Southern Discomfort

Every attorney is something of a pop psychologist and I decided that he'd probably been shy in his youth and maybe didn't realize he'd outgrown the need to hide behind glass. (Let the record show that edgy shyness can be oddly sexy at times.)

Not that there was anything shy about the way Mr. O'Connor delved into Herman's life. He interviewed Herman and Nadine separately and together, his terrier face darting back and forth between them in the hospital. When Nadine came back to work on Friday, O'Connor was right behind her, ready to start digging up every mole run in the county.

Nadine has a touching faith in modern medicine. Now that Herman was diagnosed and on the mend, she felt it was possible to leave him in the hospital's efficient hands while she came home to keep the business going.

So far, it had not occurred to her that Herman's poisoning was anything but accidental. The Raleigh News and Observer had covered Blanche Taylor Moore's trial in exhaustive detail from first suspicion till when she was sentenced to death for first-degree murder. Yet, even though the paper emphasized that most arsenic killers tended to be southern women, and most victims tended to be the man in their lives, Nadine was joking that at least Herman didn't have to worry that she'd poisoned his tea.

Along with the other two electricians Herman employed, Reese and Annie Sue could keep up with most of the routine field work, but only Nadine fully understood all the paperwork involved in running the business, and she didn't want to get too far behind. 'Especially since we haven't got us a new accountant yet,' she told me. 'Thank goodness Ralph McGee got us through tax season before he died.'

She looked abashed. 'I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Poor Gladys.'

It was a little past one on a blistering hot Friday. I had adjourned court for the weekend and stopped in to see how Nadine was getting along. The humidity was so high that just walking from my air-conditioned car to the air- conditioned office was like wading through tall grass, and I grabbed a drink from the water cooler as soon as I got inside.

Nadine was seated at her desk, going through the worksheets. As she called out all the places Herman had worked over the last ten days, Mr. O'Connor sat with his legal pad at a nearby table and wrote down the addresses.

He picked up on my name immediately. 'I was hoping to see you today, Judge Knott. I'll need to know the name of your caterer. And did anyone else get sick that evening?'

I must have looked combative because he said, 'We don't know that's where he first ingested it, but it's a place to start.'

He took off his glasses, polished them carefully, hooked the wire frames back over his ears, then looked at me with such alert expectation in those shiny black eyes that I gave him Julia Lee's name and phone number.

'She arranged everything, but the food was prepared by the Martha Circle at the First Methodist Church, and afterwards, Lu Bingham, of WomenAid, took all the leftovers to her day care center. I'm sure if there was anything in the food or punch, we'd have heard about it by now'

'Probably,' he agreed. 'But—'

The tickler bell jingled over the street door. Dwight Bryant. He'd evidently met O'Connor earlier in the day and had come looking for him specifically.

'It's the darnedest thing, but I thought you ought to know.'

'Yes?” O’Connor's eyeglasses gleamed like twin moons under the fluorescent lights overhead.

'They just called in the autopsy report on a man who was killed here in Dobbs Tuesday night. Carver Bannerman. His head was bashed in and that's what killed him, but they found a trace of arsenic in his gastrointestinal tract.'

O'Connor's smooth round head came up like a young dog that's caught the scent.

'Nice,' he said happily. 'Very nice indeed!'

Two men with arsenic in their system were going to make it three times as easy to locate the source of the poison, Gordon O'Connor said. His coffee bean eyes gleamed brighter than those eggshell- thin glasses the whole time Dwight was telling him who Carver Bannerman was.

'This Bannerman inspect any of Mr. Knott's jobs?'

'Half the time we aren't there when inspectors come around, so there's no way of us knowing,' Nadine replied. 'You'd have to compare the worksheets I gave you with whatever records the county inspector keeps. And like I told you before, we take a lot of piddling jobs that don't require inspection.'

'That's what I mean about two victims cutting the possibilities so drastically,' said O'Connor. 'For now I can forget about all the jobs this Bannerman didn't inspect and just poke around at places where they overlapped.'

'One place you could start is right next door.' I glanced at my watch. 'It's one-fifty though, and they'll be closing in a few minutes.'

Nadine frowned. 'The Coffee Pot?'

“Sure. Herman stops in every morning and Tink Dupree—he's the owner” —I explained to O'Connor—“Tink told me Wednesday morning that Carver Bannerman ate lunch there two or three times a week.'

'But I have a glass of tea in there almost every morning myself,' Nadine protested.

'Both of 'em, hmm?' Gordon O'Connor gathered up his lists, aligned the edges in neat economical movements and stashed them in a crisp manila folder. 'You never know. Maybe they both ordered something exotic.'

Dwight grinned. 'The most exotic thing you can order in the Coffee Pot is a side dish of chili peppers with your scrambled eggs.'

'Or tell Retha to hold the mayo on your hamburger at lunch,' I added.

O'Connor laughed as he stood up. He wasn't nearly as tall as Dwight, but he certainly did have long legs inside those stovepipe jeans. Long thin fingers, too. They say that men with long fingers—