The Darling Dahlias and the Poinsettia Puzzle

by Susan Wittig Albert

  Wilber’s eyes widened. “For me?”

  “Yeah. But that depends.”

  “On . . . on what?”

  “On what kind of a nose for news you have. And how much guts you’ve got. It takes balls to dig into tough stories—stories like the ones you’re likely to find at Jericho.” He regarded the boy. “How about if we sit down together and talk some more about this?”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Wilber said uneasily. “Yes, I think I could do that.” He lowered his voice. “But we can’t do it here. It’s not smart for people to see me talking to you. They might get the wrong idea, you know.”

  “Sure thing,” Charlie said. “You got a free evening this weekend? We could maybe get together over a beer and a cigarette somewhere.”

  Wilber picked up a pencil and tapped it nervously on the desk, seeming to give the matter some thought. “Well, I might could do it tonight, I guess. I was going to take Evelyn—she’s my girl—to the Cotton Gin Dance Hall, over on the other side of Monroeville.” He made a face. “But when she let slip where we were going, her mother decided they would drive up to Montgomery, to visit a sick aunt. So our date’s off.”

  “Too bad about that,” Charlie said. He wasn’t surprised that the girl’s mother didn’t want her to go dancing at the Cotton Gin. But it would be a good place to meet Wilber. The roadhouse was dark and noisy. People would be so busy dancing and flirting that they wouldn’t pay any attention to a couple of guys having a private conversation at a back-corner table. What’s more, it was twenty-some miles away, which meant that they were much less likely to be recognized.

  “The Cotton Gin is fine with me,” he added. “How about if I meet you there tonight, say, nine o’clock?”

  Wilber’s face brightened. “Yeah, sure. Tonight’ll be good. Maybe I’ll even bring—”

  Out in the hallway, they heard the warden’s irate voice. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing, you idiot? I told you to paint the other end of the hall, didn’t I? Didn’t I? You painted this end last week. You’re painting the same damn patch all over again!”

  Wilber hunched his shoulders as if against a blow. “Sounds like the warden is back. And he’s not in a real good mood.”

  “Sounds like,” Charlie agreed, glad that he and Wilber had made their arrangements before the boss walked in. With a grin, he pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “It’s been real nice talking to you, Wilber. I’m looking forward to tonight.”

  He was, too. Meeting Wilber had been an unpredictable, unexpected, but very welcome stroke of luck. The boy had a story to tell, perhaps about Bragg’s death. He might try to appear reluctant, but Charlie had the feeling that he was ready to tell it.

  And Charlie was more than ready to listen.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “WE COULD WIND UP DEAD”

  The morning light was pale outside the window of Buddy Norris’ office, and the elm tree’s bare branches shivered in the wind. The oil heater near his desk kept his feet minimally warm, but the rest of the place was chilly enough that the people who came in and out usually didn’t take their coats off. Buddy was wearing an all-wool union suit beneath his jeans and flannel shirt, with two pairs of wool socks inside his boots. He was still cold.

  Buddy laid aside the state report he was reading—“Crime in Alabama: Statistics for 1933”—pushed back his chair, and went into the waiting room to check the Musgrove’s Hardware thermometer on the wall. Fifty degrees, and that was indoors. It must be close to freezing outside.

  He went over to the old Warm Morning parlor stove that they had inherited with the house, opened the top lid, and stirred up the fire inside. When the stove was regularly fed, its cast iron sides and black stovepipe radiated heat and raised the temperature. But the bucket beside the stove was empty, so he took it out to the shed on the alley and filled it with chunks of coal, glad that Tater Brinkley had delivered a load before the cold spell hit. The cost had gone up again, though. Coal was now just over eight dollars a ton, delivered, almost a full dollar more than this time last year. At that price, some folks might not be able to afford it.

  But it wasn’t a good day to skimp on coal or let the fire go out. WALA, down in Mobile, had warned that tonight’s temperature might fall as low as fifteen, which was downright frigid. Darling’s December temperatures averaged around forty degrees, although once when Buddy was a kid, it had fallen to five degrees just before Christmas. It had snowed that week, too—the only time he’d ever had a chance to use his father’s rusty old sled that hung in the barn, along with the horse harnesses and haying tools and fishing poles. He’d made good use of it that week, though. He’d taken it out on the hill behind the house every chance he got. Snow was a kid’s heart’s desire.

  When he’d added more coal and punched up the fire so it was burning brightly, Buddy stuck his head into his deputy’s office, where Wayne Springer was hunched over his desk, updating his report of recent calls for Charlie Dickens’ Police Blotter section of next week’s Dispatch.

  It had been a normal week. A dog reported stolen had turned up in a neighbor’s chicken coop with feathers on his muzzle, incontrovertible evidence of criminal behavior. Mr. Turnell’s bull had gone on the rampage and trampled Mrs. Stewart’s rhubarb patch. A threatened brawl among the colored patrons at the Red Dog over in Maysville ended peacefully when the joint’s manager brandished his granddaddy’s Union sword and began singing “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory.”

  “Yo, Wayne,” Buddy said, “It’s going to be cold tonight. If you want to set up your cot beside the stove in the waiting room, feel free.”

  Wayne looked up from his typewriter. “I’ll do that,” he said. “The pantry got pretty chilly last night.” He leaned back in his chair. “I heard on the radio that it was down to eighteen in Gainesville. They’re saying it froze the Florida orange and tangerine crop.”

  “Too bad,” Buddy said. “It’s looking like it could be that cold here. Be sure and bring in enough extra coal to keep the fire going over night.”

  The deputy’s salary was barely enough to hold body and soul together, so Buddy let Wayne live in the sheriff’s office rent-free. He cooked in Mrs. Crumpler’s old kitchen and slept on a folding cot in the pantry—which Buddy thought was a pretty good plan. Since Wayne was sleeping on the premises, he was handy to answer the telephone or go to the door if a citizen showed up with a problem in the middle of the night. And Buddy could now tell the county commissioners that the Cypress County Sheriff’s Office was staffed around the clock.

  Which was a good thing, because he was planning to ask for a fifteen percent increase in the sheriff’s department budget at the next commissioners’ meeting. Free rent or not, he really ought to raise the deputy’s salary. Buddy still couldn’t figure out why a good man like Wayne had been willing to give up the decent money he was earning in Birmingham to come to Darling. It was a mystery.

  And he would really like to have more money himself. If he got a raise, he might even ask Bettina Higgens to marry him. He was getting pretty uncomfortable at Mrs. Beedle’s rooming house, where his five dollars a week got him a bed, breakfast five days a week, a hot bath on Wednesday night, and laundry on first and third Mondays. But his room wasn’t any bigger than Wayne’s pantry and unheated. Worse, if there was an emergency nighttime situation, the call came in on the handcrank telephone on the hallway wall, which woke everybody up—not only at Mrs. Beedle’s (four longs), but at the five other households on the party line, where people got up to listen in and find out what was going on. He couldn’t expect Mrs. Beedle to go to the expense of a private line just because she was renting the sheriff a five-dollar-a-week room.

  Buddy went to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of coffee from the percolator on the back of the stove, and returned to his office. He glanced at the clock with a flash of worry, wondering how Charlie Dickens was making out at the prison farm that morning, and hoping he wasn’t getting himself into trouble.

 
; It wasn’t an idle worry. He had awakened in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, thinking that it had been a very bad idea to send a civilian to do police work—an undercover fishing trip, fishing for information. It was flat-out dangerous, that’s what it was. A man had been killed out there at Jericho and the murder made to look like a suicide. Anybody who would do a thing like that would do just about anything. What if Dickens got himself killed?

  But Charlie’d had plenty of experience in investigative reporting. He had a cool head and he’d proved, on a couple of previous occasions, that he could use it.* And Buddy hadn’t had any other choice, had he? Jericho was a closed shop, and neither he nor Wayne could get any answers out of it. Charlie could—if he was smart. Careful. And lucky.

  He looked at the clock. It was nearly eleven. If he hadn’t heard from Dickens by lunchtime, he’d call the Dispatch office and see what was going on.

  He had just sat down at his desk again when the front door opened and somebody came into the waiting area. Through his open office door, Buddy could see the visitor. He was surprised. It was Bodeen Pyle, bundled up in a sheepskin coat, a black knitted cap pulled down over his ears.

  “Hey, Bodeen,” Buddy called. “Come on in and get warm. It’s cold outside.”

  “You said it, man,” Bodeen replied with a shiver. “That wind is like a knife.” He pulled off his leather gloves. “Don’t suppose you’ve got any coffee.”

  “Sure thing,” Buddy said. “There’s a pot on the kitchen stove. Help yourself.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “I need to check on something with my deputy. Be with you in a minute.”

  A few moments later, they were in Buddy’s office with the doors shut, and Bodeen was seated in the chair on the other side of the sheriff’s desk, close to the oil heater. He was a wellbuilt man, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with a firm jaw, a direct look, and the sharp edge of a man who’d been around long enough to know all the tricks. Bodeen Pyle wasn’t somebody you wanted to mess with. If you did, you’d better know what you were doing. His bark could be pretty bad, but his bite was a damn sight worse.

  Looking over his coffee cup, Buddy wondered how many times Bodeen had sat on the other side of the sheriff’s desk. The Pyle brothers—Randall, Beau, and Bodeen—didn’t have much truck with law enforcement unless they were on the business end of an arrest. Randall, the oldest, was in jail in Atlanta. Beau, the youngest, was out on bail here in Darling, charged with pulling a knife on a guy who’d had the bad sense to beat him at a game of pool.

  And Bodeen, the middle son, ran the biggest bootleg liquor operation in Cypress County. Buddy knew for a fact that he had five blackpots out there in Briar Swamp, and that he was running at least one hauler—a fast car loaded with twenty or more gallons of whiskey—every night. Twenty gallons at twelve dollars a gallon. Two hundred forty dollars a night. Every night. Buddy also knew that sooner or later, he’d have to arrest Bodeen. If that pesky revenue agent, Chester P. Kinnard, didn’t beat him to it.

  But in the meantime, Buddy and Bodeen had an agreement—or rather, Bodeen was operating under the assumption that they did. Buddy understood the matter differently, but that didn’t change this awkward and even potentially dangerous situation.

  It had happened this way. Some weeks before, Buddy had dropped in on Bodeen’s moonshine operation in Briar Swamp to question him about the automobile crash that had killed Whitney Whitworth. During the conversation, Buddy learned that Whitworth had been Pyle’s partner, and that Whitworth’s investment was allowing him to expand. Whitworth was, in effect, the goose that was laying Pyle’s golden egg. Pyle had been rattled—and blindsided—by his death.

  But even more startlingly, Buddy had learned that Roy Burns, his highly respected predecessor in the sheriff’s office, had been operating what amounted to a protection racket. For years, Burns had been accepting regular payments from Bodeen, Mickey LeDoux, and the smaller moonshiners in the county in return for the promise that he wouldn’t arrest them.*

  This had come as a disquieting surprise to Buddy, although on reflection, he wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him before. He had admired Burns, that’s why. He’d been naïve. It had just never entered his mind that such a fine man, with so many friends and supporters throughout the county, could be as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. But he should have seen it, and he blamed himself for being deceived by friendship and admiration for the older man.

  Surprised by Bodeen’s assumption that he was in on Burns’ racket, Buddy had let him think that he was carrying on the former sheriff’s venerable tradition of extortion. Now, some might think that the current situation was different than it had been during Prohibition, when Burns was turning a blind eye, and in some ways, it was. Repeal had happened the year before, and Alabama had gone local option. While Cypress County was still dry, it was likely to go wet at the next election, unless the churches and the Temperance Union swayed the vote.

  But even if the county went wet, Bodeen and the local shiners wouldn’t be off the hook. In fact, they would be as outlawed as ever. The only lawful booze a man could drink now came in bottles that bore Uncle Sam’s tax stamp, proving that the fed had already taken its cut—about two dollars on every twelve-dollar gallon of whiskey. Bootleggers didn’t pay taxes. Their liquor was illegal. If Roy were alive, he’d still be collecting his protection fee.

  It had been Bodeen himself who sprang the news of Burns’ racket on Buddy. At the same time, he had let the new sheriff know that he was expected to take the same deal Bodeen had had with the old sheriff. Ten dollars a week for “protection,” plus five dollars for every carload of white lightning that left Bodeen’s still (which by rights ought to be more like twenty-five, considering that every car was carrying some two hundred fifty dollars’ worth of illicit booze).

  “So we’ve got a deal, right?” Bodeen had demanded.

  Buddy had been caught between a rock and a hard place. The infamous Franklin County moonshine conspiracy trial had begun up in Virginia, and Charlie Dickens was running the ongoing story almost every week in the Dispatch. Nine Virginia county officials had been indicted by a federal grand jury for running a protection racket. Buddy understood the potential criminal consequences of taking Bodeen’s money, but until he got things sorted out and understood the situation, he felt he had to accept it. First, though, he had made something clear.

  “Yeah, we’ve got a deal, Pyle—for the moment, anyway. But that doesn’t mean you get a free pass in town. Long as you do right, stay out of sight, and don’t give me any heartburn, we’re pals. Give me or my deputy a bad time, and the deal’s off.”

  Bodeen had accepted his condition and had abided by the terms of the agreement, and Buddy, reluctantly, had made no move to break up the Briar Swamp operation. Something else was motivating him, although he wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing.

  Now, Bodeen reached into his pocket and took out a wad of bills. “Owe you some money,” he remarked casually and tossed it across the desk. “This is the weekly ten, plus five for every carload that left my still.”

  Without counting the bills, Buddy swept them into the top drawer of his desk. “You shouldn’t oughtta come here to deliver money,” he growled. “Matter of fact, you shouldn’t oughtta come here at all, Pyle. I’ll go out to the moonshine camp to collect. And if you want to talk, send me a message. We’ll meet where there’s nobody to listen in.”

  “Understood,” Buddy said defensively, “but I had to come today. It can’t wait.”

  “What can’t wait?” Buddy asked, scowling.

  Bodeen leaned forward. “One of my haulers works part time out at the prison farm. He’s seen something out there that you are gonna want to know about. In fact, you are gonna want to shut it down fast as you can—seein’ as how we’re partners.” He gave Buddy a straight, hard look. “And if you already know about it, and it’s on your protection list, I’m tellin’ you to take it off. Now.”

  “Is that right?” Buddy asked, he
aring the threat. He pulled a Lucky Strike out of the pack on his desk and lit it, to cover his confusion. “So what is this operation I’m supposed to shut down?”

  “It’s Jericho,” Bodeen said, reaching for his own cigarettes. “The warden out there is cookin’ shine.”

  Buddy choked on his lungful of smoke and began to cough. “Jericho?” he managed at last.

  “Yeah.” Bodeen flicked a match to his boot, then held it to his cigarette. “My guy says that the warden out there has got his first big batch of mash started.”

  Stupidly, Buddy’s mouth dropped open. “Burford is running a . . . still?”

  “Ain’t that what I just said?” Bodeen demanded impatiently. He gave Buddy a dark look. “You know I been sellin’ to the prison farm, Sheriff. They’re my biggest customer in the county. When Burford gets his production goin’, he’s gonna stop buying from me. Even with Mickey gone, that will be a big chunk of business for me to lose. For us,” he added significantly. “Partner.”

  Finally, Buddy understood what Bodeen was getting at. For years now, two local boys had been making the bulk of the moonshine in Cypress County. Mickey LeDoux had run a highly professional moonshine production and distribution business out of a wooded hollow on Dead Cow Creek—under the “protection” of Sheriff Burns, Buddy now knew. Then Agent Kinnard had put the still out of business, and Mickey had been packed off to the Wetumpka State Penitentiary.

  Now, Bodeen had Mickey’s customers to supply, so losing the prison farm wouldn’t cripple him. But it would be a big loss. If this was true—this story about Burford setting up a still. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this was some kind of cockamamie test that Pyle had cooked up to see if the sheriff was in his pocket. Maybe—