Slow Dollar (18 page)

The pimply faced teenager minding the desk at the Colleton U-Stor didn’t remember Brazos Hartley even though he’d taken the bid on two lockers on the thirty first of August. He was pretty sure that no one had been around about a locker belonging to a Leonard Angelopolus but Caroline Sholten? He couldn’t swear he’d ever met her, but he certainly recalled Mrs. Sholten’s angry middle-aged daughter.

“You know how kids used to say ‘Your mama wears army boots’?” He giggled. “Well, this lady really did. I mean, she was
huge
. She had on these lace-up boots like a Marine or a paratrooper, and shorts that looked like bib overalls with the pant legs cut off, y’know? And
her
legs were like tree stumps. Man, she was one tough mama! And going on and on about how it was her furniture and her mother meant for her to have it. I told her if her mother wanted to keep the stuff, she shoulda paid the rent before it got auctioned off. I mean, we sent out the letter, advertised in the
Ledger
. Posted a notice at the courthouse. It was a legal sale.”

“Did you tell her who’d bought it?” asked Mayleen Richards.

“Yep. Gave her his phone number and e-mail and told her she’d have to find him before he sold it.”

“Did she leave her own name or address?”

The kid shook his head.

“What about the owner’s address?”

He looked at her as if her deck had a few missing cards. “Well, yeah, but she’s dead, remember?”

No point in reminding him that even old ladies have friends and neighbors. “Just give me the address.”

It was only a couple of miles away, a fifties-type brick ranch with empty windows and an air of expectant neglect. The foundation plantings had overgrown their allotted spaces and all the trimwork was in sore need of paint, but help was probably on the way if the real estate agent’s sign in the weedy front yard was any indication. It had a new red SOLD! sticker across it. She took down the agent’s number just in case no one else could help, then knocked on the door of the house across the road.

“Coming, coming, coming!” called a cheerful, if somewhat trembly, voice and the door was eventually opened by a very old, very frail white woman encumbered by an aluminum walker. She seemed delighted to find a female deputy in full uniform on her front porch. Smiling as Richards introduced herself, she invited the younger woman to come in. “I’m Liz. Liz Collins. Isn’t it just wonderful all that we can be and do these days? I’d give anything if I’d been born fifty years later. Not that I didn’t have an interesting time of it”—her gnarled hand gestured to a wall of framed photographs beside the door—“but these days I could have maybe made it into space.”

Mayleen Richards glanced perfunctorily at the photographs, did a double take, then looked more closely at the young woman in the cockpit of a plane, surrounded by other women in flying gear, getting a medal pinned to her jacket by a general, sitting on the wing of an airplane. “You were a pilot? Which war is this?”

“WW Two,” she said proudly. “I was one of the women that ferried planes from the assembly lines over to Europe. They wouldn’t let us join the Air Force or fly combat missions, but at least we got to do that much.”

From the next room came another cracked and trembly voice. “May I get you some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Richards said. She turned, expecting to see another elderly person in the doorway, but no one was there.

“That’s only Billy, my cockatiel.” The woman laughed and seated herself in a high rocking chair, the seat of which was made even higher by a thick cushion so that she didn’t have far to lower herself. “Please make yourself comfortable, Deputy Richards, and are you sure I can’t get you some tea?”

“Some tea?” the bird asked again.

Richards smiled. “No, ma’am, thank you.”

She explained the reason for her visit and Mrs. Collins nodded immediately.

“Carrie Sholten. Lovely woman. We were neighbors more than thirty years. Her husband died about eighteen months ago and her daughter wanted her to come live near her in Atlanta. Carrie wasn’t exactly sure about making it permanent, so she rented the house to his cousin and put her best pieces of furniture in storage while she looked for an apartment. But then, before she could find one, she fell and broke her hip and bless her heart, she never came home from the hospital.”

“What about her daughter?”

“Janice? Yes, she came up last month to put the house on the market and get Carrie’s things, but that shiftless cousin that was supposed to forward her mail never passed on the letter from the storage place that she was behind on her rent, so they sold everything at auction. Janice was mad as fire over that, but it was all legal. Nothing she could do about it. She did go find the high bidder and bought back some of the pieces.”

“Do you have an address or phone number for her?” Richards asked.

“Oh yes.” A telephone and a large businesslike Rolodex stood on the table beside her chair. Mrs. Collins spun the round knob until she found the card she wanted. “Janice Radakovich. She’s a civil engineer with the highway department down there in Georgia. Builds roads and bridges. Isn’t that wonderful? You young women today!”

About the time Deputy Richards was checking out the E-Z-Quik Mail and McLamb and Jamison were winding up their interview with Lamarr Wrenn, Dwight Bryant was ready to walk through the outbuildings at the old Hatcher place with Tally Ames. Not that he’d known the name given to the farm by local residents in this part of the county. All he knew was that Mrs. Ames had said it belonged to her grandparents and now to her.

“They were Hatchers? You any kin to Beth Hatcher over near Clayton?”

When she said no, he gave up trying to find a personal link.

Arnold Ames and their son Val were back in Dobbs, working on the innards of a motor that turned one of the kiddie rides and hoping to get it back in operation by opening time this evening, which is why it was Mrs. Ames who led him out from the carnival. He had offered to bring her in his car, but she had declined.

“Fish’s loading the truck with the rest of the stuff Braz bought so we can store it out there, and then I have to go over to the funeral home, okay? They released his body yesterday.”

“You’re burying him here?” For some reason, that surprised him. “I was thinking you’d want to take him back to Florida.”

“No, we decided to do it here,” she said, giving him an odd sidelong glance. She started to say something, then changed her mind.

She had parked the truck over by one of the sheds and the employee they called Fish was already undoing the tarp they’d tied over the load. There was a flash of bright colors inside their plastic covering as he let down the tailgate and rolled off the rack of lingerie Dwight had seen when the van was searched on Saturday. Mayleen Richards had interviewed the guy and reported that he’d spent Friday evening in front of the dunk tank, taking money from the customers who lined up to throw baseballs at the target that would trip a spring and dump their Bozo in the water. Dwight remembered the Bozo, who’d had such an insulting mouth on him that Colleton County youths were elbowing each other aside to pay for the privilege of drowning him, but he didn’t remember this Fish.

“Nice enough guy,” Mayleen had said. “Borderline retarded, though. Not bright enough to lie.”

Mrs. Ames got out of the truck clutching a handful of keys. She wore jeans and work shoes. Her dark hair was pulled back from her face today and tied at the nape with a red scarf.

Since getting the ME’s report, Dwight found himself conscious of footwear around the carnival. Not that he really thought Mrs. Ames had stomped her son. All the same, he gave her shoes a close look. These were buff colored with equally light gum soles. They were scuffed and dusty as if they hadn’t been cleaned in some time, but no apparent stains. When she walked over to the barn doors, he noticed that the shoes left a crisp ripple pattern on the dirt path.

Fish’s shoes were Nikes that had started out white but were now stained and dingy. The stains were either black, as from grease and oil, or were drips of crayon-bright enamels from helping to paint the rides. They, too, left distinct patterns on the dirt.

“Some woman from Georgia caught up with Braz a couple of weeks ago,” said Mrs. Ames, unlocking the first shelter. “I didn’t see her, but he said she was pretty mad about the locker place selling her mother’s furniture.”

“Was she mad at him?” asked Dwight.

“Well, she certainly wasn’t happy having to buy back the things she particularly wanted. He sold her a table, some chairs, and a framed mirror and he told me he got enough from those four pieces to put him in the black for that particular locker. Braz liked to drive hard bargains.”

She threw open the double doors, and Dwight saw a massive oak bedroom suite proportioned for a room with ten-foot ceilings.

“That came out of the same auction,” said Tally Ames, “but nobody’s called him about it. Over here’s the rest of that woman’s mother’s things.”

It looked like ordinary furniture to Dwight.

“Cheap veneers and beat-up postwar era,” Mrs. Ames agreed, “but migrant workers will snap it up down in Florida. Fish, you can slide that rack in behind the dresser here, okay?”

“Okay,” he said cheerfully. He was early thirties, about five-nine, and well muscled with a heavy lower jaw and a bullet-shaped head made even more noticeable for being shaved smooth. Around his neck was a gold chain with a cross on it, and the cross banged his chin whenever he stooped to pick up something he’d dropped. Some of the filmy robes kept slipping off their hangers and he bent to retrieve them with a surprising delicacy of touch.

“They’re real pretty, Tally. You ought to keep these for yourself.”

“I don’t think so,” she told him with a smile. “Too fancy for me.”

They left him to finish unloading the truck, and Mrs. Ames showed Dwight some of the things her husband had bought, including the tools that incited the Lincoln brothers to slash the Pot O‘Gold slide.

They were headed for the far side of the compound toward a small shed that stood up on low rock pilings. “Braz’s office,” Mrs. Ames was saying when she broke off and quickened her step.

“Well, damn!” she exclaimed. “Somebody’s pulled the lock off.”

She was right. The lock was still closed tightly on the hasp, but the whole thing had been prized right off the door and now lay on the grass near an abandoned hammer. Inside was a shambles. A box of used books had been overturned and more loose papers fluttered off the old battered teacher’s desk as a breeze from the open doorway blew in.

“What on earth were they looking for?” Tally Ames wondered aloud.

“Try not to touch anything,” Dwight said, “but can you tell me if anything’s missing?”

“God, how would I know?” she said tartly. “Braz called this his office, but mostly it was where he kept the books and papers and pictures he and Arnie unload from the lockers. Arnie used to toss them in the nearest Dumpster, okay? But Braz once found a fifty-dollar bill in one of the books. And he was watching a rerun of
Antiques Roadshow
the night they showed how sometimes old tintypes and letters could be worth a few hundred. After that, he got Arnie to give him any papers he was going to toss and he’d go through them. We used to tease him about him and his slow dollar. We thought the only thing he’d found was baby pictures and old income tax returns. Nothing worth even putting in a flea market, much less on eBay.”