It was a car fire — a ragtop something with its top down.
The side panel of the burning car was riddled with bullet holes — like someone strafed it to blow out the tires and kill the driver, get the car stopped. Three flaming bodies remained inside. Three smoking mouths were opened wide in final agony.
A too-familiar and now empty duffel bag had been discarded on the roadside. I moved around to the back of the car and peered through the flames. The bumper sticker on the now-blackening rear fender read “Sigma Chi.”
Then I saw the discarded, rotting and now half-broken skull. The false head didn’t fool the murderous bastard who had killed and torched the frat boys.
Well, well.
Some machine gun-toting, car-torching headhunter was lurking out here in the sand and sage and saguaro — a real stone-cold killer — steadfastly looking for Pancho’s real lid. Probably, just like me, he also had eyes on Senator Prescott Bush’s eighty grand.
This was all a lark up to now — like one of my straight-to-paperback, written-for-walking-around money “capers.”
But now, maybe, our lives depended on seeing this mess through.
I slapped Bud on the back. “Let’s roll, hombre. We’ve got us some graves to rob.”
6
It was starting to drizzle, so we leaned into the shovels — get that wicked work done before the rain turned the graveyard to soup. Not that it was particularly hard work. These poor Mexicans were buried as cheaply as they could be; blankets for boxes and planted so shallow I was shocked the coyotes hadn’t dug ’em up long before us. We got lucky and found one skull with a pretty impressive underbite. We’d save that one for a special occasion.
Lightning slashed across the sky, illuminating young Bud and me against the rickety crosses. Christ, I felt like Colin Clive in Franken-fucking-stein.
I tossed aside my machete and pressed the heels of my hands to the small of my back. Too many bones cracked — some kind of new, dubious record. “Four heads,” I said, stretching and wincing. “That should do it, Bud.” We wrapped the heads up in old Indian blankets and set them in the trunk of my Chevy.
Bud presumed to take the wheel seat. I pressed the button and the canopy rose over us. I clipped down the top and we opened up the windows, angling the wings. Big chunky drops of rain peppered my Chevy with leopard-like dust spots.
Bud glanced over at me. “You seeing better?”
“Yeah. Better.”
“Definitely blood-sugar,” he said.
“I should have it checked.”
He nodded. “You should.” I knew if I didn’t see a doctor soon, Bud would ensure that I did. He asked, “Where to now, kemo sabe?”
“El Paso, Tonto,” I said. I rooted around my pocket and fished out the halves of Wade’s notebook. “Something called ‘The Wednesday Group’ that I want to look into.”
We were tooling south on 54, fringing Fort Bliss. Bud saw the signs and said, “Tell me about the Pershing Expedition, chasing Villa. We haven’t covered any of that. I’m still on True’s nickel.”
“Hard to take notes when you’re driving, Bud.”
“I’ve got a good memory. I’ll get the gist of it down in El Paso.”
I shrugged and resigned myself to another trip down shitty, old memory lane. “Not much on that front to confide, Bud. It was all a kind of a great waste of time. National pride was at stake — the first and only successful strike at the mainland U.S. by a foreign power couldn’t go unanswered. But it’s a hopeless notion, chasing one man in a wasteland in a country not your own — real Don Quixote stuff. Mostly, it was a practice run for the Great War. Do you know, the Mexicans really made the first extensive use of trench warfare in the revolution? Did you know that, Bud? Airplanes got their first workout down there. Machine guns, too. And, of course, the fuckin’ krauts were arming the Mexicans, trying to open up a front on our southern border to keep us out of Europe. It wasn’t the show — World War I was the show. The Pershing Expedition was just a then-unrecognized dress rehearsal.”
Bud nodded and glanced over at me. “You keep in touch with any of your old crew?”
“Naw. Hell no. We’re talking forty years ago. And a lot of my ‘old crew’ never made it out of those trenches in Europe. You know, I spent too damned much of my life with Black Jack Pershing. George S. Patton was there in Mexico, too. What a world-class asshole he was.” I stretched and massaged my tingling right leg. “There was a fella, name of Lee Ellroy, who I knew pretty well back when. He ended up being Rita Hayworth’s business agent. Lives out in California now, I think. Another couple of guys, Frank Weygandt and Cleon Corzilius; they’re both back in Ohio, now. But that’s about it. Oh, and Holmdahl. He’s the guy they arrested for stealing Pancho’s head in 1926.”
Bud smiled. “Man, I gotta hear about him.”
“Not so much I can tell there, either. He’s one of those shadowy guys who shapes history and leaves no real footprints. Pure mercenary. Did a tour in the Philippine Islands. Spent some time in the rurales, before the revolution. But he’s like a windsock, least ways to my mind. When Juárez fell, he jumped ship and joined Madero, the fella who pulled Villa into the Revolution. So Holmdahl served with Villa and later with Obregón, when Obregón was doing better than Pancho. After the attack on Columbus, when we were all dispatched with Black Jack to hunt Villa, Emil turned up as one of our guides. He was arrested in ’26 for desecrating Pancho Villa’s grave. Some rich Texas friends, they say, got him sprung. But Pancho’s skull was never found.” I lit a Pall Mall and stared off toward the Rio Grande. “Allegedly, Holmdahl stole Pancho’s head for twenty-five-grand paid him by Prescott Bush, that Connecticut senator who they say belongs to that Skull and Bones Society at Yale that all those frat boys are trying to show up.”
Fiske chewed his lip. He grinned. “Yeah, the senator with our damned eighty-grand. Why don’t we just call him up and do this deal?”
“Well Bud, because someone just fricasseed our frat friends and left the fake skull behind. Someone in the know and with a machine gun, near as I can tell. And, like I said earlier, Prescott has deep ties to the intelligence community. And beyond that, I don’t know him from Adam. We’d be best to try to grasp the lay of the land before we make that critical contact, don’tcha think?”
“Makes sense, put that way.” Bud’s skittish eyes checked the rearview mirror. His caution couldn’t hurt, but I’d been watching pretty closely. We had no tail I could spot.
Bud said, nervous-like, “On that note, I wonder how the boys of Delta Kappa Epsilon are doing?”
“Gotta be better than the Sigs,” I said.
It went like that to El Paso — whistling through the graveyard conversation, slapping windshield wipers and the roar of that Turbo-Fire V-8. Just a couple of writers tearing through the desert in a car whose trunk was filled with severed human heads.
7
El Paso: there was nothing there — damned near literally.
The Wednesday Group turned out to be some kind of social club of tony Texas Republicans. A feel-good coffee klatch or some such to bolster the spirits of the GOP House minority. Some of its members, a local historian told Bud and me, were reputed to have been among those who leaned on the Mexican government (or paid it, more likely) to release Emil Holmdahl so many years ago. But it was, on balance, a dead end.
On the other hand, we had been asking a lot of questions around town — and raising eyebrows.
Now, as we moseyed through this shithole town, we began getting looks.
Hmm.
I indulged a hunch and hit the hardware store where I bought four old carpetbags. We ambled back to my Chevy and snuck a false-Pancho head into one of the bags. I stashed the others in the trunk.
“We’ll take this fella with us,” I told Bud. “Just in case.”
“Where we going?”
“Newspaper office. We’re still in border country, so if the stuff is anywhere, it’s apt to be here. Let’s look up some old clippings
. Refresh my memory on that grave robbing.”
* * *
We found an old tearsheet from The El Paso Herald Post dated Feb. 8, 1926.
It was breathless stuff — the purple prose of some hack writer who’d clearly scented something he thought might be a story to build a yellow-journalism career upon.
Headlines and subheads:
VILLA’S BODY IS ACCUSER IN GRIM CASE
———————————
American Soldier of Fortune
Jailed Following Grave Robbery
—————————————
BANDIT’S HEAD HAS VANISHED
—————————————
Believe Decapitation Was Made
For Sale To Some Institution
1926: Emil Holmdahl strayed across the border for what was termed “a prospecting and hunting trip.” He had a crony along for the ride — some Angelino going by the handle of Alberto Corral.
Feb. 5: Emil and Alberto made a Friday-night sortie into Parral, Chihuahua to crack open Villa’s grave. Bad news for Emil and Alberto; their snooping around and the many graceless questions they had posed about Pancho Villa’s grave in previous days had not gone unnoticed. A caretaker told all and ID’d the “ghoulish head snatchers.”
Emil and Alberto also had it tougher than Bud and me on the grave-robbing front. They had to chip through concrete to do their “wretched work.”
The AP article went on:
“No satisfactory explanation has been ascribed for the gruesome decapitation, although a note left with the body said the head was to be sent to Columbus, N.M., scene of the bandit raid in 1916 that resulted in the American Punitive Expedition.
“Many here, however, believe the arch killer’s head was filched from the tomb for surreptitious sale to some institution ... Conditions about the grave offered small aid to solution of the mystery except it must have taken a number of strong men to dislodge the weighty concrete covering slab. Liquor bottles and corks smelling of pungent chemicals found near the grave are unaccounted for. The body was left partly exposed to view, apparently having been moved only enough for the decapitators to do their work. Villa was buried here in 1923, following his death at the hands of some disgruntled henchmen.”
Bud whistled low. “Outré. And some real over-the-top prose there.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Like you said. You know, a part of me thought maybe old Wade was full of shit. But this...” My observation hung there, unfinished.
I felt cold steel at the back of my neck. Bud already had his hands up.
Fuck on a bicycle.
I turned, slow-like. A man in a business suit had a gun pointed at my head. He was some goddamned El Paso Republican, I suspected. He was wearing a virgin-white straw cowboy hat. And, no shit, he had what looked like a starched bandana tied around the bottom of his face, coming down to a triangle point that didn’t quite cover his brace of chins. The bandana was too clean and showed iron lines. With the suit and that crisp white hat, the pearl-handled .45 in his shaking right hand ... well, Christ, it was like being robbed at gunpoint by some queer tenderfoot.
Fuck this.
The “bandit” spoke, a scared quaver in his voice, “The bastard’s head — where is it?”
My God — he said “bastard” like he was saying “scoundrel,” or “bounder.”
Jesus.
“Here,” I said. I reached down, lifted the carpetbag and then flung it at him. The gun pointed skyward as he involuntarily tucked his arms to catch the bagged head. With my left hand, I grabbed his gun hand — kept that sucker pointed skyward. I tugged down his bandana with my right hand. That move seemed to startle him even more, although it really shouldn’t have, ’cause I surely didn’t recognize him.
I pulled back, then swung hard between his eyes, throwing everything I had. My right knee followed, driven hard into his groin. As he doubled over, I flicked off his cowboy hat, got a handful of hair, and drove his face down into my again-rising knee. He fell to the floor — already out cold and sporting a brand new face.
Bud was slack-jawed. I shrugged and picked up the carpetbag. I tossed the bag to Bud. I tucked the pearl-handled .45 in my waistband.
Me and my poet, we were swiftly building ourselves an arsenal.
“Just couldn’t bear to lose another head this soon, ’specially to the likes of that one,” I said to Bud. “We’re going through these skulls like a drunken sailor on shore-leave in a whore house on nickel night. I’m feelin’ decidedly stingy now.” I reached down and picked up the bastard’s white cowboy hat. It was too small for my head. (Old man used to tell me, “Hec, you’ve got yourself a head like a bastard cat.” My mother used to make cracks, too, but I figured she’d had first-hand experience with that big old head of mine that my pap hadn’t had, so I gave her a pass.)
I planted the hat on Bud and he suddenly had half-assed character.
We strode out into the newspaper’s front office.
The receptionist stared at us, open-mouthed under her wicked black beehive. Her eyes were wide behind rhinestone cat’s-eye spectacles. “Fetch yourself a camera, sweetheart,” I said in my foghorn drawl. “I think there’s a breaking news story stretched out cold in back there for you.”
8
It was a very bad night for me.
I had awesomely bad dreams, riddled with strange imagery. Sad thing was, it was all rooted in recent history.
Ice cubes ... so many ice cubes.
Hypodermics.
My little black-haired, black-eyed daughter, squeezing my callused thumb in her tiny hand and whispering “Daddy” as the darkness closed over her.
Her mother — dark hair, dark eyes, dark heart. “The heart of another is a dark place” ... something like that. Who the hell said it? Turgenev? Ed Murrow? Howdy fucking Doody? One of those wooden cocksuckers, anyways.
More ice cubes and a bathtub. Old needle tracks. My big, beautiful and empty hacienda — the fucker destroys me.
My girls regularly ambushing me in my dreams, a year on. Sometimes in my dreams — no, strike that, call ’em “nightmares” — I pick up my Colt, put that Peacemaker in my mouth and press it to my palate. In his cups, in Key West, Hemingway used to pantomime for me “The Blessed Shot,” as he had dubbed it. Papa confided to me tips for doing it right. “Get that thing in your mouth, up against the roof, pointed toward the fontanel,” he’d lecture drunkenly. “Press it to your temple or under your chin and you’ll just end up disfigured, or a vegetable, or both.” That was Papa — always the teacher.
But in dreams — and in life — I can’t ever pull the trigger on myself. Too much contrition for that flavor of presumed peace, I reckon.
I awakened with a start, wrenched from my dark dreams by thunder. It was raining again — desert storm. The windows were cracked on Bud’s side and I could smell the sage and the rain. My mouth was dry and my eyes wouldn’t focus. My hands were shaking and I felt nauseous.
Bud raised his eyebrows. “You okay, Lass’?”
I nodded and sat up and stretched and felt more bones crack. I was too old to be sleeping in cars. Bud, probably prompted by all the knuckle-digging in my eyes and my blinking, passed me a thermos filled with iced tea. He rifled through a bag on the seat between us, then handed me a Stuckey’s Pecan Log and a ham salad sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. “This’ll help,” he said. It did, though it took some time.
We were rolling west along Rt. 10, skirting the Mexican border. I had slept right through Columbus and adjacent Pancho Villa State Park — the places where all of this bad juju got rolling so many bloody decades ago. My knuckles were starting to hurt from those shots I had taken at the Texas Republican. I checked my Timex. We should have been on the other side of the Arizona border by now, but we were just fringing the Pyramid Mountains.
“You stop for a quickie while I was sacked out, Bud?”
Fiske glanced at me and turned down his mouth. “Called in a marker,”
he said. “Old friend of mine is a Yale grad. I wanted some more gen on this Skull and Bones Society.”
I grunted and gulped down a half-a-thermos of tea and it didn’t touch my thirst. “Just a kind of über fraternity, isn’t it?”
Bud lit up a Pall Mall — must have bought his own pack when he stopped for my grub. He shook his head. “Naw, it goes way deeper than that, Hector.”
Marty Robbins was crooning on the radio: “A White Sport Coat (And A Pink Carnation).” I know Marty. I like him. But I prefer his cowboy ballads. I turned down the volume.
I said, “Startle me, Bud.”
“This politician,” — Bud said “politician” like he was saying “clapped-up cunt” — “this politician, Prescott Bush? He supposedly personally robbed Geronimo’s grave and stole the Apache’s head for the Skull and Bones Society’s secret archive.”
“Had heard that. And he supposedly paid Holmdahl $25,000 to steal Pancho Villa’s head,” I said. “We knew that, too. Or we thought we did. It’s all hearsay.”
“Actually, my guy told me a guy named Frank Brophy said that he and four others put up $5,000 to have Emil Holmdahl steal the head,” Bud said. “But Brophy said it was a Skull and Bones scheme, all the way.”
I shook out one of my cigarettes and fished for my Zippo. I fired her up. “That’s a big range,” I said, “twenty-five-grand down to five-grand? Big gap there, my friend.”
Bud Fiske smiled. “Huh-uh. Think about it, Hector. Prescott supposedly offered $25,000 for the head theft. Brophy, who belonged to the Skulls and Bones too, well, he said that he and four friends put up five-grand. Well, what if it was five-grand each? Then we’re right back to your $25,000. Prescott may just have handed over the collective cash.”
It cohered. It felt right. I could roll with it. “Yeah, I can buy it, Bud. But they didn’t get the head, near as we can tell.”
“Naw,” my interviewer said. “Something happened between the time Emil handed it over to his confederate and the confederate was to get it to Senator Bush. That’s the mystery that remains to be solved.”
Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series) Page 3