struggled with my guilt. It was I who had mentioned to Claude that sometimes a member of the staff was asked to fill in as spotter.

“I didn’t know Mr. Packard very well,” said the golden boy. “But really, I don’t think he could have found out anything illegal my dad was doing. This may not be respectful, especially now that Mr. Packard’s dead, but I never thought he was that smart, and if he knew something Dad was doing that was wrong, I think he’d just feel like he didn’t really understand. Or he’d go talk to Dad about it.”

I thought Bobo was exactly right.

“You look nice, Lily,” Bobo said, changing the subject so abruptly that it took a minute for his words to sink in.

“Oh. Thanks.” I was wearing a teal-colored T-shirt and sweatpants, new and unstained but strictly Wal-Mart.

“Why don’t you wear something like that?” Bobo pointed to the sportswear rack that Marshall kept stocked with expensive exercise clothing. The garment that had caught Bobo’s eye was pale pink and blue swirled in a tie-dye pattern, cut low over the boobs and high in the legs, meant to be worn over coordinating tights.

I snorted. “Right.”

“You’d look pretty. You’ve got the body for it,” he said self-consciously. “I’d like to watch your back when you’re doing lat pull-downs.”

“Thank you,” I said stiffly. “But stuff like that just isn’t my style.”

I went over to say hello to Raphael. He’d recovered from his flu, but he had something on his mind. His greeting was not the usual happy roar.

“What?”

“You askin‘ me what?” he said, rubbing the back of his head. Raphael kept his hair clipped so short that the passage of his mahogany hand made no change in the tight black curls. “I tell you what, Lily.” His voice got louder than it should have been, and I knew immediately that I had spoken to him at the wrong moment.

“You’re a good woman, Lily, but this place is not friendly to blacks.”

“Marshall-” I began. I was about to say Marshall was not a racist or some such thing, but I got interrupted.

“I know Marshall is not a bigot. But there are too many others here who are. I can’t come to a place where I’m not welcome as a black man.”

I’d never heard Raphael speak so seriously and angrily in the four years I’d known him. He was glaring at two men who were working out together on the other side of the room. They paused, stared at him for a minute, then went back to their activity. One of them was Darcy Orchard, a massively built man with long, thinning beige hair and acne-scarred cheeks, a broad Slavic face and legs like trees. I didn’t know the other man.

As I was trying to think what to say to Raphael, he just picked up his gym bag and walked out. I looked over at Darcy. He had his back turned, and his companion was lifting the bar. Everyone in the gym seemed to be looking somewhere else.

As I worked my way through my routine (today was legs and shoulders day) I tried not to brood about the little incident. I hated to think I might feel obliged to quit the gym, too. It meant so much to me, the daily workout. If I had to, could I buy my own gym equipment? No, not on my budget, not having already paid my annual fee here. I had to save so much each month, against the rainy day that would surely come. I already suspected Marshall discounted my Body Time membership.

Other users of the gym trickled in and began their workout after waving a hand or calling hello to each other and to me. This was the only group of which I could call myself a member, except for my karate class. Until a few minutes ago, Raphael had been one of us. This fellowship of sweat had a wildly fluctuating membership as people made resolutions and broke them, lasting on an average three weeks into their exercise program. There was a hard-core group of members like me who came nearly every day, and we had gradually gotten to know each other. More or less.

Del Packard had been one of this group.

All the regulars except Del were here today: Janet Shook, who was also in my karate class, a short chunky woman with dark brown hair and eyes who’d had a crush on Marshall ever since I’d met her; Brian Gruber, silver-haired and attractive, the president of a mattress manufacturing plant; Jerri Sizemore, former wife of Dr. John Sizemore, a local dentist; and Darcy Orchard, who worked at the sporting goods store, as Del had. Darcy usually worked out with Jim Box, another store employee, but today Jim was absent-probably home with the flu; he’d been sneezing yesterday. I wondered who Darcy’s new partner was. Eventually Darcy’s companion, whom I dimly recognized as someone I’d seen around the Shakespeare Garden Apartments, left. But Darcy lingered on.

Darcy was on the calf extension machine, which was my next station, so I watched as he did his second set. He had the pin pushed in at the two-hundred-pound mark, and as I waited he adjusted the shoulder pressure. Darcy, who was about six feet tall, had the rippling pectorals and ridged biceps of a workout fanatic. I thought there might be an ounce of subcutaneous fat on his body. He was wearing one of the ripped-up sweatshirts-arms chopped off, neck binding torn out-that were the mark of the committed, and his sweatpants were probably the same ones he’d worn in high school.

“Be through in a minute,” he panted, doing a set of twelve. He stepped down and walked around for a minute, relaxing the calf muscles that were taking such a beating. Darcy gathered himself, moved the pin down two more notches to add forty more pounds to his load, and stepped up on the narrow bar, his toes bearing his weight. Down went his heels, then up, for twelve more reps. “Ow!” he said, getting off. “Ow!” Staring at the floor with a scowl, Darcy relaxed the protesting muscles in his legs. “Let me just burn out now,” he said, and moved the pin up to a more reasonable weight. He stepped back on the ledge and did twenty-four reps very rapidly, until the grimace of concentration on his face became a rictus of pain.

Altogether this took only minutes, and I was glad of the rest.

“How you doing, Lily?” Darcy asked, walking in place to work off the strain. He grabbed up a beige towel and patted his acne-pitted cheeks with it.

“Fine.” I wondered if he’d say anything about Raphael’s exit. But Darcy had something else on his mind.

“Hear you found ole Del.” His small brown eyes scanned my face.

“Yeah.”

“Del was a good guy,” Darcy said slowly. It was a kind of elegy. “Del was always smiling. That guy that was here with me a minute ago, that’s the guy Howell hired to replace him. He’s a big change.”

“Local fella?” I asked politely, as I adjusted the shoulder bars down for my five feet, five inches.

“Nope, from Little Rock, I think. He’s one tough son of a bitch, ‘scuse my language.”

I moved the pin up to eighty pounds. I stepped onto a narrow ledge, came up under the padded shoulder bars to take the weight, and dropped my heels down. I pushed up twenty times, very quick reps.

I stepped down to walk it off and shift the pin to a higher weight.

“You dating anybody now, Lily? I heard you and Marshall weren’t such an item anymore.”

I looked up in surprise. Darcy was still there. Though Darcy had a wonderful body, it was the only thing about him that I found remotely interesting, and that wasn’t enough basis for an evening together. Darcy’s conversation bored me, and something about him made me wary. I never ignore feelings like that.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

He smiled a little, like someone who was sure he’d misunderstood. “Don’t want to…?” he asked.

“Date anyone.”

“Whoa, Lily! A fine woman like you doesn’t want a man to take her out?”

“As of now, right.” I stepped up, took the hundred pounds on my shoulders, and did another set of twenty. The last five were something of a challenge.

“How come? You like women instead?” Darcy was sneering, as though he felt obliged to look contemptuous when lesbianism was mentioned.

“No. I’m going to finish here now.”

Darcy smiled again, even more uncertainly, though I’d been as civil as I was able. He couldn’t seem to believe that any woman wouldn’t want to date; specifically, date him. But after a moment of waiting for me to take back my dismissal, he stalked over to the Roman chair, his narrow lips pressed together firmly in anger.

As I moved the pin to one hundred twenty pounds, once again I wondered whom Del might have asked to spot for him. Del would have trusted anyone in the room. Even Janet and I were just about strong enough to help him with some of the lower (but still formidable) weights that Del used for his bodybuilding. Janet was nearly as strong as I in the chest and arms, and had an edge on me in the legs since she taught two aerobics classes a day in addition to working at the Kids’ Club, which provided community-sponsored after-school care for kids.

After I finished my calf workout, I drifted over to Janet, who was doing abdominal crunches. Sweat had darkened her short brown hair to a black fringe around her square little face.

“One hundred ten,” she gasped, as I stood over her. I nodded, and waited.

“One twenty-five,” she said after a moment, relaxing in a heap. Her eyes shut.

“Janet,” I said, after a respectful moment of silence.

“Umm?”

“Del ever ask you to spot for him?”

Janet’s brown eyes flew open. They fixed on my face with some amusement. “Him? He didn’t think a woman could carry her own groceries, much less spot for him.”

“He’d seen female bodybuilders at those competitions. For that matter, he’d watched us work out many a morning.”

Janet made a rude noise. “Yeah, but we’re freaks to him,” she said, resentment in her voice. “Well, we were,” she amended, more neutrally. “He judged all women by that Lindy he went with, and Lindy couldn’t cut a ham without an electric knife.”

I laughed.

Janet looked up at me with some surprise. “That’s good to hear, you laughing. You don’t do that too much,” she observed.

I shrugged.

“Now that you’re over here,” she said, sitting up and patting her face with her towel, “I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”

I sat on the closest bench and waited.

“Are you and Marshall a locked-in thing?”

I’d been expecting Janet to ask me to spot her, or to go over the fine points of the latest kata we’d learned in karate class.

Everyone wanted to know about my love life today.

I kind of liked Janet, so answering her would be harder than answering Darcy. Saying no meant Marshall was open game for any woman who wanted a shot at him; I was abdicating all claim to him. Saying yes committed me to Marshall for the foreseeable future.

“No,” I said, and went to do my last set.

On her way to the changing room, Janet stopped. “Are you mad at me?” she asked.

I was a little surprised. “No,” I said.

But I was really surprised when Janet laughed.

“Oh, Lily,” she said, shaking her head from side to side. “You’re so weird.” She said that as if being “weird” was a cute little personality quirk of mine, like insisting my panties match my shoes or always wearing green on Mondays.

I left Body Time, vaguely dissatisfied with my workout session. I’d had my first personal conversation with Darcy Orchard, and I hoped it would be my last. I had confirmed that Janet Shook lusted after Marshall Sedaka; not exactly stop-the-press news. I had confirmed that Del almost certainly wouldn’t have asked a woman to spot for him. And I’d found out that Raphael felt he was getting a cold reception at a business he’d paid to patronize.

As I drove home, I tried to trace the reason for my dissatisfaction. Why did I think I should have gotten more out of the morning than a good workout? After all, it was as little my business what had happened in Body Time the night Del died as it was Janet’s business whether or not Marshall and I were committed to each other.

I hadn’t particularly liked Del. Why did I care whether he’d died accidentally or on purpose?

I’d told Claude that Del had been harmless. As I showered, for the first time I really considered Del Packard.

He hadn’t made any of the jocular comments about my strength I occasionally got from other men. Del had been mildly pleased to see me when I was in front of him, hadn’t missed me when I was gone, would have been glad to help me do anything I’d have asked him to help me with, was overwhelmingly proud of being Shakespeare’s champion, would cheerfully have gone on doing his Del Packard thing the rest of his life… if his life had been allowed to run its natural course.

He loved his mama and daddy, sent his girlfriend Lindy flowers, performed his job adequately, and went his own way without bothering a soul. All he’d wanted with any passion was to be a champion again, this time a number-one champion.

If Del’s spotter had killed Del through carelessness, he should come forward. If he had murdered Del out of malice, that, too, should be paid for.

I toweled my hair dry and put on my makeup, still turning over the questions about Del’s death to discover the source of my feeling I had a personal stake in the answers.

The police were working to discover how Del had met his death, and that should be enough to satisfy me. I certainly hadn’t felt any urge to seek personal knowledge after the beating death of Darnell Glass early in the fall, or the shooting of Len Elgin weeks afterward, both of which cases remained unsolved.

An answer came to me as I was getting in the car to go to my first job. I cared about Del’s death for two more reasons. Firstly, Bobo Winthrop was implicated, partly because of something I’d told Claude. Secondly, I was upset because Del had been killed in the gym, one of the few places I felt at home. So I cared about Del’s death, and I cared about payment for it.