The Bourbon Thief Read online

  Levi almost stopped to throw up on his way to his aunt and uncle’s house outside Lawrenceburg. He’d gone on a few drinking benders in his life and had his share of hangovers, but his stomach had never churned like this, like a waterwheel in a running river. His eyes ran and his breaths were quick. He ached like he had a fever and he would have driven into the Kentucky River to cool himself off if he’d been anywhere near it.

  When he arrived at the little white farmhouse on the edge of his aunt Gloria and his uncle Andre’s property, Levi entered through the back door without knocking. He didn’t see his uncle’s truck or Gloria’s Chevy. He went upstairs, stripped naked in the bathroom, took a long ice-cold shower and rested his head against the slick pink-tiled wall.

  He wanted to think of a thousand reasons why Tamara was wrong, why she would lie to him or why her father would lie to her. But the only thought in his head was this one—this explains everything.

  It explained why Virginia Maddox hated him so much.

  It explained why his mother never told him who his father was.

  It explained why George Maddox came to the funeral and offered him a job.

  It explained his blue eyes.

  And it explained why he let himself think for one second he was allowed to fool around with a rich white girl like Tamara Maddox. Because in his heart of hearts he knew they were the same.

  When Levi finally turned off the water, he heard footsteps and his uncle Andre’s voice calling his name.

  He dried off quickly and pulled his clothes back on. He took a few cold drinks of water out of the sink and tossed his towel into the hamper because Gloria would have his hide if he left the towel on the floor. She worked at a bank and was no one’s maid, she liked to remind him.

  Levi walked down the narrow staircase and found his uncle standing by the front door, flipping through mail.

  “You come for dinner tonight?” he asked without any other kind of greeting. They were family. Family didn’t need any hi’s and how-are-you’s.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  Andre looked at Levi, looked him dead in the eyes.

  “Son, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. You’re whiter than usual and that’s saying something.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “I see you aren’t. What’s wrong?”

  “Is George Maddox my father?”

  Levi was impressed. Andre didn’t bat an eye at the question. Then again, Andre had spent four years fighting World War II and had seen horrors he’d never speak of no matter how much liquor you poured down his throat. What was one more?

  “Let’s go in the kitchen,” Andre said, which was as much of a yes as Levi needed. “I could use a beer. So could you.”

  Andre poured two glasses of beer and Levi didn’t touch his. They both sat at the round oak table on opposite sides playing chicken. Andre blinked first.

  “Your mother never told us who your father was. She said he was a married man and he already had children. That’s all we know for certain. That and he worked where she worked.”

  “At Red Thread.”

  Andre sighed. “Your mother was a beautiful woman when she was younger. Sons don’t like to hear that about their mothers, but it was true and we have the pictures to prove it.”

  “I’ve seen pictures from when she was younger. I never said she wasn’t pretty.” His mother loved her white go-go boots, her miniskirts, her silk shirts in wild colors. She was a beauty and in his younger days he’d been proud of having the prettiest mother around.

  “She was pretty, yeah. She was also pretty wild. I was half in love with her myself, but I don’t regret picking Glory over Honor.”

  An old family joke. Two sisters—Gloria and Honora. Glory and Honor.

  “Mom wouldn’t have... Not with George Maddox. Not a chance,” Levi said.

  “She worked the night shift. I imagine the owner and company president stayed late at work a lot. She talked about him a few times. I remember her saying he and his wife didn’t get along too well. I heard she died not long ago. Thought she’d been dead for years.”

  “You’re stalling.”

  “I’m stalling.”

  “Tell me what you know.”

  “I know what she told Glory, which is what I told you. She said she didn’t think he’d leave his wife for her, but he gave her gifts, money—”

  “Me?”

  Slowly, very slowly, as slowly as anyone in history ever nodded, Andre nodded.

  “Goddammit.” Levi sighed.

  “These things happen.” Andre lifted his beer and drank half of it. He wasn’t much of a heavy drinker anymore, which meant he was enjoying this conversation about as well as Levi was.

  “So what happened between them?” Levi sat back in his chair, covered his face with his hands and breathed.

  “The usual. He lost interest, started seeing someone new. She quit when she found out she was pregnant. And six months later a baby boy was born, snow-white and blue-eyed.”

  Levi wasn’t white as any snow anymore, but he wasn’t black by any stretch of the imagination. Not even brown. Not on the outside, anyway. But the inside of a man didn’t matter to 99 percent of the population.

  “Why am I hearing about this now? Why didn’t she tell me this before she died?”

  “If it was George Maddox, then that’s your answer. Money’s bad enough, but money and power is a dangerous combination. When you turned out so light, she was afraid your father might try to take you away from her. She was afraid his family might try to kill you to cover up what he’d done from his wife. She was afraid of everything for a long while.”

  “Still doesn’t explain why she wouldn’t tell me.”

  “Your mother knew you too well. She thought you might do something stupid. Get drunk and start a fight. Make your existence known to people who had very good reasons to not want you in the world.”

  Levi thought of Virginia Maddox and her hatred of him that seemed to stem from nothing and nowhere. Always he’d assumed her loathing of him was simply bigotry, snobbery. She knew his mother was black and she hated him for it. But now he knew better. It wasn’t because of his mother that Virginia Maddox hated his guts. It was because of his father.

  “So how did you find out after all this time?” Andre asked.

  “Tamara Maddox came to see me today.”

  “She the granddaughter?”

  “She is. Sort of. She found her father’s suicide note somehow. In it he calls me George Maddox’s son. And I guess I am.”

  Andre tapped the table, wiped a swatch of foam off the inside of his glass.

  “I guess you are.”

  Levi stood up, stood over the kitchen sink and tried not to puke into it. Gloria wouldn’t have that, either.

  “I can’t believe Mom and George Maddox...”

  “Why not?” Andre asked. “Didn’t you get canned for fooling around with that Maddox girl?”

  “With Tamara.”

  “Kissing cousins,” Andre said and chuckled.

  “Not quite. Turns out Tamara isn’t her father’s daughter, after all. Tamara’s not a real Maddox, and I guess I am.” Levi’s lip curled in disgust. He couldn’t look at Andre anymore. “Son of a bitch. She worked for him making fifty cents an hour. What was she supposed to do? Tell the boss man no?”

  “Your mother told Glory she was in love. He didn’t force her as far as I know. She was young and pretty and did what young pretty things do sometimes. But she loved you, too. She married that piece of shit Jay Shelby so you could have a father and a name.”

  “She divorced him as fast as she married him.” His mother’s marriage had lasted all of two years, but Jay Shelby had given him some measure of legitimacy, and a last name other than his mother’s maiden name.

  “Probably her plan all along.”

  Levi turned around, crossed his arms over his chest.

  “I don’t know what to do with this,” Levi said. “Other than carry it.”
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  “What’s there to do with it? What’s Tamara Maddox doing mucking all this mud?”

  “Tamara said the company should be mine. That’s why she came to see me, to tell me what she knew.”

  “She wants you to have Red Thread?”

  “Her momma’s trying to sell it and she thinks she shouldn’t because it doesn’t belong to them.”

  “It belongs to whoever George Maddox left it to.”

  “And that’s Tamara. It’s not like I can waltz into a lawyer’s office, tell them who I am and smile while they hand me the keys to the place. I have no idea why Tamara told me all this. No idea what she’s got to gain by it.”

  “Maybe she’s one of the good ones. I heard rumors they exist.”

  Levi snorted a laugh. His uncle had little use for white people. It was “us” and it was “them,” and the more “us” stayed away from “them,” the better “us” had it. But on occasion he’d admit there was a good one or two of “them.” He liked Johnny Carson. He liked Frank Sinatra. He thought All in the Family was funny, but mainly because it showed the world how ignorant white people were most of the time. He’d laughed so hard when Sammy Davis Jr. kissed Archie they’d thought Andre was having a heart attack. You could count the good ones on one hand, according to Andre.

  “One of the good ones? I don’t know,” Levi said. “She’s not one of the bad ones. She’s only...spoiled. Spoiled rotten. She didn’t seem like that today, though. She seemed... I don’t know, but I think her mother’s not been too good to her. Easy to believe. Her mother’s one of the bad ones, that’s for damn sure.” Levi ran a hand through his still-wet hair.

  “She’s the one who fired you, right?”

  He nodded. “Called me every name in the book, threatened to have me arrested, threatened to have me cut up in tiny pieces and scattered in every ditch from here to Ohio. And all that two days after George Maddox died. You’d think she’d have better things to worry about.”

  “Maybe she knows something you don’t know. Maybe she knows George Maddox did want to leave you something in the will.”

  “What do you think I should do?”

  Andre shrugged, tapped his now empty glass on the table again.

  “Maybe you should hear this girl out.”

  “Tamara can’t do anything for me. She doesn’t even get the company herself until she’s twenty-one. Her mother’s in charge of it all till then.”

  “And you say she doesn’t like her mother?”

  “Sounds like Tamara hates her mother as much as I do.”

  “Go talk to her, then. Be smart about it. But hear what she has to say. She might know something worth knowing.”

  “I don’t want their money.”

  “The hell you don’t. You want to keep living in a stable and coming here for your supper all your life?”

  That was the last thing Levi wanted. And the first thing Levi wanted was his own farm, his own horses, his own stables. “You think I should go after his money? Really?”

  “All I’m saying is if you’re gonna have a cracker for a daddy, might as well be a Ritz cracker, right?”

  Levi laughed. “Right.”

  Andre stood up and carried his glass over to the sink.

  “After the Civil War, they made us a lot of promises. A lot of promises they didn’t keep. A lot of promises they should have kept.”

  “Forty acres and a mule,” Levi said. He’d heard all this before. He’d much rather have a horse than a mule.

  “I got my forty acres,” Andre said, looking out the back window at his farm. “You go get yours.”

  11

  At dusk, Levi drove back to Happy Trails and parked outside the stables. He felt like shit for leaving the horses untended. Wearing a saddle for two hours wouldn’t do them any harm, but they wouldn’t be happy about it, either.

  Inside the barn Levi found something he hadn’t expected to find. Both Ashley and Scarlett were back in their stalls, their saddles off and polished to a mirror shine and their coats brushed and their manes trimmed. The bedding looked fresh and neat. Scarlett, Ashley, Rhett, Plato, Aristotle, Queenie and Zeppelin—all seven horses had clean stalls and oats in their trays. Nothing but contented horses wherever Levi looked. Paul, the owner, never gave the horses oats in the evening. Must have been Tamara. Well, goddamn. She really did miss her horses, didn’t she?

  On the ladder leading up to the loft Levi found a piece of paper nailed into the wood.

  He ripped it off the nail and read.

  Levi,

  I’m sorry I upset you. When you are ready to talk, come to the Red Thread warehouse. I have a key. I’ll be there every night at ten until ten thirty waiting for you. It’s safe there, trust me. Momma never goes near the warehouse. She can’t stand the smell of the angels.

  Tamara

  The smell of the angels? He’d been right. Tamara was crazy. Had to be, didn’t she? If she really thought Levi had a claim on the Maddox money, there’d be no way to prove it except with that letter that showed she had no claim on it.

  Trust me, Tamara wrote. There wasn’t a Maddox on earth Levi trusted as far as he could throw them. And that included himself when it came to Tamara.

  Levi didn’t go that night. He refused to cave that easy. He’d cave, yes, but when he did, he’d cave hard.

  * * *

  Three days later he made the drive back to Frankfort. Although it was the city closest to Happy Trails, Levi usually drove the extra fifteen minutes and back to Louisville when he needed something. Last thing he’d wanted was to run into Tamara or her mother in town. And here he was driving there for the sole purpose of talking it out with Tamara. If he’d had worse ideas in his thirty years, he couldn’t remember what they were.

  Red Thread wasn’t one building; it was several. They covered a good parcel of land from the road to the river. One forked road led to both the distillery and Arden, which was hidden behind a thicket of woods. Take the left fork to the private Maddox property. Take the right fork to Red Thread. Levi turned right, which he’d never done before. He’d had nothing to do with the distillery at all when he worked for George Maddox, but the warehouse wasn’t hard to find. It was the biggest building on the Red Thread property, an ancient and hulking seven-story wood box with narrow slits for windows and an arched wooden door painted green.

  Tensing, wary of guards and guard dogs, Levi eased the green door open. According to his watch, it was 10:10 p.m., and if Tamara kept her promise, she’d be here. He looked around and saw barrel after barrel sitting on slanted wooden ricks. Endless barrels receding deep into the cool cave-like recesses. And the smell...pungent, like baking bread, but cold.

  “Hey, Levi,” she said, and Levi followed the sound of her voice upward. She sat on a wooden staircase in a slant of a security light reading a big leather-bound book. “I’m glad you came.”

  She had on gray sweatpants, a red-and-white baseball T-shirt and flip-flops. Pajamas. Funny, he’d expected a girl like her to sleep in silk nighties. Or maybe that had been wishful thinking.

  “I’m here. Make it good,” he said. “It’s past my bedtime.”

  She pursed her lips at him. She never did buy his protestations of innocent and godly behavior.

  “I’m sorry I upset you.”

  “That’s what your note said. I can’t imagine you’re dumb enough to think you wouldn’t upset me with what you told me.”

  “I knew it would upset you. But I’m still sorry.”

  “Fine. Forgiven. Now what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But I have ideas.”

  “When you have ideas, I get very nervous.”

  “Imagine how I feel.”

  “How do you feel?” he asked. He saw the title of the book she’d been reading. The Bible. Not what he expected.