The Sweet and the Dead

by Milton T. Burton

  Instead of a folder, the clippings on the state police turned out to be housed in two file boxes, each of which was about four inches thick. Miss Harper directed me to a roomy worktable in the far corner of the room where I spread the clippings out and began the laborious task of picking through them for what I needed. By three o’clock I had three pages of notes in a long legal pad, and my eyes were beginning to burn. I’d just put down my pen and stretched luxuriously when she appeared at my elbow. “If you could tell me exactly what you’re looking for I might be able to help,” she said.

  “Ma’am, I’m not really sure myself,” I said, expecting my answer to annoy her. Instead it earned me a sympathetic nod.

  “I understand,” she said. “The same thing happens to me from time to time. You think you see a pattern in a given subject, and ...” She broke off and smiled. She had a very nice smile, although I doubt she used it very often.

  “Exactly,” I said. At that moment, for no logical reason at all, I decided to trust the woman. “The pattern I keep seeing is a guy named Curtis Blanchard. Ever heard of him?”

  “Of course,” she replied tersely. “I suppose that everybody in Mississippi has, but I knew him back when he was a boy. He grew up here in Jackson and used to come in the library a lot. What about him?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said, waving my hand aimlessly at the stack of clippings on the table. “It just seems that...”

  “That he gets an awful lot of publicity, for one thing. Am I correct?” she asked, a knowing expression on her face.

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s part of it.”

  “You’re a police officer yourself, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “That’s right, but I’m retired now. How did you know?”

  “You have that look about you. What’s your name, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Webern. Manfred Webern. I’m from Texas.”

  “Mila Harper,” she said, and gave me a handshake that was as brisk and no-nonsense as the lady herself. Then she glanced down at her watch. “I can take a break anytime I want,” she said. “Let’s have coffee down the block and I’ll tell you what I know about Inspector Blanchard.”

  Ten minutes later we were at the soda fountain of an ancient drugstore that must have dated from the turn of the century. Except for the kid behind the counter and an elderly pharmacist at the rear, we had the place to ourselves.

  We both took our coffee hot and black. When her cup was empty she put it down, and said, “Despite what those ninnies upstairs at the circulation desk may have told you I don’t sleep in a coffin in the basement. They keep me hidden from the public because I’m the old-fashioned sort of librarian. We’re out of style these days, but as Ty Cobb once said, public relations are greatly overrated, anyway.”

  When I stopped laughing, I said, “Anybody who quotes Ty Cobb must like baseball.”

  “I love baseball, but I don’t really like your friend Curtis Blanchard.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Why’s that.”

  “Privilege of age,” she said tartly. “I’m seventy-four years old, and I don’t need a reason. If I want to dislike somebody, I dislike ‘em.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, laughing again. “But there must have been something that set you off on him.”

  “Well, back when he was young he was a bit too slick and unctuous for my tastes. Then in the last few years he’s gotten to be a real publicity hound, as I mentioned. And he’s also been in too many shootouts to suit me. Despite what you see on television, it’s not natural for any one officer to be involved in that much gunplay.”

  The woman was plenty smart to have realized that. “You’re right,” I admitted with a nod. “That’s what I found out today from your clippings, and it bothers me too. I was on the Dallas County Sheriff’s force for seventeen years and I was only in two shooting situations. And I headed the department’s organized crime unit the last ten years.”

  “I’m a flaming liberal,” she announced. “I suppose you’re very conservative. Most policemen are.”

  I shook my head and smiled at her. “Ma’am, you’d have to hunt long and hard to find a man who cares less about politics than I do. To tell you the truth I don’t really trust either party.”

  “That’s probably wise of you, but the reason I brought it up is that Curtis Blanchard is very political. Yet he has no discernible position on anything. You take the civil rights turmoil back in the ‘60s. To this day nobody knows what his feelings on racial equality really are. For all anybody can prove, he could have been up there marching with Dr. King. Or he could have been an out-and-out Klansman. He managed to avoid annoying either side. Don’t you know that took some fast footwork?”

  “I didn’t realize that,” I said, “but it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Why are you interested in him now?” she asked, signaling the soda jerk for more coffee. “Are you involved with him at the moment in some way?”

  “I hate to seem rude,” I told her gently, “but I really can’t say.”

  She nodded. “Then it’s some sort of covert police operation, and I don’t want to know any more about it. But you better be careful, young man. He was a sneaky little son-of-a-bitch back when he was a boy coming in my library, and I don’t believe he’s changed one bit since then.”

  Thirty-three

  It was almost nine o’clock that evening when I got back to Biloxi. Aunt Lurleen was already in bed, but Nell had a late supper of cold roast chicken and potato salad waiting for us in the kitchen. By mutual agreement we were seeing each other only out at the house while Smoot was in town. Neither she nor her aunt needed the publicity that would come from her being caught on camera with me in public.

  On my way home I decided to swing by the Gold Dust for a few minutes. It was almost midnight, and Weller was alone in the corner booth. “Hello, Hog,” he said morosely. “I guess you heard the news.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been out of town all day.”

  “Jasper let that Smoot fellow interview him. Right here at this very table, about four o’clock this afternoon.”

  “You’re joking, I hope.”

  “I only wish I was.”

  “But why?” I asked.

  “Shit, why do you think? It was because Jasper loves the attention. He thrives on it.”

  It was bad, but there was little we could do with Jasper beyond reasoning with him. Neither threats nor any amount of hell-raising on our part would have any effect.

  “This is not good, Weller,” I said, shaking my head. “We just don’t need this with the job coming up.”

  “Yeah. Everybody but me and you and him left town, and I’ve been dodging them.”

  “Me too,” I said. “What did he say?”

  “Nothing, really. He did mention that there ain’t no such thing as the Dixie Mafia. ...”

  “Well, he was right about that,” I said.

  “Sure, but it was his attitude that came across bad.”

  “Arrogant?” I asked.

  He gave me a morose nod. “Cocky as hell,” he said. “You know how he can get sometimes.…Doing that thing with his head and all that shit.”

  Sparks had the annoying mannerism of weaving his head from side to side when he made his points during a conversation, especially when he was half-drunk or coked up. He was so admired by the younger hoods and wannabes who occasionally drifted into the Gold Dust that several of them had developed the habit too. Sometimes it made me feel like I was in a room full of randomly fired tuning forks.

  “I expect Smoot to press the issue about Danny Sheffield if he finds me,” I said. “I may kick his butt if he tries.”

  Weller grinned. “I’d like to do more than kick his ass, but I can’t even afford to do that much. Not with my record. If he gets after me I’ll be like a jackass in a hailstorm. I’ll just have to hunker down and take it.”

  “We probably ought not to be out in public now,” I said.

  Weller shook his he
ad. “I think we’re pretty safe at night. This evening he was supposed to be speaking to the Chamber of Commerce, and tomorrow night he’s preaching.”

  “What!? Where?”

  “His outfit rented one of the high school gyms. Didn’t you get one of them flyers?”

  I shook my head. “What flyers?”

  “The ones announcing his sermon. Those two Bible guys that come with him have been going all over town handing ‘em out and sticking ‘em on windshields. It’s shaping up as the big event of the season. By the way, could you run me home? I came with another guy, but he picked up some girl and left about an hour ago. I was about to call a cab.”

  “Sure, come on,” I said. “No need to waste money on a cab.”

  Weller was wrong; we weren’t safe. Smoot might have been speaking to the assembled fools of Biloxi, but he’d had one of his camera crews stake out the Gold Dust, and they caught us coming out the door a few minute later. In the glare of the TV lights we were helpless. We simply ignored them and walked to my car with the cameraman following along behind. Just as I was about to slide behind the wheel an obnoxious but attractive young woman with a quacky nasal voice stuck a microphone in my face and asked, “Mr. Webern, could you tell us why you are here in Biloxi associating with known Dixie Mafia figures?”

  I gave her my warmest smile, and said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  She tried to ask something else, but I climbed into the car and slammed the door in her face before she could get a another word out.

  “Damn it all!” Weller growled.

  “Don’t worry about it, Hardhead.”

  The old man was still muttering imprecations as I drove off down the street.

  Thirty-four

  I’d begun to feel utterly alone on the operation, as though I was fumbling my way in the dark without enough information, and I had little confidence in what I did know. There were things I needed to talk to Nell about, and since my last conversation with Bob Wallace an idea had been growing in the back of my mind.

  During lunch the next day, Aunt Lurleen had the chatters. Afterward the three of us went into the library for a drop of sherry, as she called it, and she soon dozed off in her big thronelike wing chair. I motioned Nell out into the hall.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “I feel like I should bring up this business about me and Danny Sheffield,” I said.

  She gave me an offhand shrug and drained her glass. “It’s no big deal, Manfred.”

  “That I might have murdered somebody? That’s no big deal to you?”

  “No, because I don’t believe it for a minute.”

  “Don’t you ever wonder why I spend so much time with Jasper Sparks and the rest of those guys?”

  She shook her head, but her eyes evaded mine. “It’s your affair,” she muttered.

  “And you’re not curious?”

  Instead of answering she tried to move away. I took her by the arm and gently stopped her. “Aren’t you curious?” I repeated.

  She shook her head again, but this time she met my gaze. Then she reached up and laid her hand softly on my cheek. “You’re an easy man to trust,” she said softly. “But you have a hard time believing that you’re trusted. Please just drop the subject, and don’t make things any harder on yourself than you already have.”

  I stared at her thoughtfully for a few moments, then gave her a faint nod. “Okay,” I said. “But if you really trust me, let’s go back up to Greenville tomorrow.”

  She was puzzled. “Sure,” she said. “But why?”

  “I want to talk to your dad.”

  After Nell made a quick phone call to her father, we decided not to wait until the next day. “Are you sure it’s all right with him?” I asked.

  “I didn’t ask if it was all right,” she said with an impish grin. “I just told him we were coming.”

  “Yeah, but what if he has some business planned or something? I hate to impose.”

  “Even if he had anything planned, which he didn’t, he’ll be glad to cancel it to talk to you. Trust me on this.”

  Bowing to her superior wisdom on the subject of Daddy, I called and left word for Jasper at the Gold Dust that I was taking Nell home for a couple of days to see her family. An hour later we were on the road.

  Thirty-five

  Seven hours later we pulled into Greenville in time for a late supper of cold baked ham and candied sweet potatos. Bigelow seemed happy to see us. “Why don’t you and I go down to my hunting lodge tomorrow and have our little chat there?” he suggested after he hugged Nell and shook hands with me.

  I agreed, and an hour and a half later I drifted gratefully off to sleep in an ancient four-poster bed right out of Gone with the Wind. I half woke a couple of times in the night to the sound of a grandfather clock chiming away somewhere in the remote reaches of the old house, and once I heard the deep-throated voice a hound baying far off in the night.

  The next morning I found Bigelow in the kitchen, dressed in a pair of tan khakis, a red checked flannel shirt, and a shapeless old hunting coat. On his head he wore a snappy Tyrolean hat, and his feet were encased in a pair of lace-up lineman’s boots that came up to the knee. We had a light breakfast of toast and coffee, then headed out to the old carriage house that served as a garage for a half dozen vehicles, including two Cadillacs and a Ford pickup. “My pride and joy,” he said, pointing to the far side of the building where a coal black 1961 Chrysler 300 G convertible sat. “Ever seen one?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Fast cars.”

  “Yeah. It’s got a four-thirteen engine with two Holley four-barrels on the long ram manifolds. I’ve had this one dyno-tuned down in New Orleans, and it puts out damn near five hundred horsepower.”

  I got into the leather bucket seat on the passenger’s side and fastened my seatbelt snugly, sensing that I was in for a ride. He turned the key, and the engine cranked with a throaty burble. After he’d let it warm up a couple of minutes, we were on our way.

  “Chrysler spent a lot of money engineering the suspension on these things,” he said. “You know who Stirling Moss is don’t you?”

  “Yeah. The English racing driver.”

  “Right. Probably the finest Gran Prix driver since Nuvolari. Anyhow, back in ‘61, Moss took one of these things around the Riverside Road race course track only two-tenths of a second slower than the fastest Ferrari they made that year. And that’s from a full-sized, forty-seven-hundred-pound sedan.”

  He was a smooth and attentive driver, and unlike Jasper, he wasn’t operating with a head full of cocaine. I found myself relaxing in spite of his cruising between eighty and a hundred.

  Greenville lies eighty-five miles north of Vicksburg on the Mississippi River. The Yazoo flows southwestward to join the Mississippi just north of Vicksburg, the two rivers forming a rough V. That morning we struck out to the southeast from Greenville across that V through a land that was dark, alluvial, and fertile beyond imagining.

  An hour and a half later we stopped at a rambling country store and meat market outside Yazoo City and bought four big ribeyes. “This guy has the best steaks in Mississippi,” he said as we climbed back in the car. “He buys heavy sides of beef, then ages them a month in his own cooler.”

  About five miles out of town we turned off onto a graveled road, and then after another mile onto a well-kept forest trail. “This is where my property starts,” Bigelow said. “Forty-two hundred acres of prime woods, some of the best hunting grounds in the state. The big timber companies have been after me for years to let them in here, but I won’t do it. I don’t need the money, and I like it the way it is.”

  The road wound its way through a dense forest until we crossed an open space about thirty yards wide. “Power-line cut,” he said, pointing at the high-tension lines on their great towers that stretched off toward the horizon. “You can see forever down the thing. It runs gunbarrel-straight for fourteen miles through this bottom. By the w
ay, do you deer hunt?”

  “Not since I was a kid,” I said.

  “You’ll have to come up this next fall for a few days and hunt with us. All my friends make it.”

  “Does that include Curtis Blanchard?” I asked.

  “Sure. He never misses a season.”

  The lodge was a big rambling building of weathered barn planks with a tin roof and a long, deep porch across the front. About thirty yards away sat a smaller structure made of the same materials.

  “That’s the caretaker’s house,” Bigelow told me. “He’s a guy named Tull Two-Men. Tull’s Chickasaw.” He grinned at me. “He worked in the accounting department of one of the big oil companies for several years, but he’s one of those people who just don’t thrive in a corporate environment. Man’s a whole lot happier out here. I pay him a pretty decent salary, and he and his wife take good care of the place for me.”

  We drove around back and went in through the kitchen. Suddenly, soundlessly, a huge raven-haired man about my age, dressed in faded jeans and a flannel shirt, appeared in our midst. After introductions, he turned out to be anything but the stereotyped silent Indian. Instead, he chatted amiably while he loaded the big percolator that sat on the cabinet.

  “Where’s Emily?” Bigelow asked, squatting down to light the small propane heater that sat in one corner. “I brought her a steak.”

  “She went into town to pick up a few things,” Tull replied. “Don’t worry. I’ll cook it for her supper.”

  “Fine, fine…Tell her I’m sorry I missed her. Why don’t you fry us up some taters while I get the grill going outside?”

  While Bigelow and Tull busied around in the kitchen I wandered into the main room of the lodge. It was a large rectangular chamber with a floor of varnished pine, walls of unfinished planking, and a huge fireplace. The furniture was Early Rummage Sale. A battered oak sideboard in one corner served as a bar, and several mounted deer heads hung on the walls. The one in the place of honor over the fireplace was truly monstrous, with a rack that must have spanned thirty inches.