High Country Fall (8 page)
“It appeared to be a smear.”
“But if he’d hit the doctor with a hammer, wouldn’t he have been spattered with some of the blood?”
“Not necessarily, ma’am.”
“When the hammer was found, was it tested for fingerprints?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Were any found?”
“Only the decedent’s, ma’am.”
“He hit himself?”
“No, ma’am. The handle is made of a spongy black rubber with so many tiny holes that it didn’t yield fingerprints. The prints we found were on the shaft and head.”
“So no fingerprints of my client on the hammer, no spatters on my client’s clothes, which would have happened if he’d been the one to use that hammer—”
“Objection,” said Burke. “Is counsel asserting that she’s an expert in blood spatters?”
“Withdrawn,” said Delorey.
She had made a plausible explanation for the blood, but what couldn’t be explained away was the rest of Fletcher’s testimony. The statements he had taken from the various participants that evening and the next morning made it quite clear that Daniel Freeman had not gone to the Ledwig home to help repair the deck. He had gone to try and change the ultimatum the doctor had laid down to Freeman and his daughter when they told him she was pregnant and that they wanted to marry immediately.
Over his dead body, Ledwig had reportedly said. He told them he would arrange for an abortion and ordered her never to see the baby’s father again. If she refused to comply, he would see to it that Freeman’s scholarship at Fletcher-MacLeod was revoked. He would also cut her allowance immediately, stop paying her tuition, and would forbid her to come to the house or to see her younger sister for so long as the younger daughter expected his support.
Now, young women have been getting pregnant without benefit of clergy for as long as the world has been turning, and fathers have been angry and threatened to kill the man or kick out the daughter for just as long, but in this day and age? When illegitimacy carries few social stigmas in most circles beyond a shrug and a sheepish smile? It puzzled me that a man of Dr. Ledwig’s presumed intelligence and education would try to employ heavy-handed patriarchal power instead of psychology and common sense.
All of the statements Fletcher had taken were evasive about the reasons for the doctor’s opposition to Freeman until he read aloud Freeman’s statement taken Friday afternoon. “‘I told Dr. Ledwig that if my racial designation bothered him so much, I’d change it to white and the baby could go down as white, too, and he said that there’d never been a drop of nigger blood in his family and he’d be damned if it was going to start with his first grandchild.’”
I wasn’t the only one whose eyes automatically swung to Daniel Freeman in fresh appraisal of his brown hair, his hazel eyes, his summer tan as Fletcher continued reading from the young man’s statement.
“‘Yes, it made me mad, and yes, I wanted to punch him out, but I didn’t. And I didn’t go out there yesterday to pick a fight. I thought maybe if he’d had time to calm down, I could make him see how stupid this whole race thing is. But when I got there, he was already down on the rocks, and no, I did not hit him with the hammer or push him off the deck.’”
I understood now why Burke had decided to go for voluntary manslaughter instead of murder. Murder, especially murder in the first degree, requires strong elements of hatred and premeditation—the classic “malice aforethought” so dear to television cop shows. Voluntary manslaughter places partial blame on the victim, who inflames the passions of his killer, who then kills in the heat of the moment.
Ms. Delorey did not put her client on the stand, but in her closing argument to me, she insisted that Dr. Ledwig’s words were not enough to goad her client into killing.
Mr. Burke made a more convincing argument that they were.
“The State is not insisting that Mr. Freeman is a cold-blooded murderer, Your Honor. He’s a good student, has never before been arrested, never even had a speeding ticket, but when Dr. Ledwig demanded that his daughter abort their child, effectively murdering their baby, when Dr. Ledwig taunted him and called him a
nigger,
the worst insult a white man can hurl at a man of African descent, Mr. Freeman lost it. He grabbed up that hammer and he struck his tormentor down; then, no doubt appalled by what he’d done, he pushed Dr. Ledwig over the edge of the deck, hoping that the fall would cover up the wound.”
I found that there was indeed probable cause to bind Mr. Freeman over for trial in superior court and continued his bail at the twenty-five thousand Judge Rawlings had thought sufficient.
It was almost four o’clock, but with ADA William Deeck back at the prosecutor’s table, we got through all the rest of the items on the calendar before I adjourned for the day.
The twins had left me a note—
Back between 11 and 12 and we’ll bring supper. XXX
I guess they thought a greasy late-night snack would make up for the dirty coffee mugs and sticky smears I found on the dining table when I let myself into the condo and eased the strap of my laptop off my weary shoulder onto the only clean corner of the table.
As a Luddite friend keeps reminding me, a pad and pencil only weigh about six ounces; my laptop weighs seven pounds and felt like seventy that last flight of steps. Yeah, yeah, I could have left it locked in Rawlings’s office at the courthouse, but I wanted to check my e-mail, something I hadn’t had a chance to do all day and something that can’t be done with a pad and pencil.
I put the dirty mugs and sugar-encrusted spoons in the dishwasher, wiped down the table, and plugged my modem cord into the kitchen phone jack. One of these days I’m going to look into wireless communication, but for now, I keep a twenty-five-foot phone cord in my laptop case.
Along with offers of Viagra, penile implants, breast enlargement, pornographic photographs, free septic tank inspections, and the opportunity to help a general’s son fleece the Nigerian government of several million dollars, I found messages from Portland, my sole attendant if the wedding actually came off (“The way this baby’s kicking I don’t think I’m going to last till December. What about Halloween?”), from my cousin Beverly (“Forgot to tell you that there’s no garbage pickup. You’ll have to use the county’s waste site on Ridge Road.”), and a one-liner from Dwight (“You get there okay?”).
I had my finger poised over the delete button for a message entitled “Want to party?” when I noticed that the unfamiliar sender had an
NC.rr.com
in the server tag. It was a woman Will had brought to one of the weekly family music sessions we hold at a cousin’s barbecue house out near the farm. So many of us play the fiddle, guitar, banjo, or harmonica that even though none of us go every single week, there’re usually at least six or eight who show up after Wednesday night choir practice or prayer meeting to eat barbecue, play and sing the old songs, or, as Haywood puts it, just fellowship together.
Your brother Will says you’re up here alone this week? I know this isn’t much notice, but we’re having a party tonight and would love to have you join us. You probably don’t remember us, but Will invited us to sit in with y’all when we were down in the Raleigh area last winter. (My husband Bobby has a big walrus mustache and plays guitar and harmonica. I don’t have a mustache, but I do play the fiddle.)
Joyce Ashe
As soon as I read her description of her husband, I remembered who they were—early fifties, pleasant. They laughed at our jokes and slid right into the music with no fuss. I did notice that they were better dressed than we were, though. Nothing flashy. Their jeans and loafers were almost as worn as ours, but theirs had come with designer names and upscale brands; and their instruments were quality models, not the pawnshop finds that most of ours were. Will said they were down for one of his estate sales in Raleigh and I’d wondered at the time what his motive was in bringing them out to the country.
With Will, there’s usually a motive.
He’s three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four children, and he’s usually got a spare ace or three tucked in his sock or up his sleeve. A fast talker in both senses, Will earns a decent living as an auctioneer and appraiser, two callings that allow him to set his own hours; and although he knows how houses are put together and taken apart, which is why I let him supervise the building of my house, he’s much more interested in the market value of a house’s contents. He has Mother’s charm and Daddy’s streak of lawlessness. Everybody likes Will as long as they’re not the ones he’s messing over. It was not like him to be concerned about whether or not I had a social life while I was up here in the mountains, so he probably had an ulterior motive for strengthening the ties between the Ashes and himself.
Nevertheless, I
was
at loose ends this evening and I’ve always been up for a party.
“Wonderful!” said Joyce Ashe when I called the number she’d included in her e-mail. “We’re up so many twisty roads you’d never find us. Why don’t I have somebody pick you up? Say seven-thirty?”
“That’ll be fine,” I agreed and told her where I was staying.
“Casual dress and—hey! You didn’t happen to bring your guitar, did you?”
“Actually, I did.” There was a tricky chord change on a song I was learning and I’d stuck it in the trunk of my car thinking I’d get a chance to work it out. “Does this mean there’ll be playing tonight?”
She laughed. “Always. Unless you want to sing for your supper?”
Dogs don’t exactly howl when I open my mouth, but I’d as soon play Beethoven sonatas on the spoons as sing alone in front of strangers.
“Miss Deborah?” asked the man who knocked on my door an hour later. “I’m William Edward Johnson. Miss Joyce said you could use a lift out to their place?”
My driver proved to be a tubby little man pushing seventy-five like it was fifty. With his gray tie and black pants and a black vest buttoned over a long-sleeved maroon shirt, he looked like management. But his cowhide work boots and the tufts of gray hair that curled up around the edges of a grease-stained Ford Motors ball cap suggested he might be the help.
A classic BMW convertible idled in the drive. The top was down and the creamy leather seats gleamed beneath the streetlight. Cool ride, right? Did I mention that the fenders were dented, the paint was chipped, the upholstery was in tatters, and the motor roared like a Mack truck?
“This is very kind of you, Mr. Johnson,” I said and handed him my guitar case while he held the car door for me.
“Aw, call me Billy Ed,” he said, slinging my guitar into the backseat. “And I guess you’re Miss Debbie, right?”
“Wrong. Sorry. It’s either Deborah or hey you.”
Before I could get my seat belt fastened, he was peeling rubber, headed down that steep drive like a downhill skier trying to make time to the first slalom. The rear end fishtailed slightly as he braked and then made an immediate left turn to head up Main Street away from the center of town. He seemed totally oblivious to the people he’d cut off, just gunned on up the hill for about three miles, before making another left.
My hair kept whipping all around my face in the cool night air and Billy Ed glanced over. “Want me to stop and put up the top, Miss Deborah?”
“No,” I said. “I love it.”
“Good, ’cause the top’s so tore, wouldn’t do us much good anyhow.” He reached under the seat and handed me a slightly cleaner ball cap.
With one hand on the steering wheel, the other fumbled to extract a cigarette from a crumpled pack.
I held my breath as he touched the glowing lighter to the tip of his cigarette, then returned the lighter to its hole, all the while negotiating a road that twisted worse than a black snake climbing a light pole. Every time we met a car from the opposite direction, I was uncomfortably aware that the road had no guardrails and that the narrow shoulders seemed to drop off into a dark abyss, despite the moon that was trying to break through some thin clouds.
“Dim your Gee-dee lights!” Billy Ed shouted when he brushed by a large vehicle with its headlights on high.
The other car was barely moving and its brake lights lit up the night.
“Turons!” he said derisively as he shifted gears. “Know how you can tell tourists from the natives?”
“No.”
“By the smell of their burnt-out brakes. Ought not to be allowed out at night, scared as they are.”
I was glad he couldn’t see my white knuckles.
“So how you know Miss Joyce and Bobby?” he asked above the roar of the motor.
“My brother introduced them to me, but I don’t really know them,” I said, leaning toward him to counterbalance the centrifugal force that wanted to sling me out of the car as he cornered sharply. “What about you?”
“I took on their old house up on the other side of the ridge about four or five years ago.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, their kids were grown and they wanted something smaller, closer to their work.”
“What sort of work do they do?”
“Real estate. Property management. They have exclusive rights to Pritchard Cove.”
“Pritchard Cove? Isn’t that where Dr. Ledwig lived?”
“Ledwig?” He snorted. “Nope. I did hear tell he wanted to dynamite it off the face of the mountain, though.”
“Why?” Not that I cared, but anything to distract me from this headlong hurtle into hell. “What
is
Pritchard Cove anyhow?”
“Well, some folks would say it’s the best-planned community in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Others like Ledwig’ll tell you it’s a desecration of unspoiled land. Pritchard Cove was a mote in his eye. And not a teeny-tiny little mote either—it was a Gee-dee two-by-four beam. Wrecked his view.”
I thought back to the pictures I’d seen in court today. Admittedly, the focus was on the deck and on the victim’s body, not the view from that deck, but I couldn’t remember seeing anything except a long vista of colorful treetops and I said as much.
“Well-planned,” Billy Ed said again. “The houses were designed to blend into the shape of the land. Most of the trees weren’t touched, and even when the leaves drop off it’s hard to see ’em ’cause their covenant prohibits big grassy lawns. ’Course now, the houses
are
there and if you look hard enough—”