Shop Talk

by Carolyn Haines

  The silence around the table was heavy, but no one disagreed.

  Chapter Five

  All around Driskell the vivid images whizzed and whirled in a soundless kaleidoscope of color. He sighed in satisfaction. The mercury vapor glow of Pass Road was broken only by the head and tail lights of traffic, and the erratic beam of a lightshow being put on by one of the casinos over on the beach. Driskell’s complete attention was focused on the computer screen in front of him as he dialed into America On Line’s local access number and waded through the series of annoying questions and quasi-promotions that were hurdles on the road to the Internet.

  The modem in his lap-top was slow, and Driskell listened to the Gregorian chants coming from his portable boom box. It was his favorite music. Deep, somber, comforting. The chants reminded him of the high ceilings in his grandmother’s old house.

  In the big old house, light fixtures hung by two feet of decorative chain. Above the light was a space of perpetual gloom, a darkness that could harbor anything.

  The house had once been owned by an elderly rich woman. She had died there, in the bedroom on the southwest corner, when the skirt of her nightgown brushed into a low fire burning in the bedroom hearth. She’d run out into the yard, a human torch.

  It was common Cranberry knowledge that her spirit stalked the large, dark rooms, spying and waiting for a chance to rout the interlopers who dared to inhabit her home.

  As a young boy, Driskell had lain on his back every night, afraid to sleep on his stomach–afraid to sleep at all—for fear an arm would dangle off the bed and something under the dust ruffle of the big four-poster would grasp his wrist in a firm, bony grip.

  He’d developed dark circles under his eyes and an unhealthy pallor from chronic fatigue. Weariness had led to physical lethargy and a quiet studiousness that made him the butt of jokes in school. Yet while his schoolmates shunned him, his grandmother doted on him, bringing him candy and books and the fresh, tart cranberries that he loved to hold in his lips and savor. The cranberries had permanently stained his lips and made him a laughingstock, but it didn’t matter that he had no friends. His grandmother loved having him all to herself, to sit beside her as she hemmed a dress or listened to the radio.

  He had no strong recollections of his mother, who was gone a lot, or his father, who was drunk a lot. His memories were ruled by his grandmother, a big dumpling of a woman with massive breasts that always smelled of apples and cinnamon. She had been an expert seamstress with more customers than she could serve. The women she sewed for were heavy. Women too large to find stylish clothes in neighborhood department stores and too sensitive to go to the shops for larger sizes. The plus shops, as they were now called. He could still hear the burning shame, the anguish in their voices as they spoke about such shopping episodes.

  Sometimes the women used his bedroom to change clothes, and they offered him candy and short, intense hugs, otherwise ignoring him as they lifted their heavy arms out of their clothes. Instead of stepping out of a dress, they invariable pulled the dresses over their heads, revealing yards of tricot. Large women wore slips–it was a fact. And those slips held each woman’s peculiar odor. Not odor as in unpleasant, but odor as in distinctive. The essence of the women could be discovered in the heavy tricot of their slips. Sometimes they would leave their slips pooled on the carpet of his bedroom, and he would creep out of bed and pick them up oh, so carefully, and lift them to his nose and inhale the essence of some big woman whose hug had been like a cocoon of warmth, her breath a sweep of peppermint.

  He loved those women. He loved their poofy little sighs as they climbed the stairs to his room. They came upstairs to change, then back down to view themselves in the extra-large mirrors. If the house was really quiet, or the woman extremely pleased, he could hear her little exclamation of pleasure as she saw herself in her new dress. At that exact moment, if he held her old slip and inhaled sharply, he felt he had captured the totality of her being inside him. In his lungs and brain. And he would hold his breath until he thought he would burst.

  The whir of the computer brought him back to the present and the job at hand. The Internet was a wasteland of forlorn souls who spent their lonely evening hours making contact with others as pitiful as themselves. Driskell knew the scene well; he’d scanned the numerous bulletin boards and chat groups. In fact, he had been one of those cyber-people until he had taken the initiative and begun to shape his fate. Exercise became part of his daily regime. He’d overcome his fears and insecurities, unshackled himself from Dr. Rudd and the constant analysis that had been his primary human contact, and decided to live the adventure. No more John LeCarré. No more Ian Fleming. No more Anne Rice. No more books. Action was required. He was a man with a destiny.

  Biloxi and the Hares were the first step toward that goal.

  His CIA assignment from Roger, his commander and contact in the web of bureaucracy that regarded the Hares as important, had ordered him to the Gulf Coast to establish a link with the Hares. Step one of his mission was complete. He’d been employed in Bo’s Electronics for three days. His entreé had been astoundingly easy. He was in the bosom of the Hare family. Further instructions were needed.

  He found them in his E-mailbox.

  “Observe subjects closely. Note any unusual behavior. Any peculiar traits shared by siblings. Use extreme caution, the Hares are potentially hazardous to security of the nation. Do whatever is necessary to cement your place in the household. Roger.”

  Driskell read the instructions three times before he deleted them. He was new at the spy game, but the Hares seemed no more dangerous than most of the residents in south Mississippi. Lucille was obsessed with writing. Driskell found a unique freshness to her prose. Even if she was dreadful, there were lots of bad writers in America, and they weren’t a threat to national security.

  He pondered the woman who had so eagerly given him access to her family. Certainly, she was a striking physical specimen. Tall, pale, hair dyed a shade of red that contrasted with her pallor like a car wreck. Her eyes were wide with the sexy look of someone near-sighted who refused to wear glasses. A touch of vanity was good in a woman. It made her feminine.

  His thoughts traveled to Bo, a tall man, and the more intelligent of the two by a big margin. He had a certain flair for electronics, as if he could lay hands on a television and diagnose the illness. It was something to keep in the back of his mind. Something Roger might find useful.

  So far, though, there wasn’t anything so unusual as to warrant messaging the CIA back. Driskell wasn’t absolutely sure which branch of the U.S. government he’d signed on with. He’d answered an ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine for an electronics whizz. In a matter of two days, he’d found himself driving to Mississippi with three hundred crisp, newly printed one hundred dollar bills and instructions to develop a relationship with the Hares. Now his assignment was to provide detailed observations.

  The telephone at his elbow shrilled and made him jump. He picked it up without thinking. “Hello.”

  “Is this Bo’s Electronics?”

  “Indeed.” Driskell assessed the voice on the other end. Someone hesitant, defeated sounding, unsure of even the telephone number he’d dialed.

  “My television is on the blink. Could I bring it by?”

  “The shop is closed. We’ll open tomorrow—”

  “I know this isn’t your problem, but the wife has locked me out of the house, and I have this old black and white set in the garage. I’d like to watch Matlock tonight.”

  Driskell started to say no, then relented. How could he refuse a man who had been reduced to watching an old black and white unit in the garage. “Sure, bring it on.”

  Pushing his laptop under the counter, Driskell picked up the pliers and screwdriver and lifted a VCR onto the counter top. In three days of working at the shop, he’d earned Bo’s praise. He was making himself invaluable to Bo, but he had to figure out a way to spend more time watching Lucille. Trouble was, she we
nt straight home from the bank and got on her computer to write her epic western romance.

  As if answering his thoughts, Lucille jangled through the door of the shop.

  “Bo and Iris are in the back,” Driskell said. His reaction to Lucille was strange, the odd sensation of dark smoke drifting into his veins. Maybe there was something to Roger’s cautions.

  “I know.” Lucille came up to the counter. “I came to talk to you. I need advice. For my book.”

  Driskell put down his pliers. “I’m not a writer, Lucille.”

  “I don’t have anyone else to ask.”

  Driskell’s red lips turned up in a smile as he reached under the counter and brought up his laptop. “I saw something the other night on one of the writing bulletin boards.” He punched the keyboard, shifting through image after image. “Ahhh …” He signaled her to come around the counter. “It’s an ad. A writer’s group here in Biloxi is looking for a new member and a place to meet. Why don’t you give them a call? Perhaps Bo would let you use the shop for meetings. It wouldn’t bother me.” And it would be the perfect opportunity to observe Lucille more closely, Driskell thought.

  “That’s a great idea.” Lucille copied down the information on the palm of her hand. “I’ll—“

  The front doorbell jangled a warning. They stepped back from each other and turned to watch a slender, dark-haired man lugging in an ancient television.

  “The shop is closed,” Lucille said automatically.

  “It’s okay.” Driskell stepped around the counter and lifted the set with remarkable ease. “I’ll take a look at it Mr …”

  “Dr. Beaudreaux.” He stared at Driskell’s gelled back hair, the distinctive ears, and settled on his red lips. “Are you, by chance, of Transylvanian descent?”

  “I’m a Cranberrian,” Driskell answered as he zipped off the back of the set. The doctor’s stare made him uncomfortable.

  “Oh.” Robert Beaudreaux pondered that information. “Does everyone in your family look like you?”

  Driskell put down the screwdriver. “I’m the only one in my family, so that’s hard to answer. Now about your set? Do you want it fixed or not?”

  “Of course.” Robert pressed two fingers to his chin. “That was rather indelicate of me. I didn’t mean to pry into your personal business, it’s just that I’m doing some research on distinctive physical characteristics, and, well, your lips are rather unusual.”

  Driskell lifted both eyebrows. “Are they?” The one thing he didn’t need was someone poking into his background.

  “Oh, dear.” Robert took two steps back. Clearing his throat, he pointed to the television. “Can you fix it? I called eight repair shops, working my way up the yellow page entries. This was the only place that answered. My wife says I should get a new set, but I like the old black and white. It gives the shows a sense of … reality. A time when life was simpler, choices clearer. I suppose I miss the old days.”

  “Certainly.” Driskell whipped out two wires and a tiny light-bulb device. Rummaging in the spare part box, he held up a duplicate part. “You’re in luck. They don’t make parts for a set this ancient, but Bo keeps a lot of old things around.”

  Across the street from Bo’s Electronics a tall, slender man leaned in the shadows of a doorway, a possible vagrant. His age was indeterminate, and he was dressed in a man’s somewhat expensive jacket that gave his lean frame an old world elegance.

  Perhaps he might be someone who lived down one of the residential streets that fed off Pass Road, out for a late night stroll. Or a healing patient or medical employee of the nearby Veterans Administration Hospital. With his proper posture, perhaps someone from Keesler Air Force base, a man who’d sampled the bars and illicit brothels half a mile down Pass Road and who’d decided to give up sin and liquor for a walk in the cool, April night.

  If anyone had bothered to watch him, they would have seen that he was none of those things. He watched the windows of Bo’s Electronics with an intensity that had not lessened for the fact that he had been doing the same thing, at varying intervals of the day and night, for four months now.

  Tonight, with Lucille Hare and the man he recognized as Dr. Robert Beaudreaux, in the shop together, his watching was beginning to pay off.

  It had taken him years to track down the Hare name. Years of painstaking research, and in some cases, torture, and blackmail. And once he’d secured the name, he’d been thwarted to find that Happy Hare and his wife Ethel were dead and in the grave. They had both died young, and from the newspaper accounts, Happy’s death was listed as long-term heart “ailments.” Ethel had died in her sleep. Bah!

  Knowing what he knew, Marvin Lovelace was not certain that either of the Hares had met a natural end. Now his only hope was Bo and Lucille, the last surviving Hares.

  In the weeks he had watched them, he had detected nothing out of the ordinary. Lucille’s hair was a strange color, but then a lot of the women in their mid-thirties who were going for a last gasp of drama before their youth petered out on them, dyed their hair. Bo lived behind the television repair shop, a practical decision, and he opened up at eight o’clock sharp. He was reliable, pleasant, regular, and good at his job. Lucille worked at a bank. She was inefficient, caustic, harried, and had her nose stuck in a book at every possible moment.

  They were flip sides of the same coin, yin and yang. Male and female. So far, the Hares had been a big waste of his time. Marvin eased out of the doorway and drifted across the street. His stride was long, yet casual. He passed by the plate-glass front of the shop without leaving so much as a reflection on the glass. At the corner of the building he stopped and stared into the darkened interior where televisions refracted the politically correct view of American society. Even the thought made him furious. He loathed television, the insipid shows where women and minorities got the last word in a conversation, where men were portrayed as weak, egocentrics with brains fueled by testosterone and beer. Even in the cool April night the anger made him flush with heat. Television had corrupted the soul of his country and produced a society of abominations. Just like the creature he now watched.

  Bo’s new man was working by the light of a high intensity lamp. The good doctor and Lucille stood watching, as if he were performing brain surgery. Marvin studied the repairman’s slick head. It was exactly that kind of hair style that left dark, greasy stains on the backs of theatre chairs and bus seats. Disgusting. And his lips! They were painted or stained, or tattooed! That lush red hinted at aberrations that Marvin could not even bear to contemplate. He consoled himself that Driskell LaMont’s appearance would make taking care of him a pleasure. No one would miss the skinny weirdo when he vanished. Marvin’s grin revealed long, yellowed teeth. Strong teeth, without a single cavity.

  The good doctor Beaudreaux, national celebrity that he was, posed a different problem. But nothing–no one would stand in his way where Lucille Hare was concerned. Months of observation had left Marvin with that one irrefutable conclusion–she was the crooked key that would unlock the past.

  Chapter Six

  Mona sat at the black-jack table and watched from beneath the visor of her leather captain’s hat as Coco grasped a delicate pastry shell in her left hand and injected it full of thick, white cream filling. Coco’s lips trembled with desire, and her blue gaze never left the puff, which grew larger and larger until the delicate pastry was about to explode.

  “Ah,” Coco whispered softly as she placed the pastry on a doily. Her fingers brushed lovingly across the delicate crust.

  “If that bitch gets her book published by Sonny Zanzara, I’ll sit on her and force-feed hazelnut cream filling down her throat,” Mona vowed to no one in particular. The four men who also sat at the blackjack table concentrated on their cards and their cigarettes. The dealer kept shooting glances at Mona, but his job did not include taking on a woman like her.

  Bored with the wait, Mona began a pointed observation of the room. She was above the passions and woes of the other
humans. While they lived their lives of disorder and messy relationships, their needs and weaknesses, she took those very elements and created fiction. She was a writer, and this was astro glide for her dry surfaces.

  The entire room was filled with sound, light and movement. From all sides and above her came frenzied moaning, swearing, whooping and laughing. The things that didn’t make a noise blinked or glowed or spiraled. Somewhere buried beneath all the hubbub was Muzak playing “Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head.”

  Mona’s gaze sighted on the long table covered in rich burgundy where Coco towered above copper-bottomed pots. A crowd of about fifty had gathered to watch her, the women smiling and nodding, the men simply staring at Coco. They would eat her desserts, but they would prefer her. Mona pulled out a notebook and wrote down that thought. When she looked up, Sonny Zanzara was approaching Coco.

  He was obviously taken with the starched voile magenta apron she wore over hot pink short-shorts and an aqua blouse that clung to every ridgy little rib. Translucent hot pink high heels, complete with hot pink pompons, and a pearl choker made up the rest of Coco’s outfit. Coco lifted the puff pastry, crowned with two inches of chocolate, and held it as Sonny took a large aggressive bite.

  As his teeth sank into the pastry, Mona felt a little chill of anticipation. She liked a man with an appetite. A man who knew how to use his teeth. An involuntary shudder made the ice in her scotch glass rattle. She put it down and stood up. Now wasn’t the time for fantasies. She and Coco were set to meet a writer who claimed she had a meeting space available. A large space with no interruptions. No annoying little insects of humanity who didn’t understand the sensitivity of writers. Mona could only hope that this Lucille Hare was compatible enough to be included in WOMB.

  Coco gave a squeal of delight as Sonny licked a clot of hazelnut cream from her finger and then sucked the entire digit into his mouth. The crowd applauded and Coco bowed.