Bootlegger’s Daughter

“She was still in nursing then,” said Scotty. “Working the four-to-midnights at Rex Hospital. But one thing we did learn when we went over Janie’s girlfriends: she and your sister-in-law-sorry, your ex-sister-in-law-and Kay Saunders had been really close right up to a couple of months after the baby was born. Then, bang. Overnight, a few weeks before she died, Janie quite seeing them. Quit shopping with them, quit having them over to her house, quite going to theirs.”

Startled, I realized he was right. Janie, Trish, and Kay had graduated from Dobbs High School together and had then married Cotton Grove boys within two years of each other, which brought them back into the same social orbit where two incomes weren’t a necessity quite yet. The “Do

Thinking out loud, I said, “Well, maybe motherhood slowed her down too much. So far as I know, Kay never had kids, and Trish and Will were divorced before they had any. With her sister there in town, maybe she thought it was time to settle into family life.”

Except that even as I said it, I was remembering that she hadn’t really settled. Marylee’s kids were both in school and Janie had been out ru

“Well, it probably didn’t mean anything,” Scotty said. “The only reason I gave it a second thought was because there was nothing else. You girls are all alike, though. One day you’re best friends, the next day you can’t stand the sight of each other.”

I bristled and he started gri

“Did you believe them?” I asked.

“Let’s put it this way. I never could verify their movements for that Wednesday afternoon, but I do know that Trish Knott and Kay Saunders spent Friday evening playing cards with some friends over in Makely.”

“Makely?” Appalled, I looked at my watch. “Oh Lord! I’m supposed to be at a meeting in Makely in exactly twelve minutes.”

Babbling my thanks for his time, I grabbed for his bill and he let me take it. “Two things though, Your Honor-if you learn anything, I expect you to share it.”

I nodded. “And the other?”

“Just keep in mind that someone’s got away with murder once already.”

6 there’s something for everyone in america

I’d warned Gayle that my campaign was going to come first, a good thing because the next few days were so jammed I hardly had time to shower and change clothes. It was the last weekend before the primary, my last chance to shake new hands in other parts of the district where I was less well-known to voters.

On Saturday morning, I got up early and drove over to Widdington in the next county. My first stop was at a Newcomers Club breakfast followed by a midmorning bake sale for the Widdington High School Marching Band Uniform Fund, where I bought an obscenely rich carrot cake with cream cheese icing that I immediately donated to the Mothers Against Drunk Driving at their lunch meeting in Hilltop, thirty miles further east from Widdington.

“If this is a bribe, I’m easy,” laughed a plump young mother.

While our hostess sliced the moist cake into seventeen equally fattening pieces, I described the number of drunk-driving cases I’d prosecuted when I’d worked as an assistant in the DA’s office.

One smartass Republican-looking mother asked if I hadn’t spent the last few years in private practice frequently defending drunk drivers. I took the high ground-“As long as the United States remains a democracy, even the sorriest hound’s entitled to a defense”-and kept the rest of the women on my side by confessing with pretty ruefulness that I’d lost over ninety percent of the DWI cases I’d tried to defend in court. (No point mentioning that most lawyers have an even worse conviction rate. If our DA doesn’t think the facts are incontrovertible, he doesn’t prosecute. Marginal cases simply don’t come to trial all that often, and I’m pretty good at getting pretrial dismissals; but that’s not something I like to brag about. Certainly not at a MADD meeting.)

“Win or lose,” I told them truthfully, “any time a client of Lee, Stephenson and Knott is charged with driving while impaired, we require them to sign up for a substance abuse program before we’ll accept the case.”

(Okay-yes, it does usually help mitigate a guilty verdict if you can say to the judge that your client’s already entered such a program voluntarily, but again that’s not something attorneys go around telling MADD groups. Especially if said attorney’s ru

“Of course, when we’re appointed to represent indigent defendants, we don’t have the option of turning them down if they refuse.” I smiled apologetically at the Republican. “I’m afraid that goes back to their Sixth Amendment rights again-the right to counsel, whether or not they take the counsel’s advice.”

The luncheon concluded in time for me to put in a quick appearance at the end of a noontime fish fry to benefit the hospital in Hilltop. I got to pull a raffle ticket out of a gallon jar, and the white-haired gentleman who won the VCR donated by the Hilltop Radio Shack fancied himself a roguish charmer. “I claim the right to kiss the prettiest candidate in the whole damn election!” he said as he came up to collect his prize.

I smiled-God, how candidates have to smile!-proffered my cheek and mentally put a big red asterisk beside his name. He’d be gri

Midafternoon was Joplin ’s Crossroads. The volunteer fire department there was sponsoring an auction of surplus farm equipment, and my brother Will was auctioneer. Will is three brothers up from me, the oldest of my mother’s four, and a bit of a rounder. Everybody likes Will as long as they don’t have to pick up behind him and clean up his messes. He’s a fine auctioneer though and makes good money on the circuit. The crowds get to laughing at his fast-talking patter and hardly notice how high the bid’s gotten. He’d phoned me the week before. “Long as you’re going to be in the neighborhood, you ought to come on by and say hey to everybody. That firehouse is a polling place, and a lot of those men’ll vote for you if you smile at ’em pretty.”

So I climbed up onto the flatbed of a two-ton truck that he was using as a platform, flashed as genuine a smile as I could muster, and used his microphone to make a dignified appeal for their votes. Then, while some a

“That old busybody? Oh, hell, yeah. Why?”

We were sitting on the far side of the flatbed away from the crowd with out legs dangling over the edge. I popped the top on a can of Diet Pepsi someone had brought us and took a sip. “I was remembering how he said he looked hard at the man in Janie Whitehead’s car that afternoon she disappeared because he thought at first she was Trish and he wanted to see who she was cheating on you with, remember?”

“Yeah, I remember,” he said sourly. His and Trish’s divorce had not been amicable. They fought over every single thing they’d acquired together-furniture, appliances, and the dogs; but the major sticking point, and one that almost unglued the settlement, was who was going to keep the album of wedding pictures. Even though she understood the psychological significance of the impasse, Mother wound up paying their photographer to duplicate the whole damn thing right down to the album’s white taffeta cover just so she wouldn’t have to keep listening to Will mouth about it.