The Sweet and the Dead

by Milton T. Burton

  Back in his prime he’d been a well-known highjacker and killer with a sadistic bent who thrived on his victims’ fear like a vampire bat thrives on blood. In a twenty-year criminal career he’d murdered several people for money, some of them in highly inventive ways like the couple he soaked in gasoline and burned to death up in Tennessee. Bob Wallace had made the armed robbery case that sent him to Ramsey, and the old con recognized him as soon as he saw the two of us. He couldn’t meet our eyes and his hands shook as he counted out our change. I stood there in the bright friendly sun amid the busy throngs of a perfect fall day and watched Bob’s face. I could tell that he was savoring the moment the way you’d savor that big scoop of real whipped cream old-time drugstores used to put on top of a chocolate malt.

  “You take it too much to heart, Bob,” I said once we were seated at our table.

  “What?”

  “All this cops-and-robbers business. Don’t let it eat you up and kill you.”

  “It’s what keeps me going, Hog. And by the way, what we’re putting out now is that your deal with Danny Boy is going before the grand jury in January.”

  “Is it?” I asked.

  “Why, hell no. What made you think—?”

  I cut him off. “It just seems to me that we’re taking this business pretty far,” I said with a grin. “I mean, if you and Curtis both croaked I might wind up in the joint.”

  “Oh, bullshit!”

  “Just joking, Bob.”

  “Good. Now, what about this business down in Biloxi? You say it’s a carnival?”

  “Yeah. A carnival that’s wintering a few miles north of town.

  A pretty big one. Sparks says the take will be at least a couple of million.”

  “Damn! How does he know that?”

  “Because somebody there in Biloxi is steering the deal, somebody close to the carnival owner. He made allusions to the guy, but didn’t mention a name. Just called him ‘my source.’ “

  “Could it be Lodke?” Bob asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  “How many people are going to be involved?”

  “Eight to ten, depending. He hasn’t got the whole setup cased out yet, so things are still pretty fluid. But that’s what he’s looking at. Probably ten.”

  “Do you have any names?” he asked.

  “Me and Jasper and maybe Hardhead Weller. And then there’s Freddie Ray Arps. And probably that Moline guy I called you about. He’s also mentioned Bobby Dwayne Culpepper.”

  “Culpepper, huh?” he asked grimly. “That’s one more sorry bastard I’d sure like to nail. Him and that harlot wife of his both.”

  “Calm down, Bob,” I said with a grin. “You haven’t heard the good part yet.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, Jasper wants solid people on this deal—”

  “I don’t blame him a damn bit,” he said, interrupting me.

  “And he realizes that some of the guys he runs with have probably snitched at one time or another, even if he doesn’t know about it. And they may have other things out there in their pasts that he’s not aware of.”

  “Yeah?”

  “But he figures that since I was a cop I’m in a position to find out stuff like that. So he’s sorta put me in charge of personnel. He’s going to give me a list, and he wants me to check them all out. You know, call in a few favors at police departments here and there, get a little background information that he might not otherwise have. Then we can cull the ones that are weak, and I’ll make recommendations on the ones to use.”

  “You mean?” he asked, his mouth hanging wide with amazement.

  “That’s right Bob. I get to pick ‘em.”

  “God Almighty.”

  Thirteen

  We were somewhere down deep in the Louisiana rice country on the way back to Biloxi when Nell reached over and took my hand. “I want to tell you something, Manfred,” she said. “I wasn’t completely honest with you about Jasper that first night at the Grotto.”

  “Well, you didn’t know me very well then,” I answered casually.

  “Aren’t you curious?” she asked softly.

  “Of course I’m curious, but you don’t have to tell me. It’s your business.”

  “I feel obligated to, although it’s the kind of story no woman wants to tell. My freshman year at Ole Miss I was being raped and Jasper intervened and put a stop to it.”

  “Really?” I asked automatically and cast her a sharp glance. “Was it actually a rape or an attempt?”

  “Oh, no. It was the real thing. It happened at a fraternity party. I was a dumb young freshman, and the guy was a senior, a hot-shot linebacker. I was flattered by his attention, of course. Everybody was half-drunk, and nobody knew what the hell was going on. Anyway, I let him maneuver me into an upstairs bedroom. When I wouldn’t let him have what he wanted, he just decided to take it. I don’t think that I was the first, because later on I heard stories about the guy. I managed to get off one good scream before he got his hand over my mouth, and Jasper heard it. A minute later he stuck his head in the door, then disappeared. I thought I was doomed, but he was back in a few seconds with a sawed-off pool cue. I don’t know until this day where he got it, but he took the guy completely apart. Just beat the ever-loving hell out of him, and he was smiling while he did it. Then he got me out of there and took me to his place so I could clean up and pull myself together.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said with that feeling of helplessness any man experiences when he hears such a story about a woman he cares for.

  “I told Daddy, and he sent me to a therapist in Jackson for a few sessions. The verdict was that no lasting emotional damage had been done. The shrink also said that I was a pretty tough young woman. But I think you can see why I didn’t tell you the story that first night.”

  “Of course.”

  “Jasper has this thing about women. He doesn’t like to see them mistreated. I think it’s his one good quality.”

  “His redeeming quality?” I asked with a grin.

  “Oh, Jasper’s way beyond redemption,” she said, laughing. “And if I’d ever had a case on him when I was prosecuting, I’d have done everything I could to convict him. He knows it, too.”

  “What happened to the linebacker?” I asked.

  “He drank himself out of two marriages and a good business his father left him. Eventually he wound up on skid row up in Memphis.”

  “Good,” I said firmly.

  We rode along for a while in silence, then she squeezed my hand, and asked, “Manfred, would you come home with me to the Delta for Christmas? I hope that doesn’t seem like I’m presuming too much. Of course I realize that you may want to spend the holidays with your daughter….”

  I shook my head. “I’d like to be with her, but they’re going down to south Texas to visit with her husband’s family.”

  “Then you’ll come?” she asked, a little anxiously.

  “I’d love to. I’ve really got no place else to go. But will it be all right with your family?”

  “Oh, sure. It’s a huge house, and relatives will be coming and going all during the holidays. Nobody will even notice you after the first day. Just promise me you won’t shoot Daddy.”

  I laughed. “Why would I shoot your dad?”

  “He can be a bit much sometimes. By the way, do you like your son-in-law?”

  I gave her a sharp glance. “No. I think he’s a complete asshole. Why do you ask?”

  Her gentle laughter filled the car. “See? You and Daddy have a lot in common.”

  It was gratifying to be invited to meet her family, but I couldn’t help but have a lingering worry about her in the back of my mind. Despite what she’d said about being willing to prosecute Jasper, it would still be both risky to me and unfair to her if I clued her in to the real score. After all, as much as I wanted to trust her, my life was at stake. I was falling for the girl, and I didn’t even know who she really was. All I could do was ha
ng on and hope for the best.

  I dropped Nell off at her aunt’s house and went by the Gold Dust. Sparks and Weller and two girls were at the corner booth. Sparks was alert and his voice wasn’t slurred, but his eyes were shining with an unnatural brightness, and it was obvious that he was on something besides booze. After the usual greetings, and after I’d ordered a drink, he said, “Say, Hog…Billy Jack Avalon asked me to approach you as a sort of go-between.”

  “Yeah? What’s the deal?”

  “Well, he and Dolly are giving a Christmas party for all the characters in town and their old ladies, and maybe even a few of the squares from his neighborhood. They hope that you’ll come.”

  “Why me?”

  “Well, really it’s Nell. You see, Little Dolly sorta looks up to Nell. Actually, she idolizes her, and she wants her to be there real bad. And she was worried that since you and Nell have hit it off so good you might not want to come, considering the trouble you and Billy Jack had a while back. Or that there might be a bad scene if you did come. The girl is really on pins and needles about this party, and since she’s a good kid I thought maybe ...” He shrugged.

  “Sure, Jasper. You just tell Billy Jack the hatchet is buried as far as I’m concerned. We got more important things to look after.”

  “That’s my man,” Sparks exulted. “Let bygones be bygones.”

  “There is one thing I want to bring up, though,” I said, looking at Weller. “Is Hardhead going to be doing any business with us come January?”

  The old man nodded. “I’m in.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Then I need to know if you can handle me being along on the deal. I mean, considering my background and all.”

  Both men looked uncomfortable. Sparks told the girls to take a hike. Once they were gone, he said, “You see, Hog, I talked things over with Hardhead before I mentioned it to you in the first place. I gave him the rundown on what information I was getting out of Dallas, and he told me to go ahead.”

  “Is that right?” I asked Weller.

  The old man nodded.

  “Good,” I said. “I think me and Jasper both realize that you’re the real tush hog here at the moment, and I don’t want to have to be looking over my shoulder all the time.”

  “You won’t,” Weller replied with a thin smile. “Don’t worry about that.”

  “What did you hear in Dallas?” Sparks asked me. “I mean about your case?”

  “Just that some young jackass in the DA’s office is going to take this Sheffield business to the grand jury in late January to try to get an indictment. Apparently they think they have some kind of witness to something.”

  “I heard the same thing,” Sparks said. “Bad shit.”

  “Can you beat it, Hog?” Weller asked in his thick countryman’s voice.

  “Yeah. I feel pretty sure that I can, but it’ll cost me a pile, and I don’t have it.”

  “Don’t it always?” Sparks asked rhetorically.

  “There’s something that really worries me about this carnival job,” Weller said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Billy Jack Avalon. He’s one son-of-a-bitch that just can’t keep his mouth shut. And if he hears anything—”

  “It concerns me too,” Sparks said. “I thought maybe he might be leaving town, but since he’s leased that nice house it sure don’t look like he’s going to do it.”

  “We need to make sure nobody talks to him about anything,” I said. “And we have to see to it that anybody who isn’t familiar with him knows the score.”

  Weller shook his head. “That won’t make no difference. He’s got good drift sense, and with all these people coming and going, he’s going to realize that something big’s about to come down.”

  “You’re right,” Sparks said, gazing off into the distance. “If he gets wind of it, he’ll rat us out because we didn’t include him.

  If we do include him, then he’ll rat us out because he’s Billy Jack Avalon, and that’s just what he does. There’s no way to win with that cocksucker.”

  “Right,” Weller said.

  Sparks pulled his little glass bottle out of his shirt pocket and set it on the table. “Partake with me, gentlemen?” he asked.

  I shook my head. Weller grimaced. “You know I don’t fool with that shit, Jasper,” he said.

  Sparks grinned and produced his penknife and went through his little snorting ritual.

  “We need to turn Billy Jack around on this deal,” Weller said. “You know, mislead him about what’s up.”

  “That’s too complicated,” Sparks said, his face hard and his eyes diamond-bright. “We’ll just go ahead and kill that sorry motherfucker to be safe. But not until after the Christmas party. I want that party to go down good on Little Dolly’s account.”

  Fourteen

  Early the next afternoon I met with Sparks, Weller, and Freddie Ray Arps for a strategy session at Jasper’s apartment, which turned out to be a fancy layout in a complex that attracted wellheeled northern retirees down for the winter. The man wasn’t much on decorating; the place had come with basic furnishings, and he’d left the walls bare and the cabinets mostly empty. The only signs of his habitation were electronics gear and burglary tools. Among other things, I saw a dozen fancy walkie-talkies and a large police radio.

  “Know what that’s used for, Hog?” he asked with a grin as he pointed at a thirty-ton hydraulic jack with a short, sharp spine welded to both its ends.

  “Sure, Jasper. You throw it across a door facing, give the handle a few licks, and you’re in no matter how good the locks are. It just spreads the framework of the house apart.”

  “Let’s cut the crap and get down to it,” Weller said. “I know you busy young fellows need to go someplace where you can look important this afternoon.”

  Sparks spread a surveyor’s plat out on the dining table.

  “Okay,” he said. “What we have here is two hundred acres leased for the winter to an outfit called O. P.’s Shows, which is run by an old crook named O. P. Giles. It’s one of these deals that does midways and novelty attractions at county fairs and things like that all over the country. It’s not one of the biggest, but it’s far from being the smallest, either. For rides, they got Ferris wheels, Tilt-A-Whirl, the Hammer and all such bullshit as that. For novelty attractions they got girly shows and freaks and the rest of that stuff. Then they got the games. Now, some carnivals are on the up-and-up. I mean, the odds are so much in their favor on this win-a-teddy-bear crap that they don’t need to be crooked. But this outfit runs alibi games and build-up games and everything else you can think of to skin the suckers. A den of frigging thieves is all they are.”

  “How did you get onto this, Jasper?” Weller asked.

  “About four years ago old man Giles’s accountant down in Florida died, and he was looking for somebody reliable to cook his books for him. Apparently he knows some of the people, because somebody put him onto my source, and she talked him into coming up here to winter. It takes a lot of work to get the whole deal done, see. And her logic was that he needed to be close.”

  “Eula Dent,” Arps said. “Your source has gotta be Eula Dent.”

  “What?” Sparks asked with surprise. “You know Eula?”

  “Know her? Hell, I’ve fucked her.”

  “Who is Eula Dent?” Weller asked impatiently.

  “Like he said, she’s my source,” Sparks replied. “She owns an accounting firm here in town, but please keep it to yourselves.” He turned to Arps. “What’s the story on you and Eula, Freddie?”

  “We go way back. Eula came out of nowhere when she was just a kid and went to hooking in one of those old joints up there in Drewery Holler, just south of Corinth, right near the state line. That must have been about 1940, if I remember right. In three years’ time she managed to put away enough money to go on to college, and eventually she became one of this state’s first female CPAs. I was purely nuts about her back in those days. She never gave me
a freebie, though.” He laughed with the memory of it. “Never would. Never a single one.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Sparks said. “She never gave anybody else any freebies either, on anything. And she still don’t today. She’s in for five percent on this deal.”

  “She’s here in town?” Weller asked.

  “Hell yes,” Sparks said. “Got a big office downtown with a half dozen people working for her.”

  “Damn!” Arps said. “I need to go look her up.”

  “Don’t expect that freebie,” Sparks said. “Folks claim she’s gone over to the other side.”

  “What?” Arps asked. “She’s a lesbian?”

  “That’s what everybody says,” Jasper replied. “Apparently she ain’t had a date with a man since she hit Biloxi.”

  “Can we get this damn meeting back on track?” Weller asked impatiently.

  “Sure,” Sparks said. “Now look here.” He pointed at the plat. “Here’s the beauty of this deal. See here? This is where they keep the trucks that carry the rides and all the equipment. There’s a lot of maintenance and repair that has to be done on this stuff in the winter, and some of it makes noise, grinding and hammering and what-not. Old man Giles don’t like noise, so he parks the trucks over here, well away from his own trailer. And right by the trucks are the trailers where the people who work all this crap stay. They’re away from his trailer too because some of these people have kids, and he don’t like kids.”

  “Shit, what does he like?” Arps asked.

  “Money. And his own daughter. She’s almost forty herself. And that’s about it.” He looked up and smiled. “See these four trailers here? That’s where Giles and the daughter and couple of older people who’ve been with him forever live. And they’re at least five hundred yards away from the rest of the camp with some woods in between.”