by Lauren Carr
“Libations?” Cameron said. “Was your father a bootlegger?”
The elderly lady lowered herself into a wing-backed chair across from the detective. Irving leapt off the arm of the sofa to jump into Dolly’s lap. His face filled with content, he curled up and purred while she petted him with both hands down the length of his body. Cameron recognized the chair Dolly was sitting in as the same chair in the picture.
“Bootlegger is such a derogatory term for what my father did,” she said. “He was one of the best libation makers of his time. Why, orders for his moonshine came from all over the eastern half of the country. Uncle Al used to say that Daddy had the Da Vinci touch. He was an artist, and his booze was the best there ever was.”
“How did you end up in Chester, West Virginia?” Cameron asked.
“Prohibition ended, and suddenly everyone was making booze. It wasn’t such a specialized profession anymore,” Dolly said with a frown. “By the nineteen fifties, Daddy was looking for another line of work. The race track was bringing in a lot of people looking for entertainment—especially men. So he bought a big old farmhouse outside of Newell and opened up a club. But it was a very private club. Extremely exclusive. The only way people could get in was by knowing a member who would vouch for them.”
“But alcohol was legal,” Cameron said. “What made this club so exclusive and private that—” She gasped. Eight girls when she was never married.
“Daddy named it Dolly after me,” the elderly woman said with pride.
“Your girls!” Cameron said. “They weren’t your daughters.”
“I never said they were my daughters,” Dolly said, “but they were like daughters to me. I cared very much about every one of my girls. Why, after Daddy passed away and I inherited Dolly’s—”
“You were a madam,” Cameron said.
“And a very good one.” With a scoff, she waved her hand. “But Dolly’s wasn’t like any run-of- the-mill bordello. We were special.”
“How?”
“It wasn’t just sex that brought the men to Dolly’s,” the elderly woman said. “Oh, if a man wanted sex, he could go to an alley across the river in East Liverpool or the East End and get it for a fraction of what we charged for an evening with one of my girls.” She shook her head. “At Dolly’s, men were paying for an experience that you could get no place else. My girls were the most beautiful ladies in the Ohio Valley. They were dancers and entertainers. Every evening, each one would give a performance on the stage in the lounge. Then, if she had a client, she would take him up to her room. The lounge served only the best in spirits. Some club members would come only to drink and sit by the fire in the drawing room.” She leaned over to whisper, “You would not believe some of the deals that got made and broken right there in my parlor.” Her giggle took on a naughty tone. “Even a few murder conspiracies.”
Cameron didn’t know whether to believe her or not. “Murder conspiracies? Really? Is that why one of your girls was murdered?”
Dolly turned serious. “I don’t know. No one has looked into her murder to confirm that.”
“Why not?”
“Because she was a dead hooker,” Dolly said, “and no one cares about a dead hooker.”
“Except maybe a young deputy?” Cameron asked in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Yes, there was a deputy who came to visit me one day,” Dolly said. “He had heard about Ava and had a lot of questions about her. He left here swearing that he would find out what happened to her.” She added in a solemn tone, “I never saw him again. He had a young son.”
“Mike Gardner,” Cameron said. “His son’s name was Hunter.”
“I guess he got too close to the truth,” Dolly said. “There are people who prefer that the past stays right there—in the past—especially when revelations of the truth about their dirty little secrets threaten their power grip.”
“What kind of secrets?” Cameron asked. “Whose power grip?”
Dolly patted the top of a stack of photo albums resting on the table in front of her. “It’s all there. Take it. I’m an old woman. My time here on earth is about to end. Then I will need to be answering for keeping the devil’s secrets. Maybe God will grant me mercy if I make things right for those I have hurt by doing so.”
“Was your girl killed because of the devil’s secrets?” Cameron asked.
“Do you know the Nulls?”
“No,” Cameron said.
“Russell Null runs the family business now,” Dolly said. “The landscaping business just outside of Newell. He’s on the board of county commissioners. Ava was with his younger brother, Virgil, when some maniac suffocated them with duct tape across their faces.”
“When did this happen? How long ago?”
“February thirteen, nineteen seventy-six,” Dolly said. “Friday the thirteenth. The police never really cared to investigate it. Ava was such a nice girl, and no one had a bad thing to say about Virgil. Sweet, sweet boy. It was his first date with Ava.”
Cameron dug her notepad out of her purse. “Ava. February thirteen, nineteen seventy-six. What was her last name?”
“Tucker. Her name was Ava Tucker.”
Chapter Eight
“Close your mouth, Josh. You’re attracting flies,” Cameron said after breaking the news to her husband about the kindly blue-haired lady across the street.
Staring out the living room window through the hedges that blocked his view of Dolly’s home, Joshua cleared his throat in search of his voice. As if seeing Dolly would make sense of it all, he leaned up closer to the window to peer at the red brick colonial. “I don’t believe it.” He turned back to his wife. “You heard her wrong.”
Cameron picked up the photo album resting on top of a tall stack that Dolly had given her, opened it, and showed him one of the pictures. “Al Capone was her Uncle Al,” she said. “She was born in Chicago in nineteen twenty-five.”
“That woman used to babysit me.” Joshua pointed out the window.
“Gee, did your grandmother know what she did before her retirement?” Cameron asked with a smile.
“I wonder if Tad knows.” Joshua answered his own question. “Tad knows everyone and everything. He has to have known.”
“If he did, then he would have known about Ava being a hooker, which would have explained the murder Mike was investigating. If that was the case, wouldn’t he have mentioned something about it by now? Did you know about Dolly’s?”
Scratching his head, Joshua plopped down into a chair. “I had heard about it.”
“She said it closed right after the murder in seventy-six,” Cameron said, “You would have been just a kid.”
“I had heard of a private club down by the race track where they had dancing girls who were practically naked,” he said. “I was told that it was like something you would see in the gangster movies with rich men in fancy suits flashing a lot of money and beautiful women. I thought it was made-up stuff of pubescent boys … until today.”
“What happened to change your mind?”
“I finally got Mike’s mother to admit that he was adopted,” Joshua said.
“And his birth mother was Ava Tucker,” she finished.
“Who told you that?”
“No one told me,” she said. “Have you forgotten that I’m a detective?” With a shake of her head, Cameron folded her arms under her breasts. “From what you and I have found out, Ava Tucker wasn’t a dancer, she was a prostitute—”
“And Mike Gardner’s mother.”
“And she was murdered.”
“That had to be the case Mike was looking into when he was killed. Ava Tucker’s murder at Dolly’s.” Still not believing it, Joshua turned to look over his shoulder at the house across the street. “We need to get that case file and have a talk with Dolly, the sweet little madam next door.”
“Dolly was insistent that there’s something in one of these albums that will help.” Cameron resumed leafing through the books. “I finally met the infamous Lorraine Winter today,” she added in a matter-of-fact tone.
“That woman scares the dickens out of me,” Joshua continued staring out the window.
“She reminds me of an aunt I had who didn’t like children,” she said, “especially me because I would let her know how much I didn’t like her back. The sound of Lorraine’s voice makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up on end the same way it did when I heard Aunt Vivian’s voice.”
“One of my earliest childhood memories is of that witch,” Joshua said. “My grandmother about tossed her off our front porch—literally.”
“What did she do?” Cameron set down the album and went over to ask him.
“I was maybe about six years old,” he recalled. “Lorraine had come over to the house to meet with Grandmomma to go over something for some church committee they were on—”
“Lorraine went to church?” Cameron asked. “She made it very clear at lunch today that she was an atheist.”
“That happened after her son Toby killed himself,” he muttered, “probably to get away from her. Lorraine is a nutcase. She was here meeting with Grandmomma and Toby came over after school. He was a teenager then. Well, when I went to tell her that he was here, she almost knocked me over running out. She was mad as a wet hen over something. Grabbed him by the ear and dragged him bodily out onto the porch and slapped him.” He paused. “That was the first time that I had ever seen anyone hit anyone. I must have screamed, or maybe it was Lorraine’s screaming at Toby that brought Grandmomma out onto the porch just in time to see Lorraine backhand him a second time. Well, Grandmomma weighed in like a giant momma bear, grabbed Lorraine by the bun that she always wore her hair in, and gave her what for.”
“Lorraine really knows how to make friends, huh?”
“She’s a very unhappy woman,” Joshua said with a shrug of his shoulders. “She’s been playing the victim card since I’ve known her. Though as a child, I only knew that she scared the dickens out of me. But then, I got to know her story. Her husband died of a massive heart attack when he was in his thirties—leaving her with a toddler to raise alone. Then, she got mad at Grandmomma about the fight and resigned from every charity board that Grandmomma was on. Then, more fights and arguments with more people in town. She got mad at the priest over something and left the Catholic Church. When Toby killed himself, she decided there was no God and that all of us was fools for believing there was a God who would let all of that happen to her.”
“Sounds more like she’s angry with God,” Cameron said, “not so much that she doesn’t believe in Him.”
“Didn’t you get angry with God when Nick was killed?” He watched her from over his shoulder while she paused to come up with the words to answer him.
“I don’t think I was so much mad at God as I was angry at whoever it was that took Nick from me and the lack of closure due to Nick’s killer never being caught. That’s the difference. Lorraine’s husband died of a heart attack. There’s no one to point to and blame. Toby killed himself … why did he kill himself?”
“He was in his early twenties,” Joshua said. “Imagine being told for twenty years that you’re a loser and you’re never going to amount to anything. After a while, you start to ask yourself why you bother.”
“Is that what Lorraine did?”
“Heard it myself.” He went back to peering out the window.
“Why did he kill himself at Raccoon Creek? People usually go someplace that has some significance to them to kill themselves. What was significant about Raccoon?”
“What wasn’t?” Joshua asked. “Kids around here either hang out at Tomlinson Run Park or Raccoon. Maybe that was where he had spent some happy times with his friends. He did have friends. I remember he was pretty tight with Virgil Null.”
Cameron grabbed his wrist. “Virgil Null? The same—”
“Just a minute, hon!” Seeing Tad drive past, Joshua rushed outside. Cameron was directly behind him when he jogged to the end of the driveway and up Rock Spring’s cobblestone street to the house next door to intercept Tad climbing out of his SUV.
In Chester, when neighbors refer to the next street up, they are speaking literally. From the shore of the Ohio River, the small town was built into the side of the mountain. Each road that crossed the face of the mountain rose up above the street beneath it. One of the oldest streets was Rock Springs Boulevard, which crossed the width of the mountain before wrapping uphill. Side streets that contained tiny homes, including the Gardner house, shot off of Rock Springs like tiny tree branches.
“What’s with the welcoming committee?” the doctor asked when he saw Joshua and Cameron jogging up the sidewalk to meet him in his driveway. “Should I be scared?”
“You’ve known Dolly Houseman your whole life, right?” Joshua asked.
A perplexed expression crossed his face when Tad nodded his head.
Folding his arms across his chest, Joshua asked, “Did you know she owned Dolly’s?”
“Dolly’s what?”
“The private bordello out by the race track,” Cameron said.
“That Dolly’s?” Tad asked with a gasp.
“That Dolly’s.” Joshua nodded his head.
Tad looked beyond them to the quiet red brick house across the road. “Are you telling me that our sweet little Dolly is the same Dolly who—”
“That’s what she told Cameron.” Joshua jerked his thumb in the direction of his wife.
“She was a madam,” Cameron said. “And a good one, too.”
“Whoever would have thought?” Tad replied in a low voice.
“Dolly’s was real?” Joshua asked. “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought it was an urban legend in these parts.”
“I didn’t tell you because that club closed back in the seventies,” Tad replied. “The prostitution was only a small part of what Dolly’s was known for. By the time you were old enough to know or care about it, Josh, it was only a distant legend that most people thought had been blown way out of proportion.” He shrugged. “You know, it grows and grows until it’s almost impossible to know what’s real and what’s concocted.”
“Well, one thing that is true is that one of Dolly’s girls was murdered,” Joshua said, “and that girl was a prostitute.”
Tad let out a breath. “Was that the murder Mike Gardner was investigating?”
“We think so,” Joshua said.
“On record, that girl would have been a dancer,” Tad said.
“But the police knew she was a call girl,” Cameron said.
“More than likely the sheriff and prosecutor were afraid of what would come out if they asked too many questions,” Tad said. “Some real movers and shakers from the tri-state area were regulars at Dolly’s, and they met there for more than the girls. I heard that if you wanted to have the most secret of secret meetings, then Dolly’s parlor was the place to go. Politicians would meet syndicate types and be all buddy-buddy there and then call each other nasty names as soon as their limos turned out onto route two-oh-eight.”
Cameron nodded her head. “Sounds like the perfect backdrop for a murder. Maybe Ava overheard something she shouldn’t have while serving the wrong mover and shaker.”
“Do you think you could get your hands on the autopsy reports for Ava Tucker’s murder?” Joshua asked Tad.
“Wasn’t her john killed, too?” Tad asked.
“Yes,” Cameron said.
Tad looked her up and down. “I guess you have no intention of spending your medical leave resting.”
“You’re going to feed me, right?” Donny asked from the back seat of Joshua’s SUV. “I mean, that’s the only reason I’m coming.”
“You’re big enough,” Cameron s
hot back from the front passenger seat. “You can catch your own.”
Laughing, Joshua told Donny that they intended to stop for dinner on the way back from the sheriff’s office in New Cumberland.
“But I need to tag along with you and Cameron and wait while you talk to Sawyer about that murder case,” Donny said. “I wish you would have let me stay home.”
“So that you could microwave hot dogs for your dinner again,” Joshua said.
“Hot dogs aren’t bad for you.”
“They are if you eat them for every meal.”
Leaning forward, Donny grasped the back of Joshua’s seat. “How about pizza then? You can drop me off at Roma’s and I can hang out with my friends while you’re meeting with Sheriff Sawyer. Call me on your cell when you leave and I’ll order our dinner. By the time you get there, it’ll be waiting.”
“Now that sounds like a plan,” Cameron said.
“Anything that gets you out of cooking dinner sounds like a plan.” Joshua turned onto Route Eight to take them out to New Cumberland. They would be passing Roma’s Pizzeria a few miles up the road. Without a yea or nay from his father, Donny waited in apprehension for the answer, which came when Joshua turned left into Roma’s parking lot.
“Don’t run up a huge root beer tab,” Joshua ordered while the teenager leapt out of the back seat. “Do you have your cell phone?”
Pausing, Donny tapped his back pocket. “Right here.”
With a reminder that they would call him upon leaving New Cumberland, Joshua backed out of the parking lot to resume the drive to the other end of the county.
Once they were back on the road, Cameron asked, “Have you ever heard of Douglas O’Reilly?”
“Actually, I have,” Joshua said. “Today, as a matter of fact.”
Cameron squinted at him. “You’re kidding.”
“He was the boy who got Ava Tucker pregnant,” Joshua said. “Her sister told me that she got pregnant on purpose because she was afraid of losing him after he went to West Point. Instead of marrying her, he committed suicide by driving his car off a cliff into Raccoon Creek.”