“Not half as much as I’ve missed you, shug. I’ve been thinking. If Mama can keep Cal, how about I hitch a ride down to Wilmington on Thursday?”
“Really?” My heart was suddenly turning somersaults.
“Well, I haven’t seen you in that new red bathing suit yet,” he drawled, and from there the conversation took a decidedly different turn.
After we finally said good night, I continued to sit there in the moonlight, nursing my drink because I was too lazy to go in and order another.
For once, indolence and sloth were rewarded. I heard low voices and glanced over to see Chelsea Ann and Gary Edwards walking toward me with their own nightcaps.
“I thought that was you,” she said. She held Edwards’s drink while he pulled two more rocking chairs closer to mine to form a rough semicircle.
“How was the cruise?” I asked.
“Awful,” Edwards said.
Chelsea Ann gave his arm a light poke. “No, it wasn’t. But we almost didn’t go.”
“Why not?”
“It seems that cruising the river in the moonlight isn’t enough. They have special entertainment every night.” She giggled. “Guess what tonight’s was?”
I shook my head.
“A murder mystery,” Edwards groaned.
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was. I thought there would be dancing. Instead it was bad actors waving guns or running around with bloody knives, while everyone roared with laughter. Like murder’s a funny joke.”
“We found a place out on a deck that was away from all the mayhem,” Chelsea Ann said. “It was beautiful. Very relaxing. I’m glad we went.”
I noticed that his hand had found hers.
“Well, not to spoil the mood here, but something occurred to me this evening,” I told Edwards. “The money in Pete Jeffreys’s wallet. Didn’t you say it was over two hundred dollars?”
“Yeah. About two-sixty, I think. Why?”
“Well, Judge Blankenthorpe said they stopped at an ATM on their way to Jonah’s and he got three hundred dollars. That’s why she was so annoyed that he stuck her with his dinner check. She knew he had cash. Unless they stopped somewhere else along the way, what happened to that forty dollars?”
Edwards frowned. “Wouldn’t have been robbery. A thief wouldn’t have left that much cash and the credit cards.”
“Here’s what I was thinking could have happened. Say he started the evening with only ten or fifteen dollars in his wallet, which is why he stopped at an ATM. With a couple of drinks, his dinner would have run around fifty dollars. What if he ran into Kyle Armstrong in the restroom and that’s when they got into it? Then, instead of going back to the table, he pulls out his wallet and hands Armstrong enough cash to cover his bill and storms out the door to the parking lot. Armstrong kills him, pockets the money and goes back in and acts like nothing’s happened.”
Edwards thought about it a minute, then nodded. “I like it. Especially if—hey! Was Jeffreys gay by any chance?”
I shrugged and Chelsea Ann was equally unsure. “I haven’t heard that he was, but I didn’t know him, why?”
“Because one of the other waiters at Jonah’s is. He says he tried to hit on Armstrong last month and almost got punched in the nose. What if Jeffreys came on so strong to him in the men’s room that he freaked out?”
“Yes!” I said as the last piece of the puzzle snapped into place. “Armstrong did strike me as somebody so caught up in his own image that he didn’t have a real firm grasp on reality.”
“And if that image was one of total masculinity?” said Chelsea Ann, who’s seen as many impulsive and self- delusional people in her court as I have.
Edwards leaned back in his rocker and smiled at us. “Finally! A reasonable motive for why he killed a man we couldn’t prove he’d met before. Thanks, Your Honor.”
“Call me Deborah,” I said with a meaningful glance at their entwined fingers. “For some reason, I have this weird premonition that our paths are going to keep crossing.”
“By the way,” Chelsea Ann said sweetly. “What time’s our first session tomorrow?”
“Oh, yeah, right,” I said as I finished the last drops of my drink and stood up. “Sorry to have to say good night, but I really need my beauty sleep.”
Hey, I can take a hint as quick as anybody. Especially when it’s a hit over the head with a sledgehammer.
CHAPTER
27
