Up Jumps the Devil

“Using what for money?” I asked. “I thought you were broke.”

“Oh, I always keep a little jingle in my jeans,” he said with an easy smile.

“You may not need an attorney, but you can’t blame Dwight for wondering how come you ran off like that.”

“Hey, I didn’t ‘run off.’ Uncle Jap knew where I was. If I’d of thought for one minute he was going to get hisself killed—”

“So where were you?”

“Greensboro. Like I told Dwight, I had to go look at a car.”

Greensboro’s about ninety minutes to the west of us, give or take ten minutes, depending on road conditions and how heavy you’re willing to push the speed limit. It’s also only a little more than halfway to Charlotte and I didn’t understand why Allen was lying. Seems like he’d want to document as much distance as possible between himself and the murder scene.

He must have seen the disbelief on my face because he started shoring up.

“One of my old buddies asked me to take a look under the hood of a car he’s thinking to buy. I give you his number, Dwight. You don’t believe me, just call him.”

Dwight looked at the crumpled piece of paper that held a scrawled phone number. “What’s his name again?”

“Raiford Hollyfield. His wife’s Jan.”

“Anybody else see you there?”

“His sister stays with ’em. I forget her name. But I got there around ten o’clock Saturday morning and we went right over to see that car. A nice little Cutlass Supreme. They’ll tell you.” He turned back to me. “All I’ve heard is that somebody’s killed poor old Uncle Jap. Not when, not how. Come on, Deb’rah. Don’t I have the right to know?”

“You’ll get all the details soon as I confirm your story,” Dwight said sternly. He raised his voice and called, “Hey, Jack! You out there?”

A slightly pudgy, baby-faced officer came to the open doorway. “Yes, Major?”

“How ’bout you take Mr. Stancil here into the squad room? Get him a cup of coffee, maybe a sandwich?”

“And a newspaper?” Allen said slyly.

“Sure,” said Dwight. “Give him the latest Ledger, Jack.”

The Ledger is Dobb’s biweekly. It comes out on Tuesdays and Fridays. Today being Monday, it wouldn’t help Allen much.

“He’s probably already read about the murder,” I said, taking the seat Allen had vacated.

“I doubt it,” said Dwight. “Even if it made the Greensboro paper, they wouldn’t have as much on it as the News and Observer and you know what that was.”

A bare paragraph on an inside page of the Metro section: “Man Killed in Colleton County.”

“Not to say he couldn’t have talked to somebody down here an hour after Mr. Kezzie found the body. Phone lines were still working, so far as I’ve heard.”

He punched in the numbers on his own phone. The connection between Dobbs and Greensboro was extraordinarily clear for I could hear the rings from where I sat, then a woman’s staccato “Hello?”

“Mrs. Hollyfield?”

“Just a minute. Jan?” Jan Hollyfield’s voice was too soft for me to make out more than a murmur.

Dwight identified himself, then explained that he was trying to confirm Allen Stancil’s whereabouts this past weekend. Could Mrs. Hollyfield help him? Had she seen him? She had? When?

“No, ma’am, he’s not in any trouble. Not if you can tell me when you saw him… Yes, ma’am, he does know I’m calling you. That’s how I have your name and number, ma’am.”

Whoever Jan Hollyfield was, she was certainly cautious about divulging anything to a police officer she didn’t know.

“Yes, ma’am. I understand.” He slowly spelled his name and rank and gave her the Sheriff’s Department’s number, then hung up.

“She’s going to have her husband call me back.”

“Through the switchboard? Cagy lady.”

“Does make you wonder why, don’t it?” He pushed a button on his keypad and spoke into the receiver. “Faye? Could you call Detective Harry Smithwick over in Charlotte? Remind him that I talked to him last week about that chop shop they broke up a month or so ago. Ask him if he’s got anything on a Raiford or Jan Hollyfield, now living in Greensboro, okay?”

Dwight pushed the phone away and gave me an inquiring look. “You come downstairs because you heard we’d picked up Stancil?”

I shook my head. “Actually, the main reason was to ask if you’ve put names to all the tire treads past Mr. Jap’s that morning.”

He shuffled through the folders on his desk and came up with a set of black-and-white photographs. “This one’s your dad’s, this one’s Dick Sutterly’s, the bald one’s Billy Wall’s, and we don’t have a match to these diamond treads yet, why?”

“They’re Reese’s. Herman’s boy?” I paused and took a closer look at the tracks left by Billy Wall’s truck. “I