Sand Sharks dk-15

by Margaret Maron

  His voice broke then and after a moment the woman said, “ ‘I will arise now and go to Innisfree.’ Yes, I can see why she loved it.”

  A moment or two later they came around the corner. He was in jeans and a faded Obama T-shirt; she wore hip-hugging white shorts that showed off the jeweled ring in her navel and a bright pink bandeau that matched her hair. Their eyes were suspiciously moist as if the poem he’d read had moved them both to the brink of tears. They seemed startled to see me sitting there and I was equally startled to recognize them.

  “Oh, hey,” the young man said. “Did you ever find your earring?”

  “Hank, right?” I slid the book back into its slot and stood up.

  “Yes, ma’am.” To the girl with him, he explained, “The judge here lost an earring the other night but no one turned it in.”

  “Deborah Knott,” I said, extending my hand.

  “Mel Garrett,” she replied. “I work at Jonah’s, too.”

  “I know. You waited on the Stone Hamilton table.”

  “Wow! Wicked good memory.”

  “Well, it was Stone Hamilton,” I said. Not that her fuchsia-streaked hair wasn’t also memorable. “I guess y’all heard about Kyle Armstrong?”

  Both faces turned sober and Mel Garrett said, “I feel like the woman who worked alongside that serial killer—what was his name? The guy that killed all those sorority students?”

  “Ted Bundy?”

  “Yeah. Not that Kyle killed thirty women, but still. Two judges?”

  From behind me, Martha said drily, “Only one judge. My husband’s banged up, but he’s going to live. Hello, Hank. How nice to see you again.”

  “It was your husband Kyle ran down?” asked the Garrett girl. Martha nodded and the girl tsk’d in commiseration. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Me, too, sugar.”

  “I knew he had a mean streak in him, but I didn’t know it was that fu—frickin’ wide. I’m really glad your husband’s going to be okay.”

  We chatted a moment or two longer, then Martha paid for the two books she’d found, a biography of John Adams and the collected letters of E. B. White.

  Hank and Mel came up behind us and she said, “You know, Judge, sometimes the cleaning people leave things they find in a box in back instead of bringing them to the desk. What did your earring look like?”

  I described the red-and-white hoops and she said she’d check on it. “We’re both on duty this evening if you’re over that way and want to stop by.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I might do that.”

  After dropping Martha off at the hospital, I drove back to the SandCastle, where I fired up my laptop and made a note to buy an inexpensive copy of Old Yeller next time I was in Raleigh. I found a couple of messages that needed an answer, then checked out the headlines on The New York Times and The Washington Post to make sure the world was still turning on its axis. I always read The News & Observer all the way through when I’m home and keep my car radio tuned to NPR, but when I’m away like this it’s the online Times and Post. If it’s not splashed across their front pages, I figure I’m not missing anything.

  And yeah, okay, whenever I’m on the Post site, I read Miss Manners, too. Doesn’t everybody?

  I was in the middle of answering email when Rosemary called. “Chelsea Ann’s still on the hunt for that table but I’m tired of prowling through cluttered consignment shops. Want to come down to the beach with me?”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said.

  She told me where she’d set up her umbrella and twenty minutes later I was seated on a towel next to hers, smoothing sunscreen on every bit of bare skin I could reach.

  Rosemary had pulled her strawberry blonde hair back from her face with a black hairband that picked up the black leaves in her sarong-styled bathing suit. White flip-flops, white sunglasses, and a chunky white bracelet on her slender arm. She looked pretty fine for a woman entering middle age after dumping her husband.

  “You doing okay?” I asked, and she didn’t pretend I was asking after her health.

  “I’m doing better than okay,” she said with a genuine smile and showed me the title of the book she was reading: The NC Divorce Litigator’s Manual.

  “You’re not going to represent yourself, are you?”

  “I’m not that dumb,” she said, and told me the name of the attorney she’d retained, one of the best divorce lawyers in the Triangle. “But I am going to petition for reinstatement in the State Bar even though that means taking fifteen hours of CLE classes. I’ve been thinking about it and I believe family law’s what I want to practice. God knows I’m going to get a lot of practical pointers on equitable distribution of marital property and post-separation supplements in the next few months. Might as well take advantage of the experience.” She gave an evil grin. “Lovely to think of Dave having to pay for my professional training.”

  “Too bad you have to start fresh proceedings,” I said, lying back on my towel.

  “Actually, I won’t. We’ve agreed to let the original petitions go forward.”

  “Even though you technically condoned the first affair by coming down here and resuming marital relations?”

  “He’s decided it’d be better all around to get this over with as quickly as possible. After all, with you and Martha as witnesses to his fling with this waitress, it’s going to end up in the same place.”

  There was so much complacency to her tone that I couldn’t resist zinging her. “Tell me one thing, girlfriend.”

  “What?”

  “Why did you condone Dave’s last affair, then turn around and set him up with that waitress?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You pushed Jenna on him at lunch Sunday and then you let him think you’d be gone all afternoon on Monday.”

  She sat up indignantly and pulled off her sunglasses to glare at me. “We did plan to be gone all afternoon. Airlie Gardens and then the Cottage Tea Room, but Martha got tired. Remember?”

  “Oh, please, Rosemary.” I rolled over onto my side and propped myself up on one arm. “The way you kept looking at your watch? The way you persuaded us that tea on the balcony would be more relaxing so that we’d get back much earlier? The way you made sure we were right behind you when you threw the door wide open?”

  She stared at me in consternation, guilt all over her face.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I can’t help myself. I notice things. And I was always good at simple math. Two plus two and all that.”

  “You didn’t say anything to Martha or Chelsea Ann, did you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t, Deborah.”

  “Then you did set him up?”

  “The bastard set himself up. But yeah, Chelsea Ann was right. I just don’t want to have to listen to her crowing about it the next forty years, okay? I really wanted to believe him, that he wanted to save our marriage, not throw twenty years down the slop chute. But it was all a farce. He didn’t give up his little cupcake. He just put her on hold and she agreed because it would mean less for me and more for her if we had a no-fault divorce. Once he got me to publicly condone the affair by resuming marital relations, he’d be home free. He could claim that we had sincerely tried to reconcile, but ‘O sorrow, sorrow, folks. It just didn’t work out.’ ”

  As she talked, I could see Rosemary getting angry all over again. Her cheeks flushed and her green eyes shot sparks when she mimicked Dave’s voice.

  “You know when you and the Fitzhumes saw us out on his balcony Sunday morning? That touching display of domestic harmony that he deliberately staged?”

  I nodded.

  “Twenty minutes later, I left him outside and went in to get dressed. I didn’t close the French doors all the way, but I’m sure the cocky bastard thought I’d gone into the bathroom to do my face. I came back into the room to get my purse that I’d left by the door and I heard him say, ‘We’re home free, baby. Three judges and a judge’s wife just saw us connubilling.�
�� ”

  “Connubilling?”

  “His term for connubial behavior,” Rosemary said drily.

  “So as soon as Jenna presented herself, you hatched the plan?”

  “Why not? It didn’t take much pushing. She was hot to trot and he never turned down an easy roll in the hay.” She grinned. “Or a splash in a Jacuzzi.”

  “So the real reason he’s willing to let the original proceedings go forward is because he doesn’t want the cupcake back in Durham to hear about it?”

  “Oh, I imagine she’ll hear about it,” Rosemary said complacently. She held out her sunscreen to me. “Could you get my back?”

  I laughed. “Seems to me like you’ve already got it.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  That which is faulty in the beginning cannot become valid with the passage of time.

  —Paulus (early AD 3rd century)

  I lay on my stomach, my head pillowed by my crossed arms, half drowsing, when Rosemary came back to our umbrella from her swim. As she toweled her hair dry, she said, “Will Blackstone was out there in the water, too. Have you seen his eye?”

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “Sure.” She reached into her beach bag for a comb and began untangling her hair. “He and Dave worked on a report together two or three years ago. Teen courts and recidivism. He stayed over one weekend while they finished working on the statistics. Nice man.”

  “Did he say how he got the eye?” I asked innocently.

  “Slipped getting out of the shower and banged into the sink, poor guy. He says everyone’s teasing him that somebody’s husband punched him out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, if you know him, you know what a hunk he is. Divorced. Unattached. And he does like to flirt. He even flirted with me just now. He’s heard that Dave and I are headed for divorce and he said Dave must be crazy to go out for a hamburger when he had steak at home. Wasn’t that sweet?”

  “Joanne Woodward probably thought so.”

  “Huh?”

  “I read somewhere that that’s the reason Paul Newman gave for not cheating on her.”

  “Oh.” She digested that for a moment, then, with a touch of defiance in her voice, said, “I still think it was sweet of Will. He asked me to have a drink with him later.”

  “You going?”

  “Why not? Chelsea Ann’s having dinner with that detective again tonight. You want to join us?”

  The thought of watching Will Blackstone squirm through a round or two of margaritas was incredibly tempting, but I resisted. “I don’t think so, thanks.”

  I wondered if Rosemary would let him put the moves on her. Will Blackstone and Dave Emerson struck me as two of a kind and some women do have a tendency to keep picking the same losers time after time.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” said the preacher.

  “And not that you haven’t picked your own share of losers,” said the pragmatist.

  I closed my eyes and thought about the various men I’d been involved with over the years. Were there similarities? One could say that Dwight and the game warden had a few things in common—both liked the outdoors, both wore badges and were comfortable with guns. Allen Stancil never wore a badge and his moral compass was several degrees to the left of theirs, but he and Dwight were built alike. On the other hand, those three were nothing at all like the rather bookish law student I’d lived with one winter in New York, neither physically nor mentally.

  “Maybe Lev Schuster was the skinny little exception that proves the rule,” whispered the pragmatist.

  Beside me, Rosemary began to pack up her belongings. “You ready to go?” she asked. “I want to shower before Chelsea Ann gets back. Takes me a little longer these days to get all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

  “Catch you later,” I said. “I may still go for a swim.”

  I lay there for close to another hour mulling over the events of the week while the sun sank lower in the sky. Just before it touched the top of the hotel, I saw Allen’s two children dart past me. Allen trundled along behind, loaded like a packhorse with thermal bags, towels, sand toys, and an umbrella.

  “Need a hand?” I called.

  “Three or four if you got ’em.”

  The umbrella slid out of his hand and I rescued it for him and helped him set up next to mine.

  “Thanks, darlin’. You all by your lonesome this evening?”

  “For the moment. Hey, Tiffany Jane. Hey, Tyler. Y’all having fun here?”

  The little girl nodded shyly and the toddler gave me a goofy smile.

  “Did you put sunscreen on them yet?” I asked.

  “Well, damn!” he said. “I knowed I was forgetting something.”

  “That’s okay. I have some.” I rummaged in my bag and found the bottle. “Come here, honey, and let me rub it on you.”

  The child came and knelt on my towel and held her beautiful little face up for me to smooth on the cream. Allen was right. She really was going to break a heart or two before it was over. When I finished with her arms and shoulders, she took the bottle and said she could do her legs herself. “And Tyler, too.”

  “Tippy-canoe and Tyler, too,” Allen teased, his white teeth flashing beneath his luxuriant mustache.

  “Oh, Daddy!” she protested, having clearly heard him say this many times before.

  “Why you reckon folks say that?” Allen asked me. “I can see how a tippy-canoe could be a problem, but what’s with the Tyler, too?”

  “It was an old campaign slogan. From back in the eighteen-hundreds, I think. Tippecanoe was the Indian nickname for some presidential candidate, and Tyler was running for vice president, but don’t ask me who he was or if he won.”

  Well covered in sunscreen now, the children took their buckets and shovels down to the water’s edge.

  Allen sat cross-legged on his towel to keep an eye on them and popped the top on a can of light beer. “You want one?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “What happened to your finger?”

  I had just noticed that his right index finger was bandaged and seemed to have a splint on it.

  “You know what happened, darlin’.” He took a long swallow of beer. “You was there.”

  “You broke your finger when you punched Will Blackstone?”

  “That his name? Sucker’s got a damn hard head.”

  “And a very black eye, so you two are even.”

  I couldn’t help laughing and he gave a rueful shrug. “He ain’t bothered you again, did he?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  My knight in shining armor.

  “I heard that one of the waiters at Jonah’s killed Judge Jeffreys?”

  I nodded.

  “And then he got hisself killed in a car crash?”

  “Yeah. They think he was going too fast and hydroplaned off an exit ramp.”

  “Amateurs.” His voice dripped with the scorn of a professional stock car driver for nonprofessionals who take unnecessary risks. “They know why he killed Jeffreys?”

  “The theory is that Jeffreys propositioned him in the men’s room and he freaked out.”

  Allen lowered his beer can and looked at me in puzzlement. “Pete Jeffreys gay? No way in hell.”

  “You can’t always tell.”

  “The hell you can’t. Well, maybe you can’t, but I’ve got me a gaydar that’s never been wrong. I can spot ’em ten miles away. And he won’t no AC/DC neither. I’m telling you here and now, Pete Jeffreys was straighter’n a yardstick.”

  No matter how I argued that one could never be a hundred percent certain about another’s sexuality, Allen was that tree planted by the water. He could not be moved.

  In the end his conviction convinced me and I went back to the hotel to call Gary Edwards.

  * * *

  “I hate to admit it,” Edwards said when I finally got through to him, “but from all we’ve heard, your friend is probably right. Judge Blankenthorpe�
�s sure he would never have sought a homosexual encounter and that’s what we’re getting from our inquiries in Greensboro.”

  “So you’re back at the beginning with no motive?”

  “And that’s the way we’ll probably leave it. Something’s worrying the ME, but he’s promised us a preliminary report tomorrow. Soon as that comes my boss and the DA will both be ready to call it closed.”

  “What’s bothering him?” I asked.

  “Not enough blood,” Edwards said succinctly. “Bad as he was banged up, his clothes should have been soaked. Probably washed off in the rain… or…”

  “Or what?” I asked. Yet even as I asked, it came to me. “Could he have already been dead before the car crashed?”

  “Yeah. The ME wants to take another look at Armstrong’s heart. See if maybe he had a heart attack first.”

  Possibilities suddenly started to shift and rearrange themselves in my head and a different pattern began to emerge. “There’s one more thing,” I said. “Something Judge Ouellette told me.”

  When I finished talking, there was a long silence on his end.

  At last, I said, “You do remember that the conference ends at noon tomorrow and everyone scatters after that?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Better me than Fitz,” I told him firmly. “And if I’m wrong, I’ll bring a crow with me the next time I come to Wilmington and you can watch me eat it.”

  He laughed. “You’re on.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  Our ancestors established the rule that all women, because of their weakness of intellect, should be under the power of guardians.

  —Cicero (BC 106–47)

  After showering, I dressed for comfort, not style: black flats, loose black knit slacks with a white belt, a red knit halter top, and the earrings I’d made at the Cotton Exchange. With luck, Mel Garrett would have found my red-and-white hoops. Enamel over some sort of gold-colored metal. They had probably cost less than twenty dollars, but their sentimental value was above rubies. My favorite nephew had given them to me for my birthday when he was sixteen and I was touched that he had noticed my fondness for red.

  I stopped at a drugstore on the way into town and bought several fat scented candles in preparation for Dwight’s arrival tomorrow night. Candles add so much to a Jacuzzi, don’t you think? And with all the angled mirrors around the tub, a few flames would look like dozens.