Death's Half Acre dk-14 Page 12

  —Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

  FRIDAY NOON

  When Dwight and I remodeled the house to add a new bedroom, bath, and two walk-in closets, he’d had the usual male reaction while helping me switch closets.

  “I didn’t know I was marrying Imelda Marcos,” he said. “Who needs twenty-three boxes of shoes?”

  I laughed. “This from a guy who has about three dozen old ties hanging in his own closet?” I took the boxes from him and stacked them on the shelves, happy that he hadn’t noticed that at least four of those twenty-three boxes held two pairs of summer sandals.

  Fancy Footwork is the moderately priced shoe store that used to get a big chunk of my income till I became an old married lady. I haven’t dared step foot in it since I ordered satin slippers to match my wedding dress back before Christmas, but they were having their big semiannual sale, so I decided to skip lunch that day and feed my shoe appetite instead. Besides, I rationalized, hadn’t I broken the heel on my favorite pair of boots? This was the time to replace them. And I hadn’t spent a penny on the blue plaid summer dress Aunt Zell made me, so surely I’d still be ahead if I accidentally came across shoes that matched the scrap of blue cloth in my purse?

  As I drove through town, headed for the mall on the outskirts of Dobbs, I saw in the lane far ahead of me a beat-up old red pickup. Trucks like that are by no means unique to the area, which is why Daddy likes his so much. Goes with the I’m-just-a-poor-ol’-farmer image that he likes to hide behind. More than once, I’ve overtaken similarly battered trucks only to see a complete stranger at the wheel, so I didn’t bother to try to catch up to this one, especially when it continued on past the first entrance to the mall parking lot.

  While I waited in the left turn lane for the green light, I saw that pickup signal for a left turn at the far end of the parking lot and when I had parked and glanced down that way, I saw my father’s tall figure, topped by his trademark straw panama. For a brief moment, I hesitated between shopping for shoes and seeing if he wanted to grab a bite of lunch together.

  Shoes won.

  The store was crowded and yes, there were bargains, but none I could justify and nothing that really called out to me. I did find a pair of boots that were exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any left in my size. I put my scrap of blue cloth next to several pairs of sandals and was amused to see Jamie Jacobson on the other side of the rack trying to match the same sandals to a blue silk scarf. We agreed on the difficulty of finding the right shade of blue and that we ought to get together for lunch again soon.

  “Have a good weekend,” she said as she held her scarf next to a pair of aqua flats.

  “You, too,” I said.

  Ten minutes after entering the store, I was back outside and in my car. Two minutes after that, I was parking it alongside Daddy’s truck.

  I hadn’t watched to see which store he’d gone into. It was a fairly safe bet though that he wasn’t there for maternity clothes or computers. That left the pawnshop in the middle and before you start thinking cheap guitars and zircon rings, think again. This one was more like a consignment shop for expensive jewelry and tabletop accessories such as silver boxes and leaded crystal candlesticks.

  As I entered the store, several women were browsing the front display cases and a clerk was helping a white-haired woman select from a tray of antique cameo pins. I saw Daddy in consultation with someone at the rear. They were so absorbed in the object on the counter between them that they were not immediately aware of my presence and I heard the other man say, “—estate jewelry in New York. Maybe thirty thousand retail, but down here in this market, I could only get twenty for the pair.”

  “Hey, Daddy,” I said and the object disappeared into his pocket, but not before I caught the flash of a glittery earring.

  The other man immediately dropped his jeweler’s loupe into the breast pocket of his jacket.

  I felt suddenly awkward, as if I’d crashed a party to which I was definitely not invited.

  “I saw you come in and thought I’d see if you wanted to come have a sandwich with me,” I said.

  “Naw,” he said brusquely. “I ate ’fore I come. You go on ahead though. I reckon you need to get back to the courthouse.”

  I knew from that tone of voice that there was no use asking any questions and at that point, I was too confused to know what to ask.

  Instead, I stood on tiptoe to kiss his leathery cheek and said maybe Dwight and I would see him that weekend.

  Then I went back outside and drove my car out the nearest exit onto the highway where I merged with traffic, circled the block, and reentered the parking lot a fair distance from that store. I slid into a space amid a bunch of similar cars and scrunched down in the seat to watch. It was another seventeen minutes before Daddy came out and got in his truck.

  What the hell was he up to? And where did he get a pair of diamond earrings worth twenty thousand retail? The only jewelry he had ever given my mother were modest tokens of his love—a gold bracelet, earrings set with tiny sapphires, a silver necklace. So far as I knew, her only diamonds had been a band of small ones on their twenty-fifth anniversary, a ring that could not have cost more than a couple of thousand tops.

  When he pulled out onto the highway, I was six or seven cars behind him. I stayed way back and followed him through town until it seemed apparent that he was headed back toward Cotton Grove and home.

  By then it was ten minutes till I was due to resume court, so I did a U-turn in front of a service station.

  No shoes, no sandwich, no notion as to what my daddy was up to.

  CHAPTER 11

  The mouse traps are set.

  —Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

  Once he was absolutely certain that Deborah was no longer following him, Kezzie Knott left the main road and turned onto a lesser one that would eventually get him back home in a more roundabout way.

  Bad luck that she’d caught him like that, he thought, but he had to make sure them diamonds was real. Who was it said “Trust, but verify”?

  Now that he was sure that he was not the one being played for a fool, he could get on with his fishing.

  He seldom bothered to lock the truck but the collapsible fishing rod that Dwight and Terry had given him a few years back was still there on the seat beside him. They liked to fish nearly as much as he did and they each kept rods like this in their own trucks so they could wet a line whenever they got near an unexpected body of water. He had been polite about it at the time, but a bit dubious about the need for such a thing. Still and all, it had proved handy more than once and he had wound up thanking them more sincerely a few months later when he caught a four-pound catfish out of a creek he hadn’t planned on fishing when he left home that evening. But the man he was there to meet was late coming and Kezzie had killed time by throwing his hook in the water, a hook baited with a scrap of a fried chicken wing left over from his fast-food supper.

  To his way of thinking, fishing was one part luck to two parts skill. You had to know where the fish were and you had to know what bait they’d bite on. Put the right bait on your hook, he thought, and even the wiliest ol’ catfish in the creek can’t help but rise to it. Once you set the hook, it was only a matter of playing him easy, giving him enough slack to let him think it was his idea to come swimming toward you. Jerk too hard and you’d tear the hook out of his mouth or else he’d put up such a fight that he’d break the line before you could get him in your net.

  And thinking about bait . . .

  Kezzie swung into the dirt parking area of a small country store. The ground was hard with sixty years of metal bottle caps stomped into the dirt. Once this had been a thriving one-pump gas station. Now the only fuel sold was kerosene. The air hose still worked though and the drink box still held chunks of ice to chill the glass bottles. You could buy ice and hoop cheese, tinned meats and crackers, and you could buy live crickets and red wigglers by the cupful. You could also buy a
jar of ’shine if the proprietor knew you or you were vouched for by someone utterly trustworthy.

  When they had nothing else to do the ATF agents would occasionally swoop down for a bust, but so far they had never been able to find the owner’s stash of untaxed white liquor, which is how it is referred to when agents testify in court.

  Even though he had not supplied this store in several years, Kezzie knew who the current supplier was and he knew where the stash was hidden.

  “Hey, Mr. Kezzie,” the proprietor said. “Ain’t seen you in a coon’s age. How you been?”

  “Real good, Jimmy.” He pushed his hat to the back of his head. “How ’bout you?”

  “Just fair. Got a little arthuritis in my hands these days, but not nothing else to complain about.”

  A couple of the men seated at the front of the store stood up to give him a chair.

  “Naw, now, y’all keep your seats,” he said genially. “I ain’t staying long enough to set. Just stopped in to get a little bait. Anybody know what the perch’re biting on over in Hinton’s pond these days?”

  There was a moment of silence while they digested his question. None of them would point out that he had two well-stocked ponds and a creek on his own property less than a half-hour away. If Kezzie Knott wanted to fish Millard Hinton’s pond, that was his business and none of theirs.

  “Ain’t heared nobody say,” the store owner said, already reaching into the cricket cage with a small cardboard cup. “How ’bout I give you some of both?”

  “That’ll work.” Kezzie pulled out his wallet, but the other waved it away.

  “Now you know your money ain’t no good here, Mr. Kezzie.”

  The older man shook his head and laid two dollars on the counter. “I ’preciate that, Jimmy, but you got a living to make, too, and them crickets must eat a lot of mash.”

  Millard Hinton was an upright pillar of the community, a farmer who had never been known to use tobacco in any form nor to take a drink of anything alcoholic. As soon as the tobacco buyout began, he sold his poundage and began raising cotton, sweet potatoes, and soybeans.

  “Ain’t nobody ever found Jesus in a cigarette,” he said. “It’s Satan that wants to get you in his fire.”

  Nevertheless, he had told Kezzie Knott years earlier that he would be proud to have him fish in his pond anytime he wanted. A couple of elderly men who knew about the arrangement also knew what that old bootlegger had done to merit the lasting gratitude of such a man of God, but neither of them ever spoke about it.

  The man-made pond lay about a half-mile off the road and had been scooped out of three acres of soggy bottomland that had never been much good for anything except pigs and maybe holding the world together.

  When Kezzie and his truck topped the rise and headed down the lane to the water’s edge, he saw another vehicle there before him. A lone man watched him approach. He was fishing with a cane pole, and a red plastic float out on the surface of the pond showed where his hook and line were.

  “Evening,” said Kezzie, stepping down from the truck and taking out his own rod.

  The man gave him a friendly nod.

  “It ain’t gonna bother you, is it, if I do a little fishing myself?”

  “Not a bit, Mr. Knott. This place is big enough for both of us.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve got the better of me,” Kezzie said, giving the man a closer look. “I don’t believe we’ve met?”

  “My name’s McKinney,” the man said, stretching out his hand to shake. “Faison McKinney. I’m the preacher at the Church of Jesus Christ Eternal over near you.”

  CHAPTER 12

  . . . the cotton’s tied up in burlap

  sheets waiting to be weighed: my mother picked

  385 pounds in one day!

  How, I said, could you do that . . .

  —Fiddledeedee, by Shelby Stephenson

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON

  The doorbell pealed through the condo unit and the two lawmen heard Dee Bradshaw call from inside, “I’ll get it, Dad.”

  Even though Terry was now in a serious long-term relationship himself, Dwight heard his friend’s sharply indrawn breath when the young woman opened the door and they were confronted by a mass of reddish brown hair, bright green eyes, black skintight biker pants, and a black bandeau top that left almost nothing to the imagination.

  Mourning attire for the next generation, thought Dwight, trying not to admit to himself that he was looking, too, and wondering if that top ever slipped all the way down.

  “Oh,” she said, obviously disappointed that they weren’t someone else. “I guess you want to see my father?”

  “And you, too, Miss Bradshaw,” Dwight said, as she stood back to let them in.

  Inside, the place was larger than they expected. The hall was fairly wide. One side opened into the living room, the other into a small formal dining room with an oval table that would seat six. Farther down the hall, they glimpsed the edge of a kitchen and a spacious family room. Bookcases lined several of the walls and the shelves were filled with books that looked worn and well-read.

  “If you’ll wait in there,” Dee Bradshaw said, gesturing to the living room, “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  They moved into that room as directed and were surprised by the portrait over the couch.

  “Is that the mother or the daughter?” Terry asked.

  “The mother,” Dwight said when a closer look made it clear that this vibrant woman had more steel in her face. She was not as beautiful as her daughter, but she radiated a purposefulness that the younger woman lacked. Where Dee looked petulant, Candace was clearly more determined. And yet there was something provocative and sexy in that half-smile and the tilt of her head, almost as if she were saying “Damn straight you’d like to have me, but how much are you willing to pay?”

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  Dwight and Terry turned to see Cameron Bradshaw smiling at them from the doorway with proprietary pride.

  “Candace was twenty-five when that was painted. At the separation, this was the only thing she really wanted that I wouldn’t let her have. It’s a Gillian Greber. I paid the artist fifteen hundred to paint it; I turned down fifteen thousand from her gallery last year. Candace thought I kept it only because it was a portrait of her. She had no idea how good it was.”

  “Mom’s portrait’s worth fifteen thousand?” Dee Bradshaw was incredulous. “Really?”

  “I said that’s how much the gallery offered,” he said. “I imagine they would sell it for at least twenty-five.”

  “Whoa!”

  “Forget it, honey,” he said.

  She started to protest, but then laughed. “That obvious, huh, Dad?”

  He turned to his visitors. “Major Bryant, Agent Wilson. Please be seated. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m afraid we have more questions,” Dwight said.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Bradshaw said with a wry smile for his mild joke. He gestured for Dwight to sit in a tall wingback chair upholstered in deep blue leather and he lowered himself into its nearby twin. The chairs echoed the blue leaves and flowers of the couch and also the blue of the dress in the portrait. His daughter took one end of the couch and smiled at Terry, who sat down at the other end. “We want to help however we can. Have you learned why Candace felt she had to do what she did?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but it wasn’t suicide after all. Your wife was murdered.”

  Dee’s mouth dropped open and Bradshaw looked bewildered. “Murdered?”

  “It was meant to look like suicide but the medical examiner is positive that she was strangled from behind and the bag put over her head after her death.”

  “Strangled? Who?”

  “That’s what we’re looking into.”

  “But that note. It was her handwriting.”

  Terry nodded. “She was probably forced to write it.”

  Dwight said, “Miss Bradshaw—”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, call
me Dee.”

  “Very well, Dee. You told Deputy Richards today that your mother moved into her new house at Christmas and you were at Carolina from Christmas to Easter. Is that right?”

  She nodded and slid to the floor, where she could lean back against the couch and tuck her legs beneath her.

  “Were you and your mother close?”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Did you come home often? Talk on the phone?”

  “Not really. She had her life. I had mine. Anyhow, she was pretty busy. Every time I called, she was usually rushing off to a meeting or heading out to check up on one of the cleaning crews.” Her tone was light but her eyes betrayed her. “She thought the only reason I called was because I wanted something. Money or clothes.”

  “Be fair, Dee,” Bradshaw said softly.

  “You know it’s true, Dad.” Her voice was sulky, but she dropped her eyes and stretched out the top of her bandeau to tug it up, inadvertently giving Terry a view of her firm young breasts.

  “So she never mentioned that a gun had been fired into her bedroom floor?”

  “Huh?”

  “A gun?” asked Bradshaw.

  “One of my deputies dug a bullet out of the floor just now,” Dwight told them. “Did she own a gun?”

  “Absolutely not! She was completely opposed to handguns, even though she’s never said it in public. Her constituents, you see.”

  “Then that might be how she was forced to write that note,” said Terry. “Her killer could have fired into the floor as a warning threat that he’d shoot her if she didn’t do as she was told.”

  Dee looked up at him. “So the letter was a lie? She wasn’t doing anything wrong after all?”

  “Hard to say. We might still learn that something illegal was going on and the killer wanted to set her up as the fall guy. We haven’t talked to any of the commissioners and she seems to have kept files on them. On some of the more prominent business leaders in the county as well, but we can’t find them.”

  “Files?” asked Bradshaw. “What sort of files?”

  “We don’t know, but we get the impression that some things were too personal—and maybe too candid—to leave lying around for anyone to read. We don’t know if it’s papers or a CD or a flash drive.”