Stand By Your Man

Chapter Six

Cops have a way of taking care of you and backing off, all at the same time. When I threw up, Marshall Weathers whipped a square of white handkerchief from his pocket, handed it to me, and went right into his interrogation.

"You have no idea who that is?" he asked. "You've never seen him before? Think. Never?"

Cameras were flashing again, zooming in on the victim's naked chest. He didn't so much as have one curly hair on it, and there was definitely no tattoo. I was awash with relief and horror. Who was this man and where was Vernell? Furthermore, why was he wearing Vernell's clothes? Was Vernell wearing his?

Dr. Edwards pulled Marshall aside, talking in a low, urgent undertone that I couldn't quite catch. They seemed to have forgotten me, so I sidled closer.

"That would put the time of death somewhere between twenty-four and thirty-six hours ago," I heard her say. Weathers muttered something to which Dr. Edwards replied, "Maybe a thirty-eight. I don't know yet."

If another officer hadn't walked up, I might've gone home with more information, but as soon as the officer arrived, they noticed me.

"Maggie, I'm sorry," Weathers said. "I'll have someone take you back. I'll catch up with you later." I was in the way. "Will Sheila be home when you get in?" His way of seeing where I'd be and when.

"No, she's staying with a friend for the night. She won't be home until after school tomorrow."

"Well," he said slowly, "I'll catch up with you if I need to. I've got to get back to this here." He nodded toward the truck. Sixteen minutes later I was standing on Jack's loading dock, dumped without a backward glance by a tall, bald-headed cop who seemed to spend more time on his cell phone talking to his girlfriend than he did listening to his radio calls.

I raised my hand to bang on the metal door but it began to groan open. Jack had been waiting. His eyes were soft with concern and he reached out to pull me inside before I could move to walk.

"Maggie, I'm so sorry," he whispered, pulling me into his arms and hugging me. He stroked my hair and held me so tight, I almost hated to tell him.

"It wasn't him," I said. "It was his truck, but it wasn't him."

Jack pushed back and looked at me. "Well, who was it?" He hit the switch to close the garage door and walked me over to the sofa. The cool October night had chilled the warehouse, and the only warm spot seemed to be the area in front of the wood stove.

"I have no idea who it was. He looked a lot like Vernell, what was left of him." The images of the bloody body came flooding back, and along with it a wave of nausea. I sank onto the sofa and gripped my head with both hands, as if that would do any good.

"Jack, it was so horrible."

He poured a glass of wine and handed it to me. "I know, honey. Just lean back and breathe, let the feelings evaporate."

I sighed. Here we went with Jack's New Age breathing techniques. Next thing I knew he'd be handing me a fistful of herbal tablets and telling me to imagine world peace. Sad thing was, most of Jack's ideas actually worked.

So I leaned back against the sofa, closed my eyes, and envisioned a better world. The breathing helped, but I had to open my eyes. All I could see when I closed them was the body in the backseat of Vernell's pickup.

"Vernell's gonna be mad as hell when he sees his truck," I said. I sat back up and took a swig of wine, a big swig. "I figure that's a hell of a way to go joyriding!"

Jack just stared at me, his brown eyes unchanging. Then he shook his head. "You think someone stole Vernell's truck and left a body in it?"

I didn't need Jack to say another word, because the next dreadful thought crowded in on top of it. "What if they killed Vernell?" I whispered. Whoever had been in the truck with the dead man had certainly killed him. What if he'd killed Vernell too?

Jack just shook his head again. "There's another possibility, Maggie," he said slowly. "And I don't think it's one you'll want to hear." I gulped down another hefty portion of wine and looked at him.

"What if Vernell killed that man?"

The possibility lay between us like a heavy stone. I wanted to be angry with him, but I just couldn't do it. He was right. I could hear it, coming from him, my friend. I just didn't know what I was going to do if the police started talking that way. It was a possibility, but I knew Vernell. I didn't think him capable of making that large a commitment. After all, dead is dead, and Vernell Spivey likes his options open. No, Vernell Spivey couldn't knowingly kill anybody. Impossible.

I closed my eyes again and leaned back against the sofa. I wasn't exactly envisioning world peace, I was just too tired to do anything else. A sudden wave of fatigue had settled in my bones and it made all thought and memory disappear.

Jack let me stay that way for a few minutes. I heard him get up and throw another log into the wood stove, then twist some knobs to adjust it. The longer I sat, the heavier I felt.

"Come on, Maggie," Jack whispered. The now empty wineglass was tugged from my hand. He reached for me, pulling me up and out of my stupor. "Let's go to bed," he said. "You can think on this in the morning."

I wanted to fight it. I muttered, "Let me sleep here." But he didn't listen.

"Come on."

He led me up the twisting, wrought-iron steps to his bedroom. We stepped out into a room filled with a huge waterbed and a thousand candles. A giant window took up the far end of the room, with a tiny balcony off of it. The lights of downtown Greensboro twinkled in the near distance, cut by the leaves of an aging oak tree.

"Okay," he said, pulling out a drawer and rummaging through it, "you can have the 'I Love Rodeo' T-shirt or, lemme see, there's a 'Take This Job and Shove It' tee that's broke in right nice. Which do you fancy?"

I stood there, numbly staring at the two T-shirts, unable to make even that small decision.

"You look like a rodeo," he said, shoving the shirt in my direction. "I get first call on the bathroom. You go on and get changed." He entered the bathroom and closed the door.

I stared after him as I fumbled with the buttons on my shirt. That was Jack for you. Mama would've called him a gentleman. He was, the gentlest man I knew. This wasn't the first time I'd stayed with Jack. I'd done it before, when the chips were down and I couldn't stay in my own home. He'd taken me in, slept with me in his bed, and never laid a hand on me. With another man I might've worried, but Jack wasn't like most men. He'd walked out of the Golden Stallion on many a night with one cutie or another. It wasn't that Jack didn't like women, quite the contrary. Jack loved women. He just didn't take advantage of them.

I pulled the T-shirt over my head and dropped my jeans to the floor. I was stepping out of them as he emerged from the bathroom. His shirt was off and his hair looked a little wilder for it.

I passed him, slipping into the tiny bathroom, where I found my guest toothbrush in its holder, just as it had been the last time I'd come to stay three months ago. I could hear him bustling around the room and knew what he was doing. By the time I stepped out into the darkened room, he had lit some of the candles and was already lying in bed. Naked. Jack always slept naked, said it made his dreams more vivid because he wasn't confined by clothing.

I took a deep breath and gently rolled into the waterbed, pulling the pile of quilts on top of me and trying to use them as a buffer between us. Just because Jack was a gentleman didn't mean he wasn't prey to temptation.

Jack rolled to face me, watching.

"Still uptight, huh, Maggie?"

I wedged the covers a little tighter. "Jack, just because sleeping with a naked man makes me uncomfortable, it doesn't mean I'm uptight. Besides, I'm too old for you."

He half-propped himself up on his elbow and grinned. Then he reached out his finger and twirled it around a strand of my hair.

"You're a pretty woman, Maggie. Don't underestimate yourself. I kinda like my women a little older, gives 'em an edge on the competition, to my way of thinking."

Suddenly the room seemed much warmer and I felt my face flush. Jack was enjoying my discomfort.

"Go to sleep, sweetheart," he said. "I'm not gonna bite you. Not yet, that is." He turned to blow out the candles, chuckling to himself. Then he gave the bed one good hard bounce that sent me rolling into him. I squeaked and pulled back, he laughed, and suddenly it all hit me funny too. We laughed and laughed, until I remembered Vernell and fell silent.

"Come 'ere, Maggie," Jack said, pulling me into him. "Get comfortable and go to sleep. When you're feeling this bad, sometimes it's nice just to feel another human being up next to you. Kinda keeps the universe in perspective, so to speak."

He was right. It did feel good to sleep with someone's arms around me, even if he wasn't Marshall Weathers. Lying there I remembered another night, three months ago, when I'd done the same for Jack. We had a strange relationship, unlike any I'd ever had before. The other men I knew couldn't sleep naked with a woman, not without getting ideas and feeling they had a point to prove.

I nestled in closer, the quilt still wrapped around my body, feeling Jack's arm, skin-on-skin against mine. Vernell was missing. Marshall didn't love me. And a stranger on a motorcycle was stalking me. Somehow, with the moonlight streaming in through the window and Jack beside me, everything seemed temporarily smaller and I could drift off to sleep. It wasn't world peace, but it was a temporary truce in the chaos of my life.