Southern Discomfort

CHAPTER 11

LINE LEVELS

"The line level is used to test whether a line or cord is level. It is particularly useful when the distance between two points to be checked for level is too long to permit the use of a board and the carpenter's level. However, the line level will show a disadvantage at a long distance because the line has a tendency to sag."

Few crime scenes are what Aunt Zell would call neat, but the WomenAid house was a real mess.

Literally.

The yard was a muddy pigmire. Although it had been crisscrossed with car tracks and footprints, hours of rain had blurred them into a sameness impossible to differentiate.

Inside, the floors were littered with scraps of two-by-fours, bent nails, pieces of tar paper and insulation, and plastic drink cups. Plastic tarps lay crumpled in the corners or draped over the wall spacers. When we were there working in the late afternoon, Annie Sue and I had mucked back and forth to the truck, through the sawdust that had drifted over the concrete floor; and every time Stevie and I went in and out with stepladder and tools, we'd tracked yet another load of wet mud.

Dwight's crime scene people brought portable floodlights and they began to photograph every inch of the place inside and out, but I couldn't see as how they'd find much to help them. The heat they generated made the humid air even steamier.

I showed Dwight exactly where I thought I'd stumbled on the hammer near the front door. As it turned out, when I carried it back to where I found Annie Sue, I wound up dropping it less than three feet from where Carver Bannerman's body still lay, slumped over a sawbench like one of the plastic tarps, his pants unzipped but still in place.

"And you didn't see him lying there?" Dwight asked skeptically.

"Oh sure, you can say that, lit up like it is now. When I came in, though, there was nothing but my car lights. Everything was dark and shadowy. I told you I sort of thought Annie Sue was a roll of tar paper till I heard her moan, remember? And after that, taking care of her was all I thought about. It certainly didn't occur to me to start fumbling around to see if any of those other dark lumps were human bodies."

"Come here a minute," he said and took me off to the far side of the small house, out of earshot of his officers. His brown eyes were troubled as he looked deeply into mine. "Now listen, Deb'rah, and don't mouth off at me, 'cause this is for real. You sure this is the way you want to tell it?"

"What?"

"Well, think about it. If Annie Sue was the one who bashed his head in, it seems to me it'd be a clear-cut case of self-defense. The doctor can attest to her bruises and that blow on her head. She might not even have realized what she was doing. Fighting him off and all, what if she just grabbed the hammer and flailed away?"

"And then carried the hammer out to the living room for me to trip over and came back in here to pass out close to his body?"

"People with concussions do crazy things," he said stubbornly.

"True. But then wouldn't her hand be even bloodier than mine was?" I asked.

"Did she wash or—"

I was shaking my head. "No, no, and no. That's why I took her straight to the hospital instead of home. I wanted every scrap of physical evidence to remain on her body until it was documented. You and I both know that the first thing rape victims want to do is take a long hot shower, get clean again."

He nodded.

"I didn't want her near a bathroom till a nurse with a rape kit had gone over her body with a fine tooth comb." I winced at the cliché, suddenly remembering that it wasn't a trite figure of speech: Annie Sue's pubic area would indeed have been combed for foreign hairs.

"Bambi probably took fingernail scrapings, too," I said. "Even if Annie Sue'd rinsed her hands in the rain, his blood would still be there."

"I'll check," said Dwight. "But if Annie Sue didn't do it..." His voice trailed off and his face got even gloomier.

I was incredulous.

"You think I killed him?"

"Your fingerprints will be on the hammer. That's probably his blood on your skirt," Dwight said. "Say you came back and found Bannerman in the act of raping your niece. Say you had a hammer in your hand. Wouldn't you have smacked him over the head with it?"

"Damn straight!" I agreed. "But it didn't happen that way."

"You're sure."

"Dwight!"

"Okay, okay. If you say you didn't, you didn't. One more thing though." He seemed to be picking his words carefully. "You hear where they found Herman?"

My heart started to sink. "No."

"On Troop Road."

That was less than a mile from here and not on any beeline between his office and his house. "Going which direction?"

"Toward his house," said Dwight. "Away from here. It was like he wasn't going too fast when he passed out. The truck sort of coasted to a stop on the sidewalk, but he did bang his head. His face was bloody. And the time's about right."

Dwight thrust a big hand into his off-duty jeans and rattled his pocket change as he gazed at me speculatively. "So if you're sure that hammer was already sticky when you picked it up, guess I'd better have my techs take samples of the bloodstains in Herman's truck."

"I'm sure." I hated this scenario just as much as Dwight's first two, but if it were true...

"No jury in Colleton County ever convicted a man who killed his daughter's rapist."

"Even if he ran away and left his daughter behind, half-naked?"

"If he did that, it's because he was sick," I argued. "Not thinking clearly."

"Well, we'll worry about that down the road," Dwight said. "Right now, I want you to let Richards drive you first to Annie Sue's and then take you home."

"I'm perfectly capable of driving myself and—

He huffed at me in exasperation, just like one of my brothers. "You always got to argue, don't you? I swear I don't know why you gave up being a lawyer and took up the one job where you're supposed to listen to what people say and not fly off the handle before they finish talking."

"So finish," I snapped.

"I want Richards to collect the clothes Annie Sue was wearing tonight and I want that skirt and blouse you have on, too."

Before I could bristle, he gave me a sardonic look. "Preacher's wife, okay?"

He was right. And if I hadn't been so tired, he wouldn't have had to spell it out for me. As a judge, I not only had to appear above suspicion, I had to be able to prove it, too. Better to let them run my clothes through the system and verify that the bloodstains were wipes, not splatters, than to have awkward questions raised after the garments were cleaned. * * *

Deputy Mayleen Richards and I got to Annie Sue's clothes just seconds before Seth's Jessica tossed them in the washer. The whole house seemed to swarm with energetic young women and every single one of them had grown up watching their mothers so they knew how southern women were supposed to behave in a crisis.

Some were in the kitchen to load the dishwasher and put away the food Nadine had cooked before she'd rushed off to the hospital. Others had tidied the house, including cleaning up the bathroom behind Annie Sue. In fact, Jessica was only waiting for the last damp towel before starting the washer. Had I stayed to argue with Dwight, we'd have been too late.

The girls hadn't heard about Bannerman's death until we arrived, and they were wide-eyed as Richards scooped the clothes from Jessica's hands and put them in a brown paper sack.

"Carver Bannerman got his head smashed in?"

Some of my eye-for-an-eye nieces immediately declared he got what he deserved. Andrew's Ruth looked apprehensive though. When Reese rushed out of the hospital to look for Bannerman with violence in his eyes, her brother A. K. had gone with him. I squeezed her hand and told her not to worry, that Bannerman was probably dead before I carried Annie Sue to the hospital.

Paige Byrd and Cindy McGee were also there at the house. Paige kept saying, "If only we hadn't left when we did!"

Cindy's face was splotched and her eyes were red and swollen. When she heard that Bannerman was dead, fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, but at least she didn't moan and shriek and overdramatize like some of my nieces would have.

Amazingly, they didn't seem to notice, and Annie Sue had loyally kept her mouth shut about Cindy.

Knowing what I did, Cindy's misery seemed palpable, but I honestly couldn't tell whether it was (1) because her erstwhile lover was dead, (2) because he'd tried to rape her best friend, or (3) because, like Paige, she was blaming herself for leaving Annie Sue when Herman's tongue-lashing made them too uncomfortable.

Maybe it was (4)—all of the above.

Despite all the evening's shocks and a mild concussion that would have me in bed sound asleep by now, Annie Sue seemed to be bouncing back okay. As soon as she'd realized that all her injuries were external, she'd become giddy with relief. Before she'd had time to come down from that, she'd been sucker-punched with her father's collapse, which sent her into a crying jag, terrified that Herman might die.

Now, just as abruptly, her attacker was dead.

"It's so weird," she told Jessica and me as we helped her pack Nadine's cosmetics and night clothes. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry or just throw my head back and simply howl. It's like that time when I was little out at the farm, remember? When I almost stepped on a copperhead and started screaming and Granddaddy came and chopped his head off?"

Jess and I nodded. More of Annie Sue's dramatics, but it had become family lore. First she'd screamed from fright and then she'd bawled for an hour because the snake, though poisonous, had been killed.

Driving to Chapel Hill with Jess and a couple of the others would help. If she didn't fall asleep driving over, by the time they got there, they would have hashed and rehashed every detail of the whole evening. "I said— Then he— So what did you do? And then?"

Telling and retelling ought to blunt the knife edge of trauma before it could cut her too deeply.

Annie Sue had already packed her overnight bag and now she closed Nadine's.

"Wait a minute, honey," I said as the others picked up the bags and headed down the hall with them to Jessica's car.

Mayleen Richards didn't want to let me—or rather my clothes—out of her sight, but I asked her to wait down the hall and I stood in the open doorway so that she could watch without hearing.

Annie Sue's eyes grew large, but she sat down on the white hobnail spread that covered her parents' bed. She had changed into a pink floral jumpsuit and her shining chestnut hair was caught up in pink hair clips. Except for the scrapes on her elbows and chin, there were no outward signs of the mauling she'd taken.

"Dwight Bryant'll probably talk to you sometime tomorrow," I said, "and I'm sure he'll ask you if you were aware of anyone else in the house when Carver Bannerman jumped you?"

She shook her head. "No."

"Think carefully, honey. Could someone have been waiting for him out in his car?"

"Maybe," she answered slowly. "I didn't see. He didn't act like anybody was there to walk in on us. Not the way he grabbed me."

"And after he threw you down?"

"Honest, Deb'rah, I can't remember. I must have been unconscious. But when I was starting to come out of it . . .

"Yes?"

"Something... a noise? Something fell? And then... yes! A car! I heard a car start up and drive away. I guess I sort of thought it was him. Driving away in the rain. Because I remember feeling like maybe everything was going to be all right. And then I guess I must have gone under again because I don't remember anything else till I heard you calling me."

"Did you recognize the sound of the motor?" I asked cautiously. Herman's new truck was only a few months old. Maybe it had no distinctive sounds yet.

She looked at me blankly. "Nope. It was just a car. Or a truck, I suppose."

"No loud rattles, no shriek when the gears changed?" She smiled. "Like Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang or something?"

I smiled back, not wanting to put ideas in her head. "Or something."

She smoothed the lace collar of her jumpsuit as she considered. I could tell that she was replaying the sound of the engine in her head. A shadow flicked across her face and was instantly gone.

"It was just an ordinary car motor," she said and looked me straight in the eye as she said it.