The Sweet and the Dead

by Milton T. Burton

  “Of course I did, and so did Bob Wallace. That’s the way it always is.”

  “I wonder how he managed it with those other cops involved.”

  “If you’d seen the young guys he had out there you’d understand. I’m sure they were all handpicked men he knew he could count on. All bright-eyed and very eager to advance their careers.”

  “I know the type,” she replied with a nod. “I saw plenty of them when I was prosecuting.”

  “Think about it a minute, Nell,” I said. “If he’d kill seven men just for publicity, what’s his limit? Ten? Fifty? Six million? Does he even have a limit? To say nothing of using his friends the way he did.”

  “I know that my father feels terribly betrayed.”

  “Hell, so does Wallace. That’s why I’m done with police work. It’s getting to where I can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, and I’m afraid I’m becoming one of the bad guys.”

  She laughed softly. “I don’t think there’s much chance of that. But what are you and Daddy going to do about Curtis?”

  “What makes you think we’re going to do anything?”

  “I’m my father’s daughter, Manfred,” she said coldly.

  “Then maybe you better ask him,” I replied with a grin she couldn’t see in the darkness.

  “Ha!” she said, and punched me in the ribs.

  We sat and sipped our brandy in silence for a few minutes. “I’m about ready to go back home to Greenville,” she said. “Are you coming with me?”

  “Of course. That is, unless you want to run me off.”

  “No chance of that. Let’s take off first thing in the morning.”

  I shook my head. “I have to meet a guy late tomorrow afternoon. How about the next day?”

  “Fine. But who’re you meeting?”

  “Weller.”

  “Oh really?” she asked. “Why do you need to see him?”

  “I’ve still got one loose end to tie up.”

  Forty-eight

  The old man was already at Mattie’s Ballroom when I arrived the next evening, sitting in a booth near the rear with a Budweiser longneck in front of him.

  Mattie’s was a little fancier than most of the other clubs on the Strip, and it lacked the gambling room in back. It was an old joint, one that went back to the early ‘40s, and in its heyday it had featured the likes of Tommy Dorsey and Harry James. These days it was mostly given over to country and western bands, though on one Saturday night of the month a swing band played, and on those occasions it attracted good dancers from all over the area.

  I asked the bartender for a bottle of Wild Turkey and two glasses, then I strolled over to his table. Pushing his beer aside, I said, “We’re both going to want something stronger than that stuff before I get through telling you what I’ve got to tell.”

  “Okay,” he said, his face showing mild puzzlement.

  I sat down and poured us both a shot of the bourbon. “Well, have you figured it out?” I asked, swirling my whiskey around in my glass.

  “I ain’t got nothing figured out,” he said. “Except that you must have been undercover from the beginning, and that you saved my ass. But I don’t know why. If you know what happened our there that night, I sure wish you’d tell me about it.”

  “Curtis Blanchard was behind the whole thing,” I said.

  “You mean the ambush?”

  “Not just that, but the whole caper. He’s the one who steered it from the very beginning.”

  “That don’t make no sense, Hog,” he said, shaking his head.

  “It does when you realize he wants to be governor of Mississippi.”

  The old man wasn’t slow. “Publicity!” he exclaimed. “He sets it up, then he ambushes it, and—”

  “Right you are.”

  “But how did he manage to do it?”

  “Through Sam Lodke. He’s had Sam in his pocket for at least a couple of years. You see, this whole caper started with Eula Dent. Eula never fooled around with men after she came to town because she and Sam had been lovers forever. Hell, he was her pimp when she was just a kid hooking up in Drewery Holler back when Sam was part of the original State Line mob. Eula was smart as a whip, and Sam convinced her to go to school and study business. Then while she was in college he came down to the coast and opened his first club. When she got her accounting license she followed him down here, and they’ve been pulling all kinds of foul shit ever since. After she got old man Giles’s account to do the carnival’s books, she told Sam about it. He happened to mention it to Blanchard, and right then a light went off in Blanchard’s head. You see, every so often Blanchard made Lodke throw somebody to the wolves.”

  “And he got the glory.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And the time was getting ripe for a really big publicity splash. Several people thought Jasper Sparks needed to go down, regardless. Bob Wallace was one of them, plus there were some pretty powerful political figures here in Mississippi who felt the same way. So when Sam mentioned that Giles was keeping all this untaxed money out there, Blanchard came up with the idea of dangling the job in front of Jasper’s nose like a cracklin’ in front of a hound. He knew Jasper would go for it, but if he was going to be able to know when the job was about to go down, then he needed a man who could get in deep with Sparks. He had a number of possibilities, including a couple of criminals he had some bad stuff on. But he preferred a cop. When he heard about my mythical troubles over the Danny Sheffield killing, he called Wallace, and unsuspectingly Bob talked me into it. Then I came down here and stepped right in the middle of all this mess.”

  “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “And he intended to get me killed that night too. Then he would have had Nell’s dad in a bind since she and I had been seeing one another. I mean, how would it have looked in the press if such a prominent man’s daughter was involved with one of Jasper Sparks’s running buddies?”

  For a moment he appeared mystified, then the wheels inside his head spun quickly and he nodded. “I get it. He wanted Mr. Bigelow’s money and connections behind his campaign, and he thought he could use your friendship with Nell to strong-arm the man into rolling over for him.”

  “That’s right. And there’s more. You remember me talking about Benny Weiss, my old partner on the Dallas Sheriff’s Department? Well, Blanchard was behind that too.”

  “What!? Why?”

  “Long story,” I said. “It all started with an old black bluesman named Texas Red. Danny Boy Sheffield had been pressuring Red to rerelease some of his own songs on a record deal, but the old man was scared shitless of him and didn’t want anything to do with such a scheme. Unknown to me, Benny had just turned Danny Boy as a snitch. How, I don’t know. He must have gotten something pretty heavy on him, although I have no idea what it was. So Benny went to Danny Boy to tell him to back off Red, and the two of them got to talking. It just happened that Danny was cranked up on speed and drinking both. His tongue got loose and he went to bragging, something he was prone to do even when he was straight. It seems he told Benny that he’d been helping some bigwig cop with political ambitions set guys up for the kill. At that point, Benny leaned on him pretty hard. Maybe even knocked him around a little, and Danny Boy dropped all his mud. Gave up the whole story about Blanchard and Lodke and what they’d been doing—”

  “Damn!” the old man said, interrupting me. “But why was Danny setting guys up? Was Blanchard paying him?”

  “Not that I know of. I’m more inclined to believe Danny Boy was settling old scores and eliminating unwanted competition. I think in the back of his mind Danny had a beef, real or imagined, against damn near everybody he’d ever mobbed out with. He was crazy as hell, a paranoid little fucker with a speed habit about as bad as Tom-Tom Reed’s. Anyhow, about six months later, after he’d snooped around enough to convince himself that the story was true, Benny broached Blanchard and gave him an ultimatum. Told him he either had to get out of police work or get blown out of the water. Bl
anchard agreed to retire, but then he called Lodke and explained the situation. Two weeks later Benny and Danny Boy were both dead.”

  “If that don’t beat all ...”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “And you can see why this was another reason Blanchard wanted me to get killed that night. He could never be completely certain that Benny hadn’t dropped enough hints that I might figure out the whole story sometime in the future.”

  “How in the name of God did you find all this out?” he asked.

  “From Sam Lodke. Yesterday. He had no choice, the way I put it to him.”

  “Who actually did the hit, Hog?” he asked.

  I gave him an offhand shrug. “Who knows?”

  He regarded me skeptically for a few moments. “I guess you must have heard that a couple of kids found Bobby Culpepper’s body out in the bushes a few miles north of town yesterday afternoon. Somebody had put a bullet in his brain.”

  “Really?” I asked without interest. “Well, you know how it is with guys like Bobby Dwayne. Old grudges are liable to pop out of the woodwork any hour of the day or night. I wouldn’t worry too much about him if I were you.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” he said with a cold smile. “Never fear.” For a few moments he appeared lost in thought. He touched the flame of his battered old Zippo to the tip of a Lucky and stared off into nowhere. When he finally turned his head to look at me, his lifeless yellow eyes were spooky in the bar’s dim light. At last he spoke. “When I went out to do a job I always expected them to try to kill me in the interests of law and order, whatever in the hell they mean by that. That’s just a part of it. But to damn near get slaughtered just to help some son-of-a-bitch’s political career goes against my grain. I take it personal.”

  “Hell, so do I,” I said grimly. “Not only did he have my best friend killed but I know in my heart that he tried to set me up too. And Nell’s father takes some of this very personal as well. Once he found out that Nell was working for Blanchard, he realized that his little girl had been used too. Then he was fit to be tied, let me tell you.”

  “Hog, why did you do it?” he asked, suddenly changing the subject.

  “Do what?”

  “Get me out of there that night.”

  “I really don’t know for sure,” I said, laughing a little at myself and shaking my head at the memory. “I think part of it was the fact that you were serious about what we were doing. Those other guys, they’d come drag-assing in for a meeting thirty minutes late, all pilled up, and their attitude would be ‘Fuck, man, what’s the big deal?’ The one thing that drove me nuts during all my years of police work was what a piss-poor job most criminals did of crime. But you were different. You acted like you meant business, and you had sense enough not to believe your own press.”

  “Keep on,” he said with a wry smile. “I ain’t heard too many compliments in my life.”

  “And maybe, just maybe, it’s because I like you.”

  “Hell, I’ve always liked you too, Hog.”

  “Listen, Weller,” I said, leaning forward and looking at the old man earnestly, “you kept mentioning a bind that you were in for money. How bad is it?”

  “Pretty bad. If I can’t come up with seventy-five thousand in the next thirty days or so I don’t think I’ll be around much longer.”

  “I could get it for you in less than a week,” I said.

  “You’ve got that kind of money?” he asked in amazement.

  “I’ve got part of it myself, and I can get my hands on the rest.”

  “But why would you?”

  I shrugged. “Why not?”

  “What would I have to do for it?”

  I shook my head dismissively. “Nothing. Just take care of your debt or whatever it is that’s plaguing you, and then apply all your energies to any little personal problems you might have acquired along the way.”

  “Personal problems?” he asked with a puzzled frown.

  “Yeah. Like I said, we’ve all got personal problems. Me, you. Even Mr. Bigelow.”

  He understood then.

  “And that’s all,” I said. “Oh, I’d like to hope that you might quit after that. You’ve got your taverns to get by on, and it’s the smart thing to do. Take this opportunity as a gift from God or fate or whatever it is that you believe in, and hang it up.”

  It was a long time before he spoke again, but finally he nodded his head sadly and said, “Hog, you got no idea how good that sounds to me. Most of my adult life I ain’t had a night where I laid down to sleep without thinking I might wake up with gun barrels in my face.”

  “Then how about it?”

  “I don’t know. ...” He shook his head. “This particular personal problem we’re talking about would be pretty hard to get to, if you catch my drift.”

  I nodded and poured us both more bourbon. “Ever been deer hunting?” I asked.

  “Huh?” he asked, puzzled by the change of subject. “Sure, but that was back when I was younger. What’s that got to do with—?”

  “I haven’t been in a long time either, but I’m going this fall with Nell’s dad. He’s got a big place up in the Delta, better than four thousand acres of prime timber land in the Yazoo bottom. Most of his friends and business associates come up there at one time or another during the season. In fact, Curtis Blanchard never misses a November.”

  “Is that right?” he asked.

  “Indeed it is. And there’s a power-line cut on that place where you can see for miles. Last year some guy killed a fourteen-point buck at almost four hundred yards out of one of the deer stands on that cut. Of course he was using one of those fancy Weatherby Magnums.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s right,” I said, looking him right in the eyes. “But I imagine a man with a good Model 700 Remington could do just about as well.”

  “You’re on the money there,” he agreed with a nod. “You can’t beat one of them old Remingtons.”

  We sat and sipped our drinks and neither of us spoke for what must have been a full minute. Finally I broke the silence. “I’ll have the money for you in a couple of days. Okay?”

  He nodded. Enough had been said. We changed the subject and drank some more whiskey and talked on for another hour, mostly of old-time hoods we’d both known in days gone by, and the old-time cops who’d chased them. Then I paid the check and we walked out into the parking lot. It had been raining on and off all that day, and now a fine drizzle was falling. We shook hands, and the old man climbed in his pickup and drove slowly off while I stood and watched his taillights as they gradually dwindled into the misty darkness.