She rose from the table and went over to the cabinet and pulled out one of the old kerosene lamps and struck a match and touched it to its wick. Then she fumbled around getting the shade back on the lamp while I lived through the most nerve-racking moments of my life. To distract Walsh and his two henchmen I began babbling. About what I don’t remember to this day, but all the while I was trying desperately to keep my eyes glued to his face and not give the whole thing away by glancing over his shoulder where Alonzo had just emerged, specter-like, from the kitchen closet’s dark interior. The old man moved soundlessly in his sock feet, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight, his weathered face as serene as the face of a nun at her prayers, while in his hand he clutched the same ancient, stag-handled knife with which he’d punctured the bull’s jugular so many years before.
He was almost within striking distance when something—perhaps some small noise—gave him away. Stubb’s eyes widened, and Dunning jerked his head around to look behind him. But before he could raise the alarm I pulled my silenced .32 automatic from where it rested on a little shelf I’d built under the table and quickly shot him twice in the right temple. He didn’t topple over as I’d expected. Instead his body went rigid and began to quiver and twitch, his feet beating a dancelike tattoo on the floor while his hands jerked and grabbed spasmodically at the tablecloth. Walsh turned to gaze stupidly at his now-defunct deputy, but by then Alonzo was on him and had one iron-hard old hand buried in his carefully combed hair. Quickly he jerked the man’s head back so that his eyes stared upward at the ceiling. Then the knife flashed silver in the soft glow of the lamplight, and a moment later Walsh’s exposed throat lay gaping open from one side to the other.
All at once the room seemed full of blood. Dunning crashed to the floor, a crimson stream spurting from the side of his head. Martindale finally reacted and began to grope for his pistol. I pointed the .32 at his face and pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t make a sound. I looked down and saw that the cartridge casing from my second shot had hung in the gun’s ejection port. I was feverishly trying to pull back the slide to clear the jam when my aunt raised her arms above her head, the old meat ax that had resided for years unused in the cabinet now clutched tightly in her hands. Where she’d hidden it that day, I don’t know, but her face was the face of an avenging angel as she brought it down with all her might and buried its blade to the hilt in the top of Stubb Martindale’s head.
For what must have been at least a couple of seconds he sat motionless, staring at me with eyes that were sad beyond knowing, and for one dreadful moment I felt a sharp stab of pity for him deep in my heart. Then he slapped both hands down on the table and made one abortive effort to rise before he collapsed beside his chair and lay there jerking and snorting like a hog in heat.
I lunged to my feet. Alonzo had Walsh pinned to the floor, where he held him for the short time it took him to become unconscious. Nolan soon quit moving, but Martindale continued to quiver and twitch for what must have been a full minute.
Then it was all over, and the deep silence of the winter twilight descended on the room. Soundlessly, as though they were materializing from the very air itself, the other old men appeared beside us in their sock feet, their pistols in their hands. No one said anything. We all stood frozen in a moment that seemed to stretch outward into eternity. Finally I came to my senses and hobbled over to the cabinet and pulled out a fifth of bourbon. I took a long pull and handed it to Alonzo, who drank and passed it on. With trembling hands I lighted a Chesterfield and offered the rest of the pack to the others. After Pablo had drunk, he pointed down at the three lifeless bodies on the floor, his single eye shining bright and baleful in the dim light of the kerosene lamp. “Santa Muerte will feast tonight,” he said softly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
To many people South Texas presents a bleak and unforgiving landscape. Most of the trees are stunted and gnarled, and in places the undergrowth forms an impenetrable barrier against all but the most determined of men and beasts. I hadn’t exaggerated when I told Madeline that anything out in the brush that didn’t bite you would sting you or stick you. Rattlesnakes and scorpions abound, and the iron-hard spikes of the blackthorn bush are everywhere. Yet it has its own rough charm. The wildflowers seem brighter there than anywhere else, perhaps because you instinctively realize that their fragile splendor is the only color that ever comes to an otherwise drab and colorless land. And in the spring of 1943 they were magnificent, though I can’t swear they were really better than in other years. I know that I took more pleasure in them than I ever had before. Coming within an inch of being murdered will do that to you.
My foot had to be rebroken in the surgery of the San Antonio hospital, and it was a long time healing. It was the middle of summer before I could walk without a limp. In the intervening months I rested and read a great many books and often took the reins of the old buggy beside Tía Carmen as we made our daily inspection tours of the ranch. The price of beef skyrocketed, just as I’d predicted. When all the bills were paid after roundup, the books showed that 1942 had been La Rosa’s best year in over half a century.
Some nights as I lay in my bed in the dark, my mind wandered back to that late afternoon when Walsh and his two goons came to La Rosa with their hard eyes and their big guns. If I had it to do all over again, I would slaughter them the minute they stepped out of their car. But until that moment I’d had some lingering uncertainty in my mind. I’d thought that Walsh might be content to take the journal and call it quits. But when I saw Stubb Martindale with them, my doubts faded away. Walsh and Nolan were already partners in crime, each with enough on the other to send him to the chair, and they had to stand or fall together. But they had no real hold on Martindale beyond his participation in my abduction, something they could have claimed was a legal arrest. This made him both dangerous and expendable.
When we searched the bodies we found the Colt .38 Super they’d taken from me down in Beaumont. It was in Nolan’s overcoat, and I knew then what they’d had in mind. They intended to murder my aunt and me, and then one of them would have shot Martindale with my gun and arranged things to look as though he and I had killed each other in a shootout that had its roots in our mutual hatred from years past. I have no idea what they’d planned to do if their gunplay brought the attention of the vaqueros. But if Milam Walsh was anything, he was a skilled improviser, and he had brass. No doubt he’d thought he could pull it off.
The bodies went into deep pools in the Rio Grande, weighted down with old chains and stripped of anything that could identify them. I knew that before a week passed the turtles and the catfish would do their work. Two of the old men took the John Deere tractor far out into brush and bored three deep holes with the auger. Into these holes went the men’s clothes and rings and watches and wallets. Then they filled the holes, and within a few days even they would have found it impossible to return to the exact spot. Shortly after midnight that same evening a heavy car with Mexican license plates rolled up to the international bridge at Laredo. At the wheel sat a well-dressed but tired-looking man of middle age who carried documents that identified him as a medical doctor from Sonora. Traffic was light and the guards were tired. After waving him across with no more than a cursory inspection of his papers, they stood watching sleepily as Milam Walsh’s fancy Packard vanished forever into the bowels of Old Mexico.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Late in January, Charlie Grist came calling. It was a warm day, and Aunt Carmen and Alonzo were out in the buggy. I brought the coffeepot out on the front porch, and he and I sat in tall-backed rockers and drank strong coffee and talked about nothing in particular until at last he said, “Carlo Tresca’s dead.”
“That was to be expected, I suppose,” I said. “The attack on the ranch was a complete botch, and that kind of failure is a capital offense among those people.”
“What you probably didn’t expect is that they killed Marty Salisbury, too.”
“What?” I a
sked, utterly dumfounded.
“You heard me. Salisbury’s dead. They put a forty-five bullet in the back of his head and dumped him in Lake Pontchartrain.”
“And you think Scorpino had it done?”
Grist nodded. “I know he did.”
“But—”
“There’s been a power struggle going on inside the New Orleans Mob, and Salisbury was up to his neck in it. Once Galveston and Beaumont were in the fold, he and Tresca planned to do away with old Scorpino, and probably Gracchi as well. If they’d been successful, Tresca would have set himself up as the kingpin. Then with Salisbury running the Texas operation, they would have controlled all the coastal rackets from Galveston to New Orleans. A few of the other young Turks in the outfit were involved, too.” He grinned. “They tell me that there’s a lot of dead men floating around in the lakes and canals down there.”
“Imagine blood kin doing one another that way,” I said in wonder, not doubting that it was true, but still finding it difficult to accept. There is a point at which the mind rebels, a point where we learn things we don’t want to know about our fellow man, and by inference, about ourselves.
“Beats anything, doesn’t it?” Grist said. “They damn sure named old Angelo right.”
“How’s that?”
“The Scorpion Angel. Scorpions eat their own young if they get the chance.”
I shuddered. “But how did you find all this out? Who was your informant?”
“You’d never guess. Not in a million years.”
“No, I probably wouldn’t,” I said. “The whole thing has me baffled.”
“Gracchi.”
“You’ve got to be joking!” I almost yelled.
He shook his head.
“But why?”
“He was real open with me because he wanted me to know that all the problems had been taken care of. Of course, he didn’t actually tell me they had killed Salisbury and Tresca, not in so many words, at least. But he let me have the rest of it in a roundabout way.”
We sat and rocked and sipped at our coffee for a couple of minutes while I tried to digest what I’d just heard. At last Grist broke the silence. “And I guess you read in the papers that Milam Walsh has disappeared,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been following the story pretty closely.”
“What you don’t know is that the attorney general’s office down in Austin was fixing to move on him pretty soon when he up and vanished. And that the IRS was looking into his finances, too.”
“I’m not surprised. He’d gotten too blatant.”
“His wife’s squealing like a stuck pig. He left her without much cash in the bank, and on top of that she claims that he had a young woman over in Lake Charles. Seems he’s been squirreling money somewhere overseas, and now she thinks him and this Louisiana gal have run off together. She’s going to court to try to get some of his other assets freed up so she can support herself.”
“Well, Charlie, if he thought the attorney general and the Feds were about to jump him he may very well have bolted.”
He nodded and sipped at his coffee, his hard old eyes regarding me thoughtfully over the rim of his cup. “I could buy that except for one thing,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“His chief deputy is missing, too. Nolan Dunning. You remember him, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And Walsh had just hired a new deputy named Stubb Martindale who folks say came from down here in Matador County. He’s vanished, too.”
“But what does all this have to do with me?”
He sighed a long, tired sigh. “You see, I’m the one the governor picked to investigate the whole thing. He thinks there needs to be some official disposition in the matter, considering that Walsh was an important county official, even if he was a crooked son of a bitch. And since you—”
“So what do you want to do?” I asked, cutting him off. “Personally, I mean.”
He leaned back in his chair and sighed once more. “Given half a chance I’d go along with the notion that Walsh flew the coop,” he said speculatively. “It’s this business with the deputies that holds me back.”
I nodded and stared off into the yard for a while, saying nothing, just thinking. Then I asked, “Would you feel more comfortable with that conclusion if you had evidence that Walsh and Dunning were involved in murder?”
“That bad, huh? I knew Walsh was a thief, but—”
“Oh, he was a lot more than that,” I said.
“Who did they kill?”
“Henry DeMour.
“But Salisbury—”
I shook my head. “Walsh just used him and his goons to get it done.”
I got to my feet and retrieved the journal from the safe in the office. Coming back out on the porch I opened it to the pertinent pages and handed it to him and said, “Henry DeMour’s diary.”
He read quickly. When he’d finished, he turned and fixed me with his eyes and asked, “Virgil, are you absolutely certain that DeMour wrote this? It’s not a forgery?”
“It’s his, Charlie. His best friend told me about it, and his wife gave it to me.”
“But why—”
“Because it was Walsh who was behind Scorpino’s move into Texas in the first place.”
He looked at me for a moment, his eyes big with incredulity. “You’re not joking, are you?”
I shook my head and smiled. “Not at all. He convinced Scorpino that they could pull it off. With his help, of course.”
“I guess that must be the bad advice Gracchi was talking about when we met with him.”
“Exactly,” I said. “But of course, what Walsh really wanted was to use Scorpino and Salisbury to get rid of the Maceos. After which he’d use DeMour to get the governor to have the Rangers kick Salisbury’s butt out of Texas, just like you did anyway. Then he’d be the kingpin.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. If that don’t beat all. He’s certainly not the only sheriff to take bribes in this state, but to think—”
“Right,” I said. “It’s a first of sorts. The man planned on a grand scale. You’ll have to give him that.”
“So this is why DeMour was killed?”
“Not the diary, exactly. Walsh didn’t know about it until after DeMour was dead or he probably wouldn’t have had him killed. See, it was Walsh’s visit that got DeMour on his reform tangent, and that’s what did him in. Walsh misread the man completely. He thought he could force DeMour to help him because the guy was having an affair with a younger woman.”
“Really?” Grist asked in surprise. “You don’t happen to know who she was, do you?”
I nodded and gave him a smile that was full of irony. “Madeline Kimbell,” I said.
His mouth fell open and he stared at me in shock. “Damn,” he said at last.
“They used Madeline to lure DeMour out to that parking lot behind the Snake Eyes Club where Arno and Luchese killed him. You see, it was Dunning who got her to do it. He told her a big story about a business deal they had for DeMour, and he promised her that if she’d get DeMour to come out there, he’d leave her alone for good.”
“How did you find this out?”
“From Alma Copeland, her best friend.”
“So Madeline was lying about the reason Dunning was after her when you met her out in San Gabriel, right?”
“Yeah. I think Dunning really intended to let her go, but Arno and Luchese jumped the gun and killed DeMour right there in the parking lot in front of her. From that point on she was a terminal liability to Dunning. However much he may have cared about her, he cared more about his own hide, and her testimony was his ticket to the electric chair.”
“What a mess,” he said, shaking his head sadly.
“Yes, but what really caused Walsh to bolt wasn’t the diary by itself, and that’s why I believe Nolan went with him. Think about it for a minute. Walsh had to either take the kid along or kill him, because Nolan had enough on him
to hang him.”
“How about Martindale?”
“Stubb? Oh, he’s a fly-by-nighter anyway,” I said casually. “He probably just flitted off somewhere when Walsh flew the coop.”
“I wonder why DeMour didn’t just go ahead and file attempted bribery charges on Walsh.”
“You know the old saw about not getting into a pissing contest with a skunk? Well, it just wasn’t Henry DeMour’s style to make public accusations and engage in that kind of open controversy. He wanted to do it the right way, through a senate investigation. His wife said he’d been disgusted with the corruption in Jefferson County for years, but I think that when Walsh tried to drag him into it he felt so insulted that he decided to make it a personal project to clean things up.”
“But if it wasn’t the journal that made the two of them run, what was it?”
I grinned at him. “They kidnapped me the night Mrs. DeMour gave the damn thing to me.”
I almost laughed then. The old man opened his mouth and closed it about four times, utterly shocked, unable to decide what he wanted to say. At last he managed to croak out, “Kidnapped you?”
“Yeah. They’d heard about the journal and got somebody to break into DeMour’s house looking for it even before I went to Mrs. DeMour. But it was in a hidden safe in his library and the burglar couldn’t get to it. After that they figured out that she must have given it to me because I took her to the depot and put her on a train to Savannah. You see, Walsh had one of his detectives following me ever since the night you ran Salisbury out of the state.”
“Why?”
“Why not? After all, I’d been with Madeline Kimbell for three days and he didn’t know but what she’d told me the whole story. He needed to know what I was up to.”
“But if they grabbed you, why didn’t they get the diary?”
I gave him a twisted smile. “I botched a lot of things on this deal, Charlie, but I didn’t botch the diary. I knew the minute I read those pages I had to get it out of my hands. So I mailed it to my banker here in town with instructions for him to hold it in the vault for me. I didn’t think even Milam Walsh would be crazy enough to tamper with the United States mail. Of course I didn’t tell them that, but they wanted it badly enough to take me out in the woods to beat it out of me, after which they intended to kill me. I managed to get away from them, but I broke my foot in the process. And that’s the story.”
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