Sand Sharks

by Margaret Maron

  We ordered drinks at the bar and carried them out to the terrace. Most of the rocking chairs were taken, so we sat down at one of the small tables just outside the door to the bar.

  Even in the shade it was still warm, but not unpleasantly so. Sounds of children splashing in the pool drifted up to us. Out at the shoreline, eight or ten pelicans skimmed past like a string of speed skaters heading for the finish line. Further down the beach, a cloud of gulls elbowed each other out of the way to catch the chunks of bread a woman tossed into the air. I slipped off my sandals, took a swallow of my drink, and relaxed into the chair.

  “So how was your afternoon?” Chelsea Ann asked.

  “Interesting,” I said, and told her about running into Jill Mercer and the director of Port City Blues.

  “Jerome Stackhouse?”

  “Is that his name?”

  She described him right down to his graying ponytail and I nodded. “That’s him.”

  She laughed when I told her I needed a quick cram course on the show. “He wants me to tell him what they get wrong.”

  “Like he really cares,” Chelsea Ann scoffed. “I’m sure someone’s told him that in North Carolina, the prosecution and the defense both remain seated to question a witness, but that’s not as dramatic as having them stride around and get in a witness’s face. Or that you don’t automatically cite the grounds for your objection. Or that wearing a robe and horn-rimmed glasses completely keeps you from being recognized when you take your hair down, take off your robe, and turn into a hot blues singer at an after-hours club.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” I said. “A female Clark Kent/ Superman thing and the Lois Lane character—”

  “That would be Stone Hamilton,” she interposed.

  “—He never notices? Is this show played for real or is it a sort of Get Smart farce?”

  “It’s a dramedy. And in all fairness, Stone Hamilton plays the club owner, Don Harper, who’s never been in Darcy Jones’s courtroom. The episodes bounce back and forth between legal dramas and Darcy’s after-hours life. Something will happen in the club that makes her see a court case differently. Or a court case will open her eyes to what’s happening to someone at the club. The story lines alternate, see? One week, it’s mostly about Don and she’s just a minor character. The next week, Darcy’s the one front and center.”

  “Are they lovers?”

  “On screen or in real life?”

  “Whichever.”

  “I think Hamilton may be involved with someone from Dead in the Water, another show that’s filmed here in Wilmington. I don’t know about Mercer. On Port City Blues, there’s enough sexual tension between Don and Darcy to keep viewers wondering will they or won’t they, but everybody knows what happens when the guy gets the girl on these shows. Kiss of death. If they’re smart, the two characters probably won’t hook up till the very last episode.”

  While the ice melted in our glasses and the occasional judge wandered by, Chelsea Ann regaled me with incidents from the show, its legal courtroom goofs, and gossip about Jill Mercer and Stone Hamilton.

  “He’s real eye candy,” she said. “I’m going to be so disappointed if he turns out to be gay.”

  “Why don’t you come along with me and check him out for yourself?” I said.

  Her green eyes lit up like sparklers. “Really? It would be all right?”

  “I don’t see why not. That Stackhouse guy said he wanted some feedback from a real judge. This way he’d be getting a twofer and you can stop me from putting my foot in my mouth.”

  “Like that’s possible,” she said with a laugh.

  We agreed to meet in the lobby later that evening and maybe get supper somewhere on the drive over.

  * * *

  When the elevator stopped at my floor, Martha Fitzhume was waiting for the doors to open.

  “Oh, good!” she said. “I was on my way up to the party suite for a drink and I hate drinking by myself.”

  “Where’s Fitz?” I asked, allowing myself to be dragooned.

  “Having a nap. Bless his heart, he wore himself out in the pool after lunch. His retirement’s not coming a day too soon for either of us. He just doesn’t have the stamina he used to have, Deborah, and I want him to myself while we’re both still healthy enough to travel and enjoy each other.”

  On the sixth floor, the door to 628 was on the latch, and talk and laughter met us as we neared the suite. Martha knew everyone, of course, and I had met most of them. The one totally unfamiliar face belonged to Tom Henshaw. A barrel-shaped man in his late forties, he was completely bald in front and on top, but thick brown hair covered the sides and back of his head. I had been told that he was normally a shy, quiet man, but this afternoon he was downright gregarious.

  It’s not that he was celebrating the death of the man who had challenged him for his recently acquired seat on the bench, but neither was he in mourning. He greeted me so warmly that I almost expected him to hug me and thank me for finding Pete Jeffreys’s body, as if I’d somehow been responsible for his suddenly safe seat. I couldn’t help thinking that it was a good thing he hadn’t been at Jonah’s last night. Otherwise, he’d be near the top of my list of suspects.

  All the same, looking around the room reminded me that I didn’t actually have a list of suspects. Several of my colleagues had been at Jonah’s, yet I couldn’t visualize any of them as a killer. Yeah, yeah, given the right provocation, I’m sure a lot of people could kill in the heat of the moment, with or without true intent. Look how close I’d come to fatally stabbing Allen. A few centimeters in either direction and I could be sitting in prison right now.

  But to walk the length of the parking lot? To come up behind someone and take him unawares? That’s malice aforethought. Deliberate intent.

  “Surely none of these laughing, talking, pleasant faces could conceal a hatred that intense? ” said the kind-hearted preacher.

  “Oh, please,” said the pragmatist.

  Martha fixed us each a vodka collins, I snared a bowl of nuts, and we went out onto the large balcony that wrapped around the corner of the suite. Two others were there before us, Judge Lillian Jordan and a younger man who was sworn in last year. There were only three chairs at the round white plastic table and he jumped up immediately, insisting that we take his.

  Lillian smiled as we watched him bolt back into the air-conditioned room. “Thanks for rescuing us,” she said. “We were boring each other to death, but he was too polite to think of a good excuse to leave and—”

  “—And you were too kind-hearted to tell him to push off,” Martha said, handing me my drink.

  Lillian is the judge I hope I grow up to be. She’s maybe fifteen years older, but doesn’t look a day over forty. A trim figure, light brown shoulder-length hair, a genuine interest in people, and a quick sense of humor, yet there is a gravitas about her that invokes confidence in what she says and how she rules. Some judges coast on the issues, relying on these twice-a-year conferences to keep them current on new laws and new rulings from our state supreme court. Lillian is always on top of the law and is seldom reversed. She doesn’t allow any nonsense in her courtroom, but she gets her point across quietly and firmly. Most attorneys respect her even when she rules against them.

  Unfortunately she’s a committed Democrat in a Republican district and no longer bothers to run for election. Fortunately our Democratic governors keep appointing her to fill vacancies or act as an emergency judge. She had driven over from Randolph County this afternoon and was interested to hear about my finding Pete Jeffreys’s body.

  “Only if you feel like it, though,” she said, taking a single cashew from the bowl I’d brought out. “It must have been horrible and you’re probably tired of telling it.”

  “That’s okay,” I said and gave her the condensed version.

  “As close as you are to the Triad,” I said, “did you hear about any of the allegations against him?”

  She nodded without elaborating and I won
dered if she had spoken to the ethics committee.

  Martha was more willing to talk about his flawed approach to the law and I finally learned that she had found him detestable even before he came to the bench. “It wasn’t proved, but I’m pretty sure he bribed someone at a Burlington lab to give a phony result on the blood test. My cousin’s daughter went through hell before she could prove Jeffreys’s client was the father of her son.”

  My head came up on that one. “A Burlington lab?” I couldn’t quite remember the name. “Jane-something?”

  “Jamerson Labs. You heard about that?”

  “Heard about it? It came unraveled in my courtroom. I didn’t know Pete Jeffreys was involved, though.”

  I remembered the lab worker’s plain, chinless face. She had taken money to lie about a paternity case that I had sat on, and then I discovered that she had lied for Allen as well, in someone else’s court over in Greensboro. That sweet-talking flimflammer hadn’t paid her a dime, just made her feel beautiful and so desirable that she had gladly faked his test and sworn to its accuracy.

  “What about the carjacker that he let walk out of his court on unsupervised probation?” I asked. “Anybody here have a connection to the young woman he murdered?”

  Neither Lillian nor Martha could think of anyone.

  “Besides,” said Martha, “he seems to have passed all the blame for that on to the DA who didn’t alert him to the guy’s probation violations.”

  “Although he would have known about it if he’d bothered to read the file,” said Lillian, echoing what others had said about the dead judge.

  “I saw you talking to Bill Hasselberger last night, Deborah. I hope he’s got a good alibi because heaven knows there was no love lost between him and Jeffreys.”

  “Who’s Bill Hasselberger?” asked Martha.

  “Former judge who’s back in private practice down here now,” I explained. “Jeffreys unseated him in what sounds like a dirty campaign.”

  “It was,” said Lillian, “but I was thinking about his little godchild.”

  “Godchild?”

  “The talk is that Jeffreys took money to give primary custody of the little boy to the husband and the child got hold of the stepmother’s cigarette lighter and—”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “That was Bill Hasselberger’s godchild? Judge Ouellette told us about that at our committee meeting today, but she didn’t say that he was connected to Hasselberger. God! Jeffreys was a judicial disaster, wasn’t he? How the hell did he get elected?”

  “You ask that with all the incompetent crooks in office?” Martha asked sardonically. “Maybe voters thought he’d be a good man to have a beer with.” She took a final swallow of her drink and set the glass back on the table.

  Lillian smiled and assured us that Hasselberger was not a violent man.

  Me? I was suddenly remembering that he did not have an alibi if it relied on my cousin Reid. There was a half-hour unaccounted for.

  If he and Jeffreys had met on Front Street?

  If words had been exchanged and Jeffreys had flipped him off?

  If Hasselberger had erupted in anger and followed him into the dark parking lot?

  If—if—if!

  Suddenly I was very tired of talking about it. I excused myself, threaded my way through the increasingly crowded room without getting waylaid, and took the stairs back down to my floor.

  More than twenty-four hours had passed since Dwight and I had snapped at each other. If I was tired of talking about Pete Jeffreys’s death, I was also tired of feeling miserable every time I thought of Dwight. Pocketing my pride, I switched on my phone, keyed up his number, and pressed the talk button.

  Six rings, then, instead of his drawled “Leave a message,” a mechanical voice gave me the usual options.

  Huh?

  Thinking I had somehow misdialed, I tried again.

  Same results, so I said I was at the beach and to call me. No way was I going to try to make up with him through voice mail.

  I scrolled through my contacts list, but I had never entered Will’s number, so I couldn’t call him either.

  Several messages were waiting for my attention. My best friend Portland wanted to tell me that little Carolyn Deborah had just cut her second tooth, my sister-in-law Doris reminded me that I’d promised to bring potato salad to the cookout to celebrate Robert’s birthday next Saturday, and there were four messages from Reid.

  The first had been recorded a little after four. “Hey Deborah, call me, okay?”

  The second and third came at ten-minute intervals. The last had been less than fifteen minutes earlier. “Dammit, Deborah! Call me. Now!”

  He answered on the first ring. “Well, it’s about damn time.”

  Before I could ask him what was wrong, he said, “Did you talk to someone from the Wilmington police today? That detective that’s investigating Jeffreys’s murder?”

  “Detective Edwards?”

  “Yeah. Are you the one that put him onto Bill and me?”

  “What do you mean put him onto y’all? It’s a murder investigation, Reid. He was asking everyone for the names of who was there last night. I listed you and everybody else at your table and I’m certainly not the only one who saw you. Why?”

  “Did you tell him Bill left a half-hour before me?”

  “No, but is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “Well…”

  By now Reid had climbed down off his high horse and was ready to lead me into green pastures. I recognized that new tone from times past when he wanted to wheedle me into doing him a favor he knew I wouldn’t want to.

  “You lied to a police detective?”

  “We didn’t lie,” Reid assured me. “He interviewed us here at Bill’s house and I guess he sort of assumed we drove down to Jonah’s in the same car and came home at the same time. He didn’t ask us specifically and we didn’t volunteer.”

  “That’s about the dumbest thing you’ve ever done,” I said. “Well, the fourth-dumbest thing,” I amended, instantly remembering his history of leaping without looking. “Call him back and tell him the truth.”

  “We didn’t lie,” Reid said stubbornly. “Besides, you know good and well I didn’t kill Pete Jeffreys and neither did Bill.”

  “Did you know that Jeffreys took a bribe to give custody of Bill’s godson to the father?”

  “Huh?”

  “And that the child got so badly burned in the stepmother’s care that he’s had to have plastic surgery?”

  Silence.

  “And that he lost a couple of fingers?”

  “I—okay, yes, I knew, but that doesn’t mean—Look, Deborah. If we tell that detective that there’s an unsubstantiated half-hour around the time it happened and that Bill had good cause to hate that bastard, he’s going to land on Bill without looking further.”

  “You don’t know that,” I argued. “And how’d that half-hour get in there, anyway?”

  There was a long pause, and I swear I could almost feel Reid turning red.

  “Reid?”

  “If you must know,” he said in a sheepish voice, “I was hoping to get lucky. There was this little blonde at the bar…”

  Of course there was. And of course, he didn’t like to admit she must have turned him down.

  “So promise you won’t rat us out?”

  “I won’t lie for you,” I warned him.

  “I’m not asking you to lie. Just don’t tell before you’re specifically asked, okay?”

  I thought about the look on Hasselberger’s face when I told him and Reid of Jeffreys’s death.

  “That was genuine surprise,” said the preacher.

  “Or damn good acting,” said the pragmatist.

  Men don’t talk about things that matter as easily as women do, but why hadn’t he mentioned his godson when he was railing against Jeffreys this morning?

  “Deborah?”

  “Okay,” I said, hoping I was making the right choice.
r />   CHAPTER

  13

  The case was adjourned.

  —Pliny (AD 62–113)

  Chelsea Ann and I stopped at a restaurant on the other side of the causeway. We ordered shrimp cocktails, split a steak dinner, and still had time to stop for coffee at a little place on Market Street before strolling over to the shooting site.

  On the way we passed a life-size bronze statue erected to the memory of one George Davis. According to the legend on the granite base, this son of Wilmington had been a senator and attorney general of the Confederate States of America. Bareheaded, he wore a nineteenth-century frock coat and his right arm extended in an upward gesture as if hailing a hansom cab or signaling his butler to fetch him another mint julep. He might have looked more statesmanlike had some smart-ass not wedged a beer can between those bronze fingers.

  Halfway down the next block stood the building that doubled as the exterior of the club owned by the Stone Hamilton character. The street was loosely blocked off with ropes and a few sawhorses, but even though Hamilton and Jill Mercer were standing on the sidewalk in the glow of spotlights when we arrived, I was surprised to see barely a handful of onlookers. Either all the tourists had gone home or else Wilmington had become blasé about cameras and TV stars in its midst.

  Evidently this was to be a shot that established their leaving the club. We were too far away to hear their lines, but they seemed to exchange a few parting words, then Mercer walked away and Hamilton stepped off the curb and strolled toward a camera mounted on a dolly.

  For some reason, it was deemed necessary to film that little snippet several times. Between takes Mercer spotted me and waved, but Stackhouse was too busy coordinating everything to glance around.

  Eventually her part was deemed a wrap and she came over, held up the rope, and gestured for me to join her. Gone were the ball cap and mousy appearance from this afternoon. Now her long auburn hair rippled across one bare shoulder. Her eyes smoldered beneath long false lashes, and expertly applied mascara enhanced their beauty. The enhancement hadn’t stopped with her makeup. What had been a flat chest earlier in the day now looked at least two cup sizes larger.