Dark and Bloody Ground Read online

  “How much is your retainer?” Sherry demanded.

  “Twenty-five thousand.”

  Sherry and Carol agreed that he could have that by sometime tomorrow. Lester said that would be satisfactory. In the meanwhile, to show good faith and because there was no time to lose, he would head right over to the jail to see Roger.

  When the women left, Lester could hear them arguing outside. Their voices rose above the air conditioner, which was going full blast. He peeked through the window and saw Sherry poking an index finger at Carol’s shoulder.

  “Feuding and fussing,” Lester said. “Isn’t it sad, what money will make people do. Dear oh dear, I do believe those two are going to kill each other.”

  As Lester feared, Roger Epperson acted as if he had little to worry about. He seemed to regard his attorney as someone who must already have figured out how to set him free. The other two suspects, whom Lester glimpsed in their cells, did not radiate this optimism. Bartley looked like a caged rodent; Hodge, burly and sullen, stared from behind the bars with eyes that said nothing.

  Lester consulted with Epperson in a room at the jail set aside for that purpose. Roger had put on weight in the years since Lester had last seen him and had lost some hair. He was thirty-five, six-foot-one, two hundred and twenty pounds, according to the booking sheet. He was pale, flabby, puffed like a pastry. He looked as if he had been on dope; it would have been an interest he and Carol had in common.

  He told Lester that there was only one man he wanted to defend him, and that was Lester Burns. He asked Lester if he remembered how he used to watch him in court. Lester acknowledged that he did. Roger cited a couple of murder cases that had ended in acquittals.

  “Have you ever been in serious trouble before?” Lester asked.

  Roger said not much. A few minor scrapes. And he wasn’t worried about this time, either, not with Lester on his side.

  “You’ve been charged with murder,” Lester said, “and attempted murder. The robbery’s one thing, but that girl was twenty-three years old. I understand that she was stabbed to death. With a butcher knife.”

  Roger said he knew nothing about that. He had not been present. If somebody had stabbed the girl, it had been someone else, not that he knew or was saying who. He was not worried. They had nothing on him.

  What about the robbery? Lester wanted to know. According to the newspapers and what the cops were saying, a good deal of money had been found in the condominium Roger had been sharing with Hodge and Bartley, and Hodge had had money on him. What about the briefcase found in Roger’s car? Hadn’t that had about sixty thousand in it? Was this money from the Acker robbery, or did Roger have another explanation for it? Roger hesitated.

  Lester said that it was in Roger’s best interest to tell his lawyer the truth. He did not care whether Roger was guilty; if he was, it was his lawyer’s duty to keep the truth from coming out, and to see to it that he had a fair trial. If Lester didn’t know what had happened, he could not be expected to fashion an effective defense. He couldn’t be put in a position where the authorities knew more than he did. That was suicide. Had Roger participated in the Acker robbery? How much money was involved?

  “More than a million,” Roger said, grinning.

  “You got more than a million from that old man? From his house? Cash money?”

  “Make it a million-two,” Roger said. “We never finished counting.”

  “You mean a million two hundred thousand? You don’t mean two million, do you?”

  “Could be,” Roger said, acting coy. “You never know. There’s piles of it. Some of it’s so old, it stinks.”

  Where was the money? Lester asked as casually as he could. Sherry had it stashed somewhere, Roger said, he didn’t know where. She might have buried it. Carol was angry about that, so was Donnie Bartley, but Roger wasn’t worried. Sherry wasn’t about to run off, she was too stuck on Benny Hodge. She had the best head for figures, Carol was too strung out, so Sherry was the banker. They had agreed to divide everything three ways. The women had been down in Miami, getting passports and seeing about a boat, when the boys had been arrested. It was shitty timing. They had planned to leave the country. They probably still would, when they got out.

  “So most of the money is still out there?” Lester asked, making it sound like a matter of mere idle curiosity. “Over a million, you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My fee will be four hundred thousand,” Lester said. “That’s over and above the retainer.”

  Roger exploded. Lester must be kidding. This was robbery!

  Lester suggested that Roger go back to his cell to think things over. The sooner he came to a decision, the better, because if he was not going to hire Lester Burns, he had better get someone else, quick. There would be an extradition order coming down from Kentucky. There wasn’t any time to waste at all, but Roger could sleep on it, if he wished.

  “You don’t hire the best for peanuts,” Lester told him.

  As he headed for his car, Lester ran into Carol and Sherry, who were with two other women Carol introduced as Louise Farley and Sharon Wilson, Donnie Bartley’s mother and sister.

  “You are not Lester Burns,” Louise Farley said. “I have seen Lester Burns, and you’re not him. Lester Burns wears cowboy boots.”

  The next morning Lester waited for Carol in the motel coffee shop. He was feeling a bit jittery. What with thinking about all those piles of money lying around somewhere, just waiting to be put to some good use or to be found by the FBI, and what with the pain he had been feeling in his arthritic left hip, Lester, alone in his room the previous night, had made too deep an impression on the whiskey bottle. The hip needed an operation, but he had been putting that off. He had a prescription for Percodan, but he was afraid of getting hooked; the aspirin and the whiskey did help the pain, and his ideas grew wild. What if this gang really had made off with more money than anyone, including the FBI, suspected? What if Dr. Acker had been reluctant to admit how much money he had been hoarding, or what if he didn’t even know how much? Lester had already learned that Roger had been arrested earlier that summer for a robbery in Rome, Georgia; he had been out on bond for that at the time of this new arrest. How many other robberies had there been and how much was the total take? The suspects weren’t ratting on each other, not yet anyway. They might have been together long enough to have done many jobs and to have developed loyalties based on who knew how many secrets.

  As Lester excited himself with visions of heaps of cash, he became anxious. It would not be easy to show that he had no idea where his fee was coming from. Every criminal lawyer faced this difficulty, but here it was acute. This crew was unlikely to have legitimate assets. The prudent course would be to pack up and go home.

  Still, if no one knew how much cash there was, who was to know how or how much Lester was being paid? And Roger’s family had money of their own. Obviously they were not rushing to their son’s aid, they were nowhere within sight; but they might prove helpful one way or another once they realized that Roger might be facing the electric chair. If Roger could get money to them, and they could pay Lester...

  The thing to do, Lester more or less decided in his reverie, was to wait to receive the retainer and go from there. He had gone this far. He had already devoted time and money to this case. He deserved something. Was it his responsibility to know where every penny of his fee was coming from? If it were, what criminal would ever be able to hire a lawyer? This had become a hotly debated aspect of the law, especially because of the enormous cash resources of drug dealers and organized crime figures. A lawyer who knowingly accepted stolen goods could be prosecuted, but to what lengths a lawyer ought to go to ascertain the origin of a fee was not clearly defined. The key to avoiding prosecution and conviction was to be able to show that you had good reason to believe that your client had legitimate assets from which the fee could conceivably be paid.

  When Carol appeared at the coffee shop she was antsy as usua
l and, this time, irate. There was no way, she said, that Roger would agree to such an outrageous fee. Roger was insisting that she should not pay Lester a cent over a hundred thousand.

  “The money won’t do him much good after he fries,” Lester said. His spiel unreeled automatically; he had been giving versions of it for twenty-five years. “You may not even find another lawyer who’ll take this money. I notice the other two boys don’t have one. What kind of a wife wouldn’t do more for her husband than hire some no-good two-bit shyster who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow about Kentucky and how we do things there? Don’t you love your husband?”

  Of course she loved him, Carol said. Technically, they were not man and wife. Her real name was Ellis. Actually it was Keeney. They had planned to get married. Then this had happened.

  Lester leaned toward her across the table, his face assuming furrows of worry and concern. He was not one to question other people’s domestic arrangements, he said. He and his wife had celebrated their thirty-second wedding anniversary, but not everyone could be so fortunate in these troubled times. Unfortunately, he told her almost in a whisper, not everyone was so broad-minded. The law was a cruel, impartial thing. The law made an important distinction between people who were actually married and those who were not. If she was not in fact Roger’s lawful wedded wife, she would more than likely be called to testify. She could be charged with criminal facilitation, at the very least. Hadn’t she been making plans to leave the country? If the FBI found out about that, and they were very likely to find out, she could be looking at years behind bars. And there was a more serious likelihood. She could become her loved one’s executioner.

  “You may end up being the instrument that sends Roger to the chair. I have seen it happen. If you’re not his wife, they will compel you to testify against him. I have seen lives wrecked. Even if they let you off, you won’t have much to spend your money on, except flowers for his grave. What a pitiful story! I am telling you this for your own good. People do not understand how vulnerable and helpless they are. The law can grind you to bits.”

  He said that he felt so sorry for her that he would be willing to represent her, too, at no charge. His fee for her would be a dollar— assuming that Roger wised up and came to an agreement. Roger’s situation was dire. The authorities had already turned up evidence that Lester was not yet at liberty to disclose. This case would require every ounce of his experience and ingenuity. What price could you place on a human life?

  4

  THAT EVENING CAROL SUMMONED LESTER to her room at the motel. He took Ralph Gibson with him and found Carol waiting with Sherry, Louise Farley, and Sharon Wilson. The women did not appear glad to see him. His attempt at pleasantries fell flat.

  Carol handed Lester a brown paper bag. Hefting it, he took it into the bathroom and closed the door. The counter beside the sink was wet and strewn with toiletries, so he emptied the bag out onto the floor. There were five bundles of bills, each secured at both ends with rubber bands. It was all in hundreds, five bundles of five thousand dollars each. It occurred to him that carrying that amount around in a paper bag probably was not such a good idea, so he tucked the bundles under his shirt in the small of his back. Through the door he could hear the women.

  When he came out, Sherry was saying that nobody called her a bitch and a thief and got away with it. If it weren’t for her, they wouldn’t have any money to pay a lawyer. Carol would have lost it or spent it on coke. Ralph Gibson stood in a corner, looking alarmed. Lester stepped between Sherry and Carol and told everyone to calm down and listen to him. They should put everything in his hands, it was the best thing they could do.

  “Roger wants me to have his share,” Carol shouted.

  “I’ll have to hear that from Roger himself,” Sherry said.

  “Ladies! Please!” Lester begged them. “Keep it down!”

  Lester went to the window, leaned against the air conditioner and pushed the curtains apart an inch. The money bulged under the back of his shirt.

  “The FBI are everywhere,” he said. “I’ll bet they have a hundred agents on this thing. They’re scouring the state for that money. I wouldn’t go out with any money on you, if I were you. I wouldn’t keep any in the room, either.” He turned to face the women. “What about the attorneys for Benny and Donnie? Of course, you could try to get the court to appoint some nobody to defend them, if you think you can prove they’re broke. It’s too bad I’m not in a position to help, the way things are at the moment. I can only do so much. I could do a lot for all of you. I know how you must be suffering,” he said to Louise Farley, “as a mother.” He reached out and put his arms around her. “These are trying times. You’re a fine-looking woman and I know you love your son. Don’t cry.” She wasn’t.

  Back in his room, Lester told Ralph Gibson that he ought to fly back to Kentucky the next day. Things at the office would be piling up. Lester pulled out his shirt and tossed the money onto the bed, bundle by bundle.

  “There’s twenty-five grand there. You can take it with you and keep it for me till I get back.”

  Gibson stared at the money silently. Then he said that he did not think he wanted to do that. It was one thing to receive this money. It was another to transport it across state lines. The law against doing that with stolen money was clear.

  “How do you know it’s stolen?” Lester asked. “You know more than I do. How do we know this is Acker money? For all I know, one of the girls inherited it from her grandmother. Maybe Epperson’s parents are paying my expenses.”

  Gibson looked Lester in the eye.

  “All right,” Lester said. “I understand. You’re young. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to do something you don’t want to do. You go home, and I’ll take care of this end of things.”

  In the morning Lester stuffed the money into the sack his whiskey had come in and hid it under the spare tire in the trunk of his car. He realized that he was now beyond a certain threshold.

  He decided to take a Sunday drive over to Ormond Beach, fifty miles northeast, where the automobiles Epperson and the others had been driving were impounded and where Lester thought he might pick up some information. He was nervous about the money in the trunk. Because of its heavy drug traffic, Florida was the worst place in the country to be caught with loose cash you couldn’t explain, and besides, he didn’t trust the people he was dealing with. They might decide to fire him and take the money back, and they might find his existence an inconvenience, given what he already knew. If and when he received more, he would have to get hold of a gun to protect himself.

  At the Ormond Beach police compound, Lester turned on the charm and learned that Letcher County Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike Caudill, two Kentucky state troopers, and a couple of FBI agents had already been there with warrants to search the three cars, a Dodge conversion van, a Datsun 300ZX sports car, and a flaming red Corvette, all brand new, all purchased during the week after the Acker robbery, although registered in names other than those of the suspects. He heard again about the briefcase stuffed with money that had been found in Roger’s car, the Corvette. Guns had been discovered in Hodge’s van; marijuana, cocaine, a boot knife, and a portable two-way radio had turned up in Bartley’s Datsun. Lester would have learned all this officially soon enough, but he could use it now.

  Back at the county jail in Orlando, Lester confronted Epperson with the evidence and suggested that buying all those cars immediately following the robbery had not been the brightest idea. There were other cars, too, Roger admitted, six in all. The Toyota MR2 that Carol was driving was one of them.

  Yet Roger remained adamant against paying Lester the four hundred thousand. Lester dropped it to three. Roger went up to a hundred and twenty-five thousand and said he would throw in a Corvette, not the 1985 one that was impounded, but a 1963 classic that was not part of the Acker spoils. In a sense, you could call it a legitimate car. He had paid eleven thousand down for it and still owed about six; Lester could pay it of
f and it was his. Lester accepted, but they remained far apart overall.

  Leaving the jail again that afternoon, Lester encountered a pair of Kentucky state troopers who were down gathering evidence. Lester knew them both and struck up a friendly chat. He told them that he was representing Epperson but that there were questions about his fee. He would probably end up with nothing but automobiles and jewelry, and he had no use for either.

  One of the troopers, Detective Lon Maggard, said that he had been one of the first people to arrive at the Acker house on the night of the robbery and murder. The scene was horrendous. The house had been ransacked, and Maggard said he had never seen so much blood. Tammy Acker had been stabbed eleven times. The photographs were enough to make you throw up.

  “I’ll be interested to see them,” Lester said. He would take a look at them soon and would probably run into the troopers later in the week.

  “We’ll be taking those boys back to Kentucky,” Maggard said.

  “Maybe so, maybe not,” Lester said.

  But Lester knew that all three of the suspects would be going back to Kentucky to stand trial. It was not only a question of the evidence found in the cars and at the Ormond Beach condominium where they had been staying with Sherry, Carol, and apparently a third woman or girl. According to the Orlando Sentinel and what Lester had heard was being reported in papers at home and broadcast over the news, the boys were in deeper water than they had thought. In addition to the Acker case and the Georgia robbery, they were also suspects in another Letcher County robbery, in the murders of an elderly couple up in Jackson County, and in the murder of someone described only as “a prominent Florida businessman.” Roger denied a connection to any of these other crimes. It was just a typical case of the police and the FBI putting out a lot of bullshit to try people in the press and to clean up a bunch of crimes they couldn’t solve. The next thing you knew, he’d be charged with robbing Fort Knox and killing his grandmother. Once they had you locked up, they’d stop at nothing to keep you there. Cops were nothing but crooks and liars.