Bootlegger’s Daughter

18 make the world go away

I’m fine,” I said for the third time.

“You sure?” asked Dwight Bryant.

As head of the detective division, he had all his people moving in the directions he wanted them to go, and now he could make time to come over to the car and get my whole story. I was parked at the edge of the grass behind the theater with my front door open and one foot on the ground, and he leaned his big muscular body against the car as we talked so he could keep an eye on proceedings.

Although there was still plenty of daylight, portable floods had been rigged to light the interior of Denn’s Volvo while they took photographs from every angle before they moved him.

So far, everything had been done by the book. I might have disturbed the crime scene by driving in and out, but after I’d gotten to a phone and called the sheriff’s department, the first deputy to respond had blocked off the theater’s drive out by the paved road. All emergency vehicles had come in by driving straight across the grass to the edge of the back parking lot, while one member of Dwight’s team took a close look at the drive and parking lot. I doubted if she’d find anything. Gravel doesn’t mark, we hadn’t had rain in more than a week, and this sandy soil becomes too dry and powdery to hold tracks after two or three days of hot sun.

Dwight wanted to know how I’d discovered the body, and I told him about Sylvia Dayley and the message Denn’d left on the firm’s answering machine.

“You thought he’d wait that long?” Dwight asked skeptically.

“Not him,” I said. “Whatever it was he wanted to give me.”

A velvet cloak seemed such a petty object in the face of Denn’s death that I wasn’t going to mention it if I could help it. Before Dwight thought to ask, I said, “He didn’t happen to hint what it was when you talked to him on Thursday, did he?”

“Nope.”

“What did he say? About shooting at Michael on Wednesday, I mean?”

Dwight gave a wry grin. “Swore he didn’t do it; promised he wouldn’t ever do it again.” He shifted his weight against my car, and I swayed with the motion of the shocks. “Makes me wonder where Michael Vickery is right now.”

“You think Michael-?”

“Well, you’re the one who talked about menopausal males,” he said.

The radio crackled on the county’s emergency rescue truck and I was suddenly reminded of where I was supposed to be. Dwight said I was welcome to ask one of the patrolmen to tell the dispatcher to get word to the Makely Parents Without Partners that I wouldn’t be coming.

As I got out of the car, Jack Jamison, a tubby young deputy, called, “Hey, Major Bryant-see you over here a minute?”

It was more than a minute, and whatever it was that Jamison was pointing out to Dwight inside the Volvo, it sure seemed to set off a whole new flurry of activity. The patrolman I’d collared had barely finished giving the dispatcher my message than I heard Dwight putting out an APB on Michael Vickery’s gray Ford pickup.

The sun finally melted into the pine trees. Not much daylight left as reaction set in. I began to feel as tired as if I’d barned tobacco all day and so utterly saddened by Denn’s violent death. He was nearly fifteen years older than me and he and Michael had done little socializing in Cotton Grove, so we may not have been close friends, but we were friends, and I mourned- the loss of his colorful personality. I could almost smile to remember how much fun he’d made The Night of January 16th, some of his outrageous comments about my fellow cast members during costume fittings. Bitchy, witty, and surprisingly insightful. The Possum Creek Players would have a hard time replacing him.

All this went through my mind as Dwight gave a physical description of the pickup’s probable driver, and I must have been even more tired than I realized because I sat there stupidly for a moment wondering why on earth Dwight was putting Denn’s description on an APB.

The rescue people were lifting the limp form from the car. I went over and tried to focus on the body, without letting myself really look at the head again.

We sure do see what we expect to see, don’t we? Earlier, I’d assumed that the man in Denn’s car, sitting where Denn was supposed to be sitting, waiting where Denn had said he’d be waiting, was indeed Denn.

Wrong.

Now I saw quite clearly that it was Michael Vickery who’d had his face blown away.

It made the eleven o’clock news on all our local channels and the front pages of several Sunday papers around eastern North Carolina.

Scion of a prominent local family, police seeking his missing male companion, body discovered by an equally prominent candidate for a seat on the bench-all the notice that I’d avoided earlier I was now getting in spades.

The television stories concentrated on Michael and Denn, but the newspapers had time and space to include me since by now it was clear that Michael had died around nine o’clock on Friday night, the time and place Denn McCloy expected to meet me. The sheriff’s department wouldn’t speculate either on or off the record about why Michael Vickery was there instead or why a meeting I didn’t keep should have led to murder.

Nice of Dwight not to speculate out loud, but it didn’t stop the media.

In addition to my usual academic and career achievements, I was described as the “only daughter of Keziah Knott, at one time alleged to be North Carolina ’s largest bootlegger.” One or two hinted that I was-till now anyhow-the only white sheep of an infamous family, while others picked up on those phony campaign flyers and left the impression that Michael’s murder had something to do with my position on sex, race, drugs, untaxed whiskey, and God knows what else.

Although they were very careful to print or broadcast nothing actionable, the open-ended quagmire of personalities, crime, unanswered questions, and suggestive innuendos kept the reading and viewing public tuned in. I had the gloomy feeling that I was watching my seat on any bench trickle right on down the drain.

Monday came and went with no sign of Denn McCloy or the gray Ford pickup.

Mrs. Vickery had collapsed upon hearing the news of Michael’s death and was said to have spent two days under heavy sedation, devastated and unable to accept Michael’s death. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that she’d given in so completely to normal grief. There were whispers of a suicide watch, but nobody believed it. Dr. Vickery refused to talk to the media, but his son’s employees out at the Pot Shot Pottery wouldn’t shut up.

One of them in particular, Cathy King, suffered from what Uncle Ash calls congenital tongue deformity: one that’s tied in the middle and flaps at both ends.

“I really can’t say,” she told any reporter who wandered in, then immediately started running her mouth.

The only good thing-as far as Denn McCloy was concerned- was that Michael wasn’t the only one she’d told that Denn was meeting me at the Possum Creek Theatre. She’d mentioned it in a crowded 7-Eleven store where she’d stopped to pick up a jug of milk and had speculated on it at choir practice that evening. Choir practice let out at eight-thirty so, theoretically anyhow, half of Cotton Grove could have known by eight-forty-five.

What didn’t help Denn was the way Cathy described in colorful detail the times she’d heard the two men snap at each other in the last few months as their longtime relationship deteriorated and fell apart. Evidently I wasn’t so far off target with my flip remarks about male menopause. When Michael hit forty, he’d begun to stray over into the gay hangouts around the Triangle. At first, Denn ignored Michael’s wandering eye; lately though, there’d been bitter and acrimonious scenes.

“This past year’s just been wild!” said Cathy.

Her two co-workers were less dramatic but grudgingly agreed with her assessment of a growing rift between the two men. They also agreed that it must have been Denn who fired the rifle on Wednesday. Cathy saw him take Michael’s rifle from the truck and throw it in the Volvo. She said Denn even admitted that he’d gone out in the woods and fired a couple of rounds at a pine tree, but he certainly hadn’t been aiming at Michael. “If I ever take a gun to Michael, I won’t miss,” he was said to have threatened.

“Actually,” said Cathy King, “I got the feeling he meant to scare Gayle Whitehead.”

Which insured, of course, that Monday’s paper carried a complete rehash of Janie Whitehead’s death.

Gayle immediately went to earth at her grandmother Whitehead’s house.

“I don’t want to talk to any reporters,” she said when I called to see how she was, “but you know, Deborah, this may not be such a bad thing. Not Michael Vickery getting killed-that part’s so terrible! I still can’t believe we were just talking to him and now he’s dead-but if it gets people remembering about my mother… You reckon maybe he did know something more than he ever told? Something he told Denn and Denn was maybe going to tell you?”

“If that’s the case, why would Denn kill him?” I asked, trying to assess the situation logically. “If it was incriminating, you’d think Michael would have tried to stop Denn, not the other way around. It doesn’t make sense.”

“You’ll figure it out,” Gayle said promptly.

Oh yeah? With a campaign to salvage?

“Look, honey,” I began, but she interrupted with a wail of protest.

“You can’t stop now, Deborah. Everything’s so stirred up, somebody’s bound to let something slip if you just ask the right questions. Please?”

Sighing, I agreed at least to listen if anyone should stop me in the street and want to unburden a secret.

Back in the real world, reading the morning papers began to cut into work time at Lee, Stephenson and Knott. Clients can make the news, attorneys aren’t supposed to; yet my name was in print so many times that the pained expression seemed to have settled permanently on John Claude’s fine thin features.

On Tuesday Reid brought a couple of interesting tidbits to our morning coffee.

Ambrose Daughtridge had been Michael and Denn’s attorney, and he’d let slip that Michael had begun looking into the legal ramifications of untangling their financial assets. Indeed, Michael had made an appointment for yesterday afternoon to rewrite his will.

“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.”