Slow Dollar (26 page)

Dwight frowned. “Maybe his first laces broke and those were the only length he could find.”

“Look at your own shoes,” I said, pointing to his black regulation lace-ups. “It has to be like Percy Denning’s rope fibers. If you took your laces out, I bet you could see exactly how much space is between the holes. They’d be worn where they go through the metal eyelets. Can’t you call the SBI lab and at least ask them if those pink laces have always been on those particular shoes?”

“I can do better,” Dwight said decisively. “I can send them the shoes Matusik’s wearing now and have them check both pairs for fingerprints while they’re at it.”

“Once word got around about how Braz died,” I said, “he couldn’t get away with wearing the sneakers. He had to know that sooner or later someone would be around asking about hard-soled shoes and he’d be jammed up if he couldn’t produce his.”

“I was having a little trouble with the idea of Polly Viscardi crossing the midway to kill Hartley,” said Dwight, “but Matusik only needed to step around the corner of the tent when that Bowler Roller siren went off.”

“Did he kill Polly for her shoes,” I wondered aloud, “or because she saw him go into the Dozer?”

“Why don’t I just go ask him?”

He tousled my hair the way he used to when I was ten, then he was off, too.

Court ran late again, but Tracy, Janice, and I made an efficient team. We finished the traffic calendar and were actually back on schedule when I adjourned at five-forty.

Downstairs, Dwight had Matusik in custody. Bo Poole let me join him behind their new one-way glass while Dwight and Raeford McLamb questioned him. When I got there, he was still stubbornly denying everything. Eventually though, the questions got to him as they hammered away on the two pairs of shoes. With the ones he’d been wearing the last couple of days on their way to the SBI lab in Garner, and confronted by his own blistered heels, he sullenly gave it up about thirty-five minutes after I arrived.

“Yeah, all right,” he snarled. “I stomped the little bastard. World would’ve been a lot better off if somebody’d done it when he was a baby.”

“Why?” Dwight asked patiently.

“He saw me put a pillow over Irene’s face.”

“Who’s Irene?” asked McLamb.

“My wife. Last fall. She had a bad heart. Wasn’t much use for me anymore. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’ll say. Just like Polly and Tal. Yeah, she was the one good with money, good with kids, kept us going with the duck pond and balloon bust, but she didn’t want to do what a wife’s supposed to do for her man anymore and there was Bubbles with hooters out to here and she wanted me as much as I wanted her. Or I thought she did. Only she wouldn’t do it with me long as I was married to Irene and everything was in Irene’s name. I mean, Irene was old and sick. She won’t gonna live long anyhow, y’know? Doctor said so. Told me I was lucky to’ve had her long as I did when he signed the death certificate. So I got drunk one night and came home and did it. Only I didn’t know Tal had kicked Braz out that night and he’d crashed on our couch. Can I have something to drink?”

They brought him a can of Pepsi.

“You say Braz was there,” Dwight reminded him as the scrawny little man lifted the can to his mouth and drank deeply.

“Yeah. Bastard was gonna run right over to Tal and Arnold to tell them. Everybody thinks Bubbles took me for everything I had, right? Wasn’t her. It was Braz. He made me sign it all over to him that night. He sold my doublewide and my balloon bust right out from under me. Left me with nothing but my camper truck. Let me say the duck pond was still mine, but he took a percentage of it, too. That’s why Bubbles left me. I couldn’t give her nothing. Didn’t have nothing to give her if I’d wanted to. Everybody laughing at me, and then he was going to sell my Lucky Ducky. Said he was going to cash out end of the season, the little money-sucker. Leave me to starve, would he? Huh! I cashed him out. Gave him a mouthful of money to pay his way to hell.”

So this was really how Braz had accumulated so much money so fast. Not a lucky self-storage buy or a shrewd eBay sell, just plain old ordinary blackmail.

Instead of Polly as I’d first thought, it was indeed Skee who’d taken advantage of the Bowler Roller’s flasher and siren to kill Braz. And it was he who’d ransacked Braz’s trailer and tried to search the shed, looking for the paper records that might let the Ameses figure out where the money came from.

“Polly saw me come out of the Dozer Friday night and she was going to try the same trick.”

“More blackmail?” asked McLamb.

“Like I had anything left to pay her off with, y’know? I told her to come over to my truck after everybody else had gone to bed and I’d sign over the title to her. Stupid cow.”

The rest was as we’d deduced: the faked suicide and the switching of the shoes and their laces.

Bo and I went back to his office and he was shaking his head. “You’d think after he screwed up the murder of his wife, he’d have thought twice about trying his luck a second time.”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering what Tally would say when she realized where Braz’s money had come from and how he’d profited from the death of a woman who was supposed to have loved him like a grandmother. I was glad I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her.

Dwight left the mopping up to his deputies, but it was still full dark when we finally headed back to the farm. He had popped a Willie Nelson tape in the player and ol’ Willie’s wonderfully craggy voice was crooning the words of that sweet, sweet song “Let It Be Me” as the moon rose behind us. We had the windows rolled down, cool autumn air washed over us, and I thought how good it was to be with someone who was as easy with my silences as I was with his. Any other man, I’d have to be doing the charm thing—making small talk, buttering his ego, flirting. But Dwight was just Dwight, so I didn’t need to bother with any games.

The porch light had been left on for us when we got to the homeplace, but I didn’t see Daddy’s truck.

Maidie had heard us, though, and came to the door to peer out past the light and make sure it was us. “Mr. Kezzie’s gone over to Cotton Grove. Y’all eat yet?” she called.

I looked at Dwight and he shook his head.

“Thanks, Maidie,” I said, walking up on the porch, “but I’ve got something at the house and—”

“I’m not inviting you to eat here. I saved something from lunch and I made some fresh cheese biscuits just in case y’all get hungry later—for
food
, that is,” she added with such a sly smile that I knew she’d guessed.

I could never slip anything past her.

Plastic boxes stood neatly stacked on the kitchen table and Dwight carried them out to the truck. Maidie had been my rock Mother’s last summer, and as I kissed her warm brown cheek goodnight, I said, “What do you think Mother would say?”

“Well, honey, I reckon she’d say it’s way past time you quit messing around and did something sensible for a change. And then I expect she’d say for you to go on along now and fix your man his supper.”