I took the towel off my head and began finger-combing my wet hair. “You couldn’t reach the blood tech or your ex-client yesterday, right?”
“He’s somewhere between here and Baltimore, according to his girlfriend, and she doesn’t expect him back till tonight. I’ve left messages with her and with his office.”
“What about the technician?”
“Unlisted home phone. And Jamerson Labs doesn’t open till nine this morning. I’ll try again then, okay?”
“Fine,” I said. No point riding my high horse over Portland. She knew the seriousness of this without any lectures or exhortations from me. “Just let me know when you’ve got them rounded up so we can tell Ambrose.”
Portland might not have been waiting for me in chambers, but Merrilee and Pete Grimes were. After handling the details of Dallas’s funeral for Mr. Jap, Merrilee considered herself an old hand at dealing with the Medical Examiner’s office over in Chapel Hill. To her frustration though, she wasn’t being allowed to deal.
Anything that upsets Merrilee upsets Pete, and both of them wanted me to do something.
“They’re ready to release Uncle Jap’s body, but Duck Aldcroft says he can’t send a hearse for it because Allen’s Uncle Jap’s next of kin and nobody’s seen him since Friday.”
“Did you speak to Dwight?” I asked, fiddling with the zipper of my robe. Judge Carly Jernigan’s widow had given me this robe and its old-fashioned metal teeth had caught a fold of my blouse. I was hoping to work it loose without marking the white silk.
“He says he’s got the Highway Patrol keeping an eye out for Allen’s truck, but if you ask me, that doesn’t sound too urgent.”
Pete gave a supportive rumble. “If he smashed poor old Jap and took off with the money, he could be halfway to California by now.”
Merrilee nodded vigorously. “And Uncle Jap could just lie over there in Chapel Hill and—and—and rot for all he cares!”
Pete hitched his chair closer to hers and embraced her protectively. He was such a man mountain and she was so small and dainty that images of King Kong and Faye Wray flashed through my head as Merrilee automatically leaned into his arm.
An attorney stuck his head in the door waving a show-cause order I’d promised to sign and I was conscious that it was time to head for the courtroom even though I still hadn’t called over to Social Services as I’d planned. The zipper chose that moment to release my blouse and yes, it left an ugly metallic mark right at my bustline.
“Look, Merrilee, Pete,” I said, “John Claude Lee was acting as Mr. Jap’s attorney. Why don’t you go speak to him, see what he can do about the situation? After all, you’d have been one of the—”
I abruptly caught myself, but Merrilee’s narrow little Yadkin eyes sharpened alertly.
“I’d’ve been one of what?”
I shrugged, annoyed that I’d let myself be distracted into speaking indiscreetly and even more annoyed because I knew Merrilee would never leave until I satisfied the curiosity I’d unleashed.
“One of what, Deborah?” she asked again when I’d signed the show cause and the attorney was gone.
I stood and finished zipping my robe. “I spoke out of turn, but it doesn’t really matter, I guess. Mr. Jap was planning to sign a will today that would have split his estate equally between you and Allen. You would have been co-beneficiary. Now, of course, it’ll probably all go to Allen. I’m sorry, Merrilee.”
Pete was frowning as he worked it out in his head, but Merrilee was suddenly transformed. Tears streamed from her eyes, but her smile was radiant.
“Oh, Deborah! Was he really going to leave me half?”
I’d never seen anyone react quite like this to hearing they’re not going to inherit a penny. “The will doesn’t count, Merrilee, because he didn’t—”
She brushed that aside. “I don’t care about his money. Don’t you see? All these years, ever since Aunt Elsie died, I’ve been looking in on Uncle Jap, making sure he was all right, doing the sort of woman things Dallas couldn’t and Cherry Lou wouldn’t. And then when Allen came—Uncle Jap was never one for thanking people, not that I wanted to be thanked. Jesus says, ‘As you do it for the least of these, you do it for me,’ and that’s what I tried to do, but even so, it was hard to watch Allen taking and taking and Uncle Jap acting like he hung the moon. And now you tell me that he was going to will me half of what he had?”
She jumped up and gave me a hug. “Thank you for telling me, Deb’rah. Now I know that he did appreciate that I loved him and that he loved me back.”
“Aw, honey,” said Pete, looking as if he could eat her with a spoon. “Of course he loved you. Everybody loves you.”
Remembering how enthusiastically Mr. Jap had planned Allen’s future with a well-equipped garage, even if it meant selling off some of his land to get the cash, I had to wonder whether the equitable division in his will sprang from love and gratitude or was the result of John Claude’s power of persuasion and sense of fair play. John Claude would surely have pointed out to the old man that Elsie’s niece was just as deserving as his nephew.
“You go talk to John Claude,” I told Pete and Merrilee. “If he can’t help you with the ME’s office, come on back and I’ll issue you a writ or something.”
I convened court almost on time, but as soon as I decently could, I declared a fifteen-minute recess and phoned Birdie McElveen.
Birdie is a chain-smoking, hard-nosed supervisor of Colleton County’s Child Support Enforcement. More to the point, she’s a close friend of Aunt Zell’s and thinks I’m cuter than a speckled pup.
I didn’t have to explain to her why I wanted to know the financial situation between one Allen Stancil and his ex-wife Sally Stancil regarding their minor daughter Wendy Nicole, currently of 1212 East Lever Drive in Charlotte, the address I’d memorized from the dossier Dwight had compiled on Allen. It was enough for Birdie that I wanted the information and she was sure she could have it for me by mid-afternoon.
She was better than that. When we broke for lunch, a clerk arrived with a message to call her.
“There is a support order on record,” Birdie told me, “and the caseworker thinks he’s behind by about forty-five hundred dollars, but you know how it is—if the mother doesn’t holler, no one automatically goes hunting for the father. Besides, the caseworker says that he’s paid the support directly to the mother more than once. It’s supposed to be monitored and it messes up the paperwork if they don’t do it by the book, but the caseworker thinks he’s probably been giving her some of the money right along since she’s not screaming for help.”
Birdie paused and I could hear her lighting another cigarette.
“So then?” I prompted.
“So then I called Mrs. Stancil at her work. Said I was a supervisor in Child Support Enforcement, which I am.”
“Only not in Mecklenburg County.”
“I didn’t tell and she didn’t ask. Just said yes, ma’am, he did get a little behind, but he’s been making payments regularly. In fact, he came by this weekend and—”
“What?”
“That’s what she said. He was there, left this morning right after breakfast, but he gave her two thousand in cash and that caught him up with everything he owed her.”
“She didn’t happen to say when he got there, did she?”
“Sorry. I thought you wanted information on the father’s fiscal situation, not his physical whereabouts. If I’d realized—”
“That’s okay, Birdie. I didn’t realize it either. Thanks, though. I owe you one.”
“You owe me more than one,” she said with tart affection. “I’ll put it on your account.”
As I took off my robe and put on my jacket to go out for lunch, I wondered if Pete and Merrilee could be right. I hadn’t considered Allen a serious suspect and I didn’t think Dwight did either, but he’d acted broke when he fixed my alternator on Friday. Where did he get two thousand in cash to give his ex-wife this weekend?