“For now we’re just considering her a potential witness,” the chief said. “But when Horace finishes his sketch, I want you to take a look at it and have Plunkett do the same. If she’s from around here, odds are one of you will recognize her.”
But an hour later, after Horace and I had produced our masterpiece, both Vern and Plunkett shook their heads.
“Looks vaguely familiar,” Vern said. “But I can’t place her.”
“I think you got the nose wrong.” Plunkett frowned and shook his head at our drawing. “Nobody really has a nose like that.”
But I stood my ground on the nose. I could see it so clearly, emerging from the tangle of hair.
Or did I only want to believe I could see it because it was really the only distinctive thing about the drawing Horace and I had labored so hard to produce?
I even called in Rob to take a look at it, on the theory that if a young woman was even moderately attractive—and the unwed mother was, in spite of the odd nose—Rob would have noticed her.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember seeing her. But I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”
“Well, so much for the drawing,” I said to Vern. “On a happier note, I have the signed contract and a check for your cousins.”
“Fantastic. We owe you one. Want me to take it to them?”
“That’d be great.” I handed him the manila folder. “You might want to warn them to hold off a little about actually delivering her stuff.”
“They’re just hauling it back to the office for storage,” he said. “We’re sure as heck going to wait until her check clears before we let any of it out of our hands.”
“Yes, you said that,” I said. “But that wasn’t what I was thinking of.” I relayed what had just happened at the Caerphilly Inn, though not in as much detail as I’d given the chief.
“So maybe the contents of Genette’s booth might just have become a lot more interesting to you and the chief,” I suggested. “Maybe she wasn’t as drunk as I thought, and was only pretending not to recognize Brett’s new girlfriend. That would make her a suspect, wouldn’t it?”
“Genette’s always been a suspect,” Vern said. “Someone gets knocked off, we look first at the significant others—legal or otherwise. So the contents of her booth were already very interesting to us, which is why I closely supervised every single bit of the packing. Me and my digital video camera. Didn’t find anything that seemed relevant to the murder, but the movies will still be useful if she tries to claim we broke anything. And she looks like the type who might.”
“Agreed,” I said. “And there’s also the fact that she was drunk as a skunk when she signed the contract and the check. I have no idea if that matters.”
“Could invalidate the contract,” Rob said.
“Oh, great.” Vern held up the manila folder and shook it. “Does that mean we have to get her to sign this thing all over again?”
“I’m not a contract specialist,” Rob said. He had, in fact, never actually practiced law, in spite of graduating from the University of Virginia’s prestigious law school and passing the bar exam on his first try. “But I think it’ll be fine if you get her to initial an amended contract tomorrow. If you decided it wasn’t quite as involved as you expected and knocked a couple of hundred off the price, she’d probably sign in a heartbeat. You might want to run that by your own attorney, just to be sure.”
“Great idea,” Vern said. “Thanks.”
“Just when I think you didn’t learn anything in law school, you surprise me,” I said.
“Is that like an apology for telling people I flunked the bar exam?” Rob asked.
I winced.
“I never told anyone you flunked the bar exam,” I said. “I probably did tell a few people I wasn’t sure you ever bothered to show up for it, but that’s completely different. And for the record, you have my apology.”
“But I told you I passed it.” Rob didn’t look angry. More puzzled.
“Yes, but I thought you only said that to stop all of us from nagging you about when you were going to take it,” I explained. “That’s what I’d have done if I’d finished law school and decided I was never going to practice and taking the bar exam would be a waste of time.”
“Wow. When you put it that way, it almost sounds like a compliment.” Rob ambled off, looking mollified.
I sat at my desk in the temporarily empty trailer and pondered what I’d heard from Vern. To my surprise, I realized that I wasn’t disappointed to hear that they hadn’t found incriminating evidence in Genette’s booth.