Chapter 23

9:00 AM, Tuesday: Cheri, Bob, and Reverend South were sitting in the front room as I made my final preparations to leave.

"So you won our bet after all," Cheri said.

"Don’t worry about that," I said from the bedroom. "I wouldn’t have, without your help." I came into the front room with my last suitcase and leaned it against the wall.

"Still, I ought to refund your rent for next week at least."

"Forget it. I’ve had such a good time, maybe I'll come back."

Mr. South cleared his baritone. "I’d like to offer you an apology, Mr. Stack. I’m afraid I wasn’t any help to you."

"I tell you, don’t worry about it. You weren’t under any obligation to satisfy my whims. All’s well that ends well, they say."

"You might not be so charitable with me, Mr. Stack, could you but read minds. I thought some very un-Christian things about you, sir. Those will have to come up in my prayers tonight, I assure you."

I sat in the only chair available, with South in the armchair and the Sundays on the couch. The way they were sitting together did leave plenty of room beside them, but I didn't think joining them would not have aided conversation. I shrugged at the preacher. "I can understand why you might think the worst. Testament did have some terrible… stains did you call them?"

"Indeed I did, and there were more of them than I thought. Of course I knew about the prostitution, and the bootlegging, but drugs…?"

Bob quit nuzzling Cheri, and looked up. "You know, if you’d have called the state police Sunday instead of Monday, they might have caught Sheriff Gas. You let him get away."

"I don’t think so. I didn’t have any hard evidence, so they’d have waited until Monday to come anyway. I thought about arresting him, maybe, as a citizen, but what would stop him from just laughing in my face? I’d have had to shot him to stop him, and what if they couldn’t convict him? Even if I caught him in an illegal act like breaking in, he could still do any number of things: even kill me and plant evidence on me if he wanted. We know he didn’t shy from murder."

Cheri’s eyes were bright. "How’d you finally figure it all out?"

I looked around at the reverend. "Are you sure you want to hear it?"

South nodded. "We only have second-hand stories of what you told the state police yesterday."

I settled back. "There were really two lines of thought that did it. The first was simple: I had lots of testimony that Mary Cole had done very well in Testament. The pastures were green, so to speak. When that happens, one of two things usually results: either the girl becomes a mada: that is, gets friends of like mind and expands her business; or competition sets up. Neither thing happened. In fact, Mary didn’t even buy a house of her own, although good houses were going cheap." I smiled at the Sundays. " I know of one myself. That leads directly to a simple fact. Someone was controlling her.

"There are two ways to I could have figured it who. When I found the boxes in the attic of the house Mary rented - you know about that, right? - I could have guessed that the owner of the house was her pimp, and that the boxes belonged to the other prostitutes: one who "disappeared" in one case, the other who had "fallen, breaking her neck", according to Gas’s reports. I could have realized that even earlier if I had listened to Mrs…, what’s the name of the lady with the blue hat?"

"Mrs. Gardener," Cheri supplied.

"Right. She said something about 'that house ought to have been burned down', but I didn’t pay attention."

"I’m afraid I have to claim the fault for that," mumbled Mr. South.

"Anyhow, I was going to follow up on the owners of the house, but never got it done. The state police did it in jig time, and what they found would have solved the whole thing right there."

"But you didn’t have the information," protested Bob.

"That’s right, I didn’t. So I did it the other way. I figured that Mary was controlled. Who in Testament had the power to keep her where he wanted her, and to keep other prostitutes out? Lawson, that’s who, the biggest bootlegger in Tennessee.

"The problem with that was, he got killed too. That’s when I started thinking. Who says that the same person killed them both? I admit I didn’t even that didn't even occur to me until the coroner in Knoxville said that he might not have been killed at all. Pretty stupid of me, since the method of operation was so obviously different.

"By this time, though, someone else had died: David Moore. If I took it as fact that Lawson was Mary’s killer, and he was dead, then who killed Moore?

"I won’t bore you with all the ifs-and-maybes that I went through at the time. I’ll just tell you what I postulated. Most has already been substantiated.

"Old Man Lawson comes back to Testament about fifteen years ago. He takes over the moonshine business of the county. Now, if one farmer keeps back a few bushels of corn to make shine, nobody is the wiser. But I’ve seen the store room of shine at the rear of the general store. That took more than a few bushels. Old Man Lawson must not have believed in doing it small. He founded a company, and using money he made elsewhere, bought up a bunch of farms. According to the police, he controlled thousands of acres of corn. He could siphon off a thousand bushels for his moonshine, and lower his yield per acre by less than one, say. That explains, though, why the farmers around here wouldn’t talk. To keep his lowered yield from showing up with the county agent, he would have to buy off about a bushel an acre from the locals, probably in cash and probably at more than market.

"To control that much corn without being noticed, he needed warehouses. Although another company is legal owner, it’s just a paper dummy. Lawson owned them too.

"That’s a lot of shenanigans going on in one place, so to get away with it all, Lawson needed to own the sheriff. We’ll get to that in a second.

"Now remember, this is all going on about fifteen years ago, and Lawson is a man of vision, of a sort. What would a man like Lawson find to amuse himself during those years?"

"Drugs," whispered Mr. South.

"Exactly. Tell me, Mr. South, when you mentioned stains in Testament, did you, in any way, mean drugs? Buying, selling, using?"

"Of course not!"

"I didn’t think so. That’s what made this place so perfect for Lawson. According to the state police, Testament is known to be almost drug free. Anwhere else, if the cops see an open, level field, they might think "airstrip". In Testament, they think "needs fertilizer." But as a matter of fact, they’d have been right the other way.

"Lawson found a ruined man in Moore to take care of that end of his business. He was smart enough to want an expert, and Moore was a former heroin user. Moore had a van he'd drive up one of those tree-lined driveways to nowhere, where he’d be totally invisible at night, and conduct business with pilots who would land in the field."

"But why" asked Cheri.

"This is only a guess, but there is evidence to support it. The police found over a million dollars worth in hard drugs in the warehouse. Assuming he got regular shipments, he could have been the main supplier to Knoxville. He could set up any number of smaller drug suppliers in the city, and they'd take all the risk. The deals with the small fry could be done entirely without any contact: Moore drops off a supply in a pre-assigned driveway, small fry picks it up and leaves money. If the police busted one of them, all they’d get was a know-nothing small fry and a few thousand bucks worth of drugs.

"The proof came when the police traced the companies. Several of the paper companies handled transactions of up to sixteen million a year, without, of course, reporting any profit. Who needs any?

"And all the paper companies were traced back to one company that owned them all wholly. ‘New and Old, Inc.’. I don’t know if that’s a joke on the name of Testament, or on the businesses they were in – prostitution and drug running, the oldest vice and the newest. The company was owned fifty percent by Lawson, chairman of the board, thirty percent by Gas, president, and twenty percent by Moore, office of the company. There were clauses that divided the shares up in the case of the death of one member. All strictly legal."

"Is that why Gas killed Moore?", asked Cheri.

"Maybe, but I don’t think so. I think Moore had feelings for Mary Cole, and was going to talk. Not much but maybe enough. Someone told Gas about my visit to Moore – maybe Moore told him himself, wanting advice. What he got was a bullet from a target rifle into his guts. That’s the weapon that killed him, and, though they haven’t found it yet, lots of people remember Gas owning one.

"That’s why Moore kept telling me to 'Get Gas', and that’s why Gas started to run when I said that Moore was asking for him. He wanted to shut him up."

"Why did Lawson keep up the whorehouse, anyhow, if he was making millions with drugs?" asked Bob.

I shrugged. "He wanted a woman. Probably a hooker was the only kind of woman he could trust. Apparently he gave each woman a special nightgown to wear with him: Mary was wearing hers when she went into the woods with him. He must have just walked over there whenever he felt like it."

"But why not just keep the woman to himself? He could afford it."

I grinned. "I'm just guessing, but I expect it gave him a thrill to imagine the ‘goody-goody’ men of Testament sinning by his suffrage." I shrugged again. " That, or maybe he just wanted to keep her busy and out of trouble."

"And he just killed them when he was tired of them," Cheri shuddered.

"So Lawson killed the Cole woman, and Gas killed Moore to keep him quiet," mused the Reverend. "What I still don't understand is why he ran. Why didn't he just kill you, Mr. Stack?" I stared hard at the reverend. "God forbid," he added quickly.

"I guess it was just good luck. When I first met him, I mentioned that a friend of mine knew I was coming down. He must have thought that my death might cause some bad reactions. Remember, he was convinced that I was working for someone." I clapped my hands. "If that covers it, I’ll go stow my gear."

Bob jumped to his feet. "I’ll help," he said.

I didn't need it, but why not? I left a small suitcase for him to carry.

Outside by the car, well out of earshot of the house, Bob said, "By the way, I mentioned that little thing I told you about to my wife... and she’s forgiven me."

"I noticed that you looked a little more intimate," I smiled. I had also heard her in the background when I called him on Sunday, whispering him back to bed. "I can't say I'm surprised. She did strike me as the understanding type."

I opened the trunk and we tossed the gear in. Bob bit his lip. "About that call," said Bob, "what did you want to know all that stuff about Gas for? What difference did it make that he used to play on the mountain with us, that he knew his way around it?"

I leaned on the fender. "Oh, that. I had just realized that he was about your age. I thought that Lawson, instead of running him off like he did all of you, might have taken him under his wing instead. Looks like he did."

"How about the stuff about the paths and gullies back there?" Bob persisted. I didn’t answer. Bob’s voice dropped a level. "The thing is... later than night... I thought I heard a gunshot, is all. You understand."

I looked Bob right in the eyes. "Before I answer, let me mention something, Bob. When talked to the state police, I suggested that the reason that Gas skipped town was because he saw me leaving the records office. Now, I could have told them that it was because he saw a classified ad in the Knoxville papers asking about a certain Mary whose last name was either Loce or Leco, but started with ‘L’ either way. But I didn't want to tell them that, see, because if I did, I’d have to explain where I got the such an idea. You understand what I mean?" Bob nodded slowly. "Okay. About that sound you heard. That was probably me. One of my tires blew out. Too bad I don't still have it, or I would prove it too you. I threw it into one of those gullies you told me about."

Bob responded slowly. "Then nobody’ll ever find it."

"I hope not," I said, putting an arm around his shoulders and heading for the house. "It was in terrible shape."

Cheri and Mr. South met us at the door. Cheri gave me a kiss on the cheek, and the reverend shook my hand.

"If you don’t mind..." he said as I turned to go. "How do you explain Lawson’s death?"

I considered what to say. It made me uncomfortable, but couldn’t see any reason why not. "The coroner said it was an impossible death. Me, I don't think anything's impossible. Freak lightning strike, allergic reaction – it had to be something, and it could be anything. But you know, when he was dying, Moore's last words were ‘Mary… take care of killer’, and then he said ‘second death’ after I asked about Mary Cole. Maybe when he said 'second death' he was talking about religion, but Lawson's was the second death as far as I was concerned."

I gave them an embarrassed grin. I couldn't help myself. "Reverend, you told me yourself that it’d take a miracle to clean the stains from this town. It seems to me that Lawson himself was the biggest stain of all. Now, I don’t want to push this... but maybe Lawson's death was some kind of divine justice. Maybe God let a wounded soul out of hell just for a minute, so she could bring a little justice. Just think about it -maybe Mary Cole was your miracle after all!"

I turned and walked to the car before they could speak, got in, started up and backed out. They still hadn’t moved when they faded from sight in my rear-view mirror.