Bootlegger’s Daughter (29 page)

He acted embarrassed and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Terry Wilson has to get a true copy of the tape. And if it ever comes to trial-” He shrugged. “We don’t tell the media every little thing we know.”

I knew then it’d be safe to slide past the reason Janie reacted so violently when she found out Michael was gay.

For Gayle, hearing that her mother had tried to seduce Michael Vickery seemed to confirm something that she’d already half-assumed.

For Jed, it was a sudden unexpected betrayal from the grave, and I found myself trying to shore up his feelings. “It was nothing to do with you, Jed. She knew you loved her, but lots of new mothers-especially when they’ve always been as pretty as Janie… I mean, she probably just wanted to see if she was still attractive. I’m sure she didn’t mean to endanger your marriage.”

I had a feeling I wasn’t getting anywhere. The stricken look on his handsome face was turning to-

“Oh Christ!” groaned the pragmatist. “After all these years, don’t tell me he’s going to be humiliated because he wasn’t sexy enough to satisfy his pretty little wife?”

“You always forgot to remember where the male ego’s centered,” scolded the preacher.

When I finally left, Gayle followed me out to the kitchen patio, still barefooted. “Thanks, Deborah,” she said and gave me a warm hug. “Dad’ll be glad to finally know, too, once his feelings quit being hurt.” She hesitated. “You won’t ever tell him, will you?”

“Tell him what, honey?”

“About-you know. About me thinking maybe he hired somebody to-”

I put my finger on her lips. “You never said a word,” I promised.

Dwight later told me that his interview with the Vickerys was one of the worst experiences of his entire life.

“I played the second tape for them,” he said, “and they just sat there watching my tape player like two hypnotized birds watching a blacksnake. Dr. Vickery groaned a couple of times, but I swear if Michael Vickery was cracked on the subject of religion, his mother’s the one who did it to him. I mean, I know you admire Mrs. Vickery, but dammit, Deb’rah, when that tape ended, you know what her only comment was? ‘God’s will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.’ ”

Terry Wilson and Scotty Underhill dropped by my office two days later. I’d already talked to them, of course, given my opinion that Denn had told the truth on those tapes Dwight made of both interrogations. “Or at least as much of the truth as Michael had told him,” I amended.

The slicker was a cornucopia of information. The blood was definitely Janie’s, most of the fingerprints were Michael’s and Denn’s and Janie’s, but of the several others that might never be identified, all were probably there quite innocently. Even my own teenager prints had been found under the collar from where I’d once hung it up for Janie.

“You see the problem though, don’t you?” Terry asked.

“Problem?”

Scotty Underhill looked a lot fresher than the night we first talked. He’d been slightly obsessed with Janie Whitehead’s murder and had begun to think he’d go to his grave without knowing for sure what happened. Ever since Terry woke him up early Wednesday morning to tell him, he’d been quietly pleased.

“There’s still a question as to who pulled the trigger,” he said. “On the tape, Denn still has Michael over in Chapel Hill all night, Friday.”

“Obviously Michael lied. Denn either forgot that Friday night was when Janie was shot or maybe he never even knew,” I said. “After all, it was several months before he learned she was shot. Don’t forget how Michael lied to Denn about not knowing the mill had already been searched before he dumped Janie there to finish dying.”

(Seth and Will had again been questioned on that point, and Seth confirmed that they’d met Michael at the head of the lane the day after Janie disappeared.)

“He must have lied about his alibi. Anyhow, wasn’t he just one of many back then? How carefully did you really verify it?”

“True,” Scotty said.

Terry was satisfied. “One more unsolved murder off the books,” he said complacently.

“One off, two on, isn’t it?”

“Naah. This one we’ll get. Vickery’s new boyfriend doesn’t have a watertight alibi for either night. And neither does the new boyfriend’s old boyfriend, if you take my meaning. Plus, we’ve already checked the phone records and learned that Vickery called the new one early enough Friday night that either of ’em could have been sitting at that theater when Vickery drove up. He says Vickery just called to say McCloy had moved out, but we’ll see.”

“Sounds awfully thin to me,” I said skeptically.

Terry and Scotty exchanged glances. Then Terry, sighed. “I told you she wouldn’t buy it.”

“Buy what?” I asked.

“And she’s nosey as hell, too,” said Terry, shaking his head.

“What?” I demanded.

“Look, Deborah, what I’m about to say goes no further, okay? We haven’t run all the tests yet, but the lab’s trying to work us up a hopper pattern on those shotgun pellets.”

“I didn’t know you could trace shotgun pellets,” I said.

“You can’t. Not like bullets. But you know how they’re made?”

Interested, I shook my head.

“Not to go into too much detail, what it amounts to is that you melt a bunch of lead ingots in a vat and then you make the melted lead into pellets. Each vat’s got a slightly different metallurgic composition, so when the pellets are poured into a giant hopper to load the shells, each day’s production means a distinctive pattern effect in the hopper. More than likely, when somebody buys a box of shells, they all came out of the same hopper. When you analyze all the pellets in a single shotgun blast, you can say whether or not they match the metallurgic composition of another shotgun blast. Got it?”

“Sounds awfully complicated and not terribly accurate,” I said.

Scotty shrugged. “Sometimes it’s all we’ve got to go on.”

“The point is,” said Terry, “the new boyfriend may or may not be involved in some other mess that’s going on, but these are not the first two guys that’ve been blown away with shotguns in the last six weeks.”

I looked at them, flabbergasted, remembering that shooting down near Fort Bragg a few weeks back. “Drugs?”

“Well, think about it,” Terry said, his homely face dead serious. “Who had a motive to kill them? Jed Whitehead? Maybe. If he’d known that Vickery killed his wife and McCloy helped cover it up. But how could he’ve known? Besides, he was at a schoolboard meeting that night till almost ten.

“The Pot Shot’s fifteen minutes from I-95 that ties Miami to New York. Every two or three weeks, Vickery ships a load of pottery to Atlanta. Maybe the pottery didn’t always travel empty. You hear what I’m saying?”

I heard, and oddly enough, it was more believable than their first solution. Just last week, one of the businessmen in Makely, an ex-police captain in fact and a man I’d have sworn was above reproach, was arrested for laundering drug money.

“Just cool it for a while, okay?” asked Terry. “I don’t want to be doing a pattern analysis on pellets we dig out of you, okay?”

“You got it,” I said, trying to assimilate all they’d given me to think about.

As the two agents stood to leave, Terry cut his eyes at me in a familiar flash of droll amusement. “Guess I’ll see you next week.”

I was confused. “You will?”

“Yeah, Stanton and me. Kezzie’s invited us to your pig picking.”

“He’s really giving one?”

Terry grinned. “You mean he forgot to invite you? Hell, girl, it’s gonna be the social event of the political year. I hear Jim Hunt’s coming, and they’re even trying to get Terry Sanford- all the biggies.”

A week later, Ambrose Daughtridge stopped by for a heart-to-heart after court adjourned and began by telling me that Denn and Michael had indeed written mutually beneficial wills.

“Each named the other as executor of his estate and, failing that, I was named substitute executor,” he said.

That Michael had intended to rewrite his will carried no legal weight, of course, and his original instrument would be probated as written: everything to Denn. His left everything to Michael as primary legatee and, should Michael die first, to his own brother’s sons, two teenage boys.

Ambrose leaned closer and, in a softer than usual tone that meant this was to go no further, confided that Mrs. Vickery intended to try to have the ninety-nine-year lease on her Dancy property set aside.

“If she just could’ve brought herself to tell me about Michael back then, I’d have sure made some different provisions in that reversion clause,” he said.

To look after his sons’ interests, Denn’s brother had retained the legal services of a high-powered law firm in Raleigh. For starters, they were claiming that the lease alone was worth over a million dollars; and the court fight was shaping up to be every bit as complicated as John Claude had anticipated.

I wanted no part of the battle, and it gave me great satisfaction to tell Ambrose, “I really do appreciate your courtesy in consulting me and your concern for the proprieties, so let me assure you, for the record, Ambrose, that there was nothing in my dealings with Mr. McCloy that would preclude your settling his affairs any way you choose.”

Without the least hint of irony, he said, “Thank you, Deborah. Now you be sure and bill his estate for services rendered, you hear?”

A rainy afternoon in a Pullen Park caboose? An arm to lean on, the night of his lover’s wake?

Sure.

My mother had been such a sociable and hospitable person that people loved to come visit almost as much as she loved having them come. Daddy might grumble over the upset and inconvenience, but he enjoyed being a patriarch and acting the host to all the far-flung friends and family who trekked back to the farm. No matter how full the house, floor space for one more sleeping bag or pallet could always be found. Her favorite parties were big ones. Not the “cocktails from seven to nine” type, but big sprawling affairs that might go on for days.

The summer that one of the little twins decided to get married at the farm, Mother brought home a stack of etiquette books from the library. I remember that when Daddy started to fuss about the size of the guest list at breakfast one morning, Mother opened one of the books and said, “Now, Kezzie, listen to this: ‘Whether or not you have included a request to RSVP, once invitations are extended beyond the bride and groom’s immediate family, you may safely assume that at least twenty-five percent of your guest list will not attend.’ ”

Daddy shook his head at that. “That stuffs written for New York City, not down here,” he said pessimistically. “Everybody’ll come and bring along their friends.”

In the end, formal invitations were mailed to 220 people, Mother rented 250 folding chairs just to be on the safe side, but Daddy was right: at least twenty-five people had to stand through the ceremony.

The year before she got sick, Mother threw a Saturday birthday party for Daddy that had people coming in from seven states up and down the eastern seaboard. The first guests arrived on a Tuesday, the last didn’t depart till the following Wednesday week. At one point, the old farmhouse slept eight extra adults and two babies, and Daddy threatened to have the boys dig a three-holer in the backyard so he wouldn’t have to stand in line for a bathroom.

She would have loved the pig picking Daddy put on for me: three pigs, an iron wash pot full of real Brunswick stew (“It ain’t real Brunswick stew if it ain’t got at least one squirrel in it”), wooden tubs of lemonade and iced tea for children and teetotalers, and kegs of beer discreetly off to one side for those who liked their liquids a little wetter.

The pigs weren’t due to come off the cookers till six-thirty, but by the time I got there a little after two, cars were already lining the lane and one of my nephews had begun directing guests into the near pasture. “But I saved you a place right at the front door, Aunt Deb’rah,” grinned his snaggle-toothed eight-year-old sister who was helping out.

A volleyball game was in sweaty progress in the side yard and the clank of iron against iron drew me past the cookers and on down to a stretch of open space beside the potato house, where horseshoes were flying back and forth. I got there just in time to see Minnie win her game with a ringer. “Come and take my place,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to the kitchen and see if they’ve got enough cabbage chopped up.”

Ostensibly she and Seth and three of my other brothers and their wives were hosting this party. Even though it was Daddy’s idea, Minnie had done most of the planning and she was the one who coordinated all the details. If Minnie had organized the flight out of Egypt, it wouldn’t have taken forty years to reach the Promised Land.

My brother Will and I paired up against an agricultural extension agent and her boyfriend, the principal of a Widdington high school. We’d have taken them, too, if my leaner at the end hadn’t been knocked flying by the principal’s second shot. They easily fended off Dwight Bryant and his sister-in-law Kate, a couple of tobacco lobbyists from over in Widdington, and two attorneys from Makely, only to be done in finally by Terry Wilson’s son Stanton and Linsey Thomas.

“Y’all hear ’bout Perry Byrd?” Linsey boomed from behind his bushy moustache as he and Stanton waited to see who their challengers would be.

“Hear what?”

“He had a stroke this morning.”

“What?”

“Yep. Went out after breakfast this morning to cut his grass, leaned over to crank his lawnmower, and never came back up.”

The two attorneys from Makely chimed in with more details about the rescue squad’s arrival, its resuscitation attempts, and the rush to Dobbs Memorial.

“Is he going to be okay?”

They shrugged. In that near-shout that was his normal speaking voice, Linsey said, “I called over to the hospital right before I came out here and they said he’s critical but stable, whatever that means.”