Slow Dollar dk-9 Page 11

  Three o’clock came. The boys didn’t.

  At three-thirty, I started calling. Isabel answered the phone, sounding sleepy. “Stevie? He went on back to Chapel Hill right after dinner.”

  “Didn’t he get my message?”

  “Yes, but he said he had a paper to work on or something. Didn’t he call you?”

  I punched the speed-dial button for Maidie and it rang eight times before she answered. “Sorry, Deb’rah. Him and Stevie left here before two o’clock. They said they had to get up with a friend or something before going back to school. Eric did tell him you was hoping to spend a little time with ‘em, but Stevie said you’d understand. Maybe next time, honey.”

  Understand? Oh, yes. I understood all too well. Question was, what could I do about it?

  Since coming to the bench, I’ve gotten a little spoiled. If I want someone in my courtroom at a certain hour on a certain day, they damn well show up or risk a contempt of court. And if that doesn’t scare them into appearing, there are bailiffs and deputies to go out and find them for me, whether in jail or at large.

  Unfortunately, bad as I wanted to at that moment, I couldn’t sic a bailiff or a deputy on either of those two boys.

  To cool off, I walked out on my pier, stripped off the T-shirt, and jumped in. It took a few minutes of serious swimming before the water did its job and let me look at the situation objectively.

  There was a reason they hadn’t left their names with either deputy Friday night, a reason they were deliberately avoiding me now. All the same, Stevie and Eric arc two of the most laid-back kids I know. Did I honestly think that either of them would let a carny’s casual trash talk get under their skin?

  Of course not.

  And even if Braz had managed to slip the needle in, wouldn’t they both just walk away from him? That didn’t mean they didn’t know something or that they hadn’t been there when punches were thrown. And they could well have been the friends seen pulling the puncher away.

  I swam out to the boat mooring that marked a tangle of old tree roots left behind on the bottom when this pond was dredged. Bass liked to lurk down there, and it was one of Daddy’s favorite fishing spots. Nobody was out fishing today, though. I had the place completely to myself.

  The late-afternoon sun edged down behind the pines, casting long shadows across the pond. Floating on my back, gazing up into the sky, I watched the fluffy clouds above me go from snowy white to gold and pale, pale pink with streaks of deep blue in the crevices.

  Drifting lazily on the still water, I let myself think about Kidd Chapin and gradually realized—the way you realize that a sprained ankle or sore knee has finally stopped hurting even when you put your full weight on it—that I was, at long last, completely over him, even though this breakup had hurt more than any time since Jeff Creech dumped me back in college. I no longer missed Kidd himself, but I sure did miss being in love, missed having my pulse quicken at the thought of someone, missed looking forward to seeing, kissing, being held. All the same, I had spent the whole summer learning to live without all that, and if I never had it again, at least I’d had it once.

  (“More than once,” came the preacher’s stern reminder.)

  (“More than twice,” leered the pragmatist.)

  The gold-and-pink clouds above me deepened to orange and purple and I was beginning to think about food when something big landed in the water off the pier fifty feet behind me with an enormous splash. I was so startled that it was as if a featherbed had been yanked out from under me, and I sank beneath the surface to come up spluttering as I saw someone swimming toward me.

  “Jesus, Dwight!” I said when he pulled up close enough to hear. “I thought you were an alligator or something.”

  “Alligator?” Treading water, he grinned at me. “There’s no alligators for a hundred miles.”

  “All the same, you should’ve hollered or given me some warning.”

  “I really did scare you? Sorry, shug, but I did call. You must have been a million miles away.”

  “Just running through the backwoods of memory. Clearing out some old underbrush.”

  “Say again?”

  “Never mind. What’re you doing here?”

  “I thought maybe I’d get up with Eric and Stevie, but they’d already left. Maidie and Isabel both said you’d asked them to come swim this afternoon, so I figured you wouldn’t mind if I came in their place. I stopped by Mama’s, picked up a bathing suit, and here I am. Didn’t mean to scare you, though.”

  “Just yell louder next time, okay? Race you around the mooring and back?”

  I was a third of the way there before Dwight got his bearings and headed after me. My form’s better, but he’s got a longer stroke and stronger back and he finished up at the pier at least three strokes ahead of me. That was all right. Gave me a chance to get my thoughts in order before we talked. Not that I knew anything more about Stevie and Eric than he did.

  The air was starting to get cool as the sun settled further in the west and I climbed onto the pier and wrapped a towel around me.

  “Did you hear from Chapel Hill yet?” I asked.

  Dwight continued to bob around in the water. “They’ve released the body, and Duck was supposed to send someone for it this afternoon.”

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “I didn’t get the official report yet.”

  “Unofficially then. And don’t say you can’t tell me when you know it’s going to be public record soon as the DA’s office gets hold of it.”

  Dwight pulled himself out of the pond, and water streamed from his body. He hadn’t brought a towel, so I handed him mine and slipped my T-shirt back over my damp suit.

  “Okay, unofficially,” he said as he dried off. “He drowned in his own blood.”

  “Really?”

  “Truth. The ME thinks that somebody either knocked or pushed him down and then stomped him in the face while he was on his back. Most likely, he was unconscious at that point and his nose was smashed so badly he’d have had to breathe through his mouth.”

  “Only that was stuffed full of quarters,” I said, shivering at the memory as a light breeze blew across the pond.

  We walked back up to the house and I gave him first dibs on the shower.

  While he dressed in my spare room, I sluiced off all the pond water, dried my hair, and pulled on fresh jeans, a white shirt, and a blue cotton cardigan. When I got back to the living area, Dwight was thumbing through my collection of old videos.

  “We’ve watched them all,” I said.

  “So I see. I thought you might’ve broke down and bought something new.”

  “Sorry.”

  It was still light outside, but fast heading for dusk. Dwight roamed the room restlessly, picking up a framed snapshot of my parents, then one of a gang of us at a cookout over at Robert’s house.

  “Is something bothering you?” I asked.

  “No, why?”

  “I don’t know. You look uptight about something.”

  Dwight’s normally as comfortable as an old faded T-shirt, but this evening he seemed edgy, unable to light, almost as if he were annoyed at me over something that he knew was none of his business but was working up to blasting me about it anyhow.

  “What dorm’s Stevie in?” he asked abruptly.

  “Old East,” I said.

  “Is that one of the ones next to the Old Well?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Oh, come on, Deb’rah. You know why. Why else did you try to get him and Eric over here this afternoon? You know they didn’t leave their names with Jack or Mayleen.

  Just like you know that Eric could’ve been the one to punch Braz Hartley.”

  “No, I don’t!” I said hotly. “And neither do you. He wasn’t the only black kid at the carnival Friday night.”

  “Maybe not, but I’ve got to start somewhere, and it might as well be with the one who’s acting suspicious. Or his friend. The one who has an aunt who can make
him talk. Ride with me over to Chapel Hill?”

  “This evening?”

  “Why not?”

  “Aren’t you seeing Sylvia tonight?”

  “Nope. I’m seeing Stevie. Or I will if you’ll help me find him. You’re the one went to school there.”

  “You could’ve,” I reminded him tartly.

  Dwight looks more like a football player these days, but there was a time when he was so fast and could shoot a basketball from outside with such accuracy that Dean Smith had sent scouts to his high school games. For some reason, though, Dwight had joined the Army right after graduation.

  He was driving his pickup this evening instead of a patrol car and he didn’t look very official in jeans and a long-sleeved green knit shirt with a navy blue collar.

  “Shaw’s closer,” I said.

  “Yeah, but you’re not Eric’s aunt. I thought I’d try to get Stevie to talk to me, off the record. Tell me what he saw, then go from there. We can stop for supper on the way home at that Mexican place you like. You want to come or not?”

  With the odd vibes he was giving off, I wasn’t sure. On the other hand, I didn’t want him hassling Stevie without me there.

  “Okay,” I said, “but only if I drive.”

  “What’s wrong with my driving? Just because I keep to the speed limit—”

  Dwight’s actually a good driver. When expediting with blue lights flashing and siren blaring, he can safely cover as much ground as any other officer in the county, but put him behind the wheel when he’s off duty and he becomes an automotive ambler, moseying along at five or ten miles below the speed limit. The drive to Chapel Hill takes me about fifty-five minutes. It would take him at least ninety.

  “Just give me your keys,” I said. “I’m too hungry for you to drive.”

  On the way over, Dwight let go of a few more details. There had been a bloody shoe print on the floor of the Dozer, and they’d found tissue samples and nasal mucus around the heel area.

  “No distinctive tread, though,” said Dwight.

  They were going to look into Braz’s auction buys and eBay sales. “The mother says they’ve got a place this side of Widdington and he’s been storing some of his buys there till they head back to Florida next month. We’ll go out with her tomorrow, and I may send Mayleen or Jack around to any self-storage units in the area where he’s bought stuff, but I still think we’re going to find the killer right there in the carnival. You do know the speed limit’s forty-five through here, right?”

  “Why in the carnival?” I asked, ignoring his question.

  No trooper pulls you if you’re doing less than eight over the limit.

  Okay, so I was doing ten. I eased off the gas a hair and Dwight relaxed a little, too.

  “Most homicide victims know their killers.”

  “To know is not to love?”

  “Familiarity sure does breed contempt,” he agreed. “Carnies don’t usually want to talk to lawmen, but we’ve found a couple who say Braz Hartley was a liar and a petty thief, a blowhard and a coward. They say he used to bully his brother till his brother got old enough to kick ass back. Always full of big schemes to make a million dollars and leave the carnival, yet every year he was back on the road with the Ameses, who, incidentally, seem to be pretty well liked and respected.”

  “You may not like the idea of strangers like the Lincoln brothers,” I said. “All the same, money’s a big motive, and Tally told me they’ve had some high-dollar finds in those self-storage lockers. A watch worth thousands, for instance. I haven’t read the statutes lately, but as I recall, if the operator of a self-storage facility follows the procedures for notifying the owner, then it’s a good-faith sale and neither the operator nor the buyer has any obligation to the owner.”

  The forty-five gave way to fifty-five and Dwight’s truck obligingly moved right on up to sixty-three.

  “Think of how the Lincolns reacted over a few tools worth a couple of hundred at most,” I said. “If someone with the same sort of faulty logic lost something worth thousands, especially if they lost it over a technicality like missed rental payments, don’t you think they could get violent if the buyer wouldn’t give it kick?”

  “But he hadn’t bought anything particularly valuable this time out,” Dwight objected. “Just four lockers. Two were some old furniture and a couple of gilt-framed pictures.”

  “Antiques?”

  “Not that kind of old. More like made-ten-years-ago old that’s falling apart. And the pictures are the kind you see in motels. Then there was one locker that only had used cans of paint and pieces of plywood that look like somebody’s kid painted them for a Halloween party. Lots of skeletons and devils, Ames told us. Hartley bought them cheap, and Ames took them off his hands for twenty or thirty bucks and hauled ‘em out to their place near Widdington. He’s going to nail them around the outside of the haunted house that he’s planning to rebuild. Oh, and one funny thing—two racks of expensive nightgowns and bathrobes in all colors of the rainbow. Satin and lace. All on fancy padded hangers. Matching bedroom slippers, too. Hartley had to bid pretty high for that. Stuff is good quality and barely been worn, according to Mayleen. Who would store stuff like that in a locker?”

  “Maybe it’s from a lingerie store that was going out of business?”

  “Mayleen says it’s all the same size.”

  I merged onto 1-40. The speed limit here was seventy, and the truck seemed pathetically grateful to get a chance to stretch its horses.

  Mischievous thoughts occurred to me. “Maybe it was a gift from a secret lover and the only time she could wear it was when she was meeting him? Or maybe she’s a catalog model for Victoria’s Secret.”

  Dwight wasn’t amused. “So why let the rental payments lapse?”

  “Well, jail time did it for the Lincoln boys. Sickness? Death? The storage facility has to send a certified letter, but letters get tossed. Or lost. Especially during crisis times.”

  Before I could speculate further, the car in the lane beside me misjudged my speed and started to cut in front of us without signaling. I had to swerve to avoid hitting him, and I gave a blast of the horn that sent him back into his own lane as I accelerated to get away from him.

  “Jesus H, Deb’rah!” Dwight yelped. “Eighty-eight?”

  “Oops,” I said, and kept the speedometer on a sedate seventy till we hit the Chapel Hill exit.

  Visitor parking’s almost nonexistent on UNC’s north campus around the Old Well that actually furnished water for the first students back in the 1700s. I stopped beside Old East, slid out, and told Dwight to circle the block while I went looking for Stevie. “There’s his Jeep, so he shouldn’t be far.”

  I had no qualms about disturbing the scholar. He’d had at least four hours to study if he’d gone straight to the library after dropping Eric off in Raleigh.

  “Steve Knott?” asked the first student I saw when I entered his stairwell. “Yeah, he just went up. Next floor. First room on the left.”

  The lights were on and the door was ajar, and when I pushed it open, Stevie, was hanging freshly pressed shirts in his closet. He was, shall we say, surprised to see me.

  Indeed, his first words of welcome were “Oh shit, Deborah. What’re you doing here?”

  “Dwight wants to talk to you.”

  “Dwight Bryant? He’s here?”

  “Yep. Wants to know why you and Eric decided not to leave your names Friday night. Since you wouldn’t come talk to me this afternoon, you can talk to him now.”

  “You sicced him on us? I don’t believe this.”

  “Nobody sicced him on you, honey. Nobody had to. We talked to both of you at that Pot O’Gold slide, remember? When Dwight looked over an alphabetized list of attendees, you think he wouldn’t notice which Knott wasn’t on it?”

  “Did y’all talk to Eric yet?”

  It occurred to me that he might be more forthcoming if he thought we knew something he didn’t, so I merely shrugged. “Dwight
’s keeping an open mind. He wants to hear your version.”

  “Oh Christ!”

  “So why don’t we get on downstairs before he gets tired of driving around in circles?”

  Dwight was slowly making his way up Cameron Avenue when we got out to the sidewalk. At least a dozen cars were stacked up behind him. I pulled Stevie around to the driver’s side, told Dwight to shove over, pushed my nephew in, and moved smartly down the street.

  At the stoplight at South Cameron, I leaned across Stevie and said, “Don’t worry, Dwight, I didn’t tell him anything Eric said.”

  Dwight kept a poker face. “That’s good,” he said.

  When the light changed, I continued on down half a block and turned left into the parking lot at the Carolina Inn. It’s got a Guests Only sign, but hey, we might’ve been planning to dine there that evening for all the inn knew. I pulled into an empty slot directly under one of the security lights and cut the truck lights. Both of us turned in our seats to look at Stevie.

  He tried to brave it out. “So what did Eric tell y’all?”

  “No, son,” Dwight said gently. “That’s not the way it works. I ask the questions. You give me straight answers, all right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell me what happened at the Dozer game that night when you and Eric and your friends were there? Was Braz Hartley in the well of the game wagon?”

  Stevie nodded.

  “Was he razzing y’all?”

  “Is that what Eric said?”

  “C’mon, Stevie,” I said.

  “No, he wasn’t razzing us. But one of our friends was on his case.”

  “What about?” asked Dwight.

  “I didn’t hear,” Stevie said cautiously. “All I know is that one minute we’re putting in our quarters, playing the game, everything’s cool. Next minute, Lamarr’s yelling that Hartley’s an effing thief. Hartley was standing by that swinging-door thing, and Lamarr just reached over, grabbed him by the shirt, and socked him smack in the face. Hartley was bleeding like a stuck pig and crying that his nose was broken. Eric and I grabbed Lamarr and got him away. Honest, Mr. Dwight. All Lamarr did was sock him one. He was sitting on the step of the wagon when we left and everybody else sort of scattered.”