The Ranger - Ace Atkins [83]
“You should’ve said something.”
“Stagg wanted it all,” Blanton said. “The house. The farm. I was looking after your best interest.”
“You should’ve told me about my uncle and Stagg doing business.”
“I never lied to you.”
“What would you call it?”
“Stagg would’ve been in his legal right to take it all,” Blanton said. “Hamp owed Stagg a lot of money for a hell of a long time. Your uncle had his vices.”
“Stagg lied about him owing on all that equipment,” Quinn said. “Why didn’t he just tell me he funded all those trips to Tunica?”
“Sit down, Quinn, and quiet down,” Blanton said, looking over his shoulder to Varner, standing at the register. Varner was listening and closed the cash drawer with a hard snick, meeting Quinn’s eye and staring at Judge Blanton.
“Johnny didn’t want to make your uncle look bad. If folks knew he’d had a gambling problem, owed money, half his cases would be called into doubt. That’s a hell of an epitaph.”
“You and Stagg should’ve worked out a plan before I came back,” Quinn said. “You’re tryin’ to good-ole-boy me while Stagg’s trying to cornhole me. How ’bout a handshake first?”
“No one’s trying to screw you,” Blanton said. “Take the money. Your mother and that little colored boy she’s raising sure could use it.”
“You can go to hell,” Quinn said.
“Excuse me, boy?”
“You’re fired,” Quinn said. “I think my family can find some better representation.”
28
Johnny Stagg didn’t like those telephone calls when people asked you why the shit was flying when you were damn well trying to dodge it yourself. But the Memphis folks had called three times now, and on the last call asked him to drive nearly two damn hours up to the city and tell them about just what was going on with Gowrie. Johnny tried to pleasantly remind them that Gowrie was his own damn man, and if they had some kind of trouble with Gowrie, they needed to ask him. But that just wouldn’t do, and so Johnny had to skip a fish fry with the Rotarians and an early Bible study led by Brother Davis to meet Bobby Campo up at CK’s Coffee Shop off Union at eight a.m.
“We get the state people in and we’re fucked, Johnny,” Campo said, drinking a cup of coffee in a back booth and working on a Denver omelet. “You see that? Right?”
Campo was a Memphis boy but had gone to Ole Miss with several folks that Johnny knew down in Jackson. That’s how they’d become buddies. When Johnny wanted to get into the skin trade a few years back, Campo was the man who showed him the ropes and got a decent cut of the old Booby Trap, sending dancers down from Memphis and up from New Orleans. And when Stagg needed some support for a development no one had faith in, Campo produced miracles.
Bobby Campo was old Memphis, came from money, had it his whole life, and had made a lot more of it in the eighties with swingers clubs and later in the nineties with 900 numbers. Campo always dressed like a rich boy, pleated slacks and wild-colored dress shirts without ties. Today, he wore black suede loafers with gold buckles.
He’d been in and out of federal prison since Stagg had known him, most recently after pleading guilty to having live sex acts onstage at one of his clubs. He called it the price of doing business. But you’d still see him in the company of politicians and CEOs on fall Saturdays down in the Grove at Ole Miss, eating fried chicken off a china plate and drinking bourbon from a silver flask. Campo sent a lot of money to Jackson. He made a lot of important friends. If the development took off, Stagg already had a certificate for a regional hospital. Those things only happen with handshakes and winks with sharp men. Campo had handed him that gold key.
“So, what the hell?” Campo asked.
“Gowrie got robbed,” Johnny said. “Five of them labs got busted up.”
“New sheriff?”
Stagg shook his head. “Got into some kind of pissing contest with a local boy.”
“Can you stop it?”
“Nope,” Johnny Stagg said, pointing to a waitress and asking her for some