The Whiskey Baron (18 page)

Jeffreys nosed around the bar, and O’Connor stomped on the wood floors with the heel of his shoe, tapped at the baseboards with the welt until he heard the muted thunk of a loose board.

Tull sparked a match, and a cloud of fire and smoke blotted his face as he relit the stogie.

O’Connor pried up the baseboard. Beyond it was a latch that pulled up a trapdoor in the first floor, and he shined a flashlight down into the crawlspace. A ramshackle crate over loose dirt, empty now though you could see the lines of dust where gallon cans of liquor had been.

“Little late, boys.”

O’Connor set the trapdoor down and stood up. “Maybe one of these days we’ll come straight here, rather than dallying about town.”

“Now why would you do that? It’s so much more fun to make a game of it.”

“He thinks we’re playing a game,” Jeffreys said.

“Apparently,” O’Connor said.

“Do you think it’s a game?”

“I don’t think it’s a game.”

“I don’t know about you, Roy,” Jeffreys said, “but it makes me feel like maybe I’m wasting my time here.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Here we are, slaving away to protect our country from the likes of this man, and he makes a mockery of us. Makes a man wonder what he’s got to show for his years of service.”

“Hey, buddy, don’t despair. I’m sure Larthan here’s got something for us. To make us feel like we’re not wasting our time.”

“You think?”

“Yeah, sure. What do you think, Larthan? Do you think we’ve wasted our time today, coming all the way out here?”

Tull blew smoke across the room and grinned, but when he widened his lips the rest of his face remained steady. “OK, gentlemen,” he said. “What brings you out here today?”

“I don’t know, Roy. Should we talk to him now?”

“Why not? He seems ready to play ball.”

“You think?”

“Sure. Look at him, he’s smiling, he knows we’re not here to arrest him today, he’s having fun.”

“Just a game for him.”

“No, no. He’ll talk and sleep easy tonight,” O’Connor said. While the agents went back and forth, O’Connor had kept an eye on Tull, who remained still and puffed on his cigar.

Jeffreys glanced behind the bar, saw a biography Tull was in the middle of reading. “Stephen Field?” he said. “From the Supreme Court?”

“I admired him as a younger man.”

“What do you know about the law, Larthan?”

“You’d be surprised,” Tull said. “Justice Field believed the liberty of contract was implicit in our Constitution.”

“You don’t say.”

“And implicit within liberty of contract, gentlemen, is the notion that the federal government has no business interfering in the transactions of men.”

“Listen to this,” Jeffreys said. “A real smart guy, he is.”

“Sounds like it,” O’Connor said.

Tull folded his hands across the bar and said, “Gentlemen, I’m a busy man. You want to talk, let’s talk.”

Jeffreys sighed. “All right, Larthan. What can you tell us about Mary Jane?”

“He’s a drunk. Came in here last weekend and shot up two of my workers.”

“Why?”

“Lord knows.” He leaned his elbows on the bar and clasped his hands together. “Why does anybody do anything? He’s irrational. Maybe they beat him in a card game. Maybe they sidled into his favorite whore’s bedroom.”

“Who’s his favorite whore?” O’Connor asked, grinning.

“Woman out in the country named Abigail Coleman. Widow woman he’s been living with.”

“Would she know anything you’re not telling us?”

“If she does, she wouldn’t tell me. I went out there on Sunday to try to find him myself, and she beat me off with a broom.”

“Rumor going around is she and Mary Jane were brewing whiskey out on her farm,” O’Connor said.

“They may have been. I don’t keep up with who all brews what in this town.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Jeffreys said.

O’Connor glanced at Jeffreys, then back at Tull. “Larthan, the rumor is you were the one who killed those boys, and tried to kill Mary Jane, too, only he got away. Rumor is they were cutting too deep into your own business, and you felt the need to put them in their place. We were called in because the county rep believes all this to be related to the whiskey trade.”

“Well, now you can tell the county rep you came in and searched my place and talked to me, and you don’t believe the two are related, because they aren’t. Mary Jane Hopewell is crazy, and a drunk, and he may have been brewing whiskey on the side. But any connection between my employees getting shot in the street and the underground whiskey business in this state is pure fabrication. Nothing but coincidence.”

“Coincidence.”

“Runs the world,” Tull said.

“We’ll take that back with us,” O’Connor said.

“You do that.”

The agents walked out of the Hillside and stood on the pavement up the hill. The afternoon sun fired against them, and O’Connor held his hands to his hips and scanned the landscape. Farmland out there. Trees beyond the Hillside and across the road empty fields, cattle
grazing on the horizon, a farmhouse sitting low to the ground in the distance.

Tull watched them from the window and grinned. This was what he lived for, life under America’s rug. Yes, coincidence does indeed run the world. It explains why one man ends up behind a bar while another ends up in front of it. Why one man makes liquor, another man drinks it, and a third altogether tries to put a stop to the operation. Coincidence explained how Tull wound up here, snarling behind a cigar and smug in the knowledge that the two federal agents couldn’t do a thing to him. The knowledge that he was above the law.

He sucked on the cigar until he had a good inch of ash drooping from the end, and then he rose from the stool and picked up a broom, swept some of the dust off the floor. The trouble with being on top in business was that you always had to remain on the lookout. People wanted to cut him down. The feds he could handle, pay them off or give them a teaser of someone farther up on the chain. The county sheriff didn’t even need that much of a bribe. In a way he felt sorry for Chambers, an old man out of his element. Wanted only to be left alone to finish out his last years before retirement.

He picked up a pool cue and hit the remaining balls on the table into pockets.

The seven in the corner, the three into the side. The cue ball into another corner.

Chambers had come out here the night Ernest and Lee had been killed, and you could see it in his eyes that he’d rather have been at home in bed. Poor guy. Tull figured he would file a report and let it drop, but Chambers had surprised him, sniffed around town, visited Widow Coleman, interviewed the neighbors. But then again that was to be expected, for while Chambers wasn’t much, he was honorable, and townsfolk would expect him to come up with something. Stop this killing. Shut down the Hillside if you have to. What they didn’t realize was that they needed a man like Larthan Tull. He alone was willing to take on the responsibility of providing liquor to Castle County. It gave people a release, without which the county would have far bigger troubles.

Tull lay the cue stick on the table and reached for his hat.

At the sheriff’s office he found Chambers standing on his desk, cursing at a light bulb that wouldn’t screw in straight. Tull watched in amusement as Chambers sighed and squinted, his mouth agape, until the sheriff finally noticed him.

“Larthan.”

“Furman.”

Chambers wheezed as he stepped off the desk. “I was just—”

“I got you.”

“Take a seat.”

Tull sat.

“What can I do for you?”

Tull reached into his pocket and withdrew a bottle of whiskey, wrapped in brown paper, and handed it across the table. The sheriff took it.

“I figured Jeffreys would find whatever stash you had in here and swipe it from you.”

Chambers unscrewed the cap, pulled two shot glasses out of his desk drawer, poured the amber liquid to the brim of the glasses, and slid one over to Tull. They drank. After swallowing, Chambers said, “Couple of cards, they are.”

“Ha, you right about that.”

“How long you known them?”

“They come through about once a year, nose around for an hour until I pay them to go back wherever they came from.”

“Greedy and corrupt,” Chambers said, and he swigged his shot.

“Don’t say it with such disdain, Furman. Where would the world be without the greedy and corrupt to get things done? It took greed to get us out of Eden, and corruption to get us saved when they hung Jesus Christ.”

“The point isn’t the corruption. The point is we lost Eden, and it took Christ to get it back for us.”

“To hell with Eden. You know what Eden was? Eden was a married couple sitting around bored with each other. It takes a little trouble to stir things up. How often do you and your wife like to just sit around and eat fruit all day? Sounds dreadful, doesn’t it?” Tull reached for the whiskey, refilled the glasses. “Besides, if everything was paradise, you and me’d be out of a job.”

Chambers slugged the second shot of whiskey, and Tull could read his thoughts, could see the sheriff’s wife asking him to go ahead and retire, and he could see Chambers hanging on lest he face the boredom of his last days slowly withering away.

“I can see what you’re thinking, Furman. Don’t beat yourself up, thinking like that. No man wants to spend all his days with his wife by his side.”

“What about you? Don’t you ever wish you had your wife back?”

“I was never married.”

“What about Evelyn’s mother?”

“Evelyn’s mother was a whore I lived with in Knoxville. And I paid off her pimp to live with her.”

“But she’s also the mother of your child.”

“I love my child, make no mistake. I’m in business for Evelyn. But her mother and me, that didn’t mean a thing. She was just a bus stop on my way to Castle.”

“And Evelyn?”

“What about her?”

“She’s growing up, Larthan. I know, it happens fast. Don’t you ever think about slowing down, spending time with her before some boy up and decides to marry her?”

“No man’s going to touch her.”

“Why? Because she’s a bootlegger’s daughter? Some day there’ll come a man who doesn’t know who you are, or doesn’t care. He’ll come into town and steal her from this paradise you’re taking for granted, and by the time you figure it out she’ll already be gone.”

Tull sat back and stared across the desk. “What are you saying? Do you have designs on her yourself?”

“Hell no,” Chambers said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t know what to do with a young woman, even if I wasn’t married. But I was a young buck once. I remember what it’s like. And I’ll tell you another thing, I was a parent too. Even if your child doesn’t walk out of Eden, the world will come to her. That’s how life goes. You can’t fight it.”

“I’ll see you, Furman. Keep the whiskey, and let me know if the feds come back.”

“Don’t get all offended,” Chambers said as Tull stood. “Sit down. Let’s talk serious for a minute.”

The sheriff poured two more glasses of whiskey and Tull sat.

“Maybe we ought to figure out the Hopewell business,” Chambers said.

“What about it?”

“You know I can overlook what you do for a living. Hell, at least you’re organized about it. But I can’t overlook a murder. People in town—even the whiskey drinkers—want to know they’re safe, and when people get shot in the street, no one feels safe. I’ve got people calling me up from Columbia for answers, and now the federal agents are coming in. They’re all blaming it on your business, so they expect me to do something about you.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“For now, nothing. You say Mary Jane shot those boys, and there’s no evidence for anything else. But now they’re hounding me about a highway patrolman got killed up in York County.”

Tull paused. The Smith & Wesson was still in the glove box of his car.

“You know anything about that?”

“Not a thing.”

“Me either. I don’t believe Mary Jane does either, but those two feds are convinced it’s all related.”

“Everything’s related, Furman, and nothing is. That’s just the way the world works. Folks do what they have to, to get by, and your job as lawman is to see there’s restraint. Of course, restraint goes against our very natures, but we need it for our survival, and therein lies the paradox.”

“Just do me a favor and lay low for a while.”

Tull grinned. “Ain’t easy, is it, Furman? Just like being a kid again, and your parents tell you not to hang out with the boys who rule the neighborhood.”

“My brothers and I did rule the neighborhood.”

“Then don’t worry about the feds. You just sit tight. Keep ruling the neighborhood. I got some more business to do today.”

Tull left the sheriff bemused at his desk and stepped into the dusty street. He got into the car and started the engine. The streets were empty today—Thursday—and he couldn’t judge why. The only
person about seemed to be an eyeless man shuffling along the sidewalk as if he had no place in particular to go. Tull watched him lope and stop and lope again after feeling around with his cane. The man turned his head to the rumbling Studebaker, and for a moment it was as if, in place of those black sockets, he had eyes that bore straight into Larthan Tull’s soul.

T
he piedmont unfolded from the base of the Blue Ridge toward the Carolina coastline like a carpet, gently sloping across a patchwork of hills and valleys, cut through by rivers and rail lines, and stippled with mill villages. Tall ryegrasses lined the dirt roads in the upstate, dusty two-lanes that ran near the railroads, village to village. From the mountains, deciduous forest overtook the landscape, sweetgums and white oaks and tulip poplars, and farther east the forests thinned out, and jerseys and holsteins grazed in yellowgreen meadows, rows of pines in the distance. Somewhere the whistle and clatter of a train broke the stillness. A flock of crows squawked and flew in a V away from the noise. The tires of an old black Model T kicked up dust on the two-lane. The smell of late summer blooms blew on the breeze, and the flowers colored the dusty green landscape—the sweet white blooms of Confederate jasmine, feathersoft pinks and oranges of the mimosas, the bloodred trumpet creepers.