Bootlegger’s Daughter (22 page)

“They had a joint checking account,” said Reid, “but the Pot Shot itself and all the real property belonged to Michael. Or rather to Mrs. Vickery. It was Dancy land that she inherited.”

“Michael never had title?” John Claude was horrified. He would never have let a client put capital improvements into property that another family member could sell out from under him, even if that family member was the client’s mother.

Reid grinned. “It wasn’t quite that bad. Mrs. Vickery gave him a ninety-nine-year lease-one of those nominal fifty-dollars-a-year things-so he couldn’t be forced off.”

“Oh?” said John Claude, who sniffed the makings of a pretty little legal problem, one that any attorney would enjoy arguing, especially if-?

“Yep,” said Reid. “Ambrose told me that Michael Vickery and Denn McCloy had mutually beneficial wills.”

“Ah,” said John Claude.

“So if Michael had lived to keep his appointment with Ambrose yesterday, Denn might have wound up with nothing.”

I mused. “Instead, he now gets everything, including a ninety-nine-year lease on Dancy property.”

“Not if I’d handled the wording on the lease,” said John Claude.

Unspoken was the knowledge that Ambrose Daughtridge relied rather heavily on the one-size-fits-all standard forms found in forms books. Would he have remembered (or even known at the time) that Michael Vickery was more likely to have “heirs and/or successors and assigns” than “heirs of his body”?

“It’s all academic. Murderers don’t inherit from their victims,” John Claude reminded us as Sherry brought in the morning mail and began sorting it at the end of the long table so she wouldn’t miss anything.

“Guilty till proven innocent?” I said.

The little alert bell over the front door tinkled and Sherry went out to greet old Mrs. Cunningham, who comes in every month to fiddle with the codicils in her will.

After she left, I interviewed a couple of women. One of our sparkplug clerks had married abruptly and moved to New Hampshire, and we’d filled in with enough temporaries to have seen it was going to take two to replace the one we’d lost. Our clerks have to be efficient enough for John Claude and me, homely or married enough so that Reid won’t try to bed them, and biddable enough to take orders from Sherry. I was beginning to think such creatures didn’t exist, but a new crop of paralegals was due to graduate soon from Colleton Tech. Maybe we’d get lucky.

When I returned from a very late lunch, Sherry said, “Dwight Bryant’s in your office. I think it’s something official.”

“Really?”

He was standing by my desk when I got there.

“Do you mind?” I said.

“What?”

“Well, how would you like it,” I fumed, “if I came in your office and started nosing through your papers?”

“Hey, I wasn’t looking at papers,” he protested. “I just didn’t remember seeing that picture of Miz Sue and Mr. Kezzie.”

I’d left the photograph propped against my pencil holder and he took it over to the window for a closer look in better light. It was only a snapshot that I’d taken with the camera they’d given me for my ninth birthday. Mother was sitting on the swing on our front porch, Daddy was propped against a nearby post, hat in his hand, hand on his hip. Both of them smiled into the camera, but the way her slender body was half-turned towards him, the way his lean height curved toward her, you could tell that they’d been talking when I came along and called, “Say cheese!”

It was only a snapshot I hadn’t valued back then. Now I saw that I’d captured the electricity that had always flowed between them.

“Daddy gave it to me Friday night,” I said as he handed it back.

Dwight picked up the ten-by-thirteen manila envelope he’d laid on the edge of my desk and took a chair. “Yeah, I heard y’all made up.”

Normally, I’d have taken exception to his words, but he looked too bone weary to banter. Instead I let it go with a mild, “We made a start anyhow. What’ve you got there?”

He opened the flap and slipped out two flat plastic bags, each of which contained a single sheet of paper. It only took a glance to see that these had to be the original pasteups of those two flyers on mine and Luther Parker’s letterheads. Both were smudged with what I could only assume to be graphite fingerprint powder.

“Where’d you get those?” I asked.

“We got a search warrant for the Pot Shot and the barn. Did a quick and dirty Saturday night to make sure McCloy wasn’t out there, then went back a little more thoroughly yesterday. Interesting. Most of his clothes and personal things seem to be missing, but these were hidden under a pile of papers in McCloy’s desk. They had their own copier in that little office behind the sales shop. Same kind of paper. His fingerprints were all over these two sheets. He’s the one who put them together, no doubt about it.”

I was floored. “Denn? He’s about as political as Julia Lee’s poodle, for God’s sake. Why would he do something like that?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you.” He cocked his big sandy-haired head at me. “To make you stop poking into Janie Whitehead’s death?”

“He never even met Janie,” I protested.

“No, but Michael had.”

“Barely. Even if they knew each other well, so what? Michael had no reason to kill Janie.”

“That we know of.” Dwight pushed himself to his feet. “If I know you, you’re going to keep on poking around. You hear anything I ought to know about-”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.

He grinned at the exasperated tone of my voice, and for about half a minute, I almost had the feeling he was going to reach out and tousle my hair, as if I were a little girl again and he the lanky teenager who was always over to play ball or hang out with my brothers. Our eyes met, locked, and inexplicably, we were both suddenly trapped by a startled awareness that turned our casual ease into clumsy confusion.

Dwight left-fled?-without any of the usual brotherly admonitions.

Well, well, well, I thought.

But before I could explore that interesting line of speculation, the phone rang.

“Deborah Knott,” I answered automatically.

“Deborah, you’ve gotta help me,” rasped a male voice.

“Who-?”

“It’s me, Denn McCloy.”

For two solid weeks, we’d had nothing but sunshine. Now, when fair weather would have been welcome, one soggy cloud after another had rolled across the Triangle since lunch-time, cooling everything down.

Including me.

I’d still been pretty hot under the collar when Denn McCloy first called and not just because of where the thermometer stood either. Where the hell did he get off, I asked him, papering the district with lies about me and then calling up begging for help?

“I’ll explain all that,” he promised. “Just say you’ll help me. Daughtridge won’t get off his fat butt.”

“You called Ambrose?”

“He says to give myself up and then we’ll talk.” Panic edged his voice. “Michael’s dead and he’ll throw me to the wolves. He’s always despised me. All these years and he still-”

“Look, Denn, if you didn’t do it-”

“You, too?” Hysterical howls blasted my ear. “Oh God! I’ll kill myself. I swear I will!”

I tried to calm him, but he’d worked himself up till nothing I could say about the wisdom of Ambrose’s advice seemed to penetrate. I was still pissed at him. On the other hand, if he wasn’t Michael’s killer, then maybe he was entitled to the grief and panic that flooded through the telephone wires.

“It’s not a matter of what I think, Denn. It’s what you can prove.”

“Then help me prove it. Please, Deborah? I need a lawyer who believes in me. At least come and talk to me. Please?”

Against my better judgment, I finally agreed to meet him at Pullen Park, a venerable Raleigh landmark a mile or so west of the Capitol.

When I hung up the phone, the sun was shining brightly, so I’d driven out of Dobbs with nothing warmer on my arms than the thin beige cardigan that matched my tailored beige slacks. Even before I reached Garner, I’d passed through two heavy downpours and the temperature had dropped considerably.

Definitely not my idea of merry-go-round weather.

The latest cloudburst had dwindled into a fine mist as I drove into the nearly empty parking lot beside Pullen Park, and when I got out to lock my car, I shivered in the damp chill.

No umbrella, of course. Reid borrowed it back in March and still had it.

I followed the sound of an old-fashioned calliope past banks of rain-drenched roses and day lilies, past hydrangeas so heavy with water that their blue flower heads bent to the ground till I came to a round wooden structure bounded by wire netting and a waist-high plank wall.

Raleigh ’s carousel is a true jewel, a beautifully restored turn-of-the-century Dentzel. Purists think it ought to be in a museum and are horrified that the city keeps letting children clamber around on the fanciful menagerie, kicking their heels against those enameled flanks to spur them on year after year. Personally, I applaud the city’s thinking: the animals are much happier out here than they’d ever be in a museum.

But how like Denn to choose a place like this for a rendezvous. He knew perfectly well he should turn himself in to Sheriff Bo Poole and try to hire himself a Perry Mason. Instead, he wanted to do the carousel scene from Strangers on a Train. With all this rain turning on and off like somebody fixing a water spigot, I had the feeling it was going to be more Larry, Curly, and Moe than Farley Granger and Robert Walker.

Oh, well, at least it wasn’t the observation deck of the Empire State Building. (Yes, I’m a video junkie.)

Actually, if the day had continued as hot and sunny as it began, the park might have made a good place to meet, crowded as it usually was with kids of all ages. Here in the rain, though, there were only a half-dozen children waiting to ride, one accompanied by what looked like a part-time father, the others divided between two young mothers and an older woman.

Obeying Denn’s now-ridiculous instructions, I bought a ticket and watched the beautifully tooled, overhead iron cranks raise and lower the animals as the whole wonderful contraption moved round and round with a measured grace almost lost in our computerized world. Back then, people were less fastidious about hiding the gears and crankshafts of their machinery. In feet, it must have been solid and comforting to see, proof and promise that man could solve almost every problem with sturdy engineering.

The loopy swirling music of the restored Wurlitzer band organ made me think of Teddy Roosevelt, trolley cars, and white eyelet dresses tied with pink and blue sashes.

The round wooden platform slowed to a stop and I went straight to the very same animal that had been my favorite as a child: a proud gray cat with a green saddle blanket and a goldfish in his mouth. Back then it was the only animal I trusted to go up and down in proper merry-go-round fashion.

Farm kids don’t get taken to city parks all that often and I was almost too big for the carousel before I finally figured out how to tell in advance whether the steed I’d chosen would prance or remain frozen in place. Till then, if my cat was already taken and I was forced to choose another animal, it was all pure chance. I would sit apprehensively in the alien wooden saddle till the music started, waiting to see if I’d been lucky. Dismayed resignation if my tiger or reindeer kept its feet on the ground, but, oh, the sheer bliss if it slowly surged upward as the menagerie gained momentum!

The first ride came to an end and I bought a second ticket. The muscular young man who manually shifted the mechanical gears in the center acted like he thought I’d come straight over to the cat near him because I wanted to flirt. Since it was a slow day, he gave us a longer ride. The children and the two mothers were delighted, the father and grandmother exchanged disapproving frowns. I didn’t feel like explaining about childhood trust and checked my watch wondering where Denn was.

“Don’t look like he’s coming,” said the operator as the second ride finally ended.

I just smiled enigmatically and walked off into the mist like Lauren Bacall, past the fish-feeding station, over the bridge, under the willows, around the lake, and back past the swimming pool-all deserted except for the ducks that paddled along in case I had a loaf of bread with me. If Denn McCloy was anywhere in the park, I couldn’t see him.

A gray Ford pickup had materialized near one of the service areas, but before I got my hopes up, I saw that it sported one of those silver-gray permanent licenses issued to state-owned vehicles.

The skies turned dirty gray again, the mist became distinct drops. The hell with it, I thought. It was bad enough I hadn’t called Dwight the minute I hung up from talking with Denn, why should I stand out here and get drenched to the bone playing out his games?

I rounded the full-sized 1940s-style caboose parked beside the miniature train track and was heading for my car when I heard, “Psst! Deborah!”

“Denn?”

“Shh!”

I looked up and saw him gesturing dramatically from one of the caboose windows. Damned if it wasn’t going to be Strangers on a Train after all.

The interior of the old red caboose was painted a shiny gray enamel. Big iron boxes were bolted to the wall and floor to form wide benches. I wondered if these were old-time bunks and wished that one of the lockers still held a rough wool train blanket.

Denn looked warm in corduroy trousers, plaid wool shirt, and a quilted vest. Since his normal wear was black leather, I guessed this getup was his idea of a disguise. He even wore a John Deere cap to hide his short white buzz cut and, without his usual earring, looked almost like a little old farmer come to town to sell watermelons.

Keyed up though he was, he noticed my damp and chilled condition and said, “I’ve got an extra jacket on the truck. Want me to get it?”