Bootlegger’s Daughter

by Margaret Maron

  Keyed up though he was, he noticed my damp and chilled condition and said, “I’ve got an extra jacket on the truck. Want me to get it?”

  “If it’s not too far away.”

  He pointed to the gray pickup sitting in plain sight.

  “You stole a state license plate?” I said.

  “Borrowed. And I’ve got to give it back by five o’clock.”

  It was three-thirty.

  I watched as he splashed over to the truck, slipped aside the tarp that covered the bed, and pulled out a black plastic garment bag, which he brought back to the caboose. Inside were several shirts, a couple of tweedy slacks, and a Durham Bulls warm-up jacket.

  It felt wonderful around my shoulders. I settled back on one of the iron benches and said, “Okay, talk.”

  “How about some coffee, kiddo?” he asked. “I bet they have some at the concession stand.”

  “C’mon, Denn. You promised if I came without telling Dwight-”

  He slumped down on the opposite bench and the wrinkles around his mouth made him look another ten years older. “Yeah, okay. I know.”

  But he couldn’t seem to start. I’d seen this with witnesses before.

  “You left me a message on my office machine,” I prompted. “You wanted me to meet you at the theater?”

  “Yeah, but before that…” He got up and started pacing back and forth from one end of the caboose to the other. Rain drummed so noisily on the iron roof that I barely heard his words as he walked over to the doorway to watch water cascade off in silver sheets.

  I felt like drumming my fingers on his head. “Why was Michael there?” I prodded. “Did you shoot him?”

  “God, no! How can you even ask that?” He turned and for a moment I thought his face was splashed with rain. Then I realized that beneath his John Deere cap he was crying uncontrollably.

  “I loved him. He was my life.” Tears streamed from his eyes and dropped in dark splotches on his vest. “Now he’s dead- and dear God in heaven, how can I-how will I live without him?”

  I can’t stand to see anybody cry uncomforted. Convulsive sobs wracked his thin body as the rain sluiced down all around us, and I held him like a child and went on holding him, listening to his incoherent grief, till the worst was over.

  Yet, even after his emotions were back under shaky control and he’d used his handkerchief to wipe his eyes and blow his nose, it still took a few minutes before he could talk about anything except his enormous loss.

  “I’d been with others by the time we met-hell, it was the swinging sixties-of course I had. We both had. But after that, he was the only one,” said Denn. “I never looked at another man after our first night together. After a year, he comes back down here and I think I’ve lost him forever… but then he sends for me and eighteen years, kiddo. Sounds soupy in this day and age, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “Actually, it sounds lucky.”

  “We were good together, too.” He sat down on the iron bench opposite me. “Michael gave me security and I gave him warmth-someone he could be free with for the first time in his life.”

  “My mother used to say that Dancys live behind glass walls,” I said.

  He thought about it a minute, then nodded. “Only Michael was always trying to get out. He was a good person. Too good sometimes. Too religious. The kind of religion that-” He fell silent again, twisting his handkerchief in his small clever hands. “I’m not religious myself. But I always thought it ought to comfort and sustain. Not put you on a cross, too.”

  The rain had slacked off. I glanced at my watch. Almost four.

  “What happened Friday?” I asked again.

  “We fought. Again. He’s been so restless this spring.” His face threatened to crumple again, but he forced himself to stay calm. “He says he’s tired of me. Tired of the country, tired of making pots and being good, tired of me.” Denn’s voice dropped. Became shamed. His head drooped until his face was obscured by the bill of his cap. “He’s seeing someone else. Someone younger than me over in Durham. Twenty years younger.”

  Once more he resumed his pacing. “But he’d have come back to me. I know that now. He would have.”

  How many times I’ve sat in my office, filling in the blanks of a divorce petition, and heard tearful wives or brokenhearted husbands say those exact words: “It’s just a phase. A fling. The seven-year-itch. The other lover doesn’t matter. It won’t last. We have too much history together.”

  Sometimes they did; more often they didn’t.

  “I pop off. I admit it. I say things I shouldn’t. Make threats I don’t really mean. But after all the things he says-” He blew his nose again to cover a choked gulp. “This time’s different and I see there’s nothing to do but leave until he comes back to his senses.”

  While Michael had gone stomping off to the creek with the dog to cool off, Denn had flung his most important possessions into the pickup.

  “-because I can’t get my Chinese chest in the Volvo and I don’t want to leave it. Not that I expect to come back and find the locks changed-”

  From his tone, I gathered that was exactly what he expected. It sounded as if there’d been an ultimatum: get out or be thrown out.

  “So why was Michael at the theater?”

  “Cathy must have heard me call you and told him. I don’t know. Maybe he thinks I’m gonna keep the truck to make him mad. He’s ashamed of being gay. Did you know that? That’s why it was so brave of him. To come out down here-I mean even if it was self-punishment-which it wasn’t. Not really. But he could be pure Primitive Baptist at times. Very moralistic. And, of course, the truck’s part of it.”

  He was chattering, lurching from one subject to another, barely making sense, and I said so.

  “Well, it was like, okay, maybe he’s gay, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a man like any of those other good ol’ country boys. Pickup truck, dog in the flatbed, rifle on the gun rack, the whole goddamn schmear. Sitting up there in the cab of that truck, he can tell himself he’s just like everybody else. I hate the fucking thing, but I need it to move my stuff to a friend’s place over here. I was gonna see you and then take it back and get my car.”

  While I was still curious about what he wanted to give me, I’ve learned not to interrupt witnesses when the narrative flow is upon them.

  “It takes me longer to get my stuff unloaded than I think and it’s a little past nine before I get back down to the theater. I drive around to the rear and the first thing I see is the Volvo. I drive right up to it and shine the headlights inside and-and-”

  He nearly lost it again.

  “Why didn’t you call for help?”

  “Okay, so it’s dumb, but walk in my shoes for one minute, kiddo. I’ve just had a flaming fight with Michael, right? Everybody knows I’ve got a half-inch fuse. And there he sits, blown to hell before he can even get out of the car to talk to whoever’s holding the gun. I’m gonna call the same deputy sheriff that comes out the day before and lectures me about shooting at people?”

  He held up his hands.

  “I know, I know. Some dumb schmuck from Long Island, right? Too stupid to remember that there’s a test they can do to prove whether or not you’ve fired a gun, but God! I’ve just seen the man I’ve lived with eighteen years-I’m supposed to think straight?”

  “Why did you shoot at him out at the mill?”

  Without thinking, he blurted, “I wasn’t shooting at him. I-”

  He looked at me guiltily.

  I was incredulous. “You were shooting at me?”

  “Not at you. I just wanted you and the Whitehead kid to quit bugging Michael about Janie Whitehead and go away. That’s why those flyers. To get your mind back on your campaign and off Michael.”

  The rain had stopped entirely now. There were occasional drips from the trees above and I could hear the carousel’s Wurlitzer again.

  He was so outrageous that there was no point getting angry. I could only shake my head and m
arvel.

  “You know something, Denn? You really are a piece of work. You take a shot at me. Spread lies about me. And then you expect me to hold your hand when you go talk to Dwight Bryant?”

  The wrinkles around his mouth creased in an ironic grin. “Yeah.”

  20 come on in, stay a little longer

  All the way down Forty-Eight, I berated myself for a fool.

  “You don’t need this,” fumed the pragmatist pacing up and down one side my mind.

  “I’m not taking him to raise,” my Good Samaritan preacher soothed from his armchair on the other side. “Just being a friend in need. As soon as I can get Ambrose Daughtridge to take him off my hands…”

  “Ambrose Daughtridge’s got more sense than you have. You heard what he said. He wants to stay in the Vickerys’ good graces and Denn killed their son!”

  “Did he?”

  “Who knows? Okay, maybe not, but it’s still none of your business.”

  “Yeah? What ever happened to ‘Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me?’ ”

  A cynical snort. “Oh, well! If you’re going to start quoting the Bible-”

  “Yeah, that part always embarrasses me, too. Just the same…”

  “I thought you wanted to be a judge”

  “I do! But not if it means-”

  “Oh spare me any more Sunday school slogans.”

  “Oh go to hell!”

  A few miles out from Raleigh, Forty-Eight to Cotton Grove splits off to the right while Seventy goes on to Dobbs. It seemed so natural to head toward Cotton Grove that we were half a mile past the fork before I remembered that we’d agreed Denn was going to drive straight back to Dobbs and turn himself in to Dwight. I speeded up and honked my horn.

  He waved and kept going.

  Annoyed, I pulled out around him and signaled that we were going to stop. There was a church up ahead. I put on my turn signal and drove into the church yard. (Ask About Our Summer Salvation Plan, said the portable sign at the edge of the road.)

  Denn sailed on past in the pickup.

  What the hell was he pulling? I’d already cut him as much slack as I thought I could afford when I followed him through Raleigh earlier so he could return the license plate a friend of his had “borrowed.” Instead of wasting my time calling Ambrose Daughtridge and getting his runaround, I should’ve called Dwight and had him waiting at the county line.

  Another couple of miles and just as I’d decided he was going straight into Cotton Grove to tackle Ambrose himself, he put on his left turn signal, waited till oncoming traffic cleared, then turned into the gravel road that led to Possum Creek Theatre. The sun never had come back out and I followed him down the drive and around back under skies as gray as my mood.

  By the time I switched off the engine, he was standing on the concrete loading pad fumbling with his keys, an ingratiating smile on his thin lips.

  “I know, I know,” he said. “This isn’t part of our agreement, but I just remembered that this door was open when I found Michael. I want to check and see that everything’s okay.”

  “The police searched it Friday night,” I told him. “And Dwight got Leslie Odum to come over, too.”

  Leslie was his assistant stage manager who probably knew as much about the storerooms as Denn did. She’d walked through and seen nothing unusual about the backstage clutter and I told him so.

  I could’ve saved my breath. He unlocked the door and slipped inside, as if my words were nothing more than so much wind wafting through the tall pines around us.

  The hallway was dark and still. Denn knew the way, but I had to fumble for lights, and by the time I found them, he had already reached the prop room on the far side of the building.

  “Hey, Denn, you never told me what you wanted to give me Friday night.”

  “Hmm?”

  He stood in the middle of the big cluttered room-props shelved all the way to the ceiling on one side, costumes hung in two tiers on the other, with worktables down the middle.

  “The message you left. You said you had something special for me.” I looked around for the red velvet cloak and didn’t see it at first, even though the bedsheets that normally acted as dustcovers had been rucked up onto the top tier of hangers so that everything was exposed. I went over to the racks and started pushing garments aside.

  “What the hell are you doing?” cried Denn.

  “Looking for the Red Riding Hood’s cloak. Wasn’t that what you were going to give me?”

  He rushed over and started rearranging the costumes I’d pushed aside. “You’re crushing things. Do you know how hard it is to iron taffeta? And no, it wasn’t the cloak. Will you quit bugging me about the damn thing? You can have it when I’m dead. I’ll will it to you, okay?”

  He nipped the bedsheets down and tucked them protectively around the garments, as if I’d attacked them with muddy hands.

  That was the final straw. To hell with Good Samaritanism. The pragmatist was right. “I’ll call Ambrose and tell him to meet you at the sheriff’s office. See you around, Denn. Have a nice life.”

  “Oh shit, Deborah, I’m sorry,” he said in instant contrition.

  “It’s just-my mind’s going in a million different directions. Tell you what. If we don’t use the cloak in Bouncing Betty, you can have it, okay? Look, I’ll even make it official.”

  He grabbed a loose sheet of paper from the worktable and printed in big capital letters I HEREBY GIVE DEBORAH KNOTT MY RED VELVET CLOAK NOW HANGING IN THE POSSUM CREEK PLAYERS THEATRE TO BE DELIVERED NO LATER THAN 60 DAYS FROM THIS DATE. Then he signed it Dennis Aloysius McCloy, dated it, and held the paper out to me with a flourish. “Here you go, kiddo. Okay?”

  I was still ticked but he noticed that my shoulder bag was unzipped and he deftly folded the paper and crammed it inside.

  “No more stalling,” I said impatiently. “Wait’ll you see if you’re going to be arrested before you start worrying about another production.”

  “I’m ready.”

  He flicked the light switches and the windowless prop room was plunged into darkness.

  As we came down the hall, I thought I saw something move beyond the open outer door.

  “See? What’d I tell you?” said the pragmatist.

  “Oh dear!” sighed the preacher.

  The patrol car was parked so that the pickup was completely blocked. A uniformed sheriff’s deputy leaned against the truck’s hood with a happy grin on his pudgy face and a meaty hand resting lightly on his holster. Deputy Jack Jamison.

  “Major Bryant’s on his way over,” he drawled. “He said he’d ’preciate it if y’all’d wait on him.”

  21 i never said it would be easy

  Okay, so it turned out not to be as bad as it could have been. The fact that I’d called Ambrose from Raleigh supported my claim that I really was escorting Denn to the sheriff’s office even though, strictly speaking, Possum Creek Players Theatre wasn’t on the route.

  Dwight arrived a little after six and took me off to one of the side rooms to hear as much as I could tell without compromising Denn’s attorney-client privileges, even though I hadn’t formally said I’d represent him. We sat down at a table across from each other; and starting off, it was Mr. Deputy Sheriff and Ms. Lawyer as I described how I’d wound up meeting Denn at Pullen Park. No meaningful glances, no locked eyes this go-round, and soon he was back to treating me like the Knott boys’ kid sister.

  “What’s your gut feeling on him, Deb’rah?”

  “Did he kill Michael Vickery?” I asked. “No.”

  “Well, who does he think?”

  “I don’t believe he has a clue. But if your next question’s is he telling everything exactly like it happened, your guess is good as mine. I keep trying to pin him down about why he wanted me to meet him out here, and he keeps prevaricating. You going to charge him?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Why? Just because they fought? Lots of
couples fight.”

  “Oh, come on, Deb’rah. He took a gun out to the woods. He damn near killed Vickery right in front of your eyes last week. That’s no little domestic squabble.”

  “He was trying to scare Gayle and me from involving Michael in Janie’s death again. He said Michael still had nightmares.”

  “Yeah? Like a war vet’s post-traumatic stress syndrome?” Dwight looked skeptical.

  “I don’t know. Denn keeps bringing up religion. Maybe Michael felt guilty because she lay over there so long and he didn’t know, didn’t help.”

  He leaned back in his chair and propped one of his size elevens on the edge of the table as if he were back in my mother’s kitchen, arguing with my brothers around the dinner table. He’s big all over, Dwight is. Played basketball in high school and could have played at Carolina if he hadn’t joined the army. Dean Smith liked the way he could handle a ball enough to send a scout over to some of his games. Big hands, big feet, big shoulders.

  And yeah, everything else in nice proportion, too.

  The summer I was ten, to teach me patience and keep me out of trouble, my mother gave me a good little pair of binoculars and a bird book and told me to go find a sheltered place and just sit quietly without making sudden movements and I would see nature’s wonderful secrets. There was a thick stand of grapevines and honeysuckle that overlooked the creek bank where the boys used to swim and horse around buck naked after their farm chores were done. I always came back to the house with chigger bites and scratches, but Mother was right. To this day, there’s a whole bunch of men walking around Colleton County whose natural endowments are no secret to me.

  Oblivious to my memories, Dwight was still laying out reasons to arrest Denn.

  “-besides, you know as good as I do how many homicides come from domestic fights. If Denn was a woman whose husband’d been cheating on her, you know he’d be the prime suspect. How’s this any different?”