Winding Stair (9781101559239) (12 page)

“My God, you've killed me,” Johnny Boins gasped.

“Johnny, if you try anything serious again, I'll shoot you,” Schiller said as though he were speaking of the bass or the honeysuckle.

A number of men had run into the room, watching us with wide eyes. I could imagine the impression we made—three naked men, one bleeding on the floor, the other two with cocked pistols over him.

“My God, that's a heavy pistol you've got there, mister.”

“My name's Schiller. I'm a deputy marshal out of Parker's court. You've heard of that, haven't you, Johnny?”

Johnny Boins looked at us, his eyes clear despite the blow he had taken. He held one hand to his head and the blood ran through his fingers. Then, incredibly, he laughed.

“What the hell is this all about?”

“Like Mr. Pay said. We got a warrant for you.”

“What charge?”

“Trespass in the Indian Nations.”

Johnny Boins stared at Oscar Schiller incredulously.

“Trespass?” he said. And he bent over on the floor, laughing.

It was the most lasting impression I would have of Johnny Boins. That he could laugh now. I imagined him laughing when he set fire to his playmate and when he helped pull Mrs. John from the wagon seat on the slopes above Hatchet Hill. Or when he made love to the women he had seduced. The same laughter, for killing or love.

“Get into your clothes, and quick,” Oscar Schiller said. “Or I'll dent your head again.”

“No, don't hit me again with that cannon, Marshal,” Johnny Boins said, rising and leaning against the lockers. The blood ran down his chest. “That's some weapon you've got. I'm in hardware myself.”

“I've heard as much.”

“I'd say that's a .38–40 on a .45 frame, single-action Colt.”

“Get into your clothes, Johnny.”

And so on that calm spring day, we took the first of the Winding Stair Five, as I had come to think of them. And it gave me a deeper insight to Oscar Schiller, who could coldly manage people as though they were dominoes, compensating for his physical frailty with intense purpose and planning. Someone had said to me once in my college years, “If you ever get into a fistfight, try to stand uphill from the other man.” In that Eureka Springs bathhouse, I began to realize that Oscar Schiller always stood uphill.

Our work was a long way from finished. After we had Johnny Boins dressed and handcuffed and had dressed ourselves, there was a moment of apprehension that among the crowd of bystanders there might be some one of his friends who would try to break him away. But apparently we overestimated Johnny Boins's esteem among those who knew him. As we passed through the crowd toward the street, one young man called out.

“I hope you've got him good, this time.”

“Go to hell, Carl,” Johnny Boins said, holding a towel to his bleeding head. In the street he turned to me and spoke as though in great confidence. “That Carl's a jealous bastard. We went to school together once. I whipped his ass every day. I'll do it again, too, when I get out of this little scrap. Whatever it is.”

To avoid going along the front of the Boinses' store, we passed down one of the many flights of stone steps that led from one street level to another. Oscar Schiller pushed along at a fast pace, shoving Johnny Boins before him. When people saw us coming, our prisoner with the bloody towel to his head, they moved quickly off the sidewalk. As for Johnny Boins, he talked all the way to the jail. He asked us both what our first names were, and addressed us by them constantly. It was as though he thought we were newfound friends, casually taking a stroll.

It became Oscar Schiller's sorry lot to return to the Boinses' store with our search warrant for his parents' home and apprise them of what had happened to their son. I stayed at the jail with Johnny Boins and he continued to talk. He seemed impelled to explain to me all the good things about his life, and even after I told him that whatever he said to me might be used against him in court, he went on, lighthearted and cheerful, yet his words were serious enough.

He told me how hard his father had worked through the years to establish the best hardware business in the county. His mother had always worked in the store alongside his father—even when Johnny was still a toddler—leaving him to play each day in the back room among the plowshares and coiled ropes. There had been various tutors, after he had shown that the public schools did not, as he put it, fulfill his requirements. Somewhere along the way, he had become a well-educated man. I had known college men ready for their final forms before graduation who could not express themselves so well. He obviously had great respect for his parents, to whom he gave credit for anything he had ever accomplished. His mother had read aloud to him from the time he could talk and had stopped only recently. He was twenty-six years old, a confirmed bachelor, and he said his mother had always been disappointed that he had never found a nice young lady for his wife.

I found it difficult not to like him, even though there was a towering conceit just below the surface of anything he said. From what we suspected he had done in the Choctaw Nation, I had expected a brutal, unfeeling wretch. But he was far from that, although given to foul language from time to time. It became increasingly difficult to imagine him among murderers and rapists in those rain-swept mountains south of Fort Smith. I even began to doubt that he was our man, wondering whether Lila and the deputy sheriff had their own motives for painting such a lurid picture of him.

Oscar Schiller dispelled all such notions when he returned a short time before dark. He took off his glasses and hat and wiped the sweat from his face as we stood in the deputy's office, Johnny Boins safely locked in the cells behind.

“Mr. Pay, that's a hard chore,” he said. “I don't think those people believe to this minute that their boy has ever done anything except be misunderstood. They'll be close behind us with a good lawyer, I suspect.”

“Did you find anything?”

“A lot of love letters from women up north,” he said. “Some old
Police Gazettes
and postcards with pictures of women in tights. And this.” From his pocket he brought a long clasp knife. He pulled out the blade and it was six inches long.

“A lot of people have those,” I said.

“With a blade like that? Well, it doesn't matter. There's this, too.”

He handed me a dirty, crumpled envelope and from it I took a ragged piece of lined tablet paper. It was a letter, written in a crude pencil scrawl.

“I told you these people were a stupid lot,” Schiller said. “Leaving something like that laying around to be picked up.”

The note read:

At the bottom of the page was a drawn symbol:

My hand shook a little as I pointed to the drawing.

“What's that?”

“It's a signature. You see a lot of those in The Nations. I'd say it was a deer's head. I'd say it means Milk Eye Rufus Deer.”

The envelope was addressed to John Boins Esq., Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and postmarked on the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas railroad in Muskogee, I.T., May 21, 1890.

I knew what I held in my hand was a summons. For Johnny Boins to meet Milk Eye Rufus Deer in Fort Smith on the exact day I had seen them there together on the Frisco station platform.

And I knew something else besides. My throat constricted at the thought. The horse in the note was Tar Baby. And surely the girl was Jennie Thrasher. Oscar Schiller, with his usual uncanny perception of what was on my mind, shrugged as he took the letter and replaced it in his coat pocket.

He said, “I told you there was more to it than the horse.”

O
n the morning after we returned to Fort Smith, United States commissioner Mitchell held a hearing in his chambers, a small room in an old warehouse across Rogers Avenue from the federal courthouse. Oscar Schiller and I escorted Johnny Boins, who clanked along awkwardly in handcuffs and leg-irons. He was still cheerful and jocular, and when Emmitt was led into the magistrate's court by one of the federal jailers, our prisoner indicated no sign of recognition or apprehension.

Evans was there to present the government's case. First I told of having seen a man fitting the description of Milk Eye Rufus Deer with Johnny Boins on the Fort Smith railroad station platform. Oscar Schiller presented the clasp knife and the letter with the deer-head signature. Emmitt without hesitation identified Johnny Boins as the white man in the group that had attacked Mrs. John on the Hatchet Hill road, and retold in detail the story of that terrible day.

Johnny Boins waived counsel, his parents not having yet arrived in town, nor their attorney from Little Rock. In his own defense, he said he had come to Fort Smith in early June for social reasons. He said he did not know anyone named Milk Eye Rufus Deer, nor anyone fitting that description, and claimed the letter had obviously been placed in his quarters by parties unknown, because he had never seen it before. He said he had not been in The Nations since November 1889, when he visited Choteau to attend a horse race.

The commissioner ordered Johnny Boins bound over for grand jury investigation on suspicion of murder and rape. The entire proceedings lasted about fifteen minutes.

There was a federal grand jury sitting in Fort Smith on a permanent basis, each panel serving for a year before a new one was drawn. Oscar Schiller and Evans hoped the threat of going before that body would give Johnny Boins the incentive to identify his companions during the drunken spree in the Choctaw Nation. But Boins laughed at any such notion and continued to claim he knew no such people and that he had not been in The Nations at the time. Besides, he said, there had never been any need to resort to rape to get all he wanted.

Oscar Schiller's scheme of withholding from Johnny Boins our real reasons for keeping him in custody had proved fruitless. Boins had told us nothing. Now the possibility of an indictment by the grand jury had no better results. We knew no more than we had known about the people involved in the Winding Stair Massacre, except that one might have a name beginning with
C
. It didn't seem to bother Schiller, who said something to Evans about other irons in the fire.

I was anxious to see Jennie Thrasher, but Evans sent me off to the city jail on another case, to take a deposition from a prisoner there. The day was cloudy and high winds were whipping in from the west. There was talk of a possible tornado, one of the perennial spring and summer dangers along the flat valley of the Arkansas. The city's sparrows were staying close to the ground and the few redwings and chimney swifts aloft were hurtled along before the wind like black cinders before a bellows. It was at least ten degrees warmer than it had been in the mountains, and by the time I hurried back to the courthouse my shirt was damp with sweat.

Jennie Thrasher and Zelda Mores were not in the women's section of the jail, but I knew where I might find them. I started toward the National Cemetery, across an almost deserted compound. I wondered for a time why there were not the usual groups of men talking, chewing tobacco, and horse trading. It was likely the threat of a storm, but then I remembered that while we had been in Eureka Springs, two men had been hanged for murder in the Chickasaw Nation. Evans had told me that after hangings, which were well-advertised public gatherings, people generally stayed away from the gallows compound for a few days.

She was standing far down the slope toward the Poteau River, on a large rock that thrust up from the well-kept turf, her hair down and blowing in the wind. Zelda Mores was a few paces away, her purse held ready, mustached face glaring as I came near. When I stepped up to the rock on which Jennie Thrasher stood, her face on a level with mine, I could see she had been crying, the tears blown back along her cheeks. I started to give her the little china dog, but seeing her drawn features I thought better of it. She looked at me, saying nothing. There was no display of relief or pleasure that I was back, and in fact she acted as though I had never been gone. It was a hard disappointment.

“Hello, Jennie,” I said. She looked past me toward the river and I was conscious of the cotton dress pressing her breasts in the wind, and her long neck with the tiny blue veins. “What is it? Why have you been crying?”

“I'm not crying,” she said. She lowered her head and rubbed her cheeks with her fingertips. Her hands were long and well shaped, but the nails were badly bitten, almost to the quick. It gave her fingers a chunky, blunt look.

“Listen, I've been in the mountains,” I said. “But not the kind of mountains you know. A wonderful place I can tell you about, where the houses look like stacks of blocks—”