The other men laughed, but not unkindly.
Chez’s home was in a cul-de-sac that backed onto a big public course, perfect for a golfing man. No one answered the door, but I could hear kids screaming and laughing behind the house, so I followed the noise and arrived at what looked like a small amusement park. Chez had one of those big aboveground pools, and it was filled with kids, some sliding on a plastic slide into the pool, some trying to play with a beach ball, others shouting that so-and-so was hogging the space. There were swings, bikes, and even a volleyball net tucked into a corner. A dog, barking madly, climbed a ramp on the pool’s far side and jumped in.
The pool and the kids were so overwhelming that at first I didn’t see the adults on the patio. Seven or eight were drinking from pitchers of iced tea or lemonade, but beer seemed to be on tap, too. One of the women nudged a stocky guy whose hair was bleached white from the sun; he got up from his lawn chair and walked over to me, limping a bit.
“You the lady who’s writing up the history of our fire department? The boys told me you’d be stopping by. Eddie Chez.” He held out a meaty hand, wet from holding a glass of iced tea.
“V. I. Warshawski. I’m not a writer; I’m a lawyer, and I’m a long time after the fair, but I’ve agreed to represent a guy at Ruhetal. Tommy Glover. Do you remember him?”
“Tommy Glover?” Chez’s jolly red face clouded over. “Oh, my. That was a sad story if ever there was one. His poor ma, and getting killed that way—hit-and-run, I talked to Damon Guerdon, he’s our police chief, told him if they track the SOB down I want first kick at him. Netta, she always said Tommy never killed Maggie, but of course she would do—my wife would say the same if, God forbid, it was one of our kids.”
“So there wasn’t any question that Tommy killed Magda Lawlor?”
“The boyfriend, Link Beringer, that was his name, found Tommy there at the lake, staring at Maggie. All Tommy would say was that he was waiting for her to wake up. It was like some cat who kills a mouse and brings it to you, thinking you can make it start running around and squeaking again.”
“They’re sure it was Tommy who killed her, not the boyfriend?”
He nodded, grunted. “You’d have to go to the police, look up the file, but what I recollect, the autopsy showed she’d been dead for four or five hours by then, and the boy had some kind of job—Mavis!” He hollered over to the women on the patio. “What kind of work did Link Beringer do? Before he joined the Army, I mean?”
A merry-looking woman who didn’t mind spilling her thirty extra pounds around the sides of a swimsuit came over, carrying a glass of lemonade for me. “You’re interested in all that ancient history? My word. Link, he worked at his uncle’s box factory, over in, now, I don’t remember, was it Lyle? No, I think Wheaton. What I do remember is how worried Jackie Beringer was, although of course she didn’t put it into words, until they had the whole timetable worked out from when poor Maggie died and it was clear Link hadn’t killed her.”
“This lady’s a lawyer,” Eddie explained. “She’s trying to see what she can do for Tommy.”
Mavis shook her head. “He seems happy enough over there at Ruhetal, from what I hear, and I don’t know where he could live if you got him out, not now that Netta’s dead. No offense, miss, but no one here in Tampier would ever be really sure he wouldn’t do it again, and where would a big man with no more sense than a five-year-old go to live, anyway? We all liked Netta, and he was a sweet-natured boy; no one wanted to see him get the death penalty, although I guess Wade Lawlor still holds a grudge—he sometimes carries on about his sis on that show of his as if it was yesterday, not a quarter century back.”
“Tommy talked about Good Dog Trey,” I ventured.
Gilchrist laughed. “Gosh, he can’t be as stupid as they say if he remembers Trey. That dog was our mascot—he belonged to one of the other volunteers. Trey always rode in the truck with us when there was a fire. Tommy loved Trey, and a lot of times the guy who owned him left him with Tommy during the day—guy worked in a bank and couldn’t be bringing the dog to work with him.”
“Tommy said Wade kicked the dog, then tried to blame Tommy for it.”