Under the Lake Read Free

said dryly as he passed through the kitchen. Bitch. He didn’t need that from her. He ran up the stairs to the bedroom. She had left it pin neat; the maid wouldn’t have to lift a finger. He dug a suit out of his dressing room, flung it on the bed, brushed his teeth violently for two minutes, then dove into a hot shower.
    Forty-five minutes later, miraculously on time, he sat flipping idly through the pages of Poultry Month magazine and wondering what the hell he was doing there. The reception room was a perfectly normal, even tasteful one, with plush carpets, leather furniture and decent art. Only the seven-foot-high fiberglass chicken seemed out of place.
    The phone on the reception desk buzzed, and the young woman lifted it and turned toward Howell. “Mr. Pittswill see you now,” she said. She rose and opened the office door for him.
    Lurton Pitts came at him from behind the huge desk like a baseball manager comes at an umpire after a questionable call. Only at the moment his hand shot out did the man smile. “John . . . can I call you John? I’m awful glad to meet you. I’ve admired your work for an awful long time, I can tell you. I’ve been reading your stuff ever since you won the Pulitzer Prize for the stories about those murders. I read your book about it, too. Fine stuff, that was.”
    “Well, thanks, Mr. Pitts.”
    “Call me Lurton, son, everybody does. Can we get you a glass of iced tea or something?”
    Howell supposed that a man who had on his office wall a warmly autographed photograph of himself with the Reverend Jerry Falwell would not have a bar in the same office. “No thanks, I’m just fine, uh . . . Lurton.”
    “Good, good,” Pitts said, directing him toward a chair and circling the desk to find his own. “I’m grateful to Denham White for arranging this meeting. I know how valuable your time is, and I’ll get right to the point. What do you know about me, John?”
    “Well, only what I read in the papers, I guess.” Howell knew that the man had over a thousand Little Chickie fried chicken parlors all over the country, that he was the quintessential self-made man, and that he espoused causes and gave money to charities and officeholders that were all over the political ball park, from far right to far left field. It was hard to get a fix on Lurton Pitts.
    “I’ve had a rewarding life,” Pitts said, leaning back in his high-backed leather chair and gazing out over the Atlanta skyline. “My daddy was a one-mule farmer until Ishowed him how to get in the chicken-raising business. I was fourteen when I figured that out. By the time I was twenty-one I was the biggest chicken farmer in the state. I opened my first Little Chickie that year, too. It’s grown by leaps and bounds, and I don’t mind telling you we’re snapping at Colonel Sanders’s ass, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
    “Mmmm,” Howell said. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. Why was he here?
    “But my interests have always been broader than the chicken business,” Pitts continued. “I’m interested in foreign relations; bet you didn’t know that.”
    “Nope,” Howell replied, trying not to giggle.
    Pitts leaned forward and fixed Howell with an intense gaze. “John, can I confide in you?”
    “Oh, sure.” This was some bizarre joke of Denham White’s. He would arrive at lunch and there would be six guys around a table, drinking martinis and speechless with laughter. He tried to think of some graceful way just to leave, but failed.
    “This is strictly off the record, now.”
    “Don’t worry, Lurton, I’m not a newspaperman anymore.”
    “This is August first, the year of our Lord 1976,” Pitts said. “In November, Gerald Ford is going to be elected President of the United States.”
    “Could be,” Howell said.
    “The American people are not going to elect a peanut farmer to the presidency,” Pitts said, in a voice that brooked no argument.
    Howell agreed with the man but said