skeletons (7 page)

“Missing.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No, sir. I’m sorry.”

“But. But when I asked Judge Vaught if I could see them, he said certainly. He also said he assumed the other gent from New York, the late Max Sansom, had read them.”

“It must have slipped his mind.”

Slipped his mind my ASS I almost said. Instead: “Did Sansom ask for them, as I have?”

“Yes. And I told him, as I have you.”

“What did he say?”

“I can’t repeat it.”

“I’ll bet. But why would they be gone?”

“I haven’t any idea. I suppose, in those days, they weren’t as careful about keeping records. It’s not unlikely some would be mislaid.”

“Those two it is.” I scowled. “Do you mind, Mrs. Helder, if I see for myself?”

She did. She bit a lip. “Not at all, they’re public documents. Come with me.”

She took me down to the first floor, then into the basement, then to a gloomy room with a small window high and to the south, switched on a light. The walls were massed with large flat boxes of gray cardboard, two of which she lifted from a shelf, laid on a table. “Here they are—1910 and 1916. Everything we have, in chronological order by date and docket. You don’t intend to go through everything in them?”

“I do.” I pulled out a chair, sat down at the table. “Incidentally, Mrs. Helder—is this room locked?”

“Why no. Why would anyone want—” She bit again, either her lip or her tongue.

“Yes, why?” I said.

I covered everything in both boxes, every yellowed territorial piece of paper right down to pages of claims on the court by then-sheriffs for wages of deputies and hires of wagons for transport of prisoners and costs of lumber for the erection of gallows. I invested three full hours because one, Sansom wouldn’t have—he was a fast-buck operator whatever he did, and I wasn’t. And because two, the fact that the transcripts were conspicuous by their absence was the first solid indication I had that those trials had been enormously important to someone other than Tyler Vaught, either at the time or since. Important enough to steal and doubtless destroy the transcripts thereof. Which in itself was probably some kind of crime. And because three, the more paper I shuffled, the more ticked-off I became because four, I couldn’t find one damned pertinent word.
Nada.

I put the boxes back in shape and on the shelf and rode an elevator of irritation to the second floor again, there to confront somebody official. The wide courtroom doors were open, however, and I stepped in to see it and compose myself.

I took a seat in one of the spectator pews at the rear and looked round. Everything was antique and oaken and brassy—paneling, globe chandeliers, jury box, carpeting, judge’s bench, witness stand, legal eagles’ tables and chairs, rails dividing talkers and gawkers. And believe it or not, SPITTOONS. The American flag was tattered, as was that of the state of New Mexico. Behind the bench were lithographs of Blackstone and Marshall, and between them, in the place of honor, an oil portrait of some judge antecedent to the present.

Gradually the room began to resonate for me. Here one of Tyler’s grandfathers had been prosecuted for multiple murders by the other, and been acquitted. Here, six years later, four Mexicanos had been prosecuted on a similar charge by one of her grandfathers, defended by the other, and been acquitted. Only to be set free that night, hunted down, and surely slaughtered before they could reach real freedom. It was trite to think that time had stood still here. But a writer could hear the pleas to juries, could smell the adversary sweat, could taste the plug tobacco, could see in shadowed corners a spectral cast of clerks and bailiffs, deputies and condemned. Old hatreds and old fears. Withered hopes and decomposed appeals. This room preserved it all somehow, just as cardboard boxes in the basement housed the brittle bones of what had happened here. With two exceptions. Sixty-seven and sixty-one years ago. Two trials the most memorable of any in the history of the courthouse.

I reviewed my two days in Harding. Stacking BB’s. Riding Max Sansom’s futile merry-go-round. The only thing I had done that he hadn’t was read his Accidental Death Report. Talking to Pingo Chavez and dying were the only things he had done that I hadn’t. Yet. And since Tyler had warned that fooling around with the former might damned well result in the latter, I would not. I would hot-foot it back to the Ramada right now, pack up, and bye-bye blues,
adios, amigos.

“That portrait.”

I jumped a mile.

“That portrait behind the bench is of my father, the first Judge Vaught. Her grandfather.”

It was his son, who had flanked me from out of an adjoining room.

“Sorry if I startled you, Mr. Butters. He presided over the Third Judicial District for thirty years. He passed away in 1963. He was ninety-one years old.”

I had a closer inspection of the oil. The robes were black, the hair gray. But the face, the face. A hatchet. And the eyes, the eyes. On fire. This was the man twice defeated in this room by Buell Wood, whom he considered a drunk and a killer. The man who, after their elopement, had refused to acknowledge Helene, his antagonist’s daughter, as his daughter-in-law, and his own son as his son. He gave me goosebumps.

“Wow,” I said. “A hanging judge if ever I saw one. Intending no disrespect.”

Charles Vaught Jr. smiled. “Let’s simply say he was not noted for mercy.”

A break.

“Did you go to San Carlos?”

“Yes.”

“Tragic. For several years after her admission I went there, too, but she would not see me.”

Another break.

“When are you leaving us, Mr. Butters?”

“This afternoon. Now.”

“Fine. I wish you and Tyler well. Please extend my affection to her.”

“I will. By the way, sir, the transcripts of the two trials are missing. I went through the lot downstairs.”

“Oh?”

Either he had only half-heard me or decided on a change of venue. “I suppose it’s impossible for us to conceive today, what things were like in those times,” he mused. “I remember my father discoursing once. I was quite young, but I have never forgotten his words. ‘This is how it goes,’ he said. ‘First you must have order. You get it however you can, usually with a gun and a rope. Then you need law. You write that and try to live by it. Order and law—these come first, even among animals. When you have them, you can take time to think about wallpaper and a choir for the church and sunsets and indoor privies. Oh yes, and justice.’”

As the town waits, breath held, and watches, eyes wide, Buell Wood continues to walk the center of a soundless Gold Street.

Rather than slapping leather and riding out, the young ranch hands, Tigh Gooding and the Pennington boys, have reeled into the Luna again, mumbling oaths and ordering beers and being unable to drink. They cannot yet comprehend how a few rounds in the air for the fun of it could have resulted in the runaway of a horse and the death of a woman and the injury, perhaps, of a child. But now they sober enough to recognize that the law will be looking for them, that discretion might be the better part of hullabaloo. They spill out of the saloon, head for their horses.

It is not the law looking for them. It is a husband and father. Surprise stops them in their tracks. Bill Pennington takes a reasonable step. It is Buell Wood, and there are guns in his hands.

“Mr. Wood,” he begins, “we didn’t mean no—”

The attorney halts, raises his right arm, fires. The range is only thirty feet, and he intends to hit Pennington in the heart, but he has not used a weapon in four years and is unfamiliar with double-action, hence the round is low. It enters the right upper quadrant of the liver through the short ribs, causing that organ to burst blood in the abdomen. Bill Pennington sinks to his knees, pitches forward, lies still in shock, breathing rapidly.

His brother George and Tigh Gooding have never heard a gun fired in fury, have never seen a human being felled by a bullet. They take to their boot heels, tearing along the sidewalk to careen through the first open door.

Wood follows.

The first open door is that in the center of a brick-fronted building with large glass windows on either side of the door. It is the entrance to the showroom of the local Ford agency. On one of the large windows a slogan is painted in capitals, “WATCH THE 4’DS GO BY!” and on the other “20 HORSES UNDER YOUR HOOD-ALL HIGH-STEPPERS!” Inside the showroom, three new Model T’s are displayed. The center model, near the door, is the Runabout, which features a second, separate “mother-in-law seat” detached from the body at the rear. Behind the Runabout at the right is a completely enclosed Coupe, described waggishly as a “telephone booth on wheels,” and at the left rear of the room, a four-door Touring Car with side curtains attached. All three vehicles gleam in Brewster green with black high-lighting and red striping on the wood wheel spokes, since the entire 1910 mid-year factory run was painted identically. From the radiator cap of each is hung, like a feedbag on a horse, a price placard. The Runabout sells for $650, the Touring Car for $950, and the Coupe for $1,050. And there are, this afternoon, besides the automobiles, four people in the showroom—a salesman, two “lookers,” and perched on a stool at a high desk in a wire-mesh cage by the door at left which connects the room with the garage, the agency bookkeeper, Mrs. Gladys Marsh.

Their interest is aroused by the entry of two young men in cowboy attire who rush for the wide rear door, then by that of Buell Wood, who twice fires a revolver at the runners.

Neither being hit, Gooding and Pennington swerve behind the Coupe, from which cover they draw pistols and return a fusillade in the direction of the Runabout, missing it but shattering the west window of the showroom. It collapses in shards with a crash almost musical, and with it the injunction to “WATCH THE 4’DS GO BY!”

At right center, the two ‘lookers” dive full-length under the Coupe.

The salesman gapes.

Mrs. Marsh sits as though turned to stone. Buell Wood has taken his own cover behind the “mother-in-law seat” of the Runabout. Thinking to flush the pair into the open, he lets go two rounds at the Coupe. One breaks a door window, the other pierces a headlamp. It is a Jno. Brown Model 15, mounted with both doors opening from the center to facilitate lighting the burner. Wood curses the Colts. It is clear to him already that the New Navy will never be a satisfactory target weapon. The light, smooth trigger pull which distinguishes single-action simply cannot be obtained.

The Coupe responds. The Runabout’s windshield disintegrates, as does a glass panel in one of the brass, kerosene-burning sidelamps—Jno. Brown Model 60’s—below the windshield adjacent to the aluminum hood.

The fact is, Tigh Gooding and George Pennington cannot at this point hit a bull in the ass with a bushel basket. Finally—after all the stories they have heard, the dime novels they have read, the Western movies they have seen, the fantasies they have played out to gory and heroic conclusions—finally they are eye to eye and gut to gut with the real thing. The showdown with somebody over something they have dreamed of and drooled for has come at last. And they are totally unprepared. And terrified. If a new century has reduced them from cowboys to pimpled, ignorant ranch hands, truth drops them now to the lowest rung of the ladder. Truth turns them into bite-tongue, itch-crotch boys who sweat panic from every pore.

“You quit this! You quit!”

It is the salesman, shouting, standing his outraged ground with hands on hips, swiveling his head to confront as many participants as possible.

“This here is a business establishment! I won’t have no shooting—”

He is interrupted by the report of a gun and, almost simultaneously, a deafening, metallic explosion. The three Model T’s shake and shimmy. Icicles of glass cascade from the top of the west window of the agency, broken earlier. Bits of brass clang the bookkeeper’s cage with buckshot impact.

Determined to drive his prey from shelter, Buell Wood had climbed into and laid prone across the front seat of the Runabout, which is upholstered in diamond tufts of genuine leather installed over horsehair pads. Using the seat side as a rest, he had placed his revolver barrel over it, taken dead aim, fired. He had put a bullet through the brass skin of the carbide generator mounted on the left-hand running board of the Coupe. This was a cylinder divided into two tanks, in the lower a supply of calcium carbide, in the upper a volume of water which dripped slowly onto the carbide and formed a head of acetylene gas. Routed from generator to headlamps by means of red rubber tubing, the gas, once the burners were lit, provided the night driver a flickering illumination for his way. Blowing up the generator, however, proves only partially fruitful.

George Pennington dashes from the Coupe to a place of safety behind the Touring Car. One more sally and he can be through the side door into the garage.

The salesman flings himself under the Coupe and attempts to crawl over the two “lookers.” He has, unfortunately, an abundant rump. It wedges between the backside of a “looker” and the six-rivet rear axle housing so solidly that he is immobilized, his legs exposed.

On her stool in the cage, Mrs. Marsh has not moved.

Tigh Gooding remains behind the Coupe, reloading his pistol. Like his partner’s, it is a .30-20 center-fire Army Colt, nationally known as a “Peacemaker” or “Frontier Special,” bought secondhand, infrequently cleaned, and used principally to the sorrow of cacti and tin cans.

“Goddammit, Wood!” he yells. “We’re sorry, goddammit! We’re sorry!”

Somehow the salesman extricates himself, turtles from under the Coupe, runs out the rear door of the showroom.

Buell Wood lowers himself from the front seat of the Runabout to lie flat on the floor, to aim under the car and under the Coupe at one of Tigh Gooding’s boots. He fires.

The slug strikes Gooding’s left leg above the ankle, smashing both tibia and fibula. He howls. He lifts the leg. His ankle and foot hang loose from the leg, attached only by tendon and soft tissue.

“I’m hit, George!” he howls. “My God, my leg, my leg!”