Death's Half Acre dk-14

by Margaret Maron

  So yeah, Dwight thought, Bradshaw might have wanted to retire at age what? Fifty-seven? Sixty? But today, he certainly looked like a farm boy who was happy to be back on the tractor again.

  “I believe you read the letter your wife left?” Dwight asked when the formalities were out of the way.

  Cameron Bradshaw sighed and nodded. “I saw it, but I was in such a state of shock. When her cleaning woman called me . . . I went right over—that horrible bag over her head. I tore it open, but it was too late, of course, and I guess I did read the letter while I was waiting for the rescue squad to come, but I was looking for a real reason for her to do this and—”

  “Malfeasance as a county commissioner?” said Terry. “Kickbacks from special interests? Those didn’t seem like sufficient reasons?”

  “To you maybe.” The older man seemed to brush them away like so many pesky gnats. “But for Candace to kill herself over that?” He shook his head. “I’d have thought it would take something more personal. Like cancer. Or maybe problems with someone she was seeing. You know. As for those other things, well—”

  He broke off helplessly. “She wouldn’t have come to me with personal problems, of course, and she didn’t have any professional ones.”

  Dwight frowned. “Even though she says in her letter—”

  “That’s what I don’t understand,” he interrupted, leaning forward to make his point. “If she was in professional trouble, she would have asked for my help. She always came to me when she was in over her head with county business or our company here. Position papers she didn’t quite understand. Reports and technical papers. That sort of thing. Statistics and projections were always hard for her. And nonlinear concepts. I was the only one she trusted to explain them.”

  “You told her how to vote on the issues?”

  “Good heavens, no!” He drew himself up as if Dwight had suggested that he cheated at cards. “That’s not what she wanted. She needed to grasp the main points so that she could discuss them without sounding dumb. And she wasn’t dumb, although people like Jamie Jacobson thought she was ignorant because their literary allusions went right over her head. She only had a GED and she wasn’t much of a reader, but common sense? About practical concrete issues? She was sharp as anybody. It was the esoteric and theoretical that she had trouble grasping. She was always giving me hypothetical scenarios. If A had this or did that, how would it impact on B or C? That sort of thing.”

  “And you explained it all to her?” Terry Wilson said doubtfully.

  “When I was much younger, I wanted to be a teacher, Agent Wilson, but I needed to make money, to salvage what was left of the family fortune. I think I would have been a good teacher.” His voice was wistful. “I wish she had told me what the real problems were. I could have helped her.”

  Dwight felt sorry for the man’s grief. “You still loved her?”

  Bradshaw gave a sad, hands-up gesture of resignation. “I never stopped. Oh, it was stupid of me to think she could be happy making love to someone so much older, but once we were living apart, we could be friends again and I liked knowing that she relied on me and on my discretion—”

  “Your wife didn’t name names in her letter, just general accusations. Do you know who she meant?”

  “I’m sorry. I really don’t remember any of the details. Do you have it with you?”

  When Dwight shook his head, Bradshaw said, “Could I get a copy?”

  “We’d rather not right now, sir. We’re trying to keep her allegations confidential until we have a chance to investigate.”

  “Of course, of course. I understand. When will you—” He paused to find the right words. “When may we make arrangements for her funeral?”

  “It shouldn’t be too long,” said Dwight. “I hope we can count on your cooperation and the cooperation of her staff here?”

  As Bradshaw hesitated, Terry Wilson pulled out a court order he’d obtained to search the offices of Bradshaw Management for anything related to Candace Bradshaw’s position as chair of the Colleton County board of commissioners.

  Before her husband could put his glasses back on to read it, the office manager tapped at the door and opened it without waiting.

  “Sorry, Mr. Bradshaw,” she said formally, “but some people are here.”

  “They’re with me,” said Wilson of the two women behind her, special agents who specialized in documentary evidence.

  Dwight grinned, recognizing the Ginsburg twins, which was how Tina Ginsburg and Sabrina Ginsburg were known around the Bureau. They were no relation but had somehow wound up in the same division. Mid-thirties, one was an attractive blonde with an easy laugh; the other an intense brunette. Both had stiletto-sharp minds and the hunting instinct of foxhounds for sniffing out white-collar wrongdoings.

  “They have a warrant, Gracie,” said Bradshaw. “I’ll clear out of here for a couple of hours and you show these gentlemen where Candace kept her commissioner’s files.”

  “You don’t think you should stay?” A tall woman with a long plain face and a heavy jaw, the office manager was probably in her late fifties. Her clothes were a rainbow of primary colors: a bright blue jersey topped by a canary-yellow knitted vest that was edged in red wool and embellished on the back with multicolored 3-D yarn figures in a village market scene that suggested Central America. She did not seem happy with the situation. “All our confidential company records are here, too.”

  Bradshaw gave the newcomers a gentle smile. “They are officers of the court,” he said trustingly. “I’m sure they won’t take anything they shouldn’t.”

  Gracie Farmer’s raised eyebrow said, “Oh, yeah?” but she didn’t argue with him.

  “We’ll give you a receipt for everything we do take,” Wilson assured her.

  Grudgingly, the woman moved to the computer and typed in the password that gave access to everything on the hard drive.

  One of the agents sat down and began scanning the file names. “Which are the files connected to her work as a commissioner?”

  “It’s the one labeled CCBC.”

  When the agent clicked on it, all she found was a list of names and contact numbers for the current board and a calendar marked with meeting dates. “This is all there is?” she asked.

  Gracie Farmer shrugged. “I think she kept all the other files on her home computer. She really only used this one for Bradshaw Management.”

  “What about hard files or CDs?”

  “You’re welcome to look, but I’m telling you—she kept the two totally separate.”

  While the two techie agents began to plunder both the electronic and the paper files, Dwight and Terry asked the office manager if there was someplace they could talk to her in private.

  She led them to her own office, a space filled with ethnic crafts in bright colors. A small wooden oxcart painted with parrots and tropical flowers sat next to her computer and held the usual desk tools and pens. Several red-green-and-blue wooden parrots shared a perch suspended from the ceiling in a corner over pots of tropical plants in such lavish bloom that they had to be artificial even though they looked real. The walls were lined with photographs and posters of Costa Rica. It was like stepping into a tropical travel agency.

  “Wow!” said Terry. “You must really love it there. Do you get down often?”

  “As often as I can,” she said. “In fact, I’m hoping to retire there.”

  She gestured them to chairs and immediately got down to business. “Is it true then?”

  “Is what true?” Dwight countered.

  “I heard Candace left a letter saying she stole from the county and took kickbacks from people the board did business with.”

  “Does that fit with what you know of her?” Dwight asked.

  Her plain face looked troubled and her eyes dropped before their gaze.

  Trying a different tack, Terry said, “I guess you’ve known her a long time?”

  Mrs. Farmer nodded and they noticed that her earrings were
tiny enameled parrots that swayed when her head moved. “I was the one that first hired her to clean some rental property when the tenants moved out. In fact, I was the one encouraged her to get her GED out at the community college. She was a hard worker and didn’t mind getting her hands dirty.”

  As if hearing how that sounded in this context, she shook her head. “Candace was ambitious. She wanted to be somebody. You know where she came from, right?”

  “Tell us,” said Dwight.

  So Gracie Farmer told them of little Candy Wells’s rocky childhood, her move to Dobbs, her struggle for a better life for herself. “I grew up dirt poor, too. My parents were sharecroppers, but they loved me and made sure I stayed in school. Candace had no one except an old sick grandmother and look how well she’s done. Running Bradshaw Management, chair of the board of commissioners. I can’t understand how she’d throw it all away for . . .”

  She paused and looked at them. “If she did it, it wasn’t for money.”

  “No?” asked Dwight.

  “It would have been for power. Candace liked doing favors and having people beholden to her. She wouldn’t have cared for the money. It was knowing that important people came to her for favors. It would be hard for her to say no if someone like that asked her to do something that wasn’t strictly legal and didn’t really do anybody any harm. If money was involved, I’m sure she would’ve thought of it as a sort of thank-you, not a bribe or anything.”

  Terry looked at Dwight with a wry shake of his head. “Kickbacks. When you care enough to send the very best.”

  CHAPTER 8

  . . . This is farm country and

  You can see the enchantment and the hope that the characters will

  Come and make the crops, but all they want to do is play.

  —Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson

  On Thursday, I went to the Democratic Women’s luncheon. The speaker was Elaine Marshall, our secretary of state and the first woman ever elected to North Carolina’s Council of State. We were trying to get her to run for the U.S. Senate, but she loved the job she had and seemed quite happy to stay in the area with her husband and friends.

  “Hey, Deborah, look at me!” my longtime best friend Portland Brewer called as I crossed the parking lot to the restaurant. She did a happy pirouette on the gravel so that I could admire the fit of her favorite black sheath, which was topped with a lime-green linen jacket.

  Ever since the birth of little Carolyn Deborah Brewer, about eighteen hours after she’d served as my matron of honor back in December, Portland had been struggling to get back to her pre-baby size.

  “Way to go!” I applauded. “The carrot sticks are on me today.”

  Inside, we found seats at a table with Jamie Jacobson and Betty Ann Edgerton. Jamie’s part of an ad agency here in Dobbs and is one of only two Democrats on the county board of commissioners, while Betty Ann is the builder who oversaw work on a WomenAid house I helped build a few years back when I was first appointed to the bench. She’s a good ol’ gal who, with the help of my mother, opened the all-male vo-tech classes at West Colleton up to females, too. She had no interest in the secretarial courses girls were supposed to take back then, but she made straight A’s in woodworking and shop once she was allowed in.

  It was a struggle for her the first few years until the building boom hit so hard that developers didn’t care if their builders were male, female, or little green hermaphrodites from Alpha Centauri as long as the houses went up as fast as their profits. Since then, she’s built a pile of them and gives a chunk of money to the Democratic party every year.

  Candace Bradshaw’s suicide was still on everyone’s mind and like them, we also speculated on whom the Republicans would choose to succeed her.

  “Danny Creedmore could pick himself,” Portland said gloomily.

  “No way,” said Betty Ann, who is fifteen years older and wiser than we. “He’d have to recuse himself every time one of his projects came up. Much easier to put in another puppet he can keep claiming is disinterested.”

  “What I just can’t get my mind around,” said Jamie, “is why Candace killed herself. She adored chairing the board and playing Lady Bountiful. She acted as if the citizens who came to us with requests were asking her permission alone, as if she was doing them a favor with money out of her own pocket. Everybody knows whose pocket she was in—”

  “Don’t you mean whose bed?” Betty Ann said cynically.

  “Same difference,” Jamie agreed. “My point is, if she was doing something that could be proved to be illegal, then he’d be in it, too, and I’ve heard that Doug Woodall’s cut a deal with Danny Creedmore. If the county Republicans promise not to give his opponent much support, then he won’t rock any boats right now.”

  “That may not be a promise he can keep,” I said. “Once her suicide note becomes public, there will have to be an investigation.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  “You know what’s in it?”

  “Did she get specific?”

  I held up my hands to block their questions. “Have I read it? No. Has Dwight told me one single word? No. But I’ve heard the same thing the rest of y’all have heard. That she misused her office and took kickbacks. If that’s true, then Doug’s obligated to do a pro forma investigation if nothing else.”

  Our food arrived, and talk turned to whether or not Kevin Foster could take Doug’s place as our new DA, the number of turned ankles our friends had gotten from those high-heeled platform wedges (“Ugliest shoe of my lifetime,” said Betty Ann), and did we think Cameron Bradshaw was going to keep the business going long enough for Dee to get her act together and take over?

  “I hope so,” said Jamie as she forked through her salad to extract the onions she normally liked. “Meeting with a client this afternoon,” she explained parenthetically. “Much as I hated Candace’s high-handed ways on the board, I have to say that she did give good value for the money when it came to cleaning our office. I once mentioned that I thought they were missing the floor behind the commode in the bathroom and she came in herself the next evening to make sure it was done right.”

  “I’ll give her that,” said Betty Ann. “We don’t use Bradshaw Management ourselves, but the architects that rent in our complex do. I was working late one night last week and as I was leaving, here she came tripping across the parking lot in a fancy embroidered jacket and high heels to check up on one of her new cleaning gals. Tried to give me a sales talk right there in the parking lot about how she could probably give me a better deal than what I was paying.”

  “Could she?” asked Jamie.

  Betty Ann shrugged. “I didn’t get a quote. It helps out my crew if I hire some of their family members to clean for us. I give the crew chief a flat fee and they work it out between themselves. Don’t you want your peach cobbler, Deborah?”

  I virtuously handed it over. No way was I going to let Portland out-skinny me. “John Claude still uses her service,” I said, “but I never remember seeing her there after hours.”

  Portland dipped the edge of her napkin into her water glass and tried to sponge away a spot of salad dressing that had dripped on the front of her green jacket. I leaned over to help.

  “Candace tried really hard to sell Avery and me on her services,” she said when the worst was out, “but the woman who cleans our house is willing to go by a couple of times a week, so we didn’t bother. Speaking of which, did y’all hear what happened out at that Church of Christ Eternal on Easter morning?”

  “Is that the one split off from Jensen Memorial?” I asked.

  “The one they built with no windows like they’re barricading themselves against the world?” Betty Ann asked.

  “I guess so,” Portland said dubiously. “That’s where my cleaning woman goes. Or rather, where she used to go up until Easter Sunday. Their preacher’s one of those little pricks who think they’re divinely appointed and that men are superior to women.”

  “Oh yeah, a guy n
amed McKinney. I’ve heard about him,” said Betty Ann. “The women can’t wear slacks or sleeveless dresses. What’s he done now?”

  What she told us was almost unbelievable in this day and age. A man demanding so much obedience that he would order his wife to drink from his water glass after he’d spit in it?

  “Don’t tell me she did it?” I said.

  Portland nodded. “Rena says she cried, but she drank it.”

  For a moment, I thought I was going to throw up and I saw my own horror and disgust mirrored on the faces of my friends.

  “Dear Lord!” said Jamie. “Does he make her wear a veil and walk three paces behind him?”

  “I don’t know about that, but I do know it finished Rena with that church. She put her pride in her pocket and moved her membership back to Jensen Memorial.”

  “Good for her.”

  “But isn’t it appalling?” said Portland. “Next thing you know he’ll be telling her to drink the Kool-Aid.”

  “Been me,” said Betty Ann, “I’d have put a little more spit in the glass and thrown it right back in his arrogant face.”

  Someone at the next table shushed us and we turned our attention to the podium as Elaine Marshall rose to speak. She was her usual witty and intelligent self and she wore a beautifully cut dark red pantsuit.

  But then she was never going to get any votes from any Reverend Mr. McKinneys anyhow.

  Judge Luther Parker, who was supposed to hold juvenile court that afternoon, had been called away at noon on a family emergency, and because my afternoon load was light enough to shift to the others, I volunteered to sit in for him. His calendar included the type of case that is becoming more and more common these days as town and country keep bumping up against each other. If we were totally suburban, there would be one set of problems with common perceptions, experiences, and assumptions. All country would present a different set, but again, most everyone would be on the same page.