I remembered the lab worker’s plain, chinless face. She had taken money to lie about a paternity case that I had sat on, and then I discovered that she had lied for Allen as well, in someone else’s court over in Greensboro. That sweet-talking flimflammer hadn’t paid her a dime, just made her feel beautiful and so desirable that she had gladly faked his test and sworn to its accuracy.
“What about the carjacker that he let walk out of his court on unsupervised probation?” I asked. “Anybody here have a connection to the young woman he murdered?”
Neither Lillian nor Martha could think of anyone.
“Besides,” said Martha, “he seems to have passed all the blame for that on to the DA who didn’t alert him to the guy’s probation violations.”
“Although he would have known about it if he’d bothered to read the file,” said Lillian, echoing what others had said about the dead judge.
“I saw you talking to Bill Hasselberger last night, Deborah. I hope he’s got a good alibi because heaven knows there was no love lost between him and Jeffreys.”
“Who’s Bill Hasselberger?” asked Martha.
“Former judge who’s back in private practice down here now,” I explained. “Jeffreys unseated him in what sounds like a dirty campaign.”
“It was,” said Lillian, “but I was thinking about his little godchild.”
“Godchild?”
“The talk is that Jeffreys took money to give primary custody of the little boy to the husband and the child got hold of the stepmother’s cigarette lighter and—”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “That was Bill Hasselberger’s godchild? Judge Ouellette told us about that at our committee meeting today, but she didn’t say that he was connected to Hasselberger. God! Jeffreys was a judicial disaster, wasn’t he? How the hell did he get elected?”
“You ask that with all the incompetent crooks in office?” Martha asked sardonically. “Maybe voters thought he’d be a good man to have a beer with.” She took a final swallow of her drink and set the glass back on the table.
Lillian smiled and assured us that Hasselberger was not a violent man.
Me? I was suddenly remembering that he did not have an alibi if it relied on my cousin Reid. There was a half- hour unaccounted for.
If he and Jeffreys had met on Front Street?
If words had been exchanged and Jeffreys had flipped him off?
If Hasselberger had erupted in anger and followed him into the dark parking lot?
If—if—
Suddenly I was very tired of talking about it. I excused myself, threaded my way through the increasingly crowded room without getting waylaid, and took the stairs back down to my floor.
More than twenty-four hours had passed since Dwight and I had snapped at each other. If I was tired of talking about Pete Jeffreys’s death, I was also tired of feeling miserable every time I thought of Dwight. Pocketing my pride, I switched on my phone, keyed up his number, and pressed the talk button.
Six rings, then, instead of his drawled “Leave a message,” a mechanical voice gave me the usual options.
Huh?
Thinking I had somehow misdialed, I tried again.
Same results, so I said I was at the beach and to call me. No way was I going to try to make up with him through voice mail.
I scrolled through my contacts list, but I had never entered Will’s number, so I couldn’t call him either.
Several messages were waiting for my attention. My best friend Portland wanted to tell me that little Carolyn Deborah had just cut her second tooth, my sister-in-law Doris reminded me that I’d promised to bring potato salad to the cookout to celebrate Robert’s birthday next Saturday, and there were four messages from Reid.
The first had been recorded a little after four. “Hey Deborah, call me, okay?”
The second and third came at ten-minute intervals. The last had been less than fifteen minutes earlier. “Dammit, Deborah! Call me.
He answered on the first ring. “Well, it’s about damn time.”
Before I could ask him what was wrong, he said, “Did you talk to someone from the Wilmington police today? That detective that’s investigating Jeffreys’s murder?”
“Detective Edwards?”
“Yeah. Are you the one that put him onto Bill and me?”
“What do you mean put him onto y’all? It’s a murder investigation, Reid. He was asking everyone for the names of who was there last night. I listed you and everybody else at your table and I’m certainly not the only one who saw you. Why?”
“Did you tell him Bill left a half-hour before me?”
“No, but is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“Well…”
By now Reid had climbed down off his high horse and was ready to lead me into green pastures. I recognized that new tone from times past when he wanted to wheedle me into doing him a favor he knew I wouldn’t want
