Lost Man's River (15 page)

At the table, Lucius showed the Major the synopsis of his notes on the Belle Starr murder, and Dyer read the entire document while the waitress stood there, awaiting their order. He paid no attention to Lucius's impatience, far less to the poised pencil of the nervous waitress, but sat hunched forward over the table, mantling the papers like a raptor.

“A preliminary hearing in Arkansas federal court. No indictment. Won't hurt us a bit.” He slipped the Belle Starr documents into his briefcase. “All the same, we have to scrutinize any material that casts a bad light on our subject—discuss, I mean, whether it's fair to put it in our book.”

Lucius disliked the possessive tone of “our subject” and “our book.” He wanted to insist, “
My
subject, and
my
book,” but not wishing to seem petulant, he held his tongue.

Arbie sat arms folded on his chest as if trying to clamp down on chronic twitches. In the silence, he demanded, “What's in this thing for you?”

“I mean, it must be a lot of work,” Lucius added quickly, annoyed by Arbie's rudeness, yet aware that the old man was asking questions he should have asked himself.

“Not a thing, boys, not one blessed thing.” Dyer sat back in his chair to beckon the waitress. “Call it nostalgia about Chatham Bend, call it my sense of fair play. I'd like to see the Watson family fairly compensated. Mr. Watson was lynched, and his property was appropriated by the community that lynched him. Yet his title to that property has never been waived by any member of the family—”

“Couldn't waive it if they didn't know about it,” Arbie snapped. “Or if it was never nailed down in the first place—”

“That's where I come in, sir.” Dyer awarded them a self-deprecatory smile, then spiked the next question before Arbie could ask it. “No fee, no commission. The family won't owe me one red cent.”

Lucius waved the waitress to the table. “Who needs a drink?” he said.
“No liquor served here,” Dyer said approvingly. “Nice clean place. Fine old-fashioned fundamentalist family.” He observed Lucius's dismay with satisfaction. “ ‘God is our Senior Partner'—they put that right here on the menu! I dine here whenever I come through.” He smiled at the contents of the bill of fare. “Take it from me, boys, the cheapest dinners on here are the best. Deep-fried chicken, deep-fried catfish—they do it up real nice. Crispy and golden.”

Lucius muttered “Crispy and golden it is!” But Arbie cursed loudly and stood up and left the table just as the poor waitress fluttered in to take their order. “What
I
need is a good hard piss,” he growled, as she backed away. When Dyer asked if they should order for him, he stopped short and turned, cocking his head. “You talking to me?”

“Might's well get your order in,” Dyer said. That this man was calm in the teeth of the old man's hostility was impressive, Lucius thought, and a little scary.

“Make mine the Cheap Golden Dinner,” Arbie told the waitress. He moved away between the tables, shoulders high and stiff, as if ready to fend off a blow.

Having ordered his meal, the Major lit a cigar and shuffled through more papers. “Professor, you make it plain here in your notes that the outlaw Cox was the real culprit, that E. J. Watson was a solid citizen …”

“Yes, in his way—”

“ ‘Fine husband? Excellent farmer and good businessman?' You telling me now you don't mean what you say here?” He snapped open some pages and read Lucius's words aloud: “ ‘The great majority of these Watson tales are mere rumors for which there is little or no evidence. To those who knew him as a neighbor, Edgar Watson was an admirable husband and kind father, an excellent farmer and fine businessman whose reputation for generosity persists even today' ”

“It's not so simple—” Lucius stopped when he saw Arbie coming back. Arbie had sniffed out some hard drink, from the look of him.

“Listen, let me ask you something. In all those old interviews of yours, back in the twenties, you never learned of a single witness to even one of his alleged murders, right?”

“Hell
yes
, there was a witness!” Arbie interrupted, even before he sat down at the table. “His own son!”

Dyer contemplated Arbie until the old man evaded his flat gaze, looking away. Then he opened his briefcase and brought out some notes. “I understand from Professor Collins,” the attorney began quietly, “that you claim to have encountered Robert B. Watson back around the turn of the century? That you were present at Key West when Robert Watson turned up with his
father's schooner?” The attorney held each query until after Arbie had assented to the one before.

“What the hell's all
this
about?” Arbie burst out, louder than necessary.

“And you say Robert B. Watson told you some wild story about how his father murdered somebody named Tucker?”

“Wild story? Hell, no—”

“And you say you arranged for him to sell his father's schooner? And you helped him flee Key West on a steamer with what was rightfully his father's money?” He fired his questions at increasing speed, at the same time maintaining the dangerous, neutral tone of the inquisitor. “Is
that
your story, Mr. Collins?”

Lucius said, “Now hold on, Major!”

“Is that or is that not your story? Yes or no?”

“Are you calling me a liar, Mister?”

“No. Not yet.” Watson Dyer inspected his notes. “So your story is that you aided and abetted in Robert B. Watson's theft and unlawful resale of his father's schooner. And after the only witness to the alleged killing—Robert Watson, right?—was out of the way, you covered your tracks by spreading that tale about the murder of these so-called Tuckers. Is
that
correct?”

Arbie jumped up again, fuming in disgust, as if reasonable converse with this person was not possible.

“Why all this lawyerly coercion?” Lucius demanded. “What reason do you have to doubt his story?”

“None.” Dyer squashed out his cigar. “I have no reason to accept it, either.”

“Go fuck yourself!” Arbie yelled, as the whole restaurant turned to watch him go.

Dyer nodded. “I hope our fellow diners will forgive that. Come on, Professor. If we can get him to admit there
was
no Tucker murder, not by Watson, then it becomes arguable at least that E. J. Watson never killed a soul! Then we can claim that there were no known witnesses to even one of the other killings attributed to Watson, all the way back to Belle Starr. I mean, it's possible he never murdered
anybody
, isn't that true?”

“It's conceivable, I guess.”

“It's conceivable, you guess. Well, that is how I intend to argue, in case the Park Service maintains that E. J. Watson's land claim should be forfeit or invalid because he was a known criminal in that region. And I hope that no Watson nor any Watson relative”—he peered at the door through which Arbie had gone—“would contest this. Should that occur,” he warned after a pause, cementing his points as neatly and firmly as bricks, “then the Watson
house which was to stand as a monument to your father's reputation will receive no further protection from the courts, and will be burned down.”

The Major spread his napkin as his food arrived. “The renewal of the injunction against burning runs out next week,” he warned, over a raised forkful of his golden chicken. He spoke no more until he had finished eating, after which he locked his briefcase and got up. He had to be “on the road a lot,” he said, “taking care of business,” but in two days he'd be headed home. “Where the heart is,” Lucius said helpfully, trying to imagine a Mrs. Dyer and the kiddies.

“Most Americans have faith in that,” Watson Dyer warned him. But as it turned out, he had no wife or children. “I don't lead that kind of a life,” he said. When Lucius requested his home number, the Major said that his home number was of little use, since his work took him up and down the state. He scribbled the number of his message service.

Arriving next morning at the Lake City Library a half hour before it opened, they peered into the empty rooms through the bare windows. Lucius was startled by their skewed reflection—that bad old man in red baseball cap and olive Army coat too heavy for this warming day, and beside him, returning Lucius's gaze, that odd and unimaginable person—that tall figure with the leathered neck and big hard hands of one who had worked all his life with rope and iron, now garbed incongruously in the dark green corduroy and tartan scarf of a country gentleman or old-fashioned academic. A blue woolen tie sadly twisted to one side threatened to escape his v-necked sweater, and his gray hair, already on the loose, danced in a late winter gust that spun the flannel baseball cap from the old man's head and sent it bounding off across the lawn. “Sonofabitch!” the ancient said, sidling after it quick and stalky as a crab.

Lucius turned away from the man in the reflection and led the way inside, where they sat down at a shiny maple table. While the librarian fetched the basic documents that Lucius had noted on a slip, his colleague perched erect on the edge of the next chair in sign to all as well as sundry that he, too, was on hand to inspect the data. Arbie was fairly frowning in impatience, rearing around at the delay like an old inchworm.

To expedite matters, Arbie took pains to drop the name of his eminent companion. “Professor L. Watson Collins, P.H.D.!” he said.

“The Florida historian!” the eager lady cried. “And Watson kin?” The gentle question from behind his chair took Lucius by surprise, and though he nodded, she had caught his hesitation. He wondered vaguely how many haunted kinsmen had been here before him. His
History of Southwest Florida
was in her stacks, the librarian was saying, thrilled that a genuine historian was doing genuine research in her “under-utilized facility,” as she described it. Even the custodians of words, Lucius thought sadly, were succumbing to the bloated speech that was driving good English clean out of the country.

While Arbie went off to explore the old part of the town, seeking some lost corner of his boyhood, Lucius spent that soft and warm spring morning ransacking the census records for the names mentioned in the Herlong and Kinard letters. In the 1900 census for Columbia County, there was no Edgar Watson, since Papa had not returned here from south Florida until 1901. But Aunt Minnie was listed as the wife of W.H.C. Collins (Uncle Billy), together with their children, Julian, William, and Maria Antoinett, and this family included Granny Ellen Watson, born in South Carolina in 1832.

In the same census was Samuel Tolen, the man whom (Herlong said) Watson had murdered. By the turn of the century, that peculiar household consisted of Tolen and Aunt Tabitha Watson, who had given shelter to Granny Ellen after her flight south from Carolina. There were plenty of Coxes, with
e
and without, but no trace of a Leslie Cox under that name.

The librarian referred him to an elderly custodian of local history, who affirmed over the phone that Leslie Cox had been a native of these parts, “as bad as bad could be. Led a bad life and got wore out, that's all. There wasn't much left of him by the time he came back here to die, that's what we heard. Now some of those Coxes were good people, mind, they weren't
all
bad. And his kinfolks took care of him later in life, they took him in. That Cox family once lived here in Lake City, so you might find him in our cemetery, if he's dead.”

Meanwhile the librarian had scuttled away to tip off her friend, the features editor of the newspaper, who came at once in quest of “an exclusive” with the noted historian from the University of Florida who was researching “our famous local crimes.” Together these ladies persuaded Professor Collins that a lively interview in the paper might well smoke out would-be informants.

Since he wanted potential informants to speak freely, Lucius did not tell the reporter that his subject was his father, emphasizing instead his interest in Watson as an emblem of the Florida frontier. No, no, he protested, Ed Watson was nothing like that sick Bud Tendy, now on trial for his life here in Lake City. On the contrary, he was a family man, very much beloved—“What? I beg your pardon?
No, ma'am! Not
a mass murderer! Not a common criminal in any way!”