They brought him a can of Pepsi.

“You say Braz was there,” Dwight reminded him as the scrawny little man lifted the can to his mouth and drank deeply.

“Yeah. Bastard was gonna run right over to Tal and Arnold to tell them. Everybody thinks Bubbles took me for everything I had, right? Wasn’t her. It was Braz. He made me sign it all over to him that night. He sold my doublewide and my balloon bust right out from under me. Left me with nothing but my camper truck. Let me say the duck pond was still mine, but he took a percentage of it, too. That’s why Bubbles left me. I couldn’t give her nothing. Didn’t have nothing to give her if I’d wanted to. Everybody laughing at me, and then he was going to sell my Lucky Ducky. Said he was going to cash out end of the season, the little money-sucker. Leave me to starve, would he? Huh! I cashed him out. Gave him a mouthful of money to pay his way to hell.”

So this was really how Braz had accumulated so much money so fast. Not a lucky self-storage buy or a shrewd eBay sell, just plain old ordinary blackmail.

Instead of Polly as I’d first thought, it was indeed Skee who’d taken advantage of the Bowler Roller’s flasher and siren to kill Braz. And it was he who’d ransacked Braz’s trailer and tried to search the shed, looking for the paper records that might let the Ameses figure out where the money came from.

“Polly saw me come out of the Dozer Friday night and she was going to try the same trick.”

“More blackmail?” asked McLamb.

“Like I had anything left to pay her off with, y’know? I told her to come over to my truck after everybody else had gone to bed and I’d sign over the title to her. Stupid cow.”

The rest was as we’d deduced: the faked suicide and the switching of the shoes and their laces.

Bo and I went back to his office and he was shaking his head. “You’d think after he screwed up the murder of his wife, he’d have thought twice about trying his luck a second time.”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering what Tally would say when she realized where Braz’s money had come from and how he’d profited from the death of a woman who was supposed to have loved him like a grandmother. I was glad I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her.

Dwight left the mopping up to his deputies, but it was still full dark when we finally headed back to the farm. He had popped a Willie Nelson tape in the player and ol’ Willie’s wonderfully craggy voice was crooning the words of that sweet, sweet song “Let It Be Me” as the moon rose behind us. We had the windows rolled down, cool autumn air washed over us, and I thought how good it was to be with someone who was as easy with my silences as I was with his. Any other man, I’d have to be doing the charm thing—making small talk, buttering his ego, flirting. But Dwight was just Dwight, so I didn’t need to bother with any games.