Slow Dollar (20 page)

I laughed. “The storage locker was his studio?”

“Yep. So when he died, nobody knew about the locker and the rent lapsed. Bostrom, the guy who owns the facility, jumped through all the legal hoops—sent a certified letter to his home, posted it here in the courthouse, notice in the Ledger, the whole works. Ms. Wrenn says if a letter was forwarded, she doesn’t remember signing for one. The sale went forward and Braz Hartley bought the contents of the locker for thirty bucks. Old cans of paint and those hellfire and damnation pictures. His stepfather saw a use for the pictures and gave him thirty-five for the lot.”

“Where does Lamarr come in?” I asked.

“After the funeral, when he realized his granddad’s pictures weren’t in the house, he went looking them, learned about the locker, then found out that he was too late. Hartley had bought them. That’s what the fight was about. Lamarr Wrenn accused him of stealing the pictures and asked for them back.”

“I’m guessing he didn’t say ‘pretty please,’ either,” I murmured.

“Right. So on Sunday afternoon, he and some friends drove out to the property Mrs. Ames owns over near Widdington, broke into the storage shed where the pictures were, and brought them back to Dobbs, where Jamison and McLamb found them when they searched the house this afternoon.”

I didn’t like the sound of that “he and some friends.” Stevie and Eric? “But what was all that in your office just now?” I asked, hastily moving on from that topic.

“We got Ms. Wrenn and her son over from Raleigh and asked Mr. Ames to come in, too, to see if we couldn’t work something out. Like you said, Deb’rah, the theft would probably have been treated like a misdemeanor, even with the breaking and entering, if that’s what they actually did. Ms. Wrenn offered him a check for three hundred and fifty if he’d return the pictures and drop all charges against her son, and you saw how happy he was to do it.”

“Three-fifty on a thirty-five-dollar investment?” Bo laughed. “Wish my retirement fund earned returns like that.”

Still chuckling, he switched off his office light, told us to have a good evening, and left.

I looked up at Dwight. “Stevie and Eric were the friends who helped Lamarr steal back the pictures, weren’t they?”

“Well, now, shug, I never got around to asking him who his accomplices were, and he didn’t volunteer to tell me.”

“Thanks,” I said softly.

He brushed it off. “Anyhow, if he’s telling the truth, the DA would have given him a break because the door was already open. He says that someone else drove up while they were trying to decide whether to pop the lock. They stayed hidden behind the shed till they heard whoever it was rip the lock off the door and realized it was another thief. Wrenn says they were going to rush the guy, but then he twisted his ankle and the guy got away before they could even see who it was.”

“The idiots!” I fumed. “What if he’d had a gun?”

“What if he was a she?”

“A woman?”

“All they saw was from the legs down. Jeans and dirty sneakers.”

He didn’t have to spell it out. I see too many women charged with the whole range of crimes to think that men have a monopoly.

“You’re thinking Polly Viscardi? She wears work shoes, though. Work shoes with bright pink laces.”

“Now don’t you reckon whoever did it has ditched whatever shoes they had on at the time? They’d be pretty bloody.”

I thought about it and agreed he had a point.

“So tell me about Miz Ames being Andrew’s daughter,” Dwight said. “And what’s with Andrew?”

“You off duty now?” I asked.

He nodded, leaned across his desk, and hooked his jacket off the back of the chair with one finger.

“Then come ride over to the carnival with me and we’ll talk on the way.”

By the time we got out to the festival grounds, I’d told him all I knew about Tally and how Andrew and April had reacted to the news. In return, he told me about the unexpectedly big bank account that Braz had secretly squirreled away and how hurt Tally had seemed over the discovery. He also shared what Mayleen Richards had learned while backtracking on Braz’s storage-locker buys. There was a Georgia woman who’d bought back some of her mother’s furniture, which would seem to do away with any motive. Besides, Mayleen had talked to a couple of people down there in the transportation department who had gone out to dinner with the woman in Atlanta Friday evening.

The owner of the other furniture buy, a massive set of oak bedroom furniture, had been located as well.

“It was part of his ex-wife’s divorce settlement, but after they sold the house, she didn’t have any place to put it, so he stored it for her, paid the first three months’ rent and after that, forwarded all the notices on to her. Mayleen said he sounded sorta happy it’d been forfeited. Said he never had a good night’s sleep on that bed from the minute she bought it.”

That left the negligees as the only other buy in North Carolina.

“And it looks like your guess that she was keeping it secret from her husband might be on the money,” Dwight told me as I pulled into the parking lot beside the Agricultural Hall. “She sent a brother to try to save the stuff, not her husband. And she seems to have let it drop rather than making an issue out of it that might would get back to him.”

“She had the locker six years? That’s some affair,” I said. “Sounds like a divorce would’ve been easier.”

“What would be easier is if you’d get a bigger car,” he said in exasperation, untangling himself from the seat belt.

Even with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, Dwight has trouble getting his long legs in and out of my Firebird and he mouths off about it every time he rides with me. (There’s a reason so many law officers favor Crown Victorias and pickup trucks. Most of those men are as big as Dwight.)

Although the sun had set, it wasn’t completely dark yet, but the carnival was in full swing. Toe-tapping country-western music poured from the loudspeakers. The Ferris wheel was turning and the Tilt-A-Whirl held shrieking teenagers, but there seemed fewer people on the midway than on Friday night. It was still early, though.

I didn’t recognize the young woman working the Guesser, at the front of the midway. We watched while she guessed a little girl’s weight and was off by four pounds. “You must have hollow bones, honey. Pick yourself a bear.”

The child happily chose a green one, which her dad clipped to the belt loop on her jeans; then she scampered away toward the Ferris wheel.

“Guess your age, guess your weight,” the woman began when I approached her.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for Tally Ames. Do you know if she’s working this evening?”

“At the Dozer,” she answered, already losing interest in me and gazing past my shoulder to catch the eyes of the people entering behind us.

Almost immediately, we ran into the carnival’s patch, Dennis Koffer. He didn’t recognize me from Friday night, but he had a smile for Dwight. “How’s it going, Major? You here tonight on business or pleasure?”

“Some of both.” He shook hands and turned to me. “Have you met Judge Knott?”

“Judge, it’s a pleasure,” Koffer said, offering his hand.

Nothing changed in his manner that I could pinpoint, yet when he heard my name, I sensed that he recognized it and knew my relationship with Tally.

“Anything you can tell me about your investigation?” he asked Dwight, relighting the cigar that seemed permanently attached to the corner of his mouth. “I mean, anything besides what Arnie told me about the kid that punched Braz out?”

“Nothing yet,” Dwight said. “I may need your help tomorrow. We’re going to come back and interview everybody again. See if anyone’s remembered something useful.”

“Sure. You’ve got my pager number. Just give me a buzz.” At that moment, almost on cue, the pager went off. After glancing at the number displayed, he said, “Y’all enjoy yourselves tonight,” and hurried back the way he’d come, trailing a cloud of fragrant cigar smoke.

I noticed Dwight noticing Koffer’s sturdy leather shoes as the man walked away and I punched his arm hard. “I thought you were off duty.”

“I am.” All the same, he looked closely at the place where Koffer had stood. The ground had been trampled into dust and we saw that his shoes had left little triangles across the instep and heel.

We walked on down the busy midway, occasionally bumping into people we knew, though most were strangers. Invitations came thick and fast from the colorfully lit game stands to come on over and try our luck, test our skills, step right up and have a little fun.

“You gonna win me a stuffed animal to guard my bedroom door?” I teased.

He shot me a sidelong glance and his lips twitched. “Never noticed that you needed one,” he said dryly.

That was so like the old Dwight that I laughed in relief and linked my arm through his.

“What?” he said.

“I really was afraid things might change between us,” I confessed. “But you were right. They haven’t, have they?”

“Well, one thing’s changed,” he drawled. “Or weren’t you paying attention last night?”

“Oh, I was paying attention.”

The tingle was suddenly back and I could have jumped his bones right there. (It really had been a long dry summer.)

“I even took notes,” I added demurely.

As if reading my mind, he said, “How about we deliver April’s message and get out of here?”

We drew near Tally’s Dozer, and remembering the errand I was on made my thoughts take a more serious turn.

At first, I thought the game was unattended because I couldn’t see anyone looking out over the top. We went around to the door flap and I opened it to peer inside. “Tally?”

She was seated on a low stool at the rear of the space, leafing through a magazine. “Oh, hey, Deborah! When did you get here?”

She rose and came out to join us.

“You know Major Bryant, of course.”

“Oh yes.” Her smile was so like Andrew’s, I wanted to go right over to his house and throw him back under that cold shower. Anything to bring him to his senses.

“Arnie told me how it all came out this evening. The kid that stole back his grandfather’s pictures? And the mother paid three-fifty to get them back? She must’ve really loved her father.”

“More like she loved her son and was glad you and your husband weren’t pressing charges,” I told her.

She gave a sad shrug. “Kids do crazy things sometimes.”

I put out my hand to her. “Tally, April came to see you this morning while you were out at your place with Dwight here.”

“Oh?”

“She wanted to meet you and tell you to be sure to invite as many of your friends tomorrow as you like. She and some of my sisters-in-law—your aunts—will he serving lunch after the service, and they don’t know how to fix for less than an army.”

That got a small smile. She started to speak when the booth on the far side of the Dozer suddenly exploded with flashing strobe lights and ear-piercing sirens that seemed to go on for a full ninety seconds. Everyone stopped in their tracks and turned to watch as the winner of the Bowler Roller stepped up to claim his prize.

“Thank God that only happens about two or three times a night,” said Tally when the lights and siren finally cut off. “Flash is one thing, but that damn siren’s a killer.”