Underwood carefully slid the lone candle into a plastic bag. “And in the meantime, we’ll check this for fingerprints. If we get anything usable, we may have to ask y’all to come down and give us yours. You, too, Judge.”
“But we live here,” Bobby protested. “Me and Joyce, we got our fingerprints on everything in the house.”
He was a big bulky man, and with his head reared back like that, he reminded me of a bull walrus defending his territory.
“Well, hell, Bobby,” said Sheriff Horton, “we know that. It’d be for elimination purposes. And don’t y’all have a woman comes in to help?”
“I’ll need her name, too,” said Underwood.
As if summoned by a bell, a plump middle-aged white woman came halfway down the stairs and paused to catch Joyce’s eye. “Mrs. Ashe?”
Joyce excused herself to go see what was wanted upstairs in the kitchen and the men went back out on the terrace. Left to my own ends for the moment, I rejoined Tina Ledwig, who hadn’t stirred from the couch.
“You must think I’m a coldhearted bitch,” she said lazily as I helped myself to a slice of cheese.
“Not at all,” I murmured inanely.
She sighed. “Half the people in this town will tell you Carl hung the moon. Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he did. I’ll have to check tonight. See if his name’s on it.”
“I heard he’s responsible for the town’s new senior center.”
“The Carlyle Grayson Ledwig Senior Center. Oh yes. Lots of brownie points for that.”
“They say it’s quite a facility.”
“State of the art,” she agreed. “God knows it cost enough.”
“What else do they plan to build on to it?”
“Build on?”
“I understand Dr. Ledwig left money to expand it?”
“Expand it? Where’d you get that idea? It’s already three times bigger than this town’ll ever need.”
“Mrs. Osborne said that’s what she’d heard. That your husband left money to expand the center.”
“Don’t know where she’d hear that.”
“From Mr. Osborne, maybe?” Not that I gave a damn. I was just making conversation till Underwood came back and drove me to pick up my car at the courthouse.
“Not from Norm,” Tina said firmly. “He’s on the current board—
“Sounds like a good thing to have done,” I said.
She gave a cynical snort. “Good for the clinic, too. Boosted the summer client base. Always kept his eye on the balance sheet, Carl did.”
“Is that where your daughter gets her business flair?”
She looked at me blankly.
“Your daughter Carla.” Did she not know her daughter had opened a cafe? Was she as in the dark as my cousin Beverly?
Comprehension dawned in her blue eyes. “Business flair? That little tea room thingy that her friends talked her into blowing her trust fund on? Thank God Carl never found out about
Before I could ask what Simon Proffitt had to do with the price of watercress sandwiches, Joyce came down the stairs, and from outside I heard a shout followed by a babble of voices.
“Oh,” said Joyce. “Sounds like they found it.”
CHAPTER 20
On our drive back to town, George Underwood wasn’t optimistic about lifting fingerprints from the surface of the iron candleholder his men had found.
“Too rough and dimpled,” he said.
“That’s the price you pay for handmade craftsy stuff,” I told him.
He gave a rueful smile. “I doubt if the Ashes were thinking murder weapon when they bought it.”
“Lucky for the killer, though. He probably wasn’t thinking about fingerprints either.”
“Just snatched up the closest solid thing at hand,” Underwood agreed.
“Which probably means he did intend to kill Osborne when he followed him out onto the terrace.”
“He?” There was an amused note in his voice.
“Or she. I’m not a member of the PC language police. ‘He’ works for me till we know for sure. Especially since more men kill than women.”
