The Best American Mystery Stories 1998

Margaret Maron Prayer for Judgment from Shoveling Smoke

Certain smells take you back in time as quickly as any period song. One whiff of Evening in Paris and I am a child again, watching my mother get dressed up. The smell of woodsmoke, bacon, newly turned dirt, a damp kitten, shoe polish, Krispy Kreme doughnuts — each evokes anew its own long sequence of memories… like gardenias on a summer night.

The late June evening was so hot and humid, and the air was so still, that the heavy fragrance of gardenias was held close to the earth like layers of sweet-scented chiffon. I floated on my back at the end of the pool and breathed in the rich sensuous aroma of Aunt Zell’s forty-year-old bushes.

More than magnolias, gardenias are the smell of summer in central North Carolina and their scent unlocks memories and images we never think of when the weather’s cool and crisp.

Blurred stars twinkled in the hazy night sky, an occasional plane passed far overhead and lightning bugs drifted lazily through the evening stillness. Drifting with them, unshackled by gravity, I seemed to float not on water but on the thick sweet air itself, half of my senses disoriented, the other half too wholly relaxed to care whether a particular point of light was insect, human or extraterrestrial.

The house is only a few blocks from the center of Dobbs, but our sidewalks roll up at nine on a week night, and there was nothing to break the small town silence except light traffic or the occasional bark of a dog. When I heard the back screen door slam, I assumed it was Aunt Zell or Uncle Ash coming out to say goodnight, but the man silhouetted against the house lights was too big and bulky. One of my brothers?

“Deb’rah?” Dwight Bryant moved cautiously down the path and along the edge of the pool, as if his eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the darkness.

“Watch out you don’t fall in,” I told him. “Unless you mean to.”

I didn’t reckon he did because my night vision was good enough to see that he had on his new sports jacket. As chief of detectives for the Colleton County Sheriff’s Department, Dwight seldom wears a uniform unless he wants to look particularly official.

He followed my voice and came over to squat down on the coping and dip a hand in the water.

“Not very cool, is it?”

“Feels good though. Come on in.”

“No suit,” he said regretfully, “and Mr. Ash is so skinny, I couldn’t get into one of his.”

“Oh, you don’t need a bathing suit,” I teased. “Not dark as it is tonight. Besides, we’re just home folks here.”

Dwight snorted. Growing up, he was in and out of our farmhouse so much that he really could have been one more brother, but my brothers never went skinny-dipping if I were around. (Correction: not if they knew I was around. Kid sisters don’t always announce their presence.)

“You’re working late,” I said. “What’s up?”

“A young woman over in Black Creek got herself shot dead this morning. They didn’t find her till nearly six this evening.”

“Shot? You mean murdered?”

“Looks like it.”

“Someone we know?”

“Chastity Barefoot? Everybody called her Chass.”

Rang no bells with me.

“She and her husband both grew up in Harnett County. His name’s Edward Barefoot.”

“Now that sounds familiar for some reason.” I stood up — the lap pool’s only four feet deep — and Dwight reached down his big hand to haul me out beside him. I came up dripping and wrapped a towel around me as I tried to think where I’d heard that name recently. “They any kin to the Cotton Grove Barefoots?”

“Not that he said.”

I finished drying off and slipped on my flip-flops and an oversized tee-shirt and we walked back to the patio to sit and talk. Aunt Zell came out with a pitcher of iced tea and said she and Uncle Ash were going upstairs to watch the news in bed so if I’d lock up after Dwight left, she’d tell us goodnight now.

I gave her a hug and Dwight did, too, and after she’d gone inside and we were sipping the strong cold tea, I said, “This Edward Barefoot. He do the shooting?”

“Don’t see how he could’ve,” said Dwight. “Specially since you’re his alibi.”

“Come again?”

“He says he spent all morning in your courtroom. Says you let him off with a prayer for judgment.”

“I did?”

Monday morning traffic court is such a cattle call that it’s easy for the faces to blur and if Dwight had waited a week to ask me, I might not have remembered. As it was, it took me a minute to sort out which one had been Edward Barefoot.

As a district court judge, I had been presented with minor assaults, drug possession, worthless checks and a dozen other misdemeanor categories; but on the whole, traffic violations had made up the bulk of the day’s calendar. Seated on the side benches had been uniformed state troopers and officers from both the town’s police department and the county sheriff’s department, each prepared to testify why he had ticketed and/or arrested his share of the two hundred and five individuals named on my docket today. Tracy Johnson, the prosecuting ADA, had efficiently whittled at least thirty-five names from that docket and she spent the midmorning break period processing the rest of those who planned to plead guilty without an attorney.

At least 85 percent were male and younger than thirty. There doesn’t seem to be a sexual pattern on who will come up with phony registrations, improper plates or expired inspection stickers, but most sessions have one young lead-footed female and one older female alcoholic who’s blown more than the legal point-oh-eight. Yeah, and every week I get at least one middle-aged man who thinks it’s his God-given right to keep driving even though his license has been so thoroughly revoked that for the rest of his life it’ll barely be legal for him to get behind the steering wheel of a bumper car at the State Fair.

As I poured Dwight a second glass of tea, I remembered seeing Edward Barefoot come up to the defense table. I had wondered whether he was a first-time speeder or someone on the edge of getting his license revoked. His preppie haircut was so fresh that there was a half-inch band of white around the back edges where his hair had kept his neck from tanning, and his neat charcoal gray suit bespoke a young businessman somewhat embarrassed at finding himself in traffic court and eager to make a good impression. His pin-striped shirt and sober tie said, “I’m an upstanding taxpayer and solid citizen of the community,” but his edgy good looks would have been more appropriate on one of our tight-jeaned speed jockeys.

Tracy had withdrawn the charge of driving without a valid license, but Barefoot was still left with a 78 in a 65 speed zone.

I nodded to the spit-polished highway patrolman and said, “Tell me about it.”

It was the same old same old with a slight variation. Late one evening, about a week earlier, defendant got himself pulled for excessive speed on the interstate that bisects Colleton County. According to the trooper, Mr. Barefoot had been cooperative when asked to step out of the car, but there was an odor of an impairing substance about him and he didn’t have his wallet or license.

“Mr. Barefoot stated that his wife was usually their designated driver, so he often left his wallet at home when they went out like that. Just put some cash in his pocket. Mrs. Barefoot was in the vehicle and she did possess a valid license, but she stated that they’d been to a party over in Raleigh and she got into the piña coladas right heavy so they felt like it’d be safer for him to drive.”

“Did he blow for you?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. He registered a point-oh-five, three points below the legal limit. And there was nothing out of the way about his speech or appearance, other than the speeding. He stated that was because they’d promised the babysitter they’d be home before midnight and they were late. The vehicle was registered in both their names and Mr. Barefoot showed me his license before court took in this morning.”

When it was his turn to speak, Barefoot freely acknowledged that he’d been driving way too fast, said he was sorry, and requested a prayer for judgment.

“Any previous violations?” I asked the trooper.

“I believe he has one speeding violation. About three years ago. Sixty-four in a fifty-five zone.”

“Only one?” That surprised me because this Edward Barefoot sure looked like a racehorse.

“Just one, your honor,” the trooper had said.

“Another week and his only violation would have been neutralized,” I told Dwight now as I refilled my glass of iced tea, “so I let him off. Phyllis Raynor was clerking for me this morning and she or Tracy might have a better fix on the time, but I’d say he was out of there by eleven-thirty.”

“That late, hmm?”

“You’d like for it to be earlier?”

“Well, we think she was killed sometime mid-morning and that would give us someplace to start. Not that we’ve heard of any trouble between them, but you know how it is — husbands and boyfriends, we always look hard at them first. Barefoot says he got a chicken biscuit at Bojangles on his way out of town, and then drove straight to work. If he got to his job when he says he did, he didn’t have enough time to drive home first. That’s almost fifty miles. And if he really was in court from nine till eleven-thirty—?”

“Tracy could probably tell you,” I said again.

According to Dwight, Chastity Barefoot had dropped her young daughter off at a day care there in Black Creek at nine-thirty that morning and then returned to the little starter home she and her husband had bought the year before in one of the many subdivisions that have sprung up since the new interstate opened and made our cheap land and low taxes attractive to people working around Raleigh. She was a part-time receptionist for a dentist in Black Creek and wasn’t due in till noon; her husband worked for one of the big pharmaceuticals in the Research Triangle Park.

When she didn’t turn up at work on time, the office manager had first called and then driven out to the house on her lunch hour because “And I quote,” said Dwight, “‘Whatever else Chass did, she never left you hanging.’”

“Whatever else?” I asked.

“Yeah, she did sort of hint that Miz Barefoot might’ve had hinges on her heels.”

“So there was trouble between the Barefoots.”

“Not according to the office manager.” Dwight slapped at a mosquito buzzing around his ears. “She says the poor bastard didn’t have a clue. Thought Chass hung the moon just for him. Anyhow, Chass’s car was there, but the house was locked and no one answered the door, so she left again.”

He brushed away another mosquito, drained his tea glass and stood up to go. “I’ll speak to Tracy and Phyllis and we’ll check every inch of Barefoot’s alibi, but I have a feeling we’re going to be hunting the boyfriend on this one.”

That would have been the end of it as far as I was concerned except that Chastity Barefoot’s grandmother was a friend of Aunt Zell’s, so Aunt Zell felt she ought to attend the visitation on Wednesday evening. The only trouble was that Uncle Ash had to be out of town and she doesn’t like to drive that far alone at night.

“You sure you don’t mind?” she asked me that morning.

On a hot Wednesday night, I had planned nothing more exciting than reading briefs in front of the air conditioner in my sitting room.

I had originally moved in with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash because I couldn’t afford a place of my own when I first came back to Colleton County and there was no way I’d have gone back to the farm at that point. I use the self-contained efficiency apartment they fixed for Uncle Ash’s mother while she was still alive, with its own separate entrance and relative privacy. We’re comfortable together — too comfortable say some of my sisters-in-law who worry that I may never get married — but Uncle Ash has to be away so much, my being there gives everybody peace of mind.

No big deal to drive to the funeral home over in Harnett County, I told her.

It was still daylight, another airless, humid evening and even in a thin cotton dress and barefoot sandals, I had to keep the air conditioner on high most of the way. As we drove, Aunt Zell reminisced about her friend, Retha Minshew, and how sad it was that her little great-granddaughter would probably grow up without any memory of her mother.

“And when Edward remarries, that’ll loosen the ties to the Min-shews even more,” she sighed.

I pricked up my ears. “You knew them? They weren’t getting along?”

“No, no. I just mean that he’s young and he’s got a baby girl that’s going to need a mother. Only natural if he took another wife after a while.”

“So why did you say ‘even more’?” I asked, as I passed a slow-moving pickup truck with three hounds in the back.

“Did I?” She thought about her words. “Maybe it’s because the Minshews are so nice and those Barefoots—”

Trust Aunt Zell to know them root and stock.

“They say Edward’s real steady and hard-working. Always putting in overtime at his office. Works nine or ten hours a day. But the rest of his family—” She hesitated, not wanting to speak badly of anybody. “I think his father spent some time in jail for beating up on his mother. Both of them were too drunk to come to the wedding, Retha says. And Retha says his two younger brothers are wild as turkeys, too. Anyhow, I get the impression the Minshews don’t do much visiting back and forth with the Barefoots.”

Angier is still a small town, but so many people had turned out for the wake that the line stretched across the porch, down the walk and out onto the sidewalk.

Fortunately, the lines usually move fast, and within a half-hour Aunt Zell and I were standing before the open casket. There was no sign that Chastity Minshew Barefoot had died violently. Her fair head lay lightly on the pink satin pillow, her face was smooth and unwrinkled and her pink lips hinted at secret amusement. Her small hands were clasped around a silver picture frame that held a color photograph of a suntanned little girl with curly blond hair.

A large bouquet of gardenias lay on the closed bottom half of the polished casket and the heavy sweet smell was almost overpowering.

Aunt Zell sighed, then turned to the tall gray-haired woman with red-rimmed eyes who stood next to the coffin. “Oh, Retha, honey, I’m just so sorry.”

They hugged each other. Aunt Zell introduced me to Chastity’s grandmother, who in turn introduced us to her son and daughter-in-law, both of whom seemed shellshocked by the murder of their daughter.

As did Edward Barefoot, who stood just beyond them. His eyes were glazed and feverish looking. Gone was the crisp young businessman of two days ago. Tonight his face was pinched, his skin was pasty, his hair disheveled. He looked five years older and if they hadn’t told me who he was, I wouldn’t have recognized him.

He gazed at me blankly as Aunt Zell and I paused to give our condolences. A lot of people don’t recognize me without the black robe.

“I’m Judge Knott,” I reminded him. “You were in my courtroom day before yesterday I’m really sorry about your wife.”

“Thank you, Judge.” His eyes focussed on my face and he gave me a firm handshake. “And I want to thank you again for going so easy on me.”

“Not at all,” I said inanely and was then passed on to his family, a rough-looking couple who seemed uncomfortable in this formal setting, and a self-conscious youth who looked so much like Edward Barefoot that I figured he was the youngest brother. He and his parents just nodded glumly when Aunt Zell and I expressed our sympathy.

As we worked our way back through the crowd, both of us were aware of a different pitch to the usual quiet funeral home murmur. I spotted a friend out on the porch and several people stopped Aunt Zell for a word. It was nearly half an hour before we got back to my car and both of us had heard the same stories. The middle Barefoot brother had been slipping around with Chastity and he hadn’t been seen since she was killed.

“Wonder if Dwight knows?” asked Aunt Zell.

“Yeah, we heard,” said Dwight when I called him that evening. “George Barefoot. He’s been living at home since he got out of jail and—”

“Jail?” I asked.

“Yeah. He ran a stop sign back last November and hit a Toyota. Totaled both cars and nearly killed the other driver. He blew a ten and since he already had one DWI and a string of speeding tickets, Judge Longmire gave him some jail time, too. According to his mother, he hasn’t been home since Sunday night. He and the youngest brother are rough carpenters on that new subdivision over off Highway Forty-eight, but the crew chief says he hasn’t seen George since quitting time Friday evening. The two brothers claim not to know where he is either.”

“Are they lying?”

I could almost hear Dwight’s shrug over the phone. “Who knows?”

“You put out an APB on his vehicle?”

“He doesn’t have one. Longmire pulled his license. Wouldn’t even give him driving privileges during work hours. That’s why he’s been living at home. So he could ride to work with his brother Paul.”

“The husband’s alibi hold up?”

“Solid as a tent pole. It’s a forty-mile roundtrip to his house. Tracy says he answered the calendar call around nine-thirty — that’s when his wife was dropping their kid off at the day care — and you entered his prayer for judgment between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty. Lucky for him, he kept his Bojangles receipt. It’s the one out on the bypass, and the time on it says twelve-oh-five. It’s another forty minutes to his work, and they say he was there before one o’clock and didn’t leave till after five, so it looks like he’s clear.”

More than anybody could say for his brother George.

Poor Edward Barefoot. From what I now knew about that bunch of Barefoots, he was the only motivated member of his family. The only one to finish high school, he’d even earned an associate degree at the community college. Here was somebody who could be the poster child for bootstrapping, a man who’d worked hard and played by the rules, and what happens? Bad enough to lose the wife you adore, but then to find out she’s been cheating with your sorry brother who probably shot her and took off?

Well, it wasn’t for me to condemn Chass Barefoot’s taste in men. I’ve danced with the devil enough times myself to know the attraction of no-’count charmers.

Aunt Zell went to the funeral the next day and described it for Uncle Ash and me at supper.

“That boy looked like he was strung out on the rack. And his precious little baby! Her hair’s blond like her mama’s, but she’s been out in her wading pool so much this summer, Retha said, that she’s brown as a pecan.” She put a hot and fluffy biscuit on my plate. “It just broke my heart to see the way she kept her arms wrapped around her daddy’s neck as if she knew her mama was gone forever. But she’s only two, way too young to understand something like that.”

From my experience with children who come to family court having suffered enormous loss and trauma, I knew that a two-year-old was indeed too young to understand or remember, yet something about Aunt Zell’s description of the little girl kept troubling me.

For her sake, I hoped that George Barefoot would be arrested and quickly brought to trial so that her family could find closure and healing.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen quite that way.

Two days later, George Barefoot’s body was found when some county workers were cleaning up an illegal trash dump on one side of the back roads just north of Dobbs. He was lying on an old sofa someone had thrown into the underbrush, and the high back had concealed him from the road.

The handgun he’d stuck in his mouth had landed on some dirt and leaves beside the sofa. It was the same gun that had killed Chastity Barefoot, a gun she’d bought to protect herself from intruders. There was a note in his pocket addressed to his brother:

A rainy night and several hot humid days had mildewed the note and blurred the time of death, but the M.E. thought he could have shot himself either the day Chastity Barefoot was killed or no later than the day after.

“That road’s miles from his mother’s house,” I told Dwight. “Wonder why he picked it? And how did he get there?”

Dwight shrugged. “It’s just a few hundred feet from where Highway 70 crosses the bypass. Maybe he was hitchhiking out of the county and that’s where his ride put him out. Maybe he got to feeling remorse and knew he couldn’t run forever. Who knows?”

I was in Dwight’s office that noonday, waiting for him to finish reading over the file so that he could send it on to our District Attorney, official notification that the two deaths could be closed out. A copy of the suicide note lay on his desk and I’m as curious as any cat.

“Can I see that?”

“Sure.”

The original was locked up of course, but this was such a clear photocopy that I could see every spot of mildew and the ragged edge of where Barefoot must have torn the page from a notepad.

“Was there a notepad on his body?” I asked idly.

“No, and no pencil either,” said Dwight. “He must have written it before leaving wherever he was holed up.”

I made a doubtful noise and he looked at me in exasperation.

“Don’t go trying to make a mystery out of this, Deb’rah. He was bonking his sister-in-law, things got messy, so he shot her and then he shot himself. Nobody else has a motive, nobody else could’ve done it.”

“The husband had motive.”

“The husband was in your court at the time, remember?” He stuck the suicide note back in the file and stood up. “Let’s go eat.”

“Bonking?” I asked as we walked across the street to the Soup ’n’ Sandwich Shop.

He gave a rueful smile. “Cal’s starting to pick up language. I promised Jonna I’d clean up my vocabulary.”

Jonna is Dwight’s ex-wife and a real priss-pot.

“You don’t talk dirty,” I protested, but he wouldn’t argue the point. When our waitress brought us our barbecue sandwiches, I noticed that her ring finger was conspicuously bare. Instead of a gaudy engagement ring, there was now only a thin circle of white skin.

“Don’t tell me you and Conrad have broken up again?” I said.

Angry sparks flashed from her big blue eyes. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Dwight grinned at me when she was gone. “Want to bet how long before she’s wearing his ring again?”

I shook my head. It would be a sucker bet.

Instead, I found myself looking at Dwight’s hands as he bit into his sandwich. He had given up wearing a wedding band as soon as Jonna walked out on him, so his fingers were evenly tanned by the summer sun. Despite all the paperwork in his job, he still got out of the office a few hours every day. I reached across and pulled on the expansion band of his watch.

“What—?”

“Just checking,” I said. “Your wrist is white.”

“Of course it is. I always wear my watch. Aren’t you going to eat your sandwich?”

My appetite was fading, so I cut it in two and gave him half. “Hurry up and eat,” I said. “I want to see that suicide note again before I have to go back to court.”

Grumbling, he wolfed down his lunch; and even though his legs are much longer than mine, he had to stretch them out to keep up as I hurried back to his office.

“What?” he asked, when I was studying the note again.

“I think you ought to let the SBI’s handwriting experts take a closer look at this.”

“my?”

“Well, look at it,” I said, pointing to the word about.

“See how it juts out in the margin? And see that little mark where the a starts? Couldn’t that be a comma? What if the original version was just I’m sorry, Chass? What if somebody also added the capital E to make you think it was a note to Edward when it was probably a love letter to Chastity?”

“Huh?” Dwight took the paper from my hand and looked at it closer.

We’ve known each other so long he can almost read my mind at times.

“But Edward Barefoot was in court when his wife was shot. He couldn’t be two places at one time.”

“Yes, he could,” I said and told him how.

I cut court short that afternoon so that I’d be there when they brought Edward Barefoot in for questioning.

He denied everything and called for an attorney.

“I was in traffic court,” he told Dwight when his attorney was there and questioning resumed. “Ask the judge here.” He turned to me with a hopeful look. “You let me off with a prayer for judgment. You said so yourself at the funeral home.”

“I was mistaken,” I said gently. “It was your brother George that I let off. You three brothers look so much alike that when I saw you at the funeral home, I had no reason not to think you were the same man who’d been in court. I didn’t immediately recognize you, but I thought that was because you were in shock. You’re not in shock right now, though. This is your natural color.”

Puzzled, his attorney said, “I beg your pardon?”

“He puts in ten or twelve hours a day at an office, so he isn’t tan. The man who stood before my bench had just had a fresh haircut and he was so tanned that it left a ring of white around the hairline. When’s the last time you had a haircut, Mr. Barefoot?”

He touched his hair. Clearly, it was normally short and neat. Just as clearly, he hadn’t visited a barber in three or four weeks. “I’ve — Everything’s been so—”

“Don’t answer that,” said his attorney.

I thought about his little daughter’s nut-brown arms clasped tightly around his pale neck and I wasn’t happy about where this would end for her.

“When the trooper stopped your wife’s car for speeding, your brother knew he’d be facing more jail time if he gave his right name. So he gave your name instead. He could rattle off your address and birthdate glibly enough to satisfy the trooper. Then all he had to do was show up in court with your driver’s license and your clean record and act respectable and contrite. Did you know he was out with Chastity that night?”

Like a stuck needle, the attorney said, “Don’t answer that.”

“The time and date would be on any speeding ticket he showed you,” said Dwight. “Along with the license number and make of the car.”

“She said she was at her friend’s in Raleigh and that his girlfriend had dumped him and he was hitching a ride home,” Edward burst out over the protest of his attorney. “Like I was stupid enough to believe that after everything else!”

“So you made George get a haircut, lent him a suit and tie, dropped him at the courthouse, with your driver’s license, and then went back to your house and killed Chastity. After court, you met George here in Dobbs, killed him and dumped his body on the way out of town.”

“We’ll find people who were in the courtroom last Monday morning and can testify about his appearance,” said Dwight. “We’ll find the barber. We may even find your fingerprints on the note.”

Edward Barefoot seemed to shrink down into the chair.

“You don’t have to respond to any of these accusations,” said his attorney. “They’re just guessing.”

Guessing?

Maybe.

Half of life is guesswork.

The little Barefoot girl might be only two years old, but I’m guessing that she’ll never be allowed to forget that her daddy killed her mama.

Especially when gardenias are in bloom.