The Whiskey Baron by Jon Sealy Read Free Book Online Page A

different. We were at war, for one thing, and it took something out of me. You don’t go down that road lightly because you’ll never come back from raising a gun against another man.”

C hambers had just lit a cigar in his office when the county’s house representative called up from Columbia to discuss the murder. It had only been twelve hours since the bodies were found, but it being Sunday the gossip mill had spread like news of the second coming. What could Chambers tell him? “Yes sir, we’re working on it. I’ve got men out looking for Mary Jane Hopewell, and I’ve taken some statements.”
    “I tell you, Furman, this isn’t looking good. I’ve got constituents calling me up from the other side of York County asking can’t the law do something. This is campaign season.”
    “We’re working on it.”
    “My office is right down the street from federal investigators and they’ve already come by once to see what I know about it. I don’t know who tipped them off, but they smell something big. They’reprobably going to set up base in Castle and try to bring down a big fish.”
    “They think they’re going to find a big fish in Castle? This ain’t Charlotte.”
    “It’s not a small-town murder they’re interested in.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “The whiskey trade.”
    “Whiskey.”
    “Whiskey. There’s a big organization in Charlotte. None of this mountain still business. We’re talking big time. Runners coming in from three states, including South Carolina. You know Aunt Lou?”
    “I know who she is, but what’s she got to do with my county?”
    “Take it easy, Furman. They’re after Aunt Lou, but to get to her they’re nosing around in Castle. Going after one of her distributors.”
    “They likely already know all there is to know about him. Nothing new here.”
    “World’s changing, Furman. The old rules no longer apply. Mr. Tull should appreciate that as well as you do.”
    When he hung up the phone, Chambers stepped outside and stood before the main square to relight his cigar. In Castle’s downtown square, a Confederate memorial obelisk rose from the pavement and a bronze cannon aimed across Main to the courthouse and the sheriff’s station. Chambers stood in the square in front of the sheriff’s station and gazed up at the courthouse clock. A slated building with ornate carvings and embellished angles. The hash marks of power lines and poles. A row of blackbirds sinking one with their weight.
    Despite the stock market crash and the ensuing Depression, Castle was still a rich town thanks to the textile boom and the railroads that crisscrossed the Carolinas to bring cotton north. Behind the Confederate square along York Street, rows of white Colonials housed the town’s aldermen, the mill bosses and lawyers and salesmen. Magnolias sprinkled the sidewalks, sporting their sweet white flowers, and on any given day you’d see men in fedoras and white shirts ambling through town, sweating in the heat while their wives were at home in flower print cotton dresses. West along the railroad tracks from town, Highway 9 passed beyond the filling station andthe Hillside Inn and out to the Bell mill village, where the houses lay bumped together like stalks of corn, where the brick wall of the cotton mill bracketed the side of the hill, and where, beyond the mill itself, a pair of rounded smokestacks rose up on either side and coughed black air out into the summer blue sky.
    While Chambers puffed his cigar, a long black car cruised by. Two strange men in gray suits gawked as they passed. Sure enough, he thought, sure enough. The congressman must have known they were already here and had called Chambers as a courtesy. They better be careful if they didn’t want to attract attention. Folks would notice expensive shoes on Castle sidewalks. Backwoods whiskey stills would be taken down and moved piecemeal into barns, liquor buried in mason jars, hidden in hencoops. The way rumors flew, if these