Blind Tiger, page 16
“Is watching other people all that old lady does?”
“Apparently.”
Thatcher looked out across the creek to the opposite bank where a black-and-gray-striped cat was stalking something in the tall grass. “Did the old lady see the doctor walk from the house and get into his auto?”
“He keeps it parked around back.”
Thatcher brought his gaze back to the sheriff, but he didn’t say anything.
Bill said, “You’re thinking Mrs. Driscoll was dead, and he carried out her body without Eleanor Wise seeing him.”
“I’m not accusing anybody of anything.”
“Understood, understood. We’re just talking off the top of our heads here.”
Thatcher didn’t contradict him, but the truth was, he’d given this a lot of thought. Based on what he knew for fact and not scuttlebutt, he’d dismissed the various theories that had been disproved already or were too outlandish to put stock in.
The process of elimination always left Thatcher with only one plausible explanation for Mila Driscoll’s disappearance.
“If she’d died accidentally,” Bill said, musing aloud, “like if she’d fallen down the stairs, something like that, Gabe would have reported it.”
“Um-huh.”
“If they’d had a quarrel that got out of hand, if he flew off the handle and struck her—”
“A quarrel between them wouldn’t have gone that far.”
Bill’s sharp look invited Thatcher to explain why he thought that.
He said, “When she talked about him, her cheeks turned rosier than normal.”
“A woman in love.”
“A woman who worshiped the ground her husband walked on,” Thatcher said.
“Do you have a lot of experience in that area?”
Thatcher smiled. “No. Just wish I had a woman light up when she talked about me like Mrs. Driscoll did when she told me how fond her husband was of her shortbread. I doubt she ever said a cross word to him. But if they did have a squabble, she would’ve given in early. It would never have reached the boiling point.”
Looking troubled, the sheriff ran his hand over his mouth and mustache. “Here’s the thing, Thatcher. If a man kills his wife, it’s usually in a fit of passion. Fed up with her nagging about his multiple failures, he loses his temper and, while teaching her a hard lesson in who’s boss, he kills her, intentionally or not.
“Or a husband finds his beloved in bed with another man, goes blind with rage, kills them both. Afterward, he feels either justified for doing it—‘They had it coming. I’d kill them all over again.’—or mortified, and he lives out the days till they hang him eaten up with regret.
“Of course some wife-killings are plotted. Another woman catches a man’s eye, he disposes of the spouse who’s blocking his path to greener pastures.”
Bill paused and took a breath. “Over the course of my career, I’ve seen all that many times. What I haven’t seen is a man killing his pregnant wife, his very pregnant, devoted wife who thought the sun rose and set in him. Not accidentally, not in a burst of violent rage, but with cold calculation. To take her life as well as his unborn child’s, to do that with aforethought, would call for a total absence of soul. I just can’t feature it.”
Not wanting to interrupt the sheriff’s thought process, Thatcher held his peace. He picked up another rock and tossed it from hand to hand.
“And anyhow,” Bill went on, “it couldn’t have been premeditated. The doc didn’t know he was going to get called away from the house that night.”
“It would help to know the length of time between the emergency call from the roadhouse and his arrival there.”
“No more than half an hour, Lefty said.”
“What’s it usually take to drive it?”
“Roughly that. Gabe would have had to plan a perfect murder and implement it in a matter of minutes before racing out to treat the young prostitute who got beat up.”
Thatcher looked at him intuitively. “You already asked this Lefty about the timing of the doc’s arrival?”
Bill nodded.
“So this isn’t a sudden notion of yours. It had crossed your mind that the doc had a hand in Mrs. Driscoll’s vanishing.”
Bill’s sigh was as good as an admission. “He’s the one link between Mrs. Driscoll’s disappearance and Wally Johnson’s homicide. The more I thought about it, the less coincidental it seemed.”
“I thought so all along,” Thatcher said.
“So did I.”
“I just didn’t want to say so.”
“Me either.” Glumly, Bill added, “I wish you’d scoffed at the idea. Doesn’t make me feel any better to learn that it had occurred to you, too.”
“Are you going to arrest Driscoll?”
“Without any evidence? No. It’s still all speculation.”
“That didn’t stop you from arresting me.”
The sheriff put his hat back on and slapped his thighs as he stood up. “I had that coming.”
“You sure as hell did.” Thatcher also came to his feet.
“Cut me some slack. Hauling in a drifter for questioning is one thing. Hauling in a highly respected pillar of the community is another.” The sheriff started up the embankment. “But I could make it up to you. That is if you’re willing.”
“Willing?”
When the ground leveled off, the sheriff took advantage of the shade cast by the steel grillwork of the suspension bridge. “I’ve thought of a way to relieve you of suspicion.”
“How’s that?”
“I’ll deputize you.”
Thatcher laughed. “Come again?”
“You heard me. It would be a show of the faith I have in your innocence. If you wore a badge, folks would start looking at you in a different light.”
Still amused, Thatcher shook his head. “Thanks for the offer, and the show of faith, but I don’t want to be a lawman.”
“You’ve got a natural aptitude for it. You’re cool-headed. You listen more than you talk, and you yourself boasted of having a knack for reading people.”
“In a game of poker.”
“Bluffing at cards is a form of lying. Detecting it is a talent. You’d sense when a witness or suspect was giving me the runaround.”
When he saw that Thatcher was about to argue, he held up a hand. “Besides all that, Mrs. Driscoll’s fate is eating at you. You want to know what happened to her.”
“So does everybody.”
“But not everybody has a personal stake in solving the mystery. You’ve dwelled on it.”
“In my idle time.”
Bill grinned. “That speaks volumes. I’m headed out to talk again with that woman who had the breech birth. Maybe she’ll provide some insight into the doc’s frame of mind that night. Why don’t you come with me, listen in? Give it a trial run.”
Thatcher shook his head. “It won’t do any good to go on about it. I appreciate your trying to improve people’s opinion of me, but I don’t want to be a deputy. All I know is ranching and horses.”
“You could still do your horse training. You wouldn’t be on staff. Just, you know, every once in a while, I could use an extra set of eyes and ears and—”
“And?”
“I’ve seen you shoot.” After the blunt statement, he waited a beat. “I count on needing extra firepower soon, because I fear all hell’s about to break loose. The Johnsons have sworn vengeance for Wally. I’ve heard rumblings that they’re going to start sniffing out their competitors, and they’re going to keep at it until they find and execute Wally’s murderer.”
“How will they know when they’ve got the right man?”
“When they’ve killed all of them.”
He couldn’t have hammered his point home any harder, and Thatcher felt the impact of it. Nevertheless, he had no aspiration to wear a badge. “I hope it doesn’t turn into a bloodbath, Bill. But a war between moonshiners isn’t my fight, and I’m staying out of it.”
The sheriff held his gaze for several seconds. “We’ll see.”
They walked back to the stable together but said nothing more until they parted there with exchanged goodbyes.
As Thatcher watched the sheriff walk away, the words we’ll see echoed in his head. He wasn’t struck by the words themselves so much as by the way Bill had said them. Not with disappointment over being unable to change Thatcher’s mind. But with the shrewd confidence that he would.
Twenty-Three
The morning following her discovery of the still, Laurel plunged headfirst into her study of the centuries-old art of making sour mash whiskey. The more product they had to sell, the more money they could make, and the sooner she could settle their outstanding accounts.
In addition to the pressing financial necessity propelling her was a personal goal: As long as she was embarking on an illicit business, she wanted to excel at it.
Under pain of death, Ernie confided in her his family’s recipe for the mash: unsprouted corn kernels, malted barley, water, sugar, yeast, and pot-tail.
“But,” he warned, “you gotta know how much of each ingredient to add. You gotta know what stage to add it, and it has to be the right temperature. You gotta know when the mash has reached the perfect stage of fermentation. If your mash ain’t good, your whiskey ain’t gonna be.”
“How do you know when it’s fermented long enough?”
“When it gets foamy on top. But I dip my finger in and taste it just to be sure.”
Many of his instructions went that way. “What’s pot-tail?”
“Also called slop. It’s what’s left in the cooker at the end of the run.”
“And when is the run at an end?”
“When the liquor breaks at the worm and won’t hold a bead. After that it’s distilling less than a hunerd proof liquor. You stop cookin’ and pour out the pot-tail right then so it won’t burn. Hogs love it if you want to use it for feed. Chickens, too. But save some to start another batch of mash.”
“Oh. Like sourdough bread.”
“I reckon. Never heard of that. Is it like cornbread?”
She had a lot to learn, beginning with Ernie’s vast glossary of moonshining terminology. Thumper. Backings. Goose eye. Popskull. “That’s low-quality ’shine that gives you headaches for days on end,” Ernie explained.
A swab-stick was what he’d been using to stir the mash as it had begun to cook. It was different from a stir-stick, which had a forked end with a wire strung between the points. That was used to stir the mash as it was fermenting, which usually took four to five days. “Longer when the weather’s cooler.”
The referred-to “worm,” she learned, was slang for the copper tubing coiled inside the wooden barrel she’d noticed the night before. The hot vapor created by the cooking mash rose up to the cap and made its way through the cap arm into the worm, where the steam was cooled by circulating water inside the barrel. The condensed result that funneled out of the worm into the container outside the bottom of the barrel was corn liquor.
Because of his down-home way of speaking, Laurel’s first impression of Ernie was that he was simple. Most would still have that impression of him. In actuality, Earnest Sawyer was a chemist, who prided himself on the quality of his product.
“You only gotta poison one or two customers and your business is did for.” To guard against contaminants or toxins, he held to a rigid standard of filtering their moonshine three times before bottling it. Grinning widely, he’d told her, “I sample each run my ownself just to be sure.”
He walked and talked her through their next run, letting her observe the entire process. She asked a lot of questions. She even took one sip of the white lightning. Ernie and Irv laughed at the face she made. Eyes watering, coughing, she said she would leave them in charge of testing their whiskey’s quality.
Although she had no intention of taking over the distilling process, she’d wanted to have a rudimentary understanding of the science behind it.
Of course, it was also essential to learn how not to get caught. That was a science she must master.
One evening when Irv skipped going out to the still, she brought up her fear of being found out. The two of them were seated at the kitchen table enjoying a coconut meringue pie she had baked earlier that day.
Around a bite of pie, he said, “You don’t have to be fearful, just careful. There’s dyed-in-the-wool abstainers, sure. But a lot of folks around here turn a blind eye to moonshining because they understand the farmer’s plight brought on by the boll weevil. They switched from cotton to corn because corn is a boon market. And that’s because of whiskey-making. It’s basic economics.”
“It’s basic crime.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to a sod buster trying to keep his kids from going hungry. These people aren’t outlaws, Laurel. They’re hardworking, poor folk striking while the iron is hot.”
“I don’t think you take the potential dangers seriously enough, Irv.”
“All right, I’ll admit that things have clamped down since Prohibition. Before it, many lawmen ignored the illegal whiskey trade. Others adhered to ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.’ They lined their pockets with bribes. Now, though, they’re getting squeezed by federal revenue officers and the Texas Rangers.”
He raised his fork for emphasis. “That bunch is serious about upholding the law, no matter how unpopular it is. They can muscle their way past local and county officials, clean or crooked.
“Rumor is,” he continued, “the Rangers and other agencies are recruiting men to snitch, and typically these snitches are former moonshiners and bootleggers who know the business inside out. They swapped sides in exchange for clemency. Or maybe they found religion and reformed. Who knows? What I do know is that it’s happening.
“Which is why I was leery of that Hutton when he showed up at the shack, what with our whiskey still being just over the hill. He raised the hair on the back of my neck.”
“You still suspect him of being one of those snitches?”
“He looks the type.”
“What type?”
“Like Pinkerton agents. I used to see them in depots. Could spot ’em a mile off. All had the same traits. Polite. Quiet. Calm. Deadly.”
“Deadly?”
“One of my regular customers? His boy Roger works for Fred Barker who has the auto garage and stable just across the bridge from downtown.”
That was where Mr. Hutton’s handbills said he did his horse training. But she hadn’t told Irv about their meeting on the street, so she said, “I know the place.”
“Well, Roger saw this Hutton, if that’s his real name, shoot the head off a rattlesnake poised to strike a deputy sheriff. Faster than a blink, Roger said.”
He described the incident to Laurel as it had been told to him. “They were all dumbfounded, none more than Sheriff Amos, who’d been disarmed before he realized what was happening. The deputy had dirty drawers.
“But Roger claims Hutton took it in stride, never broke a sweat, like he was accustomed to beheading rattlers with one shot from twenty yards, firing a pistol he’d never touched before.” After taking another bite, he’d added, “This is damn good pie, Laurel. Save some for Ernie.”
“Of course.”
She wished he would elaborate on Thatcher Hutton without her having to prompt him with questions. However, he said no more about him, and returned to the topic of avoiding detection.
Days ago she had proposed to her partners that she take over half of Irv’s “regulars” route, giving him more time to work on the new still. “It only makes sense,” she had argued, stressing that she had time on her hands, and that the new still was essential to increasing their production. After a lengthy back-and-forth with the two men, she’d gotten them to agree.
But since she was now an active participant, actually transporting the product, Irv seized every opportunity, like tonight, to emphasize how careful she must be to avoid pitfalls.
“Don’t make a track that leads off-road. Lawmen look for them. One of Ernie’s cousins got caught by creating a trail with his truck that led through the woods straight to his still.”
“But to get to our still, we have to drive over ground.”
“So never turn off at the same place twice. Also, lawmen are on the lookout for anybody buying copper. It’s a dead giveaway. I was lucky to sneak in mine for the new still. Bought the copper sheets from an outfit in Weatherford, then smuggled them in on the bottom of my truck.”
He had already explained that the purchase of the copper had coincided with their leasing the house. That was why their other bills had gone unpaid. He had planned to make up the temporary shortfall soon by doubling whiskey production. Her “list” had limited his time to work on it.
“You trust the copper seller not to report you?” she asked now.
Irv laughed out loud. “He ain’t gonna tell. He’s supplying every moonshiner west of Fort Worth. See? The business is good for everybody.”
“How’s the still coming along?”
“About finished. Soon’s the cap passes Ernie’s inspection. He’s persnickety about the tapering. Says even before it’s sealed during a run, it’s gotta fit into the cooker as tight as a…” Clearing his throat, he’d left the analogy unspoken and simply said the fit had to be airtight.
He then circled back to other giveaways. “Don’t be caught with a stockpile of mason jars or sugar. Nobody needs twenty or thirty pounds of sugar at a time unless they’re making moonshine.”
“Where do you buy your supplies?”
“From my trusted suppliers, who will remain nameless.”
“Nameless to me?”
“Especially to you. For your own safety as well as theirs. They’re making money hand over fist, too, but they can’t be too obvious about it and jeopardize their legitimate businesses.”
