Dark and Bloody Ground (37 page)

That night they booked Epperson into the Knott County jail, from which he was scheduled to be moved to the state penitentiary at La Grange, near Louisville, where security was tighter. After bidding Roger farewell and saying they’d be seeing him again before too long, Fleming opened the back of his cruiser and gathered up the pieces of paper Epperson had dropped there. “Dear Carol,” one of them began, and went on as if describing a Sunday drive. On another sheet Roger had been calculating large numbers. Fleming saved these for evidence, doubtful that they would prove anything.

When Fleming told Danny Webb what Roger had said, the lieutenant was skeptical. Epperson, Webb pointed out, was facing the chair and had every reason to blame someone else. If Bartley had wanted sex with the girl, why hadn’t he raped her? The evidence showed that they had been in too much of a hurry to think about sex. The next thing you knew, Bartley would accuse Hodge, and Hodge would blame Epperson, or whatever. Who had done what mattered less than that they were all legally equally guilty, just for being there for the reasons they had been.

It still mattered to him, Fleming said, which one had done that to Tammy. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. It was a little guy’s crime, the act of a squirt pissed off because he had been rejected. When Danny Webb finally saw Donnie Bartley in the flesh, the lieutenant would understand.

“I believe what Roger said,” Fleming insisted as Webb continued to try to talk him out of jumping to conclusions. “You had to have been there. I believe he was telling the truth.”

The important thing, Webb reminded him, was that they were building such a tight case against all three of them. Even Lester Burns
was going to have one hell of a time trying to figure out how to plead this one. And new indictments would be coming down soon in the Morris murders and in the robbery back in May. Lester Burns had telephoned from Florida saying that he was bringing back a large cash fee. Where
that
money was coming from was another good question, but you could be sure that Lester had himself covered.

Webb recalled having run into Lester a few weeks ago over at Jerry’s Restaurant in Somerset, before the Acker murder. Old Lester had been table-hopping, working the crowd as if he were running for governor again, coming over to flatter the lieutenant and his family. He had gone on about his loyalties to the KSP and reminded Webb that he would take care of any trooper’s legal problems for a dollar.

“The way I hear Lester’s been hitting the bottle lately,” Danny Webb laughed, “I figure a dollar might be about right.”

23

B
Y THE AFTERNOON OF AUGUST
27, when Lester Burns returned to Somerset with the gym bag full of money in the trunk of Houston Griffin’s car, his anxiety had reached such an acute state that whiskey no longer calmed it, was only fueling it. Somewhere near Atlanta he had become possessed by the fear that Griff might run off with the money, had ordered the caravan to a halt, switched cars, and ridden the rest of the way in Griff’s LTD, leaving Lillian Davis to continue on her own.

His bad hip was paining him; he had fantasies of being stopped by the KSP and arrested; he was less and less sure of the wisdom of having accepted this case, which was daily revealing itself as more grisly, more complex, and more difficult; he had not been able to discover anything likeable or redeeming about Roger Epperson or either of his cohorts, nothing to persuade himself or a potential jury that these murderous thugs deserved mercy; and he no longer was confident that being upfront about the money he received would be enough to persuade anyone that he had no idea it was part of the stolen cash. A strong inner voice told him that his best course would be to head for the nearest KSP post and turn in the money, claiming that he had been shamefully misled by his client, whom he could no longer in conscience represent.

But the familiarity of home territory soothed his nerves and restored some of his confidence. The closer they came to Burnside,
the little town just south of Somerset where his office stood on Highway 27 overlooking Lake Cumberland, the more Lester strengthened his resolve to keep the money and find his way toward getting his hands on more of it. He had the suspicion that before too long Sherry Wong and Donnie Bartley’s relatives would be contacting him for help in securing other attorneys. There were opportunities ripe for the picking, more than a million bucks still out there.

Everywhere he looked around Somerset and Burnside reminded Lester of his power and prosperity: his house beside the Eagle’s Nest fairways, his farm that increased in acreage every year as he acquired the farms bordering it, his commercial and agricultural and mining properties all over the place, others on which he was ready to pounce. Unlike the mountains, it was a booming area, owing mainly to tourism and the houseboat-building industry that brought year-round employment. Lester was such a major presence there that many people believed that Burnside had been named after him; nor did he choose to disillusion them, although he knew that the name honored a Civil War general renowned for his whiskers, later called sideburns.

It was great to be home safe and sound, Lester proclaimed as Griff drove past new fast food joints and motels and boat factories and automobile dealerships, in the most progressive and beautiful spot in Kentucky, where the fish were biting and the cattle were fat and they had the best country ham and his bank account was full and people understood what it meant to work hard for a decent living.

“Pull off here,” he instructed as they approached Max Flynn Motors. “I want to give these boys a little something to cheer them up and fill their sleep with iridescent dreams.”

He retrieved the gym bag and, with Griff following like a mastiff, sashayed into the office where Max Flynn himself was sitting with one of his salesmen.

“Look at this, boys,” Lester said as he unzipped the bag and plopped it open on Max’s desk. “Feast your eyes. I bet you never saw so much cash in your life. There’s ninety-two thousand in there. I got it from a client in Florida. Not bad for a day’s work, wouldn’t you say?”

He grabbed a stack of bills and gesticulated as he crowed about his good fortune and asked how car sales were going. He might be interested in a new one himself. The Rolls-Royce was in the shop again. “Worst car I’ve ever had.”

From Max Flynn’s Lester took Griff to dinner at the 7 Gables Motel restaurant, where he showed the money off to everyone, bewildering a pair of white-haired Ohio tourists to whom for good measure he offered “the best deal in Kentucky” on a houseboat.

Griff departed for Okeechobee the next morning, without having acquired the promised Black Angus bull. By ten o’clock Lester, the money bag cradled in his arms, was in the passenger seat of Sheriff John Mar Adams’s cruiser, on his way to the Citizens National Bank on Courthouse Square in Somerset. Lester, who had known Sheriff Adams for thirty years, since their days together at the KSP Academy, asked the sheriff to accompany him to deposit cash received from a client whose cohorts were ruthless cutthroats and would stop at nothing to abscond with it.

In a private office at the bank Lester deposited the ninety-two thousand dollars, most of it in fifties, into his checking account, assuming that the bank would quickly report the transaction to the IRS, as it did. He also withdrew some twenty thousand in the form of a cashier’s check made out to the IRS, saying that he believed in paying his taxes not only on time but ahead of time.

Outside he thanked Sheriff Adams for his assistance and said that he might soon be needing help again.

The last thing Sherry Wong wanted to do was to turn to Lester Burns for help. If Lester found Sherry the most human of the gang members, the sympathy was not mutual. Lester appeared to her an outrageous, bizarre, and patently untrustworthy character. His behavior during that week in Orlando seemed little short of lunatic, even as she observed how easily he won over Carol and Donnie Bartley’s mother and sister. A jury might fall for him. Not Sherry. Yet on Saturday, September 1, only two weeks after Benny’s arrest, Sherry found herself being driven by Carol up Highway 27 into Kentucky and on toward Lester’s farm, with Donnie’s sister, Sharon Wilson, in the backseat. They were on their way to a meeting with the living legend himself. Sherry was depressed.

And desperate. Attempts to find an attorney for Benny, first in Florida and then in Knoxville, had failed. Lawyers either gave her the brush-off or insisted that she be able to prove that her money came from legitimate sources. She was making attempts to launder Benny’s share, but there had not been time enough to accomplish that while
Benny languished in Florida. Lester Burns had already obtained a Kentucky lawyer for Donnie, one Lester could work well with, so he said, and indicating that he had another in mind for Hodge, if required. What Sherry began to fear was that Lester and Bartley’s attorney would cook up a deal between themselves, maybe naming Benny as the killer and getting that pair of snitches light sentences. She had to act, now, and she hoped that cooperating with Lester might preclude getting screwed by him. She disliked him, she feared him, she distrusted him—and here she was being driven in one of Lester’s cars, no less—not the Rolls; an Oldsmobile—to pay court to him and to beg his handpicked pal to take Benny’s case.

It was dark by the time they reached the farm, several miles outside of Somerset on Slate Branch Road. A bumpy dirt track led them through fields where Sherry could barely make out cattle grazing, past an outbuilding or two, over a low hill and down toward the barn and the big stone house. To Sherry’s shock, their headlights suddenly illuminated a squad car. A deputy climbed out and shone his flashlight on them.

“Don’t panic,” Carol said. “Lester told me the sheriffs would be here. He uses them for guards. He owns the county.”

The deputy told the women to go around to the back of the house. They found Lester with a drink in his hand. He stood up to greet the ladies and introduced one man as a friend, another as his accountant, and a third as Dale Mitchell, the attorney whom Sherry was to consider hiring. Lester offered drinks and said how sorry he was that they had arrived after dark, when all they could see of Lake Cumberland down below was a path of moonlight on the water.

“What a pity,” Lester went on. “I insist that before you leave tomorrow, Sherry, and I’m so delighted to have you here, you’ll drive over to see Cumberland Falls. There’s nothing like them. A young lady fell over them just last week, poor thing, and killed herself. Very dangerous, and very beautiful.”

“Let’s get down to business,” Sherry said.

“Getting and spending,” Lester said, “it’s the way of the world, alas. You and Dale can talk privately in the kitchen, if you like. The attorney-client privilege, I’m a great believer in it. You’d be well advised to put everything into Dale Mitchell’s hands, is my advice. He and I go way back together. We practiced together for years. Dale’s a dandy lawyer, let me tell you.”

“He better be,” Sherry said, and went inside with Mitchell, a graying, regular-featured man in his early forties. They were gone about ten or fifteen minutes. When they came out, Sherry did not look pleased. Mitchell was somber.

“Did you two get everything worked out?” Lester inquired. “Did you plight your troth?”

“Carol, drive me home,” Sherry said. “I’m heading out.”

“What’s the trouble, my dear?” Lester followed and touched her shoulder as she reached the steps. “You all hung up on some technicality? We can work that out.”

“You want to call it that. Your buddy here asked me for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Plus expenses! I ain’t got that kind of money.”

“You’re saying no to him?” Lester jumped in front of her, spreading his arms and inching toward her until he bumped up against her. “You’re saying no to the one man who stands between Benny Hodge and the rope? I mean the chair. What kind of a woman are you?”

Sherry backed away. Lester inched toward her as she said that she was no fool and repeated that she did not have that kind of money.

"The hell you don’t!”
Lester boomed out, and he twirled around, a dervish in python cowboy boots, flailing his arms. The whiskey flew out of his glass, drenching the accountant. Lester emitted a yelp that was somewhere between a rebel yell and a stuck pig’s squeals. His eyes bugged out. “Why—” he rendered the word in several syllables, drawing it out through three octaves—"you
selfish
little bitch! You moneygrubbing no good goddamned ornery little Tennessee hog-calling pennypinching low-class idiot! You Judas! I have seen many a scheming heartless bitch in my time and you beat them all by a country mile! Don’t you see what you’re doing?” He screamed into her impassive face. “What good is all that money going to do you when they march Benny Hodge into that dark and dank horrible room and pull the switch? Have you seen a man die by electrocution, young lady? Have you smelt the awful stench of sizzling human flesh? Are you going to spend the money on his funeral? You mean to say you’re running out on that poor boy? What kind of a love is it that abandons a loved one in his hour of greatest need? I thought so! I knew you were going to run! I could see it in your cold eyes! Heartless! Heedless! Indifferent! Callous! Monstrous! A predator! You’d lead a lamb to slaughter! Treachery, thy name is
woman!
”

Lester’s diatribe, which ran a full two minutes, accompanied by kicks and thrusts and the rolling of eyeballs, ended as he hurled his glass over the railing, dropped to his knees, flung his arms wide, and cried out to the moon, “Oh, Lord God in heaven, if You are listening, hear the prayers of a man who asks Your bountiful mercy for this poor, pitiful female child, who knows not what she does, and for her beloved, who will soon be with Thee, or in hell! If Epperson walks and Hodge fries, she’ll have only herself to blame!” And he wept.

Sherry, who had stood gaping throughout the performance like everyone else, not moving a muscle, watched Lester struggle to his feet, rubbing his hip.