Sand Sharks (11 page)

Dave shrugged. “Well, yeah. I was a DA before I ran for judge and I worked with several agents who are still there.”

“Wow! That’s so cool. I wouldn’t have to work undercover, would I? Like, I think I’d be too scared for that, but surveillance
or profiling—that could be awesome! Is that what the guys you worked with did?”

Given the least bit of encouragement, I had the feeling that she was ready to sit at Dave’s feet and soak up stories of SBI
and DA derring-do, but Chelsea Ann interrupted to place her order for fried oysters. I wanted steamed shrimp and the others
opted for seafood of one variety or another as well.

Keeping six orders straight seemed to try young Jenna’s abilities. Either that or she was so interested in chatting with Dave
about the SBI each time she arrived at our table that she couldn’t match a single plate with the person who’d ordered it.
Even Martha, who has nothing but empathy for a restaurant’s waitstaff, sounded a little testy when she had to send her salad
back because the wrong dressing had been poured on it, while Dave, who had initially been amused by her enthusiasm, was annoyed
when his water arrived with a slice of lemon after he had specifically ordered it plain.

“Tell you what, Jenna,” Rosemary said, stepping in to deflect the table’s growing exasperation. “Instead of letting us take
up your time here, why don’t you give us your email address. My husband can send you the names of some Bureau people stationed
in this area, right, darling? I’m sure some of them would enjoy talking to her.”

I almost choked on my shrimp. I know several SBI agents myself, including more than one who would indeed be willing to “instruct”
a pretty young waitress. I glanced at Chelsea Ann, who was giving her sister a glare that I interpreted as “Are you out of
your fricking mind?”

“I guess I could,” Dave said.

“Oh, wow!” said Jenna. “That would be awesome!”

She immediately scribbled her name and contact info on her order pad and gave it to him, then hurried off to fetch the tartar
sauce she had forgotten to bring.

The gravity of a past offense never increases ex post facto.

—Paulus (early AD 3rd century)

C
helsea Ann and Rosemary invited me to join them on their hunt for the perfect vestibule table for Chelsea Ann’s new condo,
but by the time I had changed my bathing suit for more conventional lingerie and got down to the front of the hotel where
they were waiting in the car, they were snarling at each other as only siblings can.

The van’s windows were down and their angry words reached me clearly.

“He’s changed,” said Rosemary. “If I’m going to be suspicious every time a little airhead like that wanders by—”

“Give me a break,” Chelsea Ann snapped. “When are you going to realize that men like Dave don’t give a damn about what’s between
a woman’s ears? All they want is what’s between her legs. Can’t you see what’s happening? Getting you to show yourself out
on the balcony this morning? This public reconciliation in front of his peers?”

“You think it’s all about legalities?” Rosemary was indignant. “Condonation? In case we can’t get past this? You don’t think
it could be because he loves me?”

“Sorry to interrupt when y’all are having such a good time,” I said, opening a back door to check the floor and under the
seats, “but you didn’t happen to find an earring, did you?”

“No, when did you lose it?”

“Who knows?” I ran my fingers around the seat cushions. “I didn’t notice it was missing till I got back to the hotel.”

Rosemary twisted around in her seat. “You were only wearing one when we were waiting for that detective to let us go. I thought
maybe it was a new style. But then I’m only a naive little housewife, so what could I possibly know?”

Heavy sighs from Chelsea Ann.

Much as I love my job when I’m wearing a black robe and have a gavel in my hand, I was in no mood to spend an afternoon arbitrating
between two sisters who probably had issues going back to childhood—which one was more indulged by their mother or better
loved by their father, or who got spanked for something the other one did.

I closed the door and stepped back to speak through the window. “Sorry, guys, but I’m really not interested in looking at
furniture. Dwight and Cal are probably going to come back from Virginia with a truckload of it, so y’all go on without me.
I’ll just run over to Jonah’s and see if someone’s turned in my earring.”

Both insisted that it wouldn’t be that much out of their way to swing past the restaurant, but I stood firm.

As they drove off, I heard Rosemary say, “Anyhow, just because
your
marriage went down the tubes—” and I knew I’d made the right choice.

Jonah’s was having its after-lunch lull. A few people lingered with coffee or drinks under umbrellas out on the porch, but
most of the indoor tables were empty. A couple of hardy souls at the bar were getting an early start on the evening.

Kyle-the-aspiring-actor clearly did not remember me from the night before, and he was only perfunctorily sorry to say he had
not found an earring. “I think someone turned in a lipstick, though. You could ask Hank.”

Hank-the-aspiring-hotel-manager was more accommodating if a little distracted. “Sorry,” he said, as he took out a small box
from under the reception stand, “but it’s been crazy here today. The police only left a few minutes ago. A red-and-white earring?
From last night?”

I nodded and he paused from rummaging through a box of items that ranged from earrings (none of them red and white) to sunglasses
(prescription and drugstore knockoffs) and cigarette lighters (smoking is still allowed outside and in the bar). In his neat
white shirt, black slacks, and preppie haircut, he reminded me of my nephew Stevie, who just graduated from Carolina: the
same clean-cut wholesomeness of a kid who knows what he wants to do with his life.

“You at the university here?” I asked.

“No. UNC–Greensboro.”

Before I completely morphed into Martha Fitzhume and asked if he really did hope to manage a hotel someday, he said, “The
guy who got killed? They said he was one of the judges here for dinner. You a judge, too?”

I admitted that I was.

“Was he a friend of yours?”

“Not really.”

“I must have seated him, but Kyle had that table and even he can’t remember which one he was. Not that y’all all look alike,”
he assured me with a half smile.

“You remember a bearded man last night with a little girl and boy?”

“Vaguely. Why? Was that him?”

“No, but while you were getting the children seated, he came over to speak to their father.”

“Really?”

As he laid out a row of five unmatched earrings on his reservation book, I could almost see him running that part of the evening
through his memory.

“Yeah, I do sort of remember him now. You think I ought to call those detectives and tell them?”

“Tell them what?” asked a familiar voice behind me.

Detective Gary Edwards.

Hank gave him a puzzled look and I quickly realized that if Edwards had been at the hotel through lunchtime, he could not
have been one of the detectives here this morning. I performed the introductions and added, “Hank just realized that he did
see Judge Jeffreys last night.”

“He came up to the table while I was getting the customer’s children seated, but I can’t say that I paid him any attention
after that.” He turned and called to the waiter who stood staring out at the river, probably imagining himself on the prow
of a ship while cameras rolled in for a close-up. “Hey, Kyle! Last night?”

“Oh, God, not more about that guy none of us can remember,” the reed-thin young man grumbled as he reluctantly tore himself
away from the window.

I realized he must have been looking at his own reflection in the glass.

When Hank described his encounter with Jeffreys at Allen’s table—not that either of them knew Allen Stancil by name, but the
children were memorable—Kyle admitted that yeah, now that Hank mentioned it, he
had
noticed the guy. “He had a dumpy little woman with him and he took her over to that man’s table, too.”

Dumpy little woman?

Ouch!

“That would be Judge Blankenthorpe,” I reminded Edwards. “Did you get to ask her yet why she didn’t label that table?”

“She thought we only wanted a seating chart for the judges. Or so she says. I saw you talking to people in the hotel dining
room. Learn anything?”

“Nothing you probably don’t already know,” I told him. “Fitz—Judge Fitzhume? He seems to have been the last one of our group
to see Jeffreys. He was coming out of the restroom as Jeffreys was going in and he said the restroom was otherwise empty and
nobody he knew was anywhere around.”

The phone rang and as Hank answered, I said, “Are you by any chance following me?”

Edwards smiled and shook his head. “Naw. I came down to go over the interviews my squad did here this morning. Sometimes if
you go back a second time right away, somebody will have remembered something. Just like you jiggled the memory of these two.
Now that they know who he was, maybe they’ll remember something useful.”

Kyle moved off to stare at his reflection again with a moody frown.

“Happy hunting,” I told Edwards and with a nod to Hank, who was explaining to the caller that shrimp and grits would probably
be back on the menu in the fall, I decided to go hunting myself for some new red earrings since mine seemed to be lost for
good.

The Cotton Exchange, as its name implies, was once an export company that shipped that Southern commodity all over the world
from the port of Wilmington. The buildings that grew up around it have housed a milling company, a granary, a printing company,
a saloon, and heaven only knows what else over the last hundred years. Today the complex is a collection of small restaurants,
boutiques, and some of my favorite specialty shops.

I headed first to Caravan Beads, a do-it-yourself shop that sells all the findings for putting together your own one-ofa-kind
jewelry, and spent a relaxing half-hour creating a pair of red earrings from tiny featherweight enameled blocks.

“Balsa wood?” I asked the helpful clerk.

She shook her head. “Papier mâché.”

Cool!

Down some steps and around a corner, a shop window displayed several vivid posters depicting marine life. One was a chart
of colorful fishes, another showed seashells to be found in North Carolina waters. Yet another illustrated the twenty-five
most common sharks off our coast, from hammerheads and bull sharks to the sand sharks we used to catch when we went pier fishing.

To my rueful amusement, the final poster was titled “Land Sharks” and cartoon drawings of various sharks had been rendered
into courtroom scenes with each type of shark taking on lawyer-like aspects exaggerated for comic effect. As I bent for a
closer look, Cynthia Blankenthorpe came out of the shop and paused beside me.

“Cute, huh?” She jiggled a well-filled tote bag, from which protruded a rolled-up poster. “I just bought my niece one as a
gag gift for passing her bar exam. She always swore she was never going to be a land shark, yet here she is, following in
her dad’s and my footsteps.”

Kyle the waiter had called her a dumpy little woman. She was indeed short, and yes, this was not a svelte figure. But although
the tight black biking shorts she wore did nothing for her hips, she was built of solid muscle, not fat.

“You do one of those table charts for that detective this morning?” she asked, falling in beside me as I walked downstairs.

I nodded.

“Me, too, only he made me come back a second time because I left out one of the people Pete talked to. A man with two small
children.”

“Allen Stancil,” I said without thinking.

She stopped in mid-step. “Yes! You know him?”

“We’ve met,” I admitted.

“He contribute to your campaign?”

“No. Yours?”

“Not yet. Maybe not ever now that Pete’s dead.” She gestured to a nearby soda shop that was decorated like an old-fashioned
ice cream parlor with little round three-legged tables and black wire chairs. The signs were all in that fat curlicue lettering
that reminds me of the early 1900s. “Could I buy you a drink? Talk to you a minute?”

“Okay,” I said, curious as to where this was leading.

We went inside, ordered diet colas, and took them over to a wobbly back table. She put her tote on one of the dainty chairs
and sat down across from me. As she unwrapped her straw and stuck it in the icy beverage, I noticed again the wicked red scratches
on her right hand that I had seen last night in the party suite, four of them, each about an inch apart.

She saw me looking and said, “I misjudged a yucca when I was out on my bike yesterday and those needles did a job on me. I’m
lucky I didn’t get one in the eye.”

“Adam’s needle and thread,” I murmured, remembering Mother’s colloquial name for the vicious plant.

“Haven’t heard it called that since I was a kid.” Cynthia smiled and for a moment her broad plain face lost the frown lines
between her eyes before she turned serious again. “So what’s the story on Allen Stancil?”

“Story?” I asked cautiously.

“Pete told me he was a blue-collar roughneck who’s become a successful businessman. I got the impression that he donated heavily
to Pete’s upcoming campaign and Pete thought he might contribute to mine, too. Before I take anybody’s money though, I want
to know if it’s clean.”

“And you didn’t think Pete was?”

“Oh, hell, no. I’ve heard how he operated when he was in private practice. Talk about your sharks. And once he hit the bench,
there’ve been all kinds of rumors. One of my friends told me he even solicited campaign contributions from the lawyers in
his courtroom while he was holding court. Wanted them to pledge specific amounts right then and there.”

For some reason, that shocked me even more than realizing that he’d taken money to give Allen custody of his children.