Crossers (34 page)

After the last shot Ellen and Catherine, hiding under the couch, heard one of the bandits enter the back rooms. He and his accomplices must have thought they’d killed Dorothy and now wanted to make sure they’d left no other witnesses. He opened a closet door and made a quick search, then approached the couch and stood in front of it. Ellen could see the tips of his boots, inches away. I can still recall her exact words: “I thought he could hear my heart beating, so I made it stop. I did. And I will hear for the whole rest of my life the sound his boot heels made on the wooden floor and the jingling of his spurs.”

The Atascosa killings were the most sensational in Arizona’s history. Of course, Arizona didn’t have much of a history in 1921. I was Childs’s wonder boy. He gave me a dollar-a-week raise. The thrill we get out of horror and tragedy is what makes us reporters so beloved.

Lassiter sent wanted posters all over the country, and a five-thousand-dollar reward was offered for each of the killers. Ranchers and cowhands in four counties saddled up to look for them—automobiles were useless. Childs sent me to join up with one of the posses. I got little news out of it, only what we call today a color story, but the color was enough. Vigilantes chasing notorious outlaws through the desert. Grim-faced men on horseback. Winchesters in saddle scabbards. Campfires under the Milky Way. I was living one of the Western potboilers I’d read as a kid. Hard to believe, me sitting here now, sipping a martini beside a swimming pool, that all that happened just forty-five years ago.

Back to Ben and Tibbets. They were checking out tips, talking to informants in Mexico. Ben was obsessed. He convinced Lassiter to take him off all other cases. The first big break didn’t come till the winter. Ben had a lot of friends in Mexico in high places and low, and one of them was a Major General Bracamonte, commander of all the military forces in Sonora. Back in those days the army and the cops were one and the same in Mexico. Ben had contacted him, telling him that the gang were in Mexico and to be on the lookout. In late November the general wired him. Some of his soldiers had quelled a disturbance in a cantina in a pueblo called Soric. It seemed a light-skinned man who spoke Spanish with an American accent had gotten drunk, bragged about robbing some place across the line, and then threatened a patron with a gun. Another customer ran to fetch soldiers from the army post nearby, but by the time they got to the cantina, the belligerent one was gone.

Ben gave me a full account of what happened next. He and Tibbets got to Soric by car, as fast as those awful roads would allow. They borrowed horses and picked up the outlaw’s trail. It led back across the border. They followed it for two days before they spotted their man up in the Parajito Mountains. He was pretty visible from a distance—it was cold, and he was wearing a red mackinaw.

But he had also caught sight of them. A wild chase ensued, right out of the Lone Ranger and every oater Hollywood ever turned out. A couple of miles into it the fugitive’s horse stumbled and dumped him out of the saddle. He tried to run, but the two-man posse caught up with him in seconds. His sombrero had come off, and what they saw was a blond-haired, blue-eyed six-footer standing before them. Still, when Ben commanded, “Hands in the air,” he feigned confusion, so Ben humored him and said, “¡Las manos arriba, pronto!” and the guy raised his hands.

Covered by Tibbets, Ben removed the prisoner’s gunbelt, then put the cuffs on him. A pat-down turned up a booklet of blank postal money orders in his mackinaw pocket and twenty dollars in his wallet. Ben told him he was under arrest for murder and armed robbery and, still in Spanish, asked his name. He answered that it was Jorge Ramos and that he’d done nothing wrong. “Yeah, you did,” Ben said, now in English. “You did plenty wrong, you and your two amigos. Who are they? Give us their names.” And the prisoner said, “No entiendo inglés.” Ben had no patience for this guy’s language problems. He looked at Tibbets and said, “It’s a long ride back to Nogales, and this son of a bitch has lost his horse. What do you say we hang him right here?” Tibbets nodded. With no further word, Ben looped a lariat over Jorge Ramos’s neck, tossed the other end over a cottonwood branch, and tied it to his saddle horn. Then he mounted up and eased his horse forward, taking slack out of the rope.

Samuel Johnson once remarked that being sentenced to hang concentrates the mind wonderfully. It really concentrated Ramos’s mind. He acquired a full command of the English language in two seconds. “I didn’t kill anybody!” he protested. “It was those loco Mexicans. They did the shooting.” By keeping tension on the rope, Ben persuaded him to identify the crazy Mexicans—Manuel Quiroga and Plácido Santos.

“And who the hell are you?”

“George Ramsey.”

The lawmen rounded up Ramsey’s horse, manacled him to the saddle, and escorted him to the county jail, where he repeated his denial of killing the Palmers and told how he, Quiroga, and Santos rode to a hideout in Mexico, divided the loot, and then split up. He swore he had no idea of their whereabouts. He had returned to the United States, planning to cash in the money orders.

A little aside here—it says something about Ben, although I’m not sure what exactly. When I interviewed him and Tibbets about the arrest, I commented that the bluff about hanging Ramsey worked pretty well. Ben gave me a smile—he had a peculiar crooked smile—and said, “It worked because it wasn’t a bluff.” That seemed to surprise Tibbets as much as it did me.

My story about the arrest and Ramsey’s confession got picked up by the papers in Tucson and Phoenix and produced a flood of hot tips. All but one of them proved to be not so hot. The exception came from a rancher in Bear Valley, who reported that one of his vaqueros knew Plácido Santos and where he was hiding out—at a ranch his brothers owned in the Peña Blanca Mountains.

More Wild West stuff. Ben and Tibbets rode out there and barged into the ranch house and leveled their guns at five people eating dinner by lantern light—Plácido’s mother, his three brothers, and Plácido himself, who was easily singled out by his beard.

They brought him to the local justice of the peace, held him there for the night, and had him in the county jail the following morning. Ellen and Dorothy were called in to identify him, and they did. I was there when Ben and Tibbets started questioning him. Plácido, of course, swore he was innocent.

Ben said, “Ramsey told us you and Manuel Quiroga shot Palmer and his wife.”

Plácido was just twenty years old and a not-very-savvy outlaw. Instead of keeping his mouth shut, he blurted out that it was Quiroga and Ramsey who’d killed the Palmers. So Ben and his partner paid a visit to Ramsey’s cell. They suggested that I step out for lunch, a long one. They put him through a grilling that did not meet even the lax standards of decorum of that day. Ramsey cracked, admitting that he and Quiroga had shot Oliver Palmer, Quiroga firing first, Ramsey after Palmer got off a round with his shotgun. But he swore it was Quiroga alone who’d murdered Meg and smashed out her teeth.

Ben told me he would have traded Ramsey, Plácido, and ten more felons for him. To complicate things, he’d got word that Quiroga was a Mexican citizen. But Ben didn’t think so because two sets of fingerprints had been lifted at the crime scene. One set matched Plácido’s. The other set, from the phone box, matched those of a guy who’d done two years at Leavenworth for smuggling Chinese over the California line—a Manuel Quiroga, a U.S. citizen, birthplace Yuma, Arizona. So if Ben and Tibbets found him, there wouldn’t be any big complications getting him out of Mexico for trial here. Or so they thought.

You know, if I’d had any ambition, I would have turned this story into a book. Or maybe a screenplay—it had its Hollywood twists. In early April of ’22 one of Ben’s Mexican informants crossed the street and paid him a call. Francisco Montoya. I seem to recall that he and Ben had fought together in the Revolution. He knew what and who Ben was looking for. This Montoya had been drinking a beer that afternoon in a cantina on the Sonoran side of Nogales and noticed the bartender trying to pawn something off on another customer, who wasn’t interested. The barkeep went up to Montoya and asked him, “What will you give me for these?” He turned a little buckskin pouch upside down, and three gold teeth clattered onto the bar. Montoya asked where he’d got them. Some hombre who’d been in the bar earlier in the day, he said. Wanted a peso each. The barkeep paid him two. “I’ll pay you three,” Montoya offered and pocketed the pouch. He turned it over to Ben.

Ben was pretty excited, as you can imagine. The last report he’d received, Quiroga was hiding out somewhere in the northern Sierra Madres. Maybe he’d got tired of the great outdoors and came into Nogales for some fun. Maybe he needed some quick cash. The coroner’s autopsy had determined that Meg was missing six teeth—three upper, three lower. Ben was sure Quiroga would try to peddle the remaining three, if he hadn’t done so already. His plan was to check the pawnshops on the Mexican side. The problem was, he had no authority to conduct an investigation across the line and, if he did find his man, no authority to arrest him.

He went anyway. He paid a courtesy call on the commander of the Nogales military garrison, a Colonel Suárez, and told him he was in Mexico unofficially and unarmed, just nosing around for information about the slippery Señor Quiroga. Suárez wasn’t enthusiastic but said he would cooperate with Ben if Ben cooperated with him. He was to give any evidence he found to the Mexican authorities, and in case he located Quiroga, he was to inform Suárez immediately. “This man may be Mexican,” he said. “If he is, I remind you that the president of Mexico himself could not send this Manuel Quiroga out of this country.”

Ben made the rounds of the pawnshops. No luck. He was on his way to the cantina where Montoya had bought the teeth when he noticed a man leaning over the counter in a jewelry store, deep in conversation with the owner. A hairline that looked like it started an inch above his eyebrows, a skewed nose above a dense black mustache—the man fit Quiroga’s description. Ben walked in for a closer look and got more than that. On the counter were three gold-capped teeth.

Unable to get his price, the seller walked out. The shopkeeper followed him into the street and said, “All right, two pesos.” Ben was right behind. The guy was smoking a cigarette, and when he turned to look at the shopkeeper, he snapped it in two. That clinched it for Ben. You remember? Tibbets had found a cigarette broken like that at the post office. Ben called out that he’d pay three. Quiroga said the gringo had a deal. Ben paid him, then pocketed the teeth and uncorked one to Quiroga’s jaw and wrestled him to the ground. Just as he reached for the handcuffs in his back pocket, the shopkeeper yelled, “Robbery!” distracting Ben for a second, which was long enough for Quiroga to break free. Instead of running away, he pulled a switchblade and flicked it open. Ben told me that to him the blade looked as long as a sword. Quiroga was grinning as he crouched and said, “Come on, cabrón. My friend wants to kiss you!” Ben circled, his eyes on the knife. Quiroga struck, Ben dodged, and then came another quick thrust, Ben whirled sideways and tripped Quiroga as he lunged forward. leaped on his back, grabbed him by the hair, and bashed his forehead into the pavement. The knife fell from his hand. Ben clapped one bracelet to his wrist and the other to his own and jerked his semiconscious prisoner to his feet.

The shopkeeper was still sounding the alarm about a robbery, and a small crowd had gathered, and to their eyes it looked like a gringo was robbing a Mexican. Someone tossed a bottle that knocked Ben’s hat off—his favorite Stetson, he told me. Cost him thirty bucks. He grabbed the knife and held it to Quiroga’s neck, yelling that he would cut his throat if anybody tried to free him. Another one of his bluffs that wasn’t a bluff? I don’t know.

Somebody had alerted the garrison. A squad of soldiers appeared, broke through the crowd, and took Ben and Quiroga into custody. Suárez was incensed with Ben for breaking his word. “Look at the trouble you have caused, and for what? Did I not tell you that not even the president can turn a Mexican over to you people?” When he calmed down, Ben vowed that he could prove Quiroga was an American citizen, if Suárez agreed to hold him for forty-eight hours. And how would he prove that? the colonel wanted to know. Ben wiped the handle of the knife and, with the tip pointed at Quiroga, ordered Quiroga to grab it. He was flummoxed, but Suárez seemed to get the idea. “Do as he says,” he told Quiroga.

Ben returned to the sheriff’s office with the knife wrapped in his bandanna. Word of his single-handed invasion of Mexico had flown across the line, and Lassiter dressed him down for creating an international incident, then congratulated him. Ben phoned the fingerprint expert in Tucson. He came down on the next day’s train, dusted the knife, and lifted Quiroga’s prints. They matched the ones from the phone box.

With the print cards and the expert in tow, Ben hurried back to the colonel’s headquarters. The evidence did not entirely persuade the colonel, probably because Quiroga had by this time attained folk hero status in Nogales. Suárez was afraid of a riot if he turned him over. Ben had a last card to play. Call General Bracamonte in Hermosillo. Suárez did, and after some back-and-forth, the general commanded the colonel to release Quiroga to Ben’s custody as a foreign criminal illegally in Mexico.

From Jesse James to Al Capone, we’ve done a pretty good job of worshiping outlaws, but we’re no match for the Mexicans in that department. Suárez had to muster an entire company of soldiers, led by him with drawn saber, to escort Ben and his prisoner to the border. They made that long walk under flurries of rocks, bottles, and bricks, people calling Suárez a traitor and yelling for Ben’s blood. When they got to International Street, a gringo lynch mob was waiting on the other side. Quiroga balked. Suárez poked him in the rear end with his saber, and in the time it took to cross the street, the folk hero became the devil incarnate. The good citizens of Nogales, Arizona, were hollering, “Hang the dirty Mexican! Stretch the greaseball’s neck!”