Designated Daughters

by Margaret Maron

  “It’s not just idle curiosity,” I told her when her secretary put me through and I had explained what I wanted and why. “You know how Dwight gets if he thinks I’m not minding my own business, so I don’t want to say anything about this if there’s nothing there.”

  “I do still have all of my dad’s files,” Pat said, “but of course that one’s been inactive for years and I honestly doubt if there’s any smoking gun in it.”

  “You don’t still represent him, do you?”

  She gave a sour laugh. “You kidding? I’m too small-town for him.” She named a large law firm in Raleigh, then said, “I’ll have one of my clerks root out that file.”

  “Thanks, Pat. I’ll leave my phone on.”

  “Don’t thank me yet, honey. I’m not promising you a look if anything’s there,” she warned.

  After the long weekend, I knew that first appearances would be a busy session. Happily, Julie Walsh, one of the more organized and efficient ADAs, was there that morning for the State.

  It was the usual mixed bag: five D&Ds after the weekend brawls, two cases of domestic violence—one male on female, the other female on male—a hit-and-run (not fatal, thank goodness), four drug possessions, etc., etc.

  Some of the etceteras charged with felonies waived their probable cause hearings and were ready to proceed directly to trial. For those, I advised them of their right to an attorney, then set their dates to appear in superior court and their bonds, as appropriate.

  Making her first appearance was Valerie Rhodes, 18, white, and accused of deliberately ramming a 2012 Toyota Camry owned by her sister and occupied at the time by Helen Barefoot and Randall Nehring shortly before midnight Saturday night. Miss Rhodes was charged with two counts of felony assault and one count of malicious property damage.

  Seated on the front row behind the prosecution were Mr. Nehring and Miss Barefoot, she in a neck brace, he with a cast on his right arm, a black eye, and bruises on his face. Also present were his wife, an attorney for Miss Rhodes, and assorted parents.

  According to the prosecution, a Dobbs police officer had been called out to a disturbance at a side street that dead-ended behind a defunct grocery store, a site that’s showed up in my courtroom more than once. It’s popular with couples who can’t or won’t spring for a motel room and who have no convenient bed elsewhere.

  When he arrived on the scene, the officer saw that a Honda Civic driven by Miss Rhodes had rammed into the Camry, which sustained damages approximating $1500. He found the occupants of the Camry in a state of partial undress and saw Miss Rhodes hitting Mr. Nehring with her cheerleader baton.

  I wondered if she’d been in yesterday’s parade, but didn’t ask.

  The officer had called for an ambulance to convey Mr. Nehring and Miss Barefoot to the hospital and he had placed Miss Rhodes under arrest. A magistrate had set her bond, which was immediately met so that she didn’t have to stay in jail.

  Even though a first appearance is not really the time for it, I allowed Mrs. Nehring to speak.

  She looked almost as young as her sister. Same long brown hair, a similarly pretty oval face and earnest brown eyes. “Please, Your Honor, Val’s only eighteen. She shouldn’t have done this, but she did it for me. I knew that Randy was cheating, and when she saw how much I was hurting, she wanted to hurt him back. The Camry’s in my name, not Randy’s, and I don’t want to press charges, okay?”

  I know how impulsive eighteen-year-olds can be. Hell, wasn’t I only a month or two past my own nineteenth birthday when I stabbed a man with a rusty knife because he called me Debbie one time too often? And he was only annoying me, not hurting someone I loved.

  I looked over at Julie Walsh. “Madame DA, it appears that the State might have a problem with the maliciousness of this offense. Are you sure you want to go forward on it?”

  She agreed that the State could offer no evidence at this time on this misdemeanor and took a voluntary dismissal of the property damage charge.

  I turned back to Valerie Rhodes, who sat beside her attorney and looked scared. “I’m afraid the felony assaults stand unless Mr. Nehring and Miss Barefoot want to drop them?”

  Miss Barefoot looked incredulous. “Is she kidding?”

  “Absolutely not!” said Randy Nehring. (And how appropriate is that for a nickname?)

  “Very well,” I said. “As to the misdemeanor, the State has taken a voluntary dismissal. However, with regard to the felony assault, I will set a probable cause date on that for June fourth, and between now and then, the State and your defense attorney can talk about it. As a judge, I have no opinion on this at all.”

  At her attorney’s request, I left Miss Rhodes’s bond where it was. She was no flight risk.

  The combatants stood to leave, and I had a feeling that Mrs. Nehring would soon be back in someone else’s court to begin divorce proceedings.

  Last on the morning calendar came Glenn Judd, 41, and Henry Wegman, 53, both white, both charged with felony larceny and conspiracy to obtain property by false pretenses. It was the old roofing scam with a twist.

  As laid out by the prosecution, Judd and Wegman had knocked on the Cotton Grove door of two elderly sisters during last week’s rains and told them that they’d been passing by and noticed that the porch roof was leaking. When the women walked out onto the porch, there was indeed a wet place where water had run down the front wall from a spot where the porch ceiling joined the main house, although no new water seemed to be running down at the moment despite the falling rain. The men painted a picture of rot and water damage and offered to take care of it right then and there since they had just finished another job and had their ladders and a bucket of tar on the truck.

  The sisters agreed and after Judd and Wegman were up on the roof for twenty minutes, they came down and explained that they normally charged $3500, but since they were already out, it would be only $2500.

  The sisters paid with cash on hand, but a few days later, it finally occurred to them that a rainy day is not the time to tar a leak; and even if it were, should a twenty-minute job warrant such a high price? They then called their nephew, who came over, went up on the roof, and could see no evidence of fresh tar. In any event, he had overseen the installation of a new roof only two years earlier. He reported the incident to the local police, who were sympathetic but had no way to help because the sisters could furnish neither a name nor a license plate number.

  As I listened, I wondered if the nephew knew my cousin Sally. Clearly, this man was his aunts’ designated daughter.

  Happily for the ladies, Judd and Wegman were greedy enough and stupid enough to come back on Friday for a second bite of the apple. This time, they offered to reroof the whole house for only $5000. While one of the sisters offered homemade cookies to seal the deal, the other called their nephew, who immediately called the Cotton Grove police, who responded in time to make the arrest.

  The two men glumly waived a PC hearing so I bound them over to superior court and set their bonds at $5000 each.

  This was not a sexy case, it would not make headlines. Indeed, it would barely merit a mention in the county’s local paper, but like the way Rusty Alexander cheated Miss Jones, these consumer fraud cases hurt people and do as much real damage to their lives as if they’d been robbed at gunpoint. Over and over again, I see the elderly, the naïve, and the retirees with Alzheimer’s or other dementia issues lose their life savings and retirement accounts. Nurses, teachers, military retirees, and the disabled—no one’s off-limits for these bottom-feeders.

  I have a lot of issues with our current DA, but one thing about him: he does not allow any plea bargaining in cases like this. These two were definitely going to see the inside of a jail.

  Pat hadn’t called by noon, so I went downstairs, planning to eat lunch with Dwight in his office. I had made us both tuna salads with lettuce from his cold frame.

  When I got there, though, Mayleen told me that they finally had a lead in those Black Creek break-
ins. “Whoever stole one of the phones took a picture with it,” she said and explained how the owner had talked the person who’d bought it into giving him a jump drive with all the pictures. “Tub Greene got an ID on the two strangers and guess what? A girl took that picture.”

  She said that the break-ins now looked to be the work of three girls in that neighborhood and that they had even burgled their own homes to throw off suspicion. “One of them told Tub it was to get money for college. That they didn’t want to wind up with a huge debt at the end of four years.”

  “Boy, are they in for an education,” I said, shaking my head.

  Mayleen laughed.

  I got my salad out of their fridge and as I passed back through the squad room, I spotted the chart Mayleen had drawn up to show who was where when Aunt Rachel died. Most of the names had lines through them, indicating their elimination.

  “Still haven’t found anyone to vouch for Dr. Howell?” I asked.

  “Ray’s out checking right now,” she said. “The Collins girl said he went off down a hall with a nurse, but the nurse’s father had a heart attack late that night and she flew out to Iowa to be with him, so we haven’t talked to her yet. There was a medical emergency on that hall about then and there was too much coming and going for anyone to be certain. Hard to think that Dr. Howell really needs an alibi, though, isn’t it? With all the good he does?”

  On the way back to my own office, I ran into Sally coming out of the clerk of the court’s office. She wore the springy blonde wig today, curls flying in every direction as she shook her head at me in exasperation as if I had personally written the probate laws for North Carolina.

  “You ever settle someone’s estate?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you better make sure Uncle Kezzie has a detailed will. Twelve children and God knows how many grandkids, right? I just have the one brother and he’s a sweetheart, but we still have to agree on every single detail, because Mama didn’t leave a will and Jay-Jay’s got the business sense of a grasshopper.”

  I laughed. “So how much of a cut did Will take on that Hanley Willis decoy?”

  She joined my laughter, her blonde curls bouncing. “Wasn’t that a hoot? Wouldn’t you love to be there when that cheating Rusty Alexander realizes it’s a fake? We’re hoping he’ll take it up to Maryland to brag on it in front of the real Dawson Bridges.”

  She told me how she’d gone down to the Waterfowl Museum at Harkers Island to get authentic details and how Will had shot a few lead pellets into the doctored decoy to make it look as if it had been hunted over a hundred years ago. The initials, the white dot in the eyes, the feathering details, and the final “weathering” were done by a friend of his who did period restorations—something I really didn’t want to know too much about even though Will does make a point of saying on his website and in all his ads that everything is sold “as is” with no guarantees as to provenance.

  “Lucky that he found an old bill of sale among the Lattimore papers,” I said.

  “Oh, honey!” she giggled. “Luck had nothing to do with it. That was Marillyn Mulholland.”

  Her face sobered, though, as she told me that Will had turned all the money over to JoAnn Bonner and her aunt except for the restorer’s fee. “It compensates for the tea service, but it’s not nearly enough to save the house. They’ve decided not to even try. They’ve emptied the house and the bank has foreclosed on it.” She gave me a defiant look. “And we did check under all the floorboards, but we couldn’t find the Tiffany jewels. The bank will probably sell it for scrap and some lucky contractor may wind up with a quick quarter million.”

  As she turned to go, I caught hold of her sleeve. “Sally, you said that Aunt Rachel wasn’t close to Annie Ruth?”

  “So?”

  “But she kept talking about an Annie. Was that Richard Howell’s grandmother?”

  She nodded. “Why?”

  “No reason,” I lied. “Just wondered.”

  Midway through my afternoon session, Pat Hawkins sent me a text asking me to drop by when I could. While Julie Walsh thumbed through her shucks, I unobtrusively texted Pat to expect me around five.

  When I called Dwight after adjournment, he said, “I’m still down in Black Creek, so don’t wait for me. I’ll get somebody to drop me at Jimmy’s.”

  There was no need to rush, but I still went out the side door of the courthouse, cut through the parking lot and down the alley to Pat’s on the next street over.

  Her secretary showed me into her office, where a single sheet of paper lay facedown on the desk before her.

  “I’ve gone over all my dad’s dealings with the Howell family, Deborah. He handled the sale of old Mr. Howell’s feed store. It sold back then for twenty-eight thousand and there was approximately twenty-five thousand left when he died, which his wife, Richard’s grandmother, inherited.” She leaned back with her elbows on the arms of her chair and tented her index fingers against her chin.

  “This is not for public consumption, Deborah. I don’t have to remind you of attorney-client privilege, even though most of this doesn’t fall into that realm.”

  I nodded.

  “Dad kept pretty complete notes on all his clients, and reading between the lines of this paper, I’m thinking she used some of the money for Jannie’s wedding and part for Howell’s tuition at Carolina for his undergraduate degree. Can you believe that board and tuition at Carolina was way less than a thousand a year? He got a small grant from Duke when he was accepted into medical school, but Duke wasn’t Carolina when it came to tuition and board. It probably was going to take most of the rest of whatever was left out of that twenty-eight thousand to get him through the next four years, so Dad thought she went ahead and gave him the money, but she brought Dad a sealed envelope and directed him to keep it with her will, which left everything to be shared equally between Howell and his sister. Here’s what Dad wrote about that.”

  She slid the paper over to me and pointed to the handwritten notes on the second half of the page:

  Earlier, Mrs. H. told me that she had asked her grandson to sign a promissory note to repay the loan to her estate as soon as he was qualified to practice medicine and I assumed that was what was in the envelope although she did not say so. Upon her death, I gave him the envelope. He had been practicing medicine for almost a year when his sister died. If he ever gave her a share of the money, I am not aware of it.

  “So that was what Aunt Rachel meant about unpaid debts,” I said and repeated some of the other things Aunt Rachel had said. “She must have told Aunt Rachel, and Aunt Rachel would have known that he never repaid it. Maybe his sister wouldn’t have died if she’d been able to afford a better house and maybe that’s the real reason why he’s felt so guilty all these years. One of the neighbors told Dwight that Howell always wanted what he wanted and felt entitled.”

  Pat nodded. “I’m willing to bet that he’s the boy who ate all the chocolates in both those Easter baskets you told me about.”

  “He really seems to like having the whole world think good of him,” I said. “But if Aunt Rachel had kept talking, she might have added enough for everyone to know who she was talking about.”

  Pat looked thoughtful. “Sound like a motive for murder to you?”

  “And he doesn’t have an alibi,” I said.

  CHAPTER

  31

  I approve of gravity in old age, so it be not excessive.

  — Cicero

  Dwight got home shortly after me. Jimmy White had to replace both the water hose and the fan belt, and he’d changed the oil as long as the truck was up on the lift. Dwight’s faithful horse was now good for another few thousand miles.

  We ate an early supper, then carried our drinks down to our new screened-in pond shed so that Cal could go swimming. He’s part fish and we try not to be too overly protective, but we never let him go swimming by himself. As he and Bandit and one of Seth’s dogs played in the water, Dwight and I positio
ned our chairs where we could watch, and I listened while he told me about the teenage girls who thought they could build a college fund by robbing half the houses in their neighborhood.

  “If it hadn’t been for that cell phone picture, they’d still be at it,” he said. “Girls seem to be a little smarter than boys when they turn to crime. They’d babysat in some of the houses and had a good idea of where things were. We think they pooled their information about which houses were empty during the day.”

  “Nobody ever caught them on a security camera?” I asked as Cal tried a wobbly jackknife dive off the end of the pier.

  “Twice, but they were smart about that, too—hoodies to cover their hair, scarves over their faces, latex gloves. We thought they were boys. They didn’t tell any of their friends, they didn’t trash the houses or leave fingerprints, and they only stole stuff that was easy to pawn or sell. Laptops, iPods, cell phones, and jewelry.”

  “How old are these girls?”

  “Two are fifteen, the other’s sixteen, a high school junior.”

  “Minors,” I said.

  “And already lawyered up. In fact, the girl who let slip that they were saving for college? Now she says she was talking about her babysitting earnings.”

  “All middle class, all pretty, all white, and all hoping to draw a middle-aged male judge with teenage daughters?” I asked cynically.

  “Middle class and pretty, but more like the UN. One white, one Latina, and one Asian American. I don’t know about the judge.”

  He sipped his beer—a light ale he’d brewed last month—in gloomy silence.

  “Speaking of college funds,” I said, and told him what I’d learned about Dr. Richard Howell and how the Annie of Aunt Rachel’s worried comments wasn’t Annie Ruth but Annie Howell. I described the promissory note Howell’s grandmother had told Pat Hawkins’s father about and the debt that was never repaid. I also repeated Amy’s assessment of his almost pathological need to be revered for all his good works. Indeed, I laid everything out for him like Cal showing us all the goodies that Santa had left in his Christmas stocking.