skeletons (10 page)

After half an hour I surfaced from what must have been shock. My chest and belly continued to seep red. My head ticked away like a time bomb. And as the Rolls roared and nits and gnats suicided on the windscreen it occurred to me I might be in worse shape than I realized. I might have broken ribs and a fractured skull and massive internal injuries and if I had to hunt around El Paso for a hospital I might come home to Kennedy in a wooden box. I passed a sign saying fuel and food next exit, so slowed and off-ramped and there was a gas station and coffee shop and public phone booth. I stopped, whimpered into the booth, reached into my pocket for change. No change. No pocket. No pants. Saved my wallet but left change in pants in the desert. Banged my head against the phone.

“Bastards!”

“Sons of bitches!”

Emergency number. Read it off the phone, dialed, got an operator. Put in a collect call to anyone named Snackenberg in El Paso—there couldn’t be more than one Snackenberg anywhere. Waited. Number. Ringing. A female answered.

Would she accept charges? Name? Who?

“Butters! Annie, this is Jimmie Butters, kidlit, New York, the guy you’re going to let me know in case you divorce! For God’s sake don’t you remember?”

“Oh. Oh yes—Operator, I’ll accept. Jimmie, where are you?”

“In trouble! In a phone booth! Oh Annie, I’m bleeding from every pore and I have a fractured skull and ribs and massive internal injuries and I have to get to a hospital and on my way into El Paso where’s the nearest?”

“Oh no! What happened?”

“A hospital!”

“Yes—you’ll be on the freeway, coming south—I know, the Hotel Dieu.”

“Hotel? I don’t need a hotel!”

“That is a hospital—the Hotel Dieu. Take the Porfirio Diaz exit off the freeway, drive east, just a few blocks. Jimmie, I’m sorry—can I help? Shall I meet you there?”

“Porfirio Diaz exit. Hotel Dieu. Annie, you warned me but I wouldn’t listen. No, don’t meet me—I’m practically naked. But if I die, will you please see your goddamned library buys the rest of my books?”

Woozy.

This car was twenty-nine years old and probably never before been driven flat-out but look at her. God bless the Brits.

Remembering. Over there somewhere just four days ago sat on a rock wondering what I was doing here.

Woozier.

Blood on my hands, blood on the wheel.

Down into the pass. El Paso. There. “PORFIRIO DIAZ EXIT.” Off and down and round and under and east. Why so much traffic this time of night?

Stoplight. Out the window to a face: “Where the hell’s Hotel Dieu?”

“Straight ahead to Stanton, turn right. Hey, what kinda car’s that?”

Never make it. They would observe a minute of silence amongst the stacks. Children across America would weep.

Stanton, turning right. There. Lovely red letters: “EMERGENCY ENTRANCE.”

In, over the curb, brakes, hit the horn.

I fell out, reared up in glare light in socks and Jockey Classic Briefs and blood and hysterics.

Doors opened. White coats and uniforms gawping not at me but at my vehicle.

“Sedate me! Don’t just stand there goddammit! That’s a 1958 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith but in case you care about me I’ve got a fractured skull and ribs and massive internal injuries and bleeding to death so do something! Sedate me!”

Laying on of hands. I was on my back and being wheeled. A needle in my arm.

Mumbling. “Last request. Call Tyler Vaught in New York—994-1501—tell her at death’s door and she’s to blame and get her ass on a plane....”

Rock-a-bye Bertram James Butters.

I spiraled up out of dark and solitude into light and a woman’s face.

“Hello there,” she said.

“Where am I?”

“The Hotel Dieu. El Paso, Texas.”

“You re a nurse.” “

You’re right.” “

Where’s my car?”

“In our parking lot. Locked.”

“Did you call Tyler Vaught in New York?”

“We did.”

“How am I?”

“You’re fine.”

“Do I have a fractured skull and ribs?”

“No.”

“Massive internal injuries?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

“What’s all this on my chest?”

“Pressure dressings. You had fairly extensive abrasions, so we cleaned them and applied antibiotic and covered them. It’s not serious. In a few days you can remove the dressings.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost three.”

“In the afternoon? What did you do to me?

” The RN smiled. “Well, on arrival last night you demanded to be sedated. Loudly. So we did. Heavily. The customer is always right.”

“When can I get out of here?”

“That’s up to you.”

“What about now?”

“Now? No. If I were you I’d stick around till tomorrow morning. Watch TV. Rest up.”

“The Hotel Dieu has got to have room service.”

“You’re hungry.”

“Damned right.”

“I’ll arrange for something.”

“And will you please have someone unlock my car and bring up my luggage? I need things.”

“Surely.” She pushed a button, elevated the head of the bed, went to the door. “In the meantime, you have a visitor. See you later.”

She’s here, she’s here, I exulted, and composed my face in an expression of martyrdom and closed my eyes and puckered up and awaited the blessing of her lips. And became bored and opened them.

To see another John Wayne type. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof. But forty years younger and seventy pounds lighter and wearing a business suit rather than duds from Western Costume. One of the longest, leanest drinks of water in my encounter.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Butters.”

“Who re you?”

“Henry Snackenberg.”

“Oh my God. Now listen, Snackenberg, I swear to you —there’s nothing between us but a love of books—I spent an hour with her in a public library and called her last night in an emergency—I am in no condition to defend myself—I have a fractured skull and ribs and massive internal–”

“I’m not here about Annie, Mr. Butters.”

“You’re not?”

“I’m with the Border Patrol.”

“Balls.”

“Of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS.”

“Big burning balls.”

“I have information I thought might interest you. May I sit down?”

“No.”

He pulled up a chair, laid a Stetson in his lap, and crossed his prolonged legs so that I could see, I supposed, his boots. “Did you ever know a man named Philip Crossworth?”

“No. Well. It registers a little, but not personally. Why?”

“He was the first.”

“First what?”

“You thought you were the second. Actually, you were the third.”

I emitted an eloquent groan. “Can’t you see I am breathing my last? I don’t give a diddly-damn about—”

“Sansom was the second to come to Harding for Miss Vaught. You were the third. Philip Crossworth was the first. Four years ago.”

“Now wait a minute.”

“She must be very persuasive. She talked you into coming out here to find out what happened to Sansom. Before that, she talked Sansom into coming to find out what happened to Crossworth.”

“Now wait a minute.”

“Would you care to know Crossworth’s profession?”

“Now wait a minute.”

He grinned. “He wrote mysteries. I hear he was very good at it.”

I sat up straight. “Goddammit, are you saying Tyler Vaught sent three different writers out here to—”

“That’s right.” His grin was gone. “Would you care to know what happened to Crossworth?”

I stared at him. “Don’t tell me he was in a hit-and-run acci—”

“He disappeared.”

He is charged with three counts of murder in the first degree. At the arraignment he stands mute, and a plea of not guilty is entered in his behalf.
The Territory of New Mexico
v.
Buell George Wood
will be the first homicide case docketed in the new Harding County Courthouse. Only one case more memorable will ever be tried there.

Judge of the Third Judicial District, and getting on in years, Obed Cox presides.

The county prosecutor is Charles S. Vaught, recently elected and already, in secret, an aspirant to Obed Cox’s seat on the bench. A conviction—and one must ensue for the case as he sees it is open-and-shut—will nail down the claim he intends one day to make to that seat. Hero the former sheriff may be, the stuff out of which small-town legend may indeed be made, but he is also guilty as hell. To hang Buell Wood will be to prove that Charles Slocum Vaught can hang any man.

Counsel for the defense is Harry Emlyn, an attorney with a Presbyterian voice and a Baptist vocabulary.

A jury is empaneled. By vagary of the draw it includes four of Harding’s most prominent citizens: Francis Word and Hazen VanDellen, businessmen; Dr. Jack Shelley, one of the two general practitioners; and Coye Turnbow, president of the Merchants’ and Stockmen’s Bank.

The jury is sworn, the prosecution calls a series of witnesses—Sheriff Gilmore, the boy from the Guarantee Electric Store who had run tragic word to the defendant, spectators to the shooting down of Bill Pennington before the Luna and his later execution, the salesman and two “lookers” inside the Ford agency, and finally, Mrs. Gladys Marsh, the bookkeeper. Not only can she recall every exchange of gunfire, and every detail of the deaths of Tigh Gooding and George Pennington, she volunteers if asked to account for every cent of damage, however minor, done to the Model Ts on display. She is not asked.

Examination of these witnesses requires the better part of two days. His case complete, Charles Vaught offers the stage to his opponent.

Emlyn has not once cross-examined, has accepted without objection this mountain of testimony as though it were a molehill. Now, rather than putting Buell Wood on the stand, he calls the proprietor of the Luna to testify to the condition of the three victims prior to their leaving his premises.

“They were in a state of inebriation?”

“No sir. They was coot-drunk.”

Laughter.

Judge Cox gavels the room to sobriety.

Emlyn then calls several who had seen Gooding and the Pennington brothers exit the Luna and, contrary to town ordinance, pull weapons and fire into the air; who had stood in horror as the cob horse bolted, as Charlotte Wood and infant daughter were hurled from their buggy.

Twice during these recitals Vaught objects. Irrelevant and immaterial.

Ah, but it is not, Emlyn demurs gently. If provocation, and therefore motive, are not germane, what is?

On each occasion Judge Cox rules in favor of the defense.

To the surprise of all, defense counsel then recalls Gladys Marsh to the stand.

“After George Pennington was killed, did you, Mrs. Marsh, address Buell Wood?”

“Yes, sir, I did.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Wood.’ After all that shooting and yelling and bloody murder I don’t know why in heaven’s name I said such a stupid—”

“What was his reply?”

“Why, nothing. He was—”

“Did you further address him?”

“Yes I did.”

“What did you say?”

”I said—I didn’t know the poor dear had had her head split open. How could I? I’d been in the cage, working on the accounts. Mercy, if I’d known—”

“Madame, what did you say to him?”

“I said, ‘How is Mrs. Wood these days?’”

“What was his reply?”

“‘Dead,’ he said.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Marsh.”

Pleas to the jury are made the afternoon of the third day of the trial. Both are brief.

Harry Emlyn reminds the jury that he has raised no objection during the testimony of witnesses for the prosecution, nor has he cross-examined at length. He is willing to stipulate here and now that his client has in fact killed Tigh Gooding and Bill and George Pennington on the afternoon of 10 May, and in the manner described. He also reminds it, however, that it was he who had opened, over the prosecutor’s objection, the issue of provocation. He moves dramatically up and down the box, looking long into each of the twelve faces. He asks Buell Wood’s peers to try on, for a moment, Buell Wood’s boots. “Which husband among you would not be revenged for the loss of his beloved wife due directly and irrefutably to the negligent, in fact unlawful, acts of drunken, rowdy ne’er-do-wells? Which man among you, if you are men, would fail to obey the Lord’s injunction to exact an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?”

In his closing argument, Charles Vaught grants a grave injury has been done defendant, grants a helpless woman has been deprived of life, grants only chance has spared her child. The county prosecutor is a tall, spare young man of thirty-eight, with a severity of manner and expression that is almost magisterial. No match for the older Emlyn in diction, in orotundity of voice, he speaks moderately and simply, appealing for, and himself employing, reason rather than emotion.

“Buell Wood killed for revenge,” he says. “Had he not, his victims would have been charged with manslaughter, and would no doubt have been convicted. In any event, the law should have been allowed to take its course. The mills of the gods grind slowly, it is true, but in time, in time—”

He hesitates. He is not reaching them.

“In time the guilty would have been punished.”

Again he pauses, the first fear that he may lose the case a bullet in his bowels.

“What I am trying to say is this,” he continues. “We have not had violence in this degree on Gold Street, or in Harding, or in this Territory, for years. Buell Wood and his guns are obsolete. They are ghosts—and grown men do not acknowledge ghosts. But this case has a larger meaning, a meaning for every one of us. We no longer settle personal affairs in the streets. New Mexico is no longer a frontier—it will soon be a state. And this very building attests to the determination of the citizens of New Mexico to take the law out of the hands of individuals and repose it in the collective conscience of that state. Like Buell Wood and his weapons, the justice of the Old West is obsolete. Justice must henceforth be dispensed equally to all, under law which applies equally to all. It is time we civilized ourselves, gentlemen. This is a new century. Let us prove by our verdict that we are fit to live in it.”