Reid was aimlessly opening cabinet doors when I got back to the kitchen.
“Coffee’s in the refrigerator,” I told him.
“Of course. The one place I didn’t look.”
He put two filters in the basket—“Cuts the caffeine and acids”—scooped in the ground coffee and flicked the switch.
“Does that weather board I gave you work okay?”
“Sure,” I said, though truth to tell, I’d barely glanced at it since he hung it up.
“Let’s see how low the pressure is right now with all this rain.”
He headed for my bedroom and I trailed along at his heels. Did I mention that all good lawyers are actors? Reid was giving a charming performance at the moment—burbling about how his dad still checks the barometer every morning even though he can now look out the window overlooking the ninth green and see for himself whether it’s a good day for golf.
“’Course with Dad, any day it’s not sleeting is a good day for golf.”
Once inside my bedroom, he went right over to the dials and started reading them off. I just leaned against the doorjamb and watched him.
He turned around. “Aren’t you interested?”
“Oh, I’m interested all right,” I said wickedly. “Since you haven’t been able to get back here alone, what did you plan to do? Slide it under my bed as soon as I came over to look? Hope I’d think it rolled there by accident?”
“Huh?”
A textbook look of puzzled innocence spread across his face.
“Considering that it got you off the hook with Dwight, I really think you should have given me something nicer for my wall than a twenty-dollar weather center.”
He gave a sheepish grin, his first honest expression of the night. “Wal-Mart doesn’t offer a lot of choice. It was this or a sunburst clock or a bad knockoff of a Bob Timberlake painting.”
Overall, I had to agree with his decision. Nevertheless, I held out my hand and he reached into his pocket and pulled out the sterling silver pen that he’d lifted from the pencil mug beside my phone on Monday.
“When did you miss it?” he asked, turning the gleaming shaft in his fingers.
“While you were changing clothes tonight, I tidied up in here.”
“Well, damn! You mean I was that close to getting away with it?”
“Not really. I knew you were up to something, I just hadn’t figured out what. You hate gospel music, remember?”
He shrugged. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”
“No more games,” I said sternly. “How did your pen get under Lynn Bullock’s body?”
“I don’t know, Deborah, and that’s the God-honest truth. She borrowed it the last time we were together and didn’t give it back and, well, it seemed a little petty to make a big point about it since I didn’t want to see her again anyhow.”
“So why didn’t you just tell Dwight?”
“Oh, sure. My pen under the body of a woman whose neck I’d threatened to wring?”
“I didn’t mean it,” he said hastily. “You know how you say things—‘I’ll kill him,’ ‘I’m going to clean his clock’? It’s just talk. But I was so mad when I saw what she’d done to my car. Hot as it’s been? And with the windows rolled up? I had to go buy a pair of rubber gloves just to drive it to the shop. I was so pissed, I kept saying that I was going to wring the little bitch’s neck. Everybody at the shop just laughed at me, they didn’t have a clue who I was talking about, but Will was there and I’m pretty sure he knew because he gave me a wink and said he’d swear it was justifiable homicide.”
If my brother had known Lynn Bullock was the woman who’d done something like that to Reid’s car, he certainly would have mentioned it Sunday night when we were talking about her death. Will’s a consummate con man though, and he can be incredibly sneaky when he puts his mind to it. He has a way of pretending he knows more about things than he does, hoping to bluff you into telling him what you assume he already knows.
“Don’t you see? If Dwight knew it was my pen, he’d go digging around and find out—”
“And find out what?” I asked. Then it hit me. “Wait a minute! You had two dates with her last Christmas and she only lately fouled your car? When?”
“Tuesday, a week ago,” he admitted.
“Why?” I asked, even though that mulish look on his face gave me the answer. “Oh for God’s sake, Reid! Tell me you didn’t. You said she wasn’t your type.”
“Well, she wasn’t,” he said sulkily. “All the same, for all her snob talk, there was something—I don’t know— vulnerable? Did I tell you what she said about Dad coming out to her grandfather’s place when she was a little girl?”
“No.”
“She was just a kid when it happened, but she never forgot. Dad had gone out to coach her grandfather for a court appearance. She talked about Dad’s fingernails. How clean and even they were.”
Reid looked down at his own neatly manicured nails and I had a sudden mental image of my daddy’s hands, the
