Shakespeares Trollop Page 0,61

the videos weren't labeled - the ones she'd already watched, I guessed. The labeled ones had abbreviations on them that only gradually began to make sense to me. I discovered that "OLTL" meant One Life to Live and that "C" meant Cops, while "AMW" was America's Most Wanted, and "Op" was Oprah.

After I'd scanned maybe ten of the tapes, I found the one of Marlon and Deedra. I only watched a second of it, enough to confirm the identity of the couple. (That was all Marlon needed, to get a tape of Deedra with another man.) I put the tape aside with a discreet Post-It.

Since I'd started the job, I kept on with it out of sheer doggedness. I was able to weed out one more home movie - Deedra and our mailman, in partial uniform. Disgusting. All the other videos seemed to contain innocuous television programming. When I got to the bottom, I realized that I could match these shows with the synopses in Jack's old magazine. These were things Deedra had taped during the week before she died. There was even an old movie Deedra had taped on Saturday morning at the end of one tape.

Deedra had had at least two tapes with previous Saturday night shows on them in her film library. She'd taped the same pattern of shows each weekend. So where was the tape from last Saturday night? She hadn't died until Sunday; she'd been alive when Marlon had left her Sunday morning, he'd said. Even if I didn't want to believe Marlon, she'd talked to her mother at church, right? So where was the Saturday night tape?

It was probably an unimportant detail, but unimportant details are what make up housecleaning. Those details add up. A shiny sink, a neatly folded towel, a dustless television screen; this is the visible proof that your house has been labored over.

I was beginning to get a rare headache. None of this made sense. I could only be glad I wasn't on the police force. I'd be obliged to listen to men tell me day after day about their little flings with Deedra, their moments of weakness, their infidelities. Surely watching a few seconds of homemade porn was better than that, if I was still obliged to clean up after Deedra in some moral way.

It was a relief when the phone rang.

"Lily!" Carrie said happily.

"Mrs. Dr. Friedrich," I answered.

There was a long pause over the line. "Wow," she breathed. "I just can't get used to it. You think it'll take people a long time to start calling me Dr. Friedrich?"

"Maybe a week."

"Oh boy," she said happily, sounding all of eighteen. "Oh, boy. Hey, how are you? Anything big happen while we were gone?"

"Not too much. How was Hot Springs?"

"Oh ... beautiful," she said, sighing. "I can't believe we have to go to work tomorrow."

I heard a rumble in the background.

"Claude says thanks for standing up for us at the courthouse," Carrie relayed.

"I was glad to do it. Are you at your house?"

"Yes. We'll have to get Claude's things moved soon. I told my parents about an hour ago! They'd given up hope on me, and they just went nuts."

"What do you and Claude need for your wedding present?" I asked.

"Lily, we don't need a thing. We're so old, and we've been set up on our own for so long. There's not a thing we need."

"Okay," I said. "I can see that. What about me cleaning Claude's apartment after he gets his stuff out?"

"Oh, Lily, that would be great! One less thing we have to do."

"Then consider it done."

Carrie was telling Claude what I proposed, and he was objecting.

"Claude says that's too much on you since you clean for a living," Carrie reported.

"Tell Claude to put a sock in it. It's a gift," I said, and Carrie giggled and gave him the message.

"Lily, I'll see you soon," she said. "Oh, Lily, I'm so happy!"

"I'm glad for both of you," I said. Sooner or later, someone would tell Carrie about the fire, and she'd chide me for not telling her myself. But she didn't need to come down from her cloud of happiness and be retroactively worried about me. Tomorrow she'd be back at work and so would Claude. The lives of a doctor and a chief of police are not giddy and irresponsible.

The next morning I found myself wondering why I hadn't heard from Lacey. She'd wanted me to work some more in the apartment. Her marriage crisis must have