Rick felt his cheeks reddening and was glad for the dark.
“Most men are starved to be touched like this,” she continued, running her hand up his neck. “At least . . . the men that came into the club seemed to be.”
“Was Andy Walton?”
The smile faded from Darla’s face. “Very much so,” she said. “Mr. Walton . . . was a very sad man.”
“Sad about what?” Rick asked.
Darla shrugged and leaned into him, wrapping her arms through Rick’s. “Everything. He was dying, did you know that?”
“Pancreatic cancer, right?” Rick asked.
Darla nodded. “He didn’t tell me right off. The first few times he came in, we just sat in the back of the bar, talking. He really liked talking to me. And . . . I could tell he liked the way I touched him.”
“How would you . . . ?” Rick’s voice faltered. Questioning a stripper about how she touched a patron was not something you learned in law school.
“Just like this,” she said, turning to face him. “I’d brush his hair, hold his hand, or wrap my arms through his.” She leaned into Rick, and he blinked his eyes, trying to focus.
“Did you eventually, you know . . . ?” Again Rick faltered.
“Dance naked for him?”
“Yeah,” Rick said, looking away from her.
“Of course,” she said. “Eventually . . .” She shrugged. “My approach to dancing was different than most of the girls. Most of them would prance around in their G-string and throw their boobs in the men’s faces. Every few seconds they’d ask if they could give them a lap dance.” She paused. “Larry always said he needed a few foot soldiers like that. Tall, horsey-looking girls with big breasts who could work the pole and get the small bills from the day laborers and the truck drivers who would stop by. That was important for the success of the club. It set the tone and allowed me to work my magic.” She stopped and eyed him curiously. When he didn’t say anything, she asked, “Don’t you want to know what my magic is?”
“I . . .” Rick gazed into her brown eyes and then looked away, focusing on a boat floating slowly along in the water. “I didn’t want to insult you by asking. I’m pretty sure I know what it is.”
“Then tell me,” Darla said, leaning into him and elbowing him under the rib cage. “Don’t be shy, Counselor.”
“It’s . . . this,” Rick said, shrugging. “What you’re doing right now. The touching. The way you talk. The way you smell . . .”
“Do you like me?” Darla asked.
“Very much,” Rick said.
She smiled. “That’s the magic. Stripping at the highest level is no different than any other business. It’s all about building relationships . . . and I’m good at that.” Darla placed her elbow on the bench and let her hand drop onto Rick’s shoulder.
Beginning to feel warm again, Rick tried to stand. One leg had gone completely asleep, and he stumbled, almost falling into the harbor. Jesus Christ . . .
Behind him, Darla was laughing.
Rick gazed down at her and wiped sweat off his forehead. He needed to regroup. “You said Andy told you about the cancer.”
“You’re a cutie, you know that?” She was smiling at him. “I bet you have a girlfriend.”
“Ms. Ford, please . . . I . . .”
“Ms. Ford? Oooooo . . .” She narrowed her gaze and wrapped her arms around her left knee, her smile widening. You’re starting to turn me on, Counselor.”
Before Rick could protest again, Darla yawned and stretched her arms above her head. “There is a VIP room at the club,” she finally said. “After Mr. Walton requested that I dance for him, I began to take him up there. The VIP dances cost a hundred dollars for thirty minutes, but Mr. Walton didn’t care about the money. He’d let me dance with him for two or three hours. There were some weeks where he would be the only customer I’d have at night and I’d take home six grand, while some of the foot soldiers had done the pole all night along with ten lap dances and only had two hundred dollars to show for it.” She paused, shaking her head and crossing her arms. “Anyway, after about a month he told me about the cancer.”
“Do you remember when that was?”
Darla shrugged. “Wasn’t that long ago. Maybe the beginning of summer. May, I think.”
“Did he say how bad it was?”
“Just that it was terminal. I think at some point he said he wasn’t sure how long he had left. Could be a year. Could be a few months.”
Rick nodded. Keep her going . . .
“You said he was a very sad man,” Rick began. “How so? Was it just the cancer?”
“No. That was a big part of it, but there was something else. Mr. Walton . . . had something weighing on him. A secret, you might say.”
Rick felt his stomach catch and took a step closer to her. “A secret?”
Darla nodded and leaned forward on the bench, resting her elbows on her knees. When she didn’t say anything, Rick prompted her. “Did he tell you this secret?”
“Not in so many words,” she finally said.
“What does that mean?” Rick pressed, sitting down again on the bench.
She shifted her gaze to the water. “Mr. Walton said he had done a lot of bad things in his life and he was scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“Of dying.” She looked back at him. “He was scared of dying. He said the truth would die with him.”
“The truth?”
“About what he had done.”
They were going in a circle. “What had he done? Did he tell you about the bad things?”
This time Darla did shiver. “He said he done them when he was in the Klan, and a man got killed.” She stopped and squeezed her knees together with her arms. “He said it was his fault. He was responsible.”
“Did he say who he was talking about?”
Darla shook her head. “No, he didn’t. But I’ve lived in Pulaski a long time. You hear things, and I knew the rumors about Bocephus Haynes’s father being lynched on Mr. Walton’s farm. So I asked him about it.”
“How . . . did you ask him?” Rick asked, involuntarily scooting closer to her on the bench.
“I just blurted it out—not subtle at all. I said, ‘Mr. Walton, is Bo Haynes’s father the man that was killed while you were leading the Klan’?”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say nothing at first,” Darla said. “He just got the saddest look on his face I’d ever seen. Then he just started nodding.” Darla paused, shaking her head. “It was weird, like I wasn’t even in the room. Then . . .” She trailed off and stood from the bench.
“Then what?” Rick asked.
She wiped her eyes, and Rick realized that she had begun to cry. “Then he said he was going to confess.”
Rick felt the blood almost go out of his body. “What?”
Darla turned to him, fresh tears running down her cheeks. “He told me that he was going to confess. That he wasn’t going to let the truth die with him. Then”—she choked the words out—“he told me that he’d done something for me. Something special that would help me move down to the coast.” She paused. “I had told him many times about my dream to move down here and open up an oyster bar. Anyway, sure enough the Monday after he died I got a call from his lawyer. Said I needed to come down to his law office and pick something up. When I got there, the lawyer gave me a manila envelope. He said, ‘Mr. Walton asked that I personally deliver this to you.’ When I got back to my car, I opened it, and there was were ten smaller envelopes inside of it. I opened them one by one when I was back in my apartment, and they all had ten thousand dollars in them.” She paused. “A hundred thousand dollars.” She stopped and looked at Rick. “I left for Destin the next morning.”
For a moment Rick didn’t say anything. Andy Walton had bequeathed a stripper one hundred thousand dollars. Probably just pocket change for a guy like that, but still . . . It was a noble act, Rick thought. Inconsistent with the view he held in hi
s mind of the man. “Going back to the night he said he was going to confess,” Rick began. “When did this conversation take place?”
Darla shrugged. “A couple weeks before he died.”
“Did he say anything else to you?”
She nodded, and fresh tears formed in her eyes. “He gave me the same warning the last few times I saw him.”
“Which was?”
“To not . . . tell . . . anyone.” Her lip quivered with emotion, and Rick felt gooseflesh break out on his arm.
“Did you?” Rick asked.
Darla Ford crossed her arms tight around her chest and bit her lip, looking down at the ground.
“Ms. Ford, did you tell anyone that Andy Walton was going to confess to killing Roosevelt Haynes?”
Slowly, she nodded.
“Who?” Rick asked.
“Larry,” Darla said, sniffling and leaning her head on his shoulder. “I told my boss. Larry Tucker.”
37
Bone watched them from the deck of The Boathouse. He held a Bud Light bottle that he had barely touched and was dressed in a “Fisherman’s Wharf” T-shirt he’d bought while Rick and Burns were having a drink at the place next door, a tattered red cap with the cursive A of Alabama’s Crimson Tide on the front, khaki shorts he kept in a duffel bag in the back of the truck, and a pair of old flip-flops. With his scraggly beard and his hat pulled down low over his eyes, he blended into the crowd perfectly.
This can’t be good, he thought. Drake had talked with the stripper for at least forty-five minutes now, and the conversation had turned heated. For a while Drake had paced in front of the bench, asking her questions.
He’s getting something out of this, Bone knew. He had placed calls and sent texts to his benefactor on a regular basis, and so far the instructions had been to follow and report what he saw. He took the cell phone out of his left pocket and texted, They’ve talked for forty-five minutes, and the kid seems to be excited. Bone returned the phone to his pocket and waited.
When Burns had snuck out of the restaurant alone while Drake was in the bathroom, Bone had thought for a moment that the kid had been taken for a ride. Burns had scampered off down the dock a ways, so Bone wasn’t sure where he had gone. His orders were to stay with Drake.
He figured the night was probably over—a wasted trip no different than Drake’s—until he saw Nikita emerge from the shadows of the front parking lot a few minutes after Burns had left.
Bone recognized her right off from his nights at The Sundowners Club. Nikita—Bone did not know her real name—had always dressed relatively conservative as far as strippers went, and this contrast made her stand out at the club. It also made her easy to recognize now.
The phone in his left pocket vibrated, and Bone grabbed it, never taking his eyes off Nikita and Drake. He looked down at the message on the screen and felt his body temperature drop a couple degrees.
Kill the girl. And the lawyer if necessary.
Bone felt his heart pick up a beat as he read and reread the message. Not exactly what he was expecting, but . . .
A second message came in on top of the first.
And make it look good.
Bone smiled. He always did.
He glanced at his watch, then looked around. It was already past 1:00 a.m., and outside of the few stragglers in The Boathouse, Bone saw no one around. The dock below was completely deserted except for Drake and the dancer, and there was very little light.
Perfect, he thought, taking a small sip of beer and placing it on the railing. Bone felt for the gun inside the front of his shorts. His pockets were too tight for the .38, so he’d stuffed it down the front of his shorts and let his loose-fitting T-shirt hang over it.
Slowly and softly, Bone began to walk down the wooden steps to the dock. Both the stripper and Drake had come to The Boathouse from the parking lot. When he got to the bottom of the steps, he saw them.
Drake’s life is over, Bone knew, stepping behind the stairs and into the shadows. Killing the lawyer, he’d already determined, was going to be necessary. The boy, along with McMurtrie, had cost Bone a lot of money last year. And the El Camino . . .
He took the gun out of his shorts and waited. They would have to come back to these steps to get to the parking lot. When they did . . .
He flipped the gun so that he was holding the weapon by its barrel. He’d hit them both with the butt end and toss their limp bodies in the harbor. Bone could almost see the headline in the paper. “Accidental Drowning Claims Lives of Young Man and Woman.”
Bone smiled, waiting . . .
38
“Hey, I’m talking to you,” Darla said, squeezing her hands into fists and lightly tapping Rick on the stomach. “Do you think Larry could be involved in Mr. Walton’s murder?”
Rick hadn’t even heard the question the first time she’d asked it. He was still looking at the water, thinking it through in his mind. Assuming that Larry Tucker was one of the ten men who participated in the lynching of Roosevelt Haynes in 1966, then he would have every reason to want to stop Andy Walton’s confession.
Motive, Rick thought. Larry Tucker had motive. He was also the owner of the Sundowners Club, the scene of the crime. Opportunity. Rick felt his heart pounding in his chest. We might have an alternative theory . . .
“When did you tell Mr. Tucker about Mr. Walton’s plan to confess?”
“The same night Mr. Walton told me about it.”
“So two weeks before the murder?”
Darla nodded, and her eyes were wide with fear. “Do you think Larry—?”
“I don’t know,” Rick interrupted. “I think it’s possible that Mr. Tucker was involved. We represent Bocephus Haynes, who has been charged with the murder, but he has pled not guilty. If Bo is innocent of the charges, then—”
“Someone else did it,” Darla completed the thought. “And you think it might be Larry.”
“Was Larry in the Klan with Andy?”
Darla crossed her arms and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know they had been friends for . . .” She stopped and placed her hand over her mouth. “There were others. Of course . . . Mr. Haynes was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, and Mr. Walton was just one of the men.” She paused, her eyes wide. “You think Larry was one of them.” It wasn’t a question.
“I do,” Rick said. “But I can’t prove it right now. Assuming he was and he found out that Andy was going to confess . . .”
“Oh, Jesus, it’s my fault then,” Darla said. “I’m the one who told him.” Her voice cracked, and she sat down on the bench. She crossed her arms and began to rock back and forth. “After all Mr. Walton did for me . . .”
“You didn’t know,” Rick said, sitting beside her. “Besides . . .” He sighed. “It’s just a theory.”
For several minutes they both just sat there. Arms crossed, gazing out at the water. The only sounds were Darla’s sniffles. Finally, she wiped her eyes. “I would have made it here without him,” she said, her voice determined. “I was two years away from saving enough. I didn’t need a sugar daddy.” She sighed. “But he helped me. I . . . no one ever did anything for me before. If I’m somehow responsible for his death . . .”
“He was dying,” Rick said. “It wouldn’t have been much longer.”
She nodded. “Still . . . it’s not right.”
“I agree, but you can’t blame yourself. You did what you thought was right. That’s all anyone can do.” Then a thought struck him like a thunderbolt. “Did you tell the sheriff’s department or DA’s office about any of this? Andy saying he was going to confess, and you telling Larry Tucker about it?”
“They didn’t ask. All they wanted to know was what I saw the last night Mr. Walton was with me, and they told me to write a statement. They said they would schedule another interview with me, but I guess I left town before they could talk to me again.”
Rick turned and gazed into the depths of the dark water. Larry Tucker is our killer, he thought. Has to be . . .
>
“It’s late,” Darla said, snapping Rick back into the present.
“Ms. Ford, I really appreciate your time tonight. You’ve been very helpful.”
She looked at him and smiled. “You got a place to stay tonight, sailor?”
Rick creased his eyebrows. “Ms. Ford, I really can’t—”
“Relax, I’m not going to seduce you. Though if you keep calling me Ms. Ford, I may have to.” She laughed. “Come on,” Darla said, taking him by the hand.
Walking on worn-out legs, Rick followed her.
Where are they going? Bone thought. The stripper and Drake were not walking toward him. They were moving in the opposite direction.
Bone started to move, but then just as quickly he stopped and became calm, realizing what was happening. They were walking down a series of docks that would all wind back to these stairs. After they strolled around, looking at the boats, they’d have to come right back here.
Bone took a deep breath and wiped his hands on his shorts. Patience, he thought. Patience.
“Where are we going?” Rick asked, curious as to why they were walking farther down the dock as opposed to going up the stairs and back out to the highway.
“My place,” Darla said.
Rick started to ask another question when Darla abruptly stopped and gestured with her right arm. “Ta-da,” she said.
It was a pontoon boat. One of the fog lights was on, and Rick could make out that the boat was a tan color with green trim. The word “Sweetness” was etched on the side.
“What do you think?” Darla asked, her voice expectant.
“This is your place?” Rick asked, noticing that Peter Burns was sprawled out on two of the seats, either asleep or passed out. Darla stepped down into the boat and held out her hand.
“No, silly,” Darla said. “This is my boat. My place is over there.” She pointed to Holiday Isle, and Rick couldn’t help but smile. The day just kept getting crazier and crazier.
Son of a . . .
Bone started walking when he saw them step onto the boat. Then he broke into a run, knowing he would be too late.
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