Ask Not

by Max Allan Collins

  It was a lazy afternoon, sunny, kind of breezy, grass turnin’ yellow with winter on the way. Golfers were fooling around nearby on a putting green, but that didn’t faze ol’ Mac. He walked right in the pro shop and confronted Doug, who was at the cash register, and a few words were exchanged. Then Mac shot Doug point-blank five times and killed him very damn dead. Well, yeah, Mr. Heller, I guess that does sound like “overkill,” but remember, it was a little gun, so Mac was probably just makin’ sure.

  Anyway, when he come out with his shirt covered in blood, Mac waved the gun at the golfers nearby, told ’em to stay back, and then he drove off in that blue station wagon, a Pontiac. The witnesses saw the license plate was Virginia, not something you see every day in Austin, and they got the number and wrote it down. Mac got picked up right away, and there was some jurisdictional nonsense between the Austin police and the county sheriff, so the Rangers got brought in. It became my case, which is why I can tell you all this in an insider kind of way.

  Mac was charged with murder, and right off the bat, he resigned his government job. Shortly after that, he got released on thirty-grand bail, thanks to a couple of LBJ’s financial backers, and an attorney of Lyndon’s, John Cofer, out of Ed Clark’s office, showed up to defend Mac. Cofer’s the same guy who defended Johnson for ballot-box stuffing in 1948.

  Mac did not testify in his own defense. Hell, Cofer acknowledged his client’s guilt—after all, we had the car, the bloody shirt, and a damn .22-caliber cartridge in the suspect’s possession. What had me shakin’ my head, though, was when the district attorney stated he could find no motive for the murder.

  That’s right, Mr. Heller. Nothing about the sex stuff came out at the trial, and certainly not that Josefa Johnson had been in a sex triangle with the murdered man and Mac’s wife. Or I guess it’s sex quadrangle, if you count Mac.

  No evidence at all was introduced from either side about cause or extenuating circumstances. After a trial that lasted less than two hours, the jury found Mac guilty of “murder with malice aforethought.”

  Guess what he got for killing a man in cold blood? A five-year sentence—that is, a five-year suspended sentence. Not exactly the “Texas justice” you hear so much about, like the kind all those colored boys on Death Row are waitin’ on. First suspended first-degree murder sentence in Texas history. Maybe the only one.

  I hadn’t been a Ranger very long, but I’d been a deputy sheriff and a highway patrolman, and could recognize the whiff of politics. The stench of it. Do I think LBJ directed Mac to kill a blackmailer? Hard to say. But any way you slice it, Mac sure did Senator Johnson a favor by shootin’ a par five at the pitch-and-putt.

  * * *

  Peoples took a deep puff of his cigar, which had largely been forgotten in his ashtray while he spun his yarn.

  He expelled some smoke, then said, “Hell’s bells, that’s rude of me. Would you like a cigar, Nate? I got a box of Senators right here. Made over San Antonio way.”

  Somehow a Texas Senator seemed fitting, but I said, “Thanks. Smells fine. But I’m not a smoker.”

  “Clean-cut fella, huh?”

  “Not exactly. But I haven’t smoked since I was in the Pacific, and then just cigarettes.” I only got the urge when I was in a situation that recalled combat.

  “Then can I have Ruth fetch you another Dr Pepper, Mr. Heller?”

  “No thanks. But maybe you should call me ‘Nate.’ I’m starting to feel like we know each other.”

  Peoples grinned; even those blue eyes seemed to have warmed up. “Only if you call me ‘Clint.’”

  “Okay—but I thought the only Westerners called Clint were on TV.”

  That made him smile. “Nate, I ain’t never been mistaken for Cheyenne or Rowdy Yates.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Clint.”

  He blew a smoke ring, just showing off, and rocked some more. “So let’s talk about the late Henry Marshall, Nate. You know the basics, I believe.”

  “The very basics.”

  “The facts are easily laid out. Marshall was well-regarded, both as a man and a public servant. He worked for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Committee.”

  “That’s a mouthful.”

  “It is. He traveled a lot, and he worked hard—lived over in Bryan, nice family, who incidentally don’t buy his suicide, neither. Had a ranch in Robertson County, which was a mostly a hobby of his. Place to get his mind off work, mending fences, seeing to crops, feeding cattle.”

  Peoples gave me a quick refresher on the case. After discovering that LBJ’s pal Billie Sol Estes had been raking in over twenty million a year for “growing” and “storing” nonexistent crops of cotton, Marshall made his report to Washington, recommending a full-scale investigation and more stringent regulation.

  “Suddenly Marshall gets offered a higher-up position in another department,” Peoples said, “including a hefty pay raise, that would not so coincidentally make the Billie Sol matter none of his concern.”

  Marshall rejected the new position and instead spent the next several months meeting with various county officials in Texas as well as the farmers who’d been drawn unwittingly into the scam, and just generally spreading the bad word about Billie Boy.

  Shortly after, Henry Marshall turned up dead in a pasture on his ranch alongside his Chevy Fleetside pickup truck.

  “No suicide note, by the way,” Peoples said.

  I asked, “How can anybody buy a suicide shooting himself five times?”

  “It was a .22 rifle,” Peoples said with a shrug, relighting his cigar, puffing it back to life. “What the sheriff and coroner didn’t think of—or if they did, conveniently forgot about—was that Marshall’s rifle was bolt-action. He’d have had to hold the damn thing at arm’s length to work the bolt to reload after every shot, getting wounded every time—two of ’em ‘rapidly incapacitating’ wounds, our staff coroner said. And here’s the kicker—ol’ Henry had a bum right arm, from an old farm injury. Couldn’t hold the damn thing out straight if his life depended on it.”

  Or his death.

  I said, “Sounds like the exhumation brought all the evidence out. So is it murder on the books now?”

  Peoples shook his head glumly. “No. There was a ringer on the grand jury, a relative of the sheriff’s, who wouldn’t budge. Either the sheriff was bought or just didn’t want to look stupid. Also, an FBI agent came in, looked at the evidence, and called it suicide, too.”

  “And those guys are generally pretty good,” I said. “That’s a hard one to figure.”

  “Your Senator McClellan couldn’t get anywhere, either, even after he stood up at his committee hearing with the rifle and showed how hard it would be to work the bolt action at arm’s length without a bum wing.”

  “So it’s a closed case.”

  “Not from where I’m sitting.” His frustration dissolved into a sly grin. “You wondering yet, Nate, why I started by telling you the sorry tale of Mac Wallace?”

  “You know I am.”

  “Here’s that later photo of Mac I promised you.” He handed it over. “That’s still over ten years old—he’s camera-shy, our man Mac.”

  Wallace no longer looked like a college kid—the glasses were black-rimmed, the eyes cold, hair still dark, the strong jaw resting on fleshy support, eyebrows dark and heavy, but still a broodingly handsome man.

  “Latest photos available come from the Doug Kinser murder trial in ’52,” Peoples said. “But take a look at this sketch.”

  Though crude, it resembled Wallace, all right—black-rimmed glasses, similar hair.

  “Where does this come from?”

  “A sketch artist of ours drew it from a description provided by a gas station attendant who gave directions to a man looking for the ‘Marshall place’ the afternoon of the killing.”

  I sat shuffling through the two photos and the police sketch, feeling the hair on my arms prickle and it wasn’t the work of that window air conditioner.

>   I said, “You’re saying Mac Wallace killed Henry Marshall.”

  “I have not a single solitary doubt. Would you like to hear how I see it? My reconstruction, as the big city lawmen say?”

  “Clint, you know I would.”

  * * *

  It’s a beautiful Saturday, with birds twittering and flittering, in a part of Texas that looks green and lush in late spring. Marshall—who earlier drove around stopping to talk to some farmer friends, who found him in fine fettle—is puttering around the ranch.

  Mid-afternoon, after stopping at a gas station for directions, Mac shows up unannounced at Marshall’s little spread. It’s possible he tries to reason with Marshall, maybe offers him another, bigger bribe. Might be he threatens him and his family. Maybe it turns into an argument—Mac’s a volatile fella, real bad temper. My guess is, he pistol-whips Marshall, dropping him to the ground with his head cut along one side and his eye bruised up real bad.

  Mac rigs a plastic liner to the exhaust of Marshall’s pickup, and starts the truck. And now I’m just guessing, but I think something spooks our man—maybe traffic on the country road nearby.

  Marshall’s .22 bolt-action rifle is in the back of the pickup, stowed there for getting rid of varmints. Impatient with or unsure of his murder method, Mac uses the rifle to shoot Marshall five times in the side of the lower torso.

  Here’s the best part, Nate—the next morning, Mac goes back to that filling station, and tells the attendant that he changed his mind yesterday, and never did go out to the Marshall place.

  Enough to make you wonder how he got those high marks in college.

  * * *

  “That gas station attendant is lucky to be alive,” I said, shaking my head. “And Wallace has never been brought in for it?”

  “For what? A suicide? But I can tell you this, Nate. Mac Wallace has no alibi for the Marshall murder, and those other ‘suicides’—that accountant in El Paso, the building contractor flying out of Pecos, the indicted business partner in Amarillo—he has none for those, either. I believe he got a lot better at staging suicides. And he was in Texas at the time each of those kills occurred.”

  “You think Wallace is, what? A kind of hit man for the Johnson crowd?”

  “My guess is LBJ is way above the fray. But he has had some big bad nasty folks backing him from day one—oilmen, industrial folk, powerful lawyers. Or it could be Billie Sol reaching out from behind bars. He’s appealing his sentence, you know. Dead witnesses have a certain eloquence, but they don’t get called to testify.”

  “I have another for you,” I said, and I gave him the information about Joseph Plett’s suicide.

  He wrote it all down on a spiral pad.

  When I was finished, he frowned at his own notes. “This Plett fella—the date of his death, why that’s just one day after we exhumed Henry Marshall.”

  “Yes it is.”

  He sighed wearily. “Well, this one’s out of state. I won’t be able to check on Wallace’s whereabouts on this ’un. Maybe you have people who could do that.”

  “Why, doesn’t Wallace live in Texas?”

  “He works for a Texas firm, Ling Electronics, in Dallas, but they transferred him in 1961. Oh, he comes back a lot, for reasons that probably don’t always have to do with helping somebody kill their self. One possible item of interest, he was in Dallas on November twenty-two of last year.”

  “Clint, you can’t be suggesting—”

  “An individual known to be a hatchet man of LBJ’s was in town, is all I’m saying. On the other hand, ol’ Lyndon benefitted much as anybody from that particular hit.”

  I was starting to think maybe Captain Clint Peoples needed to be fitted for a tinfoil Stetson.

  “Since movin’ out of state,” Peoples was saying, “Mac Wallace has spent a hell of a lot of time back home in Texas … visits that correspond to some nasty, suspicious deaths.”

  And deaths didn’t come any nastier or more suspicious than JFK’s, I had to admit.

  I said, “Where did that electronics company move Wallace to?”

  “Mac’s workin’ for the Ling branch on the West Coast.”

  Now the hair on my neck was prickling. “Where on the West Coast?”

  “Southern California,” Peoples said. “You know, Disneyland and movie stars—the Los Angeles area.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  As the Galaxie made its way up Highway 77, through a rural landscape that might have been Illinois were it not for the occasional cotton field, the sun began to set in a vivid expressionist blaze, throwing long blue shadows across my path. Like a futuristic mirage, a skyline rose from the flat terrain, modern monuments to insurance and banking, cold stone and steel but with touches of color, the blue Southland Life towers, the red horse riding the Mercantile Bank.

  I’d had much to think about on the drive back to Dallas, and a conducive atmosphere to do it in—traffic had been light, and the landscape soothingly monotonous. The panic I’d felt at hearing that murderer Mac Wallace was within easy reach of my son and ex-wife had faded—Peoples having told me that Wallace was currently in Dallas, doing a project at the Ling Company’s home base, and staying at the Adolphus Hotel.

  “We kind of keep an eye on what ol’ Mac’s up to,” Peoples told me, “when he’s back in these parts.”

  That was apparently a fairly new policy for the Rangers, else some “suicides” might not have occurred.

  Or maybe they would have. It had only taken driving a few miles out of Waco into wide-open spaces under an endless sky to acquire enough distance to decide that Captain Clint Peoples had become a kind of rustic Ahab with a white whale called Mac Wallace. No question Wallace had killed that pitch-and-putt fucker, that was a matter of public record; but all Peoples had on Mac for the Henry Marshall murder was a crude police sketch, a lack of alibi, and a hunch.

  I had asked him, “Did you bring Wallace in for a line up for your gas station attendant to make an ID?”

  “Didn’t have enough to haul Mac in,” Peoples admitted. “I showed our witness Wallace’s picture, that same one from ’52 I gave you, Nate, and he said he was pretty sure that was the fella.”

  “‘Pretty sure’ doesn’t cut it.”

  “No, and the pump jockey isn’t cooperating anymore. Not since he got a couple of very threatening anonymous phone calls.”

  That, too, indicated Peoples might have been right about Wallace in the Marshall murder, but it was still goddamn thin. Nonetheless, I would call Lou Sapperstein tonight and have him check on Wallace’s whereabouts when Joseph Plett was killed in Chicago, and do a background check on him in California. We would put the convicted killer under surveillance when he returned to Anaheim, until I was convinced he was no threat.

  Of course, if he was a threat, I’d do something about it myself, since I also had a streak of Ahab in me.

  But right now I was in Dallas, and Wallace was in Dallas, too, so maybe I could get a jump on this particular lead.

  I didn’t bother going back to the Statler, instead pulling into the parking garage next to the Colony Club, the town’s most celebrated strip joint. In the parking garage, I got my nine-millimeter Browning in its shoulder sling from the trunk where I’d snugged it behind the spare tire. I wasn’t licensed to carry in the state of Texas, but if I was going out seeking a guy who got suspended sentences on murder one convictions, I figured better safe than sorry.

  When I exited the ramp, the sidewalk was splashed with the club’s neon. Looming over me was a sign worthy of the Vegas strip, white neon on undulating orange:

  COLONY

  CLUB

  DANCING

  FLOOR

  SHOWS

  and below that a marquee, black letters on white:

  GIRL SHOW

  JADA

  CHRIS COLT WITH HER 45’S

  PEGGY STEELE

  3 OTHER EXOTICS

  Welcome to downtown Dallas, where nobody lived except conventioneers, busine
ssmen on the road, and other lonely, horny men. When the Dallas working day was done, the rush was on to bedroom communities—executives heading north to the Park Cities, lesser white-collar types to far north Dallas and select neighborhoods in Oak Cliff and Lakewood, while the labor force took buses south. No stadiums for sports to bring them back, either, and only a few movie theaters, the Capri, the Palace, the Majestic.

  That meant the primary entertainment options were the girlie clubs—Abe Weinstein’s Colony and his brother Barney’s Theater Lounge. Jack Ruby’s Carousel, I noticed, on the other side of that parking ramp, was shuttered, a casualty of history.

  Might seem funny that one of the classiest, most famous hotels in Dallas was right across the street from its biggest strip joint, but the twenty-two-story, Beaux Arts–style Adolphus depended on conventioneers, too. I crossed Commerce Street, dodging only light one-way traffic, figuring to eat in the Century Room.

  I would eventually join the other out-of-town males at the Colony Club, if for no other reason than I had spent a couple of memorable nights with the exotic dancer named Jada (actually Janet Adams) when she played Chicago last year. But I had learned long ago not to eat at strip clubs, since food was never the attraction and when you got a hair in your soup, it had unfortunate resonance. Add to that the possibility that Mac Wallace might be dining at the restaurant in his hotel, and the Century Room it was.

  Once upon a time the Century Room had been the “Hawaiian” Century, with bamboo and native bark on the walls, palm trees with coconuts, and an animated mural of volcanoes, mountains, and breaking surf tied in with a tropical rainstorm effect. Now it was space-age modern, brown and gold, looking like a high-class Denny’s. Too bad. At least the Planked Gulf Trout Adolphus hadn’t changed with the times, except for the price—a buck twenty-five after the war, two-fifty now.

  What the Century Room didn’t serve me up was Mac Wallace, even though I lingered through my meal and went through two vodka gimlets. The weeknight diners at the Century Room consisted of married couples celebrating a birthday or an anniversary, couples who might have been married but probably not to each other, and lonely men-about-town. None of the latter were the pitch-and-putt slayer.