“Peggy Lasater?”
“Yeah, that sounds right. She’ll tell you.”
Dwight wrote the name in the little ringbound notebook he carried in his jacket pocket. “What about after the game?”
“Straight home,” King said virtuously.
“Which brings me back to my first question. Were you seeing her?”
It was clearly not a question King wanted to answer, but he leaned forward with the earnest air of a man about to put his cards face up on the table.
“Look,” he said. “I’m twenty-eight, single, and if a woman comes on to me, looking for a roll in the hay with no commitments, why not?”
“And that’s what happened with Lynn Bullock?”
King hesitated. “Is this off the record?”
“I’m not looking to jam you up,” said Dwight. “If it’s not relevant to our investigation, it stays in the department.”
“Okay then. Because, see, I’m about to ask someone to marry me. Someone whose father’s in the public eye and who wouldn’t take kindly to having his daughter’s name linked with a murder investigation. I’ve been absolutely faithful to her since we first started getting serious this past June and I intend to be faithful from here on out if we marry. I’m not going to have some little passing affair jump up and bite me in the ass ten or fifteen years down the road, if you get my drift.”
Dwight nodded, suppressing a grin. Say what you will about Clinton, he thought to himself, but for young men with their eyes on future elective office, he sure had provided a real good object lesson for keeping their peckers in their pants.
“It was at the Bar Association dinner back in April. She was there with Jason in this tight red dress.” He shook his head reflectively. “If it’d been New York—hell, if it’d even been Raleigh! But this was Dobbs and you should’ve seen all those other women looking at her sideways and reining their husbands in. Well, I didn’t have any wife and neither did one or two others. You talked to Reid Stephenson yet? Or Brandon Frazier?”
“Frazier’s a new one on me,” said Dwight, noting down the name. “Didn’t her husband mind?”
Millard King shrugged. “Some men like it when their wives make other men hot. Sorta like ‘Yeah, you’d like to get in her panties, but I’m the one she goes home with.’ Jason doesn’t miss a trick in the courtroom but he didn’t have a clue about his wife. Lynn and I got it on a couple of times, but right around then’s when I got serious about the gal I’m hoping to marry and decided I didn’t need that complication.”
Something in his virtuous tone made Dwight ask, “Your idea or Mrs. Bullock’s?”
“I guess you could call it a mutual decision,” King admitted.
“In other words, she wanted to break it off more than you did.”
“I told you—”
“So if she called you and invited you to join her at the Orchid Motel, you wouldn’t have gone?”
“Absolutely not,” Millard King said firmly.
* * *
At Memorial Hospital in Dobbs, Amy Knott stuck her head in the staff lounge and flourished a manila envelope. “I just wanted to tell everybody that we’re collecting to make a donation to pre-op in Lynn Bullock’s name.”
“I’m sure going to miss her there,” said one of the women doctors, handing Amy a ten-dollar bill. “She always went the extra mile. When’s the funeral?”
“She’s being cremated.” Amy held the envelope open as other doctors dug in their pockets. “I understand there’ll be a memorial service next month.”
The door opened and a white-jacketed doctor came in. He had poured himself a cup of coffee before the unnatural silence finally registered. Spotting Amy’s envelope, he said, “Taking up a collection?”
“For Lynn Bullock’s memorial,” Amy said with a rueful smile. “I don’t guess you want to contribute.”
“On the contrary.” Dr. Jeremy Potts set his coffee down, opened his wallet, and made an elaborate show of pulling out a twenty-dollar bill. “I can’t think of anything that would give me more pleasure.”
* * *
Back at Lee and Stephenson, Dwight was amused to see that Sherry Cobb was using her silver ballpoint pen as she and one of the clerks proofed a long legal document. John Claude smiled benignly from his doorway.
“Reid’s in his office,” he said, pointing down the wide hallway to what used to be the dining room when this was a private house.
The door was ajar and Dwight rapped on it, then pushed it all the way open. Reid was on the phone and he motioned the big deputy sheriff to come on in as he pushed back his chair so he could open the long center desk drawer. He held the phone in one hand while he rummaged with the other.
“Okay then, Mrs. Cunningham. I’ll draft that new codicil and . . . ma’am? . . . No, no, that’s quite all right. It’ll be ready for your signature tomorrow at ten.”
He hung up and continued his search. “That old lady changes her will every time the moon changes. Ah, here it is.
The morning was so overcast that Reid had his lights turned on and the silver pen gleamed in the lamplight as he fished it out from the back of the drawer and handed it over to Dwight.
Same make, same twining ivy leaves engraved along the length of the barrel.
