Bootlegger’s Daughter

27 i could be persuaded

Michael Vickery’s funeral was one of the largest ever held out at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church. They opened up the Sunday school classrooms on either side of the main auditorium and brought in extra chairs and still the church was too full to hold all who wanted to attend.

Those who couldn’t get in took up positions outside around the open grave, and Duck Aldcroft and his two sons had their hands full trying to keep reporters and television cameramen out of the way of the pallbearers. I later heard that he’d actually raised his voice at one point, but I put that down to sensationalism.

I didn’t go.

I didn’t go to Denn McCloy’s funeral either, mostly because it was a private ceremony held on Long Island. His next of kin was a brother up there, a claims investigator for a national insurance company, I believe; and as soon as Denn’s body was released by the medical examiner, it was shipped north.

After only an hour’s sleep, I got up again Wednesday morning, showered, and drove back to Cotton Grove. Jed had just put on a pot of coffee when I knocked on the kitchen door.

“Deborah?” Except for his jacket and tie, he was already dressed for work and he smelled of fresh aftershave. It was still Old Spice, after all these years. He looked rested and untroubled.

“Can I come in, Jed? I need to see you and Gayle.”

“Sure. What’s wrong?”

Gayle came down the hallway, sleepy eyed and still in her nightgown. “Hey, Deborah. What’s up?”

“I wanted to tell you about Denn McCloy before you read about it in the paper or see it on TV,” I said.

“What about him?” asked Jed as Gayle smothered a yawn with the back of her hand. Her brown hair was rumpled and her soft cheek still held the impression of her pillow.

“He was killed last night,” I said. “Shot. Just like Michael Vickery.”

Gayle’s brown eyes widened and she sat down on a stool at the breakfast counter. “Murdered?” Her small toes curled around the stool rungs.

“Who did it?” asked Jed.

“They don’t know yet. It only happened around midnight.” I glanced at the blue wall clock over the sink. “Six hours ago.”

“Sit down,” said Jed, pulling a chair out at the breakfast table. He poured me a cup of coffee and he remembered that I liked it black.

“You look like you had a rough night,” he said gently. “Were you there?”

“Not when it happened. A few minutes later.” The coffee was too hot to drink but I drank it anyhow. “There’s no easy way to say this, Jed.”

I turned to Gayle. “You wanted to know what happened to your mother, honey? Apparently Michael Vickery killed her. I don’t think he meant to or wanted to, but all the same, he did.”

“Michael?”

First they were incredulous and then they peppered me with questions. In the early morning hours while technicians measured and charted, photographed and videotaped, I’d thought about what I was going to say.

At one point, I’d asked Dwight, “Do you have to speculate about who those two Cotton Grove lesbians in Denn’s story were?”

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.