Slow Dollar (19 page)

Dwight heard the “But” in her voice and saw the troubled look on her face.

“There was more?”

She nodded. “He was doing better than any of us ever realized. You gave us his wallet back Friday night, remember? Val was looking through it this morning. There was a little bankbook in the secret compartment. He opened a new account just last winter with a seventy-thousand deposit. We had no idea he had more than two or three thousand, okay? He must have found something really great in the books or papers and he never said a word to us, just sold it and hid the money. Like he was becoming a miser or something.”

“You don’t know what he found?”

“Whatever it was, he must’ve got it from Arnie and thought if he told, Arnie would want a cut. Like Arn’s ever gone back on his word once he’s made a deal.”

By now, Fish had finished unloading the back of the truck and had wandered over with a manila envelope. “Here’s more pictures Braz had from the new place,” he said.

“Mind if I take a look?” Dwight asked as they stepped back outside.

“Keep them,” she said. “He’d already looked through them. It’s just pictures of the woman in her night things.”

Dwight glanced inside and saw what were clearly amateur photos. Most were blurry and taken from such odd angles that her face wasn’t clear in any of them. He closed the envelope and tucked it in his jacket pocket to look at later, then went back to his car for latex gloves and an instant camera.

“Why bother?” asked Mrs. Ames as he snapped pictures of the hasp, the hammer, and the condition of the shed. “There was nothing in here worth stealing.”

“This your hammer?” asked Dwight as he lifted it by two fingers, being careful not to touch the handle.

“Naw,” said Fish before she could answer. “Arnie’s got all ours with him in the other truck.”

While Dwight was bagging the hammer, Fish stuck his head in the doorway, looked around, and said, “Hey! What happened to all them pictures for the haunted house?”

“What?” said Tally Ames. She took another look. “Didn’t Arnie put them in the other barn?”

Fish shook his head. “I stacked ‘em right back there. All those skeletons and ghosts and people on fire.”

“Now, who would steal junk like that?” Tally wondered.

“You’re sure it was junk?” asked Dwight.

“Believe me, I’m sure,” she said. “We’re not talking old masters or even old primitives on oil and canvas, okay? This looked like some kids had been given a lot of leftover house paint and some old pieces of plywood to paint Halloween decorations on. That’s it. There were about thirty-five of them, and Arnie and the boys were going to use them to decorate the outside of our haunted house. Braz thought it was all scrap lumber and old half-empty cans of paint when they opened up the locker and he put his flashlight on it. I think he got it for like thirty dollars and Arn gave him thirty-five for the lot since they’d be useful.”

The main part of the compound had been neatly mowed, but weeds were high around the side and Dwight soon saw where two vehicles of some sort had recently driven in there and turned around. Ragweed and goldenrods had been snapped off or crushed down and were barely wilted.

“Any of your people park there?” he asked.

Both Mrs. Ames and Fish shook their heads.

“Who knows you have this place?”

“All our own people have been out here moving equipment in and out,” she answered. “And some of the independents know about it. Braz told Skee, the guy runs the duck pond? His wife was like a grandmother to Braz. And Skee probably told the world if it sat still long enough.”

Dwight laid a ruler across the tire tracks and took careful pictures, but he knew he was just going through the motions. The tracks appeared to be the width of standard tires, the weeds hadn’t held any tread marks, and if there had been shoe prints in the dirt immediately in front of the wooden steps, their own shoes had obliterated them.

Bostrom’s Bigfoot U-Store was out on the bypass at the edge of Dobbs, and Bob Bostrom himself was standing in the doorway when Deputy Mayleen Richards got out of her patrol car. He was about her height, of slender build, with brown hair and brown eyes that were wary at first.

“Your feet don’t look very big to me,” she said in greeting.

The wary look disappeared and he laughed. “That was my dad. Size thirteen triple E. I got my momma’s feet, thank goodness. What can I do for you, Officer?”

When she explained and showed him the receipt he’d given Braz Hartley a couple of weeks ago, he led her into his small office and pulled out a file drawer. No computers here.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Now I remember. Young black guy showed up here wanting his granddaddy’s stuff back.”

He described the man’s outrage in a vivid, almost word-for-word reenactment for her.

“He said, ‘Gibsonton, Florida? This white bastard trucked my granddaddy’s pictures to Florida? How you got the right to let him do that?’

“I told him, ‘The state of North Carolina gave me that right when your granddaddy let the rent run out on his locker and the certified letter I sent him came back.’

“ ‘But he
died!
’

“I told him even dead people got debts, debts him and his family ought to’ve paid, and you shoulda seen him puff up at that,” Bostrom told Richards. “He was a lot bigger’n me, but I just started cleaning my nails with my pocketknife here”—as if by magic, a wicked-looking switchblade appeared in his hands—“and he climbed back down. I told him to chill. He didn’t have to go all the way to Florida. The buyer was with a carnival right here in North Carolina. Ames Amusement.”

“So was his grandfather an artist or something?” asked Richards.

“You’d think he was Rembrandt to hear that guy run on about it, but the old man used to come over here and paint right out there in his locker. All the stuff I ever saw looked like the pictures my wife Jane puts on our refrigerator from our grandbabies.”

Bostrom showed her the deceased artist’s address. It was just over in Darkside, less than a quarter mile away.

When I got back after lunch, I found April waiting impatiently by the rear door of my courtroom. She looked like a teacher again. Her brown curls were tidy, makeup tamed her freckles, and she wore a crisply pressed beige cotton jumper over a short-sleeved white shirt.

“Dwight’s taken her out to her place in the country,” she said as soon as I got close enough to hear her above passing clerks and several attorneys with their clients, “and her husband didn’t know when they’d be back. I called home and Andrew’s sober for the moment, so I’m going to go on now and talk to him before I pick up the children when they get out of school.” Her voice dropped. “I don’t want Ruth and A.K. hearing about this from their cousins. What I need for you to do is go out there when you’re through with court this evening and tell her that we’ll all be there for the service tomorrow. Minnie and Isabel and Doris and Mae are going to fix lunch and you know them. There’ll be enough to feed anybody she wants to come. I expect she’ll want her own friends to be there, so you be sure and tell her that, all right?”

“Okay,” I said, but I was talking to the air. She was already halfway down the hall and nearly collided with my cousin Reid, who held the door open for her.

He gave me a half-embarrassed grin as our eyes met and he saw my eyebrow arch.

“I see you heard,” he said as he came up to me.

Despite what had happened with Dwight and me last night, his behavior Friday night wasn’t very commendable.

“Pretty shabby, Reid,” I told him. “Even for you.”

“What do you mean, even for me?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. Dwight’s your friend.”

“Well, hell, Deborah, he’s had since June to take it up the next level.”

“Take it up, or take Sylvia Clayton down?” I asked snidely.

“That relationship was going nowhere,” he assured me.

I gave him a jaundiced look. “And this one is?”

“Aren’t you late for court?” he countered, holding open the door so that I automatically entered the courtroom without thinking.

Equally automatically, the bailiff jumped to his feet and said, “All rise!” and there was nothing I could do except take my seat on the bench.

Smirking, Reid sat down as everyone else sat, too, and the clerk handed me a sheet with three add-ons. Janice Needham was clerking for me today, but her chair was far enough away from mine that I was out of reach of her compulsive fingers. Once I forgot, though, and handed her a form that put the sleeve of my robe within range. She immediately picked off a piece of lint.

“Wasn’t it awful about what happened at the carnival Friday night?” she whispered to me while we waited for the DA to confer with one of the defendants and her lawyer. “He seemed like such a nice young man. For a carnival worker, I mean.”

“Nice” wasn’t the description I’d heard used by anyone except perhaps his mother.

“You met him?”

“Well, not really. But Bradley started talking to him when he got change and then while I was playing, they talked back and forth about what it was like to travel with a carnival and what he did during the winter months. From what he told Bradley, I think he was planning to leave the carnival soon and go into the antique business. I won back three of my quarters and a real cute little bracelet, see?”

She held out her wrist. It was encircled by a tennis bracelet set with pink glass stones. Probably retailed for a dollar ninety-eight at one of those teenybopper stores at the mall. I didn’t ask her how many quarters it’d cost her. Besides, it did match her pink blouse and pink headband.

“Pretty,” I said, and turned my attention to the grandmother who took the stand to explain to me woman-to-woman why it was cruel to keep a tired child belted in a car seat when all that precious little thing wanted to do was stretch out across the backseat and go to sleep in comfort.

I asked her if she’d ever seen what a precious little thing looked like after being thrown from a car when it flipped off the road doing sixty miles an hour, then gave her the stiffest fine I could and told the DA to call his next case.

At the afternoon break, I went down to the sheriff’s department in the courthouse basement. When I tapped on the open door of Dwight’s office, he was half sitting, half leaning on the front of his desk talking to three of his deputies. His face lit up. “Well, speak of the devil! McLamb here was just about to go find a judge to get a signature on this search warrant.”

“What do you want to search?” I asked, skimming through the form McLamb handed me.

“Lamarr Wrenn’s grandfather’s house,” McLamb said. “Based on our investigations today, we think it probably contains property belonging to the Hartley guy that was killed Friday night, property that was stolen from a locked storage shed Mrs. Ames owns.”

“Really? What sort of property?”

“Some boards that his grandfather painted pictures on.”

“Pictures?”

“Halloween things. Skeletons and ghosts and—”

I looked up at Dwight suspiciously. “You serious? Didn’t you say they only paid about twenty-five or thirty dollars for those boards? And that they were only going to use them to decorate the exterior of their haunted house?”

“Theft is theft,” he said virtuously. “Breaking and entering.”

I finished looking over the document. Everything seemed in order so I signed and dated it, even though it looked like a lot of trouble for a bunch of worthless wood.

Jamison and McLamb left with the search warrant and Richards said she was going to get on the phone and call Atlanta. “See if I can verify the whereabouts of that Radakovich woman on Friday night.”

As she left, I closed Dwight’s door. “Talk to you a minute?”

“Sure.” His jacket hung on the back of his chair and the collar of his blue shirt was unbuttoned with the red tie loosely knotted. He folded his arms across his chest and remained where he was, leaning against the edge of the desk, motionless, as if bracing himself for something bad. “What’s up?”

I checked my watch. “I need to be back upstairs in four minutes, so just listen, will you? We can talk about this more after I adjourn this evening.”

“You’ve changed your mind,” he said flatly.

“About us? No, why? You having second thoughts?”

He shook his head. I hadn’t realized how tense he was till I saw his jaw unclench and his arms relax, but I didn’t have time to ask him what was wrong. Dwight’s always saying I don’t tell him things, and I didn’t want him to hear about Tally first from one of my brothers or their wives.

“Look, I couldn’t say anything to you about this till I’d talked to Daddy and Andrew and Andrew’d talked to April, only he pulled a drunk this weekend and didn’t, so I had to tell her myself this morning.”

“Hey, whoa, slow down, shug. Tell her what?”

“Just listen!” I said impatiently. “Remember how Andrew got a Hatcher girl pregnant when he was seventeen and her father made them get married and then she ran off after the baby was born?”

“Oh, yeah, I do sort of remember hearing about that somewhere along the way, but I was still a little kid and it—”

“Dwight!”

“Sorry. So?”

“So Tallahassee Ames is that baby. She’s Andrew’s daughter. My niece. They’re going to bury Braz Hartley out at the homeplace tomorrow morning, and I’ve got to run.”

As I hurried down the hall to the elevator, Dwight called after me, “Come on back when you finish court, hear?”

I’d hoped to adjourn early, but it was after five-thirty before I signed the very last order of the very last case on my calendar and called it a day. I’d already told Roger Longmire, our chief district court judge, that I was taking a half day of personal leave tomorrow, and I didn’t want anything on today’s docket to have to be carried over because of me.

When I got back down to Dwight’s office, the door was closed, but I could hear belligerent voices from inside. A woman’s shrill voice floated above angry male tones and both were followed by Dwight’s calm bass rumble.

Sheriff Bo Poole’s door was open down the hall, so I poked my head in. “What’s going on, Bo?”

“You signed the search warrant,” he said. “You tell me.”

“You mean they really found those stolen boards?”

Before he could answer, Dwight’s door opened and I glanced back over my shoulder to see a hugely smiling Lamarr Wrenn step out into the hallway. He wore a Shaw sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out, shorts, and sandals. His right ankle was taped with an elastic bandage. One big arm was around a middle-aged woman in a blue suit who scowled up at him, the other hand carried one of those crudely painted scraps of plywood. The woman was clearly his mother. She was giving him a come-to-Jesus lecture about the evils of theft, and what’d he want with those weird old pictures anyhow, and don’t think for one minute she wasn’t going to take every penny out of his hide, but he just kept smiling and hugging her as they went on down the hall.

The white man who followed them more slowly was also smiling as he put a slip of paper in his wallet. It was Arnold Ames.

“Thanks for your understanding,” Dwight said. “I really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” said Ames. “A quick dime’s better than a slow dollar any day of the week, far as I’m concerned, and this way everybody gets what they want, right?” He shook Dwight’s hand. “Good doing business with you, Major Bryant.”

“What was all that about?” Bo asked when Ames was gone.

“I’ll try to have the full report for you tomorrow,” Dwight said from his doorway, “but basically, it’s about why Lamarr Wrenn really punched out Friday night’s homicide.”

“He’s not the perp?” asked Bo.

“I don’t see how he could be,” said Dwight. “The next-door neighbor confirms the time he says he got there. She also says he was wearing sneakers, and whoever stomped Hartley was wearing hard-soled shoes.”

“But the Halloween pictures?” I asked.

“Not Halloween,” he told us. “Bascom Wrenn, Ms. Wrenn’s daddy, got religion big time about five or six years ago and started painting these strange pictures of the Last Judgment—the eye of God, the dead rising from their graves, souls in hell. Lamarr thought they were great, which was news to Ms. Wrenn. She was under the impression that they embarrassed the hell out of both of them. In fact, she was so sure the pictures were evidence that Mr. Wrenn was getting cracked and senile that he used his little pension to stick them in a self-storage unit out on the bypass to keep her from seeing them and he’d go over there to paint.”