Winding Stair (9781101559239) (31 page)

“Yeah, about midmonth he come to see me. I don't know the exact time.” She sat upright on the stand, but somehow beneath her dress she managed to show the lacy hem of at least two petticoats, and her high-button shoes were polished to a bright shine.

“What do you recall of that meeting?”

“He wanted to have a good drunk. Then he started telling me—”

“Objection,” McRoy shouted, raising his hand like a schoolboy wanting to be excused. Judge Parker grimaced.

“Mr. McRoy, now you know what a defendant has said is admissible. Overruled.”

“He got drunk,” Lila continued. “He told me he'd been in The Nations. He said him and his bunch—that's what he called it, his bunch—had got even with this man. . . . You want me to say his words?”

“Yes, please. Miss Masters,” Evans prompted.

“Well, he said they'd got even with this son of a bitch who'd tried to keep him away from a girl he'd found. He said his bunch was meaner than the James gang.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Just that over and over. He talked about always getting even with a man who'd try to keep him away from a girl.”

“Did he say where this had happened?”

“He said the Winding Stair. He kept saying that. The Winding Stair.”

“What did you do with this information?”

“I got in touch with Deputy Marshal Oscar Schiller and he come over and I give it to him. Just like I told it now. I knew about this big killing over there in Winding Stair from all the newspapers.”

Watching her, I pondered the question: After at first so vehemently refusing to take any part in the case, why had she finally decided to take the stand? Merriweather McRoy was obviously pondering the same question, in different terms. When Evans released the witness, McRoy sprang to the cross-examination, moving quickly to stand before the witness in that thrust-forward posture of his.

“May I call you Lila?”

“Most do,” she said, and her bad teeth showed as she smiled broadly.

“Lila, where did you meet Johnny Boins?”

“Where I am employed,” she said, seeming to make a joke of the words. “At Henryetta's Frisco Hotel and Billiard Parlor. I entertain there.”

“And Johnny Boins was a regular customer there?”

“Yes. He always asked for me.” And she was proud of it; it sounded in her voice.

“On the night you've described—I assume your work is done mostly at night.” And McRoy paused to allow the crowd to have its laugh. “Did Johnny Boins call the name of the man he got even with?”

“No, he never told no names.”

“He drank that night, you said. He drank most of the time. Isn't that true?”

“Mostly, he drank a lot.”

“Was he a calm drunk?”

“No, he was a little crazy, mostly.”

“Drunk and crazy beyond any capability to know right from wrong?”

“Objection, Your Honor.” And Evans was up, his pince-nez almost falling off his nose. “She's no expert in such things.”

“I suspect she might be,” McRoy said, smiling at the jury.

“Sustained,” Judge Parker said, scribbling on a notepad and not looking up.

“Lila, you said he was crazy.”

“Objection!” Evans shouted. “This woman may be an expert in a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.”

Parker sustained it again after letting the crowd finish its laughing.

“Lila, did Johnny Boins ever hit you?”

“Lots of times, when he was crazy drunk.”

“Your Honor . . .” Evans said, almost pleading, but Parker waved him down.

“It's just a manner of speaking, Mr. Evans. Let's get on with it.”

“Lila,” McRoy said, leaning closer to her, speaking confidentially. “Were you afraid of Johnny Boins?”

“Yes, I always was.”

“In fact, you told me, Lila, that at first you were afraid to testify here. Isn't that true?”

“That's right.”

“Then why did you change your mind?”

Lila looked at Johnny Boins, and the young man returned her gaze, smiling, his teeth showing across the pink flesh of his face. After a moment, Lila shifted her eyes, and I thought there was suddenly more color in her cheeks.

“I thought it was the right thing.”

“Johnny Boins often talked of other women to you, didn't he?”

“All the time.”

“What did he say about them?”

“He bragged about how good he was with them.”

Abruptly, McRoy asked the question designed to fluster the little whore, but she remained unperturbed, even a little haughty.

“Do you love Johnny Boins?”

“Yes, I love him.”

It was becoming increasingly clear to me that Johnny Boins had some kind of incredible way with women, and the thought of what else he was made it sickening.

“You're jealous of these other women?”

“Yes, I am.”

“So despite your fear, you've come here to tell this tall tale to get revenge on Johnny Boins for those other women. Isn't that right?”

“No.” Excepting the slight flush, she was still calm.

“Did federal officers pay you for this information?”

Evans started to rise but before he could speak Judge Parker waved him down.

“They paid me damned little,” Lila said, and the crowd snickered. She looked up to Judge Parker. “Pardon the expression.”

“But you made a little money and at the same time found this opportunity to take out your jealousy on Johnny Boins.”

“No, that ain't right,” she said, and everyone in the room knew that McRoy would not shake her.

I heard two newspapermen in the next pew whispering together as Lila swung out of the courtroom, walking its width to the corridor door, her heels clicking.

“That one'll have more business than she can handle the next few days,” one said.

“Yeah, she knows how to advertise it.”

“I'd take that little chippy who was on earlier, myself.”

It dumbfounded me that the remark had no power to infuriate me now, as it most certainly would have earlier. I sat and absorbed it and the only thing I felt was a deep sense of disappointment over the bitter things people did to one another. Much of it was self-pity, I suppose.

When George Moon walked to the stand, everyone in the courtroom could see that he'd just had his hair cut. Across his neck below the hairline was a strip of skin the color of parchment. The Choctaw police chief was wearing a suit with a black silk vest and a shirt without a collar.

Evans led George Moon through the events of that June day when our posse went from the Hatchet Hill road through the woods and mountains to the Thrasher farm, and the carnage we found there. The dead chickens, the dog under the porch, the milk cow, all shot with a large-caliber weapon. And, of course, the men. Thomas Thrasher butchered against the well curbing, the hired man John Price dead and naked and partly eaten by hogs in the pigpen, Oshutubee found shot dead where he sat with pants down in the outdoor toilet. He told of the search for the two women, Jennie and her stepmother, and of finding the girl in the attic after the storm.

“Now, Officer Moon, would you describe the wounds you found on Mr. Thrasher's body?”

“He was bad cut up here,” George Moon said, indicating his shoulder and chest. “And along both sides. They was deep cuts, right through the clothes. Right through the ribs. Up high on his shoulder, there was bone sticking out through the wound.”

“Did you find any weapon that would produce such wounds?”

“Yes, sir, within six, eight feet of Mr. Thrasher's body we found a single-bitted ax with a curved haft. It had blood all over it.”

A deputy brought in the ax and George Moon said it was the same one because he recognized three crosshatch marks cut into the metal head with a file, a mark Thrasher put on all his tools. For the moment, Evans did not introduce the ax into evidence but had it marked for identification only. Merriweather McRoy objected to the whole business, but Judge Parker overruled him with some irritation.

“In your investigation, Officer Moon, did you find anything missing from the Thrasher farm?” Evans continued.

“All the horses were gone. A black stallion racer with white socks at the rear and a
T
brand on the left flank where it'd be hid by the fender when the horse was saddled. Mr. Thrasher brands all his horses like that. I mean, he used to.”

“Have you had occasion to see that brand since then?”

“Yes, sir. On a bay gelding over in the federal stables. Marshal Oscar Schiller took me over to show me the horse. It's Thrasher stock.”

“Besides horses, was anything else missing?”

“Yes, sir. A black Texas hat with a pearl button on the front.”

The hat was brought in, the one we had found on Nason Grube's head the day we arrested him at the Cornkiller farm. It was marked for identification and George Moon said it was Thrasher's hat that he once had worn to town and to races.

In his cross, McRoy tried to show that there were any number of single-bitted axes like the prosecution exhibit, and that marking one was a simple procedure anyone could accomplish. He did the same thing with the Texas hat, asking George Moon to guess at the number of such hats he had seen since he'd been in Fort Smith for the trial. He got the Choctaw officer to admit that a button could be sewn on any one of them. It was all designed to put doubt in the jurors' minds, but it served mostly to chafe Judge Parker.

“Now, about that bay gelding,” McRoy said. “Have you ever seen Mr. Thrasher riding him?”

“I probably have.”

“No, Officer Moon. Have you ever seen him riding that horse?”

“I can't say for sure certain, but Charley Oskogee who lives just down the road says—”

“That will be all, Officer Moon.”

Evans immediately called Charley Oskogee, who identified ax, hat, and the horse in the federal stable as having belonged to Thrasher. McRoy let him go without cross-examination. Charley Oskogee left the courtroom, seeming disappointed that his time on the stand had been so short.

Before Evans could call another witness, one of the jurors raised his hand, looking embarrassed and red-faced.

“See what he wants,” Judge Parker snapped.

The bailiff went to the jury box and listened to the whispers of the juror and came back to the bench, smiling. He whispered to Judge Parker, who looked more and more annoyed, scowling at the jury. Then he slapped a palm against the green felt of the bench and declared a ten-minute recess. People in the courtroom began to rise and stretch, and there was a sudden burst of subdued conversation until Parker's bellow caught them with mouths open, staring at the bench.

“You people stay seated and keep still,” he shouted. “You stay right there until this jury is out of here. I don't want anyone talking to this jury or interfering with them. You marshals take this jury out to the toilets and then to the jury room and keep those halls cleared. Once they're in the jury room, you people can go do whatever it is needs doing. But I don't want anyone near that jury.”

E
ach day at noon, a Missouri Pacific passenger train departed Fort Smith for Little Rock. During that first recess I very nearly left the compound to pack and take it, to turn my back on everything. But I recalled my father telling me that if I wanted a place in criminal law, there would be situations unpleasant to a degree almost beyond bearing. I determined that my repugnance should not defeat me.

Testimony had begun when I returned to the courtroom and found Joe Mountain in my seat, grinning and once more wearing that outlandish plaid suit. He shoved people along the pew, squeezing them tight together to make a place for me beside him.

“I thought you might not come back, Eben Pay,” the big Osage whispered.

“You're too perceptive for your own good, Joe.” His long eyeteeth gleamed as the grin stretched across his flat face.

Oscar Schiller was on the stand. He had on a seersucker suit a little too big for his small frame. On the floor beneath the witness chair was the palmetto hat. He had combed his hair with water and it lay plastered to his skull, parted carefully in the middle. There were tiny red marks on his cheeks where he had cut himself shaving. He was holding an envelope and a slip of paper in his hands.

“This is a letter we found in Johnny Boins's room in Eureka Springs after we arrested him,” he said. “It's addressed to him. Mailed on the KATY at Muskogee, Creek Nation, postmarked May twenty-first.”

“Read the letter, Marshal,” Evans said.

“It says,
‘J.B. A man named C found the place. Horse and girl. Meet me F.S. on 3 day of next month.'
And then there's a pencil drawing of a deer's head.”

“The three day of next month. What month would that be?”

“June. The third of June.”

“Do you recall that date for any reason?”

“Yes. It was the day Mr. Eben Pay got to Fort Smith to begin work with the prosecutor's office.”

“Now, what do you make of all these initials? This J.B. and this C and this F.S.? And the deer's head?”

“Objection,” McRoy said.

“Sustained.”

“Very well, Your Honor,” Evans responded. “I ask this letter be placed in evidence.”

“Object,” McRoy said. “Anyone could have written that note.”

“A postmark speaks for itself,” Evans said. “But I can show chain of custody.”