Shakespeare’s Counselor

Chapter Six

Some days everything just works out wonderful. I didn’t have many of those, and I enjoyed one when I got it.

I got two phone calls the next morning before I started for Little Rock and the stakeout. One was from Mel Brentwood, the owner of Body Time, who asked if I would work that day. I tried explaining to Mel that since the thief had been captured I had moved on to another job. Mel replied that he hadn’t been able to find anyone to fill my position and if it was at all possible, he really wanted me to come in for my former shift. It would be worth the extra pay to not have to worry for one day.

“It might be a little awkward, Mr. Brentwood, having me back now.”

“Oh, they don’t know you were there as a private eye,” Mel reassured me. “As far as they’re concerned, you’re a regular employee who had another job offer. I told Linda to put you on the substitute list.”

I wished Jack were there to advise me. I didn’t want to alienate an important client of Jack’s, but I didn’t want to miss a day watching Beth Crider, either. Perhaps it might be good to lull her into security for a day? Maybe she’d been feeling watched; a day free from observation might make her careless. “Okay, Mr. Brentwood, I’ll be there,” I said. I laid down the phone and it rang immediately.

“Yes?” I asked, a little apprehensive.

“Babe, it’s me,” Jack said.

“How are you? Where are you?”

“Still at the hotel, but we’re about to leave for the airport.”

“We?”

“He’s agreed to come with me,” Jack said in a low voice. “He’s in the bathroom right now, so I can talk for a minute.”

“He just caved?” I asked, incredulous.

“He’s sick and scared,” Jack said. “And a trick beat the shit out of him two nights ago.”

If the boy had been fated to be beaten, this was the right time for it to happen, I thought, but I kept it to myself. I wasn’t always sure if I believed in fate or not, but sometimes it was comforting to believe in something.

Jack went on to tell me he planned to drive the boy home after they landed. Then he’d come to Shakespeare. “No matter how late it is,” he said.

So I was already feeling unusually chipper when I parked my car at Marvel, even though I was back to wearing the loathsome leopard-print unitard. As I slung my purse and lunch bag into my locker, Linda Doan, wearing a zebra-striped workout bra and puffy black shorts, asked me if I’d had a boob implant. Since she was pinning on her “Manager” label at the time, I was tempted to ask her what she’d leak if she stuck her breast, but I abstained, which made me proud of myself.

“No, just me in here,” I said so cheerfully that I checked the mirror again to make sure I was myself.

Even Linda looked surprised.

“You musta gotten some last night,” she observed. “You’re mighty perky today.”

I sure was. Perky. Lily Bard, perky?

As long as I was being such a cheerful team member, I asked, “Did you get any feedback from the calisthenics class?” That had been my idea. I got tired of the cute little classes taught in the aerobics room; they all pivoted around some gimmick. The set of calisthenics we did before karate class had seemed exotic to this bunch. And extremely painful.

Linda’s face took on a reserved expression. Linda was brown from the tanning bed, streaked from the hairdresser, and hard bodied from exercise. She was a little cautious, too, when she perceived that her interest was at stake. “A couple of the women said it was the hardest workout they’d ever had,” Linda said. “And at least one of them wanted to try it again.”

“Great.”

“Byron was telling me you know Mel?” Linda was striving to keep her voice casual, but I could tell we’d come to the crux of the conversation.

I nodded.

“Did he send you here to keep an eye on me?” she asked, abandoning all pretense of having a normal conversation.

“No,” I said. My shoelace was loose, so I squatted down to retie it.

“You stop trying to dodge me,” Linda said in a furious whisper.

“I’m not. I’m just tying my shoe.”

“Well, I don’t believe that you’re just here to work this job.”

“Believe what you want,” I said. I picked up the bottle of spray cleaner and the paper towels and went over to the nearest mirror to begin my cleaning round. I glanced at Linda’s reflection while I worked, and when I saw her expression I knew that she really hated me. I didn’t particularly care, but it would have cleared the air if I’d been able to tell her why I’d really been hired. Mel Brentwood had been clear about that point, though. He wanted me to remain just an occasional employee to the staff at Body Time.

One of the regular clients, Jay Scarlatti, a tall, lean, bony man, had taken a shine to me. He came in every morning after his run to lift some weights; afterward, he’d shower and go to work in a suit his wife had brought in the afternoon before.

Jay was interested in me physically. He had no idea what my character was like. Today, as always, he saw the body in the unitard and not the person who was wearing it.

“Hello, you beautiful thing,” he said this morning, coming up behind me while I was spraying the upholstery of one of the weight benches. “How are you today?”

I wasn’t supposed to beat on the customers, so I replied mildly that I was fine, and I hoped he was well.

“And Mrs. Scarlatti?” I asked.

“Katy’s fine,” he said stiffly.

“That’s good. She seems like such a nice lady, when she brings in your clothes in the afternoon. It’s really too bad you never have time to do that yourself.”

Jay Scarlatti was scowling.

“Being a little emphatic, aren’t you?” he asked, biting the words out.

“Seems like I need to. Are you going to try calisthenics today?”

He looked startled. “Sure, I guess so.”

“Then let’s get into line.”

I stowed away my cleaning things, blew my whistle, and collected a small crowd right away. Linda and Byron got in line, too, since I’d told Byron he might have to lead this exercise when I was off.

“You’ll see,” said a young muscle-builder to his pal. “This is gonna make you sore in places you didn’t even know you had muscles.” He looked excited at the prospect.

So we began, and the first time I asked them to touch the floor right in front of their toes, I heard a chorus of groans and cracking joints. But gradually they improved, and since I’d insisted on discipline from the beginning, I heard no complaints. Linda and Byron were red and panting, but they made it through the rest of the class.

Now that I wasn’t watching for a thief, I actually enjoyed being in the gym all day. And I was so thankful not to be loitering in Beth Crider’s neighborhood that I was extra friendly all day.

Jack had thought he’d get home about ten, so I left some food out on a microwavable plate for him. I got ready for bed and read for a while, then heard the familiar snick of the key in the lock of the front door.

While Jack ate and brushed his teeth, I kept him company. He talked a little about the boy he’d found, about how halfway home the boy had decided he felt a little better and wanted to go back to the streets. He and Jack had had some conversation, and the boy had decided to stick to his original plan.

“What did you say to him to persuade him?” I asked.

“I just told him I’d carry him home, kicking and screaming if necessary. When he told me I wasn’t capable of that, I pinched a nerve in his neck for a minute.”

“I bet that shut him up.”

“That, and me telling him I’d found and shipped plenty of runaways-just like him-home in coffins. And they never came back from that.”

“You’ve seen a lot of runaways.”

“Yeah. Starting back when I was a cop, I’ve seen way too many. The ones like him, the ones that started selling their butts, didn’t last three years. Sickness, or a client, or self-disgust, or drugs… mostly drugs.”

Every time Jack tracked a runaway, he went through a spell of depression; because the fact was, the kid often ran off again. Whatever grievance had led a child to leave home was seldom erased by life on the streets. Sometimes the grievance was legitimate; abuse, mental or physical. Sometimes it was based on teen angst; parents who “just didn’t understand.”

Catching a runaway often led to repeat business, but it wasn’t business Jack relished. He’d rather detect a thieving employee or catch someone cheating on a disability claim any day.

“Did you get a chance to call anyone about the new detective here?” I asked, as Jack slid into bed.

“Not yet. Tomorrow,” he said, half asleep already. His lips moved against my cheek in a sketchy kiss. “Everything tomorrow,” he promised, and before I switched off the lamp by the bed, he was out.

The next morning when I returned from cleaning Carrie’s office, Jack was in the shower. He’d already worked out, I saw from the pile of clothes on the floor. Jack didn’t believe in picking up as he went, a tenet that my mother had instilled in me when I was knee-high. I took a deep breath and left his clothes where he’d dropped them.

When he came out of the steamy little bathroom fifteen minutes later, vigorously toweling his hair, I was working on a grocery list at the kitchen table. He was well worth the wait. I sighed when Jack pulled on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and began to brush through his long hair.

“When I got up, I called this woman I know on the force in Memphis, and she knew someone on the job in Cleveland,” Jack said.

“And?” I said impatiently, as he paused to work through a tangle.

“According to this detective in Ohio, Alicia Stokes was a rising star in the office. Her clearance rate was spectacular, she handled community appearances well, and she was on the fast track for promotion. Then she got involved in a case she couldn’t solve and it all kind of fell apart.” Jack frowned at the amount of hair that came off in his brush.

“What was the case?”

“One she wasn’t even the primary on,” Jack muttered, still preoccupied by his hair loss. “That is, she wasn’t the detective in charge. She did some of the related interviews, that’s all. No one knows what set her off the deep end about this case. Which,” he added, seeing the exasperation on my face, “involved a woman who was being stalked.”

I felt a deep twinge of apprehension. “Okay. What exactly happened?”

“I heard this secondhand, remember, and I don’t know how well my friend’s source actually knew Detective Stokes.”

I nodded, so he’d know I’d registered the disclaimer.

“In Cleveland, this woman was getting threatening letters. Stuff was being nailed to her door, her house got broken into, she got phone calls, her purse got stolen three times, her car was vandalized… everything happened to this poor gal. Some of it was just annoying, but some of it was more serious, and all of it was scary when you added it up.”

“What about the police?”

“They were onto it right away. But they couldn’t catch anyone. This guy, who was like Stokes’s mentor, was the primary, and he pulled her in to do some of the questioning of neighbors-had they seen someone they didn’t know hanging around the neighborhood? Which of the neighbors had been home when the incidents happened? You know the kind of thing.”

“So she got wrapped up in it, I gather?”

“More so than was healthy. She began to spend her off time watching the house, trying like hell to catch the guy. She was so furious about what was happening to this woman…”

“I can understand why.” How would it feel to think that someone was watching your every move? Someone was waiting for you to be alone, your fear his only goal.

And that someone was able to get away with it. The police couldn’t stop him; the officers who had sworn to protect you couldn’t do their job. Despite everything, he would get you eventually.

Shaking my head, I leaned forward to rub my aching back. “So she got as obsessed about finding the stalker as the stalker was about his victim?”

“Yes, that’s about the size of it.”

“So, what happened?”

“She was warned off three times. The department gave her a lot of slack, because she was a good detective, she was a woman, and she was a minority. They didn’t want to have to fire her. After a while, when she seemed to be watching the victim as much as the stalker was, they gave her a long leave of absence so she could get her head on straight.” Jack looked disapproving; no one had suggested he be extended the chance of a leave of absence when he’d misbehaved. They’d wanted him gone. If he hadn’t resigned, he would’ve been fired.

“So, no matter what Alicia Stokes told Claude, she’s really still an employee of the Cleveland Police Department.”

“Yes,” said Jack, looking surprised. “I guess she is. Surely Claude called up there when she applied for a job here; that’s one of the first steps, checking references. You call and get the official story. Then you use the network of cops you know to get the real story, like I did this morning. So Claude must know about her problems.”

But I wondered if Claude, chronically understaffed, had taken the extra time.

I shook my head free of problems that really didn’t concern me and returned to work on my grocery list. It was taking me an awfully long time to finish my task. I couldn’t seem to concentrate. Truthfully, I was feeling less than wonderful. When Jack showed signs of wanting to make up for his inattention the night before, I had to wave him off. It was the first time for that, and when he looked surprised I felt obliged to tell him I was about to have my monthly time, and that somehow it felt worse than usual. Jack was quite willing to leave our discussion at that; I think he feels it’s unmanly to ask questions about my femaleness.

After thirty more minutes, my list was complete and I’d figured out the weekly menu. Also, I was in pain. Jack agreed to go to the store for us, and when I saw the worry on his face, I was embarrassed. I was seldom ill, and I hated it; hated going to the doctor, spending the money on prescriptions, not being my usual self.

After Jack left-after many admonitions and a lot of scolding-I thought I might lie down, as he’d suggested. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d lain down during the day, but I was feeling very strange. I went back to our room and sat down very carefully on the edge of the bed. I swung my legs up and lay on my side. I couldn’t get comfortable. I had a terrible backache. The weird thing was, it was rhythmical. I would feel a terrible tense clenching feeling, then it would back off. I’d have a few minutes of feeling better, then it would start again.

By the time I heard Jack unloading groceries in the kitchen, I was sweating and scared. I was lying with my back to the bedroom door, and I thought of turning over to face him, but it seemed like a lot of trouble to move. His footsteps stopped in the door.

“Lily, you’re bleeding,” he said. “Did you know?” There was lot of panic behind the calm words.

“No,” I said, in the grip of one of those pulses of pain. “Gosh, and I put a pad on, just in case. I’ve never had this much trouble.” I was feeling too miserable to be embarrassed.

“Surely this isn’t just your period?” he asked. He went around to the side of the bed I was facing and crouched down to look at me.

“I don’t think so,” I said, bewildered. “I’m so sorry. I’m just never sick.”

He glared at me. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “You’re white as a sheet. Listen, Lily, I know you’re the woman and I’m the guy, but are these pains you’re having… have you by any chance been timing them?”

“Why would I do that?” I asked, irritated.

“Your back hurts?” he asked, as though he were scared of the answer.

I nodded.

“Low down?”

I nodded again.

“Are you late?”

“I’m never very regular. Hand me the calendar.” Jack got my bank giveaway calendar from the nail in the kitchen and I flipped back to the months before. I counted. “Well, this one is late. I don’t know why it’s so painful, my last one was just nothing. A couple of spots.”

If I was as white as a sheet, we were a matching set. Jack lost all his color.

“What did you say?” he asked.

I repeated myself.

“Lily,” he said, as if he was bracing himself. “Honey, I think you… I think we need to get you to the hospital.”

“You know I don’t have insurance,” I said. “I can’t afford a hospital bill.”

“I can,” Jack said grimly. “And you’re going.”

I was as astonished as I could be. Jack had never spoken to me that way. He said, “I’m going to call an ambulance.”

But I balked at that. It would take us only four minutes to get to the hospital in Shakespeare, and that’s even if we caught the red light.

“Just put the bath mat down over your car seat,” I suggested, “in case I leak any more.” Jack could see I wouldn’t go unless he did as I’d said, so he grabbed the bath mat and took it out to his car.

Then he returned to help me up, and we went out to the car during a moment when I wasn’t actively in pain. I got in and buckled up, and Jack hurried around to his side of the car and jammed the key into the ignition. We went backward at a tremendous rate, and Jack got out into the street as though there were never any traffic.

After a minute, I didn’t care. I was really hurting.

Suddenly, deep inside me, I felt a kind of terrible wrench. “Oh,” I said sharply, bending forward. I took a deep breath, let it out… and the pain stopped.

“Lily?” Jack asked, his voice frantic. “Lily? What’s happening?”

“It’s over,” I said in relief. I looked sideways at Jack, but he didn’t seem to think that was good news. Just when I was about to ask him if he’d heard me, I felt a gush of wet warmth, and I looked down to see blood. A lot of blood.

I felt very tired. I thought I would lean my head against the car window. It felt cool against my cheek. Jack glanced over and nearly hit the car ahead of us.

“What’s happened to me?” I asked Jack from a far distance, as we pulled into the emergency room carport and he pushed open his door.

“Stay right there!” he yelled, and disappeared inside the building. The bath mat underneath me turned red. I congratulated myself on my foresight, trying not to admit to myself that I was terrified. In seconds, a nurse came out with a wheelchair. Jack helped me out of the car, and the minute I stood up my legs were drenched in a gush of fluid. I stared down at myself, embarrassed and frightened.

“What’s happened to me?” I asked again.

“Hon, you’re miscarrying,” the nurse said briskly, as if any fool should have known that.

And I guess she was right.