“Shit.”
“And you’re in it up to your neck, aren’t you?”
“No more’n usual, darlin’,” he sighed. “No more’n usual.”
Once again I wondered how on earth I could have been so young, so recklessly naive to run off with such a shiftless womanizer. In the harsh overhead light, he looked every year of the knockabout life he’d led, like a car that had just rolled 200,000 on its odometer.
“Dwight ask you where you got the money to give your harem?”
He preened a little at the term, then gave a self-deprecating shrug. “Won’t none of his business long as I could prove I won’t here when Uncle Jap’s got stolen.”
Shaking my head, I got up and stacked our dishes in the sink and put on my jacket.
He followed me outside to the car. His voice was husky and a little embarrassed as he asked if I’d walk over to the garage with him and show him where it’d happened.
“I just pulled into the driveway good this morning and that deputy was setting here waiting for me. Dwight says Mr. Kezzie found him?”
“Yes.”
We made our way down the sandy drive by the dim glow of a bare bulb on the back porch to the garage two hundred feet away. Yellow crime scene ribbons lay around on the ground, but I knew Dwight had finished with the building. Mr. Jap’s rattletrap truck loomed up before us, still parked where he’d left it Saturday morning. Allen touched the fender as we passed, almost like someone comforting an old horse that had lost its master.
He fumbled with the garage lock in the darkness, then opened the side door and flicked on the lights.
“He was lying there,” I said.
In the fluorescent light, Mr. Jap’s dried blood looked like only another grease spot on the stained concrete.
The old-fashioned iron safe still stood agape and the door lay on the floor in front of it. Gray fingerprint powder covered the acetylene torch which had been used to burn off the hinges. Someone—Dwight or one of his detectives, probably—had gathered up the strewn papers and piled them neatly inside the safe since I was here.
Allen began to look through them. “Dwight said they took Uncle Jap’s corn money. You reckon that was all?”
“Did he have anything else?”
Allen shrugged. “Not that I know of. Just his marker chits where people owed him money. Far as I know, Billy Wall’s the only one he was holding paper on these days.”
His lips quirked in a rueful smile beneath his bushy mustache. “He always wanted to be a big shot, like your daddy. ‘Kezzie Knott holds paper on half the county,’ he’d say. If he didn’t have but two dimes to rub together, he’d try and lend you one of ’em just so you’d owe him. Before Merrilee settled him down, Petey Grimes and me, we’d get Uncle Jap to bankroll us to cars and stuff just to make him feel good. Soon as we’d pay him back, he’d be wanting to lend us some more. Hey, here’s his bankbook.”
He opened the small green passbook and riffled the pages. “Look at this. Not but three hundred dollars in it. Pitiful. Eighty-one years old and he barely got enough Social Security to live on.”
“Hard to get a lot from something you never paid into,” I said tartly. “He always worked for cash, didn’t he? Tried his best not to let himself show up on anybody’s books was what I always heard.”
Allen had to smile at that. “No, he was a catbird, all right.”
He lifted a yellowed envelope that had the logo of Duck Aldcroft’s funeral home as a return address. “Here’s his burial insurance. All paid up so nobody’d be burdened when his time came.”
“I think Merrilee’s handling arrangements,” I said. “Since you weren’t here.”
It didn’t seem to occur to him that he should take offense at Merrilee’s preempting his next-of-kin duties.
“Then she might ought to have this.”
As he pulled the policy from the envelope, another paper fell to the floor.
He picked it up and gave it a puzzled scan before handing it over to me. “Is this a deed?”
It appeared to be a photocopy of a one-page notarized document signed by both Mr. Jap and Dick Sutterly. Hedged in therefores and whereases and dated just last week, it said that in consideration for a cash sum of one thousand dollars, Jasper Stancil promised to sell Richard Sutterly all but ten acres of his farm within ninety days of acquiring clear title to it, at a price guaranteed to be five percent above the high bid of any other would-be purchaser.
“You didn’t know about this?”
“He never said a word. What’s it mean? Does it give this Sutterly guy a lien on the land?”
“Don’t worry about it. This paper would never hold up in court,” I said. “Even if Mr. Jap were still alive, almost any lawyer could get it set aside if he changed his mind and wanted to back out.”
He took it from me and ran his rough fingers over the photocopied notary seal. “Sure
To a shade-tree mechanic like Jap Stancil, it had probably felt pretty legal, too.
“Dwight ought to see this,” I said. “It could mean that the killer got this thousand, too.”
“
“I’m telling you, Allen, it’s not worth the ink it’s written in. Especially with Mr. Jap gone. Dick Sutterly couldn’t
