“And that’s the way we’ll probably leave it. Something’s worrying the ME, but he’s promised us a preliminary report tomorrow. Soon as that comes my boss and the DA will both be ready to call it closed.”
“What’s bothering him?” I asked.
“Not enough blood,” Edwards said succinctly. “Bad as he was banged up, his clothes should have been soaked. Probably washed off in the rain… or…”
“Or what?” I asked. Yet even as I asked, it came to me. “Could he have already been dead before the car crashed?”
“Yeah. The ME wants to take another look at Armstrong’s heart. See if maybe he had a heart attack first.”
Possibilities suddenly started to shift and rearrange themselves in my head and a different pattern began to emerge. “There’s one more thing,” I said. “Something Judge Ouellette told me.”
When I finished talking, there was a long silence on his end.
At last, I said, “You do remember that the conference ends at noon tomorrow and everyone scatters after that?”
“Yes, but—”
“Better me than Fitz,” I told him firmly. “And if I’m wrong, I’ll bring a crow with me the next time I come to Wilmington and you can watch me eat it.”
He laughed. “You’re on.”
CHAPTER
29
After showering, I dressed for comfort, not style: black flats, loose black knit slacks with a white belt, a red knit halter top, and the earrings I’d made at the Cotton Exchange. With luck, Mel Garrett would have found my red- and-white hoops. Enamel over some sort of gold-colored metal. They had probably cost less than twenty dollars, but their sentimental value was above rubies. My favorite nephew had given them to me for my birthday when he was sixteen and I was touched that he had noticed my fondness for red.
I stopped at a drugstore on the way into town and bought several fat scented candles in preparation for Dwight’s arrival tomorrow night. Candles add so much to a Jacuzzi, don’t you think? And with all the angled mirrors around the tub, a few flames would look like dozens.
I made sure that my phone was switched on before I put it in my pocket. Unless it’s an emergency, Dwight is the world’s slowest driver. Nevertheless, if he’d left his conference according to plan, he could be getting home any time now and I didn’t want to miss his call.
When I got to Jonah’s, it was almost eight-thirty and the dinner rush had wound down. Even in June, vacationers aren’t standing in line to eat that late on a Tuesday night and Hank had time to chat for a few minutes while we waited for Mel Garrett to finish taking credit cards at her table.
“Sorry, Judge,” she said when she came up to me. “The only earrings are a rhinestone stud and some cheap clipons. A hell of a lot of lipsticks, though, if you’re missing one of those.” Her own lipstick was a deep dark purple that gave her a vaguely goth look and complemented the streaks in her hair.
“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said, looking out over the stepped-down dining areas. The sun had just set and bands of orange and gold burnished the river. “Not too crowded tonight.”
“Yeah, weekdays, this town pretty much rolls up its sidewalks after nine.”
“I guess y’all heard the motive the police have come up with for why Kyle killed Judge Jeffreys?”
“Not me,” said Mel, leaning closer as I lowered my voice. “Hank?”
He looked up from running the credit cards she’d handed him and shook his head.
“They think the judge hit on him in the bathroom and that Kyle got insulted, freaked out and killed him in a blind rage.”
“No shit!” said Mel, who seemed incapable of removing all the salt from her speech. I could almost see the wheels turning in her head as she fit my words with the guy she had met only a few weeks earlier when she and Hank first came to work at Jonah’s. She liked it, though. She liked it a lot because her dark eyes gleamed when she said to Hank, “He would have gone off like a pistol, wouldn’t he, Hank? Remember how he almost punched Biff in the nose for trying to flirt with him?”
“It did make him crazy when people took it for granted that he was gay,” Hank said slowly, looking at me with those shrewd, intelligent eyes. “You’re not buying it, though, are you?”
I shrugged. “Nobody at the conference knew Kyle, but several of my colleagues have known Judge Jeffreys for several years and no one believes he was wired that way.”
“But they still think it was Kyle, right?” asked Mel, who seemed reluctant to let go of her coworker’s guilt. “I mean it
“Right. But if he left his car on the street and rode his bicycle back and forth to work, someone could have hot-wired it and had it back where it belonged before Kyle missed it.”
“Oh, come on, Judge!” She pushed a fall of fuchsia hair back from her face with an impatient hand. “You saying it’s a coincidence that Kyle decided to leave town this weekend?”
“Not at all. His death is too convenient for it to be a coincidence. Whoever killed Jeffreys probably killed Kyle, too, and then sent his car off that ramp.”
