To Live and Die In Dixie (11 page)

“Never,” Jordan said hoarsely. “She made all that up. These girls, you don't know how they are. They imagine things. Blow things all out of proportion. I'm a married man. I've got three kids. Why would I risk that on a silly little high school kid?”

“You're a fucking child molester,” Jocelyn cried, leaping up from the sofa. “How dare you talk about my sister that way?”

Jordan's blasé manner pissed me off so royally I wanted to see how much of my fist would fit inside that cleft chin of his, but I suppressed the urge.

“Why don't you explain to me why you'd risk sleeping with your students,” I said calmly. “It shouldn't take
much for the cops to prove you had a relationship with Bridget. I found one of your notes to her. They can probably find more. She told her best friend about the affair, and her boss.”

“It was not an affair,” he said, nearly shouting. The baby's face crinkled in unhappiness, his pacifier dropped to the tray of the walker, and he gave a single sharp, warning cry of distress. Quickly, Jordan popped the pacifier back into his son's face. He lowered his voice. “It wasn't an affair. I slept with her once. No more, and it was all her idea. She came on to me. She showed up here at spring break, when she knew my wife and kids would be in Florida with my in-laws. She showed up late, with a bottle of wine and a pizza. All the kids at school hang out at our house. But this time Bridget was alone, and she had big ideas.”

“You're telling us she seduced you,” I said sarcastically. “Save it for somebody who cares.”

“She thought she was pregnant,” Jocelyn said, breaking in. “That's when she had the big fight with my mom.”

“Impossible,” Jordan said. “I used a condom. In fact, she brought them with her. She planned the whole thing. Look. I'm sorry your sister is dead,” he said, turning to Jocelyn. “But she was no innocent little kid. Bridget had been around the block. I wasn't her first.”

“Liar,” Jocelyn said, fighting back a sob in her fury at hearing her little sister's character being maligned. “Lying pig. Let's go, Callahan. Let's call the cops. I don't think Littlefield killed Bridget. I think Coach J did it.”

I shrugged but got up. Jordan followed us to the door.

“I didn't kill her,” he insisted again. “It was that pervert she was living with, not me. I'd never have hurt Bridget.”

“Hope you've got an alibi,” I told him, my hand on the doorknob.

Jordan seized the idea of an alibi instantly. “That was Saturday, right? I was at soccer camp. I run a soccer camp for the Rockdale Y. You can check. I was there.”

Headlights shone in through the living room drapes, and a horn beeped once, then twice.

“Oh Jesus,” Jordan whispered. “It's Lissa and the kids.”

Jocelyn and I exchanged looks again. I shook my head as a warning, but she chose to ignore it.

“How nice,” she said, sitting back down on the sofa again. “I'd like to meet your wife. I bet she'd like to meet your girlfriend's sister.”

She crossed her legs at the ankle and folded her hands neatly in her lap like a good little Catholic schoolgirl and smiled sweetly at both of us.

“Let's go, Jocelyn,” I said. She continued to smile but shook her head no.

“Please,” Jordan said, going to the window and peering out. “Oh God. You don't know Lissa. This would kill her. Please…”

We heard voices on the front walk, a woman's voice. “Come on, Jessica, tell Daddy to open the door. Kyle,” she called. “Open up quick. I've got Megan asleep in my arms.”

Jordan turned back to us, his golden face etched with panic.

I crossed over to Jocelyn, grabbed her, and effortlessly jerked her to her feet. She tried to pull away, but I held on to her arm and moved her toward the door, with Jordan right at our heels. “I don't give a rat's ass about your marriage,” I hissed. “I'm not going to be the one to tell your wife you were screwing around. But I can't promise she won't find out from the cops. Let's go, Jocelyn.”

Scowling, Jocelyn removed my hand from her arm and followed me to the front door. Jordan opened it and Lissa Jordan stumbled across the threshold, holding a sleeping toddler in her arms. In a white knit mini skirt and matching halter top, Lissa looked like a career aerobics instructor. She had streaked blond hair cut short and moussed straight up into mega-mall bangs. Big brown eyes washed over the two of us. Rose-bud lipsticked mouth and a sharp little chin. What the hell was Kyle Jordan doing screwing teenagers when he had this hot number at home, I wondered. Close on Lissa's heels followed a three-year-old version of the mother, wearing a smudged playsuit and sucking on a Popsicle.

“Hello,” Lissa Jordan said, her narrowed eyes making the word a question. Her husband stood there, frozen in terror, like a frog about to be gigged.

“Mutual of Minnesota Life and Casualty,” I said smoothly. “My assistant and I were just giving your husband a complimentary estate planning needs assessment. With all these beautiful children you folks have, it's time you…”

“Kyle gets insurance through the school. You told them that, didn't you, honey?” she said sweetly. “Maybe you could call some other time. I really need to get these kids in bed now.” She lowered the sleeping child onto the sofa and walked quickly back to the door, holding it open wide to let us know her needs no longer needed assessing.

“Thanks for coming,” she said firmly.

I caught Jordan's eye just before the door shut. “We'll be in touch,” I promised.

“Jeez,” Jocelyn exploded, once we were in the car, with the motor started. “What a weenie. What a lying, pussy-whipped weenie. You know, I used to think
Coach J was a stud. Now I can't believe Bridget let him get in her pants.”

I made a halfhearted attempt to look shocked at the crudeness of her language.

“Well, Jocelyn,” I said, “it's like those great rock philosophers Mickey and Sylvia used to say.”

“What?” she asked, accelerating so quickly that the car fairly jumped away from the curb.

“Mickey and Sylvia,” I said, appalled at her ignorance of rock history. “You know. ‘Love Is Strange.'”

S
HANE DUNSTAN, THE HEAD of Emory University's special collections, returned my phone call on the fourth try. I guess she was busy spending the school's money. Ever since 1987, when two of Atlanta's Coca-Cola billionaires had given Emory a $110 million endowment, Emory has been rolling in dough.

“This is about the Lula Belle Bird diary?” she asked, when she came on the line. Elliot Littlefield must have told her to expect my call.

“That's right,” I said. “The other items taken in the burglary were valuable too, but it's the diary that Mr. Littlefield is particularly anxious to recover.”

“We've withdrawn our bid,” she said abruptly. “I've just been drafting a letter to notify Mr. Littlefield. The chairman of the library board called me this morning.”

That, I thought, would jar my client's preserves. I had a feeling he'd hoped some of Emory's prestige would rub off on him if he helped the university acquire such a prized find.

“Any particular reason?”

“One very particular reason. Our board is unhappy with the source of the funding for the acquisition, and
the terms. I disagreed, but the board members were unanimous, and very adamant.”

“Who was the source?”

“I'm not certain I'm at liberty to say.”

“Go ahead,” I urged. “I'm very good at what I do, so I'll probably find out anyway. You could save me some time by just telling me now.”

She hesitated. “I'm assuming you'll consider this as confidential information. Two weeks ago, P. G. T. Vickers came to my office and told me he'd been contacted about buying the diary. We'd also been contacted, but of course, our purchase fund could never cover what Elliot Littlefield was asking for a floor bid. Mr. Vickers said he wanted to bid on it. You know him, don't you?”

The name seemed to ring a bell, but I didn't know why and admitted it.

“Pierre Gustave Toutant Vickers III. He's named after the great Civil War general who directed the attack on Fort Sumter and commanded at First Manassas, of course. He runs a very successful publishing company, and is involved in some rather extremist political activities.”

“P. G. T. Vickers, now I know the name,” I said. “He's not extreme. He's a certified lunatic. He lives in that fortress at the base of Stone Mountain and he publishes that states' rights newspaper,
Rebel Yell
. And didn't he run for Congress for the American Eagle party?”

“I'm afraid so,” she said, sighing. “It was the newspaper and Mr. Vickers's politics that made the board decide to decline his offer to provide the money to buy the diary for our collection. The board felt it was not in our best interest to have a P. G. T. Vickers collection here at the library.”

“I can see why,” I said. “He's always campaigning for
a return to the gold standard and writing letters to the editor about keeping Georgia's Confederate flag intact. He's also got some kind of half-cocked Kennedy assassination conspiracy involving a lost tribe of Seminole Indians and an albino hit man. The man is a nut, Ms. Dunstan.”

“A rich nut, Ms. Garrity. The arrangement he proposed would have given us physical possession of the diary and a grant to research the life of Lula Belle Bird. Mr. Vickers's Rebel Yell Press would subsequently publish a trade version of the diary. And he would have retained rights to develop a screenplay of the diary.”

“A profitable arrangement for both sides,” I remarked.

“There's nothing wrong with profit,” she snapped. “It was Coca-Cola profits that built this school. But that's a moot point now. The diary is missing, and our board is adamant about keeping P. G. T. Vickers's name from being associated with Emory.”

“Tell me something, will you?” I asked. “Is this thing really as big a deal as Mr. Littlefield is leading me to believe?”

“The Lula Belle Bird diary is the single most exciting acquisition I've pursued in my career,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry it's been stolen,” she said softly. “Your client let me hold it, and open it, but I never had a chance to really examine it. What a loss.”

I couldn't find a home listing for P. G. T. Vickers in the Atlanta telephone directory, but I did find one for Rebel Yell Press.

“Vickers here,” barked the voice at the other end. I was momentarily taken aback. I'd expected layers of secretaries and assistants. Not the head man himself.

When I told him I'd been hired by Littlefield to
recover the diary, he readily agreed to see me, and gave me directions to his office. “Come on out. We'll have lunch,” he said.

Stone Mountain is a sleepy little hamlet, aspiring to nothing more than selling a few trinkets to the tourists who come to see what's billed as the World's Largest Granite Outcropping. Most of them are actually more interested in the carving on the north side of the mountain, a two-thousand-foot-long sculpture combining the likenesses of the South's three most enduring icons: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis. (The carving was designed in the 1920s, which explains why Elvis Aaron Presley, who wasn't born until 1935, was left off.)

Stone Mountain's main street looks like the main street in one of those cowboy movies of my youth, with flat storefronts, gingerbread trim, and window boxes full of red geraniums.

Cute as it is though, Stone Mountain has a darker side. For years the mountain served as a staging area for the Georgia chapters of the Ku Klux Klan and other radical white-power groups, drawing hundreds of robed and hooded Klansmen for festive cross burnings and race-baiting rallies.

The new Stone Mountain has almost lived down its nasty old image. But the headquarters of Rebel Yell Press is a handy reminder that bad times there are not entirely forgotten.

I found Rebel Yell tucked between an ice cream parlor and a country collectibles boutique. It would have been hard to miss; a three-story-high cross between a Chevy dealership and an exact replica of Tara, with a wrought-iron fence keeping undesirables off a skinny sliver of lawn that separated the building from the outside world.

Inside, the receptionist, a frail-looking lady who looked nearly as old as the mountain, looked surprised to see a visitor. “I'm Callahan Garrity,” I said, shouting so she could hear me. “I have an appointment.” While she frantically punched buttons on the office intercom, I glanced around the two-story lobby. The walls were covered with a colorful mural of a Civil War battle, with a battalion of mounted gray-coated Rebs victorious over a sea of fallen federal soldiers. The carpets were the same shade of gray, and in the middle of the room, a grand staircase swept the eye up toward the second floor.

The old lady pushed every button in front of her. “Hello. Come in, hello,” she shouted.

“Send her on up, Miss Kate,” called a voice from above. A boyish-looking man with chestnut-colored hair hung over the second-floor balcony.

At the top of the stairway, the man stuck out his hand. He wore a taupe-colored double-breasted Italian-looking suit, with a brightly flowered tie and modish pointy-toed shoes. Right-wing zanies dress a lot better than they used to. They're a lot younger, too. I was expecting a geezer in a string tie and red suspenders, not this thirty-something dandy. “Pete Vickers,” he said. “Excuse Miss Kate. She was my father's secretary, and she likes to totter in now and then to help out. We've got lunch ready in my office. All right if we eat and talk? I've got a meeting outside the office at one.”

I followed him through a short hallway whose walls were actually glass bookcases full of the collected works of Rebel Yell Press. More books lined the walls of Vickers's office. The walls were crowded with leather-bound volumes, and where there weren't books there were busts and paintings of Civil War battles and generals. A display case directly behind Vickers's desk bristled
with a nice selection of semiautomatic weapons, carbines, and martial arts weapons. An
Impeach Earl Warren
sign, the kind that had once been tacked to every tree in the rural South, was prominently displayed on top of the case.

He caught me staring at the sign. “That was my daddy's legacy,” he said, smiling at the memory. “Rebel Yell printed thousands of those signs. Did it for cost, too. Those babies are collectors' items these days.”

I gestured toward the semiautomatic weapons. “Aren't those babies illegal in Georgia?”

“Hell no,” he said. “We still got our Second Amendment to the Constitution, don't we?”

He moved over to the case, took a small key from his pocket, and opened it. He took one off the rack and cradled it in his arms like a newborn baby. “Colt Industries M-sixteen,” he said, looking down fondly. “This one,” he said, pointing to another, “is a Colt AR-fifteen, and of course, I've got my Heckler and Koch model ninety-one semiautomatic. You can see the Galil there, that's from Israel, and then I've got a seventy-four hundred, thirty oh six Remington automatic too. These are my little play toys. Don't get enough time to play with 'em though. Business, business, business.” He put the M-16 back, gave it a final loving pat, then closed and locked the cabinet door. A shiver went from the base of my spine to the top of my neck. I've been around guns since I was a kid hunting with my dad, and later, of course, as a cop, but people who think of guns as toys scare the hell out of me.

The top of the large mahogany desk had been cleared off and a silver tray held two steaming plates of food and two tall crystal glasses of iced tea.

“Set right down,” Vickers said, motioning to an armchair facing the desk.

He handed me a plate and a packet of silverware rolled up inside a linen napkin.

The food smelled and looked divine. I had a fried chicken breast, fresh-cut corn off the cob, green beans floating in a puddle of bacon-scented juice, and a fat red slice of tomato. A corn muffin balanced precariously on the edge of the plate.

I looked up expectantly. “You always feed visiting private investigators this well?”

Vickers stopped chewing on his drumstick. “I treat everybody except liberals, the IRS, and the ATF like this. The Olde South Cafeteria next door caters for us, when we have visitors around lunchtime. We feed them too, just like my mama used to do. It's kinda a Rebel Yell tradition.”

“Nice,” I said, between a bite of muffin and a sip of tea.

“So you want to know what I know about the Lula Belle Bird diary,” he said. “Damn shame about the burglary. And the girl too, of course. I've already told Littlefield, when and if the thing is recovered, I want my bid automatically reinstated. I mean to have that diary.”

I wiped the chicken crumbs off my fingers. “Shane Dunstan says you planned to publish the diary.”

“Planned to make a killing out of it,” he said. “No pun intended. Our Civil War titles always do well, but a book like this, ‘The Diary of a Confederate Madam,' that'll be the title, should be a blockbuster. And by the way, we're looking at either a PBS miniseries or a theatrical feature. We think this thing could be bigger than
Gone with the Wind
.”

“If you can recover the diary.”

“Exactly,” he said, squeezing a slice of lemon into his tea.

“But Emory University is declining to accept the
money to buy the diary, even if it is found,” I pointed out.

He frowned slightly. His cheeks were round and full and freckled, and he had a thin ginger-colored mustache, which he probably thought made him look like Clark Gable.

“They don't want Emory's hallowed halls besmirched by the villainous Vickers name,” he said, chuckling. “Everybody in Atlanta knows that P. G. T. Vickers stands for states' rights, a strong national defense, an end to the welfare state, and the preservation of our white, southern heritage. I don't apologize for any of that. Emory doesn't approve of my ideology. All right. I don't approve of theirs either. They're the people who hired that professor who said ‘God is dead' in the sixties. A religion professor, can you imagine? After Ms. Dunstan called today and gave me the news, I called the University of Georgia. Their special collection curator accepted my offer in a New York second.”

“Why give it away at all?” I asked. “You're clearly a Civil War collector yourself. Why not just keep it?”

“Love to,” he said. “But I get a nice little old tax write-off and the kind of favorable publicity from making such a generous gift that money can't buy.”

“Did you want the diary bad enough to steal it?” I asked.

“Why sure,” he said. “I didn't though. I thought there was no way anyone could outbid me, until I heard through the grapevine that Speedy Blakeford was making a run at it.”

“You hated that idea,” I guessed.

“Are the Kennedys gun-shy? Yes, ma'am. I don't mind saying I wouldn't want to see that precious piece of southern heritage sold off to some slant-eyed Japanese bankers.”

“Would Blakeford have stolen it?”

“Ask him,” Vickers suggested. “I kind of doubt it, though. I understand he's one of them Bible-thumping committed Christian kind of fellas. Don't believe in cheatin', stealin', killin', or committing adultery.”

“Do you?” I asked.

“Don't believe in getting caught at it,” he grinned.

I pushed a green bean around my plate until I cornered it up against a chunk of bacon. “Did the police ask you about your whereabouts on Saturday afternoon?”

“Sure did. You wanna hear what I told 'em?”

I did.

“Told 'em I was at the dedication and ribbon-cutting ceremony for the P. G. T. Vickers Memorial Branch of the Stone Mountain Community Library.” He picked up a folded-up newspaper from the credenza in back of his desk and handed it to me. “See there,” he pointed. “Made the front page of
The Stone Mountain Courier-Express
.”