Mostly, I grew angrier by the second at Byron, the twenty-four-year-old man who shared my shift. I watched Byron loaf his way through his workout, making himself friendly with every female in the place except me. Me, he tried to dodge.
Byron was sculpted. You could tell he thought of himself that way; sculpted as a Greek statue, sensuous, masculine. That is, if Byron knew any of those words. Byron was a waste of space, in my opinion. In my two weeks at Marvel, I couldn't count the times I had hoped he was the thief. Unless people would pay the high membership fee just to gaze upon Byron, he was a poor employee: pleasant to those people he liked, people he felt could help him, and rude to the guests who couldn't do anything for him, guests who expected him to actually work. And he'd fondle anything that stood still. Why Linda Doan had hired Byron was a mystery to me.
"I need to go put some more towels in the women's locker room," I told him. "Then I'm going to start my own workout."
"Cool," said Byron. Mr. Articulate. He began doing another set of ab crunches.
I took the pile of towels into the tiled locker room. Someone was taking a shower when I walked in, which was surprising because it was a little early for the rush we got about ten, ten-thirty. The water cut off as I reached the shelves where I stacked the towels. I was walking lightly because I always do.
I caught a guest red-handed. She was going through my purse, which I'd left temptingly propped against an extra pair of shoes by my locker. It took me a minute to mentally leaf through the pictures I'd tried to commit to memory, and finally I came up with her name: Mandy Easley.
Mandy became aware of me after I'd watched her get a twenty out of my wallet and flip open the credit card compartment. Mandy was only in her twenties, but she looked like a hag when her eyes met mine. Her dark brown hair was still wet from the shower, her narrow face was bare of makeup, and her towel was wound around her modestly, but she still didn't look innocent. She looked guilty as hell.
"Oh! Ah, Lily, right? I was just getting some change for the Tampax machine," she said, in a jittery voice. "I hope you don't mind. I didn't have the right change, and your purse was just sitting here."
"Machine takes twenties now?"
"Ah, I ..." The twenty fluttered from her fingers as she stared down at the purse, exactly as if it had just materialized in her hands. "Oh, that fell out! I'm sorry, let me just put it back in ..." and she fumbled for the bill. She was one big twitch.
"Ms. Easley," I said, and by my voice she knew I wasn't going to smooth it over.
"Oh, shit," she said, and covered her face with her hands as if she was overwhelmed with shame. "Lily, honestly, I never did anything like this before." She tried to squeeze out some tears, but couldn't quite manage. "I just have such bad money problems, please don't call the cops! My mom would die if I had a record!"
"You already have a record," I observed.
Her face flashed up from her hands and she glared at me. "What?"
"You have a record. For shoplifting and passing bad checks." The computer had told us what employees and guests had been present at Marvel during the time the various thefts had occurred, and twenty-three-year-old divorcee Mandy Easley's name had recurred. Jack had run a check on her.
"We'll be glad to refund your membership money by mail after you hand us your card," I said, as I'd been instructed to do. "When I have your card in my hand, you can go."
"You're not going to call the police?" she asked, unable to believe her good luck. I felt exactly the same way.
"If you return your card, then you can go."
"All right, Robocop," she said furiously, relief shoving her over the edge of caution. "Take the damn card!" She turned to yank it out of the pocket on her shorts, which were draped over the bench behind her. She extricated the plastic card and threw it at me. Mandy didn't look like a well-groomed young matron any more as she yanked my twenty out of my purse and thrust it into the same pocket. She was sneering in my face.
I had seldom seen anyone look quite so ugly, male or female. I thought Mandy Easley was just as much a waste of space as Byron, and I wished her out the door. I was sick to death of her.
She read something in my face that stopped her manic rant. Yanking off the towel, she let it drop to the floor while she pulled on her shorts and a T-shirt and thrust her feet into sandals. She gathered up her purse, spitefully knocked over the stack of towels as her parting shot, and headed out the door to the hall leading to the main room. She spun on her heel to fire some comment my way, something that could be heard by everyone in the weights room, but I began moving toward her with all my disgust in my face. She hurried out of the gym for the last time.
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 ....es."
"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.
I could hear Tamsin sobbing in the background and her husband saying, "Oh, not here, too. Honey, maybe it was just some kids, or someone playing a sick joke... ."
"You know it was him. You know that," Tamsin said, choking and gasping. "I told you about the phone calls. It's him, again. He followed me."
Jack said, "Excuse me, I'm Jack Leeds. This is Lily. We were just out walking. Sorry to intrude, but can we help?"
The man with his arm around Tamsin said, "I'm sorry, too. We can't believe ....xcuse me, I'm Cliff Eggers, and this is my wife, Tamsin Lynd."
"Tamsin and I know each other," I murmured politely, trying not to look at Tamsin's face while she was in such distress.
"Oh, Lily!" Tamsin took a long, shuddering breath, and she appeared to be trying to pull herself together in the presence of a client. "I'm sorry," she said, though damned if I could think for what. "This is just very upsetting."
"Sure it is," Jack agreed. "Don't you think we ought to call the police, Ms. Lynd?"