Aphrodite Smith looked over at me now, and I decided I was also glad I’d never dated a police detective.
Given the head start I had on Maurice Tinch’s likely whereabouts, I found him in the nearby tavern before the unmarked sedan parked in front of his three-decker began a canvas of the neighborhood.
Still on the corner stool, Tinch caught me coming into the bar. He’d just about finished peeling the label off the fifth of five empty bottles of High Life. You could bet he’d finished the beer itself long before.
“The man who likes to buy me beer.”
I took the next stool again, but waved off the approaching bartender.
“You do that with every bottle you drink?”
“The way I pace myself. I don’t drink the next one until I finish scraping off the last.”
“You been pacing yourself here since I saw you?”
“Uh-oh.” He stopped his fingernail and actually engaged my eyes. “Now that sound to me like a police question.”
“It soon will be. Gloria Carson, Devonne’s girlfriend, was killed out in Calem sometime this afternoon.”
“Well, well.” A shake of the head as he doubled his efforts on the label. “Seem like that town just bad luck for everybody, don’t it?”
I glanced toward the beer cooler. “Our bartender be willing to alibi you?”
“Like they call it in the movies, I am iron-clad. Been sitting here since twelve noon, and I left my fine stool only to go to the Men’s. And Devonne, he in jail, so he be free on this one too.”
“Any ideas who might not be?”
“Like I say before, Devonne never bring any of his ‘society’ friends around. Besides, I think he like it fine, visiting his girl-friend’s house out there. Her daddy travel a lot, her momma got to go to the store and such. Privacy, if you catch onto my drift.”
“Your brother and Gloria Carson made love in her parents’ house?”
“Wouldn’t be up to our bloodline if he didn’t.” Maurice Tinch finished with the label. “My, my, what do you know? Looks like you come just in the nick of time.”
V
“Any good news?”
From the way Devonne Tinch toned his voice in the jail’s little conference room, I didn’t think he’d yet heard about Gloria Carson.
There is no easy way to tell someone that kind of bad news, so I decided to go for shock value in the hope of opening him up.
“Devonne, Gloria’s dead.”
His hard eyes bore into me. “Say what?”
“Somebody caved in her skull, then dumped her body in a public park under some trees.”
Tinch came out of his chair, fists curled, but more to pound my chest than punch. I clamped my hands around his wrists, and shook my head in an emphatic “no” to the guard stationed outside the glass walls.
Tinch shuddered once, twice, then just seemed to collapse inside himself, dropping back into his chair nearly hard enough to break it.
I waited a moment before, “Devonne?”
He brought his palms up to his face. “Who would want to kill Gloria?”
“Your brother told me you visited her out in Calem.”
“Of course I did. That’s where she lives... lived.”
“At her house. When her parents weren’t home.”
Tinch snapped up at me, his hands slapping the tabletop in front of him. “You mean, did I do the deed with her? Oh, sure, man. I nailed every damned white girl in the whole damned town.”
“Devonne, stay with me on this. It’s important.”
A sullen expression. “What is?”
“You remember telling me about the incident three years ago, with the older woman?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Did you ever mention it to Gloria?”
“Man, that’d be crazier than me telling the METCO people about it.”
“You also said something like, ‘I didn’t even wear a condom. I could have gotten a disease.’ ”
“Like I told you. But what does that have—”
“When Gloria and you made love, did you use a condom?”
“Of course we did. You think I didn’t learn my lesson?” Tinch closed his eyes and hung his head. “We even made a little game out of it, her putting the thing on me and then her taking it off again afterwards.”
“And Gloria was friends with Lisabeth Hamilton since grade school, right.”
“So?”
“So where do you suppose Lisabeth got a sample of your semen to put on her clothes?”
Devonne Tinch opened his eyes, and his mouth too, though no words came out.
More of a wail.
On my drive back out to Calem, the radio news broadcast closed its coverage of Gloria Carson’s murder with an announcement that the town’s high school would be closed for the following two days, except that grief counselors would be available “as usual” for any students wanting to talk about their friend and classmate’s death. As I turned onto the right street, I turned off the radio, thinking that it would have been unthinkable during my teenaged years for there to be a standard protocol for dealing with a student’s sudden, violent death.
The big Lincoln Navigator roared out of its driveway, the garage door opened behind it to show the Mercedes coupe still there. Because of the window tinting on the S.U.V., I couldn’t see who was in it, but the driver sped the car down the street the way Grant Hamilton had led me to his home earlier that day.
I parked at the curb again and walked up to the Hamiltons’ front door.
I knocked, first softly, then really pounding. Nobody responded.
I went into the garage, and the door from it onto the family room was unlocked. I walked quietly until I could hear muffled crying from upstairs. I climbed the steps, staying to the inside edge of each to minimize any squeaking.
And to notice that two people were crying behind separate closed doors.
I picked the one that sounded more like a fourteen-year-old girl.
After knocking and hearing a “Go away,” from behind the paneled wood, I tried the handle. Unlocked, also. I eased the door open.
Inside the room, Lisabeth Hamilton was lying prone diagonally across her bed, crying into a pillow she’d scrunched under her face. There was some kind of video playing on the computer screen in a hutch next to the bed, a frilly reading chair beside the hutch.
Given the thick wall-to-wall carpeting, I didn’t think she’d heard me walk in. “Lisabeth?”
She abruptly rose up onto knees and elbows, swinging her face around to glare at me through the tears. “What are you doing in my house?”
“I know what you and Gloria did, and I even know why.”
Hamilton went back to her pillow. “Get out of here.”
“But you have to tell me who killed her and why.”
“Get out now!”
A bluff had worked with her father back on the school grounds. “Whether you’ve had the abortion yet or not, some tissue from the fetus is kept as evidence in the rape case. And tested, Lisabeth, including for DNA.”
Hamilton let out a wail that didn’t sound any better coming from her than its mate had from Devonne Tinch back at the Middlesex jail.
I took another step into the room. “And this time, the DNA won’t match my client’s.”
From behind me, I heard the choked voice of the Honorable Willa Hamilton manage to say, “You move, and I’ll shoot.”
We made an odd trio. Lisabeth, still lying on her bed, crying in denial. Mrs. Hamilton, standing, with her makeup ruined and her hands shaking around a short-barreled revolver, its muzzle wavering but close enough not to miss if she emptied the thing in my direction. And me, sitting in the frilly reading chair next to Lisabeth’s computer hutch.