Slow Dollar (17 page)

“Dump it where? Here?”

“If they want to pay the fee. Soon as the auction’s over, they go through the stuff right out there in the driveway and bag up what they don’t want. We charge to let ‘em use our Dumpsters. Otherwise, they have to truck it to a landfill themselves. I had to tell him that nobody goes to flea markets to buy somebody else’s pictures, so stuff like that usually gets dumped right here.”

“I don’t suppose he went through the Dumpster?”

“Oh, honey, after nine days?”

“You didn’t happen to get his name, did you?”

“Wasn’t any reason to. Although, now that you mention it, I believe I did call him Mr. Hamden and he didn’t say that wasn’t his name.”

“But you told him who bought the contents of the locker?”

“Oh, yes. It’s a public sale. Brazos Hartley. Ames Amusement Corporation, Gibsonton, Florida. Don’t know how he found us from way down there. Anyhow, here’s his phone number and an e-mail address, and I gave Mr. Hamden the same information and wished him luck.”

“But all you have on Ms. Hamden herself is this mailing-service box number?”

“And this phone number. But she must have written it down wrong because I called it and the lady that answered said she’d had that number for sixteen years and nobody by that name had ever lived there.”

The gray-haired clerk looked at Mayleen Richards in sudden interest. “So how come you’re trying to find her? Was the stuff stolen?”

“All I can say right now is that it’s related to an investigation the sheriff’s department is conducting,” the deputy said. “Could you describe Ms. Hamden?”

“Sorry. That locker was rented six years ago, before I came. She was on our quarterly plan and payments always arrived by check every three months. Nothing on the checks except her name.”

“Do you remember what bank?”

The woman shook her head. “Her brother was real cute, though,” she added, trying to be helpful. “Curly black hair and gorgeous brown eyes.”

Richards thanked her for her time and checked her watch as she went back out to the car. Only a little past ten. Wouldn’t take but a few minutes to check out E-Z-Quik Mail.

The lone clerk there was cooperative but he’d only worked there a few months and could add nothing. “I’ve never seen her to know who I was looking at. Most people using the boxes out there in the vestibule don’t come on inside unless they’re mailing a package or buying stamps. According to our records, she pays cash for the box a year at the time and it’s due to expire the end of the month.”

“Is there anything in her box right now?”

“I’m not supposed to let anybody see a client’s mail without a court order,” the clerk said virtuously, but he went into the sorting room behind the bank of rental boxes and came back a minute later. “Nope. Empty as my girlfriend’s head.”

The phone number on the form was similar to the one on the Six Pines Self-Storage form. Same prefix, but she’d scrambled the same last four numbers. There was no North Carolina street address for Lee Hamden. The space had been left blank except for the notation “In transit—no permanent address.”

“‘Course now, there’s a lot of that going around,” said the clerk.

Shaw University on the south side of Raleigh had its beginning in an 1865 Bible-study class immediately after the Civil War. Despite integration during the civil rights movement, however, its student body has remained predominately black.

Even though Deputy Jack Jamison passed the school every time he drove into Raleigh, he’d never actually set foot on the campus, and in his sleep-deprived state, he was glad to tag along after McLamb, who seemed to know his way around. They found the dorm where Lamarr Wrenn and Eric Holt shared a room, but neither was in. The kid next door thought Holt might be at his job in the library and that Wrenn was probably in his modern art–appreciation class.

Since classes wouldn’t change for another thirty-eight minutes, they headed for the library, homed in on their prey, and were soon crowded together in one of the small soundproof study rooms deep in the stacks.

Of medium height and sturdy build, with light brown skin, closely trimmed hair, and a small gold stud in one ear, Eric Holt was the picture of earnest helpfulness. His eyes met theirs with innocent candor.
Hide something?
those eyes seemed to ask.
Me? Collude with my friends? Cook up a story together? Certainly not
.

“Okay, yeah, it was dumb of Steve and me not to leave our names,” he admitted forthrightly, “but hey, Lamarr’s our friend. We didn’t want to rat him out just because he lost his temper and hit that dude. Besides, the guy was fine when we pulled Lamarr away.”

“Fine’s not the way we heard it,” McLamb growled.

“Well, no,” Eric agreed. “He was bleeding pretty bad. I guess Lamarr might even’ve broken his nose. But he was definitely able to sit there on the top step of that game wagon and cuss us to hell and back. Nothing wrong with his lungs.”

“And your friend Lamarr didn’t go back later and finish him off?”

“You’ll have to ask him that,” Eric said earnestly. “He says he went home and I believe him, but the last time Steve Knott and I saw him that night, he was leaving the carnival, heading in the opposite direction from the Dozer.”

“Why’d he pop Hartley?” asked Jamison.

“Oh, they got into it about the game. Lamarr said it was rigged. Called the guy running it a thief. One thing led to another. You know how it goes,” he said, appealing to them man to man.

“Yeah,” said McLamb cynically. “We know how it goes.”

They came at him with questions from every angle, but nothing they asked made Eric Holt give up any more information. His whole attitude said that he wanted to help, wished he could help, would certainly help if there were any way in his power to do so, but everything had gone down just as he’d told them.

Lamarr Wrenn was just as helpfully unhelpful. They caught up with him as he was leaving one classroom and heading across campus for another. Dark-skinned with a small chin beard, he was built like a concrete post, tough and solid with big muscular hands that clenched convulsively around his books and looked capable of felling a mule with one blow. He walked with a slight limp that favored his right ankle (“Twisted it playing Hacky Sack yesterday”), but it didn’t seem to slow him down.

“Look, man, you make me late and it’ll go down as a cut. Steve and Eric already told you what happened, didn’t they?”

“You tell us,” said McLamb as they strode along with him.

The walks were crowded with students changing classes and they were forced to walk on the grass to keep up as Wrenn plowed his way through.

But it was clear the young men had their stories well in hand. Lamarr Wrenn had thought the Dozer was rigged, he said. He and Hartley got into it. Accusations were made by Wrenn; slurs were spoken by Hartley.

“So when he called me a dumb-ass jigaboo, I smashed his nose in for him. But that’s all. Anybody says different, he can talk to me.”

McLamb said, “Your friends say you were still steamed when you left them. You sure you didn’t go back and have another go at him?”

“Nope, I went home.”

“Home being?”

The address he gave was in the old Darkside section of Dobbs. The neighborhood was still mostly black, yet, despite some derelict shanties, it wasn’t what you’d call a real ghetto, McLamb thought as he wrote it down. Not when those shanties stood on quarter- to half-acre lots. Not when professional and middle-class African Americans were either remodeling the old clapboard houses of their parents and grandparents or else leveling them to make way for bigger and more modern homes.

“Any witnesses to the time you got there?”

Wrenn shook his head, moving more slowly up the stairs of the building they’d entered, as if it hurt to climb on that ankle.

Nobody lived in the house at the moment, he explained, because it had belonged to his grandfather who died early in the summer. His mother was the old man’s only relative and natural heir, but there was some technicality about the deed. Soon as that was straightened out, the house would be sold. In the meantime, Wrenn used it as a crash pad when he wanted to get away from school.

“Wait a minute, though,” he said as they pulled up at the doorway of his next class. “There’s a nosy old lady lives next door. I think she might’ve still been out on her porch when I got home.”

He gave them her name and address; then the bell rang again and he stepped inside the classroom just as the professor came over to close the door.