Randall #03 - Sherwood Ltd. (30 page)

“I had to find a safe place to live,” she went on. “Canada’s too cold, and it was like I’d sort of lived in England already with the RenFaire. I thought Colin was my ticket. He seemed like an okay old dude—a major dork, of course—but I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about competition for him. Stupid me.”

It might have been my virus-frazzled brain, but I started to follow her loopy logic.

Rosalee scooped a fingerful of the peanut butter from the jar and licked it. “I figured fat old Brenda wouldn’t be much competition either, so Alan was my back-up plan. I don’t have a clue what’s going on with that bitch—or him. Vera thinks Alan and Henry are hiding out until the police get finished investigating the dungeon. Like maybe they’re embarrassed to talk about all the kinky stuff that was down there.” She got up and washed her hands. “I don’t know how a lady like Vera can work for a bunch of porno guys, do you? She’s like some ’fifties housewife.”

“You’ve talked to Vera? Today?”

Rosalee was right: Vera did have a kind of honorable, maternal reliability that seemed to come from another time.

Rosalee poured more tea. “Yeah. She’s way stressed. She was creeped out when they asked her to go in and identify the bodies.”

Peanut butter turned to lead in my stomach. “She identified…Peter? She’s sure?”

“Not really. Vera said the faces had been mostly eaten by rats. The other guy had an ID on him—some ex-con. Vera said his name was William Barnstable.”

I barely made it to the bathroom before my dinner came up. If one of the rat-eaten bodies was Barnacle Bill, I had to accept the other was very likely Peter. He’d as much as admitted he and Bill were doing some kind of business together. And Gordon Trask said they were long-time partners. Who else would have been with Bill in that dungeon?

Peter was really, truly dead.

I woke from my nap to see Rosalee coming in the door with a cup of chamomile tea. “Not that it matters, with everything screwed up at Sherwood. But how is it going? It’s a good story, huh?”

“I’m enjoying it,” I said, glad I didn’t have to lie. “I like the way you’ve played with the idea of a gay Robin Hood—doing the Robin Hood/Maid Marian relationship as a gay man/straight woman thing. It makes sense. It’s always seemed odd to me that Marian’s called a “maid” if she’s in a sexual relationship with Robin—I mean, since ‘maid’ meant ‘virgin’ back then.”

Rosalee set down the teacup with a rattle.

“What did you say to me?” Her face distorted with anger. “Did you just call my book gay?”

I was way too weak to argue.

“Didn’t you mean it that way? Sorry. My best friend is a gay man. Maybe I see a gay sensibility where it doesn’t exist.”

Rosalee screwed up her face and grasped the teacup in a white-knuckled grip, as if she were about to throw the contents in my face. But after staring into the cup for a moment, she let her face relax into a bittersweet smile.

“Me too. My ex-husband was gay—or well, bi. I didn’t know when we got married; I thought he was being a gentleman.” She sat on the edge of the bed, in girl-talk mode. “But we stayed friends after we split—best friends—right up till when he died.” She bit a trembling lip. “He’s only been dead since March. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like he’s really gone…”

I saw genuine grief in her eyes.

“March? Your ex-husband—your best friend—just died? How awful.” The pain of losing Peter felt overwhelming, and I’d only known him a couple of months. Rosalee had lost a lifelong friend less than three months ago. Maybe her erratic behavior was part of her grieving process.

Rosalee’s eyes teared.

“Yeah. He died of a heart attack. After he was gone, I didn’t feel like there was anything for me back home. That’s when I decided to move to England. I guess it was nuts, but Colin had been so nice to me…” She sniffled.

I handed her the tissue box.

“I empathize. My gay best friend has been in the hospital recently. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost him. He’s like a brother.”

Rosalee gave me a hug.

“That was us—totally. In fact, he was better than a brother. My real brothers are lowlife scum.” She jumped up, the tragic moment over. “Talking about low-life scum, I’m going to go phone Alan again. He still won’t return my phone calls, the jerk.”

As I drifted off to sleep, I was grateful to have a better understanding of my countrywoman. No wonder Rosalee was so protective of the book. It was her bond with her dead husband—all she had left of a man she had loved and missed terribly.

I felt better the next morning, and barreled through several more chapters of
Fangs of Sherwood Forest
, wanting to cut mercilessly. It was a fun take on the Robin Hood myth, but scenes like the orgy with the bishops veered dangerously close to farce.

At lunch—canned soup, because I could not face peanut butter again—I tentatively asked Rosalee about the cuts and braced for a burst of angry protectiveness.

But she gave me a blank look.

“Oh, yeah. You can cut that. Cut all that. It was…well, that part was my ex-husband’s idea. Yeah. I guess I should have told you he did help with the book. A little.”

For someone who made such a habit of lying, Rosalee wasn’t terribly good at it.

But I wasn’t going to press the point.

“Why don’t I transfer what I’ve done to your computer and you can go through it and see if my cuts work for you, okay? I know you may find it hard to see so much of your husband’s work cut, but…”

Now, inexplicably, Rosalee’s anger burst forth.

“I told you, I don’t want to mess with that thing any more. I’m done with it!” She yanked away my half-finished bowl of soup. “Isn’t it enough that I’m waiting on you hand and foot?”

I realized I had indeed been letting Rosalee take on all the household chores as I convalesced. I rose to help clear the table.

“I’m sorry. I appreciate all your help. I didn’t mean to pressure you…”
Rosalee pushed me back into my chair with a forceful shove.

“You did too. You’re trying to get me to say I didn’t write that book. You think Lance wrote it!”

I felt dizzy again, and the shove knocked the wind out of me. I wasn’t used to people who resorted to physical violence in literary discussions. But I was quite sure Rosalee had just called her gay ex-husband, “Lance.”

Odd coincidence. Dead Lance from the San Francisco bookstore had written a novel, too—what had Plant called it? “A medieval vampire/werewolf saga—writteneth forsoothly.” Plant hadn’t mentioned a collaborator, however.

“Your ex-husband—his name was Lance?”

Rosalee turned her back to me and ran water into the dish pan, saying nothing for several moments. My mind was madly trying to connect dots. How could Rosalee possibly fit into the drama going on back in San Francisco?

When Rosalee swung around again, her anger had dissipated.

“My husband’s real name was Larry,” she said in a conversational tone. “He was from the San Joaquin Valley, like me. But he moved to San Francisco and got all Goth and gay.”

Now I had no doubt. Rosalee had been married to the unfortunate coyote-gnawed bookstore clerk with the Goth tattoos. I tried to keep my face serene. She didn’t need to know I was the one who had found her ex-husband’s body. It might bring more emotional outbursts. And shoving. I would prefer to avoid further shoving.

I retreated to platitudinous safety.

“That must have been difficult for you. But how nice he managed to keep working on his book, even with the temptations of big city life.”

“
His
book?” Rosalee’s voice crescendoed. “I told you—it’s not his book. It’s mine! I don’t appreciate your accusations.” She trembled with rage of a bizarre intensity. “It was all my idea—mine! I’m the one who figured out Marian was a vampire. Me! You know how? It’s in the old songs. I know all the songs—the Child ballads. You know what they are? They’re like the Bible of folk songs, and thirty-eight of them are about Robin Hood. We sang them at the RenFaire. The Madri-Gals. That was our group. An all-girl group. Lance couldn’t sing. He couldn’t carry a tune in a goddam bucket.” She clanked dishes with angry emphasis.

I took in this piece of extraneous information with a polite nod. I’d heard of the traditional Scottish Border ballads collected by Francis Child in the 19
th
century, but found it hard to picture Rosalee as a student of them.

“You shut up,” Rosalee said. “I’ll prove it to you. Listen.”

I didn’t move a muscle as Rosalee stood by the sink and sang—in a rather pretty contralto—the same old ballad about the death of Robin Hood that Liam performed that night in Davey’s lair. There was a verse about Robin Hood feeling sick and going to a priory, where a woman “pierced his vein, and let out the blood, the thick, thick blood/and afterward, the thin.”

Rosalee gave a triumphant smile.

“You see? I was in the middle of singing that one afternoon when I had this like, total epiphany. ‘That lady’s a vampire!’ I said. I’d never even been that into Robin Hood before that. Mostly I figured he was kind of a RenFaire version of Green Arrow.”

I thought the verse sounded like the description of a medieval medical procedure, but I knew better than to say so.

Rosalee went on, with increasing fervor.

“See, Robin was dying and he went to Maid Marian for help and she took his blood. Why would she do that, if she loved him? Well, I figured it out: that’s what vampires do to make you immortal. The other Madri-Gals thought I was nuts, but that night I told Lance and he got all excited and said one of Robin Hood’s nicknames was “Wolfshead”—so it was obvious—Robin Hood was totally a werewolf.”

I continued my “I’m listening” head motions as Rosalee barreled on.

“So right then, Lance and me decided we’d quit the Faire and become rich and famous writers. But since I’m bad at all that grammar stuff, I told him he should write down the words, but since it was my idea, we’d split the profits fifty-fifty.”

I credited it to my debutante training that I was able to hold my face in a polite smile while hearing such amazing nonsense.

“I see. So you had the idea, and your ex-husband wrote down the actual words?”

I felt sad for poor Lance—dealing with an ex-wife who had no idea of the soul-crunching labor involved with “just writing down the words” of a novel.

My sarcastic remark had obviously gone sailing over Rosalee’s head.

She gave me a hug. “Finally, somebody gets it! Lance was just writing down the words, but it was all my idea—well, mostly. I would have helped, but after we quit the Faire, Lance said he couldn’t write in Buttonwillow. So he went to San Francisco and got a job in some gay porno store. I couldn’t get up to visit him that often, because my boss at Taco Hut would never give me two days off together.”

I thought of Rosalee galumphing through the Castro Street bookstore and felt compassion for Lance. That brought a memory flash. Plant had told me about Felix having to deal with Lance’s “high school girlfriend or whatever she is.” That had to be Rosalee.

She went on. “Then, if you can believe it, after I did all the work contacting Sherwood Publishing, and getting Alan Greene to accept it, we were just waiting for Mr. Sherwood to give the okay—and suddenly Lance got weird and acted like it was his book. He made an appointment to meet Mr. Sherwood—by himself—without even telling me until, like, a couple of hours before. I think Lance’s snotty Hollywood boyfriend must have made him do it.”

My neck went prickly.

“Lance—your ex-husband—had an appointment with Peter Sherwood?” Even through the woolly-brain of my cold, a glaring fact came through: Peter had lied about knowing Lance/Larry the bookstore clerk.

“When did they meet—Lance and Peter?”

Rosalee sat down and leaned her elbows on the table.

“They had the appointment at the bookstore in San Francisco on the day Lance died. The actual same day. Maybe the stress killed him. We knew Mr. Sherwood was coming to the City to talk to Lance’s boss, and Lance was supposed to tell me a few days before he got there so I could get off work, but he didn’t call till that morning and he acted like he didn’t want me to come.”

I nodded, encouraging her to go on. Pieces were falling into place.

“Lance had been weird ever since he gave the manuscript to his Hollywood boyfriend. I think that snot must have wanted the story for himself. I hated that guy. He got Lance to start drinking some fancy-ass vodka. Did you ever hear of anything so stupid: forty dollars for a bottle of alcohol that has, like, no taste? For all I know, that stuff could have been what killed Lance. He never used to drink anything but beer.”

I tried not to react as Rosalee maligned Plantagenet. I didn’t need to add to the drama by disclosing that the hated “snot” was my best friend. Right now I needed to get the facts straight about Peter’s connection to Lance.