The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

But that was all conjecture, and he for sure wasn’t going to get answers to those questions out of Beau himself. “One more thing about Rona Jean,” Buddy said. “Did she write you any letters?”


“Letters? Nah. Why would she do that? I’d already told her I wasn’t givin’ her a red cent. She could’ve got down on her knees and begged, and it wouldn’t do her no good.” He fished another Camel out of his pocket and lit it with a match. “Damn, it’s hot,” he said.

Down the street, a child cried shrilly. A woman yelled, and the crying stopped. The old dog lifted his head at the sound, then went back to licking his sore paw. Buddy let the silence stretch out. Finally, in a casual tone, he asked, “So where were you last night?”

“Last night?” Beau took a long, hard pull on his cigarette, letting out the smoke before he spoke. “Well, if you gotta know, I was down at the still.” He slanted Buddy a hard, defiant look. “You got a problem with that, Sheriff?”

Buddy had the same attitude toward Bodeen Pyle’s still that Sheriff Burns had had toward Mickey LeDoux’s larger and more successful operation, before Agent Kinnard and his boys had shut it down. The sheriff’s words had been frequently and publically repeated. Far as I’m concerned, them boys can cook up whatever they want so long as they live decent and don’t go to killin’ other folks. Some of them shiners couldn’t feed their kids if they couldn’t make moon. The sheriff had said a true thing, in Buddy’s estimation, and that was the way he intended to do business in Cypress County.

Of course, the situation was different now, with Prohibition repealed, Alabama local option, and Cypress County dry. But that didn’t mean that Mickey and Bodeen and their kin were out of a job. No, not by a long shot. The only legal booze a man could drink now was the stuff that was brewed in taxpaying distilleries, and the bottles bore the stamp that proved that Uncle Sam had taken his cut, which added about two dollars a gallon to the cost of the whiskey. Bootleggers didn’t pay taxes, so their homemade stuff was still illegal. But they didn’t give a damn. They had a bone-deep contempt for the government and the laws it slapped on their moonshine.

And so did the people who drank it. Over the years since 1919, when the Eighteenth Amendment criminalized the making and drinking of alcohol, Darling drinkers had developed a strong preference for their neighbors’ swamp-brewed white lightning. For one thing, the local boys didn’t make the kind of alcohol that would pickle a person’s insides, like the poisonous bathtub gin that had killed all those drinkers in New York and Chicago. Mickey and Bodeen made good corn whiskey, which in Darling’s view was just as true and right and American as grits, peanut butter, and home-cured bacon. For another, the money that Darlingians forked over for their drink stayed right here in the Alabama county where their neighbors made it, rather than going into the pockets of some rich distillery owner up in Kentucky or Tennessee. And for a third, Darlingians felt that drinking the local white lightning was a pleasurable way of thumbing their noses at the Yankee bureaucracy, up north in Washington, D.C.

So instead of shutting down the Cypress County moonshiners, Repeal had given them what looked to be a longer, stronger life, and Buddy was taking a leaf from his predecessor’s book. He had no intention of getting in their way. Live and let live, he’d decided, as long as there wasn’t any shooting. Or strangling.

“I don’t have a problem with you being out at the still,” Buddy replied, “If that’s where you were. So how long were you out there? Was there anybody else around?”