Bootlegger’s Daughter

by Margaret Maron

But sometimes I missed feeling like John J. Malone.

  5 searching for some kind of clue

  Before Scotty Underhill could finish doctoring his tomato juice with Tabasco and Worcestershire to turn it into something that had the taste, if not the kick, of a Bloody Mary, Terry had gulped his coffee, given my shoulder a brotherly pat, and charged off to make Stanton ’s ball game.

  “I haven’t looked at those records in months, so I can’t give you chapter and verse,” Scotty warned as he squeezed a slice of lemon into his tomato juice and laid it on the napkin beside his glass. “Still, when you give it that much time, it’s not something you forget either.”

  He gave me a tired smile. “Hell, I even remember you now. You were the baby-sitter, weren’t you?”

  “Why yes. I’m surprised you remember.”

  “We looked at everybody. Even baby-sitters. You thought her husband was groovy, as I recall.”

  Unexpected embarrassment washed over me. I felt myself turning red and was thankful Terry wasn’t there to see. “Who on earth told you that?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “No. Just sounds funny hearing that an SBI agent paid any attention to a schoolgirl crush.” A crush I thought I’d hidden from the world.

  “Schoolgirls have done crazy things. Besides, you weren’t some little kid. You’d just turned sixteen, a young woman driving her own car. A white Thunderbird, as I recall.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “You were also Kezzie Knott’s daughter.”

  I let it pass. If he knew that, then he also knew that the only thing my father’s ever been convicted of is income tax evasion. He would also know that Daddy served his eighteen months in a federal prison well before I was even born. By the time I was eight, a governor and two senators had pulled the necessary strings to get him an unconditional pardon. Theoretically, that single conviction had been expunged from his record.

  In practice, helicopters continued to circle Knott land like buzzards, looking for stills and probably even strips of marijuana tucked in between tobacco rows, though I don’t think Daddy’s ever messed with pot. He always said he made his money the old-fashioned way, and he may be a scoundrel but he’s never been a hypocrite. Nevertheless, the drone of spotter planes was one of my earliest memories, and even Terry has been exasperated enough to complain about them spooking the bass when he’s fishing one of Daddy’s lakes.

  Max waved to me on his way out and his place at the big round table was taken by two women I vaguely recognized from the attorney general’s office. On the jukebox, Tina Turner was belligerently demanding to know what love had to do with it-Spot’s jukebox has always been a comfortable five years behind the hits-and the strident beat muffled words, bursts of laughter, and the tinkle of bottles and glasses as Miss Molly’s geared up for Friday night. Above the music, Morgan gave me a what’s doing? look, and when I gestured that I’d be a little longer, she lit another cigarette and turned back to the conversation at her own table while I got on with mine.

  “Who else did you look at?” I asked tightly.

  “The husband, his parents, her parents, neighbors, friends, old boyfriends. You name it, we did it.”

  He stirred his tomato juice with a straw, sipped, added a sprinkle of pepper and stirred again.

  “You probably know as much how she died as I do.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Okay, let’s see. She disappeared on the first Wednesday in May.” He looked surprised to realize the calendar was back to May again. “Day before yesterday, eighteen years ago.”

  Unlike this year, that May had begun unseasonably cool and rainy, and I remembered there’d been a heavy fog that never completely lifted.

  He nodded. “A morning that kept people indoors with the heat turned back on. No fit weather to take a new baby out in, but there was nobody to stay with her. Not her parents. Not you. You were in school till three-thirty.”

  He spoke matter-of-factly, but it gave me a weird feeling to realize how thoroughly my movements, too, had been documented back then.

  Janie’s mother and father had driven over to Durham early that morning to attend the funeral of Mrs. Poole’s cousin, Scotty continued, and her sister was down with some sort of spring virus that made it risky to expose the baby. In fact, it was her sister’s illness that took Janie out that day in the first place. Marylee Poole Strickland was room mother for her second-grader, and she’d promised to take cupcakes for a class party immediately after lunch. The cupcakes had been baked and decorated the night before, but when she awoke too sick to take them over, she’d called on Janie.

  According to Marylee, everything was absolutely normal when Janie ran in at 11:45 to get the cupcakes, leaving Gayle in the car. At Cotton Grove Elementary, the second-grade teacher didn’t know Janie well enough to confirm Marylee’s assessment, but she did think that the only thing on Janie’s mind was not leaving her baby daughter in the car by herself too long. She’d stayed just long enough to bring in the tray of cupcakes and the quart-size bottles of Pepsi, and to pass along Marylee’s apologies, before hurrying from the classroom.

  A fifth-grade teacher on the second floor of the school had been standing at the window overlooking the parking lot, trying to judge if the rain had slacked off enough for her to take her class out for a breath of fresh air before their lunch period. She had known Janie since childhood and was able to state quite definitely that she saw the young mother in her chic red vinyl raincoat cut across the schoolyard to her dark blue sedan. Janie had adjusted the blanket around the infant in the portable crib on the backseat, then driven off alone back toward the center of town. The time was exactly 12:17.

  “And that was the last time anyone was positive that they’d seen Janie Poole Whitehead alive,” said Scotty.

  “Except for Howard Grimes?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “We could never be sure whether he really saw her or whether he just wanted us to give him the time of day.”

  “Did you? Give him the time of day, I mean?”

  “I told you we listened to whoever’d talk. Trouble is, ol’ Howard quit talking before we got to him.”

  I didn’t remember it like that and protested. “He told anybody who’d listen that it was Janie he’d seen parked with some man in front of the old Dixie Motel. That it was raining too hard and the windows were too fogged up for him to make out who, though.”

  “Yeah, I know, and that story went around Cotton Grove so quick there were people who still thought she’d run off with another man right up till the minute they found her body, but I’m telling you straight: when we tried to pin him down after she was found, he started saying maybe it was somebody else’s wife he’d seen. There were two other young women in Cotton Grove driving dark blue Ford sedans.”

  “Kay Saunders and my ex-sister-in-law,” I said, meeting it head on.

  “Not yet ex,” he corrected.

  “Doesn’t matter. Trish and Kay were good friends of Janie’s. They used to run around together in high school. Anyhow, Howard said the woman was wearing shiny red, and neither Trish nor Kay owned a mod red slicker, just Janie.”

  Scotty’s head came up and for the first time I saw a beagle-hunting gleam flicker down in those weary spaniel eyes. “You sure he described the raincoat?”

  “Of course I’m sure.” Yet even as I spoke, I wondered if I’d confused his remarks with the schoolyard description widely repeated by the teachers. Janie had been clothes-proud, and I remembered the day she bought that coat, the day she modeled it for Jed and me. It was a teacher workday, a week before her death, so I was off from school. I’d kept Gayle and Marylee’s little boy, too, so the two sisters could go shopping together at Crabtree Valley, Raleigh ’s biggest and newest mall.

  I’d already fed the kids and Jed had just gotten home a few minutes earlier when Marylee and Janie pulled into the driveway, the backseat of the car loaded down with packages. With her dark hair piled up in a bouffant beehive, high-heeled white boots, and that lipst
ick red vinyl slicker, she matched my unsophisticated idea of Carnaby Street, and I watched, pea green with jealousy, as she sweet-talked Jed out of being mad because she’d spent so much money. “But, sugar darlin’, you don’t think I can keep on wearing all those old things from before the baby was born?”

  So was that why the red raincoat remained with me for eighteen years? I concentrated and retrieved a sudden mental image of Howard standing in darkness on the sidewalk in front of Jed and Janie’s house. Red and blue lights atop the emergency vehicles were refracted by water droplets. People milled about in the misty fog. I was there, some of my brothers, too, and their wives. Will and Trish. Mother was inside with the older women of the community, trying to reassure Mrs. Poole and Mrs. Whitehead that Janie and Gayle were going to be all right. Blue lights from the wet patrol cars flashed across Howard’s broad, self-important face.

  “He said he couldn’t make out the woman because she was turned toward the man beside her, but her back was pressed against the window and he saw her shiny red coat.”

  Scotty twirled his straw between his fingers. It was clear plastic and coated with dull red tomato juice. “That little detail would have made us take him more seriously. Wonder why he left it out when we talked with him?”

  “Did he?”

  “This is the first time I’ve heard it.”

  “What about when you reworked the case?”

  “We didn’t get a chance. We’d just started when he dropped dead.”

  I’d been living with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash in Dobbs by then and had forgotten-if I’d even noticed-that the two things occurred simultaneously. After all, Howard Grimes wasn’t someone important to me, and the SBI had kept their heads down so low when they returned to Cotton Grove seven years ago that I’d barely been aware they were there before they were gone again, leaving some uneasy talk that soon faded. Still, for Howard to have died so abruptly?

  I stared at Scotty and he gave an ironic grin. “Yeah, but we had him autopsied and it really was his heart. His doctor said he’d had a bad one for years. Just our luck it picked that week to give out on him. Wish I’d heard about the red raincoat, though. We might have leaned on him a little harder the first go-round instead of thinking he was just the town busybody.”

  “He was that, too,” I said and nodded to the waitress who’d come over to refill my coffee cup.

  She glanced inquiringly at Scotty’s empty glass, but he shook his head. “I’ll have a cup of brewed decaf if you’ve got it.”

  As she snaked her way back through the TGIF crowd gathered noisily around the bar for happy hour, he said, “Except for Janie’s parents, nobody had much of an alibi. You know that?”

  “Yes. Gayle brought over a box of newspaper clippings yesterday and I spent last night going over them.”

  The beagle look was still there. “Law school makes a difference, doesn’t it?”

  It did. I’d found myself studying bland and equivocal statements with a jaundiced eye, wishing whoever’d reported the stories for the county papers had been less solicitous of family feelings and had asked harder questions. The News and Observer and the now defunct Raleigh Times had both covered Janie’s death once she’d been found; but even though her murder had made a brief sensation, they’d merely rehashed what was already known.

  Janie and Gayle had vanished on a Wednesday. By Thursday morning, when her car reappeared, some five hundred people were out actively looking for them: rescue squads, a local unit of the National Guard, town and county police, state troopers, and at least four aircraft, including the traffic helicopter from one of the Raleigh TV stations.

  “That’s when we got into it,” said Scotty. He thanked the waitress as she set coffee before him, then briefly encapsulated their investigation.

  “We coordinated the search but there were a lot of loose cannons rolling through Cotton Grove that week. Later, when we tried to chart everyone’s movements from Wednesday noon through Friday midnight, it was like documenting an anthill.”

  “And Friday night was when she was actually killed,” I murmured, taking a deep swallow of coffee.

  “Friday night was when she actually died,” he corrected, shaking out the pink paper packet of artificial sweetener.

  “We didn’t publicize it, but after the autopsy report came back that she’d been dead considerably less than twenty-four hours by the time we found her, we took a closer look. No marks on her hands or wrists, yet the baby hadn’t been fed or changed.”

  He waited for me to make the connections.

  “She hadn’t fought or been tied up, so why hadn’t she taken care of Gayle?”

  He nodded. “Page Hudson was still ME back then. He put it in medical terms, but what it boiled down to was that she’d sustained a really bad head wound-probably on Wednesday- that left her unconscious till someone put a bullet in her brain sometime late Friday. There was no need to tie her hands. She would never have moved again on her own. The bullet just speeded things up.”

  The bottom abruptly fell out of my stomach. “Somebody put her out of her misery? Like putting down a horse or an old dog when they get tired of watching it suffer?”

  “ ’Bout what it amounts to,” he agreed, crumpling up the empty packets of sweetener. He stirred his coffee and drank up as I tried to fit the new facts over my old concepts.

  We had all heard about Janie’s head wound as soon as she was found, but I guess its seriousness hadn’t registered. The sensationalism of how she was shot overshadowed a mundane blow on the head. Fanned by one irresponsible newspaper sidebar-“Cosa Nostra in Colleton County?”-the hottest topic was that Janie had been shot behind the right ear “execution style,” as if someone had taken out a contract on her life.

  “I always assumed she was briefly knocked unconscious and then lived two fall days scared out of her mind before she was finally killed.”

  “She wasn’t molested,” Scotty reminded me.

  “Her head wound-did Dr. Hudson say what caused it?”

  “Nope. The bullet track kinda messed things up too much to say if she took a bad fall or was hit.”

  I sat silently as he described in more detail than the papers had carried exactly how Janie had been found. I’d heard most of it, but hearing Scotty’s version gave me a different perspective.

  After three days with bloodhounds and aerial reconnaissance that produced no results, a call had gone out for everyone to please check any abandoned buildings on their property.

  Ridley’s Mill fell in that category. It was only three miles from the edge of Cotton Grove as the crow flies, but more like six miles because of the way Old Forty-Eight followed the twists and bends of Possum Creek. Once a small and inefficient gristmill, it had fallen into disrepair back around the thirties when the main millstone broke and electricity proved more reliable than the broad sluggish creek. There were no more Ridleys either, for that matter, and the property had changed hands several times.

  Twenty years ago, a Raleigh banker bought it, thinking it might be remodeled into a rustic weekend fishing lodge. He died before he could draw up any plans, and his widow has sat on the estate ever since.

  The land’s posted, but nobody’s ever let a few No Trespassing signs keep them from where they want to go, and the mill’s always been used by fishermen, hunters, and teenage kids skipping school. The rutted overgrown lane leading in through the woods from Old Forty-Eight is probably still a lovers’ lane. It was back then.

  When it became generally known that Janie and Gayle were missing, said Scotty, someone living nearby had driven his pickup through the lane on Thursday afternoon. The man and his older brother had checked the millhouse from top to bottom. Both were on record that the place was empty, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Scotty paused. “Your brothers, I believe?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “Will and Seth. Possum Creek borders our land, too, and all of us have fished from the top of the millhouse at one time or another.”

  No poi
nt adding that while Will might lie about anything that crossed his mind, Seth never would.

  “Will’s wife’s the one who had a blue sedan, too?”

  “My brothers checked Ridley’s Mill simply because they knew it was there and they thought somebody ought to take a look,” I said and heard a defensive tone in my own voice.

  “Of course,” he said neutrally. “So you know all about how two black hands were clearing underbrush for Michael Vickery on the opposite bank upstream and heard the baby crying?”

  “Where the Pot Shot is now,” I nodded. “Michael had gone to get drinks or pick up a load of bricks or something and they forded the creek and found Janie and Gayle in the mill loft. Janie still wearing the jeans and- Wait a minute. What happened to her raincoat?”

  Scotty sat back in the booth while music and people and blue cigarette haze swirled around us, then leaned across the table so that I was the only one who could possibly hear his words above the noise. “I’m trusting Terry on you, but it doesn’t leave this table,” he warned.

  “Okay,” I promised.

  “No raincoat. The family was too torn up to notice and the news media never picked up on it either-probably because it’d turned off so hot and sunny by then nobody thought about coats. We made sure it really was missing and then we shut up about it because I thought we stood a good chance of finding it if we ever developed a strong enough suspect to get a search warrant.”

  “Only you never did.”

  “Only we never did,” he echoed grimly. “Not for lack of trying. We zeroed in on a few right away: the husband, your brothers-because they’d been out to the mill on Thursday, all the old boyfriends, Michael Vickery. You.” He gave a tired smile. “Even those two blacks that found her. We just couldn’t make the times fit. Take Jed Whitehead. He was a salesman with a Raleigh firm back then, out on the road all day Wednesday, but once it was known that his wife was missing, someone was constantly with him. Same with the rest of her family. Any of them could have bopped her over the head and hid her somewhere, but when did they have time to move her car or, for that matter, move her to the millhouse and then go back and shoot her?”