Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Counselor

Since the front door had been opened already, I knew the manager was there. Sure enough, the light in her office was on. Linda Doan didn’t like me and was determined to get rid of me the first chance she got. But Linda couldn’t fire me, though she didn’t know that yet. She didn’t know why I was really at Marvel.

I was under cover. The very term had a tendency to make me snicker, but it was true. Since its opening seven months before, the gym had been plagued by a thief. Someone was sneaking into the changing rooms and stealing items-cash, jewelry, cell phones-from the guests. It wasn’t impossible that the thief was a guest, but Jack thought the culprit was one of the staff, given the territory the thief had covered.

“The men’s changing room, the ladies’ changing room, the storage cubes outside the sauna,” Mel Brentwood had moaned. “Drinks, watches, chains, cash. Never a lot, never anything awfully expensive, but it’s just a matter of time. And the guests will hear about it and they won’t come. If we don’t find out who’s responsible, I’ll fire everyone working there and replace all of them, I swear I will.”

I was pretty sure such drastic action was illegal, but it wasn’t my business to say so, and I noticed Jack glanced out the window and kept his face blank. Mel couldn’t be the idiot he projected himself to be. He had started this string of gyms with money he’d begged and borrowed from skeptical friends of his parents, and he’d made the gyms prosper by thinking of ever-new ways to get them in the news without actually burning them down.

“Can we install a camera in the changing room?” Jack asked.

“Hell, no! How do you think these people, most of ‘em trying to take off weight, would react to discovering they’d been on camera? There’s no way to put one in there that no one would notice.” But I could tell the idea had caught Mel’s interest. “If I didn’t want to take the thief to court…” he said slowly. “If I just wanted to catch the bastard and fire him…”

“The camera would never come up,” Jack said. “We could take it out, destroy the tape, no one the wiser. I can run by Sneaky Pete’s. I’m not crazy about the idea of filming people who don’t know about it, but it would work.”

“So, do I need Lily?” Mel Brentwood eyed me like I was a gunslinger who might draw on him.

“Sure. There are things cameras won’t catch,” Jack said. “And we have yet to figure out a way to disguise them.”

“Okay, girl,” Mel said, whacking me on the shoulder to get me fired up for the big game. “You start work as soon as you can get your tights on.”

I eyed him balefully. I wasn’t happy about working for Mel, but I’d worked for plenty of people I hadn’t liked. I told myself to ease up. Politically correct he wasn’t, but Mel would pay Jack to do this, Jack would have another client who would call him when he got in a jam, and Jack’s business would prosper.

So there I was, in Marvel Gym, in glorious leopard print Spandex, making sure guests swiped their green plastic cards as they came in so their presence would be recorded on the computer. I handed out small towels to the guests who’d forgotten theirs, I checked the supply of bath-sized towels in the locker rooms, and I sold the expensive “health” drinks displayed in the cooler behind the counter. Those tasks were constants, but every day there was some specific problem to solve. In the first hour I worked today, I unstuck the weight-setting peg on a leg-extension device. Then I discreetly sprayed cleaner on a weightlifting bench after a particularly sweaty guest had used it, and got the vacuum out to suck up clods of dirt tracked in by a guest who’d been running in the mud yesterday.

Mostly, I grew angrier by the second at Byron, the twenty-four-year-old man who shared my shift. I watched Byron loaf his way through his workout, making himself friendly with every female in the place except me. Me, he tried to dodge.

Byron was sculpted. You could tell he thought of himself that way; sculpted as a Greek statue, sensuous, masculine. That is, if Byron knew any of those words. Byron was a waste of space, in my opinion. In my two weeks at Marvel, I couldn’t count the times I had hoped he was the thief. Unless people would pay the high membership fee just to gaze upon Byron, he was a poor employee: pleasant to those people he liked, people he felt could help him, and rude to the guests who couldn’t do anything for him, guests who expected him to actually work. And he’d fondle anything that stood still. Why Linda Doan had hired Byron was a mystery to me.

“I need to go put some more towels in the women’s locker room,” I told him. “Then I’m going to start my own workout.”

“Cool,” said Byron. Mr. Articulate. He began doing another set of ab crunches.

I took the pile of towels into the tiled locker room. Someone was taking a shower when I walked in, which was surprising because it was a little early for the rush we got about ten, ten-thirty. The water cut off as I reached the shelves where I stacked the towels. I was walking lightly because I always do.

I caught a guest red-handed. She was going through my purse, which I’d left temptingly propped against an extra pair of shoes by my locker. It took me a minute to mentally leaf through the pictures I’d tried to commit to memory, and finally I came up with her name: Mandy Easley.

Mandy became aware of me after I’d watched her get a twenty out of my wallet and flip open the credit card compartment. Mandy was only in her twenties, but she looked like a hag when her eyes met mine. Her dark brown hair was still wet from the shower, her narrow face was bare of makeup, and her towel was wound around her modestly, but she still didn’t look innocent. She looked guilty as hell.

“Oh! Ah, Lily, right? I was just getting some change for the Tampax machine,” she said, in a jittery voice. “I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t have the right change, and your purse was just sitting here.”

“Machine takes twenties now?”

“Ah, I…” The twenty fluttered from her fingers as she stared down at the purse, exactly as if it had just materialized in her hands. “Oh, that fell out! I’m sorry, let me just put it back in…” and she fumbled for the bill. She was one big twitch.

“Ms. Easley,” I said, and by my voice she knew I wasn’t going to smooth it over.

“Oh, shit,” she said, and covered her face with her hands as if she was overwhelmed with shame. “Lily, honestly, I never did anything like this before.” She tried to squeeze out some tears, but couldn’t quite manage. “I just have such bad money problems, please don’t call the cops! My mom would die if I had a record!”

“You already have a record,” I observed.

Her face flashed up from her hands and she glared at me. “What?”

“You have a record. For shoplifting and passing bad checks.” The computer had told us what employees and guests had been present at Marvel during the time the various thefts had occurred, and twenty-three-year-old divorcee Mandy Easley’s name had recurred. Jack had run a check on her.

“We’ll be glad to refund your membership money by mail after you hand us your card,” I said, as I’d been instructed to do. “When I have your card in my hand, you can go.”

“You’re not going to call the police?” she asked, unable to believe her good luck. I felt exactly the same way.

“If you return your card, then you can go.”

“All right, Robocop,” she said furiously, relief shoving her over the edge of caution. “Take the damn card!” She turned to yank it out of the pocket on her shorts, which were draped over the bench behind her. She extricated the plastic card and threw it at me. Mandy didn’t look like a well-groomed young matron any more as she yanked my twenty out of my purse and thrust it into the same pocket. She was sneering in my face.