The Deadline

by Ron Franscell

  Unlike much of what he heard, the stories about Old Bell Cockins rang true.

  Many years before, Old Bell secretly paid for the construction of Winchester’s first lighted Little League ballfield. It was naturally named for Hug Clancy, a strapping ranch boy who was the only Winchester boy ever to play in the majors.

  Hug Clancy’s celebrity, however, lasted much longer than his big-league career. In 1912, he pinch-hit in one at-bat in one game for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  That was all.

  Facing the great New York Giant right-hander Rube Marquard, then pitching the best season of his career, Hug Clancy had two strikes against him when he slapped a fly to shallow right field, where it was caught.

  But it was said that he grinned his gap-toothed grin all the way back to the dugout, because what he feared most was striking out. And he hadn’t struck out in his first major league appearance — and, as it turned out, his last.

  The season ended a few games later. Hug Clancy came home to help his ailing father run the family’s dried-up cattle ranch and never played again, except in some town games on the Fourth of July when the opposing outfielders would backpedal nervously toward the fence every time he came to the plate.

  When the Winchester town fathers dedicated Hug Clancy Field in 1965 — eight-year-old Jefferson Morgan was there on Opening Day and saw the withered old ballplayer rolled out to the pitcher’s mound in his wheelchair, hardly the heroic figure that was the stuff of local legend — a sign-painter summarized his life’s work on the gateway sign: He never struck out.

  For a long time, young Jefferson Morgan wasn’t quite sure if that was the highest achievement in any boy’s life or merely the minimum expectation.

  At any rate, nobody knew for a long time that Bell Cockins was the real benefactor of the new ballpark, nor that he had personally implored the elderly Rube Marquard to write a letter to Hug Clancy a few months before he died in the dark fog of his dementia in 1968.

  Hug couldn’t remember his own name most of the time, but when he read the letter from Rube Marquard, he wept.

  So when Morgan went off to college at Northwestern University in Chicago in the fall of 1975, he hauled one suitcase and a dream to become a newspaperman, just like Old Bell. His father had wished he’d pursue a more practical career, so Morgan took a few architecture classes to please his father. But at the time, after the fall of Nixon and Vietnam, changing the world seemed like a reasonable design, even for a kid from an end-of-the-road Wyoming town where nothing, including the architecture, had changed in a hundred years. Still, the study of building design had added an abstract element to his perceptive skills: Morgan saw human frailties and virtues reflected in the walls that surrounded the lives he covered.

  Morgan’s mother sent him a clipping when Old Bell’s wife, Leah, died of a stroke, sometime back in the early ‘Eighties. The old man must have written her obituary himself. Hers was the third headstone in Mount Eden’s heavenly garden, Morgan surmised now, beside Old Bell’s mother and father.

  Old Bell and Leah never had any children of their own, but it was said the crusty old man helped put some of Winchester’s best and brightest kids through college, even though he’d never gone himself and was known to verbally savage the “god-damnable sissy, clock-watchin’, good for nothin’ college boys” he hired. He made some of them cry and some just ran away. Old Bell himself told those stories; his wash-outs would never be so kind.

  Like the house his father built, Old Bell had many sides.

  And most of them were hidden from view.

  The sun had dropped behind the softly murmuring trees, casting long shadows across Old Bell’s resplendent garden. The encircling woodland grew darker, more protective.

  They’d walked down every foot-weary path. Old Bell told stories about his flowers and yanked the occasional weed that dared take root among them. He told how his father had run underground tiles from the foothills to the “pleasance” and how the springwater was diverted to the roots through a complex system of hidden aqueducts, manipulated by leaky valves hidden among the bog-loving, purple lythrum.

  Morgan sat alone on a weathered garden bench, and told Old Bell about Gilmartin’s peculiar visit to the newspaper office the day before. The old editor listened, his jaw clenched.

  “I never talked to the man, directly. Just saw him in the jail after he was arrested,” Old Bell said, pulling a dandelion hidden in a clump of pungent catmint that draped over the stone wall.

  “Back then, nobody I talked to had much good to say about him. And I talked to everybody. Gilmartin was a violent drunk and he was drunk most of the time. Couldn’t hold a job to save his sorry ass. He came back from the war pissed at the world.”

  “He fought in the war?”

  “Navy. A damn swabby. It’s the one part of his life he never lied about because he never talked about it to anybody.”

  “What happened after he got back?”

  “He fell in with the back-room boys and his world was dark, let me tell you. Women, booze, cards. Trouble all around. He’s bad news, I tell you.”

  “Maybe so,” Morgan admitted.

  “No maybe about it,” Old Bell grumbled. “This guy wouldn’t tell the truth if it would help him. He’s congenitally unable to be honest. He’s jacking you around. Hold these gloves, would you?”

  Old Bell stripped his creased leather workgloves off and dug in his trouser pockets. He flipped open the blade of a Swiss Army knife and neatly clipped a four-foot-tall cluster of pink and carmine flowers that looked like a hundred delicate bells suspended on a slender rope.

  “Foxglove,” Old Bell said, handing the brightly colored stem to Morgan. “In another week, all these blossoms will be gone. End of the season. Pretty little flowers, but the leaves will kill you. Goes to show, you can’t always tell by looking.”

  Morgan wasn’t sure just how lethal the foxglove’s foliage might be, so he handled the flowers gingerly. But he grasped Old Bell’s metaphor: He was talking about Neeley Gilmartin.

  “So you think he’s lying now?” Morgan asked, uncertain if he wanted reassurance or a challenge. “You think he did it and is just playing out this one last con?”

  “Jesus, kid, I’m talking about a goddam flower and you’re off in some other dimension,” Old Bell needled him. “You covered the cops and robbers in Chicago? Jesus Christ. If you’re gonna turn out to be a good reporter, you gotta keep your eye on the damn ball. But, hell, if he didn’t kill that little girl, who did?”

  Nearly twenty years covering one of the most savage news beats in America, Morgan thought, and suddenly he felt like a high school kid blowing his first assignment on the local paper. He’d covered John Wayne Gacy, even crept through the serial child-killer’s crawl space as investigators dug for more bodies. And by blending several computer databases from dozens of government agencies, he proved another psycho had been killing truck-stop prostitutes along Interstate 90, from Chicago to Spokane, but never in the same place, for eighteen years.

  The hunt had been a dark one. After compiling leads from a public news database, he made a simple list of all the killings, cross-indexed with the grisly details in every case: cause of death, the estimated time of the killing, whether there had been a sexual assault, the nature of the wounds, the condition of the victim’s body, the color of her eyes and hair, even weather conditions at the time of the murder.

  In that case, Morgan had acted on a hunch. He believed the killer traveled for a living, a salesman or a trucker. So he fleshed out his results with data from the FBI’s minutely detailed VICAP database of unsolved crimes, from road maps and, eventually, interstate trucking records from Chicago to Seattle. Each successive layer of data eliminated suspects until there was only one.

  When the FBI finally arrested the killer, a long-haul gypsy trucker who lived in a trailer in Blue Island, Illinois, they credited Morgan’s stories with ending the deadly wanderings of one of America’s most prolific death angels.

&
nbsp; Now he felt as if that was another life, and he was starting all over, green as ever. Old Bell had always been his highest standard, and now the old man made him feel a little sheepish. But that’s how the stormy Belleau Wood Cockins showed affection.

  Old Bell stuffed his gloves in his back pocket. He wiped his knife blade against his trouser leg and folded it back into his pocket. Without a word, he strode off toward the trees, favoring a stiff knee. He stopped on the way to pick three plump, fresh tomatoes from his free-flowing vines.

  Morgan followed him back through the darkening woods to the main house, a few steps behind. As he walked, he contemplated the foxglove, alluring and deadly.

  They stopped at the back door and scraped the mud off their shoes against a metal grate.

  Old Bell’s house smelled like wet earth after a rain. It was first a gardener’s house, second a widower’s. The large, country kitchen was festooned with pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, colanders and jars cluttering the countertops, the sink overflowing with undone dishes. Clumps of drying flowers and herbs hung from a warped traverse rod in a dark corner of the unused dining room. A police scanner, a remnant of the editor’s journalistic habits, scrolled through its channels silently inside an empty breadbox.

  The breakfast table had four chairs, three of them stacked with old newspapers. A bowl of shiny apples sat amid a clutter of botanical books and seed catalogs, many of them opened to certain pages and set aside, as if their reader might return at any moment. Other books were heaped up in the window sill and on chairs. A field guide to wildflowers, garnished with little scraps of paper bearing handwritten notes, was left inexplicably on one of the burners of Old Bell’s gas range.

  The last light of day slanted through the western window, dappling the unswept floor and illuminating motes of dust that migrated on unseen currents.

  Old Bell dumped some dead flowers out of a thin pewter vase and filled it with water for the foxglove.

  Then he banged some dirty pots out of his way and came up with a long, serious knife, which he used to carve the unwashed tomatoes into thin slices on a plate. He poured a little olive oil over them and sprinkled some herbs and parmesan cheese, then fished two clean forks from the drying rack on the sink.

  Handing the seasoned tomatoes to Morgan, he yanked open a drawer full of kitchen utensils and pawed around until he found a corkscrew. The aroma of basil tantalized Morgan as Old Bell chose a good red wine from the pantry shelf.

  “Let’s go see the world,” Old Bell said, leading the way out of the kitchen into a large, open den. Last week’s Bullet — and maybe a few previous weeks — was scattered in sections on the rumpled sofa, where a colorful hand-knitted afghan lay in a comfortable heap. Old Bell’s reading glasses were on the edge of a water-stained glass coffee table, where he might have laid them while he napped. More books lay strewn over the table top like leftover puzzle pieces waiting for their proper place to be found.

  “This way,” he said from the bottom step of a circular wood-and-iron staircase. It rose through the ceiling to the cupola Morgan had seen from outside.

  The view was magnificent. It stretched for twenty miles all around Mount Eden. A high-powered spotting scope was set up in the southern window, pointed toward the distant mountain where Old Bell could watch wildlife and gathering storms.

  Morgan paused at the tall north window. His eye settled upon Winchester in the distance, a timid little stopping place amid the vast expanse of wind-burnished flatlands beyond. Bathed in the salmon light of the day’s end, he could pick out the Presbyterian Church’s white steeple and the four-story brick facade of the elementary school. The houses of Winchester huddled around the trees near the center of town, then spread in diminishing order toward the emptiness of the surrounding plains. A low hill shyly interrupted the flatness around Winchester; its most prominent feature was a large white “W” and because of the physical hardships each autumn’s tradition-plagued freshman football players endured to whitewash it, the little prairie lump was known locally as Puke Hill.

  A thunderhead was building far to the north of the town, reflecting the sunset somewhere over Montana. Once, Montana had seemed to be another world to Morgan, now it fit under his own big sky.

  Old Bell handed him a glass of wine and bid him to sit in the soft leather chair that swiveled for the full view from his glass lookout. A hardbound copy of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was butterflied face down on the armrest. Morgan imagined the old man sitting here, alone, on summer nights, missing the ones who’d passed on. Lonely. For all his crustiness, Old Bell’s heart must have been able to see as far as his eyes from this place.

  The old editor had sagged into an antique loveseat that took up most of the rest of the tiny, round room. He pushed a few scattered magazines to the side. One had been separated from its cover, which lay partially crumpled under the sofa, looking as if it had been torn off purposely: Teddy Kennedy had been on the cover. Old Bell’s politics were transparent.

  His plate of sliced tomatoes sat atop a round coffee table that was inlaid with old wooden type from newspapering’s hot-type days. Old Bell cut into one and ate it, washing it down with a gulp of wine.

  All around him lay unshelved books in disordered piles. From what Morgan had seen, the old editor’s house looked like a madman’s library, a kind of paradise for an obsessive reader who moved from tale to tale the way a junkie moves from fix to fix.

  “What do you think?” Old Bell asked, his wine glass tucked between his legs.

  “I’ve never seen it like this,” Morgan said. “It’s better than looking down from the Sears Tower. This is the most remarkable house I’ve ever been in.”

  “Goddammit, there you go again,” the old editor said. “Keep your eye on the ball. I meant this case. What do you think about Gilmartin’s story? You don’t really think he’s innocent, do you?”

  Morgan sipped his wine and thought for a moment.

  “I don’t know. I think he’s a helluva good suspect, but there wasn’t much evidence beyond his threat against Charlie Little Spotted Horse. I mean, this isn’t some cheap mystery where a clever killer outwits the cops. That never happens in real life. Ninety-nine out of a hundred guys who get busted are guilty — and that’s from the best defense lawyer in Chicago. Who else could have done it — and why? Could there have been anything else I didn’t see?”

  Old Bell looked offended.

  “If there was, I’d have goddam well printed it,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Morgan apologized. “I just wonder if there was evidence to the contrary that got swept under the rug? Did Gilmartin get railroaded?”

  “Railroaded? Shit, kid, let me tell you a story. I got a call in the middle of the night, maybe a week after they arrested him. Somebody on the line said they were going to give him the ‘long drop’ from the Iron Mountain Bridge, just like he did to that little girl. By the time I got to town, there was a helluva ruckus on the courthouse lawn, looked like hundreds of drunkards with ball bats and deer rifles. Only one man stood between those hooligans and Gilmartin.”

  “Deuce Kerrigan?”

  “Damn straight. If Deuce had a mind to railroad anybody, he’d have let ‘em walk right in and stretch that boy’s neck longer than a horse pecker. But he wasn’t that kind of man.”

  “Did he ever suspect the parents?”

  Old Bell waved him off.

  “You’re pissin’ up a rope, kid. I never saw the sheriff’s file, but Deuce Kerrigan was as honest as he was tough. Sure, he knew the father belted the kid a few times, whole damn town did, but he told me later their story checked out. He wouldn’t have put a noose around a man’s neck if he wasn’t sure. That bastard had a damned good head on his shoulders, but he had an even better gut for solving crimes, and his gut told him it wasn’t the parents. It was Neeley Gilmartin.”

  “How ‘bout your gut, Bell? Were you sure?”

  “Right after they busted him, a deputy let me in to t
ake a picture for the paper. Gilmartin just flipped me off and turned his face away. I asked him a few questions, but he just told me to fuck off.”

  “So how’d you get his picture?”

  “I stuck one flashbulb in my old Speed-Graphic four-by-five and one in my mouth. I kept the shutter closed, but popped the flash into his cell. Faster’n hell, I stuck that new bulb in the camera and hollered for the deputy to let me out. The dumb fucker Gilmartin turned toward me, ‘cause he was sure he’d snookered the newspaperman. And that’s how I got my picture.”

  The jeering face of Neeley Gilmartin, cocked wickedly over his bare, muscular shoulder, was printed three columns wide in the next week’s edition of The Bullet. Old Bell had cropped the photo so the word TERROR, tattooed on his arm, could be seen clearly.

  “He must have been pissed,” Morgan said.

  “He had that look, you know? His eyes were dead. He had this evil air about him. You’ve sensed it, a kind of evil electricity. Like bolts of anger. That tattoo has stuck with me all these years. He chose terror more than it chose him. My gut? Yeah, he did it.”

  Disappointment nudged Morgan. Maybe he’d hoped to hear that Old Bell had doubted the case against Gilmartin. Or that some vital piece of evidence had turned up in the intervening years that proved his guilt. But if even a feeble flame of his old passionate idealism still burned in Morgan’s heart, it now flickered as if a cold draft had blown through his chest.

  The two newspapermen sat without talking, watching the sun go down all around them. Morgan swirled the wine in his glass, absorbed in thought.

  Old Bell interrupted the silence.

  “Some nights, a red-tailed hawk circles around the place and you can watch him while he watches you, three-hundred-and-sixty degrees as he swings around this little perch. The Crows say the hawk is a spirit, if you believe that shamanistic Indian crap. But I think he’s looking for dinner. Damn rabbits are thicker than spinsters in the front pew. But it’s a sight no city folks ever see,” he said.