The Sweet and the Dead

by Milton T. Burton

  The two of them grabbed Joe Don’s arms and pulled him up into a sitting position against the side of his car. Then Moline squatted down, felt around inside his fancy tweed coat, and came out with a long, slim wallet. Quickly he rifled its contents and removed several bills. “Understand that this isn’t a mugging,” he told Durrell. “We don’t fool with chickenshit stuff like that. Now, I see that you’ve got a little better than nine hundred dollars in cash here. I’m taking five hundred of it for Siam and leaving you the rest. I think that’s fair, considering the things you made her do.”

  He tucked the wallet back inside the man’s inner coat pocket. “The next time a woman tells you she don’t want to do something, you better listen,” he said. “And if you go to the cops about this, the very least we’ll do is make sure your wife knows all about your late-night activities down here on the Strip. So you better think before you act.”

  I would have bet anything it was the first time Joe Don Durrell had ever come off second-best in a physical encounter. Certainly it was the first time he’d ever been soundly thrashed by someone who knew who he was and didn’t care in the least. No doubt it was a whole new experience for him—one he’d probably meditate on for some time. He looked at Moline with a dazed expression on his face, then gave a minute nod.

  “Good enough,” Moline said.

  Weller had left his truck at home and come with me that night. As soon as the two of us were in my car, he said mildly, “I didn’t really see no need of them doing that, Hog. Especially not with this job coming up.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Don’t this bunch take the cake?” he asked with a long sigh.

  I glanced over toward the old man. He looked tired and defeated. “Why don’t you pull out of this mess?” I asked impulsively. “You don’t need the aggravation.”

  “No, I don’t. But I’m in the same fix you’re in. I need the money, and I need it bad.”

  I had a couple of days of anxiety afterward. The last thing in the world I needed was to be pulled in as a material witness or maybe even a defendant in a senseless assault case. But we never heard a word of the matter. Apparently Durrell had taken Moline’s ultimatum seriously and kept quiet. And to the best of my knowledge, he never came back around the Strip.

  Twenty-five

  Then things got even more complicated. It began with a lot of unwanted publicity. Danny Boy Sheffield’s dramatic departure from this earth three months back had inspired a slick Austin magazine to do a big article on southern professional criminals that mentioned several of the Gold Dust regulars. A companion piece was a short profile on Curtis Blanchard in which he was called “Organized crime’s most resolute foe in the South.” The articles were in the January issue, which hit the stands with a fair amount of fanfare in mid-December. Its appearance actually rated a small spot on the evening news shows of a couple of the larger TV stations in Texas and Mississippi—an interesting case of publicity getting publicity. This was the catalyst for a series of three lengthy pieces on the so-called Dixie Mafia that appeared in the Dallas Times Herald just after the first of the year. While the articles themselves were reasonably accurate, their implications were lurid in the extreme. The impression one came away with was of a vast, multilayered criminal cabal grown so large that it was in danger of completely undermining the civic order of a half dozen southern states. Once again, Curtis Blanchard was covered extensively, and the concluding piece named three nightclubs that were supposed to be the epicenters of the conspiracy: the Roundabout Club in Houston, the Fan Tan in Dallas, and Sam Lodke’s Gold Dust Lounge in Biloxi, Mississippi.

  All this sudden notoriety brought the screwballs out of the woodwork, and several of them headed our way. One was a rich timber heir from deep East Texas named Davis Martin. He was a plump young toad who cruised over to Biloxi in a huge black Cadillac Fleetwood and spent a lot of time at the Gold Dust trying to look tough. He failed miserably, but was allowed to hang around for a few days because of his high entertainment value. I put his age at about twenty-five years, a time span in which he’d apparently learned nothing. One night he announced earnestly, “I want to be a character, you know? I mean, I really think I have what it takes.”

  Freddie Arps looked across the table, and said to me, “Hog, why don’t you go back there to the office and get him an application blank.” Then he turned to Martin. “We ain’t got any openings right now, but we’ll be happy to call you if anything turns up. Would you be able to furnish your own guns?”

  The kid looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then nodded enthusiastically.

  When Jasper learned that the boy was carrying about $3,000 cash on him, he turned him around in a poker game and then sent him back home for more.

  An ethereally beautiful young hippy girl showed up one night, said she’d read the series, and claimed that it had inspired her to come all the way down from Muncie to bring us peace. Slops Moline fed her, fucked her, gave her fifty bucks, and sped her on her way. A week later he came down with the clap. Then Bob Wallace called and told me that Perp Smoot was coming to town.

  Twenty-six

  Amid all this lunacy something good happened: Billy Jack Avalon solved the Billy Jack problem for us by himself. In the interval between Christmas and New Year’s I’d rented a small one-bedroom apartment. On a Saturday a few days after New Year’s, Nell and I put in an appearance at the Gold Dust. We stayed about an hour, made our excuses, and then went back to my place and passed a quiet evening together. Everybody understood our wanting to be alone. “Ahhh…young love,” Jasper said as we left.

  I took Nell home about two, then climbed in bed myself. I got up at ten the next morning and drove a few miles down the coast to a little truck stop café I’d found for a late breakfast. I’d been back home about an hour when the phone rang. It was Nell and she needed me out at the house.

  When I arrived the maid led me back to the kitchen where Nell and her aunt sat with Little Dolly at the breakfast table. The girl’s face had been pounded almost beyond recognition. Both eyes were blackened and swelled nearly shut, her lips were busted and swollen, and her nose had been bloodied.

  “My God,” I said with disgust.

  “That’s not all,” Nell said. “Look at this.”

  She pulled up Dolly’s sweater in back. “Please, Nell, don’t. ...” the girl began plaintively.

  “Settle down, hon,” Nell replied.

  The kid’s back was a mass of wide red welts that looked like the work of a heavy leather belt.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked.

  “I’m going to send her home to her folks up in Topeka,” Nell said. “I hoped you might have a few words with Billy Jack.”

  “Oh, I’ll be happy to talk to him,” I replied. “Count on it. And I think I ought to stay out here at the house tonight. Billy Jack’s a coward at heart, but if he were to get drunk or pilled-up he might decide to do something foolish.”

  “I agree,” Lurleen said. “We’d all feel better if you did.”

  That evening I tracked Weller down by phone at the Motherlode and told him what had happened. “I need you to help me put the fear of God into him,” I explained.

  “Well, I ain’t got a whole lot of sympathy in me,” he said. “But what little I got is for women like Dolly. She reminds me of my mama. My old daddy beat that poor woman for years.”

  “What finally happened?”

  “Don’t ask, Hog,” he said, his voice sounding old and tired. “It ain’t nothing I’m proud of.”

  “Then you’ll lend me a hand?” I asked.

  “Sure. I’ll see if I can phone him right now and set up a meeting on some pretext.”

  An hour later he called me back to tell me that he was supposed to meet Avalon at two o’clock the next afternoon at Lucy’s Place.

  Twenty-seven

  It was ten minutes after two when I walked into the café. As usual, Avalon was Buddha-like behind his dark shades. I eased into the booth bes
ide Weller. “Hi, boys,” I said.

  Weller nodded casually and turned his head to peer out the window. Avalon pulled a Winston from the pack lying on the table in front of him and fitted its filter tip between his soft, little-girl’s lips. “Say, Hog,” he began. “You see, me and Hard-head, we were talking kinda private here. Ya get it?”

  “I won’t take up much of your time, Billy Jack. It’s just that Nell asked me to have a word with you.”

  “Ah, that Nell,” he said, smirking and shaking his head. Given a fresh scent he was off on the chase with more secret inside knowledge. He held up the first two fingers of his right hand, twisted together. “Her daddy and the governor are just like that, ya know? Paving contracts. They both got blind interests in this big asphalt company that gets most of the state’s road contracts. Ya heard about that deal?”

  I shook my head.

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “But this big-wig state senator, see…He goes and buys this other asphalt company. Then he starts raising hell at the highway people about the bidding process ‘cause he’s head of the committee that oversees all the highways. Ya get it?”

  I shrugged. “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, all of a sudden he’s the one gettin’ most of the contracts, and daddy and the governor are hanging out in the cold. But you know what they did?”

  Without waiting for me to answer he babbled on. “They get together with the senator and merged the two companies through this Canadian outfit, and then the three of them, they’re gettin’ all the paving contracts together, and nobody’s the wiser. Ya get it?”

  “Yeah, I get it, Billy Jack,” I said. “But to tell you the truth, I really don’t give a shit.”

  He shook his fancy gold ID bracelet, then hoisted his gold Ronson and fired up his Winston. “I just thought ...” he began, and shrugged. I continued to stare at him, saying nothing. He started to fidget around, then said, “What’s the deal, Hog? I thought we were square. I mean the party and all...”

  “Little Dolly.”

  “Huh?”

  “You have hurt that poor girl for the last time. Nell is going to send her back up to Kansas to her parents, and you’re not going to object. Furthermore, you’re not going to try to contact her. Now or ever.”

  “Man, that’s bad form,” he protested. “You can’t just slide in and get between a man and his old lady like that—”

  I held up my hand for silence. “Billy Jack, hear me. I know that you’ve pulled off some gutsy moves in your time, and that you may have even killed some people. But don’t let it go to your head. Believe me when I tell you that you’re going to do this my way, or I’ll grind you up for sausage. Now what’s it going to be?”

  There was a short silence, and then Weller turned to stare pointedly at Avalon with his cold, dead eyes. All the time we’d been talking, he’d been gazing disinterestedly out the window. Avalon had glanced at him a couple of times, but both times the old man seemed to be paying us no attention. Now he said firmly, “Billy Jack, I think Hog’s right on this, and I’m convinced it would be in your best interests to do like he says.”

  That was the trump card. Avalon blanched and his hands began to tremble a little. He might not have had much in the way of brains, but he had an instinctive drift sense that had kept him alive so far. He nodded quickly. “Sure, Hardhead. I mean, I don’t want to…Well, you understand.”

  Weller smiled sympathetically but said nothing.

  “Yeah, I been thinking, anyway,” Avalon continued. “You know, about going down to Florida for a while. In a couple of days? I mean, I got a little business to take care of here first, but then ...”

  “I think that’s a fine idea,” I said.

  “And anyhow, the way I been lookin’ at it, a guy travels faster when he travels alone, right? I mean without having to drag some gal along and all ...”

  Weller and I both nodded. Now it was Avalon’s turn to look out the window. He gazed off into the blue so long I thought we’d lost him. “Paving contracts,” he finally muttered. “Asphalt. That’s the way it always is with guys like that. Now, you take that parking lot right across the street.” He stabbed a short, stumpy finger toward the glass. “It’s on state land, right? But you still got to pay to park there. ...” When his big, round, fat face swiveled back toward us, his all-knowing cherub’s smile had returned. “The governor and his buddies. Ya get it?”

  Twenty-eight

  Jasper picked Wayne “Junior” Connally as the eighth man over my objection. I didn’t really care, but it seemed like a reasonable thing as director of personnel for me to mount an occasional challenge just to make things look good. The logic I gave Sparks was simple: Junior was low-grade white trash and there’s no other way to put it. He came out of an extended north Alabama criminal clan that had seen a dozen of its members off to prison and two in the death house in the past fifty years alone. His father, Wayne Senior, had been a notorious Klansman and moon-shiner who was known to have participated over the years in several lynchings and killed at least five men before his career ended in a hail of bullets after a running gun battle that spanned three counties and involved over a hundred lawmen before it was finished.

  Junior himself vehemently loathed what he called “niggers, queers, gooks, kikes, dagos, mackerel-snappers, rich assholes, shysters, and cunt lawmen.” Plus just about anybody else that wasn’t poor, white, and redneck, and he didn’t really care for many of them either. He had an especially violent hatred for homosexuals of either sex, but the absolute pinnacle in his pantheon of hatred was reserved for those he referred to as “mother-fucking Krauts.” It seems that by some miracle his father’s younger brother had reached the age of eighteen without having accumulated enough felonies to disqualify himself for military service. Consequently he was drafted in 1943 and got killed the next year somewhere in the hedgerows of France, a misfortune for which Junior blamed the whole German nation, including anybody of German ancestry. I was never at ease around him. He was in his late thirties, rawboned and ugly, with a long, mean face and an unruly shock of sandy hair. Even Jasper was wary of him and wouldn’t have used him except that he was known to be rock steady in the clutch. We first hooked up with him at the Motherlode. He didn’t offer to shake hands with anybody, and when Sparks introduced him to Moline he examined the Charleston hood closely, but said nothing.

  The day after Junior’s appearance, Tom-Tom Reed finally hit town. He was better than six feet tall and inhumanly thin, with a curiously elongated, narrow head, narrow shoulders, and skinny hips. He was just out of the federal narcotics hospital up in Lexington where he’d reputedly been cured of a long-term amphetamine habit. According to Weller, Reed had been using speed heavily for more than twenty years. “He used to look normal,” the old man told me. “But I guess he’s done so much of that shit that it shrunk his bones up sideways or something.”

  Shrunken bones or no, he was an intelligent man who used good grammar and had excellent manners. His sheet listed two felony convictions, one for armed robbery, the other for safe burglary. He was also suspected of killing confederates on a couple of occasions, and was reputed to be volatile and extremely dangerous when on crystal meth, his current drug of choice.

  That day we had a brief meeting at Jasper’s apartment.

  “When’s it going down?” Junior Connally asked.

  “Two weeks,” Sparks said.

  “Jesus! Why so long?”

  “We got some special stuff planned for that night to get as many of those people out of there as possible. What’s the big deal? Are you getting short?”

  “Well, shit, Jasper! Of course I’m short. I just fell out of the fucking joint a month ago.”

  I knew that Junior had been jammed up in Parchman for three years on a state firearms beef, and he hadn’t had much time to “earn” any real money, as he so quaintly put it.

  “I can front you a few hundred,” Sparks said.

  “I need it bad, man.”


  “Have you got the info on the safes yet?” Tom-Tom asked.

  “Tomorrow,” Jasper replied. “My contact promised to have that by tomorrow evening. Now, over the next few days I want everybody to go out there and familiarize yourselves with the location. Each of us needs to know how to get in and out, where the gates are, and so forth. Don’t go in a big convoy or nothing like that. I mean, we don’t want to attract attention to ourselves, but I want everybody to be able to get out there and back if something should go wrong. Okay?”

  We all nodded.

  “Now we need to meet at my place again in two days. We need to do a little work with the walkie-talkies. Anything else you can think of?”

  No one had any further questions. We broke up and I drove Weller back to his little room. As the old man climbed from the car, he said, “Now we’ve got more shit to worry about.”

  “You mean Junior, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Right. Tom-Tom’s solid even when he’s speeding. You just have to be careful not to rile him, and that’s not too hard to do. But there’s something wrong with that Junior Connally. It just ain’t natural for a man to hate as many different breeds of folks as he does. I realize there’s no way to get shut of him now, but I wish Jasper hadn’t brought him in.”

  “I feel the same way,” I said. “And he’s just looking for an excuse to come down on Moline because he’s Italian. Did you see how he was staring at him the whole time?”

  “Yeah, and Slops was staring right back at him.” He shook his head tiredly. “I’m too old for this shit, Hog.”

  “Nahhh ...” I said. “Me and you are the most solid guys in the deal.”

  He grinned. “That’s what worries me, since I don’t think either one of us got half sense.”

  “See ya, Hardhead,” I said with a laugh, and backed from the drive.