skeletons (8 page)

He drops his pistol, tries to hop on his right leg from Coupe to Touring Car and his friend, left ankle and foot flopping grotesquely.

Behind the Runabout the attorney rises, exchanging the empty Colt for that fully loaded. Standing erect, he aims, fires.

The range is twenty feet. Tigh Gooding is hit just anterior to the backside of the neck. His spinal cord is severed. An instant quadriplegic, he dies before crumpling, for his respiratory centers fail at once to function.

One of the two “lookers” leaves his haven under the Coupe and absquatulates via the rear door of the showroom.

George Pennington has meanwhile reloaded his gun and scrambled into the front seat of the Touring Car. Here he is hidden from sight by the side curtains, designed to protect driver and passengers from inclement weather and secured from doors to top by Murphy fasteners. On hearing Tigh Gooding’s howls, he thrusts his weapon out the flap in the curtain on the driver’s side, cut to allow arm signals, peers through it, and locating the attorney on his feet behind the Runabout, fires several errant rounds at him, then rapidly withdraws the “Frontier Special.” He succeeds only in demolishing the east window of the agency, including the information that with the purchase of a 1910 Ford you will have “20 HORSES UNDER YOUR HOOD-ALL HIGH-STEPPERS!”

Wood, intent on Gooding’s fall, is unable to pinpoint the source of fire at him. But suspecting it has issued from the front seat of the Touring Car, he spaces three shots in the general area. The first hits the steering wheel spider and ricochets through the windshield. The second wreaks singular havoc. It passes through the rubber bulb of the horn, through the Stewart speedometer, Model 26, offered for the first time this year as standard equipment and calibrated to 60 mph, and finally through the Heintz coil box mounted on the dashboard.

The third pierces the door and perforates the ten-gallon gasoline tank beneath the front seat.

After this exchange the showroom enjoys a period of peace and quiet.

The last “looker” rolls from the cover of the Coupe and departs the premises in haste.

Behind the mesh, Mrs. Marsh observes.

Driven from the front seat of the Touring Car by the attorney’s barrage, George Pennington lies on the floor halfway under the four-door. He is twenty-four years old. He had hoped to flee into the garage, but knows now he cannot reach it; and he has now seen the corpse of Tigh Gooding sprawled between Coupe and Touring Car. His mental state borders on the psychotic. Except for the sphincter certainty that if he does not kill he will be killed, his contact with reality is profoundly impaired. He begins to weep. He extends his right arm, sighting the “Peacemaker” through tears on the legs of the man standing behind the Runabout. A stream of gasoline leaks from the gas tank above, causing him to urinate, inexplicably, himself. He pulls the trigger.

Muzzle flash ignites the gas. A flare of flame envelops his forearm, setting his shirt sleeve on fire, singeing hair, producing second-degree burns on arm and hand.

He screams like a girl, drops his pistol. He is out from under the Touring Car and upright in one reflexive effort.

“Oh I’m burnt! I can’t fight no more!” he screams. “Mr. Wood I give up! Jesús Christ don’t shoot me!”

Buell Wood advances on him from the Runabout. He moves to within ten feet of the Touring Car, raises arm, aims the New Navy, fires.

It is an execution. He shoots George Pennington in the open mouth. The hard palate, or roof, of the mouth is fractured into slivers. The bullet then tracks through the soft palate and pharynx and the upper end of the spinal cord. Were it not severed, Pennington would drown in his own blood, for the palate and pharynx are highly vascularized.

The attorney strides to the corpse of Tigh Gooding, nudges it with a boot to be sure of death.

Mrs. Marsh speaks. “Good afternoon, Mr. Wood.”

There is no response.

“How is Mrs. Wood these days?”

“Dead,” he says.

He walks round the rear end of the Runabout and out the front door of the showroom.

Gladys Marsh is to assert for the remainder of her life that she never understood why she stayed on her stool in the cage or why she addressed inanities to Buell Wood. But she has, and it will be she alone who can render, on the witness stand, a detailed, coherent account of the slaughter. In any event, when the attorney has left the Ford agency she rises from her seat, exits the cage, takes two steps, faints.

Buell Wood hesitates in sunlight, matched pair of guns which had been a civic gift in his hands. He is a tall, handsome man with dark hair and mustache. He wears a black serge vest and trousers, white shirt, a black string tie. The street is silent as before. Men, women, children, horses, automobiles, wagons, buggies are fixed in time and space exactly as they had been. It is as though, for a staccato of minutes, the heart of Harding has ceased to beat.

He looks left. Bill Pennington, his first victim, lies on the sidewalk in front of the Luna. He has come out of shock, and is on his side, groaning, his face slate, arms hugging his belly and the bullet in it, drawing up his legs, straightening them, drawing them up again. Hemorrhaging has by now flooded his abdominal cavity. The hepatic capsule about the liver has ruptured.

Stepping on a snow of broken glass, Wood goes to the youth, lowers a revolver barrel to his temple, fires, puts him out of his agony.

He pushes guns under his belt, walks then across the street to the buggy and Marmon sedan and watering trough, and stands for a moment over the body of his wife. A woman brings a bundle to him. It is his infant daughter, Helene, wrapped in a shawl, unharmed. He takes the child in his arms, carries her through the pure spring afternoon down the center of Gold Street to his office, opens the door, enters, closes the door behind him.

I I: I4

I I: I4

But I was still burned about that speeding ticket. So instead of packing up and pulling out of Harding I hiked across the street from the courthouse to the lair of the local law, a new slump-block headquarters and hoosegow, demanded to see the sheriff himself, was thumbed into an office posh enough for Park Avenue. It was a toss-up which of us most disbelieved the other.

My ensemble may have been responsible. A double-breasted Halston jacket in Ultrasuede over a rust polka-dot body shirt of silk jersey with a yellow ascot at the neck. Flared beige Cacharel slacks of cavalry twill over above-the-ankle Florentine leather boots in antique mahogany. Informal, perhaps, but quite correct for an afternoon in rural New Mexico searching transcripts and confronting the constabulary.

But if he gave me a twice-over, I gave him a thrice. He wore neither star nor badge nor gun. His chino summer uniform was tailored to a T and creased to cut. His belt was hand-tooled and buckled with turquoise set in silver. His boots were custom-stitched. He was just my size and just as natty.

“Sheriff,” I began, “I want to protest this ticket. Yesterday one of your—”

He held out a hand. His nails were manicured.

I gave him the ticket.

He tore it up over a wastebasket.

“Thank you,” I said. “You know who I am and why I’m here.”

“Yes.” His voice was soft, almost melodious.

“What have you done to find the guy who hit Sansom.”

“Not much.”

“Why not?”

“He is possibly in New Jersey. Sleeping well. Or in California. On the beach.”

“What happened to Sansom’s car?”

“We called Hertz in El Paso. They picked it up.”

“He must have stayed at the Ramada Inn, but they have no registration card for him.”

“A mystery.”

“They put me in the same room.”

“The plot thickens.” He smiled. He had several gold teeth and a pencil mustache.

“When he was here, did he talk with you?”

“Yes. He did what you have done. Questioned Judge Vaught, drove up to San Carlos, found out that the transcripts are missing. Then he walked across the street to see me.”

“And that night—you’re sure it was hit-and-run?”

“I’m sure. I have seen a hundred of them.”

“Suppose it–wasn’t. Suppose he dug up something he shouldn’t have and somebody here in Harding wanted him to forget it—permanently. Who might it have been?”

He frowned. “Me, probably.”

“You.”

“I didn’t like him. He was a swell-head son of a bitch. A Jewish
chingao.”

“Anti-Semitic?”

“There is nothing wrong with being Jewish unless you are Jewish about it. He was. Ego? My God.” Chavez shook his head. “If he wasn’t there, it didn’t happen.”

“Wasn’t where?”

“Oh, the world wars, the birth of Christ, the moon landing. If he wasn’t there, they didn’t happen.”

I had been distracted by six pen-and-ink drawings on the wall behind him. Sensual sketches of full-bodied peasant women fondling babies, manipulating tortillas, caressing melons.

“Pardon me. Are those Riveras?”

“They are.”

DIEGO RIVERAS? In the office of a SHERIFF?

“I bought them in Mexico City in 1951, for $12.50 each. I have been offered a thousand each.”

I stared at them, then at him again. His eyes were brown and easy. His hair was black as comedy, with epaulets of gray at the temples which were damned near distinguished. According to Tyler, if anyone had finalized Max Sansom, it had to be Pingo Chavez. Poor girl. She had to be as non compos as her poor mother. If this intelligent, cultured “Little Devil” was a murderer, I was Robert Redford.

I sat down. The chair was real leather. “When he came to see you—Sansom—what did he want?”

“What you want. What I could tell him about the two trials, and what happened to the Villistas. He was going to write a book. I told him what I knew. It was not much.”

“How much?”

“About the trials, nothing. About the four peons—that they were let go and caught and killed. That some years ago my people buried them near the border and made a sort of shrine. It is called ‘La Casa de la Justicia.’ ‘The House of Justice.’”

“Justice?”

“We have our sense of humor, too.”

“Oh.”

“If you want to see it, drive down. It is on my ranch. Eleven miles south, toward Columbus. You will see a sign, ‘Los Esqueletos.’ Turn left under the sign and follow the road. It leads to my house.”

“Did Sansom go there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

He offered me a small cigar. I said no thanks. He lit one himself.

“What I don’t get is this,” I said. “If those Villistas were run down and wasted in 1916, as you say, and Judge Vaught says, why wasn’t something done about it later? Or anytime since? There’s no statute of limitations on murder—I read that in a crime novel.”

“Nothing was done because they were Mexican.”

“You’re bitter.”

“Realistic. And whoever killed them joined them long ago. The men who sat in this chair before me could not track down dead men. Should they have dug up the graves of the guilty and said I arrest you for homicide?” He appraised his cigar smoke. “It was a bad thing, though—four men executed for a crime the jury had found them innocent of.
La Mierda de Dios.”

“What’s that?”

“The Shit of God.”

I was running out of rope. Somewhere, counterpoint to our conversation, was the monotone of a radio dispatcher’s voice moving prowl cars around the county. “Is there much friction here between Chicanos and Anglos?” I asked.

“Not now. There was in the old days. I was born north of the railroad tracks. We call that place ‘Sal Si Puedes.’ ‘Get Out If You Can.’”

“And you did.”

“Over twenty years ago. I was first elected sheriff in 1956, but I was a deputy long before that. The first Mex on this force. Times had changed by then.”

I stirred. “Well, this has really been a wild-goose chase. It all started when I went out to Kennedy with Tyler to sign for the body.”

“We shipped it. That is, my department called our mortuary here. They did what they could to make him presentable, then hearsed him to American Airlines in El Paso. Standard procedure.”

“I don’t know what to tell her—she thinks old Max was murdered.”

He smiled again. “If a woman wishes to believe something, permit her. She will be contented, and better in bed.”

That depends, Pingo, I thought, recalling the last night in my apartment, the second sexual round when I had tried to play the man to Tyler’s insatiable girl and completely pooped myself in the process. “Did you know Tyler Vaught?”

“No. I saw her once—she was very young and came here for the funeral of her grandfather, the old Judge Vaught. She was very beautiful.”

“She still is. She warned me about you, by the way. She says you’re dangerous.”

“I am. You can tell.”

“She claims that if anyone knocked Max off, it really was you.”

He sobered. “Do you believe it?”

“Hell no.”

“Gracias.”

It was time to go. He rose with me, walked me to the door. I caught a slight limp.

“You return to New York City now? In that splendid car?”

“Home sweet home.”

“My sympathies to your chief of police.”

“Oh, I forgot. Her other grandfather, the gunslinger— after the 1916 trial he turned up missing, too. Like the Villistas. And the transcripts. Any idea of whatever happened to him?”

“No. But he lives.”

“Lives?”

This time his smile was ironic. “Once a year, on Gold Street. Buell Wood Day.” We shook hands.
“Buenos tardes,
Mr. Butters.”

“Tally-ho, Sheriff.”

“Go back and write your books.”

“Earn a living.”

“Make the children happy.”

Tyler:

Why estranged from parents?

Why not tell me mother’s condition?

How came by Buell Wood’s gun?

What’s she got against Pingo?