“Nora, this is Madeline Kimbell,” I said. “She’s had a little trouble with an ex-boyfriend and needs to hide out here for a few days.”
“Pleased to meet you, Madeline,” Nora said, shifting the shotgun to her left shoulder so she could shake hands. “Glad to have you visit. It’ll be fun to have somebody to talk girl talk with.”
“I love your outfit,” Madeline said appreciatively.
Nora gave her a big grin. “Thanks. I bet you didn’t expect to find nobody dressed this stylish out here in these woods, did you? I been to town this morning is the reason I’m all dolled up. Come on inside and let’s have some coffee.”
She turned and led us back through the house toward the kitchen with a confident, almost masculine walk. It was a cozy country place with hooked rugs and heavy furniture from the past century. Bookshelves stuffed to capacity filled one wall of the sitting room.
“You must read a lot,” Madeline said in surprise.
“Yeah,” Nora replied. “It’s my character flaw, Daddy says. Of course he don’t read anything but the Palestine newspaper.”
“Haven’t you found you a guy yet?” I asked her as we took our places at the big square maple table in the kitchen.
“Hell, Virgil,” she answered with an easy laugh, “I can find all the guys I want at the dance hall in Palestine on Saturday nights. It’s just that don’t none of them seem worth the effort.”
She turned to look at me, her face full of mischief. “To tell you the truth, I’ve just about decided that I don’t want a man in my life on a permanent basis. You have to make too many compromises when you’re living with somebody.” She shook her head and turned back to the stove. “Nope, it’s better just to find you one that’s got plenty of energy over the short course. Then when you get done with him you can boot him out and go on about your business.”
“How about living with your dad?” I asked. “Aren’t there compromises there?”
She lifted a pot from the stove and poured three cups of coffee and set them on the table. “Actually, living with Daddy works out pretty good. When you’ve got a pair of anarchists like me and him under the same roof, you got two people willing to give each other plenty of latitude.”
Just then the outside door opened and Press Rafferty stepped into the room and hung his worn old Savage Model 99 lever-action rifle on a peg beside the stove. He was a tall, thin man with a prominent nose, two darting, mirth-filled eyes, and a small, closely trimmed mustache over a tiny mouth, all of which contrived to make him resemble a lively, intelligent rodent. As always in cold weather, he was dressed in a pair of faded denim overalls, a flannel shirt, and a red checked wool mackinaw. “Virgil, how you doing, boy?” he asked and stuck out his hand, obviously pleased to see me.
I introduced Madeline and gave him a quick rundown on her problems. “I’m positive nobody followed us,” I said, “and not a soul besides Aunt Carmen knows where we are.”
“Any friend of yours is welcome here,” he said, pulling a pack of Camels from the front bib pocket of his overalls. “You know that.”
“I appreciate it. But are you sure you’re up for something like this? It could be dangerous.”
“Me and Nora can handle ourselves if we have to. Don’t worry about it.”
“I know, but be careful.”
He gave me a cold smile. “I’ve got a pair of Catahoula leopard dogs out back in the kennels that will kill anything, man or beast, that comes inside my fence at night. Just to be safe I’ll turn them out into the yard after you leave. How’s that for careful?”
“You staying for supper, Virgil?” Nora asked. “Daddy killed another deer last week, and it’s aged out enough to start eating it.”
I checked my wristwatch and then nodded. “Sure. I’d love to.”
A few moments later Nora’s daughter, Brenda, came into the room and crawled up into her grandfather’s lap. She was a miniature of her mother, with the same angular pixie’s face and ash blond hair. “Did you get a good nap, baby?” Nora asked her.
The little girl nodded and regarded me gravely for a few seconds, then said, “Hi, Virgil. Who’s the redheaded lady? You gonna marry her?”
* * *
After a supper of fried venison, baked sweet potatoes, corn bread, and winter turnip greens fresh from the garden, I reluctantly pulled myself together to leave. “I hate to burden you this way, Press,” I said as the four of us walked out on the front porch, “but I didn’t have much other choice.”
“Hush that talk, boy,” he snorted. “I’ve told you before that if it hadn’t been for your daddy I’d never have lived through that mess down in Cuba back in ninety-eight. Besides, she’ll be good company for Nora.”
I hugged Nora, shook hands with Press, and then kissed Madeline good-bye. “Whatever you do, stay here until I come back for you,” I told her.
“When will that be?”
“Soon. A week at the outside, I think. But you stay here even if it’s longer.”
As I drove away I watched the three of them dwindle in the rearview mirror. For the first time since the meeting in the barroom of the Weilbach, I began to relax.
CHAPTER TEN
It was a long, lonely drive, and I was glad to see the lights of Beaumont come into view. Even at night it was obvious the town was booming. The refineries were running full-bore around the clock helping meet the Allies’ need for gasoline and diesel, and two new shipyards had opened to build liberty boats. Skilled tradesmen of every kind were in demand, but welders and electricians could practically set their own terms. Despite the chronic shortage of building materials, new construction was springing up everywhere.
I checked into the Creole Hotel, where my family had always stayed in Beaumont. The Creole was nine stories of burgundy-colored brick and wrought-iron trim with a distinct Carribean flavor to it. The bellboy showed me to my room just before 1:00 A.M., and after a stiff shot of Old Charter and a hot shower I piled in bed and fell asleep almost instantly. At eight on the dot the hotel operator called as I’d requested the evening before. I ordered coffee and doughnuts from room service, then I gave her Jim Rutherford’s number in Port Neches and asked her to put me through.
Jim answered on the second ring and I quickly brought him up to date. “I wanted to turn her over to Charlie Grist, but I couldn’t find him,” I explained. “The only thing I could think to do was to hide her some place safe until I could try to sort this mess out.”
“You couldn’t find him because he’s down here on the coast,” Jim said.
“He is?” I asked, thoroughly puzzled. I knew that except for a short stint in Austin when he was a young man, Grist had spent his entire career as a Ranger on the border. “This is a ways out of his territory, isn’t it?” I asked.
“The whole state is his territory when Colonel Garrison wants it to be.”
He meant Homer Garrison, the head of the Department of Public Safety, the man who bossed both the Texas Rangers and the highway patrol.
“So the Colonel sent him, huh?” I asked.
“Yeah. There are things about this deal that you don’t know yet, Virgil.”
“Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?” I asked dryly.
His laugh was earthy and good-natured coming through the receiver. “I talked to Carmen last night, and she said for me to expect you today. Charlie is coming by about ten to have coffee. Why don’t you pull yourself together and get on over here?”
* * *
Rutherford lived with his daughter, Betty, in a neat, white frame house on a shady residential street in Port Neches, a small town about a dozen miles southeast of Beaumont. A few years earlier Betty’s husband had been killed in a shrimping accident, and Jim moved back to the coast to help her raise her two teenaged children. Betty worked part-time at the Beaumont library, but had it not been for Jim’s savings and his federal pension she would have been hard-pressed to get by.
He quickly answered my knock—a big, shambling man with white hair
and ruddy skin, comfortably dressed in wrinkled khakis and a shirt of green corduroy. “Glad to see you,” he said in a deceptively soft voice as he stuck out his hand.
The house had the same cozy, hooked-rug ambience as Press Rafferty’s place. In one corner of the living room a big gas heater burned against the damp cold of the day.
Rutherford went in the kitchen and put the pot on to perk. By the time the coffee was ready we heard a knock at the door. It was Grist. Sixty years old with a face that was weathered and seamed like Rio Grande mud, he stood about five-ten, with fleshy features and a protruding belly. That day he wore a pair of rumpled khaki pants and a leather jacket over a flannel shirt of dark blue checks. A Colt .45 auto, its grip safety tied down with a rawhide thong, protruded—sans holster—from the waistband of his trousers.
In all the years I’d known Charlie I’d never heard him laugh. Normally I never fully trust a man without a good sense of humor, but with Charlie I knew the reason why and I made an exception in his case. Three decades earlier he’d been living in Brownsville, down on the border, when a late-night call from an informant took him away from his young wife and three-year-old daughter. By happenstance, an escaped convict was on the prowl that evening, a psychopathic rapist named Lucas Redgrave who was already serving three back-to-back life sentences. When Grist returned home in the middle of the morning he found his house full of police. Both his wife and child were dead, and his wife had been raped and savagely mutilated.
The Rangers take care of their own; three days later Redgrave was literally shot to rags while trying to surrender after a lengthy chase through the Southern Pacific Railroad yards in San Antonio. But Grist never recovered. From that day forward he was a chronic depressive whose view of mankind was so bleak as to border on nihilism. My own feeling was that his sole sense of purpose in life was the occasional opportunity to eliminate the violent and the cruel of this world. I personally knew of at least a half dozen such individuals he’d accounted for over the years, but these were all official kills. I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn there were at least as many unofficial ones. Still, along the border he was respected by Anglos and Mexicans alike as a fair if often brutal lawman. Or as one cop friend of mine put it, Charlie disliked everybody equally regardless of race or religion. Mostly I think he disliked himself for not being home the night Lucas Redgrave came knocking at the door. That he’d only done what any conscientious lawman would have done in the same situation was meaningless to Charlie. He was guilty in the high court of his own mind, and that was the only verdict that mattered to him.
He shook hands with both of us, and seemed as glad to see me as he ever was to see anybody. Our host went in the kitchen and quickly returned with a battered tray that held three cups and an enameled percolator.
“What brings you to the coast, Charlie?” I asked casually.
“The Colonel told me to get down here and look into this DeMour thing.”
“I know who killed him,” I said.
“I think I do, too,” Grist said. “You tell me your story first.”
As we sipped our coffee I filled him in on my meeting with Madeline Kimbell at the Weilbach and the attack on the ranch. “She told me she saw DeMour strangled, and that one of the guys that did it was a hood named Johnny Arno,” I said. “She claimed she didn’t know the other guy’s name.”
“It was Paul Luchese,” Grist said. “Both of them were fished out of the swampy end of Lake Sabine a little before three this morning. A couple of fishermen checking their trotlines found them about midnight.”
“Damn!” I said.
“Right. Somebody’s cleaning up loose ends.”
“Salisbury?” I asked.
“Either him or Angelo Scorpino.”
“Exactly how does Salisbury tie in with Scorpino?” I asked.
“He’s Scorpino’s nephew.”
“Really? ‘Salisbury’ doesn’t sound Italian to me.”
“It ain’t. Scorpino’s sister married an English ship captain. But half-breed or not, little Marty is the apple of the old man’s eye and his heir apparent. The last couple of years he’d been overseeing the syndicate’s bookmaking business, but now he’s eager for bigger things.”
“Like the Maceo operation,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Do you have any idea why they killed DeMour?” I asked.
“I think so,” Charlie said with a nod. “From what DeMour’s friends say, he was planning to run for the state senate with the notion of forcing a legislative investigation into the rackets here in Jefferson County. Or more specifically, into the relationship between the rackets and local law enforcement, meaning Milam Walsh. He’d picked up some strong backing from several of the old families in Beaumont, and it looked like he stood a pretty good chance to get elected. With Salisbury and Scorpino poised to make their big move against the Maceos, they couldn’t stand that kind of attention. My guess is that they figured they’d just head him off at the pass.”
“I need to talk to Salisbury,” I said. “I’ve got to impress on him that he needs to leave my family alone. Besides, there’s no reason to bother the girl now that Arno and this Luchese guy are dead.”
“I want to get a look at him myself,” Grist said. “Why don’t we go by his place tonight? You and him can have your chat while I just size things up. And if by some chance he doesn’t want to talk to you, I bet I can make him change his mind.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said.
“I wish the governor would quit dragging his feet on this,” Grist said. “As soon as I get the go-ahead I’m going to boot Salisbury’s ass back across the Louisiana line.”
This announcement came as no great shock to me. Such things had happened before. The Italian crime syndicates had never really gained a strong foothold in Texas, largely because, aside from gambling, the mainstay of their income was labor union racketeering. The changing political climate brought on by the New Deal had forced the big Texas oil companies and chemical corporations and the great Brown & Root Construction Company grudgingly to accept unionization beginning in the midthirties. But they were determined that if they had to tolerate unions, they would be honest unions. Or at least unions free of Mob control. Using their enormous influence in Austin, they put pressure on the politicians, who in turn quietly encouraged the Texas Rangers and certain extremely tough local lawmen to give free rein to their darkest urges when dealing with out-of-state gangsters.
“How about Henry DeMour?” I asked.
Grist shook his head. “We’ll never be able to pin that on Salisbury, but he should have sense enough to go on back to New Orleans and count his blessings and stay the hell out of Texas. If he doesn’t…” He stopped speaking and shrugged again.
“One more body in the lake,” Rutherford said with a sigh.
Grist nodded thoughtfully. “I could see that happening. A man just never knows what fate has in store.”
“Hell of a way to do things, though,” Rutherford said testily.
“It’s either that or let them get the kind of hold they got on South Louisiana,” Grist countered.
“Yeah, but they had help down there,” Rutherford pointed out. “Huey Long was hand in glove with Scorpino from the day he started out in politics. He let Scorpino have free rein down around New Orleans, and the Mob gave him their political support.”
“We got politicians in this state who’d be willing to do the same thing,” Grist said. “Let somebody like Scorpino get his foot in the door, and before you know it we’d have the same situation.”
“Yeah, but—” Rutherford began.
I knew they’d yammer back and forth all day unless I sidetracked them. “Charlie, is anybody working with you on this?” I asked.
The old man nodded. “Yeah. A young fellow named Johnny Klevenhagen. He was a deputy sheriff in San Antonio until he made Ranger last year. He’s assigned to Company A up in Houston, but the Colonel wanted me to bring him along on this deal. You
ever met him?”
“Not that I recall,” I replied with a shake of my head.
“He’s a good lad. A hill country German from New Braunfels. One of that dark-haired breed of Krauts the old-timers used to call Black Dutch.”
“Where does Milam Walsh fit into all this?” Rutherford asked.
Grist shrugged. “I think he’s just waiting to collect his tribute from whoever comes out on top.”
“Ralls told me they were hired by a guy in New Orleans named Carlo Tresca,” I said.
“He’s one of Scorpino’s top boys,” Grist said. “He started out a few years ago as a street-level enforcer, but he’s come up the ladder quick.”
“I wonder why they didn’t send their own people,” Rutherford said.
“Because if Ralls and the other two had managed to kill the girl at your place, they would have wound up in the lake just like Arno and his buddy.”
“But weren’t Arno and Luchese part of Scorpino’s outfit?” I asked.
Grist nodded. “Yeah, but after the girl saw them, they became a link to Salisbury. From that point on they were expendable. Besides, they were queer as a pair of loaded dice, and those old-school dago mobsters don’t approve of that.”
“Ralls and his friends may have been hired by Tresca like Ralls claimed,” I said. “But you can bet that Salisbury had his finger in the deal somehow.”
“Sure,” Grist said. “He went to his uncle, and then his uncle told Tresca to hire them. Layers of insulation between the top boys and the act itself.”
“Okay, when do we see Salisbury?” I asked him.
“I’m told that he’s usually at the Grotto by nine. Why don’t we meet here at Jim’s house at 8:30?”
“Good enough,” I said. “What are you doing until then?”
“I got a few people to see. How about you?”
“I’m thinking maybe I’ll go over to Galveston and poke around a little. Maybe drop in on Sam Maceo.”
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