Slow Dollar

CHAPTER 14

DEBORAH KNOTT

MIDDAY MONDAY

When I got back after lunch, I found April waiting impatiently by the rear door of my courtroom. She looked like a teacher again. Her brown curls were tidy, makeup tamed her freckles, and she wore a crisply pressed beige cotton jumper over a short-sleeved white shirt.

“Dwight’s taken her out to her place in the country,” she said as soon as I got close enough to hear her above passing clerks and several attorneys with their clients, “and her husband didn’t know when they’d be back. I called home and Andrew’s sober for the moment, so I’m going to go on now and talk to him before I pick up the children when they get out of school.” Her voice dropped. “I don’t want Ruth and A.K. hearing about this from their cousins. What I need for you to do is go out there when you’re through with court this evening and tell her that we’ll all be there for the service tomorrow. Minnie and Isabel and Doris and Mae are going to fix lunch and you know them. There’ll be enough to feed anybody she wants to come. I expect she’ll want her own friends to be there, so you be sure and tell her that, all right?”

“Okay,” I said, but I was talking to the air. She was already halfway down the hall and nearly collided with my cousin Reid, who held the door open for her.

He gave me a half-embarrassed grin as our eyes met and he saw my eyebrow arch.

“I see you heard,” he said as he came up to me.

Despite what had happened with Dwight and me last night, his behavior Friday night wasn’t very commendable.

“Pretty shabby, Reid,” I told him. “Even for you.”

“What do you mean, even for me?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean. Dwight’s your friend.”

“Well, hell, Deborah, he’s had since June to take it up the next level.”

“Take it up, or take Sylvia Clayton down?” I asked snidely.

“That relationship was going nowhere,” he assured me.

I gave him a jaundiced look. “And this one is?”

“Aren’t you late for court?” he countered, holding open the door so that I automatically entered the courtroom without thinking.

Equally automatically, the bailiff jumped to his feet and said, “All rise!” and there was nothing I could do except take my seat on the bench.

Smirking, Reid sat down as everyone else sat, too, and the clerk handed me a sheet with three add-ons. Janice Needham was clerking for me today, but her chair was far enough away from mine that I was out of reach of her compulsive fingers. Once I forgot, though, and handed her a form that put the sleeve of my robe within range. She immediately picked off a piece of lint.

“Wasn’t it awful about what happened at the carnival Friday night?” she whispered to me while we waited for the DA to confer with one of the defendants and her lawyer. “He seemed like such a nice young man. For a carnival worker, I mean.”

“Nice” wasn’t the description I’d heard used by anyone except perhaps his mother.

“You met him?”

“Well, not really. But Bradley started talking to him when he got change and then while I was playing, they talked back and forth about what it was like to travel with a carnival and what he did during the winter months. From what he told Bradley, I think he was planning to leave the carnival soon and go into the antique business. I won back three of my quarters and a real cute little bracelet, see?”

She held out her wrist. It was encircled by a tennis bracelet set with pink glass stones. Probably retailed for a dollar ninety-eight at one of those teenybopper stores at the mall. I didn’t ask her how many quarters it’d cost her. Besides, it did match her pink blouse and pink headband.

“Pretty,” I said, and turned my attention to the grandmother who took the stand to explain to me woman-to-woman why it was cruel to keep a tired child belted in a car seat when all that precious little thing wanted to do was stretch out across the backseat and go to sleep in comfort.

I asked her if she’d ever seen what a precious little thing looked like after being thrown from a car when it flipped off the road doing sixty miles an hour, then gave her the stiffest fine I could and told the DA to call his next case.

At the afternoon break, I went down to the sheriff’s department in the courthouse basement. When I tapped on the open door of Dwight’s office, he was half sitting, half leaning on the front of his desk talking to three of his deputies. His face lit up. “Well, speak of the devil! McLamb here was just about to go find a judge to get a signature on this search warrant.”

“What do you want to search?” I asked, skimming through the form McLamb handed me.

“Lamarr Wrenn’s grandfather’s house,” McLamb said. “Based on our investigations today, we think it probably contains property belonging to the Hartley guy that was killed Friday night, property that was stolen from a locked storage shed Mrs. Ames owns.”

“Really? What sort of property?”

“Some boards that his grandfather painted pictures on.”

“Pictures?”

“Halloween things. Skeletons and ghosts and—”

I looked up at Dwight suspiciously. “You serious? Didn’t you say they only paid about twenty-five or thirty dollars for those boards? And that they were only going to use them to decorate the exterior of their haunted house?”

“Theft is theft,” he said virtuously. “Breaking and entering.”

I finished looking over the document. Everything seemed in order so I signed and dated it, even though it looked like a lot of trouble for a bunch of worthless wood.

Jamison and McLamb left with the search warrant and Richards said she was going to get on the phone and call Atlanta. “See if I can verify the whereabouts of that Radakovich woman on Friday night.”

As she left, I closed Dwight’s door. “Talk to you a minute?”

“Sure.” His jacket hung on the back of his chair and the collar of his blue shirt was unbuttoned with the red tie loosely knotted. He folded his arms across his chest and remained where he was, leaning against the edge of the desk, motionless, as if bracing himself for something bad. “What’s up?”

I checked my watch. “I need to be back upstairs in four minutes, so just listen, will you? We can talk about this more after I adjourn this evening.”

“You’ve changed your mind,” he said flatly.

“About us? No, why? You having second thoughts?”

He shook his head. I hadn’t realized how tense he was till I saw his jaw unclench and his arms relax, but I didn’t have time to ask him what was wrong. Dwight’s always saying I don’t tell him things, and I didn’t want him to hear about Tally first from one of my brothers or their wives.

“Look, I couldn’t say anything to you about this till I’d talked to Daddy and Andrew and Andrew’d talked to April, only he pulled a drunk this weekend and didn’t, so I had to tell her myself this morning.”

“Hey, whoa, slow down, shug. Tell her what?”

“Just listen!” I said impatiently. “Remember how Andrew got a Hatcher girl pregnant when he was seventeen and her father made them get married and then she ran off after the baby was born?”

“Oh, yeah, I do sort of remember hearing about that somewhere along the way, but I was still a little kid and it—”

“Dwight!”

“Sorry. So?”

“So Tallahassee Ames is that baby. She’s Andrew’s daughter. My niece. They’re going to bury Braz Hartley out at the homeplace tomorrow morning, and I’ve got to run.”

As I hurried down the hall to the elevator, Dwight called after me, “Come on back when you finish court, hear?”

I’d hoped to adjourn early, but it was after five-thirty before I signed the very last order of the very last case on my calendar and called it a day. I’d already told Roger Longmire, our chief district court judge, that I was taking a half day of personal leave tomorrow, and I didn’t want anything on today’s docket to have to be carried over because of me.

When I got back down to Dwight’s office, the door was closed, but I could hear belligerent voices from inside. A woman’s shrill voice floated above angry male tones and both were followed by Dwight’s calm bass rumble.

Sheriff Bo Poole’s door was open down the hall, so I poked my head in. “What’s going on, Bo?”

“You signed the search warrant,” he said. “You tell me.”

“You mean they really found those stolen boards?”

Before he could answer, Dwight’s door opened and I glanced back over my shoulder to see a hugely smiling Lamarr Wrenn step out into the hallway. He wore a Shaw sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out, shorts, and sandals. His right ankle was taped with an elastic bandage. One big arm was around a middle-aged woman in a blue suit who scowled up at him, the other hand carried one of those crudely painted scraps of plywood. The woman was clearly his mother. She was giving him a come-to-Jesus lecture about the evils of theft, and what’d he want with those weird old pictures anyhow, and don’t think for one minute she wasn’t going to take every penny out of his hide, but he just kept smiling and hugging her as they went on down the hall.

The white man who followed them more slowly was also smiling as he put a slip of paper in his wallet. It was Arnold Ames.

“Thanks for your understanding,” Dwight said. “I really appreciate it.”

“No problem,” said Ames. “A quick dime’s better than a slow dollar any day of the week, far as I’m concerned, and this way everybody gets what they want, right?” He shook Dwight’s hand. “Good doing business with you, Major Bryant.”

“What was all that about?” Bo asked when Ames was gone.

“I’ll try to have the full report for you tomorrow,” Dwight said from his doorway, “but basically, it’s about why Lamarr Wrenn really punched out Friday night’s homicide.”

“He’s not the perp?” asked Bo.

“I don’t see how he could be,” said Dwight. “The next-door neighbor confirms the time he says he got there. She also says he was wearing sneakers, and whoever stomped Hartley was wearing hard-soled shoes.”

“But the Halloween pictures?” I asked.

“Not Halloween,” he told us. “Bascom Wrenn, Ms. Wrenn’s daddy, got religion big time about five or six years ago and started painting these strange pictures of the Last Judgment—the eye of God, the dead rising from their graves, souls in hell. Lamarr thought they were great, which was news to Ms. Wrenn. She was under the impression that they embarrassed the hell out of both of them. In fact, she was so sure the pictures were evidence that Mr. Wrenn was getting cracked and senile that he used his little pension to stick them in a self-storage unit out on the bypass to keep her from seeing them and he’d go over there to paint.”

I laughed. “The storage locker was his studio?”

“Yep. So when he died, nobody knew about the locker and the rent lapsed. Bostrom, the guy who owns the facility, jumped through all the legal hoops—sent a certified letter to his home, posted it here in the courthouse, notice in the Ledger, the whole works. Ms. Wrenn says if a letter was forwarded, she doesn’t remember signing for one. The sale went forward and Braz Hartley bought the contents of the locker for thirty bucks. Old cans of paint and those hellfire and damnation pictures. His stepfather saw a use for the pictures and gave him thirty-five for the lot.”

“Where does Lamarr come in?” I asked.

“After the funeral, when he realized his granddad’s pictures weren’t in the house, he went looking them, learned about the locker, then found out that he was too late. Hartley had bought them. That’s what the fight was about. Lamarr Wrenn accused him of stealing the pictures and asked for them back.”

“I’m guessing he didn’t say ‘pretty please,’ either,” I murmured.

“Right. So on Sunday afternoon, he and some friends drove out to the property Mrs. Ames owns over near Widdington, broke into the storage shed where the pictures were, and brought them back to Dobbs, where Jamison and McLamb found them when they searched the house this afternoon.”

I didn’t like the sound of that “he and some friends.” Stevie and Eric? “But what was all that in your office just now?” I asked, hastily moving on from that topic.

“We got Ms. Wrenn and her son over from Raleigh and asked Mr. Ames to come in, too, to see if we couldn’t work something out. Like you said, Deb’rah, the theft would probably have been treated like a misdemeanor, even with the breaking and entering, if that’s what they actually did. Ms. Wrenn offered him a check for three hundred and fifty if he’d return the pictures and drop all charges against her son, and you saw how happy he was to do it.”

“Three-fifty on a thirty-five-dollar investment?” Bo laughed. “Wish my retirement fund earned returns like that.”

Still chuckling, he switched off his office light, told us to have a good evening, and left.

I looked up at Dwight. “Stevie and Eric were the friends who helped Lamarr steal back the pictures, weren’t they?”

“Well, now, shug, I never got around to asking him who his accomplices were, and he didn’t volunteer to tell me.”

“Thanks,” I said softly.

He brushed it off. “Anyhow, if he’s telling the truth, the DA would have given him a break because the door was already open. He says that someone else drove up while they were trying to decide whether to pop the lock. They stayed hidden behind the shed till they heard whoever it was rip the lock off the door and realized it was another thief. Wrenn says they were going to rush the guy, but then he twisted his ankle and the guy got away before they could even see who it was.”

“The idiots!” I fumed. “What if he’d had a gun?”

“What if he was a she?”

“A woman?”

“All they saw was from the legs down. Jeans and dirty sneakers.”

He didn’t have to spell it out. I see too many women charged with the whole range of crimes to think that men have a monopoly.

“You’re thinking Polly Viscardi? She wears work shoes, though. Work shoes with bright pink laces.”

“Now don’t you reckon whoever did it has ditched whatever shoes they had on at the time? They’d be pretty bloody.”

I thought about it and agreed he had a point.

“So tell me about Miz Ames being Andrew’s daughter,” Dwight said. “And what’s with Andrew?”

“You off duty now?” I asked.

He nodded, leaned across his desk, and hooked his jacket off the back of the chair with one finger.

“Then come ride over to the carnival with me and we’ll talk on the way.”

By the time we got out to the festival grounds, I’d told him all I knew about Tally and how Andrew and April had reacted to the news. In return, he told me about the unexpectedly big bank account that Braz had secretly squirreled away and how hurt Tally had seemed over the discovery. He also shared what Mayleen Richards had learned while backtracking on Braz’s storage-locker buys. There was a Georgia woman who’d bought back some of her mother’s furniture, which would seem to do away with any motive. Besides, Mayleen had talked to a couple of people down there in the transportation department who had gone out to dinner with the woman in Atlanta Friday evening.

The owner of the other furniture buy, a massive set of oak bedroom furniture, had been located as well.

“It was part of his ex-wife’s divorce settlement, but after they sold the house, she didn’t have any place to put it, so he stored it for her, paid the first three months’ rent and after that, forwarded all the notices on to her. Mayleen said he sounded sorta happy it’d been forfeited. Said he never had a good night’s sleep on that bed from the minute she bought it.”

That left the negligees as the only other buy in North Carolina.

“And it looks like your guess that she was keeping it secret from her husband might be on the money,” Dwight told me as I pulled into the parking lot beside the Agricultural Hall. “She sent a brother to try to save the stuff, not her husband. And she seems to have let it drop rather than making an issue out of it that might would get back to him.”

“She had the locker six years? That’s some affair,” I said. “Sounds like a divorce would’ve been easier.”

“What would be easier is if you’d get a bigger car,” he said in exasperation, untangling himself from the seat belt.

Even with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, Dwight has trouble getting his long legs in and out of my Firebird and he mouths off about it every time he rides with me. (There’s a reason so many law officers favor Crown Victorias and pickup trucks. Most of those men are as big as Dwight.)

Although the sun had set, it wasn’t completely dark yet, but the carnival was in full swing. Toe-tapping country-western music poured from the loudspeakers. The Ferris wheel was turning and the Tilt-A-Whirl held shrieking teenagers, but there seemed fewer people on the midway than on Friday night. It was still early, though.

I didn’t recognize the young woman working the Guesser, at the front of the midway. We watched while she guessed a little girl’s weight and was off by four pounds. “You must have hollow bones, honey. Pick yourself a bear.”

The child happily chose a green one, which her dad clipped to the belt loop on her jeans; then she scampered away toward the Ferris wheel.

“Guess your age, guess your weight,” the woman began when I approached her.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for Tally Ames. Do you know if she’s working this evening?”

“At the Dozer,” she answered, already losing interest in me and gazing past my shoulder to catch the eyes of the people entering behind us.

Almost immediately, we ran into the carnival’s patch, Dennis Koffer. He didn’t recognize me from Friday night, but he had a smile for Dwight. “How’s it going, Major? You here tonight on business or pleasure?”

“Some of both.” He shook hands and turned to me. “Have you met Judge Knott?”

“Judge, it’s a pleasure,” Koffer said, offering his hand.

Nothing changed in his manner that I could pinpoint, yet when he heard my name, I sensed that he recognized it and knew my relationship with Tally.

“Anything you can tell me about your investigation?” he asked Dwight, relighting the cigar that seemed permanently attached to the corner of his mouth. “I mean, anything besides what Arnie told me about the kid that punched Braz out?”

“Nothing yet,” Dwight said. “I may need your help tomorrow. We’re going to come back and interview everybody again. See if anyone’s remembered something useful.”

“Sure. You’ve got my pager number. Just give me a buzz.” At that moment, almost on cue, the pager went off. After glancing at the number displayed, he said, “Y’all enjoy yourselves tonight,” and hurried back the way he’d come, trailing a cloud of fragrant cigar smoke.

I noticed Dwight noticing Koffer’s sturdy leather shoes as the man walked away and I punched his arm hard. “I thought you were off duty.”

“I am.” All the same, he looked closely at the place where Koffer had stood. The ground had been trampled into dust and we saw that his shoes had left little triangles across the instep and heel.

We walked on down the busy midway, occasionally bumping into people we knew, though most were strangers. Invitations came thick and fast from the colorfully lit game stands to come on over and try our luck, test our skills, step right up and have a little fun.

“You gonna win me a stuffed animal to guard my bedroom door?” I teased.

He shot me a sidelong glance and his lips twitched. “Never noticed that you needed one,” he said dryly.

That was so like the old Dwight that I laughed in relief and linked my arm through his.

“What?” he said.

“I really was afraid things might change between us,” I confessed. “But you were right. They haven’t, have they?”

“Well, one thing’s changed,” he drawled. “Or weren’t you paying attention last night?”

“Oh, I was paying attention.”

The tingle was suddenly back and I could have jumped his bones right there. (It really had been a long dry summer.)

“I even took notes,” I added demurely.

As if reading my mind, he said, “How about we deliver April’s message and get out of here?”

We drew near Tally’s Dozer, and remembering the errand I was on made my thoughts take a more serious turn.

At first, I thought the game was unattended because I couldn’t see anyone looking out over the top. We went around to the door flap and I opened it to peer inside. “Tally?”

She was seated on a low stool at the rear of the space, leafing through a magazine. “Oh, hey, Deborah! When did you get here?”

She rose and came out to join us.

“You know Major Bryant, of course.”

“Oh yes.” Her smile was so like Andrew’s, I wanted to go right over to his house and throw him back under that cold shower. Anything to bring him to his senses.

“Arnie told me how it all came out this evening. The kid that stole back his grandfather’s pictures? And the mother paid three-fifty to get them back? She must’ve really loved her father.”

“More like she loved her son and was glad you and your husband weren’t pressing charges,” I told her.

She gave a sad shrug. “Kids do crazy things sometimes.”

I put out my hand to her. “Tally, April came to see you this morning while you were out at your place with Dwight here.”

“Oh?”

“She wanted to meet you and tell you to be sure to invite as many of your friends tomorrow as you like. She and some of my sisters-in-law—your aunts—will he serving lunch after the service, and they don’t know how to fix for less than an army.”

That got a small smile. She started to speak when the booth on the far side of the Dozer suddenly exploded with flashing strobe lights and ear-piercing sirens that seemed to go on for a full ninety seconds. Everyone stopped in their tracks and turned to watch as the winner of the Bowler Roller stepped up to claim his prize.

“Thank God that only happens about two or three times a night,” said Tally when the lights and siren finally cut off. “Flash is one thing, but that damn siren’s a killer.”

“Pulls them in, though, doesn’t it?” I said, watching young men line up to try their luck at setting the bells and whistles off again.

“That’s the whole point,” Tally said with a resigned shrug.

One of her customers called for change, another was ready to cash in her prize chips. While we waited for her to come back, I glanced around the end of the tent where little children were splashing their hands in the water, trying for prizes at the duck pond. Across the way, a teenager was demonstrating to potential customers how easy it was to climb the rope ladder to reach the prizes at the top.

From the other side of the Dozer tent came the entrancing odor of fried dough sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. I was ready to follow my nose when Tally returned. Someone else immediately claimed her attention, though.

“Hey, Tal?”

A rough-looking man, late forties probably, with bloodshot eyes, full tattoos on both arms, and a day’s growth of whiskers leaned wearily against the end of the Dozer.

“Sam? When did you get in?” Tally said. “Did you get them?”

“Yeah, Arnie’s there. You seen Polly? How come she didn’t open up tonight?”

Dwight and I followed their eyes across the crowd to where Polly’s Plate Pitch was still dark and shuttered.

“She ain’t in the trailer and the girls say they ain’t seen her all day, neither.”

Tally shook her head. “I don’t know, Sam. It’s been so crazy here. You want to go ahead and open it up for me?”

“I’ll open it, but I can’t work it. I missed some of the road markers coming in and got turned around, wasted an hour. I gotta go get some sleep, Tal. I nearly run off the road just before I got here.”

“That’s okay, I’ll find somebody. Here, Deborah,” she said, untying her money apron and handing it to me. “Mind the Dozer for me a minute? Make change? If anybody wants to cash in for a prize, ask them to wait or come back later, okay?”

“Hey, wait!” I called. “I don’t think—”

Too late. She had disappeared into the crowd, leaving me holding the bag in the shape of a money apron.

“I don’t think this is something appropriate for a judge to be doing,” I told Dwight, who just shook his head in amusement.

“Don’t look at me, shug. If it’s bad for a judge, think about a deputy sheriff.”

“Oh, well. She’ll probably be back before anybody wants anything.”

We stood there by the Dozer and watched as the man went over, pulled some keys from his pocket, and began unlocking the flaps. One part folded down to reveal the words POLLY’S PLATE PITCH in bright red letters. The other part folded up and locked into place. It was lined with small multicolored lights that began chasing themselves as soon as he flipped a switch. Stacks of shiny plates in all colors and sizes gleamed beneath the lights. The game is a simple one: You just toss a quarter onto any plate. If it stays in the plate, then you could win one of the large stuffed animals dangling from a rod in the back. After surfing some of the carnival sites on the web yesterday morning, I had learned that the harder it is to win, the bigger and nicer the prizes.

Skee Matusik’s Lucky Ducky next door was a play-till-you-win with every player a winner. His prizes probably cost him a dime at the most. Same with the balloon race across from him. But the Bowler Roller, Polly’s Plate Pitch, and the rope climb next to it all had big prizes, so I knew they had to be a lot harder than they looked.

“Change, please!” someone called from the Dozer, and I stepped up into the well of the wagon, took the woman’s two dollar bills, and handed back eight quarters from Tally’s money apron.

It was fascinating to stand back here and watch quarters tumble over the side spills into the baskets beneath each station. I had a vague idea that the Harvest Festival Committee was supposed to get a percentage of the carnival’s take, but how was it decided? The honor system? I found myself thinking about cash-only businesses and the IRS. No paper trails here. How would the government go about guessing how much money the games on this lot took in? ‘Course that line of logic’s what got my daddy into trouble with the IRS all those years ago. He was never convicted for making or distributing white lightning. No, his conviction was for income tax evasion.

“I’m ready to cash in,” said a man’s pompous voice from the other side, a voice I recognized at once.

Reluctantly, I looked over the countertop and saw a startled Paul Archdale, the attorney who’d probably be running for my seat in the next election.

“Judge? Judge Knott?” Disbelief and disapproval were in his eyes. “What on earth are you doing in there?”

“Research,” I said blandly. “I thought I ought to see what goes on behind the scenes at a carnival so I can better understand why some of our rowdier citizens flip out. What about you?”

“Supporting the festival,” he said with returning righteousness.

He tried to hand me the poker chips he’d collected. I knew there was a system for equating chips with prizes, but I didn’t have a clue what it was.

“My goodness,” I told Paul. “You have supported the festival here tonight if you’ve played long enough to get that many chips.”

He flushed and muttered something about getting lucky.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to come back in about ten minutes when the owner’s here,” I said. “I have no idea how the prizes work.”

Archdale huffed away impatiently.

Dwight was leaning against the end of the Dozer with a broad grin on his face. “Research?”

I shrugged. “All I could think of.”

Across the way, the man Tally called Sam finished opening the booth just as Tally reappeared with a young woman who didn’t look much older than sixteen or seventeen.

We saw her giving the girl last-minute instructions, then the man left them with a weary wave of his hand and headed toward the trailer area. The girl stepped into the booth and smiled at the people who had immediately paused to play the simple-looking game.

Tally started back through the throng to join us. Before she’d gotten halfway to us, though, screams pierced the air. Even the music pulsing through the loudspeakers was no match for the girl’s terror. Plates went crashing as she stumbled from the booth, wide-eyed and gibbering and pointing to the huge stuffed pandas and Sesame Street characters hanging at the back.

Dwight rushed over and I followed.

There among the prizes hung the body of a woman with bright red hair.

Polly Viscardi.