Nights of the Red Moon

by Milton T. Burton

  “I don’t know that I’d have any particular reaction. Like I said, I don’t know that much about Zorn because I’ve never had any reason to find out. What’s their connection?”

  “They’re old friends from the rodeo circuit,” Muldoon said. “How much do you know about Sipes?”

  I quickly ran down for them what I remembered about the man. He was a banker, real estate developer, and reputed hood whose vulgarity of lifestyle surpassed even that of the early oil barons. A few years earlier his name had been front-page fodder all over the state, and before that he was a champion bull rider with a nationwide reputation. Tough and durable like most men who practice that sport, he’d come out of the rodeo circuit with a few hundred thousand dollars in prize money and a ruthless determination to get big rich. Within a decade he’d parlayed his stake up to a net worth of several million that included controlling interest in two small coastal banks, one in Crystal City, the other in Kemah. Then he became associated with an outfit that newspapers came to call the “Cowboy Mob” when the story of its marijuana importing scheme hit the headlines. In reality, this so-called syndicate had been nothing more than a crew of rodeo has-beens who’d managed to smuggle over four hundred tons of Colombian Red into the country in the short span of two years using a fleet of commercial fishing boats that had been outfitted with oversize fuel tanks so they could make the trip to South America by way of Yucatán. Investigation showed that these boats had been leased to a nonexistent customer of Sipes’s Kemah bank, and the lease had been paid with a “loan” from the bank itself.

  The Feds came at him with the RICO statute. The ensuing trial was moved from Houston to Fillmore up in Northeast Texas on a change of venue, and it turned out to be a long, garish affair that generated masses of publicity and lurid stories of late-night parties at Sipes’s Crystal Beach marina, where prominent South American politicians cavorted with half-naked call girls.…

  Muldoon nodded. “That’s him.”

  “I saw him one time,” I said.

  “Really?”

  The waitress came by to refill our cups, and I waited until she was gone. “I was at a restaurant up there in Fillmore when he was on trial. As it happened, we finished lunch about the same time, and I followed him out into the parking lot. He was driving a candy apple red Cadillac Fleetwood and had a pair of bodyguards with him who looked like the Marlboro Twins. All three were decked out in fancy Western clothes, boots, hats, the works. And I don’t mean just hats, my friends. These guys were wearing the damnedest hats I ever saw. Hats that bore the same relation to the kind of hat I wear that a ski jump bears to your front doorstep.”

  Hotchkiss smiled. “We know those hats. Sipes and all his goons wear them. They’re his trademark.”

  “One of his trademarks,” Muldoon said.

  “Right,” Hotchkiss said. “No more red Cadillacs for Lester. Now it’s a black Mercury Marquis, and that’s all he’ll drive. He also bought one for each of his banks to use as courier cars.”

  “How come?” I asked.

  “When we prosecuted him before, he thought he was going to prison for sure. Hell, we thought he was going to prison. The reason he didn’t was a brilliant old lawyer from El Paso named Durwood Keane. For some reason, Keane drove him to the courthouse the day of the verdict in his own car, which was a black Marquis. People who know Sipes say he’s very superstitious, and somehow he got it into his head that Keane’s car had something to do with his acquittal. Ever since then he won’t drive anything else.”

  “For real?” I asked.

  They both nodded.

  I shook my head in bemusement. “My years on this job have taught me that you will never cease to be surprised by the things people do. I even surprise myself sometimes. So why are you still interested in Sipes?”

  “We’re really not at liberty to discuss that at the moment,” Muldoon said.

  “Then it must be either drugs or big-time money laundering or both. I won’t press you, but it would be nice if you could give me some notion of where Zorn fits into whatever it is you’re investigating. You say he and Sipes are old friends?”

  They glanced at each other before either spoke. Then Muldoon nodded and said, “That’s another thing Sipes is superstitious about. He believes in loyalty. The story is that Zorn helped him one time when he was down and out, and Sipes has stuck with him ever since.”

  “So that’s all there is to the connection?” I asked.

  “We think so,” Muldoon said. “Except that Sipes may have bankrolled his liquor store.”

  “Then why does Zorn deserve so much attention?”

  “Sheriff, this is a major investigation. We’re following every possible lead. Just because we think that’s the extent of their involvement doesn’t meant that it really is.”

  The waitress brought our orders, and the three of us dug in and ate for a while in silence. Eventually I looked up from my plate and smiled and said, “You two sure got to the crime scene quick enough this morning. How did that come to pass? You wouldn’t happen to have an ‘unofficial source’ here in town, would you?”

  More sideways glances. “We got a call from a friend,” Muldoon said. “You see, Zorn and Mrs. Twiller have been in and out of that marina Sipes owns at Crystal Beach a lot in the last month. In fact, they took a trip with Sipes down to Brownsville about three weeks ago. So when we heard that Zorn had come back home to Sequoya, we contacted our guy up here.”

  Their “guy” had to be a cop of some kind, but I didn’t say so. Instead I asked, “What else did he tell you?”

  “Only that he’d heard Zorn and the Twiller woman have been spending a lot of time in the evenings at the Sawmill Club down in Nacogdoches. Do you know the place?”

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s a big country-and-western dance joint. Have you been there yet?”

  “No,” Hotchkiss said. “This business has been a hit-or-miss thing for us. We’ve got other cases, and we’ve just been gathering information for a team of agents down in Houston that’s working Sipes full-time.”

  “I need to talk to Reverend Twiller,” I said. “They’ve taken him to the Nacogdoches hospital, so I’ll just plan on stopping by the Sawmill Club too.”

  “Good,” Muldoon said.

  “Hey, Sheriff,” Hotchkiss said. “Before we go, I want to ask you about your sidearm. We’ve heard a lot about it.”

  “If you’ve heard about it, then it’s doing its job,” I said.

  He seemed a bit baffled. “I don’t understand.…”

  I smiled at him. “Image, my friends. I have to get elected, so image is important to me. My predecessor was a fellow named John Nightwalker, and besides being a crackerjack cop, he was a very shrewd politician. After he came down with cancer, he got me appointed to fill out his term. Along with a lot of other sound advice, he told me that a sheriff in this part of the country needs something for his constituents to be able to brag about. You know, something to set him apart from the herd, something they can be proud of.

  “Now, John was six foot five and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds. He carried a Colt .44 hog-leg with an eight-inch barrel and drove a Ford 427 interceptor. That was his image. Of course, I doubt that he pulled the gun out of its holster in the last ten years he lived, and he drove that damn car so slow the plugs stayed fouled all the time. But nobody noticed any of that because all they saw was their giant sheriff with his big gun and fast car. Well, I only stretch to five eleven on a good day and don’t weigh but about one seventy. Since fast cars really aren’t my cup of tea, what I did was get me a brand-new Colt .45 automatic and send it to Ferlach, Austria, where a master engraver gussied it up with about a thousand dollars’ worth of that fine scroll engraving they do over there. When I got it back home I fitted it out with a fancy pair of ivory grips with eagles’ heads carved in them, and started practicing out at my farm just about every day until I got real good with the thing. I mean uncommonly good. I’ve always had a natural talent with a handgun,
and I pushed it right out to the limit. Then I started showing up at the Caddo County Gun Club and shooting circles around most everybody out there. Thus was born the legend of Sheriff Beauregard Handel and his Mighty Forty-Five. It’s good politics, my friends, and it’s good psychology with the criminal element too.”

  “Have you ever shot anybody with it?” Hotchkiss asked.

  I held up two fingers. “I wish I’d been spared that, but I don’t think two is so bad for almost thirty years in office. One of the benefits of having a reputation as a first-class pistolero is that it sometimes forestalls armed conflict, and that’s fine with me. I’ll take diplomacy over gunplay any day of the week.”

  “Did either of the guys you shot offer any comments on the experience?” Hotchkiss asked.

  “The one that lived claimed it hurt a right smart.…”

  * * *

  After they went on their way, I decided to have one final cup of coffee and try to collect my thoughts. But before I could get started on such a probably futile project, a slim, pretty woman in her early thirties with shoulder-length auburn hair and pale blue eyes sat down in the other side of the booth. My niece, Sheila Warbeck, star reporter for the Nacogdoches Daily Sentinel and occasional freelancer for several slick, wide-circulation magazines, including Texas Monthly. Four years earlier she’d enjoyed a budding career with the Dallas Morning News, including two years on the police beat. Then her marriage failed, and after the divorce she abandoned urban life and brought her daughter, Mindy, back home and moved in with her mother, a calm, unobtrusive woman a couple of years my junior. It was hardly the life she had envisioned for herself when she graduated with honors from the University of Texas School of Journalism.

  “I just heard about Amanda Twiller,” she said. “I also heard you drew the case.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s so awful. Who would want to kill that poor woman?”

  “Right now I don’t have any idea. How about you? You go to the Methodist Church, so you must have known her.”

  “Bo, I don’t think anybody really knew her.”

  “I bet her husband feels like he knew her less than anybody right now. By the way, do you happen to know who’s her doctor?”

  “Her doctor?” she asked, her eyes wide. “Why are you interested in her doctor?”

  “Because it looks like the lady had a prescription drug problem.”

  “Oh my…”

  “Her doctor’s name?” I urged.

  “Dotty Fletcher, down on the square. Almost everybody at the church goes to Dr. Dotty because she’s our pianist.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Oh, absolutely. I’ve seen her in the waiting room a couple of times.”

  “So what did you hear about her?” I asked. “Did you know anything about her private life?”

  “Just that she started keeping company with that asshole Emmet Zorn.”

  Sheila rarely used rough language, and only with the most extreme provocation. I stared at her pointedly for a few seconds. “What’s the problem?”

  “Nothing, really. Forget about it.”

  “Has he been coming on to you?”

  “Only every time he sees me. I think he’s singled me out as his next conquest.”

  “I’ll put a stop to it for you.”

  “No, Bo—” she began, shaking her head.

  “Hush. It’s done.”

  She gave me a shy smile. “Okay, if you insist. My knight in shining armor.”

  I snorted. “Wranglers and cotton dress shirts, please.”

  “But mounted on a gray charger and carrying a Rebel flag. Are you still a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  We grinned at each other across the table. “So, General Beauregard, when will you have something for me on the Twiller murder?”

  “Come by the house about seven this evening and I’ll fill you in. Of course, a lot of what I have to tell you I can’t let you use yet. If something comes up and I can’t meet you there, I’ll call you on your cell phone.”

  “Okay. How about giving me a quote now that I can put in my story today?”

  “Just say that Sheriff Handel has several promising leads, and that he will leave no stone unturned in his efforts to apprehend the perpetrators of this senseless and savage crime. Does that sound pompous enough for you?”

  “It sounds grand,” she said, scribbling quickly in her notebook. “Do you? Have several good leads, I mean?”

  I shook my head. “No. All I’ve got is half a lead and a semi-suspect.”

  “Then I’ll see you tonight,” she said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sequoya lies about forty miles from the Louisiana border in central East Texas, a land of languid, slow-moving rivers and red clay hills covered in dense pine and hardwood forests. It’s a county seat, a place big enough that I need a dozen full-time deputies, but still small enough that people who move here soon feel like they know everybody in town. Like the rest of Texas, Caddo County was originally part of Mexico, settled by colonists who wandered up El Camino Real during the long, fading twilight of the Spanish empire. They named it La Ciudad Nueva, which meant the New City, but under Spanish rule it never amounted to anything more than a dismal collection of huts clustered around its plaza, an irregular pentagon which housed the communal well that was always the social center of a Latin village.

  The Spanish are long gone now, but the well is still there, curbed and lined with native fieldstone and securely locked against the “depredations of children, idiots and drunkards,” as the city council’s 1896 ordinance reads. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Celtic settlers began to trickle in from the Old South, and by the time Sam Houston and his ragtag army won Texas from Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, the town had become thoroughly American.

  The timber boom of the late nineteenth century brought prosperity, which inspired the city fathers of that era to cover ten blocks of South Main with paving bricks of a deep maroon color. That same year the county found the money to build a new courthouse on the old Spanish plaza, a three-story Renaissance Revival structure of dull red brick and white marble trim that rises sedately from a grove of ancient oaks and magnolias. Its copper dome is visible for miles around, and the statue of Lady Justice standing atop its crown is still the highest point in the county.

  My first destination that morning was more prosaic—the Pak-a-Sak liquor store over on the north side of town, an ugly modernist pile built back in the 1950s of red brick with a glass and aluminum front. I parked my cruiser and pushed the store’s door open to see Emmet Zorn where he stood in front of the counter talking to a skinny young clerk.

  Zorn was in his early forties, tall and slim with a handlebar mustache and a full head of heavily sprayed, ash-blond hair that swept up and backward so dramatically that it looked like the work of a moderately skilled taxidermist. The lower end of this amazing apparition was firmly encased in well-shined cowboy boots of full quill ostrich hide that ran about a thousand dollars a pair. In between he wore western-cut pants of tan twill and a heavily-starched white western shirt with mother of pearl buttons. A black bolo tie with a large turquoise clasp and a pair of aviator sunglasses completed his getup.

  When I came in the door, he reached up and took off his shades. “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “We need to talk outside.”

  He hesitated a moment before answering, and then gave me a laconic, “Okay.”

  I went through the doorway and he followed me out into the parking lot. “So what’s on your mind?” he asked.

  “I thought you might like to know that Amanda Twiller is dead.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” he said. “Terrible.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “About ten last night.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “A bar over in Nacogdoches.”

  “That would be the Sawmill Club, I sup
pose.”

  This threw him a little. “How did you know that?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Did the two of you go there together?”

  He gave me an offhand shrug. “Yeah, we went with another couple that left early. About an hour later I left with some friends, and I don’t know what she did after that.”

  “Did you have an argument?” I asked.

  “Nah. Just one of those things, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know. What kind of things?”

  Before he spoke he rolled his toothpick over to the other side of his mouth with the tip of his tongue, then he said, “We split up.”

  “Why?”

  “Hey, man, that’s personal.”

  “I can make one phone call to the DA and have you in front of the grand jury when it convenes next week. So why not tell me now and avoid that embarrassment?”

  He sighed a deep, long-suffering sigh—the sigh of a man of affairs forced to waste valuable time on a hick lawman who probably wasn’t too smart anyway.

  “What’s it going to be?” I asked. “My way or the grand jury?”

  “Okay, I may as well since you’ve probably heard anyway. The woman was a doper. She abused prescription drugs, painkillers and stuff. She was starting to hook up with some street-level sources and people like that. I didn’t want any part of it.”

  “I’m still going to want you to come in,” I said. “I’ll need a statement from you since you were involved with the lady.”

  “Should I bring my lawyer?”

  “I don’t know. Should you? All I asked about was a statement for the record, and here you start in on lawyers.”

  He licked his lips and tried to hold my gaze and couldn’t. He dropped his eyes and muttered, “No, of course not.”

  “There’s one more thing we need to talk about,” I said.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Sheila Warbeck.”

  “Who?” he asked, then repeated himself, “Who?”

  “Who-who? What are you, an owl? You know who I’m talking about. The reporter.”

  “Oh, her. That little redhead. What about her?”