Past Dying (The Alan Graham Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  I explained about our excavations and the need to know as much as possible about the background of the place we were working. Capshaw listened, face impassive.

  “I was interested in the legend of a lost silver mine in the hills,” I said finally and held my breath.

  Calvin Capshaw frowned. “Who told you about that?”

  His wife shook her head. “Calvin, everybody in town knows that story.”

  “Was it Dawson Stokes, that so-called mayor?” he demanded, leaning forward. A bony finger came out to push down against my knee. “Do you think this town will ever get anywhere represented by a man like that?”

  “Now, Calvin …” Myrtle Capshaw began.

  “The man’s a laughingstock,” her husband proclaimed. “All you have to do is look at him.”

  “I’m not sure where I heard the story about the lost mine,” I said quickly.

  “You probably heard about my shiftless son, too,” Capshaw said. “Went up in the hills looking for it.”

  “I heard,” I said.

  “Digging that hole was the most work he ever did in his life.”

  Myrtle Capshaw’s face twisted in pain. “Oh, Calvin, that’s such a terrible thing to say. Berry was such a nice young man …”

  “Nice and worthless, like most of the people in this town,” her husband thundered. “Not to mention stupid. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. My son was a draft dodger during Vietnam. What do you think of that?”

  “It was a long time ago,” I said.

  “Yes, it was,” Myrtle said. “I keep telling Calvin that.”

  “Now hear me,” Calvin declared, pressing my knee again. “I served for four years, in North Africa and Italy, and then in Europe. Our young people today don’t know what sacrifice is about. It’s get-rich-quick. Gambling, the lottery, lost silver mines.”

  “I hear he bought a map from Jacko Reilly,” I said.

  Calvin Capshaw snorted. “Then you got it all wrong. Although it was Jacko that swindled him, not that it’s hard to swindle a fool.”

  Myrtle shook her head. “Jacko Reilly hurt so many people. That boy was just plain bad.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Calvin reached for the cigarette pack on the table. “Berry got the notion of a mine from me. Read about it and got greedy.”

  “That was when Calvin gave his talk,” Myrtle explained. “It was to the Daughters of the American Revolution down in Simmsburg. There was a nice little article in the paper.”

  “Berry read where I said there was a legend about this mine in the hills and he went out and spread it to the heathens he was running with,” Calvin explained. “Told the Reilly boy.”

  “It was just a shame what that Reilly boy did,” Myrtle tisked.

  “Hell, it was Berry’s stupidity,” Calvin said. “Jacko Reilly was smart and Berry was dumb.” I waited.

  “Once Jacko heard the story he knew he had a live one on the line,” Calvin said. “He asked Berry where this mine was supposed to be and when Berry told him, Jacko told him his family owned the land.”

  “Imagine,” Myrtle said. “As if Jacko Reilly’s family ever owned anything at all.”

  “It was slick, is what it was,” Calvin went on. “Jacko knew nobody’d believe him if he just up and claimed he owned the land. What he did was let poor dumb Berry know that he had a claim on the land and couldn’t do anything about it because he couldn’t hire a lawyer to fight International Paper. Said if he could just hire this lawyer in Baton Rouge, they could get the land from I.P. and find the silver. Got Berry to fork over three thousand dollars. Sold his car, the fool. All for a half interest in land somebody else owned. Naturally, Berry couldn’t wait for the paperwork—as if there was any. Went out on his own and started digging and was thrown off the land by the sheriff.”

  “What did Berry do when he found out he’d been cheated?”

  “What could he do, the fool?” Calvin leaned forward again. “Hear me now, I’m not one to say there ought to be laws to protect fools from themselves. He whined a lot and finally left town and got a job over in Jena. There’s probably a bigger market for fools over there.”

  “What’s the truth about the silver mine?”

  “The truth?” Calvin Capshaw sat back in his chair and drew on his cigarette. “Mister, the only man who knows the truth is dead. He died at the Alamo in 1836.”

  “You mean Jim Bowie.”

  “That’s who. The Bowies were landowners in this parish. They settled here before they moved down to Opelousas in what was called the Atakapas country, and then, later, they moved up to Rapides Parish. But Bowies always owned land around here and James Bowie had land in those hills. There aren’t many Bowies in the parish now, but once there were a good many.”

  “The silver mine story started with Jim Bowie, then?”

  “Probably. He was a big land speculator, you see. Today people remember him for that knife he carried—the one the story says was made out of a meteorite by the blacksmith James Black of Washington, Arkansas—but back in his lifetime he was better known as a land speculator. He sold thousands of acres in Louisiana and Arkansas, mainly Arkansas, and almost all on Spanish land grant titles he forged himself.”

  “You mean Jim Bowie was really the Jacko Reilly of his time?”

  “That’s a way of putting it. Man was out to get rich, all right. But it didn’t work and so he abandoned Louisiana and went to Texas. That was in 1830, year all his land schemes fell through and his hopes of being elected to Congress along with ’em.” Calvin Capshaw picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue. “But Bowie wasn’t ever one to stay down. Texas was the place to be then, with land for the taking. All you had to do was comply with some Mexican formalities. Bowie did more than that: He married the daughter of the vice governor of the province. He was on the way to becoming a power in Texas when it all started to go wrong again: She died of a fever in ’33, while he was back in Louisiana, settling his affairs. That included selling the two hundred acres he owned in the hills above town.”

  “Calvin’s researched it all,” Myrtle said with pride. “He used to teach at the high school.”

  “I retired when we started to get students who didn’t care about learning,” he said. “But then why should they? I ask you, look at the kind of people they elect around here. That judge who sits there and pretends to be better than other people: It’s his wife who has the money, he doesn’t need to put on airs.”

  “Now Calvin—”

  “And a sheriff who’s a horse doctor. Is that the kind of person you’d vote for?” he asked me, and I stuttered.

  “Not that he’s much worse than that drunk and bully we had before. I tell you, sir, this country is headed straight for ruin. The past is dying and nobody cares.”

  “So there never was any silver,” I said.

  Capshaw blinked, as if taken aback. “Well, there were rumors about silver in the hills in the early days, when this land was first settled. James Bowie played on that. He spread the notion that there was silver in the hills after he bought the land. It made it easier for him to make money when he sold the tract.”

  I tried to imagine the Jim Bowie I’d seen in the movie The Alamo, cunningly duping land buyers. It didn’t jibe well with my memory of Richard Widmark valiantly plunging his big knife into a Mexican as the invaders broke into the room at the Alamo where Bowie lay ill …

  Calvin Capshaw gave a bitter little smile. “Bowie was a clever man: He might have salted the tract with silver.”

  “Spanish silver, like coins?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” He stared at his cigarette and then flipped it into the fire. “Course, there’s another possibility, though I don’t recommend it.”

  “And that is?”

  “While Bowie was in Mexico, right after his marriage to Ursula Veramende, he took off for north Texas, to the San Saba area, where there was supposed to be a silver mine guarded by the Indians. He and his people
were attacked by one of the tribes and barely escaped. He always wanted to go back but his little detour to the Alamo put an end to that.”

  I waited as he marshaled his thoughts.

  “There are rumors he really found the mine on that first trip and made off with a few pack horse loads of silver bullion.”

  “You mean …”

  Another shrug. “He might have brought some back to Louisiana with him, to pay off debts. He might have buried what was left up in those hills, on or near his tract.”

  “Then why would he have sold the tract?”

  “He didn’t sell it. The rumor is he lost it in a card game. Bowie was a big gambler. He may have come here meaning to sell the land after he dug up the money. But once he got into the card game, he may have ended up having to use the land to cover his bets.”

  “Even if he lost the land, he would have gone back and gotten the hoard, wouldn’t he?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he couldn’t find it again. Maybe he had more than one hoard. Maybe something kept him from staying—like the sheriff. Bowie had a mean temper and he was quick with that big knife. Or, most likely, there wasn’t any silver hoard at all.”

  “But wouldn’t it be nice if there was?” Myrtle asked. “I mean, think of it, a real treasure, right up in the hills.”

  “That’s just what we need,” her husband said sourly. “One more excuse for people not to work. Not bad enough we got the lottery, promises people they’ll be millionaires if they just buy a dollar ticket. Gambling casinos on the Indian reservations, where people go throw away their welfare checks. Now we need a treasure for ’em to dig for up in the hills.”

  “Calvin, I only meant—”

  “Nobody knows how to work anymore,” her husband went on, ignoring her. “And that includes our weak-minded son. Hear me, something’s happened to this country. It isn’t the same as it used to be.”

  I got up slowly, nodding. Nothing was ever the same as it used to be, but it did no good to argue the point.

  “It’s called the old Corvin tract,” Calvin Capshaw said, following me to the door. “I.P. bought it before the war but before they got it, it was called the Corvin tract. Corvins owned a lot of land in this parish but they’re all gone now.”

  We shook hands and I thanked him.

  “I wouldn’t go up there looking,” Capshaw said as I drew away. “It’s a fool’s quest and lots of fools have been up there. There isn’t any silver and never was. It’s just a dream. A dream of stupid men.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But hear me on this: If Berry’d had any guts, after what Jacko Reilly pulled on him, he’d of cleaned Jacko’s clock. That’s what I’d of done if it’d been me.”

  For the first time I realized what a big man Calvin Capshaw was, even in the later stages of his life.

  “Were you mad enough to do it for him?”

  His eyes stared at me and his fists clenched. “No. I say let fools watch out for themselves. But if it had been me, they wouldn’t have found enough of Jacko Reilly to bury.”

  FOURTEEN

  It was just before one o’clock when I left the Capshaws. I thought of stopping by the courthouse, but I was still mulling Jeff Scully’s lie: There hadn’t been a wreck on Highway 20, so why had he told me there was?

  Without thinking I drove out Highway 20, then left onto 12, away from the brooding hills.

  Was there something up at the cabin Jeff didn’t want me to see? Did it have something to do with the treasure hole a dead man had excavated? Was there something to the rumors about old Jim Bowie that the sour Calvin Capshaw had recounted? Then I thought about the little piece of silver: It wasn’t raw ore, or even a piece of bullion—it was part of a coin. If there was truth to the story about the San Saba mine, then the peso fragment found with Jacko Reilly could hardly be connected, because the San Saba treasure, according to Capshaw, had been bullion, not coins.

  I came to the gravel road that arrowed left, toward the archaeological excavation, and kept going. I had to think it all through, try to make sense of things. Could Jeff be more involved in this than he’d let on? I didn’t want to think so—during all the time I’d known him, Jeff Scully had been straightforward, but in the last few days I’d been seeing a sly side, capable of manipulation. Maybe he was just learning to be a successful rural politician, but now I began to wonder if there were other, darker aspects of his personality.

  A car roared past me and I realized I was crawling at forty-five, clogging the narrow two-lane.

  If I kept going I’d end up in Simmsburg. There was no reason to go there except …

  Then I remembered that was where Jacko’s widow lived. I wondered how closely she’d been questioned and whether a visit might not be of value. I took a deep breath and, to the gratification of the long stream of cars behind me, increased my speed to sixty.

  I didn’t know her address but I remembered Jeff telling me that her maiden name had been Fowkes and her father ran a gas station. I was betting she’d moved back in with her parents after Jacko’s disappearance.

  I found a phone book at a stop-and-go gas station and there was only one Fowkes listed, Kenneth. I copied the address and then asked the counter clerk where Mound Street was.

  Five minutes later I stopped in front of an old white frame house on a side street. There was a tricycle in the front yard, and a little boy with an intense look and a heavy overcoat was playing motorcycle with it, oblivious of his runny nose. I wondered if he was Jacko’s son and tried to put aside thoughts about what his life would be.

  I smiled at him and drew a scowl. “Don’t need nobody here,” he said.

  I went on up the steps to the porch and knocked on the door.

  The woman who opened the door was in her fifties, with her hair done into a bun, Pentecostal style, and a long, plain dress.

  “Yes?” Her black eyes studied me suspiciously. “My name is Alan Graham,” I said. “I was looking for Lisa Reilly.”

  The woman gasped and a hand went to her throat. “What about?”

  “I’m the archaeologist who found the car with her husband’s remains. I was wondering if I could talk with her for a minute.”

  “My daughter’s suffered enough,” the woman said. “She made mistakes but she’s been forgiven. There’s no need to rub it in.”

  I heard movement behind her: “It’s all right, Mom.” The woman stepped sideways, as if to block my view of her daughter.

  “There’s no need to keep raking this up,” the older woman said.

  “I’ll deal with it,” her daughter said.

  “Like you dealt with everything else,” her mother said. “You did a real good job, bringing that child into the world, disgracing yourself before God and your family.”

  “I’m Lisa Reilly,” the girl said, stepping around her mother, who sucked in her breath and took a step backward.

  I looked down at her: Raven hair set off a ruddy complexion that hinted of Indian blood, and her dark eyes were hard. Large breasts thrust against her sweater, and her jeans showed off her lines to obvious advantage.

  “Let’s go outside,” Lisa said, grabbing a jacket from a chair. She slammed the door behind us and strode across the porch as if I weren’t there.

  “Junior, get away from the ditch,” she cried. “How many times I have to tell you, damn it?”

  She reached inside her jacket and brought out a pack of cigarettes. She lit one without offering the pack to me and stood glaring at her son for a few seconds. Then she turned to me: “So what is it, you from an insurance company or something?”

  “I’m the man who found your husband’s car. At least, it was my magnetometer that detected it under the water.”

  The cold eyes assessed me for a second. “You looking for a reward, then?”

  “No. I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “The sheriff already talked to me.”

  “Maybe there’s something he forgot to ask.”

  “M
aybe. Look, hurry, will you? It’s cold as hell out here.” She jerked her head toward the boy: “Junior, I said to get away from the goddamn ditch, do I have to come over and whip your butt?”

  “Did your husband ever mention silver coins?”

  “What?” Her lips twisted into a lopsided smile. “Is that what this is all about? You after his money? You’re goddamn crazy, that’s what you are. Jacko didn’t leave a thing.”

  “I’m not after anything but who killed him. The sheriff asked me to look into it.”

  “The sheriff.” I thought she was going to spit but she held it in. “He couldn’t find his thing with his zipper open.”

  “Your husband had something with him when he died.” I took out Pepper’s color scan of the silver wedge and held it up for Lisa to see. “Recognize this?”

  She squinted. “What the hell is it?”

  “A piece of an old silver coin, a Spanish peso.”

  She looked down quickly. “I never saw it. Now is that all?”

  “The last time you saw your husband, did he act normal?”

  “No, he didn’t act normal. He acted like Jacko. Now I’m going in.” She threw her cigarette down on the sidewalk.

  “Did he say anything or give any sign about where he was going or who with?”

  “You just won’t let go, will you?”

  I waited while she fidgeted. “Hey, you got any cigarettes? That was my last one and my folks are strict … I’m gonna move out as soon as I got a few dollars. Look, if you don’t have smokes, can you spare a couple of bucks so I can get some?”

  I reached into my wallet and came up with a ten. Her hand snagged it so fast I wondered if I’d ever had it in the first place.

  “So what about the last time you saw him?”

  “It was night, he was getting ready to leave the trailer, go out and meet somebody. I hear him talking to ’em on the phone. I didn’t want him to go out. We argued. The bastard bit me.”

  “Any idea who he was talking to on the phone?”

  “No. But whoever it was, Jacko was pissed. I heard him say something about the wrong one. That was what had him jacked.”