Monday came and went with no sign of Denn McCloy or the gray Ford pickup.
Mrs. Vickery had collapsed upon hearing the news of Michael’s death and was said to have spent two days under heavy sedation, devastated and unable to accept Michael’s death. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that she’d given in so completely to normal grief. There were whispers of a suicide watch, but nobody believed it. Dr. Vickery refused to talk to the media, but his son’s employees out at the Pot Shot Pottery wouldn’t shut up.
One of them in particular, Cathy King, suffered from what Uncle Ash calls congenital tongue deformity: one that’s tied in the middle and flaps at both ends.
“I really can’t say,” she told any reporter who wandered in, then immediately started running her mouth.
The only good thing-as far as Denn McCloy was concerned- was that Michael wasn’t the only one she’d told that Denn was meeting me at the Possum Creek Theatre. She’d mentioned it in a crowded 7-Eleven store where she’d stopped to pick up a jug of milk and had speculated on it at choir practice that evening. Choir practice let out at eight-thirty so, theoretically anyhow, half of Cotton Grove could have known by eight-forty-five.
What didn’t help Denn was the way Cathy described in colorful detail the times she’d heard the two men snap at each other in the last few months as their longtime relationship deteriorated and fell apart. Evidently I wasn’t so far off target with my flip remarks about male menopause. When Michael hit forty, he’d begun to stray over into the gay hangouts around the Triangle. At first, Denn ignored Michael’s wandering eye; lately though, there’d been bitter and acrimonious scenes.
“This past year’s just been wild!” said Cathy.
Her two co-workers were less dramatic but grudgingly agreed with her assessment of a growing rift between the two men. They also agreed that it must have been Denn who fired the rifle on Wednesday. Cathy saw him take Michael’s rifle from the truck and throw it in the Volvo. She said Denn even admitted that he’d gone out in the woods and fired a couple of rounds at a pine tree, but he certainly hadn’t been aiming at Michael. “If I ever take a gun to Michael, I won’t miss,” he was said to have threatened.
“Actually,” said Cathy King, “I got the feeling he meant to scare Gayle Whitehead.”
Which insured, of course, that Monday’s paper carried a complete rehash of Janie Whitehead’s death.
Gayle immediately went to earth at her grandmother Whitehead’s house.
“I don’t want to talk to any reporters,” she said when I called to see how she was, “but you know, Deborah, this may not be such a bad thing. Not Michael Vickery getting killed-that part’s so terrible! I still can’t believe we were just talking to him and now he’s dead-but if it gets people remembering about my mother… You reckon maybe he did know something more than he ever told? Something he told Denn and Denn was maybe going to tell you?”
“If that’s the case, why would Denn kill him?” I asked, trying to assess the situation logically. “If it was incriminating, you’d think Michael would have tried to stop Denn, not the other way around. It doesn’t make sense.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Gayle said promptly.
Oh yeah? With a campaign to salvage?
“Look, honey,” I began, but she interrupted with a wail of protest.
“You can’t stop now, Deborah. Everything’s so stirred up, somebody’s bound to let something slip if you just ask the right questions. Please?”
Sighing, I agreed at least to listen if anyone should stop me in the street and want to unburden a secret.
Back in the real world, reading the morning papers began to cut into work time at Lee, Stephenson and Knott. Clients can make the news, attorneys aren’t supposed to; yet my name was in print so many times that the pained expression seemed to have settled permanently on John Claude’s fine thin features.
On Tuesday Reid brought a couple of interesting tidbits to our morning coffee.
Ambrose Daughtridge had been Michael and Denn’s attorney, and he’d let slip that Michael had begun looking into the legal ramifications of untangling their financial assets. Indeed, Michael had made an appointment for yesterday afternoon to rewrite his will.
“They had a joint checking account,” said Reid, “but the Pot Shot itself and all the real property belonged to Michael. Or rather to Mrs. Vickery. It was Dancy land that she inherited.”
“Michael never had title?” John Claude was horrified. He would never have let a client put capital improvements into property that another family member could sell out from under him, even if that family member was the client’s mother.
Reid grinned. “It wasn’t quite that bad. Mrs. Vickery gave him a ninety-nine-year lease-one of those nominal fifty-dollars-a-year things-so he couldn’t be forced off.”
“Oh?” said John Claude, who sniffed the makings of a pretty little legal problem, one that any attorney would enjoy arguing, especially if-?
“Yep,” said Reid. “Ambrose told me that Michael Vickery and Denn McCloy had mutually beneficial wills.”
“Ah,” said John Claude.
“So if Michael had lived to keep his appointment with Ambrose yesterday, Denn might have wound up with nothing.”
I mused. “Instead, he now gets everything, including a ninety-nine-year lease on Dancy property.”
“Not if I’d handled the wording on the lease,” said John Claude.
Unspoken was the knowledge that Ambrose Daughtridge relied rather heavily on the one-size-fits-all standard forms found in forms books. Would he have remembered (or even known at the time) that Michael Vickery was more likely to have “heirs and/or successors and assigns” than “heirs of his body”?
“It’s all academic. Murderers don’t inherit from their victims,” John Claude reminded us as Sherry brought in the morning mail and began sorting it at the end of the long table so she wouldn’t miss anything.
“Guilty till proven innocent?” I said.
The little alert bell over the front door tinkled and Sherry went out to greet old Mrs. Cunningham, who comes in every month to fiddle with the codicils in her will.
After she left, I interviewed a couple of women. One of our sparkplug clerks had married abruptly and moved to New Hampshire, and we’d filled in with enough temporaries to have seen it was going to take two to replace the one we’d lost. Our clerks have to be efficient enough for John Claude and me, homely or married enough so that Reid won’t try to bed them, and biddable enough to take orders from Sherry. I was beginning to think such creatures didn’t exist, but a new crop of paralegals was due to graduate soon from Colleton Tech. Maybe we’d get lucky.
When I returned from a very late lunch, Sherry said, “Dwight Bryant’s in your office. I think it’s something official.”
“Really?”
He was standing by my desk when I got there.
“Do you mind?” I said.
“What?”
“Well, how would you like it,” I fumed, “if I came in your office and started nosing through your papers?”
“Hey, I wasn’t looking at papers,” he protested. “I just didn’t remember seeing that picture of Miz Sue and Mr. Kezzie.”
I’d left the photograph propped against my pencil holder and he took it over to the window for a closer look in better light. It was only a snapshot that I’d taken with the camera they’d given me for my ninth birthday. Mother was sitting on the swing on our front porch, Daddy was propped against a nearby post, hat in his hand, hand on his hip. Both of them smiled into the camera, but the way her slender body was half-turned towards him, the way his lean height curved toward her, you could tell that they’d been talking when I came along and called, “Say cheese!”
It was only a snapshot I hadn’t valued back then. Now I saw that I’d captured the electricity that had always flowed between them.
“Daddy gave it to me Friday night,” I said as he handed it back.
Dwight picked up the ten-by-thirteen manila envelope he’d laid on the edge of my desk and took a chair. “Yeah, I heard y’all made up.”
Normally, I’d have taken exception to his words, but he looked too bone weary to banter. Instead I let it go with a mild, “We made a start anyhow. What’ve you got there?”
He opened the flap and slipped out two flat plastic bags, each of which contained a single sheet of paper. It
