Bootlegger’s Daughter Read online

  Bootlegger’s Daughter

  Margaret Maron

  This first novel in Maron's Imperfect series, which won the Edgar Award for best mystery novel in 1993, introduces heroine Deborah Knott, an attorney and the daughter of an infamous North Carolina bootlegger. Known for her knowledge of the region's past and popular with the locals, Deb is asked by 18-year-old Gayle Whitehead to investigate the unsolved murder of her mother Janie, who died when Gayle was an infant. While visiting the owner of the property where Janie's body was found, Deb learns of Janie's more-than-promiscuous past. Piecing together lost clues and buried secrets Deb is introduced to Janie's darker side, but it's not until another murder occurs that she uncovers the truth.

  Margaret Maron

  Bootlegger’s Daughter

  The first book in the Judge Deborah Knott series, 1992

  To Carl Jackson and Sue Stephenson Honeycutt- for friendship and kinship rooted two hundred years in eastern North Carolina’s sandy loam

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere thanks to the professional men and women of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, especially Special Agents Henry Poole and Shirley Burch; to the attorneys and judges of the Second Judicial Division, especially Ms. Joy Temple, and the late Judge Edwin S. Preston, Jr.; and most of all to Elizabeth Wells Anderson, whose memories “kept me between the ditches” when I started traveling down roads where she once lived. They patiently answered my questions with candor and honesty, and if there are errors, the fault lies not in the things they told me but in my transmutation of their answers.

  Disclaimer

  While North Carolina is-happily-much more than a state of mind, it has no county named for Sir John Colleton, one of King Charles II’s lords proprietors. In rectifying that omission, I should like to make it clear that my Colleton County does not portray a real place, and any resemblance between its fictional inhabitants and actual persons is purely coincidental.

  Bootlegger’s Daughter

  MAY 1972

  PROLOGUE

  Possum Creek trickles out of a swampy waste a little south of Raleigh. By the time it gets down to Cotton Grove, in the western part of Colleton County, it’s a respectable stream, deep enough to float rafts and canoes for several miles at a stretch.

  The town keeps the banks mowed where the creek edges on Front Street, and it makes a pretty place to stroll in the spring, the nearest thing Cotton Grove has to a park, but the creek itself has never had much economic value. Kids and old men and an occasional woman still fish its quiet pools for sun perch or catfish, but the most work it’s ever done for Cotton Grove was to turn a small gristmill built back in the 1870s a few miles south of town.

  When cheap electricity came to the area in the thirties, even that stopped. The mill was abandoned and its shallow dam was left for the creek to dismantle rock by rock through forty-odd spring crestings.

  These days, Virginia creeper and honeysuckle fight it out in the dooryard with blackberry brambles and poison ivy. Hunters and anglers may shelter beneath its rusty tin roof from unexpected thunderstorms, teenage lovers may park in the over-grown lane on warm moonlit nights, but for years the mill has sat alone out there in the woods, tenanted only by the coons and foxes that den beneath its stone walls.

  The creek does serve as boundary marker between several farms, and the opposite bank is Dancy land, though no Dancy’s actually dirtied his hand there in fifty years.

  Until this spring.

  About two-tenths of a mile upstream from the mill is a surprisingly sturdy old hay barn that Michael Vickery, a Dancy grandson, has recently claimed for a ceramics studio. He’s a pretty fair painter, and ceramic sculptures will be the latest in a string of artistic endeavors since he came home from New York in January. He’s making the spacious hayloft into a comfortable modern apartment, doing most of the work himself, and the two middle-aged black laborers that he’s hired to clear out the underbrush around it have heard it’s going to be a real fancy living place all right. They’d give a pretty to see it, but things being how they are, they’d never ask flat out, and it hasn’t occurred to Michael to show it to a pair of black “boys” even though he’s been off to Yale and does support the civil rights movement.

  (He never uses the word nigger anymore except when he’s knocking back a Schlitz down at the local beer joint and he honestly doesn’t feel that counts. It’s just to keep the home boys thinking I’m still one of them, he tells himself with conscious cynicism. Like a sweet-faced woman feels she has to say “fuck” once in a while when she’s out with the girls so they won’t think she’s too prissy. Means nothing.)

  After three days of chilly fogs and rain that made working outdoors miserable, the low-pressure system has finally moved on out to sea, and proper spring weather has filled in behind with hot sunshine and a warm west wind. Michael Vickery’s got those two day laborers back clearing the slope down by the edge of the water while he stacks bricks for an outdoor kiln on the other side of the barn.

  Of course, there are chemical weed killers that would knock out the poison oak, briars, and bullace vines, but Michael’s troubled by fish kills in other North Carolina creeks and rivers and he wants to mend the damage done to Possum Creek by Dancy tenants who laced these fields with chemical fertilizers and pesticides and never had a minutes uneasiness for what might be happening to the water table.

  The hired men would spray if Mr. Michael told them to, but grubbing roots by hand stretches out the pay at a time of year when farm work’s thin. Too late to plant tobacco, too early to start suckering it. So it’s yessuh, Mr. Michael. Whatever you say, Mr. Michael. Want us to work up from the creek today, ’stead of down from the barn where we started? Sure thing, Mr. Michael.

  Sweat pours off their bodies and drenches their shirts as they toil in the steamy morning sunlight, and each time they pause to get a drink of water, they seem to hear something downwind across the creek. A baby pig maybe?

  “Ain’t no pigs over yonder,” says one. “Closest place with pigs is probably Mr. Kezzie and he ain’t got but a couple of fattening hogs. Might be a cat. Or a mockingbird. Used to be one’d set up on our chimney and sound like the rusty hinge on our screen door.”

  They swing bush knife and mattock and talk about some of the odd noises they’ve heard mockingbirds mimic.

  “Only that don’t sound like no mockingbird,” says the first man stubbornly.

  The sound drifts fitfully on the soft western breeze, never lasting really long enough to get a good fix on it. When Michael Vickery comes down to see what they want him to bring them from the store for a midmorning snack, they tell him to listen.

  He does, but naturally the bird or cat or whatever it is chooses that time to go silent.

  The white man shrugs, takes their drink orders, and says he’ll be back in about thirty minutes, ’cause he has to run by the brickyard before they close for the weekend.

  As the roar of his pickup fades over the rise, heading for the highway, both men ease off on their tools. A drowsy humid stillness hangs over the creek bank. Even the birds are mute in this hot morning air. Just when they’ve decided that whatever it was is gone for good, it comes again, a high thin note floating back up the quiet water.

  The first workman drops his mattock and heads for the creek. “Some little creature’s in trouble,” he says.

  For some reason, it’s a pitiful noise to him, halfway between a kitten and a young piglet so hopelessly entangled in barbed wire that it’s almost resigned itself to death, and the older man just can’t let it go.

  Together, the two track the thin mews downstream to the mill. They splash across the broken spillway and finally follow their ears into the old millhouse itself.
r />   And that’s when they abruptly connect the cries with what’s been occupying the hearts and souls of half of Cotton Grove ever since Wednesday.

  They look at each other fearfully. One of them is still carrying his axe-handled bush knife, and he holds the sharp hooked blade in readiness as they enter the dim stone building. The other grabs up a couple of potato-sized rocks, and he, too, is on guard. Field mice rustle among the debris near the door, but the two men barely notice. The crying comes from overhead and sounds exhausted to them now.

  “Who’s up there?” they shout. “Anybody there?”

  The mewing cries continue, and it almost breaks the heart of the older man because now he’s surer than ever what it is up there crying. Half a lifetime ago, he listened to cries just that pitiful as his only baby son wasted away from diphtheria in his cradle.

  As he mounts the steps, a stench meets his nose.

  Carrion. And body wastes.

  Part of the tin roof has collapsed at the gable end of the loft overlooking the creek, so there’s enough light to see clearly.

  The cries come from a very young infant strapped in a molded plastic carrier. She’s soaked in her own urine and stinks of putrid diapers, but that’s not what makes the men want to retch.

  It’s the white woman who lies on the stone floor beside the baby.

  She’s face up. Her body is clad in the long-sleeved black jersey, white jeans, and flat-heeled slippers the radio said she’d been wearing when she disappeared three days ago.

  Blowflies are thick all over her pretty face and maggots are already working the clots of blood and brains beneath her long dark hair.

  APRIL 1990

  1 rainy days and mondays always get me down

  Hs green-and-vermilion topknot was as colorful as a parrot’s, and in Colleton County’s courtroom that afternoon, with its stripped-down modern light oak benches and pale navy carpet, a cherryhead parrot couldn’t have looked much more exotic than this Michael Czarnecki.

  Nineteen years old. Tattooed eyeliner on bloodshot eyes. Stainless steel skull-and-crossbones dangling from his left ear-lobe. His jaw was purple from where it’d banged the steering wheel when he ran off the road a little past three that morning, and he was still wearing black skinny-legged jeans and the electric orange-and-green “Boogie On Down To Florida” sweatshirt he’d had on when the state troopers plucked him off 1-95 and perched him in our brand-new jail.

  From his own perch, the black-robed judge frowned down at Czarnecki like an elderly cowbird while Assistant District Attorney Kevin Foster read the charges: speeding 74 in a 65 zone, driving while impaired, simple possession of marijuana.

  “You got an attorney?” asked Judge Hobart, who knew quite well that he’d appointed me that morning when the calendar was first called and that this was why I was now seated at the same table with the defendant.

  I stood up. “Your Honor, I represent Mr.-” I glanced again at the court calendar in my hand and tackled the unfamiliar name with more confidence than I felt. “Mr. Zar-neck-ee.”

  “Zar-n’kee,” my client corrected me shyly.

  “Not representing him too well, Miss Knott, if you can’t even say his name right,” the judge sniffed. “How does he plead?”

  I’d worked it out with Kevin before lunch. He’d knocked a 78 down to 74 and had thrown out a piddling seat belt violation and two charges of reckless and endangering, but we were stuck with DWI and simple possession. And I was stuck with punk hair, “Boogie On Down To Florida,” and a judge with many, many axes to grind.

  I-95 passes straight through the middle of Colleton County, North Carolina, linking Miami to New York. I’ve never actually looked into the wording of the billboard law that regulates signs along a federally funded highway, but it’s lax enough that farmers here can rent their roadside land to advertise the locations of factory outlets that sell towels and sheets, name-brand clothing, and, of course, cheap cigarettes.

  Despite the tourist dollars, our stretch of I-95 would be a no-exit tunnel if Harrison Hobart had his druthers, and he normally throws the book at any Yankees who stray off the interstate and into his court. Fortunately, it was only a week till the May primary, so Czarnecki, who was boogie-ing on back up to Teaneck, New Jersey, got lucky. His outlandish hair, his satanic earring, and his smartass sweatshirt afforded so many opportunities to zing me, that Hobart finally let the kid off with a ninety-day suspended and a two-fifty fine.

  Did I mention that Harrison Hobart’s seat is up for election?

  Or that I’m one of the candidates?

  I hadn’t really planned to run for judge. Not consciously anyhow, but it must have been lurking down deep in my subconscious because something snapped last winter. It wasn’t even my case. I was sitting there on the lawyers’ bench at the front of Courtroom #2 that rainy January morning, waiting to try and keep Luellen Martin out of jail one more time even though she was nearly seven months behind in her restitution payments and her probation officer was ticked because she’d skipped a couple of reporting sessions as well. Luellen works out at the towel factory and makes enough money to get her hair fixed every week, keep up car payments on a Hyundai, and trundle her kids down to Disney World over the Christmas holidays; but she couldn’t ever seem to get up the monthly hundred dollars she was supposed to be paying various complainants after bouncing checks all over town last spring.

  A jury case was in session; Reid Stephenson defending an impassive-looking black man.

  “What’s the charge?” I whispered to Ambrose Daughtridge, who was also waiting for a case to be called. I should have known. After all, Reid was not only my cousin, he was also one of my partners.

  “DWI, wouldn’t take the Breathalyzer,” Ambrose whispered back.

  Refusal to take a Breathalyzer test’s not a real smart decision under the usual circumstances. As the examining officer explained, “I tried to tell him that if he didn’t take the test, God himself couldn’t let him drive for twelve months in the State of North Carolina.”

  “And did he understand?” asked Tracy Johnson, who was prosecuting the calendar that day in a navy blazer and red wool skirt. She’s tall and slender with blonde hair clipped shorter than most men’s. Quite pretty actually, except that she keeps the good bones of her face obscured by businesslike hornrimmed glasses.

  “Objection,” said Mel. “Calls for a conclusion.”

  “Sustained.”

  Tracy had graduated from law school only six months earlier, and it still needled her a bit whenever an objection to one of her questions was sustained. She pushed her oversized glasses up on her nose and hurriedly restated. “Did you ask Mr. Gilchrist if he understood that if he didn’t take the test and was found guilty, he’d automatically lose his license for a year?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the officer. Sanderson. Late twenties, spit and polish uniform. Always sits at attention. Even when he’s trying to convey more-in-sorrow-than-anger earnestness. “I did everything but beg him to take that test. I told him even if he didn’t pass, he could probably get a limited permit. But if he didn’t take it, he was going to be walking for twelve months. He didn’t say nothing ‘cept ‘Huh!’ ”

  “ ‘Huh’?” asked the judge. Perry Byrd that day. Well into his third term of office.

  “That’s all he’d say, Your Honor,” Sanderson said. “Every time we asked him anything, that’s all he’d say; ‘Huh!’ Real cocky-like.”

  No law officer says uppity anymore. Not in open court anyhow. Cocky’s the new code word in the New South.

  Judge Byrd nodded and laboriously made a notation on the legal pad in front of him. At fifty-two, Perry Byrd’s peppery red hair had a hefty sprinkle of salt in it. Broad strapping shoulders on a six-foot-two build, and the florid face of an incipient stroke victim. He also had a prissy little high-pitched voice and, even talking under his breath, everyone sitting near the front, including the jury, could hear his absent-minded “cocky-like” as he wrote.

  Reid look
ed over at the lawyers’ bench and he rolled his eyes at Ambrose and me.

  Judge Byrd finished writing and looked up. “Well, get on with it, Miss Johnson,” he told Tracy, fussily.

  Some judges enjoy bossing brand-new ADAs and it’s not always a male/female thing, although the two years I’d worked in the DA’s office, there’d been this one white-haired little bastard who rode me like a dog fly, never lighting, always just out of swatting distance.

  Tracy quickly finished her examination of Trooper Sanderson, and Reid’s cross-examination explored the possibility that he and the arresting trooper might have maybe, “unintentionally of course,” denied his client permission to call his lawyer.

  “No, sir,” said Sanderson, displaying a copy of the Alcohol Influence Report form he’d filled out earlier and which Gilchrist had signed. “We go right down the list and when we got to ‘Is there anyone you now wish to notify?’ he said ‘No.’ ”

  “But hadn’t he earlier asked to call his lawyer?”

  “Not to my knowledge, sir,” Sanderson said blandly.

  Even though Reid is my mother’s first cousin, he’s four years younger than me. He’s got the Stephenson good looks, too: tall, blond, melting blue eyes. When he wants to, he can look like a Wall Street broker; most of the time though, he tries to act like a good old country lawyer. He leaned back in his swivel chair and wheedled around every way he knew, but Sanderson sat up straight in the witness box and wouldn’t admit that Gilchrist had been denied any of his constitutional rights.

  “No further questions,” Reid finally said.

  “State rests, Your Honor,” said Tracy.