No way could I be that cool if Dwight dumped me.
The buffet table had been cleared away from the lobby outside our meeting room and the food replaced with tubs of iced drinks and urns for coffee or hot tea. The area was crowded elbow to elbow and I was working my way down for a final cup of coffee when someone from the next district stopped me. She’d heard about my marriage for the first time that morning and wanted to give good wishes. “And he comes with a little boy?”
I smiled and nodded. “He turned nine last month.”
“Good luck,” she said. “My husband brought a twelve-year-old daughter to our marriage.”
“You have my sympathy,” I said, remembering the unremitting antagonism shown by my game warden’s resentful teenage daughter.
“Fortunately, she’s sixteen now and has started to think I’m pretty cool because I’m not on her case about her boyfriend and her clothes the way my husband and his ex seem to be.”
We agreed that boys were probably easier than girls.
“And cats are easier still,” said Aubrey Hamilton, a judge from up near Virginia. She wore a black pantsuit that sported a generous scattering of cat hairs.
I laughed. “At least kids don’t shed on you,” I said.
“There is that,” she conceded.
I started to edge past her to get to the coffee when over her shoulder I saw Will Blackstone approaching the urns from the opposite direction. His handsome face sported a black eye of epic proportions and he seemed to be getting jovial remarks from those around him.
I decided a bottle of water from the tub of ice at my elbow would do just fine and hastily returned to my seat next to Chelsea Ann, who was laughing with Beth Keever seated on the other side of her.
“We were talking about Judge Blackstone,” she said. “You know him?”
“We’ve met,” I said cautiously.
“Have you seen that black eye he’s wearing?”
Judge Keever leaned in with an amused smile. “He says he fell in the shower last night and hit his eye on the sink. He’s even making noises about a lawsuit against the hotel because of the slippery tub, but John Smith saw him come in off the beach last night with a bloody nose so I don’t think that dog’ll hunt.”
To change the subject, I said, “I saw Rosemary out in the lobby. She seems pretty relaxed.”
Chelsea Ann nodded. “It amazes me, too, how well she’s taking it. I guess she was more ready to move on than she realized. I do wish it’d stop raining, though, so she could get out on the beach while we’re tied up in here. Want to let’s go out somewhere for lunch?”
“Sure,” I said and we turned our attention to the podium as a professor from the School of Government put up the first slide for our update on criminal law.
When we broke for lunch, Detective Gary Edwards was loitering outside. He wanted to talk and I wanted to hear what news, if any, there was in his investigation, but hunger battled with curiosity.
“I’m really sorry,” I told him, “but I skipped supper last night and only had a slice of melon for breakfast, so I’m too hungry to skip another meal.”
“Well, if it’s breakfast you want instead of lunch, let me take you to the best breakfast place out this way. I could use some myself.”
His invitation included Chelsea Ann, who looked interested. “You’re talking about the Causeway, right?”
He nodded.
“Why don’t y’all go on ahead? I have to find my sister. See what she wants to do. Maybe we’ll catch up with you later.”
It was still raining heavily, but Edwards had parked under the portico so I didn’t need an umbrella. Twelve minutes later we were seated on mismatched chairs in just about the scruffiest restaurant I’ve ever walked into.
Its main attempt at a unified decor were the aqua oilcloths imprinted with shellfish that encased the tabletops. The grungy walls and wooden booths cried out for paint, as did the low ceiling. We had passed through clouds of smoke from the cigarette addicts who filled the porch tables. Inside, the air was redolent of hot grease, bacon, and fried fish. On a chalkboard, the day’s leading offering was eggs and grouper.
I was afraid to ask what the sanitary rating might be, but as crowded as it was on this rainy Monday, I knew the food had to be special.
“Only the breakfast menu,” Edwards said. “Everything else is ordinary.”
I quickly settled on scrambled eggs and country sausage—air-dried links with a flavor like nothing else.
“Grits or hash browns?” asked our waitress, a seen-everything brunette on the wrong side of forty. She did not have a cigarette dangling from her lips, but judging by the cloud of nicotine that enveloped her, a lit one waited for her somewhere.
“Grits, please.”
“Biscuits or toast?”
“Biscuits.”
Edwards wanted the salt-cured ham and redeye gravy with his eggs and we both ordered coffee.
I was amazed by the prices listed on the menu. Even with a generous tip, I’d get serious change back from a ten-dollar bill.
“And it’ll be a ten-dollar bill,” Edwards told me. “They don’t take plastic.”
On the drive over, he had told me that Martha was encouraged by the thought that Fitz had squeezed her hand. He also told me that the car that had hit him was registered to Kyle Armstrong, the waiter from Jonah’s, and that he appeared to have fled the town with all his belongings.
As we waited for our food to come, he asked if I’d noticed Kyle paying much attention to Jeffreys.
I shook my head. “Martha’s the one who pays attention to waiters, not me, I’m afraid. Although he did desert us when Stone Hamilton came in, but it wasn’t his table and we got him back. Speaking of Hamilton, what about the dog leash?”
“He showed us his and it wasn’t a brand-new one, either. We’re thinking now that the leash that strangled Jeffreys was a piece of litter. Somebody’s dog probably chewed the lead off and they just threw it away. It was frayed and sun-bleached and caked with dirt, like it’d been outdoors for a while. One of the waitresses said she saw a faded blue length lying in the bushes out front when she came to work. The killer must have just grabbed up the handiest thing possible to choke him with.”
“You’re saying that if someone hadn’t littered, Jeffreys might still be alive?”
“Not necessarily. If it hadn’t been the leash, he could’ve had his head smashed in with a rock or something. It might not have been premeditated, but we’re pretty sure it was done by someone who did mean to kill him.”
Our breakfast plates arrived and everything was wonderful. It’s always risky to order soft-scrambled eggs because they often come out as dry and tasteless as if they’d been sitting on a steam table for an hour. These were moist and creamy with streaks of yolk still visible amid the white. The biscuits were hot and flaky, the grits were perfectly seasoned, and the sausage tasted homemade.
“Mmmm!” I said blissfully.
Edwards grinned as he poured redeye gravy over his grits and dug into his own ham and eggs. “Told you they know how to do breakfast.”
The waitress came back to refill our mugs. “Y’all need anything else, just holler,” she said.
After a couple of mouthfuls to ease my hunger pangs, I said, “The thing that sounds odd about all this is that Jeffreys wasn’t all that tall, but he was well built and looked like he worked out.”
Edwards lifted an eyebrow at that.
“I saw him on the beach that afternoon,” I explained. “In a bathing suit.”
“Your point is?”
“Well, Kyle Armstrong didn’t strike me as somebody who spent any time in a gym. He’s almost skinny, in fact. Would he have been strong enough to strangle Pete Jeffreys and then throw him in the river?”
“Maybe. He seems to be a cyclist.” Edwards told me about the waiter’s specialized license plate and that he owned a bicycle. “Cyclists can be stronger than they look.”
“Like Cynthia Blankenthorpe,” I mused. “She’s
a cyclist, too. Brought her bike down with her and rode from the hotel to the Cotton Exchange in all that heat Sunday.”
A sudden thought struck me. “Did you see her hands?”
“What about them?”
“One of them had four deep scratches on the back. She said it was from a run-in with a yucca plant, but…”
“But you’re wondering if it could have been Jeffreys when he was struggling to get free?”
“Did anybody check his fingernails?”
“You’ve been watching too much CSI,” he said with a wry grin. “But yes. We did bag the hands. They were in water for at least an hour though, and our ME didn’t get anything useful from the fingernail scrapings. Besides, Judge Blankenthorpe was in somebody’s view from the time Jeffreys left their table till she rode back to the hotel with the Fitzhumes. And that reminds me.”
He pulled out a list of names and handed it to me. “You know those four that aren’t marked through?”
I put a dab of blackberry jam on my biscuit and took a bite as I looked at the list. “I know Bill Hasselberger and Judge Feinstein. Not the Beechers. He’s brand-new to the bench, appointed last month, I think.”
“Mrs. Fitzhume says these are the ones at Jonah’s Saturday night that she wouldn’t recognize and doesn’t think her husband would either. What’s your opinion?”
“She’s probably right about the Beechers,” I said slowly, stalling for time by cutting up my sausage and eating a piece with a forkful of egg. “I’m pretty sure that Fitz and Feinstein were on a committee together last year.”
“What about Hasselberger? He’s on your list of people at the restaurant next door. Along with your cousin.”
I gave a reluctant nod. “But Fitz would probably recognize him. He was on the bench for four years till Jeffreys ran against him and took his seat.”
“Really? Not much love lost there then, right?”
“No, but as you just said, he was at the restaurant next door. What would he be doing near the restroom inside Jonah’s?”
At Jonah’s, the men’s restroom was diagonally to the right of the front door. What if that door opened about the time Fitz and Jeffreys were passing each other? Even if Bill Hasselberger had been walking past out on the sidewalk at that exact moment, would Fitz have noticed him enough to remark on it?
“Besides,” I argued, “how could he be driving Kyle’s car when it hit Fitz? And why would Kyle have cleared out if he’s not the killer? I should think you’d be trying to find the connection between him and Jeffreys.”
“Jeffreys was from the Triad and the car is registered to Armstrong’s home address in Myrtle Beach.” He pulled another crumpled sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. It looked like a computer printout. “Here’s what we’ve learned so far: graduated high school in Myrtle Beach, then enrolled in the drama program at Cape Fear Community College downtown. Dropped out in the third semester. Lived with an aunt when he first came here—”
“Right!” I interjected. “That’s what he said when Martha was telling us about his wanting to act. He said his aunt lived here and that she knew someone on the Matlock show. She got him into a courtroom scene as an extra when he was a child. Have you questioned her yet?”
“My partner’s on his way out to Castle Hayne right now,” he said, referring to the next town up from Wilmington, off I-40. “But there’s nothing on this paper to indicate he was ever further into North Carolina than right here. Nowhere near the Triad. So unless Jeffreys came down here and royally pissed him off…”
He broke off in frustration and finished his ham and eggs.
“If it really was Kyle, wouldn’t one of the other waiters notice if he wasn’t on the floor?”
“They say not. He might not have been gone that long. Less than five minutes, ten at the most, to follow Jeffreys out to the parking lot, slip the leash around his neck as he was unlocking his car, then roll him over the edge of the bank and into the river.”
“What about the other people in Jonah’s that night?” I asked. “We weren’t the only ones there.”
“I know and I’ve got officers checking out the names we got off the credit card receipts to see if any of them noticed Jeffreys and Armstrong together. It’s probably a waste of time. Once we get Armstrong and his car, we’ve got him on the hit-and-run and that should be enough to pry the rest of it out of him.”
All the time we’d been there, he had kept glancing past me to the door.
“Guess she decided to go somewhere else to eat,” he said as he called for our checks.
I glanced at my watch. Still thirty-five minutes till the next session was due to start.
“Sorry,” I said.
He gave a fatalistic shrug. “I’m just spinning my wheels with her, aren’t I?”
It was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know. Honestly. She likes you. She just doesn’t see much future if she’s going back to Raleigh on Thursday.”
“Raleigh’s not so far.”
“That’s what I told her.”
“Yeah?” He brightened. “Thanks.”
We took our checks over to the cash register. When I opened my wallet to pay, I saw that I had nothing left but three fives and a few ones. Time to find an ATM.
It was a short drive back to the hotel, with the rain still coming down heavily enough to make potholes and low spots a real hazard. We saw two fender benders on the way.
I was still trying to work out the sequence of events. “Okay. Let’s say Kyle recognizes Pete Jeffreys and he’s there in the vestibule when Jeffreys comes out of the restroom and leaves through the front door. Kyle follows him out to the parking lot, kills him, and then comes back inside before he’s missed.”
Edwards nodded as he swerved to miss a deep puddle and turned the windshield wipers up a notch.
“He may have noticed Fitz, but he didn’t know his name till you and I were talking about it at Jonah’s when I was there to look for my earring. Oh, God!” I said, suddenly stricken. “That’s how he knew. It’s my fault Fitz was run down. If I’d kept my mouth shut, he never would have known.”
“Not necessarily,” Edwards said kindly. “He worked your table. The Fitzhumes paid with a credit card, so he had to have seen it.”
I could not excuse myself so easily. “Maybe so, but my telling you that Fitz was the last of our group to see Jeffreys put a big red bull’s-eye on his back.”
As he pulled up under the SandCastle’s portico, Edwards said, “What I keep wondering is how someone other than you judges would have known that Judge Fitzhume would be walking across the parking lot when he was.”
I had been wondering that myself and I thought I had the answer.
“Come on inside and I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER
21
I was aware of the difficult nature of the case.
Pliny (AD 62–113)
DETECTIVE GARY EDWARDS (TUESDAY MIDDAY, JUNE
17)
People had begun to filter back from lunch as Edwards followed Deborah Knott through the SandCastle’s lobby to the registration table set up at the archway that led to the meeting rooms. At the near end stood an easel with a whiteboard where judges could leave each other messages. The schedules for each day’s events were clipped to the top of the easel, and yesterday’s schedule was still there. She pointed to the bottom of the sheet where large letters proclaimed that a reception honoring Judge Fitzhume would take place at 6:30 at a clubhouse on the other side of the island.
“That’s been posted here all weekend,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have a picture of him?”
“Actually, I do,” said Edwards. When Andy Wall had joined him at Jonah’s, he had brought along an extra copy of the photo South Carolina’s DMV had sent them.
He listened as the judge showed it to the women working the table and asked if they had seen him hanging around the whiteboard on Sunday or Monday.
Blank looks.
She described Kyle Armstrong’s slend
er build and tentative manner in more detail and added, “He may be the one who ran Judge Fitzhume down,” which made them look at the picture even more closely.
“Poor Judge Fitz!” said the woman who seemed to be in charge of handing out the conference packets and information sheets. “I wish we could help, but with so many people in and out, unless he came over and asked a specific question, he’d’ve had to be wearing a hot pink tutu for us to notice him. Do hope they catch him though.”
Judge Knott handed him back the picture with a rueful smile. “I was so sure this was how he knew.”
“It’s still a logical premise,” Edwards assured her.
“Is there anything else I can do for you right now?”
“Well, it’d be helpful if you could refresh my memory and point out the Beechers and Judge Feinstein.”
“I think that’s Judge Beecher at the end of the hall,” she said and guided him through the judges who were gathering for the afternoon session.
As he trailed along behind her, he found himself thinking that Dwight Byrant was probably a lucky guy with this sexy, down-to-earth woman for a wife. Well liked by her peers, too, if one could judge by the warmth of the smiles that greeted her as they passed.
She paused a step away from a threesome who seemed to be one-upping each other on how to get delinquent dads to pay their child support.
“—and I told him I didn’t care how he paid his arrears, but he was going to be doing community service eight hours a day for no pay till they were. Two days of picking up trash along the highway and he found the money.”
“Yeah, I tell ’em, ‘Hey, I don’t have a problem. You’re the one with a problem,’ ” said a satanically handsome judge with a neatly trimmed Vandyke. “Five times out of eight they’ll come up with the money before you adjourn. Oh, hey there, Deborah! You want to talk to me?”
She smiled. “I always want to talk to you, Chuck, except that right now I want to meet Judge Beecher.”
Now that she had identified him, Edwards remembered that he was the one who couldn’t put many names on the diagram of Jonah’s porch tables. A middle-aged white man with a shock of graying black hair and polished rimless glasses, Beecher took the hand she offered him with a ready-to-be-amused look on his face.
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