and this way everybody gets what they want, right?” He shook Dwight’s hand. “Good doing business with you, Major Bryant.”
“What was all that about?” Bo asked when Ames was gone.
“I’ll try to have the full report for you tomorrow,” Dwight said from his doorway, “but basically, it’s about why Lamarr Wrenn really punched out Friday night’s homicide.”
“He’s not the perp?” asked Bo.
“I don’t see how he could be,” said Dwight. “The next-door neighbor confirms the time he says he got there. She also says he was wearing sneakers, and whoever stomped Hartley was wearing hard-soled shoes.”
“But the Halloween pictures?” I asked.
“Not Halloween,” he told us. “Bascom Wrenn, Ms. Wrenn’s daddy, got religion big time about five or six years ago and started painting these strange pictures of the Last Judgment—the eye of God, the dead rising from their graves, souls in hell. Lamarr thought they were great, which was news to Ms. Wrenn. She was under the impression that they embarrassed the hell out of both of them. In fact, she was so sure the pictures were evidence that Mr. Wrenn was getting cracked and senile that he used his little pension to stick them in a self-storage unit out on the bypass to keep her from seeing them and he’d go over there to paint.”
I laughed. “The storage locker was his studio?”
“Yep. So when he died, nobody knew about the locker and the rent lapsed. Bostrom, the guy who owns the facility, jumped through all the legal hoops—sent a certified letter to his home, posted it here in the courthouse, notice in the Ledger, the whole works. Ms. Wrenn says if a letter was forwarded, she doesn’t remember signing for one. The sale went forward and Braz Hartley bought the contents of the locker for thirty bucks. Old cans of paint and those hellfire and damnation pictures. His stepfather saw a use for the pictures and gave him thirty-five for the lot.”
“Where does Lamarr come in?” I asked.
“After the funeral, when he realized his granddad’s pictures weren’t in the house, he went looking them, learned about the locker, then found out that he was too late. Hartley had bought them. That’s what the fight was about. Lamarr Wrenn accused him of stealing the pictures and asked for them back.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t say ‘pretty please,’ either,” I murmured.
“Right. So on Sunday afternoon, he and some friends drove out to the property Mrs. Ames owns over near Widdington, broke into the storage shed where the pictures were, and brought them back to Dobbs, where Jamison and McLamb found them when they searched the house this afternoon.”
I didn’t like the sound of that “he and some friends.” Stevie and Eric? “But what was all that in your office just now?” I asked, hastily moving on from that topic.
“We got Ms. Wrenn and her son over from Raleigh and asked Mr. Ames to come in, too, to see if we couldn’t work something out. Like you said, Deb’rah, the theft would probably have been treated like a misdemeanor, even with the breaking and entering, if that’s what they actually did. Ms. Wrenn offered him a check for three hundred and fifty if he’d return the pictures and drop all charges against her son, and you saw how happy he was to do it.”
“Three-fifty on a thirty-five-dollar investment?” Bo laughed. “Wish my retirement fund earned returns like that.”
Still chuckling, he switched off his office light, told us to have a good evening, and left.
I looked up at Dwight. “Stevie and Eric were the friends who helped Lamarr steal back the pictures, weren’t they?”
“Well, now, shug, I never got around to asking him who his accomplices were, and he didn’t volunteer to tell me.”
“Thanks,” I said softly.
He brushed it off. “Anyhow, if he’s telling the truth, the DA would have given him a break because the door was already open. He says that someone else drove up while they were trying to decide whether to pop the lock. They stayed hidden behind the shed till they heard whoever it was rip the lock off the door and realized it was another thief. Wrenn says they were going to rush the guy, but then he twisted his ankle and the guy got away before they could even see who it was.”
“The idiots!” I fumed. “What if he’d had a gun?”
“What if he was a she?”
“A woman?”
“All they saw was from the legs down. Jeans and dirty sneakers.”
He didn’t have to spell it out. I see too many women charged with the whole range of crimes to think that men have a monopoly.
“You’re thinking Polly Viscardi? She wears work shoes, though. Work shoes with bright pink laces.”
“Now don’t you reckon whoever did it has ditched whatever shoes they had on at the time? They’d be pretty bloody.”
I thought about it and agreed he had a point.
“So tell me about Miz Ames being Andrew’s daughter,” Dwight said. “And what’s with Andrew?”
“You off duty now?” I asked.
He nodded, leaned across his desk, and hooked his jacket off the back of the chair with one finger.
“Then come ride over to the carnival with me and we’ll talk on the way.”
By the time we got out to the festival grounds, I’d told him all I knew about Tally and
