Thursday, August 30
0900 hours
Flagstaff, Arizona
Flagstaff was an anvil under a hammer sun. Frank Keogh was in a motel strip on a street called Frontier Drive. A Holiday Inn blocked the slantwise sun and he stood in its shadow for a while, feeling hot and filthy and constructed mainly of road salt and gravel.
The car was gone, his Browning and his cash. He had his NYPD buzzer and a few bills and a borrowed Arizona State Colt and a license in the name of a dying man. It was in his mind to say the hell with it and go call the Flagstaff PD and tell them to come and get him. Then he thought about all the shooting these cowboys seemed to do and he thought, Well, no. Later. Maybe.
He walked a bit down Frontier Drive toward the center of town. Traffic was building in the four-lane road, cabs and family sedans and pickup trucks. He waved a cab down and climbed into the air-conditioned interior like a man slipping into a cool bath. The driver was wearing a massive black Stetson and listening to a radio evangelist cursing hellfire on the fornicators.
“You a fornicator?” asked the driver, looking at Frank in the rearview.
“Every chance I get,” said Frank.
The driver smiled and said, “Me too, buddy. Where ya goin’?”
“I need a library.”
The man thought while he cut hard in front of a Winnebago.
“Got the metropolitan downtown. Never go there myself. Go to bars.”
“Bars? That depends.”
“On what?” said the cabbie, punching the horn.
“On what kind of bars,” Frank said, but the cabbie wasn’t listening.
Fifty feet back, the driver of an unmarked Flagstaff car looked at his partner. His partner was a Flagstaff detective named Ewell Carson. They called him the Gibbon because of his first name and because he looked like a bald pink ape in his tan three-piece suit. “Now what do we do, Ewell?”
“You heard the FBI, Ozzie. We’re not supposed to pick him up. We’re supposed to follow him and see what he does.”
“What’s the connection between this guy and Sonny Beauchamp? Isn’t Beauchamp part of that outfit took the bank in Lawton, Oklahoma, last month? Killed that trooper? What the hell is that guy doing in Arizona?”
The Gibbon sighed. “What do you want from life, Ozzie? You want it to make sense? We got every trooper in a three-state area looking for Sonny Beauchamp now. And all you and me have to do is trail this little mick. Don’t put the spurs to God, Ozzie.”
“How come all of a suddenlike we’re just supposed to follow him? Late as yesterday this guy was a three-state bulletin.”
The Gibbon didn’t have to explain the mysteries of cop work to Ozzie. Somebody back East had put in a call and now the word was follow him. And somebody’d bag Beauchamp and then they’d put both of them in a room and see what happened.
Ozzie was quiet for a while. He seemed to expect no answer. It was a good trait in a partner, and a rare one.
“Where you figure he’s going, Ewell?”
“Damned if I know. Downtown anyway.”
“You think it’s true, about him saving Benbone?”
“That’s what the guy says.”
“Doesn’t make any sense.”
The red cab pulled left onto the city parkway.
“He’s going downtown all right.”
“Yeah,” said the Gibbon, pulling a huge plaid handkerchief out of his breast pocket and wiping his shiny pink forehead. “Maybe he needs some socks.”
The death of Keiko Chung started small, a blurry nursery school shot no bigger than an inch square on page 17 of the Flagstaff Eagle. A headline, CHILD MISSING, and a few lines describing her and citing the concern of her parents. A call was made to the people of Flagstaff to assist the police in their search. That appeared on May 11, 1960.
Frank pressed the control and the pages flickered by on the microfilm reader, a dizzying stroboscopic flutter of lives and times and fashions from twenty-eight years ago. Watching it all go by made Frank feel his age. Sitting in the little booth in the main floor of the sandstone library, surrounded by the hush and murmur of air and voices and the padding of feet on the carpet, Frank felt isolated and somehow comforted.
Up on the second floor, leaning on the railing where he could keep an eye on Frank at the booth, the Gibbon chewed on a Jerky Treat and wondered about the guy. Why would a running man come all the way to Flagstaff to use the public library?
It didn’t figure. It just didn’t fit.
The Gibbon was uncomfortable with behavior that didn’t fit his expectations. He was a good cop because he knew the basic cop truth: People Are All The Same.
A man kills a bunch of people, he runs like a pro or a putz.
This guy ran like both of them.
This guy has somehow made it all the way from the East and could no doubt have crossed a border, got his ass into Mexico, where anything and anybody that can’t be bought can be rented.
But no, he runs straight into the arms of the Feds here in Flagstaff, which is running like a putz.
And what about this Beauchamp guy? The Gibbon had heard all about Sonny Beauchamp. He’d done hard time in Santa Fe, gone north to New York. Killed a New York cop. Now here he was, in a fire fight with a runaway cop on Route 66. Hell of a coincidence.
Curiouser and curiouser. The Jabberwock had come to Flagstaff.
Actually, shit like this made the Gibbon very happy.
He was always happy to have his expectations stood on their heads. It made him feel young again, made him feel that the world could still surprise him.
No, thought the Gibbon, chewing at the Jerky Treat, leaning on the railing and watching the little bulldog-type guy in the microfilm booth, watching the bulge at the side of his jean jacket where the Gibbon figured he was carrying a pretty sizable piece of iron, something’s wrong. Something don’t fit right.
And that call from Alvin Matthias, the FBI agent from New York, telling them just to watch the guy and not to scoop him yet. What the hell did that mean? The guy was protected?
No. It didn’t fit and Ewell Carson didn’t like it.
MISSING GIRL FOUND DEAD
There it was … May 13, 1960. A Friday. Christ, Friday the thirteenth. A front-page banner in the Flagstaff Eagle, pictures of a doll-like little Oriental girl with black hair and wide eyes and a tentative smile. Keiko Chung. Dead at two years.
The story was elliptical, as these stories are. A sexual assault was denied but rose from the wording like the smell of something rotting under the front porch. The Flagstaff police expected to make an arrest within hours. Which meant they had nothing. A Flagstaff detective by the name of Dewey Schuyler was listed as the investigating officer. Frank wrote his name down. Maybe Schuyler could help him out.
Right, Frank. Excuse me, Dewey, but I’m a famous fugitive cop-killer and I was wondering if you’d give me a few minutes of your time?
The story went through the usual media cycle. Front-page banner above the fold. Arrests pending.
Then, as the days passed and Dewey Schuyler labored in vain, the coverage began to slide down and shrink until it slipped off the front page and finally appeared as part of a regretful editorial in the May 30th edition, part of a general diatribe against the Flagstaff cops and Dewey Schuyler in particular. All the media coyotes had gone yelping off after some other animals fresh kill.
Frank had the film for the first six months of 1962, the year that D’Arcy Kent was arrested and tried. And in the March 11th edition he found his father’s picture staring put at him.
NEW YORK DETECTIVE CONFERS WITH FLAGSTAFF EXPERTS
In the photo his father was a thick-bodied man in a two-piece suit, shaking hands with a lanky, egg-headed detective wearing a white Stetson and a stiff-looking denim jacket and jeans.
John Keogh was frowning and sullen, staring at the camera in obvious resentment of the media attention. The caption identified the other man as Detective Sergeant Dewey Schuyler. The Keiko Chung case was mentioned in passing. Apparently, John Keogh was in town to look at the Chung case, and Dewey Schuyler was helping him out. And they were being pretty vague with the press.
Yet, no charges had ever been laid in the Chung case.
The FBI letter was clear on that. Keogh fished it out of his jean jacket. Yes.
Queens NY 11/13/59 CARUSO, JULIA WF aged 9 years.
Queens NY 11/27/59 CADMAN, DONALD WM aged 5 years.
Brooklyn NY 12/25/59 DOUEY, BRUCE BM aged 10 years.
Jesus. The Douey kid was killed on Christmas Day. What a miserable prick this Kent guy must have been.
Bronx NY 02/24/61 BENKO, GRAZIELLA WF aged 3 years.
Manhattan NY 08/04/61 VIGODA, BIANCA WF aged 13 years.
How old would Kent have been in 1961?
KENT, MICHAEL DARCY WM/DOB 11/11/45.
Kent would have been just sixteen years old.
Too young. In those days anyway, too young to be traveling alone. It was too early for the shuffle of drifters that spread out across the nation in the high years of the hippie era.
Parents. He’d have traveled with his parents.
A vacation? Something like that?
Did the kid kill Keiko Chung … on his fucking vacation?
What supreme arrogance.
Whatever happened to old Mom and Dad?
In all the documents there was no mention of his parents. Yet they must have ridden out a season in hell over the killings, over the arrest and conviction of their son.
Where were they now?
* * *
The Gibbon pushed himself back off the railing. The guy was up and moving. Where?
The telephone books? The guy was going across to look at the shelves of telephone books from all over the nation. What the hell was he doing? The Gibbon got on to the handset.
“Ozzie, you awake?”
Crackle and some static.
“I’m here, sir.”
A figure was waving from down on the main floor. Ozzie was standing behind a rack of magazines holding a newspaper up in front of him.
“Ozzie, the guy’s away from that booth. Scamper on over there and see what he’s looking at. Now.”
“He’ll see me.”
“Ozzie, I can see him. Ill warn you. Now go!”
Ozzie sidled over to the booth. You look like a pickpocket making a lift, thought the Gibbon. Saint Jude preserve us.
The Gibbon could see his partner leaning over the microfilm booth. Across the floor the guy was riffling through phone books with obvious urgency in every motion.
I don’t know, thought the Gibbon. It doesn’t fit at all.
“He’s looking at a picture of Dewey Schuyler, sir.”
Crackle. The Gibbon digested that.
“Sir?”
“Yeah, thanks. Get the fuck out of there. And put that paper down. You look like a floorwalker at Woolworth’s.”
Dewey Schuyler?
Dewey Schuyler, who just retired off the force a year ago and who was now running Dewey’s Dew Drop Inn, about a block from where they were right now?
The Gibbon started to smile, his large leathery lips pulling back over his long yellow teeth. He shook his head and grinned down at the top of Frank Keogh’s head.
This is turning out to be a good one, he thought. He was gonna like this one.
Look at the guy down there, rooting around in the files like a dog at a rabbit hole.
What was he doing?
Why not just go down there, ask the guy?
Because the Fed would blow a testicle screaming at him.
Jesus. Wouldn’t want that.