Charlaine Harris: Shakespeare’s Champion

“Can you eat yet?” I asked, not knowing what else I could do for him.

“Maybe some toast,” he said in a pitiful voice that sounded very odd issuing from his extremely muscular throat. Marshall is one-quarter Chinese. He has skin that’s just between pink and ivory, and his eyes and hair are dark. His eyes have a bit of a slant, just a hint. Other than that, he’s Caucasian, but since he’s a martial arts teacher he enjoys emphasizing the Oriental fraction of his heritage.

“Please,” he added, even more pitifully, and I laughed.

“Mean,” he said.

I got up and found his whole-wheat bread and waved a butter knife over it, toasted it dry, and brought it to him with some water.

He sat up and ate every crumb.

“You’re going to live.” I took the plate from him and carried it to the sink. I would coddle him to the extent of loading his dishwasher, I decided.

Afterward I returned to sit by the couch. He’d slid down to his original position. He took my hand.

“I guess I will live,” he admitted, “though for a few hours I didn’t want to. And finding out about Del, God! Who would have thought Del would be dumb enough to drop a weight on his neck?”

“I don’t think he did.” I told Marshall about the lack of fingerprints on the bar, about the light that should have been on.

“You think the spotter dropped the bar on Del by accident and then panicked?”

I shrugged.

“Hey, you don’t think someone killed Del on purpose? Who would do that?”

“I’m not a doctor, so I don’t know if this is possible… but if you felt a crushing weight on your neck and you knew you would die if it stayed there, and you were a grown healthy man, wouldn’t you fight to heave it off?”

“If I wasn’t killed instantly, I’d try as hard as I could,” Marshall said grimly. “If you’re saying someone held the bar down, who would be cruel enough to do that?”

I shrugged again. In my opinion, any number of people had that capacity for cruelty, even if they hadn’t discovered it in themselves yet, and I told Marshall that. I just couldn’t understand why anyone would indulge that cruelty by killing harmless, thickheaded Del Packard.

“You’re cold sometimes, you know?” Marshall had said that more than once lately. I looked at him sharply. This cold woman had gotten her butt out at six in the morning to open his business.

He went on. “Maybe Del was seeing someone else’s wife- that got Len Elgin killed-or maybe Lindy got mad at his training so much.”

“Del was too self-involved to go to the trouble of sneaking around,” I said. “And if you think Lindy Roland can lift fifty pounds, let alone close to three hundred, you better find another job.”

“That’s right, the one who dropped the weight had to be able to lift it first,” Marshall said thoughtfully. “Who do we know that can lift that much?”

“Almost anyone we know that works out regularly could lift that. Especially the men. Maybe I could, if I had to.” But I said the last part doubtfully. It would take a mighty surge of adrenaline.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t kill Del.”

I could kill a man-I had killed a man-but I didn’t think I could do it unprovoked. I began mentally reviewing the list of regular weight lifters at Body Time.

“I can think of at least twelve and I’ve only been trying for a minute or two,” I said.

“Me, too,” Marshall said, and sighed. “Aside from feeling sorry for Del and his folks and Lindy, this isn’t going to be good for business.”

“Who’s cleaning up the mess?” I asked.

“Would you…”

“No.”

“Maybe the cleaning service from Montrose?”

“Phone them,” I said.

He looked at me accusingly. “You’re being cold about this.”

I felt a surge of irritation. There was that accusation again.

Marshall wanted me to yoke myself with him and his interests as though we were a permanent couple.

I wasn’t willing.

I shifted my shoulders under my T-shirt, rolling the muscles in an effort to relax. I reminded myself once again that Marshall was ill. I slid my hand from his.

“Marshall,” I said, keeping my voice quiet and even, “if you wanted warm-fuzzy you came to the wrong woman.”

He laid his head back against his pillow and laughed. I made myself think of his having thrown up all night and some of the morning. I made myself remember an especially good time we’d had in that bed I could glimpse through his open bedroom door. There were several to choose from.

He’d been my sensei, my karate teacher, for four years now. We’d become friends. Then Marshall had left his terror of a wife, Thea. After that we’d shared a bed from time to time, and some good hours of companionship. Marshall was capable of moments of great compassion and sensitivity.

But as our relationship progressed, I’d discovered Marshall expected me to change, and swiftly; expected all my edges to be rounded off by that lust, companionship, compassion, and sensitivity… all my peculiarities to be solved by the fact that I had a steady guy.

Since having a steady guy, having Marshall, was nice in many ways, I found myself wishing it worked that way. But it didn’t.

As I said a brief good-bye and left for home, I felt gloomy and restless. I’d rebuffed Claude, who was a proud man; now I was considering parting from Marshall. I couldn’t read my own signals, but I could tell it was time for a change.

During the week after Del Packard’s death, my life went according to routine once more.

I didn’t catch the flu.

A woman who specialized in cleaning up crime scenes drove to the gym from Little Rock. She expunged the mess Del’s passing had left. The gym reopened and Marshall resumed running it and teaching karate. He rearranged the workout equipment and mixed the bench Del had died on in with the others, so no one could say it was haunted, or try to reenact the crime.

I went to karate class, and I worked out. But I went to my home alone instead of to Marshall’s after karate, contrary to my recent practice. Though Marshall looked a little angry and a little hurt as I wished him a good evening, he also looked a little relieved. He didn’t ask me to explain myself, which was a pleasant surprise.

I didn’t see Claude Friedrich. It took me a couple of days to register that I wasn’t running into him and he wasn’t dropping in for lunch, and after that it took me a couple more to decide that this was by design, his design. I missed Claude’s company, but I didn’t miss the pressure of his desire.

And I lost clients. Tom and Jenny O’Hagen, who’d lived next door to me in the Shakespeare Garden Apartments, moved to Illinois to manage a larger Bippy’s. I wasn’t too concerned at the opening in my schedule. I had a standby list. I began calling. The first two potential clients fobbed me off with a lame excuse, and I could feel the worry start somewhere in my gut. Ever since the Burger Tycoon parking lot fight, I’d been concerned that my clientele would drop off.

The third family had found another maid, so I crossed them off. The woman who answered at the fourth number said she and her husband had decided to get divorced, and she would be doing her own cleaning. Another X. The fifth name on the list was Mookie Preston. After puzzling over the entry, I remembered that when Ms. Preston had called me a couple of months before, she’d said she’d just moved to Shakespeare. When I called her, she sounded delighted to hear that I could work for her on Friday mornings. She was renting a house, and she wanted longer than the hour and a half I’d given the O’Hagen apartment.

“Why don’t I work from ten to twelve on Fridays?” I was trying to imagine why a young single woman would need me for that long.