SYNOPSIS
Book 1: The Killing
The story begins with murder in an Arkansas town. A liquor store owner, Edwin Mayhew, is killed and his body soaked with whiskey. Billy Walker, Chief of Criminal Investigation for the Medford Police Department, is called into the case. He is assisted by Cordelia Hull, a young black woman, good at her job and devoted to Walker. Billy’s other assistant is Bob Claggert. Not nearly as professional as Hull, he will leave his job in disgrace. Walker goes to where his investigations so often take him, the town’s shifting, jobless, and sometimes criminal underclass. Claggert turns him on to a suspect, but Billy finds that Claggert has manufactured evidence against the man, and Claggert is dismissed. The Captain’s investigation has, thus far, made little progress.Billy comes to realize he’s looked in the wrong places all along and that the common motives don’t apply. He finally perceives Mayhew’s murder for what it truly is, a grudge killing. Someone out of the victim’s past has committed the crime, and for a reason that’s known only to him. The pouring of whiskey on the body is more than just a killer’s sudden caprice. The whiskey part has always haunted Walker, and he knows now that this act is tied up with the motive. He and Cordelia Hull must get on the trail of Mayhew and trace it into his past, back to the time when Mayhew set another person’s hand against him.Book II: The Killer
Mayhew was a womanizer, young girls. His wife left him because of it. He also controlled the town’s illegal gambling and was an active loan shark. He made bitter enemies. New avenues of investigation are opened up and the policemen go down them all. Finally, they get a break. A recovering alcoholic talks to Billy. He reveals that he has a close friend who was in love with a young girl. The girl became an alcoholic and addict. Violently disturbed, she’s now confined in the state mental institution at Benton, Arkansas. Mayhew was responsible. He supplied, seduced, and destroyed her in an almost casual way. Everything points to the girl’s lover, but he is not the killer. There’s someone just as close or even closer to her. That someone is disordered by rage and by what he feels is his own personal part in the girl’s tragedy.It’s finally revealed that the father, an itinerant preacher, is the murderer. He was once forced to get a loan from Mayhew. The devoted daughter made payments at the liquor store in order to save her father embarrassment. Her eventual ruin dates from these encounters with the store owner. Confined and insane, she is a living reminder to the father of his weakness, and of the evilness in Mayhew.Billy and Cordelia find the preacher in a remote cabin by the Mississippi River. There, everything is resolved.
