Ask Not

by Max Allan Collins

  Her eyes grew very large. “You would do that?”

  “Yes. But there’s no guarantee we’ll get anything out of them. So you’d be on the hook for the expenses.”

  “That’s fine. That’s fine. Do you think there’s a possibility that…?”

  “I do. These other suspicious deaths, two with carbon monoxide poisoning as the murder method, make proving foul play a real possibility.”

  She smiled. For the first time I couldn’t see the scream behind the smile. “Thank you, Mr. Heller. Nate. Thank you. This is the first glimmer of light my family has seen in a very long time.”

  “Family’s important,” I said, Sam smiling at me from his picture on my desk. Even the ex had a smile for me.

  I came around and walked her to the door, then let Lou take her to do the paperwork in Gladys’s office. We worked through a lawyer’s office when client cases had sensitive issues that might benefit from confidentiality.

  A few minutes later, Lou was shut back inside my inner office and seated across from me again.

  “A third of that insurance money on a contingency case is standard,” he reminded me, grinning. “If it gets around that Nate Heller has a heart, we’ll be out of business.”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “What did you think of that suicide note?”

  “You first.”

  “Everything in it seemed aimed at silencing other potential witnesses—‘bells even toll when a rat dies’? If you talk and get killed, it says, ‘the burden of guilt’ is on your own shoulders, ‘no one else is to blame.’”

  Both his eyebrows went up. “Yeah, and those left behind can have ‘a clear conscience,’ because you caused your own murder.”

  “And the text of the note got in the papers?”

  “Oh yeah.” His eyes narrowed. “Carbon monoxide MO sure makes it sound like one guy is doing this.”

  “It does. One guy among several in a dirty business, elected to cleanup duty.”

  He nodded, then asked, “So what now?”

  “You’ll need to handle this on the Chicago end. That garage is a very old crime scene, but give it a gander. Talk to neighbors and see if anybody saw anybody around that night who didn’t belong, or anything suspicious. And get the police files on this thing, look at the photos if there are any, talk to the dicks who worked it, see if you can locate the coroner who called it suicide.”

  “What I would do without these work tips? What about you, Nate?”

  “Well, I’m taking the advice I’ve been given so often by so many.”

  “What advice is that?”

  “I’m going to hell,” I said cheerfully. “And Texas.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  The boy in me had been expecting a rambling mission-style structure with a hitching post for horses, while the grown-up me figured on an anonymous modern building with an American flag and parking lot of patrol cars. What the Waco branch of the Texas Rangers turned out to be was a pair of crowded, cluttered rooms among half a dozen others at the rear of the first floor of a defunct department store in a section of the downtown that looked like a war zone.

  What lived up to expectations was Captain Clint Peoples himself, a rangy hombre in his fifties with dark graying hair in a military-short cut and a ready smile that didn’t keep me from noticing that those steady blue eyes didn’t blink much. One of the two rooms was his, half as big as the bullpen shared by nine two-man desks, counting his secretary’s just outside his office door. About eleven Rangers in plainclothes were making phone calls, typing reports. This might have been the bustling bullpen of a precinct house in Manhattan, except for the drawls.

  Right now we were shut inside the captain’s office, the door muffling but not defeating the bullpen clamor. With his back to a scarred old rolltop desk shoved against the wall, Peoples sat facing me in a visitor’s chair. There wasn’t much else to the room except a quartet of metal filing cabinets and a bulletin board of WANTED posters. No framed photos or citations on the cracked-plaster walls, despite this man being a celebrated lawman, veteran of countless arrests leading to convictions, and shoot-outs leading to dead perps.

  A window air conditioner chugged in this room, as did one in the outer room. It was ninety degrees outside, and humid, and if this was fall in Waco, I wasn’t anxious to summer here. The heat hadn’t taken a toll on me, though, as I’d moved rapidly from an air-conditioned car into the cooled building. I was casual in a yellow Ban-Lon and a lightweight brown H.I.S. suit, the coat of which my host had already invited me to hang on the coat tree in the corner, where his own jacket and a multi-gallon Stetson worthy of a Texas Ranger already resided.

  Like his Rangers, he wore street clothes—a short-sleeve white shirt with dark-brown tie, cowboy boots glimpsed under tan chino trousers; but a small gold CAPTAIN badge was pinned just above his breast pocket. A .45 automatic with fancy ironwood grips rode high on his right hip, and he was smoking a cigar, a big one. The air conditioner cut the smokiness in the air, and anyway it was a good cigar, so I wasn’t bothered.

  We had already gone through with the handshaking ritual, and his secretary, Ruth, delivered us both cold bottles of Dr Pepper (“The native drink,” Peoples said). It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon, after I’d driven down in my rental Galaxie from Dallas, where American Airlines had deposited me around eleven. I’d checked into the Statler Hilton, freshened up, and made the ninety-minute drive to Waco on Highway 77. The ride had been surprisingly rolling and green, Waco itself a modern city dropped into a big bowl formed by low hills. An ancient suspension bridge bisected the town, taking me over the muddy Brazos at South First Street and Austin Avenue.

  “I appreciate you seeing me at such short notice, Captain,” I said.

  “That was some high-powered advance scout you sent lookin’ for me,” he said, blowing out a little smoke signal of cigar smoke, his eyes amused.

  “It was nice of Senator McClellan to make that call,” I said.

  “Impressive, you workin’ for him and Bobby Kennedy on that rackets committee.”

  “More impressive if we’d sent Hoffa to jail.”

  He nodded, smile fading. “Now and then a big one gets away,” he said, as much to himself as to me. Then his smile returned. “But the senator is one of the good ones. He tried damn near as hard as we did to put a certain party away.”

  “What party is that?”

  His smile turned sly and he rolled the big cigar around in it as he rocked. “We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. Mr. Heller, what do you know about the Texas Rangers?”

  “Pretty much what I’ve seen in the movies and on TV. Which I figure is about as accurate as what you’ve seen about private detectives.”

  He let out a laugh. “We’re not a Wild West show anymore, Mr. Heller. We’re with the Department of Public Safety—us and the Highway Patrol and licensing bureaus and so on. We’re essentially the state’s detective division—we help out sheriffs and police departments, if investigatin’ a major crime is beyond their means. And of course we handle fugitive apprehension, since a fleein’ felon doesn’t confine himself to county and city boundaries. Roadblocks, aerial reconnaissance, all your standard modern police methods.”

  “What, no horses?”

  “Oh, we still have horses, Mr. Heller. There are lots of places left in Texas where it takes a horse to get there.” He shifted in the chair. “I do apologize for these cramped quarters. When I spoke of ‘modern police methods,’ I was definitely not referrin’ to these sloppy surroundings.”

  “Are they temporary?” It had that feel.

  “They are now.” He shrugged and puffed cigar smoke. “When Company F got relocated to Waco, a few years back, all we got was these couple of rented rooms, some cast-off office furniture, and a cleaning crew that comes in once a month, if the mood strikes ’em.”

  I jerked a thumb toward the street. “You know, this looks like a nice place to live, college town, trees along the river—lots of indust
ry, I understand. Must be close to a hundred-thousand population.”

  “Not quite yet. Gettin’ there.”

  “So why does your downtown look like East Berlin? This building included.”

  He half-turned to tamp cigar ash into a glass tray on his desktop. “That’s a sad one, Mr. Heller. Terrible tornado blew through here in ’53, right down the middle of town. Killed well over a hundred. Chewed up hundreds of buildings and spit ’em out. This downtown was one of the main casualties.”

  “Well, they obviously rebuilt it.”

  “Some of it. Some they never got around to. And in the meantime a new shopping center went in. That killed the downtown deader than the tornado.”

  “That’s happening places where there hasn’t been a tornado. But Waco’s disaster was ten years ago—what makes these quarters ‘temporary’ now?”

  He grinned. Those blue eyes even granted me a blink. “Remember how you got here, Mr. Heller? How you made your way back to us through the driver’s license testing area, and those offices with pretty young girls and callow young men in them?”

  “I believe my memory goes back that far.”

  “Well, we took to walkin’ various suspects through there for questioning back here in No Man’s Land. On a fairly regular basis, we rounded up some fairly unsavory types, on prostitution and vagrancy and drug dealing and such like.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “I’d already been hounding the Powers That Be about the need for a separate facility for Company F’s Rangers. And I have a few influential friends in the community, including a former mayor or two and assorted Chamber of Commerce folk.”

  “So when do they break ground?”

  He grinned around the cigar again and his eyebrows flicked up. “Next May, Mr. Heller. Next May. Now, you didn’t come all this way to hear about my problems—at least not my problems with these cramped quarters.”

  “No.” I sipped Dr Pepper. Not bad for a regional drink. “I’m told, by Senator McClellan among others, that you’re the man to talk to about the Henry Marshall ‘suicide.’”

  “It’s an interesting story, Mr. Heller.” He wasn’t rocking. “And I would be glad to tell it. But there’s another story—at least as interesting as that one—that you really should hear first.”

  “By all means,” I said.

  * * *

  Let me tell you about another Texas boy, Mr. Heller. Born in Mount Pleasant, Texas, back in 1921. Name of Malcolm Wallace, “Mac” to most. His daddy was a hardworking man, a farmer who later signed onto road crews, and he must have been proud of his boy, making good grades and keeping out of trouble.

  By high school, Mac stood a broad-shouldered six foot, and kept right on pulling down high marks, and was popular enough to get elected vice president of his senior class. Something of a football star, too, till he hurt his back and had to quit. After he graduated high school, the boy joined the Marines, this was before the war, around ’39 … oh, you were in the Marines, too, Mr. Heller? I was a bit too old to serve myself, I’m afraid.

  Anyway, Mac Wallace served on the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier, but he took a tumble off a ladder in 1940 and, wouldn’t you know it, injured his damn back again. Got himself a medical discharge, and … you, too? No kidding, Mr. Heller. Section Eight, huh? Guadalcanal? That’d do it. Still, I bet you jumped right smack in the swing of things, back on the home front.

  So did Mac Wallace. He enrolled at the University of Texas, over in Austin, and was active in student groups, some of a type that a less charitable man than myself might term pinko. But he wasn’t no oddball or nothin’, no. He was elected student body president, and kept pullin’ down top marks. When the university’s president was fired because of his socialist ways, Mac headed up a student protest, led eight thousand kids in a march. The movement failed, but it got in all the papers. He was for sure a young man worth watching.

  Here’s a picture of him—you can have that, Mr. Heller, I had that made for you. That’s him about 1945—handsome devil, look at that curly dark hair, those moody dark eyes, regular Tyrone Power type, but kind of studious-looking too, don’t you think, in those wire-rim glasses. Later on he preferred black-rimmed jobs. I got an older picture of him, which you can also have. But I’m gettin’ ahead of myself.

  Brainy as he was, it still took him something like seven years to get his degree, partly ’cause he switched majors a bunch of times, finally settling on economics. Plus, he was working his way through, taking various jobs, at least till the G.I. Bill kicked in, in ’44. I should mention he was chosen to belong to the Friar Society, sort of the Texas version of Yale’s Skull and Bones, if you’ve heard of that. Figured you had. Anyway, that put this fast-rising young man on a path to the highest reaches of business and government in the Lone Star State.

  The Friars’ is probably how he met up with Edward Clark, LBJ’s man, his top legal counsel and financial adviser. Later on, Clark would introduce Mac to Lyndon, but I’m gettin’ ahead of myself again.

  Where was I? Oh, after graduation Mac married a good-lookin’ gal named Mary Andre DuBose Barton. Her daddy was a Methodist preacher, but they had some powerful relatives up and down the family tree. Unfortunately for Mac, his young wife was a wild one. You know how preacher’s daughters can be. In divorce proceedings against her, years later, Mac said she was a sexual pervert. He told me himself that she was a whore and a homosexual. And frankly there’s evidence to back him up.

  What kind of evidence? Well, Mary Andre Wallace was picked up on several occasions by police at notorious make-out spots, public parks primarily, with other women. Stripped down to their undergarments. Apparently Mary Andre liked both boys and girls, and Mac didn’t like that at all. I won’t bore you with all the ins and outs … that didn’t come out right, did it?… but he up and hauled the little woman off to New York, where he did a couple of semesters at Columbia, going for a doctorate. Top marks again. He was doing some teaching, too. They had a kid, and then the gal got pregnant again, and she would get real wild during the pregnancies, boy howdy. Her own mama called the police on her for having sex with both men and women in Zilker Park.

  Anyway, Mary Andre claimed Mac got violent with her, hitting and raping her and so on, and she filed a divorce petition, and Mac didn’t bother fighting it. But he must have carried the torch, ’cause he remarried her some time later. My apologies for this mixed-up chronology, but Mac Wallace led a pretty mixed-up life after college. Not that he wasn’t doing respectable work. Taught at two or three colleges, winding up back in Austin, where his wife took their young son.

  Finally Mac got tired of Mary Andre’s catting around, and took a big step toward respectability and the kind of career he had seemed headed for, before his ill-fated marital union. His connections with President Johnson, of course he was Senator Johnson then, led to a job in Washington, D.C., with the Department of Agriculture. Once again, seemed like Mac was going places.

  There’s another interesting LBJ tie-in, by the way—while he was separated from his wife, Mac dated Lyndon’s sister, Josefa. This may indicate that Mac was his own worst enemy, since Josefa was herself a wild child who caused LBJ considerable embarrassment—divorced twice, a heavy drinker who liked to dally with both men and women, even worked in a brothel for a time.

  This is where a feller named Doug Kinser comes into the story. We’re going to set Mac Wallace aside, just temporarily, and take a look at Doug, an Austin boy who grew up loving the game of golf. He realized a dream when his brother went in with him to open up a little pitch-and-putt nine-hole golf course by the downtown lake in Austin.

  Now, golf wasn’t Doug’s only enthusiasm. He also loved theater. He even went to New York to give acting a whirl, which is where he met up with Mac and his wife Mary Andre. All three were involved in some amateur theater there, when Mac was studyin’ at Columbia. But by 1950, Mac was in D.C. working for the Department of Agriculture, while back home in Austin, Mary Andre was gettin’ involved in loc
al productions with Doug. Josefa Johnson was part of that thespian group, also. Kind of funny how some people get those two words confused—thespian and lesbian?

  Well, those words got confused a lot when Doug was pursuing his other enthusiasm—having sexual affairs with willing ladies. He particularly liked what the French call ménage a twat. That means a threesome, but I can tell by your silly grin that you knew that already.

  So now if you been keeping score, we got Mac Wallace havin’ an affair with LBJ’s wild-gal sister, Josefa—well, Mr. Heller, I call it “an affair” because Mac was still married to Mary Andre at the time. She dropped her divorce petition, though they weren’t living together, at least not steady. Hell, any way you look at it, it was a mess. Particularly considering that Mary Andre and Josefa were both having affairs with our friend Doug, sometimes two at a time, sometimes all at once.

  Now here’s an item that may or may not be significant. As a law-enforcement officer, I will caution you that it is not even close to evidence. But it sure as hell is suggestive.

  Some time during or in between pillow talk with Josefa, Doug asked her to try to get her brother Lyndon to loan him some money to pay off some outstanding debts that were threatening his new pitch-and-putt enterprise. Apparently she went to Lyndon, got turned down, and went back again a couple times, after Doug pressed the issue. It’s possible Lyndon might have viewed this as attempted blackmail. Possible.

  Now, Mac was living in D.C. at the time, or anyway in Arlington, and late October 1951, he drove down in his shiny new blue station wagon to Dallas, where he borrowed a little .25 from an old college roommate of his, who happened to be in the FBI. That always makes me smile. He spent a couple of days talking to Mary Andre, and asking her to be a better wife, a more normal wife, and just what the hell had she been up to lately? Who’d been doing what to whom, he wanted to know, and that kind of thing. By all reports, he was calm and cool and collected. No talk of him slapping her around this trip. Anyway, he wound up in Austin a few days later, and drove to Butler Park, where the pitch-and-putt golf course was.