Embellished True Stories of Lamar, NC: Spades, Preachers, and Spirits - Vol. II

By Tom Byrd

Vol II. of a two volume collection of short stories reflecting the life, culture, and goings-on of the residents of Lamar, NC., home of the author, Tom Byrd.

Lamar is itself a fictional town in rural, central North Carolina. Tom Byrd was born and raised in this part of the state but left the farms for life in academia. He returne

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scism Designs, LLC
• Release date: Jan 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736044742

Tom Byrd

Lamar is a fictional town in rural, central North Carolina. Tom Byrd was born and raised in this part of the state but left the farms for life in academia. He returned to his home place when his beloved wife passed too early in life and spent a considerable number of years writing stories depicting one slice of life in that region. Lamar, NC, a community by consensus of its residents, but is not large enough to warrant a road sign saying "Lamar." It is known legally as Lamar because it has a small post office, with a sign that reads 'Lamar' on the entrance door, and so "Lamar" can be defined geographically as being composed of the area where the Lamar post office delivers mail by rural routes. At the end of World War II, there were not many paved roads in the area; only the principal north-south highway was paved. Between 1949 and 1953, a North Carolina governor named Kerr Scott instituted a road paving program that helped to make Lamar a thriving community, so that over the next thirty years, the area grew large enough to support not only the small post office, but three or four country convenience stores, two of which also sold gasoline.

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Lamar, N.C. – A Garden of Eden

Lamar, NC, is a community by consensus of its residents, but is not large enough to warrant a road sign saying Lamar.  It is known legally as Lamar because it has a small post office, with a sign that reads ‘Lamar’ on the entrance door, and so Lamar can be defined geographically as being composed of the area where the Lamar post office delivers mail by rural routes.

At the end of World War II, there were not many paved roads in the area; only the principal north-south highway was paved.

Between 1949 and 1953, a North Carolina governor named Kerr Scott instituted a road paving program that helped to make Lamar a thriving community, so that over the next thirty years, the area grew large enough to support not only the small post office, but three or four country convenience stores, two of which also sold gasoline.

Table of Contents

Vol. II

Detective Story (Harnett Solves a Murder)

Fast Women and Loose Cars (Frank Coles’ Cars)

Flying to Glory (Wildman Parachutes)

Juries and Wine (Wildman as Juror)

Dynamite Part I - Introduction to Roscoe

Dynamite Part II – Roscoe on Route 29

Dynamite Part III – Conclusion

Guns and Mules

Preaching and Consequences

Women in the Military

Mormons and Roscoe

Edna May in the Hospital

Judges and Forty Thousand Killed

Booth Opens Stores

Budders’ September Morning

Parable of Seeds and Pinches

Egans Gets Born Again

Egans in Florida (Salvation)

Egans and McKinney Caught in a Tryst (Salvation Follows Sin)

Egans’ Trial (Finale)

Wildman Shack Move

Wildman and Nebraska

Wildman’s Hubcaps Sale

Peewee and Son

Peewee’s Parents

Peewee and Dorothy

Iraq as End Time Predictor

Kernel Maple Myers (The Great ABC Store Raid)

U.S. Criminals in Jail After Myers’ Killing

Food at Spades

Hauper – Part I

Hauper – Part II (The Stopover Diner)

Hauper – Part III (Business is Mostly Acumen)

Hauper – Part IV (Conclusion)

Burly vs Gantry – Nuptial Agreement

Moonshine and Peg

Parable of Benches and Coca-Cola

Blackwater Tree Fall

Blackwater and Margie Milder

Toler Bibles to Soldiers

End of Bibles to Iraq

Wildman and the Smoking Law

Wildman’s Death

Wildman’s Death by Roscoe

Comments on Wildman’s Death

Harvell and Ugly

Parable of Granny’s Apron Strings

Blackwater and Crash Outcome

Wildman After Death

Wildman’s Name

Weldy and the Lottery

Rangy Bio / Preacher at the Mall

Pollit Death – An Introduction to Rangy

Elijah to Lamar (Chicago’s Gain)

Elijah and Ellie Mae

Parable of Quilts

Detective Story

(Harnett Solves a Murder)

Deputy Sheriff Sam Harnett, long since retired, once solved a murder mystery that had rested heavy on the heads of our community’s leaders. I knew about the murder, and that the culprit was apprehended, but I did not know many of the details. I ran into Sam at the mall last week, where he has started to take walks as I do, and we talked about it over coffee for three days running.

First, a caveat: I am not a mystery writer, so this tale is likely to move along by fits and starts. Nor do I know how to build suspense.

I will, for the sake of suspense, present the matter as it unfolded for Sam. For me, the suspense was non-existent, because I knew who had been sentenced to a 20-year jail term for the killing.

------ 0 ---------

One Friday evening about 9 PM in what seems like a century ago and actually was more than 50 years past, Sam received a call from the Danville police saying that they had found a body on the Dutch Road, about 100 yards from the Va. state line, in NC.

Sam went to the designated point, a short drive for him because he lived on the Dutch Road. On the way, he called the sheriff’s office, then called Ronnie Crouty and Joseph Egans, the other two immediately available deputies in the township.

When Sam reached the spot, there were already two or three Danville police cars there, and five policemen milling about. All the flashing lights were flashing, all the headlights were on, and every policeman was waving a flashlight. It was like Christmas out there, Tommy.  Sam still calls me ‘Tommy,’ my childhood nickname.

Sam got out and saw a body, still uncovered, laying sprawled in the ditch beside the road. The Dutch Road was paved, and barely wide enough for two cars to pass, and the dirt shoulders were no more than three feet wide, with a drainage ditch on each side of the road.

Sam said, Does it look like a hit and run?

One of the policemen said, No, we’re pretty sure it ain’t. Ain’t nothing hurt, ain’t no lesions or bruises on his body but his head and you can see that’s got a big dent in it. And we found a Pepsi-Cola bottle laying right there and it’s got some blood on it and we think that’s what done it. Somebody crowned this guy good.

Sam looked at the body. I know that man. Name’s Armistus Robinson. They call him Armp.

Armistus Robinson was a heavy set man, perhaps 50, and a lifelong resident of the County. He enjoyed alcohol, but was not quite a drunk, and he indulged a penchant for petty thievery, and sometimes big time thievery, depending on where he was and who he could steal from and what he could steal.

When he was a little boy, everyone except my Father and Mother called him Armp, including Armp himself, but he pronounced it Oimp, so that it sounded like the beginning of a hog grunt - oink - and ended up with the mp sound. My parents, I recall, always used the full Armistus.

My mother told me that Armistus’s father had been in World War I, and on Armistice Day he had been shot, but only wounded, and he thought the Lord was trying to tell him something, so he came home and joined the church, became a deacon, married, and when the first male child was born to the union two months later, named him ‘Armistus,’ after that traumatic day that changed his life. The unique spelling remains unexplained. The father was a tenant farmer all his life, and seems to have believed that was what God saved him to do with his life.

Armistus, less fatalistic about the flow of life, often took matters into his own hands, and over his lifetime acquired financial independence.

When Ronnie and Joe arrived, Ronnie took the relevant photos of the scene, they all took whatever notes deputy sheriffs take, signed papers that relieved the city policemen from any further responsibility, and called Swicegood’s Funeral Home to come get the body and haul it to the County offices for an autopsy.

It is of passing interest, but not relevant to this case, that bodies would be hauled to the proper County officials, looked at in horror, then put back in the ambulance and transported to Durham where the actual autopsy was done. I assume the County paid Duke or somebody to do the work.

Sam took charge of the evidence, or at least what there was of it. And that was a Pepsi Cola bottle with a torn paper label about half off the bottle and a blood smear across the bottom and one side of the bottle, the side away from the label.

One of the Danville cops said, Looks like whoever done it just crowned this man from the side, judging from the fact that his skull is crushed in there right behind his left ear. And the bottle ain’t broke. makes you think it was done from close range.

The torn label, incidentally, was explained by the fact that Pepsi Cola used to apply paper labels to its bottles, and the Danville bottler, Kernodle Bottling Plant, maintained the practice.

The collection of law enforcement officials scoured the area, but found nothing else that seemed to relate to the crime. Sam said, Well, we can turn this bottle over to the High Sheriff tomorrow and let them see if there’s any fingerprints on it anywhere, and tell us if it’s Armp’s blood on it.

Ronnie was designated to drive to Armp’s home and tell his mother and sister, who were his only known relatives in the area. He had several other brothers and sisters, but they were scattered all up and down the east coast.

And here I will let Sam tell the story. To the extent possible, I will keep my own participation in the conversations to a minimum, and, as I prefer to do, let the principal talk in sometimes long monologues. Of course, I nodded where appropriate in the conversations because Sam has a way of talking that lards up his conversation with questions, and I made an occasional comment, but I will omit my interruptions because they do not add anything to the flow of the story.

Sam and I were having our coffee in the mall, and Sam picked up the story with the morning after the body was found.

"The next day Sheriff Smith he scattered us all over talking to Armp’s friends and that crowd he run with and the people that lived near him and people he had done business with. We done all that but it didn’t lead nowhere at all to speak of. After about a week, we had come up with a few names of folks we thought might need further investigating.

So we done what you do when you run out of everything else. We picked up everybody we knew drunk heavy, and all the boys who was regularly in and out of jail, and the ones we thought was just plain mean. We got a couple dozen that way. We took ‘em all to the sheriff’s office one at a time and the sheriff and some man what come up from Raleigh with the SBI questioned them."

We carried some people we knowed had some dealin’s with Armp, like both of them Rosterts boys, Tootie and Bill, and three Milders, and here Sam clicked off names on his fingers, Gary and Wayne and Gary’s wife Dorothy.

Then he added as an aside, Tommy, you knowed Dorothy real well back in your younger days didn’t you?  And he grinned that sly grin of people who want you to know that they know things you didn’t think they knew.

All of them had been drinkin’ that day and all of them had seen Armp and I be durned if all of them hadn’t had a fuss with him over one thing or another - I don’t mean on the day Armp was killed exactly, but in that general time frame.

Here Sam spread out his hands and laughed, Now all of a sudden we had more suspects than we could count.

We had five of ‘em, and them others we carried in for questioning had really good alibis. We could prove none of them was anywhere around the Dutch Road at the time Armp got killed, and in fact four of the worst ones was in Richmond, they had gone up there to get some cars, they said, and I imagine they was pickin’ up stolen Chevrolets- you remember back then any Chevrolet you could get you could sell right off the bat in Danville or Reidsville. That was them two Snowden boys and Harold Pinckt and some buddy of his from Reidsville - I can’t remember his name - you remember them?  They spent their lives in and out of jail and they’re every one in jail to this very day.

"Now I might have put my money on any one of the Rosterts or the Milders crowd. Tootie Rosterts was such a sneak thief and slunk around so much. He grinned a lot and smiled at you but you couldn’t trust him out of sight.

He admitted he didn’t like Armp anyway because one time he had tried to beat Armp out of some money and Armp beat him to a bloody pulp. Of course, Tootie told it like he was the one who got took, but we all knew what kind of boy Tootie was and I knew he’d tried to steal from Armp because his own brother Bill told me that much. Tootie said he was with his cousin Bud all that night of the killin’ over at Bud’s house on the Grove Springs Road.

Sam got a refill for his coffee. Over the next few days we tried to run down the whereabouts of each one of them boys. We learned that Gary and Dorothy Milders was drinkin’ some but best I could tell from talkin’ to them they was laid up in their house most of that day.

And I was about to write them off as suspects, but a day or so after I had thought I was done with the Milderses, I was having myself a lunch at Boots’ place there in Stokesland - you remember where it was there? That woman bought out the Dairy Freeze and made it into a restaurant? - well, I run into Dorie Louis, you know she was Dorothy’s sister, and Dorie died a few years back, I think from liver disease. You know all them Louis crowd drunk to excess every day. Well Dorie and me got to talkin’ about Armp’s death and she let it out that Dorothy and Gary had come to see her that Friday and was talkin’ about how they had gone up there to Armp’s place to see if he’d give them a bottle of liquor and Armp wouldn’t give them none on credit and they was really mad at him because of all the times they had bought from him and paid cash.

Sam took a drink of coffee, we both waved at Bill Adcock who was walking past on one of his six trips around the mall, then Sam continued. I went back to see Gary and Dorothy and they finally admitted yes they had seen Armp and yes they didn’t like him a bit because he had done them dirt when they needed a helpin’ hand. They had gone up there late in the afternoon to see him and he turned them away. See Tommy, ol’ Armp didn’t do credit for nobody, especially you can’t do credit to somebody who’s already drunk, you don’t know if they’ll even remember it much less pay you back. And what I learned from 40 years in law enforcement is that ‘paying back’ means gittin’ even, it don’t mean passin’ no money over. And they admitted they didn’t go back home but went over to Dorie’s, but they both swore they left Dorie’s because she didn’t have no money she could give them and they went over to see J.W. (Ed note:  another Louis sibling) and he had a bottle or two so they stayed over there drinkin’.

I don’t have no idea why Gary and Dorothy couldn’t have told me that when we first questioned them, if that was the truth. Why, see Tommy, they had several witnesses that put them in the clear if their story was true. All I could think was maybe they was so tanked up they really didn’t remember where they was or what they was doin’. Or they was guilty of something pretty serious. You can see what a problem I was lookin’ at?

The next day or two I got to talk to Bill Rosterts some more and that’s when I learned what Tootie had done to Armp, beatin’ him out of some money, and I guess Armp had plenty of reason to hate them Rosterts boys. I just drove up to Bill there at his tobacco field there on 29 across the road from your old home house - you remember he rented that farm for several years and always made a really good crop?  He was a good tobacconist. He was cuttin’ down the stalks, gettin’ ready to plow them under. Of course, he was three months late doin’ it. Bill never did do nothin’ on time.

See he had told that SBI man that about a week before Armp got killed, ol’ Armp he had gone over to Bill’s to collect some money and they had got into a really mean quarrel about money over there at Billy’s house and it led to Armp throwing a rock at Bill when Bill was walkin’ back into his house, and Bill picked up that rock and throwed it back and hit Armp in the back as Armp was runnin’ away. Knocked him down, Bill said.

"They was fussin’ over some money deal from last spring that they had worked out where Bill bought a old car from Armp and signed over some of his tobacco crop for it and let G.W. Wooler hold the note. You know G.W. had that Planter’s Warehouse on Industrial Avenue, and he always did hold a few notes for farmers and when they sold their tobacco he would take out the money for the note and give it to whoever it was due, which was usually G.W. But a lot of them notes was two-party ones where G.W. didn’t get a cent out of it. He was just the intermediary. It was good business for him. It meant them farmers had to sell their crop with him.

You know I mean the granddaddy G.W. in that family?  You know there’s three generations of them now and all of them named G.W.?

I remember the granddaddy G.W. Wooler did that for me once. I paid my hail insurance on the 4 acres I was growing by note to Blackwood - he was the Nationwide man you remember, your Daddy done business with him - and we give it to G.W. and when I sold my tobacco, G.W. he took out the insurance part and give it to Blackwood and give me the rest. Blackwood always give you a fair price and never tried to gouge you if he thought you was short of money. That’s why he did so much business. He treated people as poor as me just like he did people as well off as the Fitzhughs.

Sam returned to the quarrel between Armp and Bill Rosterts. When it come time to sell the tobacco Billy sold it in Reidsville and not in Danville so he could dodge that note - did you know Reidsville had two sales warehouses in them days?  Well apparently Billy he went over to Armp’s and give Armp some of the money and said he’d get the rest to him the next week, and then he give him a little more, but at the end of the selling year Billy still owed Armp money and Armp was really mad over it. That’s when they got into that quarrel. Now Billy was scared we was goin’ to put the killin’ on him so that’s why he told the whole story, and I tell you it sure did have the sound of the truth. Billy was puttin’ it all on the table.

Then there was Tootie Rosterts. Tootie knew about the deal between Billy and Armp because Tootie was over there borrowin’ that car every time he could.  Sam’s face fell blank. You know I don’t remember what make or model it was. He shrugged his shoulders more in exasperation that resignation.

Well see Billy may have got the idea he could gull Armp because he knew Tootie had outwitted him. Billy told me all about it. See Tootie had told the Sheriff and that SBI man his quarrel with Armp was over Armp tryin’ to hoodoo him. But Billy told me that won’t true.

Just then three of our friends who were mall walkers finished their rounds and sat, as usual, at our table, and we chatted amiably for the next 30 or 45 minutes. Sam’s story of the Armp killing was ended for the day.

The next day, when I had finished my walk and joined Sam at the table, by way of starting up the story again, I asked Sam if the bottle had fingerprints on it.

Sam said, Well it had some smudges on it, but they couldn’t get nothin’ off of it worth anything to us. They told us the autopsy showed Armp had been drinkin’ a lot and the blood on the bottle was his, so as far as we was concerned that clinched it that the bottle was the murder weapon. But we didn’t have no idea how it happened or why.

What we did know was that the Danville police that night had took trouble not to disturb the area around the body, and we had searched it pretty close with flashlights and couldn’t see no sign of any sort of struggle. I mean, won’t no bushes broke off, won’t no shoe marks around, won’t no foot treads like where somebody might have been walkin’ or runnin’ away.

See they won’t but three things could have happened. Either Armp was killed somewhere else and brought there and throwed out, or he got into a fight with somebody there and got hit, or somebody drove by in a car and throwed the bottle at him.

We could almost rule out the first two scenarios because if he had of been killed somewhere else and hauled to that spot and dumped out, we figured there would have been some blood smears somewhere on his clothes or somewhere besides just on his head and the collar of his shirt, and there wouldn’t have been no murder weapon like that Pepsi bottle. And if he had of been hit by somebody who was there with him, we think we’d have found some signs of a second person there on the ground by where Armp’s body was layin’. But there won’t nothin’ there.

We finally concluded that the killin’ won’t premeditated. See, what we worked out was we sort of by elimination decided what had happened was somebody had drove by and throwed that bottle out of a car and hit Armp. And the next question was which way was the car goin’, comin’ toward Armp or comin’ up from behind him. We felt like it had been somebody comin’ up from Armp’s rear because his skull was busted behind his left ear, which if Armp was walkin’ on the shoulder of the road and somebody drove by they would of throwed the bottle before they got to Armp, allowing for the speed of the car they was in. I remember tellin’ Ronnie that whoever throwed the bottle was just lucky it hit Armp in the head. I mean you can’t be that good a pitcher when you’re ridin’ by in a car and tryin’ to judge your car speed and when to throw the bottle and so on. So what I reckoned was whoever throwed that bottle didn’t really mean to kill Armp, just hit him or scare him.

I was thinkin’, what we was lookin’ for was somebody who didn’t like Armp but who won’t necessarily a killer. As far as I was concerned, I was lookin’ for somebody like the Rosterts boys or the Milderses. Somebody who was mean, but who didn’t have no record of anything more violent than a barroom brawl when they was drunk or some sort of petty thievery. And on top of that, Billy never had been in jail. So that’s how I was conducting my part of the investigation.

Sam returned to the meeting with Billy where he had left off the day before. I was tellin’ you about Tootie’s run-in with Armp, won’t I?

I said yes, and Sam began again. Well Billy told me what Tootie had done was, one day the year before he was killed, Armp was lookin’ to hire somebody to take down a couple old tobacco barns and wanted to haul the logs to his house and use them to make hisself a second home. Tootie said he could take down for $400 - I don’t know the exact figure any more, but that’s close - and went over there with a buddy or two and started the job.

He talked Armp into givin’ him an advance so he could pay his helpers because he told Armp they wouldn’t work for Tootie unless they could get some money up front because they needed it to buy food and stuff - see they was dead broke. So Armp he give Tootie $100 at the end of the day, and the next day Armp had to go to Reidsville and that night Tootie come by and got $100 more for his helpers, and the same thing the next day, then the next day Armp went down there to see the progress because he thought they ought to be done by then and nobody was there and there hadn’t been a lick of work done since Armp left two days before. What Tootie and them boys had done was skin Armp.

Armp he didn’t take it settin’ down. He got in his car and drove over to Tootie’s place and him and Tootie got into a fuss, and Tootie said well the money was spent and by god Armp can’t git blood out of a turnip. Armp grabbed Tootie and if what Billy told me is the truth he beat Tootie so bad he was in bed for two or three days over it, and Armp took some tools out of Tootie’s barn as part payment.

Sam laughed. And it turned out that some of them tools Tootie had stole from the Grammar School, from the maintenance department when he worked there, and that new janitor lived over by Armp and saw the tools and reported them and Armp almost got into some serious trouble over it. But he got out of it. The school never reported it to us. They just took the tools back.

Sam reflected a moment. I don’t know to this day if all that’s the exact straight of it, but that’s the story Billy told. I do know nobody ever reported it to the sheriff’s department. So if the story was right, Tootie never got no time or paid no fine for stealin’ them tools. But he made a serious enemy out of Armp.

Now it was time for Sam to get his second cup of coffee. I always get two, he explained, Because they’re free after the first one.

He took a drink out of the fresh cup and said, I had a lot to do on the case. See we still didn’t have a motive, and really didn’t have a clue about who had done it, but we had suspicions. We had five people who didn’t like Armp, but it didn’t seem to me like any of them was a killer. I was really thinkin’ we was on the wrong leg of a three legged mule.

I had to check out Gary and Dorothy’s alibi, and I had to talk to Wayne Milders, and talk to Tootie, and find out where Billy was on the night Armp was killed. See Billy said he was at home and in bed, and he did have the reputation for going to bed early, or at least if he stayed up late drinkin’, he always done it at home because his wife didn’t like to stay by herself at night. He didn’t get out carousin’ like Tootie or the Milderses. But he did like to drink.

I was puzzlin’ over what to do next, and decided I ought to go see what Wayne Milders had to say. See Wayne he had fussed with Armp over some cord wood Armp wanted to sell him and which Wayne claimed was his by rights. What had happened is Armp had got some people to cut some wood for him and they had cut over onto Wayne’s land, so Armp had give Wayne some money for his loss, but Wayne wanted the cord wood and Armp said he’d have to buy it to get it and him and Wayne had a real go-round over that.

Sam continued, But Wayne had what I thought was a really good alibi for the night Armp was killed. He had been messin’ around with a old girl and said he was in her bed all night. It’s probably true because I know Wayne’s wife left him a couple days later, and knowin’ her, I’d say she wouldn’t leave him if he killed somebody, but she might if he was runnin’ around on her.

I laughed, Sam laughed. I recalled that Wayne’s wife was a big woman and Wayne was hen-pecked, so I believed Sam had correctly divined the situation.

Sam resumed the tale. I stopped at Hodges’ store to get a bite to eat, and got me a pack of peanuts and a Double Cola out of his drink box.

Now Tommy, and Sam leaned forward to emphasize the fact that he was about to open a door to the solution to the killing, I knowed there was something bothering me about the scene of that killing. But I couldn’t put my finger on it. Well while I was drinkin’ that Double Cola it hit me.

Now Tommy, he repeated, You know back then a lot of stores had put in electric coolers for their drinks, but some of the old ones still had those drink boxes where they had ice in it to cool off water and put the drinks in there. And a whole lot of people still felt like a drink that come from a drink box was better than one out of a electric cooler, so some people would go out to Hodges’ store to get their soda pop. Hodges was the only store on the Dutch Road that still had that old drink box.

I was mystified by Sam’s comments, and said so.

He explained. It’s like this Tommy. Pepsi Cola used to put paper labels on their drinks and after they had been in a drink box those labels would get soaked through and slide around and leave a sticky place where the label had slid away. That’s one reason I drunk Double Cola. They didn’t have no paper label and you didn’t have to fool with no paper label comin’ off in your hand like on a Pepsi.

Sam leaned forward again. That Pepsi bottle that killed Armp?  I remembered that it had a label that had slipped some and was tore. So what did that tell me?  It told me that the Pepsi bottle had come out of drink box with ice water. So whoever hit Armp with that bottle had bought it in a store that had a drink box. And Hodges’ was the only store in that area that had a drink box like that.

I walked over to Old Man Hodges and told him I knew it was like chasin’ a needle in a haystack, but did he think he could remember who bought a Pepsi Cola from him really late in the day, maybe as late as 7:00, on the day Armp was killed. See I was really fishin’ around. But it paid off before I left the store. Old Man Hodges said he didn’t know about that, hell, a lot of people bought Pepsi Colas from him.

So I said, Mr. Hodges do you know if any of the Milderses or Tootie or Billy Rosterts drinks Pepsi if they come in here? Old Man Hodges said yes, Tootie come in a lot of days and got a Pepsi, and now that he thought about it he was pretty sure Tootie had come in on the day of the killin’. Tootie always come in after he had eat supper. He’d buy the Pepsi and take it outside and have a few drinks of liquor and chase it with the Pepsi. And Armp had been killed on a Friday night and Tootie hadn’t missed many times comin’ in on a Friday evenin’ in several years. Him and Bud, usually."

Sam sat back. Tommy, I felt like I had my killer. I was excited. I got in my car and drove straight over to Tootie’s house and he come out and I laid out that I knowed the Pepsi bottle had come out of Hodges’ drink box - I lied to Tootie and told him where the bottle come from could be identified by what was written on the bottom of it, and it won’t but a few minutes til Tootie broke down and confessed that him and a cousin everybody called Bud had got a couple Pepsis at Hodges and had a few drinks while drivin’ around and when they finished the Pepsi they passed Armp walkin’ on the shoulder, headed the other way, and Tootie asked Bud to turn around and drive back and Bud did, and when he got close to Armp Tootie reached out the window and throwed the bottle at him, but didn’t know he was killed but he did know he had seen him fall down and it scared Tootie and they drove off. Tootie said he didn’t mean to kill anybody, just gettin’ even for Armp not payin’ him for tearing down them tobacco barns.

And I said, Tootsie -- I called him Tootsie when I was tryin’ to put him in his place -- you can’t even get the whole truth out now. I know the story about them tobacco barns and I believe the truth is you owed Armp money on the deal. What you was gettin’ even for is that Armp beat you black and blue.

I put Tootie in my car and took him over to the jail and they arraigned him over there. Didn’t give him no bail, so he had to set in jail a good long while before they tried him.

I met Sam again the next morning after we completed our walks, we got our coffee, sat at