“And right now, Isabel probably does, too.”
“
“Last summer,” I said. “Wrightsville Beach. Our summer conference?”
He smiled, remembering the Jacuzzi in my hotel room. “Yeah?”
“I told you that the trial lawyers were having their conference, too. Remember? I had a drink with Reid and some of his colleagues that first night before I found one of my colleagues floating in the river?”
“So?”
“There was an attorney at the table that they called Gallie. Not a high school student, Dwight. Someone out of Malcolm’s past. I had lunch with Reid just now and he says the guy’s real name is Paul Gallagher. He married a girl from Asheville and has been in practice out there ever since he graduated from law school. He’s originally from Fuquay, though, and when he heard that I was from outside Cotton Grove, he asked me if I knew various people. Malcolm Johnson was one of several he mentioned. He said he and Malcolm used to room next door to each other at Carolina and hadn’t seen each other in years till he ran into Malcolm and his son in Raleigh last spring. He said the son wanted to hear all about what Malcolm was like when they were in college.”
Dwight still didn’t get it. “What’s that got to do with Jeff Barefoot? Or Isabel, for that matter.”
“Gallagher said he was poor as Job’s turkey back then. Didn’t have a car and Malcolm often gave him a ride home since Fuquay’s right on the way to Cotton Grove. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions without a net,” I said, “but I think you ought to look up the records, see if there was much of an investigation when Jeff Barefoot fell off his roof that night and supposedly hit his head on a rock. See if that’s the same day the kids would be getting home from Carolina. Fuquay’s only twenty minutes from Cotton Grove. If he says Malcolm dropped him off around six, why did it take Malcolm two hours to get home?”
Exasperated, Dwight said, “Now how the hell do you know it took him two hours?”
“I called Isabel. That woman doesn’t forget a thing.”
When my sister-in-law answered the phone an hour earlier, I had asked her if she remembered telling me how Malcolm and Sarah had married.
“Oh, honey, yes,” she’d said. “I can’t stop grieving for them. Especially poor Sarah, losing her daughter right here at Christmas just like she lost her first husband. It was a blessing for her to have another fine man wanting her, but it sure did hurt Jeff’s mama. I told you about that.”
“Yes. That she was bitter because Malcolm got Jeff’s wife and Jeff’s son and Jeff’s life.” Hesitantly, I had asked Isabel, “I don’t suppose anybody asked where Malcolm was when Jeff fell off the roof?”
“Now, you know something? That’s exactly what Jeff’s mama wanted to know when Sarah was fixing to get married again. She just couldn’t believe that Jeff would fall off his own roof when he’d been up and down so many roofs his whole life.”
“She thought Mal had something to do with it?”
“No, not really. That was the grief talking. Like I said, Jeff and Mal stayed real good friends. Only time they had a cross word was when Jeff and Sarah eloped to South Carolina. He thought Jeff should’ve told him so he could be the best man.”
“So where
“Driving home from Chapel Hill for Christmas. I heard he hadn’t been in the house a half hour till somebody called him about Jeff’s fall. His mother was so provoked. She’d made a dinner party ’specially so Malcolm could meet the daughter of some fancy-pants businessman in Raleigh. They were supposed to eat at seven-thirty, but he didn’t get home till almost eight, and even then, soon as he got that phone call, he left and went right over to Jeff’s house. He was so tore up about it, he even finished stringing up the lights and threw the rock into the gully out back of the house so Sarah wouldn’t have to see it.”
“Now wasn’t that real thoughtful of him?” I had said.
At that point, Isabel had caught her breath. “When you say it like that, honey… you don’t really think—? Do you?”
“And then he married her eight months later.”
“Oh, Lord, honey,” she had said. “You gonna tell Dwight?”
When I finished repeating that conversation to Dwight, I said, “Don’t you think Jeff’s mother might have hinted at something like that to Charlie when he and Malcolm started having problems? Then Charlie met Gallagher last spring and right after that he changed his name. You don’t think the two events are related?”
“That’s an awfully big jump, shug,” Dwight said. “You don’t know that Jeff died the same evening this Gallagher person hitched a ride. Or that it was even the same Christmas.”
Even while he was throwing up reasonable objections, I could see his mind working.
“Malcolm always did go after whatever he wanted, but this? I don’t know, Deb’rah.”
Denning and Richards returned almost together. Denning had caught Judge Longmire on his way out the door. He agreed to hang around a few minutes longer if it turned out that Malcolm Johnson really did own a .32.
“He does,” said Richards. “Bought it eight years ago. What you want to bet that he’s the one that smashed Faison’s flashlight?”
“Get me a warrant form,” Dwight told her.
He turned to me with a what-can-I-tell-you look on his face.
I fixed him with a stern eye. “It’s not even two o’clock yet. If y’all can’t find that gun and book him in three hours, you’re not much of a detective. Besides, it’s your family. Six o’clock, mister.”
CHAPTER 31
