Bootlegger’s Daughter

“Well, to tell you the truth, honey, I used to wonder if it might not be some married man here in town. If Janie needed to prove to herself that she was straight through and through, she might have come on too strongly to somebody and then- just like with Kay and me-maybe tried to weasel out in the end, only he wouldn’t let her.”

Whenever a sentence starts with “to tell you the truth,” I automatically look for the underlying prevarication. “Which married man?”

“Oh, hell, Deb’rah. It could have been a dozen different men.”

“Name me some names.”

She was just tipsy enough to do it. Some of them I didn’t recognize, others were no longer in the area, the rest were all respectable middle-aged-to-elderly pillars of the community now. As I ran their faces through my memory, she drained her wineglass, then added two more names: “And of course, let us not forget my future ex-husband or Fred Saunders.”

15 somebody lied

The Ledger may be the county’s oldest continuous newspaper, but it’s housed in a modern structure, a small boxy cube that’s slightly canted on its lot next to a former tobacco warehouse that’s now a weekend flea market. The exterior’s sheathed in cedar shingles that have been stained a dark greenish gray. There are times, especially in deep summer, when the building almost disappears into its plantings of birch and fir. The illusion is further enhanced by the front sheet of glass that lets people gaze straight into a central garden planted with small deciduous trees so that it’s shady in summer yet flooded with sunlight all winter, a neat piece of passive solar pla

Everybody goes ape over gracious old traditional houses, but I grew up in one and I’m here to tell you they cost a fortune to heat and cool, and they’re a bitch to clean. If I ever build a house of my own, I’m going to steal Linsey Thomas’s blueprints.

Luther Parker was just getting out of his car when I pulled up in front of the Ledger building shortly before eight-thirty. The paper goes to press at eleven on Fridays, and we wanted to make sure Linsey had time to put together an accurate account.

As Luther held the door for me, the receptionist, who doubled as Linsey’s secretary, looked at the phone she was holding and then at us with an air of confusion. “Miss Knott! I was just phoning you. Mr. Thomas was hoping-”

She flipped an intercom button. “Mr. Thomas? Miss Knott just walked in.”

Almost immediately, he appeared at the door of his office down at the right corner of the atrium. A tall fit man, midforties with a hairline that had receded all the way past the crown of his head, and proud possessor of the world’s ugliest moustache, Linsey Thomas had learned to talk while toddling around the press shop behind his grandmother, and his voice had never toned down to normal levels.

“Deborah!” he shouted, big brown eyes gleaming behind shiny rimless glasses. He gestured for us to hurry on down the hall. “You must have read my mind. Mr. Parker, I’m Linsey Thomas. We met at the Harvey Gantt breakfast last month.”

He thrust out his hand to a disconcerted Luther Parker, who murmured, “Yes, of course,” evidently unaware that this was one editor who honestly never expected people to remember his name, his megaphone ma

He swept us into his office. Half of one wall was a floor-to-ceiling window that looked directly into the heart of the atrium. Unfortunately, its tranquilizing effect was wrecked by the piles of books and papers stacked on every surface, even lining the floor along the baseboards. Before we could find empty chairs, he was waving a crumpled sheet of paper in our faces.

“I want to know whose scrofulous sphincter excreted this scurrilous piece of filth?”

(No one has ever heard Linsey Thomas actually curse, but that certainly doesn’t mean his mind is pure and virginal, merely that he learned hundreds of synonyms from the same grandmother who wrote my grandfather’s obituary.)

“That’s what we came to discuss,” I said as I tipped books out of the nearest chair and sat down. “I have no idea who sent out that garbage in my name.”

“Huh? What in all the sulfuric flames you talking about?” he boomed. “I was addressing my remarks to Mr. Parker here.”

“Wait a minute.” I reached for the paper he kept waving around. “This isn’t my letterhead.”

“Who said it was?”

Luther Parker was too polite to dump a chair full of books on the floor, but he seemed to have no scruples about reading over my shoulder. Evidently he read faster than I did, because I was only halfway through the first sentence when he began spluttering.

This one was on his letterhead and it was almost a duplicate of the one circulated in Makely the day before, only this time, the beast with seven horns that Judicial District 11-C was being warned about was me.

If one could believe everything in this open letter, Luther Parker was an upright, foursquare Christian family man who sang with the angels when he wasn’t defending Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Ms. Deborah Knott, on the other hand, was an unmarried, (a) castrating bitch, (b) promiscuous whore, or (c) closet lesbian (pick one), the daughter of the biggest bootlegger in Colleton County history, and a defender of foreign drug dealers from whom she was probably getting a cut of the profits. “If Ms. Knott is elected to the bench, it will be speedy trials and speedier acquittals for drunks, junkies, and perverts of all kinds.”

“They were on nearly every News and Observer box in Dobbs,” said Linsey in his dulcet, window-rattling tones. “Not the ones here on Main Street, but all the out-of-the-way places where there’s not much nighttime traffic.”

He sat behind his desk and twisted a few hairs of his exuberant moustache while reading the flyer with my letterhead. As soon as he’d finished, he swiveled over and flicked the intercom. “Hey, Ashley,” he shouted. “Get me Hector Woodlief, okay?”

I don’t know why he bothered with the intercom since his door was still open.

“Hold on there a minute,” Luther objected. “You don’t want to involve Woodlief. Even if he had a hand in it, you sure we want to remind voters there’s a Republican alternative?”

“Smart thinking,” Linsey agreed. “Ashley? Cancel that call.” He swiveled back to us. “But if it’s not Woodlief, who else benefits?”

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said tightly, “but I seem to be the only one with serious damage here and I get it coming and going. In one I’m a redneck racist, in the other I’m the devil’s mouthpiece for organized crime. Mr. Parker’s accused of being black. Period.”

He acted like he was fixing to protest, but Linsey was nodding in thoughtful agreement, and after a moment’s consideration, Luther nodded, too. “I’m afraid you’re right,” he said.

“You don’t sound terribly sorrowful,” I observed. “And the Ledger endorsed you, didn’t it? Tell me, Linsey. Am I being set up here?”

Both men acted genuinely shocked that I could even consider such a possibility, but when challenged to produce another person who benefited from those two letters, their one pitiful candidate was Hector Woodlief. Yes, Hector files for some office or other almost every election, but it’s just to keep Democrats honest. He’s never really campaigned and would hardly begin with this sort of dirty trick.

We briefly discussed our two primary opponents who’d come in third and fourth. Sour grapes?

I didn’t think so.

In the end, I reluctantly agreed to a story that downplayed specifics and appealed to voter intelligence and sense of fair play when confronted with obviously phony campaign literature.

Sure.

Back at the office, I called Mi