She laughed as she caught me staring. “Push-ups and padding. What you see ain’t what you get.”
I introduced Chelsea Ann, who had barely taken her eyes off Stone Hamilton. We watched as the main camera rolled backward across the street while Hamilton walked toward it. Suddenly a bright light flashed across his face and he squinted as if in surprise and apprehension.
“This is where he’s supposed to realize that a car’s about to hit him,” Jill Mercer explained.
After another twenty minutes of duplicating that bit—who knew that watching the filming of a show could be so boring?—the main camera withdrew to the far sidewalk and someone cued a dark car parked near the end of the block. Its lights came on and it trundled slowly down the street.
“They’ll speed it up and add screeching brakes when they edit it,” Jill said.
The fourth time the car came rolling toward the point of impact, Hamilton had been replaced by a stunt double who met the front right headlight and appeared to be tossed like a beach ball. It was only as he was getting up that I noticed the mats that had been laid along the sidewalk behind him to cushion his fall.
As soon as Stackhouse was satisfied with the take, the mats were removed and Hamilton lay down on the bare concrete and tried to arrange his limbs to look like an unconscious hit-and-run victim.
Once he was still, Stackhouse shouted, “Hey, Jilly! Where the hell are you?”
“Oops!” said Mercer. “That’s my cue.”
She hastened back into the scene crying, “Don! Don!”
As she dropped to her knees beside his sprawled body, extras spilled from the doorway of the “club” and one of them shouted, “Call 911!” Another, “Did anyone see the car?”
The camera rolled in to focus on Mercer’s distraught face next to Hamilton’s as she implored him to hang on.
* * *
It was after midnight before we got that drink at a real club a few blocks over. Stone Hamilton had begged off—“I gotta go walk my dog,” he told us—to Chelsea Ann’s disappointment.
While Stackhouse flirted with Chelsea Ann and took notes on everything she had found wrong with the program’s courtroom scenes, I learned that Jill Mercer’s soft Southern accent originated right here in North Carolina.
“I was born in Elizabeth City and studied acting at ECU, a few years after Emily Proctor graduated. She was my idol and it still amazes me that I’ve pretty much matched her role for role,” she said proudly.
We traded courtroom stories, real and fictional, which led to Pete Jeffreys’s murder the night before.
“Did the police question y’all?” I asked.
She looked puzzled. “No. Why would they?”
“Because of the run-in Stone Hamilton had with him.”
“What run-in?”
So I told her how Jeffreys had kicked the boxer, claiming that it had lunged at him. “And he was strangled with a woven nylon dog leash just like the one Hamilton had for his dog.”
“Mo would never go for someone unprovoked,” she said.
“Mo?”
“Stone’s boxer. For Muhammad Ali. You think Jamie Lee Curtis was sappy over that chihuahua? Stone’s worse about Mo. He’s got a short temper, too, but if he didn’t deck the judge right then and there, he certainly wouldn’t go after him later.”
“He didn’t mention it to you?”
“No, but we’re not that tight, y’know? His girlfriend crews on the Dead in the Water set, so he mostly hangs with them when we’re not working.”
Suddenly she laughed, then immediately apologized. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of your friend’s death, but if you and I were anything like Judge Darcy Jones, we’d have this thing wrapped up by the time they rolled the final commercial.”
I smiled. “And the killer would be—?”
“Oh, the sleazy prosecutor or the bailiff or some anonymous nobody at the back of her courtroom.”
We batted outrageous scenarios back and forth a while longer, but when Stackhouse proposed another round of drinks, I shook my head. “It’s been a long day and we have to be up early in the morning.”
Back at the hotel, Chelsea Ann and I both went straight to our rooms. Even though I was tired, I couldn’t resist going out on the balcony. The moon was three nights from full and was already on its downward slide over the top of the hotel, but it lit up the beach. From where I stood, I could see that the tide was quite low and the waves rolled in on long slow parallels that held me hypnotized till I realized that I was almost asleep standing up.
Before I fell off the balcony, I went inside and undressed, brushed my teeth, and smoothed cleansing cream on my face. That woke me enough to remember that I had been catching up on my voice mail when Reid’s call interrupted. I rooted my phone out of my purse, switched it on, and listened to one of my nieces asking if it was okay to bring some of her friends over to swim off my pier that afternoon. Because she and her cousins had been the one to build it, they had an open invitation to use it any time, so this was just a courtesy call.
Still no call from Dwight, but one from my sister-in-law Minnie reminded me of a political lunch we were supposed to attend on Friday and there was a second call from one of those unfamiliar and unidentified numbers.
I punched the button to play the message and adrenaline shot through my veins the instant I heard Dwight’s voice.
“Deb’rah? You get my last message? If you didn’t, call me back on this number, okay?”
I didn’t wait for him to repeat the number, but scrolled straight back to the first message that had come in from that number yesterday afternoon.
“Hey, shug. We got here just fine, but when we stopped for lunch, I dropped my phone in the parking lot and by the time I missed it, somebody’d run over it.” I heard his rueful laugh. “You were right. We should’ve packed a lunch. Sandy’s lending me hers while we’re here. They think the SIM card’s okay, so I’ll wait till I get home to buy a new phone. Call me back at this number, okay?”
I played that message three times and heard absolutely nothing in his voice to indicate that he was still mad or that he thought I might be. All my angst for nothing?
Relief flooded through me as I remembered the many times I had snarled at him back when he was more like another brother than a future love. Half the time he never realized I was mad at him. The other half he just shrugged it off. He knew me too well: if I was seriously angry, I’d let him know; otherwise, I’d get over it as soon as I cooled down enough to think it over.
Was it really that simple? I played the message again.
Yesohyesohyes!
He and I and Cal were still going to have to sit down and thresh out the ground rules again, but for now, the huge weight that had burdened my shoulders for two days melted away like ice cubes in a glass of warm sweet tea. I was no longer exhausted. I wanted to rush downstairs and dance naked on the beach. I wanted to ring room service and order champagne. Most of all, I wanted to hurry the night along so that morning would come quickly.
I slid between the sheets and fell asleep hugging one of the oversized pillows and whispering happy nothings in its nonexistent ear.
CHAPTER
14
Under the name of things personal are included all sorts of things moveable… by the common law, of all a man’s goods and chattels… But things personal, by our law, do not only include things moveable, but also something more.
—Sir William Blackstone (1723–1780)
Monday dawned blue-skies bright with crystalline air that for June was almost humidity-free. Sunlight sparkled on the turquoise water and turned the soaring gulls a dazzling white. Another day in paradise, made even more beautiful by calling Dwight as soon as I awoke. We talked for almost an hour. He planned to go on to his seminar this morning while Cal went camping with Paul Radcliff and his boys. Paul and his wife Sandy had known Dwight and his first wife from their tour of duty in Washington. Paul is now chief of police in Shaysville, which w
as how he and Dwight have kept in touch over the years.
“What about the house?” I asked.
“There were some family pieces that Jonna’s mother wanted back,” he said, “and you remember Eleanor Prentice, Mrs. Shay’s cousin?”
The only normal member of that whole family? Of course I remembered her.
“Her daughter will take the china. It’s been in the family a couple of generations and I didn’t think we wanted it.”
“God, no,” I said. In addition to the casual dinnerware we’d received as wedding gifts, we also had my own mother’s Royal Doulton in enough place settings to serve a formal dinner to twenty.
“How’s Cal handling things?” I asked.
“Okay. He cried a little when we got to Jonna’s room, but Eleanor had emptied out all her closets and drawers and stripped the bed so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I guess. About the only thing he really talked about was that the house and yard looked smaller than he remembered.”
Time does that, I thought—magnifies in memory the well-loved places of childhood.
“Will’s on his way back with a truckload of things he’ll put in his next auction. The housing market here’s a lot worse than ours, but the real estate agent’s going to try renting the house to someone with an option to buy. With gas prices what they are, she thinks people are going to want to live in town again instead of miles out in the country.”
“There was nothing in the house Cal wanted to keep?”
“Not really. We pretty much cleaned out his room when we moved him down in January. There was a little wooden box that Jonna used to toss her spare change in and a souvenir mug from Six Flags, stuff like that. None of the furniture. So how’s your conference going?”
“It doesn’t officially start till this afternoon,” I said, stalling as I tried to decide how to tell him that there might be a murderer among us. “The chief judges meet at three and there’s a reception tonight in honor of Judge Fitzhume.”
In the end, because there was no way to avoid it, I told him as calmly and unemotionally as I could about Pete Jeffreys’s death.
He was concerned that I was the one who had discovered his body in case Jeffreys had been someone I liked and respected. Not that my likes or dislikes would ever affect the way he works his cases.
“Who’s in charge?” he asked.
“The lead detective’s a guy named Gary Edwards. He says he’s met you and to tell you hey when I talked to you.”
“Tell him I said hey back if you happen to see him again. He struck me as pretty solid. You aren’t messing around in his case, are you?”
Before he could tell me to stay out of Edwards’s investigation or start worrying that I might be in danger, I said, “Too bad you’re not here. They’ve remodeled the hotel and there’s a Jacuzzi in every room now.”
He chuckled. “Well, damn! If I didn’t have to teach that class, I’d be right down.”
“On the other hand,” I said, tossing another ball into the air, “I don’t know as I’d want to expose you to so much temptation. Guess who Chelsea Ann and I had drinks with last night? Jill Mercer and the director of Port City Blues.”
The distractions worked. The rest of the phone call was devoted to last night’s filming of a hit-and-run scene and that yes, Jill Mercer seemed to be as nice as she was beautiful. I didn’t tell him about the push-up bra and padding. Some illusions should not be shattered, I decided, smugly aware that I hadn’t needed padding since I was twelve.
* * *
After the call, I indulged myself by going back to bed for another hour, then called room service for a pot of coffee, a bowl of fruit, and a flaky croissant with blackberry jam, which I ate on my balcony while reading The Star-News’s update on the investigation. The story had moved off the front pages, shrunk to two short paragraphs, and was captioned “No Leads in Death of Judge.”
True or not, I had no reason to call Detective Edwards. No startling revelations had been whispered into my shell-like ears in the last twenty-four hours. There was that bit about Jamerson Labs, but that was old news. Yes, Martha Fitzhume was still carrying a grudge because her cousin’s daughter was screwed when Jeffreys bribed a lab tech to alter her ex’s paternity test. Once that tech came clean in my court, though, all her cases were reexamined and, so far as I knew, new tests had set everything straight.
Bill Hasselberger was a possibility if he was emotionally close to his godson. Say he had brooded excessively over the child’s burn injuries to the point that the sight of Jeffreys was enough to push him over the edge into murder. That missing half-hour certainly gave him enough time. It couldn’t have taken more than five minutes to follow Jeffreys to his car, loop that leash around his neck, then throw him into the river.
I still thought it was odd that neither he nor Reid had mentioned the boy when they were cataloging Jeffreys’s sins on Sunday.
Of course, the murder didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Jeffreys’s bungled court decisions. Maybe it played out on a more basic level. Judges have a certain amount of power and more than one old, fat, ugly man has proved that power is an aphrodisiac. I might have been turned off by Jeffreys’s smirk, but I’m willing to bet that he saw plenty of action around his district. Maybe it was time to talk to Roberta Ouellette again and see if I could pry loose some names that would link back to the trial lawyers who were meeting forty minutes away.
Only not now. This was my last day of hedonistic freedom and I was going to put Pete Jeffreys out of my mind and enjoy it.
A half-hour later I was sitting under a coral umbrella out on the sand. A warm breeze blew in from the water that gradually retreated as I smoothed sunscreen on every bare area I could reach. According to the lifeguard when I passed his stand, high tide was at ten and it would be at its lowest around four. Castles built at the waterline now would last for many hours, but nobody was working on one and my yellow sand bucket and red plastic shovel were thirty years gone. I don’t quite understand the allure of a pool at the beach, but the SandCastle’s was crowded with kids and adults while the ocean went begging.
I waded out till I was hip-deep, then dived into the next wave as it was cresting and swam out beyond the breakers so that I could float on the gentle swells without being dumped back on the shore. The water was as warm as a bath and the salt was sweet on my lips.
After almost a hour, when my fingers had turned to prunes, I paddled back toward the shore and wound up a bit further from the hotel than I had started. As I emerged from the water, there sitting on the sand at play with his children was Allen Stancil.
“Hey, darlin’,” he called, holding out a towel to me. “Come and meet my young’uns.”
Useless to tell him not to call me darlin’. And churlish to walk past the little girl who was giving me a shy smile.
Instead I took the towel, dropped to my knees and smiled back. “You must be Tiffany Jane.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she said, ducking her blonde head. She wore a pink bathing suit printed with green and yellow starfish.
“And this little man’s Tyler,” Allen told me.
The toddler looked to be about sixteen months old and his disposable swim diaper sported starfish and seashells. He was having a grand time knocking over his sister’s sand towers as soon as they were built.
I finished drying my hair and handed the towel back to Allen. “I thought you were only here for the weekend.”
“Naw, we’re staying till Wednesday. Wendy Nicole found us a good deal on the Internet. Bet you pay as much for your room as I’m paying for a whole suite.” His eyes suddenly narrowed. “You with that bunch of judges down the hall from me? Sixth floor?”
I pled guilty.
“Y’all sure are noisy. Kept Tiffany Jane awake till after midnight.”
“They were talking in their outdoor voices,” the child said disapprovingly.
“Not me,” I said. “Not last night anyhow.”
Allen cut his eyes at me and
white teeth flashed an amused smile beneath his dark beard. “Examining a witness in another room, darlin’?”
“What’s a witness?” his daughter asked.
Before I could tell Allen that my comings and goings were none of his business, he grabbed my left hand.
“Is that a wedding ring?” he asked in astonishment. “Don’t tell me you went and married that rabbit sheriff after all?”
The last time our paths crossed, I had indeed been involved with a game warden from further up the coast, but he was ancient history.
“No.”
“That SBI guy who was always hanging around?”
“Dwight Bryant,” I said. “Last Christmas.”
I didn’t have to explain who Dwight was. They’ve known each other off and on since childhood. Whenever Allen ran away from home and fetched up at a neighbor’s house, he and his cousin became part of the gang of boys that hung out at our house to play whatever ball was in season at the time. Too, he had been a “person of interest” when our paths last crossed and Dwight had called him in for questioning.
“Well, I’ll be damned! Ol’ Dwight? Maybe if I’d had a badge on my shirt, you and me’d still be married.”
“We were never married,” I reminded him. “And the only badge anybody’d ever give you is maybe a dogcatcher’s.”
Tiffany Jane sat back on her heels. “Did you catch dogs, Daddy? And put them in jail?”
“Naw, honey. She’s just joking.”
At that moment young Tyler’s face brightened and the little girl cried, “Aunt Sally!”
Both children ran toward a bone-skinny woman who carried a large white plastic bag from one of the hamburger chains. An inch or two over five feet, she had lemon-yellow hair gathered up into a topknot tied with a peach-colored ribbon. Her sun visor was lime-green and so were her scoop-necked tank top and the frames of her oversized sunglasses. With her peach-colored slacks and stacked orange sandals, she was a walking fruit salad.
From a distance, with that sassy walk, she looked forty. As she got closer, I saw that she was past fifty. Her skin had the leathery look of someone who had either worked out in the sun all her life or else had her own tanning bed. “Time for lunch,” she called. “Y’all hungry?” Her voice had the husky timbre of an addicted smoker.
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