That Night at the Palace

by Watson, L. D.

  Brewster stood silent for a moment. There was a little sound coming from the back of the building. “Chief Hightower?”

  Faintly, from another room he heard, “Just a minute.”

  There was the sound of a toilet flushing, then a ruffled Chief Thomas Jefferson Hightower came up the hall as he tucked his shirt in his belt, which was almost completely hidden by his belly. A law officer who didn’t maintain a reasonable weight wasn’t tolerated among the Rangers. It was a very rare occasion when a Texas Ranger ever had to chase down a bandit, but he was expected to be capable of it. More importantly, to Brewster’s thinking, a peace officer needed to command respect. In the 1890’s Captain Bill McDonald had been called into Dallas to squelch an uprising of a group of very unhappy and probably drunk boxing fans who were threatening to riot over a canceled boxing match. When he got off the train, a reporter asked if he was the only Ranger sent. McDonald, it is said, answered, “One riot, one Ranger.” The story had made the afternoon paper and, as the Captain himself put it, “There never was any riot.”

  Brewster didn’t believe a word of it. He suspected that some reporter made the story up. He had met Captain McDonald early in his career, and he doubted that the man, though an excellent Ranger, was eloquent enough to conjure up such a clever retort. Still, the story caught on, and the point was quite valid. If you looked and acted as if you could handle a riot, you would never need to handle a riot.

  Police Chief Thomas Jefferson Hightower looked as if he had difficulty fastening his belt, let alone handling a riot.

  “Corporal McKinney?” Jefferson asked as he walked up to Brewster, holding out his hand.

  The Ranger hesitated, confident that the unkempt chief hadn’t bothered to wash. Finally he shook the man’s hand, “Chief,” Brewster replied.

  “You probably don’t remember me. I was chief when you handled an investigation here several years back.”

  Brewster smiled, something he didn’t do often. “I remember, Chief.” The man he recalled had been thirty pounds thinner, though.

  Jefferson motioned to the chair in front of the desk. “Have a seat, Corporal. You must be tired. I just made some coffee, you want some?”

  “Thank you, Chief. I’ll take it black,” Brewster said as he took his seat.

  Jefferson poured two cups from a pot sitting on a hotplate behind his desk. The coffee pot was a sore spot to Jefferson’s pride. He had charged it to the town account at George Henry McMillian’s store as an office expense. It only seemed reasonable that the town would cover the cost of coffee. He gave a cup to everyone who came in the door, he reasoned. Then, Samuel Hastings, the mayor, town manager, and overall pain in Jefferson’s backside, got the bill and darn near soiled his trousers. The result was Jefferson paying for the coffee pot.

  “What have you got for me, Chief?” Brewster asked as Jefferson handed him a cup of coffee. McKinney was thankful that the Chief had held it by the handle.

  “There’s a kid down by the river. He’s got his head bashed in. We found his car first. It was crashed into the feed store with the passenger seat all covered in blood. Then a little later this mornin’ some boys were out huntin’ and came across the body, half eaten by an alligator.”

  “Any suspects?”

  Jefferson breathed a heavy sigh. He really didn’t want to do this. “Last night the kid, his name’s Cliff, and his best friend, Jesse Rose, got into a fight at the picture show. Jesse yelled, right there in front of fifty people, that he was gonna kill Cliff.”

  Brewster’s eyes widened. It sounded pretty open and shut, but these things were never open and shut.

  “I broke up the fight and sent ‘em home separately, but they got together later and had a beer down by the river.”

  “Same place as you found the body?”

  Jefferson nodded, “Yeah. Look Corporal, I’ve known Jesse all of his life. I think he was angry, and those words just came out of his mouth. Those boys have been best friends since they learned to walk. It just don’t make sense.”

  “Do you know what they were fightin’ about?”

  Jefferson sighed again and rolled his eyes, “It was a girl. The two boys used to be pretty sweet on her, I think. But the last few years they have been courtin’ these two sisters. Hell, half the town is bettin’ on when Jesse is gonna ask the older one to marry him. So then last night this other girl, Jewel Stoker, well, her old man came into the Palace with a shotgun and darn’ near killed Cliff. As a matter of fact, Jesse’s the one that stopped it. Well, we get the lights on and I grab Irwin, Jewel’s old man, and take his gun, and he says that Cliff got his daughter pregnant. No sooner than the words came out of his mouth, Jesse jumped on Cliff and started beatin’ the daylights out of ‘im.”

  Brewster leaned back in his chair and took a long drink of coffee. He suddenly realized how tired he really was. “Where’s this girl’s daddy?”

  Jefferson looked up at the ceiling. “He’s sober now, sitting in a cell. I’m gonna drive him to Rusk tomorrow. I suspect Judge Buckner will put him on the road gang for a week or two.”

  “And both these boys have girls?” Brewster asked, knowing the answer but asking more as part of processing the information.

  “Yeah,” Jefferson replied. “That’s what I don’t get. Jesse’s as in love as anyone I’ve ever seen. There’s nobody in town that would disagree with me either. He’s goin’ off to join the Aggie Corps next fall. Just about everybody thinks he’s gonna ask her to marry him before he leaves.”

  “What about this other kid, Cliff?” Brewster asked, “Do you think he got this girl pregnant?”

  Jefferson grimaced, “Corporal, if there was trouble to get into in this town, Cliff would find it. He’s not a troublemaker. I mean he’s never done anything really bad. He just does things without thinking them through. And that girl, well, she is a bit of a looker. She finished school last spring and’s been catchin’ the bus into Jacksonville. Works at the Chevy dealership up there.”

  “The boys are in school?”

  “Yeah, worked out at the timber mill all summer. They’ve been doing that for the past two or three years. Like I said, Jesse’s headed down to College Station. Cliff, I hear, got accepted into Stephen F. Austin Teacher’s College. I suspect he was plannin’ to keep working at the mill and drive into Nacogdoches. His folks don’t have the money that Jesse’s family has.”

  “They’re pretty well off?

  “His daddy’s a big dog with Powhatan Oil. I think he manages all of their rigs around here.”

  Brewster sat silent holding the warm coffee cup on his lap for a long moment, “So where’s this body?

  “Still sittin’ where we found it. I deputized a couple of boys, and they’re watchin’ over it. I figured that you’d want to look at it before we handed it over to the undertaker.”

  “I appreciate that, Chief. We better get out there. It’ll be dark soon”

  “The car’s out back if you want to look at it first.”

  “Yeah, take me to it,” now remembering that although Chief Hightower looked a bit sloppy, he was a pretty decent police officer.

  Jefferson led the Ranger through the hallway to the back door. The coupe sat next to some garbage cans, covered in canvas.

  “I didn’t want anyone to see it until you got a look,” Chief Hightower said as he began pulling the tarp off the car.

  Brewster walked around the car, looking closely for any sign of a clue. He then began looking at the bloody seat.

  “I haven’t had time to look, but the boys who towed it in said that there’s a bloody tire-iron under the seat.”

  Brewster opened the door and reached under the seat. He pulled out an angled tire wrench. The socketed end was covered with blood.

  “In the morning I’m going to need to go over the car for fingerprints. I doubt that I’ll find anything, but you never know. I
s there a place where we can keep the car locked up?”

  “One of the boys I deputized has a mechanic shop. He’ll let me keep it over there.”

  “Do you have a camera or someone who can take some crime scene pictures for us?”

  “I’ve got a boy up there waiting. I told him not to leave the bridge until you’ve looked at the scene first.”

  “How about a doctor? I’d like to get a time of death.”

  “I forgot to tell you. I had him down as soon as we found the body. He says that the poor kid died a half-hour or so before my boys found him.”

  Again Brewster was reminded that despite being overweight and a little unkempt, Chief Jefferson Hightower was a decent lawman.

  “Good. Now take me to see this body. Call your undertaker, and have him meet us out there.”

  #

  Corporal McKinney had seen quite a few bloody crime scenes in his time as a Texas Ranger. Most were the result of a robbery or a fight in an alley behind a gin-joint. Once there was a housewife who used a carving knife to turn her cheating husband into a pincushion. In that last instance, both Brewster and the judge on the case felt like the wife was completely justified. Her husband was a louse. Had she stabbed him once or twice she might be walking scott-free right this minute, but there was just no possible way a judge could let a woman off after she stabbed her husband two hundred and thirty-five times with a twelve-inch knife right after she bopped him over the head a dozen times with a rolling pin.

  Still, as bad as that poor hacked-up cheating husband looked, he didn’t compare to this. One side of this poor kid’s head was completely caved in, no doubt from the tire iron. From the looks of things, he had lived for quite a while after the beating. He had vomited at least twice. Once up the hill a little and then again right where he lay, after the gator dragged him down the slope. Brewster had only seen one killing that was anywhere close to this bad, and that was just a quarter of a mile up the those same tracks. That time the guy’s skull was broken and he had been slung out of a car that had been hit by a train.

  Brewster prided himself in not getting ill at a crime scene. It was unprofessional and showed weakness, two things a Texas Ranger couldn’t afford. But this one got to him. He made sure to not let the deputies up on the bridge see his face as he looked over the body. Chief Hightower was standing a little up the slope, but he doubted the Chief noticed. The Chief had already contaminated the crime scene once and looked as if he was about to again.

  Finally, after walking around the body a couple of times, he went down the slope to the water’s edge and looked up. The alligator was just a few feet up the embankment. Above the gator to the right lay the victim. On the top of the slope was a small tree with some broken limbs. The muddy slope was smooth but there were alligator tracks all around. The body was hung on some small broken bushes and partially wedged between a bush and a small tree. The gator had been trying to pull the boy between the two. By the look of things, the tree would have to be cut just to get the body free.

  One of the victim’s legs was ripped away and one hand had been chewed on. The victim’s remaining hand was holding a two-foot stick that he most likely had used to fight off the gator.

  “What do you think, Corporal?” Jefferson asked.

  “He definitely died after the gator dragged him down here.”

  “Seriously?” Jefferson asked in shock. “How can you tell?”

  “There’s vomit next to his face. Someone bashed his head with that tire-iron. They probably put him in the car and drove to the bridge and shoved him down the slope. I suspect they thought he’d float downstream some. He got hung up on that broken tree,” he said, pointing. “He probably hung there a while until the alligator smelled the blood and came up the slope and grabbed hold of his legs. From the looks of the mud the gator worked at him a while and finally broke him loose and dragged him down here where he got hung up again. The alligator most likely fought with him for quite a while. There’s a lot of smoothed-out mud. I suspect the gator went into a roll and ripped off the leg. At some point the kid finally died. The gator was still trying to get him loose from these bushes when your boy there shot it.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Look at his right hand. He’s holding on to that tree limb. Your undertaker will have to pry it free.” Brewster answered as he looked around. Then he spotted something at the tree on the slope above. “Chief what is that at the base of that tree?”

  Jefferson worked his way back up the slope toward the bridge. On the ground there were a few rocks stacked up. Jefferson looked at them and then back at Brewster. “Someone stacked up some rocks.”

  Brewster climbed to the slope to where Jefferson stood. He was a little put out with himself. He had been looking at the body where it lay and hadn’t thought about the fact that it had been moved by the gator. It was a rookie mistake. A seasoned investigator such as he shouldn’t have made such an error.

  He looked at the rocks and the trees and the marks on the ground. When the boy was pushed off the bridge he landed wedged in the small trees. He was probably weak from the blood loss, not to mention the pain. Most likely he didn’t have the strength to stand up, let alone get out of the trees. He must have made a pillow with the rocks while he lay there, probably so that he could keep an eye on the gator.

  Brewster walked back down to the body. The kid had grabbed the limb when the gator dragged him into the bush. The Ranger looked at the leg that was still attached. The heel of the boot was dug into the ground. He was still fighting to the very last.

  The Ranger turned his head away from the chief and the deputies and looked out at the water. Part of him wanted to vomit. Another part of him wanted to cry. That gator may have worked on him for hours before he died. No human should have to go through anything like that.

  Brewster turned and began walking up the slope to the Chief, somewhat disgusted with himself that he was still nauseated. The long-time peace officer considered himself above such things. It occurred to him it was because this was just a kid, and a good one at that, that it bothered him so. He couldn’t help but wonder if he would have felt that way had it been a bank robber or a cop killer lying on that slope. Blood is blood, but when it’s a bad guy you don’t mind seeing it spilt. Conversely, when it’s a decent kid like this, it breaks your heart.

  When he reached Jefferson, he walked past the chief toward the trestle, “Have your boys go ahead. I’ve seen enough.”

  “Sure,” the Chief replied as he followed the Ranger up to the tracks.

  Alongside the tracks, behind the prowler, sat a black hearse with two men leaning on the hood beside Bobby Weatherholt, who was there holding a camera. Jefferson motioned to Bobby and the three began walking to the river. “Let Bobby get his pictures before you boys touch anything.” He then turned to his four deputies who had been standing on the trestle watching the corporal, “Toad, you and Hunker give ‘em a hand,” he ordered.

  As the chief was talking to his deputies, Brewster began walking to the far end of the bridge, away from everyone else. After a few minutes Jefferson walked up. “What do you think, Corporal?”

  Brewster, stopped walking and leaned on the bridge and watched as the four men began trying to lift the body. “Do you go to the movies, Chief? Charlie Chan, the Thin Man, Mr. Moto?”

  “Sure, every week.”

  “Well, it’s never like that. Killers don’t plan it out. They don’t try to frame-up someone. Killers get angry and they shoot, or in this case, clobber someone over the head. Tell me about these two boys.”

  “They’re good kids. Oh, sure, Cliff got in a little trouble now and then, but, like I said, he never did anything bad.”

  “You said earlier that they were together a lot?”

  “They were best friends. You almost never saw them apart. They were in school together, they worked together, and even last night they we
re out on a date with their two girls together. Corporal, there’s just no way Jesse did this. He’s a good kid.”

  “Someone who was really mad stopped that boy in town last night and hit him with that tire iron. It was rage. He didn’t just hit him once or twice. He hit him a dozen or more times to make a dent like that.

  “Then the killer drove the kid in that coupe down here and tossed that body down off the bridge, knowing that he’d bleed out and the critters would eat up the body. It’s just dumb luck that those two found him.”

  “Why would anybody want to do that?”

  “If his buddy didn’t do it, then it was someone who had a real good reason to hate that boy.”

  “Do you think it was someone he knew?”

  “Whoever did this definitely knew him. Murderers kill for a reason. This kid doesn’t look like he had any money, so it wasn’t robbery. The fact is, most murderers are family members or co-workers, people who know the victim well enough to have a reason to hate him.”

  “I can’t believe his family did this and, damn-it, I just ain’t buyin’ that it was Jesse.”

  “Okay, let’s say it’s not this Jesse kid. Let’s say there’s someone else out there, someone who has a reason to kill this boy,” Brewster began, thinking out loud, “These two kids are best buddies. They probably know just about all the same people. And they were together most of the time, which means that if someone had reason to kill one of the boys, then he probably has reason to kill the other. You say this kid and the other one were out late last night, and this one dropped the other kid off and headed home?”