Bootlegger’s Daughter (21 page)

“At least they’re all still honoring whatever vows they made,” said the preacher starchily.

The pragmatist held his tongue.

The Possum Creek Players Theatre began life as a one-room schoolhouse in the center of town a hundred years ago. The one room grew to three before it was abandoned for a new brick school in the twenties. A pentecostal congregation immediately bought the building and moved it to the banks of Possum Creek about five miles north of Cotton Grove. In the fifties, shortly after the church elders had taken out a new mortgage to remodel the structure, long-simmering animosities over scriptural interpretations suddenly came to a boil and emotions ran so high that the church split right down the middle. The wealthier members pulled out and built a new church at a crossroads south of Cotton Grove. The rest of the flock, unable to meet the mortgage payments, soon drifted off to other churches, and the bank foreclosed.

After that, the building sat empty for several years. The property kept changing hands. Different enterprises tried and failed out there, but nothing seemed to work until the Possum Creek Players organized and eventually raised enough money to take it over on a fairly sound financial footing. Raleigh was near enough to furnish better-than-average amateur actors; and Raleigh provided a dependable paying audience as well, once the theater had built a reputation for campy musical comedy, farce, and melodrama.

A gravel road wound in from the highway, through a stand of pine trees and azaleas out to the old white clapboard building on the banks of the creek. With the sun at my back, I drove into the sprawling dirt parking lot where a neat square sign announced that Bouncing Betty’s Betrothal would open the first of June. As I thought, the parking lot was empty, but I drove around back. There, a covered archway sheltered a set of double doors used to move sets and furniture in and out of the building.

To my surprise, Denn’s Volvo was pulled up to the far edge of the concrete loading zone. The theater’s double doors were in shadow, but I could see that one of them stood slightly ajar.

I tapped my horn.

Nothing.

I switched off my motor and stepped out of air-conditioned coolness onto sun-parched grass. Warm air flowed around my bare arms almost like the red velvet cloak itself.

The sun was down below the pines now, and silence wrapped the shadowed creek bank. I walked across the concrete pad and pushed the door wider.

“Denn? Michael?” I called. “Anybody here?”

All at once it struck me what a dumb thing it was to be walking into an isolated building out here in the middle of nowhere. Probably deserted, but maybe not. Not with Denn’s car parked only ten feet away.

“And let us not forget who’s shown himself to be just a little too damn free in the way he handles a rifle,” said the pragmatist.

“She who fears and runs away lives to fear another day,” the preacher agreed nervously.

I backed away from the door, feeling slightly foolish. On the other hand, I do keep a loaded.38 locked in the truck of my car and this seemed like as good a time as any to get it out.

The concrete loading zone was only eight or nine inches off ground level, but when I turned, I found myself looking straight down into the front seat of Denn’s car. An instant jolt of pure adrenaline jerked me backwards. I was propelled by such a strong and instinctive survival response that I had no time to reason. I could only react in primitive, headlong, terrified flight across the strip of open ground between the two cars. I dived into mine and dug out of there so fast that gravel spun out in all directions, and I hunched as low as I could, expecting to feel a shotgun blast between my shoulder blades at any second.

Like the blast that’d taken out the driver’s side of the Volvo windshield and blown away Denn McCloy’s whole face.

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.