Bootlegger’s Daughter

As the raucous hoots and gotchas turned into general conversation, Morgan waved to a quiet older man across the room. I knew Scotty Underhill by sight, but he’d always been a family man, not one to dawdle long in bars after-hours, so I didn’t know him all that well.

According to Terry, his daughters were grown now so he’d started stopping by occasionally. Morgan offered to scoot over and slide in another chair next to hers, but he shook his head and went off to a side booth with Terry. When they’d finished their business a few minutes later, Terry motioned for me to join them.

Underhill started to rise. I appreciate good ma

“I told Scotty you’re looking into the Janie Whitehead case,” said Terry.

“Her daughter’s eighteen now,” I explained, “and wants to know more about what happened to her mother.”

“That baby’s eighteen? Good golly Moses.” He sighed, tucked the ends of his blue plaid tie back inside his neat gray jacket and shook his head at the rapid passage of time. “But yeah, she was a year younger than my youngest daughter, and Delia’s sure enough nineteen now.”

“If you have daughters, then you can probably appreciate how Janie Whitehead’s daughter must feel, growing up not knowing why her mother was killed,” I coaxed.

“Yeah, sure, but we reworked it about three or four years ago.” He glanced at Terry for confirmation.

“Seven years,” said Terry.

“Seven? You sure? God! Where does the time go?” His blue eyes were probably three shades lighter than what he’d started with and his hair almost completely gray. There were also tired lines around his mouth that made him seem older than the fifty he probably was. “Well, whenever. We tried to come at it fresh, like we’d just got the call that she’d been found in that millhouse. I’ll never forget it. That pretty young thing lying on those cold stones. All those blowflies. Could have been so much worse, of course. May and everything. It can get hot. Look at today.”

He took another sip of his ice water. “The baby was dehydrated, though, and it was a damn good thing she hadn’t started crawling yet ’cause there was a Christ almighty big gaping drop where the paddle wheel used to go.”

“Could you account for all Janie’s movements that day?”

He leaned back in the booth and regarded me steadily, though it was Terry he spoke to. “You say she’s going to be a judge?”

“Is that a problem?” I asked mildly.

His eyes may have been pale blue but they were the eyes of a weary old spaniel who’d learned to wait instead of chasing after every breeze that bent the grass, and they didn’t waver now. “Not as long as I go by the book.”

Terry started to stir, but I laid my hand on his arm. “Primary’s not till Tuesday,” I pointed out. “And we’re a long way from November.”

Underhill seemed to consider, then shrugged. “Well, Terry’s my boss now. If he says it’s okay…?”

“It is okay,” said Terry.

“All technicalities anyhow. We didn’t find a damn thing the first time through and not a hell of a lot more the second time. So what do you want me to tell you?”

“Everything,” I said and signaled Spot for another round of drinks. Terry and I switched to coffee; Underhill opted for tomato juice.

It was sensible. It was healthy. We were all going to live to be a hundred.

But sometimes I missed feeling like John J. Malone.

5 searching for some kind of clue

Before Scotty Underhill could finish doctoring his tomato juice with Tabasco and Worcestershire to turn it into something that had the taste, if not the kick, of a Bloody Mary, Terry had gulped his coffee, given my shoulder a brotherly pat, and charged off to make Stanton ’s ball game.

“I haven’t looked at those records in months, so I can’t give you chapter and verse,” Scotty warned as he squeezed a slice of lemon into his tomato juice and laid it on the napkin beside his glass. “Still, when you give it that much time, it’s not something you forget either.”

He gave me a tired smile. “Hell, I even remember you now. You were the baby-sitter, weren’t you?”

“Why yes. I’m surprised you remember.”

“We looked at everybody. Even baby-sitters. You thought her husband was groovy, as I recall.”

Unexpected embarrassment washed over me. I felt myself turning red and was thankful Terry wasn’t there to see. “Who on earth told you that?”

“Does it matter?”

“No. Just sounds fu

“Schoolgirls have done crazy things. Besides, you weren’t some little kid. You’d just turned sixteen, a young woman driving her own car. A white Thunderbird, as I recall.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “You were also Kezzie Knott’s daughter.”

I let it pass. If he knew that, then he also knew that the only thing my father’s ever been convicted of is income tax evasion. He would also know that Daddy served his eighteen months in a federal prison well before I was even born. By the time I was eight, a governor and two senators had pulled the necessary strings to get him an unconditional pardon. Theoretically, that single conviction had been expunged from his record.

In practice, helicopters continued to circle Knott land like buzzards, looking for stills and probably even strips of marijuana tucked in between tobacco rows, though I don’t think Daddy’s ever messed with pot. He always said he made his money the old-fashioned way, and he may be a scoundrel but he’s never been a hypocrite. Nevertheless, the drone of spotter planes was one of my earliest memories, and even Terry has been exasperated enough to complain about them spooking the bass when he’s fishing one of Daddy’s lakes.

Max waved to me on his way out and his place at the big round table was taken by two women I vaguely recognized from the attorney general’s office. On the jukebox, Tina Turner was belligerently demanding to know what love had to do with it-Spot’s jukebox has always been a comfortable five years behind the hits-and the strident beat muffled words, bursts of laughter, and the tinkle of bottles and glasses as Miss Molly’s geared up for Friday night. Above the music, Morgan gave me a what’s doing? look, and when I gestured that I’d be a little longer, she lit another cigarette and turned back to the conversation at her own table while I got on with mine.

“Who else did you look at?” I asked tightly.

“The husband, his parents, her parents, neighbors, friends, old boyfriends. You name it, we did it.”

He stirred his tomato juice with a straw, sipped, added a sprinkle of pepper and stirred again.

“You probably know as much how she died as I do.”

“I doubt it.”

“Okay, let’s see. She disappeared on the first Wednesday in May.” He looked surprised to realize the calendar was back to May again. “Day before yesterday, eighteen years ago.”

Unlike this year, that May had begun unseasonably cool and rainy, and I remembered there’d been a heavy fog that never completely lifted.

He nodded. “A morning that kept people indoors with the heat turned back on. No fit weather to take a new baby out in, but there was nobody to stay with her. Not her parents. Not you. You were in school till three-thirty.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, but it gave me a weird feeling to realize how thoroughly my movements, too, had been documented back then.

Janie’s mother and father had driven over to Durham early that morning to attend the funeral of Mrs. Poole’s cousin, Scotty continued, and her sister was down with some sort of spring virus that made it risky to expose the baby. In fact, it was her sister’s illness that took Janie out that day in the first place. Marylee Poole Strickland was room mother for her second-grader, and she’d promised to take cupcakes for a class party immediately after lunch. The cupcakes had been baked and decorated the night before, but when she awoke too sick to take them over, she’d called on Janie.