The Whiskey Baron (6 page)

“We’re working on it.”

“My office is right down the street from federal investigators and they’ve already come by once to see what I know about it. I don’t know who tipped them off, but they smell something big. They’re
probably going to set up base in Castle and try to bring down a big fish.”

“They think they’re going to find a big fish in Castle? This ain’t Charlotte.”

“It’s not a small-town murder they’re interested in.”

“Then what is it?”

“The whiskey trade.”

“Whiskey.”

“Whiskey. There’s a big organization in Charlotte. None of this mountain still business. We’re talking big time. Runners coming in from three states, including South Carolina. You know Aunt Lou?”

“I know who she is, but what’s she got to do with my county?”

“Take it easy, Furman. They’re after Aunt Lou, but to get to her they’re nosing around in Castle. Going after one of her distributors.”

“They likely already know all there is to know about him. Nothing new here.”

“World’s changing, Furman. The old rules no longer apply. Mr. Tull should appreciate that as well as you do.”

When he hung up the phone, Chambers stepped outside and stood before the main square to relight his cigar. In Castle’s downtown square, a Confederate memorial obelisk rose from the pavement and a bronze cannon aimed across Main to the courthouse and the sheriff’s station. Chambers stood in the square in front of the sheriff’s station and gazed up at the courthouse clock. A slated building with ornate carvings and embellished angles. The hash marks of power lines and poles. A row of blackbirds sinking one with their weight.

Despite the stock market crash and the ensuing Depression, Castle was still a rich town thanks to the textile boom and the railroads that crisscrossed the Carolinas to bring cotton north. Behind the Confederate square along York Street, rows of white Colonials housed the town’s aldermen, the mill bosses and lawyers and salesmen. Magnolias sprinkled the sidewalks, sporting their sweet white flowers, and on any given day you’d see men in fedoras and white shirts ambling through town, sweating in the heat while their wives were at home in flower print cotton dresses. West along the railroad tracks from town, Highway 9 passed beyond the filling station and
the Hillside Inn and out to the Bell mill village, where the houses lay bumped together like stalks of corn, where the brick wall of the cotton mill bracketed the side of the hill, and where, beyond the mill itself, a pair of rounded smokestacks rose up on either side and coughed black air out into the summer blue sky.

While Chambers puffed his cigar, a long black car cruised by. Two strange men in gray suits gawked as they passed. Sure enough, he thought, sure enough. The congressman must have known they were already here and had called Chambers as a courtesy. They better be careful if they didn’t want to attract attention. Folks would notice expensive shoes on Castle sidewalks. Backwoods whiskey stills would be taken down and moved piecemeal into barns, liquor buried in mason jars, hidden in hencoops. The way rumors flew, if these boys were hoping for a quiet investigation and a big time bust, they’d nearly blown their cover already, before they’d even gotten out of the car. That didn’t bother Chambers much. Because of the murder, people would be guarding themselves more closely. All he wanted was for his town to run smoothly. His folks wanted to be left alone. No one wanted change, and it was up to him to make sure everything remained steady.

He walked into the jailhouse next door to check on Shorty Bagwell. There were two prisoners right now, both in for getting drunk and causing trouble. A young troublemaker named Boots Miller showed up in town on Friday, skunk drunk and holding his belly and laughing all up and down Saluda Street. Chambers’s deputy heard the laughter through an open window, walked out, and clubbed Boots on the back of the head and dragged him to the jailhouse. Today he sat on the floor of the cell, hummed a blues without missing a beat when Chambers walked in. The sheriff moved on to the back cell where Shorty Bagwell slept on a hard cot, one arm draped over his eyes. Beyond the square of barred light at the top of Shorty’s cell, a hawk glided across the white sky. Water dripped onto bald concrete in the empty cell across the hall, its unmetered splat the only timekeeper for those inside. On the floor of the cell was an uneaten pimento cheese sandwich slathered in potato gravy, gorged on by flies.

“Shorty,” Chambers said, rousing the man from his slumber.

Shorty started and sat up, a chubby tub of a man whose feet barely touched the ground from the cot. “Well hey, Sheriff.”

Chambers clanked the keys in the lock and twisted the rusted iron. The cell door groaned from the friction, and he said, “Let’s go, Shorty.”

The man stared at the pimento cheese sandwich, said, “I was enjoying some of the county’s fine hospitality, thanks.”

Chambers led him down the concrete hall and out into the sunlight. In the sheriff’s office, Chambers sat across from the grimy man and stared at him. “How long you got left in there?”

“Well Sheriff, you ought to know as well as I would.”

“I could look up the exact date.”

“Unless Miss Meacham’s changed her mind and forgiven me for defiling her flowerbeds.”

Chambers laughed, said, “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.”

“I don’t believe it is, either,” Shorty said.

In the spring, he and Mary Jane had been riding around too fast through town, and they’d plowed into Miss Meacham’s flowers and knocked over a fence. Miss Meacham lived in one of the York Street mansions, and her poor lawn had been a blemish much discussed among the women in town ever since. She’d barked at Chambers over the phone to come out and arrest those liquored-up yahoos before she took a notion to take the law into her own hands. He came out to find her—one of the town’s oldest residents—out on her lawn raising high hell, shouting about sin and tarnation, so much that Chambers even felt a little sorry for Shorty and Mary Jane, leaning on her car and saying, yes ma’am, yes ma’am, while she carried on. The both of them sober and bleary-eyed, it seemed at first like they would come in peaceably enough, but then Shorty, still drunk no doubt, decided to grab the deputy’s billyclub and start an all-out riot on Main Street. Chambers still had a pink scar on his knuckles from where he’d tackled Shorty and smashed his hand into the pavement.

Chambers quit laughing about it and leaned back in his chair. Shorty rolled his eyes and said, “I got another five days.”

“And then what are you going to do?” When Shorty didn’t answer, he said, “You got to do something. Make money somehow.”

“Maybe I’ll get on out at the Bell. I’ve done that before.”

“That’s good work. Honest. Beats running whiskey, that’s for sure.”

“Aw, Sheriff, you know I ain’t—”

“What? You ain’t running whiskey?”

“Wouldn’t think of it.”

“That’s not what I’ve been hearing. You heard what happened last night, out at the Hillside?”

“Your deputy filled me in at breakfast.”

“Your buddy Mary Jane is in some trouble now. From what it sounds like, he’s been doing more than carting whiskey for Larthan Tull. From what it sounds like, he’s been brewing his own on the side.”

“I don’t know a thing about that.”

“Don’t know a thing. Let’s start simpler. You know whiskey is against federal law? And you also know that don’t stop folks from drinking it.”

Shorty scoffed. “I know one person who drinks it.”

Chambers ignored this, sat forward, put his elbows on the desk. “And you know where it’s at in Castle County. Who makes it and where it’s sold. None of that’s a big secret. There are larger forces at work in the whiskey trade, and right now those forces are about to come down hard against this town. What I’m wondering is what else you might know about it. You know Aunt Lou up in Charlotte?”

“Aunt Lou? Who’s that?”

“I think you know who she is.”

“Now how would I know that?” Shorty put his hands behind his head and grinned.

“Larthan’s had some people running loads of whiskey to her every week, sometimes twice a week, for years now. Thousands of gallons a year. Rumor has it you were one of his runners, when you didn’t have money for a pint, but that’s not what I’m wanting to know here.”

“Those are some mighty strong accusations.”

“Look, Shorty, you pick your battles in law enforcement. If folks want to drink a little whiskey now and then, as far as I’m concerned it’s not my position to get in their way. Matter of fact, I think a little whiskey keeps folks on an even keel. Gives em a release that don’t involve blowing two boys up with a shotgun right in the middle of the street. What I’m looking for from you is some information about Mary Jane.”

Shorty lolled his head, and Chambers couldn’t tell if the man was considering what he was saying, or if he was laughing at him. Chambers cracked his knuckles and was about to return Shorty to the cell when he spoke: “I don’t have much I can tell you, Sheriff. God’s honest truth is, yes, I’ve occasionally run some whiskey up to Charlotte when I needed some money. I never met any Aunt Lou. It was always some man in a cornfield. And, yes, Mary Jane’s gone with me. We run together, we drink together. But you already know that.”

“I know it.”

“I go over to the Hillside, play cards, and drink with Mary Jane, but, and again this is the God’s honest truth, I don’t know anything about Mary Jane starting up his own whiskey business. A man’d have to be a damn fool to want to do that in this town.”

“How long you and Mary Jane been friends? Y’all been causing trouble in this town together for as long as I’ve been sheriff. You’re going to try to sit there and tell me you don’t know a thing?”

“If he’s brewing whiskey, he didn’t let me in on it. You ought to talk to the widow. The two of them have been conspiring together for months now.”

“Left you out of the loop.”

“That’s right,” Shorty said. He held his head high, or as high as a short chubby man can hold it, and Chambers saw he wasn’t going to get anything else out of Shorty Bagwell. But he wasn’t going to let him off just yet.

He said, “I’ve already been out and talked with Abigail this morning.”

“And did she say Mary Jane and I have been brewing whiskey together?”

“No, she didn’t mention you. She said it was Mary Jane and those two boys that got shot out by the Hillside.”

“Well there you go.”

Midafternoon found him finishing his cigar as he drove west through the countryside to the Bell village. The mill rose out of the red clay and yellowed grass, its tall smokestacks spewing soot even after the
whistle blew to mark the day’s end, guarding the square brick walls like sentries. Past the mill, he turned up Harvey Lane and slowed, for here children scampered through the streets like rabbits in a garden. You never knew when a child might emerge from between the close-knit houses and scurry into traffic.

In the heart of the village, he felt the eyes of the millhands upon him, peering through curtains, watching from porches. The law rarely had reason to come out here, and when it did it was more than likely on a Saturday night to bust up a brawl. Folks didn’t call the sheriff for two young men going at it in the front yard, but they would if a husband and wife came to blows. Houses so tight here you could hear curses and glass shattering from around the block. But that was on a Saturday night, and often a deputy was enough to break up the disturbance. Chambers didn’t know how much word had spread about the Hillside murders. Probably everyone knew he was looking for Mary Jane Hopewell, but he felt the suspicious eyes on him nonetheless.

He parked in front of the Hopewell residence, a gabled bungalow with ferns on the front porch. Cigarette butts and cinders from the mill on the pavement in front of the house. The grass spare and burnt the color of autumn corn, mainly crabgrass and clover over rusty soil. He knocked and immediately there was a click as Susannah Hopewell opened the door. Beyond her, the two boys and the old man sat at the dining room table, and Joe leaned against a doorway.

Chambers’s eyes flickered back to Susannah, and he took off his hat. “Ma’am,” he said.

Despite having two boys nearly grown, she was still pretty. She came to town every once in a while and drew eyes from storefronts. She had soft yellow hair and comely skin and a slender face with soft lines where wrinkles would soon appear. Her hair had thinned some—he could imagine her seventeen, with a full shock of curls and ruddy skin, pretty as a peach and ripe for the picking—but time had its way with everyone out on the mill hill. She’d fared well, but he could see that in a few more years she would look seventy, wrinkled and thin and hunched over. Age hit you like that, a pretty young thing one day and a grandmother the next. He’d seen it with his
mother, then with Alma. Same thing happened to men, but they never burned as brightly in their youths, so the transformation wasn’t as stark.

Joe shoved off the wall and came to the door. “Sheriff,” he said.

“Hey, folks,” Chambers said. “May I come in?”

Joe stepped aside. He was dressed in his Sunday shirt, a white button-down with the top button undone, the shirt tucked into cedar-brown pants. He had a lean face with almost gaunt cheekbones and flat, expressionless eyes. Not a happy man, Chambers thought, but he couldn’t pinpoint what made him think it.

Chambers took off his hat and followed Joe back to the dinner table. The inside of the house had dark wood floors and white walls with dark wood trim that seemed to swallow the light. It felt tight and dark even though the sun was still close to its peak.

The boys rose and began clearing dinner plates.

“Offer you anything? Coffee?”

“No thank you. I’m sorry to be interrupting your dinner.”

“Not at all,” Susannah said. “Please, have a seat.”

She stacked a few plates in the sink, wiped the counter, and then left for the other room. When they were alone, Joe sat and nodded at the table for Chambers to do the same. Chambers sat next to the old man, the grandfather whose name he could not recall. Chambers said, “I reckon you’ve heard about what happened at the Hillside?”