At first, Buster wasn’t sure that he heard that right, nor did anyone else, for that matter. But as it set in, the pandemonium in the courtroom was so raucous that the soundmen from the media had to yank their headsets before their eardrums exploded. Jimmy turned around to face the courtroom, more specifically her old friend, Sheriff Dudival, who sat with Jimmy’s incriminating evidence box at his feet. She slowly wheeled her squeaking oxygen tank to stand beside him and said, “‘Gennelness and morill strength com-bined must be the sa-li-ent carakerstics of the gennelman’…Missuz Hump-freez Manners For Men.” Dudival put his head in his hands and cried. Jimmy placed a weather-beaten hand on his shoulder and patted him as if she were comforting Ranger.
“Didja really think ah’d let anythin’ happen to him, ol’ soldier?”
The next logical question that occurred to everyone was this: if Jimmy was the mother then who was the father? Slowly, everyone pivoted around in his or her chair to gaze upon Sheriff Dudival, whose eyes were still moist from Jimmy’s declaration. Twenty-five years of derision would now come to an end as he sat up proudly and looked with affection upon his old inamorata. Judge Englelander banged her gavel.
“Order in the court!”
Of course, none of the Vanadians took heed of her request. She considered her options for a moment then banged the gavel for the second time.
“This court is in recess!” Judge Englelander said standing. “Mr…Ms. Morgan, Mr. District Attorney…come to my chambers now!”
The corrections officer re-handcuffed Buster and began to lead him out. Buster looked incredulously at Jimmy, her skin waxy and yellow as a Yukon potato.
“Don’t worry, son,” she said and winked with typical bravado. “No one knows the law better than a Morgan—and Grampie give me the playbook on this one.”
Buster, more confused than ever, was led out to the alley where the transport was waiting surrounded by the media and reporters. Jimmy was pushed, somewhat roughly, into the judge’s chambers.
“This better not be bullshit!” Judge Englelander said, encouraged by the outlandish events to use profanity. Jimmy turned off her oxygen and started to fire up a Commander. “What do you think you’re doing? You can’t smoke in here! This is a government building!”
Jimmy smiled and, uncharacteristically of her, obeyed. She tossed the still-lit cigarette out the window. “All right, then.” Judge Englelander was flummoxed. She had no idea as to how to proceed.
“Ah’m willin’ to waiver my rights to self-incrimination,” Jimmy offered, trying to move things along. The judge decided to take a page from the sheriff’s book—as the highest ranking elected state official present—and improvise.
“Ms. Morgan, would you be willing to place your right hand on a Bible and say that everything you are about to say is the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”
“Hell, yeah,” said Jimmy.
Now the sheriff entered the room, standing against the wall.
“Perhaps now you can tell me what exactly happened to Mr. Mallomar.”
“Well, here’s what happened. Ah had a powerful hate for that man. He came here for an ‘Authentic Western Experience’ and then whaddaya know? The sonofabitch goes and changes ever’ damn thang! So I set a charge a dynamite to that there rezee-vor they got up there above the house. The resultin’ mudslide swept the fat-assed bastard away. And the rest, as they say, is history.” The judge looked to Sheriff Dudival.
“Is what she asserts possible, Sheriff?”
Jimmy looked sangfroid at her old co-conspirator. With Jimmy willing to stand tall on the Mallomar murder and Buster steered clear of the Dominguez and Cord Travesty homicides, a patch of sunshine was now shining over Lame Horse Mesa. “I would say, yes, that is entirely possible.”
Of course, in Jimmy’s tale, the only murder she owned up to was one murder never committed. She had cagily excised the part of the evening that dealt with Cookie Dominguez and Cord Travesty. The way she saw it, there was no use confessing to something that Buster wasn’t on the hook for—thanks to Sheriff Dudival. But the judge still remained skeptical.
“Ms. Morgan, it’s obvious that you’re gravely ill…”
“Come down with cancer,” Jimmy said, instinctively reaching for a cigarette but then putting it back.
“How can the court know that, having received a death sentence yourself, you’re not attempting to take the blame for your son?”
Jimmy laughed so hard she had to spit a glob of expectorate into the waste basket. “Do ah haveta tell ever’body how to do their fuckin’ job ’round here? Examine the damn crime scene, search my domo-cile!”
She looked over at Sheriff Dudival and winked.
“I’m not quite sure I understand your motivation in committing this crime.”
“Ya don’t need no motivation when yor carryin’ out orders.”
“And whose orders were those?”
“The kinda orders a body don’t lightly agnore.”
“By whose orders, exactly, did you kill Mr. Mallomar?”
Even Sheriff Dudival was anxious to hear where she was going with this one. A sly smile crept across the old cowboy’s face as she slowly extended her cadaverous hand to the Holy Bible sitting on the table and tapped its cover with a nicotine-stained fingernail.
“His’n,” she merely said, implementing Grampie’s playbook.
Sheriff Dudival cocked his head slightly. How could she make this stick? Everyone knew her as the most profane, blaspheming person in the county. She was obviously having some fun on her way out.
“God ordered you. How?”
“He speaks to me.”
“Is he speaking to you right now?”
“No, ma’am. He only speaks to me in one place and one place only.”
“And where is that?”
“The Hail Mary.”
Judge Englelander looked to Sheriff Dudival for the local information.
“It’s an abandoned silver mine on Lame Horse Mesa.”
Jimmy was remanded into Sheriff Dudival’s custody. In the cruiser on the way back to Vanadium, Jimmy was finally able to fire up a smoke.
“Ah saw what you did up there…at the rezee-vor.”
“Oh yeah? What did I do?”
“Ah am-bell-ished it a might. Go up and see fer yersef.”
“I just might do that.”
“Didja see how everbody looked at ya in the courtroom?” She cough-laughed and shook her head. “They think yor the daddy.” Dudival smiled, liking that deceit. “Ah think it’d be better fer all concerned if’n ya jes let’m go on thinkin’ long them lines.”
“All right.” It kind of cheered him to think of himself as Buster’s father. After all, he had taken a proprietary interest in the boy from the day he was born—a guardian angel yes, but not, in fact, Buster’s father.
After Sheriff Morgan’s untimely death, Jimmy became the sole beneficiary of the Morgan’s insurance policy that provided double indemnity in the case of his dying in the line of duty—a sum of fifty thousand dollars. There was also the deed to the dried-up Hail Mary silver mine that Atomic Mines had given their bought dog “in trade” for making a certain state mining inspector disappear. There were some books, clothing, weapons and an oil painting of a local prostitute named Hog-Nosed Fanny that Morgan had evidently commissioned. Jimmy used her inheritance to buy a vacant piece of land on Lame Horse Mesa that came with a sheepherder’s wagon. Deputy Dudival, who won election as the new sheriff, was not in favor of her living up there alone and unprotected. He worried that there were too many people who hated her grandfather’s guts and might want to take it out on her. But Jimmy felt she could take care of herself and that was that.
Just a few weeks later, she opened her eyes to find three men standing over her bed wearing potato sacks over their heads. It was around two-thirty in the morning. They were drunk, but not drunk enough for her to push them out the door. Jimmy’s first gambit was to cajole them into having another drink with her. She got out of bed and went to the shelf where she kept a bottle of Highland Fling—mainly for use as an antiseptic on horses. Behind the glasses was one of her grandfather’s loaded pistols. Jimmy made a lunge for her gun, but they grabbed her before she could get her hands on it. The three of them beat her up badly then raped her—Jimmy, all the while coolly taking note of the kinds of boots they were wearing, their clothes, identifying tattoos, jewelry, wristwatches, etc. When it was over, they left. Jimmy washed herself in the horse trough. She didn’t cry. She poured herself a drink and had a cigarette. She was about to get in her truck and drive to Sheriff Dudival’s house but decided against it, feeling ashamed.
It was Jimmy, and not the poor Mormon girl, who struggled across that snowy mesa that New Year’s night with Buster dangling between her legs. A few months after being raped, she started to feel changes in her body that scared and confused her. When she actually started to look pregnant, she retreated in horror to her sheepherder’s wagon and stayed there. No one had laid eyes on her the whole time including Shep. When he drove out there to see her, she wouldn’t let him in. Shep convinced himself she was acting this way because he had not found her grandfather’s killers.
Finally, on the night that Buster came into the world, Jimmy realized that she could keep him a secret no longer. She needed help, and the only person she trusted was Shep Dudival. The snow on her dirt road was too deep for her truck to drive. With brass and determination, she made it the sheriff’s office and gave birth to the baby on the floor of the men’s restroom. She finally admitted what had happened to her, and Shep swore to find the men responsible and make them pay. She told him, with an odd look on her face, that that would not be necessary. Clearly, she’d already taken care of them. What she asked for, instead, was his cooperation in a cover story about the baby. She didn’t want anyone to know that it was hers.
Whatever her motives, Jimmy and Dudival entered into a pact that would haunt them for the rest of their lives—she regretting having given up the baby and he regretting that he looked the other way for three of her first murders. Little would he know, when taking his first step on that slippery slope, that he would become her unwitting accomplice. Jimmy slyly concocted a phony person, the McCaffrey girl. Dudival produced a phony death certificate. There were only a few people still around in Vanadium who would ever stop to wonder who was actually in that grave in the cemetery—if it wasn’t the poor Mormon girl. An exhumation would have revealed a pine box containing a ninety-five pound sack of rocks.
b
Sheriff Dudival had Mrs. Poult fix up a cell for Jimmy with a real mattress and other lady-like comforts, but Jimmy, taking one look at it, demanded a regular cell. As instructed by Judge Englelander, Dudival went through the motions of corroborating Jimmy’s story. Once again, he returned to the ruins of the Mallomar residence. Crews were still hoping to find the Mallomar at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box. Dudival hiked up the hill behind the house to what was left of the reservoir and found not only the Jimmy boot prints that he made there—but entirely new evidence in place; Kleenex which contained Jimmy’s bloody sputum, some of her cigarette butts and an empty bottle of Crazy Crow embossed with too many fingerprints to count. Jimmy had evidently been back to salt the “crime scene.” As he placed these items in an evidence bag, Dudival couldn’t help smiling to himself. That’s why he loved her.
At Jimmy’s cabin back at the pony ranch, Dudival found pictures of Marvin Mallomar clipped out of the local newspaper taped to her work board. She had taken a pencil and drawn a noose around his neck in one, horns and fangs on another. Dudival also discovered a hastily written “diary”—in the drawer next to a carton of Phillip Morris Commanders and a rolled up tube of Preparation H. The diary spoke of God’s plan for Jimmy with Noah-like instructions as to how He wanted the reservoir blown and why it was necessary “to send Mr. Mallomar ass-under.” Dudival had never realized that Jimmy had such a creative flare. When he submitted his written findings to the court, Jimmy, despite her terminal illness, was formally booked on pre-meditated murder.
The jury was reconvened and, once again, a public defender represented the indigent client. Jimmy threw herself upon the mercy of the court and asked for only one thing—that the jury be given the chance to hear the Word of God themselves. The public defender contacted Jimmy’s doctor in Grand Junction and discussed whether it was neurologically possible that her illness was responsible for the heavenly voices she was hearing. The doctor confirmed that the position of her brain tumors were likely to create auditory hallucinations. Armed with this information, he gently warned Jimmy against pushing for the jury to discover what he already knew—that the voice of God had, in her case, a scientific causality.
Jimmy insisted, however, and gave specific instructions as to how and when the jury was to be taken to the Hail Mary mine. It had to be on a night with a streaky orange and purple sky, no earlier than six o’clock in the evening. Folding gallery chairs had to be placed in juxtaposition to the mine’s entrance according to a drawing that Jimmy had crudely sketched on the back of an In-N-Out Burger bag (Jimmy was not a fan of Mary’s catered food). And so, with everything carried out exactly as she had dictated, the jury was taken to the mine the next evening on a borrowed Vanadium school bus.