Slow Dollar

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We were halfway to Dobbs before I remembered the pictures I’d found.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dwight said. “Doesn’t look like those lockers have anything to do with Hartley’s death after all.”

“But what about the person who tried to break in the shed out at the farm when the gang of three were liberating Lamarr’s grandfather’s pictures?” I asked. “How do you explain that?”

“I don’t. Sure would’ve helped if they’d gotten a good enough look to say if the person was male or female. It might be sheer coincidence, you know. A burglar totally unconnected with the carnival, just looking to take what he could.”

“So instead of ransacking the house or unlocked sheds, he—or she—headed straight for the most securely locked outbuilding on the place?”

“Okay,” he conceded, “but if it was Viscardi, we still don’t know why she would want Hartley dead. That story she told us about his blackmail attempt? Maybe he had something on her more serious than who she was sleeping with. Something she couldn’t get out of just by having him beat up.”

“She really did have him beat up?”

“Oh, yes. Jamison interviewed that Sam Warrick and he admitted it. Didn’t want the Ameses to know, but from what we gather, everybody knew it but Mrs. Ames, including her husband and her son.”

So we were back to the Ameses again, with yet another reason to dislike Polly Viscardi.

Even with Dwight driving, we had plenty of time to get to Dobbs and he kept the truck on back roads that were more direct as the crow flies but meandered through the country. Summer was definitely winding down. Wild asters made patches of blue along the ditch banks, and wasteland was yellow with coreopsis, sneezeweeds, and goldenrod. Pokeberries hung in clusters from dark purple stalks and sassafras leaves were bright red and orange against the pines.

“We still don’t have a viable theory as to how Viscardi killed Hartley without being seen,” he said.

I’d been thinking about that myself ever since last night when Arnold told us about Polly’s shoes being bagged.

“Her game is one that’s pretty hard to win,” I said. “That’s something I picked up on the Internet. Unless the coins have a lot of backspin or land just right, they simply won’t stay on the plates. And remember, you don’t have to buy chances to play. People just step up and start tossing. In fact, her main reason to be there was to keep them back behind the foul line.”

Dwight looked dubious. “Okay, so maybe she could leave it for the two or three minutes it’d take her to get across to the Dozer, do Braz, and get back. But why didn’t anybody see her enter or leave?”

“Windy Raines’s Bowler Roller,” I said. “Remember last night when we were talking to Tally? Those strobe lights and the siren? How we all stopped and stared over there and it seemed to go on forever? Even people playing the Dozer went around to that side to watch till the siren stopped. That must have been when she did it. The Bowler Roller’s another one that’s hard to win, but it does happen three or four times an evening. All she’d have to do is wait till it went off, then take advantage of all the lights and noise and people looking there instead of at the Dozer.”

“Makes about as much sense as anything we’ve been able to come up with,” Dwight said, pulling around a tractor and flatbed loaded with irrigation pipes. “The ME couldn’t tell if the injury to the back of his head was before or during the actual stomping. Mayleen thinks she either hit him over the head or got him to lie down by telling him it would stop his nosebleed. She says her grandmother used to put a cold spoon on the roof of her mouth or cold metal across the bridge of her nose to stop the bleeding.”

“Cold quarters?” I wondered.

CHAPTER 19

TUESDAY AFTERNOON

I convened court at precisely one o’clock. Janice Needham was clerking for me again. The courthouse grapevine had learned of my relationship to Tally Ames and her murdered son, and Janice leaned in to me solicitously to say, “Bradley and I are so sorry, Judge. We had no idea he was kin to y’all.”

“Thank you, Janice,” I said. “I do appreciate you and Brad thinking of us.”

She looked expectant, hoping for some direct-from-the-horse’s-mouth tidbit that she could pass around at the next break, but I glanced over to Tracy Johnson, who was prosecuting this afternoon, and nodded for her to call her first case.

“People versus Martin Samuelson, Your Honor.”

To my surprise, it was the same elderly black man who’d recently stood before me charged with DWI. I’d suspended his license. Now here he was back with heavier charges.

“Mr. Samuelson,” I said, “didn’t I suspend your license just two weeks ago?”

The old man nodded.

“And didn’t you promise me that you wouldn’t ever drive again when you’d been drinking.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“But you did. And you drove with a suspended license.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Why, Mr. Samuelson?”

“See now, I didn’t want to drive,” he said, “but I couldn’t just leave my car on the side of the road. I had to get