“When did you miss it?” he asked, turning the gleaming shaft in his fingers.
“While you were changing clothes tonight, I tidied up in here.”
“Well, damn! You mean I was that close to getting away with it?”
“Not really. I knew you were up to something, I just hadn’t figured out what. You hate gospel music, remember?”
He shrugged. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
“No more games,” I said sternly. “How did your pen get under Lynn Bullock’s body?”
“I don’t know, Deborah, and that’s the God-honest truth. She borrowed it the last time we were together and didn’t give it back and, well, it seemed a little petty to make a big point about it since I didn’t want to see her again anyhow.”
“So why didn’t you just tell Dwight?”
“Oh, sure. My pen under the body of a woman whose neck I’d threatened to wring?”
“What?”
“I didn’t mean it,” he said hastily. “You know how you say things—‘I’ll kill him,’ ‘I’m going to clean his clock’? It’s just talk. But I was so mad when I saw what she’d done to my car. Hot as it’s been? And with the windows rolled up? I had to go buy a pair of rubber gloves just to drive it to the shop. I was so pissed, I kept saying that I was going to wring the little bitch’s neck. Everybody at the shop just laughed at me, they didn’t have a clue who I was talking about, but Will was there and I’m pretty sure he knew because he gave me a wink and said he’d swear it was justifiable homicide.”
If my brother had known Lynn Bullock was the woman who’d done something like that to Reid’s car, he certainly would have mentioned it Sunday night when we were talking about her death. Will’s a consummate con man though, and he can be incredibly sneaky when he puts his mind to it. He has a way of pretending he knows more about things than he does, hoping to bluff you into telling him what you assume he already knows.
“Don’t you see? If Dwight knew it was my pen, he’d go digging around and find out—”
“And find out what?” I asked. Then it hit me. “Wait a minute! You had two dates with her last Christmas and she only lately fouled your car? When?”
“Tuesday, a week ago,” he admitted.
“Why?” I asked, even though that mulish look on his face gave me the answer. “Oh for God’s sake, Reid! Tell me you didn’t. You said she wasn’t your type.”
“Well, she wasn’t,” he said sulkily. “All the same, for all her snob talk, there was something—I don’t know—vulnerable? Did I tell you what she said about Dad coming out to her grandfather’s place when she was a little girl?”
“No.”
“She was just a kid when it happened, but she never forgot. Dad had gone out to coach her grandfather for a court appearance. She talked about Dad’s fingernails. How clean and even they were.”
Reid looked down at his own neatly manicured nails and I had a sudden mental image of my daddy’s hands, the nails split and stained with country work.
“What was her grandfather charged with?”
“I looked it up in the files.” Reid gave me a lopsided grin. “Let’s put it this way. Your dad was paying my dad’s bill. And he paid her grandfather’s fine and court costs.”
“What?”
“Oh, come on, Deb’rah. Everybody knows Mr. Kezzie made his money in bootleg whiskey.”
“When he was younger, yes,” I agreed, “but he gave all that up before I was born and Lynn Bullock was younger than me.”
“Whiskey’s the only thing your daddy’s ever lied to me about,” Mother once told me. “The only thing I know he lied about anyhow.”
I looked at Reid sharply. “Is he still mixed up in it?”
“Old as he is? I doubt it,” said Reid. “’Course, a lot of people still think he is, and it probably amuses him to let them. I’m sure you’d’ve heard about it, if he were.”
“True,” I said, relieved. Dwight or Terry or certainly Ed Gardner, who works ATF, would have put a bug in my ear if he were still active. One thing a judge doesn’t need is to have her daddy hauled in for making moonshine.
“Anyhow,” said Reid, “Lynn Bullock was a damn good lay. I’m not seeing anybody special these days, so I thought what the hell, why not give her another call?”
“Only her memory being better than yours, she was still ticked that you’d dumped her after the second night and it really steamed her when you called out of the blue with nothing on your mind but sex?”
“Something like that. Look, Deborah, you’ve got to help me. Don’t tell Dwight it was your pen I showed him. Okay?”
“You’re crazy. I’m a judge. An officer of the court. I can’t not tell him. So she smeared dog dirt inside your car. Big deal. And you vented at the garage. Hyperbole. You tell him who you were with before you got to the ball field, she confirms it and—”
There was that look again. “No who?”
“No who,” he said.
“You’re not being noble, are you?” I asked suspiciously. “Saving somebody’s reputation?”
“The only reputation I was saving was mine. Everybody thinks I get laid six days a week and twice on Sundays. Truth is, I’m damn near a virgin these days. I went to the office Saturday morning, got sleepy after lunch, flaked out upstairs and almost slept through the game.”
I looked at him. I may have eleven older brothers, but he’s the nearest thing to a kid brother I’d ever had. His handsome face was an open book.
Or was it?
“Oh come on, Deborah. I did not kill Lynn Bullock.”
“You know he couldn’t,” whispered my internal preacher.
“Irrelevant!” snapped the pragmatist from the other side of my head. “You withhold something like this from Dwight and you could find yourself facing an ethics review.”
Reid still held my pen in his hand.
“If I’d been a little smarter, I’d have found a way to put this back and you wouldn’t have known the difference. All you have to do is forget the last few minutes ever happened.”
He walked over to my telephone and dropped the pen into my pencil mug.
“See?”
“Reid—”
“Please, Deborah. All I’m asking is that you wait about talking to Dwight. Give him a chance to find Lynn’s real killer. Or—” He gave me a sharp, considering look. “Maybe we could find him first.”
“We?”
“Why not? We’re both professionals. Taking depositions is what we do. And people talk to civilians like us quicker than they’ll talk to Dwight. We just ask a few questions around town, listen hard to all the gossip and figure it out. What do you say?”
His eager, almost adolescent expression suddenly reminded me of Mickey Rooney in those old movies Dwight and I sometimes watch.
I didn’t feel one bit like Judy Garland though and I sure as hell didn’t want to try putting on a show in the barn.
“How hard can it be for us to figure out who was balling her?” Reid wheedled, as he followed me out to the kitchen. “She didn’t do it in the middle of Main Street or in her own house, even, but she sure wasn’t the most discreet woman I ever slept with.”
“Do you suppose Jason knew?” I asked, pouring us a cup of the freshly brewed coffee.
“Had to, you’d think.” Reid reached into my refrigerator for milk and kept dribbling it in until his coffee was more au lait than café. “Unless he’s one of those husbands who makes a point of not knowing? He’s such a grind though, maybe not.”
“Grind? He was playing ball Saturday.”
“Grind,” Reid said firmly. “He and Millard King. Birds of a feather. And not just because they humped the same woman.”
“How’s that?”
“Both of them are ambitious as hell and both of ’em have at least two reasons for everything they do. Like playing ball. That’s an appropriate ‘guy’ activity. Makes you seem human. Puts you right out there to bond with your peer group. Good social contacts. Like the way you moved your membership over to First Baptist in Dobbs,” he added shrewdly.