by Rex Burns
“Oh, sure, I understand. And I’m not going to do a story on you if you don’t want it. I’m just trying to do the groundwork for when this thing does break.” The drooping mouth lifted and fell again in what was meant to be a friendly way. “This destroying angel thing’s a real story, Gabe. I want to claim it before the Denver Post or the wires or somebody sends some stringer down here to steal it. You see what I mean?”
“I see. How’d you know about me?”
“This here’s a small town. You can’t keep many secrets in a town this small. Did you and Yates learn anything new up to Mueller’s place? Off the record.”
Wager guessed this was the man’s way of proving what he said about small towns. “I just looked at the crime scene. Did you know Mueller well?”
“I knew him. Everybody knew him. But nobody knew him well.”
“Why?”
“He kept to himself. Worked around for wages when he needed money, and stayed by himself up in his cabin when he didn’t.” Without being asked, the tired woman brought Winston a bottle of Coors and he winked “thanks” at her. “See what I mean?” he asked Wager. “Everybody in town knows I drink Coors. Can’t sit in any bar in town without getting a Coors shoved at me.”
“Do you know any reason why somebody would shoot him?”
Winston shook his head. “Don’t know of any man that hated him that much, or any woman that liked him that much.”
“What about those avenging angels?”
The head, balding in a wide strip from brow to crown, shook again. “I’m a Mormon—a jack-Mormon, anyway; used to be a Mormon. But I know there’s no such thing anymore in the orthodox Mormon church.”
“I understand there’s different kinds of Mormons around here.”
“Well, yes, that’s true.” Pouring his beer into a tall glass, Winston dropped his voice with a glance toward the waitress. “Some local folks have been kicked out of the Mormon church. Excommunicated, you understand. If anybody around here believed in the destroying angels, it’d be them.”
“Why?”
“They claim to be fundamentalist Mormons. They claim the church left the basic teachings and they’re the only true Mormons left. They have their own churches and their own prophets.”
“Prophets?”
“Sure. The president of the Mormon church is a prophet. If he says God told him Negroes can be saved, then the church lets them in. If he says the MX missile system is against God’s will, then the brethren vote against the missiles. If he says God told him polygamy’s not to be practiced, then the church won’t approve it anymore.”
“I get the idea, Mr. Winston.”
“Orrin. Just call me Orrin, Gabe.” He took a long sip at his beer. “Actually, the church never denied polygamy as a sacred institution revealed by Joe Smith. What happened was they said it was against the laws of the state and its time just hasn’t come yet. It was a political maneuver, not a religious one, and a lot of members at that time believed the compromise was a betrayal of the faith.”
“At what time? When was this?”
“End of the last century.”
Wager blinked. “And people still get excited about that?”
“Well,” Winston said mildly, “in generations, that’s not too long ago. My own granddaddy was one of them.” He started to say something else, but did not.
“You mean you’ve got local polygamists who still fight the church?”
“And each other. Their fathers were polygamists and their fathers before them. There’s maybe four main schisms scattered from here into California and Mexico. Each one claims its own president and prophet. There’s some smaller groups, too.”
“How do you know so much about them?”
“I was born a Mormon. I’ve lived here for fifty-five years. I know a lot of people and they talk to me. People who wouldn’t give non-Mormons the time of day, they’ll ask me if I heard about so-and-so, or do I know what such-and-such did.” The square shoulders lifted and fell beneath the plaid shirt. “They’re not just being sociable, Gabe. They tell me so they can see something come out in the paper. You get used to it in this business. But if a serious problem does come up and they need the law, they’ll tell me and I’ll be the one to go to the sheriff with it. That way, nobody out there has broken faith with the brethren and communicated with the Gentiles.”
“Gentiles?”
“Non-Mormons. Sometimes they call them strangers or infidels.”
“Do they have an ayatollah, too?”
“Ha! I guess it is a little like that. You are either with them or against them, and if you’re with them, you do what their prophet says. Some of the groups try to convert the Gentiles, but mostly they try to save other Mormons who follow a different prophet. That’s the ones they really go after—false prophets are worse than no prophets at all.”
Wager peeled the spine and ribs out of the smoking white flesh of his trout and squeezed lemon juice onto the flaking meat. “And now somebody wants you to tell me something.”
Winston leaned back, his shirt rubbing in little squeaks against the plastic. “You catch on fast for a city boy, Gabe.”
Some of the Hispanic ways of doing things were just as roundabout as Winston’s, but Wager didn’t bother explaining. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“How’s the fish, Officer? Everything all right?” The waitress stood at the table edge, expecting Wager to say “just fine.” When he did, she smiled wearily and said, “You want anything, just holler. Orrin—another beer?”
“In a while, Doris.” He waited until she was out of sight again behind the kitchen’s swinging doors. “I didn’t tell her you were an officer.” The baggy lips smiled. Then, when Wager didn’t answer, Winston went on. “They want to know who got shot over in Denver and Pueblo.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
Winston shook his head. “I’m not supposed to tell you that. They won’t like me saying this much.”
“How’d they know about the Pueblo killing?”
“That flyer from over there that came into the sheriff’s office a couple weeks ago. Then yours came in just behind it. Both had the destroying angel drawings.”
“But how in hell did civilians learn about that?”
“How did Doris know you’re a policeman?”
“From the kid at the front desk. Mr. Winston, I’m not here to talk about cases that are under investigation. If ‘they’ have information, they should tell Tice. If they want information, then they should ask Tice. Or call the Denver Police Department and talk to Chief Doyle. He’s the only one to authorize information.” That wasn’t quite true, but sometimes the bureaucracy could be used in this kind of game.
Winston rubbed an arthritic hand along the strip of scalp. “Those queries of yours weren’t marked confidential. In fact, Sheriff Tice showed me the Pueblo letter and asked me if I knew anything about it, because he knew what the destroying angel meant.” Winston sipped and took a different approach. “Look, Detective Wager— Gabe—say a man has two, three, maybe four wives, and maybe ten or fifteen kids. In the eyes of the law, only one family is legal; the others are bastards—no legal rights at all. And the man can go to jail for bigamy and leave those people to starve. It’s happened.”
“I’m only interested in avenging angels.”
“But these people don’t know that. You’re the law. With Tice,” Winston shrugged, “they have a kind of understanding, and the Mormon vote keeps him in office. But you’re an outside lawman, and the law’s been after these people for a hundred years.”
“I’m out of my jurisdiction, Winston. I’m no more law than any other citizen in this county.” That, too, wasn’t quite true, except for the polygamists. “Now suppose you tell me why two people killed in Denver and Pueblo are so important to somebody around here.”
It took Winston a long silence and a quick half-glass of beer before he could get started. “Well, take those ten or fifteen kids. A man might have some of them
work his ranch. Others he’d send out to work to bring in hard cash to the family. Or tribe. I think of them as a tribe. Anyway, a lot of people working here in town are related in some way to the people on the benchland, and even if that blood gets sort of mixed up sometimes, it’s still thicker than water. A lot of these people call each other cousin, but they’re not. They’re half-brother or half-sister. Same pa, just a different wife. Even if they don’t see each other much, the ties are still there; and when trouble comes to one, it can pull in a whole raft of cousins.”
No wonder the Mormons were so interested in genealogy. “What about you? Do you have any of these cousins?”
Winston looked at him for a long minute, and then nodded once. “My pa had three wives. My ma was the middle one. I got four real brothers and sisters, and twelve more I call cousin. That old sonofabitch Pa, he lived to be eighty-three and died courting a fourth wife. I can’t spit in a high wind around this county without hitting a relative of one kind or another. I got a lot of kin over on the benchland. That’s why they talk to me, despite the fact I don’t claim their brand of Mormonism.” He added, “I’m not a believer in polygamy, Gabe; I saw what kind of life Ma got out of it. But some of Pa’s kids think there’s nothing wrong with it because that was the way they were raised.”
Wager stared at the man’s level, dark eyes, feeling some weird shift of time that made him wonder if he was really sitting here in the last quarter of the twentieth century. From the corner jukebox a pinched voice wailed a country-and-western ballad about somebody not loving somebody anymore; the rumble of slow voices at the bar was punctuated by the sharp tink of bottle on glass; from behind the kitchen door came the raised voices of the crew closing down the stoves and cleaning up. Formica table, plastic seats, imitation wooden columns hinting at a division between eating area and lounge. All modern and forgettable. And this man telling Wager things that suddenly made real and immediate the stories that earlier had sounded as if they had been old a hundred years ago. “You’re married?”
“One wife.”
The modern way was to have your wives in sequence; the old was to have them all at the same time. Fifty years ago, the sequential way was called a sin; fifty years from now, polygamy might not be. “Well,” Wager said, “you tell whatever cousin asked you that we don’t know who was killed. We haven’t been able to identify either victim.”
“No idea at all? You’re sure?”
“I’m not lying to you, Winston.”
“Take it easy, Gabe—I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m just anxious to know, that’s all.”
“We have no missing-persons calls that match the victims. No fingerprint identification. No dental records. Nothing. If your cousins know of someone who’s missing, they should tell me. Without an i.d. of the victims, we don’t have much chance to catch the killers.”
“I see.” Winston poured more pale beer into his glass and rubbed a finger around the rim to oil it, letting the foam rise high above the glass before he bobbed his head to sip at it. “The fact you have no records on the victims …” He wagged his head once, and then explained. “These people have to live outside the law, Gabe; they don’t register for the draft or join social security. They can’t go to the police when they have trouble. They want nothing to do with a government that they see as an enemy.”
“Who do they think the victims are?”
“Do you have any photographs of the two?”
“Is someone missing from around here?”
“I don’t know, Gabe! They tell me what they want me to know, and that’s all. But they know each other and they keep in touch. Even if one part of the church lives across the state, they visit a lot and they write.”
“How many people are in these churches?”
“In my, ah, cousin’s church, he’s got maybe four or five hundred scattered over Utah and Arizona.”
“That many?”
Winston shrugged. “There’s a church along the southern Arizona line that claims a couple thousand in the U.S. and Mexico.”
Wager pulled the brown envelope from his vest pocket and slid out two of the i.d. photographs. They had been touched up by the police artist to approximate what the victims must have looked like when alive. “You recognize them?”
Winston’s scalp gleamed in the dim light as he shook his head slowly. “If you’ll let me, I’d like to show them around.”
“Around where?”
“The benchland.”
“Sure. As long as I come with you.”
CHAPTER 5
BY THE TIME Winston picked him up the next morning the newsman was resigned to Wager’s going along. Something had made him agree to Wager’s shaky argument that the photos were classified documents in an ongoing investigation and that any unauthorized use of them was punishable by fine or imprisonment or both. It had sounded good last night after a few beers, but today he wondered if the newsman had really been fooled. Something was going on—Wager wasn’t too dumb to see that; even if he didn’t yet know what lay behind Winston’s carefully chosen words or his occasional thoughtful silences, it was clear that Winston wasn’t showing all his cards. It was a bit like fishing; a gentle, slow approach, a delicate twitch of the rod to give the lure its lifelike motion on the still water, a lot of patience. The way, Wager thought wryly, he should have approached Cynthia Moreles.
The sheriff’s young clerk had been at her desk when Wager arrived a little after eight, following a motel breakfast of huevos rancheros and a wad of greasy hash-brown potatoes that kept exploding in his stomach with gaseous regularity. When she smiled good morning he nodded and asked if he could talk to her for a few minutes.
“Me? Sure, I guess. What for?”
“I’d like some information about the avenging angels.”
Her lipstick stood out against the sudden paleness of her face and she almost pushed back against the desk. But she said nothing.
“Do you believe in them, Cynthia?”
Her glance went to the woman at the radio console, across to Tice’s door, to the busy blond, and then back to Wager in a plea. “I don’t even want to talk about them. Please.”
“Have they ever threatened you?”
“No,” she murmured. “Please.” She turned quickly to busy herself with a stack of warrants, keeping her face down until Wager finally wandered over to his own corner of the office and sat and waited for Winston. Avoiding his eyes, she managed to find all her work on the other side of the room; and Wager, glad to get away from the bruised feelings that radiated from the girl, gave up and went outside to wait.
Orrin Winston arrived more or less when he said he would in a Dodge pickup truck carrying a CB antenna and a sun-faded magnetic sign on the door: GRANT COUNTY BEACON. “Morning, Gabe. Let’s take my truck. They see that thing of yours, and they won’t even answer the door. Besides, you’d leave your transmission hung up on some rock halfway there.”
Wager had noticed the bent rear license plates on many of the local cars. In Denver that was done to hide the number from police eyes; here, it was from dragging on steep dirt roads.
“You got those confidential pictures with you?” Winston wore a different plaid shirt but the same bolo tie with its turquoise stone like an oily fragment of the sky. A sweat-stained Stetson shaded his balding scalp.
“I brought them.”
It was all they said for the next five or ten miles; only the occasional twanging jabber of the CB broke the silence. Finally Wager asked about what had been troubling him all morning. “Do you know of any recent threats or assaults around here by the avenging angels?”
Winston thought, before saying with a shrug, “Not recent. Not for years. Like I told you last night, Gabe, I really don’t think they’re around here anymore.”
“Not even since Mueller?”
His head wagged once. “You got me there. But if it was an angel, he must have been from outside—Denver, maybe. Where you found the other one. But damn it, there’s no
reason to kill Mueller—Danite or not.”
“Danite?”
“Sons of Dan. That’s what the Mormons call the destroying angels.” He shook his head. “I’d swear Mueller had nothing to do with any Mormons around here. And he didn’t have a damn thing anybody could want. No money. And that ranch of his isn’t worth spit.” His head shook again. “Unless my cousin knows something about it that he hasn’t told me, I can’t see any connection at all between Mueller and anybody, let alone a Mormon sect.”
“What about other local people? I talked to somebody who was too scared to say a word about the avenging angels.”
“Oh?” He geared down for a cattle guard, beyond which the county highway narrowed to a roughly patched strip of tar that jolted the white pickup and made something clatter rhythmically beneath Wager’s feet. “Well, some people are still afraid of them, that’s true. Personally, I think it’s like being afraid of ghosts, but there’s a lot of people believe in ghosts, too. Who’d you talk to?”
Wager wondered how much to tell this lean man he had met just last night, and who seemed so open and friendly. But the girl made no secret of being afraid. She couldn’t keep a fear like that hidden. “Cynthia Moreles.”
“Ah—well, yeah.” Winston’s sagging mouth widened briefly, but it was not in a smile. “If anybody’s got reason I guess she has, poor thing.”
“Why’s that?”
“They killed her granddaddy. Lord, over twenty years ago now.”
“The avenging angels did?”
“That’s what people said. But nothing was ever proven and nobody was ever caught. The sheriff—the one before Tice—didn’t try too damned hard. That’s how Tice got the job: beat him out on just that killing.” Winston said “um” and added, “Cynthia was maybe three or four years old, but I guess she remembers the whole thing. Terrified the poor girl, and I guess she’ll never get over it.”
“What made people think it was the avenging angels?”
“There wasn’t any picture, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He tipped his Stetson back. “The Moreles family, they’ve been here since God knows when. Before the first Mormons, anyway. The Mexicans pushed out the Indians, and the Mormons pushed out the Mexicans. Cynthia’s granddaddy—Ramon Maria Moreles—he fought in a local Mormon war when he was a teenager. Maybe 1893–94. Their family lost it and it cost them a lot of land—good land, too. Land, water rights, everything. But old Ramon, he never gave up, and the older he got the louder he got against Mormons of all stripes. About that time—the sixties and all—some Mexicans down in New Mexico started looking up old land grants and suing in court for property they claimed had been stolen from them a hundred years ago. Ramon started doing the same thing here. I tell you, he really stirred things up. Hell, he might have been on to something, too; he had enough to get a couple lawyers interested, anyway. Then three men broke in one night and shot him.”