“Naw, she won’t let me,” said Herman.
Annie Sue shrugged her sturdy shoulders. “No point rubbing Reese’s nose in it.”
“Hell, girl,” said Will. “He’s gonna be working for you someday, idn’t he?”
“I hope it’ll be a partnership, Uncle Will. We sure don’t want him to quit. He’s a good electrician and he’s pulling his share of the load. This way, he can work off my license, too, now.”
Herman’s oldest child, Edward, is a white-collar office worker out in Charlotte. Ditto Denise in Greensboro. Reese and Denise are twins and Annie Sue was an “oops” baby. Reese is still single, but he’s never been one to crack the books. As long as he can earn enough to pay for his truck, his trailer, and his tall ones, it doesn’t seem to much matter to him who’s higher in the pecking order. All the same, it was so like Annie Sue to consider his male pride. If and when Herman turns the business over to them, I’m sure it’ll be on equal terms.
Dwight and Zach arrived in the middle of our spontaneous celebration and offered to treat her to the supper of her choice—hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream, or tacos. I took the T-shirt Dwight had brought me and headed to the restroom to change.
When I got back to the hot dog stand, I saw Dwight in conversation with his deputy, Mayleen Richards. Standing beside her was a good-looking Latino in jeans, hand-tooled boots, a large silver belt buckle, and a black Stetson. Without the boots and hat, he was probably only about a half-inch taller than she, but he had an easy air of confidence that was at odds with her self-conscious awkwardness.
And at the moment, she looked more self-conscious than usual and had flushed until her fair skin was the same shade as her freckles. As I joined them, she took a deep breath, lifted her chin, and said, “Good to see you, ma’am. I’d like you to meet my friend Mike Diaz. Mike, this is Judge Knott, Major Bryant’s wife.”
“We’ve met before, I believe,” I said, shaking the hand he held out to me. He had once come to court to speak for one of his compatriots.
“
“But surely you’ve seen baseball in Mexico,” I said.
“Oh yes. Half the major league teams here have Mexican players, but she says I have to see it like a native.” He lifted his hot dog and made a wry face. “Tacos are better, but when in Rome . . .”
We all laughed and Mayleen’s face was almost its natural shade by the time we parted for separate sections of the field.
“I like him,” I told Dwight when we returned to the family with drinks and dogs for everyone. “Does this mean Mayleen’s going to go against her family for him?”
He had told me about how conflicted she was over this relationship and how her family had threatened to disown her if she did not break it off.
“Don’t know, honey,” Dwight said. “But if she’s coming out in public with him around town here and introducing him to folks, it must mean something.”
We distributed the food and drinks. Cal took his and immediately joined some younger kids standing down by the fence behind home plate.
At the end of the first inning, the score was one–zip in favor of the visitors and that’s the way it stayed till the bottom of the ninth when Jackson reached first for the third time in the game and a teammate smashed one over the fence.
2–1 Dobbs!
On the drive home, Dwight said that they had come up with a name for Candace’s cousin and that someone would probably be eyeballing her old car tomorrow if the cousin still owned it.
I told him about going to her house with Will. “Did you see that bathroom?”
“Pretty fancy, huh? Mirrors on a bedroom ceiling’s one thing. I’m not real sure I’d want that many in the bathroom.”
“Bradshaw told Will that Dee’s laptop was stolen?”
“Yeah. Sort of confirms that the two deaths are linked. The Ginsburg twins think that Dee might have found the flash drive that Candace used and that’s why she was killed.”
“Really?” I was suddenly and uncomfortably reminded that the flash drive everyone was so anxious to find was probably the one in my purse.
Cal had fallen asleep in the backseat. Overhead, the stars blazed down from a cloudless sky. Very romantic. Dwight smiled over at me. “Remember when all cars had bench seats instead of buckets?”
I smiled back. Unfortunately, there was a console and a gearshift between us.
But he was in a talkative mood and told me about the phone calls Dee Bradshaw had made the evening she was killed: two to Gracie Farmer about the dollhouse and Farmer’s umbrella, one to her boyfriend, who was too drunk to talk, one to Will to ask him to come out and make her an offer, one to Roger Flackman about the possibility that her mother had been skimming the company’s take, and one to Danny Creedmore, who claimed that she had ended the conversation shortly after eight because someone was at the door.
“And Greg Turner says she left a three-minute message on his answering machine, but he swears she said nothing important and he immediately erased it.”
“You think one of them killed her?” I asked.
“Still up in the air,” he said. “I don’t know how the office manager would benefit unless she was in on some skimming, but Flackman says the books are in perfect order and we’re welcome to audit them.”
“Are you?”
“Hell, yes.”
