“This is fine, ma’am,” I said. “If you’d just tell him we’re here.”
She turned away, and I said quietly to Tom, “Have you ever been able to climb leisurely out of a shower when someone’s waiting at the door?”
Pasquale grinned, no doubt thinking that, hell, it might be fun to piss off the chairman of the county commission as long as it was the old sheriff’s neck that was on the block, not his.
In due course, Sam Carter appeared, hair wet and curling away from the bald spot that he took pains to cover. He wore a white terry-cloth robe, was barefoot, and had a towel in hand. He draped the towel around his neck as he swung open the door.
“Christ, what’s going on?” he asked. “Is the town burning down or what?”
“Nothing like that,” I said. “I had a couple of questions that I’d like to shoot your way, and from the way the day’s shaping up, I thought this might be my best chance.”
“Christ, it’s five-thirty in the morning, for God’s sakes.” His tone softened a bit. “And questions about what?” he asked. If he’d had the chance to do it all over again, he might have taken pains to make his tone a little less guarded.
I moved closer to the light and opened the folder. “These letters still puzzle me, Sam.”
“Letters?” He shot a glance sideways at Tom Pasquale but then concentrated his frown at me.
“Yes. Your copy of the letter about Deputy Pasquale, here, and the similar ones received by Dr. Gray, Leona Spears, Frank Dayan, and I assume other folks we haven’t heard from yet.”
“What about it? What did you find out?”
“Well, for one thing, we’re going to get back a pretty comprehensive fingerprint analysis from the state crime lab. They’re awfully good at what they do.” I smiled helpfully. “That ought to come sometime today. If we’re lucky, someone might have been just a tad careless.”
“All right. But I’m sure you didn’t come over here at five-thirty to tell me that.”
“No, actually, I didn’t.” I leafed through the letters as if I were reading them, which in that dim light would have been a real trick. “You told me earlier that you received yours in the mail, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that in itself is interesting, since of the folks who have brought this letter to my attention, you’re the only one whose copy was mailed.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know, Sam. But you also told me that you didn’t show the letter to anyone at the time. I think the expression you used, if I remember correctly, was something like, ‘If this got out, it’d be a real mess,’ or words to that effect. Do you remember saying that?”
“Well, I guess so. I don’t remember everything I say in the course of a busy day.”
“Few of us do, I suppose,” I said. “But in this case, you made a considerable effort to find me and talk with me in private, as I recall.”
Carter lifted the towel and dabbed at his left ear and again shot a glance at the silent figure of Thomas Pasquale. “What’s your point?” Carter asked, and he didn’t bother trying to soften the question.
“My point, Sam, is that you specifically told me that you didn’t show the letter to anyone else.”
“And I didn’t,” he said, then retreated a bit and tacked on, “not that I recall, anyway.”
“Do you recall showing the letter to Taffy Hines?”
“Taffy Hines?”
“Yes.”
His pause was just a shade too long, a pause of calculation rather than simple recollection. “I…I might have, now that you mention it.”
“So, despite your concern, the first person you showed the letter to was not me, but your head cashier. A woman who spends her day talking with half the town.”
“Now wait a minute,” Carter flared, and he grabbed the ends of his robe belt and jerked them tight. “I did show it to her, yes I remember that now. But I told her to keep quiet about it until I talked to you. Did she tell you that, too, the town blabbermouth?”
“Yes, she told me that. She also told me that her first reaction was to think that you’d written it.”
“Now wait a minute,” he blustered, and he took a step toward me, which by coincidence happened to be a step away from Tom Pasquale.
Before Sam could splutter out anything else, I said, “I didn’t come here to upset you, or make waves. What I really need is the envelope, Sam. I understand that Taffy often opens the mail for the store, but that she doesn’t remember seeing anything that might be a match. Since there might be prints on the envelope, it’s important. Or a postmark. Any number of things.”
“I don’t think I still have the envelope,” Carter said. “And now that I think about it, I’m not absolutely certain it came in the mail. With the mail, maybe. I’m just not sure.”
“Why wouldn’t you keep it?” I asked. “Something as important as that? Wouldn’t you be curious about the return address, if there was one, or the postmark?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t save it. I guess I should have. I…I didn’t think. And you didn’t ask me for it.” He stopped abruptly.
“Yes, I did,” I said. “You said you’d look for it, as I recall.”
“And I didn’t,” Carter said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s only been a couple of days. Is there a possibility that it’s still in the trash can in your office?”
He shook his head without hesitation. “No, no. That’s emptied as a matter of course every day.”
“When’s the Dumpster pickup? That’s not until this afternoon, is it? This is Thursday?” I turned to Pasquale. “We can put a couple of deputies on that this morning. Turn the damn thing upside down. If the letter’s there, it’ll turn up.”
“I just don’t understand,” Carter snapped. “Hines holds a king-sized grudge against me, and I can understand why she’d say just about anything, but you sound as if you think I wrote the damn note, too. Is that what you both think?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “What I’m doing is trying my best to clear up the discrepancies.”
“Let me tell you what’s most likely, Sheriff. And I don’t say this out of spite. I just don’t trust the woman-”
“What woman is that? Taffy?”
“No. Leona Spears. This is just the sort of thing that Leona Spears is good at. You see all the letters to the editors that she writes? God’s sakes, the woman has an answer for everything. This is just the sort of thing that Miss Spears would do.” He spit out the Miss as if the one word included everything anyone needed to know about Leona Spears’s private life and predilections.
I smiled. “Maybe so, Sam. Maybe so. Whoever wrote the letter to Miss Spears agrees with you, that’s for sure.”
He didn’t ask what I meant but nodded vigorously. “Well, you just check it out,” he said testily. He glanced at his wrist where a watch should have been and settled for rubbing the spot with the towel.
“We won’t take any more of your time, Sam. I just wanted to check and get some clarification, that’s all. We’ll get the print analysis today and, with any luck, the analysis of the paper and the machine that did the printing. Maybe something will show up.”
Sam Carter’s reaction didn’t tell me if he thought that was a good idea or a world-class waste of time.
We made our way back to the vehicles, and I turned to Pasquale. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s a lying son of a bitch.”
“Well, maybe.”
“I think it’s interesting that he never bothered to ask me if I did what that letter says I did.”
“Uh-huh.” I nodded. “That’s because in an election year, what actually happened isn’t too important to folks like Sam Carter. Give him a little time, and best of all maybe an audience, and you’d be surprised how tough Sam Carter can be.”
“Five minutes alone with him might be the answer,” Pasquale muttered.
“I don’t think so, Thomas. Just be patient.” That was easily said, of course. But I knew perfectly well that patience wasn’t young Thomas Pasquale’s strong suit.
Chapter Twenty-six