“Yes, please.” I held the door of my temporary chambers open.
When we were inside with the door closed, and before I could speak, Dwight put his arms around me. “Sorry,” he said, “but I’ve been wanting to do this all day.”
God, he kisses good! As slow and deliberate as his driving. And with the same attention to all the road signs.
“Much as I’d like to pursue this line of thought to its logical conclusion,” I said, stepping back a little breathlessly, “I have to get back in there in fifteen minutes and you’ve got a lot of ground to cover, too.”
“I do?”
“Those shoes that Polly Viscardi was wearing when she died. Are you sure they’re hers?”
“Huh? Yeah... well, pretty sure. Pink laces, little bells on the lace tips. Why?”
“Look at my poor foot,” I said, and slipped off my shoe so he could see the red where a blister was trying to form beneath the sheer nylon.
“I’ve got six people out there doing a canvass of the carnival and you call me back to show me your blister?” He gave a sudden grin. “Am I supposed to kiss it and make it all better?”
“Only if you have a foot fetish,” I said, smiling back. “No, you’re supposed to think about Skee Matusik’s blisters. I’ve had these shoes three years and they still look like new because they hurt my feet so much I can’t wear them for very long at a time. Skee’s on his feet all day. Those are not new-looking shoes he’s been wearing the last two days, but they were certainly brand-new blisters.”
“I don’t know what he was wearing Friday night,” I said. “I didn’t notice. But on Saturday, it was dirty white sneakers. Yesterday it was the leather shoes he had on at the funeral, but the laces are way too short. Even leaving the top holes untied, he could barely make a bow. And you saw those blisters on his heels today at lunch when Jessica brought him Band-Aids. Those can’t be his own shoes that he’s wearing.”
“Matusik killed Hartley?” Dwight asked. “Why?”
“Sorry,” I said, and I really was. For better or worse, Tally’s first son had been part of our family, lost to us before we knew he existed, as forever unknowable as my father’s first son. “I don’t know enough about either of them to even begin to guess. He and his late wife were supposed to be like grandparents to Tally’s boys. Tally said the only reason they let Skee come out with them this trip was because Braz begged them to on account of their close relationship. But if the shoes Polly was wearing turn out to be Skee’s, then he has to have been the one that killed Braz, not Polly. And after he finished killing her late Sunday night or early yesterday morning, he must have switched shoes. Put her pink laces in his low-top shoes, and his short laces in her ankle-high ones. He’s a small man, and she was a sturdy woman, so their feet would have been roughly the same size. Only his laces weren’t long enough to go through all the holes.”
Dwight frowned. “Maybe his first laces broke and those were the only length he could find.”
“Look at your own shoes,” I said, pointing to his black regulation lace-ups. “It has to be like Percy Denning’s rope fibers. If you took your laces out, I bet you could see exactly how much space is between the holes. They’d be worn where they go through the metal eyelets. Can’t you call the SBI lab and at least ask them if those pink laces have always been on those particular shoes?”
“I can do better,” Dwight said decisively. “I can send them the shoes Matusik’s wearing now and have them check both pairs for fingerprints while they’re at it.”
“Once word got around about how Braz died,” I said, “he couldn’t get away with wearing the sneakers. He had to know that sooner or later someone would be around asking about hard-soled shoes and he’d be jammed up if he couldn’t produce his.”
“I was having a little trouble with the idea of Polly Viscardi crossing the midway to kill Hartley,” said Dwight, “but Matusik only needed to step around the corner of the tent when that Bowler Roller siren went off.”
“Did he kill Polly for her shoes,” I wondered aloud, “or because she saw him go into the Dozer?”
“Why don’t I just go ask him?”
He tousled my hair the way he used to when I was ten, then he was off, too.
Court ran late again, but Tracy, Janice, and I made an efficient team. We finished the traffic calendar and were actually back on schedule when I adjourned at five-forty.
Downstairs, Dwight had Matusik in custody. Bo Poole let me join him behind their new one-way glass while Dwight and Raeford McLamb questioned him. When I got there, he was still stubbornly denying everything. Eventually though, the questions got to him as they hammered away on the two pairs of shoes. With the ones he’d been wearing the last couple of days on their way to the SBI lab in Garner, and confronted by his own blistered heels, he sullenly gave it up about thirty-five minutes after I arrived.
“Yeah, all right,” he snarled. “I stomped the little bastard. World would’ve been a lot better off if somebody’d done it when he was a baby.”
“Why?” Dwight asked patiently.
“He saw me put a pillow over Irene’s face.”
“Who’s Irene?” asked McLamb.
“My wife. Last fall. She had a bad heart. Wasn’t much use for me anymore. Yeah, yeah, I know what you’ll say. Just like Polly and Tal. Yeah, she was the one good with money, good with kids, kept us going with the duck pond and balloon bust, but she didn’t want to do what a wife’s supposed to do for her man anymore and there was Bubbles with hooters out to here and she wanted me as much as I wanted her. Or I thought she did. Only she wouldn’t do it with me long as I was married to Irene and everything was in Irene’s name. I mean, Irene was old and sick. She won’t gonna live long anyhow, y’know? Doctor said so. Told me I was lucky to’ve had her long as I did when he signed the death certificate. So I got drunk one night and came home and did it. Only I didn’t know Tal had kicked Braz out that night and he’d crashed on our couch. Can I have something to drink?”
They brought him a can of Pepsi.
