“Goose, the girl was pregnant.”
Danny Yanez held onto his seat and howled so loudly that Lowell ran back into the office thinking Fischer had hit him. Fischer motioned Lowell to leave again.
“I love kids!” cried Goose. “I got three kids.”
“Why don’t you tell me the whole story, Goose, you’ll feel better then.”
“We didn’t know about no baby. She was a witch. That’s what we were told. A witch!”
“Who told you that?”
“That lady, the cop’s mom. Oh, shit, man, shit...”
“She was going to have a baby.”
“Oh, man...” Yanez started to cry. “I’m no fuckin’ good.”
“Why don’t you tell me everything you know, Goose?”
Yanez jumped out of his chair, and Fischer with him, in case he would have to bring him down. “I’ll do it for my kids!” he cried. “I’ll tell the truth about everything.”
Fischer eased him back into his chair and called Martin Lowell into the office. They gave Yanez a cup of coffee and Fischer sat behind the desk, a yellow pad in front of him. He clicked the button of his ball-point pen several times and said, “Okay, Goose, go ahead.”
“She was gonna have a baby?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You gotta believe me, we didn’t know about the baby.”
“We believe you, Goose. Nobody would kill a baby if he knew. You just tell us what happened.”
Yanez had an unclear recollection of that meeting at the Panama Club. Juan Barrajas had told them there was a lady with a lot of money and someone was in her way. She was with an old lady. A guy was fixing the jukebox, he remembered. Soon, he forgot his remorse and struggled to recall details.
He told them of seeing the movies several times before getting around to going over to Maria’s house. He described pulling her into the car and trying to subdue her. He told of how hard she fought.
“On top of everything else,” he said, “the damn car was givin’ us trouble. That car was a loser. I had a car once, boy, before they repossessed it, a Thunderbird. That was some car. It was a French car.”
“A Thunderbird ain’t a French car, Goose,” said Fischer.
“This one was. The tires was always going down on me!” Yanez followed with, “Yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk!” and twisted his mouth and nose to one side of his face in imitation of his hero Jerry Lewis.
Lowell and Fischer laughed at him, and Fischer had to put down his pen for a moment to crack his knuckles and wipe his eyes.
“You’re too much, Goose,” said Fischer.
“Everybody says I should be on television,” said Yanez.
“I can guarantee it. By tomorrow you’ll be on all the channels.”
It took a moment for Yanez to understand. The irony of his achievement did not diminish his pride in it.
He told them of passing the Pike’s Peak Turf Club trying to find a spot to drop her. He told them of pulling off the road, going under the main highway and burying her under a railroad trestle.
Lowell and Fischer looked at each other, a silent tension in their faces.
“Tell us again where you buried her.”
Yanez described the spot.
“What exit was this from the highway?” asked Lowell.
“I don’t remember,” said Yanez.
“Well, think, dammit.”
“I am thinking.”
“Was it called County Line Road?” asked Fischer.
“That’s it.”
“And you’re sure she was alive when you were digging the grave?” asked Lowell.
“Yeah.”
“You killed her in Pueblo County,” said Lowell.
“So?” asked Yanez.
“So that makes it Fergie’s case,” explained Fischer.
Yanez was still not interested. Until Lowell said, “You’re one dead goose.”
FOUR
Beef Buddusky endured the sermon, fighting his own fatigue and boredom at being told once again that every day he continues his low-down ways, salvation slips further and further out of his reach. The captive congregation could sense from the rhythm of the zealot’s voice that he was building to his conclusion. Derelicts about the room elbowed their neighbors awake. As anticipated, he made one last plea to seek Jesus Christ, “...the Son of God, who taught us all to pray...” At last he gestured them to their feet and they bowed their heads and mumbled the half-forgotten phrases of the Lord’s Prayer. Then they were given their beans and cornbread.
Beef was in Los Angeles, stopping at still another mission. He had made it to Mexico, where all he did was watch and listen to the mariachis. They don’t slough off. They can be singing to two drunk gringos, one with his head dead on the table, and they still give it all they got. You wonder what it means to them. The one fella could be out cold and his friend could be wishing they’d all go away, but the mariachis don’t slough off.
Maria’s presence weighed too heavily on him in Mexico. He wanted to try for Peru. If he could only get to Peru, he was sure, he would be able to start a new life. But instead he went drifting northward again. Thanks to Ginny and Mae, he had become too domesticated in the Springs ever to find comfort and freedom in the road. He wished he had something to insulate him from his loneliness: an obsession or a talent or a purpose in life. Some of what the mariachis had.
Someone had left a newspaper on the table. He spread it out in front of him and saw the headline on the bottom right corner: salvation army handyman sought for role in girl’s disappearance, Man Posed as Policeman.
He had never thought of himself as posing as a cop. That meant something different from what he had actually done. He was not sure he could pass himself off as a cop, but that’s what it said in the paper. He boxed his own ears for the despicable pride he felt. The wasted men sitting on either side of him drifted away, accustomed to crazies who beat their own heads.
The newspaper account made much of the man who allegedly impersonated Gordon Wynn in the illegal annulment He was known alternately as “Beef” and “Bomba the Jungle Boy,” and the story suggested that some sort of hedonistic cultism may be involved.
“I never hurt nobody!” he sobbed. “God, I was born to lose,” he quoted the tattoo on his bulging bicep. Somebody called the goons, who invited Beef to seek salvation elsewhere.
He claimed his bag and walked to an entrance of the Harbor Freeway. He extended his thumb. “Might as well be in hell,” he muttered.
A caravan of cars followed Danny Yanez down Route 25. Manacled, he sat in the back seat between a priest and Ronnie Fischer, the only officer he would trust.
He directed the driver off the highway and told him where to stop. Fischer helped him walk through the snow to the railroad trestle. Newsmen and police from two counties clustered behind them. Yanez had no difficulty finding the spot. He broke down and had to be taken aside and comforted by the priest, who put his arm around his shoulders. After a few moments Danny stepped forward and pointed down to the ground. He was helped back up to the car by Ronnie Fischer. The priest stayed behind. With the first shovelful of dirt they found her.
FIVE
Beef had colored his hair black with shoe dye and had touched up his newly grown moustache, still sparse, with black eyebrow pencil. He wore a pair of fake eyeglasses. He bought two bottles of aspirin and the evening papers at a drugstore and took them back to the room he had rented near the Pueblo County Courthouse.
Being on the lam was not abnormal to his prior way of life, and being in Pueblo was not in itself so unsafe. The fugitive runs, he does not stay within sight of the court that wants him. But safety was an unsatisfactory reason for his presence there, and he had no other explanation, no more than the singed moth who returns to the flame to be burned crisply.
Nobody would have listened to him, he reasoned. Why would anybody take his word, a drifter with a record, against the word of a cop’s mother? Maybe, though, if he had gone to the cops, they would have at l
east talked to her about it and that might have been enough to scare her away from killing Maria. Ginny could have then pressed charges against Beef for slander or something. Still, a girl would be alive today. Hell, people are dying every day from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Innocent people, beautiful people, pregnant people. Old suicidal fantasies offered small comfort.
He went out into the hall and called the Ponderosa Pines in Colorado Springs. He would take Mae back on her terms, on any terms. He needed an ally and she was the only one to whom he could turn. Maybe they could get a little back of what they once had.
“Ponderosa Pines.”
“Is Mae there?”
“Mae don’t work here no more.”
“Oh, yeah? Where’s she work?”
“I don’t know. She left town.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Utah, I think.”
“Ed? This you?”
“Naw, Ed don’t work here no more either.”
“Well, where the hell is he?”
“Jail.”
He was going to have to see this through on his own. He went back to his room and opened the paper.
maria’s body found in pueblo county: policeman’s wife beaten, strangled. Suspect Admits Murder for Hire.
There was a large picture of the grave site. Her partially uncovered and decomposed body was hardly discernible. The story included the late-breaking news that the coroner’s autopsy indicated Maria might have been buried alive.
He studied the picture of her corpse, still half in the ground, and he remembered seeing her for the first time and knowing he would love her, and knowing how much. He took a handful of aspirins for his headache.
It was a mistake to bury Maria under that particular railroad trestle, a mistake her killers could not have anticipated, a mistake they could not appreciate even after their arrests. It put the crime in the jurisdiction of Ralph Ferguson, district attorney’ of Pueblo County.
Ferguson was a bent and frail man who wore mismatched clothes and kept his pants up with suspenders passed down from an earlier generation. He looked quasi-official, almost agricultural, like a pig farmer who also happens to be president of the school board.
But he was a giant-killer and a local hero. Even Beef, who had never done Colorado time, knew “Fergie” from talks with those who had. His was one of the most respected names in the joints, and when ex-cons got together to fantasize about future jobs, they made a wide circle around Pueblo County. There was no making a deal with Fergie, there was no measure of mercy when he prosecuted. Pueblo County was a hostile environment for criminals.
Upon discovery of the body, Ferguson, who was hounded by the press, issued a statement.
A crime has been committed in Colorado, one of such frightening brutality, of such devious premeditation, that we must move as quickly and as forcefully as possible to assure that the perpetrators are meted out punishment in kind. There will be those who will rise to the defense of these ruthless killers, who will try to find excuses for their despicable behavior, but will anyone speak for the beautiful young girl and her unborn child Who were beaten and putinto the ground still fighting for life? If ever society were called upon to accept the role of retaliator, this is the case.
Beef read the statement and said to his empty room, “This man wants Ginny Mom and the two Mexican kids dead.”
District Attorney Ferguson, Beef read, made $17,500 a year and was in office for his tenth year. He had been a defense attorney and reportedly ran for DA because he thought it was too easy to win cases against the county. It was rumored that he successfully defended a child molester he knew to be guilty, and when his client smiled and extended his hand after his acquittal, Ferguson said, “Get away from me, you son-of -a-bitch.” Shortly after, a political unknown and a recent transplant from Michigan, he was elected district attorney by a landslide.
He was first in his class as an undergraduate and first in his class at law school. After his first year in office Pueblo County topped the state with its conviction rate, 97.4 per cent. During nine years in office he was number one in conviction rate six times. He always appeared alone and unaided in important cases, and he never lost a jury trial. Never.
In the previous year only one of 196 offenders was found innocent by a jury, and one of Ferguson’s deputies lost that case. During his tenure he prosecuted five capital cases, and all five eventually paid for their crimes in the gas chamber.
“Woi Yesus!” said Beef Buddusky. Reading about the district attorney sent him into a panic he believed was on Ginny’s behalf. Then he faced the unthinkable. “What if he wants me dead?”
If Ginny’s lawyer was intimidated by the district attorney she did not reveal it to the press. In interviews she ridiculed him and his statement, claiming he had a “vengeful God complex.” When reporters tried to promote a pre-trial feud, Ferguson said coolly, “I’ll deal with Miss Ryan and her client in court.”
Sally Ryan was one of a handful of American lawyers who had transcended the practice of law to become personalities in their own right, newsworthy people who could be called upon at a moment’s notice to fill a vacancy on a TV talk show, nothing to promote but themselves.
Expert showmen all, who charged exorbitant legal fees to those who could afford them, they would take a case without a fee and fight it for years if it had the potential for staying in the news. One of Sally’s East Coast colleagues had won so much publicity as a personality that he hardly practiced law at all, preferring to spend most of his time playing the part of a lawyer or judge in TV dramas and feature films. Some say the man’s heart broke when he tried to get the lead in On the Waterfront but found he had been typecast and inferior actors like Brando were picking up the meaningful roles.
Sally Ryan was severe in dress and manner; everything about her seemed battened down and under lock and key. If she wore make-up, it was not enough to make a difference. And yet she had a fine figure and very good legs, though one knew instinctively that she had never lain with another human being. Perhaps only one, if you cared to invest in her a mystery and seek an explanation for the way she was.
She was head of her own busy firm and had an enormous number of clients. Her method of fee setting frequently got her into trouble with the bar, which suspected her of usury, but she took advantage of the bar’s notorious reluctance to speak ill of one of its own and always escaped with a mild rebuke.
She was the darling and champion of Denver homosexuals. She would visit the jail, agree to defend the recent men’s room violator at a nominal fee, if he would agree to bring her five others similarly charged whom she could defend on a sliding scale, at an average of $20 per month for an average of five years. She was the only lawyer in Denver with a secretarial pool of nothing but homosexual males, past clients, who toiled for subsistence wages, working off their fees.
She was anywhere from forty-five to sixty years of age, and though she had lost several capital cases no client of hers had ever said farewell from the gas chamber. She contacted Gordon Wynn, who had inexplicably already been turned down by a long list of other prominent attorneys, and he was quick to agree to her terms. Sally Ryan would defend Gordon’s mother to the final disposition of the case in return for 100 per cent of the publication rights to the Wynn story (hard-cover, soft-cover, foreign, domestic, magazine, newspaper) and 100 per cent of the film rights, TV rights, recording rights, and other rights to technical advancements still to be invented. In addition, Gordon turned over to her the registration for his car, and he agreed to work in her office as investigator for a period of three years, at subsistence wages.
SIX
Beef’s mother had come through with some cash. It was Christmas, after all. Always before, wherever he was, and once he was in prison, Beef tried to create a sense of Christmas for himself. It did not take much. An eggnog with some barroom cronies was sufficient. Once he was part of a family, and a family is never so good as on Christmas and the lack of one nev
er harder than then. Traditionally, his family would have a goose stuffed with an exquisite mixture of sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, and caraway seeds. The anticipation of the feast was so great, the smell of the house so rich, that he and his father had to take a long walk through the strippings and into the woods before dinner, and this too became a tradition. Then when his father disappeared the tradition went with him. Still, the memories were there, and with them the memories of two Christmases with the family of his own making, and every year he tried to keep Christmas in some small personal way. But not this one.
He made instant coffee in his room, and for dinner a piece of baloney on two pieces of dry bread. This brought back memories only of the drunk tank, where he and the others would stand at the bars with both shaky hands outstretched. The bull would walk down the line, placing a piece of bread on each hand. He would make a second trip to put a piece of baloney on every other slice of bread. The drunks would slap their hands together like one muted unit of applause and sit back against the wall to dine.
By Christmas Day, after Yanez had confessed and Maria’s body was exhumed, Rudy Montalvo still refused to talk. He had been transferred from Colorado Springs to Pueblo and booked for murder. He was spending his fourth Christmas in the custody of the People.
Martin Lowell and Ronnie Fischer spent a good part of their holiday with him, urging him to confess to his part in the crime.
“Don’t you guys have families? I got nothing to say,” said Montalvo.
“You should see your pal Goose,” said Lowell. “He’s calm and happy and sleeps like a puppy. He’s got nothing on his chest.”
“But pimples,” said Montalvo.
Lowell started cleaning his fingernails with a paper clip. “You may think he’s dumb, but old Goose has outsmarted you. He’s gonna come out on top and let you and the old lady suck up the gas. Hell, he’s only a poor retard led around by you and Ginny Mom.”
The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Page 17