“Wouldn’t you?”

“Why? Just because they fought? Lots of couples fight.”

“Oh, come on, Deb’rah. He took a gun out to the woods. He damn near killed Vickery right in front of your eyes last week. That’s no little domestic squabble.”

“He was trying to scare Gayle and me from involving Michael in Janie’s death again. He said Michael still had nightmares.”

“Yeah? Like a war vet’s post-traumatic stress syndrome?” Dwight looked skeptical.

“I don’t know. Denn keeps bringing up religion. Maybe Michael felt guilty because she lay over there so long and he didn’t know, didn’t help.”

He leaned back in his chair and propped one of his size elevens on the edge of the table as if he were back in my mother’s kitchen, arguing with my brothers around the dinner table. He’s big all over, Dwight is. Played basketball in high school and could have played at Carolina if he hadn’t joined the army. Dean Smith liked the way he could handle a ball enough to send a scout over to some of his games. Big hands, big feet, big shoulders.

And yeah, everything else in nice proportion, too.

The summer I was ten, to teach me patience and keep me out of trouble, my mother gave me a good little pair of binoculars and a bird book and told me to go find a sheltered place and just sit quietly without making sudden movements and I would see nature’s wonderful secrets. There was a thick stand of grapevines and honeysuckle that overlooked the creek bank where the boys used to swim and horse around buck naked after their farm chores were done. I always came back to the house with chigger bites and scratches, but Mother was right. To this day, there’s a whole bunch of men walking around Colleton County whose natural endowments are no secret to me.

Oblivious to my memories, Dwight was still laying out reasons to arrest Denn.

“-besides, you know as good as I do how many homicides come from domestic fights. If Denn was a woman whose husband’d been cheating on her, you know he’d be the prime suspect. How’s this any different?”

“For one thing, I talked to his friend in Raleigh who swears Denn didn’t leave his place till a quarter past nine. Say thirty-five minutes to get to the theater, you’re talking what? Nine-fifty, almost ten?”

Dwight doodled a clock face on the yellow legal pad in front of him. “It was nearly twenty-four hours before you found the body. The ME said everything was ‘consistent’ with nine P.M. being when he died, but fifty minutes more or less don’t make an alibi.”

He sat back, clicking and unclicking his ballpoint pen.

“Denn’s friend also helped him unload the truck,” I said, “and can swear categorically that there was no shotgun in it.”

Before Dwight could say the obvious, I beat him to it. “Yeah, yeah, I know. He could have stashed it anywhere between here and Raleigh.”

Dwight grinned. “Now you’re starting to sound sensible. One drawback though: nobody at the Pot Shot ever saw a shotgun out there. Just the rifle.”

He took his foot off the table and the chair came down with a bang. “I guess I’ll just get his statement first and see what happens. You going to sit in and advise him?”

“If I can’t get Ambrose to come over.”

“Is that a smart thing to do?”

“Somebody has to.”

“Yeah, but should it ought to be you?”

“Probably not,” I sighed. “Is that all?”

“I reckon. For now anyhow.”

On the way out of the room, I remembered something and shut the door before I even had it open good.

“What?” he asked.

He’s a lot taller than me, so I had to reach up to pull him down to my level. It wasn’t mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or anything like that, but it was still a damn good kiss.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he said and stepped back, breathing heavily.

I laughed and fluttered my eyelashes outrageously. He was just Dwight again, only more so. “Well, you wanted to know, didn’t you?”

He was still looking dazed.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I did.”

“Anything else?”

“Naah,” he grinned. “I think that’ll just about get it.”

Using the theater phone, I tried one last time to make Ambrose Daughtridge come over and sit in on the interrogation, but even after I told him that Dwight probably wouldn’t book Denn, he still declined.

“I am not now and never have been Mr. McCloy’s attorney,” he said. “I may’ve drawn up his will as a favor to Michael Vickery, but I do not consider him my client.”

Ambrose Daughtridge is silver haired and soft spoken and looks like he should be cataloguing rare books in a university library somewhere. Unlike a lot of us who are ham actors at heart, Ambrose avoids courtroom appearances when he can, prefers civil cases to criminal, and never defends anything more serious than a misdemeanor if he can help it, even though his courtroom skills are quite adequate.

“I hope you won’t take this wrong, Deborah,” said Ambrose, misinterpreting my silence. “It’s not that I’m prejudiced against homosexuals or anything. I always got along just fine with Michael.”

“Because he didn’t flaunt it and Denn’s more obvious?” I asked caustically.

“Because he was a gentleman,” came the soft reply. “Now I do appreciate your courtesy in calling me and your concern for the proprieties, so let me assure you, for the record, that there is nothing in my former dealings with Mr. McCloy that would preclude your representing him, if you and he so choose.”

What could I say except, “Thank you, Ambrose”?

Actually, as I walked back down the hall to tell Denn I’d look after his interests tonight if he still wanted me to, it occurred to me that I’d heard something else in that telephone conversation. Ambrose is always a perfect gentleman even when he’s casting aspersions on a witness’s testimony, but there’d been a conciliatory note in his voice. A definite attempt not to alienate me.

Well!

The first sign that maybe I didn’t need to start drafting a concession letter to Luther Parker quite yet.

The interrogation went smoothly and quickly. Dwight set his tape recorder on the table in the green room, Denn answered all his questions calmly without breaking down again, and I had to interrupt and object to the phrasing of a question only two or three times.

When Dwight got to the specifics of Friday night, Denn said, “You have to understand where I’m coming from, okay? Every time the Whitehead woman is mentioned, Michael freaks. So I know that if Deborah and Gayle Whitehead stir things up, Michael will start having nightmares again, right? So I think to myself that the best way to stop Deborah is to give her something else to worry about. If she’s busy shoring up her campaign, she doesn’t have time to bother Michael, okay? I couldn’t think of any other way to stop her, so I cranked out those letters.”

He rubbed the back of his thin neck and gave me a sheepish smile. “If I hadn’t left Michael, I had this letter from Jesse I was going to doctor up. But I’m so angry Friday night that I decided nightmares serve him right, and now I’m sorry for the hard time I’ve given you, okay? This is a good place to meet. I’ll confess. Do the sackcloth and ashes bit. Give you a pitcher- the prototype for a new line that I’ll never get to produce since I’m leaving, maybe even going back to New York for a while.”

The rest I’d already heard: how he got to the theater around ten, how he found Michael dead, how he panicked and fled. He added nothing new to the telling.

When he’d finished, Dwight clicked off the tape recorder and sat looking at Denn a long moment. It was like a big brown Saint Bernard looking at a high-strung miniature poodle. Luckily for Denn, Dwight was no homophobe.

“Okay,” he said at last, “I’m not arresting you tonight, but you don’t leave the county without checking with the sheriff’s department. I’ll have somebody transcribe this and maybe you’ll come in and sign it, say tomorrow afternoon?”