Sand Sharks

by Margaret Maron

  “What time was that?”

  She shrugged. “Around ten or so. Why?”

  “The police are asking who saw him last.”

  “I doubt that was me.”

  “Did you know him long?”

  “Not really.” She took a hefty swig of whatever was in her glass. “I have to run this fall and to give him his due, he was willing to introduce me to his donors and to the other judges here.”

  “Sounds like you didn’t care for him all that much,” I said.

  She shrugged. “He came on a little strong. For some reason, he decided he was going to be my mentor… give me advice on how to run my campaign, show me the ropes, he said.”

  The short man perched on the arm of her chair rolled his eyes and said, “Yeah, I just bet he did.”

  He was built like a bowling ball—round and solid, with the same amount of hair. I felt as if I should know him, but I couldn’t put a name to his pudgy little face.

  “Bernie Rawlings,” he said, intuiting my lapse. “From the mountains of Lafayette County. You covered court for my brother last fall. Almost got yourself killed, I hear.” He described the outcome of a murder investigation from my time up there in Cedar Gap. As I expected, a lack of evidence had kept one of the culprits from being charged even though everyone was pretty sure he was the killer.

  As we talked, others had come and gone, mostly gone until there were only a half dozen of us left. Steve and Julian began to gather up the empty cans and bottles and to store the cheese and olives in the small fridge. It wasn’t exactly here’s-your-hat-what’s-your-hurry, but yeah, it was pushing two a.m. and well past time for respectable judges to call it a night.

  I always ask for a room near the elevator, which means that I’m also near the ice machine and vending area. When I said good night to the others and exited at my floor, I heard someone filling an ice bucket. Martha Fitzhume emerged from the alcove with an ice bucket and a can of Coke and seemed surprised to see me.

  “I didn’t realize we were neighbors,” I said.

  Her white hair was rumpled as if she’d slept on it wrong. In lieu of pajamas, she wore gray knit pants and an oversized purple T-shirt from Fitz’s last election. A sheen of moisturizer glistened on the bony angles of her patrician face.

  She was equally observant. “You look like hell, sugar. I heard about Jeffreys. You all right?”

  “Just tired,” I said, key card in hand. “Couldn’t you sleep?”

  “Not me, Fitz.” She shook her head ruefully. “Those damn crabs. He ate all of his and half of mine, too, and now he has indigestion. I thought maybe a Coke would settle his stomach. You reckon there was something wrong with them? I heard you got sick, too, or was that because of finding Pete Jeffreys?”

  “Probably the margaritas,” I admitted.

  “I suppose the police questioned you about this evening?”

  I nodded.

  “You didn’t find it necessary to repeat what I said about him, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Fitz is always telling me I run my mouth too freely at times.”

  “But why did you dislike him, Martha?”

  “Just stuff,” she said with a vague wave of the Coke can. “You know how word goes around.”

  “What stuff?” I persisted.

  “Don’t get me started.” She moved past me toward a door down the hall that had been left on the latch. “It’d probably take an hour and I need to get back to Fitz. Don’t you worry though. I didn’t kill the bastard. Fitz wouldn’t’ve let me.”

  I couldn’t help smiling as I swiped my key card in the lock. No way could Martha have strangled Pete Jeffreys and dumped him into the river, but there was also no way Fitz could’ve stopped her from trying if she’d set her mind to it.

  Moonlight spilled through the windows of my dark room, and without switching on the lamps I crossed over to the balcony doors and stepped out into the humid night air. Beyond the multilevel pool decks, the gazebos, and the deserted pool lay the ocean. No whitecaps and almost as calm as a millpond. The tide was dead low and what waves there were rolled gently onto the sand and quietly dissolved in white foam. The moon was three or four nights from being full and it sparkled on the slowly undulating water like a handful of golden sequins tossed by a careless mermaid.

  The moon, the stars, the thick brine-ladened air—I had stood gazing out to sea like this on dozens of other summer nights and memory held me in its grip, sending kaleidoscopic images coursing through my head of weekends with Mother and Daddy and my brothers back when I was a child: musty summer cottages borrowed from a more affluent aunt or uncle, pallets of quilts on the floor, sand underfoot no matter how often the floors were swept.

  A week at the beach for high school graduation, chaperoned by my brother Seth and his new bride: beach music and shagging the night away on the boardwalk at Atlantic Beach and sneaking sips of beer when Seth’s back was turned, trying to forget for a few hours at a time that Mother would be dead by the end of that summer.

  Then, after I was grown, that heady mixture of freedom and abandon, and yes, the mild flirtations with a colleague or two here in this very hotel during summer conferences.

  But I had never been to the beach with Dwight. No memories of kissing him with salty lips, of making love to him in the moonlight on a deserted stretch of sand.

  I sighed and stepped back into the air-conditioned room, switched on the lights, and drew the curtains. My cell phone lay amid a clutter of tissues and lipsticks where I had unthinkingly left it when I changed purses earlier in the evening. I’m not quite as bad as Daddy about talking on phones, but the fact is that I don’t like being tethered to one and the older I get, the more often I seem to forget to carry mine or to switch it on. It exasperates the hell out of Dwight, who never turns his off. I flipped it open and saw that I had missed several calls. Chelsea Ann’s number was there, along with my friend Portland’s, and several I didn’t recognize, but Dwight’s?

  Nada.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Augustus took care that no persons should hold office who were unfit or elected as the result of factious combinations or bribery.

  —Dio Cassius (ca. AD 230)

  Despite my late night, I was wide awake by 8:30. Reid had left his riverfront table long before I did, so if I was up, he might be, too.

  He answered on the fourth ring and did not sound all that happy to hear my voice. “Do you know what the hell time it is?” he asked.

  “Sorry,” I said unrepentantly, “but I wanted to catch you before you left for your first session.”

  “First session?”

  “Isn’t today the opening session of your conference?”

  “Yeah, but we don’t plan to get down there till this afternoon.”

  “You mean you’re still in Wilmington?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  I heard him yawn, which made me yawn, too, of course.

  “Deborah? You still there?”

  “I’m here.” Another yawn overtook me. “How about we have breakfast together? Where are you?”

  “At my friend Bill’s house. Bill Hasselberger. You met him last night, remember? He said I could stay with him this week. Save on hotel bills.”

  “Ask him where’s a good place to get breakfast.”

  “It’s too early for breakfast,” he grumbled, but after a muffled conversation on his end, he said, “Bill says for you to come on over here. He claims he makes an awesome frittata.”

  I got directions and we agreed I’d be there within the hour after I’d showered and dressed. From his lack of questions, I gathered that neither of them knew about Pete Jeffreys’s death. Good. Maybe I’d get to see their faces when they heard. Not that I suspected either of them. All the same…

  Forty minutes later I turned off Market Street, counted three blocks, turned left, and pulled up in front of a modest white clapboard bungalow with dark red shutters and a porch that was shaded by a large mimosa
tree covered in thousands of puffy pink flowers. Only a few miles from the ocean and not quite 9:30 in the morning, but the white-hot sun shone fiercely in a sullen blue sky and the air was already muggy when I opened the car door. My antiperspirant gave up the fight before I could make it up the front walk to the shady porch.

  Hasselberger’s rolled-up Sunday paper lay by the steps where his delivery person had thrown it.

  Reid met me at the door, along with the odor of bacon, basil, and sauteed onions. A night’s growth of stubble darkened his jawline and he was still in a faded T-shirt and loose knit pants. Like all my male Stephenson relatives, he’s tall and good-looking and he loves women. With his broad shoulders, curly brown hair, and clear hazel eyes, they love him right back, which is the main reason his marriage fell apart. He still acts like a kid in a candy shop with an unlimited allowance, but it cost him the love of his life and the mother of his son.

  He didn’t notice the newspaper and I didn’t call his attention to it. Instead, I followed him into the air-conditioned coolness, past a pullout couch in the living room where he had slept last night and into the kitchen, the source of those entrancing aromas. Except for the unmade sofa bed, the house was tidy enough, but it had the temporary air of a bachelor’s place—mismatched furniture, odd lamps, clashing colors.

  Reid may have been a member of Hasselberger’s wedding party, but evidently that marriage had gone the way of Reid’s. Clearly no woman lived here. Had ever lived here. Not with these furnishings anyhow. The severely tailored couch was cranberry verging toward plum, the overstuffed recliner next to it was a gold-and-brown plaid, while the three floor lamps were modern chrome-and-steel rods and were more suited to an architect’s office. It looked to me like the leavings of a bad divorce settlement.

  Not that I was there to criticize any man who would immediately hand me a mug of strong fragrant coffee. Not when I could see the frittata that had my name on a wedge of it almost ready to emerge from the broiler of his electric oven.

  “Glad you could come,” he said, wiping his bony hands on a pink dishtowel before shaking mine. Once again, his smile split his face from ear to ear. The warmth of that smile lit up his long thin face and brown puppy-dog eyes.

  “Thanks for asking me,” I said. “Y’all got away last night before I could tell Reid to meet me at a pancake house this morning somewhere between here and Sunset Beach. This is much nicer.”

  “Is something up?” my cousin asked. “We see each other almost every day back home. Why down here?”

  “Does there have to be a reason? We haven’t really talked in ages. And then you left early without coming over last night. One minute you were there, the next minute you were gone.”

  He shook his head at me. “I’m surprised you noticed. You looked well on your way to getting smashed.”

  “I was just tired,” I said defensively.

  His lifted eyebrow showed me just how much he believed that, but he didn’t push it. Instead, while Hasselberger poured us glasses of juice, we talked generalities and about the agenda before the Trial Lawyers this weekend. One of the main pieces of business was to vote on changing the association’s name to Advocates for Justice.

  “Everybody pretends that the new name better describes what we do,” Bill said, “but we all know that it’s because ‘trial lawyers’ has become a dirty word.”

  True. They’re constantly being slimed by certain probusiness elements who oppose big judgments against corporations and their insurance companies, never mind whether said corporations are grossly negligent or merely indifferent to the possible harm their protocols might cause.

  I waited until the frittata was out of the oven and we were seated at the table with heaped plates to say, “So, Bill, how come we never met when you were on the bench?”

  Reid kicked me under the table, but Bill flashed another one of those warm smiles, this time with a hint of mischief. “Actually, we did meet. Fall conference one year and here last summer a couple of years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “Reid had told me all about you, so I knew who you were, but I guess I was just part of the crowd. Hard to get your attention with Chuck Teach there, and then the next summer—”

  Reid’s fork, laden with cheese and tomatoes, paused in midair. “You and Judge Teach hooked up?”

  “It was nothing more than a few drinks and dinner,” I said.

  “Yeah? Does Dwight know?”

  “Who’s Dwight?” Bill asked, proffering the coffeepot.

  Reid held out his cup for a refill. “Dwight Bryant. Her husband.”

  “You’re married now?”

  I wiggled my left hand to show him my rings. “Going on seven months.”

  “Well, damn!” he said with a laugh. “I finally get a chance to register on your radar and it’s half a year too late. Is he with you this week?”

  I shook my head. “No, he had a seminar up in Virginia.” I took another bite of that delicious mixture of eggs and herbs and cheese. “I don’t mean to be tactless, but was it hard leaving the bench?”

  Reid rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Deborah.”

  “It’s okay, pal,” Bill said. “I’m pretty much over it. Yeah, I liked being a judge, so I was sorry to leave, but it wasn’t leaving the bench itself that I minded so much as the way I was pushed off.”

  “Pete Jeffreys?”

  “You got it. It was a bad time all around and he played into it. My wife and I were going through an ugly divorce, so he started a rumor that she kicked me out because I was gay and that I made a couple of DWIs go away for some gay friends. You know how hard those things are to stop once enough people believe it. You don’t need any fire if there’s enough smoke. And I did dismiss a DWI for a friend who happens to be gay, but it was for cause and thoroughly justified. My dismissal rate for DWIs was a lot lower than his is.”

  “He doesn’t just dismiss the cases in open court either,” said Reid. “It’s an open secret that one of his big-donor attorney friends has a drawerful of blank dismissal forms that Jeffreys signed for him.”

  I wasn’t as shocked as I should have been.

  Like it or not, I doubt if there’s a courthouse in the state where that hasn’t happened.

  “The worst of it is that he’s lazy,” Bill said. “Sitting on a bench is a damn sight easier than maintaining an office, chasing down cases, and working actively for a client who may or may not pay you for your services. I’m absolutely convinced that the main reason he ran for judge wasn’t the prestige and certainly not because he could make a difference, but because of the salary and the pension plan and it’s a first step toward higher office. He shoots from the hip with his rulings and half the time he doesn’t bother to read the whole case file. Just last fall, he put a guy on probation who was already on probation and hadn’t once reported to his probation officer. If he’d read the file, he would have seen an escalating pattern of criminal behavior—robbery, car theft, and a felony breaking and entering that was really a burglary because he broke into an occupied home at night.”

  “Why didn’t Jeffreys keep him in jail for that?” I asked, since even first-time burglaries carry hefty jail time.

  Bill shrugged. “He pleaded to the lesser charge and Jeffreys hadn’t read the file.”

  “Is this the case where the guy left court and then murdered a girl?”

  Grim-faced, Bill nodded. “Two days later he carjacked a waitress who was working her way through college. Raped and killed her and put her body in the trunk, then drove around for three days, using her credit cards and checkbook before he was picked up and they opened the trunk. He’ll probably get the death penalty when it comes to trial, but Jeffreys ought to be charged, too. Of course, he blames the DA and the probation officer for not alerting him to the guy’s record, but it was all there in front of him if he’d bothered to read it.”

  “And now he wants to run for superior court,” Reid said, hotly indignant on his friend’s behalf.

  “I
guess everyone knows there’s no love lost between the two of you,” I said.

  “After the way he helped screw up my life? Not that my ex didn’t do her share, too. She never exactly said I was gay, but she never came to my defense either. She just gave a little martyred smile and let the allegations stand so that our so-called friends wouldn’t blame her for catting around the courthouse on me.”

  “She’s an attorney, too?”

  He nodded. “That’s why I moved down here. I had to go back into practice, and I wasn’t going to stand up in a courtroom and call him ‘Your Honor’ after what he’d done. Besides, I didn’t want to keep running into my ex or one of her lovers every time I crossed the street. They’ll both get theirs one of these days but I wasn’t going to stay there and wait for it.”

  “As far as Jeffreys is concerned, your wait’s over,” I said, speaking more flippantly than I felt. “He got his last night.”

  “Huh?” said Reid.

  “Someone strangled him last night in the parking lot near Jonah’s and threw him in the river.”

  I kept my eyes on Bill’s face as I described the scene. The news seemed to surprise him, but then most lawyers have trained themselves to contain their emotions and to cultivate a poker face.

  Both asked a dozen or more questions. In the end Reid leaned back in his chair and lifted his coffee cup as if toasting his friend. “They say you can’t go home again, but maybe now you can.”

  “Not while Lisa’s still there,” Bill said grimly.

  “One down, one to go.”

  “Don’t joke,” I told Reid. “Once the police come up with a list of his enemies and learn that Bill was in the vicinity, they’ll want to know what time y’all left the restaurant last night.”

  “Us? Oh hell, Deborah, you know we didn’t have anything to do with his death.”

  “Well, as long as you can alibi each other,” I said. “You did drive back here together, right?” I said.

  There was a split-second silence as the two men locked eyes.