“Benny does have a temper, I guess, but that’s another thing that reminds me of my brother. And Donnie is—I’ve never met anyone like him before.”
“How is that?”
“He’s extremely sweet to me. This is how they are to me. I’ve just never met anyone like him before.”
“And Roger?”
“I don’t know. He’s sort of quiet and to himself.”
Becky’s Tennessee drawl enhanced the impression of scenes from a girl’s holiday heaven. Caudill, an earnest, hard-working fellow, dark-haired and chunky, was annoyed. Hoping to jolt Becky into some sense of reality, he reminded her of what these kindly fellows had actually done, describing the mayhem at the Acker house, with emphasis on the butcher knife. “Your friend Bartley’s fingerprints were found on the scene. We have a witness. The doctor himself has identified both Bartley and Hodge as being there. Another eyewitness saw all three of them together in the area.” Was Becky under some illusion that she owed something to these people, that she should protect them?
“They absolutely did do it. They absolutely committed a horrible crime. They are very brutal men, and it’s not the first time that they did it.” Caudill did not mention Ed and Bessie Morris; he was guessing that Becky Hannah might know or suspect something about the Gray Hawk killings, or that he might jolt her into making connections in her mind. If she did, she gave no sign. From what he could tell, he may as well have been addressing a houseplant.
She was worried about her car, Becky said. She understood that her Datsun was impounded and sitting out in the hot Florida sun. Someone had told her that a window was broken and sealed with orange tape. She hoped that the tape would not melt onto the paint. Could she have her keys? Mike Caudill gave up.
When Lester Burns descended on Orlando to represent Roger Epperson, Detective Frank Fleming was privately delighted. He did not think that even Lester Burns had much of a chance of getting Epperson off, not with the way the case was developing; but Lester was bound to make things more interesting, certainly more entertaining. Like most mountain people on either side of the law, Fleming admired Lester Burns for having come so far from such humble origins, and he appreciated the humor and the shrewdness Lester brought to everything he did. With Lester on the scene, it would be a different case, because Lester’s effect was like cayenne pepper. Fleming now assumed that it would take weeks of maneuvering to get Epperson extradited back to Kentucky.
To Fleming’s surprise, when he ran into Burns at the Orlando jail, Lester revealed that he was waiving extradition for his client and that Fleming and Lon Maggard could take Epperson home in a matter of days. At dinner at their hotel on August 22, Lester confirmed that extradition would quickly be allowed, although Hodge and Bartley, still without attorneys, continued to refuse it.
Fleming and Maggard had thought that they had come down to Florida only to gather evidence and otherwise assist Mike Caudill in dealing with local authorities and the FBI. They were more than willing to take Epperson home with them, but they had only Fleming’s Chevy Impala cruiser, which was equipped with neither the special restraining devices nor a screen separating front and back seats as required by KSP regulations for the transportation of dangerous criminals over long distances.
Fleming knew Roger Epperson. He remembered having arrested him years before on auto theft and other charges, knew his parents and his brothers fairly well, and saw no reason why two armed Kentucky boys could not handle another unarmed fellow from the mountains. They were all about the same age and size, but Roger was out of shape from a strenuous style of life. By telephone, Danny Webb decided to waive the regulations, agreeing that it was not worth the cost to send another car and that they might as well haul Epperson back while they had the chance.
They headed for home on Saturday morning, August 24. Frank drove with Lon Maggard beside him, Roger in the middle of the back seat, handcuffed behind his back but otherwise unrestrained. Right from the word go he talked a blue streak, offering suggestions on the fastest route and agreeably entering into conversation about the narcotics trade—how much a mule received for carrying drugs from Florida or Tennessee up to Cincinnati, how much a kilo of this or that brought in various markets, what the markup was from drug grower to dealer, from importer to customer. It was a regular education, Frank thought, even if half of what Roger said might be bullshit. Epperson talked so big, he was the kind of guy who had to have an answer to whatever question, and he had a personal anecdote or two to embellish every point, always with himself as the smart dude, the one who pulled something off when everyone else went down. He reminded Frank of a second-rate Lester Burns, except not as funny or as likeable. He could understand why Roger had hired Lester, who was maybe the only man Epperson had ever met who could out-horseshit Roger and who actually made money at it.
A stranger in that car would have found it hard to believe that these cops and this criminal were adversaries, the talk flowed so easily, so matter-of-factly among the mountaineers who had grown up together knowing the same people up the same hollows speaking the same lilting, snappy lingo. Somewhere in central Georgia, Roger, leaning forward to thrust his head over the seat between the troopers, complained that the handcuffs were cutting into his wrists and stopping his circulation. They hurt so bad. He hated to complain, but they were killing him.
What the hell, Frank thought. He ain’t going nowhere. He told Maggard that it would be all right to take off the cuffs. Roger twisted around and Maggard reached back to unlock them.
“I sure am obliged,” Roger said.
“You want to jump out at ninety or a hundred miles an hour,” Frank said, “go right ahead. If you live, we’ll shoot you.”
What he would really like, Roger said, was a pen and some paper so he could write a letter to his girlfriend. He wanted to tell her that the cops were treating him fine. He knew she’d be worried.
Fleming and Maggard watched from time to time out of the corners of their eyes as Roger scribbled, then tore up a couple of sheets, tossed them on the floor, and started over. I guess he wants to get whatever he has to say down right, Fleming thought.
Late that afternoon they stopped for dinner at a restaurant off the highway in Atlanta. Fleming and Maggard, in street clothes, did not feel like putting on their jackets, it was so hot; but neither did they want to barge into the restaurant wearing exposed shoulder holsters and service revolvers. They left their guns in the car and, in shirt sleeves, walked casually with Roger, who was wearing jeans and a polo shirt, into the dining room. Only Maggard among them carried any sort of weapon, a small pistol in a holster strapped to his ankle.
All three ordered big steaks and iced tea. It was not that Fleming was growing to like Roger, far from it, but he now felt he knew him well enough to be certain that he would not try to run under these circumstances.
A kind of rapport had been established. If Roger did try to run, Fleming was sure he could catch him and would not hesitate to punish him.
Their corner table permitted conversation. They reminisced about old crimes—rackets, scams, coal schemes. Having listened to him and studied him for hours, Fleming found it difficult to imagine Roger actually stabbing Tammy Acker. Which of the three had killed her was the question that haunted Fleming more vividly and persistently than any other, because he could not forget the sensation of removing that butcher knife. As the one who had pulled it out, he felt a peculiar link to whoever had plunged it in—a bond that joined cop to killer at right hands.
Fleming decided to take advantage of the friendly atmosphere to ask what had been making him wake up in a sweat every night for two weeks.
“Roger,” he began in his blunt, cheerful way between bites, thrusting out his square jaw and cocking his head as he narrowed his eyes, “which one of you all stabbed Tammy?” With his fingertips he touched Roger’s bare forearm. “You ain’t under oath, buddy. I’m not recording this. Just between us, off the record, who did it?”
“I never did nothing
wrong,” Roger said, and he looked Fleming in the eye, something Frank had noticed he usually avoided. “Donnie Bartley. Bartley done it.”
“Why? Why like that?”
“He went nuts after she wouldn’t do what he asked.”
“What was that? What wouldn’t she do?”
“Give him a blow job. She wouldn’t come across. He wasn’t real happy about that.”
“So he went crazy?”
“He didn’t have far to go.”
“You want to make that official? It might go better for you if you did.”
“Sure,” Roger said. “I’ll take a deal. Here’s what it is. If I talk, I walk.”
“I don’t think we’ll go for that one,” Fleming laughed. “Let’s have us some of that strawberry shortcake.”
That night they booked Epperson into the Knott County jail, from which he was scheduled to be moved to the state penitentiary at La Grange, near Louisville, where security was tighter. After bidding Roger farewell and saying they’d be seeing him again before too long, Fleming opened the back of his cruiser and gathered up the pieces of paper Epperson had dropped there. “Dear Carol,” one of them began, and went on as if describing a Sunday drive. On another sheet Roger had been calculating large numbers. Fleming saved these for evidence, doubtful that they would prove anything.
When Fleming told Danny Webb what Roger had said, the lieutenant was skeptical. Epperson, Webb pointed out, was facing the chair and had every reason to blame someone else. If Bartley had wanted sex with the girl, why hadn’t he raped her? The evidence showed that they had been in too much of a hurry to think about sex. The next thing you knew, Bartley would accuse Hodge, and Hodge would blame Epperson, or whatever. Who had done what mattered less than that they were all legally equally guilty, just for being there for the reasons they had been.
It still mattered to him, Fleming said, which one had done that to Tammy. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. It was a little guy’s crime, the act of a squirt pissed off because he had been rejected. When Danny Webb finally saw Donnie Bartley in the flesh, the lieutenant would understand.
“I believe what Roger said,” Fleming insisted as Webb continued to try to talk him out of jumping to conclusions. “You had to have been there. I believe he was telling the truth.”
The important thing, Webb reminded him, was that they were building such a tight case against all three of them. Even Lester Burns was going to have one hell of a time trying to figure out how to plead this one. And new indictments would be coming down soon in the Morris murders and in the robbery back in May. Lester Burns had telephoned from Florida saying that he was bringing back a large cash fee. Where that money was coming from was another good question, but you could be sure that Lester had himself covered.
Webb recalled having run into Lester a few weeks ago over at Jerry’s Restaurant in Somerset, before the Acker murder. Old Lester had been table-hopping, working the crowd as if he were running for governor again, coming over to flatter the lieutenant and his family. He had gone on about his loyalties to the KSP and reminded Webb that he would take care of any trooper’s legal problems for a dollar.
“The way I hear Lester’s been hitting the bottle lately,” Danny Webb laughed, “I figure a dollar might be about right.”
23
BY THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST 27, when Lester Burns returned to Somerset with the gym bag full of money in the trunk of Houston Griffin’s car, his anxiety had reached such an acute state that whiskey no longer calmed it, was only fueling it. Somewhere near Atlanta he had become possessed by the fear that Griff might run off with the money, had ordered the caravan to a halt, switched cars, and ridden the rest of the way in Griff’s LTD, leaving Lillian Davis to continue on her own.
His bad hip was paining him; he had fantasies of being stopped by the KSP and arrested; he was less and less sure of the wisdom of having accepted this case, which was daily revealing itself as more grisly, more complex, and more difficult; he had not been able to discover anything likeable or redeeming about Roger Epperson or either of his cohorts, nothing to persuade himself or a potential jury that these murderous thugs deserved mercy; and he no longer was confident that being upfront about the money he received would be enough to persuade anyone that he had no idea it was part of the stolen cash. A strong inner voice told him that his best course would be to head for the nearest KSP post and turn in the money, claiming that he had been shamefully misled by his client, whom he could no longer in conscience represent.
But the familiarity of home territory soothed his nerves and restored some of his confidence. The closer they came to Burnside, the little town just south of Somerset where his office stood on Highway 27 overlooking Lake Cumberland, the more Lester strengthened his resolve to keep the money and find his way toward getting his hands on more of it. He had the suspicion that before too long Sherry Wong and Donnie Bartley’s relatives would be contacting him for help in securing other attorneys. There were opportunities ripe for the picking, more than a million bucks still out there.
Everywhere he looked around Somerset and Burnside reminded Lester of his power and prosperity: his house beside the Eagle’s Nest fairways, his farm that increased in acreage every year as he acquired the farms bordering it, his commercial and agricultural and mining properties all over the place, others on which he was ready to pounce. Unlike the mountains, it was a booming area, owing mainly to tourism and the houseboat-building industry that brought year-round employment. Lester was such a major presence there that many people believed that Burnside had been named after him; nor did he choose to disillusion them, although he knew that the name honored a Civil War general renowned for his whiskers, later called sideburns.
It was great to be home safe and sound, Lester proclaimed as Griff drove past new fast food joints and motels and boat factories and automobile dealerships, in the most progressive and beautiful spot in Kentucky, where the fish were biting and the cattle were fat and they had the best country ham and his bank account was full and people understood what it meant to work hard for a decent living.
“Pull off here,” he instructed as they approached Max Flynn Motors. “I want to give these boys a little something to cheer them up and fill their sleep with iridescent dreams.”
He retrieved the gym bag and, with Griff following like a mastiff, sashayed into the office where Max Flynn himself was sitting with one of his salesmen.
“Look at this, boys,” Lester said as he unzipped the bag and plopped it open on Max’s desk. “Feast your eyes. I bet you never saw so much cash in your life. There’s ninety-two thousand in there. I got it from a client in Florida. Not bad for a day’s work, wouldn’t you say?”
He grabbed a stack of bills and gesticulated as he crowed about his good fortune and asked how car sales were going. He might be interested in a new one himself. The Rolls-Royce was in the shop again. “Worst car I’ve ever had.”
From Max Flynn’s Lester took Griff to dinner at the 7 Gables Motel restaurant, where he showed the money off to everyone, bewildering a pair of white-haired Ohio tourists to whom for good measure he offered “the best deal in Kentucky” on a houseboat.
Griff departed for Okeechobee the next morning, without having acquired the promised Black Angus bull. By ten o’clock Lester, the money bag cradled in his arms, was in the passenger seat of Sheriff John Mar Adams’s cruiser, on his way to the Citizens National Bank on Courthouse Square in Somerset. Lester, who had known Sheriff Adams for thirty years, since their days together at the KSP Academy, asked the sheriff to accompany him to deposit cash received from a client whose cohorts were ruthless cutthroats and would stop at nothing to abscond with it.
In a private office at the bank Lester deposited the ninety-two thousand dollars, most of it in fifties, into his checking account, assuming that the bank would quickly report the transaction to the IRS, as it did. He also withdrew some twenty thousand in the form of a cashier’s check made out to the IRS, saying that
he believed in paying his taxes not only on time but ahead of time.
Outside he thanked Sheriff Adams for his assistance and said that he might soon be needing help again.
The last thing Sherry Wong wanted to do was to turn to Lester Burns for help. If Lester found Sherry the most human of the gang members, the sympathy was not mutual. Lester appeared to her an outrageous, bizarre, and patently untrustworthy character. His behavior during that week in Orlando seemed little short of lunatic, even as she observed how easily he won over Carol and Donnie Bartley’s mother and sister. A jury might fall for him. Not Sherry. Yet on Saturday, September 1, only two weeks after Benny’s arrest, Sherry found herself being driven by Carol up Highway 27 into Kentucky and on toward Lester’s farm, with Donnie’s sister, Sharon Wilson, in the backseat. They were on their way to a meeting with the living legend himself. Sherry was depressed.
And desperate. Attempts to find an attorney for Benny, first in Florida and then in Knoxville, had failed. Lawyers either gave her the brush-off or insisted that she be able to prove that her money came from legitimate sources. She was making attempts to launder Benny’s share, but there had not been time enough to accomplish that while Benny languished in Florida. Lester Burns had already obtained a Kentucky lawyer for Donnie, one Lester could work well with, so he said, and indicating that he had another in mind for Hodge, if required. What Sherry began to fear was that Lester and Bartley’s attorney would cook up a deal between themselves, maybe naming Benny as the killer and getting that pair of snitches light sentences. She had to act, now, and she hoped that cooperating with Lester might preclude getting screwed by him. She disliked him, she feared him, she distrusted him—and here she was being driven in one of Lester’s cars, no less—not the Rolls; an Oldsmobile—to pay court to him and to beg his handpicked pal to take Benny’s case.
It was dark by the time they reached the farm, several miles outside of Somerset on Slate Branch Road. A bumpy dirt track led them through fields where Sherry could barely make out cattle grazing, past an outbuilding or two, over a low hill and down toward the barn and the big stone house. To Sherry’s shock, their headlights suddenly illuminated a squad car. A deputy climbed out and shone his flashlight on them.
Dark and Bloody Ground Page 27