I introduced Chelsea Ann, who had barely taken her eyes off Stone Hamilton. We watched as the main camera rolled backward across the street while Hamilton walked toward it. Suddenly a bright light flashed across his face and he squinted as if in surprise and apprehension.
“This is where he’s supposed to realize that a car’s about to hit him,” Jill Mercer explained.
After another twenty minutes of duplicating that bit—who knew that watching the filming of a show could be so boring?—the main camera withdrew to the far sidewalk and someone cued a dark car parked near the end of the block. Its lights came on and it trundled slowly down the street.
“They’ll speed it up and add screeching brakes when they edit it,” Jill said.
The fourth time the car came rolling toward the point of impact, Hamilton had been replaced by a stunt double who met the front right headlight and appeared to be tossed like a beach ball. It was only as he was getting up that I noticed the mats that had been laid along the sidewalk behind him to cushion his fall.
As soon as Stackhouse was satisfied with the take, the mats were removed and Hamilton lay down on the bare concrete and tried to arrange his limbs to look like an unconscious hit-and-run victim.
Once he was still, Stackhouse shouted, “Hey, Jilly! Where the hell are you?”
“Oops!” said Mercer. “That’s my cue.”
She hastened back into the scene crying, “Don! Don!”
As she dropped to her knees beside his sprawled body, extras spilled from the doorway of the “club” and one of them shouted, “Call 911!” Another, “Did anyone see the car?”
The camera rolled in to focus on Mercer’s distraught face next to Hamilton’s as she implored him to hang on.
* * *
It was after midnight before we got that drink at a real club a few blocks over. Stone Hamilton had begged off —“I gotta go walk my dog,” he told us—to Chelsea Ann’s disappointment.
While Stackhouse flirted with Chelsea Ann and took notes on everything she had found wrong with the program’s courtroom scenes, I learned that Jill Mercer’s soft Southern accent originated right here in North Carolina.
“I was born in Elizabeth City and studied acting at ECU, a few years after Emily Proctor graduated. She was my idol and it still amazes me that I’ve pretty much matched her role for role,” she said proudly.
We traded courtroom stories, real and fictional, which led to Pete Jeffreys’s murder the night before.
“Did the police question y’all?” I asked.
She looked puzzled. “No. Why would they?”
“Because of the run-in Stone Hamilton had with him.”
“What run-in?”
So I told her how Jeffreys had kicked the boxer, claiming that it had lunged at him. “And he was strangled with a woven nylon dog leash just like the one Hamilton had for his dog.”
“Mo would never go for someone unprovoked,” she said.
“Mo?”
“Stone’s boxer. For Muhammad Ali. You think Jamie Lee Curtis was sappy over that chihuahua? Stone’s worse about Mo. He’s got a short temper, too, but if he didn’t deck the judge right then and there, he certainly wouldn’t go after him later.”
“He didn’t mention it to you?”
“No, but we’re not that tight, y’know? His girlfriend crews on the
Suddenly she laughed, then immediately apologized. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of your friend’s death, but if you and I were anything like Judge Darcy Jones, we’d have this thing wrapped up by the time they rolled the final commercial.”
I smiled. “And the killer would be—?”
“Oh, the sleazy prosecutor or the bailiff or some anonymous nobody at the back of her courtroom.”
We batted outrageous scenarios back and forth a while longer, but when Stackhouse proposed another round of drinks, I shook my head. “It’s been a long day and we have to be up early in the morning.”
Back at the hotel, Chelsea Ann and I both went straight to our rooms. Even though I was tired, I couldn’t resist going out on the balcony. The moon was three nights from full and was already on its downward slide over the top of the hotel, but it lit up the beach. From where I stood, I could see that the tide was quite low and the waves rolled in on long slow parallels that held me hypnotized till I realized that I was almost asleep standing up.
Before I fell off the balcony, I went inside and undressed, brushed my teeth, and smoothed cleansing cream on my face. That woke me enough to remember that I had been catching up on my voice mail when Reid’s call interrupted. I rooted my phone out of my purse, switched it on, and listened to one of my nieces asking if it was okay to bring some of her friends over to swim off my pier that afternoon. Because she and her cousins had been the one to build it, they had an open invitation to use it any time, so this was just a courtesy call.
Still no call from Dwight, but one from my sister-in-law Minnie reminded me of a political lunch we were supposed to attend on Friday and there was a second call from one of those unfamiliar and unidentified numbers.
I punched the button to play the message and adrenaline shot through my veins the instant I heard Dwight’s voice.
“Deb’rah? You get my last message? If you didn’t, call me back on this number, okay?”
