The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover Read online

  He put out his hand. “Charlie Dickens, Darling Dispatch,” he said. “I understand there’s been an accident.”

  The warden was red-faced, with a substantial belly that hung down over his belt. “Down there,” he said gruffly, jerking a thumb in the direction of the drop-off. “Engine’s cold. Looks like it’s been there all night.” He nodded toward the other man. “Jimmie Bragg, my assistant. He saw the car on his way to work this morning and notified me.”

  Charlie shook hands with Bragg, a short, wiry man with dark hair and a scar across his chin. “Sheriff’s on his way?” he asked.

  “S’posed to be,” the warden replied. “The deputy said he’d get out here soon as he could.” He shook his head. “Last time somebody got in trouble on this hill, it was a supervisor from Montgomery, come to see if we was feedin’ the boys right. Only he didn’t manage to turn his car over. He hit that tree.” He indicated a large sweet gum on the wooded uphill side of the road. Its trunk bore the scars of more than one vehicle encounter. “Goldurned lucky, too. Smashed the motor back in his lap and stove in his ribs real bad, but he crawled out alive.”

  Charlie looked down at the road. Tire tracks—ruts in the soft mud—led to the edge and then veered sharply off. He stepped to the embankment and looked over. The car was on its roof, wheels in the air, about twenty feet down the steep drop-off, lodged against a boulder. The front end was pointing uphill, toward the road, so Charlie figured it must have vaulted end over end when it went over the edge. From this angle, it was hard to identify the make of the vehicle, but he could see one sleeved arm flung out onto the dirt, unmoving. Holding his camera at his waist and looking down into the viewfinder to center the image, Charlie took a photo, then turned the crank to advance the film and took another.

  They heard the sound of a motor and the warden turned to look up the hill. “Reckon that’s the deputy now,” he said.

  Charlie glanced up to see Buddy Norris’s new deputy, Wayne Springer, parking his dinged-up black 1927 Chevy next to the Pontiac at the top of the hill. He walked down slowly, pausing as he went to study the tire tracks. When he got to the bottom, he introduced himself, then followed the tracks to the edge and peered over, surveying the scene for several moments.

  Springer was tall and rail thin, with a narrow, sun-darkened face, high cheekbones, and a beaked nose. Charlie wondered if there might have been a Cherokee or two somewhere on the man’s family tree. He wore a blue denim shirt with a deputy’s badge pinned to the pocket, faded blue jeans, and a battered black cowboy hat with a hawk’s feather stuck in it. Yep, part Cherokee, Charlie decided.

  “Helluva bad hill,” Springer said gruffly, hitching up his jeans. “If you don’t know it’s here, you can come over the top way too fast. Reckon that’s what happened?”

  “Could be.” The warden took his cigar out of his mouth, regarded it gloomily, then tossed it into the bushes. “We lose somebody down here at the bottom every couple of years. Folks who drive out this way gen’rally know to keep it slow. Guess this feller didn’t.” He pointed down the embankment. “We checked. Driver’s dead. Stone cold dead,” he added, as if to reassure himself that there was nothing that might have been done for the man. “Likely been out here all night.”

  “Had to be.” Jimmie Bragg spoke around his cud of chewing tobacco. “I was at Pete’s place shootin’ pool yestiddy evenin’. I quit about eight.” He spat. “That car wasn’t here when I drove back to the farm.”

  Springer stepped back to the edge and peered over again. “You sure about that?” he said over his shoulder to Jimmie. “How do you know? You wouldn’t have seen it from the road.”

  “See them tracks?” Jimmie pointed to the ruts in the mud. “They’re deep enough for me to have seen ’em. If ’n they’d been here, I would’ve stopped and got out to look. It was still light when I come along.” He pointed to the other side of the road. “Them’s my tracks, there. I know to stay on the uphill side when the road is muddy.”

  Springer knelt down to have a look at the ruts. He studied them for a moment, then stood. “Anybody know whose car this is? Know the driver?”

  Warden Burford said, “No idea.” He looked at Bragg. “You recognize it, Jimmie?”

  Jimmie cocked his head. “Yeah. Seen it a time or two in town. A Pierce-Arrow—old but kept nice. Not a car you forget easy, once you seen it.”

  Pierce-Arrow? Charlie thought, and then, I know that car. There was only one Pierce-Arrow in Darling. It belonged to Whitney Whitworth. He shivered. So unless somebody had stolen the car, that arm flung out there in the dirt must belong to Mr. Whitworth.

  “Wonder why that fancy car was all the way out here,” the warden remarked casually. “There’s no place else to go on this road but the prison farm, and that fella surely wasn’t comin’ to see us.”

  Charlie considered. It wasn’t quite true that there was no place to go on this road but the prison farm. Past the prison farm, the Jericho Road dwindled to a narrow, rutted track, ending in a marshy morass at the northern edge of Briar Swamp. For the past few months, the boys over at the CCC camp had been doing their level best to drain the swamp, but that was never going to happen, at least not in as big a way as they thought. There were a couple of thousand acres of quagmire out there, nothing but bald cypress up to their knees in water and tupelo gum and hummocks of buttonbush and black willow and pawpaw. Folks would tell you that there was nothing in that swamp but silent flooded lands and mosquitos damned near big enough to carry you away, if the alligators didn’t chew off your feet first.

  But folks told you that for a reason. There was something out there in that quagmire, although Charlie had never been quite sure where. And it didn’t bother him that he didn’t know, either, for this was one of those cases where the less a man knew, the better off he was. Bodeen Pyle’s moonshine camp was out there in the swamp, and the road they were on was the only way in and back out again. And Bodeen Pyle would be a damned dangerous man if somebody tried to get in the way of what he did for a living.

  Which of course the warden wouldn’t mention within earshot of the deputy, and for one very simple—and very good—reason. The prison farm—or so it was rumored—was one of Pyle’s best customers. The steady supply of shine that was made available to inmates and their guards was responsible for the fact that Jericho ran smoothly and had very few escape attempts. The warden would want to protect Pyle’s operation, especially since Deputy Springer was new to Darling and still pretty much a cipher. Charlie had heard that old Sheriff Burns knew about Jericho’s arrangement with Pyle, but he also knew when to let well enough alone. He had been fond of saying that as long as the local moonshiners kept to themselves and stayed out of trouble, he would stay out of their way. The warden had never met Springer, though, and had no idea how he would view the little arrangement. He probably couldn’t be too sure of Buddy Norris, either. He was being cautious.

  Charlie cleared his throat. “I know that car,” he said. “It belongs to Whitney Whitworth.”

  The deputy tipped his cowboy hat on the back of his head and looked over at Charlie. “So it does,” he said drily, and Charlie realized that he had known this all along. “Tell you what, Dickens. If you’ve got more film in the camera, how about you walk up that hill a piece and take some pictures looking downhill? Get three, four good shots of those ruts, too.” To Burford, he said, “Looks like we got some work to do here, warden. Gotta turn that car over on its wheels.”

  “We’re not waiting for the sheriff?” the warden asked, clearly not sure where he stood with this deputy.

  Springer shook his head. “He knows we’re here—said he’d be out when he could. He told me to go ahead and do what had to be done. And what’s gotta be done is turn that thing over and see if that’s Whitworth dead under there, or somebody else.”

  Jimmie Bragg spoke up. “How ‘bout I git a few of the fellers from the farm and a tractor to do the job?”

  Springer said he thought this was a good idea, and
the warden nodded. Twenty minutes later, a half-dozen men wearing black-and-white striped prisoners’ uniforms arrived in a wagon pulled by a forty-horsepower Massey-Harris tractor with cleated steel wheels and driven by a big, bald prisoner named Mango, also in a striped uniform. It took them all of twenty minutes to right the wrecked car, retrieve the dead driver, and lay him out beside the road. His face nearly obliterated, he was not a pretty sight. His own mother probably wouldn’t know him, Charlie thought with a shudder.

  Then they attached a chain to the wreck’s rear bumper and dragged it up the embankment as Charlie took photos. The Pierce-Arrow, a large seven-passenger sedan, had indeed been a splendid car, once. It was painted pale beige, with a contrasting dark roof and a great deal of chrome on the radiator and lights. Now, the roof was pancaked flat across the tops of the seats, the front-end grill was caved in, and there was a dent in the rear.

  The driver must have died instantly, Charlie thought, crushed under that heavy vehicle. He imagined what it would be like to come over the top of that hill in the dark and plunge down the other side, maybe only half-aware that this was a dangerous business, and then go flying off the road and do a somersault in the air. If it was your time to go, it might not be a bad way to leave this earth.

  Charlie took several photographs of the car and of the deceased Mr. Whitworth, bizarrely frozen by rigor mortis into a sitting position. The latter were so graphic that he knew he couldn’t run them in the newspaper. Sensational stories might be the blood and bones of big-city newspapers, but his father had always said that if the Dispatch had a motto, it would be “All the news that’s fit to be read (by Darling Sunday School teachers).”

  Still, as Charlie continued to snap the shutter, he was thinking that he might try selling the grislier shots to the Associated Press. Just last May, the AP had run photos of the bodies of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, ambushed and shot to death on a rural road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana, by a six-man posse of Texas and Louisiana officers. A boisterous crowd flocked to the ambush spot. Several women cut off bloody locks of Bonnie’s hair and pieces of her dress to sell as souvenirs, and a man tried to hack off Clyde’s trigger finger. Photos of the killing had been plastered all over the newspapers. The public appetite for such things was insatiable. Newspapers were delighted to deliver.

  Even without the photos, though, the story Charlie was already writing in his mind was going to command attention. Whitney Whitworth was very well known, not just in Darling but in the surrounding area. So the first question that would pop into everyone’s mind was likely to be “What the heck was Whitney Whitworth doing on Spook Hill all by himself, on a Sunday night?” Charlie wanted to know the answer to that question, whether he would be able to print it or not.

  Springer had been examining Whitworth’s body, giving him a long and careful going-over. With the dead man’s billfold in his hand, he straightened and came over to Charlie. In a low voice, he said, “Get a couple of good close-ups of the rear end of that car, will you? When they’re developed, I want copies. One of every shot you’ve taken.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Charlie smiled to show that he was asking a casual question. “Any reason why, in particular?”

  The deputy didn’t smile back. “When I think of a particular reason, I’ll tell you,” he said shortly. He turned away and climbed up the hill, pausing now and again to bend over and study the car tracks in the mud like some old Indian tracker. When he got to his car, he started it, pulled around Charlie’s Pontiac, and drove slowly down to where they were all standing. He got out, carrying a black rubber raincoat that he handed to Burford.

  “Warden, I don’t have a sheet for the body, but this raincoat will do. I’d appreciate it if a couple of your men could wrap Mr. Whitworth in it and put him into the rumble seat of my car. I’ll take him into town to Nolan’s funeral parlor.”

  “What about the Pierce-Arrow?” the warden asked. “We can tow it to the farm? We’ve got some other junked cars there.”

  “Nope.” The deputy nodded at the man who was driving the tractor. “I’d prefer it if Mango here hooked it up to his tractor and pulled it into town, to the sheriff’s office.”

  “I’ll go with Mango,” Jimmie Bragg volunteered. He grinned at the tractor driver. “Make sure he don’t try to escape.”

  “Okay by me,” the warden said. He pulled another cigar out of his shirt pocket, giving Jimmie a stern look. “But you stay on that tractor with him, Bragg. And you and Mango come on straight back to the prison farm—no stopping at Pete’s Pool Parlor. You hear?”

  “Yassuh, boss,” Jimmie said, and gave an exaggerated salute.

  The warden regarded him suspiciously. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll drive along behind, just to make sure there’s no funny business. Somebody’s got to pick up the mail, anyhow. Might as well do that while I’m in town.”

  “Okay, then,” the deputy said. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll lead the way. Jimmie, you and Mango come next. Warden Burford, you bring up the rear.” He turned to Charlie. “We’re going to be pretty slow, Dickens. Why don’t you go on back to town and get started on those photos?”

  Charlie resisted the sarcastic temptation to salute and say “Yassuh, boss.” But as he drove back to the Dispatch office and got to work developing the photographs, he couldn’t help wondering. What had the deputy spotted out there on that hill that he hadn’t? What could be of such interest in his photos that Springer wanted copies—and wanted them fast?

  Other people, too, had questions that morning, as they observed a cavalcade of several vehicles crawling slowly along Darling’s main street. Curious about what was going on, they went to their windows or stepped out onto their front porches or stopped on the sidewalk to watch and wonder.

  First came the sheriff’s deputy in his old black Ford roadster, a passenger wearing a raincoat sitting rigidly in the rumble seat, head bent forward, one arm flung stiffly to the side. Darlingians who gave this curious spectacle a casual glance might have concluded that Deputy Springer (who, everyone agreed, was proving to be a diligent lawman, with just the right sort of experience to back up the inexperienced young sheriff) was hauling a drunk to jail. Obviously, the fellow had consumed a little too much of Bodeen Pyle’s powerful tiger spit and would spend the rest of the day sleeping it off in one of the two cells in the second-floor jail over Snow’s Farm Supply, next door to the sheriff’s office.

  But those who took the trouble to step down off their porches and walk out to the curb for a better look could see that the man in the deputy’s rumble seat was no drunk at all, but a very bloody, very dead corpse. Whose corpse, they couldn’t be sure, for the head was bowed and the face was hidden.

  However, these curious Darlingians didn’t have to wait long for an answer to their shocked and breathless question: Who in the world …? A half-block behind the deputy sheriff came a slow, heavy, steel-wheeled tractor, clanking ponderously along the street like one of Colonel George S. Patton’s army tanks. It was followed by a black Ford with the Alabama state shield and the words Jericho State Prison Farm painted on both sides, driven by a portly, important-looking officer smoking a cigar the size of a corncob. The tractor was driven by a large Negro with a shiny bald head, wearing striped prison garb, a skinny uniformed man perched behind him. The tractor was towing a wrecked ivory-colored Pierce-Arrow, splattered with red clay mud, the roof smashed flat.

  And the instant Darlingians saw that car, they knew whose corpse it was.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LIZZY GETS A LETTER

  Before she went back to Mr. Moseley’s law office, Lizzy took a minute to walk around the corner to the post office. Thaddeus Flagg, the postmaster, was a stooped little man who wore a green eyeshade, a red knitted cap, a purple sweater, and black fingerless gloves, even in the heat of summer, when everybody else was sweltering. He claimed to be deaf, but everybody knew he could hear what he wanted to hear, especially when it was gossip. They also suspected that he read their
postcards and the return addresses on their mail—and wouldn’t put it past him to steam open a promising envelope over that little teakettle he kept on a hotplate in the back room.

  “Whose mail?” Mr. Flagg demanded testily, as if he had never seen Lizzy before in his life—which was of course ridiculous, for she went to the post office every day to pick up the office mail.

  “Mr. Moseley’s, please,” Lizzy said meekly and waited while he stomped off in the direction of the wooden cubbyholes arrayed across the back wall of the post office. Darling was behind the times, for nearby Monroeville had real post-office boxes with brass-plated doors and little glass windows and combination locks, so you didn’t have to ask the postmaster for your mail. Lizzy’s mailman (a pleasant fellow named Tootie Blue) carried the mail in a big leather shoulder bag and delivered hers right to her door. But businesses and professional people who got a lot of mail, like Mr. Moseley, rented a cubby.

  Mr. Flagg was gone for several minutes, and when he came back, his hands were full. “Too much mail again today,” he growled, as if the postal service imposed some sort of limit. “Tootie’s out sick, so yours is here, too.” He thumped the mail on the counter.

  “I’m sorry,” Lizzy said contritely. She saw her name on the top envelope, from Nadine Fleming, of Fleming and Finlay Literary Agency, in New York City, and her heart jumped. It wasn’t something bad, was it? More revisions to her book—again? A delay in the publishing schedule? Or maybe the editor had decided he didn’t like what she had done and wouldn’t be publishing it after all! Miss Fleming had told her not to count her chickens until they had hatched—that is, until the book was actually published.

  Mr. Flagg peered down at the envelope in Lizzy’s hand. “Literary agency.” He grunted. “A rejection notice, I reckon.” He shook his head gloomily. “You young girls. Never content with what you got, allus shootin’ for the moon. Oughtta get yerself a husband and settle down to a real job.”