Chiefs (6 page)

Skeeter paused for a moment. “Now, about guns. I’ve pulled my gun a dozen or fifteen times in eight years, and I’ve fired it at a man twice. Killed ‘em both. One of ‘em was about to try to kill me with a pistol, and I didn’t bat an eye; I just shot him. The other one was running from me, and I told him to halt, and he wouldn’t, and I shot him. I didn’t mean to kill the second one, just bring him down. I was aiming at the seat of his pants, but I hit him in the small of his back and cut his spine.” He looked away. “I didn’t lose any sleep over the first one; it was me or him. The second one hadn’t done much, though, just stole some tires from a filling station, but he was trying to escape and would have if I hadn’t shot him. I guess I didn’t feel too good about either one of them. I can’t give you much advice about when to shoot at a man, Will Henry, unless he’s trying to kill you. You’ll have to work that out by yourself. But I’ll tell you this, you’d better work it out in your mind right now, ‘cause when the time comes you won’t have time to think about it.”

Will Henry’s breath was coming more easily now; he stood up and filled his lungs. “Well, thanks for the advice, Skeeter. If I ever recover my health enough to use it, it ought to come in real handy.”

“I’m just giving you the little lecture I give when I get a new deputy. You’d be surprised the way some of ‘em act as soon as they get a badge on. I have to pick ‘em real careful.” Skeeter traced some obscure pattern in the dirt with a toe. “I wouldn’t have picked you, Will Henry. If Holmes had asked my advice I’d of told him to find somebody else.”

Will Henry was stung. “You think I’d push people around?”

“Oh, no, no, no. That’s not why I wouldn’t of picked you. Just the reverse. I don’t know if you’ve got it in you to be hard enough. I think you’re likely to hesitate when the time comes. That’ll breed disrespect, and word’ll get around. You won’t be able to keep things straight. And when that happens, Carrie’s going to have good reason to worry. Somebody’ll kill you, Will
Henry, as sure as you’re standing there.”

They were both silent for a moment. It occurred to Will Henry that this must be one of the most solemn moments of his life. Skeeter Willis, with patent sincerity, was giving him the most earnest possible advice, based on knowledge and experience. The man was trying the very best he knew how to help him survive the work he had chosen to do. Will Henry was moved.

“Skeeter, I understand you, and I’ll try to remember what you’ve told me. I reckon if I don’t die in bed it won’t be your fault. Thank you.”

Skeeter heaved a deep sigh and nodded. He patted Will Henry’s shoulder heavily a couple of times, gave him a small smile, and walked away toward his car.

Will Henry stopped in front of the house and looked at it. Although chilled from the walk home, he felt compelled to pause and reflect. The night was clear and very cold, even though it was not much past six. The rising moon gave the white frame house a luminous quality. It looked secure and inviting. He still felt somewhat disoriented. Only the day before he had left the house he was born in, left a country life, changed irrevocably his existence. The farm was receding into the past at an astonishing rate; it surprised him to feel, standing in front of this strange house, that he had arrived
home.
Inside, his wife was preparing a supper she had not grown or picked or plucked. His children would get up tomorrow morning and walk a short distance to school, and afterwards would play with other children who lived only a few yards away. Tomorrow, his work would allow him to walk on pavement in shoes he normally wore only on Sundays. People would seek him out with their problems, or simply pass the time of day. People. He would see more people in a day than he normally saw in ten. He had a place, a position in other people’s lives, for the first time. He would not disappoint them.

In one short day he had single-handedly captured two armed bank robbers in a manner that, if anyone other than Frank Mudter ever found out about it, he would never live down; he had almost seen his son kill his daughter with a pistol he himself had left loaded and within reach; and he had been knocked on his ass by the sheriff of Meriwether County. It was less than an auspicious beginning, but it was, by God, a
new
beginning.

He climbed the steps and went inside.

Chapter 8.

HOLMES closed the front door and carefully hung his coat in the hall closet.

“Hugh?” The call came from upstairs. “Is that you?”

“Yes, Ginny, I’m home.” He heard her start for the stairs, and he waited in the entrance hall for her. He kissed her on the lips as she reached him, and they went into the small sitting room together. They had only recently completed the red-brick colonial house, and already they gravitated toward the “den,” as Virginia called it, instead of the more formal living room, which was kept for occasions when company called. The den was oak-paneled and leathery, and in winter Virginia always had a fire going in the little fireplace by the time he arrived home. Here, too, was kept their dark secret. In a cupboard which was part of a bookcase, concealed by a door onto which was glued a row of book spines, rested a bottle of bourbon whiskey, one of Scotch, one of very good cognac, and a bottle of very dry sherry. Holmes had made the cupboard himself after the builders had departed. Neither he nor Virginia ever touched the whiskey or brandy. Those were kept for civilized and trusted visitors, none of whom had as yet appeared. But Holmes knew that, surely, the day would come when he would want to offer a man a drink, and he would be ready.

The cupboard was the only receptacle in a Meriwether
County home which had been consciously constructed for the storage of alcoholic beverages, secret spirits usually residing in a cellar or out-of-the-way kitchen cupboard. Alcohol was a religious issue in Delano, and there were many people who held the belief that a man could not both drink whiskey and call himself a Christian. Although he had been brought up in an abstemious home, Holmes could see no logic in this viewpoint. He and Virginia had traveled widely in the United States and seen respectable people imbibing in hotels and restaurants without debauchery. The summer before, in London, on their first trip abroad, they had gone to Rule’s, the famous restaurant in Covent Garden, and Holmes had impulsively asked the wine waiter to recommend a good half-bottle of wine. He had also accepted a recommendation of sherry before the meal. He and Virginia had returned to Brown’s Hotel slightly tipsy, had had the best night in bed of their eight-year marriage, and had smuggled a bottle of sherry home.

Although the Eighteenth Amendment would not be declared officially ratified until later that same month and would not go into effect for another year, a man in Holmes’s position did not buy liquor openly. Instead, once a month, a small, extremely well-dressed young man in a large Pierce Arrow called at the Holmes residence after dark, filled a modest order, accepted cash in payment, and continued on his merciful rounds.

Holmes poured them both a sherry and sank into the leather sofa. He did not come home for “dinner,” as most men did. He had a sandwich at his desk and worked. Virginia prepared a three-course meal for the evening—they had dinner later than other people—and they shared half a bottle of wine with it. When he arrived home at night, the day’s news was fresh between them, and they always had plenty to talk about.

“You heard about the bank robbery and the arrest.”

“Yes, in great detail, at least four times this afternoon.”

“I swear, Ginny, it was the best thing that could possibly have happened right at this time.”

“You mean you’re
glad
the bank was robbed?”

“Oh, no, not that, although it will teach us to be a little more prepared for that sort of thing. What it’s done is made this whole chief-of-police situation so much easier to handle. We got a motion to build a police station through the council just like
that,
and I think we’ll get a police car through next meeting.”

“Even Idus Bray went along?”

“Went along! He was leading the charge! I’ve never seen him so excited about anything! Will Henry handled the thing real well, too. Naturally, he was surprised, and I could tell he was nervous, but he stopped that car and arrested those two boys just as cool as you please. You know, I probably wouldn’t have wanted Will Henry to have that job if there had been any kind of real choice, if there had been an experienced man available. Skeeter Willis still has a lot of reservations about him, I think, but he handled this thing real well, and he’s anxious to get Skeeter’s advice about everything. He may not know much about being a policeman yet, but at least he
knows
he doesn’t know much. Thank the Lord for that. Can you imagine what somebody like Foxy Funderburke would be like in that job?”

They talked on for a while, then Virginia excused herself to finish cooking dinner. Holmes felt the sherry warming him and stretched out on the sofa, groaning with fatigue and pleasure. He closed his eyes and felt a sense of completion. With the new fire department and the appointment of the chief of police, he felt that the town had reached a milestone, that it now had the organization and staffing and equipment that it needed. The paving of the central streets, the waterworks, the telephone exchange had all been milestones. There were dozens of other things they would need in the future, but for the moment, everything seemed complete. Holmes dozed.

Unlike Will Henry and Carrie Lee, who had grown effortlessly into what they were, like healthy plants, the products of long and provincially selective breeding, Hugh Holmes had designed and constructed himself, brick by plank by nail. He was a farmer’s son, too, but his father, who had been born to a starving sharecropper’s family, had had only his own shrewdness, industry, and sense of timing to help him extract a prosperous farm and cotton gin from the shambles of Reconstruction. He had passed on to the young Hugh the notion of the self-made man, the idea that he could decide what he wanted to do and then do it. Holmes took the idea quite literally, and he began with one or two attributes which would be of great help. In addition to a remarkable native intelligence, nature had given Holmes a rare physical presence. He was six feet five inches tall and might have been thought of as Lincolnesque, if his posture had not been so erect. From his early teens he towered over everyone he met; indeed, he did not meet a man taller than himself until he was thirty, and the experience depressed him for a week. He learned early to use his height with subtlety and effectiveness, when to slump into a chair and when to rise and look down. To his imposing height was added the distinct advantage of early maturity. Grayness tinted his hair at nineteen, and his features had been large and craggy even before that, lending him an air of thoughtfulness and wisdom.

Holmes decided early that he wanted a career in business, specifically, in banking. He realized that banks were at the heart of every business transaction of any consequence, that they held the power to move a community or a state, perhaps even a country. He knew, too, that a good bank was a highly efficient intelligence-gathering organization, and he liked the idea of having a special knowledge of what was going on. He believed that with such knowledge and with access to capital he could achieve* whatever he wanted.

There was not, however, a megalomaniacal bone in Holmes’s body. He did not wish to be J. P. Morgan. He wished to be a big fish in a small pond and to gather to himself just enough power to shape his own destiny and that of the pond he chose. He wished to travel, to learn, to experience many things in the world, and he knew if he went into a big city bank he would have to devote all of his energies to climbing the business ladder and to surviving in intramural, political warfare. He did not doubt that he could excel in such circumstances, but they were not circumstances to his liking.

Hugh Holmes had constructed a set of circumstances exactly to his liking, and, at the time of Will Henry Lee’s escape from the farm, at the end of 1919, those circumstances were the Bank of Delano. They were achieved with a combination of hard work, intelligence, and a stroke of luck, to which he had applied a finely developed sense of opportunism and a willingness to take, under the right circumstances, a major personal risk.

The first time Holmes had seen Delano, or rather, the place where Delano would soon be, was more than ten years before. He was the cashier at the Farmers and Merchants Bank at Woodbury, some twelve miles north, when on a Sunday afternoon he took the train to Warm Springs for a Sunday School Union picnic. Warm Springs was a prosperous and fashionable resort, attracting people from all over the South to bathe in the naturally warm waters and listen to music and lectures at the Meriwether Inn. It was also a favorite spot in the county for church outings, and Holmes was with a party of thirty who took the M&B to Warm Springs that day.

The Macon and Birmingham Railroad was misnamed, since it did not reach either Macon or Birmingham. The local name, Mule and Wagon, was more appropriate, owing to the slow speed at which the trains traveled. On this occasion, the train stopped for water at a country tank, and after a few minutes it was announced that there would be a short delay due to mechanical troubles, and that passengers were encouraged to stretch their legs. The whistle would blow when the train was ready once again.

Holmes got down from the train and looked about. They were in a pine forest—mostly young trees, but a few older, taller ones. There was a generous scattering of oaks and elms, as well, and the place was cool on a hot day. He strolled aimlessly away from the train into the woods, enjoying the scented air and the carpet of pine needles underfoot. Shortly, he came to a large clearing and was surprised to see a very new, white Cadillac touring car parked there. Three men, their dusters and goggles draped over a fender, stood talking, occasionally referring to a map and pointing in one direction or another. Holmes approached the group. “Good day to you, Gentlemen.” The men responded. “I’m a little bit surprised to see a big car like that so far off the beaten track.”