A call to Nanny Honeycutt snagged me the information I needed: Brittany Honeycutt was living with one of Gail’s cousins near Garner. She had been too young either to remember or to articulate any of the details about that night. Gail had not wanted her to testify. A court-appointed psychologist had agreed it would be too damaging, given how little the girl would have contributed.
Okay, a voice inside my head insisted, but now she’s at least eight years older. What could it hurt? Nanny Honeycutt tussled with me a little over my plan—that family sure was protective about the little girl—but in the end she agreed to call the cousin and get her permission. I could see the child tomorrow, on Saturday, since she was not in school. I thanked her and hung up.
I called to check on Bobby D. and the nurse told me he was fine, it was the rest of the hospital that was in pain. It seems Bobby snored loud enough to shake the rafters on the new addition they were building next door. They had his nostrils pried as wide open as the Grand Canyon, but when he was napping, the beds of the other patients rattled as if an earthquake had hit. I thanked her for her colorful update and hung up. The phone rang immediately.
Bill Butler. Now that was a surprise.
“Why aren’t you at the graveside service?” he asked.
“Why aren’t you?” I said back.
“I asked first.”
I sighed. Now we had deteriorated to the level of five year olds fighting over a Twinkie. “I hate graveside services. Don’t ask.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “I’m back on the job. Lots of pressure. Attempted rape last night. The victim escaped with broken teeth. But half of Raleigh’s in a panic.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “I swear I’m innocent.”
“I doubt that sincerely. But for this one, you’re off the hook. You don’t fit the description.” He paused. I was getting mighty curious as to why he had called.
“Wheindowtexhy did you call me if you thought I’d be at the service?” I finally asked when the silence stretched to an embarrassing length.
“I just wanted to know how the case was going,” he said. “And I had a few minutes free.”
“It’s going just fine,” I told him. “Except I’m being followed by some homicidal maniac.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked quickly.
I wasn’t about to tell him about the break-in or explain about my illegal gun or why I had failed to call the police. “I think someone’s been following me whenever I drive somewhere,” I said instead.
“That’s easy to mistake when you’re nervous,” he said, sounding relieved.
“I’m not imagining it,” I insisted.
“Maybe not,” he conceded. It wasn’t good enough for me. I was hoping my silence would intimidate him. It didn’t. He gathered back some of the old Bill Butler strength. “Hey, how about a late dinner tonight?” he suggested. “We can talk and try to hammer out some sort of a working relationship here. Get back on track. I’m sorry about how I acted at the funeral. I was a little upset. Seems you might be right about Roy Taylor having been a dirty cop. I got a source over in Durham says it was true. It pisses me off when I’m wrong.”
Now that was interesting. “Sounds good to me,” I agreed. “Let’s meet.”
“Great,” he said. “I’ll call you or you call me about eleven. How’s that sound?”
Before I had the wherewithal to realize that he had assumed I’d be free on a Friday night, Bill had hung up. Oh well, I never was good at that particular brand of game playing anyway.
But why had he really called? I’d bet my new black-lace bra that he wanted something from me other than dinner or sex. But what?
It was time to face facts. I had nothing to go on. I needed those files Peyton had left behind real bad. I decided to get to Sylvia’s house early and shanghai her as soon as she arrived. I packed my current case files back into the trunk’s tire well and headed for Sylvia’s. But it took me a good thirty minutes just to reach her home in a very expensive subdivision of North Raleigh. An inordinate number of oldsters crawling along at five miles an hour seemed to be clogging the roads. When I finally arrived at the address she’d given me, it looked like a huge party was in progress. Land boat after land boat hogged the curb, and a steady stream of elderly visitors flowed into the house.
I should have realized that southerners weren’t going to forego an opportunity to eat. This was the post-funeral wake. Inside there’d be platters of turkey and ham biscuits, tea sandwiches, miniature quiches, pound cake out the wazoo, punch and god knows what other goodies. Before the day was out, someone would die of cholesterol overload, and the cycle would begin anew. What a dilemma for an antisocial paranoid like me. Should I brave the mourners for a plateful of munchies? On the plus side, this crowd was old and slow. I’d have an easy time hogging the pickin’s. On the minus side, I’d be obligated to listen to a gazillion childhood stories about Peyton, and I’d end up more depressed than the first runner-up in a beauty contest. I decided to hunker down and wait for the crowd to thin. Then I’d go in.
An hour later, the crowd was still thick—and getting thicker on my share of the feast. My eyelids grew heavy in the warm incubator of the car and I dozed off. I woke when a rapping on the car window interrupted my dreams.
A young black woman wearing a rent-a-maid apron was standing politely in the street, waiting for me to get my ass in gear.
“Yes?” I asked, rolling down the window.
“Miss Bennett wants to know if you’d like a plate of food to eat while you’re on stakeout, or if you’d prefer to remain undisturbed.”
Well, damn. I guess the grieving fiancée was a lot more on the ball than I gave her credit for. “I’d like a boatload of food,” I told the woman. “Heavy on the starches and meat. And maybe a ton of pound cake.”
“Ice tea?” she asked politely. “Looks like you could use some caffeine to me.”
I nodded my head in drowsy agreement. “And please tell Miss Bennett I send her my thanks.”
“Would the gentleman like anything?” the girl asked, her eyes sliding further down the street.
“The gentleman?” I asked, turning around so I could get a better look.
“The man in the red car. Miss Bennett said he was probably with you. He’s right there…” She pointed to a bend in the crowded road. “He was right there,” she amended herself. “I guess he’s gone.”
“Just bring me his share,” I suggested. “When he shows up again, I’ll give it to him.”
“Be right back with your boatload,” she promised, though her sweet voice never wavered. She was a stealth smart-ass, it seemed.
She was as good as her word, but by the time she appeared with the food, I still hadn’t figured out who the hell the man in the red car could be. An image of a crazed ex-bartender flickered through my mind. But how tacky to stalk me at someone’s wake, for chrissakes. I wished Jack hadn’t mentioned the fact that the fellow had a gun. I’d have given up the entire portion of chopped-pork barbecue heaped before me for the clean feel of my Astra in my hand.
Since my options were few, I got my revenge by eating the mysterious stranger’s food right after I polished off mine. Two plates of food and two glasses of iced tea later, I felt like a hog the night before first frost and had to piss like a race-horse. Fortunately, the wake showed signs of slowing down. Mourners had started to filter out the front door and totter toward their cars. As their cars pulled away, one by one, they crept forward at a whopping three miles an hour. It could take days just to clear the street. Finally, everyone was gone except for two catering vans parked in the concrete driveway. It was time to go inside.
“I’m sorry but Miss Bennett is sleeping,” the same maid told me after I emerged from my desperate dash to the bathroom. “She just got to sleep a few minutes ago.”
I didn’t have the heart to wake her. I’d waited a good three hours. I’d just have to wait a little bit longer. Maybe I’d take the opportunity for a little more shut-eye myself.
If I could have afforded a maid, I’d have snapped up Sylvia Bennett’s in a heartbeat. “Would you care to relax in the den?” she asked. “Miss Bennett seemed anxious to see you. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
I sank into an immaculate white couch and was soon breast-deep in pillows. I removed my high heels and groaned in ecstasy. My doggies were barking up a storm. Without asking, the maid brought me a beer—god bless her well- trained heart—and I spent a few hours sipping imported brew and channel surfing old movies on a fifty-two-inch color television. I felt like an upper-crust coach potato. So this was how the other half lived.
It was dark and the evening news was long over by the time Sylvia Bennett reappeared. She was wearing a green velour sweat suit and her eyes were bleary with sleep and dried tears. She shuffled into the den and slumped down on the couch next to me, staring at what was on the television screen: “An Affair To Remember.” I switched it off.
“You okay?” I asked.
She stared at my beer. “That looks good.”
“I’m sure your maid would bring you one. Personally, I think she should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.”
The comment almost earned a smile. “She is a good person,” Sylvia agreed. “One of Peyton’s cases from when he d grom whewas a judge. He put her on probation when she was seventeen and ordered her into drug rehab and a remedial high-school diploma program instead of jail,” she explained. “When she came out, she needed a job and a place to live so she could stay away from her old ‘friends.’ I needed someone to help me with this house.”
“It is a big house for one person,” I said.
She shrugged. “My grandmother died six years ago and left me more money than I know what to do with. But I hate this house. It makes me even more lonely than I already am. I was planning to sell it and move in with Peyton.”
We were both quiet then, our silence interrupted only when the maid entered the room with another cold beer for me on a tray. She had brought a cup of hot tea for Sylvia.
Sylvia didn’t argue. She sipped and watched the maid move quietly from the room. “Have you noticed that the only person taking care of me right now was a complete stranger a year ago?” she asked. “And that I have to pay for the privilege?”
“She seems pretty devoted to you,” I said. “Who cares how long you’ve known her?”
Sylvia stared at her hands. They were immaculately manicured, unlike my own chipped mess. I had to fight the urge to hide them behind my back.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I asked politely, though I was itching to grab the files and run.
“Yes. You can get those files out of my house. They’re in the study.” She rose slowly, as if she were decades older than she was, and I followed her down a long hall to the far side of the house. She talked as she led the way. “The police don’t know much,” she said. “They don’t seem to think it’s suicide. They wanted to know what I thought of you. I told them I’d never met you in my life.” She smiled at me grimly. “Too bad we had to meet under these circumstances, huh?” She was parodying the comment she must have heard a hundred times earlier that day.
“What else did the police say?” I asked. “If you feel comfortable telling me.”
“They wanted to know if Peyton had received any threats recently. If he’d seemed unusually bothered. If his finances were healthy. That sort of thing.”
“What did you tell them?” We reached the door of a locked room, and I waited while she unearthed a key from the base of a nearby wall shelf.
“I told them that no one had threatened Peyton to my knowledge, that he was upset about the Taylor execution next month and that he had more money than he knew what to do with.”
n>
She threw open the door and we entered a perfect replica of a nineteenth-century study, complete with Oriental rug, expensive mahogany furniture and original Currier & Ives on the walls. “You’re a decorator?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Not going to change the world much, is it?” She walked over to an antique rolltop desk and fumbled for the upper catch. “I’m not giving the files to the police,” she said. “They don’t even know I have them.”
“Why not?” I asked as she searched through the slots of the desk.
“When I figured out that Peyton was having some problems,” she explained, “I suggested he go to the police. He said he couldn’t. That they were part of the problem.”
“Part of the problem?” I repeated. “He said ‘they.’ As in plural? Was he talking about the Roy Taylor case?”
She frowned, then opened the side drawers and continued to search. “I don’t know what he was talking about,” she finally answered. “I just know it was more than one folder. There were about nine or ten in all, labeled with numbers that were maybe ten digits or more long. There might have been dashes, too. I can’t remember. I asked Peyton what they were all about, but he said it was nothing. Just some old questions that needed asking about a matter that might help Gail Honeycutt. He said it all happened before he ever met me. He said something like, ‘I can’t believe it was right there in front of my eyes and I didn’t put it together.’ He wouldn’t tell me any more. He said it was safer if I didn’t know.”
Suddenly, her shoulders sagged. She pulled out the straight-back chair that matched the desk and slumped down in it, putting her head down on the green-felt blotter. In a moment I heard her sobs. This was it. The woman had lost her shit. “They’re not here,” she said between sniffles. “And you know what? I can’t deal with any of this.” She began to cry harder.