The Inside Ring

by Mike Lawson

  “You okay, Joe?” Emma asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re limping.”

  DeMarco nodded. The knife wound in his leg where Estep had stabbed him was throbbing. He wanted to pull up his pant leg and look at it but he was afraid of what he might see.

  Emma took hold of DeMarco’s arm to stop him and turned him so she could look at his face. She studied DeMarco’s pupils as though she knew what she was doing and touched the lump on his head tenderly. “We better get you to a hospital and have that hard head of yours checked out,” Emma said.

  “No, we need to get out of here before the sheriff drives by and sees our cars. I’ll find a hospital in Waycross if I need one.”

  “Okay, but try not to pass out at the wheel on the way there,” Emma said.

  There was no chance of that happening, DeMarco thought. He feared if he slept the dead would invade his dreams: a grinning Dale Estep draped in blue Spanish moss; Taylor smiling arrogantly as air hissed from the holes in his chest; and Morgan, Cyclops’s twin, blood running hot out of his eye socket. But he knew it wasn’t the ghouls that would keep him awake in nights to come, it was the innocents: Billy Mattis and his mother. He’d hear the snap of Jillian’s neck breaking until the end of time.

  THE DOCTOR AT the clinic in Waycross asked what had caused the wound in DeMarco’s leg. DeMarco told him he had cut it on a piece of sheet metal. “Doin’ some work around the house, ya know? Threw all the junk in a heap, then tripped over it.”

  The doctor took in the condition of DeMarco’s clothes and the bruise on his head, then gave him a look to let him know he wasn’t stupid. Fortunately—at least from DeMarco’s perspective—two ambulances bearing the carnage of a three-car pileup distracted the doctor and without further comment he gave DeMarco a tetanus shot and a prescription for painkillers.

  He found Emma in the emergency room waiting area reading a magazine on gardening. He couldn’t imagine her being interested in an activity where one couldn’t occasionally draw blood.

  They drove their two rental cars to a drugstore for DeMarco to fill his prescription, then to a grocery store for DeMarco to buy a six-pack, contrary to his physician’s orders. DeMarco took his beer to Emma’s car, popped the top on a can, and drank. It was an ordinary Bud in a can—and he had never tasted anything so wonderful.

  “Better watch the booze,” Emma said, “with that head injury and those pills.”

  DeMarco ignored her advice, took another swallow, and told her about his night in the Okefenokee Swamp. “What a way to go” was Emma’s only comment about Estep’s demise.

  “Now you wanna tell me why you were loafing in a jail cell while Estep and Taylor were trying to kill me?” DeMarco said.

  Emma took the can of beer from DeMarco’s hand, took a sip, and handed the can back to him. “I went to see Hattie again, as you know. Among other things, Hattie told me how Taylor was using the Okefenokee Swamp as his own private reserve: poaching alligators for hides, harvesting the lumber, taking rich men gator hunting. That kind of thing.”

  “Interesting, but what does this have to do with you getting arrested?”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  DeMarco nodded. “Was Estep helping Taylor?”

  “Of course,” Emma said.

  DeMarco lit a cigarette and swallowed more beer. It felt so good to be alive and able to enjoy all his life-shortening vices. “How in the hell did Taylor and Estep get away with it?” he asked.

  “For one thing, everyone who worked at the swamp really worked for Taylor and—”

  “I knew those rangers weren’t spotted-owl fans.”

  “—and Hattie thought he was bribing someone back in Washington responsible for the swamp. Maybe at the Department of Interior. And the other thing he’d do is change the swamp boundary.”

  “Change the boundary?”

  “Think about it. He owns all the land adjacent to the swamp. How the hell can anybody tell where public land stops and private land begins? Estep would change the boundary markers every few years, bring in crews to harvest timber or whatever, then move the boundary back and start someplace else. According to Hattie, Taylor’s been doing this for almost thirty years. He had himself this huge, tax-free estate, and would use state and federal money to replant trees or clean up whatever mess he made. Hell of a scheme.”

  DeMarco shook his head in amazement.

  “But that’s not how he made his real money,” Emma said. “According to Hattie, that damn swamp gets thousands of tourists every year.”

  “More like four hundred thousand. I saw that in one of the brochures at the motel.”

  “Well aren’t you smart. Anyway, Taylor was raking it in big-time from the tourists. He was not only getting a legitimate share of the tourist trade from his businesses—he owned the motel where we stayed in Folkston, by the way—but he was also taking a slice of the gate at the swamp.”

  “A slice of the gate?”

  “Yeah. Ten folks pay the entrance fee; they pocket the cash from three and the books show only seven went in. Same thing with the crap they sell in the souvenir shops.”

  “Can we prove any of this?”

  “I would imagine. An accountant could take a look at the books and put some of it together, and I’m sure if squeezed properly, Estep’s ranger friends will talk.”

  “So how did you end up in jail?”

  “Hattie wanted to show me where the boundary used to be and a couple of places where Taylor currently had crews working on federal land. We drove down to a fence line that said ‘No Trespassing,’ and she convinced me to crawl under it with her. Like an idiot, I did. Couple of lumberjacks see us, tell us to get lost, and Hattie gives ’em a ration of shit. The lumberjacks call the sheriff’s office, and Hattie gives the deputies a ration of shit. So they threw us in jail.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you call me so I could make bail for you?”

  “They wouldn’t let me. Prisoners’ rights are not a hot social issue down here. They decided to teach Hattie a lesson for shooting her mouth off—she’d given ’em problems before—so they just let us sit in jail for two days. I’m lucky I didn’t end up on a chain gang. Anyway, when I got out I saw your note and went right to Jillian Mattis’s place.”

  DeMarco shared with Emma what he learned from Jillian Mattis, the sad tale of the Honeys.

  “My God what a horror story,” Emma said.

  Indeed it was. Taylor had dominated the county since the late 1960s. He used the money he had mysteriously obtained in 1964 to gain economic control, then used his influence to take over the legal system and the media. And with power came the abuse of power—a symbiotic relationship DeMarco had seen all too often in the nation’s capital. Taylor indulged his lust for teenage flesh and when any whim was opposed, and he couldn’t get what he wanted by threats or economic pressure, he turned to Morgan or Estep for assistance.

  DeMarco also thought about Taylor’s lifelong plunder of the Okefenokee Swamp, and reflected that the money was probably not as important to Taylor as his ability to treat the swamp as his personal property. It was his swamp, not the government’s. It was the moat surrounding King Max’s castle.

  “We still have three mysteries, Emma,” DeMarco said.

  “Only three?”

  “One, where did Taylor and Donnelly get their money in 1964? Two, what’s the damn connection between Taylor and Donnelly? And three, why in the hell did Taylor try to kill the President?”

  “He didn’t try to kill the President, Joe. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”

  “What?” DeMarco said.

  “You remember Hattie saying something about a man questioning her, a honey-tongued, handsome son of a bitch?”

  DeMarco sat a moment.

  “Oh, shit,” he whispered.

  41

  DeMarco’s head hurt—in fact, his whole body ached—and the whiny, high-pitched voice of Philip Montgomery’s daughter was an auger piercing his skull.
He was sitting with the woman in the kitchen of the late author’s Atlanta estate. Outside the kitchen window was a rose garden where a sprinkler ran, creating small rainbows as the late-afternoon sun struck water-drop prisms.

  DeMarco had called Mahoney before flying to Atlanta. He left a brief message, telling his boss that Emma was fine, that Taylor was no longer a problem, and that he had a few things sorted out. He was glad that Mahoney hadn’t been available to speak to him; he’d let the callous bastard stew over the meaning of the message until he got back to Washington.

  Janice Montgomery was a disgruntled woman in her thirties dressed in baggy jeans and a black T-shirt. Her short hair was mousy brown, her doughy face devoid of makeup, and her thin lips locked in a line of perpetual disapproval. One of the many things she disapproved of was her father.

  “He was a complete bastard,” she said. “He cheated on my mother the whole time they were married. And when my brother committed suicide, the son of a bitch gave the most moving eulogy the world has ever heard. I still see it quoted in magazines. The truth was that he hardly knew his own son and had no idea how depressed Peter always was, living in the great man’s shadow, unable to measure up to his famous name. Philip Montgomery spent more time with his agent than he did with his family.”

  This bitter tirade had started when DeMarco told Janice Montgomery how sorry he was about her father’s death and how much he had admired his work. Though he was just trying to be cordial and establish a relationship with Montgomery’s dour daughter, he truly had admired the man’s writing.

  Montgomery wrote fiction, but fiction based on harsh reality and obtained by completely immersing himself in his subject. He lived in India for almost a year before writing a nine-hundred-page novel similar to James Clavell’s Shogun. He put into historical and social perspective the Indian class system and described a poverty so great that it was beyond the average American’s comprehension.

  For another book he spent four months in Cambodia with a group of peasants who had survived the killing fields and were so emotionally traumatized that they were like zombies. From this experience came Silent Cries, a novel that even the most apathetic could not read without becoming enraged at the plight of a people the world had abandoned. For a short time after the book was published, charitable donations to that part of the world tripled.

  He loved to travel—maybe to get away from his family—and almost everything he had written had been set in a foreign country, lending his novels an exotic touch that would have been absent in more familiar surroundings. Montgomery’s apparent passion for the downtrodden, as much as his literary brilliance, made him one of the most popular writers in the twenty-first century—but clearly his daughter was not a fan.

  DeMarco had arrived at Montgomery’s house half an hour earlier and introduced himself as a member of Congress doing a follow-up investigation on the assassination attempt. He had said that as a matter of routine “we” needed to know what Montgomery was working on before his death. His daughter’s first reaction had been to slam the door in his face.

  “I’m getting every dime of his royalties from this point on and if I can sell the rights to whatever he was writing before his death, I’ll do that too. I’m not showing you shit.”

  DeMarco explained he had no intention of removing anything from the premises, or even of making copies, but she was obdurate. He tried to be gentle with her, thinking she might still be mourning her father, but when he couldn’t move her he abandoned the compassionate approach.

  Threatening to serve her with a warrant, then bagging everything in the house as evidence—virtually guaranteeing she wouldn’t be able to sell the rights to Montgomery’s last work for a decade—finally got him through the front door and into the kitchen.

  He didn’t know what to say about her feelings toward her father, and frankly with his head hurting the way it did, he didn’t really care.

  “I’m sorry to hear he was so, uh, callous toward you, Ms. Montgomery, but do you think I could—”

  “And this crap with the President,” she said. “Their famous reunions. Maybe when Daddy’s drinking buddy became President, maybe then they cleaned up their act. But when they were younger they’d tell their wives they were going hunting and spend a week getting shit faced, trying to fuck anything in a skirt. They were just a couple of gray-haired frat rats, both of them. They made me sick.”

  “Uh, Ms. Montgomery,” DeMarco said, “do you think I could see your father’s papers now, whatever you have that might give us some idea what he was doing the last few months?” He was so tired of listening to this woman complain.

  “There aren’t any papers, not in the sense you probably mean. There’s no rough draft or plot outline. When my father was researching his books, he’d jot down facts in a spiral-bound notebook like the type kids use for school. He had an incredible memory. After he did his research he’d take long walks for a few weeks, mixing everything he’d learned around in his head. Then he’d sit down and just write his books. He was a prick but he was also a genius.”

  “Could I see the notebooks, please?” DeMarco asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, heaving herself up from the kitchen chair with a groan you’d expect from a woman twice her age.

  As they were walking toward her father’s study, DeMarco asked, “Do you have any idea what he was working on?”

  “Me?” she said, followed by a bitter laugh. “My father didn’t confide in me. He just used me like he did my mother. I was his free cook and cleaning lady when he was in town.”

  So why the hell did you live with him? DeMarco wanted to ask but didn’t.

  “All I know,” she continued, “is that he was working on something here in the States, which surprised me. He was packing for a trip back in April and when I asked where he was going, he said ‘Out in me own backyard, m’dear’ in this idiotic W. C. Fields accent. He said there was a ‘delicious pile of shit’ just a few miles away, but he didn’t explain what he was talking about. It never occurred to him to involve me in his work; I was just his daughter.”

  They entered Philip Montgomery’s den and DeMarco took a moment to take in the photos and plaques of a life of incredible achievement. While he was looking at a picture of Montgomery accepting the Pulitzer Prize, his daughter walked over to an antique rolltop desk and picked up a spiral-bound notebook with a red cover and handed it to him.

  “I have to change the water in the garden,” she said. “I’ll be back in a moment. I’m going to take you at your word that you won’t take anything.”

  DeMarco nodded, no longer listening to her. Montgomery had doodled on the cover of the red notebook, mostly spirals and stars and geometric figures, but in one corner was a crude picture of a castle and a man wearing a crown. DeMarco took a seat at Montgomery’s desk and flipped open the notebook. The only thing written on the first page, in capital letters and underlined, was THE SWAMP KING. DeMarco was surprised to see only about twenty pages filled with writing, mostly cryptic phrases, names, and numbers. There were no long narrative sections. There was enough there, however, to confirm what Emma had suspected.

  Philip Montgomery had somehow gotten wind of the situation in Charlton County. DeMarco could imagine someone living there writing a letter to the author, telling him he didn’t have to go to Asia to uncover a tale of despotism, tragedy, and repression. He could also imagine Montgomery, probably not initially believing it but intrigued by the possibility, eventually journeying to southeast Georgia to investigate. DeMarco couldn’t tell from Montgomery’s notes if he was going to write a nonfiction account or a novel as he usually did. He was guessing a novel. With a novel Montgomery would reach a broader audience and with his talent, truth couched as fiction would be even more effective than straightforward reporting.

  If Montgomery’s book had been published, Taylor would have been finished.

  DeMarco also concluded that Montgomery was a better researcher than he was. His notes contained things DeMarco ha
d not even suspected. Some of the figures suggested that Montgomery had been able to calculate how much Taylor was making off Charlton County taxes and his illegal use of the Okefenokee Swamp. Compared to most white-collar crimes and Wall Street scandals, the numbers weren’t mind-boggling—only a few hundred thousand a year—but then Max Taylor didn’t need much to maintain his rural lifestyle. There was one note in the book that didn’t make sense to DeMarco. The notation read: $$$$—Guerrero—Dallas?????

  Simple phrases told everything else: “feudal lord,” “pocket police force,” “strong-arm enforcement.” One line simply said, “the Honeys, God help ’em.” Estep’s name was mentioned, so was Hattie McCormack’s and a dozen others DeMarco didn’t recognize. Unfortunately there was no mention of Patrick Donnelly, nor was there any indication that Montgomery had figured out the original source of Taylor’s income.

  It had never occurred to DeMarco—or anyone else—that the real target of the assassination attempt had been Philip Montgomery. The sequence of shots at Chattooga River had made it seem clear that the intended victim was the President because after killing Montgomery with the first shot, Estep had taken two more shots in an evident attempt to kill the President.

  That the President had been wounded, DeMarco now realized, was deliberate. Estep was too good with a rifle to have missed the President three times. The final shot Estep had taken—the shot that passed between Mattis’s legs and hit the agent lying on the President—was the kind of sick, playful thing Estep would do. Estep had shown DeMarco just how playful he could be that night in the swamp.

  Taylor must have learned—just the way he had learned about DeMarco—that Montgomery was researching a book about Charlton County and his despotic hold over the region. Taylor would have been afraid of Montgomery. State and federal authorities might ignore complaints from poor county residents, and if they did investigate they could be bribed or frightened, but no one was going to bribe or frighten Philip Montgomery, best-selling author and confidant to the President.