Bootlegger’s Daughter

by Margaret Maron

  “So what’d McCloy leave here?” he asked, turning serious.

  “Whatever it was he was going to give me.”

  “A pitcher?”

  “Made a pretty story, didn’t it?” I said sourly. “Only when we walked upstairs together for him to change clothes for the funeral home, that particular pitcher was sitting on a shelf at the top of the stairs. He thought I wouldn’t remember that he was supposed to’ve had it with him on Friday night when he drove out here to meet me. Kinda insulting, isn’t it?”

  The walkie-talkie burst into sound again. “Baby Bird to Blue Jay. The Snowball should be in your view any minute now! Over.”

  Up on the highway, headlights slowed, then turned into the drive. Instinctively I drew away from the door as Dwight said, “I see him, Baby Bird. Proceed as planned. Out.”

  As the pickup’s headlights flashed through the pines, Dwight turned off the receiver and took my hand and we rushed down the aisle. He tried to get me to hide behind the curtains on stage, but I said no way, José, and there wasn’t time for him to make me. As it was, we barely got ourselves stationed behind the screen again than we heard the outer door thump to. No hiding the truck or cautious reconnoiter for Denn.

  A moment later, the prop room door opened and lights came on. The Chinese screen had four hinged panels, and Dwight and I both had our eyes up against the narrow cracks. We saw Denn framed in the doorway, still in his white shirt, but now wearing his usual black jeans and black leather cap.

  “No!” he said sharply. “Come on in here and behave yourself.”

  A familiar clicking sound pattered along the hall and then, to my utter dismay, Lily trotted past him and began sniffing the air.

  Dwight and I both froze.

  “Good girl,” Denn said absently and walked over to the racks of costumes.

  Lily quartered the room, poking her nose under the dust sheet, checking out the boxes under the worktables.

  As Denn started to pull back a dust sheet, Lily suddenly caught our scent. Her hackles rose and a low rumble started in her chest.

  “What’s the matter, girl?” asked Denn, hesitating with the sheet in his hand.

  Stiff legged, the dog slowly stalked across the room toward our hiding place. Her growl became a snarl and then she was barking fiercely and looking to Denn for instructions.

  Without waiting to see who we were, Denn took off through the door.

  “Stop!” Dwight roared as the screen fell over with a crash.

  Confused, Lily didn’t seem to know whether to run or attack and I used her hesitation to call out, “Good girl, Lily. Come on, you know me. Right? There’s a good girl.”

  I don’t know if it was because she did remember that I’d scratched her ears earlier in the evening or because she had always been more Michael’s dog than Denn’s, but she lowered her hackles and came over to me with her tail wagging while Dwight chased after Denn.

  It wasn’t much of a chase since Jack Jamison-ol’ Baby Bird-had blocked the pickup’s exit again.

  Denn was brought back to the prop room where he tried to bluster it out.

  “I have a right to be here. I have a key!” he stormed. “Do you? Where’s your warrant?”

  He did a true double take when he saw me standing there with Lily. “Deborah? You here, too? What’s going on?”

  “You want a minute alone with your client?” Dwight asked.

  “He’s no client of mine,” I said. “I don’t keep clients who lie to me.”

  “Lie?” cried Denn.

  “Lie,” I said coldly and gave him chapter and verse about the pitcher. “You start telling the truth right this minute or I’m outta here and you can rot in jail for all I care. In fact, jail might be your best bet right now. Hasn’t it sunk in yet that maybe it was supposed to be you lying in a closed coffin at Aldcroft’s? Your car, kiddo, sitting right where you were supposed to be.”

  His head came up and his eyes widened abruptly. Clearly this was the first time such an obvious-and terrifying- possibility had occurred to him.

  “You’ve jerked me around all afternoon,” I snarled. “I haven’t had any supper, and I’m tired of holding your hand while you think up more lies. Why’d you really leave word for me to come here Friday?”

  Denn’s thin shoulders suddenly slumped in defeat. “I was going to tell you who killed Janie Whitehead.”

  25 it’s out of my hands

  As soon as hed said it, I think Denn wished he could take it back. The narrow brim of his black leather cap shadowed his eyes from the overhead lights, but I saw the wrenching pain there as he bit his lips.

  “It feels like such a betrayal now,” he whimpered. “He said we were through. There’s someone in Durham he wanted to be with. I was hurt. And furious. All I could think of was how to hurt him back. If you’d answered the phone, Deborah, I’d have told you then and there what happened to Gayle’s mother, but it was only because I was mad then. I knew before I left Raleigh that night that I wouldn’t go through with it. That’s why I was late getting back. I hoped you would have gotten tired of waiting and already left. How could I betray him after all these years?”

  “He can’t be hurt now by anything you tell us,” I said.

  Dwight was less diplomatic. “Talk,” he said, plunking the tape recorder down on the table in front of Denn.

  Rattled by the emotional roller coaster he’d been on since Michael’s death, Denn talked.

  While Jack went off to try to find us some hamburgers or something, Denn sat hunched in a wicker peacock chair with a slipcover of gold satin-the throne from Once upon a Mattress, I believe-and told us how Janie Whitehead died.

  “I explained about how Michael came back to Cotton Grove eighteen years ago and tried to lead a straight life?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “But you need to tell Dwight, too.”

  Haltingly, Denn repeated the tale of how Mrs. Vickery had worked on Michael’s basically conservative nature and his sense of guilt to persuade him to come home and make an effort to be the manly son she and Dr. Vickery could be proud of. He could do it if he tried. They would help him.

  “You don’t realize how much things have changed down here these last twenty years,” said Denn. “I’m not saying gay marriages are ever going to make it in this county, but back then some people would rather have their kids dead than admit they were gay. Am I right?”

  “ ’Fraid so,” said Dwight, and I thought of Will. He’d still rather take a licking than have it come out about Trish.

  “So Michael tells me good-bye and comes home in January. New year. New beginning. And from January to May, he tries to be straight. He prays, he paints, he piles bricks for a kiln, he even chases after pu”-glancing at me, Denn caught himself-“pretty girls.”

  He paused. “Could I have some water?”

  He and Dwight both looked at me.

  “Why sure,” I said. “I believe there’s a water fountain down by the men’s room. Y’all go right ahead. I’ll just wait and drink whatever Jack brings me.”

  Dwight laughed. Denn didn’t seem to think it was particularly funny. He went over to the work sink, pulled a paper cup from the dispenser hanging on the wall, and ran himself a long drink.

  “Not stalling, are you?” I asked.

  “Now, Deborah,” Dwight said mildly, “let the man wet his throat.”

  Well, look at that, I thought to myself. I get to play Bad Cop

  The table was just a hair too wide for me to kick Dwight. Besides, I had on sneakers, not some pointy-toed pumps that would do a number on his shins. But at least my sharp question got Denn back on his fairy tale throne and Dwight turned the tape recorder back on. He gave me a transcript later and I might as well put it in here, since the rest of Denn’s story was pretty much a monologue.

  TRANSCRIPT of INTERROGATION CONDUCTED 15 MAY

  Voices present on this tape:

  DM = Dennis “Denn” McCloy

  DB = Maj. Dwight Bryant, deputy sheriff, C
olleton County

  DK = Ms. Deborah Knott, attorney at law

  DM: As I was saying, Michael tries to do it Mrs. Vickery’s way and he’s miserable. Now, at the back of their grounds, that’s where Janie Whitehead’s living with her husband and new baby. She’s nice. Friendly. Michael doesn’t think twice about her because she’s a married lady and a mother.

  I told you that he was pretty conventional in a lot of ways, right?

  Anyhow, on the day it happens, Michael’s been working out at the barn all morning and he drives back into town and stops at Hardee’s for a hamburger. As he gets back to his truck, it starts to rain again and about that time, Janie Whitehead pulls in beside him. She wants a Pepsi and she’s got the baby with her and Michael, always a gentleman, goes back in and gets it for her. Well, the rain’s really coming down now, and she pushes the car door open on the passenger side and tells him to get in and talk with her a minute. He eats his hamburger, she drinks her Pepsi, she asks him about how his remodeling’s coming along out at the barn.

  If he’d worked ten minutes longer or quit ten minutes sooner, it never would’ve happened.

  DK: Wait a minute. They sat and talked at Hardee’s? You sure? Somebody said it was at the old Dixie Motel.

  DM: Yeah. Howard Grimes. Michael never understood how that old coot got the two parking lots mixed up. Turns out it was a good thing he did though. See, Janie starts asking so many questions that somehow, before Michael knows how it happens, he asks her if she wants to see the barn. Of course she does. Then she acts like it’s a done deal that they have to drive out together, and since she’s got the baby and all in the backseat, she drives.

  God, he’s such an innocent, Michael. He’s got no interest in women, so he forgets they might think he’s the sexiest looking thing they ever saw.

  DB: What’d you say, Deborah?

  DK: Nothing. Denn’s right though. Michael was a hunk in those days. I just never realized Janie was looking, too.

  DM: She was looking, kiddo. They get out to the barn and she takes the baby upstairs with her to see how Michael’s roughed in the partitions and laid out the baths. Marble slab for the hearth. And all the time, she’s giving him this line about how it might surprise him to know that Cotton Grove’s as sophisticated as New York in some ways. Right. And then she tries to kiss him. Takes him so off-balance that he blurts out something that makes her guess, and he’s too flustered to deny it right away. And to show you how sophisticated she is, she totally freaks. I mean, she’s bouncing off the goddamn walls, yelling what the fuck’s happening to Cotton Grove? Is everybody in the whole fucking town queer as a three-dollar bill? When did Cotton Grove become the fag and dyke capital of the county? I mean this lady’s the homophobe from hell, right?

  You want to hear the kicker? Seems she’s been jumped by a couple of lesbians a couple of weeks earlier! She’s decided she has to get it on with Michael to prove to herself that there’s nothing queer about her, and damned if she hasn’t hit on the only man in town who can’t get it up for her!

  DB: You wanted to say something, Deborah?

  DK: No.

  DM: Well, she starts screaming that she doesn’t care who he is. Cotton Grove doesn’t need his kind of filth. She’s going to tell everybody in town. He’ll be run out on a rail. His family disgraced. The whole schmear. She grabs her coat to go and-

  Okay, he never says he actually pushes her, but he does panic. He sees this messy scandal, his mother totally wiped out with humiliation in front of the whole town, his father shamed. He can’t let her do it. I don’t know how it happens, but suddenly she falls over backwards and cracks her head open on the sharp edge of the marble hearth. There’s blood all over everything. Now he really panics. It’s bad enough she was going to tell the world he’s gay; now he’s a gay who’s assaulted a sweet young mother.

  He knows he ought to drive into town for help, but he’s too scared of what’ll happen when she regains consciousness. He thinks, What if she never wakes up? His secret will be safe. She almost quits breathing. He’s sure she’s going to die any minute and he’s paralyzed. It’s like a bad dream with no way out and he sits there for hours till it’s past dark and he realizes that he’s waited too long. There’s no way he can call for help now. And soon somebody’s liable to notice how long his truck’s parked at Hardee’s.

  The baby’s screaming. He runs down and finds a bottle of milk and the baby drinks it and goes off to sleep. He’s not thinking clear at this point or he’d put the baby in the car and leave her, but he’s afraid no one’ll find the car before she gets a heat stroke and dies. Anyhow, he drives Janie’s car back to Cotton Grove, leaves it behind her father-in-law’s office, and walks over to Hardee’s about a block away, where he picks up his truck and goes on home to his parents’ house like nothing’s happened.

  When he gets there, he hears that Janie and the baby have been missed and that half the town’s turned out by this time to look for them. He hardly closes his eyes that night, and next morning, he’s almost afraid to go back out to the barn.

  He finally does. Janie’s still alive and the baby’s screaming like crazy till he can’t stand it. He picks Janie up and carries her down to the creek. It’s still cool and rainy. At first he thinks maybe he’ll put her in the water and let the creek take her away. But he just can’t do it. He keeps walking on down the creek bank. When he gets opposite the mill, he’s talked himself into believing that even if she’s found now, she’s too far gone to ever regain consciousness. He’ll just put her and the baby in the mill loft and soon somebody’s bound to check it out.

  DK: But they already had. My brothers were there that Thursday morning.

  DM: Yeah? Was that why it took ’em so long to find her? I wondered about that.

  DK: But Michael knew my brothers were there, Denn. He told Gayle and me that he’d met them coming out of the lane and that’s why he didn’t search the mill himself.

  DM: Yeah? Well, he probably said that to throw you off, keep you from wondering why he didn’t go over himself. Anyhow, he spends Thursday cleaning up the blood till there was no trace of it. Every minute he expects the sheriff or somebody to drive into the barnyard and ask if he knows anything about how Janie got in the mill, but nothing. Another awful night. The tension’s killing him. He stays away Friday. Doesn’t come back till early Saturday morning and they still haven’t found Janie. So now he decides that she’s never going to be found. It’s over with. He just has to carry on normally. He’s arranged for a couple of guys to work that morning, so he goes and gets them and drives them out to the barn. I guess you know the rest after that? How they found her. And Michael had to go over and look at her. It was awful for him. Just awful.

  DK: When did he shoot her?

  DB: And what did he do with the pistol?

  DK: Come on, Denn. Finish it up.

  DM: That’s the part he never wants to talk about. In fact, I don’t find out for months that that’s how she finally dies. He tells me all that I’ve just told you when he comes for me. How it was an accident, but he can’t ever tell anyone. But he doesn’t mention the shot and there’s not that many people around here talking to me yet. It’s on into next spring and somebody says something abut Janie Whitehead being shot and it surprises the hell out of me. He wouldn’t tell me any of the details. “It had to be done,” he says. “She suffered too long as it was. I was a coward not to do it the first night.”

  DB: If he was so afraid to have Cotton Grove know he was gay…

  DM: Why’d he come out of the closet and bring me down?

  DB: Yeah.

  DM: He tried it straight and look where it got him. He’s in total despair. Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. It’s like he has to do something major to make up for hurting Janie. He talks about atoning.

  Gives up art. Or thinks he does. He says the fine arts are a snare and a delusion and from now on he’s just going to be a simple artisan and make plain utilitarian things. Like the Shakers. Only he rea
lly is an artist, and even when he’s trying to be plain, it’s plain with a spin on it, right?

  And it’s still not enough. He’s like one of those strange desert monks from early Christian times, those guys that sit inside hollow trees or on top of pillars. Michael really loved me, I know he did, but at the same time, coming out of the closet was sort of like a hair shirt.

  Okay, okay, I know it sounds strange, but it sort of makes a crazy sense-Janie gets hurt because he denies what he is, right? Even though I tell him it’s not really his fault. And when you think about it, she’s as much to blame for what happened as he is. It’s not him who goes looking for her, is it? But Michael can’t see it like that, and so to punish himself, he admits to the world that he’s gay.

  DB: He gets to be himself and this is punishment?

  DK: It’s weird, but Denn’s right, Dwight. Go take another look at that altar he set up in his bedroom. I thought the Madonna and child looked familiar. They could be Janie and Gayle. They were Janie and Gayle to him, weren’t they, Denn?

  DM: Yes.

  DB: So who killed him, McCloy?

  DM: I don’t know. Honest.

  At this point, Baby Bird Jamison returned with a bag of hamburgers, fries, and four chocolate shakes. Denn wasn’t hungry and merely picked at his, but just the aroma made me shaky. It’d been nearly twelve hours since I’d had anything more than a stale Nabs cracker I’d found in the bottom of my purse before locking it in my trunk. I was so ravenous that I’d gobbled down all my fries and was ready to start on Denn’s when Dwight remembered the missing panel.

  “Why do you think Michael took it down, and where is it now?” he asked.

  Again Denn shook his head. “I just can’t figure it.”

  He unwrapped his hamburger and began feeding it to Lily, who acted almost as hungry as me. When she’d finished it, he leaned back wearily in the golden chair. “I’m dead.”

  That brought an ironic smile to his lips. “Look, could we please call it a day? Any minute now, all my systems are going to crash.” He took a deep breath. “And tomorrow doesn’t look to be any easier.”