Flying Crows (25 page)

He died peacefully in his sleep.

A minister was with him at his death. There was a printed form headed DEATH REPORT that had a line labeled
Disposition.
Someone had written,
Buried in Unknowns Section of cemetery.

Randy stood up and went to Harry Leonard, who had remained in the basement and was passing the time by rearranging some old attendant personnel files.

“Why would they bury this man as an unknown?” Randy asked Harry with some edge in his voice. “They knew his name.”

“He must have been without visitors or interest for several years, so when he died they declared him an unknown and just had a preacher come out from town and read the Bible over the body in a box at grave-side. It was simpler. Otherwise, they'd have to go to the trouble—usually fruitless, anyhow—of trying to locate next of kin.”

“Can I see his grave, or where his grave is? Where's the Unknowns Section of the cemetery?”

“It's under one of the new warehouse buildings over and down by the Kansas City Southern track,” Harry said. “I think it's directly beneath the Wal-Mart distribution center, to tell you the truth.”

Randy started counting to himself. At twelve, he said, “How in the name of decency was that allowed to happen?”

“When the development started four years ago, they moved the headstones to a cemetery in town. Each is only a foot long and three or four inches wide and all they have on them are numbers. No names.”

“What do you mean, they moved the headstones? What about the . . . you know, the bodies, the remains, whatever's left in the ground?”

“Somebody decided moving them would be too expensive and not worth the trouble. Who would have known or cared anyhow? So they left them there and built over them.”

Randy was ready to go now. He
had
to go before he said or did something really stupid. His curiosity—his obsession—with two men who had lived in an insane asylum before running away to Union Station more than sixty years ago was rapidly coming to an end.

Then, as he arranged the Lancaster file to hand back to Harry Leonard, he noticed a final piece of paper stuck in at the end. It was a typed statement by somebody clearly not that proficient at using a typewriter, because it was filled with type-overs, mark-throughs, and misplaced capital letters.

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

I was called by an attendant at the Somerset hospital to come speak to a patient who was near death. The patient had requested that he be allowed to say something important to a minister of the Lord before passing on to his reward. I went to the hospital and to the bedside of Joshua Alan Lancaster, a patient I knew only as Josh from my frequent visits to service the spiritual needs of hospital patients and staff.

In a weak but clear voice, Josh asked that I listen to what he had to say and pass it on in whatever fashion I desired to God in Heaven. I promised to do so.

He then told me that on a Sunday morning when he was fifteen years old his father ordered him not to go to Sunday school. The father, disturbed and angry, said the whole family—his mother, two younger brothers, and a sister, as well as himself—could not go this morning. But Joshua disobeyed his father, ran out of the house to their church in town some two miles away, and went to Sunday school anyhow. Upon his return to his house after church more than an hour later, he found his entire family dead. Each and every one had been brutally stabbed to death with a pitchfork. His brothers and sister were in one room, his mother was in the kitchen, and his father was in the back bedroom.

Josh said all but his father were lying on their backs, clearly victims of someone's unspeakable anger. His father was lying on his side with the spokes of the pitchfork still in his chest. Josh concluded that his father must have killed the others and then killed himself by falling or throwing himself onto the fork. In the fury that followed this supposition, Josh yanked out the pitchfork by the handle and repeatedly thrust it into various parts of his father's lifeless body, stopping only after he had succeeded in burying most of the metal part fully into the body's flesh. He said he was crying and yelling and begging for God's mercy as he did so. He said he believes with certainty that he lost his mind at that time.

He said he told the town marshal and everyone else that he, Josh, had been the killer. He said he told that lie out of shame for his father but, most compellingly, out of his own personal guilt for having been the only member of his family to survive and for having run away to church that morning. Maybe, had he obeyed his father and stayed at home, he might have been able to prevent the massacre of his beloved family. I made a vain attempt to placate his feelings of guilt. What he said finally was that what he knew now, as he faced death, was that he wanted his Lord and Savior to know that it had not been he who had taken the lives of his family. He committed crimes that fateful Sunday morning but not the crime of murder.

Josh died within the hour after his discourse to me. I returned to the hospital the following afternoon to preside over his burial service. Later that day, while studying God's Word at my desk at the parsonage, I concluded that there was a value to putting this deathbed statement down on paper, to be made a part of the record of one man's tormented life. I did so, in keeping with Josh's last wish, after first reporting Josh's words to God in Heaven. I did this in direct communication through prayer.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,

R. W. Lanpher, pastor
First Church of the Nazarene
Somerset, Missouri
February 13, 1967

Randy sat back down. He read the statement again—and again. That year, 1967. Didn't something else happen then too? Yes, Birdie Carlucci said that was when the Kansas City Southern killed The Flying Crow.

Now he really did
have
to go.

But Mack Gardner was right. It was one helluva story. Randy had come across many strange and compelling tales in his years as a police officer but never one like this. Here was a kid who confessed to a horrible massacre he didn't actually commit but was perhaps driven insane anyhow. Maybe not, but he spent most of his life in an asylum. Another kid was driven insane—maybe or maybe not—by having participated in and witnessed another massacre. If Birdie Carlucci really was just sent here to hide out by some Kansas City gangsters, he wasn't really nuts. But on the other hand, sane people don't live in train stations, even great ones like Union Station, for sixty-three years, do they?

Randy thanked Harry Leonard, handed him the file, and stepped toward the stairs.

Then he caught sight of a large alcove in a corner behind the stairwell. He asked Harry what was in there.

“Some equipment from the old days,” said Harry. “There used to be a maintenance guy around who pack-ratted what he thought might be in a museum someday. I made sure none of it was thrown out.”

Randy had trouble imagining his kids' school history club and tour busloads of other happy children and chaperoning parents filling up parking lots to see relics from an old insane asylum. But, that issue aside, he was curious about what kind of stuff had been saved.

There were a couple of shelves of books, most of them appearing to be bound copies of official documents and writings about Missouri history, particularly from the Civil War period. There were at least three or four just about the Centralia massacre.

And there was a Bible, a very old version covered in soft black leather that had begun to deteriorate.

Randy reflexively grabbed it off the shelf and opened it. There, at the beginning of the Old Testament, were the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and a couple of others. Then there was Samuel. He found 1 Samuel 22, and then verse 23:

“Abide thou with me, fear not: for he that seeketh my life seeketh thy life: but with me thou shalt be in safeguard.”

Yes, Mr. Carlucci, you got it right. Of course you did.

Carlucci had said it was about friendship. Randy got that. It could also be about cops. How about friendship between cops?

Randy vowed then and there that he would go straight to Mack Gardner when he got back to Kansas City. First, he'd suggest they try to line up some Royals tickets for Sunday. They were playing a doubleheader against the Yankees.

Then he'd confess to lying. He had never discussed anything about publicity with Birdie Carlucci. He had not given him his word about preventing it from happening. That was a lie. But he would plead for Mack's forgiveness and then for his cooperation in keeping the Carlucci story out of the papers anyhow. He would argue that it be done for personal reasons. Even though it had only been ten weeks, he had developed a fondness for the old man, not a friendship really but a good feeling. Like it said in that Samuel verse, a desire to keep him safe, if nothing else.

“These are electric shock machines,” said Harry Leonard, who had been standing by while Randy did his reading of Samuel.

Harry was pointing at two instruments that resembled small table-model radios with cords coming out of each end. Those, obviously, were stuck against the patient's temples. Randy blanched at the thought, as he did at the sight of the small waist-high stainless-steel table next to them.

“Autopsy table,” said Harry, confirming what Randy had surmised. “They used them mostly to cut out brains for study. That was a big thing to do for a while.”

Randy said, “I'm really impressed with all you know about the old asylum and its history.”

“I told you about my father. My grandfather and grandmother—as well as an uncle and two aunts and a cousin—all worked out here too. We were a Somerset Hospital family. I grew up with the place and the people and the stories.”

So Harry Leonard was from a Somerset insane asylum family the way Randy Benton was from a Missouri Pacific railroad family.

Harry, without being asked, added, “I was at Warrensburg State, aiming to become a history teacher. I had some grade problems, Vietnam came along, I didn't want to go to war, so I came back home and went to work here. They gave draft deferments then for working in state mental hospitals. I've been here ever since.”

Randy's own life was slightly similar. He was in his third year in business school at U.M.–Kansas City, planning to pursue a management career with Southwestern Bell Telephone. A recruiter from the Kansas City Police Department came to campus and Randy, the son of a railroad detective, dropped by to chat. He ended up taking—and acing—the police exams, realized that being a cop was his natural destiny, became a KCPD officer upon graduation from college—and he'd been
there
ever since. It was satisfying.

Randy went over to eight or nine dark pine rocking chairs that were lined up facing a wall. With the push of a hand, he set one of them on an up-and-back movement.
Bump . . . ta, bump . . . ta.
He had heard from Birdie what
they
were all about. There were also several heavy long-handled brooms that also matched the old man's talk about rocking and sweeping being the major things for patients to do.

Then, at the end of the row of rocking chairs, he spotted two baseball bats leaning against the wall. He picked up one of them. It was a Louisville Slugger with Ty Cobb's autograph etched on it. Randy knew the name. Cobb, known as the Georgia Peach, was a great outfielder for the Detroit Tigers in the twenties and thirties.

“At least they let the patients play some baseball,” Randy said, swinging the bat at an imaginary pitch. He had been a pretty fair third baseman and right-handed hitter in high school. But why was that padding—it looked like a piece of a quilt—tied around the fat part of the bat? “I never heard of anybody playing baseball with a padded bat like that, though,” he said to Harry. He took another easy swing.

“I think they hit on patients with them,” Harry said.

Randy said nothing. He was thinking of Josh and Birdie and wondering if either of them had ever been hit by a ball bat. . . .

“I'm really sorry we couldn't find any trace of your friend Carlucci,” Harry said. “The only Carlucci I ever heard of was the company in Italy years ago that made mustard and other spicy things. I haven't seen any of their products around since I was a kid.”

Randy tightened the grip on the Ty Cobb bat. “Spicy things?”

“Yeah, my mom used their tomato sauce when she made spaghetti and meatballs. I think they made oregano, powdered peppers, cinnamon, and a lot of other things too—mostly for cafés and restaurants. I think Mom got hers from a waitress friend who worked in Kansas City.”

That old man just picked the name Carluccio ff some old mustard jar!

Randy laughed out loud.

He raised the bat high over his right shoulder and then swung it down and around with enough force to have hit any ball thrown by anybody out of the park.

XXIII

BIRDIE

UNION STATION

1933

Josh had been gone toward Track 3 less than a minute when Birdie caught sight of a woman who looked a lot like Janice the Harvey Girl. She was coming out the employees' door by Gate 1, just a few yards from where he was standing.

It was Janice! But she was wearing a regular blue cotton dress and white sandals, her brown hair flowing down onto both shoulders. The Harvey Girl uniform, look, and starch were gone.

And she was looking right at him, walking right at him. I knew she loved me, he thought. Too bad Josh didn't see her.

Without a word of greeting, Janice said, “Two hours ago three men came into the lunchroom looking for you and your friend—not the one in the tie but the other. They described the two of you pretty well. They said there was reason to think you had come here this morning on The Flying Crow. I think they were policemen, but I couldn't tell for sure and they didn't say. I don't know why, but I told them I hadn't seen you. That could get me put in jail with you, if that's where you're headed. Is it?”

“I'd love to be in jail with you, Janice,” Birdie purred.

She ignored what he said and, in her body language, was pretty much ignoring him too. “That's all I have to say to you, and I would appreciate your never telling anybody, particularly anybody at Fred Harvey's or the police, that I told you this.”

And she walked away from him.

Birdie wanted to run after her.

But instead he moved off quickly in the opposite direction. He opened the employees' door, went down the stairs to the large storeroom, went to the corner, opened the mirror and the other door, and disappeared inside the condiments and spices room.