CHAPTER THIRTY

Late in January, Charlie Grist came calling. It was a warm day, and Aunt Carmen and Alonzo were out in the buggy. I brought the coffeepot out on the front porch, and he and I sat in tall-backed rockers and drank strong coffee and talked about nothing in particular until at last he said, “Carlo Tresca’s dead.”

“That was to be expected, I suppose,” I said. “The attack on the ranch was a complete botch, and that kind of failure is a capital offense among those people.”

“What you probably didn’t expect is that they killed Marty Salisbury, too.”

“What?” I asked, utterly dumfounded.

“You heard me. Salisbury’s dead. They put a forty-five bullet in the back of his head and dumped him in Lake Pontchartrain.”

“And you think Scorpino had it done?”

Grist nodded. “I know he did.”

“But—”

“There’s been a power struggle going on inside the New Orleans Mob, and Salisbury was up to his neck in it. Once Galveston and Beaumont were in the fold, he and Tresca planned to do away with old Scorpino, and probably Gracchi as well. If they’d been successful, Tresca would have set himself up as the kingpin. Then with Salisbury running the Texas operation, they would have controlled all the coastal rackets from Galveston to New Orleans. A few of the other young Turks in the outfit were involved, too.” He grinned. “They tell me that there’s a lot of dead men floating around in the lakes and canals down there.”

“Imagine blood kin doing one another that way,” I said in wonder, not doubting that it was true, but still finding it difficult to accept. There is a point at which the mind rebels, a point where we learn things we don’t want to know about our fellow man, and by inference, about ourselves.

“Beats anything, doesn’t it?” Grist said. “They damn sure named old Angelo right.”

“How’s that?”

“The Scorpion Angel. Scorpions eat their own young if they get the chance.”

I shuddered. “But how did you find all this out? Who was your informant?”

“You’d never guess. Not in a million years.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t,” I said. “The whole thing has me baffled.”

“Gracchi.”

“You’ve got to be joking!” I almost yelled.

He shook his head.

“But why?”

“He was real open with me because he wanted me to know that all the problems had been taken care of. Of course, he didn’t actually tell me they had killed Salisbury and Tresca, not in so many words, at least. But he let me have the rest of it in a roundabout way.”

We sat and rocked and sipped at our coffee for a couple of minutes while I tried to digest what I’d just heard. At last Grist broke the silence. “And I guess you read in the papers that Milam Walsh has disappeared,” he said.

I nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been following the story pretty closely.”

“What you don’t know is that the attorney general’s office down in Austin was fixing to move on him pretty soon when he up and vanished. And that the IRS was looking into his finances, too.”

“I’m not surprised. He’d gotten too blatant.”

“His wife’s squealing like a stuck pig. He left her without much cash in the bank, and on top of that she claims that he had a young woman over in Lake Charles. Seems he’s been squirreling money somewhere overseas, and now she thinks him and this Louisiana gal have run off together. She’s going to court to try to get some of his other assets freed up so she can support herself.”

“Well, Charlie, if he thought the attorney general and the Feds were about to jump him he may very well have bolted.”

He nodded and sipped at his coffee, his hard old eyes regarding me thoughtfully over the rim of his cup. “I could buy that except for one thing,” he said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“His chief deputy is missing, too. Nolan Dunning. You remember him, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“And Walsh had just hired a new deputy named Stubb Martindale who folks say came from down here in Matador County. He’s vanished, too.”

“But what does all this have to do with me?”

He sighed a long, tired sigh. “You see, I’m the one the governor picked to investigate the whole thing. He thinks there needs to be some official disposition in the matter, considering that Walsh was an important county official, even if he was a crooked son of a bitch. And since you—”

“So what do you want to do?” I asked, cutting him off. “Personally, I mean.”

He leaned back in his chair and sighed once more. “Given half a chance I’d go along with the notion that Walsh flew the coop,” he said speculatively. “It’s this business with the deputies that holds me back.”

I nodded and stared off into the yard for a while, saying nothing, just thinking. Then I asked, “Would you feel more comfortable with that conclusion if you had evidence that Walsh and Dunning were involved in murder?”

“That bad, huh? I knew Walsh was a thief, but—”

“Oh, he was a lot more than that,” I said.

“Who did they kill?”

“Henry DeMour.

“But Salisbury—”

I shook my head. “Walsh just used him and his goons to get it done.”

I got to my feet and retrieved the journal from the safe in the office. Coming back out on the porch I opened it to the pertinent pages and handed it to him and said, “Henry DeMour’s diary.”

He read quickly. When he’d finished, he turned and fixed me with his eyes and asked, “Virgil, are you absolutely certain that DeMour wrote this? It’s not a forgery?”

“It’s his, Charlie. His best friend told me about it, and his wife gave it to me.”

“But why—”

“Because it was Walsh who was behind Scorpino’s move into Texas in the first place.”

He looked at me for a moment, his eyes big with incredulity. “You’re not joking, are you?”

I shook my head and smiled. “Not at all. He convinced Scorpino that they could pull it off. With his help, of course.”

“I guess that must be the bad advice Gracchi was talking about when we met with him.”

“Exactly,” I said. “But of course, what Walsh really wanted was to use Scorpino and Salisbury to get rid of the Maceos. After which he’d use DeMour to get the governor to have the Rangers kick Salisbury’s butt out of Texas, just like you did anyway. Then he’d be the kingpin.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. If that don’t beat all. He’s certainly not the only sheriff to take bribes in this state, but to think—”

“Right,” I said. “It’s a first of sorts. The man planned on a grand scale. You’ll have to give him that.”

“So this is why DeMour was killed?”

“Not the diary, exactly. Walsh didn’t know about it until after DeMour was dead or he probably wouldn’t have had him killed. See, it was Walsh’s visit that got DeMour on his reform tangent, and that’s what did him in. Walsh misread the man completely. He thought he could force DeMour to help him because the guy was having an affair with a younger woman.”

“Really?” Grist asked in surprise. “You don’t happen to know who she was, do you?”

I nodded and gave him a smile that was full of irony. “Madeline Kimbell,” I said.

His mouth fell open and he stared at me in shock. “Damn,” he said at last.

“They used Madeline to lure DeMour out to that parking lot behind the Snake Eyes Club where Arno and Luchese killed him. You see, it was Dunning who got her to do it. He told her a big story about a business deal they had for DeMour, and he promised her that if she’d get DeMour to come out there, he’d leave her alone for good.”

“How did you find this out?”

“From Alma Copeland, her best friend.”

“So Madeline was lying about the reason Dunning was after her when you met her out in San Gabriel, right?”

“Yeah. I think Dunning really intended to let her go, but Arno and Luchese jumped the gun and killed DeMour right there in the parking lot in front of her. From that point on she was a terminal liability to Dunning. However much he may have cared about her, he cared more about his own hide, and her testimony was his ticket to the electric chair.”

“What a mess,” he said, shaking his head sadly.

“Yes, but what really caused Walsh to bolt wasn’t the diary by itself, and that’s why I believe Nolan went with him. Think about it for a minute. Walsh had to either take the kid along or kill him, because Nolan had enough on him to hang him.”

“How about Martindale?”

“Stubb? Oh, he’s a fly-by-nighter anyway,” I said casually. “He probably just flitted off somewhere when Walsh flew the coop.”

“I wonder why DeMour didn’t just go ahead and file attempted bribery charges on Walsh.”

“You know the old saw about not getting into a pissing contest with a skunk? Well, it just wasn’t Henry DeMour’s style to make public accusations and engage in that kind of open controversy. He wanted to do it the right way, through a senate investigation. His wife said he’d been disgusted with the corruption in Jefferson County for years, but I think that when Walsh tried to drag him into it he felt so insulted that he decided to make it a personal project to clean things up.”

“But if it wasn’t the journal that made the two of them run, what was it?”

I grinned at him. “They kidnapped me the night Mrs. DeMour gave the damn thing to me.”

I almost laughed then. The old man opened his mouth and closed it about four times, utterly shocked, unable to decide what he wanted to say. At last he managed to croak out, “Kidnapped you?”

“Yeah. They’d heard about the journal and got somebody to break into DeMour’s house looking for it even before I went to Mrs. DeMour. But it was in a hidden safe in his library and the burglar couldn’t get to it. After that they figured out that she must have given it to me because I took her to the depot and put her on a train to Savannah. You see, Walsh had one of his detectives following me ever since the night you ran Salisbury out of the state.”

“Why?”

“Why not? After all, I’d been with Madeline Kimbell for three days and he didn’t know but what she’d told me the whole story. He needed to know what I was up to.”

“But if they grabbed you, why didn’t they get the diary?”

I gave him a twisted smile. “I botched a lot of things on this deal, Charlie, but I didn’t botch the diary. I knew the minute I read those pages I had to get it out of my hands. So I mailed it to my banker here in town with instructions for him to hold it in the vault for me. I didn’t think even Milam Walsh would be crazy enough to tamper with the United States mail. Of course I didn’t tell them that, but they wanted it badly enough to take me out in the woods to beat it out of me, after which they intended to kill me. I managed to get away from them, but I broke my foot in the process. And that’s the story.”

“You should have called me about this the minute you got your hands on it,” he said.

I sighed and nodded. “I know, Charlie. That’s what I intended to do. I was going to come back home, wait for the diary to arrive, then hunt you up after I had it safe in my hands. But that kidnapping scared the hell out of me, and I decided it was safer to try to cut a deal with Walsh for the book in exchange for his agreeing to leave me and Tía Carmen alone. After all, the problems of Jefferson County really aren’t my concern. But I never got a chance to make that deal because he vanished.”

He gazed unblinking at my face for the longest time, then he actually smiled and said, “Virgil Tucker, you are full of shit. Even if Walsh had agreed to leave you alone, you wouldn’t have believed him. You ain’t stupid, boy.”

I smiled right back at him. “I can be, believe me. And there was a point there where I would gladly have traded the journal for his assurance that our business was finished.”

“You’re not telling me the whole story, though. And we both know it.”

I laughed a little and shook my head and gazed out into the yard for a while, unwilling to meet his wise old eyes. Finally I turned to face him. “Think what you want, Charlie. But I’ll tell you one thing we can agree on. Any sorry bastard that invades a man’s home with the intention of harming him and his family deserves whatever he gets.”

That hit him where he lived. He leaned back once again in his chair and rubbed his face thoughtfully for a few moments, saying nothing. Finally he nodded and asked, “Who murdered the girl?”

“My guess is that it was Nolan Dunning,” I said. “But that’s another of those things we’ll never know for certain.”

“Virgil, do you feel sure, and I mean dead sure, deep down in your gut, that they’ve both gone far enough away that none of this is ever going to come back to haunt us?”

“Charlie, I think they’ve gone about as far as they could possibly go.”

He’d heard all he wanted to hear. We dropped the subject and let the conversation drift back to things that didn’t matter while we sat and rocked and drank more coffee. Finally he rose to his feet. “You don’t mind if I take this with me, do you?” he asked, holding up DeMour’s diary.

“I’d be grateful for you to get it out of my sight. I wish I’d never seen the damn thing.”

We shook hands and he started toward his car. When he was halfway across the yard, I called out, “What’s your official report going to say, Charlie?”

He turned and pulled off his Stetson and wiped his brow with his shirt sleeve. After he’d squared his hat back on his head, he said, “I plan to dump your story and this book right in the governor’s lap and let him make that decision himself. And if I know Coke Stevenson as well as I think I do, we’ve both heard the last of Milam Walsh.”