Cracker Town

by WF Ranew

  “My God, Red, this is so horrible. What are you saying about Gordon? Or Wallace?”

  Red got out his handkerchief and handed it to his one-time lover. She dabbed the tears.

  “That is still a question that needs to be answered, Ginger Gail,” he said. “But I believe the killer was not Cleet Wrightman. But hear me out. The assumption is Cleet killed the Goings family. One, he knew Doctor Goings. Knew him quite well, mind you. Two, someone spoke with him in Valdosta the day of the murders. Also, Cleet showed up in Damville. A couple of weeks later, Jamison went missing. They found his body in a swamp. The term gator bait never had so much meaning as the man’s mauled remains.”

  She sat in silence, not looking at Red.

  He went on with his point.

  “Coincidences, yes, but here’s yet another one. Doctor Goings visited Gordon and Wallace on the same day in the summer of seventy-two. He met Wallace in town and went out to the church to see Gordon. Several months later, he and his family are found dead. Hacked to death.”

  Not only that, Red said, but a young man observed two men at the Goings home. “The witness saw one man two weeks to the day before the family died,” he said. “He spotted the second man on the night of their slayings.

  The pair sat in silence. Ginger Gail dried her tears and told him why she sought him out.

  “My sweet man, I guess you have to arrest Gordon,” she said. “Understand, I do think he needs to account for what he might have done many years ago. If he killed anybody, and I’m not convinced he did. I do know he is shit crazy about sex. The kinky kind. The things he’s made me do in bed. Also, in the woods. And in the back seat of his big car.”

  Red asked if she knew something he didn’t.

  She hesitated and looked around the room. “Perhaps I do.”

  “What is it?”

  She grimaced.

  “Well, I don’t know Cleet,” she said. “Perhaps he did witness Mitsy’s killing. What I do believe is what Wallace told me.”

  “What was that?”

  Red perked up. Is this new information coming?

  “He came upon the Goings family killings,” she said. “Right afterward.” In halting words, she went on to explain. “He saw Gordon leaving the house. He was dressed in bib overalls and a hat, very similar to clothes Wallace wore every day to his auto repair shop.”

  Red knew the description contradicted B.J. Beresford’s account in one or two ways. He didn’t tell Ginger Gail that but asked if Wallace might be framing his brother for the crime.

  Ginger Gail nodded as tears, dripping eyeliner, rolled down each cheek.

  “Just as he might have framed Cleet.”

  * * *

  The beautiful redheaded woman from his past told him her plan. It was a simple one in that it meant she would leave Gordon and move back to Bainbridge.

  When her uncle died, Ginger Gail purchased the house where she lived and renovated it into four apartments. She rented three of them and kept the fourth for herself.

  “I’ll go back there for now,” she said. “I have a feeling one way or another Gordon won’t be around too much longer.”

  Red felt confused. Was Ginger Gail asking him to back off completely on pursuing Gordon?

  “Do you say that figuratively or literally?” Red asked.

  “I mean it a little bit both ways.”

  Red pushed her for specifics.

  “Gordon is headed for a crash, a personal implosion, a breakdown,” Ginger Gail said. “You can call it different things, but the man has been pushing his luck and getting away with his misdeeds for decades. He’s a preacher, that’s true. But the man has no conscience. And he’s told me a lot about his past.”

  Ah, more information.

  “Example?”

  “When he got into the ministry in the sixties, he served a church in Dothan, Alabama,” she said. “He got drunk one night. And Gordon rarely drank. But he got frisky and said he wanted to do it like he did with a woman in Alabama.”

  “Damned.” Red shook his head. “I don’t even want to guess about that.”

  “Red, he killed her. She was the wife of one of the church leaders. She came to him for counseling, and he tried to force himself on her. He went to her again a few days later, and he said she was more compliant.”

  One more notch against the preacher. “God almighty, that guy does have wayward ways,” Red said.

  “They had an affair that went on until he left the church. But, my dearest. That’s not the worst part.”

  Red leaned forward as if preparing for something unfathomable even for him. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

  Ginger Gail smiled nervously.

  “He wanted to have sex with me and insisted I resist him. That I try to fight him off,” she said. “I did, kind of, but don’t think my act was very convincing. The episode got me thinking about him and other women. Women I might even know in the church. Anyway, here’s the terrible part. Gordon told me the woman’s husband went missing. It was right after Gordon left Alabama.”

  Red moved his hand to pull out his notebook and pen but decided that might distract from the conversation. He wanted to hear it all.

  “I decided to do some detective work on my own,” Ginger Gail said. She lowered her voice and leaned in over the table. “I went to the library in Dothan and looked at the local newspaper’s back issues. I found all the stories of the man disappearing. They found his body several weeks later. In a swamp just over the Florida line. He’d been hacked to death.”

  Everything fell into place for Red at that moment. Whatever doubts he had about Gordon Adan suddenly evaporated. He believed he had his man.

  “The tragedy in that was the woman Gordon assaulted,” Ginger Gail paused a moment before continuing. “She was found dead after her husband went missing. Shot in the head. It was ruled a suicide, but I don’t know about that one.”

  Red held up a hand and brought it down in a chopping motion on the table.

  “But women who kill themselves usually don’t use a gun,” he said. “They take a softer approach. Pills, poison, the like. Some preacher.”

  “And, on that point. You know he was never ordained,” Ginger Gail said. “Got his theology diplomas through the mail and faked an ordination certificate from a nonexistent church down in Florida.”

  “And he started his own church?”

  Three women chatted it up as they brought their coffee and pastries to the table next to theirs.

  Red and Ginger Gail talked even softer.

  “Yep. Founded it in sixty-seven,” she whispered. “Borrowed money for a trailer and an acre of land. That’s where he held Sunday services. Outgoing Gordon drew a crowd. In a few years, he had a doublewide sanctuary and two or three other trailers for a choir hall and Sunday School rooms.”

  She told Red what happened later in the seventies and eighties when Gordon’s church boomed into a large congregation. Along with that came a red brick building and adjacent, two-story education building with offices, Sunday school and music rooms, and rehearsal hall for the choir, and a fellowship hall with a kitchen.

  “He had the architect include a large food and clothes pantry,” she said. “They helped poor people all over the county. The membership grew even more. Gordon built all that. But there is so much else he destroyed.”

  Ginger Gail stopped and went to use the ladies’ room. When she returned, Red gave her his impression and a limited version of his plans.

  The women wrapped up their social time and left together.

  Ginger Gail returned to the table.

  “Understand, Ginger Gail, I represent a client who lost his family to a murderer,” Red said. “My mission is to find out who committed those killings. We have two cold cases here. The Valdosta family deaths and Jamison Elton’s.”

  “What can you tell your client?”

  “For starters, the truth,” he said. “When I corroborate what Cleet says, we’ll have the person who killed those people.�
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  Ginger Gail shook her head. “How will you do that? I mean, Red, you’re putting the word of a mentally ill man against that of a preacher. Playing devil’s advocate here.”

  Red nodded. He fully understood the thin threads holding his case against Gordon together. He felt emboldened, though.

  “From what you told me, Wallace knows much more than what he told Cleet and me,” Red said. “About the Goings family and Jamison.”

  Ginger Gail looked at him for several seconds without speaking.

  “Red, when you talked with Wallace, he didn’t tell you?” she finally asked.

  “Correct.”

  “Why do you think he’ll tell you now?” Ginger Gail asked.

  “Because he trusts you, and we’re going with me to see him. Together.”

  Ginger Gail smiled. Red still loved her smile.

  He did.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Red had to make a decision. If he tracked down Gordon Adan, he would confront a dangerous man.

  He no longer carried a law officer’s badge, as Red had when he first encountered the Adan brothers in the seventies.

  He had to figure Sheriff Paul Mason would be the man to arrest Gordon, but to what end? He couldn’t tell at that point.

  The murders happened in the fifties and seventies.

  A recent death with suspicious evidence remained under investigation. As far as Red knew, nothing of substance linked Gordon to Rubin Gillis’s death.

  Red had spoken with Mason about the Gillis car wreck. The investigation quickly focused on the tampered brake line. Red knew the sheriff hadn’t come up with any suspects.

  As it turned out, his next meeting with Wallace Adan had to wait. The man came down with the fall flu and was in the hospital. He couldn’t have visitors.

  Things developed on a different course, one set by the preacher himself.

  As he prepared to travel back to Damville, Red got a call from Ginger Gail.

  “Red, hey,” she said. “Listen, my gun safe has been opened, and several pistols were taken. I have an idea who did it. Gordon, of course. The bastard found the combination somewhere. I know it was him since he can shoot a pistol. I doubt if he even knows how to open and load a double shotgun.”

  Red told Ginger Gail to get over to Bainbridge and hunker down.

  “I’m over here now,” she said. “I packed the rest of my rifles and shotguns and basically moved out after discovering the safe open.”

  Red told her his plans to drive to Damville but would divert over to Bainbridge. He planned to arrive by seven that evening.

  “OK, come on over to the house,” she said. “That’s where I’m staying. My old apartment. Except, you’d be shocked at the renovations. We can grab a steak when you get here.”

  Red agreed, and their call ended in a whoosh sounding as if Ginger Gail blew him a kiss.

  No way. I’m a married man now.

  * * *

  Gordon Adan prepared for the worst. He loaded three pistols and extra clips and put them on the river cabin’s kitchen table. He’d be ready when that private investigator arrived.

  Gordon knew Red would come after him.

  He’d gotten a call in his church office the afternoon before from a church member who was a deputy. The man said Sheriff Paul Mason wanted to question the preacher about Rubin Gillis’s auto crash death.

  Gordon rushed out of the church office, got into his car, and sped to Fanning Springs.

  He got there in a little over two hours, shaving thirty minutes off the drive by going ninety on the back roads.

  Gordon first went to Ginger Gal’s gun safe. He opened from the combo he’d found one day snooping in her purse.

  He took three handguns he knew how to load and several clips and boxes of ammo. One gun was a revolver, a thirty-eight. The other two were semi-automatics, both forty-fives.

  He packed everything in his car, grabbed a bag of clothes, and drove up around Florida’s Big Bend and over to St. George Island on the Gulf of Mexico. A deacon in his church had a bayside home there and a boat moored at the house’s dock. He’d given the preacher access to the house and craft anytime he wanted it.

  Gordon planned to hide out at the house and escape on the boat if he had to. He would avoid Red Farlow as long as possible and figured the man couldn’t find him for some time.

  When he did, Gordon would take off for New Orleans.

  * * *

  Bainbridge, Georgia, had fallen on hard times long before Red drove into the town at seventy-thirty on the evening to meet Ginger Gail. He’d visited many times since the early seventies, and the town had slowly changed over that time.

  He went into town and took a right onto Clay Street by the First Baptist Church. Two blocks and another right, he parked along the street and got out to walk up to Ginger Gail’s front porch.

  Chapter Thirty

  Gordon had disappeared, according to Sheriff Macon, and there was little Red could do to apprehend the man. He reminded himself that he couldn’t anyway since he no longer was a sworn law officer. He tended to forget that at times.

  That night, Ginger Gail called around to members of her Sunday School class. She learned from a deacon’s ex-wife that Gordon had asked to use the man’s Gulf Coast home. The woman gave Ginger Gail the address.

  The next morning, Red and Ginger Gail traveled to St. George Island. When they arrived, Red drove to the deacon’s home. No one was there.

  The man’s fishing boat no longer was moored at the house’s dock.

  Red stood there looking over the Gulf of Mexico on a day darkened by leaden clouds. He noted the careless way someone tossed the mooring lines onto the dock. One bobbed in the water.

  A gust of wind slapped him in the face. Few boats were on the Apalachicola Bay as a tropical storm was moving northward toward the island. The Coast Guard had issued a small craft warning, and already the chops tipped with white caps, rendering the bay precarious for any boat smaller than a Coast Guard cutter.

  Red had a feeling that Preacher Gordon, wherever he was, had moved to safe harbor on his journey of escape. He didn’t know the man’s destination but figured the inexperienced boatman wasn’t so stupid as to brave the storm on the water.

  Ginger Gail walked around the house, admired the citrus trees, picked several grapefruit, and joined Red on the dock. They spoke briefly about whether Gordon was anywhere around and decided to drive to Damville.

  Their only meal that way was the citrus fruit from the deacon’s island yard.

  They didn’t know Wallace’s condition, but they intended to visit him in the afternoon.

  * * *

  Sheriff Paul Mason called as Red neared the southside of Tallahassee.

  “Hello, Red. Got some news for you,” he said. “I visited Wallace Adan this morning. He had some interesting things to say about the Rubin Gillis accident. Wallace confessed to tampering with the breaks. I don’t think he’s long for this world, Red. He’s in a talkative mood about the past and wants to come clean. You may want to get up here pretty quick. He’s in the Thomasville hospital now.”

  They arrived in the Rose City around four in the afternoon.

  Wallace had been moved from the nursing home to an ICU unit when his influenza worsened.

  Ginger Gail and Red walked to the reception desk and asked to see Wallace.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Gordon Adan wasted no time loading the sport fisher christened the Land of Uz and taking off across the Apalachicola Bay. He hugged the coastline about a mile out and headed west. Six hours later, he made it to Panama City and tied up at a marina on the west side of St. Andrews Bay north of the bridge.

  He thought about calling Ginger Gail but decided against it. He’d pinged her phone three days before and learned she was in Savannah, Georgia.

  Gordon Adan knew she’d had a thing for Red Farlow many years ago, not long before he’d finally hooked up with the redheaded soprano in his church’s choir.

/>   He nailed that bitch before I got her. Damned bastard. Still worth my time.

  Rolling that memory through his head unnerved Gordon as his jealousy raged. There were two reasons for this, and each time one or both entered his mind, he fumed for hours.

  First, the fact Ginger Gail married that rube farmer. Hey, that’s a good one. Rubin the rube. Ha! Ha!

  The second thing that set him off, many years later, was her pillow talk about how good Red Farlow was a lover. That had shocked him, mainly because he hadn’t known about her fling with the state agent in seventy-three. The news made him even more furious as he was having erectile dysfunction issues. For the first time in his life, he couldn’t consummate the sex act with a woman.

  “Goddamned, you preacher freak,” Ginger Gail yelled in frustration at the seventy-five-minute mark of his trying on a hot July day at the river cabin. “You are sweating like a stuck pig all over me. Feel the pillow and the sheets. They’re sopping. And me, I’m drenched. I feel like a two-dollar whore on farmers’ day at the county fair.”

  Gordon felt defeated, too, and ridiculed over an inability to ejaculate. He tried everything. Nothing.

  Then she cursed him.

  “Sorry…I’m having…a difficult moment, Ginger Gail,” he muttered breathlessly.

  “Shit, you idiot,” she said. “You couldn’t wait to have me at the church that night. Now, look at you. Can’t even finish.”

  He was fifty-nine. Ginger Gail had just turned forty-eight. From everything he experienced with her over the years, she had sustained her physical performance as she approached fifty. Wanted to do it all the damned time.

  Gordon was another matter. He wasn’t as inclined to intercourse as he once was. He just didn’t want it anymore. Plus, he couldn’t do it when he tried.

  He learned this one afternoon at Ginger Gail’s place in Bainbridge. They got naked and jumped into bed.

  Suddenly, without warning, he couldn’t get an erection.

  “Shit, Gordy, what has happened to you?”

  “Oh, hell. Still trying.” Thirty minutes of attempts and nothing. “This is bad, ain’t it?” he said.