Slow Dollar

CHAPTER 3

FRIDAY NIGHT (CONTINUED)

I backed out quickly and bumped into Dwight, who was holding dollar bills in his own hand.

He grabbed my arm to steady me, took one look at my face, and said, “What’s wrong, shug?”

I swallowed and pointed to the space behind me.

He squeezed through the narrow opening, then immediately stepped back out and reached for the phone clipped to his belt to call for backup.

As Reid came over to see what was going on, Tally Ames darted out of the midway crowd with a frown on her face.

“Hey,” she called. “No customers in the hole, okay?”

Her eyes ran across the top of the game as if expecting a head to pop up from behind the glass boxes with their endlessly moving blades. “Braz!”

With an exasperated sigh, she said, “I swear I’m gonna kill him, sneaking off again and leaving the store to run itself. Here, y’all need change? I’ll get it for you.”

She tried to move past Dwight, but he held his ground in front of the opening. “Sorry, ma’am.” To Reid, he said, “I saw a couple of town officers around here earlier. Run see if you can find them.”

While my cousin for once went off to do as he was told without asking why, Tally protested. “Officers? Hey, wait a minute, Mister. You got a problem with Braz or this store, you talk to me, okay? I’m the owner. And if I can’t fix it, I’m sure our patch—”

“Wassup, Tail?” asked a man who was working the duck pond next door, an idle pond now since all his little customers seemed to have gone home to bed.

She turned to him gratefully. “Is Dennis still on the lot, Skee?”

“Yeah, I saw him up at the gate a few minutes ago. Want me to get him?”

“Would you? And if you see Braz, tell him to get his tail back here right now, or he can just keep on going, okay?”

She swung back to me and said, “Look, Judge, can’t you tell your friend here—”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ames.” I was almost positive that it was her older, missing son who lay just beyond the hinged flap, and even though Dwight was shaking his head at me, I couldn’t not start preparing her for the worst. “There’s been an accident. And this is Dwight Bryant of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department.”

“Accident? Sheriff’s department?” She glared at us suspiciously. “What sort of accident?”

The African American couple who’d been feeding quarters into the machine next to Reid started to edge away, and Dwight said sharply, “You two! Wait right there, please.”

“Hey, this ain’t nothing to do with us,” said the man.

“Woods, isn’t it?” asked Dwight. “Vernon Woods?”

I couldn’t quite remember the charges—DWI? Possession of an illegal substance?—but I was pretty sure that he’d stood before me in a courtroom in the last year or so. From the way he was scowling, he seemed to remember me, too. The woman tugged at his sleeve, and he subsided.

Not Tally Ames, though. She was getting more and more upset, yet, curiously, the vibes I was getting were not because she feared something had happened to her son, but more as if she feared he’d instigated whatever it was that required the law.

Happily, Reid soon returned with two of Dobbs’s finest close at his heels, one black officer, one white. And from the opposite direction came help for Mrs. Ames in the form of a good-looking white man in jeans and a short-sleeved white polo shirt. A little shorter than Dwight, he was slender, with a small gray moustache that was as neatly trimmed as the salt-and-pepper hair beneath his gimme ball cap. Without the least hesitation, he instantly deduced who was in charge here and held out his hand to Dwight.

“Dennis Koffer, Officer. I’m the show’s patch. They tell me there’s a problem?”

At the time, I’d never heard the term “patch,” but Dwight clearly had. He shook the man’s hand and said, “I’m afraid so. Someone’s been hurt here.”

“Dead?” Koffer asked shrewdly.

Dwight nodded.

“Who?”

“We don’t know yet.”

Koffer nodded almost imperceptibly toward the door flap and lifted an inquiring eyebrow.

Dwight nodded again.

“Want me to take a look?”

“Maybe in a few minutes, after my people get here.”

By now, Portland and Avery had begun to realize that something was wrong and had come around with their fish and teddy bear to join the group. Sylvia trailed them with a happy smile on her face and both hands so full of quarters and prize tokens that she could hardly keep from dropping some. She hadn’t been bragging. She really was good at this game.

Abruptly, she realized that the fun and games were over. “Dwight?”

“Someone’s been hurt,” he said. “Looks like I’m going to be tied up for a while. Reid? You mind driving her home? I’ll call you tomorrow, Sylvia.”

Reid nodded and Sylvia said, “Sure thing, honey.”

I was surprised and, okay, yes, a little impressed that she didn’t fuss or exclaim or make a big deal of it. Of course, this couldn’t have been the first time one of their evenings was cut short. Goes with the territory when you’re seeing a sheriff’s deputy.

“We’ll head on out, too,” said Avery. “Deborah?”

I glanced at Dwight, thinking he’d want to question me about what, if anything, I’d noticed, but he’d turned back to Dennis Koffer and was conferring in low tones.

“Thanks, Avery,” I said, “but my car’s here and I’ll be okay.”

“You’re sure?” asked Por. “You know you’re welcome to crash with us tonight.”

It wouldn’t have been the first time. We each know where the other’s house key’s hidden and we run in and out as freely as sisters. Now I patted her arm and said I’d be fine. “You need a good night’s sleep and Avery needs to get that fish in your pond before it dies.”

Several squad cars arrived, followed by the county’s crime-scene van and an EMS truck. They drove straight down the midway. The crowd had been thinning, but all the people still there now surged toward the flashing blue, red, and orange lights, ready to gawk at this new attraction. I hung off to the side, hoping none of my family was still around, or, if any were, that they wouldn’t connect this with me.

Around the lot, flaps were being closed and secured on the various games, lights were turned off, and several of the concessionaires, including the man called Skee, the woman we’d met earlier at the guessing booth, two younger women from the cotton candy wagon, and presumably the Polly of Polly’s Plate Pitch, opposite the Dozer, gathered in a protective clump around Tally Ames. I’d heard that carnival people form a tight-knit community and now I was seeing it in action.

Someone pulled the plug on the upbeat country-western music that had pounded through the loud speakers all evening just as Tally’s teenage son from the Cover the Spot game came running up and the boy’s question was audible to everyone. “Mom? What’s wrong? What’s Braz done now?”

She shrugged, then said something to him in a low voice that sent him loping down the midway to eel through two concessions at the end where he disappeared from my view. A cluster of travel trailers and eighteen-wheelers were parked out there beyond the line of game booths—“stores,” in Tally’s usage.

The newly arrived officers immediately began stringing yellow tape to establish a perimeter around the tent, and Dwight told two of them to start collecting garbage bags from all the trash containers.

“I don’t know if a weapon was used, but if it’s been dumped, I want it found. Any bloody rags or paper napkins, too.”

Normally, Dwight’s so slow-talking and laid-back that most times you’d never know he spent several years in Army Intelligence. He makes it easy to forget that they don’t take just anybody and they don’t give rapid promotion just because they like your looks.

“Hey, Deborah,” said my nephew Stevie. “What’s happening?”

“Somebody at the Dozer get hurt?” asked Eric Holt.

“Looks like it,” I said noncommittally. “Did y’all play it tonight?”

A glance passed between them.

“Yeah, for a few minutes,” said Stevie. “Then we decided to do more rides.”

“Was there someone here making change?”

“Yeah, a guy about our age, maybe a little older. Is that who got hurt?”

Before I could answer, Dwight borrowed the hand mike from the game next door and addressed the crowd. “Anybody who played this game tonight, we ask you to speak to the officer over here to my left. The rest of you can go on home. There’s nothing more to see here.”

Even before he spoke, I’d noticed several don’t-want-to-get-involved types melt away toward the entrance, but Dwight had already posted someone there at the gate to take down the names of everybody still on the lot. He wouldn’t be able to catch them all, of course. The place was too porous. But with close questioning and crosschecking, I was willing to bet he could come up with the names of ninety-five percent of the people who’d come to the carnival today and surely one of them would have seen something.

I looked around for Stevie and Eric but they were gone.

Without telling the deputy they’d played the Dozer.

All this time, there was an eerie glow from the floodlights aimed at the floor inside the wagon, and now the photographer stepped out to let a colleague start collecting any physical evidence. He handed one of the instant prints to Dwight, who showed it to Dennis Koffer, who confirmed my original guess.

“It’s Braz, Tally.”

“Braz?”At first she seemed incredulous. Then her head began to shake back and forth in denial. “No! Oh God, no! How? What happened?”

She tried to duck under the yellow tape, but was held back.

Across the lot, I saw Val Ames returning with a wiry man of middle height and a receding hairline.

Pushing through the stragglers who probably wouldn’t leave till they were chased with a stick, he roared, “What the hell’s going on, Dennis?”

Tally Ames had been watching him, and now she burst into tears, rushed to him, and buried her head on his shoulder. “It’s Braz. He’s been hurt bad, Arn. He’s dead.”

“Arnold Ames,” Dennis Koffer told Dwight. “Tally’s husband. Arn, this is Major Bryant of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department. He and the judge here were playing your Dozer when they found Braz in the hole.”

Colleton County’s in the process of switching away from the old coroner system, and the doctor who’s acting as interim medical examiner came over and told Dwight that he was ready to have the body transported to Chapel Hill for autopsy as is required in cases of violent death.

Uniformed officers of the Dobbs PD moved people back even further so that the boxy EMS truck could move in closer. The techies had draped the still form before lifting him out onto the gurney. As they transferred him into the ambulance, Tally Ames’s low sobs were the only sound until the ambulance drove slowly away and murmured speech returned to the onlookers.

The crime scene technician went back inside in case there had been anything under the body that he’d missed the first time. When he came back out, he extinguished the floods, packed up the van, and told Dwight he was finished for now.

“I’d like to come back tomorrow morning, though. In the daylight.”

Dwight nodded, then asked the Ameses if there was someplace private where they could sit down and talk.

Tally Ames looked around. “Dennis?”

“You could use the cookhouse,” he suggested, pointing toward the one food stand that offered places to sit down and eat. Four wooden picnic tables with attached benches stood beneath a yellow tent. “We can close the flaps so you can be private.”

“What about the Dozer?” asked Mr. Ames. “We got close to five hundred dollars in quarters there.”

“I’m going to leave a guard here for tonight,” said Dwight, “but if it’d make you feel better, you can let the sides down. I assume they lock? I’ll ask you not to go inside till we’re finished tomorrow morning.”

The man nodded and looked around for some of his help. “Binga? Herve? Raggs?”

The three men slipped under the tape. Inside their glass boxes, the Dozer blades moved back and forth until one of the men disconnected the power cord that snaked from the back side.

As the men lowered the sides of the game and locked them in place, the carnival’s patch asked Dwight, “What about tomorrow? Saturday’s usually our biggest day. You’re not going to keep us from playing tomorrow, are you?” He glanced at the Ameses. “No disrespect, Tal, Arnie, but you know we can’t afford to close tomorrow.”

“We know,” Arnold Ames said grimly.

“We’ll get someone to cover for you,” said Koffer, and murmurs of agreement from the other carnies backed him up.

“There’s no reason you can’t open the rest of the carnival,” said Dwight. “If we keep these tent flaps shut, we can come in and out without anybody hardly knowing we’re here.”

I realized that Dwight probably wasn’t going to get to me tonight and that I might as well go on home, but thinking of how the Ameses were strangers in a strange town, I slipped over to them and said, “If there’s anything I can do to help with the legalities—”

Before either adult could speak, their son glared at me with hot, resentful eyes. “We don’t need the help of any damn Knotts. Just leave us the hell alone!”

The boy’s hostility was like a slap across the face, and I could feel my cheeks flushing.

Arnold Ames glared at him. “Shut your mouth, Val! Now! Help the others close up, then get to the trailer and stay there. You hear me?”

The teenager nodded with matching anger, then stomped off toward his game stand.

“I apologize for our son,” said Tally Ames, and her voice broke again as the mention of one son seemed to renew her grief for the one so newly dead. “He’s—We’re—”

“I understand,” I told her, even though I didn’t. Unless it was because I was the one who found his brother’s body, so let’s kill the messenger?

“We do appreciate your offer of help, though,” said her husband. He put his arm around Tally’s shoulders to guide her toward the tent with picnic tables. “Come on and sit down, Tal. Kay’s getting you something to drink.”

As I started to walk away, Dwight called to me. He was holding out that stupid stuffed Dalmatian. “Sylvia forgot her dog. Could you stick this in my truck for me on your way out?”

“You sure you don’t want to forget it yourself?” I was only half joking.

“And find myself in the doghouse tomorrow? Not hardly. Course, if you don’t want to be bothered—”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Hand it over.”

With the thing hoisted on my shoulder, I walked on down to the main gate. The patrol cars and emergency vehicles had effectively closed the carnival for this night. Most of the gaming concessions were shuttered tight and looked shabby and forlorn with but a scattering of unflattering security lights to illuminate their gaudy fronts. Deputy Mayleen Richards had rigged herself a flat surface for her laptop and was typing in names and addresses so efficiently that only a few people were still in line when I got there, and the line moved briskly.

She smiled at the dog on my shoulder. “Oh, hey, Judge. I see you got lucky.”

“Not me, your boss.”

As she entered my name and numbers on the glowing screen, I made my voice casual. “Many of my relatives here tonight?”

Her sturdy fingers manipulated the keyboard and the list she’d compiled obligingly sorted itself in alphabetical order. Haywood and Herman and their wives had been there along with Robert and Doris and some of their grandchildren. Several of my nieces’ and nephews’ names were starred like mine to indicate they’d played the Dozer. As I’d feared, Stevie’s name wasn’t there at all, which made it a safe bet that Eric Holt’s wasn’t either. I made a mental note to look into it, but not tonight.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Dwight parked his truck, would you?”

Mayleen stood and shaded her eyes against the bright headlights of cars and trucks streaming from the parking area. There were still quite a few vehicles back there in the darkness and more than hall were pickups.

“Is that it down yonder towards the end?” she asked, pointing in what was also the general direction of my own car.

Shifting Mr. Dot to my other shoulder, I told Mayleen goodnight and headed across the gravel and grass lot. Dwight’s truck was there all right, but both doors were locked. I considered slinging the dog in the back to let it take its chances, but I know that enough of my fellow citizens would think this ridiculous object was something worth stealing, so I lugged it on over to my car and crammed it in the front seat, where it sat looking through the windshield as I fastened a seat belt around its bulk.

I wondered what Blue and Ladybelle would think if they caught sight of a dog like this in my car. Those two hounds belong to my daddy, but they like to lope across the fields and visit me, and they’re always trying to hitch a ride in my car if I start to leave while they’re there.

My brothers keep offering to get me a dog of my own even though I don’t want to bother with one just yet.

“You need you a good loud barker,” says Haywood.

“Protection,” says Herman.

“After all,” says Will, “you are living out there all by your lonesome.”

I should be so lucky

My so-called lonesome is only an illusion of isolation and nothing more. Daddy cut me off a few acres of the farm when I built out there, and while my plat’s surrounded by fields bordered in trees and brush so that no other house is visible, I wouldn’t have to yell loud to have half my family there in a heartbeat. The farm is criss-crossed by tractor lanes and somebody’s always passing by my place at any hour of the day and night, either one of the boys or one of their children. I say they’re being nosy, they say they’re just taking the shortcuts they’ve always taken.

Whichever, there are so many watchful eyes that only complete strangers or total fools would risk coming onto Knott land with evil in their hearts.

The lights of Dobbs dimmed in my rearview mirror as I drove westward under the three-quarter moon. I knew my surface thoughts of dogs and busybody brothers were just a stalling effort to keep my mind from playing an endless loop of that young man crumpled on the floor of the Dozer, his face like raw steak, those bloody quarters spilling from his mouth.

Blood money?

Money to keep his mouth shut?

Surely his killer intended some sort of symbolic statement with that grisly touch?

And why had his brother been so hostile? At the Pot O’Gold, even before I found Braz’s body, he hadn’t taken my outstretched hand when his mother introduced us. I’d ruled in favor of Ames Amusement Corporation and had put a judgment on those vandals that would repay any monetary loss they’d suffered. Was he mad because I hadn’t sent them to jail instead?

Or was he simply acting out some sort of adolescent angst with his parents and it wasn’t about me at all? And for that matter, why wasn’t that boy in school instead of traveling with a carnival?

“Not your problem,” said the pragmatist who lives in my I lead and tries to keep me from messing with things that aren’t my business.

From the other side of my head came the preacher who tries to keep me from acting only in my own self-interest. “The Ameses are poor wayfaring strangers.”

“With plenty of friends to comfort them,” said the pragmatist.

But there had been something odd about Val Ames’s words: “We don’t need the help of any damn Knotts.” As if it weren’t just me he was angry at, but other members of my family, too.

Had some of my nieces or nephews insulted him since the carnival came to town? Or gone down to Widdington last month and caused trouble? None of my brothers’children are bad kids, but they aren’t Sunday school saints, either. Andrew’s son A.K. spent a couple of weekends in jail last summer for vandalism and Herman’s Reese has brawled his way into overnight lockups a time or two. Some of the others, including the girls, have collected DWIs and misdemeanor possession of marijuana before settling into respectability. And let’s not talk about the times I’ve danced with the devil myself.

Haywood’s Stevie has always stayed out of trouble, though. So why had he and Eric Holt sneaked away from the carnival without telling Dwight’s people that they’d played the Dozer?

I wasn’t crazy about any of the possible answers.

Maybe it was time to listen to the pragmatist for a change, or as Daddy’s housekeeper Maidie would say, “Don’t trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.”

Nevertheless, blood-smeared quarters troubled my dreams all night, only they were blue beneath the blood, not silver.