The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover Page 15

  Ophelia rolled her eyes.

  Charlie had never been very good at developing film, but when he turned out the red light and pulled the curtain aside, there were two dozen photos hanging from the line. It would be a little while before they were dry enough to take down. In the meantime, he rearranged them on the line so they were in order. Not the order he had taken them in, but from the top of the hill to the bottom, following the tracks of the heavy Pierce-Arrow from the moment Whitworth topped the hill to his summersault at the bottom. At the far end of the line were the photos of the wreck as it lay on the embankment and a couple he had taken of the car’s rear end, after it had been towed up to the road.

  Charlie studied the photos for a few moments, his eyes narrowed, brow furrowed. Then he went to his desk, took out a magnifying glass, and went back to the photographs, starting at the beginning, leaning close, peering at details, and moving slowly from one photograph to another. The problem was that there were several sets of tracks, and they intersected, but …

  After a while he straightened, shaking his head. He was buffaloed. He could be wrong, of course. But judging from the tracks, it looked like something had happened on the way down that hill, before the Whitworth’s Pierce-Arrow had gotten to the bottom and flipped. But he’d be damned if he could figure out what.

  However, this wasn’t the only mystery Charlie had on his mind. All morning long, whenever he stopped thinking about whatever he was thinking about at the moment, his thoughts had returned to the question that was painfully lodged at the back of his mind. It was the mystery of Fannie’s money—those monthly fifty-dollar checks she was sending to somebody (or something) with the initials JC. It was like having a tiny thorn stuck in the ball of your foot: it hurts, but you can’t find it to pull it out. Fifty dollars a month, six hundred dollars a year. Six hundred dollars a year!

  What was the story on those checks? What kind of secret was his wife concealing? Why hadn’t she told him what she was doing? Was it because she didn’t trust him? Or because whatever she was hiding was so terrible that she feared that he would …

  Charlie made himself stop. He couldn’t let his brain whirl around and around the problem like a kid’s toy top, spinning this way, then that. He had to do something—good, bad, or indifferent, it didn’t matter, so long as he was doing it.

  And at that moment, he decided what he was going to do. The photos were dry enough now so that he could take the copies to the sheriff’s office and leave them with the deputy. Then he would walk across the street to the bank. What he wanted was a look at one of those canceled checks, to see if the endorsement gave any clue to the identity of the person who had cashed it.

  Of course, Charlie reminded himself, it was Fannie’s account, and there were probably bank rules against letting anybody else take a look. But he was her husband, after all, and he and Al Duffy had gotten to be pretty good friends over the year that Al had been president of the bank. He figured Al would go along with what he wanted to do, although he would have to add one important condition: that Fannie not learn anything about this.

  His wife would be really angry with him if she found out he was snooping in her business.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE SHERIFF GETS THE WRONG IDEA

  Buddy Norris wasn’t any too happy as he walked up the steps to the front door, Ophelia Snow right behind him. When he had been here earlier that morning, Mr. Whitworth was a missing person. Now the man was dead, and announcing that tragic news to the next of kin was not a favorite part of Buddy’s job. But it was his to do, for although he hadn’t been out to the accident scene yet, his deputy had told him what had happened. So he had the story—as much of it as Wayne was able to put together at this point, anyway. There were some loose ends to be tied up, but it was time to notify the new widow.

  When he rang the Whitworths’ doorbell for the second time that day, the sheriff felt pretty well prepared. And because Ophelia Snow had come along, he also felt quite a bit easier in his mind. If there was to be any fainting, Ophelia could handle it. She had smelling salts in that handbag of hers, along with the reporter’s notebook he had glimpsed.

  When he saw that, he had frowned and said, “No notetaking while we’re in there, Miz Snow,” and Ophelia had rolled her eyes and said, “Yes, Buddy,” in the tone adults use to little kids when the kid is being a nuisance.

  Ophelia Snow was one of the Darling people who called him Buddy in the way he didn’t like. The Snows remembered him from when he was fourteen or fifteen and had been smitten by one of the daughters of their next-door neighbor. They had seen him riding his old rusty bicycle or hanging out at the swimming hole on Pine Mill Creek, where pretty much everybody in town went to cool off on a hot August Saturday afternoon. They had no doubt heard about him getting into trouble—stealing smokes, catching a ride on an L&N freight car, smacking a baseball through old Mr. Newkirk’s dining room window—the things boys do when they don’t have a momma to ride herd on them and make sure they do what’s right.

  And now here he was, the sheriff of the town he’d grown up in, which meant that he always had something to prove to folks like the Snows who knew him from back when. And quite a few things to live down, because people in Darling seemed to remember the most embarrassing stuff—like the time somebody stole his britches and shoes at the swimming hole and he’d walked home barefoot and humiliated in nothing but his long-tailed shirt.

  Thankfully, Regina Whitworth had not known him when he was a kid. While she wasn’t much older than he was, she had grown up on her grandmother’s plantation on the Alabama River, where she had been privately schooled. For once, he would be starting with a clean slate.

  When the maid showed them into the parlor, Buddy was relieved to see that Mrs. Whitworth had settled down some since the morning. Clutching a hanky and wearing a long-sleeved navy silk dress that emphasized her delicate throat and slender shoulders, she was seated on a garnet velveteen loveseat in front of two tall, graceful parlor palms, under a large gilt-framed oil portrait of a heavily jeweled woman with a formidable bosom and an autocratic look. Buddy didn’t have to guess who that was: the wealthy Helene Marie Vautier, who (he’d heard) had died and left her plantation and her fortune to her granddaughter Regina, shortly before she became Mrs. Whitworth.

  Buddy took a chair—gingerly, because it looked like a rickety antique and he wasn’t sure it would hold his weight. Ophelia lingered in the doorway, whispering to the maid that it would be a good idea if she brought in a pot of very strong tea. Then she sat down on the loveseat close to Mrs. Whitworth. Buddy leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, and broke the news as gently as he could.

  “He was killed instantly,” he said at the end, hoping that would be a comfort. “Doc Roberts is over in Monroeville this morning and hasn’t yet had a look,” he added. “But we think that’s a safe assumption.”

  There were tears and sobbing, of course, but Ophelia put her arms around Mrs. Whitworth and stroked and patted and soothed, and to Buddy’s relief, the worst of the crying was over fairly quickly. The maid appeared with a polished silver teapot and delicate china cups on a silver tray. Ophelia forced a cup on Mrs. Whitworth and poured for herself and Buddy. While they sipped their tea, Buddy was able to ask the question that had been bothering him all morning, ever since he’d heard where the accident happened.

  “The car went off the road at the foot of Spook Hill,” he said. “Do you have any idea why your husband was out there on that road last night?”

  Mrs. Whitworth pressed her lips together tightly. She looked down at her fingers, twisting her white handkerchief into a tight knot. When she looked up again, her hair swung back, and Buddy saw something he had missed when he’d talked to her earlier: a dark purplish bruise on her jaw, and an abrasion.

  And then her hair swung forward again, concealing the injury. Hesitantly, in a low, slow Southern-lady voice, she said, “I don’t know for sure, but he might have been on his way to meet Bodeen Pyle
.”

  Buddy was genuinely startled. “Bodeen Pyle? You mean—” He thought immediately of what Violet had told him earlier that morning: that Mr. Whitworth might be in the bootleg business with Bodeen Pyle.

  “I should try to hide this, to save his reputation,” Mrs. Whitworth said, sounding resigned. “But I suppose you ought to know. I do hope you’ll keep it to yourself, though. It doesn’t have anything to do with …” She twisted the handkerchief again. “With how he died, I mean. Since it was an accident.”

  “What is it you want me to know, exactly?” Buddy asked, feeling his way.

  She untwisted her handkerchief and smoothed it out. “That he invested money—some, I don’t know how much—in Bodeen Pyle’s liquor business. If I’d had any say in the matter, I would have said no,” she added. Buddy thought he heard a note of something like bitterness in her voice. “But I didn’t. It was all his doing.” She added in a low voice, as if to herself, “With my money.”

  Ophelia leaned forward. “Was that the reason for the divorce?”

  “Divorce?” Buddy straightened, blinking. “You and Mr. Whitworth were thinking of—”

  “No, not at all,” Mrs. Whitworth said quickly. She looked at Ophelia, her eyes dark. “I don’t know where you got that silly idea, Mrs. Snow, but it’s not true!” Her voice went up a notch. “Really. Not in the very slightest.”

  Ophelia looked startled, then contrite. “Oops, sorry.” She ducked her head, embarrassed. “The gossip in this town is just … well, there’s enough to drown a horse, that’s for sure. Listen long enough, and you’ll hear just about everything under the sun, no matter how ridiculous. I do sincerely apologize.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Whitworth said softly, and leaned over to pat Ophelia’s hand. “It’s not one bit important, really. I … I just wouldn’t want the sheriff to get the wrong idea, that’s all.”

  Buddy looked from one of them to the other. He had always been a pretty good reader of people’s reactions. He would swear that Ophelia had been right in the first place and Mrs. Whitworth was pretending she was wrong and Ophelia was pretending to agree. And that both of them understood exactly what was going on. But he was more interested in her remark about Mr. Whitworth’s business arrangement with Bodeen Pyle, because he knew that Pyle’s moonshine camp was somewhere in Briar Swamp, not more than a couple of miles from where the accident occurred.

  Buddy cleared his throat. “How long had your husband been Pyle’s partner?”

  “I don’t know. I only found out about it a couple of weeks ago.” Mrs. Whitworth took a cigarette out of a silver bowl on a table beside her. “I think it had something to do with Pyle wanting to expand his business after that other man was arrested.”

  “That other man?” Buddy asked, frowning.

  And then he understood. Mrs. Whitworth was talking about Mickey LeDoux, who for years had run a highly professional moonshine production and distribution business out of a wooded hollow on Dead Cow Creek, in the hills west of Darling. LeDoux’s moonshine had generally been vouchsafed the best in this part of the state. But Mickey had been put out of business by Chester P. Kinnard, a revenue agent who had made it his mission to shut Mickey down. It was a sad story. Mickey’s youngest brother was dead, shot by the revenue agents in Kinnard’s posse, and Mickey had been sentenced to the Wetumpka State Penitentiary.

  But Mickey’s loss had been Bodeen Pyle’s gain, and it wasn’t more than a few days before Cypress County had another supplier. Pyle had long been Mickey’s fiercest competitor, and he used whatever tricks came handiest to gain a bigger piece of the market. His whiskey didn’t pack the notorious LeDoux punch, but it didn’t cost as much, and for folks who had to choose between a new pair of boots and a couple of bottles of white lightning, a cheap drunk was as good as a pricey one. When Mickey was hauled off to Wetumpka, Pyle had expanded his operation. In fact, Darling whispered that Pyle was getting some investment money somewhere, although nobody knew exactly where. And nobody really wanted to guess, because the less you knew about Bodeen Pyle’s business arrangements, the better off you were.

  “Ah,” Buddy said, feeling that he was moving toward an understanding of something, although he wasn’t sure what it was. “Did Pyle ever come here to discuss this with your husband?” The skin on the back of his neck was prickling, but he made his voice light and casual. He didn’t want her to think that his questions held any special significance.

  “Once,” Mrs. Whitworth said. Not looking at him, she pulled on her cigarette. “But my husband preferred to meet him … somewhere else. People talk, you know.”

  He understood what she was not saying. Whitworth wouldn’t have wanted his ritzy neighbors on Peachtree Street to see a known moonshiner dropping in every so often. It would make more sense for him to meet Pyle out at the Briar Swamp operation. Which might explain what Whitworth was doing on that road.

  “I see,” he said again, but in a different tone. Mrs. Whitworth had a lot to deal with right now, and he didn’t want to upset the lady. But what they were talking about was against the law—against several laws, actually. Roy Burns had done what he could to keep foreign moonshiners—nonlocal bootleggers—from setting up shop in the county. They brought in crime and violence, he said, and it was true. But Roy had been a man of compassion and he’d left the locals pretty much alone. It was, after all, a simple matter of economics. Corn was selling right now for no better than fifty cents a bushel, less than it cost to raise it. But that bushel of corn would yield three gallons of shine, which would sell for twelve dollars a gallon. Twelve dollars a gallon! Buddy could remember Roy’s exact words: “They can cook up whatever the hell they want out there in those camps so long as they live decent and don’t bother me none. Some of ‘em couldn’t feed their kids if they couldn’t shine.”

  Of course, the shiners and their families were Cypress County voters, so Buddy suspected that there was more to Roy’s tolerance than simple compassion. But that wasn’t his approach. In the short time he’d been sheriff, he had already arrested Pootie McKay and dumped out the eighty gallons of bootleg tiger spit he was carrying. Prohibition had been repealed but that didn’t make unlicensed and untaxed moonshine legal. And the key word here was “tax,” for the feds were collecting a whopping two-dollar tax on every gallon of whiskey. The eighty gallons that Pootie was hauling amounted to $160 that didn’t find its way into Uncle Sam’s pockets. Of course, dumping out all that perfectly fine shine hadn’t made Buddy many friends, but a lawman who worried too much about votes probably wasn’t doing his job.

  Nervously, Mrs. Whitworth blew out a stream of smoke. “I wouldn’t want you to think that my husband’s arrangement with Pyle was something I … encouraged.” She seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “I … wasn’t any too happy about it when I found out. I wouldn’t want anyone else to know.”

  “I can imagine,” Ophelia said quietly.

  “I’m sure it must have bothered you,” Buddy said, feeling that this was a substantial understatement. He cleared his throat. “Say, is it okay if I use your phone? I need to call Lionel Noonan and find out when you can go over there and see your husband.”

  Mrs. Whitworth’s eyes widened. “Do I … do I have to see him?” she whispered faintly. She held out an appealing hand to Buddy. “I am so sorry, Sheriff, but if you made me go over there, I’m afraid you would just have to carry me out. I couldn’t bear to look at my grandmother when she was laid out in her coffin.” She closed her eyes and brought her hand to her forehead. “Just the thought of it makes me feel—”

  Alarmed, Buddy said, “No, of course you don’t have to see him. Not if you don’t want to.” He wondered if Ophelia could locate that bottle of smelling salts in a hurry.

  “And please don’t feel sorry about it,” Ophelia said quickly. “You just do whatever you can do.” She gave Buddy a cautioning glance and put an arm around Mrs. Whitworth’s shoulder. “Mr. Noonan will be glad to come over here and discuss funeral arrangements wit
h you any time you feel up to it,” she added soothingly. “Give him a call and let him know. And if I can do anything for you, let me know.”

  “Thank you,” Mrs. Whitworth said in a muffled voice. “You’re terribly kind, both of you. I appreciate it more than I can say.”

  A few minutes later, Buddy and Ophelia were in his sheriff’s car, heading back into town.

  “My goodness,” Ophelia said, puffing out her breath. “That was informative, wasn’t it?”

  “What sort of information did you get out of it?” Buddy asked, sliding a glance at her. One thing he had learned about women. They saw things a whole lot differently than he did. He could be in the same room with a woman, listening to the same conversation, but then come to find out, the conversation she heard wasn’t the same one he had heard.

  “Well, for one thing,” Ophelia replied thoughtfully, “she didn’t seem too surprised when you told her about the accident. I mean, she was upset, of course. And maybe she was sort of expecting something, since he hadn’t been home all night.” Without hesitating, she added, “And she told a lie—just a little one, but it was still a lie. I wasn’t going to contradict her to her face, but she did tell me she planned to get a divorce.”

  “Did she really?” Buddy said, interested.

  Ophelia nodded. “We drove over to Monroeville the other day—in her new car, actually. We stopped for something to drink and she told me about the divorce. In fact, she even said she had talked to Mr. Moseley about it. He’s advising her.”

  Buddy wasn’t terribly surprised—people seemed to be getting divorces awfully easily these days. But he found himself puzzled. “She said she didn’t want me to get the wrong idea—but you’re saying she lied. Why? If she was planning on getting a divorce, why did she say she wasn’t?”