“I hear you know Marshall Sedaka,” Friedrich said abruptly.
The comment was so unexpected that I actually looked at him directly.
“Yes.”
“He was down to the station this morning, talking to Dolph Stafford. Dolph tells me he inherits that business now that Pardon Albee’s dead. Pardon had a lot of irons in a lot of fires.”
I raised both hands, palms up. What of it?
“No one here knows much about Marshall,” Friedrich commented. “He just blew into town and married Thea Armstrong. No one could figure out why some man hadn’t snatched Thea up years ago, her being so pretty and smart. Marshall got lucky, I figure. Now I hear he’s moved out of the house, got himself a little rental place on Farraday.”
I hadn’t known where Marshall was living. Farraday was about three blocks away. I reached in the refrigerator, got out a container of soup I’d made over the weekend, and put it in the microwave.
It was a long two minutes until the timer beeped. I propped myself against the counter and waited for the police chief to go on.
“Pardon Albee was killed by one hard blow to the neck,” Friedrich observed. “He was struck first on the mouth, and then got a crushing blow to the throat.”
I thought of how strong Marshall is.
“So you’re thinking,” I said as I ladled soup into a bowl, “that Marshall dumped Thea for me and killed Pardon Albee so he’d own his business, now that he doesn’t have Thea’s twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year salary from SCC?”
Friedrich flushed. “I didn’t say that.”
“That’s the only point I can grasp from all this. Could you tell me any other implication I might have missed?” I stared at him for a long moment, my eyebrows raised in query. “Right. Now, here’s something real. Investigate this.” I held out the handkerchief, plain white, with a design of white stripes of different widths running around the border. Inside the handkerchief were the bumpy shapes of the gun and the handcuffs.
“You want to tell me about this?” Friedrich said.
Briefly and, I hope, unemotionally, I described what had happened at the Drinkwaters’ that morning.
“You didn’t call us? Someone was in the house with you and you didn’t call us? Even if you were all right, what if they took something of Mel and Helen’s?”
“I’m sure nothing was taken. I know everything in that house, and nothing was out of order. Nothing was rummaged through, or moved out of place, no drawers left open.”
“You’re assuming that these items were left by someone who knows about what happened to you in Memphis.”
“Isn’t that a logical assumption? I know you’ve found out. Have you told anyone?”
“No. It wasn’t my business to do that. I did call the Memphis Police Department a couple of days ago. Like I said, I remembered where I’d heard your name-after I thought about it awhile. I’ve got to say, I’m kind of surprised you didn’t change it.”
“It’s my name. Why would I change it?”
“Just to avoid anyone recognizing it, wanting to talk about what happened.”
“For a while, I thought about it,” I admitted. “But they’d already taken enough away from me. I wanted to keep at least my name. And then… it would have been like saying I had done something wrong.” And I glared at Friedrich in a way that told him clearly he was not to comment. He sipped his tea thoughtfully.
I wondered if Pardon had known the truth about my past. He’d never even hinted as much to me, but he had been a man who liked to know things, liked to own a little piece of the people around him. If Pardon had known, surely he would have hinted around to me. He wouldn’t have been able to resist it.
“So, did the Memphis police send you a report of some kind, something on paper?” I asked.
“Yes,” he admitted. “They faxed me your file.” He put his hand to his pocket, asked me if he could smoke his pipe.
“No,” I said. “Where’d you leave the fax?”
“You think someone at my office has spread this around? You yourself haven’t told anyone in this town about what happened to you?”
I lied. “I haven’t told anyone. And whoever left these on the steps at the Drinkwaters’ house knows I got raped, and knows the circumstances. So the knowledge had to come from your office, as far as I can tell.”
Claude Friedrich’s face darkened. He looked bigger, tougher, mean. “Lily, maybe someone has known since you moved here. Maybe they’ve just had the good taste not to mention it to you.”
“Then they lost their good taste with a bang,” I said. “You need to go. I have to work out.”
He took the handkerchief, handcuffs, and gun with him when he left. I was glad not to have them in my house anymore.
Normally, I don’t work out on Thursday nights, especially when I’ve already gone to Body Time in the morning. But the day had been one long accumulation of fear and anger, interrupted by the boredom of everyday work. I needed to do something to relax my shoulders, and the punching bag didn’t appeal to me. I wanted weights.
I pulled on a pink spandex shorts and bra set, covered it with a flowered T-shirt, grabbed my workout bag, and drove to Body Time. Marshall doesn’t work on Thursday nights, so I wouldn’t have the emotional strain of seeing him while he was still trying to digest what I’d told him.
Derrick, the black college student who picks up the slack for Marshall in the evenings, waved a casual hand as I came in. The desk is to the left of the front door, and I stopped there to sign in before going over to the weight benches, unzipping my gym bag as I walked. There were only a couple of other people there, both serious bodybuilders, and they were doing leg work on the quad and calf machines and the leg press. I knew them only by sight, and after returning my nod, they ignored me.
The rest of the building was dark-no light in Marshall’s office, the doors closed on the aerobics/ karate room.
I stretched and did some light weights to warm up, then pulled on my weight-lifting gloves, padded across the palm and with the fingers cut off at the knuckle. I pulled the Velcro straps tight.
“Need me to spot?” Derrick called after I’d done three sets. I nodded. I’d done twenties, thirties, and forties, so I got the fifty-pound dumbbells from the rack and sat on one of the benches, lying down carefully with a dumbbell in each hand. When I felt Derrick’s presence at my head, I checked my position. The dumbbells were parallel with the floor and I was holding them down at shoulder level. Then I lifted them up and in until they met over me.
“All right, Lily!” Derrick said. I brought the dumbbells down, then back up, fighting to maintain my control. Sweat popped out on my face. I was happy.
By the sixth repetition, the lift had begun to be a struggle. Derrick gripped my wrists, helping me just enough to enable me to complete the move. “Come on, Lily, you can do it,” he murmured. “Push, now.” And my arms rose yet another time.
I put the fifties on the rack and got the fifty-fives. With a great deal of effort, I lay down on the bench and struggled to lift them; the conventional wisdom at the gym is that the first time is the hardest, but in my experience, if the first time is really difficult, it’s likely all the succeeding lifts will be tough, too. Derrick held my wrists as my arms ascended, loosened his grip as my arms came down. I lifted the fifty-fives six times, my lips pulled back from my teeth in a snarl of concentrated effort.
“One more,” I gasped, feeling that treacherous exhaustion creeping through my arms. I was so focused on making my lift that until the dumbbells were triumphantly in the air, I didn’t realize that the fingers helping me were ivory, not black.