Sand Sharks

CHAPTER

28

That which is faulty in the beginning cannot become valid with the passage of time.

—Paulus (early AD 3rd century)

I lay on my stomach, my head pillowed by my crossed arms, half drowsing, when Rosemary came back to our umbrella from her swim. As she toweled her hair dry, she said, “Will Blackstone was out there in the water, too. Have you seen his eye?”

“You know him?” I asked.

“Sure.” She reached into her beach bag for a comb and began untangling her hair. “He and Dave worked on a report together two or three years ago. Teen courts and recidivism. He stayed over one weekend while they finished working on the statistics. Nice man.”

“Did he say how he got the eye?” I asked innocently.

“Slipped getting out of the shower and banged into the sink, poor guy. He says everyone’s teasing him that somebody’s husband punched him out.”

“Oh?”

“Well, if you know him, you know what a hunk he is. Divorced. Unattached. And he does like to flirt. He even flirted with me just now. He’s heard that Dave and I are headed for divorce and he said Dave must be crazy to go out for a hamburger when he had steak at home. Wasn’t that sweet?”

“Joanne Woodward probably thought so.”

“Huh?”

“I read somewhere that that’s the reason Paul Newman gave for not cheating on her.”

“Oh.” She digested that for a moment, then, with a touch of defiance in her voice, said, “I still think it was sweet of Will. He asked me to have a drink with him later.”

“You going?”

“Why not? Chelsea Ann’s having dinner with that detective again tonight. You want to join us?”

The thought of watching Will Blackstone squirm through a round or two of margaritas was incredibly tempting, but I resisted. “I don’t think so, thanks.”

I wondered if Rosemary would let him put the moves on her. Will Blackstone and Dave Emerson struck me as two of a kind and some women do have a tendency to keep picking the same losers time after time.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” said the preacher.

“And not that you haven’t picked your own share of losers,” said the pragmatist.

I closed my eyes and thought about the various men I’d been involved with over the years. Were there similarities? One could say that Dwight and the game warden had a few things in common—both liked the outdoors, both wore badges and were comfortable with guns. Allen Stancil never wore a badge and his moral compass was several degrees to the left of theirs, but he and Dwight were built alike. On the other hand, those three were nothing at all like the rather bookish law student I’d lived with one winter in New York, neither physically nor mentally.

“Maybe Lev Schuster was the skinny little exception that proves the rule,” whispered the pragmatist.

Beside me, Rosemary began to pack up her belongings. “You ready to go?” she asked. “I want to shower before Chelsea Ann gets back. Takes me a little longer these days to get all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

“Catch you later,” I said. “I may still go for a swim.”

I lay there for close to another hour mulling over the events of the week while the sun sank lower in the sky. Just before it touched the top of the hotel, I saw Allen’s two children dart past me. Allen trundled along behind, loaded like a packhorse with thermal bags, towels, sand toys, and an umbrella.

“Need a hand?” I called.

“Three or four if you got ’em.”

The umbrella slid out of his hand and I rescued it for him and helped him set up next to mine.

“Thanks, darlin’. You all by your lonesome this evening?”

“For the moment. Hey, Tiffany Jane. Hey, Tyler. Y’all having fun here?”

The little girl nodded shyly and the toddler gave me a goofy smile.

“Did you put sunscreen on them yet?” I asked.

“Well, damn!” he said. “I knowed I was forgetting something.”

“That’s okay. I have some.” I rummaged in my bag and found the bottle. “Come here, honey, and let me rub it on you.”

The child came and knelt on my towel and held her beautiful little face up for me to smooth on the cream. Allen was right. She really was going to break a heart or two before it was over. When I finished with her arms and shoulders, she took the bottle and said she could do her legs herself. “And Tyler, too.”

“Tippy-canoe and Tyler, too,” Allen teased, his white teeth flashing beneath his luxuriant mustache.

“Oh, Daddy!” she protested, having clearly heard him say this many times before.

“Why you reckon folks say that?” Allen asked me. “I can see how a tippy-canoe could be a problem, but what’s with the Tyler, too?”

“It was an old campaign slogan. From back in the eighteen-hundreds, I think. Tippecanoe was the Indian nickname for some presidential candidate, and Tyler was running for vice president, but don’t ask me who he was or if he won.”

Well covered in sunscreen now, the children took their buckets and shovels down to the water’s edge.

Allen sat cross-legged on his towel to keep an eye on them and popped the top on a can of light beer. “You want one?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “What happened to your finger?”

I had just noticed that his right index finger was bandaged and seemed to have a splint on it.

“You know what happened, darlin’.” He took a long swallow of beer. “You was there.”

“You broke your finger when you punched Will Blackstone?”

“That his name? Sucker’s got a damn hard head.”

“And a very black eye, so you two are even.”

I couldn’t help laughing and he gave a rueful shrug. “He ain’t bothered you again, did he?”

“No.”

“Good.”

My knight in shining armor.

“I heard that one of the waiters at Jonah’s killed Judge Jeffreys?”

I nodded.

“And then he got hisself killed in a car crash?”

“Yeah. They think he was going too fast and hydroplaned off an exit ramp.”

“Amateurs.” His voice dripped with the scorn of a professional stock car driver for nonprofessionals who take unnecessary risks. “They know why he killed Jeffreys?”

“The theory is that Jeffreys propositioned him in the men’s room and he freaked out.”

Allen lowered his beer can and looked at me in puzzlement. “Pete Jeffreys gay? No way in hell.”

“You can’t always tell.”

“The hell you can’t. Well, maybe you can’t, but I’ve got me a gaydar that’s never been wrong. I can spot ’em ten miles away. And he won’t no AC/DC neither. I’m telling you here and now, Pete Jeffreys was straighter’n a yardstick.”

No matter how I argued that one could never be a hundred percent certain about another’s sexuality, Allen was that tree planted by the water. He could not be moved.

In the end his conviction convinced me and I went back to the hotel to call Gary Edwards.

* * *

“I hate to admit it,” Edwards said when I finally got through to him, “but from all we’ve heard, your friend is probably right. Judge Blankenthorpe’s sure he would never have sought a homosexual encounter and that’s what we’re getting from our inquiries in Greensboro.”

“So you’re back at the beginning with no motive?”

“And that’s the way we’ll probably leave it. Something’s worrying the ME, but he’s promised us a preliminary report tomorrow. Soon as that comes my boss and the DA will both be ready to call it closed.”

“What’s bothering him?” I asked.

“Not enough blood,” Edwards said succinctly. “Bad as he was banged up, his clothes should have been soaked. Probably washed off in the rain… or…”

“Or what?” I asked. Yet even as I asked, it came to me. “Could he have already been dead before the car crashed?”

“Yeah. The ME wants to take another look at Armstrong’s heart. See if maybe he had a heart attack first.”

Possibilities suddenly started to shift and rearrange themselves in my head and a different pattern began to emerge. “There’s one more thing,” I said. “Something Judge Ouellette told me.”

When I finished talking, there was a long silence on his end.

At last, I said, “You do remember that the conference ends at noon tomorrow and everyone scatters after that?”

“Yes, but—”

“Better me than Fitz,” I told him firmly. “And if I’m wrong, I’ll bring a crow with me the next time I come to Wilmington and you can watch me eat it.”

He laughed. “You’re on.”