widow woman than in matters of business. Lee Evans and Ernest Jones had been with him going on two years now. They made a good pair and he was sad to see them gone. Not least because it meant running all the loads on his own until he found a replacement.
He drove into Charlotte’s east end before midnight, through neighborhoods with shaded houses behind wrought iron gates, and he pulled up to number 102 and paused. A black man came and opened the gate and Tull drove up a gravel drive, parked under a hickory tree. The night was clear yet, but had the cool acid scent of rain on its way before morning. No moon that he could see, only the faint patter of the stars above the limbs of the hickory. He walked up the brick steps to the front door, rang the bell, and waited.
As near as he could tell, Aunt Lou had been living in this house forever, and Prohibition had made her the woman to go to if you had more than a passing interest in the liquor trade. Her father had been some sort of railroad tycoon, back when Charlotte was little more than a sleepy mill town like Castle, before the industrial boom of big businesses. Banks and stockbrokers in the 1910s and ’20s, a resurgence of gold mining now that the banks had failed. But before all that were the railroads, the boom and clank of steel, the chug and smoke of the engines. While tracks passed through every hamlet and outpost in the piedmont, Charlotte was the central hub of the South. Knoxville, Atlanta, Richmond—they all connected here, and Aunt Lou’s money came from her father recognizing what the trains meant for commerce and distribution. Rumors lingered even now that he’d had ties to the great J.P. Morgan himself, financier of the Southern Railway. Like Larthan Tull, like Spencer Watkins, Aunt Lou’s father had been a man with connections, a man who always got his way.
Like a lone puppeteer behind the scenes of an elaborate show, the man dealt everything from rugs and jewels to opium and liquor. While her siblings moved on, went to college or married, Aunt Lou stayed home with her father, a widower who seemed uninterested in remarriage or incapable of falling in love again. Some folks thought the relationship between father and daughter unnaturally close, butAunt Lou—so named for a mess of nephews and nieces who had scattered throughout the Carolinas like Roman soldiers cast to far-flung outposts, Brittany, Romania, Judea—remained with her father until the end and then rose up and took over his operations. What Tull would have given to have been there when she met with her father’s distributors and told them what was what, that she was reorganizing the operation to focus on only the most profitable arms of her father’s business.
Here was this woman who looked like your spinster aunt, the kind of churchgoing lady who would offer you tea and pinch your cheek, in charge of shipping black market goods alongside the textiles coming in and out of the city. She didn’t know the first thing about making decent shine, but she knew how to get it into the hands of customers anywhere east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon. She stayed out of Florida, and she kept away from the Chicago boys. Otherwise, she was the man, and she was the one who reached out to Tull, sent a man down from Charlotte to Castle with a letter: Dear Mr. Tull, Through some acquaintances of mine I have procured some of your soda plant brew and have a business proposition for you . Not so much a proposition as a procedural explanation. What choice did he have? Anyone who went his own way wound up at the bottom of the Broad River, blocks of concrete around his feet.
The bolt clicked in the lock, and another man opened the door to let Tull into the foyer without making eye contact. The house had a musty opulence to it, as though someone with money adorned the walls and then shuttered out the light. Walnut-colored walls darkened the entryway, and a red Persian rug led down the hall. On
He drove into Charlotte’s east end before midnight, through neighborhoods with shaded houses behind wrought iron gates, and he pulled up to number 102 and paused. A black man came and opened the gate and Tull drove up a gravel drive, parked under a hickory tree. The night was clear yet, but had the cool acid scent of rain on its way before morning. No moon that he could see, only the faint patter of the stars above the limbs of the hickory. He walked up the brick steps to the front door, rang the bell, and waited.
As near as he could tell, Aunt Lou had been living in this house forever, and Prohibition had made her the woman to go to if you had more than a passing interest in the liquor trade. Her father had been some sort of railroad tycoon, back when Charlotte was little more than a sleepy mill town like Castle, before the industrial boom of big businesses. Banks and stockbrokers in the 1910s and ’20s, a resurgence of gold mining now that the banks had failed. But before all that were the railroads, the boom and clank of steel, the chug and smoke of the engines. While tracks passed through every hamlet and outpost in the piedmont, Charlotte was the central hub of the South. Knoxville, Atlanta, Richmond—they all connected here, and Aunt Lou’s money came from her father recognizing what the trains meant for commerce and distribution. Rumors lingered even now that he’d had ties to the great J.P. Morgan himself, financier of the Southern Railway. Like Larthan Tull, like Spencer Watkins, Aunt Lou’s father had been a man with connections, a man who always got his way.
Like a lone puppeteer behind the scenes of an elaborate show, the man dealt everything from rugs and jewels to opium and liquor. While her siblings moved on, went to college or married, Aunt Lou stayed home with her father, a widower who seemed uninterested in remarriage or incapable of falling in love again. Some folks thought the relationship between father and daughter unnaturally close, butAunt Lou—so named for a mess of nephews and nieces who had scattered throughout the Carolinas like Roman soldiers cast to far-flung outposts, Brittany, Romania, Judea—remained with her father until the end and then rose up and took over his operations. What Tull would have given to have been there when she met with her father’s distributors and told them what was what, that she was reorganizing the operation to focus on only the most profitable arms of her father’s business.
Here was this woman who looked like your spinster aunt, the kind of churchgoing lady who would offer you tea and pinch your cheek, in charge of shipping black market goods alongside the textiles coming in and out of the city. She didn’t know the first thing about making decent shine, but she knew how to get it into the hands of customers anywhere east of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon. She stayed out of Florida, and she kept away from the Chicago boys. Otherwise, she was the man, and she was the one who reached out to Tull, sent a man down from Charlotte to Castle with a letter: Dear Mr. Tull, Through some acquaintances of mine I have procured some of your soda plant brew and have a business proposition for you . Not so much a proposition as a procedural explanation. What choice did he have? Anyone who went his own way wound up at the bottom of the Broad River, blocks of concrete around his feet.
The bolt clicked in the lock, and another man opened the door to let Tull into the foyer without making eye contact. The house had a musty opulence to it, as though someone with money adorned the walls and then shuttered out the light. Walnut-colored walls darkened the entryway, and a red Persian rug led down the hall. On
Similar Books
