I stepped into the Winthrop kitchen, for once feeling positively happy to be there. The kitchen was dim and warm, wonderfully warm. For a couple of minutes I stood under a vent, enjoying the rush of heated air, restoring my circulation. I pulled off my old red Lands End squall jacket and hung it on one of the chairs at the round table where the family ate most of their meals. I strolled out of the kitchen, still rubbing my hands together, to the huge family room, stylishly carpeted in hunter green and decorated in taupe, burgundy, and gold. I picked up a couch pillow and fluffed it, replacing it automatically in the correct corner of the couch, which could easily seat four.
Still trying to reach a normal temperature, I stood staring out the sliding glass doors. The backyard looked melancholy in the late autumn, the foliage thinned out and the high fence depressingly obvious. The gray pool cover was spotted with puddles of rainwater. The warm colors of the big room were more pleasant, and I roamed around it picking up odds and ends as I stretched chilled muscles.
The pleasure of being warm made me feel like singing. I’d only rediscovered my voice recently; it was as though for years I’d forgotten I had the ability. At first the memories had wrenched at me—I remembered singing at weddings as a teenager, remembered church solos…remembered what my life once was. But I’d gotten past that. I began humming.
Though it wasn’t my regular cleaning day, from habit I walked through the whole house, as I always did when I came in. Upstairs, Bobo’s room was picked up and the bedspread was actually pulled straight. No such epiphany had inspired Amber Jean and Howell Three, but then they’d never been as sloppy as Bobo. The two upstairs bathrooms were more or less straight. Downstairs, Beanie always made the king-size bed in the huge master bedroom, and she was meticulous about hanging up her clothes because she had paid a lot for them. Beanie’s family had a great regard for money.
I began singing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” as I went to the “cleaning stuff” closet in the kitchen to select what I’d need: dust cloths, the vacuum cleaner, glass cleaner and rags, shoe polish.
Twice a year, for extra pay of course, I performed this odd little service for Beanie. I took everything out of her huge walk-in closet, every single thing. Then I cleaned the closet, reorganized her clothes, and checked to make sure all her shoes were polished and ready to wear. Any clothes that needed mending or were missing buttons I put to one side for Beanie’s attention, or rather her seamstress’s.
I had sung my way to the end of the ballad when I took all my cleaning paraphernalia into the big dark bedroom—Beanie kept the drapes drawn—and dumped it on the floor to one side of Beanie’s closet. I opened the mirrored door and reached inside to switch on the light.
Someone grabbed my wrist and yanked me in.
I FOUGHT IMMEDIATELY, because Marshall had taught me not to hesitate; if you hesitate, if you falter, you’ve already lost psychological ground. In fact, I almost went crazy and lost all my training, but hung on by a little rag of intelligence. I formed a good fist and hit with my free left hand, striking for anything I could hit. I couldn’t place my assailant exactly, had no idea who had grabbed me.
My blows made contact with flesh, I thought a cheek. He grunted but didn’t lessen his formidable grip on my right wrist, and it was only with an effort that I kept the left hand free. I knew it was a man from the sound of the grunt, so I went for his balls, but he twisted to one side and evaded my fingers. He’d been wanting to catch that free hand, and this he finally did; bad news for me. I tried breaking loose by stepping into him and bringing my hands, palms up, against his thumbs, the same move that had worked against Bobo; once I was free, I would slap him over the ears or gouge his eyes, I wasn’t particular, I would kill him or hurt him however I could.
The move didn’t work because he’d been expecting it. His hands slid down from my wrists to hold me right below the elbows. I slammed my head forward to break his nose but got his chest instead. As I threw my head back up I heard his teeth click together, so I’d clipped his chin, but that wasn’t enough to effect any major damage. I tried for the groin again with my knee and this time managed to make some contact because I got the grunt again. Elated, I tried to bring him down by hooking my leg between his legs and kicking the back of his knee. This was incredibly stupid on my part, because I succeeded. I brought him down right on top of me.
He pinned me to the floor with his body, his strong hands gripping my arms to my sides, his legs weighting mine. I lost my mind. I bit him on the ear.
“Goddamn! Stop it!” He never lessened his grip, which was what I was working for, but brought his forehead down on mine, using my own trick against me. He hadn’t used full force, not by a long shot, but I gasped with pain and felt tears form in my eyes.
He moved his head down to my ear, so his cheek was against mine, an oddly intimate contact. I heaved and bucked against him, but I could feel the weakness in my movements. “Listen,” he hissed. And then as I opened my mouth to scream, hoping to throw him off guard for a second, he said the one thing that could have achieved a truce.
“They’re breaking in,” he whispered. “For God’s sake, just shut up and be still. They’ll kill us both.”
I know how to shut up and I know how to be still, though I couldn’t stop quivering. My eyes finally adjusted to the near-darkness of the closet, and by the faint light coming in through the partly open door, I saw that the man on top of me was Mr. Black Ponytail.
After a second, I wasn’t too surprised.
Those eyes were not focused on me, but staring out the closet door as the man listened to the faint sounds that were just now penetrating my tangled state of fear and rage.
He bent back so his mouth was by my ear, his newly shaven cheek again resting against mine. “It’s gonna take them a while. They don’t know shit about breaking and entering,” he said in a voice so low it seemed to come from somewhere inside my own head. “Now, who the fuck are you?”
Through clenched teeth I said, “I am the fucking maid.” Every muscle in my body was tensed, and the shivering would not stop no matter how I willed myself to be still. I began to make myself relax, knowing that if I didn’t, I would remain weak and disadvantaged.
“That’s better. We’re on the same side,” whispered the man as he felt my body soften and still beneath him.
“Who are you?” I asked him.
“I,” he told my ear, “am the fucking detective.” He shifted on top of me. He wasn’t as calm or cool as he was trying to sound. His body was reacting to its proximity with mine, and he was getting uncomfortable. “If I let you go, are you gonna give me any trouble? They’re much more dangerous than I am.”
I thought about it. I had no idea if he really was a detective. And whose detective? FBI? Private? ATF? The Shakespeare police force? Winthrop County?
I heard glass shattering.
“They’re in,” he breathed into my ear. “Listen, the game plan has changed.”
“Huh,” I said contemptuously and almost inaudibly. I hated sports metaphors. I felt much better almost immediately. Angry is better than scared or confused.
“They’ll kill us if we’re caught,” he told me again. His lips, so close to my ear, suddenly made me want to shiver again in a completely different way. His body was talking to mine at great length, no matter what his mouth was saying.
“Now, what I want you to do, when they’re all in the house,” he whispered breathlessly, “is start screaming. I’m going out the front door, circling around to the alley to get their license plate number, identify the car, so I can try to find where they go after this.”
I wondered what his original plan had been. This one seemed awful haphazard. His hands, instead of gripping my arms, were rubbing them slowly.
“They’ll know it was me and come after me.”
“If you’re never in their sight, they won’t believe you saw them,” he breathed. “Give me three minutes, then scream.”
“No,” I said very so
ftly. “I’ll turn on the vacuum cleaner.”
I sensed a certain amount of exasperation rolling off Mr. Ponytail. “OK,” he agreed. “Whatever.”
Then he slid off me, and rose to his feet. He held out his hand and I took it without thinking. He pulled me up as easily as he’d helped me do chin-ups that morning. He gave me a sharp nod to indicate the clock was running, and then he was gone, easing himself out of the closet, through Beanie’s bedroom, and presumably down the little hall that led to the foyer of the house. His exit was much more subtle than the burglars’ entrance.
I peered at my big-faced man’s watch, actually timing the self-proclaimed detective, trying not to wonder why I was doing what he said. At two and a half minutes, I risked stepping out of the closet. I could hear the intruders clearly now. Once they’d gotten into the house, they’d abandoned all attempts at silence.
After plugging in the vacuum cleaner, I suddenly began belting out “Whistle While You Work.” Without waiting to assess the reaction, I stepped on the “On” button and the vacuum cleaner roared to life. I was careful to keep my back to the bedroom door as I began industriously vacuuming, because I could see in Beanie’s dressing table mirror if I was being stalked. I caught a shadow swooping across the mirror, but its owner was in the act of departure. I’d spooked them.
When I felt sure they were gone, I turned off the vacuum cleaner. Watchfully, I once again toured the Winthrop house. One of the sliding glass doors leading to the pool area was broken. Looking across the covered pool, I saw one of the wooden gates standing ajar. The Winthrops needed a full-fledged security system, I thought severely. Then I realized I would have to clean up all the glass, and I found myself irrationally peeved.
Also, I had to call the police.
There was no way around it.
Should I tell them about Black Ponytail? If it weren’t for Claude, I’d lie in a jiffy. All my contacts with the police had been painful. But I trusted Claude. I should tell him the truth. But what could I tell him?
I was fairly sure Howell Jr. must have admitted Black Ponytail to the house or given him the keys. My doubts about their relationship recurred. But no matter what that relationship was, it seemed to me I’d be violating whatever loyalty I was supposed to have to the Winthrop family if I told the police Black Ponytail had been already concealed in the house, anticipating this very break-in.
This was knotty.
I called the police station and reported the break-in, and had a few moments to think hard.
The safest thing was a straight break-in. I don’t know nothin’, boss.
It helped immensely that Claude didn’t come. Dedford Jinks, the detective who’d so frightened Bobo, and two patrolmen responded to my call. Claude was in a meeting with the county judge and the mayor and had not been told about the incident, I gathered from listening to the patrolmen.
Dedford was a good ole guy with a beer gut hanging over a worn belt buckle he’d won in his calf-roping days. He had thin graying hair, a thin compressed mouth, and a ruddy complexion. Dedford was nobody’s fool.
My story was this: I’d heard little noises, but thought that a member of the family had come in. From then on, I told the truth: I’d plugged in the vacuum and turned it on, I’d heard a big commotion, I hadn’t seen anyone.
After they’d checked out the backyard and found a gate unlocked, and many footprints in the flower beds, the police said I could go.
“I have to clean up,” I said, gesturing to the glass on the Winthrops’ thick hunter-green carpet. They’d gathered up the biggest pieces for fingerprint testing, but there were lots of fragments.
“Oh,” said one of the patrolmen, disconcerted. “Well, OK.”
Then Howell burst into the house, moving faster than I’d ever seen him move. His face was red.
“My God, Lily, are you all right?” He actually took one of my hands and held it. I reclaimed it. This was strange. I could feel the policemen looking at each other.
“Yes, Howell, I’m fine.”
“They didn’t hurt you?”
I gestured wide with my hands to draw his notice to my uninjured body.
“But the bruise on your forehead?”
I touched my face carefully. Sure enough, my forehead was tender and puffy. Thanks, Mr. Ponytail. I hoped his ear hurt.
“I guess I ran into the doorframe,” I said. “I got pretty excited.”
“Well, sure. But one of the men didn’t…”
“No.”
“I had no idea you were going to be here today,” Howell said, taking his snowy white handkerchief out of his pocket and patting his face with it. “I am so glad you weren’t harmed.”
“I came to do your wife’s closet. It’s just a twice-a-year thing,” I explained. For me, I was talking too much. I hoped no one would notice. I was rattled. I knew now that Howell was directly involved in this day’s peculiar doings. At least it was Howell who had let Ponytail in, so he had been here legitimately. I guessed Howell was now wondering where the hell his man was and what part he’d played in this fiasco.
“I’ll just clean up this mess and go,” I suggested again.
“No, no, you need to go home after this,” Howell exclaimed, his handsome, fleshy face creased with anxiety. “I’ll be glad to clean it up.”
Definite glances between all police personnel within earshot. Shit.
“But I’d like to…” I let my sentence trail off as Dedford raised an eyebrow in my direction. If I insisted longer, so would Howell, drawing more attention to his unusual preoccupation with my condition. He was obviously guiltstricken. If he kept this up, everyone present would figure something strange was going on, and they might think it was more than Howell having an affair with his maid, which was bad enough.
“Where’s your car?” Howell asked suddenly.
“It wouldn’t start this morning,” I said wearily, by now tired of explaining myself. “I walked.”
“Oh my God, all that way! I’m sure one of these boys will be glad to give you a ride home!”
One of the “boys,” the older paunchier one with a disbelieving mouth, said he sure would be glad to do that.
So I got delivered to my house in style. My car was still in my carport, but with a sheet of yellow legal paper stuck under the windshield. It read, “I fixed it. You owe me $68.23.” It was a lot more direct and honest than the blue sheets that were suddenly papering the town. I turned to the patrolman, who was waiting to see me enter my house safely. “Do you know anything about those flyers that are turning up under everyone’s windshield wipers?”
“I know they ain’t no ordinance against it,” he replied, and his face closed like a fist. “Likewise they ain’t no ordinance against the blacks meeting to talk about it, which they aim to do tonight.”
“Where?”
“The meeting? At the Golgotha A.M.E. Church on Castle Road. We got to maintain a presence, case there’s any trouble.”
“That’s good,” I said, and after thanking the man for giving me a ride home (and being willing to part with information without asking any questions) I sat in my recliner and thought.
Chapter 5
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED OF THE REST OF THE day. I think I expected the man in the closet to pop up any minute; to tell me what had happened when he left, to ask me if he’d hurt me in our struggle, to explain himself.
After seeing him everywhere I turned, now he was nowhere. I passed through being worried, to being angry, and back through worried. I made my feelings cool down, concentrated on chilling them; I told myself the fear and rage engendered by our silent struggle in Beanie Winthrop’s walk-in closet—what a location—had nudged me past some internal boundary marker.
Out of sheer restlessness, that night I attended the meeting at Golgotha A.M.E. Church. I found it with a little difficulty since it was in the center of the largest black residential area in Shakespeare, which I seldom had reason to visit. The church itself, redbrick and larger than I e
xpected, was set up on a knoll, with cracked concrete steps bordered by a handrail leading up to the main doors. It was on a corner lot, and there was a big streetlight shining down those steps. Golgotha was so centrally located that I saw many people walking to the meeting despite the gusty cold wind.
I also saw two police cars on the way there. One was driven by Todd Picard, who gave me an unhappy nod. It was easy to tell that every time he saw me, I reminded him of something he wanted to forget. I felt the same way about him.
I went up the steps of the church at a fast clip, anxious to get out of the wind. It seemed to me I’d been cold all day. There were double doors at the top of the steps, and inside those, a large foyer with two coatracks, a table spread with lots of free literature on Planned Parenthood and Alcoholics Anonymous and the practice of daily prayer, and the doors to two rooms, one on each side, that I guessed were vesting rooms or perhaps served for choir practice. Ahead, there were two sets of doors into the body of the church. I picked the right set of doors and followed the flow of people into the sanctuary. There was a long center set of pews and a shorter set on each side, with wide aisles in between, the same conformation I’d seen in many churches. I picked a long central pew at random, and scooted toward the center to give later arrivals easy access.
The meeting was scheduled to begin at seven, and surprisingly enough it did. The high attendance on a cold school night was a measure of how strong feeling was running in the African-American community. Mine was not the only white face in view. The Catholic sisters who ran a preschool for disadvantaged children were seated some distance away, and Claude was there: a good public relations move, I thought. He gave me a curt nod. Sheriff Marty Schuster was sitting beside Claude on the dais. To my surprise, he was a small wizened man you would’ve thought couldn’t arrest a possum. But his appearance was deceiving; I’d heard more than once that Sheriff Schuster had cracked his share of skulls. Schuster’s secret, Jim Box had told me one morning, was to always strike first and hardest.
(LB1) Shakespeare's Champion Page 10