Grime and Punishment

alike. Not close up, but from the back, and when you vacuum, you usually have your back to the door.“
    “How interesting. Hmmm. I didn’t know, of course, that the two women were similar, and that vacuuming thing is interesting. Only a housewife would think of it.”
    Jane had been considering telling him about Shelley’s pearls. After all, Shelley had, at one point, asked her to do so. But his tone changed her mind. She considered just calling him a condescending bastard and hanging up; Suzie would have recommended it, she was sure. But she rejected that course as well. VanDyne wasn’t going to find out anything more from her, but she might want to learn something from him.
    “Well, thanks for listening,“ she said with venomous sweetness. “If there’s ever anything else you want to know about housework, I’m your woman. Just call—I’ll be in the kitchen trying to decide which paper towel is more absorbent.“
    “Say, you’re not mad, are you?”
    Furious, insulted, pissed as hell
    “No, I’m not mad, Detective VanDyne. Good-bye.”
    She really should have turned Suzie loose on him.

Ten

    On three out of every four Sundays they all ‘· went to church. On the fourth the kids went, and Jane stayed home to get ready for dinner. She didn’t usually need the time, but the occasional quiet Sunday morning alone was a blessing itself. This monthly family dinner had been another tradition Steve had started and she had continued—with a few alterations and under considerable pressure from her mother-in-law Thelma.
    It was by no means the only hold she still had on Jane, but she used it to the hilt, as if Jane and the kids might escape her iron circle of influence if she didn’t show up monthly to tighten up the “ties that bind.”
    These family dinners would have been unbearable if Thelma hadn’t been diluted by the other guests. Steve’s brother Ted and his wife Dixie Lee usually came along too. Ted was a quiet, pleasant man; not a thrilling conversationalist by any means, but amiable, and a neutralizing influence on his mother’s antics. His wife Dixie Lee was an Oklahoma girl, hardly into her twenties, with a sweet disposition and an accent like warm molasses. To Jane’s delight, Thelma disapproved of her even more heartily than she disapproved of Jane.
    “She’d expected Ted to stay home with her forever,“ Jane had explained to Shelley two years ago when Ted fell for Dixie Lee. She had been hired to demonstrate a new line of beauty products in the family’s main drugstore, and Ted was instantly smitten. “Steve had escaped from Thelma’s clutches when I—a scarlet woman if there ever was one—snared him. But this girl! Half Ted’s age and too nice—or too dumb—to even notice Thelma’s digs? It’s too much for Thelma. She’s about to go berserk.”
    After all this time, Thelma was still fuming and casting barbed remarks at Dixie Lee, and Dixie Lee was still blissfully unaware of them. Ted shared her attitude. If he had any idea of what his mother felt, he didn’t let on. Nor did he seem the slightest bit influenced by her unceasing attempts to denigrate his wife.
    After Steve died, Jane had added a guest to the dinner roster: her honorary Uncle Jim, her father’s life-long best friend. An ex-Army officer, he’d finished his twenty years and gone to work for the Chicago police department. Assigned to the most lawless part of the inner city, he was the happiest he’d ever been. Life among the pimps and pushers suited him right down to the ground.
    “All I ever did in the Army was push papers around and go to drills for events that never happened,“ he explained. “In this job things are always happening, and from time to time I actually manage to do something worthwhile.”
    Thelma hated his intrusion into the family circle with a fervor that sometimes approached frenzy. The first time Jim had joined them, last February, she’d attacked Jane for inviting him.
    “After all, my dear, he associates with such unacceptable people. One would hardly think he was a good influence on the children.“
    “He’s associated with my parents for forty years!“ Jane shot back. “I don’t have them near me, but I must have him.“
    “But Jane, dear, we’re your family now.“
    “Thelma, you make it sound like I’m a Middle-Eastern camel trader’s daughter who’s left her tribe for her husband’s.“
    “Rather a vulgar analogy, don’t you think?”
    “What’s vulgar? The