“Catch you later,” I said. “I may still go for a swim.”
I lay there for close to another hour mulling over the events of the week while the sun sank lower in the sky. Just before it touched the top of the hotel, I saw Allen’s two children dart past me. Allen trundled along behind, loaded like a packhorse with thermal bags, towels, sand toys, and an umbrella.
“Need a hand?” I called.
“Three or four if you got ’em.”
The umbrella slid out of his hand and I rescued it for him and helped him set up next to mine.
“Thanks, darlin’. You all by your lonesome this evening?”
“For the moment. Hey, Tiffany Jane. Hey, Tyler. Y’all having fun here?”
The little girl nodded shyly and the toddler gave me a goofy smile.
“Did you put sunscreen on them yet?” I asked.
“Well, damn!” he said. “I knowed I was forgetting something.”
“That’s okay. I have some.” I rummaged in my bag and found the bottle. “Come here, honey, and let me rub it on you.”
The child came and knelt on my towel and held her beautiful little face up for me to smooth on the cream. Allen was right. She really was going to break a heart or two before it was over. When I finished with her arms and shoulders, she took the bottle and said she could do her legs herself. “And Tyler, too.”
“Tippy-canoe and Tyler, too,” Allen teased, his white teeth flashing beneath his luxuriant mustache.
“Oh, Daddy!” she protested, having clearly heard him say this many times before.
“Why you reckon folks say that?” Allen asked me. “I can see how a tippy-canoe could be a problem, but what’s with the Tyler, too?”
“It was an old campaign slogan. From back in the eighteen-hundreds, I think. Tippecanoe was the Indian nickname for some presidential candidate, and Tyler was running for vice president, but don’t ask me who he was or if he won.”
Well covered in sunscreen now, the children took their buckets and shovels down to the water’s edge.
Allen sat cross-legged on his towel to keep an eye on them and popped the top on a can of light beer. “You want one?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “What happened to your finger?”
I had just noticed that his right index finger was bandaged and seemed to have a splint on it.
“You know what happened, darlin’.” He took a long swallow of beer. “You was there.”
“You broke your finger when you punched Will Blackstone?”
“That his name? Sucker’s got a damn hard head.”
“And a very black eye, so you two are even.”
I couldn’t help laughing and he gave a rueful shrug. “He ain’t bothered you again, did he?”
“No.”
“Good.”
My knight in shining armor.
“I heard that one of the waiters at Jonah’s killed Judge Jeffreys?”
I nodded.
“And then he got hisself killed in a car crash?”
“Yeah. They think he was going too fast and hydroplaned off an exit ramp.”
“Amateurs.” His voice dripped with the scorn of a professional stock car driver for nonprofessionals who take unnecessary risks. “They know why he killed Jeffreys?”
“The theory is that Jeffreys propositioned him in the men’s room and he freaked out.”
Allen lowered his beer can and looked at me in puzzlement. “Pete Jeffreys gay? No way in hell.”
“You can’t always tell.”
“The hell you can’t. Well, maybe
No matter how I argued that one could never be a hundred percent certain about another’s sexuality, Allen was that tree planted by the water. He could not be moved.
In the end his conviction convinced me and I went back to the hotel to call Gary Edwards.
* * *
“I hate to admit it,” Edwards said when I finally got through to him, “but from all we’ve heard, your friend is probably right. Judge Blankenthorpe’s sure he would never have sought a homosexual encounter and that’s what we’re getting from our inquiries in Greensboro.”
“So you’re back at the beginning with no motive?”
