skeletons (11 page)

Harry Emlyn’s summation dwells, now that the prosecutor has mentioned it, on the subject of western justice. “Defendant is a living symbol of it,” he declares. “And if the justice of our fathers is obsolete, then we cannot be their sons. We have not their will, their strength, their courage. If that justice was not always sure, it was surely swift, and it served them well in the past. It brought order—order—to a wilderness.

And the brick and concrete of this courthouse are a monument to that achievement.” He lays both hands on the rail of the box, bows his head, raises it. “To convict Buell Wood is to say to curs and villains—take our streets again. Do with us what you will. To free Buell Wood is to say nay—don’t tread on us. We will defend ourselves, our women, our children, our homes, by any means and at any cost. Because we are good citizens, yea, but before we are citizens—before Almighty God—we are men.”

Judge Cox charges the jury. He reads to it the statute which defines murder in the first degree. He invests some time defining the terms “deliberate,” “premeditated,” “willfully,” and “maliciously,” instructing Word, VanDellen, Shelley, Turnbow
et al.
in the application of these terms to the case at contest.

He removes his spectacles, rubs the bridge of his nose. “Finally,” he says, “ignore the rhetoric, gentlemen. Decide on the basis of the facts. The facts.”

The jury retires. The courtroom waits. Every bench is filled, the walls lined with standees. The day is warm, the rhythm of women’s fans like a pulse.

In three minutes the jury returns.

It finds Buell Wood not guilty.

There is no applause, nothing.

Obed Cox leans forward. Before he dismisses the jury he wishes to say a few words to it. It has done its superficial duty: It has returned a verdict. But in so doing, so far as the law is concerned, so far as he is concerned, it is responsible for a miscarriage of justice as blatant as any in his judicial experience. His face purples. It has ignored the facts and heeded the rhetoric—in deliberate, premeditated, willful, malicious, and jackass disregard of his instructions.

An eye for an eye, provocation, mitigating circumstances be damned. It has set free a man who has killed thrice and walked away and cannot be tried again for his crimes.

“This court has its verdict, gentlemen. It is yours alone. Very well—eat it, sleep it, live with it if you can. You are dismissed.”

The room moves. Few words are exchanged. The jury leaves the box in grim single file. Harry Emlyn waits in vain for congratulation. Charles Vaught remains seated, staring at the acquitted with unconcealed hatred. A man whose time and place of birth have enabled him to murder and get off. To confound the law. To shoot down in hot blood the highest aspirations of a society with guns which have been a gift of that society. He will be—he must be—the last of his kind. Charles Vaught has learned a lesson from which he will profit the rest of his life: Men are ruled, not by their minds, but by their passions.

No one looks at or speaks to Buell Wood. No one shakes his hand.

I I : 14

I I : 14

I I : 14

Disappeared?”

I squawked like a parrot,

“That’s right,’ said Henry Snackenberg. “Crossworth flew from New York to Harding four years ago. On the suggestion of Miss Vaught, I suppose. Not a trace of him since.”

It was too heavy for me to handle. Philip Crossworth. Whoever he was and whatever he was to Tyler. The peaceful town of Harding, New Mexico, was turning out to be a bottomless pit.

“Then, two weeks ago, another writer,” Snackenberg resumed. “Max Sansom, here probably for the same purpose. And three days later—gone. Written off as a victim of hit-and-run.”

“Well, the hell he was.” If he could one-up me, I could one-up him. “For your information, Sansom was tied under a car and dragged to death to make it look like hit-and-run. Everybody over there claims it was—I read the report of the county medical examiner—but it wasn’t. I know because that’s why I had to check into the Hotel Dieu last night. They popped me over the head and tied me under a car and told me to get out of town—how many Western flicks have you heard that line in?—then dragged me just long enough to peel my chest like a peach. And ruin some of the best-looking clothes ever seen in these primitive parts.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“That’s my biz. Anyway, that’s how Sansom demised. They took it easy with me, but they pulled him to a pulp. He was murdered. Tyler said he was and she was right.”

He leaned forward. “One problem. If he was murdered, where’s the body?”

“Buried. The Bronx or somewhere.”

“Is it?”

“Now wait a minute. Of course it is. I saw it come off the plane at Kennedy in a coffin in a wooden box.”

“Did you open the coffin?”

“Why should—” I stopped.

“We can move fast when we need to, Mr. Butters. We cooperate with other agencies, too, federal, state, and local, and they with us. Since Annie told me four nights ago she’d met a writer on his way to Harding to look into the death of Max Sansom, we’ve moved very fast. Sansom was buried by then, all right, but we got a New York court order to exhume.”

I was staring at him again.

“We dug it up. The coffin you went out to Kennedy to take delivery of was empty. Except for two one-hundred-pound sacks of sand.”

BUELL WOOD.

TRANSCRIPTS.

PHILIP CROSSWORTH.

MAX SANSOM.

I thought I was going back into shock. I had to get out of that bed, to stand on my feet, to look out a window at real things like people and cars and trees. But when I stood, in a kind of white smock which tied in the back, I was dizzy, and might have keeled over had Snackenberg not unfolded out of his chair in a flash and put an arm around my shoulders.

“Window,” I said.

He helped me to it. I planted my hands on the sill and looked my fill.

He removed his arm, and after a time said, “You were lucky, Mr. Butters. I’m sure Crossworth was killed and now you’re sure Sansom was. All you’re out is some skin, but at least you lived to tell the story. I wish you would.”

“Why did you dig Sansom up? How did you find out about Crossworth and Tyler?”

“That’s my story.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I asked you first.”

“Goddammit, Snackenberg, you tell me.”

“If I do, will you?”

“Probably. I like telling stories. It’s how I make my living.”

“I know.”

Just then a nurse came in with a tray. I got back in bed, this time on my own, adjusted my table before me. Snackenberg delayed till she was gone.

“All right. I head an SIU, a Special Investigative Unit. For some years now the biggest job of the Border Patrol has been to try to slow down—we can’t stop it because Congress won’t fund us and this loco amnesty idea has only made things a damnsight worse—to slow the flow of illegal aliens over the line into the U.S. We get fourteen thousand a week into Texas alone. That’s a week. Nationally, it’s taking on the proportions of a disaster.” They had given me tea and toast, when what I really needed was a rare steak and a Caesar salad preceded by a double mart, very dry, with an obese olive. “There are eight million illegals in the country now, minimum, and they come in a million more a year. We catch only one out of ten. If we deport him, chances are he’ll be right back. It would be one thing if they were all agricultural—stoop labor, fruit and produce pickers, so on—but lately we’re getting skilled workers—carpenters, masons, meatcutters, mechanics, and the like—and they hurt. Our estimate is, if we could get rid of them, three million jobs would open up for Americans overnight.” I played with the tea bag and hot water and attacked the toast and let the crumbs fall where they might. “A big business has developed bringing in these skilled people—smuggling them in, providing them with papers, hauling them to big cities like Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Detroit, Kansas City. They’re charged up to a thousand a head for the ride, which they pay back in installments out of their wages. Or unless they bring in enough narcotics to cover the cost. They do that, too. The traffic is organized now—the people running it operate on both sides of the border. South of it they recruit—they even use commercials on Mexican radio stations. North of it they transport and handle the paper work and collections. As I said, it’s big business, Americans finance it and run it, and it’s very lucrative. We cracked a ring operating out of Baja into LA last year—it was called ‘Las Huertas,’ ‘The Blondes’—and their records showed they were shipping in more than two thousand skilled every twelve months and raking in nearly two million dollars from it.” He knew I wasn’t listening, but he carried on, doing his duty, the good civil servant earning his pay and perks while I slurped tea and polished off the toast. He was a little too cowboy for my tastes, but I was beginning to like old Henry Snackenberg despite the fact that he had roped and branded Annie before I could lay a lasso on her. He was simple and shambling and drawly and I changed my mind about him. James Stewart, not John Wayne. “To make the story short, for the last two years we’ve been after another operation, as big or bigger than The Blondes. We know its point of entry is around here, near El Paso, because we’ve tracked down a lot of the people brought in by it to Chicago and Denver and LA. Interrogated them. But not got much out of them. Too scared. We’ve worked our tails off, tried everything, but—”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

He was unperturbed “Well, it’s been slower than pee through a boot. And after you’ve tried everything and nothing works, you pray. You wait for a break. Some incident, something unusual in the sector.”

Two male orderlies entered lugging my luggage. I thanked them, pushed my tray away, got out of bed, found myself steady on my pins, opened the bags, began going through my gear.

“I saw in the newspapers that Sansom had been hit by a car and killed in Harding. That rang a bell with me because I remembered reading another writer named Crossworth had disappeared over there four years ago. I asked New York to run a check on them and the word came back they both had relationships with a woman named Tyler Vaught. New York also said Vaught was originally from Harding. Then we got the court order to exhume. No corpus. Sacks of sand. I was about to go East and talk with Vaught myself when Annie phoned me last night in Tucson you’d called her and were hurt and on your way here. I don’t have to be hit over the head by coincidence.”

I let him monologue along and hung my garment bag in the closet till I could decide what to wear.

“So that’s it, Mr. Butters. Three writers go to a small town in New Mexico. Two disappear. The third is dragged under a car and told to leave town. I don’t know why, but after a while you depend on your instincts in this business, and every instinct of mine says there must be a connection between what we’re trying to do and what you three were doing in Harding. Are you ready to tell me?”

“I am not.”

I stepped into the John, hassled myself out of the hospital smock, slipped into clean jocks, emerged a viable human being. “Why didn’t they murder me, too?” I asked him. “Why didn’t I just disappear?”

“Three in a row would be too obvious. Bound to rouse suspicion. That’s why with Sansom they went to the trouble of the hit-and-run and shipping an empty coffin.

Maybe they found out four years ago Crossworth wouldn’t scare, wouldn’t leave town, and maybe Sansom wouldn’t either, so they had to kill. But they thought you would. And you did.”

“I resent that,” I snapped, rummaging in the bags for my shaving kit.

“Sorry. Where were you last night when they put on the demonstration?”

“In the desert.”

“Doing what?”

“Oh my God.”

Hit over the head again.

BUELL WOOD.

TRANSCRIPTS.

PHILIP CROSSWORTH.

MAX SANSOM.

TAURINO GARCIA.

JUAN SANCHEZ.

Jesús ALVAREZ.

LUIS OBEDO.

I’d been standing. Now I drifted down to the bed like a falling leaf.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“Doing what in the desert?” he repeated.

“Digging up a grave.”

We looked at each other.

“What did you find?”

“Oh my God.”

“Well?”

“Just what you did.”

“You mean—”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Not even sacks of sand.”

We looked at each other.

“Now?” asked Henry Snackenberg.

“Now,” I sighed.

I made it brief, hitting principally the high spots—Tyler and me and Buell Wood’s trial in 1910 and the trial of the Villistas in 1916 and the missing transcripts and La Casa de la Justicia. “So I drew a complete blank on Tyler’s ancestors and all that historical jazz, but I scored on what she wanted. I had to get dragged under a car to do it, but I know who killed Sansom, and probably Crossworth, too. Pingo Chavez.”

“The sheriff? Hold on.”

“Goddammit, I know it was. I recognized his voice when they tied me under the car.”

“Vocal recognition isn’t enough. Not in a court of law.”

“Who said anything about a court of law?”

“If that sheriff is chargeable on two counts of homicide, don’t you want to see him brought to—”

“Not in the least. Sansom was an obnoxious son of a bitch. Crossworth I never knew. I’ve done what I came out here to do and I’m going home.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“Wish I wouldn’t?”

“Yes. That’s really why I’m here today, Mr. Butters. To ask you to cooperate with us.”

“Cooperate.”

“First, by keeping all this confidential. Any government involvement, that is. I understand Miss Vaught is on her way out here. I’d appreciate your not mentioning me to her. This conversation.”

“Proceed.”

He was uncomfortable. There was simply too much of him, lengthwise, to adapt to any chair. “Second, I wish you’d go back to Harding for a few days and look around a little more and keep asking questions and see if you can get some answers.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m not. After what you’ve told me, I admit I can’t see the tie-up, but there must be one. Between the past and the present. I can’t see it, but it’s the only way any of this adds.”