Twenty
I managed to get in two more fishing trips before Christmas, and caught one malingering tarpon that hadn’t gone down the coast yet. It took a hard fight of well over an hour to bring it alongside the boat using a 6-0 Penn reel and a Fenwick trolling rod that belonged to the captain. Before we released it back into the water, he estimated that it weighed at least ninety pounds, well under the record, but it was the biggest fish I’d ever caught. A storm front was blowing in from the Gulf, and by the time we started back in, the water was getting choppy. It was a thrilling roller-coaster ride with the throttles of the boat’s twin diesels wide open and the spray crashing in over the bow. The sun had set by the time we came in sight of land, leaving the lights of Biloxi stretched across the misty horizon like a string of glittering gold beads. The rain began in earnest just as we docked. I quickly paid the captain, gave him a generous tip, and managed to get to my car before I was completely soaked. I counted it as one of the finest days of my life.
Time to leave for the Delta rolled around. We went in my deVille and gave Aunt Lurleen the place of honor beside the driver. “Oh, but this is such a lovely automobile,” she said as we pulled out of her drive. “Is it a Packard? My daddy just loved Packards.”
According to the map it was 286 miles from Biloxi to Greenville. It took us almost nine hours with a stop for lunch. Aunt Lurleen kept up a running commentary on the places we traveled through. It seemed that she knew someone in every crossroads hamlet we passed. And not just them, but their ancestries, their mating habits, and their diseases as well. It was like traveling with the Mississippi edition of Burke’s Peerage. Once I got used to her fluttery, hesitant voice that made every sentence sound like a question, she was really quite interesting: “Now, the Walkers lived here at Mount Olive for generations. They had about three thousand acres and the loveliest old home. They were fine people, but there was a crazy streak that ran in that family, and sometimes when ...”
Daddy didn’t own half the Delta, but he owned enough of it that the rest didn’t matter. The house, which looked like a movie set, was nestled in a grove of ancient oaks and magnolias a few miles north of Greenville. Built in the 1840s of hand-fired pink brick, it had six white two-story columns out front. Daddy himself turned out to be a big, boisterous, bourbon-drinking fellow who called his thirty-five-year-old, twice-divorced daughter “my little girl” and held court in a cyprus-paneled chamber that was full of leather chairs and fancy shotguns.
Before supper he and I passed an interesting hour during which he plied me with aged whiskey and tried to intimidate me. When I didn’t intimidate, he tried a bit of tactful wheedling. After that failed, he shifted the subject around to politics. When I told him I had none to speak of the conversation fell flat. No doubt he had a raging curiosity about me and Nell, but that was his problem, not mine. Finally he said, “So you and my little girl are pretty close. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered. “I believe we are.”
“Well, she certainly speaks highly of you. I call her every day, you know. And you’re all I’ve heard for the last two weeks. It’s been ‘Manfred, Manfred, Manfred.’ “
“That’s very nice of her.”
“It looks to me like she’s set her sights on you, boy.”
I smiled and shrugged.
He looked thoughtfully at me for a few seconds, then said, “By God, you don’t say much do you?”
“I talk to Nell a good deal,” I replied pleasantly. “That gets it out of my system.”
He sighed. “I guess that’s better than either one of those two fools she married. Never an unspoken thought with either one of them. Nor a thought worth speaking, either.” He leaned across his desk and offered me his hand for the second time that day. “Well, I’d be proud to have you in the family, if that’s the way things are headed.”
I figured I could afford to give him something. After all, he was just showing a man’s natural concern for his only child. “I don’t know where it’s headed Mr. Bigelow,” I said sincerely as we shook hands. “But I want you to know that I’m very respectful toward your daughter.”
That seemed to satisfy him.
The next morning Nell and I drove in to Jackson to do our shopping. We bought stuff. That’s all I can say. I’m the world’s worst gift shopper. The night of Christmas Eve was eggnog and rum punch and a tall tree in an elegant old room with family in from everywhere. Cousins. They were all cousins over there in the Deep South. The only reason they didn’t all show up in one place at one time was that they all had too many other places to go: “Honey, we were at Mary Beth’s last year so that means we just have to go see Aunt Nanny and skip y’all this year.”
Some of her cousins were even married to one another. “Keeps it all in the family,” said Cousin Alice, who was married to Cousin Dabney.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what “it” was, so I didn’t ask. I was in the middle of my third rum punch and suffering no pain when Alice sidled up to me. “You feel out of place in this crazy bunch, don’t you?” she asked.
“Just a little, maybe,” I replied with a grin.
“Don’t. Everybody likes you. Besides, Nell’s daddy is the only one that matters, and he told me that he’s taken a real shine to you. Not that it makes any difference because he wouldn’t say ‘scat’ if she came home dragging in a two-headed giraffe.”
“Really?” I asked, grinning despite myself.
“It’s the gospel truth, honey. He’s afraid she’ll get mad and not talk to him. My daddy’s the same way. Why, one time I didn’t speak to him for nearly six months, and he like to have shriveled up and DIED!”
And more of the same.
Late in the afternoon on Christmas Day Daddy and I somehow found ourselves back in his gun room or whatever he called it. Decanters emerged and aged whiskey once again flowed into heavy crystal glasses. Halfway through our second drink Daddy smiled. Only his eyes didn’t smile. They were hard, piggy little blue eyes much like my own, and there was no hint of humor in them. “Curtis Blanchard speaks highly of you, Manfred,” he said.
I decided it was time to quit mincing around. “That really doesn’t surprise me, sir,” I said. “I had a good reputation as a peace officer, and he and I have worked together a couple of times in the past. What does surprise me is that the two of you were talking about me. You must have checked me out when I started seeing Nell.”
He shook his head. “No real point in it. Nell’s going to do what she wants to do come hell or high water.”
“Then why?” I asked, truly puzzled.
Before he could answer, a black maid stuck her head in the door, and said, “Mr. Norman Fuquay’s on the phone, Mr. Bigelow.”
“Tell him I’ll call him back later,” he replied impatiently.
The maid vanished, and he pointed at the telephone on his desk. “You see that goddamned phone?” he asked hotly. “Well, I hate interruptions, and that’s why the phone in this room hasn’t got a ringer on it. Someday I’m going to shoot every damned phone in this house and be done with it. Then maybe I’ll get a little peace. Now, where were we?”
I couldn’t help but grin at him. I’d felt the same way myself many times. “We were talking about why you and Curtis Blanchard had been talking about me,” I said.
“Right.” He leaned back in his big leather chair and sighed. “As you probably know, Nell is casual friends with a hood named Jasper Sparks. I don’t approve of it because I think he’s dangerous. Hell, I know he’s dangerous. But, damn it, the girl is thirty-five years old and she does what she damn well pleases, so—”
I cut him off. “Mr. Bigelow, just what’s the purpose of this conversation? What do you want from me?”
“By God, you get right to the point, don’t you?” He actually grinned. “Okay, I’ll come right out with it. I know that you and Blanchard have something brewing down there on the coast with Sparks and that bunch, and I don’t want my little girl caught up in it and hurt.�
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“I’ve thought about that myself, sir,” I said, looking down and swirling the whiskey in my glass. “And it worries me some. Truly it does. But I can promise you that if things ever get to the point that I think she’s in danger I’ll send her home. And I believe she’ll leave Biloxi if I tell her to.”
“You’re giving me your word on that?”
“Certainly.”
“Good enough. That’s all any man can ask.”
I locked eyes with him before I spoke. “But as for this business Blanchard and I are working on, please understand that my ass is on the line and I hope that—”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not going any further. To be frank with you, Nell seems happier than she’s been in years, and I think you’re the cause. The last thing in the world I’d want is for you to get hurt and ruin it for her. To say nothing of the possibility of losing somebody who’s obviously a fine man.”
“Thank you, sir. I appreciate you saying that.” I rose to my feet. “I won’t try to find out how much information you have about the Biloxi affair. My guess is that any man in a position to keep the Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives waiting while he talks to a retired deputy sheriff is in a position to know just about as much as he wants to know.”
“What I do know, and what I can tell you, is that this is one of the poorest states in the Union. We need industry and investment and new people, but it’s hard to attract all that when the crime situation is out of hand like it is. I mean, with Sam Lodke and that damn den of thieves and cutthroats operating from down there at Biloxi. Hell, Sparks and two other hoods pulled a hundred-thousand-dollar residential burglary right here in Greenville last March.”
“You’re sure it was Sparks?” I asked.
“Yeah, hell yes. No proof, but it was him for sure. Then you add the moonshine wars up on the state line north of Corinth in the past few years, damn bodies stacked up like cordwood. That’s what we’re up against. Now, if you were a businessman would you want to move your operation to a place like this?”
“I see,” I said. “I would like to ask one thing, though. That is, if you don’t mind.”
“Fire away.”
“How far up does approval for this operation go?”
He gave me a beatific smile and pointed his big hard index finger straight upward.
“Pardon?” I asked.
“We’re all nothing but clay in the Potter’s hands, Manfred,” he said, his finger never wavering. “Just clay in the Potter’s hands.”
The day after Christmas I got one of the most unnerving shocks of my life. Nell and I had driven up to Jackson so she could exchange the Japanese silk robe she’d bought her mother for Christmas. It was a little too big, and she wanted to take care of it before we returned to Biloxi. She also had a couple more errands to run. I dropped her off downtown a little before noon with the understanding that I’d meet her in an hour and a half. Then I drove to a little café I knew near the capitol, a dark, rustic joint with a beamed ceiling and a sunken dining room. I was just about to take a stool at the counter when I glimpsed the familiar figure of Curtis Blanchard in a booth near the rear of the room, deep in conversation with someone I couldn’t see. I was about to go back to say hello when he accidentally dropped the salt shaker. His companion leaned out to pick it up, and I caught a brief flash of the man in profile. It was Sam Lodke.
It felt like a thousand volts of electricity had hit my nervous system at once. I turned, hurried from the building, and drove quickly away, my mind in a state of complete confusion.
During the trip back to Greenville I was distracted. I was long lost in deep thought when Nell poked me in the ribs. “Where do you keep going off to, Manfred?”
“Just tired,” I replied with a false smile.
I pulled over to the side and told her to take the wheel. “Sure,” she said. “But I can’t help but wonder why you want me to drive so much of the time. Most men aren’t like that.”
“When you drive I get to sit here and look at you,” I said. I also get to try to figure it all out, I thought. Just who are you, Nell Bigelow? And who’s Daddy? And Curtis Blanchard? And what am I doing here?
Twenty-one
I decided to hold off on telling Bob Wallace about seeing Blanchard with Lodke. Not that I didn’t trust the old Ranger completely. But I knew that he’d broach Blanchard about the incident with steam coming out of his ears, and I didn’t want that at the moment.
As soon as I returned from the Delta Jasper and I got down to the serious business of picking the other members of the crew. The holidays had drawn a lot of characters to Biloxi, and we had some good people to choose from. Or at least they were people who would have been considered good by their standards. One man Jasper mentioned that I quickly vetoed was Lester Trout. He was a flake and a speed freak, though he was a reasonably competent criminal. He was also geared up. About six months earlier he’d acquired himself a little sweetie down in Tampa who knew how to work those gears. In fact, she kept him in overdrive most of the time, and it was fun to watch. He was in his early fifties, a bookie and strong-arm artist who’d done some hard federal time. He’d also pulled off several lucrative armed robberies and was known to deal in stolen government securities. A couple of years back, at an age when most people are settling down, Lester discovered speed, and he was off to the races once again. The girl, a curvy little blond trick with a pug nose and a cloying lisp, was less than half his age. But she already had a couple of mink coats and a silver fox cape, to say nothing of an impressive collection of jewelry. All of which, I feel sure, was attributable to her deep understanding of Lester and his gears.
Another character we considered was Little Harry Capelton. He was a small, coarse-faced cracker out of south Georgia who wore handmade shoes and tailored silk suits to try to compensate for the white trash ambiance that hung about him like a cloud of blowflies. His constant companion was a monstrous tallowpacked thug called Big Harry Rozel who stood several inches over six feet and weighed in at around three hundred pounds. Big Harry was glib and garrulous and prone to chatter, while his partner’s style was an impassive silence that was obviously studied. They were heavies, though, and both were dangerous. In the past couple of years they’d robbed a number of big-money poker games, and a couple of times they’d left people dead. Regrettably, there had never been enough evidence for an arrest, much less a conviction.
Aside from Jasper himself, the most notorious and well-known of the Gold Dust regulars was Bobby Dwayne Culpepper. In his early forties, he stood six four and weighed about two forty. Years ago he’d played college football, and at one time there had been some talk of his going professional. But the nightlife beckoned, and early on he developed a fondness for cocaine that would never leave him. He had thick, coarse black hair, fleshy features, and a handsome if somewhat sullen face. His lengthy rap sheet included arrests for burglary, extortion, murder, interstate prostitution, and cocaine possession. Always with enough money to hire the best lawyers, he’d beaten everything but the prostitution charge, a fiasco that bought him three years in federal prison. In the past decade he’d made numerous trips to South America and was reputed to be on Interpol’s list of international badasses. Though he had a reputation as a stand-up guy who wouldn’t rat out, I knew of at least two instances where he’d traded heavy information for dropped charges.
Culpepper was married to a woman named Lilla Cranston, a buxom, long-legged Texarkana madam who was known to police agencies all over the quad-state area. A couple of days after Christmas she came down to Biloxi with him and dropped in at the Gold Dust. Lilla was aggressive, especially around other women, and she always ran out a strong like of con. It amused me to see younger whores get flummoxed trying to follow her drift. Now thirty-five, she looked younger, and even though she’d given up routine hooking she had a couple of old, well-heeled customers she continued to service on a regular basis. In fact, every orifice she had could still be rented, pr
ovided enough money was involved. Culpepper knew all this, of course, and he expected it of her as her part in covering their joint overhead and living expenses. Personally, I never understood how a man could strut around like he owned Mississippi when he and everybody else knew his wife was screwing some banker once a week, but he did. In point of fact, all his character friends also knew, and they considered him a lucky man to be married to such an enterprising woman. However, had he ever gotten the idea that she was enjoying herself, or had he ever caught her having an affair on the side for pleasure rather than profit, he would have beaten her half to death and might have even killed her. It was a strange ethos practiced in the world of the Dixie Mafia.
I learned just how strange one night right before New Year’s. I was in the Gold Dust with Culpepper and Sparks when a Dallas pimp named Chuck Vessing dropped by. I’d heard his reputation as a young man on the make. He was tall and muscular, dressed in a modish suit with wide lapels and flared legs, his thick blond hair worn stylishly long and combed down over his ears like the Beatles in their early incarnation. It was obvious that he basked in Sparks’s attention, and from time to time he gazed at the older hood with the rapt expression of a medieval penitent contemplating a splinter of the True Cross.
Since he was from Dallas, Vessing knew me by reputation, and at first he was reluctant to say much in my presence. But finally a couple of vodka martinis opened him up and he told the story of a Fort Worth procurer of his acquaintance who’d provided a couple of girls for an SMU frat party. The affair grew a bit rowdy, and to forestall any problems the pimp let his coat fall open in such a way as to let the college boys see the little .32 automatic in the waistband of his pants.
“Oh, bad form, bad form,” Culpepper said, shaking his head in disgust.
Sparks and Vessing both nodded in sage agreement. “A man like that shouldn’t even be allowed in the game,” Sparks remarked.
The Sweet and the Dead Page 12