CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Besides Alonzo and the other old men, the ranch had four full-time hands, two Mexicans and two Anglos, young, unmarried men who lived in the old bunkhouse a half mile from the main house. On Tuesday morning I gave them each a fifty-dollar New Year’s bonus and told them to take the remainder of the week off. Within the hour they had all departed for the fleshpots of Nuevo Laredo.

On Wednesday afternoon I sent the guards home. Thursday morning dawned bright and clear. I had breakfast, then whiled the day away alternately reading and working on the ranch’s bookkeeping. In the early afternoon I had a final word with Alonzo. We were as ready as we were ever going to be.

Finally, a few minutes before sunset, I heard the throaty purr of a heavy car coming up the lane. I hobbled to the front door in time to see a big Packard convertible sedan swing up in front of the house. It was one of the top-of-the-line models, a huge, looming machine, its dark green paint and shiny chrome gleaming brightly in the last dying rays of the setting sun. Three men emerged and started up the walk, and I felt my heart sink.

The healing remnants of several small cuts dotted Stubb Martindale’s face, and his hair had been shaved back a couple of inches from his forehead where his scalp had taken a dozen or so stitches to close a deep gash. Nolan Dunning didn’t show any outward damage beyond what I’d done to him in San Gabriel, but he moved slowly and stiffly like a man with a couple of broken ribs. Walsh was his usual confident, smiling self, dressed in a pair of gray slacks, a leather jacket, and a shirt of sparkling white.

As they started up the steps, I said, “If this visit is really as amiable as you claim, why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee? I think I’ve earned the right to ask a few questions.”

“Gladly,” Walsh answered. “There’s no need for hard feelings. In fact, if you’re interested, I imagine a place could be found for a man of your talents in the organization my friends and I are putting together.”

“That might be something worth considering,” I said.

Moving ponderously on the crutches Press had given me, I led them back through the house to the kitchen and flopped down gratefully in a chair on the far side of the table. “Have a seat,” I said.

Dunning’s face was impassive, but Stubb Martindale had been staring daggers at me since he’d come in the house. I winked at him and said, “Hi, Stubb. New hairstyle?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but Walsh cut him off brusquely. “I believe you mentioned coffee?”

“Right you are,” I said.

The two younger men took seats on either side of their boss. My aunt came in the room and I introduced her to Walsh. He was polite, but paid no more attention to her than he would have a waitress in a restaurant. She reached for the big percolator on the back of the stove, and after she’d poured us each a cup, I found myself staring across the table at the man.

Some people might have said that Milam Walsh had come a long way from the decaying blue-collar neighborhood in Port Arthur where he’d been born and raised. Personally, I don’t think he ever left it, at least not in his own mind. Underneath his silky exterior and charm-school manners still lurked all the sullen, poor-boy resentments that had driven him so ruthlessly upward. Drafted into the American army not long after Wilson’s declaration of war, he’d shipped to Europe with Pershing’s force and seen a fair amount of combat.

Despite the democratic rhetoric and the successes of the occasional Stonewall Jackson or Ulysses S. Grant, the American officer corps has always been dominated by men from prosperous, well-to-do families. I suspect that it was there, in the trenches of France, perhaps chafing under the inept leadership of some high-born CO who was his equal in neither brains nor ability, that Walsh first understood that the class distinctions he’d suffered growing up back in Texas were likely to be permanent. Unless, of course, he took matters in hand himself.

Then after the war came a taste of the splendors of Paris. But a common soldier’s plebeian amusements wouldn’t have satisfied him completely, and in my mind’s eye I could see him standing beside some broad Parisian boulevard in the gathering twilight, gaping at the fine Renault limousines that whisked by, and at the stylish women and finely dressed men and high-ranking officers who entered the nightspots where a month’s worth of his pay wouldn’t even meet the cover charge. Then he was back home again and struggling to put himself through college by bussing tables, the Twenties beginning to roar all around him, with the rich young swells he’d known in high school decked out in their Stutz roadsters, their sexy and compliant girlfriends beside them, passing him as he plodded homeward late at night on the rain-slicked streets, and then gliding off into the night while their mocking laughter rang in his burning ears.

My earlier comparison of him to Errol Flynn was more accurate than I realized. His physical appearance, his style of dress, his demeanor, even his way of phrasing his sentences—all were straight out of Hollywood. There was nothing left of the real Milam Walsh except his hidden resentments and his boundless ambition. He was like a man who wasn’t there. Only he was there, and he was my problem as he sat sipping his coffee and returning my stare. “So what do you want to know?” he asked me at last.

“Let me give you a theory I’ve come up with,” I said, “and then you can tell me how close I am.”

“Sure, why not?” he replied with a smile.

I returned the smile. “It was you, wasn’t it? You were the one behind the whole thing. You and nobody else.”

His face lighted up as though I’d paid him a compliment, and he asked, “What makes you think so?”

“Well, I kept trying to figure out who those ‘powerful individuals’ behind you could be, the ones you told me about that night in the car. But there was nobody that fit. I’ve got a pretty fair grasp of how the various power structures in this state operate, and there just wasn’t anybody with that much clout who would have been interested. They were all too busy frying other fish. Then finally a couple of days ago it hit me, and I realized that it was you all along. You were the one who dreamed up the idea of taking over the gambling in Galveston. It was you who approached Salisbury instead of the other way around. And that’s what got this whole mess started.”

He gave me another film-idol smile and said easily, “You’re pretty smart to have figured that out, Tucker.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “And your being a county sheriff was a perfect cover. Oh, people expect a certain amount of corruption in law enforcement, and I’ve even known a couple of peace officers who owned part interest in gambling joints. But for one to be a boss cop and a kingpin gangster both at the same time? Who would have believed it?”

“I would have been the only complete man in the business,” he said with a cynical smile.

“Congratulations.”

“But you are wrong on one point. It wasn’t Salisbury I talked to first, even though I’d heard that he was eager for bigger things. It was Scorpino, and in all modesty I must say that I was instrumental in convincing the man that the move was feasible. With my protection, of course.”

“But then you found out that Governor Stevenson was under pressure to eject Salisbury, and you didn’t want that. At least quite yet. So you came up with the idea of going to DeMour and offering him a piece of the action. You knew he had enough influence with the governor to keep the state boys off Salisbury until the two of you could deal with the Maceo brothers and consolidate your hold on the upper coast. Then when they finally did run Salisbury out of the state, you would have been left with the whole pie. Or maybe, just maybe, if your timing was right, you could have killed Salisbury and convinced his uncle the Rangers did it. Oh, you would still have had to kick some of the money back to Scorpino, but it wouldn’t have been a lot. With DeMour’s influence you would have been in a strong bargaining position. What I don’t understand is why you thought that after you’d killed Sam and Rosario you could just saunter into Galveston and take over their operation.”

“And why not?” he asked. “What was there to stop me? Without Sam and Rosario the organization would have been nothing. The island’s influential families might not have liked it, but they would have gone along with anybody who could guarantee peace and prosperity. And I could have guaranteed it.”

“And then you could have started expanding on down the coast. Because the one part of what you said that night that was true was your dream of a string of resort casinos all the way down to Brownsville.”

“That’s correct,” he said.

“What do you intend to do now?”

“Wait awhile till the dust settles, and then begin again on my own.”

“But why?”

He looked at me with an expression that was close to pity. “You should know the answer to that.”

“No, I really don’t.”

“Because it’s all possible. After all, why did Caesar conquer Gaul?”

“Because he was an asshole,” I said.

He gave me the sort of patronizing smile you might give an idiot stepchild. “You lack vision, Tucker,” he said.

“If I thought vision would make me like you, I’d take myopia every time.”

This bought me a mild scowl, but I ignored it and plunged on. “But let’s get back to Henry DeMour,” I said. “He’s a lot closer than Caesar and Gaul. As it turned out, you misjudged him completely. Because of all his womanizing you thought he was bound to be crooked, too. Or barring that, you believed you could blackmail him into coming around. Whatever you thought, you didn’t take into account that he was old money, old family, or that he had a sense of personal honor that ruled out graft and murder. A man with his values just wasn’t conceivable to you because you think everybody has an angle. Nor were you aware that in his social class there’s no great stigma attached to having a mistress on the side. So when you broached him, he told you to go to hell. And he probably did it in a way that made you feel like something he’d scrape off the bottom of his shoe before he went in the house.”

His remained impassive but his face reddened a little, and I knew I’d hit a nerve.

“And he wrote it all in his journal,” I went on. “Just the same as he’d been doing for years. And it was there in his own handwriting, the handwriting of a man who would be believed if word of it ever got out. It wouldn’t have been enough to convict you of anything, but think of what Sam Maceo’s friends at the Houston and Galveston papers could have done with it. You would have been ruined politically at the very least, and probably the attorney general’s office in Austin could have used it to subpoena all your records. So after you learned about DeMour’s journal, you knew you were vulnerable. If I hadn’t come across it, somebody else would have. Some reporter, maybe. Or some of his family. I don’t know for sure how you found out about the thing, but according to his wife it was common knowledge among his friends.”

“Go on,” he said.

“The only thing I don’t know is how deeply Madeline Kimbell was involved. And I’m still not sure who killed her or why.”

“Well, I guess there’s just some things you won’t ever be able to figure out, smart-ass,” Dunning said contemptuously, the only time he spoke.

“I don’t suppose it really makes any difference,” I replied.

“You’re right about that,” Walsh said. “And now I need that diary, as we agreed. Then we can be on our way.”

I took a deep breath and looked at my aunt, and our eyes met in understanding. “Would you mind?” I asked her. “It’s in the safe in the office.”

“I’ll get it,” she said. “But let me light the lamp first. It’s getting dark.”

She rose from the table and went over to the cabinet and pulled out one of the old kerosene lamps and struck a match and touched it to its wick. Then she fumbled around getting the shade back on the lamp while I lived through the most nerve-racking moments of my life. To distract Walsh and his two henchmen I began babbling. About what I don’t remember to this day, but all the while I was trying desperately to keep my eyes glued to his face and not give the whole thing away by glancing over his shoulder where Alonzo had just emerged, specter-like, from the kitchen closet’s dark interior. The old man moved soundlessly in his sock feet, his bald head gleaming in the lamplight, his weathered face as serene as the face of a nun at her prayers, while in his hand he clutched the same ancient, stag-handled knife with which he’d punctured the bull’s jugular so many years before.

He was almost within striking distance when something—perhaps some small noise—gave him away. Stubb’s eyes widened, and Dunning jerked his head around to look behind him. But before he could raise the alarm I pulled my silenced .32 automatic from where it rested on a little shelf I’d built under the table and quickly shot him twice in the right temple. He didn’t topple over as I’d expected. Instead his body went rigid and began to quiver and twitch, his feet beating a dancelike tattoo on the floor while his hands jerked and grabbed spasmodically at the tablecloth. Walsh turned to gaze stupidly at his now-defunct deputy, but by then Alonzo was on him and had one iron-hard old hand buried in his carefully combed hair. Quickly he jerked the man’s head back so that his eyes stared upward at the ceiling. Then the knife flashed silver in the soft glow of the lamplight, and a moment later Walsh’s exposed throat lay gaping open from one side to the other.

All at once the room seemed full of blood. Dunning crashed to the floor, a crimson stream spurting from the side of his head. Martindale finally reacted and began to grope for his pistol. I pointed the .32 at his face and pulled the trigger, but the gun didn’t make a sound. I looked down and saw that the cartridge casing from my second shot had hung in the gun’s ejection port. I was feverishly trying to pull back the slide to clear the jam when my aunt raised her arms above her head, the old meat ax that had resided for years unused in the cabinet now clutched tightly in her hands. Where she’d hidden it that day, I don’t know, but her face was the face of an avenging angel as she brought it down with all her might and buried its blade to the hilt in the top of Stubb Martindale’s head.

For what must have been at least a couple of seconds he sat motionless, staring at me with eyes that were sad beyond knowing, and for one dreadful moment I felt a sharp stab of pity for him deep in my heart. Then he slapped both hands down on the table and made one abortive effort to rise before he collapsed beside his chair and lay there jerking and snorting like a hog in heat.

I lunged to my feet. Alonzo had Walsh pinned to the floor, where he held him for the short time it took him to become unconscious. Nolan soon quit moving, but Martindale continued to quiver and twitch for what must have been a full minute.

Then it was all over, and the deep silence of the winter twilight descended on the room. Soundlessly, as though they were materializing from the very air itself, the other old men appeared beside us in their sock feet, their pistols in their hands. No one said anything. We all stood frozen in a moment that seemed to stretch outward into eternity. Finally I came to my senses and hobbled over to the cabinet and pulled out a fifth of bourbon. I took a long pull and handed it to Alonzo, who drank and passed it on. With trembling hands I lighted a Chesterfield and offered the rest of the pack to the others. After Pablo had drunk, he pointed down at the three lifeless bodies on the floor, his single eye shining bright and baleful in the dim light of the kerosene lamp. “Santa Muerte will feast tonight,” he said softly.