Chiefs

by Stuart Woods

  They talked on for a while, then Virginia excused herself to finish cooking dinner. Holmes felt the sherry warming him and stretched out on the sofa, groaning with fatigue and pleasure. He closed his eyes and felt a sense of completion. With the new fire department and the appointment of the Chief of police, he felt that the town had reached a milestone, that it now had the organization and staffing and equipment that it needed. The paving of the central streets, the waterworks, the telephone exchange had all been milestones. There were dozens of other things they would need in the future, but for the moment, everything seemed complete. Holmes dozed.

  Unlike Will Henry and Carrie Lee, who had grown effortlessly into what they were, like healthy plants, the products of long and provincially selective breeding, Hugh Holmes had designed and constructed himself, brick by plank by nail. He was a farmer’s son, too, but his father, who had been born to a starving sharecropper’s family, had had only his own shrewdness, industry, and sense of timing to help him extract a prosperous farm and cotton gin from the shambles of Reconstruction. He had passed on to the young Hugh the notion of the self-made man, the idea that he could decide what he wanted to do and then do it. Holmes took the idea quite literally, and he began with one or two attributes which would be of great help. In addition to a remarkable native intelligence, nature had given Holmes a rare physical presence. He was six feet five inches tall and might have been thought of as Lincolnesque, if his posture had not been so erect. From his early teens he towered over everyone he met; indeed, he did not meet a man taller than himself until he was thirty, and the experience depressed him for a week. He learned early to use his height with subtlety and effectiveness, when to slump into a chair and when to rise and look down. To his imposing height was added the distinct advantage of early maturity. Grayness tinted his hair at nineteen, and his features had been large and craggy even before that, lending him an air of thoughtfulness and wisdom.

  Holmes decided early that he wanted a career in business, specifically, in banking. He realized that banks were at the heart of every business transaction of any consequence, that they held the power to move a community or a state, perhaps even a country. He knew, too, that a good bank was a highly efficient intelligence-gathering organization, and he liked the idea of having a special knowledge of what was going on. He believed that with such knowledge and with access to capital he could achieve whatever he wanted.

  There was not, however, a megalomaniacal bone in Holmes’s body. He did not wish to be J. P. Morgan. He wished to be a big fish in a small pond and to gather to himself just enough power to shape his own destiny and that of the pond he chose. He wished to travel, to learn, to experience many things in the world, and he knew if he went into a big city bank he would have to devote all of his energies to climbing the business ladder and to surviving in intramural, political warfare. He did not doubt that he could excel in such circumstances, but they were not circumstances to his liking.

  Hugh Holmes had constructed a set of circumstances exactly to his liking, and, at the time of Will Henry Lee’s escape from the farm, at the end of 1919, those circumstances were the Bank of Delano. They were achieved with a combination of hard work, intelligence, and a stroke of luck, to which he had applied a finely developed sense of opportunism and a willingness to take, under the right circumstances, a major personal risk.

  The first time Holmes had seen Delano, or rather, the place where Delano would soon be, was more than ten years before. He was the cashier at the Farmers and Merchants Bank at Woodbury, some twelve miles north, when on a Sunday afternoon he took the train to Warm Springs for a Sunday School Union picnic. Warm Springs was a prosperous and fashionable resort, attracting people from all over the South to bathe in the naturally warm waters and listen to music and lectures at the Meriwether Inn. It was also a favorite spot in the county for church outings, and Holmes was with a party of thirty who took the M&B to Warm Springs that day.

  The Macon and Birmingham Railroad was misnamed, since it did not reach either Macon or Birmingham. The local name, Mule and Wagon, was more appropriate, owing to the slow speed at which the trains traveled. On this occasion, the train stopped for water at a country tank, and after a few minutes it was announced that there would be a short delay due to mechanical troubles, and that passengers were encouraged to stretch their legs. The whistle would blow when the train was ready once again.

  Holmes got down from the train and looked about. They were in a pine forest—mostly young trees, but a few older, taller ones. There was a generous scattering of oaks and elms, as well, and the place was cool on a hot day. He strolled aimlessly away from the train into the woods, enjoying the scented air and the carpet of pine needles underfoot. Shortly, he came to a large clearing and was surprised to see a very new, white Cadillac touring car parked there. Three men, their dusters and goggles draped over a fender, stood talking, occasionally referring to a map and pointing in one direction or another. Holmes approached the group. “Good day to you, Gentlemen.” The men responded. “I’m a little bit surprised to see a big car like that so far off the beaten track.”

  The shortest of the three men spoke up. “Well, it’s only about a hundred yards through the trees there to the Atlanta highway. There used to be a sawmill here, and there’s an old road to the highway.” Holmes remembered that the train had just traveled under a rickety wooden bridge. The man stuck out his hand. “My name is Thomas Delano.” Holmes recognized the name immediately. Delano, after a short, but successful career as a merchant, was becoming something of a tycoon in the textile business, based in Atlanta, but having mills in three smaller towns nearby. “This is Mr. Bill Smenner, of the M&B Railroad, and Mr. Svensen, a visitor from Norway, who is doing some surveying for us.”

  “I’m Hugh Holmes, from Woodbury.”

  “You the cashier in the bank over there?” Holmes registered surprise. “Oh, I do a little business over there, as you know.” Holmes had had no idea that Delano had business in the county. Delano exchanged a glance with Smenner. He turned back to Holmes. “You might be interested in what we’re up to here, Mr. Holmes.”

  “Well, it looks like kind of a lonesome place to put a cotton mill.”

  “It may look that way, now, but in two years it won’t. We’re going to build a town here, Mr. Holmes. Have a look at Mr. Svensen’s plan.” He spread the map out over the hood of the Cadillac and pointed out various features. “As you can see, this is the spot where the M&B and the Atlanta-Columbus highway cross. That’s pretty good transportation access to start with. I’m going to build a modern cotton mill right here, and Mr. Smenner has decided—you don’t mind my mentioning it, Bill?—he’s going to put the new repair shops for the M&B right up there, about where the water tower is. The two together will be a fine base of employment for a town.”

  Holmes was impressed. “What will you do for a water supply? Or will you have folks digging their own wells?”

  “No, sir. There’s a spring up on that mountainside over there that’s got a flow rate that would supply a city of a much greater size than we’re planning. We’ll have a modern waterworks and a sewerage system, too, and we’re going to pave the business district and four residential streets first thing.”

  Holmes noticed he was breathing faster. “What method of financing all this will you be using?”

  “We’re forming the Delano Development Corporation—the town will be called Delano; I’m not bashful about things like that. Our initial capitalization will be one hundred thousand dollars. Mr. Smenner and I will participate personally in that, in addition to our capital expenditure on the mill and rail shops, and we’ll be inviting a limited number of other gentlemen to invest, men who have the personal resources and the kind of business experience to help the town grow. We’re going to have a barbecue here on this spot the fifteenth of next month and sell three hundred residential lots for seventy-five dollars each and fifty business lots at two hundred dollars. Folks will pay their money in advance, and the
n there’ll be a drawing for locations. The corporation will retain ownership of all the other prospective residential and business property until such time as it feels more should be sold.”

  Holmes was quiet. Delano was watching him closely. “It would be the finest investment a young man could make, Mr. Holmes. It would be an investment with a future, and it would mean getting in on the ground floor. At this moment no more than a dozen men know about this, but our commitments are firm, Mr. Holmes. This is going to happen.” The train whistle blew.

  “Mr. Delano, this sounds like a very interesting idea to me. Could I get in touch with you at your Atlanta office?” Holmes shook hands with the three men and turned to leave. Delano stopped him.

  “Mr. Holmes—Hugh, if I may call you that—I’ve already made proper application to the secretary of state for a bank charter, and I expect it to be granted shortly. This bank is going to have the mill and the railroad as depositors right off, and it’s going to need the right man to run it. I’ve heard some good things about you, and I’d be interested in talking to you about it. There would be an opportunity for investment, and a chance for more later. Why don’t you think about it for a day or two, then come see me in Atlanta?”

  “I’ll be in touch with you before the week is out, if that’s all right, Mr. Delano.”

  “That’s fine.” They shook hands again, and Holmes hurried back to his train. The picnic at Warm Springs passed in a blur, and he did not sleep that night. The next morning he telephoned a man in Athens who had previously made him an offer for his recently deceased father’s farm and cotton-ginnning business and named a price. After the usual haggling, the man met it.

  Within the week he had invested ten thousand dollars in the Delano Development Corporation. The following month he went to the barbecue on the Delano site and bought a residential lot and a business lot. He drew the land on Upper Third Street, where he would later build his house and the lot at the intersection of Main Street and the Atlanta highway, where the bank would be built. He suspected that he had been more than lucky in the draw, but he did not question it. Before the day was out, he bought two more business lots, one adjacent to his own, for three hundred dollars each from men who found a fast hundred dollar profit more interesting than a long haul in a new town. He also renewed an old acquaintance with a prosperous farmer named Idus Bray and agreed to put up twenty-five percent of the capital in the new telephone company Bray was to build. He reached agreement with Thomas Delano on the bank. He would own forty-nine percent of the stock and supply that proportion of the capital. In five years he could buy the two percent that would give him control, and Delano would sell the remainder of the stock to local investors.

  By the end of the day, he had committed all but two thousand dollars of his inheritance and savings. Still, two thousand dollars cash, three business lots, a residential lot, twenty-five percent of a telephone company, forty-nine percent of a bank, and ten percent of the Delano Development Corporation constituted an extraordinary collection of holdings for a man of thirty-four years, even if his holdings were mostly paper. He was very pleased with himself.

  And as he responded to Virginia’s call to dinner, he was more pleased with himself than at any time since that day.

  9

  TWO WEEKS PASSED. Work on the new jail moved rapidly along, now that the firehouse was finished. Holmes got the authorization of the council to buy a good secondhand car for the police department. A two-year-old Ford was found, and a clerk at Ralph McKibbon’s hardware store painted Delano Police on both front doors in white paint. Will Henry began to establish a routine of sorts. When the stores opened at eight o’clock, he would make a slow tour of Main Street, speaking to those store owners he saw, and being seen by the others, just in case anyone had any loss or complaint to report. He would then go to the post office, collect any police mail and take it to the city hall, where, in Willis Greer’s office, he would sort the various bulletins and wanted posters which came in. He would have a cup of coffee at about ten with a small group of merchants and businessmen who gathered every day at the Delano Drug Company’s soda fountain to exchange gossip and opinions. He figured that if there were any dissatisfaction with the way he was doing the Chief’s job, he would hear about it at these daily meetings before it got to be a problem.

  After coffee he would make a slow tour of the whole town, “showing the flag” on every street in both black and white sections. Sometimes he would stop and chat with someone, and most days he stopped in Smitty’s Grocery Store in Braytown, the black section unofficially named after the white man who owned about a third of the property within its boundaries. Smitty’s was the daytime social center of the black community, and Will Henry would have a cold drink and chat for a few minutes with Smitty and whoever else happened to come into the store. He began to know many of the black people by name.

  After leaving Smitty’s he would drive to the north side of town and park the police car in a conspicuous place near the city limits sign on the Atlanta highway. He did not arrest anyone for speeding. He wanted the truck drivers and traveling salesmen who drove regularly from Atlanta to Columbus and back to know that the town now had a police car, and the sight of the car was enough to slow anybody down. He stayed at this post for an hour or so, then drove back to the city hall to check in before going home for dinner. He spent an hour at dinner, fifteen minutes of it stretched on the living-room sofa in half a doze, then made another tour of the town, stopped at the drug store for an afternoon cup of coffee, and parked near the city-limit sign on the south side of town, the Columbus side, for an hour.

  With all this routine he still had two or three hours of his day to spend looking for something to do. He passed it at city hall, making lists of things to do in the future, or at the firehouse, talking with Jimmy Riley and checking on the progress of the police station. He felt that when the building was complete he would not be at such a loss as to how to spend his time. After supper each night, just before bedtime, he drove to Main Street, parked the car, checked all the front door locks on all the stores, then got back into the car and made another quick tour of the town.

  One rainy morning when the police station was nearly finished, a small man, neatly dressed in a brown tweed suit with a matching brown derby hat, walked in and introduced himself. “Chief Lee? Thought so.” The man extended a hand which Will Henry found to be as soft as a child’s. “T. T. Brown, National Law Enforcement Equipment Company, Incorporated. Sheriff Willis said to stop in and see you. Ah, I see you’re making progress with your station. Mind if I have a look around?”

  “Go right ahead, Mr. Brown.” Will Henry followed him into the back of the building.

  “Ah, see you took Skeeter’s advice on making it roomy. Good, good. Oh, that won’t do. Got to have a cement floor, no good putting bars around a pine floor, you’ll have some booger prising ‘em up and getting out of here, see what I mean?” Will Henry nodded. He was embarrassed that he had not thought of the floor.

  “I suppose you’re right about that, Mr. Brown. We’ll need cement to set the bars in, too, I reckon.”

  “Now, about the bars, Chief, about the bars. You can’t go having your local blacksmith make those, you know. Not that he wouldn’t do his best job, of course. But you need a specially hardened steel for jail bars, and you need the right locks, too. We can make all that up for you at our factory.”

  “Well, now, I don’t have approval from the city council for that sort of expenditure just yet. I’ll—”

  “Course you don’t. Can’t be expected to know about all this your first month on the job. Here, take this end of the tape measure, and we’ll see what you’ve got here. We’ll get you measured up, see how many locks and keys you’ll need, and I’ll get you an estimate drawn up right away so you can talk to your council. Just back right along there. Hold it.” He scribbled in a black notebook. “Now, it’s four cells, isn’t it? Window in each. No, two against the firehouse wall. Tell you, though, I’d p
ut a window in the end of the corridor there. You want as much ventilation as you can get in here. Now, that’s four cells, two with windows, two extra windows; you can get one in over there, too, and four locks. Tell you, you’ll want a door locking the whole jail area off, too. Basic security, that is. You going to screen one off for the ladies? That’s one extra wall you’re gonna need, too. There, I’ll get that typed up in our Atlanta office and have it down to you all official in a day or two. Phone it in this evening. We’re very quick about these things, Chief Lee, we know the needs of our Georgia law-enforcement officers, and we don’t want the law waiting to be enforced, do we? No, siree. Now, you’ll be wanting some personal equipment, I expect.”

  “Well, yes. Why don’t we go around to the firehouse where we can sit down? Jimmy’ll have some coffee over there, too.”

  “Fine, Fine. I’ll just get my cases out of the car.” The little man hauled two very large leather sample cases out of his car and deposited them on the firehouse floor. “I’ll need a hand with the trunk. Two hands wouldn’t hurt.” Will Henry and Jimmy Riley helped Brown drag a small, extremely heavy, padlocked trunk into the building. “Thank you, Gentlemen.” He began unstrapping the two cases. “Now, let’s start with some duty clothing. I’d recommend three changes of uniform, summer and winter. You can get by with two changes in the winter, but when the hot weather comes in, you’re gonna have to change every day if you’re gonna stay looking neat, and that’s important to a law-enforcement officer, of course. I’d say you’re a stock standard forty-two in the chest, am I right?” He whipped out a tape and measured Will Henry’s chest, waist, and trouser length. “Right, thirty-four in the waist and thirty-one length. My trousers are all thirty-two in the length, but no doubt your little lady can fix that up for you. Now, I’ve got a real handsome uniform tunic here that goes real well with a white shirt, but I’ll admit that most of my officers are happier with the heavy wool shirt without a tunic. Suits real good for spring and all, and they wear the pea jacket over it in the cold weather. What would be your preference, Chief?”