“You sleeping with her, Mr. Flackman?” Terry asked politely.
“That something else Dee told you?”
When they didn’t answer, he shook his head. “No. I’m not going to say I didn’t want to—my wife left me eight years ago—but it never happened. Sorry.”
With his eyes on that pen, now almost motionless in Flackman’s fingers, Dwight said, “What about your own position on the board? She throw some of those extra opportunities your way, too?”
Roger Flackman’s Adam’s apple bobbled as he denied it, but his pen was suddenly twirling so fast that it flew out of his fingers and clattered across the table.
“Oops! Sorry.” He retrieved the pen and slid it into an inner jacket pocket. With his hands planted firmly on his legs under the table, he told them that he had gone home early on Tuesday with a migraine headache and that he stayed home watching television alone on Sunday.
Greg Turner had the blond good looks of an All-America lacrosse player, as indeed he had been when he played for Duke twenty years earlier. With straight hair so blond that it was almost silver, extremely fair skin, keen blue eyes, a neck almost as wide as his head, and a lightly muscled body that stood two hairs over six feet, there was a prosperous sleekness about him when he poked his head in Dwight’s door in mid-afternoon and said, “You left a message with my office that you wanted to speak to me?”
Mayleen Richards was there to report on the morning’s findings and she rose to go, but Dwight motioned for her to stay, so she sat back down and nodded politely as introductions were made. She knew who this attorney was. Greg Turner was gaining a reputation for infallibility and clever arguments, especially in the big-money civil cases. Courthouse gossip had him divorced and currently unattached. He was certainly handsome, but did not appear conceited, and he was pleasant to everyone, even sheriff’s deputies with a high school education, while he himself was a graduate of the Duke school of law.
This was the man of her mother’s dreams—a super-white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant professional. There were some whispered speculations about his sexual orientation, but as long as they were only whispers, her mother could easily ignore them.
What she couldn’t ignore was Mayleen’s involvement with a dark-skinned Latino who owned a landscaping business and probably burned candles and incense to obscure saints no right-thinking Baptist had ever heard of.
Mayleen sighed and tried to concentrate on the interview.
“Yes,” Turner was saying with an easy smile. “I did get a phone call from Dee Bradshaw Sunday night. She left a message on my answering machine. Said she wanted to talk to me about her mother.”
“What about?”
“I have no idea.”
“The time of her call was around seven-fifteen, right?”
He nodded.
“You were out?”
“No, I was there, but I was in the middle of cooking myself an omelet for supper and I didn’t want to turn it off. I figured if it was anything important, they could leave a message and I’d call back.”
“It was quite a long message,” Dwight said. “Almost three minutes.”
“Yeah. She was talking about how Candace took her position on the board of commissioners very seriously and knew I did, too.”
“Do you mind if we listen to that message?” Richards asked.
Turner glanced at her as if surprised to find her still there and allowed to speak, but he gave her one of his high-wattage smiles meant to convey amused regret. “Sorry. I always erase my messages as soon as I’ve finished listening to them.”
“And you didn’t call her back?”
He shrugged. “Callous of me, I suppose, and now that she’s dead, I wish I had. But it had been a hard week and I just didn’t feel like dealing with a bereaved daughter at that moment.”
“Is there anyone who can vouch for your being at home alone all evening?”
He gave a small ironic smile. “Sorry.
CHAPTER 20
I recessed for lunch a few minutes early on Tuesday at the request of the two attorneys who had not yet reached an agreement over damages incurred when a tree service dropped a huge dead oak tree on a neighbor’s in-ground swimming pool late last fall, smashing one corner and flattening the fence. The neighbor wanted an all- new pool, and he wanted it filled with water he didn’t have to pay for. He was also asking damages for the mental trauma caused by a tree falling near the sandbox where his two young sons were playing.
The tree service’s insurance company wanted to repair the corner and replace the fence, but they were not willing to pay for more than half the water as the pool had already been winterized and was a little low at the time. (With so many extra straws sipping water out of our rivers and treatment plants these days, water’s getting to be real pricey.) Because both parents had been at work while the boys played under the watchful eyes of a babysitter, the insurance company disputed how much trauma the neighbor had actually suffered.
