Browning Without a Cause

by Peter Corris

  23

  ACCORDING to Hoover, Luciano was still in Mexico and arrangements had been made to keep him there, permanently. Someone had to be the patsy and I was the perfect candidate — last seen driving Charley Lucky to Mexico, radical change in appearance, change of identity, no record of re-entering the United States. The FBI undertook to consolidate my new identity, re-locate me and set me up in some kind of business. Nothing about the idea appealed to me, but Hoover's manner indicated that I didn't have much choice. Again I got the feeling that there might be more dangerous instruments in the trunk of the Packard than a camp stool.

  'People know I'm back in the States,' I said. 'James Dean, Brennan, Pedro Cortez, Sheriff Clayhorn…'

  'That can all be taken care of,' Hoover said.

  'What about my wife?'

  'What about her? I understand she doesn't know where you are. All you have to do is play a waiting game, Dick. Bide your time and you can get together with her again. I'm a great believer in the family. Why, the two of you might meet up again in Australia. How about that? That'd sure be nice.'

  'Bide my time?'

  'Sure. Lie low for, say, six months while everything slots into place. It's going to take a power of organising. We'll look after you.'

  The cigar wasn't tasting good at all by this time but I kept smoking it. I'd have smoked it if it had tasted like rubber and I'd have drunk battery fluid. I was in a desperate spot and I knew it. I had to agree. Here I was talking to a man who was setting about arranging an assassination with all the trimmings. As I pondered I recalled the rumours that had been running around for years that the guy Hoover, his agents and the cops nailed outside the Biograph wasn't John Dillinger but some poor unfortunate lookalike. A patsy, in other words.49 I was in the hands of experts and I had to risk everything on one question. I took a long drag on the cigar and expelled the smoke slowly.

  'I can't see why you need me to agree to this. Why not just bump me now and set it up anyway you like? You'll understand my concern.'

  Hoover laughed, actually laughed. He was in his element, enjoying every moment of it. 'I'm really just a policeman, Mr…Kelly. Sworn to uphold the law at all times. My methods might get a little unorthodox now and then. I might get a little…creative, but I'm downright insulted by your suggestion that I'd be a party to your murder.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Besides, we need things from you — some telephone calls, certain documents, like letters. Photographs maybe, fingerprints on selected items. You understand me?'

  I dropped the cigar end out onto the rough ground between the stool and the car and watched it smoulder for a second or two before I nodded. 'Ok, Mr Hoover. I'll do what you ask, but I'm giving up an old life and taking an enormous risk with the new one and there'll have to be a considerable…financial inducement at some point in the proceedings.'

  Hoover smiled. 'I hoped you'd say something like that. I think you understand things perfectly. Congratulations, you just saved your miserable, worthless life.'

  That was it. He got up off his stool, nodded to Burgess and McAlpine and went back with his pilot to the helicopter. A few minutes later and he was just part of a droning dot, heading towards the horizon.

  'Nice guy,' I said to the agents. 'Gave me a cigar. I didn't notice him give you two a cigar. Why would that be?'

  'Don't get cute,' Burgess said. 'I still don't like you.'

  'Ah, but you've gotta be nice to me, don't you? That makes a difference. Now let's see, I sure could do with a drink, and a bath and a change of clothes. A good meal wouldn't go amiss either and…What the hell are you doing?'

  From the trunk McAlpine took out my suitcase and a few other personal items, like my boots, cowboy hat and pistol harness. He opened the case and removed the bag I kept my shaving tackle in. Then he put an enamel dish on the seat his boss had occupied and filled it with water from a large jerry can. A cake of soap and a towel also appeared.

  'Get cleaned up, Mr Kelly. You're going on a little trip.' He unlocked the handcuffs.

  Burgess examined the .38, checking it for weight and balance. He wheeled, dropped into a crouch and fired six rounds into the trunk of a tree about thirty feet away. Rapid fire. Good pattern. Birds that had been disturbed by the chopper had settled back into the trees. Now they flew up into the sky again, squawking and calling.

  'Nice weapon,' the agent said. 'I'll be sure to take real good care of it for you.'

  I shrugged as I climbed out of the car and used the crutch to hobble across to the bowl. 'Have you got any water for drinking?'

  'Better than that.' McAlpine hauled out a bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon and one of those plastic cups that concertina down. Then he produced a lunchbox of the kind factory and construction workers carry, opened it and took out some sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. 'Everything you need.'

  'How about some coffee to finish up?'

  McAlpine took a thermos flask from the trunk and held it high. 'Get cleaned up and get dressed if you want some of these comforts,' he said. 'And don't piss against the wheel of the car.'

  I wanted the comforts very badly and I did the best I could under the circumstances. The water in the bowl was warm and I managed a rough shave, cleaning up around the edges of my neat beard. I washed and pulled on a clean shirt and underwear. There was no way I could get my strapped-up foot into a pair of pants, but Burgess obliged me by using his pen knife to slit the leg of my jeans. I ended up halfway respectable with everything vital covered, wearing my socks and one boot.

  This rough toilet refreshed me considerably and I swung over to Doc Clanton's optimistic view that I'd probably survive uncrippled. Burgess and McAlpine smoked and discussed FBI things among themselves. I completed my ablutions by hobbling across to the tree Burgess had shot at and pissing long and hard against it.

  'I'm ready for that drink now. Going to join me boys?'

  They declined, but we shared the sandwiches and they drank some coffee while I took a few solid jolts of the Wild Turkey with warmish water. The ankle was still hurting and I accepted a couple of aspirin tablets from McAlpine. I decided they were pretty nice fellows, for G-men, that is. I was feeling pretty mellow by now, what with the sun low on the horizon and all, and I suggested that it was about time we got back to Marfa.

  'You c'n watch them makin' the picture,' I said. 'Nearly finished. Get to meet 'Lizabeth Taylor and James Dean. How'd you like that? Get to meet Rock Hudson himself.'

  'That'd be fine, Mr Kelly,' Burgess said. 'Agent McAlpine and I'd certainly enjoy that. Why don't you get in the car now and we can move along.'

  'Right,' I said. 'In the car. Bloody ankle's still sore.'

  'You sounded like an Englishman just then,' McAlpine said.

  They helped me to the back seat and I more or less crawled in and lay along the length of it. 'Australian,' I muttered. 'Greatest country on earth, Australia. Greatest climate, best beaches, best tennis players. Lew Hoad, greatest player of all time except…' I remember saying this but I know I didn't complete the thought and I never have.50 I still wonder what I meant.

  24

  'FORWARD, 185!'

  I was supposed to shove the bucket and mop out of the cell with my foot, step over it and present myself and the cell for inspection. I was in D wing of the military section of the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. 185 were the last three digits of my number, the rest of which I forget. Prisoners in D wing had a cell each and were allowed a few comforts, such as a radio for two hours per day, a weekly hot shower and unlimited borrowing from the prison library, but we received no visitors and were not permitted to speak unless requested to by a guard. It was not quite solitary confinement in that we could see our fellow inmates at cell-inspection time, exercise hour and at church, but the rule of silence made it worse than solitary in some ways.

  I recalled nothing of the drive from Texas and had woken up in the cell, dressed in prison denims, shaved and crop-headed. A piece of paper was pinned to my chest on which t
he regulations governing D division were printed. The statement about silence was heavily underlined and I got the message. I was in a kind of limbo. I had no idea what paperwork there was on me in the prison, if any. I didn't know what my offence or sentence were supposed to be. The silence rule was enforced with the very compelling argument of the billy club and a sensible man didn't challenge it.

  Otherwise, the discipline wasn't so harsh. I'd experienced worse in Long Bay and other places. The guards were the usual brutal thugs, the doctors the usual brain-dead alcoholics and the chaplains were away with the fairies of their various persuasions. In some ways the semi-isolation was a blessing; I didn't have to worry about the predatory homosexuals who were the scourge of life in general prisons, nor informers or stir-crazy escape-plotters. The boredom and the empty hours were the main torment, along with the uncertainty of my situation. The routine, and that's what prison life consists of above all, was: lights on and a wake-up bell at six a.m.; wash and shave (beards were forbidden and a razor was issued and re-claimed each morning); cell clean-up and inspection; breakfast eaten in the cell; two hours of nothing; two hours of work; lunch in the cell; two more blank hours; one hour of exercise before being locked back in the cell at four p.m. where we stayed for the evening meal and the next eighteen hours. The food was bland and starchy, but bearable. The coffee was thin and adulterated with chicory. The tobacco ration consisted of two plugs per week of rock-hard stuff that had to be shaved with a thumbnail and rubbed hard before it would light. The issued cigarette papers were thin and too lightly gummed. The two hours of radio came through in this period, not always at the same time. We had no control over the program which was mostly music I didn't like and commercials for things I didn't want. No news broadcasts.

  The work details didn't offer a lot of stimulation — painting a part of the penitentiary that was undergoing renovation, stints in the prison laundry, licence plate stamping and yard sweeping. I was never much of a reader and the stuff in the library didn't interest me — the trolley that came around held mostly law books and westerns and it's pretty hard to pick a good book just by pointing to the title on the spine, which was all we were allowed to do. The only thing to be said for having a good few years on the clock, and it only really applies I imagine to prison sentences and long sea voyages, is that empty time passes more quickly than it did when you were young.

  As an old institutional hand, I had an almost instinctual knowledge of the way to loosen up the bonds of a rigid system. Malingering is far and away the best method. When I felt I couldn't stand the boredom and routine any longer, I deliberately cut down on my food intake and hoarded my tobacco for a smoking binge. My appetite was poor anyway (I've never been very interested in food except as a blotter for booze) and I'd lost weight since entering the prison. A week of starvation, heavy smoking and pacing my cell at night induced a fever, a few tremors and various other symptoms it wasn't difficult to exaggerate.

  I began this account of my time in Leavenworth with a guard's order to move forward. For forty-nine days — according to the tally I'd kept with spent matches — I'd obeyed, but not this morning. I lay on my bunk feeling genuinely feverish and weak, very prepared to accept proper medication and nursing. The guard rapped on the bars with his club.

  'Forward!'

  No response from Browning, or Kelly or whoever the hell I was supposed to be. The guard slammed the door shut and I was left in peace. I had no idea what the procedure was in this place but I felt myself equal to the occasion. After a couple of hours the door slid back and one of the piss-pot doctors put his head into the cell. I'd heard him coming and had held my breath for as long as I could manage, thus achieving a fast pulse rate and heightened blood pressure. I needn't have bothered, he wasn't going to be that thorough.

  'What's the matter with you?' the doctor asked from just inside the doorway. He was hanging there as if afraid the door would shut on him.

  'He's on silence, doc, ' the guard immediately behind him said. 'Probably won't answer you.'

  'How am I going to tell what's wrong with him?'

  The guard elbowed the doctor aside. 'I'll check him out. What do I look for?'

  The guard approached my bunk, bent over me and I took a slow, gentle swing at him with my right fist. The punch landed on his flabby jaw with all the force of a snowflake. The guard chuckled throatily and scarcely moved.

  'Hell,' he said. 'This guy's as weak as a fucking kitten. Don't reckon I'd even have to report that as an attempted assault.'

  Nevertheless, the doctor had retreated towards the door. 'What colour is he?'

  'Shit, doc, he's a white man. Ain't no niggers in here.'

  'I mean is he pale, flushed or what?'

  The guard leaned down. In fact I was strong enough to flatten his nose and remove some teeth and I was sorely tempted, but I lay still. 'Both, seems to me. Yep, I'd say he was pale and flushed. What's that mean?'

  'Sick bay,' the saintly doctor said.

  It's a strange fact, but in my experience prison hospitals are usually a lot better than you'd expect given the unpleasantness of the places they serve. It's as if the planners feel a bit guilty about the general awfulness and build in at least one humane element. I've been told that the hospitals in some of the high-class minimum security facilities rival the Mayo Clinic and I can believe it, although I hope never to find out personally. The Leavenworth hospital wasn't too bad. I was in a ward with six other men — genuinely very ill fellows — and the no-talking rule wasn't in force. That was the first great improvement. The second was that the penitentiary's bootleg liquor network took in the hospital, unlike D wing. The food was the same, the tobacco was the same but we got an extra hour of radio per day.

  Of course the great advantage was being treated, not exactly like a human being, but at least as a medical case, which might not sound like much, but it's a hell of a lot better than just being a number. There was the interest of the doctor's examinations and the attentions of the ward nurses and orderlies — male of course, you can't have everything. The security was tight — barred windows, guards on the doors and no useful implements left lying about. From the window of my cell in D wing I could see the exercise yard; from the window in the ward I could see an internal road, a couple of administration buildings and some small garden plots along with a few patches of lawn. I'm no great nature lover, but those bits of greenery did me a lot of good.

  One of the first requirements was the compilation of 185's medical history. I was subjected to a thorough physical which involved inspection of all protuberances and orifices and was pronounced clear of venereal disease. Then I sat down with a youngish doctor, not yet reduced to a drunkard by the system, to be grilled about my illnesses from day one. I found it amazingly enjoyable. To be forbidden to talk for several weeks and then to be invited to talk as much as you liked and all about yourself was like being given the key to the candy store. I resolved not to disappoint the doctor.

  'A sickly child?' he queried.

  I nodded. 'Very. Not expected to survive a week — underweight, difficulty in breathing, bad colour. My parents had lost five before me and pretty much gave me up. But I pulled through, as you see.'

  'Yes. Do you know why?'

  'Sure. The Aborigines.'

  'Excuse me?'

  'I was born in the Australian bush. My father despaired at the thought of losing yet another son and he took to me the local black medicine man. The ngalanana, as they call them. He smoked me, rubbed me with goanna oil and kangaroo blood and I came through.'

  He was scribbling fast. 'Remarkable.'

  'Right. I was as strong as a lion as a kid — great athlete, swimmer, all that. I wrestled a shark in Botany Bay once. Got a few scratches but we ended up eating the shark.'

  'Australians eat sharks?'

  'All the time.' That was about the first truthful thing I told him.51 I rattled on like this for a while, inventing furiously because in truth I'd scarcely had a day's illness in my life.
Broken bones and bullet wounds, yes, but not much else. Except tuberculosis. I'd had a bout of that more than twenty years back after I'd spent an unfortunate time as a hobo, my lowest ebb.52 This was getting into tricky territory and I wondered how to play it — it could give me a ticket out into a sanitarium maybe if I could convince them I'd had a recurrence. Even a prolonged stay in these relatively pleasant surroundings would be something. On the other hand, they might just lose interest in me as someone who was on the way out. Back in the 30s the only treatment was fresh air, rest and hope — plus prayer if you were that way inclined. It had worked for me. I'd heard that they had new drugs for the disease nowadays,53 maybe it wasn't taken so seriously. I decided to risk it.

  'Tuberculosis,' I said in answer to his question about serious illnesses in adulthood.

  He checked the file he had on me and nodded. 'Yes, I see. Hmm. Give me the details.'

  Of course I spun him a tale about contracting the disease while working on banana boats between Honduras and Los Angeles. I laid it on thick, talking about the incredibly hard work, the appalling conditions, bad diet and reliance on rum to keep going.

  'Why were you doing work like that? You're an educated man?'

  Time to plant a seed. 'Well, doctor, it was kind of… undercover work. I can't say anymore about it.'

  He jotted down everything I said and then referred to my file again. 'You're very underweight for a man of your height and build. I think we should run some tests to see if the tuberculosis has come back.'

  I contrived to look terrified. 'God, don't say that. They told me it'd kill me for sure if it came back.'

  The doctor laughed. 'Back then it might have, but things have moved on since then. Where did you get this medical advice, in Honduras or LA?'

  I had to consider that one and the germ of an idea was forming. 'I believe I was in Montana when the diagnosis was made. I went to work on a cattle ranch and the clean air cured me.'

  'It'd be a help to have those medical records. Where are they?'