“Oh yes, sir. He’s that big one over there, that big fella.”
Murray’d been dozing off in his chair that whole morning, his jaw dropped down into them two chins of his. But when Joe throwed a finger towards him, that old boy jerked up outa his chair and went to hollering: “I didn’t have anything to do with this train thing and I’ll bust every bone in anybody’s body who says I did!”
I liked that ’cause I knowed the judge wouldn’t.
I was right.
The judge was a man named Adam C. Cliffe with black horn-rim glasses. He pulled his glasses down to the tip of his nose and he shot Murray a look that coulda melted steel. “Now look here! You’re going to get a square deal in this court, but if anything like this happens again, I won’t accept excuses.”
Murray’s lawyer put his hand on Murray’s shoulder and pushed him down. “Oh, your honor, he hasn’t a bit of sense. Please excuse him this time.”
’Course, all that yapping from Murray meant that his lawyer was gonna have to make us Newtons look like no-count liars, and that’s exactly what he done—or tried to do. He couldn’t shake Joe on the train details. Joe was airtight on them. But then that dirty lawyer thro wed a twist in things.
“It’s true, isn’t it, Mister Newton, that at first you and your brother Jess disagreed in much of your stories about the dates in the planning of the robbery and such things. But since your arrest, you have met several times and agreed on the statements you are both making before this jury?”
Joe give a smile. “Yes, sir.”
Damn! Wrong time to be honest! You could hear some titters and chuckles from the people in the courtroom. I looked over at the jury. A few of ’em raised their eyebrows. Then that defense lawyer started prancing around waving a cut-out story from some newspaper.
“The papers say, Mister Joe Newton, that you have a flapper girlfriend with a ‘stunning head of bobbed red hair’ who is ‘crafty and cunning as a leopard.’ They say you’ve been buying her fancy clothes for a year or so, and last year bought her a brand-new 1923 Studebaker. Is that true?”
Joe give another smile. “Yes, sir.”
“Mister Newton, you bought her all these things long before this train robbery. What kind of work were you doing last year that you can buy a woman a car?”
Joe furrowed his brow. “I’m sorry, sir. I can’t recall.”
“Where did you get that money, Mister Newton?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t recall.”
“Let me remind you that you’re under oath, Mister Newton. Think hard.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t recall.”
That newspaper article had it right, about Joe’s red-headed girlfriend. Fact is, Joe’d graduated from them “solid” Woolworth gals to a smooth article named Dorothy. But why in the hell couldn’t he have flat-out lied and said he’d got his money from oil, like I always done?
The lawyer looked over at the jury box and smiled: “Isn’t it strange, men of the jury, that Mister Joe Newton can remember so many details about the train robbery when he can’t even remember what he was doing in nineteen and twenty-three?” He said, “Isn’t it hard, men of the jury, to believe anything a man says when he has such a mixed-up memory?”
I seen a few men of the jury nod their heads.
If folks in the courtroom tittered when Joe walked off the stand, with them long legs, they tittered five times more when Jess walked on. Jess was all dressed up like a cowboy; a high-crowned white Stetson on his head and high-heel riding boots on his feet and a big, shiny silver Mex’kin belt buckle around his waist. He’d begged the federal lawyers to let him wear that get-up.
He swaggered on the way to the stand, and when he got on it, he set cross-legged and he swayed—real slow—back and fro, back and fro.
People in the courtroom was chuckling.
It didn’t take me a second to see what he was doing.
He was drawling ever’thing so slow you could see the lawyers was wanting to reach inside his mouth and pull his words out. He said he’d been a Texas bronc-buster and butcher who’d give up snapping horses and cutting up chuck to mess with guns. And then he told the exact same train-robbing story Joe told—detail for detail. He said Murray was the one that first come up with “some good jobs around Chicago,” and that Fahy was the one that’d got us the inside information.
“Can you point out Mister Fahy?” the lawyer asked.
“No sir. I heard all about him, but I never met him.”
“How about Mister Murray?”
“Oh yeah. You can’t miss him. Big one right there.” This time Murray just hurrumphed.
I was wondering what dirty trick Murray’s lawyer was gonna pull on the cross-exam. I didn’t have long to find out. They’d figured they’d make Jess look like a no-count drunk that couldn’t be trusted with nothing—stories or money.
“Mister Newton, is it true you took off to Mexico with $35,000 of the train loot?” the defense attorneys asked.
“Yessir, but I’m afraid it’s dead and buried now.”
“Money can’t die, Mister Newton.”
“I reckon it’s just buried then.”
The crowd laughed.
Jess laughed, too, and leaned back in his chair and told his escape story. He told the courtroom how he stopped off at a bootleg joint in San Antone on his way down to Mexico, and how he figured he’d better hide that $35,000. How he went to the bartender and said he was gonna meet a married lady out in the country and could that bartender drive him there for $100? How they took the bartender’s old rattle-trap Model T, tied together with baling wire, and drove out into the woods.
“I buried most of the loot under a oak tree,” Jess said, swaying back and fro in that witness chair. “I put three knife marks in it. Next day, it come to me I needed to hightail it to Mexico, so I go back to the bar and I says to the bartender: ‘Here’s another hundred dollars. Take me back where we was last night.’ And the bartender says: ‘OK, shure, where was that?’ Well, my knees go to jelly right under me and I says, ‘I got no idea. I was drunk.’ And damn if that bartender don’t look me straight in the face and says, ‘Well, mister, I don’t got no idea either. I was drunk too.’”
You could hear people laughing all over again, all over that courtroom. Even the judge give a little smile.
Jess looked out into the crowd. “This ain’t a funny story, folks. I really did lose that money. And that’s sad, sad, saaaad.”
The only one that wasn’t snickering was Murray’s lawyer. He’d wanted to make Jess look sneaky. Jess just looked like a thick-headed old cowpoke.
I heard a man behind me say to the man next to him: “No wonder these birds got caught, they’re not smarter’n that.” But his friend said right back: “Don’t you be fooled, Harry. It takes a shrewd fellow to pretend to be dumb like that and get away with it in front of all these lawyers.”
Sucked-in Glasscock was the last one of our team to go up. The dirty, old louse! I could hardly stand to look at him walk to the stand, his hair all slicked back and his cheek twitching. If it wasn’t for Glasscock, we’da all been millionaires!
Was he gonna mess things up again?
But before the lawyers went at him, something come down I wasn’t expecting. The judge nodded his head over at a coupla of guards, and they put their hands on the ready at their pistols. And in opens the doors to the chambers. And in come two men holding what looks like a hospital stretcher. It’s covered with a big white cotton blanket and there are lumps and bumps poking up all over.
The two men set the thing down on a table and one of ’em pulls the sheet offa the thing real slow.
The crowd in the courtroom gasped.
“This look familiar, Mister Glasscock?” the judge asked.
“Yessir.”
“What is this?”
“I guess you could say it’s part of the root of our evil. Yessir. The root of our evil.”
There it was.
All the loot they
’d dug up so far. Wide-mouth jugs stuffed with greenbacks. Fruit jars filled with loose diamonds and rubies, all a-glittering. A big white wicker basket overflowing with bonds.
The federal lawyer went over to it.
He pulled out a fist of loose greenbacks, and let ’em flutter down.
He pulled out a fist of bonds, and let ’em flutter down.
He pulled out a fist of diamonds and rubies, and let ’em plunk down.
“What we have here, gentleman of the jury, is one million, two-hundred and forty thousand dollars!” he said.
My eyes hurt.
The root of our evil?
That’s what Pa’d called money right after Mister Pike kicked us offa his land back in Rising Star, when I was sixteen.
What would Pa’ve said if he seen that million dollars?
The whole time Glasscock was up there answering questions, my eyes kept flipping from that old boy to all that money.
God.
Glasscock started out alright.
“I’ve known Murray since 1917,” he told the federal lawyer. “We’ve broken bread a thousand times. In February of this year, he first suggested mail robbery to me. He said he could get the dope from a good friend. A Mister Frank Fahy.”
When the prosecutor asked Glasscock to point out Murray, he done it without a hiccup.
I knowed he’d do that.
But when the federal lawyer asked if Glasscock had ever met Fahy, damn if he didn’t say, “Of course.”
And then he nodded his head and pointed.
“He’s that little jug-headed man right over there.”
Fahy near shot outa his chair. “I’ve never met that man in my life! He’s a lying fool!”
Well, Glasscock was lying, alright. But he wasn’t no fool. That morning, when the guards was leading us into the courtroom, I’d heard a whisper in my ear. It was Glasscock. “Which one’s Fahy?”
“Jug-headed one on the left,” I whispered back.
“Gotcha.”
I could hardly believe it, how Glasscock jutted his finger out there and pointed plumb at Fahy. If I’da been in the jury, I’da believed they was bosom pals. The only thing was, Glasscock didn’t stop there. He kept on going. He started talking about how he’d first met Fahy on a chilly day, setting on a box in a alley behind Jacobsen’s Restaurant.
“The first time I met Mister Fahy,” Glasscock said, “he flashed a badge at me and said, ‘I’m a postal inspector.’ I said what we wanted was good dope for robberies. And Fahy said, ‘Oh, I can do that all right.’ The second time I met him, Fahy told me the registered mail was all in the second car after the engine, and that the clerks had guns, but that they wouldn’t shoot them. They didn’t know how. Because he was in charge of gun-training.”
I near shot out of my chair. That liar! That damn liar!
I was the one that’d planned the job, I was the one that learned all them things, and there Glasscock was setting up there, oily as his oiled hair, acting like he was the leader! But wasn’t nothing I could do except keep my mouth shut. Then I looked over at the jury box, and damn if most of them men didn’t look like they was buying ever’thing Glasscock said.
Well.…
Well.…
He was a damn liar. He was a damn good liar.
On the cross exam, the defense lawyers tried to make Glasscock look like a bad liar. But they had a hard time of it. “Why do you keep repeating my questions before answering them?” was about all they could say. “To think up something to say?”
The judge ordered them to take that offa the record.
It was the last piece of the trial that had me squirming the most.
Right before them two old louses—Murray and Fahy—went up, the federals put a coupla postal inspectors up on the stand to add a little fuel to their case agin ’em. They told about how they’d trailed Fahy after the robbery and tapped his telephone.
Still, it was pretty much gonna be our word agin Murray’s and Fahy’s.
Well, Murray grunted and huffed climbing up on that stand, the big strong lights in that courtroom shining off that stay-combed hair of his. And he spun his tale like nobody’s business. Since ever’body knowed already he was a booze runner, that’s exactly where he took the story.
“Yes, of course, I knew Mister Glasscock, and I’d arranged with him to haul some booze for me the night of June 12th. Mister Dock Newton was shot when he was trying to hijack my shipment. I hear he’s a bit off, if you know what I mean. But the night of that holdup, I was visiting a nephew who’d been hit by an automobile. It was the Oak Park hospital, and I was there with my wife.”
That liar!
Fahy blowed up to the stand, light-footed, and set with that rod-straight spine. His voice was a little trembly at first, but he kept to his story that he’d been framed, too. He bragged how he’d solved all the big train robberies up around Chicago in them past five years—the Pullman robbery, the Harvey robbery, the Grand Rapids robbery.
“It’s the Eastern inspectors back in New York, they’re the ones giving me the tumble for this jam. There’s more framing on this case than any I’ve ever worked on,” he said. “And why? Those Eastern inspectors wanta cover their hinies. They hire mail handlers without checking them out. It’s a cinch for an ex-convict or a criminal to get a station job. And they’re the birds who pulled off this Rondout job, some ex-con mail handlers.”
Another liar!
But, as it come out, Fahy didn’t “spring” no real surprises. I guess the only surprise was that there wasn’t no surprises. He’d just been bluffing. And, nope, he couldn’t prove one thing he’d said. All he could do was stand on his record. Only problem, so far as we was concerned, was that his record as a inspector was pretty damn good.
FORTY
I slept like a baby that whole night before the verdicts come in.
Why waste a good night’s sleep? The rock’d been kicked off the hill, and there wasn’t nothing I could do but stand back and watch where it rolled.
The verdicts for Fahy and Murray come in at 1:10 p.m.
They made both of ’em stand up. The judge read Murray’s first. He was staring kinda funny at the judge. He had a smile on his face, but I knowed that smile. It was a dog-snarl smile. The jury found him guilty. He got the full 25 years. Fahy fell back into his chair when he heard that. He knowed he was gonna get the same thing. He did.
They practically had to carry him out of the courtroom.
Missus Fahy was standing there screaming: “He didn’t have anything to do with that robbery! I’ll wait for him!”
Crazy lady.
It was good, and it was bad. It meant the jury’d bought our story. It also meant the jury wasn’t happy about the crime. Was Aldrich bluffing us?
The rest of us—me and my brothers and Glasscock—got our sentences next.
Before the judge give ’em to us, they took me and Jess and Joe and Glasscock outside the courtroom for “a breath of fresh air.” They said they was waiting for something. They didn’t tell us what. We waited for five minutes, then another five minutes, then another five minutes.
And then it come.
It come around the corner way on down the hallway. It was long, white and lumpy.
There was two big men a-carrying it, one of ’em on each end, and the closer them men come to us, the more I could hear they was panting like dogs. Joe looked at me and I looked at Joe, and Jess looked at me and I looked at Jess, and Glasscock looked at me and I glared at Glasscock, and then all of us looked back at what they was bringing.
“Jesus godamight!” I said.
With handcuffs on my arms and chains on my legs, I couldn’t move more’n a few inches in any direction. But there wasn’t nothing I wanted more in the whole world right then but to run up and throw my arms right on plumb around Dock.
In two minutes, they was right up on us.
When Dock seen us, he moved his head half a inch to the right. And I seen that his eyes lit up. But he wasn’
t saying nothing. I guess he couldn’t say nothing. Still couldn’t use his tongue. There was three big cotton pillows under his head and half his face was covered over with thick white cotton bandages.
But I was so happy to see that old boy I coulda shot right up to the moon!
Then I throwed my head back and went to laughing. Laughing like a hyena ’cause it hit me that there was six months of good, hard cussing stuck down in that bull-thick throat of Dock’s! And when that old boy did get the use of that tongue back, well, BLOOEY!
Lord have mercy on whatever nurse was standing in the way of that blast!
Soon as they carried Dock up, a guard called us back into the chamber and made us stand in a line, right in front of him. Except for Dock. They let him lay.
They’d also let Louise into the sentencing, and she was setting behind us on a hard-back chair. Before the judge started, I turned around and caught her eye. I give her a smile, and she smiled back. But when we did that, my handcuffs felt tighter around my wrists, and my shackles cut into my ankles.
Then the judge begun: “I want to ask that all of you hold back from any show of emotion.”
Nobody said nothing. What could we say? We didn’t know what kinda emotions we was gonna have.
The judge squinted at each one of us, one by one, over his horn-rim glasses.
He started with Glasscock. “Mister Brentwood Glasscock, you have prior convictions for assault and bank robbery. The court sentences you to the full twelve years.”
Glasscock’s head turned red. I guess he thought he’d get just a year or two for giving up all that loot. Crazy man! Don’t he know that just because you don’t have the money no more, don’t mean you ain’t wrong for having took it?
I smiled on the inside of me.
The judge turned to Dock. “Mister Dock Newton, the jury is sorry for your condition, but you were an escaped felon at the time of this crime and the court sentences you to twelve years.”
Dock’s eyes slammed shut.
Poor old Dock! He never did get a break.
The judge turned to Joe. “Mister Joe Newton, you are still a very young man and I suspect were under the influence of your older brothers. You have no prior convictions. I sentence you to three years.”
All Honest Men Page 31