The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition

by Darryl Ponicsan

  “The man upstairs knows I’m innocent.”

  “You’re getting the shaft, pal,” said Lowell. “The grand jury meets day after tomorrow. You’d better get in under the wire.”

  “I’m making book that the other two’ll beat it.”

  “Fuck you.”

  After a long silence, Fischer said, “The girl was Catholic, you know. I wonder if that means her baby will go to hell, not being baptized and all. Of course, the baby wasn’t born yet, but you’d have to say it was alive. It was a little girl, the coroner said. I wonder if she will go to hell. I wonder what they do with her in this case. I mean, do they embalm the little girl and bury her in the same coffin as her mother or do they put her in a separate coffin or do they put her back inside the mother and sew her up or what?, What do you think?”

  Montalvo started to sniffle.

  “Will the baby go to hell, Rudy? What’s your opinion?”

  Rudy covered his face with his hands and had to be returned to his cell. They waited until eleven that night and then Fischer called for him again. He asked him only one question: “Rudy, do you want a priest?”

  “Yeah, I think I do.”

  Fischer called Father Cooper, one of two Catholic chaplains who regularly visited the jail. He arrived at eleven forty-five, excited because he knew from the newspapers and television who Montalvo was. Fischer shook hands with him and took him to the interrogation room and said only that the boy wanted to talk to him. Father Cooper was with Montalvo for forty-five minutes. When he opened the door to leave, Fischer could see Montalvo inside, praying on his knees. As Father Cooper passed Fischer, he clasped his hands together and said, “I think he’s ripe.”

  Twenty minutes later Rudy Montalvo emerged from the room smiling sweetly. He asked Fischer, “Do you know how it feels to finally turn to your Saviour?”

  “Good, huh?”

  “The best.”

  Fischer offered him a cigarette and lit it for him. They leaned against opposite walls in the hallway and smoked.

  “The circumstances,” said Rudy, “are very, very unfortunate, and I am very, very sorry, but I know God has forgiven me and now I am ready to be judged by man.”

  Fischer led him to another room, called the captain and a stenographer, and listened to Itudy’s full confession.

  Two days after Christmas the grand jury met to hear testimony regarding the death of Maria Wynn. Martin Lowell was the first witness. He identified photographs of Yanez, Barrajas, Virginia Wynn, Montalvo, and Mrs. Lister.

  The coroner took the stand and dispassionately described the condition of Maria’s body and testified that in his opinion death was not by natural causes or by self-inflicted wounds but by some human agency other than the victim.

  Montalvo told of the crime from his point of view and Yanez followed with his. Mrs. Lister told her rambling story. Two landladies were called. Finally the last witness, Gordon Wynn, was called.

  Ralph Ferguson did not bother rising. He questioned him from his table, methodically, and with a great deal of quiet contempt, revealing through his questioning that although Mrs. Wynn had been married once or twice during Gordon’s adult life, she chose to live with her son rather than with her husband. Wasn’t this an unusual state of affairs, wondered Ferguson. Gordon replied that he didn’t think so.

  Ferguson then stood up and asked, “At the time that you lived with your mother, did you ever sleep in the same bed with her?”

  A few members of the grand jury leaned forward. Gordon turned to look at them before answering. “No, sir,” he replied, unruffled.

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  Ferguson had no further questions.

  The grand jury deliberated for ten minutes and brought back an accusation against Virginia Wynn, Rodolfo Montalvo and Daniel Yanez of a felony, to wit, a violation of Chapter 40, Article 2, Sections 1 and 3 of the Penal Code, murder. In addition, Mrs. Wynn was indicted on four counts of felonies in connection with the fraudulent annulment. Also indicted, in absentia, on three counts of felonies was John Doe, alias “Bomba the Jungle Boy,” alias “Beef.”

  SEVEN

  It was late at night, early in the morning, and the few left in the place voted to unplug the jukebox and sing, Beef Buddusky among them, holding and swinging his bottle of Coors by its sweaty neck. “Last Saturday night I got married, me and my wife settled down...”

  He was with good old aces he knew, though he had never seen a one of them before that night, men who spoke the same language as he, transplanted like him from a bed of gravel to a patch of sand. Honky-tonk men, juke-jointers, barflies; chips off the old block, heartaches to their mothers to see how like their fathers they have become, whiskey bass troubadours willing to face the action end of a broken beer bottle for the honor of a sodden chum or a Four Roses chippy, but unable as hell to raise a kind word to the only ones in the world who love them, against all common and uncommon sense.

  He was with folks who gave their full sympathy unstintingly. Time and again he had sought and received their collective succor against the inequities of a landlady, a boss, a wife, an insensitive society, a D and D. On the other hand, they were equally willing to swoop down en masse with definitive condemnation upon those who have earned it and to suggest to the wheelers of fate what ought to be done about them. Communists ought to be sent to Russia, dissatisfied Negroes ought to be sent to Africa; crooked politicians ought to be shot, child molesters ought to be staked to an anthill. That sort of thing.

  Mom Wynn, as she was now known, ought to be given the gas chamber. In the other seat they ought to put that dodo Yanez and on her lap ought to sit baby-face Montalvo.

  Beef thanked the dear Jesus, Mary, and Joseph that they failed to include him in their vigilante fantasy.

  “The son, too, they ought to cut off his copper balls, the goddamn lousy mama’s boy,” said one of the hairy-chested men.

  “What balls?” asked another, well hung.

  “He didn’t have nothin’ to do with it,” offered Beef. “Montalvo said.”

  “That’s a cover-up, can’t you see? They’re protectin’ the little shit.”

  “He was a cop. He turned her in,” said Beef. “You think he’d do that if he knew she was guilty?”

  “Look at ‘im, there’s nothin’ he wouldn’t do.”

  “Now, wait a minute...”

  “Hell, you heard what he told the grand jury.”

  “The way I read it...”

  “Hell, boy, you don’t know nothin.’”

  “Well, maybe I don’t know nothin’, but I do know this here: in America a person’s innocent till he’s proven guilty or there ain’t a cow in Texas.”

  “Maybe not, but there’s a helluva lot of bull!”

  The barflies Beef knew tended to reduce things to cat-and-mouse. If you can get away with it, fine; if you get caught, tough shit. Seldom were they vindictive toward a common captured criminal. If you get caught, you do your time, and no adrenalin is wasted on you. But this case was awakening in them a pristine savagery, an indignant alarm on behalf of the entire tribe.

  They soundly condemned the killers and cursed as well those who knew about the impending murder but did not lift a finger to save the girl.

  “Look here,” Beef asked the most vocal of them, a small weasel-like man. “What would you do in that case?”

  “I’d rat on them, quick as a shot,” he answered.

  “Easy to say,” said Beef. “The old lady Lister was senile, the Mexican guy was afraid of gettin’ sent to the joint, and Bomba had a record, how could they go to the cops?”

  “Hell, I have a record, I’d of gone.”

  “That’s easy to say.” Beef braced himself for the ordeal of discussing himself in the third person. “What about Bomba the Jungle Boy?” he asked.

  “They’ll catch him. He’ll get his.”

  “All he did was help her get an annulment.”

  “I hope the bastard can sleep nights.” />
  Beef winced. He couldn’t sleep nights. Would they forgive him if he told them that? “Seems to me he was only what they call an innocent victim of circumstances,” he said. “You know, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Shit, boy.”

  “Don’t call me no boy. I’m as old as you are.”

  “But you’re dumb, boy. Anybody’d stand up for that bloodsucker and her crowd is as dumb as they come.”

  “For all you know, she was only a good mother,” said Beef.

  “She chewed his balls away. Call that a good mother?”

  “She wanted to keep him out of trouble,” Beef said. “What the hell is a mother for?”

  “Anybody’d stand up for a ball chewer must like chewin’ on them himself.”

  Beef lowered his head and said, “Cut it out.”

  “You hungry for balls?” continued the small weasel-like man. He pushed Beef and when he encountered no resistance pushed him again. Beef turned his back on him. The small man shoved him. “Cmon, tell us how you do it, you big tub of yellow shit.”

  Beef said nothing.

  The small man grabbed his arm and pulled him to the door. “Get the hell out of here!” he yelled. He opened the door and forced Beef outside. “Come in here again and I’ll kill you, you motherfucker!”

  Out on the sidewalk, Beef heard them laughing and after a moment heard them singing wistfully again, of lonely trains that whistle by on moonless nights.

  EIGHT

  Beef believed he had done a good job of protecting Maria, up to his one lapse, when they killed her. If only she hadn’t rejected him, called the police on him as he stood there guarding her, he would not have fallen into oblivion with Straight, drowning the ugly man’s dream of loving a beautiful woman. Now, he must find some way to repay her for letting down his guard. God save him, he still loved her.

  He recklessly made the rounds of the Pueblo honkytonks, seeking a merciful word for the accused and absolution for Bomba on the lam. In each smoky room the verdict was the same.

  Some suggested that Bomba the Jungle Boy might even have been rubbed out because he knew too much. It made a kind of sense to Beef. He went back to his room and read again the long arid complicated definition of schizophrenia that he had copied into his notebook at the public library. He wanted so badly not to be Bomba the Jungle Boy that he sometimes believed he was not that person. That may be why he thought he could go to court, like any other citizen, and watch the trial of Mom Wynn. Rudy and Yanez were each to receive separate, subsequent trials, this hi exchange for their pleas of guilty and their testimonies against Ginny Wynn.

  He did not expect it to be so crowded, especially during the early proceedings. The spectators lined up before dawn and the corridors swarmed with newsmen, who were calling the crime “the Silver Cord Murder Case.” Beef did not know why; as far as he knew, no silver cord had been involved.

  No one expected an acquittal. In fact, when Ginny pled “Not guilty,” and Sally Ryan added, “And not guilty by reason of insanity,” the spectators groaned.

  It seemed a fair plea to Beef. If they did not catch him soon he would be able to cop the same plea himself. His hanging around this crowded courthouse, for instance, seemed not quite sane.

  Gordon and Ginny walked into every court session arm in arm, through the hooting and the jeering of the many who waited in line. “Yoo-hoo, copper, mama’s boy!” Beef would turn to those next to him and hiss, “Shhhhhh!” Neither Gordon nor Ginny ever looked their way.

  Juan Barrajas, in the grip of consumption, had been secretly kept in a hospital by the DA’s office and was helped into court by a nurse.

  Mrs. Lister strolled into court every day on the arm of a bailiff. The DA chose not to consider her an accomplice. Likewise, Bomba the Jungle Boy, should he ever be found, would not be prosecuted except for his role in the fraudulent annulment. An accomplice, according to law, was someone who could be charged with the same crime as the defendant, and a defendant cannot be convicted solely on the testimonies of accomplices. This rule, at trial time, tends to cut down the number of accomplices.

  Beef was momentarily relieved. He was not an accomplice. The DA said so. That must make it so. Why couldn’t he believe it?

  The district attorney had in court a large map of Colorado Springs. Through the questioning of detectives he ascertained the locations of the Panama Club, Ginny’s apartment, Maria’s various apartments, and many other more incidental addresses connected with the case. The coroner and his assistant testified that the body found buried below the railroad trestle was indeed that of Maria Delgado Wynn, and that she died by other than natural causes, accident, or suicide. She died, he said, at the hands of another person or persons. The cause of death was one of three mechanisms: strangulation, suffocation, or brain damage. All so cold, the words.

  Two landladies, Mrs. Rogers and Mrs. Shaw, testified to the disturbance created in their units by Mrs. Virginia Wynn.

  Attorney Roger Glover was called and he testified about the fraudulent annulment. Sally Ryan tried’ to object to any testimony regarding another charge but Ralph Ferguson claimed that the annulment proved motive for the crime. Miss Ryan was overruled.

  Montalvo and Yanez were called, in that order, and the jurors moved uncomfortably in their seats as they listened to their calm descriptions of the night they murdered Maria Wynn. Montalvo insisted that had they known she was pregnant she would be alive today, for both he and Yanez loved kids. He ended his testimony by saying that for the first time in his life he was happy, now that Jesus was in his corner.

  Yanez’s account was vague and uncertain, though he earnestly tried to answer each question in a dignified, intelligent manner.

  Juan Barrajas testified in faltering English and was followed by Mrs. Lister, who testified for an entire day, sometimes growing so tired she almost fell asleep on the stand. She told long, rambling stories that often were incomprehensible and sometimes drew laughter from the audience and jurors alike.

  During a recess, Beef left with the half of the audience that went out to the corridors for a smoke. The other half saved their seats for them. A woman with thick legs offered him a cup of coffee from her thermos.

  “Ain’t this the berries?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I used to come to court all the time, but it bored me to tears after a while. This one’s a beaut, though. Old Fergie’s gonna gas the dame.”

  “You think so?”

  “Oh, sure. She’ll be the first woman ever executed in the state of Colorado.”

  She seemed to take a perverse pride in the new ground broken.

  “I look at her,” said Beef, “and I can’t see her killing somebody.”

  “Bighearted lug, ain’t you?”

  “What about Bomba the Jungle Boy?” he asked.

  “What about him?”

  “He didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “The hell you say.”

  “He’s just another guy, like me, passing through one town on his way to another.”

  “So if he’s innocent, why ain’t he here to speak up?”

  “Well, maybe he is,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  The spectators began filing back into court.

  “Thanks, missus, for the joe.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, screwing the top back on the thermos. “She’ll get the chamber, kiddo. Good for her.”

  When they resumed, the district attorney spilled onto a table the pieces of a tie Maria had given Gordon for his birthday and his mother had cut up. Mrs. Lister had saved the pieces.

  Just like her, thought Beef.

  NINE

  Sally Ryan made no opening statement. She began her defense by questioning Ginny Wynn, one of only three witnesses for the defense.

  That day the corridors were packed by 5:30 a.m. The courtroom door guardian was Deputy Sheriff Ralph Moran and it happened to be his birthday. A few of the girls got together and
baked a cake. Others brought coffee in thermos bottles. Others brought paper plates and cups and napkins. Standing in the corridor, a piece of cake crumbling in his hand, Beef sang the encore with the others: “Happy birthday, dear Deputy Ralph...”

  He shook the deputy’s hand and said, “Many happy returns. How old are you, ace?”

  “Thirty-nine,” said the deputy, smiling.

  “You and Jack Benny, huh?”

  The deputy laughed. “Yeah, next year I start counting backward.”

  “Well, many happy returns. Whaddaya think of all this?” Beef took a big bite of cake.

  “All in a day’s work,” said the deputy.

  “Tasty stuff,” said Beef, wiping crumbs off his mouth.

  Everyone ate and enjoyed, many already worried about what they would do once the trial was over. They would miss each other.

  Preferred places in line went up to $10.

  Courthouse secretaries showed up for work at 6 a.m. and typed and filed and ran about industriously so that by nine-thirty they could have permission to slip through the judge’s chambers and get the best seats in the house for the morning session.

  The questioning began with minor details about her history and Gordon’s childhood, adolescence, and young manhood, during which he always stayed in his own bed, she claimed, no matter how cold the morning or frightening the night.

  She told of her suicide attempt and of later seeing Maria and Gordon together. She had no impression at all of Maria until it became clear that Gordon was serious about her. She admitted calling her once and accusing her of sleeping with Gordon, which Maria did not deny.

  “Naturally I was quite upset over such goings-on,” she said.

  Miss Ryan led her through the stories the other witnesses had told. Yes, it was true that she went to Maria’s apartment. Gordon was supposed to be at a football game and when Ginny saw that he wasn’t there she became worried. But there was no argument. Gordon simply wanted to go home with her, and he did. Bomba the Jungle Boy was there. Ask him.

  Another time she went to Maria’s apartment to show the landlady that Gordon was not really living there. The landlady was very cooperative and let her into the apartment. Ask Bomba, he knows.