‘That’s if you get a discount,’ Bubba said.
‘What about suspects?’ Brazil had gotten to that part of the report. ‘Anybody you think might have done this?’
‘It had to be somebody who knew what I had inside my shop,’ Bubba said. ‘And the door wasn’t forced, so the person had a remote, too.’
‘That’s interesting,’ Brazil commented.
‘You can buy them at Sears,’ West said, looking up at the retracted Sears garage door. ‘Mr. Fluck, I’m going to see to it that a detective comes by before the day’s out to look for any possible evidence, prints, tool marks, whatever.’
‘My prints will be in here,’ Bubba worried.
‘We’ll have to print you, now that you mention it, to know what’s yours and what’s not,’ West said.
They walked out of the workshop, careful where they stepped. Half Shell was bawling and jumping in circles.
‘Thank Chief Hammer again for me,’ Bubba said, following West and Brazil to their car.
‘Again?’ Brazil looked baffled. ‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘Not directly,’ Bubba said.
CHAPTER nineteen
Hammer was extremely sensitive to racial issues and had studied the Richmond metropolitan area’s thoroughly. She knew it wasn’t so long ago that blacks couldn’t join various clubs or live in certain neighborhoods. They couldn’t use golf courses or tennis courts or public pools. Change had been slow and in many ways was deceptive.
Memberships and neighborhood associations began to accept blacks, and in some cases women, but making it off the waiting list or feeling comfortable was another matter. When the future first black governor of Virginia tried to move into an exclusive neighborhood, he was turned down. When a statue of Arthur Ashe was erected on Monument Avenue, it almost caused another war.
Chief Hammer was worried as she and administrative assistant Fling drove through Hollywood Cemetery to inspect the damage and find out if the descriptions of it were exaggerated. They weren’t. Hammer parked on Davis Circle, where the painted bronze statue was clearly visible in the distance, rising amid a background of magnolias and evergreens, small Confederate flags fluttering at the marble base, the perimeter secured with yellow crime-scene tape.
‘Looks like he’s hogging the basketball and won’t pass it to anyone,’ Fling observed. ‘He looks kind of stuck-up, too.’
‘He was,’ Hammer commented.
She stifled laughter, her blood fluttering with peals of it that were almost impossible to suppress. The statue of Davis had always been described as having a proud and haughty air. He had worn the southern gentleman’s dress typical of his day, before the graffiti artist, remarkably, had transformed the long coat into a baggy jersey and voluminous shorts to the knees. Trousers had become muscular legs and athletic socks. Boots had been turned into hightop Nikes.
Hammer and Fling got out of the Crown Victoria as the throaty roar of a black Mercedes 420E came up from behind. The sedan, with its sunroof and saddle interior, swerved around Hammer’s car and parked in front of it.
‘Shit,’ Hammer said as Lelia Ehrhart gathered something off the Mercedes’s front seat and opened her door. ‘Where’s the interpreter?’
Although Ehrhart had been born in Richmond, she had spent most of her growing-up years in Vienna, Austria, where her father, Dr. Howell, a wealthy, prominent music historian, had labored for years on an unauthorized psychological biography of the very gentle, sensitive Mozart and his fear of the trumpet. Later the family had moved to Yugoslavia where Dr. Howell explored the subliminal influence of music on the Nemanjic dynasty. German was
Lelia Ehrhart’s first language, Serbo-Croatian followed, then English. She spoke nothing well and had combined the three, stirring and folding, as if making a cake.
For a moment, Ehrhart stood, transfixed by the statue, her lips slightly parted in shock. She wore yellow Escada jeans, a full yellow-striped blouse with an E on the breast pocket, a black belt studded with brass butterflies and shoes to match. Although Hammer mostly wore Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan, she knew other designers and recognized that the butterflies were several seasons old. This gave Hammer a little satisfaction, but not enough.
‘This will excite a riot,’ Ehrhart exclaimed, moving in closer to the crime scene, a Canon Sure Shot in hand. ‘Nothing like this has even happened before this.’