Justice Lost (Darren Street #3)(21)
“Who?” I said.
“Ben Clancy. The very same man who framed you for murder and who we hanged in our barn and fed to our pigs.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “But Clancy didn’t live an extravagant lifestyle. I mean, I did surveillance on him before we grabbed him up. Are you sure?”
“I have an old friend who operates in Knox County and who Morris has allowed to keep operating in exchange for a little piece of a big pie. She works in the sex trade, runs a big porn store out on the interstate and an escort service. She told me Clancy set things in motion many years ago, he and a sheriff named Joe DuBose. Did you know DuBose? She said he’s dead.”
“Yeah, he and Clancy were pals. I didn’t care much for him. Doesn’t surprise me that he was dirty.”
“Certain people in Knox County are allowed to operate in exchange for money and protection. My friend is one of those people. They watch out for her and the others who have been chosen. If somebody new tries to come in, those who are protected serve them up to the police, the police make their arrests, the prosecutors prosecute them, the judges sentence them to prison, and it appears as though people are doing their jobs. But it’s a selective process. The ones who are allowed to operate without interference get richer and richer. All they have to do is refrain from doing stupid things. They don’t get to kill people, burn down houses, crazy things like that.”
“Why haven’t you gotten in before now?” I said.
“Because somebody beat me to it a long time ago. There’s a man named Roby Penn who controls the gambling. Mean as a striped snake from everything I’ve been told about him. Wears this big, white handlebar mustache and military fatigues. They say he was some kind of Special Forces soldier in Vietnam. He’s also related to the sheriff. He’s got the gambling rackets locked down.”
“How does the money work?” I said.
“That’s set up out of the sheriff’s department. Morris has an assistant who supposedly supervises special investigations, but I don’t know of any special investigations they’ve done. He’s also Morris’s bagman. He collects Morris’s piece from the sheriff, but the sheriff does most of the work. He keeps the accounts and sees to it that the money is collected every month. He makes distributions to Morris and whoever else gets paid. I don’t know the full extent of it, but it’s a big operation.”
“I wonder why the feds aren’t onto them,” I said.
“The feds don’t care about public corruption anymore,” she said. “They’re too busy worrying about terrorists.”
“So it’s the Wild West?”
Granny smiled. She looked at her grandsons and took a sip of her tea. “And it’s about to get wilder. We’ve been wanting to get into Knox County for years, but we’ve been shut out. Now that we have you in the picture, it’s a real possibility. We, along with some powerful friends I happen to have in Knox County, think we can get you elected. In exchange, you let us move in and do business. We don’t care about prostitution and we don’t fight animals, but we are interested in the drug trade and we’d like to open a casino near the county line, maybe two.”
“And all I have to do is leave you alone?” I said.
She nodded. “You tell the sheriff you won’t prosecute us. We’ll stay in the county so the Knoxville city police won’t bother us. If the TBI tries to sting us, you make sure it goes away.”
“What do I do about the others? The cockfighters and the dogfighters and the bare-knuckle fighters and the pimps? What do I do about this Roby Penn you were talking about?”
“As far as Penn goes, we’re going to have to figure out a way to take him out of the picture, and it isn’t going to be easy. Especially since he’s the sheriff’s uncle. The rest of them? I don’t care what you do about them except for my friend. I’ll tell you her name when the time comes. Chances are you won’t have to worry about it, though, because they’ve already made their deals with the sheriff. They’ve been around forever, so I don’t really see anything changing. The sheriff isn’t suddenly going to start bringing you dogfighting and cockfighting cases to prosecute. Your office won’t be deluged with gambling and prostitution cases. The biggest obstacle is that you and the sheriff are going to have to figure out a way to get along. You’re going to have to trust each other.”
“Which means I’ll have to go on the take with that carnival barker. He’s a showboating redneck. I can’t stand him.”
The sheriff of Knox County was the kind of stereotype that I loathed—the big, fat, loud Southern county sheriff. Many local sheriffs in Tennessee operated quietly. They were powerful in their own fiefdoms and served eight-year terms, so their primary focus was usually to get elected and then get under the radar and stay there. Once a sheriff got himself elected in Tennessee, the voters rarely heard from him until he came up for reelection, and if he hadn’t done anything stupid, they’d reelect him.
It was fairly easy to stay out of sight, too, because the truth of the matter was that nobody really cared about the criminal justice system. It was one of the bastard stepchildren of government. Politicians and taxpayers didn’t want to fund it, nobody wanted to think about it unless they had to, and nobody outside the system really cared about the elections of criminal-court judges or sheriffs or district attorneys or public defenders. Sure, there was the prurient interest generated by murders and rape and violence and corruption, but the fact of the matter was that our society—like most societies—didn’t give a tinker’s damn about people who committed crimes. We wanted people who murdered, people who raped and robbed and assaulted other people, people who used or sold drugs, and people who ran whores or gambling operations, removed from society, warehoused, and forgotten. They were nothing more than short-term fodder for the news industry and a source of employment for those—prosecutors and cops and defense lawyers and judges and clerks and probation officers and all the others employed by the criminal justice system—who fooled themselves into believing there was such a thing as justice and wanted to be a part of that system. Once we were all done using the criminals for our own benefit, they became a dirty, forgotten little secret, and nobody really cared.