“Such a shame we couldn’t do any picking and singing tonight,” she lamented, reaching for her banjo case. “Maybe next week we’ll have more folks to come. You know, we might need to start us a phone tree to turn us out better.” As she passed Ralph, she said, “I sure hope Miz Freeman makes it home safe. This is real bad weather to get stuck off somewhere.”
We all said goodnight to Steve, who locked up behind us and turned off the lights on his way through the restaurant to the rear door that’s a shortcut to his house out back.
Haywood held an umbrella over Isabel as they splashed out to their car. Like the southern gentleman he aspires to become, Reid told me to stay under the porch while he brought the car over.
Ralph Freeman stood beside me staring out at the rain indecisively. His face held the same hopeless misery I’d seen on Cyl’s face last night, and to my horror, instead of some innocuous platitude about hoping everything turned out okay, I heard myself say, “Did y’all have a fight? Is she doing this deliberately? Punishing you for Cyl?”
“Cyl?” The worry lines between his eyes deepened. “You mean Ms. DeGraffenried?”
I touched his arm. “You don’t have to pretend, Ralph. I know about you two.”
“You do?” He looked at me warily. “How? She tell you?”
“Only after I guessed,” I said and told him how I’d put two and two together last night.
“How is she?” His need was so great that it was almost as if he didn’t care that I knew so long as I could tell him about Cyl.
“She’s really hurting.”
His broad shoulders slumped even more if that was possible.
Reid pulled in beside the single porch step. I held up two fingers and he cut his lights to show that he’d wait with his motor running till I finished talking.
Ralph said, “You must think I’m the world’s biggest hypocrite.”
“It’s not for me to judge,” I answered primly.
“No?” He gave me such an ironic lift of his eyebrow that I had to smile.
“You know what I mean. I’ve got too much glass in my own house for me to go around looking for stones in my neighbors’ eyes.”
That didn’t come out quite the way I intended, although Haywood would surely have understood my mangled metaphors.
“Where are your children?” I asked pointedly.
“Home. The wife of one of our deacons is with them. And to answer your first question, Clara might do something like this to me, but she’d never do it to them. She was supposed to pick Lashanda up from her Brownie meeting after school, but she didn’t. I can’t understand it.”
“Friends?” I said. “Family?”
“All back in Warrenton except for her prayer partner. Rosa’s the only one Clara’s really taken to since we moved here. Rosa Edwards. I called her right off, but she hasn’t seen Clara since first thing this morning. I don’t know where else to look, who else to call.”
“Maybe you just ought to go on home,” I said. “Be with the children. That’s where she’d call, wouldn’t she?”
He nodded. “She’ll know they’re worried and she’ll want them to know she’s all right, soon as possible.”
“Want me to speak to Dwight Bryant? He could probably put on a couple of extra patrol cars.”
“Would you? I’d appreciate that.” He hesitated. “You wouldn’t have to tell him about Cyl and me, would you?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks, Deborah.”
“No problem,” I said.
He took a deep breath and stepped out bareheaded into the rain. Reid pushed open the passenger door and I slid inside.
As we headed back down 48, Reid said, “What was that all about?”
“His wife. He’s really worried about her.”
With Ralph’s red taillights shining up ahead, we rode in a silence broken only by the windshield wipers on wet glass, till Reid turned off the highway onto the road that led to my house. I found myself automatically checking the ditches on both sides, half-expecting to see Clara Freeman’s car.
When we got to my house, I pushed the remote and once more the garage door swung up so that Reid could drive in.
“Any chance of a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” I replied. “Just let me call Dwight first.”
* * *
I could have called from the kitchen, of course; instead, I went straight to the phone beside my bed. Sometimes Dwight’ll give me a hard time for meddling. Tonight he listened as I stated the case against Clara Freeman just taking off without a thought for her children.
“Ralph’s afraid she’s had a wreck or something and if she has, you know the quicker she gets help, the better it’ll be,” I urged. “Do you really have to wait twenty-four hours?”
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’ll shift all the patrols over to that sector till they’ve covered all the roads. If she’s out there, they’ll find her.”
* * *
Reid was aimlessly opening cabinet doors when I got back to the kitchen.
“Coffee’s in the refrigerator,” I told him.
“Of course. The one place I didn’t look.”
He put two filters in the basket—“Cuts the caffeine and acids”—scooped in the ground coffee and flicked the switch.
“Does that weather board I gave you work okay?”
“Sure,” I said, though truth to tell, I’d barely glanced at it since he hung it up.
“Let’s see how low the pressure is right now with all this rain.”
He headed for my bedroom and I trailed along at his heels. Did I mention that all good lawyers are actors? Reid was giving a charming performance at the moment—burbling about how his dad still checks the barometer every morning even though he can now look out the window overlooking the ninth green and see for himself whether it’s a good day for golf.
“’Course with Dad, any day it’s not sleeting is a good day for golf.”
Once inside my bedroom, he went right over to the dials and started reading them off. I just leaned against the doorjamb and watched him.
He turned around. “Aren’t you interested?”
“Oh, I’m interested all right,” I said wickedly. “Since you haven’t been able to get back here alone, what did you plan to do? Slide it under my bed as soon as I came over to look? Hope I’d think it rolled there by accident?”
“Huh?”
A textbook look of puzzled innocence spread across his face.
“Considering that it got you off the hook with Dwight, I really think you should have given me something nicer for my wall than a twenty-dollar weather center.”
He gave a sheepish grin, his first honest expression of the night. “Wal-Mart doesn’t offer a lot of choice. It was this or a sunburst clock or a bad knockoff of a Bob Timberlake painting.”
Overall, I had to agree with his decision. Nevertheless, I held out my hand and he reached into his pocket and pulled out the sterling silver pen that he’d lifted from the pencil mug beside my phone on Monday.
“When did you miss it?” he asked, turning the gleaming shaft in his fingers.
“While you were changing clothes tonight, I tidied up in here.”
“Well, damn! You mean I was that close to getting away with it?”
“Not really. I knew you were up to something, I just hadn’t figured out what. You hate gospel music, remember?”
He shrugged. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
“No more games,” I said sternly. “How did your pen get under Lynn Bullock’s body?”
“I don’t know, Deborah, and that’s the God-honest truth. She borrowed it the last time we were together and didn’t give it back and, well, it seemed a little petty to make a big point about it since I didn’t want to see her again anyhow.”
“So why didn’t you just tell Dwight?”
“Oh, sure. My pen under the body of a woman whose neck I’d threatened to wring?”
“What?”
“I didn’t mean it,” he said hastily. “You know how you say things—‘I’ll kill him,’ ‘I’m going to clean his clock’? It’s just talk. But I was so mad when I saw what she’d done to my car. Hot as it’s been? And with the windows rolled up? I had to go buy a pair of rubber gloves just to drive it to the shop. I was so pissed, I kept saying that I was going to wring the little bitch’s neck. Everybody at the shop just laughed at me, they didn’t have a clue who I was talking about, but Will was there and I’m pretty sure he knew because he gave me a wink and said he’d swear it was justifiable homicide.”
If my brother had known Lynn Bullock was the woman who’d done something like that to Reid’s car, he certainly would have mentioned it Sunday night when we were talking about her death. Will’s a consummate con man though, and he can be incredibly sneaky when he puts his mind to it. He has a way of pretending he knows more about things than he does, hoping to bluff you into telling him what you assume he already knows.
“Don’t you see? If Dwight knew it was my pen, he’d go digging around and find out—”
“And find out what?” I asked. Then it hit me. “Wait a minute! You had two dates with her last Christmas and she only lately fouled your car? When?”
“Tuesday, a week ago,” he admitted.
“Why?” I asked, even though that mulish look on his face gave me the answer. “Oh for God’s sake, Reid! Tell me you didn’t. You said she wasn’t your type.”
“Well, she wasn’t,” he said sulkily. “All the same, for all her snob talk, there was something—I don’t know—vulnerable? Did I tell you what she said about Dad coming out to her grandfather’s place when she was a little girl?”
“No.”
“She was just a kid when it happened, but she never forgot. Dad had gone out to coach her grandfather for a court appearance. She talked about Dad’s fingernails. How clean and even they were.”
Reid looked down at his own neatly manicured nails and I had a sudden mental image of my daddy’s hands, the nails split and stained with country work.
“What was her grandfather charged with?”
“I looked it up in the files.” Reid gave me a lopsided grin. “Let’s put it this way. Your dad was paying my dad’s bill. And he paid her grandfather’s fine and court costs.”
“What?”
“Oh, come on, Deb’rah. Everybody knows Mr. Kezzie made his money in bootleg whiskey.”
“When he was younger, yes,” I agreed, “but he gave all that up before I was born and Lynn Bullock was younger than me.”
“Whiskey’s the only thing your daddy’s ever lied to me about,” Mother once told me. “The only thing I know he lied about anyhow.”
I looked at Reid sharply. “Is he still mixed up in it?”
“Old as he is? I doubt it,” said Reid. “’Course, a lot of people still think he is, and it probably amuses him to let them. I’m sure you’d’ve heard about it, if he were.”
“True,” I said, relieved. Dwight or Terry or certainly Ed Gardner, who works ATF, would have put a bug in my ear if he were still active. One thing a judge doesn’t need is to have her daddy hauled in for making moonshine.
“Anyhow,” said Reid, “Lynn Bullock was a damn good lay. I’m not seeing anybody special these days, so I thought what the hell, why not give her another call?”
“Only her memory being better than yours, she was still ticked that you’d dumped her after the second night and it really steamed her when you called out of the blue with nothing on your mind but sex?”
“Something like that. Look, Deborah, you’ve got to help me. Don’t tell Dwight it was your pen I showed him. Okay?”
“You’re crazy. I’m a judge. An officer of the court. I can’t not tell him. So she smeared dog dirt inside your car. Big deal. And you vented at the garage. Hyperbole. You tell him who you were with before you got to the ball field, she confirms it and—”
There was that look again. “No who?”
“No who,” he said.
“You’re not being noble, are you?” I asked suspiciously. “Saving somebody’s reputation?”
“The only reputation I was saving was mine. Everybody thinks I get laid six days a week and twice on Sundays. Truth is, I’m damn near a virgin these days. I went to the office Saturday morning, got sleepy after lunch, flaked out upstairs and almost slept through the game.”
I looked at him. I may have eleven older brothers, but he’s the nearest thing to a kid brother I’d ever had. His handsome face was an open book.
Or was it?
“Oh come on, Deborah. I did not kill Lynn Bullock.”
“You know he couldn’t,” whispered my internal preacher.
“Irrelevant!” snapped the pragmatist from the other side of my head. “You withhold something like this from Dwight and you could find yourself facing an ethics review.”
Reid still held my pen in his hand.
“If I’d been a little smarter, I’d have found a way to put this back and you wouldn’t have known the difference. All you have to do is forget the last few minutes ever happened.”
He walked over to my telephone and dropped the pen into my pencil mug.
“See?”
“Reid—”
“Please, Deborah. All I’m asking is that you wait about talking to Dwight. Give him a chance to find Lynn’s real killer. Or—” He gave me a sharp, considering look. “Maybe we could find him first.”
“We?”
“Why not? We’re both professionals. Taking depositions is what we do. And people talk to civilians like us quicker than they’ll talk to Dwight. We just ask a few questions around town, listen hard to all the gossip and figure it out. What do you say?”
His eager, almost adolescent expression suddenly reminded me of Mickey Rooney in those old movies Dwight and I sometimes watch.
I didn’t feel one bit like Judy Garland though and I sure as hell didn’t want to try putting on a show in the barn.
“How hard can it be for us to figure out who was balling her?” Reid wheedled, as he followed me out to the kitchen. “She didn’t do it in the middle of Main Street or in her own house, even, but she sure wasn’t the most discreet woman I ever slept with.”
“Do you suppose Jason knew?” I asked, pouring us a cup of the freshly brewed coffee.
“Had to, you’d think.” Reid reached into my refrigerator for milk and kept dribbling it in until his coffee was more au lait than café. “Unless he’s one of those husbands who makes a point of not knowing? He’s such a grind though, maybe not.”
“Grind? He was playing ball Saturday.”
“Grind,” Reid said firmly. “He and Millard King. Birds of a feather. And not just because they humped the same woman.”
“How’s that?”
“Both of them are ambitious as hell and both of ’em have at least two reasons for everything they do. Like playing ball. That’s an appropriate ‘guy’ activity. Makes you seem human. Puts you right out there to bond with your peer group. Good social contacts. Like the way you moved your membership over to First Baptist in Dobbs,” he added shrewdly.
“See?” said the preacher, who’s always been embarrassed by that cynical act.
The pragmatist shrugged.
“Before it’s over, you’re going to see King and Bullock both on a statewide ballot,” said Reid. “Just remember that you heard it here first.”
“Elective office?”
“Why else do you think King’s so hot to marry one of the homeliest gals that ever wore lipstick? Because she’s connected on both sides of her family to some political heavy hitters, that’s why. And in this state, you still need a ladywife to do the whole white-glove bit. If Lynn Bullock threatened to make a scandal, she could’ve scared the little debutante off. Soured things with her daddy the Justice.”
His venom surprised me. “What’s Millard King ever done to you?”
“Nothing really. Just sometimes I get a shade tired of the deserving poor.”<
br />
“Come again?”
“All these up-by-their-bootstrap people, who keep reminding you that you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth while they had to work for everything they got,” he said scornfully. “As if you’re worth shit because your parents and your grandparents could read and write, while they’re the true yeoman nobility who really deserve it. And all the time they’re sneering, they’re out there busting their balls to have what they think you’re born to. As if money’s all it takes.”
“Why, Reid Stephenson! You really are a snob.”
“If not apologizing for who and what my parents are and what they gave me makes me a snob, then guilty as charged,” he said as his scowl dissolved into one of those roguish smiles. “But I’m not guilty of murder.”
“You’re the one without an alibi though.”
I drained the last of my coffee and as he took my mug to pour me another cup of the rich dark brew, we mulled over the other men known to be in Lynn Bullock’s life.
“She died between five-fifteen and eight, give or take a few minutes,” I said. “Dwight and I got to the ball field around four-thirty. Jason Bullock was right behind me when she called at five and after the game, he went straight from the field to the pizza place with us. We even followed him back to Cotton Grove.”
“He may be out of it,” said Reid, “but what about Millard King?”
“He told Dwight that he was there jogging for at least an hour, but I didn’t notice him till he was coming off the track around six o’clock. I suppose he could have cut through the trees and jogged over from the Orchid Motel. It’s on this side of the bypass and less than a quarter-mile as the crow flies.”
“Or the jogger jogs,” said Reid, brightening up a bit.
“Courthouse gossip says that she was with Brandon Frazier for a while.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too, but so what? Frazier doesn’t have a wife or anybody special and he doesn’t act like someone planning to run for political office.”
“Frazier and King. Not much of a pool,” I observed.
“And neither of them threatened to wring her neck,” Reid said glumly. “There has to be somebody else, somebody we haven’t heard about yet.”
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