Death of the Weed Merchant
By Robert G. Rogers
Copyright © 2020 Robert G. Rogers
All rights reserved.
Also by Robert G. Rogers
Bishop Bone Murder Mystery Series
A Tale of Two Sisters
Murder in the Pinebelt
A Killing in Oil
The Pinebelt Chicken War
Jennifer’s Dream
La Jolla Shores Murders
Murder at the La Jolla Apogee
No Morning Dew
Brother James and the Second Coming
The Taco Wagons Murders
He’s a Natural
The Legal Assassin
Non-Series Murder Mysteries & Suspense/Thrillers
The Christian Detective
That La Jolla Lawyer
Runt Wade
The End is Near
Contemporary Dramas
French Quarter Affair
Life and Times of Nobody Worth a Damn
Historical Women’s Fiction – Jodie Mae
Youth/Teen Action and Adventure
Lost Indian Gold
Taylor’s Wish
Swamp Ghost Mystery
Armageddon Ritual
Children’s Picture Storybook – Fancy Fairy
Introduction
Before retiring, Hank Thomas was a successful truck farmer in the southern part of Mississippi, near the small town of Lawton. He raised fresh fruits and vegetables on his four-hundred-acre farm and trucked them to customers up and down the state. Occasionally he’d take a truck load of produce into Louisiana or Alabama, but not often.
“I don’t want my vegetables to wilt before they get to the table,” he told people. “That’s why I stay mostly in Mississippi. When you buy something I grow, you’re buying it because it’s fresh. I haven’t had any complaints.”
People who knew how tight he was joked that he just didn’t want to spend the extra gas to drive out of state. And while that was pretty much true, it was also true that he prided himself on providing fresh vegetables to his customers.
When Hank reached sixty-five he was ready to quit the business and just relax. The competition had increased so much over the years that it had become extremely difficult to show a consistent profit. Everybody seemed to be in the business and many of them had exclusive contracts with the big grocery chains.
Hank’s father, Jessup, had owned choice land along the Mason River near Lawton from which he cut and sold prime timber. He also harvested and sold timber in partnership with other land owners around the state. Jessup’s two sons worked side by side with him when they were young. One son died in military service but Hank survived and elected to become a truck farmer after his father and mother had passed on.
It seemed to him that lumber companies had sewed up the timber business his father had enjoyed and made a living doing. He also believed the lumber companies controlled the timber business and anybody competing against them suffered the consequences.
Like his father, Hank also had two sons. The oldest, George, was the apple of his eye. He was studying Agricultural Science at Ole Miss, in the northern part of the state, with a plan to take some of Hank’s land to grow vegetables for a chain of road side vegetable stands in the southern part of the state. Hank was going to come out of retirement to help and was looking forward to it. But the boy was killed in an auto accident in his second year of college. Hank was devastated. Those who knew him well, knew he would always have a hole in his soul where George lived.
Hank’s younger son, Stan, was never as keen on agriculture as his brother. Both boys had helped Hank when they were big enough to handle responsibilities until they packed their bags and went off to college. But Stan’s help, Hank always thought, was reluctant.
Stan obtained a business degree from Ole Miss and later a law degree. Afterward, he passed the state bar and opened a law office in Lawton.
After helping him get through college, Stan’s mother, Emma, and his father, provided the “financial backing” Stan needed to open and maintain a law office while developing the practice.
“We figured it was fair to help him get an education. Our parents helped us get an education. So, we’re doing for Stan what was done for us,” Hank told their friends. What they didn’t tell their friends was that Stan was one of the new age children who expected things to be easy. And to that end, they expected their parents to make it easy for them, unlike when Hank was young and worked along-side his father and never gave it a second thought.
Not only did they help him Stan into the legal business, they also gave him what was left of his grandparent’s estate, twenty acres more or less and the old family home along the Mason River. Hank and Emma had used the proceeds from the sale of the rest of the estate to acquire the truck farm they’d used to produce fruits and vegetables for their customers.
Lawton Creek ran along one property line of Hank and Emma’s truck farm. Hank pumped water from the creek to keep his vegetables watered during dry times, when he was in the business. He had wells on the property but didn’t want them to run out of water from over use.
Most of the men who knew him figured him for a bit of a scrooge.
The old family home that they gave to Stan was a 2500 square foot house, to which they had added indoor plumbing and other modern developments while they lived there.
Stan moved into the home and one day after he’d settled in, a man driving an old Ford truck came by looking for work and a place to sleep. Garcia Perez was his name. He spoke a modest amount of English and Stan spoke about as much Spanish, but they managed to communicate with some illustrative hand gestures.
Stan figured the man was an illegal alien but he didn’t care how he got there. He was there and looking for a place to stay. And Stan needed some help around the place. That was the important thing as far as he was concerned.
His grandparents had built what amounted to a one room, decent sized, apartment with necessary conveniences, onto the barn for workers helping them on their farm and with their timber business. Stan figured the man had heard about it from somebody and that was why he’d come by asking for work and a place to stay.
Works for me, Stan thought and let the man move in.
A few weeks later, the man’s wife showed up. Her name was Silvia. She spoke quite a bit more English than Garcia, but he was learning more every day, Stan noticed.
Garcia told him she’d been working as a cleaning lady in a Casino on the Coast but wanted to be with him. She soon got a job cleaning local motels part time. When somebody needed a cleaner, they’d call her.
Garcia did work for other people too, mostly landscapers, around the county, so they both stayed busy.
Instead of charging them rent, which they didn’t look like they could afford, Stan had them work around the farm, clearing and weeding and taking care of the yard and beds. That’s what he needed. He figured if the work was more than they felt the rent should be, they’d say something. To date, they hadn’t said anything.
“Maybe I’ll let ‘em plant a garden. Hell, they could plant enough vegetables to open a small stand. People love fresh vegetables.” He let the idea simmer some. He didn’t know them well enough to get into anything as permanent as that.
*****
While getting his undergraduate business degree, Stan had worked at the Ole Miss cannabis farm sanctioned by the US Government for cannabis research. His experience working with his dad on the truck farm, along with his dad’s recommendation, got him the job. His dad had a degree from the university and provided financial support to it.
The “bud” grown on the Ole Miss farm was harvested, cured, and shipped to researchers at
other universities and laboratories across the country for their studies of the medical uses of the cannabis drug. The process was very strictly controlled, but Stan managed to smoke a few joints while he worked at the farm and found the experience enjoyable. He also learned the ins and outs of ordering supplies and equipment for the University’s farm.
Chapter 1
Stan graduated from law school, passed the bar, and began his search for a place to hang his shingle with an existing firm or established attorney. If not, he’d have to “hang” it in his own office and build a practice. His goal was to make enough money to pay back the amount his parents had given him to get his degree. Or at least he’d offer to, hoping to be turned down. Now and then his dad reminded him of all they’d put into his education.
As far as Stan was concerned, he talked mostly to lawyers who were wasting time, his and theirs, even interviewing him. Most, even though they’d been in practice for some time, were still half way living off what their wives brought home. Talking with Stan helped get them through the day.
One guy who’d had a beer for lunch told him, “Stan, this is a small town. Not enough legal work for the lawyers we already have. Most of us dream of a good damage suit that’ll make us enough to retire on.” Stan figured the man’s wife gave him the money for the beer.
Stan came to the conclusion that if he wanted to make any money he’d have to go to work for a government agency someplace, probably in Washington if he could get a local congressman to put in a good word for him. Or for a government agency in Jackson, the state capital, using the same route, getting a good word from one of the local state representatives.
He had a girlfriend, Shelly Gambrel. She was thin, about five and a half feet tall with dark hair that hung over her shoulders and matching dark eyes. She stayed in shape jogging practically every day and lived in her parents’ garage apartment in Lawton.
Her father dabbled in stocks, mostly companies headquartered in Mississippi, like Hilton Farms. He’d buy a stock and if it did well, he’d sell it for a gain. He didn’t make a lot of money doing it, but it kept him busy and gave him something to do besides working in the yard.
Stan had had dinner with them a number of times since he’d been dating Shelly. And she’d had dinner with his family during the same time.
They had been more or less engaged since his last year of law school. Both were about the same age. She was a senior nurse at the Lawton Hospital with a degree from a University near Lawton. They wanted to get married, but Stan wanted to wait until he could afford to support a wife. He sure wasn’t going to let a woman support him, he’d said. No one argued about his decision, but all concerned were frustrated; both her parents and his. Something, their marriage, was supposed to have happened after a year of being engaged but hadn’t.
After talking it over with his parents, they recommended that he hang his shingle in an office building his dad owned in Lawton and let the practice build over time. It was the best offer he’d had.
“You’ve got good sense, boy,” his dad had told him when it was clear he wasn’t going to find a suitable position with an established firm. “Let it work for you. People will come back if you do a good job for them. You won’t have to pay rent. I have an empty office ready for you, hell, unless you want to move to Jackson and do grunt work for one of the agencies! Probably the only legal work you’d do up there is pay your annual bar dues and argue with other lawyers about where to have lunch. But you would get paid. Might make enough to pay your apartment rent.”
Before Hank retired, he would use any extra money he’d made to buy real estate. The office building downtown was about the last piece he had left. He’d sold the rest. He wasn’t making enough money from office rentals to brag about it, but it gave him something to do, and enough positive cash flow to afford to let his son use one of his offices without paying, initially anyway.
Stan decided to take his dad’s offer and open his own practice. Money might be slow, but he’d be his own boss. He was happy his dad could help.
So Stan moved into Hank’s empty office, rent free. Its furnishings looked as if they’d been bought, which was the case, from a used furniture store. All the wooden furnishings were chipped or scarred. The chair cushions showed a number of small tears in them. The waiting room had two cushioned chairs and one old pull-out sofa.
Stan had complained, but his complaints were ignored by his dad who said, “People coming to see you aren’t interested in what things look like in your office. They’re interested in what you can do about their problems. That’s what lawyers do Son, they solve people’s problems.”
Stan had no choice. He had to agree since he didn’t have any money to put into the office.
He soon found out what the one lawyer was talking about. In a small town, there just wasn’t enough legal business to go around and what there was, was already taken.
Most families either had a lawyer someplace in the family or had a close friend who had a lawyer in their family. And people used lawyers they either knew or who were recommended by someone they knew. And hustling for legal business, as the more successful attorneys did to build a decent practice, wasn’t anything Stan could embrace.
So he ended up doing odd legal jobs that nobody else would take because the lawyer would be working for minimum wages doing the work, if that. He’d try to keep lawbreakers out of jail, or if in jail, he’d work to get them a reduced sentence.
Divorces, even with little or no pay from it, were around. At least he was getting some trial experience. He filed bankruptcies, drafted legal agreements, deeds, wills and trusts, handled bank collection work, all one-shot deals with little follow up. His waiting room always had plenty of empty chairs.
But he was a lawyer and, socially at least, that was better than being a used car salesman even if the salesman made significantly more money. He often wished he’d gone to medical school. Not only would he command respect, he’d be making money as well.
*****
Bishop Bone sat in a rattan chair on his screened-in back porch drinking an afternoon beer and watching the beavers work in their pond on the other side of Indian Creek that flowed past his backyard.
He owned twenty-two acres and an old log cabin on stilts overlooking Indian Creek that every so often overflowed into his yard. The stilts were insurance against what the locals had called the 100 year-flood, which hadn’t happened since he’d been there, but the stilts gave him comfort for the day it would happen. His cabin wasn’t too far from the homes of Stan and Hank Thomas although he didn’t know either man just then.
The creek almost divided the property into equal parts. On the far side of the creek, the beavers had built a dam across a small branch that fed into the creek and created a pond for their stick-mud mounds that poked up here and there from the pond’s surface. The interstate marked one boundary of his property, a waterfall down the creek marked the other. He had bought it after arriving in Lawton, an old lumber town, and had never considered leaving.
For his afternoon exercise, he would often drag his old wooden boat down to the creek and row across to jog three times around the pond before returning to his reward – a glass of cold beer.
He also played tennis with friends at the Country Club. He wasn’t a member but his friends were. Today wasn’t a tennis day, so he had to fall back on a jog around the beaver pond for his exercise. Sometimes he cut his grass or cleaned brush from around the larger trees on his land. There was always something that needed doing, something that would enable him to work up a sweat.
It was April and the mosquitos were getting active but the screen around his back porch kept them out. Otherwise, the temperature was just right, one of the best seasons in Southern Mississippi.
The weather was warming up after a cooling spring rain during the night. The spring had been a rainy-one insuring leafy green vegetation and new, natural grown in and around Lawton well into the summer. Although numerous, most rains hadn’t been so heavy th
at people around Lawton, with a little effort, couldn’t get around. And most people were glad for the rain. It saved them from having to constantly water their yards and gardens.
*****
Bishop Bone, in his early sixties, stood a shade over six feet, with almost no flab, a consequence of staying in good shape. His face was rough and showed the beginnings of age lines. He had light brown hair that was showing some gray here and there with a thinning spot at the back. His eyes were green. He only shaved when he was seeing Kathy Sullivan, his very close friend (to say the least) and when he was handling an assignment from a bank.
He’d met Kathy at Lawton’s public library, which she managed. Instead of buying his reading material, he’d begun checking it out. They eventually talked and discovered they were mutually attracted. Like Bone, she’d been married before for a short time. Kathy lived in an old Queen Anne home, which had belonged to her late mother, in the better section of Lawton.
They’d talked about marriage, but when they first began their relationship she was taking care of her mother, and marriage was out of the question. After her mother passed away they’d decided to keep their relationship the way it was. It was comfortable and they had become more than good friends. And it had stayed that way over the years. Marriage, they’d concluded, wouldn’t improve on their feelings for each other. And if their feelings changed, all they had to do was let the other one know about it. There’d be no legal issues to deal with. But so far their feelings were just as strong as they had been at the beginning. That always made Bishop happy to know.
*****
Before coming to Lawton, Bishop had consulted with banks in California about their bad loans and properties, mostly commercial, around the state. He was a lawyer and had been doing very well until one day he got blindsided in Los Angeles by a crooked borrower and a bank manager the borrower had bought with a few two martini lunches and a couple of five-minute rounds with an expensive hooker.
Death of the Weed Merchant Page 1