San Carlos was up higher, in pine country. The earth was red, smoke from a smelter defaced the sky, copper tailings the land.
2100 Tamarisk Drive turned out to be a clutch of low brick buildings secluded in pines at the edge of town. I parked. Down the street, the patrol car parked. I got out, noted a copper name plate at the gate: “Tamarisk—State of New Mexico.” Then I noted additionally that the place was fenced in with high chain-link and that every damned window in every damned building was screened with heavy wire mesh. Bells rang.
I had to lean against the car.
CRACKER CITY.
BANANALAND.
When I recovered I pressed a button, the gate opened, and I was presently inside an administrative office signing a visitors’ register and talking with a psychology Ph.D. who said yes, Tamarisk was a mental institution funded by fees from affluent relatives of the residents but operated by the state. I said I wanted to see Mrs. Charles S. Vaught Jr. and she said why. I had to go through the entire off-again-on-again-son-in-law routine.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“When she was first admitted, we used the term ‘dementia praecox.’ Now, to be more exact, it’s ‘schizophrenia.’ To simplify, let’s just say she—she has difficulty coping with reality.”
“How long has she been in?”
She referred to a card. “Since 1947.”
“My God.”
“It is a long time.”
“Does her husband, Judge Vaught, visit her?”
“No.”
“What about her daughter, Tyler?”
“No.”
“My God.”
“Of course, she might not know them anyway.”
“Are you saying she hasn’t had a visitor in thirty years?”
“Well, no. There was one, week before last.” The Ph.D. glanced again at the card. “A man from New York City. Mr. Max Sansom.”
“Wouldn’t you know.” I thought a minute. “Has she ever been out of here?”
The card again. “Twice. We don’t call them ‘escapes,’ just ‘unauthorized absences.’ We merely sigh and notify the police, who find them and return them, usually rather soon.”
She smiled indulgence. “The fence is high, but Helene’s a strong, spirited woman. The last time, two years ago, they located her in Santa Fe, at the summer opera, enjoying the second act of Traviata.”
She sent me into a patio with a bench under a pepper tree and a fountain and, on its rim, a pottery turtle who reminded me of Chata, my Acapulco turtle. In a short while I was face to face with Mrs. Charles S. Vaught Jr. She wore a light blue sort of smock, evidently the uniform at Tamarisk. We were alone. I introduced myself and invited her to sit with me on the bench and hemmed and hawed about Tyler and marriage and divorce and remarriage.
“How is my dear girl?”
“Fine.”
“Is she beautiful?”
“Very.”
She smiled her pleasure, and I thought there’s nothing wrong with her, she’s sharp as a tack, what the hell is she doing here? “I understand you had a visitor recently, Mrs. Vaught. A man named Max Sansom.”
“What I loved most,” she replied, “was Chautauqua.”
“Chautauqua?”
“They played Harding every spring, in a huge tent.”
I almost fell off the bench.
“Your name is Butters?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Charley and I eloped, you know.”
BONKERS.
“We went to Albuquerque. I was twenty-three and Charley twenty-four. Then we had to drive home and face the music—tell his father. You see, my father killed three men. How he hated my father! And so of course he hated me.”
“Who hated you?”
“Why, Charley’s father. The old judge.”
“Why?”
“Because of the trials.”
“Did Max Sansom ask you about the trials?”
“I can remember one show, every attraction. There were the Kaffir Boys from Africa. They chanted and danced to drums.”
She had Tyler’s rare gray eyes. The difference was that after a moment or two of clarity, they darkened, clouded. She had Tyler’s posture, too. Proud and free. Her hair was white, though shampooed and set, her face lined, though cared for, but she could once have been as by God beautiful as her daughter.
“Do you love her?”
“I really do, Mrs. Vaught.”
“And the New York Marine Band. And the Folly Girls–skits and dramatic recitations—delightful! And a marvelous magician with white doves.”
“Max Sansom is dead, Mrs. Vaught. He was killed in a hit-and-run accident near Harding.”
“What did you say your name is?”
“Butters. Jimmie Butters.”
“That’s how my mother died—in an accident. The horse bolted, right on Gold Street, and the buggy crashed. She was thrown into a watering trough.”
“How awful. Can you tell me anything about the two trials, Mrs. Vaught? The one of your father, after the shoot-out, and the one of the four Mexicans after the raid on Columbus?”
She reflected, looking at the fountain and the turtle. “We came into his house—he lived alone because Charley’s mother was long dead. We told him we’d been married, and asked his blessing. He sat there for a time—I can see that terrible face to this day. Finally he asked us if the marriage had been consummated. We said yes. He shook his head. Charley, he said, I can’t believe I sired you. You are a cipher—have always been, always will be. I don’t know how you had the spunk to defy me, to marry the daughter of a drunk and a killer. It would have been better, my dear, he said to me, if you had died on Gold Street, when your mother did. You see, Mr. Butters, my father disappeared after the Villista trial—my mother’s father raised me. Vanished. Oh, there were rumors for years —that he was south of the border, that he was a sheriff in Utah, so on. But I never saw him again. My blessing? No, the old judge said, I will give you my verdict. You will leave my house now, and never enter it again. When you appear before me, Charley, I will treat you as impartially as I would any officer of the court. But I will never in my lifetime acknowledge the daughter of Buell Wood to be my daughter, and I will never again acknowledge you, Charley, to be my son. And then they had Mawson’s Moving Pictures, an entire evening of them. Scenes of Mr. Peary’s expedition to the North Pole. Whales and walruses and Eskimos. So informative. What nights those were, at the Chautauqua. We would go home afterward and be so stimulated we couldn’t sleep. We’d sit on our front porches and drink lemonade and sing lovely old songs. I can hear the voices yet, up and down the dark streets, under the mulberry trees.”
She paused. There had been nothing stagey about her recital. She might have been enumerating the week’s menus at Tamarisk.
“He stood then. I remember I was wearing a new cashmere sweater and skirt and spectator pumps—that was 1933. Black-and-white spectators. Go to your rented house now, he said to us. Take off your clothes and go to bed. I doubt if Charley knows what to do in bed yet, but you can teach him, my dear. Fuck. See what you get. I doubt you will get anything—I pray in fact you do not—a weakling and the bitch of a killer. But try. Enjoy yourselves. See what you get. Those were his exact words.”
She folded her hands. I became aware of the wind, a small incessant wind in the pepper tree above us. Suddenly I had to leave her, urgently, just as I had needed to bust the hell out of her husband’s chambers that morning.
“I must go, Mrs. Vaught. Thank you so much for talking with me. It’s been just great to meet Tyler’s mother.”
We stood together. She took my arm. “I like you,” she said. “I trust you. I didn’t trust the other one.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Did Tyler ask you to come to Harding?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To find out what happened to Max Sansom.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“
Why yes, what else?”
Helene Vaught smiled again. “You are a child. That’s why I trust you.”
Leaving 2100 Tamarisk Drive I was picked up again by the patrol car which had waited down the block. He tailed me to the Maria de la Luz County line, dropped off, and I was at once picked up by another car. When I slowed, he slowed. To call his bluff, as we neared Harding I put the Rolls up to sixty. After a mile he turned on his red lights and siren, pulled alongside, motioned me over. I parked. He got out of a Harding County Sheriffs Department car, came back to me in his big hat and boots. He said I’d exceeded the limit and I said of course, deliberately, because I wanted a chat with him. He asked for my license, and I said what for, he knew goddamned well who I was, which was why I’d been followed all the way to San Carlos and back.
He held out his hand. “License.”
I gave it to him. He began writing a ticket.
“I demand to know why I’ve been followed.”
“What kinda rod is this?”
“This rod happens to be a 1958 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith two-door saloon. ‘Wraith’ is spelled W-r-a-i-t-h. I have been subjected to police harassment, and—” “Local address?”
“You know that, too. If you don’t, guess.”
“Ramada Inn.” He wrote it down. “What room?”
“Guess.”
“Sure, 112. Hey, how about that?”
“How about what?”
“Same room.”
“Same as whose?”
“Guess, buddy.”
“Why in hell didn’t you tell me she’s nuttier than a fruitcake? Why didn’t you say he’s a judge? She’s been in a happy academy up in San Carlos for thirty years, for God’s sake! And you’ve never once visited her and neither has he! Shame!”
I was on long-distance that night to Tyler, who was staying in my apartment. I’d called her twice before, from someplace in Ohio and from Joplin, Missouri.
“Jimmie, where are you?”
“Harding. Ramada Inn. The same damned room as our mutual dead friend Max—a sweet coincidence.”
“It’s no coincidence. Someone’s trying to tell you something.”
“I wish you had.”
“How are you, darling?”
“Peachy keen. I got a speeding ticket. Tyler, your good bed-buddy Sansom was hit by a slow-moving car probably drunk—I mean Max—and pulled under it and dragged and had his face scraped off and about every bone in his body broken. I talked to the county medical examiner and read the official report. Anything else is your macabre imagination—your father said so. So I’ve driven two thousand miles and shot a week for zilch and I’ve got a deadline coming up on the Frisby-Africa book. I’ll read the trial transcripts in the morning and be on my merry way by noon. Four days from tomorrow you can clamp me to your bountiful bosom and we’ll have our second honeymoon. Or our third. Then we’ll get married. Oh—try Bloomingdale’s for the trousseau.”
“But Jimmie, you’re not finished! You haven’t—”
“Yes I am, practically. This case is closed. I love you. And you better be true to me, Tyler, till I get there. Because listen, if you aren’t, if I find you’ve taken off again with some schmuck, there’s a librarian in El Paso named Annie Snackenberg I could buy a ranch and settle down and raise cattle and kids with. Say, do I have any important mail?”
“I love you, too. But haven’t you found out anything?”
“Sure I have. Your mother was mad for Chautauqua when she was young and your grandfather Vaught had a hernia when she and your father eloped and she didn’t trust Maxie when he dropped in on her but she trusts me and Buell Wood did a terrific vanishing act after the trial in 1916. Neither hide nor hair, ever again. Oh yes, a small item. After I talked to the medical examiner, he got on the phone fast to somebody called Pingo. Who’s that?”
“Pingo Chavez.” I could hear her thinking. “He phoned Pingo?”
“Who’s he?”
“The county sheriff.”
“Oh. What kind of a name is ‘Pingo’?”
“In Mexican, ‘Little Devil.’”
“Well, I’ll tete-a-tete with him, too.”
“No. Don’t.”
“Why not?”
She hesitated. “He’s dangerous, Jimmie. If anyone murdered Max, it was Pingo.”
“Come on, Tyler. A sheriff?”
“I warn you, Jimmie, don’t. Please.”
“The Sam Spade of the Southwest does not scare. I’ll take him by his tin star and shake him till he tears up my speeding ticket.”
To celebrate getting the hell out of Harding and safely back back to the arms of my blessed damsel I had some drinks and overslept the next morning and by the time I dragged into the courthouse it was almost noon. And when I asked Mrs. Helder, Clerk of the Court, if I might read the transcripts of the two trials, that of Buell Wood for the killing of three men in 1910 and that of the four Villistas after the Columbus raid in 1916, she pulled a long, archival face.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Butters. But we don’t seem to have them.”
“Don’t seem to–”
“No. They’re missing.”
“They re what?”
“Missing.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, sir. I’m sorry.”
“But. But when I asked Judge Vaught if I could see them, he said certainly. He also said he assumed the other gent from New York, the late Max Sansom, had read them.”
“It must have slipped his mind.”
Slipped his mind my ASS I almost said. Instead: “Did Sansom ask for them, as I have?”
“Yes. And I told him, as I have you.”
“What did he say?”
“I can’t repeat it.”
“I’ll bet. But why would they be gone?”
“I haven’t any idea. I suppose, in those days, they weren’t as careful about keeping records. It’s not unlikely some would be mislaid.”
“Those two it is.” I scowled. “Do you mind, Mrs. Helder, if I see for myself?”
She did. She bit a lip. “Not at all, they’re public documents. Come with me.”
She took me down to the first floor, then into the basement, then to a gloomy room with a small window high and to the south, switched on a light. The walls were massed with large flat boxes of gray cardboard, two of which she lifted from a shelf, laid on a table. “Here they are—1910 and 1916. Everything we have, in chronological order by date and docket. You don’t intend to go through everything in them?”
“I do.” I pulled out a chair, sat down at the table. “Incidentally, Mrs. Helder—is this room locked?”
“Why no. Why would anyone want—” She bit again, either her lip or her tongue.
“Yes, why?” I said.
I covered everything in both boxes, every yellowed territorial piece of paper right down to pages of claims on the court by then-sheriffs for wages of deputies and hires of wagons for transport of prisoners and costs of lumber for the erection of gallows. I invested three full hours because one, Sansom wouldn’t have—he was a fast-buck operator whatever he did, and I wasn’t. And because two, the fact that the transcripts were conspicuous by their absence was the first solid indication I had that those trials had been enormously important to someone other than Tyler Vaught, either at the time or since. Important enough to steal and doubtless destroy the transcripts thereof. Which in itself was probably some kind of crime. And because three, the more paper I shuffled, the more ticked-off I became because four, I couldn’t find one damned pertinent word. Nada.
I put the boxes back in shape and on the shelf and rode an elevator of irritation to the second floor again, there to confront somebody official. The wide courtroom doors were open, however, and I stepped in to see it and compose myself.
I took a seat in one of the spectator pews at the rear and looked round. Everything was antique and oaken and brassy—paneling, globe chandeliers, jury box, carpeting, judge’s bench, witness stand, legal eagles’ tables
and chairs, rails dividing talkers and gawkers. And believe it or not, SPITTOONS. The American flag was tattered, as was that of the state of New Mexico. Behind the bench were lithographs of Blackstone and Marshall, and between them, in the place of honor, an oil portrait of some judge antecedent to the present.
Gradually the room began to resonate for me. Here one of Tyler’s grandfathers had been prosecuted for multiple murders by the other, and been acquitted. Here, six years later, four Mexicanos had been prosecuted on a similar charge by one of her grandfathers, defended by the other, and been acquitted. Only to be set free that night, hunted down, and surely slaughtered before they could reach real freedom. It was trite to think that time had stood still here. But a writer could hear the pleas to juries, could smell the adversary sweat, could taste the plug tobacco, could see in shadowed corners a spectral cast of clerks and bailiffs, deputies and condemned. Old hatreds and old fears. Withered hopes and decomposed appeals. This room preserved it all somehow, just as cardboard boxes in the basement housed the brittle bones of what had happened here. With two exceptions. Sixty-seven and sixty-one years ago. Two trials the most memorable of any in the history of the courthouse.
I reviewed my two days in Harding. Stacking BB’s. Riding Max Sansom’s futile merry-go-round. The only thing I had done that he hadn’t was read his Accidental Death Report. Talking to Pingo Chavez and dying were the only things he had done that I hadn’t. Yet. And since Tyler had warned that fooling around with the former might damned well result in the latter, I would not. I would hot-foot it back to the Ramada right now, pack up, and bye-bye blues, adios, amigos.
“That portrait.”
I jumped a mile.
“That portrait behind the bench is of my father, the first Judge Vaught. Her grandfather.”
It was his son, who had flanked me from out of an adjoining room.
“Sorry if I startled you, Mr. Butters. He presided over the Third Judicial District for thirty years. He passed away in 1963. He was ninety-one years old.”
I had a closer inspection of the oil. The robes were black, the hair gray. But the face, the face. A hatchet. And the eyes, the eyes. On fire. This was the man twice defeated in this room by Buell Wood, whom he considered a drunk and a killer. The man who, after their elopement, had refused to acknowledge Helene, his antagonist’s daughter, as his daughter-in-law, and his own son as his son. He gave me goosebumps.
skeletons Page 5