The Whiskey Baron (2 page)

Chambers rose and looked down the road. Tire tracks bit into the loose chert by the roadside, and two spent shells still rested on the macadam. The blood on the road was sticky and drying fast, the holes in the bodies already clotted with flies. They would begin to smell fast in this heat. He said, “You here when it happened?”

“I was at home,” Tull said. “But my man Depot was here.”

“I talked to Depot. I thought he said you were here when it happened.”

Tull shook his head. “I got here quick, though. Depot called me before he called you, wondering what he should do. I told him, hell, son, call the sheriff.”

“That a fact.”

“Yeah, he was here, counting the deposit like he always does this time of night. Slow business day. These two sitting in the back, and in walks Mary Jane Hopewell, mad as a hornet and waving a shotgun around. Depot told him to get out, but he wouldn’t leave until these two boys came with him. Then, I shit you not, he promptly marched them up the hill here and fired twice, one round after another, and killed two of my best workers.”

“Where’s Depot now?”

“He’s over on the porch. Poor man never saw someone get killed before.”

Chambers picked up one of the shells. Twelve gauge. A small crowd still gathered in the streets, and he needed to speak with them before they went home. He’d seen all he needed here. “Mary Jane Hopewell, you say?”

“I do say.”

“I’ve known his people for years. He’s a wild one, but I wouldn’t have pegged him for murder.”

“Me neither. He was a pretty good customer himself, you want to know the truth.”

When Tull grinned, his eyes did not move, as though he were studying you even as you spoke. His steadiness unnerved Chambers. Usually after a crime, folks got a little nervous and would shift from foot to foot. But not Tull. Sinewy, still, calm. Like he knew what the future held and was just waiting idly for them to get on with it. Reminded Chambers of his grandmother, who died when he was very young. She would sit on the porch with that same kind of quietude, a patience acquired partly through old age but also because she had a second sight. His great-grandmother, she said, told the future and knew everything that would happen before it did, and his grandmother said that by the time it reached her, the gift had been
watered down. She had to be near a person to know what his future held. But Chambers always thought the ability had been a comfort to her, took away her worry so she could sit in her rocker and watch the world pass.

And here was Larthan Tull, bemused as though he had a second sight as well. Chambers had met all manner of human beings, and although he didn’t have his grandmother’s gift, he could look at a man and know his quirks and fetishes. His secrets. And he could tell by looking into Tull’s shadowed eyes that this was a man with secrets that stretched back as far as his childhood, so long repressed that he might not even know what they were. Whatever happened to Tull, he’d respond like a dog that gets mean after too many beatings. It wasn’t evil Chambers saw in Tull’s eyes, it was the amoral indifference of a godless universe. Evil at least meant there was something larger than ourselves out there, but Tull seemed to confirm that maybe there was nothing. Nothing at all.

Chambers said, “Any ideas about why Mary Jane would come in and shoot these boys?”

Tull shook his head.

“Any arguments? A bad card game?”

“You never know what kind of violence the human beast is capable of, Furman, once he sees through the illusion of free will.”

“Free will.”

“We’re all locked on a stage here. You’ve got a job to do. I’ve got a job to do. Mary Jane’s job was to get drunk. As long as we play our parts, everything runs along smoothly. The show goes on. It’s only when the curtain is pulled back and we see the scaffolding and the strings that we realize something is amiss. And then, who knows?”

“You’re saying Mary Jane killed those boys over scaffolding.”

“Who knows, Furman? Maybe Mary Jane saw the scaffolding all along, and that’s why he was a drunk. Maybe after a while being a drunk wasn’t enough. You could tell me a thing or two about that, why a man drinks.”

“Didn’t Depot keep a shotgun behind the bar?”

“He said he didn’t have time to reach for it when Mary Jane came in, waving his own gun around.”

“Sure, sure. A man pointing a gun at you makes it hard to know
what to do. Why don’t we go take a look at that gun, though. You mind?”

“Come on in.” Tull led Chambers into the dim tavern. Before Tull, the Hillside had been a boardinghouse for folks passing through, back when more folks passed through Castle County. Tull had boarded up the stairway and ripped out the downstairs wall to open the whole room. A pool table was over in what was once the dining hall, and a few wooden booths lined the back wall. The bar itself was to the right, solid oak with stools pulled up to it. There was a light by the bar and a light by the pool table, and shadows hovered over the rest of the room like spirits.

Tull went behind the bar and pulled out an old Remington Model 10. Chambers inspected it and saw it hadn’t been fired in quite some time. Dust coated the barrel, the metal itself ungreased and looking to rust.

“You ought to oil this,” he said. “Would it even fire?”

“Depot just keeps it for show, in case someone gets rowdy. We’re not in the business of shooting people here.”

“I should hope not. Well. Walter ought to be here any minute, and we’ll get those boys cleared up. I’m a go speak to those folks and will probably stop by later to talk more.”

“I’ll be around,” Tull said.

Outside, across the street, Roger Howe and Jim Weber and the Vanderford boys and a few neighbors lingered, spitting tobacco and waiting on the sheriff to walk over and give them the word. Chambers said, “Folks, there’s not much going to happen tonight. Walter’ll be here to take away them bodies soon, but for now if any of y’all saw what went down I’d appreciate a word. Otherwise I’ll be making the rounds to collect official statements from everyone later in the day.” The neighbors all shook their heads and wandered a ways off, yet they didn’t leave. Chambers pursed his lips. These country folk would all be getting up for work in a few hours, but they never would turn away from some juicy gossip.

He knew many of them sold some of their extra crops to Tull’s soda plant, but he didn’t know if any of them were into anything else. Spenser Watkins, a childless man, had founded that plant twenty
years ago. When Tull had come to town, he’d passed many evenings on Watkins’s front porch, smoking cigars and watching the world go by, and in less than a year he’d worked his way up to co-managing the business. In 1920, the two men had once again sat on Watkins’s porch for a few months, and not long afterward Castle County had a flourishing bootleg trade and Tull was overseeing the Hillside Inn. Since Watkins’s death, Tull had moved back to the plant and left Depot Murphy to cover the Hillside. What all went on in the soda plant, only a few men actually knew, but the entire town had made its collective judgment.

The country had been dry twelve years now, but even in times when money was too tight to drink a sweet water, people still seemed to find the money to buy liquor. Half the town’s residents—good churchgoing folks—were irate about its mere existence and wanted Chambers to shut Tull’s business down. But the other half of town, even if they didn’t go in for all the debauchery, bought whiskey off Tull, including Chambers himself, and to shut down the Hillside meant to shut whiskey out of Castle County. Even some of the good churchgoing folks didn’t want that. Of course, the system of turning a blind eye was over now that there had been a double murder.

Folks who farmed out here still knew the value of hard work, no matter who bought their crops. All they seemed to want was to be left alone, more and more now that the railroad was coming through and the population was growing. Chambers didn’t have much sense for how the economy worked, but he figured if the country ever made it out of this downturn it wouldn’t take long before no one would be able to just own a farm and live off it. They’d either have to deal in tobacco or find work in the mill for as long as that lasted. Everyone was secure in the mills now, but Chambers was old enough to know the world moved in cycles, and that some new thing was coming, maybe not in this generation, but the next or the next, that would limit what their sons could do if all they knew how to do was work a loom.

Chambers nodded to the neighbors, walked back down the slope to the Hillside porch. In the darkness Depot sat on a rail with his foot propped up. A bowling pin head, razor-close hair and a ruddy Irish face. A lazy eye that made him look dumb, which might help
if you had to control a bunch of drunks by yourself night after night. He didn’t speak when the sheriff approached, and Chambers leaned against the opposite rail.

“Furman.”

“Long night.”

“Aye.”

“I heard it was a slow day. Anyone else here other than you and Ernest and Lee?”

“No, just us.”

“Well what happened?” Chambers asked. To the man’s continued silence, he said, “Depot, I know what goes on in there, and I’m not aiming to stop it tonight. You don’t have to tell me what you was doing, just what happened to them boys lying in the road. How’d they get there?”

“They were in the back telling stories—”

“And no one else was here? Larthan?”

“Just us,” Depot said again. “Anyway, we was killing time. I was joking with them from the bar, when Mary Jane Hopewell walks in carrying his 12 gauge. ‘God almight,’ I says to him, and the boys just stared.

“‘This don’t concern you, Depot,’ Mary Jane says to me, and I says, ‘Like hell it don’t.’

“‘I won’t be long,’ he says.

“I thought about grabbing my own gun, but he raised the 12 gauge and says, ‘I won’t mess up your place. I just need a moment with these two boys,’ and he points to Ernest and Lee. They were just drinking, not causing anybody any harm, but I imagine they were pretty drunk because they stood up and didn’t seem to mind at all someone waving a shotgun around and looking for them. ‘Let’s go boys,’ Mary Jane says to them.

“‘We ain’t going nowhere,’ Ernest says.

“‘Yeah, what do you think you’re doing?’ Lee says.

“‘I know what I’m doing and why,’ Mary Jane says.

“‘Hellfire,’ Ernest says and slams his whiskey. ‘We were leaving anyway.’

“The three of them walked out of the bar, and a few moments later Mary Jane shot them here in the street.”

When Depot finished his tale, Chambers brushed his hair with his hand. Depot’s story was straightforward enough, and Larthan was right. The man did sound shaken up—he had a quiver in his voice, like a young buck approaching a gal at a dance for the first time—but instinct told Chambers he was being lied to. Mary Jane Hopewell was a troublesome good old boy, nicknamed so on account of wearing Mary Jane dresses for too long when he was a child. He’d come off the farm twenty years ago and into the mill like the rest of them. His brother Joe and his family had soon followed, and they lived a respectable life in the Bell. Went to church twice a week, had two boys who worked in the mill, a pretty wife who came into town once in a while wearing a blue and white gingham dress and a bonnet and catching eyes all along Main Street. Mary Jane himself wasn’t as successful as his brother. Married as a young man for about six weeks, his betrothed had taken off with a traveling salesman, a real fast talker with nothing real to say, and Mary Jane had been in and out of work ever since. Lived in a hovel by the dump and knew every lowlife who set foot in Castle County, though he himself was a nice boy. He drank plenty, he lost borrowed money in card games, and he sometimes woke in a gutter on a Sunday, but he was honest and forthright and gentle. He may run with those cast into the outer darkness, but he wasn’t one of them, Chambers believed, or at least he’d never given anyone reason to think him dangerous. Some folks thought he was a little simpleminded, because if he was sober you might find him playing baseball with some kids, or you might find him sitting by the river with a stray dog for hours on end. Lately he’d been seen in the company of Widow Coleman. His old running mate, Shorty Bagwell, was in the jailhouse for driving drunk through Miss Meacham’s flowerbeds. Chambers made a note to check in with the widow and with Shorty to see what they knew.

To Depot, he said, “You saw Mary Jane shoot them?”

“No, but hell, Sheriff, who would have done it otherwise?”

“I’m just trying to get the record straight, and not rule anything out.”

Depot didn’t reply.

“Like I was telling Larthan, I’ve known the Hopewell people for years. Not well, but the ones out in the Bell work hard and go to church and walk a straight line. Mary Jane is a bit of a hellraiser, as
I’m sure you know, but he doesn’t strike me as the killing type. Can you think of a reason why Mary Jane might have done this? Did you hear any arguments, anything out of the ordinary?”

Depot spat over the rail. “Not that I know of. All I know is what I just told you.”

The ambulance drove up and parked on the street with its lights on, so Chambers said, “I know it’s late here, and I’m sure you want to get some sleep, but tell me something.”

“Yeah?”

“Why they call you Depot? I never did understand it.”

“I don’t know. I’ve always been Depot,” he said. “I think it’s cause I liked to play around trains when I was a youngun.”

“That’ll do it,” Chambers said. He turned and walked toward the ambulance.

The widow Abigail Coleman lived by the river. Forty years old now, a lifetime of bad news and about to get some more. Her husband was a casualty of the war, and Chambers had shot her teenage son in 1926. A few years ago, she’d taken in Ernest Jones, who helped her farm corn. She sold much of her crop to Larthan Tull, but she had a still herself set up on the creek down in her property bottoms. She made premium whiskey and buried it along the river, mostly for herself although she was known to sell a jar to the occasional hellraiser who’d gotten too wild for the Hillside Inn. Not having spoken with her since he’d shot her son, Chambers dreaded the news he had to bring her today.