Bootlegger’s Daughter (19 page)

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said tightly, “but I seem to be the only one with serious damage here and I get it coming and going. In one I’m a redneck racist, in the other I’m the devil’s mouthpiece for organized crime. Mr. Parker’s accused of being black. Period.”

He acted like he was fixing to protest, but Linsey was nodding in thoughtful agreement, and after a moment’s consideration, Luther nodded, too. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said.

“You don’t sound terribly sorrowful,” I observed. “And the Ledger endorsed you, didn’t it? Tell me, Linsey. Am I being set up here?”

Both men acted genuinely shocked that I could even consider such a possibility, but when challenged to produce another person who benefited from those two letters, their one pitiful candidate was Hector Woodlief. Yes, Hector files for some office or other almost every election, but it’s just to keep Democrats honest. He’s never really campaigned and would hardly begin with this sort of dirty trick.

We briefly discussed our two primary opponents who’d come in third and fourth. Sour grapes?

I didn’t think so.

In the end, I reluctantly agreed to a story that downplayed specifics and appealed to voter intelligence and sense of fair play when confronted with obviously phony campaign literature.

Sure.

Back at the office, I called Minnie and told her the depressing news. Her initial outrage and indignation quickly gave way to a practical curiosity as to who was behind the flyers and why.

“Makely Wednesday night, Dobbs last night. Sounds like a one-man job. Wonder where he’ll strike tonight? Cotton Grove?”

As I hung up the phone, I heard John Claude talking to Sherry and walked out to show them the latest, but John Claude already had a copy in his hand. I told him of my meeting at the paper and he gave a pointed look at the grandfather clock beneath the stairs.

“The first issues of the Ledger should be rolling ofF the press in about twenty minutes. I suggest we take the rest of the day off. Sherry can turn on our answering machine. Most of the novelty should have worn off by Monday. Have a nice weekend, Deborah.”

There were fish fries I should be attending, voters’ hands I should be shaking, probably even babies somewhere in the district that I should be kissing, but with those flyers kiting around and the Ledger due out in Dobbs any minute, I wanted an afternoon off. I wanted to forget lawyering and campaigning, to just get outdoors and-

As soon as I got that far, I knew exactly how I wanted to spend the next few hours. Soon I was in jeans and sneakers heading west toward Cotton Grove. On the way out of town I stopped at a bait store for some night crawlers. All I needed was a cane pole sticking out my rear window with a red bobber, and I figured I could borrow one of those from my brother Seth. I just wanted to go sit on a pond bank and watch a cork bobble on the surface of flat water.

Halfway there though, I had a sudden thought and pulled in at M.Z. Dupree’s Cash Grocery.

It was one of those small crossroads general stores that sell a little bit of everything: clotheslines, plumbing and electrical supplies, tin buckets, canned meats, bread and milk. There was a hoop of deep orange rat cheese on the counter by the cash register, glass bottles in the drink box, and just three fuel pumps out front: regular, high-test, and kerosene. In cold or rainy weather, there’d be four or five pickups nosed in toward the door. On a beautiful May afternoon like this, however, the place was deserted. All those pickup owners were out on huge green tractors, cleaning grass from their tobacco, corn, or cotton.

“Hey, Mr. M.Z., you doing all right?” I said to the owner, an elderly thin man whom I’d never seen dressed in anything but a white long-sleeved cotton shirt and a pair of blue overalls.

“Can’t complain. How ’bout you?”

As many times as I’d stopped in at that store, I was never quite sure if he remembered from one time to the next who I was, even though one of my campaign handbills with my picture on it was thumbtacked beside his door.

“I can’t complain either,” I said, setting a package of cheese Nabs and an ice-cold Pepsi on the counter. Lunch.

“Wouldn’t do us no good if we did grumble, would it?” He smiled. “Now’s this gonna be all for you today, young lady?”

“I need ten dollars’ worth of high-test, and you reckon I could use your phone, please?”

“Ain’t long-distance, is it?”

“No, sir.”

“Well then, you just help yourself,” he said; and while he went out to fill my gas tank, I made a quick call to ask if Dr. Vickery would let me visit on such short notice.

The maid returned to say that Dr. Vickery would expect me with pleasure.

When I was a child, Dr. Vickery had his office behind the drugstore, so I’d never been in this fancy house built by his wife’s father. It was all Persian rugs and Queen Anne furniture and smelled of lemon oil and beeswax as the maid led me down the central hall, through a formal parlor replete with grand piano and gilt-framed oil paintings of big tree-filled landscapes, then out onto a lovely brick terrace. At one end a trellis arched on Grecian columns above some wicker chairs and tables and shaded them with the same climbing yellow roses I’d seen out at Michael Vickery’s barn. The maid deposited me there as Mrs. Vickery stood up from her ministrations to a stunning iris border.

Dr. Vickery immediately came around the corner with a pair of pruning clippers.

They were of equal height. As a child, though, I’d always thought of Mrs. Vickery as much taller. Probably because she’d been what folks used to call a fine figure of a woman: big boned and stoutly built with strong, well-fleshed arms and legs. These days she was still tall, but flesh had dwindled from her frame until now her good Dancy bones were starkly revealed. Now it was Dr. Vickery who looked taller and more vigorously full of life’s juices.

Mrs. Vickery wore a large straw hat, a trapezoidal garment of blue linen that was a designer version of Aunt Zell’s gardening duster, and white canvas gloves, which she did not remove as she greeted me and offered refreshment. When I refused, she nodded briskly and said, “As your business is with my husband, I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I continue weeding? Chickweed’s about to take this bed.”

“Certainly,” I murmured, though I could see almost nothing out of place among those regal stalks of blue, yellow, and royal purple.

Nevertheless, she shifted a green vinyl-covered kneeling pad a few feet over and knelt down to extirpate invisible sprouts. Her glass wall was less obvious than her son’s, but unmistakable all the same.

“Are you sure you won’t take a glass of tea?” asked Dr. Vickery as he-joined me under the trellised roses. He brushed fallen yellow petals from his chair with his own canvas gloves, then laid the gloves on the glass-topped table where an earthenware pitcher sat beside a matching ice bucket. Both were glazed with Michael Vickery’s trademark green. Dr. Vickery filled a tumbler with ice cubes, poured the ubiquitous amber tea over it, and held it out to me, but I smelled something much stronger than tea on his breath.

“No, thank you,” I smiled.

As had my brothers, I’d flourished like a green bay tree all the days of my childhood, so my memories of doctor visits were limited to periodical booster shots and the odd sprain or broken bone. He’d been an aloof, no-nonsense doctor who treated his patients’ offspring because there was no pediatrician in town, not because he was “so good with children,” and I felt no warm folksy glow at seeing him again now that I was grown. He’d sold his practice at least fifteen years ago, but he was still trim and dapper. Like Michael, he’d aged well and remained a handsome man, despite the wrinkles in his face and the liver spots on his bony hands. There was a jaded glint in those pale blue eyes that peered out at me from beneath the rim of an old sun-faded canvas boating hat.

Suddenly I had a clear memory of someone’s disapproving voice: “There was that good woman a-prayin’ in the garden with Michael and the girls while that fornicator was upstairs a-packin his bag to go to the beach with his newest girlfriend.” A white voice, but uneducated. One of Daddy’s tobacco-barning crew who’d once helped the Vickery maids here with some of the heavy cleaning? I couldn’t put a face to the voice, but it seemed as if I’d known forever that Dr. Vickery had never been overly faithful.

Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t surprised when Trish put his name on her list the night before.

Still, with Mrs. Evelyn Dancy Vickery kneeling in her iris border less than twenty feet away, I could hardly ask him if Janie had thrown herself at him.

“How may I help you, Miss Deborah?” His tone was playfully gallant as he skirted the problem of how to address someone he’d treated as a child, someone who might be a professional yet had never become a Vickery equal.

I plunged right in and explained how Gayle had commissioned me to look into her mother’s last few weeks of life. “You were her doctor, weren’t you?”

“Oh my, no. Does her daughter have that mistaken opinion?”

“I just assumed since she lived next door-”

“Ah, I see. A natural mistake.” He held the full glass of tea in lightly clasped hands. Moisture beaded up on his glass and dripped on the bricks beside his shoes.

“No, Janie Whitehead came from Dobbs, and I’m almost certain she continued with her family doctor there. Dr. Brewer, I believe. Dead now, of course. I did occasionally treat Jed Whitehead, and I was the first to examine the baby when they found her since her own pediatrician was in Raleigh. Shocking condition!”

He shook his head in wonder. “Amazing, the resilience of the human infant. I scratch my arm and it takes ten days to heal. Scratch an infant and you’d be hard put to find the mark twenty-four hours later.”

He took a deep drink and set the glass on the table.

“But you did see the Whiteheads occasionally?” I persisted. “Besides Jed, I mean. Their yard did touch yours.”

The lush spring greenery at the back of their grounds completely blocked any view beyond, but I knew that poky little rental house was still there.

“No, I can’t say I did,” Dr. Vickery answered promptly.

Mrs. Vickery’s weeding had brought her within earshot again.

“What about you, Evelyn?” he asked. “Did you have occasion to speak to Janie Whitehead in a neighborly fashion?”

“Only to ask that she discourage her baby-sitters from annoying Michael,” she answered coolly.

She didn’t look up from her task. If your radar’s working, you don’t have to see flames to know when you’ve scored a direct hit.

Dr. Vickery appeared unaware of her intent. “Annoying Michael?” he queried.

“That was the spring he painted the picture over the mantle in the breakfast room. My tulips.”

“Ah, yes. Your tulips. But how was he annoyed?”

“Don’t be dense, Charles. Don’t you recall how he hated to have us speak to him when he was concentrating on his art?”

“But surely a young man in the springtime will excuse in a young woman what’s inexcusable in his parents?”

She rocked back on her heels and glared at him, and I wondered if he’d somehow managed to delude himself about Michael? Then I saw by the bland smile on his cruel lips that he wasn’t the one who yearned to be deluded.

I never liked Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and I broke the tension by asking, “What about Howard Grimes?”

“Who?” He turned his handsome head to me courteously and Mrs. Vickery went back to her weeding.

“The man who saw someone in the car with Janie the day she disappeared.” Without going into details, I told him how I’d reviewed the circumstances of Janie’s murder with the SBI.

“The agent said you were his doctor at the time of his death seven years ago. I thought you’d retired much earlier.”

“I continued to see a selected few of my patients who didn’t want to change,” he said. “Howard Grimes was one of them.”

“And he really did have a serious heart condition?”

“Like many a man in Colleton County, Howard Grimes thought he could eat all the salt-cured ham, fried chicken, or hot buttered biscuits he could cram in his mouth, so yes, ma’am, he did have a serious heart condition. Long as he took his pills and watched his diet, he was just fine. Trouble with men like Howard, they can’t help digging their graves with their own teeth.”

He patted his own flat stomach complacently.

“Well, different men have different appetites, don’t they?” I said sweetly.

It didn’t faze him. “Some appetites are healthier than others, Miss Deborah,” he smiled. “Everything in moderation.”

Mrs. Vickery stood abruptly and picked up her kneeling pad. “If you will excuse me, Miss Knott?”

There were two bright spots of color in her cheeks, and even though she’d been snide about my futile attempt to flirt with Michael, I still had to admire her self-control. Been me, I’d have smashed the pitcher over the bastard’s head.

Without waiting for my ritual reply, she marched straight-backed down the terrace and through a set of french doors at the far end.

“Three kids, three fucks,” he murmured after her, so softly that I wasn’t sure I was meant to hear. Then he turned to me with his heartless smile. “Now you sure I can’t pour you a glass of tea, Miss Deborah?”

After that, it was a relief to get out to Seth and Minnie’s, where I found them together in the den, amiably bickering over the fertilizer figures they were inputting on their computerized farm records.

“Oh, good,” Minnie greeted me. “I tried to call you back, but I just kept getting y’all’s answering machine.”

“John Claude thought we might as well close early before the paper came out and wait for things to calm down over the weekend. ’Course if there’s going to be a new batch of those goddamned flyers every morning-”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Minnie beamed. “Your brother’s come up with an absolutely brilliant idea.”