At almost the same instant that Charlie removed the wedge from beneath the men’s room door, Ciccone shoved it open, his hand gripping the Colt in his pocket. The first thing he saw when he entered was the surprised look on Nicole DiMartini’s face. It was also the last thing he saw.
Charlie had only half-straightened from stooping to grab the wedge when the door opened. Reflexively, he reached for his gun even as he flattened himself against the wall. The door began to swing shut, Ciccone’s Colt came into view, followed by his back and the mass of black hair. Charlie brought the .38’s barrel down – hard.
Nicole watched him crumple. “Thank you. I hope you killed the sonofabitch.”
Charlie felt for a pulse. “Looks like you got your wish.”
Nicole coolly shoved the wedge back under the door, gave Charlie a short resume on Ciccone as she helped prop him up on one of the toilets. Then, while Charlie withdrew Joe Bob Millgrim’s boots from one of the shopping bags, his Stetson from the other, she locked the stall door with the wire hook. He quickly got into the boots, pulled the hat low on his forehead, briefly appraised himself in the mirror, caught her reflection. She was directly behind him, holding his chinos, jacket.
“What?” He more than half expected her reply to be a comment on how ridiculous he looked.
“Let me come with you.”
Charlie’s surprise was fleeting. “No.” He grabbed up his shoes.
“Please.” Together they stuffed his discarded clothes into the money-carton.
“Hey, your father, he may not have had a choice---”
“Bullshit. Fuck my father. Fuck all of--- Wait!” She saw that Charlie was about to jam the carton into the trash can. “They find Johnny’s body, they’ll definitely look in there.”
“I got rid of the labels.” Charlie shoved the box as far down as he could, wadded some paper towels, scattered them on top, spoke rapidly. “Look, you want my advice, you’ll give your old man’s guys the film, then put as much distance as you can between you and them – as fast you can...” He grabbed the bag of cash, crossed to the door. “...and start a life somewhere.” He kicked the wedge loose, craned out into the lobby. It was empty of people. He looked back, fleetingly locked eyes with the lost young woman. And wished he could help. He also wished he could have said something – anything – cleverer than: “Good luck.” Then he exited.
The smallish driveway/parking area notched into the northwest corner of the Courthouse was crammed beyond capacity with palleted, tarped building supplies, a substantial debris-pile, contractors’ trucks, a pair of off-duty Sheriff’s cruisers. Another patrol car was hastily parked at an angle across the sidewalk, gumball flashing. A handful of deputies glanced up and down the street. Others stood in pairs, confiding, grumbling, losing interest in what was clearly a false alarm. Charlie emerged from the building and, drawing scarcely a look from the uniforms, sauntered past the vehicles, started up-ramp toward the street.
“Heads up! There. Behind the tree.”
“Oh shit. Armed, I think.”
“Got him, Al. You! Drop whatever you’re holding.”
Charlie followed their eyes, gestures, as the deputies ducked for cover, readied their weapons. Across the street, on the small lawn of a single story house, a figure with what might be a rifle or shotgun retreated behind a large oak. Charlie got only a glimpse, but it looked like Rocco Parisi.
A deputy shouted nervously: “Out – outa there – with your hands up. Now!”
Which was followed by one of those odd, local silences in which the most noticeable sound was a dog yapping several blocks away. Charlie hunkered behind one of the cruisers. And spotted Nicole coming out of the Courthouse, looking about. She saw his Stetson, started toward him. Charlie shook his head, wigwagged emphatically, but she continued toward him.
The jittery deputy fired first. Nicole looked off, startled. In the next half-second, the place erupted. Shouts. Shots. Lots of them, whining, impacting. Charlie pulled his head into his collar, pressed against the side of the car. The vehicle bucked as bullets tore through its steel, glass. The window above him crazed but mostly held together. He tentatively peered around the rear of the cruiser – and there was Nicole, less than ten feet away, on a line with him and the shooter. Charlie frantically motioned her back, to the shelter of the adjacent car. Too late. Her chin went up, right arm flung behind her. She pirouetted, swoonlike, as she fell. It reminded Charlie of the famous Robert Capa combat photograph.
Unthinking, he crawled to her. The gunfire continued. A shot struck the pavement just ahead of him. The deputies continued firing, seemingly unaware of him or Nicole. Charlie cradled her head, tried to do a turtle as another bullet whined past. There was blood at the corner of her mouth. She looked up at him, tried to form words. If he had to describe her expression, he’d have said mystified, questioning. Her throat rattled. Her back arched in a final convulsion, then she went limp. And he saw the bloody hole in her chest.
Shit.
Suddenly, Charlie didn’t give a rat’s ass anymore. About the money, his survival, any of it. Fuck it all. Which was disorienting. He’d experienced the feeling before, but the when or where were just out of his reach. At the same time there was this buzzer going off someplace in his head, his shit-detector, telling him his reaction was bogus – he shouldn’t trust it. Between that and the lovely, dead girl and the racketing gunfire, it was making him crazy.
Then, abruptly, the gunfight was over. Quiet. No more shots, or shouts. The lawmen slowly, cautiously rose, weapons cocked, aimed, eyes fastened on the far side of the street. They warily advanced toward the dark, static shape on the ground near the tree.
For Charlie, a moment passed before the shape became the body of the shooter.
He looked at Nicole’s face. Remagen. He’d held Private Dave Marcus’s head the same way, watched him die. And felt the same despair of surrender. An attitude totally counter to his nature. Back then, it pretty much dissipated in a few hours, replaced by guilt. And here, in Moab, he was already repeating that part.
C’mon, with Dave Marcus you weren’t entitled either.
Charlie gently laid her head on the pavement. Her right arm was still outstretched, palm upturned. There, just beyond her fingertips, was the little film canister. A small group of onlookers was converging on the scene across the street, vying for a look at the dead gunman. Nobody had noticed him or Nicole. Charlie scooped up the container, pocketed it, retrieved his shopping bag, joined the cluster of spectators, lagging unobtrusively at the fringe. He guessed that any ID Parisi might have on him would be phony. Suddenly, a woman called out from behind them. She had discovered Nicole’s body. All but two of the deputies hurried to the parking area, along with most of the curious.
Nobody took particular notice of the cowboy with the shopping bag, who hung back, then walked unhurriedly north along the tree-lined residential street. The temperature was falling. But it wasn’t because of the cold that he was blinking back unexpected tears. For the girl, sure. But Christ – pity for the New Orleans wop shitheel that murdered John F. Kennedy?
Charlie wiped an eye with the back of his hand.
Go figure.
TWENTY-FIVE
Present Time
Thursday
Packard exited the I-70 near Cisco, began paralleling the Colorado just below the northern entrance to Kokopelli’s Trail, crossing to the south bank via the Dewey Bridge. The campground there was full of RV’s and tents, most of them dark. It was another seventeen miles to the dirt road that brought them to the motor-home up on Armadillo Ridge, still an hour till dawn.
The door was crisscrossed with yellow plastic police-tape, ends of which flapped in the night wind. Packard was reluctant to revisit the scene inside, but he was unwilling to make things any easier for their adversaries by using his own phone. He located two, one of them with a half-charge left in its battery. And a working flashlight.
At 4:45 AM he called Fran Jeeter, surprised that she was al
ready awake. Less surprising was the anxious wordspill with which she interrupted him: “Mygod, where’ve you been? I’ve been calling you since yesterday afternoon and then half the night. Do you know you’re a goddam interstate dangerous fugitive, murder and car theft, you and some woman, Norris is ’er name I think? A Louise Troup, they say you killed her last night over southeast of Borrego Junction. I mean what is all that---?”
To make sure I can’t ask the police for help. Or, if I get caught, to give them an excuse to kill us. Paranoia was still an awkward fit, but he was growing into it. Quickly.
“Fran! Stop. What were you calling about yesterday?”
Adding that she assumed he was being set up, she went into another breathless burst; George Quinn’s office and home had been searched as well as the Sheriff’s office. Acting Sheriff Toland of course denied the latter, but Fran did a little “nosing,” learned from several deputies – not for attribution, of course – that it was true. As with Quinn’s place downstairs in the Courthouse, there was telltale evidence of “penetration by person or persons unknown.” Nothing, apparently, had been stolen.
Something tripped at the back of Packard’s brain; the contrast between the finesse of the searches, both in Moab and Borrego Junction – and the clumsy brutality of Matanza-the-knife-wielder, plus the way Dorothy Purviance died. Messy. It was almost as if there were two competing forces at work. He briefly brought Fran up to speed on everything except the connection with the Kennedy assassination. The less others knew, the better their prospects for dying when they were supposed to. He told her the sixteenth man might have been working a blackmail scheme.
But Fran sniffed a clinker. “Whoa, professor. There’s a statute of limitations on damn near everything except murder – and from that long ago – what in hell could still be worth killing for?”
So Packard told her.
“Ho-ly shit.” Fran turned to the tall, wiry white-haired man in bathrobe and slippers who was stooped over the smoking stove. “Yo, Woody, try not to burn the goddamned eggs, wouldja?”
The man grunted.
Fran resumed with Packard. “So – what do you figure – those people tore all his clothes off looking for the goddam film, and then threw him in there? How come they never found it?”
Packard admitted he couldn’t explain it. “...But that’s why I’m calling. If we knew how he got here in the first place...”
Packard sat, his legs hanging over the edge of the trail, took a belt of the coffee Kate had picked up in town, along with some sandwiches. It was already past noon. She rubbed his shoulders. Fifty yards upslope was the entrance to the burial chamber. Hoping to retrace Charlie Callan’s steps, they had begun at the bottom, alongside the bank of Muleshoe Creek, where it rushed beneath the road and out into the Colorado River. They worked their way into the low reaches of the canyon, near the spot where Packard had started his abortive-if-ultimately-life-changing dirt-bike ride – it seemed like a month ago – then on up the steep path. The search was inch-by-inch tedious. Fortunately their flashlight lasted till nearly daybreak, but – where to look? Behind every rock, certainly. Beneath every shred of brush. And for what, exactly? An assumed, tiny object they had no right to expect to find. If it was one of those little canisters, then likely – from that era – he remembered his father saved them for tacks and paperclips – it would be aluminum, with a screw-on cap. At the same time, Packard knew that any or all of their presumptions could be totally off. The strips of negative might have been in something flat, such as an envelope or a folder. Or not in a container at all, but rather, long-since turned to dust. Callan might have ditched or hidden them somewhere else entirely. Or burned them. Except that others had some reason to believe the film would be found in Muleshoe Canyon. What did they know about Callan’s movements, his fate, that Packard did not? He was bummed. Part of it, he knew, was exhaustion. “We don’t even know if this is how he got in here.” The phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his jacket, spoke warily. “Yes?”
“Jesus, now everybody in the goddam world’s looking for you. The Sheriff, CNN’s sending a crew, CBS, MSNBC---” It was Fran Jeeter.
“Fran, c’mon...”
“Okay. I think I’ve got what you’re looking for.”
Immediately after Packard’s earlier call, Fran had awakened her friend, Marion Estes, persuaded her to open the Library early. Twenty minutes later, Fran was in the small back room, immersed in microfiche archives.
Now she was back at her kitchen table, on which she had spread a topographical map of the area, plus photocopies of old stories from the Moab Mirror-Gazette. “Coupla things actually. I don’t know why I never read ‘em this way before...” She grabbed one of the copies, on which she’d circled a small item headlined ABANDONED CAR FOUND ON 128. “Okay, for starters, December 1, 1963 they found an abandoned maroon ‘61 Chevvie sedan at the base of the cliff about a quarter-mile this side of Slakes Canyon. It’d been covered with snow from the big storm on the night of November 27th. That was the day of all the shooting at the Courthouse?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Anyway, they closed down the road, and the plows probably buried it even further. The piece goes on to say Sheriff’s Investigators learned the car had been purchased – secondhand – on the afternoon of the 27th at the Gaither Chevrolet Agency, by – let’s see – Robert Samson of Elko, Nevada. They quote the salesman as sayin’ the guy paid cash. Whereabouts of Samson unknown at press-time.”
“Slakes Canyon. Where would that put him?”
“That’s the good part. Almost on a line, up the cliff and over, puts him on Armadillo Ridge, and then down the Muleshoe Canyon trail.”
Kate’s ear was close to the phone. Packard glanced up the slope, beyond the burial shaft, then: “Wait-wait. Up that cliff next to the road? It’s like a sheer wall along there. Is it climbable?”
“That’s the iffy part. Not easy, unless you’ve got equipment – and experience.”
“Or if you’re motivated. Like with people shooting at you. What else?”
Fran selected another page. “All right, here’s another one I saw before and didn’t think about. It might be nothing, but---”
“You’re breaking up. Keep going.” Packard was trying to picture where Charlie might have come down over the top.
“Hey, I’m doin’ my best. On the 4th of December, hikers--- Woody, would you get that?”
Her father turned, grunted an inquiry.
Fran cupped the phone, vexed, jerked her head in the direction of the front door. Louder. “The door?”
The old man grunted again, shuffled out of the small kitchen.
Fran muttered. “Jesus, it’s like talkin’ to a stone.” Fran found her place. “Okay, here we go – hikers? They found a body up near Armadillo Ridge. Dead several days, apparently from exposure but not for certain. Identified as Errol McTeague, late 50’s. Beard, six-foot, hundred and eighty pounds. Recluse, sometime prospector who’d been in the Moab area for years. Friend of Charles Steen, only never got that lucky. Nothin’ else in here, but V.J., I got him goin’ through old records – down in the Courthouse basement, so it could take awhile.” Fran looked off as V.J. Toland entered, his uniform dusty, trailed by her father. “Oh, hold on – whaddya got, V.J?”
“Well...” V.J. took a notepad out of his back pocket, found his place with a smug flourish. “...Samson? Your man from Elko that bought the Chevvie? A week later they got a telex – there was no such guy living in the State of Nevada...” Fran held the phone toward him. He went to the next page of his notepad. “...and McTeague? Except for a buncha D-and-D’s, no record. Death certificate lists natural causes. Coronary occlusion...” V.J. again referred to his notes. “...Inventory was odd though. Some of his clothes were fairly new, and his bag contained a Pentax 35 millimeter camera, an old baseball, and a leather briefcase with the initials ‘C.C.’ – oh, and cash. Thirty-seven hundred and forty-two dollars...”
Minutes earlier, the panel van had slo
wed to let the Sheriff’s car pass. The young deputy parked his cruiser in front of the Jeeter place, crossed to the front door, knocked. The van rolled by, swung around in the cul de sac, headed back up the street. Affixed to the driver’s door was a new, blue-on-white pressure-formed plastic sign: La Sal Plumbing. Below was a motto: Serving Greater Moab. Neither the street or phone numbers were real.
The door of the house was opened, the Deputy entered. The van stopped at the curb opposite the Sheriff’s car. There were no pedestrians, no moving cars. The van’s coveralled driver grabbed the fishing tackle box from the seat beside him, exited the vehicle.
The small, neat single-story house Fran Jeeter shared with her aging father was surrounded by similar homes on one of several such streets that had been developed during the uranium boom of the early ‘50’s. By January, 1964, when Norwood Jeeter and his small daughter moved in, Moab was no longer so prosperous, the hiking, biking and rafting craze still several years off, so he got the place for the first few lines of a song. A recent widower, the laconic Jeeter went to work as a reporter for the Mirror-Gazette, having presented credentials and a letter of recommendation from the owner/editor of a recently defunct Arizona weekly. He admitted to being born in Texas, but as far as Fran knew, her father moved with his parents to Flagstaff when he was a boy. Nor did he ever reveal to her that he had once been a Dallas police officer whose beat included clubs owned by Jack Ruby. After his daughter graduated from the University of Arizona, the Mirror-Gazette took her on as an apprentice reporter. A year later, Woody Jeeter retired. He had few friends, no hobbies unless you counted long, solitary hikes in Muleshoe Canyon which he never tired of revisiting. And, had anyone bothered to note, on alternate Tuesdays during the noon hour, through good weather and bad, he could be seen at one or another Moab public telephone, placing brief, collect calls. More frequently the past few days.
The Sixteenth Man Page 24