Southern Discomfort (14 page)

"Proper surface preparation is an essential part of any paint job; paint will not adhere well, provide the required surface protection, or present a good appearance unless the surface has been properly treated."

The investigator from Environmental Health, an environmental epidemiologist to give him his official title, was named Gordon O'Connor. Thirtyish, going bald early. Despite laid-back sneakers and jeans, there was an edginess about his wiry build that made me think he'd probably been a nerd in grade school. An intelligent nerd with something of a terrier's nervous intensity just before he picks up the rabbit's trail.

He wore rimless round glasses perched on a long thin nose. The lens were thinner than fine crystal and polished to a shining gloss that rivaled the gloss of his bald dome. Behind those glasses, his eyes gleamed like two large black coffee beans; yet, they couldn't have needed much correction because the lens didn't distort their appearance any more than ordinary window glass.

Every attorney is something of a pop psychologist and I decided that he'd probably been shy in his youth and maybe didn't realize he'd outgrown the need to hide behind glass. (Let the record show that edgy shyness can be oddly sexy at times.)

Not that there was anything shy about the way Mr. O'Connor delved into Herman's life. He interviewed Herman and Nadine separately and together, his terrier face darting back and forth between them in the hospital. When Nadine came back to work on Friday, O'Connor was right behind her, ready to start digging up every mole run in the county.

Nadine has a touching faith in modern medicine. Now that Herman was diagnosed and on the mend, she felt it was possible to leave him in the hospital's efficient hands while she came home to keep the business going.

So far, it had not occurred to her that Herman's poisoning was anything but accidental. The Raleigh
News and Observer
had covered Blanche Taylor Moore's trial in exhaustive detail from first suspicion till when she was sentenced to death for first-degree murder. Yet, even though the paper emphasized that most arsenic killers tended to be southern women, and most victims tended to be the man in their lives, Nadine was joking that at least Herman didn't have to worry that she'd poisoned his tea.

Along with the other two electricians Herman employed, Reese and Annie Sue could keep up with most of the routine field work, but only Nadine fully understood all the paperwork involved in running the business, and she didn't want to get too far behind. "Especially since we haven't got us a new accountant yet," she told me. "Thank goodness Ralph McGee got us through tax season before he died."

She looked abashed. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Poor Gladys."

It was a little past one on a blistering hot Friday. I had adjourned court for the weekend and stopped in to see how Nadine was getting along. The humidity was so high that just walking from my air-conditioned car to the air-conditioned office was like wading through tall grass, and I grabbed a drink from the water cooler as soon as I got inside.

Nadine was seated at her desk, going through the worksheets. As she called out all the places Herman had worked over the last ten days, Mr. O'Connor sat with his legal pad at a nearby table and wrote down the addresses.

He picked up on my name immediately. "I was hoping to see you today, Judge Knott. I'll need to know the name of your caterer. And did anyone else get sick that evening?"

I must have looked combative because he said, "We don't know that's where he first ingested it, but it's a place to start."

He took off his glasses, polished them carefully, hooked the wire frames back over his ears, then looked at me with such alert expectation in those shiny black eyes that I gave him Julia Lee's name and phone number.

"She arranged everything, but the food was prepared by the Martha Circle at the First Methodist Church, and afterwards, Lu Bingham, of WomenAid, took all the leftovers to her day care center. I'm sure if there was anything in the food or punch, we'd have heard about it by now"

"Probably," he agreed. "But—"

The tickler bell jingled over the street door. Dwight Bryant. He'd evidently met O'Connor earlier in the day and had come looking for him specifically.

"It's the darnedest thing, but I thought you ought to know."

"Yes?” O’Connor's eyeglasses gleamed like twin moons under the fluorescent lights overhead.

"They just called in the autopsy report on a man who was killed here in Dobbs Tuesday night. Carver Bannerman. His head was bashed in and that's what killed him, but they found a trace of arsenic in his gastrointestinal tract."

O'Connor's smooth round head came up like a young dog that's caught the scent.

"Nice," he said happily. "Very nice indeed!"

Two
men with arsenic in their system were going to make it three times as easy to locate the source of the poison, Gordon O'Connor said. His coffee bean eyes gleamed brighter than those eggshell-thin glasses the whole time Dwight was telling him who Carver Bannerman was.

"This Bannerman inspect any of Mr. Knott's jobs?"

"Half the time we aren't there when inspectors come around, so there's no way of us knowing," Nadine replied. "You'd have to compare the worksheets I gave you with whatever records the county inspector keeps. And like I told you before, we take a lot of piddling jobs that don't require inspection."

"That's what I mean about two victims cutting the possibilities so drastically," said O'Connor. "For now I can forget about all the jobs this Bannerman
didn't
inspect and just poke around at places where they overlapped."

"One place you could start is right next door." I glanced at my watch. "It's one-fifty though, and they'll be closing in a few minutes."

Nadine frowned. "The Coffee Pot?"

“Sure. Herman stops in every morning and Tink Dupree—he's the owner” —I explained to O'Connor—“Tink told me Wednesday morning that Carver Bannerman ate lunch there two or three times a week."

"But I have a glass of tea in there almost every morning myself," Nadine protested.

"Both of 'em, hmm?" Gordon O'Connor gathered up his lists, aligned the edges in neat economical movements and stashed them in a crisp manila folder. "You never know. Maybe they both ordered something exotic."

Dwight grinned. "The most exotic thing you can order in the Coffee Pot is a side dish of chili peppers with your scrambled eggs."

"Or tell Retha to hold the mayo on your hamburger at lunch," I added.

O'Connor laughed as he stood up. He wasn't nearly as tall as Dwight, but he certainly did have long legs inside those stovepipe jeans. Long thin fingers, too. They say that men with long fingers—

Dwight was looking at me and I stopped that train of thought before it could roll on into the station. Judges really do have to be discreet.

Especially
lady
judges.

On the other hand...

"How 'bout I introduce you to Tink?" I volunteered.

"I'll do it," Dwight said firmly. "I probably ought to tag along for this anyhow."

In the end, we both tagged along. I don't know if O'Connor sensed what was going on, but when Dwight starts acting like he's been commissioned to keep me from doing something rash, it naturally makes me want to throw discretion out the back window.

"I'm afraid we already went and cut off the grill," Tink apologized when the three of us entered the Coffee Pot. "We still got some cold chicken salad, though. I could make y'all a sandwich and there's a fresh pitcher of tea if y'all are just thirsty."

"That's okay, Tink," I said. "We're not here as customers. This is Gordon O'Connor from Environmental Health in Raleigh."

As soon as he heard the word
health
mentioned, Tink gazed fearfully at a framed document over the coffee maker, an inspection rating from the Health Department. Retha suddenly appeared from behind the kitchen partition, wiping her rawboned hands on a clean dishtowel. Without that high rating, they wouldn't have a business.

Dwight explained about Herman and Bannerman.

"And since both men frequented your place," said O'Connor, "I thought I'd begin here."

The Duprees just gazed back at him numbly.

"It doesn't mean a thing," I soothed, trying to reassure them. "Somebody's got to be first and y'all just happen to be it."

O'Connor already had his check sheet out and was clicking his ballpoint pen in and out.

"Let's just start with a few routine questions," he said. "What sort of pesticides do you use in the kitchen?"

Eventually the Duprees quit acting like deer caught in a jacklight and started answering his questions. They took him back to the kitchen and showed him the ant and roach traps, "but mostly we just try to keep everything clean and swept up," said Retha. "It's a whole lot easier to keep it so you don't never get pests than it is to get shet of 'em after they get started good."

"Ever use any Terro Ant Killer?" asked O'Connor.

The question sounded almost as casual as the others, but I thought I sensed that quivering intensity again. Retha screwed up her face and said she couldn't remember.

Ava came in from the back alley where she'd been putting out the garbage and sweeping up around the barrels. Again the introductions and explanations. She'd heard the last question and said, "Stuff's hardly worth bringing home anymore. No arsenic in it, if that's what you mean. Just borax."

"Really?" asked Retha. Like Tink, she'd quit school in the eighth grade and was constantly amazed by all the things that Ava, who'd finished high school, seemed to know. "You can kill ants with borax?"

"Not very good," said her daughter. "Not like with arsenic."

"My granny used to strew red pepper on the threshold," Tink said. "In her pantry, too. Don't nothing like to crawl through red pepper."

That reminded Retha of the tansy
her
granny had used. O'Connor just listened with one ear while continuing to poke around in the cupboards. He found corrosive drain cleaners and spray cans of pyrethrin-based insecticides—enough stuff to wipe out half of Dobbs if the Duprees were so minded. In short, the usual deadly concoctions found in your average American kitchen.

Nothing with arsenic, though, and neither Tink, Retha, nor Ava could think of anything Bannerman and Herman might have ordered in their cafe that no one else had.

"Are there any other employees?"

An awkward silence.

"Not right now," Tink said.

"Why sure there is." Dwight gave him a jocular grin. "You're forgetting your own son-in-law. Where is ol' Bass anyhow. Haven't seen him around town lately."

It was too late to kick him even if I'd been close enough to do it unobtrusively. Instead I had to stand and watch as Ava flushed a painful red and the mottled scar tissue became terribly noticeable. Retha moved toward her protectively, but Ava's chin came up.

"He ain't here no more," she said defiantly. "Gone back to Georgia. I run him off last week."

"He didn't never touch the plates anyhow," Retha chimed in. "We're filling in with a Mexican dishwasher part-time now, but just me and Tink and Ava are the only ones ever handle food here."

According to the preliminary autopsy report, Bannerman had probably ingested his trace of arsenic sometime during the previous weekend, Dwight said, so O'Connor went off to the county inspector's office to get a list of houses on the dead man's schedule.

Dwight walked me out to my car and we stood there in the hot thick sunshine talking.

When they widened the streets a few years ago, they cut down most of the huge old oaks that had shaded the old cracked sidewalks. Now stiff little Bradford pears marched up and down in wire support cages. One of these days they would flower and be pretty in the spring, but they'd never provide the shade those oaks had.

Depressing.

Dwight wasn't too happy with himself for embarrassing Ava. He wanted to blame me for not telling him that Bass had walked out on her, but that dog wouldn't fight and he knew it. Still, it did remind me.

"You're all the time saying I don't tell you things, but you were out of the county then, too; so do you remember how Ava got burned?"

Like me, he knew only that there'd been a fire. When I told him about why Herman wanted to take part of the blame for Tink's miswiring of the old house, he looked thoughtful. "You thinking one of them—"

"No," I said firmly. "I don't. But we both know people can brood on things and finally do something weird. I still think O'Connor's going to find a perfectly accidental source, but if the Coffee Pot does turn out to be the only eating place they really crossed, you'll find a way to blame me if you don't have all the facts. Besides, didn't Bass leave last week about the time Herman started feeling bad? Are the two connected? You're the police officer, you tell me."

"But Bannerman had nothing to do with the fire."

"No, but he couldn't keep his fly zipped. If he ate at the Coffee Pot three or four times a week, you can bet money he made at least one pass at Ava. Just to be friendly if nothing else. She's not even twenty-five yet, and with men like him, every woman under fifty's an automatic hit. Did it flatter her or make her mad? And what did Bass and Tink think?"

Dwight allowed as how I had a point. So far, he'd had no luck finding out who'd used the hammer on Bannerman.

"Maybe I'll go question Rochelle Bannerman again. I have to tell her about the arsenic. Maybe she knows something."

I resisted the temptation to be catty and opened my car door. At the last minute, I remembered what Reese had told me. "Did either of your deputies tell you she wasn't home when Reese and A.K. got out to the trailer park Tuesday?"

"Yeah. She was over at a girlfriend's place."

"The whole evening?"

He shrugged. "You know what the trouble with air-conditioning is? Everybody stays inside with their doors and windows closed and watches television."

"Too bad you didn't have Mayleen Richards go through the Bannerman hamper for his wife's dirty clothes."