Free Death in the Polka Dot Shoes by Marlin Fitzwater Page A

money just wasn’t my motivating factor. Diane was a student of capitalism, and she wasn’t motivated by sentimentality. In fact, Diane was laminated with invincibility. There were no soft spots for vulnerability, or sentimentality. In spite of my affection for her, and my respect for her judgment, she had an air of superficiality manufactured by money and pretension. I once had a girlfriend who would call Diane a “fancy” lady. After we quit dating, this girl always asked if I had taken up with a “fancy” lady. She meant any woman with enough money to buy all the parts of an ensemble, understand how they fit together, and wear them. Diane was that woman. I even thought that someday I might lust for her, but I knew she would crawl into bed with earrings, bracelets and sharp elbows. So we had better stick to law.
    I gave Diane a quick tour of Parkers that took in the auto body shop, the Post Office, three crab houses that passed for restaurants, and Flossie’s grocery store. Flossie’s had been a fixture for forty years. It wasn’t large by modern standards. The aisles were narrow and never as long as you expected. The store had been enlarged several times over the years, with wings extended in every direction like spokes on a wheel. Sometimes while wheeling your cart, you would hit aisle four, I think, and it would extend the full length of two wings, including all the breakfast cereal, all the canned goods, and a few crackers. The next aisle over might be only a third as long and it would seem like another building. Sometimes Flossie would rearrange the stock and you could walk for miles in search of peanut butter, and no two aisles would be the same length.
    We were passing Flossie’s when Diane pointed to the side of the road and exclaimed, “My God, look at that.”
    â€œNed,” she said, “that woman is smoking a corn cob pipe. And those two scraggy dogs. What is that?”
    â€œThat’s the pipe lady,” I said. “I don’t know her name. I used to ask, but no one ever knew. Just “The Pipe Lady.” You say that, and everyone in town knows who you’re talking about.”
    The pipe lady pushed a grocery cart along the side of the road every day between Flossie’s and her home on Strawberry Point, or so they said. I never actually knew where she lived. Once I decided to follow her home. A little sleuthing. But she moved so slow that I gave up after about a mile. It just wasn’t worth it.
    The pipe lady had two dogs that followed her, in single file. The black Labrador retriever -- or it could have been some mongrel combination of a lab and several other breeds -- was always right on her heels. Behind the lab was a small shaggy animal with hair that protruded in every direction, covering scars and raw spots where raccoons, possums and muskrats had tried to pick off the little guy at the end of the caravan. Or the little dog had tried to pick them off on some dark night. Rumor around town was that the little dog was a killer, at least of animals its own size, and fearless in defense of the lab and the pipe lady. With those two dogs, the pipe lady was protected on every flank.
    Not that she needed it, of course. I never saw anybody with the pipe lady, or even talking to the pipe lady, although she did talk to herself a lot. She wore black trousers, always, and a white starched blouse, always, sometimes under a summer-weight jacket or a threadbare tweed coat in winter. In winter, she wore a black stocking cap and allowed her gray hair to fall out on all sides of the cap. It seemed to me that life might have been easier if she had cut her hair short. Less effort in the morning, at least. Washing it was another matter, although the pipe lady wasn’t dirty, that I could tell, unless she had been walking beside the highway for some distance. Then the dust kicked up by cars tended to collect on her white blouse. That was the most