The Sweet and the Dead

by Milton T. Burton

  “A friend of Leland’s shot that buck on the power-line cut three years ago this past November,” Tull said, coming up beside me. “Killed it with a Weatherby 7 mag at almost four hundred yards.”

  Forty minutes later the three of us sat down to a memorable feast. After lunch Tull drifted outside while Bigelow and I lingered over our coffee. “So what’s on your mind?” he asked me. “Nell said you needed to talk to me.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I do, and Bob Wallace claims that I can trust you all the way,” I said. “He also says that Price Daniel would tell me the same thing if I asked him.”

  “I damn sure hope he would,” he said with a laugh. “Me and Price been friends for years. He’s a good man, uncommonly good for a politician. So let’s have it.”

  “I’m worried about my ass,” I said, and went on to relate the story of the two men Jasper killed in the Gold Dust parking lot.

  I also told him about my conversation with Blanchard that same night.

  “And Curtis just decided to let it all ride until after this business that you’re working on is over.…Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” I replied. “He told me we’d make the case after we finished our other business.”

  “That’s heavy,” he said, shaking his head with a concerned frown. “I’ve never heard of the cops putting a double murder on the back burner like that. Besides, I thought his original objective was to nail Jasper Sparks. Looks to me like this would do it.”

  “Of course it would, but he claims he won’t be satisfied without getting the whole bunch.”

  “What’s the legality on this?”

  “To me it seems questionable, but this is his state and he’s got powerful friends.” I grinned. “You’re one of them, if you haven’t noticed. But there’s something else that worries me just as much.”

  “Which is?”

  I told him about the highway patrol commission I was supposed to have. “I didn’t want the badge and the ID, of course,” I explained. “It would have been too dangerous to have them in my possession. But he didn’t offer to show them to me either. At the time I didn’t think anything about it, but now I’m beginning to wonder if they really exist.”

  “I don’t see what you’re getting at—”

  “Look at it this way. I’m an ex-deputy sheriff with what appears to be a clouded past—”

  “Yeah, but that’s all moonshine.”

  “Sure it is,” I replied. “But who besides me and you and Wallace and a couple of other people really understands that? I don’t have any real proof of it. And as soon as this Smoot guy’s show goes on the air, the good people of this state are going to assume that I’m a dirty cop who may have been involved in two murders in Dallas. Let’s suppose the trooper commission Blanchard claims he got me was never issued, and let’s suppose this business about the killing at the Gold Dust blows up in my face. I could find myself sitting in the dock beside Jasper and Freddie Arps with no way to prove what I’ve been doing.”

  “But Curtis ...” He fell silent and stared at me with sudden understanding.

  “Right,” I said. “At this moment I am dependent on his good intentions, if indeed they are good. This puts me completely at his mercy, and I don’t like the feeling.”

  “I don’t blame you.” He looked down at his coffee cup for a moment, and then played around absently with his spoon. “Okay,” he finally said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Find out about that commission, find out if it’s real. But don’t let Blanchard know you’ve been snooping. Can you do that?”

  “Sure. But it will take me a few days if you want him kept in the dark. I’ll have to feel around the capital, see which of my friends have the most dependable contacts in the bureaucracy.”

  “Good. Just don’t let Blanchard know you’re snooping.”

  “Don’t worry about that, but like I said it may take a while.”

  “Maybe it’s all my imagination,” I said, rubbing my fingers tiredly through my hair. “At least, I hope it is. For a lot of reasons.”

  “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t just phone me and asked me to check this business out. Why drive all the way up here?”

  I shook my head. “I know this all sounds a little crazy, and I figured I could be more persuasive in person, if it came to that.”

  He grinned a big grin and his hard little eyes gleamed. “And you weren’t sure if you could trust me or not, right? You wanted to feel me out a little more first.”

  I nodded sheepishly. “You’re right,” I admitted.

  “Hell, I don’t blame you,” he said with a boisterous laugh, and reached over to squeeze my shoulder reassuringly with his big hand. “Don’t you worry, though. I got enough faith in me for both of us. But I can’t see why you don’t just walk away from this mess and tell Curtis to stuff it.”

  I shook my head. “That wouldn’t do me any real good. For one thing, until he goes public with the charges against Jasper for the Gold Dust murders and names me as a witness instead of a participant, I won’t be in the clear regardless of whether or not I’m on the job. Besides, I’ve never weaseled out of a case in my life. I’ve been pulled off of a couple, but I never quit. It’s just not my style.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear you say that,” he said. “But now you’ve got me a little worried too. Aside from having taken a liking to you as a friend, my little girl seems pretty sold on you.”

  I didn’t pick up the bait, but an hour later on the way back to Greenville, he raised the subject again, obliquely. “Don’t let all these aristocratic trappings intimidate you, Manfred,” he said, looking over at me with a grin. “My ancestors were just as common as mud.”

  He went on to tell me how his great-grandfather had come to Mississippi out of nowhere in the 1820s and got rich in ways that make him blush to think about them today, and how, by the time of the Civil War, the family had built the plantation house and acquired a veneer of respectability and culture along with several thousand acres of prime cotton land. “But hell,” he said, “they really weren’t any worse than most of their neighbors. Their world was only a few years removed from the frontier, and they were all rough people under their silks and brocades. Look at Jim Bowie and Sam Houston, guys who were just as much at home sitting around a campfire eating roasted dog meat with the Cherokees as they were in a New Orleans ballroom.

  “Then during the War the Yankees came through and burned Greenville slap to the ground. They burned a lot of local plantations, too, and razed everything on our place except the main house. Why it survived, no one knows. After the Confederacy fell apart, the old wild blood and determination to prosper came boiling to the surface. My own granddaddy was tried for killing two Freedman’s Bureau carpetbaggers who were trying to foreclose on his place for back taxes. Tried and acquitted, I might add, because a couple of key witnesses disappeared. My point being—”

  “That I don’t need to worry about being accepted by the family if Nell and I were to decide to get married,” I said, interrupting him.

  “Exactly. And don’t worry that I’m looking for a son-in-law to run my businesses after I’m gone. I’m quite content that my little girl can handle things. Mostly ...” Here he fell silent for a few moments and his voice was softer when he resumed speaking. “Mostly, I just want her to have what me and her mother had.”

  “Nell told me her mother was dead, but that’s all she said.”

  “There’s nothing else to say, really. Cancer. Five years ago.” He shook his head. “She was gone almost before we knew it. Ninety-one days from diagnosis to funeral. God, how I miss that woman.”

  Despite being a poor state, Mississippi has some of the best highways in the country, black and straight and velvet smooth. On one particularly long stretch south of Greenville he put the pedal to the floor and the car leaped forward like a blooded stallion with the bit in its teeth. About thirty seconds later the speedometer’s needle sank out of sight. How fast we were going, I
have no idea, but it was faster than I’d ridden in a car in my life. I looked over at my companion. He was relaxed, easy, a big confident man completely at home in his world, dressed as he was in his khaki and red flannel with his Tyrolean hat pulled low over his eyes. It was impossible not to like him as he skillfully guided the big Chrysler down the road while it ate up the miles.

  Thirty-six

  The next day we made the long drive back to Biloxi. That evening Smoot preached to a packed house at the high school gym and then left immediately for Texas to edit his material for his show, which was to air two nights later in Dallas. According to people who were there, his sermon was an equal mixture of oldfashioned hellfire evangelism and anticrime hysteria.

  The next morning I decided I’d had enough of both the Gold Dust scene and Smoot’s foolishness for a while, to say nothing of Curtis Blanchard and his manipulations. I called my charter boat captain and went fishing. I didn’t catch anything worth writing home about, but I had a good, relaxing day. We docked about five that afternoon, and after I’d showered and dressed, I picked Nell up and we headed for Karl’s Grotto.

  After supper, we drove around awhile, then took a walk on the beach. Then I took her home and we kissed good night on the porch.

  “You’re coming over to watch Smoot’s broadcast tomorrow night, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Sure, I suppose so. But I feel like I’m wearing out my welcome.”

  “Nonsense. It’s airing at eight on cable. Come about six for supper.”

  “But ...” I protested.

  “Aunt Lurleen’s orders.”

  “This broadcast is probably going to make me look pretty bad—” I began.

  “Auntie is the world’s champion at seeing things the way she wants to see them. She’s sold on you, so if you walked in the house with Smoot’s head in a bucket she’d think it was cute. Be on time.”

  The next evening Nell popped up a big bowl of popcorn and the three of us installed ourselves in front of Lurleen’s new Zenith color TV. The show began with FBI wanted flyers on a number of notorious criminals, several of whom had nothing to do with Biloxi or its underworld. Then the scene cut to shots of the various clubs along the Strip interspersed with shots of dead bodies, bombed cars, and peeled safes. It was typical television journalism—urgent and quasihysterical, with breathy narrative voice-overs by Smoot designed to leave the viewer feeling that American civilization was on the verge of utter collapse, and that the nefarious Dixie Mafia was at the root of it all.

  Jasper Sparks came across as an arrogant fool in the segment of his interview that was aired. He claimed that after his last short trip to prison he’d turned his life around and now made his living as a gambler rather than a highjacker.

  “And where do you gamble, Mr. Sparks?” Smoot asked.

  “Well, Vegas, of course. And you know how it is.…Here and there.”

  “But isn’t it true that gambling is illegal everywhere in this country except Nevada? I thought you said you’d reformed and quit crime.”

  “So what’s the big deal about a little gambling? And I also go down to Guatemala a lot.”

  “Really?” Smoot asked with interest.

  “Yeah. Their government sponsors junkets to attract American gamblers. That kind of thing ...”

  “Brilliant,” I muttered under my breath.

  “What?” Nell asked.

  “He just admitted to a felony on television,” I said. “He doesn’t even have a passport.”

  “That’s Jasper,” she said with a grin.

  Smoot savaged me too, and stopped just short of libel. Twice they repeated the footage of Weller and me leaving the Gold Dust while the voice-over talked about my so-called legal problems in Dallas. Like most TV journalism, it left an unspoken question hanging in the air: if I was a respectable retired lawman, what was I doing so far from home associating with such notorious figures?

  But the centerpiece of the show was Curtis Blanchard. Smoot was very careful to let his audience know that it was the only interview the inspector had ever given to the press. Blanchard was suitably magisterial as he described the grave threat posed to society by such criminal combines as the one currently operating in Mississippi. Notably absent from the program was any reference to Sam Lodke or any of his three clubs. It was like having a show about Christmas that failed to mention Santa Claus.

  The surprise guest of the evening turned out to be Billy Jack Avalon. Smoot talked with him in the federal holding tank of the Jackson jail where he was installed Buddah-like behind his wraparound shades, his smarmy smile plastered once more on his fat face. As might be expected, he had the news behind the news. Twice he tried to sidetrack the discussion off into paving contracts, sweetheart real-estate deals, and other examples of official hanky-panky, but both times Smoot managed to steer him gently back onto the subject of organized crime. Without actually ratting anybody out by name, he painted a lurid picture of the mythical Dixie Mafia, an outfit he claimed to have been a high-level member of at one time. He also left viewers with the impression that while he and his criminal cohorts might have viewed other policemen with some measure of contempt, it was only with the utmost fear and trembling that they dared to even utter the name of Inspector Curtis Blanchard of the Mississippi State Police. Then near the end of the segment he launched off once again despite Smoot’s efforts to dissuade him. The director then did a slow fade-out as Billy Jack rattled on and on and on, giving everybody the secret, inside lowdown on everything.

  “I wonder what Billy Jack is getting out of that,” Nell said.

  “Something, you can be sure,” I said.

  Avalon had been a surprise, but the real shock of the evening was an announcement by Smoot himself in a short segment tacked onto the end of the program. After obtaining special permission from his superiors, Inspector Curtis Blanchard had signed on to Smoot’s new nationwide organization, Christians for a Crime-Free America.

  Thirty-seven

  Lardass?” I asked in disbelief. “He’s going to replace Culpepper with Lardass?”

  Two days earlier Bobby Dwayne Culpepper had unexpectedly pulled out of the job without giving anybody any real explanation, only saying that he had better things to do. I’d tried to talk to Jasper about a solid substitute, but at the time he was too coked up to be interested in the subject. Now this.

  “That’s what he told me,” Weller replied. “Gonna make him wear a mask and everything. To tell you the truth I don’t see no whole lot of sense in making Lardass wear no mask. It ain’t like he’s just gonna be able to take it off afterwards and disappear into a crowd.”

  “Shit,” I said in exasperation.

  “Hog, I think the time has come for me and you to have that talk with Jasper. Otherwise I’m afraid this job’s liable to clabber up on us real bad. For one thing, he’s got to get off that damn toot he’s doing all the time.”

  “I’ll be behind you like I promised,” I told the old man.

  “Good enough.”

  That night we managed to maneuver Jasper over to a table where we could talk to him by ourselves. All we could do was reason with him or take him out and kill him; there was no in-between. What the average citizen never realizes about criminal psychopaths like Jasper is that they are so lacking in conscience and remorse as to almost constitute a different species that coinhabits the planet with us. They do not react as we do; they do not have the same motivations that we have; and so far as emotions go, they are relatively dead and capable of little beyond rage and fear. Like every other segment of the population, they run the gamut from utter cowards to the completely fearless. And no one who knew him would ever call Jasper Sparks a coward. So all we could do was have a quiet, fatherly talk with him and hope that he could see the wisdom of our viewpoint.

  “Me and Hog are concerned about this score,” Weller told him.

  “Ahhh, don’t be, Hardhead. It’s going to go down like a military operation,” he bragged. “Timing and organizatio
n. That’s the key.”

  “Organization my ass,” Weller said bluntly. “I ain’t never heard of no military outfit yet where half of ‘em showed up late and the other half stayed fucked up on dope all the time. Ain’t nobody but me and Hog taking this thing serious enough.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about it. It’ll all fall into place. What we need is—”

  “What we need,” the old man said, interrupting him, “is a solid crew and a planner who ain’t suckin’ every nickel he gets his hands on straight up his damned nose. Jasper, to tell you the truth, if I didn’t need this money so bad I’d be long gone. Now if you want this deal to go down right you better get off that damn stuff and put a little backbone into things. I’ll back you up if you want me to, but what in hell are we going to do if…?” His voice trailed off and he snorted in disgust.

  “I think Hardhead is giving you some good advice here, Jasper,” I said firmly. “We have to get our shit together and quit fooling around.”

  “I’ll take care of it, Hog. I promise.”

  “One other thing,” Weller said. “If you don’t mind to listen to me just a minute longer ...”

  “Hell no,” Sparks said. “Go ahead.”

  “Jasper, you’re a fool to be doing what you’re doing. Your family’s got money and connections. You could pull up from this business and make a good living a whole lot easier. I’m just saying this because I feel like I ought to. It don’t make much difference to me one way or another how you live your life, but I grew up too poor not to hate waste, and a man with your talents is wasting himself.”

  “Aw, man…I appreciate the advice, but this is the way I like it.”

  “Okay, but you need to remember one thing. You ain’t done but two short jolts. When you hear that iron door roll shut and you’re staring down into twenty years or more of hard time, then you may think different. Now, that’s all I got to say.”

  A few minutes later when Sparks went to the bar to get another drink, Weller turned to me, and said, “Hog, the people on this job are all supposed to be the kingpin highjackers in this whole part of the country. If they are, I don’t know what the world’s coming to.”