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CHAPTER 43

AFTER SWITCHING FROM beer to coffee and dessert, we settled our dinner tab and prepared to go home and get a good night’s sleep. And maybe have good dreams to wash through our sadness.

As we neared the front room, the steel drum band got louder. Rikki sang, “Shake, shake, shake, Senora. Shake it all the time.”

We heard the claps of encouragement as the limbo contest began. I didn’t recognize the song, but it had a calypso beat, and a thin man was arched backward, knees bent, dancing barefoot under the bamboo pole. The point of the game is to go low enough and to dance as expressively as possible while moving under the pole without knocking it off the supporting brackets. He was directly under it when he breathed a little too deeply and bumped the pole. It fell off the brackets that held it loosely at opposite ends.

The thin man got thunderous approval from the crowd for his efforts … and when I looked again, I saw that Claire had joined the line.

Claire calls herself a big girl. That means size 20 or so, and she’s past her fiftieth birthday. Not to mention she’s got a bum knee.

Well, tonight Claire was on.

She was shaking her shoulders, and with bended knees and a horizontal torso, she was shimmying under the limbo pole. Sure, the pole had been reset for her. But I knew I couldn’t do it.

Yuki, Cindy, and I joined in with the crowd, chanting, “Claire! Claire! Claire!” as she progressed inch by inch under the pole. “Low-er, low-er, low-er!”

When our medical examiner, my boo, had cleared the pole and it had stayed put, the place erupted in applause. She had done the next to impossible, and the front room was egging her on to do it again.

But Claire was leaving on a high note. She bowed to Rikki and his band, waved at the crowd, and pushed Susie’s front door open with the rest of our Murder Club following, laughing, hugging her, teasing her about her heretofore hidden talent.

“And that’s without practice,” she said.

Cindy said, “Where you from, lady? Tobago? Jamaica?”

“San Francisco, California,” Claire said, laughing.

I said just loudly enough to be heard: “A star is born.”