Free Drumsticks by Charlotte Carter

stood there, not speaking, while he continued to look for signs of Aubrey.
    A few seconds later she appeared. Long legs in white tights. Yellow angora sweater that bared one shoulder. Tresses tousled here, pinned up there. She made that all-important eye contact with Sweet, the look that promised—lied— Play your cards right and I could get every bit as interested in you as you are in me .
    â€œHey,” she said simply, making that a word of at least three syllables.
    â€œYou remember my friend Aubrey, don’t you, Leman?”
    Poor Numb Nuts. He began to laugh idiotically, trying not to stutter. Finally he managed a “How you doing, Aubrey?”
    â€œI’m good.” Long pause, sly grin, eye contact unbroken. “Nanette, did you offer Sweet something to drink?”
    â€œSomething to drink, Leman?”
    â€œNaw, that’s okay,” he answered quickly, not even pretending to look at me.
    â€œIt is not okay,” Aubrey said. “I’m gonna get you a beer. I got a Heineken in there with your name on it. How would you like that, Sweet?”
    He nodded so vigorously I thought he might break his neck.
    â€œSo,” I said, taking the chair across from him, “something’s happened?”
    â€œWhat happened?”
    â€œI don’t know. I thought you were going to tell me.”
    â€œOh. Yeah. Something did happen. I called Loveless about that old lady you been talking about. They didn’t find any papers on her, like you told me. But they finally i.d.’d her from prints. Ida Williams was not her real name.”
    â€œUh huh.”
    â€œMore like it, you could say it was only one of her names. She had four or five …”
    Aubrey came in with the beer then. She placed it on the glass table along with a stein and then demurely withdrew from the room.
    â€œâ€¦ four or five aliases and a record going back twenty years.”
    â€œYou’re kidding.” An automatic response from me. I knew, suddenly, clearly, that he wasn’t.
    â€œShe did a couple of stretches for forgery, grand larceny—like that,” he added.
    It was my turn to laugh idiotically. For the same reason he had done it: I could not find my tongue.
    Leman twisted his head around. Aubrey was on the kitchen telephone and he was straining to hear what she was saying. But she remained tantalizingly out of reach, her voice a distant purr.
    â€œLooks like that old lady wasn’t ’xactly what you thought she was,” he said. Then he took a long drink of beer and wiped at his mouth with the pink paper napkin our hostess had provided.
    â€œLooks that way,” I said slowly, thinking.
    â€œWhy don’t we tell Aubrey about it, too? Maybe knowing Ida was a phony’ll cheer her up.”
    â€œHmmm. Good idea,” I murmured. “We’ll tell her in a minute.”
    I was thinking, quite frankly, Will I catch more hell if I tell him now or later? Can I get away with saying nothing at all about my foray into housebreaking? I looked over at the yearbook, which lay facedown next to the dolls. Aubrey’s siren act was my salvation. But would her protection extend to my father if indeed it turned out that he had something to do with Ida’s misdeeds—let alone with her death? No way.
    I recalled how much Leman resented me, when first we met, for what he saw as my know-it-all “college girl” airs. If my overachieving father had done anything wrong, he’d take more heat than a common criminal off the street. Leman would see to it. That chubby-cheek Negro on the Supreme Court had coined the phrase that seemed to apply here: there would be a high-tech lynching.
    â€œHow about some pretzels, Sweet?” That was Aubrey calling from the kitchen.
    â€œYeah, how about some?” I prompted him, still scheming, putting off the inevitable.
    â€œNaw. I’m watching my salt,” he answered.
    â€œGood for you,” Aubrey