Designated Daughters (11 page)

His smile broadened. “You think I’d tell you? And you a judge? Married to a sheriff’s deputy? Not hardly likely, little sister.” He shook his head. “Besides, that last come-to-Jesus session with Daddy put me on the straight and narrow. Well, on the straight anyhow. Funny that a man who spent the first half of his life breaking the law would take it so seriously when we did it. You ever think about that?”

Of course I had. “I think that cheating the government out of its whiskey tax never struck him the same as stealing from a neighbor or somebody he’d looked in the eye. So far as I know, though, he never dealt dishonestly with a buyer or ever went back on his word.”

“Well, neither have I. Not with any of my consignors anyway. And not since I got my auctioneer’s license.”

I took his carefully worded disclaimer with a grain of salt. Just because he was honest with them doesn’t mean he’s honest with everyone else, but I wasn’t here to pick a fight or monitor his morals. I just wanted to know about Rusty Alexander.

“Yeah, I’ve heard things. Nothing blatant. The licensing board is pretty vigilant,” he said, “but there have been a few times when he gets to auction off a nice estate and somehow the prices just don’t meet expectations.”

“Like Frances’s mother’s tea set?” asked Sally.

She and the others had brought their paper plates to the table and there was a companionable sound of munching as pickles and chips were consumed. Marillyn had placed another open bag of chips in the middle of the table and I was virtuously trying to ignore it.

“Like the tea set,” Will agreed. “Georgian? Sterling? With its own sterling tray and hallmarks from one of the best silversmiths working in London at that time? It should have fetched at least seven or eight thousand, even in this market. Forget about the historical value. The melt value of silver’s around thirty dollars an ounce now and a set that large would weigh several pounds. I don’t know what all was in your house, Miss Jones. Sally says a lot of nice antiques and maybe they were. But maybe they were only high-quality factory-made pieces. Just because something’s old, doesn’t mean it’s valuable, but a sterling tea set from the early eighteen hundreds has a recognized worth and no way should it have gone for the twelve hundred you say it brought.”

“See, Deb’rah?” said Sally. “I told you so!”

Will finished his first dog in two bites and reached for the second one on his plate. “Another thing, Miss Jones. You say he charged you for advertising the sale but that there weren’t many people in the audience?”

Frances Jones nodded. “He said it was such a nice day, people were probably out doing other things.”

“And if it’d been raining, he’d’ve blamed the weather for that, too,” Will said. “I keep my eyes open for quality auctions and if he put notices in the paper or sent out flyers, I never saw one.”

JoAnn Bonner fumbled for the straw purse beneath her chair, opened it, and pulled out a sheet of pale green paper. It was folded in thirds and had been secured with a bit of tape. On one side was a mailing label and canceled stamp with the auction house’s return address. On the other side was a long list of household items.

Marillyn looked at it with a printer’s professional interest and held it disdainfully by one corner. “Cheap twenty-pound bond, Helvetica font, probably run off on his office printer, and he didn’t even use the printer’s highest-quality resolution.”

She passed it to Will, and JoAnn said, “He told us he mailed out about two hundred of these and sent emails to another thousand of his usual customers.”

I took the sheet from Will and ran my finger down the list till I came to
English Silver Tea Set
. Nothing about its age, its hallmarks and provenance, nor how many pieces the set contained.

Vintage costume jewelry.

Nice old walnut dining table with eight chairs.

China service for 10.

Everything listed was equally generic. “This is supposed to draw people in?”

“Only if he really did send this to someone other than these two,” Will said grimly. “I’m willing to bet that he certainly didn’t send it to any of his high rollers, only his low- to mid-range buyers. A detailed list would have gone to a ring of dealers who had agreed beforehand to keep the bidding low. Later, they would have the real auction among themselves and split the proceeds with Alexander.”

“So how do we nail the bastard and get some of Frances’s money back?” asked Sally.

Will shook his head. “I’m afraid there’s no legal way.”

“What about an illegal way?” asked Marillyn.

At that point, I decided it was time for me to get back to court.

Dwight Bryant—Monday afternoon

E
nforcing the state’s local alcohol laws was no longer the province of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, so Dwight was surprised when ATF Agent Ed Garrison joined them at the lunch meeting set up by ALE’s Virgil Dawson.

“An operation this active, this close to the interstate, they’re probably sending it on down to Florida or up to Virginia,” Garrison explained, which was why the feds were involved.

Dawson laid a map of the highway on the table to look at while they ate. He pointed to exits along the section that crossed from Johnston County into Colleton. “Here, here, and here, we’ve had reports of sales being conducted out of the back of a white panel van. They must use magnetic signs to change the look, because one informant said it was a window cleaning service, but this time, it was a florist.”

He showed them a fairly crisp picture that someone had given him. Although taken at night, it showed two men, both with their backs turned. A stocky man in coveralls appeared to be transferring gallon plastic milk jugs from the back of a van to the bed of a pickup truck parked beside it. A second picture showed several dozen jugs being covered by a tie-down tarp.

“He couldn’t have gotten a picture of the license plate?” asked Garrison.

“She,” said Virgil Dawson. “She manages the snack bar at that service station here.” He pointed to an intersection on the map. “They were at the far side of the parking lot and she’d have been noticed. They caught her attention because it was around nine thirty at night, a real odd time for a florist to be making a delivery. As it was, she was plenty nervous but pretended she’d gone outside to make a call on her cell phone, not taking pictures.”

Aerial flights along the route had given them nothing. It was maddening, because patrol cars up and down that stretch of highway had reported fleeting but distinct smells of the mash being cooked, yet thorough searches each time uncovered nothing in the woods or underbrush or any nearby barns and no lingering telltale aromas.

Garrison and Dawson were both old school, nearing retirement, and they spoke nostalgically of the days when a simple flyover might show smoke from a still during the day or red coals at night.

“Not that I miss it,” said Garrison. “You’d lie out in the brush and briars for two or three days at a time, fighting mosquitoes and chiggers and snakes, eating cold beans and Vienna sausages, waiting for the still hands to come work the mash. Nowadays, it’s barns and basements, under hogpens or inside chicken houses. They cook it with propane or electricity and pipe in cold water rather than set up by a creek.”

Dwight grinned. “Next thing you know, they’ll add wheels and— Hey, wait a minute! We’ve got mobile meth labs now, right? Idiots cooking it up in the back of their SUVs?”

His Johnston County counterpart immediately saw where he was headed. “Well, damn! You know a semi would hold at least two of those five-hundred-gallon pots. They could just trundle it up and down from one rest stop to another.”

“We only have one rest stop for trucks,” Dwight said, touching the map where the interstate entered and exited the bulging western edge of Colleton County, “but I’ll have my patrols start running the plates on every rig they see parked there or anywhere else along this route.”

The others were thumbing their phones as lunch broke up and they scattered from the restaurant to their cars. Ed Garrison was parked next to Dwight. “Tell Deborah I said hey, okay?”

“You’re really going to retire this fall?” Dwight asked as he unlocked the door to the prowl car he’d driven over in. “How’s Linda gonna like having you hang around the house twenty-four hours a day?”

Garrison grinned. “I’m gonna ease her into it. Catch up on my reading. She’ll barely notice I’m there.” He got into his own government-issued car and, with a wave of his hand, headed back to Raleigh.

Benson was still so small that Dwight soon found the metal works two blocks off Main Street near the railroad tracks. The sidewalk in front of the place was lined with decorative iron gates embellished with flowers and trailing vines. The double shed doors that fronted on the street had been rolled up for ventilation and the interior was noisy with the clang of hammers against iron and the hiss of blowtorches.

“Help you?” said one of the workers, lifting his mask and dialing back the flame on his torch.

“I’m looking for a Davis Thornton,” Dwight said.

The man gestured to a co-worker at the rear of the shop and went back to welding a break in a wrought-iron lawn chair.

“Davis Thornton?” Dwight asked as he approached.

A stocky gray-haired man with muscular arms that bulged from a sleeveless denim shirt, the blacksmith was in the process of turning an iron rod into a ram’s-head fireplace poker. “With you in a minute,” he said as he put the touches to the small head with a curved neck that would form the hanger. He had already twisted one horn into place around the ram’s face. Now, with the inch-long head clamped in a vise, he used a blowtorch and heavy-duty needle-nose pliers to twist the second red-hot horn into a curlicue shape. He gave it a brisk scrub with a wire brush, then held it up for Dwight to see. In just those few seconds, the metal had gone from fiery red to a gleaming black.

A row of finished pokers hung nearby, no two heads precisely alike, each with a twist in the rod and a pointed tip and spur at the end for moving hefty logs around a hearth.

“How can I help you?” the man said.

Dwight introduced himself. “Actually, I’m looking for Billy Thornton. Would that be your dad?”

Davis Thornton nodded. “It would. What’s this about, Major Bryant?”

“We’re trying to locate someone who might have witnessed a death about sixty or so years ago,” he said, “and we’re told that your father might have been there.”

“Death? Whose death?” Thornton hung the unfinished poker on the wall with the others and lifted one side of his leather apron to reach into the pocket of his jeans. He pulled out a lollipop and tossed the paper wrapper onto the hot coals of his fire. Seeing Dwight’s amusement, he shrugged.

“You ever smoke? Hell on wheels trying to quit and stay quit. So who’d my dad see die?”

“A Jacob Knott.”

“Knott? One of Kezzie Knott’s crowd?”

“You remember hearing about it?”

“Don’t remember a Jacob, but there were so many of them boys. Used to go to school with Haywood and Herman. They were smack-dab in the middle as I recall. Was Jacob older or younger?”

“He would’ve been their uncle.”

“Uncle? Oh yeah. I do sorta remember some talk about how Mr. Kezzie had twin brothers and one of ’em drowned and the other got shot or something?”

“Jacob was the one that drowned. In Possum Creek. Your dad ever talk about that?”

Thornton shook his head, his jaw distended by the lollipop. “Don’t think so.”

“Where can I find him?”

“He lives with my sister over in Cotton Grove, but I’m afraid it may not do much good to try to ask him anything. He’s eighty-three and his memory’s going fast. Half the time he won’t even know who I am.”

Thornton gave Dwight his sister’s name and address, then said, “Don’t suppose you want to buy a fireplace set, do you? Poker, shovel, and hanger? I can let you have one cheap.”

“How cheap?” Dwight asked.

By the time Raeford McLamb and Tub Greene finished testifying in their separate cases and then met to watch Mayleen’s DVD, it was past noon. They stopped for takeout at one of the fast-food places and drove on over to the hospital, where they ate in their unmarked cruiser with the windows rolled down to let the warm May air flow over them.

Up in the hospice wing, they showed a picture of the orderly to the receptionist at the desk.

“Chad Rouse,” she said promptly. “But he’s not on duty till two.”

They filled the time questioning the staff who had been around the previous Wednesday and checking the layout of that floor.

The hospice wing was part of the original hospital built in the fifties and extensively remodeled. The current main entrance was several yards farther down a curving sidewalk, but the public could still enter through the original doors. A wide wooden staircase rose from that lobby to the family waiting room and more stairs from there up to the third floor. An elevator was tucked behind the stairs. The hospice wing was completely open on every floor to the newer parts of the building, where larger elevators could accommodate gurneys, rolling trays, laundry carts, and cleaning equipment, which meant that staff and visitors could move back and forth freely.

There was a fire exit on each floor at the end of the halls, but the doors opened only from the inside and were supposed to be kept locked at all times. An orderly on duty sheepishly admitted that sometimes he sneaked out onto the third-floor fire escape for a quick cigarette, leaving a mop bucket or broom in the doorjamb to keep from locking himself out.

“Worse than Swiss cheese,” said McLamb. “Holes everywhere and the nurses’ stations don’t seem to be manned full time.”

“That’s right,” a passing aide said cheerfully. “We don’t keep any drugs here either. They’re dispensed elsewhere and brought over on an as-needed basis.”

Like that aide, several staff members were ready to stop and gossip and voice the surprise they’d felt when they heard how Rachel Morton had died, but none of them had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

“Although that sure was the biggest family gathering I ever saw here,” said one. “So many people in and out, how would you know who was supposed to be there and who wasn’t?”

“Was that really Kezzie Knott’s sister?” asked a young nurse who had grown up on stories of moonshining and epic car chases.

All agreed that the privately hired aide who had attended Rachel Morton was a dedicated and conscientious woman.

“Lois Boone has a true calling for hospice work. Not everybody does,” said one of the registered nurses who worked in that wing as needed. “Some people find it morbid and depressing and I admit it can be sad, especially when it’s a child or young person who’s dying. By the time someone’s admitted here, all hope of recovery has been exhausted. Our job is to help terminal patients get through this last stage of life as painlessly as possible. It’s palliative care only, you know, not curative, and Lois is wonderfully calm and reassuring about that. She helps the family understand that when they authorize the doctors to turn off all the life-support systems and move the patient to this unit, they aren’t giving up on their loved ones, just accepting the fact that death is a natural end that can be as beautiful in its way as birth.”

The nurse was indignant when asked if Lois had ever hastened someone’s end, perhaps with an overdose of painkillers? An injection? Or, yes, a pillow?

“Absolutely not! In the first place, she’s an aide, not an RN nor even an LPN. She has no access to drugs and wouldn’t know how to give a proper injection if she did. And she certainly wouldn’t do what you’re suggesting.”

Chad Rouse arrived at the hospital a few minutes before two. A native of Widdington who hadn’t rolled far from the tree, he appeared to be in his early twenties, a slightly chubby young man with fair skin, a pleasant face, and an open friendliness. There was no apprehension in his manner when the two deputies approached him in the staff locker room. As Rouse changed into green scrubs, McLamb was amused to see that he wore boxer shorts imprinted with little red hearts. He volunteered the information that he had just come from morning classes out at the community college.

“This time next year, I’ll be an LPN,” he told them. “Pays about twice what I’m making now.”

He spoke willingly about Rachel Morton’s last day. “Yeah, I knew who she was. I mean, I knew she was Kezzie Knott’s sister. I been hearing stories about him forever. Thought he must’ve died years ago, yet there he was, big as life. I almost asked him for his autograph first time I saw him here last week. Lois didn’t know too much about him, but Mrs. Morton’s daughter—Mrs. Crenshaw? Or her son, Mr. Morton? If nobody else was here when I brought up a supper tray, they’d talk to me about him some. Things she’d told them about what it was like growing up with moonshiners. Their granddaddy did it, too, you know.”

Tub Greene listened with a fascinated interest that made Ray McLamb smile. No one in the department except maybe Sheriff Bo Poole would ever come straight out and mention Major Bryant’s father-in-law to his face, but it was a source of head-shaking amusement around the courthouse that a judge and a chief deputy would be so closely related to someone who was a cross between Jesse James and Junior Johnson if half the stories told could be believed.

Eventually, McLamb led Rouse back to the day in question. They learned that the wing held twelve rooms, six here on the third floor, six on the second, but it was unusual to have more than two or three occupied during the week.

“Now on weekends, we might have a full house because we give respite care to folks who’re still at home so that their caregivers can have a day or two off. Like if they have to go somewhere and don’t have anybody else to step in.”

Rachel Morton was the only patient on this floor last
Wedn
esday, though. “I came on at two o’clock and first thing I did was collect the lunch trays from her room. When I saw all the people, I thought maybe she’d died, but no, they were there because she suddenly started talking. It was so crowded that I just took the trays and left, but I did come back with some soft drinks later. I knew they wouldn’t want a supper tray because their church people were setting up in the family room, but I was hoping to meet Kezzie Knott. Didn’t happen, though. After that, I was busy on the other halls.”

“Did you come back after her visitors went downstairs to eat?”

“I wish! You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I heard what happened.”