Slow Dollar

CHAPTER 6

SATURDAY AFTERNOON (CONTINUED)

I stayed with my arm around Tally till the worst of her sobs eased off, then wet some paper towels with cold water so that she could soothe her reddened eyes.

“Tell me about Braz,” I said. “Why was he killed?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think.” My newfound niece pressed the wet towels to her eyes even as she shook her head in frustration. “Nobody that really knew him would hurt him.” She hesitated, choosing her words with care. “I mean... he’s had his problems. All kids do. And he wasn’t any angel, okay? I know that. I did the best I could, but hell, I was still a kid myself when I had him. If it hadn’t been for Irene Matusik, I’d have probably dropped him on his head the first week.”

“Who’s that?”

“Irene? She and her husband had the doublewide next door to Hartley’s trailer in Gibtown. Maybe you saw him last night? Skee Matusik, okay? She started with the duck pond he’s still running, Had a couple of other hanky panks, too. She loved children, but couldn’t have any on account of her bad heart. All the same, she’s the one showed me how to take care of Braz when he was born. What does a fifteen-year-old know about being a good mother if you had a tramp for your role model?”

I started to protest, but she brushed away my words with an impatient wave of her hand.

“You think I don’t know why Andrew Knott claims I’m not his? With my grandpa yammering at me how she was the whore of Colleton County? Maybe your brother’s right. Maybe I’m not any kin to you.”

“With those eyes? That mouth? What’s your real hair color?”

“Dirty blond. Even duller than yours,” she said with the same tell-it-like-it-is bluntness of some of my younger brothers.

“You’re kin,” I said firmly.

There was a framed snapshot on the ledge behind the couch of her family standing in front of a gleaming new Pot O‘Gold. There were palm trees in the background and a bright blue Florida sky. Tally was in the center, her husband had his arm loosely around her shoulder, and her younger son leaned against her other shoulder. A young man with long sandy hair pulled back in a ponytail stood slightly apart from them, his face in a shadow. His arms were tightly folded across his chest to make his muscles stand out, and there were tattoos running up both arms.

“Is that Braz?” I asked.

“He didn’t like to have his picture took, but we’d just got that ride and we were so proud of it. First brand-new one we ever bought. You know the smell of a new car? It’s not half as sweet as the money smell of a brand-new ride. This is the only picture I have with all four of us in it together.”

Her eyes filled again as she looked at her dead son. Never mind that his shadowed face was indistinct. I knew she was seeing every feature as sharply defined as the others in the photograph. To me, though, there was no mistaking that lanky build.

“Throw them both in with the rest of my nephews and you’d be hard-pressed to say which boy belonged where,” I said. “Did Braz have any cowlicks?”

Her smile was wobbly as her hand went unconsciously to her nape. “He and Val both got mine. Reason I can’t wear my hair real short.”

“Me too,” I said, lifting my hair so she could see my version of the cowlicks most all of Daddy’s descendants have on either side of their necks. “Daddy says his grandfather had them there, too.”

“I wish I had a better picture to show you, but everything’s back in Gibtown. Wait a minute, though.”

She got up and went into her bedroom. I heard a drawer open and close, then she was back, carrying a red billfold thick with credit cards and photographs.

“Here’s his graduation picture.”

For some reason, that surprised me. Carny kids graduate from regular high schools? But there he was, a head-and-shoulders shot in a cap and gown that hid his tattoos. He had a senior’s usual pimply chin and goofy, self-conscious grin, but there was a gold stud in his nose, two rings through his left eyebrow, and another three in the visible ear. His face was more oval than square, and while his eyes were Knott blue, all right, they were closer together than Tally’s.

“He was very good-looking,” I said. In truth, though, head piercings anywhere except the earlobes are so distasteful to me that I have to bend over backwards to stay objective in the courtroom whether it’s the plaintiff or the defendant who sports a lot of metal through his face. “His mouth and chin are different, though. He must have taken after his father.”

Tally shrugged. “Couldn’t prove it by me. I barely saw that guy in daylight, okay? I always thought Braz looked more like the pictures I’ve seen of my mother and grandmother when they were young.”

She took back the photograph and shook her head as she slid it into her billfold. “He was supposed to’ve taken out the rings and stud before he got to the photographer’s. When the proofs came back...” She shook her head. “Kids.”

“Yeah,” I said, both of us conveniently forgetting for the moment our own teen years of acting out.

From where I sat, I could see the whole length of the trailer and into the back bedroom. With the front wall popped out, it wasn’t much smaller per person than the spaces my brothers had shared growing up, but it appeared to hold only a single bed.

“He didn’t actually live with you?” I asked.

“Not when we’re on the road. He needed his own place. We fixed him like his own little room in a corner of the van. Mattress and box springs. A desk for his computer. A hookup for electricity. He’d shower over here, eat with us whenever he wanted, but most of the time he was pretty much on his own. It was what he wanted.”

I wondered how he and the younger boy had gotten along. An eight-year age difference with no linking siblings in between?

“It was the usual,” said Tally. “Val thought Braz picked on him. Braz thought we babied Val.” She shrugged and lit another cigarette. “And there were girls, of course. He was twenty-four, okay? A grown man. What could I say?”

Indeed.

“Dennis told me his face was smashed in. That his mouth was full of quarters. You’re the one found him like that, weren’t you?”

I nodded. “Why would anyone do that to him, Tally?”

“Polly said she saw a black guy hit him. Maybe he came back later.”

By the sudden set of her jaw, I knew there were things she wasn’t telling. Dropping the sodden paper towels into a nearby wastebasket, she went over to the refrigerator and pulled out more ice cubes to replace the ones that had melted while we talked.

“You said he wasn’t an angel,” I reminded her as she closed the refrigerator door. “They’ve already run his record, you know. It’s standard procedure.”

She dumped her ashtray and rinsed it out. “Your deputy friend tell you what they found?”

“Yes.”

Her back was still to me as she tore off another wad of paper towels, dried the ashtray, wiped a few stray drops off the counter, then wiped it a second time.

“He took against being on the road for a while, okay? Once he hit high school, he wanted to stay in Gibtown year-round. My friend Irene lived down the block from the new place Arn and me bought after Val was born. She said she’d keep an eye on him. She was like his grandmother, so I gave in and let him. Tell you the truth, it seemed easier than having him with us and listening to him bitch all the time, okay? He wasn’t a bad kid, but he could be a real pain in the butt when he put his mind to it.”

“Most teenagers can,” I said. “You’ve got a bunch of cousins who are living proof.”

“Yeah? Anyhow, Braz was a follower, not a leader, and even though he was my son, he couldn’t seem to read people the way you need to be able to read them if you’re in the life. So he started running with some wrong kids, broke into some pawnshops, and they left him holding the bag. Twice. He was a slow learner, okay? And I guess you know he served a few months for trying to sell a digital sound system a so-called friend of his gave him to pay off a debt. He forgot to tell Braz the stuff was stolen, and with his record, the judge didn’t believe him.”

She turned to face me and the sadness in her smile made my heart ache for her. “But he’s been clean for the last eighteen months, ever since he got his own laptop and started buying and selling online. He got along all right with everybody here this summer, our crew, the other agents. You ask any of them. ‘Course, he did like to stick his nose in everybody else’s business, like he was the boss, not Arnie. And other times he’d get on that computer when he was supposed to just be going to the donniker.”

“Donniker?” I asked.

“Toilet,” she translated.

I remembered her exasperation last night when she thought he’d deserted his post.

“Somebody probably had too much to drink and got pissed off about something. Braz could mouth off without thinking and sometimes he’d let the marks get under his skin. A couple of times—if Arnie hadn’t been there...? You’ll see. If it wasn’t that black kid that hit him the first time, it’ll be something as stupid as a drunk cake eater punching him out because the Dozer took all the rent money.”

I didn’t know whether to say “Oh, surely not” or “I hope so,” but it didn’t really matter. She was back to beating up on herself again.

“Oh God! If I’d only let him go to the auction last night instead of making him work!”

“What auction?”

“One of those self-storage places was having an auction down in Makely but we were shorthanded and I told him if he went, he could just keep on going ‘cause we were counting on him here.”

“Storage lockers like the one the Lincoln brothers had their tools in?”

“Those guys that put a knife through my ride? Yeah, I told you. People don’t pay the rent on them and they get put up for auction. A lot of time, it’s just junk. Old clothes. Ratty furniture. You’d be amazed at the garbage people’ll pay thirty-five dollars a month to hang on to. Sometimes, though, you can wind up with some interesting things. Braz took the bid on a locker last year stacked with books. None of them were all that old, but they were all first editions, okay? He bought them for like two-fifty, and by the time he sold the last lot on eBay, he made almost four thousand clear profit. The first year we started doing it, Arnie found an antique pocket watch with a solid gold chain. It was just crammed into a box full of buttons someone had cut off old shirts. That locker cost us seventy-five dollars, okay? He and Braz put a picture of that watch on eBay and the bidding went to just shy of eight thou.”

“Braz thought Arnie ought not to sell it so fast, get it appraised first. But Arnie always says that a quick dime’s better than a slow dollar. He’d rather make his profit and move on to the next lot. Braz, now, he always put a reserve on his stuff. He didn’t mind sitting on it till he got the price he thought it ought to bring.”

I listened to her talk some more about the odd things people abandon in self-storage lockers, everything from bicycles and surfboards to clothing and family photo albums, even wedding gifts still in their original gift boxes. All the time, though, I couldn’t help noticing her likeness to other members of my family—the way she held her head like Robert, the unconscious hand gestures Reese and Lee always use, the curve of her lips when she smiled and the sweep of her eyelashes that were both like Herman’s Annie Sue and Haywood’s Jane Ann.

Several of the kids were probably out there on the midway right now, squealing on the Tilt-A-Whirl, throwing darts at a balloon board. I wasn’t sure if all of them knew that Andrew had fathered a child before he married April, that A.K. and Ruth had a half-sister none of them had ever seen. Hell, I wasn’t even sure A.K. and Ruth knew.

And to learn that she existed in one breath and then hear in the next that it was her son who’d been murdered last night?

One thing was certain. I couldn’t tell any of them till I’d talked to Daddy.

As I stood up to go, Tally said, “You sure it’s going to be cool with your dad if we put Braz there?”

“I’m sure. We’ll have to tell the others, though. And as soon as they hear, they’re all going to want to meet you.”

“Do you have to do that right now?”

I couldn’t blame her for hesitating. It’s one thing to spend an hour or two in the courthouse uncovering paper facts about a grandfather, father, stepmother, half siblings, ten uncles, one aunt, and a yardful of first cousins who are no more than names in a database. It was quite another to think of meeting that many kinfolks in the flesh.

“How about we start with Daddy, Andrew, and April?” I said.

She took a deep breath. “I’ve handled drunks and crazies, even talked a cokehead out of trying to rape me after Hartley died, but I gotta tell you, Deborah, this scares me more than anything else.”

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Any thoughts of when you want the funeral?”

“Well, we’re booked here through next Saturday night and it’d cost us a bunch to breach the contract. We were planning to tear down that night and lay over at the farm a couple of days, then jump to Kinston. We don’t open till five on weeknights, so maybe one day this week, okay?” Tally looked suddenly bereft. “Only I don’t know when they’ll let us have him—his body back.”

I told her the name of Duck Aldcroft, the funeral director in Cotton Grove. “And I’ll call him, too, if you like. He’ll tell you what to expect.”

“We’re not religious,” she warned. “Arn and Val and me, all we want’s a graveside service, okay?”

“Duck’ll do whatever you want,” I assured her. I gave her my phone numbers. “Call me anytime. I’ll be in court here Monday. And what about you? Is there a number where I can reach you?”

She gestured to the cell phone plugged into its charger on the shelf behind me, and while she was writing down the number for me in my address book, there was a tap at the door.

It was the man who ran the duck pond next to their Dozer, the guy who’d found the carnival’s patch for her last night. Shorter than me, he was one of those wiry little white men who reach a certain age and then time stops. They look the same at eighty as they did at forty: wispy gray hair, weather-beaten face with deep lines around the eyes. Although his arms were free of tattoos except for a band of small red spiders around his scrawny wrist, the head of a bright green dragon peeked up past the neckline of his dark blue T-shirt. He wore dirty jeans and even dirtier white sneakers and carried a cardboard tray that held hamburgers and two capped drink cups.

“Arnie asked me to bring you something to eat, Tal,” he said, proffering the tray. “He said he’d be along in a few minutes. You heard any word yet on how it’s going? If they caught the guy who did it?”

His eyes were bright with curiosity.

“Hey, you’re the lady found Braz, right?”

“Right,” I said.

I knew Dwight or some of his people had probably already talked to him and it really wasn’t my place to ask, but I couldn’t resist.

“You worked next to Braz all evening, didn’t you?”

The man looked from me to Tally.

“It’s okay,” she told him. “Deborah, this is Skee Matusik. He’s known Braz since before he was crawling. His wife Irene’s the friend I told you about that used to babysit for me. Deborah and me, we’re kin to each other, Skee.”

“Yeah?” His face cleared but his eyes were still wary. “Yeah, I was there all evening, but there’s canvas between my store and the Dozer, and I was pretty busy till about nine.”

“Polly told Arn that he and some black guy were mixing it up. Braz wasn’t a fighter. What happened, Skee?”

“It was over before I knew it was happening,” he said with a shrug. “All I saw was some black and white kids pulling another black kid away. I looked around the corner of the tent and saw Braz sitting on the step of the Dozer with his nose all bloody, so I wet a towel in my pond and gave it to him. Polly came over, too. We asked him if he was all right and he said he was. Next time I looked around the corner, I didn’t see him. Figured he was taking a break.”

“No loud voices? Nobody running away?”

“Lady, this is a carnival. It was Friday night. Loud voices? Running? Who’d notice?”

“Who’s Polly?” I asked.

“Runs the plate pitch across the way from the Dozer.”

Through the open door, I saw Tally’s husband heading toward us.

I patted her shoulder and told her I’d be in touch soon.

As I threaded my way across power lines and cables that snaked through the grass, past the trailers and back to the midway, Dwight fell into step beside me.

“Buy you a chili dog?” he offered.

I kept on walking. “She didn’t have anything to say that you probably don’t already know.”

“Hey, did I ask?”

“No, but you were fixing to, weren’t you?”

He smiled down at me ruefully. “Well...”

“Fortunately for you, I’m starving, so yes, you can buy me a chili dog.”

“Unless you’d rather have barbecue?”

“That would mean the big twins and Isabel and Nadine,” I reminded him.

“Right. Chili dogs, then.”

Not that Dwight doesn’t enjoy their company, but he knew perfectly well that if we joined my brothers, there would be four conversations going at the same time and none would be the one he clearly wanted to have with me.

The murder didn’t seem to be affecting either the festival or the carnival. The beautiful weather had brought out a big crowd, and we had to wait in line several minutes for our dogs and drinks. I got bottled water, Dwight got something in a drink cup with ice.

“So what did she want?” he asked when we were settled with our food on a low wall out of the flow of foot traffic.

“Oh, this and that,” I said vaguely.

Normally I can tell Dwight anything. In this case, though, I didn’t feel that Tally’s true identity was something I could talk about to anybody till I’d told Daddy and Andrew.

“She was worried about the legalities of getting her son’s body back. And funeral arrangements. I gave her Duck Aldcroft’s number.”

A drop of chili landed on his blue tie and I wet my napkin with water and leaned over to wipe it off before it could leave a spot.

“She did tell me that he hadn’t been in any trouble with the law since he got involved with buying up storage lockers and selling the stuff on eBay and at flea markets.”

“Yeah,” said Dwight. “The van he’s been sleeping in looks like a thrift shop. Furniture, books, clothing.”

“Find anything useful?”

“I doubt it. The place had been tossed before we searched it.”

“What?”

“Yep. Least that’s what his stepdaddy says. Says Braz took after his mother. Place for everything and everything in its place. And it was still sealed from last night, so that means whoever tossed it probably did it between three o’clock when he took a computer break and the time we sealed it.” He took a swallow of his drink and frowned as he looked into the cup. “These damn things are more ice than drink.”

“I don’t suppose Ames knew what the tosser was looking for?”

“Says not.”

“Remember I told you about Tally Ames being in my courtroom this month?”

“Yeah. Someone vandalized her slide. So?”

I recapped the case for him in more detail. Since he’d been the one who arrested the Lincoln brothers on the larceny charge that sent them away two years ago, he listened intently.

“Don’t you see? They were so mad at Arnold Ames for buying their tools when they defaulted on the storage locker fees that they tracked him down and slashed his ride. What if Braz Hartley bought the locker contents that belonged to somebody who was even more violent than the Lincoln boys?”

“You reckon?” Dwight said thoughtfully. “Mayleen and Jack have been hearing that he and his brother didn’t get along. Don’t forget that more people are murdered by family members than by strangers.”

“So who was the stranger that punched him in the nose the first time last night?” I gibed.

“Who told you that?” he asked sharply. “Mrs. Ames?”

“No, it was the guy running the Lucky Ducky duck pond. Skee Matusik is his name. Said he didn’t see it actually happen, but a woman across the way did. A woman named Polly? Runs that game where you try to land coins on a plate?”

“We’re looking into it,” he said. “Leave it alone, Deb’rah.”

Usually when he’s warning me to mind my own business, there’s a blend of exasperation and amusement in his voice. This time I heard something different there. A real No Trespassing sign.

And suddenly I remembered Stevie. Who hadn’t given his name to either deputy last night.

And Eric Holt. Who could fit the description of some young black guy whose friends had pulled him of Braz and hustled him away.