Shakespeares Champion Page 0,29

God-like decision-maker all week.

"Is that the niece everyone was talking about, the one he left everything to?" Carrie had fastened on the first item. But she would get around to all of them.

I nodded.

"What's she like?"

"She's got long blond hair, she wears heavy makeup, she works out and takes karate, and she probably features in the wet dreams of half the guys she meets."

"Smart?"

"Don't know."

"Has she rented out Marcus's apartment yet? A lab tech at the hospital is looking for a place to live." Shakespeare had a tiny hospital, perpetually in danger of being closed.

"I don't think the dust has had time to settle on the windowsill yet. Tell the lab tech to get on down there and knock on the apartment to the rear right."

"So what's with the chief? He show you his nightstick?"

I smiled. Carrie had a ribald sense of humor. "He wants to, but I don't think it's a good idea."

"He's been hanging around you for months like a faithful hound, Lily. Cut him loose or give in."

I was reminded yet again of how much people in a small town knew about you even when you tried to keep your life private.

"He's cut loose as of last night," I said. "I just enjoy his company. He knows that."

"Do you think you can be comfortable with him now?"

I thought of a quick answer and a longer truer one. I sat down in one of the two patient chairs and said, "It was possible until Claude started talking about the Darnell Glass lawsuit."

"Yeah, I hear Mrs. Glass is talking to a lawyer from Little Rock about bringing a suit. You'd be a witness, huh?"

"I reckon."

"Tom David Meicklejohn is such a jerk."

"But he's Claude's jerk. She'd be suing the Shakespeare Police Department, not just Tom David or Todd."

Carrie shook her head. "Rough waters ahead. Think you and Claude can weather it as friends?"

I shrugged.

Carrie's smile was wry. "It's uphill work being your confidant, Bard."

I sat silent for a minute. "I expect that's from being Victim of the Year after I got raped. Too many people I talked to, people I'd known all my life, turned around and told everything I said to the press."

Carrie looked at me, her mouth slightly open in surprise. "Gosh," she said finally.

"Got to work." I got up and pulled on my yellow rubber gloves, prepared to tackle the patients' bathroom first, since it was always the nastiest.

When I left the room, Carrie was bending over her paperwork with a little smile on her lips.

Another favorite woman of mine was Marie Hofstettler, and I was sorry to see today was not one of her "limber" days. When I used my key to enter her ground-floor apartment, I could see at a glance that she wasn't in her usual chair. Marie had been living in the Shakespeare Garden Apartments, next door to me, for years. Her son, Chuck, who lives in Memphis, pays me to clean once a week and take Mrs. Hofstettler wherever she wants to go on Saturdays.

"Mrs. Hofstettler," I called. I didn't want to scare her. Lately, she'd been forgetting when I was due to come.

"Lily." Her voice was very faint.

I hurried back to her bedroom. Marie Hofstettler was propped up, her long silky white hair in an untidy braid trailing over one shoulder. Somehow she seemed smaller to me, and her myriad wrinkles looked deeper, chiseled into her fine skin. Her color was bad, both pale and gray-tinged.

She looked like she was dying. The effort of calling out to me had clearly exhausted her. She gasped for breath. I picked up the phone on the bedside table, jammed between a framed picture of her great-grandchild and a box of Kleenex.

"Don't call," Marie managed to say.

"You have to go to the hospital," I said.

"Want to stay here," she whispered.

"I know, and I'm sorry. But I can't..." My voice trailed off as I realized I'd been about to say "be responsible for your death." I cleared my throat. I thought about her courage in the face of the pain she'd endured for years, from arthritis and a bad heart.

"Don't," she said, and she was begging.

As I knelt by the bed and held Mrs. Hofstettler's hand, I thought of all the people in this apartment building I'd seen come and go from its eight units. Pardon Albee had died, the O'Hagens had moved, the Yorks were gone, and Norvel Whitbread was in jail for forging a check: this, out of the tenants that had been in