“I can imagine. Plus the shock of seeing it all back there. Was the front door open? How about the balcony?”
“Both locked. Deadbolt and all.”
“The toilet seat? Any cigar smoke?”
“Nope. Everything cool. Just the clothes.”
“This is so strange.”
“I know. And you want to hear something even weirder?”
“Weirder than Sally moving to New Orleans to be near your old flame Bobby LaRue? Got himself locked up in ’gola with his bro? Sally said she met him through a personal ad.”
Jane screamed. “That little bitch! I can’t believe it!”
“Y’all hold it down in there.” It was Peaches passing in the hall. “Decent people thinking about going to bed. Don’t need all this hollering.”
“You upset?” Sam fanned Jane with a magazine.
“Upset? I’m hysterical. Sally and Bobby LaRue? That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“Good. When you get the use of yourself, tell me what’s weirder than your clothes coming home.”
Jane clicked back in. “You’re really gonna love this. So I was sitting there on my sofa, having taken a bath, enjoying the luxury of changing my clothes, when Craig knocked on my door.”
“And?”
“Now you have to keep this quiet. He’ll lose his job.”
Sam gave her a look. Asking an investigative reporter to be discreet was like asking a winning pitcher to cut off both his arms. But then, she wasn’t doing a story, was she? She could try. “What?”
“Remember I told you when I talked with him he was all in an uproar because Miss Bitsie, our landlady, had been by to drop off a rent increase notice?”
“Something. You said she waved at you. Didn’t seem important.”
“Well, then,” Jane grinned, “you missed the good part.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Well, Craig was pissed as hell at Miss Bitsie, so—”
“Why does this Miss Bitsie ring a bell? Is she one of those Buckhead bluehairs?”
“No, no, no. I’ve told you about them. She’s little woman to our landlord, Old Holier Than Thou, Sue Your Butt Chuckie Walters. Though come to think of it, she’s not so little. Actually, she’s about my size.”
“Ah ha!”
“Hold on. He has those kind of slicked-up cracker-come-to-town looks. Tall. Lean. Kind of anxious around the eyes. They’re both about forty. She looks like a former showgirl. Vegas. Miami Beach. You know the type. Miss Pettigrew in 1A told me once there was some gossip about what she did before she met Chuckie. But nothing definitive.”
“And he’s the former hellraiser, present religious fanatic, and Atlanta’s most litigious lawyer to boot.”
“That’s our Chuckie. Did I tell you he recently hit somebody in Piedmont Park when he was out bike riding with Miss Bitsie and then sued the victim? Said he was maliciously obstructing his right of way. And they’re suing for Bitsie too. For the trauma and mental anguish of breaking a fingernail. Anyway, Craig was so pissed about the rent increase and her nerve dropping by in her gigantic Mercedes, like they need the money, he went right to Big Betsy—”
“Betsy?”
“MegaCard’s megacomputer in the sky—and pulled up all Bitsie and Chuckie’s records.”
“Oh, my goodness. Isn’t that terrible?” Butter wouldn’t have melted in Sam’s mouth as she considered the possibilities. “What’d he find?”
“Well, at first Craig didn’t think he had anything interesting. Except it made him even madder to see the volume of charges that this pair makes each month. I mean, the money just flows—”
“And?”
“Here. Look for yourself.” Jane handed Sam a sheaf of computer printouts detailing specific charges.
Chuckie should have owned stock in Saks’s men’s department. He was Calvin Kleined and Giorgio Armanied up the wazoo. And the interior designers at Rich’s must have sent flowers every time the Walters picked up the phone. Custom drapes, upholstery, antiques to make their West Paces Ferry house rival Versailles. A pool cover that was mechanized. Silver. Crystal. Alligator luggage. Travel all over the world.
“Wowsa!”
“And they pay their bills. But what’s not here?” Jane grinned.
“Twenty questions, right?”
“Right.”
And then Sam saw it. “No clothes for Miss Bitsie.”
“You got it.”
The pieces fell into place. “You saw her last night on your way out. And more importantly, she saw you leaving. And she’s the landlady. She must have keys.”
“Most important, she never buys any clothes. Unless she pays cash for them, or uses another card. Which seems unlikely, because Craig said they’re in some Big Spenders MegaClub and get oodles of bonuses for being rich and doing everything on this card.
“So this is how she shops. In tenants’ closets. Around the city they own about a thousand apartments. She takes a bunch of clothes, plants a couple of false clues like the toilet and the cigar, browses at her leisure, then I guess returns the stuff she doesn’t want. Actually, I’m sort of insulted she kept so little.”
“Jane, this is nuts.”
“Well, Miss Bitsie is nuts. After I figured this out, I called Charlie downtown. Luckily, he was in, booking some father-raper.”
“And he traced her for you.”
“You wouldn’t believe the woman’s record. Barbara is her real name. Barbara maiden name Winslow. She
was
a Vegas showgirl, just like I thought. But she was also, and still is, obviously, a very weird klepto. She served time in California with guess who?”
“Uncle.”
“Patty Hearst.”
“Great. So now what? It’s going to be pretty hard to get the boys downtown to press charges against her unless they can tie her to some other burglaries.”
“Charlie says it would be tough to do. Most people don’t even report them. He punched up records on a couple reports in the Walters’ properties in the last year, and usually other stuff is taken too.”
“How about the fingerprint reports?”
“Charlie ran hers against it. Nada.”
“So?”
“If I kick up a stink, Chuckie’s going to sue the do-waddy out of me, right? I’m already going to have to find another place to live pronto. I can’t keep Bitsie in black lace.”
“You’ll let the burglary drop?”
“Oh, no. No, no.”
Sam didn’t like the look on Jane’s face. She’d seen Cheshire cats who looked less smug.
“Breaking in her house and stealing all her clothes is illegal, Jane.”
“I’d never dream of doing such a thing.”
“So’s burning down her house.”
“I know.” Then Jane flipped a credit card at Sam across the coffee table.
“You’re giving me back my Rich’s—no, you didn’t take—what is this, Jane? Barbara Walters. You have Barbara Walters’s MegaCard?”
“Bitsie’s card.”
“Oh. Right. Bitsie—Barbara. You stole her credit card? You’re going to charge replacements for the things she took from you? Don’t you think she’s canceled it by now, Jane?”
“No. This is a new card. And she can’t cancel it. And I’m not going to charge things for me.”
“I give. And I’m getting older by the minute here. Just lay it out.”
“This,” Jane tapped on the coffee table with the gold plastic, “card happens to be a special issue. I will use it to shop for Bitsie and Bitsie only. Nor for me. That would be illegal.”
“You don’t think shopping for her with this is illegal?”
“It’s a fine line.”
“Who’d you get this from?” Then it dawned. “From Craig? Craig has put himself and his career on the line this way because he’s mad at her for raising the rent when he’s moving away? Seems a little rash.”
“No,” said Jane. “Actually, you know I have a few old friends in useful places—”
“Please.” Jane’s résumé and the contacts she’d made through her days of go-go dancing, stripping, and other extracurricular activities were things Sam never wanted to know.
“And there’s a friendly banker downtown who just can’t wait to give Craig and Patti a house loan. So, anyway, every time she cancels the card, Craig will issue another. That is, until I get bored. Actually, I think a few weeks of nonstop deliveries to her house of fabulous clothes should just about do it. Wildwood’s Born to Shopping Service. What do you think?”
“How about Naked Came I?”
“Clothes Make the Woman.”
“Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing.”
“Dressed to Kill.”
“Uh-oh. Naked Truth.”
“Cut from the Same Cloth.”
“Fits You to a T.”
“Fits You Like a Glove.”
“Survival of the Fittest. Speaking of which, let’s go downstairs and raid Peaches’s icebox.”
“Refrigerator.”
“Whatever.”
No Neutral Ground
Diana stood, distracted—furious, actually—on the St. Charles neutral ground. A late spring afternoon, the rain was pouring on that grassy median strip down the middle of the boulevard where the streetcars run.
It wasn’t like Diana to let her emotions get the best of her. The chair of the English Department of the university just across the way, Diana Banks was a focused woman. An extremely busy focused woman. On her plate: a creative writing seminar, the deadline looming for a collection of her own short stories, endless committee meetings, and a department contentious as the Balkans.
The peacekeeping was particularly wearisome. Just this afternoon, even before the incident that had moved her to rage, Diana had said to her friend Abby, “Cristabel is having another nervous breakdown. Peter’s complaining that Marcus isn’t pulling his load on the honors issue. And Gloria and Phil are at it again, duking it out on the hiring committee.”
“As if hiring itself weren’t demanding enough, right here at term’s end,” Abby, a university research librarian, commiserated.
“I know. We’ve got to make a decision this week on the new instructor. And snipe, snipe, snipe, that’s all Gloria’s done since Phil won the editorship of the journal. I wish she’d just go ahead and slash his tires, get it out of her system.”
Diana had called to see if Abby could give her a ride to pick up her car from the repair shop. Her friend couldn’t, but while Diana had her ear, why not vent a little?
Abby had laughed. “Well, you know what they say about academe.”
“The politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low? And we’re locked together forever, like lifers with no parole.”
“Tell me about it. Despite the pain of hiring, if it weren’t for the occasional new blood, I think I’d shoot my brains out. Speaking of which, did you see the new men’s baseball coach? A dead ringer for the young George Clooney. Hubba hubba.”
“You’re a naughty woman, Abigail Markson. I’m telling Steve on you.”
“How do you think we’ve stayed married twenty-six years? It’s my dirty mind that keeps Steve panting.”
But Diana hadn’t heard Abby’s answer. Her friend’s
hubba hubba
had taken her elsewhere.
Taken her to thoughts of Rob, an adjunct in her own department and one of the candidates for the full-time position. The candidate she was rooting for. No, amend that. The candidate Diana was set on hiring, come hell or high water.
Rob, Rob, Rob, that’s where Diana’s mind was now, while her body stood in the downpour, waiting for the streetcar. Behind her sprawled Audubon Park, its green lawns puddling, mighty spreading oaks spectral through the mist.
“The bod of a thirty-year-old,” Rob had whispered to Diana more than once, the sweet words more intoxicating than the small crystal pitcher of Sazerac that had become part of their pre-loving pas de deux.
Clever man, Rob.
What words could a woman hovering on the cusp of fifty more want to hear?
Now, from behind her, from Riverbend, Diana heard the hum of the streetcar approaching. Here it came, rain pelting off the top of the olive-green electric car from the 1920s trimmed with reddish mahogany. She climbed on impatiently, her black mood not improved by the dripping gaggle of tourists, the handful of laughing students.
Thank God, there on the river side of the car was a pair of empty seats. Diana piled her things in the aisle seat to discourage takers. She turned, then frowned at her reflection in the window, her brunette curls gone to frizz.
“Sexy, sexy hair” was another endearment Rob had murmured more than once, loosing it from the barrettes keeping it out of her face. Keeping it more professional.
Certainly no paean to her intellect had ever flipped the same switch as Rob’s honeyed pillow talk about her looks. Not for Diana, who’d been told since girlhood how smart she was.
“This little girl of mine’s gonna be a lawyer, you mark my words,” her daddy had said more than once. At seventy-five, he was finally retiring this year, crowned in glory, sheriff of the rural parish in the northern part of the state where she’d grown up. “Gonna be a lawyer and world-class skeet shooter.”
Her mother had given him a hard look when he’d talked like that. Smart girls, lawyers, didn’t find husbands, and she’d never approved of his dragging their only child along with the dogs and the guns on hunting expeditions. Though Diana had been a pudgy child, her teeth a train wreck, so what were her chances of a decent husband anyway?