Free Tressed to Kill by Lila Dare Page B

was a sweet man, but he wasn’t much of a judge of character. Some of the men he called friends . . . lordy. There was one in particular, a skunk named Carl Rowan. He was white—not that I hold that against him—but this was back in the early ’80s when it was still unusual to see a white man hanging with a black man, at least in small-town Georgia. William always held to it that Carl was a real friend because he didn’t pay any mind to the threats he got sometimes for hanging with a black man. The Ku Klux Klan even burned a cross in his yard once. Me, I think Carl took up with William because he’s the only one who would tolerate him.
“William worked in the paper mill in those days, and I did facials sometimes to make ends meet, with your mama. Your daddy was still alive then, so there wasn’t really a salon, but we had friends who wanted us to cut their hair and do their facials—they said we were as good as any of the stylists in the high-class beauty parlors. Carl, he didn’t work. He’d inherited some property from an uncle or something and he spent his time drinking and smoking and playing cards.”
“Sounds like a real bum.”
“You got that right.”
We walked in silence for a few minutes, turning east, and the smell of the ocean grew stronger. It wasn’t a happy smell tonight, like it usually is; it smelled mournful. But maybe that was just me reacting to something I heard in Althea’s voice.
“Anyway,” Althea resumed, kicking at a pinecone on the sidewalk, “something happened between Carl and the DuBoises—they were the only bank in town then, in that building Walter Highsmith has now. Carl said they stole property from him, that Philip DuBois convinced him to put it up as collateral to buy into a development Philip and his partners were undertaking. Something went wrong—they were denied the licenses or permits they needed, or something—and the project never got off the ground. Everyone involved lost a lot of money. Carl had to forfeit the land. Carl would have it that Philip deliberately sabotaged the project so he could get his hands on the property. He ran off at the mouth, saying he was going to contact the attorney general, go to the newspapers, tell what he knew about Philip DuBois and his business dealings. Only he was killed before he got the chance. And my William with him.”
We had reached the boardwalk that ran along the St. Elizabeth beachfront. Reggae music filtered from a bar down the block, and lights from restaurants and bistros spilled into the night. The Intracoastal Waterway was a dark presence on our right, separating the mainland from the offshore islands and the Atlantic beyond. Its gentle waves welled up and subsided with a shushing both monotonous and vaguely ominous, like jungle drums throbbing. I shivered and made myself remember the beach on a sunny day when Alice Rose and I splashed in the surf and built sand castles or when Vonda and I lay on our towels and scoped out the boys playing Frisbee or bodysurfing.
“Did they catch who did it?” I asked. By mutual accord we stopped walking, and the beach breeze flapped at Althea’s loose shirt.
“They never found the bodies,” Althea said, her voice cracking. “The police said there was no evidence that the men hadn’t gone off on their own, so I don’t know how hard they tried to get at the truth. I don’t think they ever even interviewed Philip DuBois about it.”
“You think—”
“I know Philip DuBois either killed Carl Rowan or paid to have it done. And William died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong sorry-ass friend.” Althea spat the words with a bitterness that almost thirty years hadn’t sweetened. “I never heard from my William again after he left that February evening to meet up with Carl and play some poker. He wouldn’t walk out on me, just disappear. And with Carl?” She snorted.
“I tried to get someone to believe me, make ’em keep investigating, but Rowan’s widow packed up her stuff and moved