Southern Discomfort (4 page)

"They're buying the fixtures and outlets, but we had some extra coils of wire left over from another job," Herman grunted. "I told Lu I'd just donate it. Along with my services," he added heavily.

"But don't you see, Dad?" Annie Sue broke in. She sat with her heels resting on the edge of her chair, her hands clasped around suntanned legs drawn up in front. "It's supposed to be only women that's building the house. To make a statement."

"And just what kind of statement, daughter? That women don't need men for anything?"

"Oh, now, hon," said Nadine as I stirred uncomfortably in my chair. "She didn't mean that."

"Yes, ma'am, she did. Just look at her."

Annie Sue had showered since work and was dressed in a cool blue sundress because she had a date later. White sandals on her feet, pale pink polish on her nails, her shining chestnut hair clipped up off her neck. A stranger might have seen only a sturdy young woman who hadn't yet lost all her baby fat, sitting in respectful silence; but there was nothing respectful about the set of her lips or those hot blue eyes.

I waded in with flags flying. "And just what's wrong with women proving they can be self-sufficient?"

His big hand tightened around his glass of half-melted ice. "Now don't you start on me, Deb'rah."

The exact tone of defensive exasperation, even his choice of words, made me smile. "You sound just like Daddy when he gets cranky."

The anger went out of Herman's jaw. He loves our father. So does Annie Sue. She put fresh ice cubes in Herman's glass and filled it up again with tea.

"Look," I said. "What I'm hearing is that you're afraid it'll endanger your license if Annie Sue screws up the wiring, right?"

"No, it's because I don't want another Mary Dupree on my conscience." As soon as he'd blurted it out, I could tell he wished he'd kept that thought to himself.

"Why, Herman Knott!" exclaimed Nadine, clearly surprised. "You still worrying about that after all these years when you know good and well that wasn't your fault?"

"Who's Mary Dupree?" Annie Sue and I asked.

"Tink Dupree that owns the Coffee Pot's mother."

The Coffee Pot is next door to Herman and Nadine's office. It's only open for breakfast and lunch, but half the town walks in and out between six and two. Herman stops off there for a cup of coffee every morning and I think Nadine takes her midmorning break there. It's a family business—Tink and his wife, Retha, and their daughter, Ava—but I didn't remember seeing his mother.

"Happened about ten years ago. During that time you lived off," said Herman. (All my brothers walk gingerly around that patch of wild oats I'd sown back then.) "Tink and Retha were working at the Coffee Pot, but they didn't own it then."

"Didn't have two nickels to rub together," Nadine said, stirring more sugar into her tea.

"His daddy used to work on the base at Fort Bragg and one night they were driving back down to Fayetteville and got in a bad wreck. It was raining and he run off the road and got killed. His mama got banged up so bad she had to come up to stay with Tink and Retha while her leg healed, Tink being their only child and all."

Annie Sue was waiting impatiently to hear what Tink Dupree's mother had to do with wiring the WomenAid house, but Mo-Cat rearranged his bulk on my lap so I could stroke his other side for a while.

"Won't enough room in that old house to cuss a cat without getting hair in your mouth," said Herman, "so they give Ava's room to Miss Mary and they made a little attic room for Ava. It was around Thanksgiving, so that worked out okay as far as it being warm enough up there. Heat rises. She'd've burned up if it'd been summer. But they figured either Miss Mary'd be back in her own house by then or that they'd just build 'em on another room if they needed to. Ava won't happy about having to move, of course, and she pitched a fit to have her hair dryer and her stereo and all the other stuff girls think they've got to have."

Annie Sue rolled her eyes again. I knew what Ava Dupree looked like now, and now I remembered hearin how she got that way; but Herman was so deep into his tale that, like the Ancient Mariner, he was constrained to finish.

"Tink got me to come in and show him how to add another circuit for the attic. That fuse box of his was so old and rusty, I told him right off I didn't feel good about adding anything else to it. But he kept on and on at me, swore it had to be done or Ava wouldn't give him no peace, promised they'd be careful about overloads, and then said he was going to do it whether I helped him or not. The long and short of it was that I told him how it could be done and I give him a good price on the stuff to do it with, but I said not to come blaming me if his house burned down—never for a minute thinking it would."

"And he didn't," Nadine said loyally, —cause it wasn't your fault."

"So you say and so says Tink." Herman set his empty glass back on the tray. "But every time I look at the scars on Ava's face and arms—every time I think of Miss Mary dead in that fire— Well, I know and Tink knows, too, who bears half the blame."

"If I recall," I said, "it was her insurance policy that gave Tink the money to buy the Coffee Pot?"

"That and selling her mobile home down in Fayetteville," said Nadine. "The insurance wasn't supposed to be all that much but it paid double because of the way she did die. The Lord moves in mysterious ways, doesn't he? Miss Mary used to fret about Tink and Retha living hand to mouth and then she was the cause of them getting the Coffee Pot. I thought they did a real good job fixing Ava's face, don't you? You can't hardly tell she was ever in a fire at all."

"Mother!" Annie Sue was appalled. "You look at her arms and her hands!"

"Well that's her own choosing. Retha says they've tried to get her to let the plastic surgeon fix those, but she won't and I can't say as I blame her. Long as her face looks all right. Didn't keep her from getting a husband, did it?"

Bass Langley wasn't much of a husband, far as I could tell. Amiable enough, but a full two slices short of a loaf. Did the heavy lifting and cleaning at the Coffee Pot.

"Might've got him, but couldn't keep him," said Herman gloomily. "He's gone."

"Who's gone?" asked Nadine. "Bass? When? Where?"

"Don't know where. He took off last week sometime. Just packed all his things and left without a word to anybody. Tink was sort of telling me about it around the edges when Ava wasn't nearby."

"So that's why she was so short with me yesterday," Nadine mused. "How come you didn't tell me?"

Herman shrugged. "Only reason Tink told me was because I was sitting there when somebody came in and said he'd come about a help wanted ad in the paper."

Nadine clearly wanted to cross-question Herman about the details, but the sun was almost down, mosquitoes were starting to rise, and Annie Sue was still champing at the bit.

"Listen," I said to her, "it's all very well to want all the work done by women, honey, but in this county, all the building inspectors are men. Long as one man's going to be inspecting it, what's the harm in a second?"

I turned back to Herman. "What if you just come over and look at what she's done after we knock off Saturday night? Would that ease your mind?"

"I reckon," he said grudgingly.

Not the most gracious acquiescence, but enough to erase Annie Sue's scowl.

I myself was right pleased. I'd come to borrow a hammer and had wound up with the use of a whole truckful of tools.

Maybe I'd have to rethink that chromosome chart.

"When men... are directly below other men working above, the men below must be sheltered against possible falling objects by a protective covering. The men below MUST wear protective headgear."

Superior court had a jury still deliberating Friday morning, but I should have realized that didn't account for so many attorneys cluttering up the hall when I came through robed and ready. Yet even when I saw Doug Woodall himself waiting there to prosecute, no alarm bells went off.

Doug's in his second term and he runs as a "hands on" district attorney, so if I gave his presence a second thought, it was merely that he was a considerate boss who'd let Cyl DeGraffenried and the other ADAs get an early start on their weekend.

On the other hand, Ally Mycroft was clerking, not Phyllis Raynor. Ally's a two-faced priss pot who simpers and coos over male attorneys and gives short shrift to females.

An anticipatory air hung over the crowded front benches. John Claude wasn't there, but Reid was. I beetled my eyebrows at him and he gave a don't-blame-
me
shrug.

"Whatever's up can't be too bad if your own cousin didn't warn you," the preacher comforted.

"Don't bet on it," the pragmatist said sourly. "He's left you holding the sack at the end of more dirt roads than one."

"Fair's fair," said the preacher. "Just remember how many snipe hunts you've taken him on."

Suppressing a grin at the memory of sticking Reid with the Castleberry sisters—grandmothers now but still at each other's throats under an unbreakable trust that would yoke them till they died—I waited for the bailiff to finish his Oyez, oyez routine and took my chair.

Only five or six people were scattered around the courtroom beyond the rail, yet the attorney's bench was jammed. And there crammed in amongst all the seer-sucker and linen suits was Dwight Bryant in his summer uniform as detective chief of Colleton County's sheriff's department. He appeared a little embarrassed and wouldn't meet my eyes even though I've known him all my life from when he was a gangly teenager shooting baskets down at the barn with my older brothers.

What the hell—? I looked at my calendar. Nowhere was Dwight listed as a prosecuting witness.

I turned to Ally Mycroft. "Did you forget to give me some add-ons?" I asked coldly.

"Oh, I'm
so
sorry, Your Honor," said that whited sepulcher as she handed up the proper sheet.

I barely had time to scan the amended form when Doug Woodall said, "Line three of the add-ons, Your Honor. State versus Elizabeth Hamilton Englert."

Immediately, Ambrose Daughtridge, the county's most courtly silver-haired attorney, entered through the double doors at the rear of the courtroom, his hand on Mrs. Englert's elbow, as if she might trip on her way down the aisle to the bar of justice. Ambrose couldn't have been more lofty and dignified than if he were escorting her to a concert, but I thought I detected a slightly self-conscious expression on Mrs. Englert's patrician face, the sort of look she might wear if she'd arrived at the concert after the conductor had begun the first movement, so that she now had to inconvenience those already seated and wrapped in music. Ambrose shepherded her to a chair at the defense table as Doug began reading the charge.

I kept my face serene and interested, but inside I was seething. Those bastards. Reid and Dwight.
Wait'll I get my hands on you, I promised them silently.

The other attorneys might think it funny that Kezzie Knott's daughter was going to have to pass judgment on one of Dobbs's most prominent women for possession of untaxed liquor; but of those present, only Reid and Dwight knew that Mrs. Englert had personally squashed the matrimonial designs her son had on me a few years back. A bootlegger's daughter had been deemed an unsuitable vessel by which to convey Hamilton-Englert genes into the twenty-first century.

Not that I would have had Randolph Englert as a present on a Christmas tree, but it should have been my decision, not his mother's. Unfortunately, Reid and Dwight were both there in the lounge of the Holiday Inn the night Randolph suggested that we cool it for a while till his mother came around. I told him our relationship was already cold enough to keep his reptilian relatives in hibernation till the next glacier hit town; then, just in case he still had any hots for me, I dumped an ice bucket in his lap and walked out.

Next day Reid left a package of Frosty Morn frozen sausages on my desk. Said it was Dwight's idea.

Sophomoric enough to be something Dwight'd think up—especially when you look at how teeny those sausages are.

Doug finished reading the charge: unlawful possession of untaxed liquor.

"How does the defendant plead?" I asked.

Ambrose came majestically to his feet. "Not guilty, Your Honor."

"Call Major Dwight Bryant to the stand," said Doug.

Theoretically, I could have disqualified myself since I'd already heard Dwight describe the circumstances under which he'd found two half-gallon Mason jars of white whiskey in Elizabeth Hamilton Englert's basement. On the other hand, Ambrose would be hard put to find a judge in the district who hadn't heard. Any time the mighty get humbled, the story goes around faster than blue mold through a tobacco field, particularly when circumstances were this ridiculous.

From time out of mind, Hamiltons had led the fight for an alcohol-free county. Every generation threw up at least one preacher or congressman or state senator who'd ride that hobbyhorse far as he could to the exclusion of all others.

Englerts tended to be less vocal but generally more adamant about the evils of drunkenness. Every Englert generation threw up at least one backslider.

Elizabeth Hamilton had unwittingly married her generation's backslider.

Not that Lawrence Englert was intemperate by normal standards; just that by Hamilton-Englert principles, anybody who looked upon the wine when it was red (or whiskey when it was white, for that matter) was a potential degenerate perched atop the slippery slopes of hell.

So Mr. Englert in his day, like his son Randolph in this generation, had done his drinking on the sly. He had cultivated a connoisseur's taste for smooth apple brandy. I don't
know
that my daddy supplied him—Daddy tells me he hasn't touched a brass worm in years—but they had been known to go hunting together a time or two, and Mr. Englert always tipped his hat to him when Daddy came to town.

Anyhow, Mr. Englert died a couple of years ago and Mrs. Englert's rattled around in that big house all by herself ever since.

On the night in question, she thought she heard someone downstairs and she'd called the sheriff's department rather than the town police, whom she considered incompetent.

Dwight happened to be around and at loose ends that night, so he went along for the ride. "Never hurts to have an Englert appreciate special services the law can provide" is what he told me back when it happened. Not what he was testifying now, of course, when Doug asked him to describe what he'd found upon arriving at the Englert home.

"Mrs. Englert called to us from the upstairs window and then came down and let us in."

"Us?" asked Doug.

"Myself and Deputy Raeford McLamb, who was on duty that night."

"What did you do then?"

"First we searched the ground floor thoroughly and examined all the doors and windows for signs of forced entry."

"And did you find any?"

"No, sir."

"What did you do next?"

"Mrs. Englert stated that she thought the noises she heard might have come from the basement, so we went downstairs and again conducted a thorough search."

"What did you find?"

"No indication of an intruder, but shortly after we entered the basement, the central air conditioner switched on and we heard a rustling noise in one of the ducts. We later ascertained that a piece of trash had fallen into the vent and was causing the noise that Mrs. Englert mistook for an intruder."

"What else did you find around that air conditioner unit, Major Bryant?"

"Objection," said Ambrose. "The prosecution is leading the witness."

"Sustained," I agreed.

"I'll rephrase," said Doug. "Did you find anything else that night?"

"Yes, sir. Deputy McLamb drew my attention to two half-gallon jars of clear liquid behind the air-conditioning unit."

"Permission to approach the witness, Your Honor?" Doug asked.

"Permission granted," I said.

Doug lifted a half-gallon Mason jar from the brown grocery bag beside his chair and carried it up to Dwight. "Major Bryant, I show you this jar and ask if you can identify it as being one of the jars you found in Mrs. Englert's basement on the night of June twenty-eighth."

"It is. That's my mark on the lid."

"I ask that this be entered as state's Exhibit A," said Doug. I nodded assent and he continued, "Did you open this jar?"

"Yes, sir."

"What does it contain?"

"Objection," said Ambrose, standing with ponderous dignity. "Calls for an informed conclusion this officer is not qualified to make."

There were snickers from the side benches that any Colleton County law officer couldn't recognize moonshine when he saw it.

Doug, too, had a grin on his face. "Your Honor, Major Bryant is a veteran law officer with many years experience. I should call him eminently qualified."

"So should I," I said, "but Mr. Daughtridge is technically correct. Major Bryant is not a chemist. Objection sustained."

"I'm prepared to introduce into evidence a detailed analysis of the contents by an Alcohol Law Enforcement agent," said Doug. "I thought in the interest of saving time and—"

Mrs. Englert had tugged at Ambrose's jacket and as he bent down to listen, the whole courtroom heard her exasperated whisper. "Why do you quibble so, Mr. Daughtridge? Everyone
knows
what it is. Get on with it."

"Your Honor," said Ambrose, "the defense will stipulate as to Major Bryant's expertise in this matter."

"Thank you," said Doug.

As Dwight confirmed that the jars had held untaxed liquor that was probably at least eighty proof, I thought about the things we weren't going to hear from the witness stand today. Things like how a silly combination of circumstances could cause a waste of taxpayer money. Ordinarily, Dwight would have emptied those jars down the nearest sink drain, and that would have been the end of it. But young Raeford McLamb was pushing to go by the book and Dwight knew if he overrode McLamb, he'd lay himself open to charges of kowtowing to the rich and well connected.

Now McLamb might have let someone else's liquor go down the drain; but three days earlier, Mrs. Englert had entered a complaint against his sister because his sister's cat occasionally used Mrs. Englert's herb garden as a litter box. McLambs are pretty clannish. Cut one and you've cut them all. If Mrs. Englert couldn't overlook a little cat urine, no way was Deputy McLamb going to overlook two jars of white lightning.

Nor could Doug overlook them once McLamb brought the ALE in on it. Not that there was any love lost between him and Elizabeth Englert either. As a Republican, she'd supported his opponents in both races.

"No further questions," said Doug.

I looked over at Ambrose. "Cross-examine?"

"No questions," he replied.

"The prosecution rests," said Doug.

"Mr. Daughtridge?"

Ambrose stood, straightened the front of his beautifully cut navy linen jacket, and smoothed his silver hair. "Your Honor, the defense does not dispute that two jars of untaxed liquor were found when and where Major Bryant has so testified. What I do dispute is the implication that these jars were attained by my client or that they were ever in her possession. The district attorney has not proved possession and I would therefore move that this charge be dismissed."

Doug was already on his feet. "Your Honor, is my worthy opponent suggesting that Mrs. Englert does not own the house? If so, I think we can have a copy of the deed up here in ten minutes."

"Motion denied, Mr. Daughtridge," I said. "Present your case.

"I would call Mrs. Elizabeth Englert to the stand."

Mrs. Englert crossed firmly to the stand. The bailiff handed her a Bible and when Ally Mycroft asked if she swore to tell the truth, her frosty reply suggested she felt insulted at being required to swear to veracity. Surely the whole world
knew
a Hamilton never lied?

As expected, she denied any knowledge of how those jars came to be in her basement. When Doug invited her to speculate on cross-examination, she declined. Yes, it was her house. Yes, under the terms of her late husband's will, she now owned its entire contents; but she had not brought every item into the house nor could she possibly know what else might lie hidden within its spacious confines.

Ambrose asked that his client be declared not guilty, while Doug argued that possession is possession is possession.

When they had finished, I sat back in my chair and regarded the participants. Mrs. Englert's eyes met mine and half-narrowed as it finally sank in that I and I alone had the power to prolong this public embarrassment. I suspect she was remembering her past petty snubs.

I hoped she was.

I leaned forward. "Mrs. Englert, the court sincerely regrets any personal emotional pain this incident may have caused you. In this court's opinion, you have been a victim of overzealousness, both on the part of the sheriff's department and the district attorney's office. Possession of untaxed liquor is a serious matter, as I'm sure you know; but you were clearly an unwitting possessor, therefore I find you not guilty of all charges."

I smiled sweetly. Never had revenge tasted so good.

"Thank you, Your Honor," said Ambrose; but Elizabeth Hamilton Englert suddenly looked like a person biting into an unpeeled persimmon. In three sentences, I had patronized her, implied that she was slightly stupid, and then put her in my debt for all time.

Top that, sugar!

Over on the side bench, Reid was grinning broadly and Dwight was trying not to.