Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  “In that case,” said Raymer, digesting the news, “send me a backup man,” a plainclothes officer who could enter the Continental Café without provocation. If this Vandiver had his gun, an officer in street clothes would have better opportunity to get in close. Raymer would be a second or two behind, in uniform, with a drawn weapon for support.

  But Longview’s only plainclothesman on night duty was at that moment tied up in a burglary investigation, and all the dispatcher could locate was a twenty-two-year-old rookie in uniform, a boy named Bill Martin. He rendezvoused with Sergeant Raymer down the street from the Continental, and across his face was the bluff of ill-hidden fear. Instantly the older cop changed his plan: he would give the kid the easier assignment.

  Everything must be quick; fast, sweeping strokes. Nothing choppy or jerky. “You drive in back of the café and park,” ordered Raymer, “and I’ll hang around the entrance until I see you coming. They’re used to me dropping in for coffee about this time of night. As soon as I determine that you’re just a few feet behind me, I’ll enter, go directly over to this suspect, arrest him, and if there’s any trouble, you’ll be right there to help me out. Okay?” The young cop nodded, fascinated by the strategy for his first battlefield mission.

  Vicki was tired, her feet and shoulders aching from six hours of throwing cheeseburgers and chicken fried steaks at the customers. She decided to steal a few minutes and go to the toilet and sit down and have a cigarette. On the way, she stopped at the pool table where Bobby was playing with the black dude. She put her arm around him lightly, and he shook her embrace away. It interfered with the shot he was lining up. Vicki leaned closer and whispered, “Hey, baby, your gun’s showin’ a little.” Bobby glanced down; his .38 had ridden above his belt line, its jet-black head glinting in the light above the table. “Thanks, lady,” he said, shoving it deeper, out of sight. Vicki left on her errand.

  As soon as he saw the younger uniformed cop walking gingerly toward the front door of the café, Sergeant Raymer pushed open the entrance and stepped inside, the feeling rushing over him of intrusion on alien ground. Laughing, animated faces turned hurriedly away from him, staring sullenly toward their cups and mugs. Conversation withered. The plaintive cries from the woman singer on the juke box seemed to swell in volume. The other waitress, Netta Joe, met the cop at the threshold. She was saucy. “Whatta you want, John Raymer?” she asked. The middle-aged officer, suddenly feeling older than his years, sensing that the clientele was young and strong and mostly drunk, and dangerous, gestured toward the pool table. “I wanna talk with that boy who’s over there shootin’ pool.” Raymer delicately moved his hand to his side. He unsnapped the holster. Then it all took less than thirty seconds.

  Unhesitating, Raymer walked to the pool table where a low-hanging yellowish light illumined but half of Bobby Vandiver’s lean body. He held a pool cue in his hand. He was leaning over the green felt when Raymer’s words broke his concentration.

  “Bobby?” the officer said. Now his gun was drawn.

  Bobby jumped back, perhaps startled at the use of his real name. Everyone else in the café, save Vicki, knew him as “J.C.”

  “What?” he cried, his voice pitching upward. With the one word, he dropped his pool cue. It fell clattering to the floor. His opponent in the game, seeing the officer’s threatening gun, backed up prudently against the wall.

  The two men, cop and fugitive, stood but two feet apart. Between them, a literal connecting rod, was Raymer’s service revolver, pointed at Bobby’s flat stomach. Reflexively, Bobby jerked out his left hand and grabbed the gun, trying to shove it away. At the same moment he snaked his right hand into his trousers and pulled out his own weapon. John Raymer saw the new gun and did not hesitate. He fired. Point-blank. But his weapon was still in the grasp of Bobby’s left hand, and the bullet screamed downward, into the floor, ricocheting up to the ceiling where it buried itself. The explosion made the gun barrel so hot, and the powder fumes were so painful, that Bobby let loose of the police weapon for a moment. John Raymer fired his now freed gun a second time. The bullet tore open Bobby’s chest.

  He sagged to the floor, his arms reaching out like a supplicant and clutching the cop, pulling him down. The two men fell to the floor, locked in a terrible embrace. At the sound of the first shot, Vicki had run out of the ladies’ toilet, and now she saw Bobby writhing on the floor. Then, quickly, he was silent. She rushed to him and flung her body over his, hysterically pushing the police executioner away. She seized Bobby’s face and held it in her hands, kissing his eyes, pressing her full weight against him as if she could transfer her life into his. But there was no need. It was over. Vicki raised her head and howled like a mother animal.

  “You’ve killed Bobby!” she screamed, demonstrating to the room that when she forced open his eyes they fell forever shut again.

  Stunned, Raymer backed away. He leaned against the pool table. He had never killed a man before. He pointed at the gun that Bobby still held tightly in his lifeless hand. “You see what he’s still holding in his hand, don’t you?” said the cop in a voice strong enough for a jury to hear. He wanted support from this crowd. When the ambulance came, Vicki could not let go of her lover. Attendants shrugged and lifted both of them onto the stretcher, carrying the dead man and his mourning woman—as one—away.

  The import of the killing in the Continental Café was not learned until the next morning. A brief report found its way onto the Associated Press news wire, and a reporter hurried over to the Harris County courthouse in search of Bob Bennett. The prosecutor, in trial on another case, read the item incredulously. Then again. He asked the judge for a brief recess. After a telephone call to Longview for confirmation, Bennett wadded up the news report and threw it against the wall. He was angry—his murder case was devastated and perhaps destroyed. But he also felt curious grief. “I liked him,” he told Jerry Carpenter, in similar anguish. “I know everything wrong that Bobby Vandiver did, but I still liked the poor son of a bitch.”

  Of course it occurred to Bennett that Bobby might have been killed by contract. A lot of people would pass their nights more comfortably with the state’s star witness in a grave. But after an investigation was conducted, after John Raymer was interviewed and his simple story dissected, Bennett came to believe that the death was just what it seemed. It is not inconceivable that a Texas cop would accept a contract to kill a character “in the line of duty.” But Raymer was not only a respected officer, a grandfather, a devoted churchman, he—most supportive of his story—had enlisted the aid of a brother cop moments before the tragedy. If a lawman wanted to carry out a bounty killing, he would not have chosen an escort, nor would he have done the deed in full view of a café crowded with customers.

  “Hell, I didn’t know who Bobby Wayne Vandiver was until the next day,” Raymer told Bob Bennett. “He was just another fugitive as far as I was concerned. I wouldn’t have shot him if he hadn’t pulled the gun on me.”

  But one point nagged John Raymer. How foolish it was for Bobby Vandiver to attempt a showdown in the Continental Café. The thirty seconds were a blur in the policeman’s mind, yet he could not shake the notion that Bobby wanted to buy a death ticket. Raymer wished he could have heard the fugitive speak more words than the solitary word, “What?” Even it sounded—and here Raymer knew he was engaging in fanciful speculation—not unlike the voice on the telephone, the anonymous tipster who first spilled the name “Bobby Vannerman.” Could Bobby have informed on himself? Could he have used John Raymer as the instrument of his own death? Did he want the law to hold final court on him, as he had told the Dallas posse a year before? John Raymer would never know. He would puzzle over these questions for a long time, particularly during the daylight hours when he couldn’t sleep worth a damn anyway.

  Bobby’s sister had known of the flight to Longview. For a month there was nothing but silence after Bobby and Vicki left her house the Sunday night before his scheduled murder trial. But one morning in early
May, around 10 A.M., Vicki called. “Bobby and I are in Long-view,” she had said. “We’re okay. We’re just living from hour to hour. It probably won’t last, but at least we’re together.” Red had asked that Bobby take the phone himself. But after a moment of muffled talk Vicki returned to the line and said he was “unavailable.” “I understand,” said Red. She knew her brother all too well. He was shamed to be once again in flight, the evidence of failure. “Tell him I love him,” she said simply. “And tell him I’ll always be here if he needs me.”

  Now she prepared his burial. She remembered his saying so many times over the years that he would not tolerate a religious event. Yet his mother would be devastated if he were put into the earth with no respect for the God he had believed in for all the young, clean years of his life. Red searched for a compromise. After interviewing several ministers, she finally found one who agreed to preside over a businesslike burial, speaking no preacher words, only thoughts of comfort—no warnings and prophecies from the scriptures. At Laurel Land Cemetery, more than one hundred and fifty mourners gathered, some worn and weathered from the farms of Venus, others as vivid and cheap as the prizes of a carnival shooting gallery. The Baptist minister spoke briefly of Bobby Wayne Vandiver, of his deep love for Vicki, and of Vicki’s children, and all those who were young, for Red had filled him in on her brother’s rapport with youth. He said not to mourn Bobby too much, for he had chosen his way of life. As Red listened to the brusque eulogy she pictured her brother from so long ago, with his face full, his eyes fresh and sparkling, his hair cropped close as in a Marine recruitment poster. Just before the lid was clamped down on the coffin, Red glimpsed her brother for the last time: he had the face of an old farmer, a thin, pinched countenance from the Depression years of Venus, a look of sadness that the cosmetician’s art could not push into contentment. His hair and his mustache were long, gray, and melancholy.

  The minister suggested that no one judge Bobby Vandiver too harshly, then he closed his eyes. For a worried moment Red feared he would break the agreement and conclude with an automatic Baptist prayer. But then he opened them and smiled at Red and said simply, “Good-by, Bobby.”

  A matron located Marcia as she walked in a line to the prison cafeteria. “Your fall partner finally did something good,” the matron said.

  “What’s that?” said Marcia.

  “Bobby Vandiver just got himself shot to death in Longview,” she said coldly.

  Marcia fell to the floor screaming. Two attendants were summoned to drag her back to the cell. Later they told her she remained in an almost zombie trance for more than a month.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Now Bob Bennett tried to pick up the pieces of his shattered case. “This is the most snake-bit son of a bitch I’ve ever encountered,” he swore wearily. Not a doubt was in his mind that four people had conspired to cause the murder of Dr. John Hill, but by early autumn 1974 he held grave concern that any of the remaining three would pass a night in prison for the crime. Around the courthouse, the coffee shop advice was to let the case slide; wait; delay; tell the reporters that the postponements were being caused by an ill witness or a conflict in scheduling. Finally, after years had gone by, no one would really care or even remember. The man who pulled the trigger was confessed and conveniently dead. If Lilla Paulus really had cancer of the cervix, then she was probably doomed. Marcia was already in the penitentiary on other charges, and when she got out her life style would boomerang her back in. And Ash was nearing eighty. The advice was tempting.

  Nevertheless, there was, amid the messy mounds of legal papers, folders, briefs, tape recordings, and bits of a hundred other human dramas, a manila envelope that seemed always to rise to the surface, demanding his attention, pricking his conscience every time the temptation rose to abandon Vandiver et al. He shook out four color photographs and glanced once again at John Hill lying bloodied and dead in his foyer. Once again his resolve was renewed.

  The young prosecutor had always imposed a severe moral ethic on his life. He was in fact driven by a small wedge of guilt, not the kind that contorts a man into the far reaches of neurotic behavior, but a blip of concern that he had somehow short-changed his obligations. In 1961, Bennett went to the nation’s capital, both to attend law school at George Washington University and to answer the lure of John Kennedy’s presidency. He was but one of the thousands of strong young men who went to Washington, knowing that it was their turn to run the country. Bennett’s plan was to obtain a job when he graduated from law school somewhere in the Kennedy circle, no matter how far from the core, and serve both his President and his nation. In the excitement of the Berlin crisis, Bennett hurried to the Naval Air Force seeking a commission. He was rejected as (1) too short and (2) asthmatic. Discouraged, he returned to his studies, only to face the garden-variety Army draft a year later. The U. S. Army certainly wanted him. “Well, to hell with that,” said the law student to himself. He won a student deferment to finish his law studies. Then a lunatic in Texas—Lord, why did it have to be in Texas?—destroyed John Kennedy, and all the young men went home. Bennett returned to Texas with his law degree and a season of discontent. With a wife and children, he now escaped military service completely.

  “None of it really matters,” he used to argue with himself. “I did nothing felonious. The record will show that I asked to serve my country and they turned me down and I obtained deferment.” Still he suffered from pangs of conscience. He became a prosecutor, in part, to assuage his feelings of guilt. Most young lawyers who serve valuable apprenticeships in the DA’s office leave after a year or two. Bennett had ample opportunity to abandon his oppressive courthouse cubbyhole whose blinds were drawn to conceal dirty windows and a view of decaying Houston—enchilada parlors and bail-bond offices. But he stayed. In 1974 it was his tenth anniversary, and the reason he had endured so long when his classmates were making thrice his salary was rooted somewhere in the old-fashioned, almost trite attitude of responsibility to the community. “And god damn it,” he groused to a brother DA, “I may get my ass thrown out of court, but it’s unfair to the people of this community, not to mention John Hill, if I don’t at least try and prosecute this bunch.” Unlike previous prosecutors who had worked this street, Bennett had no emotional ties to Joan Robinson Hill. He neither knew her nor cared about the circumstances of her death. He only wanted to convict those responsible for the murder of her husband.

  Of course, principles are not evidence, and Bennett addressed himself to the discouraging prospects of obtaining a conviction against the remaining three. They ranged from bleak to, at the moment, hopeless. Ironically, the strongest of a bad lot was the case against Marcia, and she, in Bennett’s view, was the least guilty. True, she had introduced Bobby Vandiver to Lilla Paulus, and true, she drove the killer to the scene of the murder, kissed him good-by like a suburban housewife, told him to be careful, and collected him afterward. But she had committed no personal violence against anyone. Hers was a subsidiary role, hardly murder in the first degree. But because the gun passed through her hands, and Bennett could prove this in court, then it was probably enough to persuade a jury, even if her clever Dallas lawyer managed to quash her confession.

  Lilla Paulus was represented by one of the nation’s most successful and cunning legal strategists, Percy Foreman, even though he had turned the actual courtroom appearances over to his able young associate, Dick DeGeurin. The old master would certainly be standing in the wings, however, and he had already told one newspaper reporter that the case against Mrs. Paulus was “preposterous.” Bennett knew that the Foreman defense would move promptly to throw out both Bobby’s and Marcia’s statements. And chances were good the motion would be granted. Without those confessions, Bennett had scant corroborating evidence against Lilla. Locked in his filing cabinet was another manila envelope, this one embarrassingly slim. Within were the scraps of paper seized in the search of Lilla’s home and purse on the day of her arrest. Could he fling these down before a jury an
d contend that they linked Lilla Paulus beyond doubt to the terrible death of John Hill? He could more easily grow sunflowers at the North Pole.

  And Ash Robinson? Bennett had unleashed investigators from the DA’s office to probe the old man’s financial affairs, hoping that somewhere along the convoluted line his bank accounts would show enough mysterious cash withdrawals to finance a killing. Helpfully, Racehorse Haynes had already subpoenaed the oilman’s records during depositions for the $10-million slander suit. They showed nothing that would even persuade a grand jury to indict Ash, much less a trial jury to convict. Bennett even spent days poring over the intricate transactions of the oil and gas business, entertaining a hunch that maybe old Ash had paid for his son-in-law’s extermination by transferring a lucrative oil lease to Lilla Paulus or an intermediary. His search of state records in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida, where Ash was known to hold extensive interests in that state’s Panhandle, produced fascinating transfers of revenue-producing properties to several prominent Houstonians, including two of the doctors Ash had enlisted in his original campaign against John Hill. But no lease was traceable to Lilla, or Bobby, or Marcia. By the end of summer, with the trials of the two women near, Bob Bennett came to the discouraging realization that he had nothing—nothing!—on Ash Robinson other than Marcia’s and Bobby’s confessions. The situation outraged him, and he toyed with the idea of asking the federal district attorney to investigate the matter. Under federal law, no corroborating evidence is required in accomplice cases—Watergate was the lighthouse example—and, theoretically, the confessions of Bobby and Marcia might be enough to convict Ash. But on what charge? The best Bennett could unearth was “conspiracy to deprive John Hill of his civil rights by killing him,” and that punishment hardly seemed to fit the crime. Also chafing was the bizarre fact that the general public still had no idea that Ash Robinson was the puppeteer of this grisly show. Houston’s newspapers had treated him with deference since the day his daughter died (he had, surely, cautioned them against libel as well) and, as far as the city knew, he was only a sorrowing senior citizen, a rich and eccentric character of the fiber that built the great town, and lonely to the point of pity from the tragedies that had ravaged his twilight years.