Death's Half Acre (16 page)

“Oh,” she said, obviously disappointed that they weren’t someone else. “I guess you want to see my father?”

“And you, too, Miss Bradshaw,” Dwight said, as she stood back to let them in.

Inside, the place was larger than they expected. The hall was fairly wide. One side opened into the living room, the other into a small formal dining room with an oval table that would seat six. Farther down the hall, they glimpsed the edge of a kitchen and a spacious family room. Bookcases lined several of the walls and the shelves were filled with books that looked worn and well-read.

“If you’ll wait in there,” Dee Bradshaw said, gesturing to the living room, “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

They moved into that room as directed and were surprised by the portrait over the couch.

“Is that the mother or the daughter?” Terry asked.

“The mother,” Dwight said when a closer look made it clear that this vibrant woman had more steel in her face. She was not as beautiful as her daughter, but she radiated a purposefulness that the younger woman lacked. Where Dee looked petulant, Candace was clearly more determined. And yet there was something provocative and sexy in that half-smile and the tilt of her head, almost as if she were saying “Damn straight you’d like to have me, but how much are you willing to pay?”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Dwight and Terry turned to see Cameron Bradshaw smiling at them from the doorway with proprietary pride.

“Candace was twenty-five when that was painted. At the separation, this was the only thing she really wanted that I wouldn’t let her have. It’s a Gillian Greber. I paid the artist fifteen hundred to paint it; I turned down fifteen thousand from her gallery last year. Candace thought I kept it only because it was a portrait of her. She had no idea how good it was.”

“Mom’s portrait’s worth fifteen thousand?” Dee Bradshaw was incredulous. “Really?”

“I said that’s how much the gallery offered,” he said. “I imagine they would sell it for at least twenty-five.”

“Whoa!”

“Forget it, honey,” he said.

She started to protest, but then laughed. “That obvious, huh, Dad?”

He turned to his visitors. “Major Bryant, Agent Wilson. Please be seated. What can I do for you?”

“I’m afraid we have more questions,” Dwight said.

“Don’t be afraid,” Bradshaw said with a wry smile for his mild joke. He gestured for Dwight to sit in a tall wingback chair upholstered in deep blue leather and he lowered himself into its nearby twin. The chairs echoed the blue leaves and flowers of the couch and also the blue of the dress in the portrait. His daughter took one end of the couch and smiled at Terry, who sat down at the other end. “We want to help however we can. Have you learned why Candace felt she had to do what she did?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but it wasn’t suicide after all. Your wife was murdered.”

Dee’s mouth dropped open and Bradshaw looked bewildered. “Murdered?”

“It was meant to look like suicide but the medical examiner is positive that she was strangled from behind and the bag put over her head after her death.”

“Strangled? Who?”

“That’s what we’re looking into.”

“But that note. It was her handwriting.”

Terry nodded. “She was probably forced to write it.”

Dwight said, “Miss Bradshaw—”

“Oh for heaven’s sake, call me Dee.”

“Very well, Dee. You told Deputy Richards today that your mother moved into her new house at Christmas and you were at Carolina from Christmas to Easter. Is that right?”

She nodded and slid to the floor, where she could lean back against the couch and tuck her legs beneath her.

“Were you and your mother close?”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

“Did you come home often? Talk on the phone?”

“Not really. She had her life. I had mine. Anyhow, she was pretty busy. Every time I called, she was usually rushing off to a meeting or heading out to check up on one of the cleaning crews.” Her tone was light but her eyes betrayed her. “She thought the only reason I called was because I wanted something. Money or clothes.”

“Be fair, Dee,” Bradshaw said softly.

“You know it’s true, Dad.” Her voice was sulky, but she dropped her eyes and stretched out the top of her bandeau to tug it up, inadvertently giving Terry a view of her firm young breasts.

“So she never mentioned that a gun had been fired into her bedroom floor?”

“Huh?”

“A gun?” asked Bradshaw.

“One of my deputies dug a bullet out of the floor just now,” Dwight told them. “Did she own a gun?”

“Absolutely not! She was completely opposed to handguns, even though she’s never said it in public. Her constituents, you see.”

“Then that might be how she was forced to write that note,” said Terry. “Her killer could have fired into the floor as a warning threat that he’d shoot her if she didn’t do as she was told.”

Dee looked up at him. “So the letter was a lie? She wasn’t doing anything wrong after all?”

“Hard to say. We might still learn that something illegal was going on and the killer wanted to set her up as the fall guy. We haven’t talked to any of the commissioners and she seems to have kept files on them. On some of the more prominent business leaders in the county as well, but we can’t find them.”

“Files?” asked Bradshaw. “What sort of files?”

“We don’t know, but we get the impression that some things were too personal—and maybe too candid—to leave lying around for anyone to read. We don’t know if it’s papers or a CD or a flash drive.”

“What’s a flash drive?” he asked.

“Thinner than a Bic lighter but about the same shape,” Dee explained to him. “Plugs into your computer and has a ton of memory.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m pretty much a Luddite when it comes to computers. I read
The London Times
and
The New York Review of Books
online, and I can do e-mail or look up information, but as far as understanding the mechanical side of it?” He gave a hands-up gesture of ignorance.

“What about you, Dee?”

“Yeah, she used flash drives for her personal sh—” She caught herself. “Her personal
stuff.
See, there was this story on the news. About some crooked politician or one of those sleazy corporations? And how they got nailed by their computers because even if you delete or erase, it’s still there on your hard drive? For some reason, that really freaked Mom, so I told her that if she’d get herself a memory stick and work from that and never save anything to the hard drive, she ought to be safe from most snoopers. That’s when she bought her laptop. I showed her how to download to the flash drive and then transfer the files to her new computer. I even told her how to disable the automatic backup on her word processing program. She bought an extra stick, so I know she used at least one for her private stuff.

“Next time I came home, I told her about digital shredders that even get rid of cache files. She said she wished she’d known about that before she took apart her old computer and smashed the insides with a hammer. I thought that was a little over the top. I mean, what did she have that was so damn secret? A formula to blow up the world? She laughed and said I was closer to the truth than I knew.”

“And how did you interpret that?”

Dee gave a dismissive shrug of her bare shoulder. “I thought she was just trying to sound important.”

“When was this?”

“Last fall. Before she moved into the new place.”

“It’s an expensive house,” Dwight observed. “She must have been doing very well with the business.”

Cameron Bradshaw looked uncomfortable at that, and Dwight made a mental note to look into the financing of that house.

“I’m sorry, Officers,” Bradshaw said, clearly trying to cover his lapse. “I never offered you anything to drink. Tea? Or I could make coffee?”

“Would you, Dad?” Dee asked, deliberately widening her clear green eyes to coax him. “Dad grinds his own beans and I’m absolutely addicted to his coffee.”

“Flatterer,” Bradshaw said with an indulgent smile, but he was already rising from his chair. “Officers?”

“Yes, please,” Terry said before Dwight could decline. “Let me help you, sir. I know how Major Bryant likes his.” He gave Dwight a significant wink as he followed Bradshaw.

As soon as they were clear of the room, Dee turned to Dwight and in a low and urgent voice said, “You’re right, Major Bryant. Dad’s in denial, but Mom was doing
very
well. She bought a new car last spring even though her old one was only two years old. She just gave it away to her cousin in Georgia, a cousin she didn’t even like all that much.” Unforgotten resentment darkened her pretty face. “He came through with a load of peaches and a hard-luck story and she just handed him the damn keys. Paid cash for a new one the very next day. Same with the house. She paid cash for it, too. I mean, I guess when she sold our old house, she must’ve got a nice chunk of money, but the new house probably cost half a million and she just wrote a check.”

“Where do you think the extra money came from?” Dwight asked her.

“I’m sure she was skimming from the company. Dad thinks because he hired his own accountant that the books are straight, but I know Mom. There was never a man she couldn’t get around once she set her mind to it and Roger Flackman’s a real weenie.”

“Any other man in particular?”

She shrugged. “Look, you asked if Mom and I were close? We used to be. Not maybe when I was a little kid because she was working so hard and I got left with day care or babysitters, but once I hit ten or twelve and didn’t need a sitter any more, she’d take me along on some of the jobs, especially after she and Dad split. We’d go shopping and eat out a lot. I was proud of her and in her way, I think she was proud of me. Little things. Like, she took me to one of those Chamber of Commerce banquets one year when I was eleven and it totally cracked her up that I knew which was the salad fork and which was my bread-and-butter plate. She told me later that she’d never even seen a salad fork till after she married Dad.

“And that thing about guns? She wouldn’t talk about her parents very often except to say that they were trailer trash and that she used to pretend they had stolen her away from her real parents. But she did let slip once that her father used to get drunk and shoot up the trailer they lived in. Scared the hell out of her.”

She looked up at Dwight in sudden wonder. “I guess I never thought about it before, but she really did come a long way, didn’t she?”

“Sounds like it,” Dwight said.

“I mean, no money, no family connections, no education except a GED. Yeah, marrying Dad helped, but she took advantage of all her opportunities, didn’t she? Making enough of a name for herself to run for the board of commissioners? She was always saying she wanted to be somebody, but it was like nothing was ever enough. Important people could praise her to the skies, but if the
Ledger
ran a critical letter from some nobody out in the country, it cut her to the quick.

“You want to know what was probably on her flash drive? I guarantee you it had everybody who ever said something ugly about her. She had the memory of an elephant. I’m not saying she used her position to hurt that person, but she certainly wouldn’t have gone out of her way to do him any favors.”

“So who did she do favors for, Dee?”

The girl looked back at him and Dwight saw her jaw tighten.

“You said you weren’t close to her when she died. What happened?”

But the time of confidences seemed to be over. It was as if suddenly realizing why her mother had been so driven to succeed had made her no longer willing to speak of any failings Candace might have had.

“You do know that whoever killed her might have been one of those she did favors for?” he said gently.

“I’d better go help Dad bring in the coffee,” she said, unfolding herself up from the floor just as Bradshaw and Wilson returned.

The coffee was every bit as delicious as promised and Bradshaw seemed as willing as ever to help, but a distinct chill radiated from his daughter.

“When can we have the house back?” she asked as she handed Dwight a cup of fragrant brew.

“My deputies are finishing up there now.” He looked at his watch. “I guess they’re probably done. But if you come across that flash drive, I hope you’ll call us right away.”

She gave an indifferent shrug that promised nothing.

“Of course she will,” said Bradshaw. “Cream or sugar, Bryant?”

“No, thank you. Just a couple of further questions. Can you suggest anyone at all that might want your wife out of the way?”

The older man shook his head. Dee sat motionless, as if her mind were elsewhere and she wished they were gone so that she could go wherever that was.

“Would you tell us, sir, where were you Tuesday evening between four-thirty and six?”

“Is that when it happened?” The man shook his head sadly. “I realize you must ask that question, Bryant, but I could never hurt my wife. I was here at home then.”

“Alone?”

Bradshaw nodded. “Dee dropped her things off earlier, but she was gone by then.”

“There’s no one to corroborate that?”

He placed his spoon precisely on the saucer and set them back on the tray. “Sorry. I sat on my patio with a drink and a dictionary of quotations until dark, but I saw no one until a neighbor came out to walk his dog on the commons. That would have been around seven or seven-thirty.”

“Dee?”

“I was at a friend’s house till four.” She gave the friend’s name and address. “Then I drove back into Dobbs for a five o’clock job interview. After that I went out to supper with more friends and didn’t get back to Dad’s till almost ten.”

“Job interview?” asked Dwight.

“I believe he’s your brother-in-law,” she said with a mocking smile. “Mr. Will Knott?”

CHAPTER 13

Hope is forgetting that one’s

Father will be in the deep, running currents

Forever.

—The Persimmon Tree Carol,
by Shelby Stephenson

S
hortly before the Friday afternoon break, my clerk leaned over between cases and whispered, “Someone down in the office says Danny Creedmore told his secretary that Candace Bradshaw was murdered.”