Bootlegger’s Daughter (7 page)

“These two guys got a contract to burn out an old dilapidated tobacco warehouse over in Smithfield, see? Insurance scam. You sure you didn’t read about it?”

I shook my head. Smithfield was in Johnston, a county that touched Colleton but wasn’t in my judicial district.

“They had the preliminary hearing yesterday, and one of the perpetrators copped a plea and blamed it all on his partner. He just carried the can, he says, and it was his Dumbo partner who sloshed around all that gas. And it was Dumbo that made the Pall Mall fuse. You know what that is, don’t you?”

Actually I did, but he was cute and wanted to stretch it out.

“It’s a delay device,” he explained, taking his own cigarette from the ashtray and threading the unlit end through a book of matches. “See, tobacco burns at approximately 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I could burn this cigarette all day long and never set off gas vapors because it takes between 550 and 850 degrees to ignite them. Now this cigarette’ll take about ten minutes to burn down to the match heads, giving me time to get back here to Miss Molly’s and establish my alibi. The match heads’ll ignite at less than 350 degrees and generate enough fire and heat to set the paper on fire. The paper will generate up to 1,000 degrees and that’s finally hot enough to ignite the vapors, see?”

I nodded.

“Well, Dumbo does it all-matchbook nailed low to a center post ’cause he did know gas vapors are heavier than air, cigarette laced through the matches, only he forgot to light the cigarette till the last minute and what does he do?”

Everyone was grinning in anticipation.

“He flicks his goddamn Bic. I figure ol’ Dumbo probably had time to say Oh… but by the time he got to shit, he was standing in front of St. Peter, one pitiful crispy critter.”

Through the laughter, Morgan said, “Pretty good, Max. Almost beats one we had a few years ago. Before your time. He and his old lady’d been fighting half the night and she kicked him out of her trailer at two o’clock in the morning. He was so pissed he went next door and borrowed a match.”

I sipped my virgin GT and smiled lazily at Max. Enough to show him he was appreciated but not enough to move him around the table. I couldn’t afford any new entanglements right then.

Morgan misinterpreted and, with misguided generosity, offered me a Wake County sheriff’s deputy. “Tell Deborah ’bout that guy from California yesterday,” she said, gracefully stubbing her cigarette in one of the glass ashtrays.

“That call we got about some suspicious activity out near Fuquay?”

This one was a big, corn-fed blond with an easy aw-shucks-ma’am smile, who didn’t have to be asked twice to perform.

“I got out there and found a red GT with California plates. Unattended. Trunk lid up though, and the trunk half filled with that there stuff we call green vegetable matter when we have to take the stand.”

Terry leaned forward to listen. This was evidently a new story to him and he’d worked drugs. Tobacco is North Carolina ’s biggest legal cash crop, but they say marijuana puts more cash into the state economy than tobacco, and Terry takes it personal.

“Well I just hung around a few minutes and pretty soon, here comes this joker crashing out of the underbrush with his arms full of more green vegetable matter, freshly cut. He’s stripped to the waist. Sweaty. Briar scratches on his chest. Man, he’s been working double-time.”

He paused and tipped up his beer glass, then wiped his lips with calm, assured motions.

“He’s halfway up the ditch bank before he sees me standing there, my unit nosed right in behind his little GT. He drops his load so quick you’d think all that g.v.m.’s suddenly turned to poison oak. I don’t move a muscle or say a word till he gets up level with me. He’s scared shitless and just stands there looking.

“Finally I say, ‘Son, what the hell you think you’re doing trespassing on private property?’

“He doesn’t know whether to lie or tell the truth and starts moaning, ‘Omigawd, omigawd, omigawd.’

“ ‘Son,’ I say, ‘let me see your driver’s license.’ He hands it over and now he’s whining, ‘Please, officer, I didn’t mean nothing. I was driving through-everybody says North Carolina has good weed growing wild-I thought I’d check it out. I swear to God I’ve never done anything like this before.’ ”

“Sure he hadn’t,” said Terry sarcastically.

“Well, now, Terry, that’s where you and me might differ. There was something that made me believe maybe he hadn’t. And that’s exactly what I told him. ‘Son,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the pure look of truth in your eyes, so I’m gonna let you off easy this time. You empty your trunk and then you get your tail out of the state of North Carolina and don’t ever come back, you hear?”

“Well he dumped all that g.v.m. and was in his car hightailing it back to California before you could spit twice.”

He took another deep swallow of his beer and leaned back in his chair, smiling through those sleepy blue eyes.

Terry frowned. “You let him go?”

“Well, hell, Terry,” the deputy drawled. “Far as I know, there ain’t no law yet against filling your trunk with fresh-cut ragweed.”

Laughter erupted all around and Terry threw Max’s book of matches at him. “You sorry rascal!”

As the raucous hoots and gotchas turned into general conversation, Morgan waved to a quiet older man across the room. I knew Scotty Underhill by sight, but he’d always been a family man, not one to dawdle long in bars after-hours, so I didn’t know him all that well.

According to Terry, his daughters were grown now so he’d started stopping by occasionally. Morgan offered to scoot over and slide in another chair next to hers, but he shook his head and went off to a side booth with Terry. When they’d finished their business a few minutes later, Terry motioned for me to join them.

Underhill started to rise. I appreciate good manners, but he looked tired, so I said, “No, don’t get up,” and slipped into the booth next to Terry.

“I told Scotty you’re looking into the Janie Whitehead case,” said Terry.

“Her daughter’s eighteen now,” I explained, “and wants to know more about what happened to her mother.”

“That baby’s eighteen? Good golly Moses.” He sighed, tucked the ends of his blue plaid tie back inside his neat gray jacket and shook his head at the rapid passage of time. “But yeah, she was a year younger than my youngest daughter, and Delia’s sure enough nineteen now.”

“If you have daughters, then you can probably appreciate how Janie Whitehead’s daughter must feel, growing up not knowing why her mother was killed,” I coaxed.

“Yeah, sure, but we reworked it about three or four years ago.” He glanced at Terry for confirmation.

“Seven years,” said Terry.

“Seven? You sure? God! Where does the time go?” His blue eyes were probably three shades lighter than what he’d started with and his hair almost completely gray. There were also tired lines around his mouth that made him seem older than the fifty he probably was. “Well, whenever. We tried to come at it fresh, like we’d just got the call that she’d been found in that millhouse. I’ll never forget it. That pretty young thing lying on those cold stones. All those blowflies. Could have been so much worse, of course. May and everything. It can get hot. Look at today.”

He took another sip of his ice water. “The baby was dehydrated, though, and it was a damn good thing she hadn’t started crawling yet ’cause there was a Christ almighty big gaping drop where the paddle wheel used to go.”

“Could you account for all Janie’s movements that day?”

He leaned back in the booth and regarded me steadily, though it was Terry he spoke to. “You say she’s going to be a judge?”

“Is that a problem?” I asked mildly.

His eyes may have been pale blue but they were the eyes of a weary old spaniel who’d learned to wait instead of chasing after every breeze that bent the grass, and they didn’t waver now. “Not as long as I go by the book.”

Terry started to stir, but I laid my hand on his arm. “Primary’s not till Tuesday,” I pointed out. “And we’re a long way from November.”

Underhill seemed to consider, then shrugged. “Well, Terry’s my boss now. If he says it’s okay…?”

“It is okay,” said Terry.

“All technicalities anyhow. We didn’t find a damn thing the first time through and not a hell of a lot more the second time. So what do you want me to tell you?”

“Everything,” I said and signaled Spot for another round of drinks. Terry and I switched to coffee; Underhill opted for tomato juice.

It was sensible. It was healthy. We were all going to live to be a hundred.

But sometimes I missed feeling like John J. Malone.

Before Scotty Underhill could finish doctoring his tomato juice with Tabasco and Worcestershire to turn it into something that had the taste, if not the kick, of a Bloody Mary, Terry had gulped his coffee, given my shoulder a brotherly pat, and charged off to make Stanton ’s ball game.

“I haven’t looked at those records in months, so I can’t give you chapter and verse,” Scotty warned as he squeezed a slice of lemon into his tomato juice and laid it on the napkin beside his glass. “Still, when you give it that much time, it’s not something you forget either.”

He gave me a tired smile. “Hell, I even remember you now. You were the baby-sitter, weren’t you?”

“Why yes. I’m surprised you remember.”

“We looked at everybody. Even baby-sitters. You thought her husband was groovy, as I recall.”

Unexpected embarrassment washed over me. I felt myself turning red and was thankful Terry wasn’t there to see. “Who on earth told you that?”

“Does it matter?”

“No. Just sounds funny hearing that an SBI agent paid any attention to a schoolgirl crush.” A crush I thought I’d hidden from the world.

“Schoolgirls have done crazy things. Besides, you weren’t some little kid. You’d just turned sixteen, a young woman driving her own car. A white Thunderbird, as I recall.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “You were also Kezzie Knott’s daughter.”

I let it pass. If he knew that, then he also knew that the only thing my father’s ever been convicted of is income tax evasion. He would also know that Daddy served his eighteen months in a federal prison well before I was even born. By the time I was eight, a governor and two senators had pulled the necessary strings to get him an unconditional pardon. Theoretically, that single conviction had been expunged from his record.

In practice, helicopters continued to circle Knott land like buzzards, looking for stills and probably even strips of marijuana tucked in between tobacco rows, though I don’t think Daddy’s ever messed with pot. He always said he made his money the old-fashioned way, and he may be a scoundrel but he’s never been a hypocrite. Nevertheless, the drone of spotter planes was one of my earliest memories, and even Terry has been exasperated enough to complain about them spooking the bass when he’s fishing one of Daddy’s lakes.

Max waved to me on his way out and his place at the big round table was taken by two women I vaguely recognized from the attorney general’s office. On the jukebox, Tina Turner was belligerently demanding to know what love had to do with it-Spot’s jukebox has always been a comfortable five years behind the hits-and the strident beat muffled words, bursts of laughter, and the tinkle of bottles and glasses as Miss Molly’s geared up for Friday night. Above the music, Morgan gave me a what’s doing? look, and when I gestured that I’d be a little longer, she lit another cigarette and turned back to the conversation at her own table while I got on with mine.

“Who else did you look at?” I asked tightly.

“The husband, his parents, her parents, neighbors, friends, old boyfriends. You name it, we did it.”

He stirred his tomato juice with a straw, sipped, added a sprinkle of pepper and stirred again.

“You probably know as much how she died as I do.”

“I doubt it.”

“Okay, let’s see. She disappeared on the first Wednesday in May.” He looked surprised to realize the calendar was back to May again. “Day before yesterday, eighteen years ago.”

Unlike this year, that May had begun unseasonably cool and rainy, and I remembered there’d been a heavy fog that never completely lifted.

He nodded. “A morning that kept people indoors with the heat turned back on. No fit weather to take a new baby out in, but there was nobody to stay with her. Not her parents. Not you. You were in school till three-thirty.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, but it gave me a weird feeling to realize how thoroughly my movements, too, had been documented back then.

Janie’s mother and father had driven over to Durham early that morning to attend the funeral of Mrs. Poole’s cousin, Scotty continued, and her sister was down with some sort of spring virus that made it risky to expose the baby. In fact, it was her sister’s illness that took Janie out that day in the first place. Marylee Poole Strickland was room mother for her second-grader, and she’d promised to take cupcakes for a class party immediately after lunch. The cupcakes had been baked and decorated the night before, but when she awoke too sick to take them over, she’d called on Janie.

According to Marylee, everything was absolutely normal when Janie ran in at 11:45 to get the cupcakes, leaving Gayle in the car. At Cotton Grove Elementary, the second-grade teacher didn’t know Janie well enough to confirm Marylee’s assessment, but she did think that the only thing on Janie’s mind was not leaving her baby daughter in the car by herself too long. She’d stayed just long enough to bring in the tray of cupcakes and the quart-size bottles of Pepsi, and to pass along Marylee’s apologies, before hurrying from the classroom.

A fifth-grade teacher on the second floor of the school had been standing at the window overlooking the parking lot, trying to judge if the rain had slacked off enough for her to take her class out for a breath of fresh air before their lunch period. She had known Janie since childhood and was able to state quite definitely that she saw the young mother in her chic red vinyl raincoat cut across the schoolyard to her dark blue sedan. Janie had adjusted the blanket around the infant in the portable crib on the backseat, then driven off alone back toward the center of town. The time was exactly 12:17.