He promised Keith and Agnes that he would never stop campaigning.
Chapter 16
With the election over, and those pesky reformers once again put in their places, 1968 began with a bang. Fats had managed to mollify long-simmering feuds while he worked to control the voting, but things got out of hand soon enough.
An ambitious outlaw named Dusty Cromwell opened a joint on Highway 90, half a mile from Red Velvet. His bar was called Surf Club and at first sold nothing but legal booze. With a liquor permit in hand, he soon opened an illegal casino and expanded into a strip club advertising an all-girl revue. Cromwell had a big mouth and let it be known that he planned to become the king of the Strip. His plans were set back when Surf Club burned to the ground early one Sunday morning when no one was around. After a cursory investigation by the police, no cause of fire could be determined. Cromwell knew it was arson and sent word to Lance Malco and Ginger Redfield that he was out for revenge. They had heard it before and braced for trouble.
Mike Savage was known in the business as the go-to arsonist and was often used in cases involving insurance fraud. He freelanced and was on no one’s payroll, but he hung around Red Velvet and was known to associate with Lance Malco and other members of the Dixie Mafia. He left the club one night and never made it home. After three days, his wife finally called the sheriff’s office and reported him missing. A farmer in Stone County noticed a mysterious car parked in the woods on his land and figured something was amiss. The closer he crept to it the stronger the odor became. Buzzards were circling above. He called the law and the license plates were tracked to Mike Savage of Biloxi. When the trunk was opened, the odor nauseated the deputies. Mike’s bloated corpse was covered in dried blood. His wrists and ankles were tied together with baling twine. His left ear was missing. An autopsy revealed numerous stab wounds and a viciously slit throat.
A week after the body was found, a package addressed to Lance Malco arrived at Red Velvet. Inside, wrapped in a plastic bag, was someone’s left ear. Lance called Fats, who sent a team to have a look.
Motive was easily ascertained, at least by Lance, though there were no suspects, no witnesses, and nothing useful from the crime scene. Dusty Cromwell had delivered a message, but Lance was not one to be intimidated. He met with Fats and demanded he take action. Fats, as always, said that he did not get involved in turf battles and disputes among the mobsters.
“Settle it yourself,” he said.
The murder was duly reported by the Gulf Coast Register, though details were scarce. Most of those with knowledge of the Biloxi underworld knew it was little more than a gangland payback.
One of Dusty’s gun thugs was a bouncer called Clamps, a real brute of a boy who’d spent ten of his thirty years in prison for stealing cars and robbing convenience stores. With Surf Club in ashes, he was out of full-time work and looking for trouble. He had yet to kill anyone, but he and his boss were having conversations. He never got the chance. When Dusty sent him to New Orleans to collect a shipment of marijuana, he was followed by Nevin Noll. The shipment was delayed and Clamps checked in to a motel near Slidell. At three in the morning, Nevin parked his car, now sporting Florida license plates, and walked half a mile to the motel. The front office was closed, all the lights were off, and the handful of customers appeared to be sleeping. He picked a room that was empty for the night, and with a flathead screwdriver unlocked the knob to the only door. The low-end motel did not use either deadlocks or security chains. He left and eased through the darkness to the room where Clamps was sound asleep. He quickly unlocked the door, turned on the light, and as Clamps was trying to wake up, focus, figure out what the hell was happening, Nevin shot him in the face three times with a .22 caliber revolver muffled by a six-inch silencer. He finished him off with three more shots to the back of the head. He gathered Clamps’s wallet, cash, car keys, and pistol under his pillow and put everything, including his screwdriver and Ruger, into the cheap overnight bag Clamps was traveling with. He turned off the light, waited fifteen minutes, and drove away in Clamps’s car. He parked behind a truck stop, quickly removed the Mississippi license plates, substituted them with a set from Idaho, and drove to a gas station that was closed for the night. He left the car there, walked back to his own car, and returned to Biloxi.