Bootlegger’s Daughter (6 page)

“That’s why you tried to have a hypnotist take you back?”

“It didn’t work, though.” Lingering disappointment shadowed her voice. “I was really hoping maybe I’d remember her.”

My own mother died the summer I turned eighteen, and trying to imagine never having known her made it easier to understand why everybody could get sentimental and maudlin about Gayle’s semi-orphaned status. Gayle’s next words, however, made it clear that something else was going on in her head.

“What was her tragic flaw, Deborah?”

I looked at her blankly. Okay, we all knew Gayle was bright. They don’t give out full four-year scholarships to the university just because someone’s mother got killed. But was she brains or book learning?

“I took an interdisciplinary honors course last fell,” she said. “Hamlet, Edward the Eighth, Richard Nixon. We discussed their tragic flaws, and I couldn’t help applying it to my mother. Not who killed her, but why? What was her tragic flaw?” She leaned forward. “Everybody says she was good and sweet and beautiful and that I’m just like her. Well, nobody’s that damn sweet and good. I’m not and I bet she wasn’t either.”

Brains, then?

There had been a million unanswered questions when Janie Whitehead was killed, but every question was predicated on the belief that innocence and purity had been cruelly slaughtered that chilly May afternoon. Yet, in the months before, lust for Jed Whitehead had made me acutely aware of Janie’s flaws and, yes, she had her human share. I had collected them secretly and gloated over them like a miser polishing his coins. God knows I’d been wracked with guilt when I saw her cold stiff body lying in that coffin, her shining black hair spread across the pink satin pillow, her luminous brown eyes closed for all eternity; but remorse and guilt and prayers to God for forgiveness had not washed away the question with which Gayle now struggled.

“They say everybody carries within themselves the seeds of their own destruction,” she said.

“Sounds like another way to blame the victim for the crime,” I hedged starchily, as if I were already a judge.

“She was only twenty-two,” said Gayle, her voice passionate. “Four years older than I am right now. What if I really am like her?”

“Nobody’s going to kill you,” I told her.

Again it was the wrong comment and she waved me off impatiently.

“I’ve almost quit wondering about who killed her, Deborah. Now I think if I just find out why, that might be enough. People either pat me on the head when I ask what she was like or else they tell me another bedtime story. You knew her and you know everybody in Cotton Grove. And I’m not asking you to do it for nothing either. I’ve got Grampa Poole’s trust fund, and I’ll spend every last cent if that’s what it takes to find out what she was really like that somebody felt she needed killing.”

Jed didn’t like it when I called to tell him that Gayle was determined to go through with it one way or another. Not one little bit did he like it.

“She’s as headstrong as her mother,” he said finally, but his voice got softer. “Janie always had to have her way, too, didn’t she?”

“Just tell me what you want me to do, Jed,” I said impatiently. “I’ve got enough on my plate right now. I don’t need this. You want me to tell her no, I will.”

He sighed. “No, I reckon we’ll have to do what she wants.” He sighed again. “Better you than some real detective.”

North Carolina houses our State Bureau of Investigation in what used to be a school for the blind on Old Garner Road south of Raleigh. Some of us don’t let the agents forget it either.

When I showed up in his office without an appointment just before five that Friday afternoon, Special Agent Terry Wilson leaned back in his swivel chair, put that canary-feathered grin on his big ugly face and drawled, “Well, looky who’s here! You want to hear something funny? Somebody said you was running for judge.”

“Naah. Dogcatcher.” I tried to look serious, but a matching grin spread over my own face. Terry does that to me every time. Even when I used to get furious with him, I couldn’t stay furious. He’d cut those hazel eyes at me, the tip of his long nose would twitch and I’d laugh before I could help it.

There was a moment about six years ago when I seriously considered marrying Terry just because life with him could have been so damn much fun. The moment passed, since three things stood between us and the altar at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist: one, he was working narcotics undercover at the time and, as his first two wives had already learned, undercover agents don’t make good husbands; two, he’d made it clear that his son, Stanton, would always come first; and three, I’d made it just as clear I wouldn’t take second place for anybody or anything-not to Stanton, whom I actually liked, and certainly not to his job.

So we stayed buddies, and though we no longer partied together, we did still go fishing occasionally. In fact, the large-mouth bass mounted on the wall opposite his desk came out of one of my Daddy’s lakes. Stanton and I were both in the boat the day Terry pulled it in. Only eight pounds, but he was using ten-pound test, so it’d been a classic battle between man and fish. There’d been other, bigger bass, but that was the day we acknowledged our moment had passed and I sometimes wondered if that was the real reason he’d mounted this particular fish. Of course, at the time, he said it was because its big mouth reminded him of me.

Looking at him now, I suddenly realized it’d been over a year since we’d gone fishing together. His flat brown hair had thinned a little more, his crisp white shirt didn’t quite conceal the faint beginning of a paunch, and laugh lines were just a shade deeper around his hooded eyes. He was checking me for changes, too. I wore my sandy blonde hair a little shorter these days, and though I’d taken a few pains with makeup and clothes, time hadn’t exactly stood still for me either.

“How far’d you have to chase him for those ugly suspenders?” I teased even though they matched his maroon tie and actually looked rather sharp against the white cotton.

“He was right behind the good-looking gal you took that raggedy old blouse off of,” Terry grinned, maligning the beautiful turquoise silk shirt that I was wearing with a soft paisley skirt. He propped his feet on the open top drawer of his desk and leaned all the way back in his chair till his long body was lying almost horizontal beneath a large blue-and-gold plaque depicting the great seal of North Carolina. Esse quam videri with Liberty and Plenty for all.

I helped myself to the chair in front of his executive-size desk.

Except for one or two papers, the broad top itself was quite tidy for someone in charge of MUST, the SBI’s Murder Unsolved Task Force. In fact, the whole office was strangely bare of excess books and papers, as if the real work must surely be done elsewhere, not in this roomy, stripped-down office with spring sunlight blazing through the two tall windows onto the clean white rug. Nothing was piled on the two matching sand-colored file cabinets. A narrow white Parsons table beside Terry’s desk held a laptop and a printer and nothing else. The bulletin board over the table was only one layer deep, and there were even a few open spaces between an up-to-date wanted poster and some cryptic memos to himself.

His tackle box was always just that neat. No broken lures, no flutter of leaders, weights, or feathers.

On the opposite wall, the head-high bookcase was empty except for a row of looseleaf notebooks on the bottom shelf and some framed pictures of Stanton on the top shelf. He’d be about fifteen now, and of the three of us, he’d changed most of all, if the pictures were any indication-a young man all of a sudden and not a little kid anymore.

“ Stanton ’s getting handsomer all the time,” I said, picking up the wood-framed photograph on his desk. When Terry started to beam, I added, “Must take after his mother.”

“Like hell! Everybody says he’s me all over again.”

“What’s he up to these days?” I asked, truly wanting to know. I liked Stanton from the beginning. He lived with his mother, Terry’s first wife, and I knew he looked forward to weekends with Terry, yet he’d never seemed to mind when I came fishing with them.

“Doing real good. Plays shortstop on the varsity baseball team. Carrying a good solid B, too,” he bragged.

I put the picture back on his desk. “Starting to break a few hearts?”

The tip of his nose twitched. “Like I told you-he’s me all over again.”

“You wish!”

We talked trash a few minutes more before I broached Janie Whitehead’s murder and explained why I was asking.

“That was before my time,” Terry said, and without sitting up, he stretched across to snag a slim folder from the rack neatly aligned with the far edge of his desk. “I believe Scotty Underhill worked that case.”

He leafed through the eight or nine sheets in the file folder. From where I sat, I couldn’t make out specific words, but it looked like a condensed printout of all the unsolved cases assigned to Terry’s MUST team: names, dates, a one- or two-sentence description of each case and some comment as to any solvability factors.

“When was the last time it was worked?” I asked.

“Seven years ago,” he murmured, still reading.

The MUST force was developed only four years earlier.

“You didn’t rework it when you took over?”

“Oh, come on, Deborah,” he said. “I’ve got eight men and over two hundred cases. Janie Whitehead’s murder was thoroughly worked at the beginning and Scotty went back and poked around some more back in eighty-three. Nada.”

I vaguely remembered a flurry of hushed talk around Cotton Grove in the spring of 1983, but I hadn’t paid it much mind, especially since it died down almost as soon as it began. “And no suspects either time?”

Terry closed the folder and replaced it in the rack. “Now you know well and good I wouldn’t name names if we had any, which, as a matter of fact, we don’t. You can ask Scotty yourself if you want.”

He glanced at his watch. “I’m supposed to meet him at six. Want to come along?”

Miss Molly’s Bar and Grill on South Wilmington Street hadn’t changed all that much since I was last there with Terry. A few more neon beer brands had been added to the already crowded walls and I saw that Spot had finally found him that old blue guitar he’d been looking for last time we talked about his collection of neon signs. He hadn’t taken Little Richard and Elvis off the jukebox, but Randy Travis and Reba McEntire were there now, too.

Spot acted glad to see me.

“The usual,” Terry said as we passed the bar.

“You still drinking gin and tonics?” Spot asked me.

“Yeah, only make it a virgin,” I told him. “I’ve got to drive to Makely tonight.”

“Getting old, kid?” Terry needled.

“Getting cautious. All I need’s a headline in the Dobbs Ledger: ‘Judicial Candidate Cited for DWI.’ ”

We headed back to the big round table at the rear, which had always been populated by law people. That hadn’t changed much either.

I recognized two homicide detectives from the Raleigh PD, a couple of SBI arson investigators, and someone from the attorney general’s office, all males if no longer all white. We’d barely reached the table when a familiar whiff of musky perfume overtook me and I felt light fingers on my shoulder.

“Deborah? That you? Well, hey, gal! How you been? Where you been? God, it’s been ages!”

I turned and there was Morgan Slavin, a blur of long blonde hair, long gorgeous legs, and the clearest, brightest blue eyes south of Finland. We hugged and grinned at each other and found chairs while she pulled out a pack of Virginia Slims and lit up, talking all the while.

“You remember Max, don’t you? And Simon? And, hey, Jasp! Lacy know you’ve slipped your chain?”

Last time I saw Morgan she looked like one of those skinny, white trash motorcycle mamas-tight jeans, denim jacket studded with red-white-and-blue glass nailheads, no makeup, hair skinned back under a baseball cap, and flying high. She’d just infiltrated the busiest crack house in the Triangle and was waiting for the warrants and backups to get there before she closed it down.

Big change from the high heels and chic teal suit she wore this evening.

“Busting corporation types now?” I queried as we pulled out adjacent chairs.

“Naw. This is how supervisors dress.” She poked Terry’s shoulder. “Less’n you’ve got one of them Y chromosomes.”

“Always bragging about double Xs,” Terry grumbled. “Only reason they promoted you.”

“Hey, that’s great,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, thank you,” she said with mock modesty. “And you’re going to be a judge, I hear?”

I held up crossed fingers as Spot arrived with a tray of drinks. Morgan was still drinking scotch on the rocks and the other men had beers, but I lifted my brows at the can of Diet Pepsi and glass of ice cubes that Spot placed in front of Terry.

“Getting old, Terry?” I mocked, squeezing the slice of lime into my tonic water.

“ Stanton ’s got a game tonight.”

“Yeah, sure.” I was going to let him get away with it, but then he remembered I’d heard him order “the usual” and he raised the can sheepishly.

Across the table, the men were trading war stories.

“Y’all work that Smithfield warehouse last week?” Terry asked.

They nodded and Morgan laughed with delight. “You hear about that one, Deborah?”

I shook my head and leaned back and waited for it.

SBI agents have to be brave, cheerful, thrifty, loyal, and all those other Boy Scout virtues, but I sometimes wondered if an SBI director hadn’t added “warped sense of humor” to the job description somewhere along the line.

“Tell her, Max,” said Morgan, acting like a big sister pushing her little brother out to show off

Max was the agent directly across who’d been coming on to me with those big brown eyes ever since I sat down.