Slow Dollar

CHAPTER 18

TUESDAY MORNING (CONTINUED)

Most funerals are not totally somber and Braz’s was no exception.

After Duck Aldcroft escorted Tally, Arnold, and Val up to the house, his people quickly lowered the casket into the ground, filled all the dirt back in, mounded the excess, and covered the grave with the blanket of roses. They took away the chairs and the navy blue carpeting, and they left the matching navy blue tent discreetly lettered ALDCROFT FUNERAL HOME to shelter the grave and the flowers heaped there from sun and rain. As Daddy had promised, there were plenty of wreaths and sprays from the rest of the family and one as big as a tractor wheel that Ralph Ferlanski, the other carnival owner, must have sent. It was composed of large white spider mums, yellow daisies, and the biggest bronze mums I’d ever seen. Gold lettering on the burnt orange ribbons read FROM YOUR CARNIVAL FAMILY.

Family’s where you find it, isn’t it? And I was proud of mine today. They were everywhere, talking, making folks welcome, urging people to fix themselves a plate of fried chicken, sliced ham, meatloaf, chicken pastry, and vegetables of every kind. And what about another serving of cake, pie, or peach cobbler? They fetched ice and slices of lemon for tea, cream and sugar for coffee, fresh cups of water. They showed people where the bathroom was and made sure there were plenty of paper towels.

Kay, the girl who’d found Polly Viscardi’s body, was about the same age as Jane Ann and Jessica, and Candy and Eve weren’t much older. All five of them sat along the edge of the old board porch, swinging their legs while they ate, and my nieces were peppering them with questions about carnival life and listening to the answers with such uncritical interest that I could feel a definite easing of tension.

April swooped by and gave me a hug on her way to the front parlor where Andrew, A.K., and Ruth were trying to bridge the years with Tally. The rest of the family were tactfully giving them space so as not to overwhelm her with so many of us at once.

Arnold and their son Val had gone out to eat on the front porch with Daddy, Dwight, Stevie, Reese, and those of my brothers who live close enough to come. The rocking chairs and swings were as full as the plates the men were balancing on their knees, but several offered to get up and give me their seats. I told them to stay as they were and perched on the steps with a red plastic cup of iced tea to listen with the others as Arnold described their tentative plans for the farm.

“You going to become a farmer?” Haywood asked dubiously, making short work of a drumstick.

“Not like you people.” Arnold took a sip of tea and set the cup down on the floor beside his chair. “We were thinking about turning the place into a Halloween attraction. If it all works out, we could come in off the road next year or year after next at the latest. Become forty-milers. We’ve already got the haunted house and if we weren’t hauling it up and down the eastern seaboard, losing bits and pieces every time we jump, I think we could make it something really special. I’ve got a good mechanic working for me right now, and Val has some great ideas for pop-ups and illusions if we can only figure out all the wiring and lighting.”

We’d all been sneaking glances at Val, trying not to stare as we cataloged every feature of this new twig that had popped out on the family tree, and Arnold’s words gave us permission to look our fill. I knew that after he left with his parents this afternoon, my kin would be saying how he was built just like Reese at that age, how his hair was like the little twins’, his hands and feet as big as theirs, and Did you see the way he cocks his head when he’s listening? Just like you do, Daddy.

From his wheelchair on the other side of Haywood, Herman said, “I’m just a plain ol’ everyday electrician, but that sounds like the kind of thing Annie Sue’d love to mess with. You need to talk with her.”

“Yeah? The one who was singing down there? She knows electrical gimmicks?”

“When she was twelve,” I laughed, “she wired her mother’s electric stove so that every time Nadine turned on one of the back burners, the doorbell rang.”

“And remember the time she wired the toilet seat in y’all’s bathroom, Herman?” Haywood chuckled as he related another family legend for the newcomers’ amusement. “It played ‘Remember Me’ every time he lifted the seat so’s to remind him to put it back down when he was finished.”

Val laughed out loud and Arnold nodded. “Sounds like someone we could use, all right.”

For his parents’ sake, the teenager seemed to be making an effort to be friendly today, and he said, “Tell them about the corn maze, Dad.”

“Oh, yeah.” Tally’s husband borrowed a match from Daddy and lit a cigarette. “We thought we could put four or five acres into a really elaborate corn maze.”

“You mean that fancy-colored corn?” asked Robert, who was working on a ham biscuit. “They’s a pretty good market for Indian maize over in Cary and Apex.”

“That’s another possibility,” said Arnold, “but I was talking m-a-z-e, not m-a-i-z-e. I want to grow tall field corn and have paths all through it for people to get lost in. Pumpkins, too. Charge five bucks apiece to go through the maze, two bucks for the haunted house, and maybe sell the pumpkins for a couple of bucks each.”

“How much land you got over there?” Seth asked, interested.

“Eighty-three acres.”

“Woods? Creek?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well, if you had you a tractor and a flatbed, you could give hayrides, too. Littie kids love them.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely gonna need to buy a tractor, but we could lend you plows and disks to get you started,” Zach said.

When they started talking the merits of one tractor over another and just how much horsepower Arnold would need and where he might find a good used one, I gathered up the plates of those who’d finished eating.

Dwight stood up, too, and said, “Here, let me get that door for you.”

He held the screen door wide, then followed me on down the hallway. As we passed the parlor, I glanced inside. Tally was leaning back against the faded couch cushions and looking a little more herself while April and Ruth made light conversation. A.K. still looked uneasy and Andrew looked dazed, but I had a feeling it was going to work out. It was probably way too late for any true father/daughter relationship, but just connecting ought to help the healing on both sides.

Dwight and I went straight through the house to the back porch to dump the empty plates in the trash barrel and fix a couple for ourselves now that the line had thinned out. We passed Minnie, Isabel, and Zach’s wife Barbara in the hallway, on their way out to the porch with their own plates. Nadine, Doris, and Maidie were at the kitchen table in deep conversation with a couple of carnival women I recognized by sight though not by name.

Outside, the rest of the crowd were in groups spread out around the yard. Some were seated in lawn chairs under the shade trees, others were braving the sun on a knee-high wall next to a border of gardenias, hydrangeas, spireas, and forsythias, bushes whose flowering time was finished for the year. We paused to watch Windy Raines and Skee Matusik, who were giving some of the younger kids a demonstration of two-man juggling. They were surprisingly good. Windy was talking trash a mile a minute and Skee kept adding in more lemons from a basket little Bert held out to him till one of them suddenly lost the rhythm and lemons went flying all over the grass.

As the children scrambled to pick them up and asked to be shown the first moves, Zach’s Emma came out with a box of Band-Aids for Skee, who had raw blisters on both his heels. Bert was still of an age that Band-Aids are wonderful. He immediately found a half-healed hurt on his hand and demanded one, too. With his sun-wrinkled skin and old, discolored tattoos, Skee Matusik was an unlikely grandfather figure, but I guess his years of working the Lucky Ducky had made him wise to the ways of children. Before tending his own hurt, he very seriously and very carefully unwrapped a Band-Aid, smoothed it across Bert’s small hand, and said, “There you go, Bo.”

At that moment, Tasha came around the corner with Sam, who had cleaned up better than I expected. A good night’s sleep, a shower, and a shave made a world of difference. He wore clean khakis, a long-sleeved dark purple knit shirt, and brown loafers with no socks. By now, he must have been told that Polly Viscardi was dead, but from the proprietary way Tasha was filling a plate for him, he wasn’t in heavy mourning.

I saw Skee and Windy exchange lifted eyebrows and heard Windy mutter, “Guess he gets to keep on sleeping in the cathouse.”

Almost against my will, my eyes went to Tasha’s feet. Blue leather with thin soles.

Adding a slice of tomato to my plate of field peas and butter beans, I followed Dwight out to a bench under a pecan tree. He looked very nice today in his tan slacks and shirt and a tweedy brown jacket that matched his brown eyes. I resisted the impulse to smooth down the unruly cowlick that always stood up.

“At least Andrew and Tally are talking,” I said. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

“How’d you get him over here?” Dwight asked. “Seth said he wasn’t coming.”

“Seth just didn’t use the right argument.”

He bit into a chicken thigh. “I see you told Mr. Kezzie.”

“Daddy spoke to you?”

“No, but when I got up to open the door for you just now, he gave me a wink.”

“He’s really pleased about it,” I said. “Probably feels I’m getting the best end of the bargain. What about Miss Emily? Did you tell her last night?”

“Yep.”

“How did she take it?”

He laughed. “You mean you didn’t see the skyrockets going off?”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. Oh, and she gave me this.”

He hooked a ring from his pocket, a lovely, old-fashioned square-cut diamond in an antique setting. A stray spot of sunlight through the thinning leaves caught the stone and it flashed blue fire. “She gave her own ring to Rob when he and Kate got engaged. This was her mother’s.”

He held it out to me, but I couldn’t take it. Agitated butterflies were tumbling around in my stomach so wildly that for an instant I thought I was either going to pass out or throw up.

“What’s wrong?” Dwight said as I took long deliberate breaths in and out to steady myself.

“You okay?” he asked, starting to look worried.

I nodded. “Stupid of me. Bad reaction. It’s just that telling your mother, my father, and now your grandmother’s ring—it’s really going to happen, isn’t it?”

He closed his hand around it. “Not if you hate the whole idea so much that you’re gonna keep turning green every time you think about it,” he said grimly.

“I don’t, I’m not,” I protested. I took his hand, uncurled his fist, and slipped the ring on my finger. It was a perfect fit.

“I can’t wait to start wearing it,” I lied, handing it back for safekeeping till he had told his son and I would have to put it on for all the world—and my family—to see. “When are you going up to tell Cal?”

“I would’ve already gone if Polly Viscardi hadn’t been killed last night.”

“It wasn’t suicide? She didn’t kill herself because she’d killed Braz?”

“Nope. It’s murder with a sloppy attempt to look like suicide.”

“You can tell that quick? Before the autopsy?”

“All Percy had to do was look at the rope with a magnifying glass,” said Dwight, speaking of Percy Denning, the deputy who’d had extra training as their crimescene specialist. “Whoever killed her used a rough jute rope. Looped it over the pipes that supported the canvas roof of the stand, then hoisted her up. Percy could tell by the direction the fibers had been rubbed that the line had been pulled across the pole and tied off while it supported her whole weight. If she’d tied it off first, then jumped off the edge of the platform like we were supposed to think, the fibers would have been rubbed in the opposite direction.”

“Then she wasn’t the one who stomped Braz?”

“Oh, we’ve still got her tagged for that.”

I looked at him questioningly.

“Her shoes. We’ve sent them to the SBI lab for confirmation. She’d cleaned them up pretty good, but Percy’s pretty sure from the heel print in the Dozer and the sample he scraped out of the crack between the heel and the shoe itself that she’s the one stomped Hartley to death. The blood type’s consistent with his.”

“Wait a minute! Does that mean her death was revenge for his?” I didn’t like this scenario one little bit. Not when the three people most likely to want Braz’s death avenged were Tally, Arnold, and Val.

“Too soon to know,” he answered.

“What about time of death?”

“Sometime between one A.M. and daybreak. The night guard was supposed to make the rounds at twelve, two, and four, but there’s just his word for it that he did. Even then, there was lots of time in between. He says he would have noticed if there was anybody unauthorized on the lot.”

“What about authorized?”

“He said the patch—Koffer—was still roaming around at midnight, so we talked to him, too. Something about measuring one of the game stands to see if it was longer than the independent agent claimed. I gather they pay by the running foot for the privilege of booking in with the carnival and some of the agents try to fudge the figures. He says it cuts down on the hassles just to measure when no one else is around. He also says he was asleep in his own trailer by one o’clock.”

“Polly’s bunkmates say the last time they saw her was around one. That they went to bed and she stayed up to read.”

“Yeah, Richards told me. They say anything else she might not’ve heard?”

Feeling like a total snitch, I repeated the gossip Tally had told me about Polly’s love life, about her current lover whom she’d taken from Tasha, and her former lover—the corn dog cook who was also Eve’s father. Probably none of it was relevant, but I’d have felt even worse if I didn’t tell him and it turned out to be important.

“Tally didn’t ask me not to repeat it,” I said, “and she’s clicked on the possibility that we’re more than friends. All the same—”

“Don’t worry, shug. It’s probably common knowledge on the lot. They won’t know it came from you.”

I glanced at my watch. A quarter past twelve and I was due in court at one.

“I need to get rolling, too,” Dwight said. “Want to ride into Dobbs with me?”

“And you’ll bring me back this evening?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Just let me go say goodbye to Tally and Arnold.”

As we walked back through the house, I almost bumped into Stevie, who did an abrupt about-turn and ducked into the bathroom.

I leaned close to the door. “You can run but you can’t hide forever, Stevie Knott. You and I are due for a little prayer meeting.”

I tiptoed away. Let him think I was waiting outside the door to snag him.

Out on the porch, we found that several of the carnival people had already left and the Ameses were getting ready to leave themselves. Tally wanted to walk down to the grave site alone with her son and husband, so I hugged her goodbye and said that I’d get over to see her again before the carnival closed.

Then I hugged Andrew, who gave me a bear hug back. Lastly, I told Daddy I was going to leave my car there for the time being and ride over to the courthouse with Dwight. He’s played too much poker to give us away, and as for the others, they take Dwight so much for granted that no one seemed to think it odd that he’d make the round-trip out from Dobbs twice in the same day. Indeed, April was still so clueless that she even smiled up at him and said, “We’re going to have to get you and Sylvia out for supper one night before too much longer.”

Dwight turned a becoming shade of red, which made my brothers laugh and rag him about wedding bells in his future.

We were halfway to Dobbs before I remembered the pictures I’d found.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dwight said. “Doesn’t look like those lockers have anything to do with Hartley’s death after all.”

“But what about the person who tried to break in the shed out at the farm when the gang of three were liberating Lamarr’s grandfather’s pictures?” I asked. “How do you explain that?”

“I don’t. Sure would’ve helped if they’d gotten a good enough look to say if the person was male or female. It might be sheer coincidence, you know. A burglar totally unconnected with the carnival, just looking to take what he could.”

“So instead of ransacking the house or unlocked sheds, he—or she—headed straight for the most securely locked outbuilding on the place?”

“Okay,” he conceded, “but if it was Viscardi, we still don’t know why she would want Hartley dead. That story she told us about his blackmail attempt? Maybe he had something on her more serious than who she was sleeping with. Something she couldn’t get out of just by having him beat up.”

“She really did have him beat up?”

“Oh, yes. Jamison interviewed that Sam Warrick and he admitted it. Didn’t want the Ameses to know, but from what we gather, everybody knew it but Mrs. Ames, including her husband and her son.”

So we were back to the Ameses again, with yet another reason to dislike Polly Viscardi.

Even with Dwight driving, we had plenty of time to get to Dobbs and he kept the truck on back roads that were more direct as the crow flies but meandered through the country. Summer was definitely winding down. Wild asters made patches of blue along the ditch banks, and wasteland was yellow with coreopsis, sneezeweeds, and goldenrod. Pokeberries hung in clusters from dark purple stalks and sassafras leaves were bright red and orange against the pines.

“We still don’t have a viable theory as to how Viscardi killed Hartley without being seen,” he said.

I’d been thinking about that myself ever since last night when Arnold told us about Polly’s shoes being bagged.

“Her game is one that’s pretty hard to win,” I said. “That’s something I picked up on the Internet. Unless the coins have a lot of backspin or land just right, they simply won’t stay on the plates. And remember, you don’t have to buy chances to play. People just step up and start tossing. In fact, her main reason to be there was to keep them back behind the foul line.”

Dwight looked dubious. “Okay, so maybe she could leave it for the two or three minutes it’d take her to get across to the Dozer, do Braz, and get back. But why didn’t anybody see her enter or leave?”

“Windy Raines’s Bowler Roller,” I said. “Remember last night when we were talking to Tally? Those strobe lights and the siren? How we all stopped and stared over there and it seemed to go on forever? Even people playing the Dozer went around to that side to watch till the siren stopped. That must have been when she did it. The Bowler Roller’s another one that’s hard to win, but it does happen three or four times an evening. All she’d have to do is wait till it went off, then take advantage of all the lights and noise and people looking there instead of at the Dozer.”

“Makes about as much sense as anything we’ve been able to come up with,” Dwight said, pulling around a tractor and flatbed loaded with irrigation pipes. “The ME couldn’t tell if the injury to the back of his head was before or during the actual stomping. Mayleen thinks she either hit him over the head or got him to lie down by telling him it would stop his nosebleed. She says her grandmother used to put a cold spoon on the roof of her mouth or cold metal across the bridge of her nose to stop the bleeding.”

“Cold quarters?” I wondered.