At the afternoon break, I went down to the sheriff’s department in the courthouse basement. When I tapped on the open door of Dwight’s office, he was half sitting, half leaning on the front of his desk talking to three of his deputies. His face lit up. “Well, speak of the devil! McLamb here was just about to go find a judge to get a signature on this search warrant.”
“What do you want to search?” I asked, skimming through the form McLamb handed me.
“Lamarr Wrenn’s grandfather’s house,” McLamb said. “Based on our investigations today, we think it probably contains property belonging to the Hartley guy that was killed Friday night, property that was stolen from a locked storage shed Mrs. Ames owns.”
“Really? What sort of property?”
“Some boards that his grandfather painted pictures on.”
“Pictures?”
“Halloween things. Skeletons and ghosts and—”
I looked up at Dwight suspiciously. “You serious? Didn’t you say they only paid about twenty-five or thirty dollars for those boards? And that they were only going to use them to decorate the exterior of their haunted house?”
“Theft is theft,” he said virtuously. “Breaking and entering.”
I finished looking over the document. Everything seemed in order so I signed and dated it, even though it looked like a lot of trouble for a bunch of worthless wood.
Jamison and McLamb left with the search warrant and Richards said she was going to get on the phone and call Atlanta. “See if I can verify the whereabouts of that Radakovich woman on Friday night.”
As she left, I closed Dwight’s door. “Talk to you a minute?”
“Sure.” His jacket hung on the back of his chair and the collar of his blue shirt was unbuttoned with the red tie loosely knotted. He folded his arms across his chest and remained where he was, leaning against the edge of the desk, motionless, as if bracing himself for something bad. “What’s up?”
I checked my watch. “I need to be back upstairs in four minutes, so just listen, will you? We can talk about this more after I adjourn this evening.”
“You’ve changed your mind,” he said flatly.
“About us? No, why? You having second thoughts?”
He shook his head. I hadn’t realized how tense he was till I saw his jaw unclench and his arms relax, but I didn’t have time to ask him what was wrong. Dwight’s always saying I don’t tell him things, and I didn’t want him to hear about Tally first from one of my brothers or their wives.
“Look, I couldn’t say anything to you about this till I’d talked to Daddy and Andrew and Andrew’d talked to April, only he pulled a drunk this weekend and didn’t, so I had to tell her myself this morning.”
“Hey, whoa, slow down, shug. Tell her what?”
“Just listen!” I said impatiently. “Remember how Andrew got a Hatcher girl pregnant when he was seventeen and her father made them get married and then she ran off after the baby was born?”
“Oh, yeah, I do sort of remember hearing about that somewhere along the way, but I was still a little kid and it—”
“Dwight!”
“Sorry. So?”
“So Tallahassee Ames is that baby. She’s Andrew’s daughter. My niece. They’re going to bury Braz Hartley out at the homeplace tomorrow morning, and I’ve got to run.”
As I hurried down the hall to the elevator, Dwight called after me, “Come on back when you finish court, hear?”
I’d hoped to adjourn early, but it was after five-thirty before I signed the very last order of the very last case on my calendar and called it a day. I’d already told Roger Longmire, our chief district court judge, that I was taking a half day of personal leave tomorrow, and I didn’t want anything on today’s docket to have to be carried over because of me.
When I got back down to Dwight’s office, the door was closed, but I could hear belligerent voices from inside. A woman’s shrill voice floated above angry male tones and both were followed by Dwight’s calm bass rumble.
Sheriff Bo Poole’s door was open down the hall, so I poked my head in. “What’s going on, Bo?”
“You signed the search warrant,” he said. “You tell me.”
“You mean they really found those stolen boards?”
Before he could answer, Dwight’s door opened and I glanced back over my shoulder to see a hugely smiling Lamarr Wrenn step out into the hallway. He wore a Shaw sweatshirt with the sleeves cut out, shorts, and sandals. His right ankle was taped with an elastic bandage. One big arm was around a middle-aged woman in a blue suit who scowled up at him, the other hand carried one of those crudely painted scraps of plywood. The woman was clearly his mother. She was giving him a come-to-Jesus lecture about the evils of theft, and what’d he want with those weird old pictures anyhow, and don’t think for one minute she wasn’t going to take every penny out of his hide, but he just kept smiling and hugging her as they went on down the hall.
The white man who followed them more slowly was also smiling as he put a slip of paper in his wallet. It was Arnold Ames.
“Thanks for your understanding,” Dwight said. “I really appreciate it.”
“No problem,” said Ames. “A quick dime’s better than a slow dollar any day of the week, far as I’m concerned,
