The Last Juror (36 page)

The closing of Western Auto was, of course, front page news.

It was followed in January by the closing of Swain’s pharmacy next to the Tea Shoppe, and then Maggie’s Gifts, next door to Mr. Mitlo’s haberdashery. I treated each closing as if it were a death, and my stories had the air of obituaries.

I spent one afternoon with the Stukes twins in their hardware store. It was a wonderful old building, with dusty wooden floors, saggy shelves that held a million items, a wood-burning stove in the back where serious things got debated when business was slow. You couldn’t find anything in the store, and you weren’t supposed to. The routine was to ask one of the twins about “the little flat gizmo that screws into the washer at the tip of that rod thing that fits into the gadget that makes the toilet flush.” One of the Stukes would disappear into the slightly organized piles of debris and emerge in a few minutes with whatever it took to make the toilet flush. Such a question could not be asked at Bargain City.

We sat by the stove on a cold winter day and listened to the rantings of one Cecil Clyde Poole, a retired Army major, who, if put in charge of national policy, would nuke everyone but the Canadians. He would also nuke Bargain City, and in some of the roughest, most colorful language I’d ever heard he ripped and blasted the company with great gusto. We had plenty of time to talk because there were almost no customers. One of the Stukes told me their business was down 70 percent.

The following month they closed the doors to the store their father had opened in 1922. On the front page, I ran a photo of the founder sitting behind a counter in 1938. I also fired off another editorial, sort of a wise-ass “I-told-you-so” reminder to whoever was out there still reading my little tirades.

“You’re preachin’ too much,” Harry Rex warned me over and over. “And nobody’s listenin’.”

______

T
he front office of the
Times
was seldom attended. There were some tables with copies of the current edition strewn about. There was a counter that Margaret sometimes used to lay out ads. The bell on the front door rang all day long as people came and went. About once a week a stranger would venture upstairs where my office door was usually open. More often than not it was some grieving relative there to discuss an upcoming obituary.

I looked up one afternoon in March 1979 and there was a gentleman in a nice suit standing at my office door. Unlike Harry Rex, whose entrance began on the street and was heard by everyone in the building, this guy had climbed the stairs without making a sound.

His name was Gary McGrew, a consultant from Nashville, whose area of expertise was small-town newspapers. As I fixed a pot of coffee, he explained that a rather well-financed client of his was planning to buy several newspapers in Mississippi during 1979. Because I had seven thousand subscribers, no debt, an offset
press, and because we now ran the printing for six smaller weeklies, plus our own shoppers’ guides, his client was very interested in buying
The Ford County Times.

“How interested?” I asked.

“Extremely. If we could look at the books, we could value your company.”

He left and I made a few phone calls to verify his credibility. He checked out fine, and I collected my current financials. Three days later we met again, this time at night. I did not want Wiley or Baggy or anyone else hanging around. News that the
Times
was changing hands would be such hot gossip that they’d open the coffee shops at 3 A.M. instead of 5.

McGrew crunched the numbers like a seasoned analyst. I waited, oddly nervous, as if the verdict might drastically change my life.

“You’re clearing a hundred grand after taxes, plus you’re taking a salary of fifty grand. Depreciation is another twenty, no interest because you have no debt. That’s one-seventy in cash flow, times the standard multiple of six, comes to one million twenty thousand.”

“And the building?” I asked.

He glanced around as if the ceiling might collapse any moment. “These places typically don’t sell for much.”

“A hundred thousand,” I said.

“Okay. And a hundred thousand for the offset press and other equipment. The total value is somewhere in the neighborhood of one-point-two million.”

“Is that an offer?” I asked, even more anxious.

“It might be. I’ll have to discuss it with my client.”

I had no intention of selling the
Times.
I had stumbled into the business, gotten a few lucky breaks, worked hard writing stories and obituaries and selling pages of ads, and now, nine years later, my little company was worth over a million dollars.

I was young, still single though I was tired of being lonely and living alone in a mansion with three leftover Hocutt cats that refused to die. I had accepted the reality that I would not find a bride in Ford County. All the good ones were snatched up by their twentieth birthday, and I was too old to compete at that level. I dated all the young divorcées, most of whom were quick to hop in the sack and wake up in my fine home, and dream about spending all the money I was rumored to be making. The only one I really liked, and dated off and on for a year, was saddled with three small children.

But it’s funny what a million bucks will do to you. Once it was in play, it was never far from my thoughts. The job became more tedious. I grew to resent the ridiculous obituaries and the endless pressure of the deadlines. I told myself at least once a day that I no longer had to hustle the street selling ads. I could quit the editorials. No more nasty letters to the editor.

A week later, I told Gary McGrew that the
Times
was not for sale. He said his client had decided to buy three papers by the end of the year, so I had time to think about it.

Remarkably, word of our discussions never leaked.

CHAPTER 36

O
n a Thursday afternoon in early May, I received a phone call from the attorney for the Parole Board. The next Padgitt hearing would take place the following Monday.

“Convenient timing,” I said.

“Why’s that?” he asked.

“We publish every Wednesday, so I don’t have time to run a story before the hearing.”

“We don’t monitor your paper, Mr. Traynor,” he said.

“I don’t believe that,” I snapped.

“What you believe is irrelevant. The Board has decided that you will not be permitted to attend the hearing. You violated our rules last time by reporting on what happened.”

“I’m banned?”

“That’s correct.”

“I’ll be there anyway.”

I hung up and called Sheriff McNatt. He, too, had been notified of the hearing, but wasn’t sure if he could attend. He was hot on the trail of a missing child (from Wisconsin), and it was obvious he had little interest in getting mixed up with the Padgitts.

Our District Attorney, Rufus Buckley, had an armed robbery trial scheduled for Monday in Van Buren County. He promised to send a letter opposing the parole, but the letter never made it. Circuit Judge Omar Noose was presiding over the same trial, so he was off the hook. I began to think that no one would be there to speak in opposition to Padgitt’s release.

For fun I asked Baggy to go. He gasped, then quickly let loose with an impressive list of excuses.

I walked over to Harry Rex’s with the news. He had an ugly divorce trial starting Monday in Tupelo; otherwise he might have gone with me to Parchman. “The boy’s gonna be released, Willie,” he said.

“We stopped it last year,” I said.

“Once the parole hearings start, it’s just a matter of time.”

“But somebody has to fight it.”

“Why bother? He’s gettin’ out eventually. Why piss off the Padgitts? You won’t get any volunteers.”

Volunteers were indeed hard to find as the entire town ducked for cover. I had envisioned an angry mob packing into the parole board hearing and disrupting the meeting.

My angry mob consisted of three people.

Wiley Meek agreed to ride over with me, though he had no interest in speaking. If they were serious about banning me from the room, Wiley would sit through it and give me the details. Sheriff McNatt surprised us with his presence.

Security was tight in the hall outside the hearing room. When the Board attorney saw me he became angry and we exchanged words. Guards in uniforms surrounded me. I was outnumbered and unarmed. I was escorted from the building and placed in my car, then watched by two thick-necked ruffians with low IQs.

According to Wiley, the hearing went like clockwork. Lucien was there with various Padgitts. The Board attorney read a staff report that made Danny sound like an Eagle Scout. His caseworker seconded the nomination. Lucien spoke for ten minutes, the usual lawyerly bullshit. Danny’s father spoke last and pleaded emotionally for his son’s release. He was desperately needed back home, where the family had interests in timber, gravel, asphalt, trucking, contracting, and freight. He would have so many jobs and work so many hours each week that he couldn’t possibly get into more trouble.

Sheriff McNatt gamely stood up for the people of Ford County. He was nervous and not a good speaker, but did a credible job of replaying the crime. Remarkably, he neglected to remind the Board members that a jury drawn from the same pool of people who elected him had been threatened by Danny Padgitt.

By a vote of 4–1, Danny Padgitt was paroled from prison.

______

C
lanton was quietly disappointed. During the trial, the town had a real thirst for blood and was bitter when the jury didn’t deliver the death penalty. But nine years had passed, and since the parole hearing it had been accepted that Danny Padgitt would eventually get out. No one expected it so soon, but after the hearing we were over the shock.

His release was influenced by two unusual factors. The first was that Rhoda Kassellaw had no family in the area. There were no grieving parents to arouse sympathy and demand justice. There were no angry siblings to keep the case alive. Her children were gone and forgotten. She had lived a lonely life and left no close friends who were willing to press a grudge against her murderer.

The second was that the Padgitts lived in another world. They were so rarely seen in public, it was not difficult to convince ourselves that Danny would simply go to the island and never be seen again. What difference did it make to the people of Ford County? Prison or Padgitt Island? If we never saw him, we wouldn’t be reminded of his crimes. In the nine years since his trial, I had not seen a single Padgitt in Clanton. In my rather harsh editorial about his release, I said “a cold-blooded killer is once more among us.” But that wasn’t really true.

The front page story and the editorial drew not a single letter from the public. Folks talked about the release, but not for long and not very loudly.

Baggy eased into my office late one morning a week after Padgitt’s release, and closed the door, always a good sign. He’d picked up some gossip so juicy that it had to be delivered with the door shut.

On a typical day I arrived for work around 11 A.M. And on a typical day he began hitting the sauce around noon, so we usually had about an hour to discuss stories and monitor rumors.

He glanced around as if the walls were bugged, then said, “It cost the Padgitts a hundred grand to spring the boy.”

The amount did not shock me, nor did the bribe itself, but I was surprised that Baggy had dug up this information.

“No,” I said. This always spurred him to tell more.

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you,” he said smugly, his usual response when he had the scoop.

“Who got the money?”

“That’s the good part. You won’t believe it.”

“Who?”

“You’ll be shocked.”

“Who?”

Slowly, he went through his extended ritual of lighting a cigarette. In the early years, I would hang in the air as he delayed whatever dramatic news he had picked up, but with experience I had learned that this only slowed down the story. So I resumed my scribbling.

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise, I guess,” he said, puffing and pondering. “Didn’t surprise me at all.”

“Are you gonna tell me or not?”

“Theo.”

“Senator Morton?”

“That’s what I’m tellin’ you.”

I was sufficiently shocked, and I had to give the impression of being so or the story would lose steam. “Theo?” I asked.

“He’s vice chairman of the Corrections Committee in the Senate. Been there forever, knows how to pull the strings. He wanted a hundred grand, the Padgitts wanted to pay it, they cut a deal, the boy walks. Just like that.”

“I thought Theo was above taking bribes,” I said, and I was serious. This drew an exaggerated snort.

“Don’t be so naive,” he said. Again, he knew everything.

“Where did you hear it?”

“Can’t say.” There was a chance that his poker gang had cooked up the rumor to see how fast it would race around the square before it got back to them. But there was an equally good chance Baggy was on to something. It really didn’t matter, though. Cash couldn’t be traced.

______

J
ust when I had stopped dreaming of an early retirement, of cashing in, walking away, jetting off to Europe, and backpacking across Australia, just when I had
resettled into my routine of covering stories and writing obits and hawking ads to every merchant in town, Mr. Gary McGrew reentered my life. And he brought his client with him.

Ray Noble was one of three principals in a company that already owned thirty weekly newspapers in the Deep South and wanted to add more. Like my college friend Nick Diener, he had been raised in the family newspaper business and could talk the talk. He swore me to secrecy, then laid out his plan. His company wanted to buy the
Times,
along with the papers in Tyler and Van Buren Counties. They would sell off the equipment in the other two and do all the printing in Clanton because we had a better press. They would consolidate the accounting and much of the ad sales. Their offer of $1.2 million had been at the high end of the appraisal.