Designated Daughters (23 page)

N
ext morning, Dwight rode into Dobbs with me after leaving his truck at Jimmy White’s to get a leaky water hose and frayed fan belt looked after.

Whites have been keeping our family’s vehicles going ever since Jimmy’s daddy quit running whiskey for my daddy and went to running his own garage, which Jimmy expanded to a two-bay operation when he took over the business. The all-white county commissioners wanted to zone the garage out of existence when the first housing development went up in the neighborhood, but John Claude and I managed to get him grandfathered in. Before that, though, when we realized how gentrified things might become, we advised Jimmy to buy a couple of adjoining acres so that there would be room to add another bay and a salvage yard if his son James decided to carry on the work, which he has.

Between berms and evergreen shrubbery, most newcomers don’t even realize there’s a garage and junkyard back there in the trees behind his house until they start asking around for a good mechanic. The only indication is a small sign at the entrance drive, because word of mouth gives them as much business as they can comfortably handle.

Dwight’s official workday begins a full hour before mine, so I had time to talk my way into Ellis Glover’s office early and go hunting through the will books. Twenty minutes later, I found the one I was looking for. It was straightforward and exactly as I’d heard last week, and it even named the attorney who had drawn it up, a name I could run past John Claude, who’s been practicing law long enough to know every firm in the district.

“Louis Royster?” he said. “I think he died at least twenty years ago.”

“Who would have taken over his practice?”

“His daughter, of course. Patricia Hawkins.”

“Pat Hawkins is his daughter? But Royster practiced in Makely and Pat’s here in Dobbs.”

“So is her ex-husband,” John Claude said dryly.

Sometimes you just get lucky. Gray haired and nearing retirement, Pat considers herself one of my mentors. She recommended me to the then-DA when I first passed the bar and needed to get my feet wet before joining Lee & Stephenson. She had been an active supporter when I decided to run for judge and we have stayed good friends. Indeed, we had hugged each other warmly when we met at the bar association dinner only last week, so I didn’t hesitate to call her office.

“It’s not just idle curiosity,” I told her when her secretary put me through and I had explained what I wanted and why. “You know how Dwight gets if he thinks I’m not minding my own business, so I don’t want to say anything about this if there’s nothing there.”

“I do still have all of my dad’s files,” Pat said, “but of course that one’s been inactive for years and I honestly doubt if there’s any smoking gun in it.”

“You don’t still represent him, do you?”

She gave a sour laugh. “You kidding? I’m too small-town for him.” She named a large law firm in Raleigh, then said, “I’ll have one of my clerks root out that file.”

“Thanks, Pat. I’ll leave my phone on.”

“Don’t thank me yet, honey. I’m not promising you a look if anything’s there,” she warned.

After the long weekend, I knew that first appearances would be a busy session. Happily, Julie Walsh, one of the more organized and efficient ADAs, was there that morning for the State.

It was the usual mixed bag: five D&Ds after the weekend brawls, two cases of domestic violence—one male on female, the other female on male—a hit-and-run (not fatal, thank goodness), four drug possessions, etc., etc.

Some of the etceteras charged with felonies waived their probable cause hearings and were ready to proceed directly to trial. For those, I advised them of their right to an attorney, then set their dates to appear in superior court and their bonds, as appropriate.

Making her first appearance was Valerie Rhodes, 18, white, and accused of deliberately ramming a 2012 Toyota Camry owned by her sister and occupied at the time by Helen Barefoot and Randall Nehring shortly before midnight Saturday night. Miss Rhodes was charged with two counts of felony assault and one count of malicious property damage.

Seated on the front row behind the prosecution were Mr. Nehring and Miss Barefoot, she in a neck brace, he with a cast on his right arm, a black eye, and bruises on his face. Also present were his wife, an attorney for Miss Rhodes, and assorted parents.

According to the prosecution, a Dobbs police officer had been called out to a disturbance at a side street that dead-ended behind a defunct grocery store, a site that’s showed up in my courtroom more than once. It’s popular with couples who can’t or won’t spring for a motel room and who have no convenient bed elsewhere.

When he arrived on the scene, the officer saw that a Honda Civic driven by Miss Rhodes had rammed into the Camry, which sustained damages approximating $1500. He found the occupants of the Camry in a state of partial undress and saw Miss Rhodes hitting Mr. Nehring with her cheerleader baton.

I wondered if she’d been in yesterday’s parade, but didn’t ask.

The officer had called for an ambulance to convey Mr. Nehring and Miss Barefoot to the hospital and he had placed Miss Rhodes under arrest. A magistrate had set her bond, which was immediately met so that she didn’t have to stay in jail.

Even though a first appearance is not really the time for it, I allowed Mrs. Nehring to speak.

She looked almost as young as her sister. Same long brown hair, a similarly pretty oval face and earnest brown eyes. “Please, Your Honor, Val’s only eighteen. She shouldn’t have done this, but she did it for me. I knew that Randy was cheating, and when she saw how much I was hurting, she wanted to hurt him back. The Camry’s in my name, not Randy’s, and I don’t want to press charges, okay?”

I know how impulsive eighteen-year-olds can be. Hell, wasn’t I only a month or two past my own nineteenth birthday when I stabbed a man with a rusty knife because he called me Debbie one time too often? And he was only annoying me, not hurting someone I loved.

I looked over at Julie Walsh. “Madame DA, it appears that the State might have a problem with the maliciousness of this offense. Are you sure you want to go forward on it?”

She agreed that the State could offer no evidence at this time on this misdemeanor and took a voluntary dismissal of the property damage charge.

I turned back to Valerie Rhodes, who sat beside her attorney and looked scared. “I’m afraid the felony assaults stand unless Mr. Nehring and Miss Barefoot want to drop them?”

Miss Barefoot looked incredulous. “Is she kidding?”

“Absolutely not!” said Randy Nehring. (And how appropriate is
that
for a nickname?)

“Very well,” I said. “As to the misdemeanor, the State has taken a voluntary dismissal. However, with regard to the felony assault, I will set a probable cause date on that for June fourth, and between now and then, the State and your defense attorney can talk about it. As a judge, I have no opinion on this at all.”

At her attorney’s request, I left Miss Rhodes’s bond where it was. She was no flight risk.

The combatants stood to leave, and I had a feeling that Mrs. Nehring would soon be back in someone else’s court to begin divorce proceedings.

Last on the morning calendar came Glenn Judd, 41, and Henry Wegman, 53, both white, both charged with felony larceny and conspiracy to obtain property by false pretenses. It was the old roofing scam with a twist.

As laid out by the prosecution, Judd and Wegman had knocked on the Cotton Grove door of two elderly sisters during last week’s rains and told them that they’d been passing by and noticed that the porch roof was leaking. When the women walked out onto the porch, there was indeed a wet place where water had run down the front wall from a spot where the porch ceiling joined the main house, although no new water seemed to be running down at the moment despite the falling rain. The men painted a picture of rot and water damage and offered to take care of it right then and there since they had just finished another job and had their ladders and a bucket of tar on the truck.

The sisters agreed and after Judd and Wegman were up on the roof for twenty minutes, they came down and explained that they normally charged $3500, but since they were already out, it would be only $2500.

The sisters paid with cash on hand, but a few days later, it finally occurred to them that a rainy day is not the time to tar a leak; and even if it were, should a twenty-minute job warrant such a high price? They then called their nephew, who came over, went up on the roof, and could see no evidence of fresh tar. In any event, he had overseen the installation of a new roof only two years earlier. He reported the incident to the local police, who were sympathetic but had no way to help because the sisters could furnish neither a name nor a license plate number.

As I listened, I wondered if the nephew knew my cousin Sally. Clearly, this man was his aunts’ designated daughter.

Happily for the ladies, Judd and Wegman were greedy enough and stupid enough to come back on Friday for a second bite of the apple. This time, they offered to reroof the whole house for only $5000. While one of the sisters offered homemade cookies to seal the deal, the other called their nephew, who immediately called the Cotton Grove police, who responded in time to make the arrest.

The two men glumly waived a PC hearing so I bound them over to superior court and set their bonds at $5000 each.

This was not a sexy case, it would not make headlines. Indeed, it would barely merit a mention in the county’s local paper, but like the way Rusty Alexander cheated Miss Jones, these consumer fraud cases hurt people and do as much real damage to their lives as if they’d been robbed at gunpoint. Over and over again, I see the elderly, the naïve, and the retirees with Alzheimer’s or other dementia issues lose their life savings and retirement accounts. Nurses, teachers, military retirees, and the disabled—no one’s off-limits for these bottom-feeders.

I have a lot of issues with our current DA, but one thing about him: he does not allow any plea bargaining in cases like this. These two were definitely going to see the inside of a jail.

Pat hadn’t called by noon, so I went downstairs, planning to eat lunch with Dwight in his office. I had made us both tuna salads with lettuce from his cold frame.

When I got there, though, Mayleen told me that they finally had a lead in those Black Creek break-ins. “Whoever stole one of the phones took a picture with it,” she said and explained how the owner had talked the person who’d bought it into giving him a jump drive with all the pictures. “Tub Greene got an ID on the two strangers and guess what? A girl took that picture.”

She said that the break-ins now looked to be the work of three girls in that neighborhood and that they had even burgled their own homes to throw off suspicion. “One of them told Tub it was to get money for college. That they didn’t want to wind up with a huge debt at the end of four years.”

“Boy, are they in for an education,” I said, shaking my head.

Mayleen laughed.

I got my salad out of their fridge and as I passed back through the squad room, I spotted the chart Mayleen had drawn up to show who was where when Aunt Rachel died. Most of the names had lines through them, indicating their elimination.

“Still haven’t found anyone to vouch for Dr. Howell?” I asked.

“Ray’s out checking right now,” she said. “The Collins girl said he went off down a hall with a nurse, but the nurse’s father had a heart attack late that night and she flew out to Iowa to be with him, so we haven’t talked to her yet. There was a medical emergency on that hall about then and there was too much coming and going for anyone to be certain. Hard to think that Dr. Howell really needs an alibi, though, isn’t it? With all the good he does?”

On the way back to my own office, I ran into Sally coming out of the clerk of the court’s office. She wore the springy blonde wig today, curls flying in every direction as she shook her head at me in exasperation as if I had personally written the probate laws for North Carolina.

“You ever settle someone’s estate?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you better make sure Uncle Kezzie has a detailed will. Twelve children and God knows how many grandkids, right? I just have the one brother and he’s a sweetheart, but we still have to agree on every single detail, because Mama didn’t leave a will and Jay-Jay’s got the business sense of a grasshopper.”

I laughed. “So how much of a cut did Will take on that Hanley Willis decoy?”

She joined my laughter, her blonde curls bouncing. “Wasn’t that a hoot? Wouldn’t you love to be there when that cheating Rusty Alexander realizes it’s a fake? We’re hoping he’ll take it up to Maryland to brag on it in front of the real Dawson Bridges.”

She told me how she’d gone down to the Waterfowl Museum at Harkers Island to get authentic details and how Will had shot a few lead pellets into the doctored decoy to make it look as if it had been hunted over a hundred years ago. The initials, the white dot in the eyes, the feathering details, and the final “weathering” were done by a friend of his who did period restorations—something I really didn’t want to know too much about even though Will does make a point of saying on his website and in all his ads that everything is sold “as is” with no guarantees as to provenance.

“Lucky that he found an old bill of sale among the Lattimore papers,” I said.

“Oh, honey!” she giggled. “Luck had nothing to do with it. That was Marillyn Mulholland.”

Her face sobered, though, as she told me that Will had turned all the money over to JoAnn Bonner and her aunt except for the restorer’s fee. “It compensates for the tea service, but it’s not nearly enough to save the house. They’ve decided not to even try. They’ve emptied the house and the bank has foreclosed on it.” She gave me a defiant look. “And we did check under all the floorboards, but we couldn’t find the Tiffany jewels. The bank will probably sell it for scrap and some lucky contractor may wind up with a quick quarter million.”