I squawked like a parrot,
“That’s right,’ said Henry Snackenberg. “Crossworth flew from New York to Harding four years ago. On the suggestion of Miss Vaught, I suppose. Not a trace of him since.”
It was too heavy for me to handle. Philip Crossworth. Whoever he was and whatever he was to Tyler. The peaceful town of Harding, New Mexico, was turning out to be a bottomless pit.
“Then, two weeks ago, another writer,” Snackenberg resumed. “Max Sansom, here probably for the same purpose. And three days later—gone. Written off as a victim of hit-and-run.”
“Well, the hell he was.” If he could one-up me, I could one-up him. “For your information, Sansom was tied under a car and dragged to death to make it look like hit-and-run. Everybody over there claims it was—I read the report of the county medical examiner—but it wasn’t. I know because that’s why I had to check into the Hotel Dieu last night. They popped me over the head and tied me under a car and told me to get out of town—how many Western flicks have you heard that line in?—then dragged me just long enough to peel my chest like a peach. And ruin some of the best-looking clothes ever seen in these primitive parts.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“That’s my biz. Anyway, that’s how Sansom demised. They took it easy with me, but they pulled him to a pulp. He was murdered. Tyler said he was and she was right.”
He leaned forward. “One problem. If he was murdered, where’s the body?”
“Buried. The Bronx or somewhere.”
“Is it?”
“Now wait a minute. Of course it is. I saw it come off the plane at Kennedy in a coffin in a wooden box.”
“Did you open the coffin?”
“Why should—” I stopped.
“We can move fast when we need to, Mr. Butters. We cooperate with other agencies, too, federal, state, and local, and they with us. Since Annie told me four nights ago she’d met a writer on his way to Harding to look into the death of Max Sansom, we’ve moved very fast. Sansom was buried by then, all right, but we got a New York court order to exhume.”
I was staring at him again.
“We dug it up. The coffin you went out to Kennedy to take delivery of was empty. Except for two one-hundred-pound sacks of sand.”
BUELL WOOD.
TRANSCRIPTS.
PHILIP CROSSWORTH.
MAX SANSOM.
I thought I was going back into shock. I had to get out of that bed, to stand on my feet, to look out a window at real things like people and cars and trees. But when I stood, in a kind of white smock which tied in the back, I was dizzy, and might have keeled over had Snackenberg not unfolded out of his chair in a flash and put an arm around my shoulders.
“Window,” I said.
He helped me to it. I planted my hands on the sill and looked my fill.
He removed his arm, and after a time said, “You were lucky, Mr. Butters. I’m sure Crossworth was killed and now you’re sure Sansom was. All you’re out is some skin, but at least you lived to tell the story. I wish you would.”
“Why did you dig Sansom up? How did you find out about Crossworth and Tyler?”
“That’s my story.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“I asked you first.”
“Goddammit, Snackenberg, you tell me.”
“If I do, will you?”
“Probably. I like telling stories. It’s how I make my living.”
“I know.”
Just then a nurse came in with a tray. I got back in bed, this time on my own, adjusted my table before me. Snackenberg delayed till she was gone.
“All right. I head an SIU, a Special Investigative Unit. For some years now the biggest job of the Border Patrol has been to try to slow down—we can’t stop it because Congress won’t fund us and this loco amnesty idea has only made things a damnsight worse—to slow the flow of illegal aliens over the line into the U.S. We get fourteen thousand a week into Texas alone. That’s a week. Nationally, it’s taking on the proportions of a disaster.” They had given me tea and toast, when what I really needed was a rare steak and a Caesar salad preceded by a double mart, very dry, with an obese olive. “There are eight million illegals in the country now, minimum, and they come in a million more a year. We catch only one out of ten. If we deport him, chances are he’ll be right back. It would be one thing if they were all agricultural—stoop labor, fruit and produce pickers, so on—but lately we’re getting skilled workers—carpenters, masons, meatcutters, mechanics, and the like—and they hurt. Our estimate is, if we could get rid of them, three million jobs would open up for Americans overnight.” I played with the tea bag and hot water and attacked the toast and let the crumbs fall where they might. “A big business has developed bringing in these skilled people—smuggling them in, providing them with papers, hauling them to big cities like Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Detroit, Kansas City. They’re charged up to a thousand a head for the ride, which they pay back in installments out of their wages. Or unless they bring in enough narcotics to cover the cost. They do that, too. The traffic is organized now—the people running it operate on both sides of the border. South of it they recruit—they even use commercials on Mexican radio stations. North of it they transport and handle the paper work and collections. As I said, it’s big business, Americans finance it and run it, and it’s very lucrative. We cracked a ring operating out of Baja into LA last year—it was called ‘Las Huertas,’ ‘The Blondes’—and their records showed they were shipping in more than two thousand skilled every twelve months and raking in nearly two million dollars from it.” He knew I wasn’t listening, but he carried on, doing his duty, the good civil servant earning his pay and perks while I slurped tea and polished off the toast. He was a little too cowboy for my tastes, but I was beginning to like old Henry Snackenberg despite the fact that he had roped and branded Annie before I could lay a lasso on her. He was simple and shambling and drawly and I changed my mind about him. James Stewart, not John Wayne. “To make the story short, for the last two years we’ve been after another operation, as big or bigger than The Blondes. We know its point of entry is around here, near El Paso, because we’ve tracked down a lot of the people brought in by it to Chicago and Denver and LA. Interrogated them. But not got much out of them. Too scared. We’ve worked our tails off, tried everything, but—”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
He was unperturbed “Well, it’s been slower than pee through a boot. And after you’ve tried everything and nothing works, you pray. You wait for a break. Some incident, something unusual in the sector.”
Two male orderlies entered lugging my luggage. I thanked them, pushed my tray away, got out of bed, found myself steady on my pins, opened the bags, began going through my gear.
“I saw in the newspapers that Sansom had been hit by a car and killed in Harding. That rang a bell with me because I remembered reading another writer named Crossworth had disappeared over there four years ago. I asked New York to run a check on them and the word came back they both had relationships with a woman named Tyler Vaught. New York also said Vaught was originally from Harding. Then we got the court order to exhume. No corpus. Sacks of sand. I was about to go East and talk with Vaught myself when Annie phoned me last night in Tucson you’d called her and were hurt and on your way here. I don’t have to be hit over the head by coincidence.”
I let him monologue along and hung my garment bag in the closet till I could decide what to wear.
“So that’s it, Mr. Butters. Three writers go to a small town in New Mexico. Two disappear. The third is dragged under a car and told to leave town. I don’t know why, but after a while you depend on your instincts in this business, and every instinct of mine says there must be a connection between what we’re trying to do and what you three were doing in Harding. Are you ready to tell me?”
“I am not.”
I stepped into the John, hassled myself out of the hospital smock, slipped into clean jocks, emerged a
viable human being. “Why didn’t they murder me, too?” I asked him. “Why didn’t I just disappear?”
“Three in a row would be too obvious. Bound to rouse suspicion. That’s why with Sansom they went to the trouble of the hit-and-run and shipping an empty coffin.
Maybe they found out four years ago Crossworth wouldn’t scare, wouldn’t leave town, and maybe Sansom wouldn’t either, so they had to kill. But they thought you would. And you did.”
“I resent that,” I snapped, rummaging in the bags for my shaving kit.
“Sorry. Where were you last night when they put on the demonstration?”
“In the desert.”
“Doing what?”
“Oh my God.”
Hit over the head again.
BUELL WOOD.
TRANSCRIPTS.
PHILIP CROSSWORTH.
MAX SANSOM.
TAURINO GARCIA.
JUAN SANCHEZ.
Jesús ALVAREZ.
LUIS OBEDO.
I’d been standing. Now I drifted down to the bed like a falling leaf.
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Doing what in the desert?” he repeated.
“Digging up a grave.”
We looked at each other.
“What did you find?”
“Oh my God.”
“Well?”
“Just what you did.”
“You mean—”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Not even sacks of sand.”
We looked at each other.
“Now?” asked Henry Snackenberg.
“Now,” I sighed.
I made it brief, hitting principally the high spots—Tyler and me and Buell Wood’s trial in 1910 and the trial of the Villistas in 1916 and the missing transcripts and La Casa de la Justicia. “So I drew a complete blank on Tyler’s ancestors and all that historical jazz, but I scored on what she wanted. I had to get dragged under a car to do it, but I know who killed Sansom, and probably Crossworth, too. Pingo Chavez.”
“The sheriff? Hold on.”
“Goddammit, I know it was. I recognized his voice when they tied me under the car.”
“Vocal recognition isn’t enough. Not in a court of law.”
“Who said anything about a court of law?”
“If that sheriff is chargeable on two counts of homicide, don’t you want to see him brought to—”
“Not in the least. Sansom was an obnoxious son of a bitch. Crossworth I never knew. I’ve done what I came out here to do and I’m going home.”
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Wish I wouldn’t?”
“Yes. That’s really why I’m here today, Mr. Butters. To ask you to cooperate with us.”
“Cooperate.”
“First, by keeping all this confidential. Any government involvement, that is. I understand Miss Vaught is on her way out here. I’d appreciate your not mentioning me to her. This conversation.”
“Proceed.”
He was uncomfortable. There was simply too much of him, lengthwise, to adapt to any chair. “Second, I wish you’d go back to Harding for a few days and look around a little more and keep asking questions and see if you can get some answers.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m not. After what you’ve told me, I admit I can’t see the tie-up, but there must be one. Between the past and the present. I can’t see it, but it’s the only way any of this adds.”
I blew. “Are you seriously asking me to go back there and lay my ass on the line again for the goddamned government? Just because a few million tortillas are up here looking for a better life?” I bounced off the bed, shook my shaving kit at him. “No way! Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin. Which reminds me—I have to shave. So long, Mr. Snackenberg. Give my love to Annie and Ace.”
I flounced into the John and opened my kit and lathered up and assumed he had slunk back to the bureaucracy. But no. In a minute he was at the John door, about six feet four inches of him, looking for a place for his head. I hummed a tune and readied a razor.
“If you had any idea how much those eight million illegals cost us,” he said. “Thirteen billion dollars every year, in welfare and Social Security and food stamps and houses and evaded taxes and schools and health care—thirteen billion. In addition to the dollars they send home, which is hard on our balance of payments.”
“What’s a billion to Washington? We’re bankrupt anyway.”
“If you could see what happens to many of them, as I have,” he persisted. “They’re exploited, ripped off, slave labor. They exist under the threat of being turned in to us and deported unless they keep their mouths shut. If they don’t pay the people who brought them in, and keep on paying, they’re beaten, and in some instances killed. As examples to the others. It’s hell for them here.”
“A pity you don’t play the violin.”
“I hate to use the word ‘patriotism,’ Mr. Butters, but if-”
“Then don’t.”
He actually blushed. “I know, being from New York, you think we’re pretty hick out here. Possibly we are. But I’ll tell you something. If Uncle Sam asks us to help, we help first and fuss about it later. Whether it’s fighting a war or chipping in for a cause or flying the flag. And we’re not ashamed of it.”
“Please don’t sermon me while I’m shaving. I absolutely, unequivocally refuse to go back to Harding and be murdered.”
“I can give you protection.”
It was a kind of showdown. I resolved to let him look down the barrel of a little oratory. “Sorry,” said I. “I must live for the sake of American kidlit. From where the sun now stands,” quoth I, “I will sleuth no more forever. I am getting the hell out of the Wild West and going gaily back to the dear dogshit sidewalks of New York City with Tyler Vaught. I will never even take in a Western movie again.”
“I’m sorry, too. My job, and the job of the INS, is to enforce the law. And when the citizens of the United States will no longer volunteer to assist—”
“I pay my taxes.”
“Then this country hasn’t much future.”
“But I have,” I declared, razor suspended over my Adam’s apple. “And I’m hanging on to it. So you saddle up Old Paint and ride out and patrol your border, Snackenberg. And happy trails to you.”
He unbuttoned his jacket. And in the mirror I glimpsed something I wasn’t supposed to. In a holster at his belt line. A real GUN. I got the shivers.
“All right,” he said. “Go home, marry Vaught. See if you can sleep nights.”
“I can.” But my hand trembled. My razor hand.
“I doubt it. Crossworth, Sansom, Butters. Won’t you lie awake wondering who she’ll leave you for next? Who number four will be?”
To be a bastard, if you’re basically a good guy, you have to work at it.
I was dressed and the orderlies had bellhopped my luggage down to the car and the RN had warned me to fly low for a few days and we were alone. Tyler looked terrific. A St. Laurent suit of faded blue denim, the jacket studded with brass nailheads, the skirt gaucho, and a red-and-white-checked gingham blouse. She came to kiss me. I turned my face from her. I said, “Heard from Philip Crossworth lately?”
It was as though I had slapped her.
Then, on our way to a hotel, Tyler at the wheel to spare me, I said, “Guess what. The law has dug up old Max’s coffin. It was full of sand.”
She pulled the Rolls over to the curb, incapable. I had to drive. She had come by cab directly from the airport to the hospital, so we took a room on the top floor of the Paso del Norte. To show how anguished and contrite she was she tried again to kiss me, and again I turned my face away. We ordered up some margaritas. She wanted to see the dressing under my shirt and gave me tequila and sympathy, but I said no thanks, my war wounds were my own.
Then I said, “The trial transcripts are missing.”
Her glass was halfway. She put it down, salt on
the rim unsullied.
She ordered dinner—gargantuan Guaymas shrimp and bollos and Bohemia beer and sopapilla and coffee. Waiting for it she said the Paso del Norte was a very historic hotel: From its roof El Pasoans had watched the battle for Juarez during the revolution, and while General Pershing was chasing Pancho Villa around Chihuahua, the officers of National Guard regiments stationed along the border held their fancy-dress balls here. I said how interesting.
Dinner arrived. I dug in, then said, “Villa. Remember the Villistas who were let go and tracked down and killed? The Texas horse race you told me about? Well, the word in Harding is that the four of them were found and buried a few years back near the border by their own people. A flame burning and all that—sort of a memorial to gringo justice. So I drove out there last night, to the graves. I dug one up.”
She waited.
“Empty.”
Her fork was in her first shrimp.
“Those graves are fake.”
That finished dinner for her.
But not for me. I pigged everything. She did have coffee, and afterward we sipped in silence and watched out the windows as the sky flared and darkened and lights blinked on in Mexico, across the river.
“I lived with Phil Crossworth for two years,” she said. “A long time ago. Toward the end, I happened to mention—”
“Harding,” I interjected. “And the trials and your grandfathers and the Villistas—I know, I know. And it sounded like great material for a thriller.
So he whipped right out here and did the Hindu rope trick.”
“The police worked long and hard. I think his case is still open—he could even be alive. He rented a car in El Paso and drove over, but they never found that either.”
My curiosity got the better of me. “What about his things—bags, clothes, so on?”
“Nothing. He’d checked into a room at the Ramada Inn and-”
“I bet he did. Good old 112.”
“How do you know?”
“I told you when I phoned. That’s where they put Max and yours truly. So it had to be 112. I think they keep that one on reserve for your literary playmates from New York. Did you love him?”
“Who?”
“It’s no wonder you have to ask. With a love-life as complex as yours. Crossworth.”
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