The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  “You’re right,” I said with a laugh. “No doubt about it.”

  “Where to?” he asked. “I’ll drop you off anyplace you need to go.”

  “The hotel,” I said. “I guess it’s time to face the music.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  When Ollie Marne finally brought me home at almost 4:00 A.M. Della was still awake. “Are you all right?” she asked as I entered the bedroom.

  “Yes,” I said, and gathered her into my arms. “But I’m bone weary.”

  “Could you eat something? I’ve been so nervous that I haven’t had a bite since breakfast.”

  “Sure,” I replied.

  She quickly whipped up bacon, eggs, and toast, and broke out the last bottle of Taittinger. While the bacon was frying we each had a stout belt of scotch over ice.

  “It’s not completely over yet,” I told her. “The worst is behind us, but I promised to tell you—”

  “Not tonight,” she said. “And not ever if you don’t want to. But tonight we just eat and try to get some sleep.”

  We polished off the last bottle of Champagne with our food, and soon we were in bed with neither of us feeling any pain. There were no fun and games that night. Instead we drifted quickly and quietly off to sleep spooned together. I held her small body pressed close to my chest. As I buried my face in her hair, I breathed in the rich smell of her perfumed shampoo, and I thought for the first time since late 1942 that all might really be well with the world. And it was. For a little while, at least.

  * * *

  Della was already up the next morning when the phone rang just before noon, but I was still in bed. It was Marne. I stumbled into the living room and picked up the receiver. “We need to talk,” he said, a tightness in his voice. “Have you had your morning coffee yet?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Then why don’t me and you get together at Bartlett’s Drugstore down on Roosevelt Avenue for a cup? We can visit there.”

  Fifteen minutes later I found him waiting for me at the counter. “Come on,” he said, and led me to a small back room that held only a table and a half dozen chairs. “This is where us poor folks play our poker. Old man Bartlett lets me use it when I need to talk to somebody private.”

  The waitress stuck her head in the door. We both ordered coffee and I asked for a hamburger.

  “The Mercantile State Bank got burgled last night,” he announced without small talk or fanfare. “About the same time your poker game was getting hijacked.”

  “No kidding? I asked calmly. “What happened?”

  “They came in the back and torched the vault.”

  “How did they get in?” I asked, honestly curious.

  He laughed. “They just threw a big hydraulic jack across the door and jacked the door facing apart. That was after they tricked out the alarm, of course.”

  “But the vault,” I said. “I heard they had a new vault put in a few years ago.”

  “They did. It was fireproof, but not much for security. It was an old design, a time-lock deal. They just cut through the steel with an acetylene torch and knocked one pin out of the way with a sledgehammer and a big drift punch. Nothing to it if you know your business, and these guys obviously did. They got almost three hundred grand.”

  “That’s unfortunate, but I don’t bank there, so—”

  “Me either,” he said with one of his braying little laughs. “But it is odd, don’t you think?”

  I just shrugged indifferently.

  He gazed at me for a few moments, his hard, marblelike little eyes full of unasked questions. “Then something else strange happened,” he said. “Clifton Robillard had no more than got home this morning when Bob Crowder and two other Rangers rousted him out and took him to the DPS office up in Sweetwater for questioning. The story is that it was on Homer Garrison’s orders.”

  “Is that a fact?” I asked. “Well, they may be talking to a lot of us before this thing is all over.”

  We sat for a few moments in silence. Finally he leaned forward, and said confidentially, “I got my first royalty check. It was even better than you said it would be.”

  “That’s good, Ollie. I like to think that everybody I touch gets what they deserve.”

  “I don’t deserve that money and you know it.”

  “Sure you do,” I said soothingly. “You’re a good family man. You work hard in a dead-end job, and you don’t get much thanks for it. And even if you don’t deserve it, that little girl of yours does.”

  “I’ll buy that, but the lease ain’t really what I wanted to talk to you about.” He stopped speaking, an expression of discomfort and confusion on his face.

  “Go ahead, Ollie,” I told him. “Say what you need to say.”

  “This is hard for me to bring up, but after the bank robbery, and after Robillard got hauled off by the Rangers, I got to thinking about something you said one time about killing pillars of the community. And you know, there’s more than one way to kill a man. I mean, you don’t have to actually render him dead to do him in.…”

  “Surely you don’t really think I had anything to do with all this mess?” I asked calmly.

  “No, but I’m here to tell you that I don’t care if you did. That’s between you and me, of course. Robillard is just about the biggest bastard in this town, and as far as I’m concerned he deserves whatever happens to him.”

  “Then maybe that’s the way you ought to handle the investigation, Ollie.”

  “Huh?” He looked at me with a puzzled expression. “What do you mean?”

  The waitress was back in record time with our orders and we fell silent till she left the room. I took a bite of my burger and sipped my coffee. Finally I spoke. “We both know that he’s got a piece of all the action down on Buckshot Row, including the prostitution and the gambling. Maybe that’s where you ought to start looking.”

  “But we don’t have any proof that he’s involved in any of that stuff. I mean, everybody knows he is, but—” he broke off, and shrugged.

  “You could find some proof quickly enough if you went and talked to some of those bar owners and whores down on the Row. And maybe if you did a little prowling around in the deed records down at the courthouse.” I took another bite of my hamburger and let him think it over for a while.

  “It might work,” he said.

  “It will, but you need to plant the seeds in the mind of the public before the newspapers find out about his connections on their own.”

  “How do you know they’ll even be looking that deep?”

  “Ollie, you just watch. The papers are fixing to root through that man’s life like hogs through a collard patch. Some reporters from the Dallas papers have already been in town today, haven’t they?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Fort Worth and Houston, too. They were on their way just as soon as word got out last night about the robberies. I imagine somebody at the hotel tipped them. Then he or she got a few bucks when they got to town.”

  “Of course,” I said. “How are you handling the poker game with the press?”

  Marne laughed and shook his head. “We aren’t. Scoggins told them it was a bridge tournament that got hijacked.”

  “For God’s sake,” I exclaimed, amazed at the man’s audacity. “How did he explain that much money being lost at a bridge game?”

  “He didn’t. He just let out that it wasn’t but a few thousand dollars in all. You know, just about what you would expect a bunch of rich guys to carry on them.”

  “How much was really taken? Do you have any idea?” I asked.

  “About a hundred and sixty grand, as best we can tell.”

  “Christ…” I muttered.

  “Big haul, ain’t it?” he asked with a bemused smile.

  “Yeah,” I said with a little laugh and a rueful shake of the head. “But let’s get back to Robillard. How do you feel about connecting him with the rackets?”

  “I dunno,” he replied with a worried frown.

  “Oll
ie, if I give you some inside information I got a week ago, will you not bug me about the source?”

  “Yeah, sure…”

  “Robillard has been embezzling from his own bank.”

  He looked both amazed and dubious. “But why? I mean, he’s worth—”

  “Several million dollars,” I said, finishing his sentence for him. “But guys like him never have enough money. When this oil strike hit, Simon Van Horn offered to let him go partners with him on some of his deals. But Robillard didn’t have the free cash, and he couldn’t borrow it. So he simply pilfered it from his own bank.”

  “How much?” There was amazement in his voice.

  “About two hundred thousand dollars. I think he originally intended to pay it back, but I guess he got greedy and started thinking why not just have the bank robbed on a weekend after he’d faked the amount of money in the ‘cash-on-hand’ account. Then the robbers get, oh, say a hundred or a hundred and fifty grand, but the books show that they got much, much more.”

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Absolutely sure. He’d been bribing a state banking examiner. The guy was arrested yesterday down in Austin.”

  I didn’t tell him that the arrest was arranged and that the man had expected it. Or that he’d already made a deal for probation in return for his testimony against Robillard. Instead, I let him think it over while I finished off my hamburger.

  “I don’t mind seeing him tied up with the rackets,” he finally said, “but I’m not sure I want to be the man to do it.”

  “I understand,” I said, pushing my plate aside. “If he and the sheriff were as close as I heard they were, then Scoggins may not want you to handle it this way.”

  “The sheriff has his own damn problems at the moment, and he’s not really studying Clifton Robillard one way or another.”

  “Oh yeah? What kind of problems?”

  “The Rangers are back on his ass. That Bob Crowder is like a damn bulldog.”

  “Ollie, exactly what are they looking for?”

  “Just what you’d expect. Payoffs. And they’d like to get him for extortion too, if they could. You name it and they’ll use it if it’ll nail Will Scoggins.”

  “Ollie, could you get dragged into this?”

  “Nah. For years I’ve run what he called his ‘little bag,’ just the kind of nickel-and-dime goodwill offerings you got coming in from merchants to every police department in the country. The big stuff he did on his own because he never trusted nobody else. He was afraid that we’d short him.”

  “Then here’s what you do.…” I said, and took out my pen and fished around in my pockets trying to find something to write on.

  Marne grinned and handed me one of his business cards. “What’s wrong? Did you let some crook get away with your wallet?” he asked.

  I wrote the name and phone number Bascomb Barfield had given me on the back of the card and handed it across to him. “This guy is a reporter on the Dallas Morning News. You call him and mention my name. Tell him what to look for on Robillard, and then go help him find it. But before you talk to him, call the paper here in town and tell them that you’re investigating possible connections Robillard may have had with the local rackets. You must know somebody on the paper.”

  “Yeah, sure.” He gazed at me with a puzzled frown. “Jesus! You’ve got this all thought out down to the last detail. Just who in the hell are you, anyway?” he asked.

  I looked him right in the eyes. “I’m a guy very much like yourself, Ollie,” I said. “You’re a country boy, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, so am I. And we’ve both had to wade through our share of slop in this life, have we not?”

  “Oh yeah. You’re damn right about that.”

  “And we both have fine, devoted women we were lucky to get, don’t we?”

  His head bobbed up and down.

  “Then that’s who I am. Just another Ollie Marne, but one with a high-toned college education and a few years in Europe. Those are about the only differences between us. And Ollie, I’ve never done anything that you wouldn’t have done yourself in the same situation. I’m convinced of that.”

  “Okay, if you say so…” he replied dubiously.

  “You’re not worried about what’s going to happen to Will Scoggins, are you?”

  “After the things he’s said about Dixie? Don’t make me laugh.”

  “Did I steer you wrong about the oil?” I asked.

  He shook his head vigorously. “No.”

  “Then do this my way. Call your local reporter friend. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen to you if it doesn’t work out?”

  “I could lose a job I don’t even need anymore,” he said with another one of his braying laughs.

  “That’s right. And this is the payoff I’ve got coming for the percentage of the lease that I gave you. After this we’re even.”

  “Okay, I’ll do it.” We rose to leave, and he said, “But maybe I ought to go talk to Crowder myself.”

  “Oh, you’ll talk to Crowder all right. But don’t approach him on your own. Let him come to you.”

  “But what if he don’t?”

  “He will. I can guarantee you that. And it won’t be long, either.” I threw my arm around his shoulders. “I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again … we’re the good guys in this deal.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “Don’t say that. Like I said, the good guys are clowns. Let’s just be the neutral guys in the middle.… Okay?”

  I laughed. “Ollie, I really like you. You know, Marcus Aurelius said that only a man who’s truly noble in character consistently underestimates his own virtues.”

  “Marcus who?”

  “Aurelius.”

  “Never heard of the guy.”

  I grinned and slapped him on the back. “That’s okay, Ollie. He lived a long, long time ago.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  A little before eight o’clock that morning an anonymous phone call reporting a loud argument brought Sweetwater police to the Alamo Plaza Tourist Courts. The best the officers could later determine, four men had left to go to breakfast, only to return sometime later to see their cabin surrounded by police. They abandoned the place, of course. And in doing so they also abandoned two cheap suitcases full of nondescript clothes, a few bottles of whiskey and a duffel bag containing $94,000 from the robbery of the Mercantile State Bank.

  * * *

  That afternoon the cops brought us all back in and grilled us until late in the evening. There were two Rangers present, and they were more thorough in their interrogation than the local cops. They interviewed us separately and they interviewed us as a group, but nothing changed. At last they grew tired of hearing what they already knew, and told us we were free to go.

  It turned out to be a busy week for Bob Crowder. The next day the Attorney General’s Office in Austin announced that Clifton Robillard had been arrested and charged with seventeen counts of embezzlement from a state chartered financial institution. It was Crowder who made the arrest. Twenty-four hours later he drove to Dallas, and then flew on to Kansas City. He was gone three days. The newspapers speculated that the trip was related to the robberies that had occurred the previous weekend.

  Shortly after returning to town, he and two Dallas FBI men rearrested Clifton Robillard, who had managed to make bail on the embezzlement counts. This time Robillard was jailed on both state and federal charges of bank robbery and suborning a felony.

  The following morning Crowder walked into Will Scoggins’s inner sanctum, laid a warrant on his desk and told him that he was under arrest for numerous charges of bribery and extortion. Normally in Texas when peace officers are arrested for nonviolent crimes they are not handcuffed and subjected to the public humiliation of being led away in chains. But such was Crowder’s contempt for Scoggins that he disarmed and cuffed him and took him out into the street manacled like a common felon.

  The rob
bery of the bank had already brought a number of big-city reporters to town, and word quickly spread among them that the sheriff was to be transported to Sweetwater in neighboring Nolan County for arraignment. When Crowder and Scoggins arrived at the courthouse there, a crowd of newsmen awaited them. The next day pictures of the sheriff in irons graced the front pages of the state’s major daily papers. In the Dallas Morning News those pictures ran alongside a story that quoted Detective Ollie Marne as saying his office was investigating possible ties between Clifton Robillard and organized criminal elements in the community. On that same front page a shorter article documented the long-standing personal association between the recently jailed Robillard and the recently jailed sheriff. These stories were quickly picked up by the wire services, and the affair was deemed timely enough that reporters for several out-of-state papers, including the New Orleans Times, were dispatched to the area. Within days, documentation of Robillard’s Buckshot Row connections began to emerge and appear on front pages all across the Southwest. One of the most interesting developments was proof of his outright ownership of one of the most lucrative of the Row’s hot-pillow fleabag hotels.

  A tastefully written and almost nostalgic account of the history of the Weilbach and its longtime patrons appeared in the Dallas Times Herald. The same week a San Antonio daily noted neither for taste nor nostalgia ran a similar article, only this one was much longer and it dwelt on the darker side of the hotel’s past. It did further damage to Robillard’s reputation by revealing that the “bridge tournament” the now-disgraced sheriff had spoken of was actually a high-stakes poker game that had been going on for decades. Mention was made of the presence of mistresses and call girls in the suite, and the article dwelt at great and vivid length on the amounts of whiskey consumed and the large sums of money that had flowed across the table. A photo of one of the bedrooms appeared with the article, and its caption read, “Millionaire Cattle Barons Gamble, Tryst in Famous Old Hotel.” Meanwhile the West Coast tabloids had pounced on the story. A reporter for one of them, a Los Angeles rag called Whisper, found Miss Teeny-Tunes, and the band played on.