Greg Turner had the blond good looks of an All-America lacrosse player, as indeed he had been when he played for Duke twenty years earlier. With straight hair so blond that it was almost silver, extremely fair skin, keen blue eyes, a neck almost as wide as his head, and a lightly muscled body that stood two hairs over six feet, there was a prosperous sleekness about him when he poked his head in Dwight’s door in mid-afternoon and said, “You left a message with my office that you wanted to speak to me?”
Mayleen Richards was there to report on the morning’s findings and she rose to go, but Dwight motioned for her to stay, so she sat back down and nodded politely as introductions were made. She knew who this attorney was. Greg Turner was gaining a reputation for infallibility and clever arguments, especially in the big-money civil cases. Courthouse gossip had him divorced and currently unattached. He was certainly handsome, but did not appear conceited, and he was pleasant to everyone, even sheriff’s deputies with a high school education, while he himself was a graduate of the Duke school of law.
This was the man of her mother’s dreams—a super-white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant professional. There were some whispered speculations about his sexual orientation, but as long as they were only whispers, her mother could easily ignore them.
What she couldn’t ignore was Mayleen’s involvement with a dark-skinned Latino who owned a landscaping business and probably burned candles and incense to obscure saints no right-thinking Baptist had ever heard of.
Mayleen sighed and tried to concentrate on the interview.
“Yes,” Turner was saying with an easy smile. “I did get a phone call from Dee Bradshaw Sunday night. She left a message on my answering machine. Said she wanted to talk to me about her mother.”
“What about?”
“I have no idea.”
“The time of her call was around seven-fifteen, right?”
He nodded.
“You were out?”
“No, I was there, but I was in the middle of cooking myself an omelet for supper and I didn’t want to turn it off. I figured if it was anything important, they could leave a message and I’d call back.”
“It was quite a long message,” Dwight said. “Almost three minutes.”
“Yeah. She was talking about how Candace took her position on the board of commissioners very seriously and knew I did, too.”
“Do you mind if we listen to that message?” Richards asked.
Turner glanced at her as if surprised to find her still there and allowed to speak, but he gave her one of his high-wattage smiles meant to convey amused regret. “Sorry. I always erase my messages as soon as I’ve finished listening to them.”
“And you didn’t call her back?”
He shrugged. “Callous of me, I suppose, and now that she’s dead, I wish I had. But it had been a hard week and I just didn’t feel like dealing with a bereaved daughter at that moment.”
“Is there anyone who can vouch for your being at home alone all evening?”
He gave a small ironic smile. “Sorry. Alone means just that, Major Bryant.”
CHAPTER 20
. . . started out with a mule. Now
he’s got sixteen big John Deere tractors:
$100,000 a piece.
—Paul’s Hill, by Shelby Stephenson
I recessed for lunch a few minutes early on Tuesday at the request of the two attorneys who had not yet reached an agreement over damages incurred when a tree service dropped a huge dead oak tree on a neighbor’s in-ground swimming pool late last fall, smashing one corner and flattening the fence. The neighbor wanted an all-new pool, and he wanted it filled with water he didn’t have to pay for. He was also asking damages for the mental trauma caused by a tree falling near the sandbox where his two young sons were playing.
The tree service’s insurance company wanted to repair the corner and replace the fence, but they were not willing to pay for more than half the water as the pool had already been winterized and was a little low at the time. (With so many extra straws sipping water out of our rivers and treatment plants these days, water’s getting to be real pricey.) Because both parents had been at work while the boys played under the watchful eyes of a babysitter, the insurance company disputed how much trauma the neighbor had actually suffered.
If anyone had suffered trauma, it was probably the sitter. Unfortunately for her, she wasn’t a party to the suit. Testifying for the insurance company, she described how terrified she had been when she saw that tree come crashing down, but that the boys were delighted by the whole incident. Too young to realize how close they had come to serious harm, they thought it great fun to clamber up onto the tree trunk and walk along its length. They had even begged to keep it and cried when it was removed from their yard.
I left the attorneys to it and joined Portland Brewer and Jamie Jacobson for lunch at a Tex-Mex place three blocks from the courthouse. The food is cheap and good and there are booths along the back wall where we could talk without being interrupted. Even though I was early, they already had frozen margaritas in front of them. I knew that Portland was still nursing the baby, so hers would be a virgin and I told the waitress to bring me one about half the strength of whatever Jamie was drinking.
Jamie laughed. “And just what makes you think mine’s not a virgin, too?”
“I’m psychic.”
We caught up on each other’s doings over the weekend, but soon shifted to Jamie’s curiosity about Sassy Solutions and Danny Creedmore’s brother-in-law.
“It’s not a big deal,” I said, and explained how Will had come into possession of Linsey Thomas’s files and how some of them were clearly meant to be the basis for future Ledger stories. “For some reason he linked Grayson Village to you and Sassy Solutions both.”
“So? We both submitted proposals,” Jamie said, sipping from the salt-rimmed glass before her. “Wonder why he thought that would make a story?”
“You tell me. There was an arrow from your agency to Grayson Village, but the arrows to Sassy came from Danny and Candace.”
“I still don’t see why Linsey would care that we were competing for the same client. Happens all the time. They’ve got some sharp people working for them and we’ve come up with almost the same identical ideas at times, darn ’em! That’s how I missed landing Grayson Village. I thought I had a unique angle on a marketing approach and darned if they didn’t have the same angle, but with a slightly different spin.”
“Why’d he have a file on you and Mr. Kezzie?” Portland asked.
“Oh, you know how people always think it’s funny that a reformed bootlegger has a judge for a daughter. He probably thought it might make an amusing sidebar to another story.”
“So who else did he have files on?” asked Jamie as she delicately licked a grain of salt from her fingertip.
I lifted my own margarita for a first taste of its sour sweetness to give myself time to think about the affair Barbara Laughlin was supposedly having with Harvey Underwood, about Greg Turner’s flirtation with embezzlement, and a couple of implied acts of malfeasance on the part of the commissioners. Although it’s always fun to dish, I could wait until Terry’s people decided if there was anything that could be prosecuted. Portland and Jamie would be discreet if I asked them, but if I couldn’t hold my own tongue when it was part of Dwight’s investigation, how could I expect them to hold theirs?
So I shrugged and said, “I didn’t see anything except largely unsubstantiated allegations and Dwight’s turned it all over to the SBI.”