by Jack Lynch
Cornell kept his land posted with “No Trespassing” signs, but the walk to where the labor contractors would wait was an extra ten miles if his ranch was to be skirted, and there always were those too impatient to get to fields where work and wages could be found.
Findley said Cornell had shot and killed at least three adult males and one fourteen-year-old boy that people in the area knew about. He had wounded others, who managed to hobble away. After a fatal sniping episode he would call the county coroner’s office and tell them he’d found a dead man on his land.
When local sheriff’s deputies questioned Cornell about the shootings he would deny knowing anything about them, but Cornell was a man who drank, and when he drank he tended to hint of this and that in a boastful manner.
The killing of the fourteen-year-old was something local authorities weren’t going to let slide. They pulled in Cornell and questioned him at length. They obtained a warrant and searched his ranch. But they couldn’t find the rifle that killed the boy. There wasn’t enough evidence to take him to trial, even, but the bad feeling generated in the community was what apparently prompted Cornell to put the ranch on the market and move north.
“Never was much of a rancher anyhow,” said Findley.
“How did you learn all this?”
“A deputy sheriff from Starr County, Texas, dropped by the office one time to tell us about it. He’d gotten Cornell’s new address from the real estate firm that found a buyer for the ranch. One summer the deputy and his wife came up to visit a daughter living just outside Reno. On their way from there down to San Francisco the deputy noted the highway went right past Claireborn, so he drove in to pay a courtesy visit and let us know a little bit about Cornell’s background.”
We were nearing town again, and Findley’s eyes flickered up at the surrounding green and granite slopes. “I’m a quarter-blood Arapaho myself,” he told me. “Some of my people came from down around Oklahoma and Texas. I’m familiar with the sort of mentality J. D. Cornell had. That’s why I figure the world’s a better place without him.”
“Seems to me you’ve just told me why a bunch of people might have better motives for killing Cornell than Buddy Bancetti did.”
“That would be true if he’d been killed down in Starr County, Texas.”
The sergeant dropped me off on the street near my car. He said that he’d phone the county jail so I could visit Buddy Bancetti. He told me the jail was in a new building south of town. The county had been sued some years earlier over conditions in the old jail down in the courthouse basement. A federal judge in San Francisco had ordered the county to either rehabilitate the existing facility or build a new one. It turned out it was cheaper to build new. So the county prisoners now were incarcerated in clean, warm, well-lighted modular units outside of town. It was hoped that one day the county would scrape together the money to put up new county offices and a courthouse next to it, but for now the sergeant, after parking his patrol car, would have to return to the cavelike atmosphere in the basement. He told me rather proudly that his office used to be an old jail cell.
Findley also gave me directions to the attorney who was supposed to be representing Buddy Bancetti, a crusty old bird named Clayton Wilstock. He had offices a couple of blocks down the street, on the top floor of a three-story building of brick and concrete. The building entrance was framed by a pizza parlor and a dry goods store. The directory inside the musty lobby indicated Wilstock shared the building with a dentist, a chiropractor, a job printing firm, another attorney and a couple of names that could have meant most anything.
The elevator ride up took a fair amount of the rest of the day. I finally stepped out into a third floor hallway that had been recently painted. Compared with the sergeant’s quarters, it was blindingly cheerful. There were landscape prints on the walls and at the far end, sunlight poured in through a window with a fire escape sign over it.
Lawyer Clayton Wilstock’s office was at that end of the hall. The office door had a frosted pane of glass with Wilstock’s name lettered on it. Somebody was putting an electric typewriter through its paces inside. I opened the door and stepped into a small reception area. Three chairs with padded leather seats were along a wall across from a busy-looking desk where a middle-aged woman was working at the typewriter. On second glance, her age was indeterminate. She had a narrow face and observed the world through large, rimmed eyeglasses that made her look like a lean owl. Her hair was a curious blend of light and dark chestnut along with a smattering of gray, as if it couldn’t make up its mind about things. She had it tied up in a stringy sort of bun atop her head, and when she looked up at me, she raised a hand to pat and prod at it.
“Yes sir?”
I gave her a business card. “I’d like to see Mr. Wilstock. Is he in?”
“Why, yes he is,” she told me, studying the card at arm’s-length. “But he’s terribly busy, I’m afraid. We all are. That’s why we’re working on a Saturday.”
“That’s just what I’m doing, madam. I drove up here from San Quentin prison. There’s a hostage situation going on down there. My business with Mr. Wilstock concerns that. It is a very serious, very urgent matter, and I would appreciate it if you would pass that information along to Mr. Wilstock.”
“Well, my heavens,” she exclaimed, popping up from the desk. “Wait one minute, please.”
She went through an inner door as if she had a role in the school play, glancing at me over her shoulder as she faded from view.
Attorneys, on the other hand, leap for no man. I know. I share offices with a pair of them on Market Street in San Francisco, and I’ve spent my time cooling heels in the offices of others, appointment or no.
When the angular secretary did return, she held open the door for me. “The counselor will see you now.”
I thanked her and went in. She shut the door behind me. Counselor Wilstock had a properly sober expression on his face and a frown on his forehead. He was a large man who’d gone to seed. He was overweight, his hair was over-gray and his skin was over-sallow. But his eyes were something far different. Dark and attentive, they showed intelligence, a certain bravado and something else. Greed, maybe. He half stood and offered his hand. We shook. His grip was about a four. He gestured me to a chair.
“Mr. Bragg, from San Francisco, I see. What is this urgency about San Quentin?”
“Buddy Bancetti’s brother, Beau. He and some friends took hostages yesterday afternoon and tried to escape. They were stopped. For right now it’s a standoff. Beau wanted to get out so he could come up to Claireborn here and knock heads until he found out what was behind his brother’s arrest. I got the feeling you were one of the people on his list. With the prison warden’s blessing, in an attempt to defuse the hostage situation, I’m sort of a surrogate for Bancetti. It’s not my intention to knock heads, but I’d like to get the answers to some questions. How close are you to getting Buddy out of this jam?”
“Now, whoa, wait just a minute, young fellow. The wheels of justice grind exceedingly, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Beau Bancetti thought they were grinding a little too exceedingly et cetera. I had the impression that by now he’d be across that desk with his hands around your throat.”
“He’s vicious, that Bancetti.”
“He’s in a hurry. What about his brother?”
Wilstock had unconsciously raised one hand as if to guard his throat. He now cleared that proud vessel and lowered his hand, eyelashes blinking. “Well, how much do you know?”
“I have the sheriff’s side of it. I’ve been to the homicide scene. Take it from there.”
He breathed in and sighed out. “Well then. The biggest problem to sorting things out is that young man down there in the county jail, Buddy Bancetti. He so far has refused to tell me anything more than he’s told the sheriff’s investigators. Says he’s innocent; says he didn’t see Mr. Cornell on the day of the slaying. Says he wasn’t at Mr. Cornell’s home on that day. But he will not
say where he was. Tells several stories about that. He either was at home by himself, out hiking in the hills or taking his dog for a ride. Or all three. Believe me, young man, I applied the full majesty of my courtroom presence in an attempt to get the youngster to open up to me.”
“Maybe another lawyer would have better luck.”
He choked on something and had a little coughing fit. He wheeled around in his chair and poured himself a glass of water from a decanter on a small stand beside the window. He drank the water, staring at me over the rim of the glass. He cleared his throat with a rumble.
“I can’t tell if you joke or not, sir.”
“You have my word for it, I do not joke when it comes to a lad being held for murder, and as a result of that, two women hostages being held inside a prison by some very desperate men. How many times have you talked to him?”
“Once. No, twice, I believe.”
His secretary entered just then and placed a file folder on the desk. On her way out she looked at me with a quick touch to her bun of hair. The folder looked pretty slim. Wilstock studied what looked like a photocopy of the original investigation report Sergeant Findley had shown me. The folder held another couple of reports, a brief letter and another letter or report still in its envelope. I got up and took a move toward the desk. I was close enough to see the postmark, Tamalpa, on the envelope before lawyer Wilstock noted my approach and hastily closed the folder and gave it a little thump with his hand.
“No, nothing of much use there, I’m afraid. A pity. The boy’s his own worst enemy in this matter.”
“Have you gone over the murder scene?”
“No sir.”
“Why not?”
“I’m a counselor of law, not an investigator. I develop my cases through knowledge of the law, creative application of that law to a given set of circumstances and a comprehensive analysis of the case developed by my adversary in the courtroom. I am not a hunter, Mr. Bragg. I am a trapper.”
He said that last with a wily emphasis, then added a codicil. “I also depend heavily on the story told me by my client, in confidence, of course. That boy is his own worst et cetera.”
“How much money did you get to handle the case?”
He colored a bit and sat back in his chair. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m just curious as to what sort of price brings all this fulsome talent to bear in a small town in this neck of the woods.”
“I don’t see that it has any bearing on the matter.”
“What’s your next move?”
“To do with young Bancetti?”
“That’s what we’re talking about.”
He gave me a sly grin. “Well, Mr. Bragg, as I said, I’ve about given it my best, trying to get the defendant to open up to me. I believe the best game at this point is the waiting game. Let the lad stew in that jail cell for a bit. Bring him around to a more revelatory point of view. Get him to open up. That will be a day for us to rub our hands, sir. Then we can get cracking.”
We carried on for another five or ten minutes. The mess at San Quentin didn’t seem to make any difference to him. The point of it all was that lawyer Wilstock didn’t feel any compunction to turn a hand on the Bancetti matter until Buddy did something other than et cetera, or the prosecution made a move to bring the case to trial. And my own hunch on that was that despite the wallet and skivvies, any prosecutor with a brain in his head would be very reluctant to go to trial with the slender set of circumstances outlined to me by Sergeant Findley.
Meanwhile, on the slow trip back down in the elevator, after musing for a moment trying to remember the last time I’d heard anybody use the word revelatory, I had the distinct impression that for whatever reason, lawyer Wilstock was stalling. And that Buddy Bancetti’s lack of cooperation had nothing to do with it.
SIX
The new county jail was on a spacious plot of ground more than a mile outside of town. Conditions inside were relatively pleasant. There were several brightly painted unit clusters, each consisting of a large dayroom with a television set and comfortable lounge furniture, a magazine rack and vending machine. Individual one-man living quarters ringed the lounge area. There were bars on the outside windows, but no cell doors of metal bars, just normal interior wooden doors which the inmate could leave open or closed, as he preferred. And each of the living quarters had its own toilet and wash basin. It was a unit designed on principles of modern penology, and not too bad, as those things went. But not even this sparsely populated county could avoid the overcrowding common to the California prison system. Other counties where the jail population had reached the acute stage contracted out prisoners for housing in less crowded facilities, like this jail outside of Claireborn. The knots of men wearing the red jumpsuits of inmates had this jail nearing capacity also, I was told by the sheriff’s lieutenant who was watch commander that day.
“If we were forced to double them up in the living quarters to handle people from our own county, we would,” he told me. “But so long as we can shut off the faucet of out-of-county prisoners, we’ll keep it the way it is. Things are reasonably mellow here. That’s how we want it.”
Buddy Bancetti, the lieutenant told me, rarely left his quarters to join the other inmates in the dayroom. He came out for meals in the jail cafeteria, for showers or to visit the jail library or take an exercise period in the outside yard. Because of the nature of my business and the nature of Buddy himself, the lieutenant took me up to his living quarters. He felt I might have a more relaxed talk with him there than in the main visitation area.
“He’s no problem,” the lieutenant told me. “But he’s very withdrawn. If he were here serving a sentence, he’d be out on the jail farm. But we can’t do that for somebody with a murder rap hanging over them.”
He took me up to the wing where the Bancetti boy was housed. The men and youths lounging around the dayroom looked benign and easygoing. I knew that could be deceptive, with the way things can build up in a man’s mind, but for the moment there was nothing to set them apart from a normal group of men anywhere except the bright red jumpsuits and the occasional yellow jumpsuit worn by a trustee.
The lieutenant rapped at a closed door, then opened it. Over his shoulder I had my first glimpse of the boy. He bore little resemblance to his older brother, outside of the same straw-colored hair. He was tall and gangly, sitting shoeless on his bed with his knees drawn up and a book in his hands. He blinked as the lieutenant introduced us. The officer gave me a nod and left the room. Several of the men in the dayroom were watching all this.
“Mind if I close this so we can talk in private?” I asked.
A small, inarticulate sound came from his throat, but his shoulders did something I took to be a shrug and I closed the door and sat in a nearby chair. Buddy stared at me a little bug-eyed. Ordinarily I would have drawn the chair closer to the bed, but I was afraid if I did that in this case the boy would leap off the other side.
“Have you heard about your brother?” I asked him.
He shook his head and put aside the book. So I told him about his brother. There had been television and radio reports about the trouble at San Quentin, but prison authorities hadn’t publicized the connection between that and this tense youth in Claireborn jail. Buddy’s hands were balled into fists, resting on his knees. He didn’t make eye contact except for brief flickers. He stared at his hands or at the end of the bed as I talked. I told him just about everything. About the hostages, the reason his brother tried to get out and about Beau’s reluctant agreement to have me come to Claireborn in his place. The boy swallowed a time or two as if his throat was dry, but that was his only change. I told him about visiting the murder scene and about the talk with lawyer Wilstock. When I finished, the two of us just sat there. He still didn’t look at me. He didn’t speak.
Nobody had said this was going to be easy, but I hadn’t expected it to be this hard, either. Buddy occasionally opened one hand, then the other, flexing his fingers, stret
ching them, then knotting them tightly again. They were strong hands. They might have been the product of farm labor. And three weeks in the jug hadn’t entirely faded the outdoor coloring of his skin.
“We don’t know each other, Buddy,” I finally said. “That always makes things tougher. But maybe you can help me.”
He darted a glance at me. The color rose in his face, then subsided. His long ears seemed to stretch at attention. He thought I was going to use his attorney’s approach and demand that he spill his guts.
“You can help, Buddy, by telling me how you’d go about doing what I’m trying to do.” That got his attention. “Where would you go, who would you talk to, if you were in my shoes, trying to prove that Buddy Bancetti is telling the truth. That he didn’t kill J. D. Cornell. That he didn’t even see the man that day.”
The moment passed quickly enough. He rubbed his head and looked away with what I took to be a brief shake of his head.
“Well, if you can’t think of what I could do, I guess I really do have a problem.”
He screwed his mouth around some and drove the knuckle of one hand into the mattress beside him. He cleared his throat.
“I don’t know,” he said, still not meeting my eye. “I guess I’d talk to people. Find out what I’m like. That I wouldn’t do anything like what happened to Mr. Cornell.”
“Who would you talk to?”
He shrugged. The knuckle kept after the mattress. “I don’t know.”
“No, seriously,” I told him, taking a pad and ballpoint pen from my pocket. “You tell me the names of the people. I’ll talk to them. As soon as I leave here.”
He made a sideways wag of his head, as if it wouldn’t make a great deal of difference anyway. He probably was right about that. “Dr. Schindler, I guess.”
I scribbled on the pad. “Dr. Schindler. I see. He’s a local doctor in town?”