Sand Sharks

CHAPTER

13

The case was adjourned.

—Pliny (AD 62–113)

Chelsea Ann and I stopped at a restaurant on the other side of the causeway. We ordered shrimp cocktails, split a steak dinner, and still had time to stop for coffee at a little place on Market Street before strolling over to the shooting site.

On the way we passed a life-size bronze statue erected to the memory of one George Davis. According to the legend on the granite base, this son of Wilmington had been a senator and attorney general of the Confederate States of America. Bareheaded, he wore a nineteenth-century frock coat and his right arm extended in an upward gesture as if hailing a hansom cab or signaling his butler to fetch him another mint julep. He might have looked more statesmanlike had some smart-ass not wedged a beer can between those bronze fingers.

Halfway down the next block stood the building that doubled as the exterior of the club owned by the Stone Hamilton character. The street was loosely blocked off with ropes and a few sawhorses, but even though Hamilton and Jill Mercer were standing on the sidewalk in the glow of spotlights when we arrived, I was surprised to see barely a handful of onlookers. Either all the tourists had gone home or else Wilmington had become blasé about cameras and TV stars in its midst.

Evidently this was to be a shot that established their leaving the club. We were too far away to hear their lines, but they seemed to exchange a few parting words, then Mercer walked away and Hamilton stepped off the curb and strolled toward a camera mounted on a dolly.

For some reason, it was deemed necessary to film that little snippet several times. Between takes Mercer spotted me and waved, but Stackhouse was too busy coordinating everything to glance around.

Eventually her part was deemed a wrap and she came over, held up the rope, and gestured for me to join her. Gone were the ball cap and mousy appearance from this afternoon. Now her long auburn hair rippled across one bare shoulder. Her eyes smoldered beneath long false lashes, and expertly applied mascara enhanced their beauty. The enhancement hadn’t stopped with her makeup. What had been a flat chest earlier in the day now looked at least two cup sizes larger.

She laughed as she caught me staring. “Push-ups and padding. What you see ain’t what you get.”

I introduced Chelsea Ann, who had barely taken her eyes off Stone Hamilton. We watched as the main camera rolled backward across the street while Hamilton walked toward it. Suddenly a bright light flashed across his face and he squinted as if in surprise and apprehension.

“This is where he’s supposed to realize that a car’s about to hit him,” Jill Mercer explained.

After another twenty minutes of duplicating that bit—who knew that watching the filming of a show could be so boring?—the main camera withdrew to the far sidewalk and someone cued a dark car parked near the end of the block. Its lights came on and it trundled slowly down the street.

“They’ll speed it up and add screeching brakes when they edit it,” Jill said.

The fourth time the car came rolling toward the point of impact, Hamilton had been replaced by a stunt double who met the front right headlight and appeared to be tossed like a beach ball. It was only as he was getting up that I noticed the mats that had been laid along the sidewalk behind him to cushion his fall.

As soon as Stackhouse was satisfied with the take, the mats were removed and Hamilton lay down on the bare concrete and tried to arrange his limbs to look like an unconscious hit-and-run victim.

Once he was still, Stackhouse shouted, “Hey, Jilly! Where the hell are you?”

“Oops!” said Mercer. “That’s my cue.”

She hastened back into the scene crying, “Don! Don!”

As she dropped to her knees beside his sprawled body, extras spilled from the doorway of the “club” and one of them shouted, “Call 911!” Another, “Did anyone see the car?”

The camera rolled in to focus on Mercer’s distraught face next to Hamilton’s as she implored him to hang on.

* * *

It was after midnight before we got that drink at a real club a few blocks over. Stone Hamilton had begged off—“I gotta go walk my dog,” he told us—to Chelsea Ann’s disappointment.

While Stackhouse flirted with Chelsea Ann and took notes on everything she had found wrong with the program’s courtroom scenes, I learned that Jill Mercer’s soft Southern accent originated right here in North Carolina.

“I was born in Elizabeth City and studied acting at ECU, a few years after Emily Proctor graduated. She was my idol and it still amazes me that I’ve pretty much matched her role for role,” she said proudly.

We traded courtroom stories, real and fictional, which led to Pete Jeffreys’s murder the night before.

“Did the police question y’all?” I asked.

She looked puzzled. “No. Why would they?”

“Because of the run-in Stone Hamilton had with him.”

“What run-in?”

So I told her how Jeffreys had kicked the boxer, claiming that it had lunged at him. “And he was strangled with a woven nylon dog leash just like the one Hamilton had for his dog.”

“Mo would never go for someone unprovoked,” she said.

“Mo?”

“Stone’s boxer. For Muhammad Ali. You think Jamie Lee Curtis was sappy over that chihuahua? Stone’s worse about Mo. He’s got a short temper, too, but if he didn’t deck the judge right then and there, he certainly wouldn’t go after him later.”

“He didn’t mention it to you?”

“No, but we’re not that tight, y’know? His girlfriend crews on the Dead in the Water set, so he mostly hangs with them when we’re not working.”

Suddenly she laughed, then immediately apologized. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of your friend’s death, but if you and I were anything like Judge Darcy Jones, we’d have this thing wrapped up by the time they rolled the final commercial.”

I smiled. “And the killer would be—?”

“Oh, the sleazy prosecutor or the bailiff or some anonymous nobody at the back of her courtroom.”

We batted outrageous scenarios back and forth a while longer, but when Stackhouse proposed another round of drinks, I shook my head. “It’s been a long day and we have to be up early in the morning.”

Back at the hotel, Chelsea Ann and I both went straight to our rooms. Even though I was tired, I couldn’t resist going out on the balcony. The moon was three nights from full and was already on its downward slide over the top of the hotel, but it lit up the beach. From where I stood, I could see that the tide was quite low and the waves rolled in on long slow parallels that held me hypnotized till I realized that I was almost asleep standing up.

Before I fell off the balcony, I went inside and undressed, brushed my teeth, and smoothed cleansing cream on my face. That woke me enough to remember that I had been catching up on my voice mail when Reid’s call interrupted. I rooted my phone out of my purse, switched it on, and listened to one of my nieces asking if it was okay to bring some of her friends over to swim off my pier that afternoon. Because she and her cousins had been the one to build it, they had an open invitation to use it any time, so this was just a courtesy call.

Still no call from Dwight, but one from my sister-in-law Minnie reminded me of a political lunch we were supposed to attend on Friday and there was a second call from one of those unfamiliar and unidentified numbers.

I punched the button to play the message and adrenaline shot through my veins the instant I heard Dwight’s voice.

“Deb’rah? You get my last message? If you didn’t, call me back on this number, okay?”

I didn’t wait for him to repeat the number, but scrolled straight back to the first message that had come in from that number yesterday afternoon.

“Hey, shug. We got here just fine, but when we stopped for lunch, I dropped my phone in the parking lot and by the time I missed it, somebody’d run over it.” I heard his rueful laugh. “You were right. We should’ve packed a lunch. Sandy’s lending me hers while we’re here. They think the SIM card’s okay, so I’ll wait till I get home to buy a new phone. Call me back at this number, okay?”

I played that message three times and heard absolutely nothing in his voice to indicate that he was still mad or that he thought I might be. All my angst for nothing?

Relief flooded through me as I remembered the many times I had snarled at him back when he was more like another brother than a future love. Half the time he never realized I was mad at him. The other half he just shrugged it off. He knew me too well: if I was seriously angry, I’d let him know; otherwise, I’d get over it as soon as I cooled down enough to think it over.

Was it really that simple? I played the message again.

Yesohyesohyes!

He and I and Cal were still going to have to sit down and thresh out the ground rules again, but for now, the huge weight that had burdened my shoulders for two days melted away like ice cubes in a glass of warm sweet tea. I was no longer exhausted. I wanted to rush downstairs and dance naked on the beach. I wanted to ring room service and order champagne. Most of all, I wanted to hurry the night along so that morning would come quickly.

I slid between the sheets and fell asleep hugging one of the oversized pillows and whispering happy nothings in its nonexistent ear.