Shakespeare’s Trollop

Chapter Eleven

It was warmer the next day, with just a hint of the sweltering heat of summer: a wake-up call to the inhabitants of southern Arkansas.

Jack and I had gotten up early and gone to work out together at Body Time. We’d done triceps; I was sure to be sore after working triceps with Jack, because I tried heavier weights when he was with me, and I pulled harder for that extra set of reps.

Janet was there, and after she greeted Jack and went back to her leg presses, I noticed that Marshall himself came out of his office to spot her. I was pleased. Marshall needed to notice Janet, who had long had a soft spot for him.

Jack, on the other hand, would never be very partial to my sensei because he was well aware that Marshall and I once shared some time together. He wasn’t ridiculous about it, but I noticed a stiffness in the way he chatted with Marshall.

Marshall seemed to be in a very good mood, laughing and joking with Janet, and generally going around the room in a circuit to meet and greet.

“What’s up?” Jack asked when Marshall reached us.

“My ex is getting remarried,” Marshall said, beaming, an expression that sat oddly on his face.

I’d had some dealings with Thea, who was tiny, lovely, and widely respected. So are small poisonous snakes.

“Who’s the unlucky man?” I stood up straight after my second set of tricep pushups. Jack and I usually did them against the rack that held the heavier weights. We would put our hands close together on the top rack, and with our feet as far back as our height allowed, we would begin to lean down until our noses touched the weights, and then we’d push back up. I shook my arms to relieve the ache.

“A guy from Montrose,” Marshall said, actually laughing out loud. “And I stop paying alimony when she remarries.”

“When is the wedding?” Jack asked, planting his hands to do his set.

“Three months.” Marshall beamed at me. “No more Thea. And he owns the John Deere dealership, so she’ll be set. She’s not even going to go back to work.” Thea had been a child-care worker, and a very poor one, at the SCC day-care center.

“That sounds good,” I said. “I hope nothing happens to the man before she marries him.”

“He’s in my prayers,” Marshall said, and he wasn’t being facetious. He slapped me on the shoulder, nodded at Jack, and strolled back over to Janet, who was patting her face with a towel. She was trying to restrain her pleasure at being singled out by Marshall, but it wasn’t working. She was glowing with something besides sweat.

Back home, I showered and put on my makeup for work while Jack repacked and ate some breakfast. Then he took his turn in the bathroom while I ate some toast and made the bed.

We could make cohabiting work, I figured. It might take some adjustments, since both of us were used to living alone, and it might take some time, but we could do it.

Jack and I pulled out of the driveway at the same time, he to head back to Little Rock, and me to work for Birdie Rossiter.

Birdie was in full spate that morning. Unlike most people, who’d leave when they saw me pull up to their house, Birdie looked on me as a companion who was incidentally a housecleaner. So from the time I entered until the time I left, she provided a constant accompaniment, chattering and questioning, full of gossip and advice.

It wore me out.

I wondered if she talked to Durwood when I wasn’t there. I figured Durwood qualified to be some kind of dog saint.

But sometimes, in the middle of all the inconsequential gossip, Birdie let drop a nugget of something useful or interesting. This morning, Birdie Rossiter told me that Lacey Dean Knopp had made Jerrell Knopp move out.

“I guess she’s just got unhinged since poor little Deedra got killed,” Birdie said, her mouth pursed in commiseration tinged with pleasure. “That Deedra, she was the light of Lacey’s life. I know when Jerrell was courting her, he was mighty careful not to say one thing about Deedra. I bet he was after Lacey’s money. Chaz Dean, the first husband, he died before you came to Shakespeare… Well, Chaz left Lacey one nice pot of money. I knew she’d get remarried. Not just for the money. Lacey is pretty, no doubt about it, and no ‘for fifty’ or whatever age. Lacey is just plain pretty. If you marry somebody good-looking who has money, you just get a bonus, don’t you?”

I didn’t know which element would be the bonus, the money or the looks. Lacey, who had both, did not seem to me to be a particularly lucky person.

While Birdie went to pour herself another cup of coffee, I thought about Lacey making Jerrell move out, and I thought about the nasty speculation Janet and I had developed. I’d thought no one would worry if Deedra said she was going to make a relationship public, but I’d temporarily forgotten Jerrell. If she’d endangered his relationship with his wife, Deedra would have to be ruthlessly eliminated. Jerrell was crazy about Lacey. I’d never liked the man, and from my point of view it would be a great solution to Deedra’s murder if her stepfather could be found guilty.

But I caught myself scowling at the sponge mop while I squeezed it out into the mopping bucket. I couldn’t make a convincing case against Jerrell, no matter how much I tried. While I could see Jerrell hitting Deedra with a handy two-by-four, even taking a gun to shoot her, I couldn’t see Jerrell planning the elaborately staged scene in the woods. The strewn clothes, the positioning of the body, the bottle… no, I didn’t think so.

Birdie was back and babbling again now, but I wasn’t listening. I was mentally examining what I’d just said to myself, and I was forming a little plan.

It was a Monday eerily like that other Monday; it was clear and bright, and the air had a little touch of hotness to it, like standing just the right distance away from the burner on a stove.

Instead of parking out on Farm Hill Road, I turned into the graveled trail. I didn’t want to risk my worn-out suspension on the ruts, so I parked right inside the edge of the woods. I sat in my car, just listening for a minute or two. No bobwhite today, but I heard a mockingbird and a cardinal. It was a little cooler in the shade.

I sighed and got out of my car, removing the keys and stuffing them in my pocket for safekeeping. It never hurts to be careful.

Then I was moving down the trail again, telling myself that this time there wouldn’t be a car sitting in the middle of the woods, knowing there was no way a car would be in the same spot again…

But there was a car there, parked just where Deedra’s had been, and like hers it faced away from me. I stopped dead in my tracks.

It was a dark green Bronco, which explained why I hadn’t picked it out before. There was someone sitting in it.

“Oh no,” I whispered. I shook my head from side to side. This was like one of those dreams in which you are compelled to do something you dread doing, something you know will end in horror. When my feet began moving forward, my teeth were clenched to keep them from chattering, and my hand was over my heart, feeling it hammer with fear.

I drew abreast of the driver’s window, standing well back so I wouldn’t catch the smell again. I didn’t think I could stand that without throwing up, and I didn’t want to put myself through it. I leaned slightly to look in and then I froze. I was looking into a gun.

Clifton Emanuel’s eyes were just as round and black as the barrel of the gun, and almost as frightening.

“Don’t move,” he said hoarsely.

I was too shocked to say anything, and I wasn’t about to move a muscle. A lot passed through my mind in a second. I saw that if I acted instantly I could disarm him, though he was equally ready to pull the trigger. But he was a law-enforcement officer and my tendency was to obey him, though I knew from experience that some people in law enforcement were just as wrong headed or corrupt as the sociopaths they arrested.

On the whole… I remained frozen.

“Step back,” he commanded, in that eerie voice that told me he was wound as tight as a coil could be wound.

If I stepped back I wouldn’t be frozen anymore, but I decided it wasn’t the time to quibble with him. I stepped back. Marshall had always warned us that no matter how skilled you became in martial arts, in some situations the man with the gun would rule.

I watched, hardly breathing, as Clifton Emanuel opened the car door and emerged from the car. Though he took great care to keep the gun trained on me, there was one point at which I could’ve begun to move, but my uncertainty held me paralyzed.

Though I just didn’t think the deputy was going to shoot, I remained tense and strung up for action. His eyes were showing a little too much white to suit me. But when I figured he’d heard me coming up the trail, drawn his gun, and sat in the car waiting for me to approach, it wasn’t surprising he was squirrelly.

“Up against the car,” he ordered. Now that I felt sure he wasn’t going to shoot me out of hand, I began to get mad. I put my hands against the car, spread my legs, and let him pat me down, but I could feel my tolerance draining away with my fear.

He frisked me as impersonally as I could want, which was saying a lot.

“Turn around,” he said, and his voice was not so hoarse.

I faced him, having to look up to gauge his emotional state from his expression. His body was relaxing a little, and his eyes looked a trifle less jumpy. I focused on looking nonthreatening, trying to keep my own muscles from tensing, trying to breathe evenly. It took a lot of concentration.

“What are you doing out here?” he asked.

He was in plainclothes, though I noticed that his khaki slacks and brown plaid shirt were not too far from the uniform in spirit.

“I could ask the same,” I said, trying not to sound as confrontational as I felt. I don’t like feeling helpless. I don’t like that more than I don’t like almost anything else.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I wanted to look at the spot again because…” I faltered, not happy at explaining what had really been an unformed feeling.

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to think about it,” I finished. “See, I was thinking…” I shook my head, trying to formulate what I wanted to say. “There was something wrong about this.”

“You mean, besides the murder of a young woman?” he asked dryly.

I nodded, ignoring the sarcasm.

He lowered the gun.

“I think so too,” he said. Now he looked more astonished than anything, as if it amazed him that I would think about what I’d seen that day, think about Deedra’s last moments after I’d reported her death. It appeared that in Clifton Emanuel’s estimation, I was so tough that the death of a woman I’d known for years wouldn’t affect me. It would be wonderful, I thought, to be that tough.

He holstered his gun. He didn’t apologize for drawing on me, and I didn’t ask it of him. If I’d been in his shoes, I’d have done the same.

“Go on,” he invited me.

“I found myself thinking that…” I paused, trying to phrase it so he’d understand me. “We’re meant to think that a man came out here in Deedra’s car with her.”

“Or maybe arranged to meet her out here,” he interjected, and I nodded, waving a hand to show I conceded that.

“Howsoever. So, she’s out here, and so is the murderer, however he got here. And then, we’re supposed to think that this killer got Deedra out of the car for a little sex, told her to take off her clothes. She strips for his pleasure, tossing her clothes at random, pantyhose here, blouse there, pearls, skirt… and she’s out here in the middle of the woods naked as a jaybird. Then she has sex with him, and he’s using a condom unless he’s a complete moron. Or maybe they don’t have sex? I don’t know what the autopsy said. But at that point, something goes wrong.”

Clifton was nodding his big head. “They argue about something,” he said, taking over the scenario. “Maybe she threatens to tell his wife he’s screwing her. But that doesn’t seem likely, since everyone agrees married men didn’t appeal to her. Maybe she tells him she thinks she’s pregnant, though she wasn’t. Or maybe she tells him he’s a lousy lay. Maybe he can’t get it up.”

That had crossed my mind briefly before, when I’d considered Deedra’s artificial violation with the bottle. When Clifton Emanuel said it, the idea made even more sense. I looked up at the deputy in surprise, and he nodded grimly. “For some people, not performing would be reason enough to go off the deep end,” he told me darkly.

I looked off into the shadows of the woods and shivered.

“So he shows her potency,” Emanuel continued. “He strikes her hard enough in the solar plexus to kill her, and while she’s dying he hauls her into the car and then shoves the bottle up her… ah, up her.” He cleared his throat in a curiously delicate way.

“And then he leaves. How?” I asked. “If he arrived in her car, how does he leave?”

“And if he came in his own car, it didn’t leave any trace that we could find. Which is possible, especially if it was a good vehicle with no leaks. The ground was dry that week, but not dry enough to be powdery. Not good for tracks. But it just seems more likely that he was in the car with her, that he wouldn’t risk being seen pulling in here with her. So he must’ve had his car already parked somewhere close. Or maybe he had a cell phone, like yours. He could call someone to come pick him up, spin some story to explain it. Someone he trusted wouldn’t go the police with it.”

I spared a moment to wonder why a law-enforcement officer was being so forthcoming with speculation.

“She wasn’t pregnant,” I muttered.

He shook his heavy head. “Nope. And she’d had sex with someone wearing a condom. But we don’t know if it was necessarily the killer.”

“So you think maybe he couldn’t do it, and she enraged him?” But that kind of taunting didn’t seem in Deedra’s character. Oh, how the hell did I know how she acted with men?

“That’s possible. But I did talk with a former bedmate of hers who had the same problem,” Deputy Emanuel said, amazing me yet again. “He said she was really sweet about it, consoling, telling him next time would be okay, she was sure.”

“That wouldn’t stop some men from beating her up,” I said.

He nodded, giving me credit for experience. “So that’s still a possibility, but it seems more unlikely.”

Emanuel paused, giving me plenty of eye contact. He had no interest whatsoever in me as a woman, which pleased me. “So,” he concluded, “we’re back to the question of why anyone would do in Deedra if it wasn’t over some sexual matter? Why make it look like the motive was sex?”

“Because that makes so many more suspects,” I said. Emanuel and I nodded simultaneously as we accepted the truth of that idea. “Could she have learned something at her job? The county clerk’s office is pretty important.”

“The county payroll, property taxes… yes, the clerk’s office handles a lot of money and responsibility. And we’ve talked to Choke Anson several times, both about how Deedra was at work and about his relationship to her. He looks clear to me. As far as Deedra knowing something connected to her job, something she shouldn’t know, almost everything there is a matter of public record, and all the other clerks have access to the same material. It’s not like Deedra exclusively…”

He trailed off, but I got his point.

“I’m going to tell you something,” I said.

“Good,” he responded. “I was hoping you would.”

Feeling like this betrayal was a necessary one, I told him about Marlon Schuster’s strange visit to Deedra’s apartment.

“He had a key,” I said. “He says he loved her. But what if he found out she was cheating on him? He says she loved him, too, and that’s why she gave him a key. But did you ever find Deedra’s own key?”

“No.” Emanuel looked down at his enormous feet. “No, never did. Or her purse.”

“What about you and Deedra?” I asked abruptly. I was tired of worrying about it.

“I wouldn’t have touched her with a ten-foot pole,” he said, distaste making his voice sour. “That’s the only thing I have in common with Choke Anson. I like a woman who’s a little more choosy, has some self-respect.”

“Like Marta.”

He shot me an unloving look. “Everyone else in the department thinks Marlon did it,” Deputy Emanuel said quietly. He leaned back against his car, and it rocked a little. “Every single man in the department thinks Marta’s blind for not bringing her brother in. They’re all talking against her. You can’t reason with ‘em. He was the last to have her, so he was the guilty one, they figure.”

So that was the reason Emanuel was confiding in me. He was isolated from his own clan. “Marlon was with Deedra Saturday night?” I asked.

The deputy nodded. “And Sunday morning. But he says he didn’t see her after he left to go to church on Sunday. He called her apartment several times, he says. And her phone records bear that out.”

“What calls did she make?”

“She called her mother,” Clifton Emanuel said heavily. “She called her mother.”

“Do you have any idea why?” I asked, keeping my voice soft, because it seemed to me Clifton was about to pull the lid back on top of his loquacity, and I wanted to get everything I could out of him before the well ran dry.

“According to her mother, it was a family matter.”

That lid was sliding shut.

“About Jerrell fooling around with Deedra before he dated Lacey?”

His lips pursed in a flat line, Clifton gave an ambiguous movement of his head, which could mean anything. The lid was down now.

“I’m gonna go,” I said.

He was regretting talking to me now, the luxury of speculating with another skeptical party forgotten, the fact that he was a lawman now uppermost in his mind. He’d talked out of school and he didn’t like himself for it. If he hadn’t been so enamored of Marta Schuster, if he’d been in good standing with his fellow deputies, he’d never have said a word. And I saw his struggle as he tried to piece together what to say to me to ensure my silence.

“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I don’t think Marlon killed her. And rumor has it that yesterday Lacey told Jerrell to move out.”

Deputy Emanuel blinked and considered this information with narrowed eyes.

“And you know those pearls?”

He nodded absently.

I inclined my head toward the branch where they’d dangled.

“I don’t think she would have thrown them around.” The pearls had been bothering me. Clifton Emanuel made a “keep going” gesture to get me to elaborate. I shrugged. “Her father gave her that necklace. She valued it.”

Clifton Emanuel looked down at me with those fathomless black eyes. I thought he was deciding whether or not to trust me. I may have been wrong; he may have been wondering if he’d have a hamburger or chicken nuggets when he went through the drive-through at Burger Tycoon.

After a moment of silence, I turned on my heel and went down the road, all too aware that he was staring after me. I didn’t get that uneasy feeling with Deputy Emanuel, that prickling-at-the-back-of-the-neck feeling that some people gave me; the feeling that warned me that something sick and possibly dangerous lurked inside that person’s psyche. But after our little conversation I was sure that Marta Schuster was lucky to have the devotion of this man, and I was glad I was not her enemy.

On my way into town, I was thinking hard. Now more than ever, it seemed to me-and I thought that it seemed to Clifton Emanuel, too-there was something phony about the crime scene in the woods. Though Deputy Emanuel had run out of confidence in me before we’d run out of conversation, he too had seemed dubious about the scenario implied by the trappings left at the scene.

At my next job, Camille Emerson’s place, I was lucky enough to find the house empty. I was able to keep thinking while I worked.

That implied scenario: though I’d gone over it with Emanuel, I ran it again in my head. Deedra and a flame go out to the woods in Deedra’s car. The flame gets Deedra to strip, which she does with abandon, flinging her clothes and jewelry everywhere.

Then a quarrel occurs. Perhaps the man can’t perform sexually, and Deedra taunts him (though Emanuel had testimony and I agreed that such taunting was unlike Deedra). Maybe Deedra threatens to tell the flame’s wife, mother, or girlfriend that Deedra and the flame are having sex, period. Or possibly the flame is just into rough sex, killing Deedra in a fit of passion. But would that tie in with the catastrophic blow that stopped her heart?

I was so tired of thinking about Deedra by that time that the last explanation tempted me. I didn’t want to think Deedra’s death was anything more than passion of one kind or another, passion that had gotten fatally out of hand.

But as I finished dusting the “collectibles” on Camille Emerson’s living-room shelves. I caught sight of myself in the mantel mirror. I was shaking my head in a sober way, all to myself.

The only injury Deedra had sustained, according to every source, was the killing blow itself. I knew all too well what rough sex was like. It’s not one blow or act or bit of brutality, but a whole series of them. The object of this attention doesn’t emerge from the sex act with one injury, but a series of injuries. The bottle insertion had happened after Deedra was dead. Therefore, I realized, as I carried a load of dirty towels to the laundry area, that little nasty, contemptuous act was no more than window dressing. Maybe the equivalent of having the last word in a conversation.

That said something about the person who’d performed the insertion, didn’t it? I covered my hand with a paper towel and pulled a wad of bubble gum off the baseboard behind the trashcan in the younger Emerson boy’s room.

So, we had someone strong, strong enough to kill with one blow. The blow was probably purposeful. Evidently, the person had meant to kill Deedra.

We had someone who despised women. Maybe not all women, but women in some way like Deedra. Promiscuous? Attractive? Young? All of the above?

We had someone who had no regard for human life.

And we had someone clever. When I turned it over in my mind yet again, I could see that the staging was successful if you didn’t really know Deedra. Deedra wouldn’t throw things around like that, even if she were stripping for someone, which I could very well imagine her doing. Even then, she might sling a blouse, but it would land on something that wouldn’t tear or dirty it. She wouldn’t toss her pearls around. And the woods… no, she wouldn’t do that in the woods! Where was the lap robe or blanket for the lovers to lie on? Why ask Deedra to strip if the goal was a quick screw in the backseat of the car?

I concluded that whoever’d killed Deedra hadn’t thought anything at all about her character, had only known facts: that she was promiscuous and biddable. He hadn’t thought of her fastidiousness about her surroundings, hadn’t thought about her care for her possessions, the care that had never extended to cover her own body.

As I closed the Emersons’ door behind me, I realized that now I knew much more than I had this morning. What to do with it, how to make it work for me, was still mysterious. These pieces of knowledge were not evidence to which anyone else would give credence, but at least Clifton Emanuel had listened. I was relieved to know he had been wondering, as I had been, if the whole scene in the woods was a setup.

A setup to serve what purpose?

Okay, the purpose had to be, as the deputy and I had hinted to each other in our conversation, to misdirect. The scene had been staged to make it appear that Deedra had been killed for a sexual reason; therefore, if the scene was false, Deedra had not been killed because she was sexually active.

She had been killed because… she worked at the county clerk’s office? She was Lacey Dean Knopp’s daughter? She was the granddaughter of Joe C Prader? She was easily led and promiscuous, so she was an easy target? I’d hit a mental wall.

It was time to dismiss Deedra from my thoughts for a while. When I was sitting in my kitchen at noon, that was easy.

My house felt empty and bleak without Jack in it. I didn’t like that at all. I ate lunch as quickly as I could, imagining him riding back to Little Rock, arriving at his own apartment. He’d return his phone messages, make notes on the case he’d just finished, answer his E-mail.

I missed him. I seemed to need him more than I ought to. Maybe it was because for so long I had done without? Maybe I valued him more deeply because of what I’d gone through all those years ago? I saw Jack’s faults; I didn’t think he was perfect. And that didn’t make a bit of difference. What would I do if something happened to Jack?

This seemed to be a day for questions I couldn’t answer.