by Otto Penzler
“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:
E — God, I’m so sorry about Chass. I never meant to hurt you. You know how much you mean to me.
Love always,
George
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 Fm 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.
/
JAY MCINERNEY
Con Doctor
from Playboy
They ve come for you at last. Outside your cell door, gathered like a storm. Each man holds a pendant sock and in the sock is a heavy steel combination lock which he has removed from the locker in his own cell. You feel them out there, every predatory one of them, and still they wait. They have found you. Finally they crowd open the cell door and pour in, flailing at you like mad drummers on amphetamines, their cats ’ eyes glowing yellow in the dark, hammering at the recalcitrant bones of your face and the tender regions of your prone carcass, the soft tattoo of blows interwoven with grunts of exertion. It�
��s the old lock ’n sock. You should have known. As you wait for the end, you think that it could’ve been worse. It has been worse, Christ, what they do to you some nights. ... t
V
In the morning, over seven grain cereal and skim milk, Terri says, “The grass looks sick.”
“You want the lawn doctor,” McClarty says. “I’m the con doctor.” “I wish you’d go back to private practice. I can’t believe you didn’t report that inmate who threatened to kill you.” McClarty now feels guilty that he told Terri about this little incident — a con named Lesko who made the threat after McClarty cut back his Valium — in the spirit of stoking her sexual ardor. His mention of the threat, his exploitation of it, has the unintended effect of making it seem more real.
“The association is supposed to take care of the grass,” Terri says. They live in 3 community called Live Oakes Manor, two to four bedroom homes behind an eight-foot brick wall, with four tennis courts, a small clubhouse and a duck pond. This is the way we live
now — walled in, on cul de sacs in false communities. Bradford Arms, Ridgeview Farms, Tudor Crescent, Wedgewood Heights, Oakdale Manor, Olde Towne Estates — these capricious appellations with their diminutive suggestion of the baronial, their vague Anglo-pastoral allusiveness. Terri’s two-bedroom unit with sun-deck and jacuzzi is described in the literature as “contemporary Georgian.”
McClarty thinks about how, back in the days of pills and needles — of Percodan and Dilaudid and finally fentanyl — he didn’t have these damn nightmares. In fact he didn’t have dreams. Now when he’s not dreaming about the prison, he dreams about the pills and also about the powders and the deliquescent Demerol mingling in the barrel of the syringe with his own brilliant blood. He dreams that he can see it glowing green beneath the skin like a radioactive isotope as it moves up the vein, warming everything in its path until it blossoms in his brain stem. Maybe, he thinks, he should go to a meeting.
