nails split and stained with country work.
“What was her grandfather charged with?”
“I looked it up in the files.” Reid gave me a lopsided grin. “Let’s put it this way. Your dad was paying my dad’s bill.
“Oh, come on, Deb’rah. Everybody knows Mr. Kezzie made his money in bootleg whiskey.”
“When he was younger, yes,” I agreed, “but he gave all that up before I was born and Lynn Bullock was younger than me.”
“Whiskey’s the only thing your daddy’s ever lied to me about,” Mother once told me. “The only thing I
I looked at Reid sharply. “Is he still mixed up in it?”
“Old as he is? I doubt it,” said Reid. “’Course, a lot of people still think he is, and it probably amuses him to let them. I’m sure you’d’ve heard about it, if he were.”
“True,” I said, relieved. Dwight or Terry or certainly Ed Gardner, who works ATF, would have put a bug in my ear if he were still active. One thing a judge doesn’t need is to have her daddy hauled in for making moonshine.
“Anyhow,” said Reid, “Lynn Bullock was a damn good lay. I’m not seeing anybody special these days, so I thought what the hell, why not give her another call?”
“Only her memory being better than yours, she was still ticked that you’d dumped her after the second night and it really steamed her when you called out of the blue with nothing on your mind but sex?”
“Something like that. Look, Deborah, you’ve got to help me. Don’t tell Dwight it was your pen I showed him. Okay?”
“You’re crazy. I’m a judge. An officer of the court. I can’t
There was that look again. “No who?”
“No who,” he said.
“You’re not being noble, are you?” I asked suspiciously. “Saving somebody’s reputation?”
“The only reputation I was saving was mine. Everybody thinks I get laid six days a week and twice on Sundays. Truth is, I’m damn near a virgin these days. I went to the office Saturday morning, got sleepy after lunch, flaked out upstairs and almost slept through the game.”
I looked at him. I may have eleven older brothers, but he’s the nearest thing to a kid brother I’d ever had. His handsome face was an open book.
Or was it?
“Oh come on, Deborah. I did
Reid still held my pen in his hand.
“If I’d been a little smarter, I’d have found a way to put this back and you wouldn’t have known the difference. All you have to do is forget the last few minutes ever happened.”
He walked over to my telephone and dropped the pen into my pencil mug.
“See?”
“Reid—”
“Please, Deborah. All I’m asking is that you wait about talking to Dwight. Give him a chance to find Lynn’s real killer. Or—” He gave me a sharp, considering look. “Maybe we could find him first.”
“We?”
“Why not? We’re both professionals. Taking depositions is what we do. And people talk to civilians like us quicker than they’ll talk to Dwight. We just ask a few questions around town, listen hard to all the gossip and figure it out. What do you say?”
His eager, almost adolescent expression suddenly reminded me of Mickey Rooney in those old movies Dwight and I sometimes watch.
I didn’t feel one bit like Judy Garland though and I sure as hell didn’t want to try putting on a show in the barn.
“How hard can it be for us to figure out who was balling her?” Reid wheedled, as he followed me out to the kitchen. “She didn’t do it in the middle of Main Street or in her own house, even, but she sure wasn’t the most discreet woman I ever slept with.”
“Do you suppose Jason knew?” I asked, pouring us a cup of the freshly brewed coffee.
“Had to, you’d think.” Reid reached into my refrigerator for milk and kept dribbling it in until his coffee was more
“Grind? He was playing ball Saturday.”
