Slow Dollar (25 page)

“Polly’s bunkmates say the last time they saw her was around one. That they went to bed and she stayed up to read.”

“Yeah, Richards told me. They say anything else she might not’ve heard?”

Feeling like a total snitch, I repeated the gossip Tally had told me about Polly’s love life, about her current lover whom she’d taken from Tasha, and her former lover—the corn dog cook who was also Eve’s father. Probably none of it was relevant, but I’d have felt even worse if I didn’t tell him and it turned out to be important.

“Tally didn’t ask me not to repeat it,” I said, “and she’s clicked on the possibility that we’re more than friends. All the same—”

“Don’t worry, shug. It’s probably common knowledge on the lot. They won’t know it came from you.”

I glanced at my watch. A quarter past twelve and I was due in court at one.

“I need to get rolling, too,” Dwight said. “Want to ride into Dobbs with me?”

“And you’ll bring me back this evening?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Just let me go say goodbye to Tally and Arnold.”

As we walked back through the house, I almost bumped into Stevie, who did an abrupt about-turn and ducked into the bathroom.

I leaned close to the door. “You can run but you can’t hide forever, Stevie Knott. You and I are due for a little prayer meeting.”

I tiptoed away. Let him think I was waiting outside the door to snag him.

Out on the porch, we found that several of the carnival people had already left and the Ameses were getting ready to leave themselves. Tally wanted to walk down to the grave site alone with her son and husband, so I hugged her goodbye and said that I’d get over to see her again before the carnival closed.

Then I hugged Andrew, who gave me a bear hug back. Lastly, I told Daddy I was going to leave my car there for the time being and ride over to the courthouse with Dwight. He’s played too much poker to give us away, and as for the others, they take Dwight so much for granted that no one seemed to think it odd that he’d make the round-trip out from Dobbs twice in the same day. Indeed, April was still so clueless that she even smiled up at him and said, “We’re going to have to get you and Sylvia out for supper one night before too much longer.”

Dwight turned a becoming shade of red, which made my brothers laugh and rag him about wedding bells in his future.

We were halfway to Dobbs before I remembered the pictures I’d found.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dwight said. “Doesn’t look like those lockers have anything to do with Hartley’s death after all.”

“But what about the person who tried to break in the shed out at the farm when the gang of three were liberating Lamarr’s grandfather’s pictures?” I asked. “How do you explain that?”

“I don’t. Sure would’ve helped if they’d gotten a good enough look to say if the person was male or female. It might be sheer coincidence, you know. A burglar totally unconnected with the carnival, just looking to take what he could.”

“So instead of ransacking the house or unlocked sheds, he—or she—headed straight for the most securely locked outbuilding on the place?”

“Okay,” he conceded, “but if it
was
Viscardi, we still don’t know why she would want Hartley dead. That story she told us about his blackmail attempt? Maybe he had something on her more serious than who she was sleeping with. Something she couldn’t get out of just by having him beat up.”

“She really did have him beat up?”

“Oh, yes. Jamison interviewed that Sam Warrick and he admitted it. Didn’t want the Ameses to know, but from what we gather, everybody knew it but Mrs. Ames, including her husband and her son.”

So we were back to the Ameses again, with yet another reason to dislike Polly Viscardi.

Even with Dwight driving, we had plenty of time to get to Dobbs and he kept the truck on back roads that were more direct as the crow flies but meandered through the country. Summer was definitely winding down. Wild asters made patches of blue along the ditch banks, and wasteland was yellow with coreopsis, sneezeweeds, and goldenrod. Pokeberries hung in clusters from dark purple stalks and sassafras leaves were bright red and orange against the pines.

“We still don’t have a viable theory as to how Viscardi killed Hartley without being seen,” he said.

I’d been thinking about that myself ever since last night when Arnold told us about Polly’s shoes being bagged.

“Her game is one that’s pretty hard to win,” I said. “That’s something I picked up on the Internet. Unless the coins have a lot of backspin or land just right, they simply won’t stay on the plates. And remember, you don’t have to buy chances to play. People just step up and start tossing. In fact, her main reason to be there was to keep them back behind the foul line.”

Dwight looked dubious. “Okay, so maybe she could leave it for the two or three minutes it’d take her to get across to the Dozer, do Braz, and get back. But why didn’t anybody see her enter or leave?”

“Windy Raines’s Bowler Roller,” I said. “Remember last night when we were talking to Tally? Those strobe lights and the siren? How we all stopped and stared over there and it seemed to go on forever? Even people playing the Dozer went around to that side to watch till the siren stopped. That must have been when she did it. The Bowler Roller’s another one that’s hard to win, but it does happen three or four times an evening. All she’d have to do is wait till it went off, then take advantage of all the lights and noise and people looking there instead of at the Dozer.”

“Makes about as much sense as anything we’ve been able to come up with,” Dwight said, pulling around a tractor and flatbed loaded with irrigation pipes. “The ME couldn’t tell if the injury to the back of his head was before or during the actual stomping. Mayleen thinks she either hit him over the head or got him to lie down by telling him it would stop his nosebleed. She says her grandmother used to put a cold spoon on the roof of her mouth or cold metal across the bridge of her nose to stop the bleeding.”

“Cold quarters?” I wondered.

I convened court at precisely one o’clock. Janice Needham was clerking for me again. The courthouse grapevine had learned of my relationship to Tally Ames and her murdered son, and Janice leaned in to me solicitously to say, “Bradley and I are so sorry, Judge. We had no idea he was kin to y’all.”

“Thank you, Janice,” I said. “I do appreciate you and Brad thinking of us.”

She looked expectant, hoping for some direct-from-the-horse’s-mouth tidbit that she could pass around at the next break, but I glanced over to Tracy Johnson, who was prosecuting this afternoon, and nodded for her to call her first case.

“People versus Martin Samuelson, Your Honor.”

To my surprise, it was the same elderly black man who’d recently stood before me charged with DWI. I’d suspended his license. Now here he was back with heavier charges.

“Mr. Samuelson,” I said, “didn’t I suspend your license just two weeks ago?”

The old man nodded.

“And didn’t you promise me that you wouldn’t ever drive again when you’d been drinking.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But you did.
And
you drove with a suspended license.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why, Mr. Samuelson?”

“See now, I didn’t want to drive,” he said, “but I couldn’t just leave my car on the side of the road. I had to get it home, didn’t I?”

“But your car should have been at home,” I told him. “A suspended license means you can’t drive even if you’re completely sober.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know that, and that’s why I got my nephew to drive me to the ABC store. But on the way home, there was this roadblock up ahead, and Leon, he didn’t want to go through it. I don’t know why, so he just drove in the tobacco field and left me setting there. Well, it was only a half mile from my house and I had to get my car home, didn’t I? And I won’t going to drive on the highway. I was figuring to go through the fields once I got turned around.”

The trooper who’d pulled him, Ollie Harrold, testified that he was assisting in a license-check roadblock when he saw Mr. Samuelson’s Ford drive into a tobacco field about a hundred yards away. “The driver jumped out and ran through the field and disappeared. After maybe ten minutes, the person in the passenger seat got out and went around to the driver’s seat. It was almost stuck in the sand, but he kept rocking it till he got it backed out of the field and onto the road, and that’s when I went down and asked him for his license.”

Harrold also testified that he’d administered the Breathalyzer test and Mr. Samuelson had blown a point-oh-eight. Not so long ago, that would have been well under the legal limit. Not anymore, though. And under the required sentencing a Level One DWI meant a mandatory minimum of thirty days’ jail time.

“Your Honor?” said Harrold, who knew what sentence the old man was facing. “I know Mr. Samuelson, and I know he’s telling the truth about not intending to drive.”

A case like this one is precisely why I hate mandatory sentencing. Nothing left to the discretion of the judge except to decree guilt or innocence. My hands were tied.

The intent of mandatory sentencing is noble. It’s supposed to ensure that everybody will be treated roughly equally under the law. Black, white, brown, red, or yellow. Rich or poor. A Daughter of the American Revolution or a just-off-the-plane Nigerian immigrant. Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist. Almost no wiggle room for bigoted judges (think there aren’t any left?) to come down hard on some groups and easy on people just like themselves. As with most noble intentions, however, the law of unintended consequences always comes into play and here I was with Mr. Samuelson, who hadn’t meant to drive. If his superior hadn’t been out there on that roadblock that day, the patrolman would probably have found a way to get Mr. Samuelson and his car back home without anything official going down in the books.

Once he’d written the ticket, though, all the legalities were set inexorably into motion.

I could see the pleading in Harrold’s eyes for me not to do what the law required, and I leaned back in my chair to think of my options. I wasn’t helped by the throbbing that had begun on my right foot.

Even though they’re pretty and had cost more than I usually pay, the low-heeled navy shoes I’d chosen for the funeral were reminding me why I seldom wore them, funeral or no funeral. I’ve never had corns but I do have a rather prominent bony knob at the base of my big toe and some shoes rub me raw there if I wear them more than a couple of hours. I slipped my foot out to ease the pain and concentrated on Mr. Samuelson’s dilemma. Mine, too. Nothing would be served by sending an eighty-three-year-old man to jail for thirty days. He hadn’t deliberately gone out to break the law. If his nephew hadn’t left him with his ox in a ditch, so to speak—

A glimmer of possibility gleamed through the legal underbrush. A legal out no doubt inspired by the Book of Luke: “And which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the Sabbath day?”

I looked at Mr. Samuelson. “Sir, did you feel this was a real emergency?” I asked. “And that you had no other choices?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. I won’t going to leave my car there. Time I might could get somebody to fetch it, it’d be stripped down to the axles. They’s some bad people out here, Your Honor.”

“There is a legal term called the Doctrine of Emergency,” I said, “and it protects those who perform technically illegal acts during an emergency from the legal consequences of those acts. I hereby declare that Mr. Samuelson’s actions were covered by that doctrine. Case dismissed.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Harrold murmured quietly as he stepped down from the witness-box.

Tracy just shook her head and called her next case.

Hey, if it was good enough for Jesus, it should be good enough for the state of North Carolina.

I slipped my foot back into my shoe and that place at the base of my big toe protested. I decided then and there that these shoes weren’t going back into my closet. As soon as I got home, I was going to put them in the Goodwill box. Let somebody else wear them.

Somebody else?

One train of thought immediately coupled itself to another, and then another, till I had a whole line of freight cars pulling out of the station loaded with possibilities.

Well, damn!

Tracy moved into routine cases of excessive speed and seat belt violations, but I gave her only half my attention. The other half was chugging around the carnival lot as I remembered all I’d seen and heard these past few days. The things Tally and Dwight had told me, the things I’d gleaned from the Internet, the things I’d wondered about. All came together in such dovetailing clarity that it was all I could do to sit there and rule on these misdemeanors. I might not know why Braz was killed, but I had a pretty good idea why Polly Viscardi was.

While the ADA sorted through her shucks before calling the next case, I scribbled a note to Dwight and called the bailiff over. “Give this to Major Bryant, please, Mr. Overby. And if he’s not there, see if they can locate him?”

He nodded and went out, and for the next hour and forty-five minutes, I did my best to pay attention and dispense justice.

When I recessed at three for the afternoon break, Dwight was waiting outside in the hallway talking with Reid and my other former law partner, John Claude Lee. I’d’ve paid a nickel to have heard what Reid had to say to Dwight the first time they met after that Saturday morning sunrise surprise, but now was not the time to ask.

“You wanted to see me, Your Honor?” Dwight said formally.

“Yes, please.” I held the door of my temporary chambers open.

When we were inside with the door closed, and before I could speak, Dwight put his arms around me. “Sorry,” he said, “but I’ve been wanting to do this all day.”

God, he kisses good! As slow and deliberate as his driving. And with the same attention to all the road signs.

“Much as I’d like to pursue this line of thought to its logical conclusion,” I said, stepping back a little breathlessly, “I have to get back in there in fifteen minutes and you’ve got a lot of ground to cover, too.”

“I do?”

“Those shoes that Polly Viscardi was wearing when she died. Are you sure they’re hers?”

“Huh? Yeah... well, pretty sure. Pink laces, little bells on the lace tips. Why?”

“Look at my poor foot,” I said, and slipped off my shoe so he could see the red where a blister was trying to form beneath the sheer nylon.

“I’ve got six people out there doing a canvass of the carnival and you call me back to show me your blister?” He gave a sudden grin. “Am I supposed to kiss it and make it all better?”

“Only if you have a foot fetish,” I said, smiling back. “No, you’re supposed to think about Skee Matusik’s blisters. I’ve had these shoes three years and they still look like new because they hurt my feet so much I can’t wear them for very long at a time. Skee’s on his feet all day. Those are not new-looking shoes he’s been wearing the last two days, but they were certainly brand-new blisters.”

“I don’t know what he was wearing Friday night,” I said. “I didn’t notice. But on Saturday, it was dirty white sneakers. Yesterday it was the leather shoes he had on at the funeral, but the laces are way too short. Even leaving the top holes untied, he could barely make a bow. And you saw those blisters on his heels today at lunch when Jessica brought him Band-Aids. Those can’t be his own shoes that he’s wearing.”

“Matusik killed Hartley?” Dwight asked. “Why?”

“Sorry,” I said, and I really was. For better or worse, Tally’s first son had been part of our family, lost to us before we knew he existed, as forever unknowable as my father’s first son. “I don’t know enough about either of them to even begin to guess. He and his late wife were supposed to be like grandparents to Tally’s boys. Tally said the only reason they let Skee come out with them this trip was because Braz begged them to on account of their close relationship. But if the shoes Polly was wearing turn out to be Skee’s, then he has to have been the one that killed Braz, not Polly. And after he finished killing her late Sunday night or early yesterday morning, he must have switched shoes. Put her pink laces in his low-top shoes, and his short laces in her ankle-high ones. He’s a small man, and she was a sturdy woman, so their feet would have been roughly the same size. Only his laces weren’t long enough to go through all the holes.”