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“Wouldn’t you?”
“Why? Just because they fought? Lots of couples fight.”
“Oh, come on, Deb’rah. He took a gun out to the woods. He damn near killed Vickery right in front of your eyes last week. That’s no little domestic squabble.”
“He was trying to scare Gayle and me from involving Michael in Janie’s death again. He said Michael still had nightmares.”
“Yeah? Like a war vet’s post-traumatic stress syndrome?” Dwight looked skeptical.
“I don’t know. De
He leaned back in his chair and propped one of his size elevens on the edge of the table as if he were back in my mother’s kitchen, arguing with my brothers around the di
And yeah, everything else in nice proportion, too.
The summer I was ten, to teach me patience and keep me out of trouble, my mother gave me a good little pair of binoculars and a bird book and told me to go find a sheltered place and just sit quietly without making sudden movements and I would see nature’s wonderful secrets. There was a thick stand of grapevines and honeysuckle that overlooked the creek bank where the boys used to swim and horse around buck naked after their farm chores were done. I always came back to the house with chigger bites and scratches, but Mother was right. To this day, there’s a whole bunch of men walking around Colleton County whose natural endowments are no secret to me.
Oblivious to my memories, Dwight was still laying out reasons to arrest De
“-besides, you know as good as I do how many homicides come from domestic fights. If De
“For one thing, I talked to his friend in Raleigh who swears De
Dwight doodled a clock face on the yellow legal pad in front of him. “It was nearly twenty-four hours before you found the body. The ME said everything was ‘consistent’ with nine P.M. being when he died, but fifty minutes more or less don’t make an alibi.”
He sat back, clicking and unclicking his ballpoint pen.
“De
Before Dwight could say the obvious, I beat him to it. “Yeah, yeah, I know. He could have stashed it anywhere between here and Raleigh.”
Dwight gri
He took his foot off the table and the chair came down with a bang. “I guess I’ll just get his statement first and see what happens. You going to sit in and advise him?”
“If I can’t get Ambrose to come over.”
“Is that a smart thing to do?”
“Somebody has to.”
“Yeah, but should it ought to be you?”
“Probably not,” I sighed. “Is that all?”
“I reckon. For now anyhow.”
On the way out of the room, I remembered something and shut the door before I even had it open good.
“What?” he asked.
He’s a lot taller than me, so I had to reach up to pull him down to my level. It wasn’t mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or anything like that, but it was still a damn good kiss.
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said and stepped back, breathing heavily.
I laughed and fluttered my eyelashes outrageously. He was just Dwight again, only more so. “Well, you wanted to know, didn’t you?”
He was still looking dazed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I did.”
“Anything else?”
“Naah,” he gri
Using the theater phone, I tried one last time to make Ambrose Daughtridge come over and sit in on the interrogation, but even after I told him that Dwight probably wouldn’t book De
“I am not now and never have been Mr. McCloy’s attorney,” he said. “I may’ve drawn up his will as a favor to Michael Vickery, but I do not consider him my client.”
Ambrose Daughtridge is silver haired and soft spoken and looks like he should be cataloguing rare books in a university library somewhere. Unlike a lot of us who are ham actors at heart, Ambrose avoids courtroom appearances when he can, prefers civil cases to criminal, and never defends anything more serious than a misdemeanor if he can help it, even though his courtroom skills are quite adequate.
“I hope you won’t take this wrong, Deborah,” said Ambrose, misinterpreting my silence. “It’s not that I’m prejudiced against homosexuals or anything. I always got along just fine with Michael.”
“Because he didn’t flaunt it and De
“Because he was a gentleman,” came the soft reply. “Now I do appreciate your courtesy in calling me and your concern for the proprieties, so let me assure you, for the record, that there is nothing in my former dealings with Mr. McCloy that would preclude your representing him, if you and he so choose.”
What could I say except, “Thank you, Ambrose”?
Actually, as I walked back down the hall to tell De
Well!
The first sign that maybe I didn’t need to start drafting a concession letter to Luther Parker quite yet.
The interrogation went smoothly and quickly. Dwight set his tape recorder on the table in the green room, De
When Dwight got to the specifics of Friday night, De
He rubbed the back of his thin neck and gave me a sheepish smile. “If I hadn’t left Michael, I had this letter from Jesse I was going to doctor up. But I’m so angry Friday night that I decided nightmares serve him right, and now I’m sorry for the hard time I’ve given you, okay? This is a good place to meet. I’ll confess. Do the sackcloth and ashes bit. Give you a pitcher- the prototype for a new line that I’ll never get to produce since I’m leaving, maybe even going back to New York for a while.”
The rest I’d already heard: how he got to the theater around ten, how he found Michael dead, how he panicked and fled. He added nothing new to the telling.
When he’d finished, Dwight clicked off the tape recorder and sat looking at De
“Okay,” he said at last, “I’m not arresting you tonight, but you don’t leave the county without checking with the sheriff’s department. I’ll have somebody transcribe this and maybe you’ll come in and sign it, say tomorrow afternoon?”