The Freshour Cylinders
Speer Morgan
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Speer Morgan
A perfect mystery.
In this suspenseful literary mystery, Speer Morgan takes us back to the events surrounding the discovery and destruction of the Spiro Mound in the 1930s, the most significant pre-Columbian temple mound every found in North America. Weaving history with the compelling story of murder, broken hearts, and greed, Morgan gives us one of the most engrossing, sexy, and suspenseful reads of the year.
Chapter 1: Editor's Note
I first heard of the recordings in a telephone call from Betsy Hillen, an old friend with whom I grew up in Fort Smith and who still lives there today. Her husband, Marshal Hillen, a bank executive, had discovered the boxes of wax cylinders while cleaning out a superannuated vault in the Mercantile Bank. After inquiring among others on the bank's staff about the cylinders, with no luck, Mr. Hillen decided to throw them away. He had actually moved them to the front sidewalk to be hauled off when the only longtime employee he had not questioned, a janitor named Darius Jones, recognized the cylinders and told him that the previous bank president (deceased) had promised Mr. Tom Freshour that bank officials would put them in the right hands when the time came.
Unable to get any further information about the recordings and not having a Dictaphone on which to listen to them, Marshal Hillen took the boxes home and stored them in his garage. This was in 1988, and the boxes sat there, largely forgotten, until 1996, when Betsy did "the mother of all cleanings" and promptly sent the cylinders to me. As she put it, I was the only historian she knew.
Historian or not, a very dependable allergy to dust has eroded my sentimentality about old things. When people eagerly tell me about a bundle of yellowing letters in their attics, my reflex response is to ask them to burn them, please. I was a little piqued by my old friend calling to inform me that she had already sent me these things. However, I'd known Betsy since we were in first grade together; we had a lifelong habit of presuming upon each other, and possibly it was her turn.
When the recordings arrived I made no particular effort to listen to them, aside from making a couple of inquiries to try to find a recorder of a model that used this type of cylinder. Many years ago, when writing my first book, I had used such a machine in Britain when transcribing accounts of World War I, so I was familiar with it. Having no luck initially, I did what Marshal Hillen had done: set aside the boxes and went on about my business. I am a bachelor, and one of the pleasures of bachelorhood is being able to leave things lying about. They remained stacked in a floor alcove of my dining room, three boxes containing forty-six cartoned cylinders, each neatly labeled "Spiro" in a cursive script that I later identified as Tom Freshour's. I assumed that the recordings had to do with some kind of bank business in the Spiro region, and, fascinating though that might be to someone studying regional financial history, such material would hardly be of interest to me.
A month after receiving them, while eating dinner, I idly slit the tape of three of the smaller boxes and found at the bottom of one of them, under one of the cylinders, a handful of photographs. They were black-and-white snapshots, partially faded, of what appeared to be items from an archaeological dig. Three were photos of seashells with complex engraving on them; a fourth was a wooden deer mask; another was a shot of four eye masks, apparently made of a lustrous dark mineral, lying side by side on a table; and another pictured what appeared to be a cloak or coat of some kind. The coat was spread out and appeared to have feathers in it.
I finally put two and two together-"Spiro" plus archaeological items-and realized that the recordings might concern the famous mound located just east of that town. Despite having grown up fifteen miles from the site, I knew little about the Spiro Mound except that it existed and was considered important. Somewhere, decades ago, I had seen pictures of Spiro shells but could recall nothing about their significance.
The last snapshot was of a man sitting behind a desk, glancing up toward the photographer with a distracted expression, a tangle of dark hair down over an eyebrow and his hand on a telephone. He was a handsome man of middle years, caught unawares, preoccupied, in full mental stride, and one could almost see his next movement in the still photograph. He seemed oddly familiar. I had a feeling that I had seen him, conceivably a number of times, during my childhood.
The photographs led me to renew my efforts to find a Dictaphone. Dr. Wesley Miller of the Smithsonian Institution-who has been unfailingly generous in this project e-mailed me to say that I was welcome to come to Washington and use one of theirs. Unable to do so immediately because of university obligations, I showed the photographs to an old friend from the archaeology department, Jim Kimpole. Jim is an Old World archaeologist and a knowledgeable generalist as well. I've known him for twenty-five years and trust his judgment.
He sat at his desk looking at the photographs for some three minutes, at first taking off his glasses and looking at them from very close range, then getting out a magnifying glass, lingering quite a while over the shell work.
"Creepy, aren't they?"
"Is that your learned opinion-'creepy'?"
He was still thinking. "Warriors, serpent tongues coming out of mouths, severed heads in hands. Death imagery. On first glance, you'd almost think Mayan .... "He pursed his lips and frowned. Beneath the oblique exterior, he seemed oddly excited.
"What does a bank vault in Fort Smith have to do with Mayan?" I asked.
"Oh no, it's Spiro all right. There's no question about that." He laid down the photographs picturing the masks and the coat, side by side, as if organizing his thoughts. Eventually he got up from his chair and paced to his window, glancing out at Old Main as if to confirm, on this gray winter afternoon, that it was still there; then he came back and bent over the images a while longer before perching his glasses back on his face. "A bank vault in Fort Smith ... Anything else? Anything written?"
"Forty-six wax-cylinder recordings made on an old Dictaphone machine."
"Concerning what? Have you listened to them?"
"They're labeled 'Spiro.' All I know is that the person who dictated them apparently was someone named Tom Freshour. I assume that's him." I pointed at the snapshot of the man at the telephone.
He frowned at it. "Never heard of him. Are the recordings brief? Lengthy?"
"There are several boxes of them. I haven't listened to any, so I have no idea. They may be blank; they may have all melted. They're numbered sequentially and labeled 'Spiro.'''
"Well you'd better carry along these photographs." He pointed at his desk. "These two you'd better take very good care of. Store them in a lightless place. They're already faded. They'll have to be worked on."
"I don't have time.”
”Oh yes you do."
"Don't be gnomic, Jim. It's too near the end of the semester.”
”If they're what I think, these are artifacts that are missing and thought to be doubtful."
"Doubtful as in thought not to exist?"
"Exactly. There are no other photographs or drawings or verifiable listings of them. This one," he pointed at one of the snapshots, "is ... " He seemed momentarily at a loss for words. "Well, it could be among the more valuable items in North American archaeology. It was thought to be the product of some collector's overheated imagination." He moved the photograph and looked at it under the glass once more. "It's the full feathered cloak. You may have evidence here that it's not just a legend."
I stared at him, trying to take this in. Jim can be histrionic in the classroom, but he is generally restrained with colleagues.
"It's pre-Columbian, reported to have been in flawless shape. A priestly or kingly robe, suggestive of a well-developed economy and of certain religious beliefs. It was disputed-possibly lost, possibly never existed. Anyway, the reasonable contingent decided it was only a rumor. You just don't find textiles or organic products in decent shape after seven or eight hundred years in North America. A few fragmentary baskets and sandals in dry caves was about the extent of what was thought to be possible. But there were other textiles at Spiro that are in excellent shape."
"What kind of textiles?"
"Whole kilts with the dye still vivid. The best collection of them is in New York at the Museum of the American Indian. They're gorgeous. If you know the odds against their having survived, they're breathtaking. When I saw those kilts, the very first thing that occurred to me was that maybe the full feathered cloak did exist."
I was not quite sure how to proceed. "So it's rare?"
He shook his head. "If it exists, it's unique. Which makes it priceless." He moved his head closer to the photograph and said, as if thinking aloud, "Of course, I'm only making guesses. But you've got solidly identifiable Spiro materials in this shellwork, and this thing-" He pointed at the snapshot of the wooden deer mask. "Ever seen it before?"
It did look vaguely familiar, but I had no idea where I'd seen it. He got up and went to a bookshelf and pulled out a paperback, The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. There, on its cover, all by itself, was the same eerily evocative deer mask.
He set the book down on the corner of his desk. "It's one of those poster-child artifacts-you see it all over. So. You've got several well-known Spiro items in the shells, along with what appears to be a feathered cloak. You've also got one of the other legendary groupings." He put his finger on a second photograph. "These look like the four masquettes, also declared to be fantasy." He bent down and looked at them again. "And perfectly worked. Those little items were made seven hundred, a thousand years ago. They look almost Chinese."
I was beginning to feel a kind of dread. I let out a little laugh.
"I obviously need to turn this over to you, Jim."
He thought a moment, then shook his head. "Don't tempt me, Carl. I'm Old World. A person has to organize his life somehow. I have never done a minute of real New World research. Nothing beyond introductory courses. You don't become a temple-mound scholar by teaching it in Arch 10."
"Well, I'm not an archaeologist at all!"
"Lucky you. If this is a bunch of recordings, it must concern the discovery of the mound. That's history, not archaeology. You're a good editor of primary materials. And you're from the area. You're the natural person to do it."
"If you won't take it, do you have a New World colleague who would?"
Jim looked somber. "Sure, we've got them, but they're all chasing their own little rabbits at the moment. Penis sheaths, dog mites-I know these things matter. They just fail to give me that old thrill."
"And this does?"
"Oh, indeed," he said, lifting his eyebrows. "No one deserves more than you-"
He waved a hand at me. "That's a nice thing to say, Carl. Truly. But you carry on with it. I couldn't take the excitement. I'm retiring next year; I've got my landing gear down and too much to do before then as it is. Go to Washington. And call me from there. I'll want to know how it proceeds."
That night, I e-mailed Dr. Miller at the Smithsonian, telling him Jim's hypothesis and asking if he could listen to sample cylinders to ascertain whether the recording was intact. He agreed to do so, and I sent the cylinders that according to the numbered labels were the first and last. Three days later, Dr. Miller responded that the recording indeed was in good shape. He recommended that I come as soon as possible. At the conclusion of the note, he said, "I don't quite know what to make of them-since you have sent me only the bookends-but I get the impression that Dr. Kimpole may be on to something. I strongly recommend that you not check these cylinders in airline luggage. Have them packed by a professional at your museum and send them by the most secure transport, well insured.
"You've got them buzzing here. I assure you that you will be welcome. Let me know when you'll be arriving so I can reserve a listening room for you."
Experience and common sense tell me that this story has, or had a written text behind it. If Freshour did write the story before recording it, the physical manuscript might offer further clues to how literal his tale was meant to be. Such proof would be particularly useful considering the implications of the story and the skepticism that it has already aroused.
In any case, the following is a transcription of the Freshour narrative, divided according to the cylinders. From what he says, Tom Freshour made the Spiro recordings sometime in 1960, when he was in his seventies. The recording medium is the helical wax cylinder designed for a 1933-model Dictaphone. The cylinders are all labeled "Spiro" and are successively numbered beginning with 6. Whether Freshour recorded an initial five cylinders is not known, but the story does appear actually to start on 6. A few of the numbers are actually two physical cylinders labeled a and b. I have taken the liberty of labeling each of these as a single cylinder. Dubbed tapes of the original recordings are available to qualified researchers at the Smithsonian Institution. .
.
Carl Penfield
Fayetteville, 1998
Chapter 2
I first heard about Lee Guessner and the Indian mound on a hot Wednesday of a hot summer, in the third week of July. I had a trial closing that morning on William Jefferson Goback, a.k.a. "Bill J." or "Jay," for assault and the attempted murder of his wife, and I wanted to drop by the office on my way. When the kitchen door flapped shut behind me, I had less than an hour before court.
It was 1934. Prohibition was over; the New Deal was on hold after its first big spasm. Roosevelt was on a one-month vacation, floating around on the USS Something-or-other in the Caribbean, flashing an occasional well-tanned smile for the photographers. I was a forty-eight-year-old widower who thought of myself as a seasoned, middle-aged man in the afternoon of life, with certain things behind me. I toiled in the trenches-sometimes latrines-of county prosecuting. From my current exalted perspective of years, I wonder if by that summer I had not become a haunted, austere sort of man. The kind who every day has his nose a little too close to the grindstone, trying to fit expectations to accomplishments, categories to facts, beginnings to ends.
I should mention at the start that I am telling this story twenty-six years later to an old wax-tube recorder, which is a formidable instrument of time travel with its pointer riding down a ruler, telling me exactly how many inches I have remaining on each tube. The day the Dictaphone man laid it on the desk of my boss, Bernie Pryor, he said, with the oracular, fumy gleam of a good city salesman in his eye, "Here it is, Mr. Prosecutor, the dick machine. Your life won't be the same." Indeed, the boss's life would change, but not in ways anybody could have imagined.
The machine, in fact, was bought not by the county but by the prosecutor himself. Bernie was the beneficiary of coal money and could indulge his enthusiasms about new kinds of office machinery. He bought the recorder and enough of these cylinders to set down the Encyclopedia Britannica, imagining that we-meaning the secretary and I-would use them up in a fury of efficiency.
On the morning that the Goback trial was to end, I was supposed to be twenty-four hours away from a long-delayed fishing trip to Florida. It had been four years since my last vacation, and getting ready to go had been like swimming through molasses. I was out of practice at arranging vacations. The trial had been postponed and drawn out for a month and a half longer than it should have taken. The defense lawyer, Smiling John Gillis, knew about my upcoming trip and had tried to delay the proceeding until I'd be forced to hand it off to somebody else. Now, finally, it did promise to end, and I was determined to get out of town the next day. But when I pushed the starter button, I discovered there was something else to worry about.
My Ford wouldn't start.
I remember exactly the way I felt at that instant, in 1934, with my finger on the little rusted chrome button and the starter not turning over. Sitting there in my little black clunker in the two-path driveway staring through the windshield at a row of dried-up crimson clover alongside the sun-bleached garage. I remember that moment-when nothing happened-almost more clearly than the strange doings later that day. I felt cranky. I was fed up with the sun looming every day like an incinerator in the pale sky. I was doing my work all right but frankly had gotten a little sick of it. I punched the starter again, and it flashed through my mind that Jay Goback, out on bond, may have wired dynamite to the motor, and this was the slice of time before my fiery demise.
My car didn't need dynamite to make it a bomb, however.
I'd bought it after my wife, Laura, died, from the Ford dealer.
Jim Forrest was his name, and he served on the school board, went to the First Methodist Church, for what that's worth, and I guess tried to be as honest as the next businessman. Because of the car Mr. Forrest had sold me, he and I had nearly gotten into a fistfight in his repair garage one day. Lately the car had been under the care of a mechanic named Harlan Jones. The wheel bearings had gone out three times, cables had busted, the brake shoes had to be replaced every few months, the crankshaft proved to be slightly off, causing the valves not to seat perfectly, the carburetor got asthmatic in particularly hot or dusty weather, which that summer was every day, and I could go on with other things that were wrong with it. Many times I had been in a mood to drive this malignant automobile someplace where I had enemies and unload it for ten bucks, but I kept thinking that once you've replaced everything, you've got a new car. There could be no such thing as a modern, mass-produced machine with a curse on it.
I stripped to my undershirt and opened the hood to see if I could find what was wrong. Because I was due in court, I hedged my bet and called Melody Parker, the secretary in the prosecutor's office, and asked if she could come get me. By the time she drove up and gave me her usual sunny 'lo, I was very glad to see her. I'd gotten the grease washed off but was still carrying my tie in my hand.
She was wearing a white blouse, red lipstick, and a canary skirt that matched her yellow Chevy sport coupe. This was well into the Depression, and the jazzy weeds of the '20s were out of fashion. Those who could afford to follow styles were wearing plain clothes or even imitation bum outfits with discreetly arranged fake patches. Not Melody. She stayed intrepidly bright.
She gave me the once-over, wrinkling her nose at the smell of the borax soap I'd used to degrease my hands, then backed into the street and raced off toward the courthouse.
Mel had a generally defective sense of danger. Heavy breathers sometimes called the prosecutor's office and threatened to burn down our houses, skin us, nail us to the wall, and so on. Such calls didn't seem to faze her. She might casually mention them at the water cooler. I had served in an ambulance unit in the war and worried about threats more than she did.
Above the clattering of tires on the brick street, Mel said, "Good thing your car broke down here rather than on your vacation."
"Hadn't thought of it that way," I said, trying to get the knot of my tie straight without a mirror.
"Do you want me to drop by the moron's garage for you?”
”Just call him. Tell him he might have to tow it. And please, don't call him a moron."
"On the phone I could call him anything. He doesn't listen anyway."
One of Harlan Jones's quirks, we both knew, was that he seldom responded to telephone calls. He had a telephone at his garage, which he did answer, but he didn't really believe in telephoning. He regarded all phone talk with limp, ironic amusement. "Oh? You don't say! I'll be." Even a simple request over the phone he would later seem barely to remember, as if it was something you might or might not have mentioned to him twenty years before.
We were sitting at a stoplight when Melody said her phone hadn't stopped that morning.
"Some of the rags called about the trial," she said. When Mel broke bad news gently, it always made me nervous. I was sensitive to her expressions, and she had that look.
"Oh?"
"Three of them. All Oklahoma. Mostly just checking to see that today was closing statements."
I was already well aware of the newspaper coverage. No surprise there. Particularly during the last few days of the trial, the eastern Oklahoma newshounds had been thick as weeds in the courtroom, and a few of them were headlining the case. People had gotten bored with the national news. A sea change seemed to be under way, and no one knew which direction things were going. There'd been a passel of investigations in the U.S. Congress, with about twenty-five committees looking into various high crimes and misdemeanors-Communists in the closet, Nazis under the bed. But people had gotten bored with congressional inquisitions.
Newspaper readers were tired of a lot of things-tired of tax foreclosures, tired of strikes and bankruptcies, and even tired of bank robberies. About a year earlier, Pretty Boy Floyd had waltzed into his home town, Sallisaw, Oklahoma, twenty miles from Fort Smith, and robbed the local bank, taking bows like a movie star making an appearance at a premiere, but there had been too many machine-gun massacres since then; the general mess and confusion of the country had gotten too thick. Crime, even against bankers, was losing its entertainment value.
A little wife-shooting by a colorful local character, that might still be fun.
I didn't talk to newspapers when I was prosecuting a case. Area reporters were used to me and didn't waste their time asking me questions. My boss, Bernie Pryor, the prosecutor, did most of the talking to the papers when he was in town.
"Judge Stone called," Melody added, then hesitated a beat. "So did the prosecutor, long distance. Said he was cutting short his vacation. Said he'd be back tonight."
That-and the green flatbed truck we were about to run into-got my attention.
"Damn, Mel! Slow down." She zipped around the flatbed.
"Did you say Bernie's coming back?”
”He called less than an hour ago."
I couldn't see the prosecutor cutting short his annual "big vacation" (Bernie had all sizes and grades of vacations) unless his wife had thrown him out. That wouldn't have been unprecedented. Berenice Pryor was a very demanding woman, something of a drinker, and she occasionally got openly sick of Bernie. Their "big vacation" was always taken in her old family home on one of the barrier islands off Georgia.
Surely Bernie wouldn't be rushing back to brag about the Goback case, no matter what kind of splash it made in the newspapers. He hadn't even been in town during the trial.
"Did he say why he was coming back?”
”No, he did not."
"Then why'd he call?"
"I really don't know. It sounded like he was in a train station.
All he said was 'Don't worry, tell Tom I'm on my way back.'''
"What am I supposed to not worry about?" I asked, and she just shook her head. More to the point was how any worry I might have could be alleviated by Bernie coming back, but Melody and I had an unspoken pact to talk as little as possible about such things.
I fell into my usual mood about my job and the boss. Bernie was five years younger than I, had vague political yearnings, and enjoyed a trust fund that was large enough or safely enough invested that the Crash hadn't visibly crimped his style. Officially I had no status except that of a month-to-month employee. Without doubt, any work in 1934 was good work. There were lawyers in town who would have polished Bernie Pryor's saddle oxfords and mixed his wife's highballs for my job.
A couple of other lawyers occasionally handled cases for us, but Mel and I hired them and really ran the office, while the prosecutor showed up now and then and made a nervous pass at playing executive. He sometimes went with me to the courthouse and sat a while at the prosecutor's table. He also had a knack for talking to newspaper reporters, but that was about all he seemed to get a kick out of. The bread and butter of prosecuting is lining up witnesses, and Bernie couldn't be bothered with such details.
All this is Bernie before the campaign, before the change, Bernie B.C., as Mel and I later called it. But there was no way to anticipate what would happen to Bernie, no hint except his restlessness. He was not an unhappy man. He had a family. He had money. He took pleasure in certain things. In a town full of drunks, he was not one himself. He was fidgety, he was absentminded and a little insecure about whether others esteemed him, and he was evasive toward authorities and obligations. On that Wednesday morning I knew I had a rich, lazy, uninvolved boss-a decent man who had not found his purpose in life and who showed no sign of ever finding it.
I had worked for the Indian Agency in Muskogee and practiced law for a while on my own in the '20s, and I knew that no job or boss-or lack thereof-was ideal. Bernie did have his qualities. He made sure you got paid, which in 1934 was no small virtue. He wasn't a nitpicker. He'd been to college (a good one) and law school, unlike a lot of lawyers in those days. And he was pretty smart about making arrangements. I was a good assistant because I'm part Indian by blood and could never have replaced him as prosecutor: my skin was dark enough that Bernie didn't have to worry. And Melody was a good secretary because she didn't mind her boss being perpetually absent. She regarded Bernie's absence as a simple fact of life. If somebody asked where he was or how long he would be gone, she'd tell them. She never offered excuses for him, while I occasionally felt that I needed to, and it became something of a game among the lawyers to taunt me about the prosecutor's laziness, the idea being that if Bernie went down, I would too. And he did dance on thin ice, it was true: he occupied an elected office and elections were coming up, and he was paid by public money during a time when they were routinely having to delay schoolteachers' salaries for months at a time, while he, bless his rich soul, did barely a lick for his salary.
I didn't register Melody's other piece of news until she'd stopped in front of the courthouse. Its front steps were already beginning to wiggle with heat.
''Judge Stone called too?"
She nodded and looked at me directly, eyebrows raised. Mel had brown eyes flecked with gold.
"He wants to see me before session?"
"Didn't say. He did sound a little upset. Maybe he was the one who called Mr. Pryor and asked him to come back to town."
With my hand on the door handle, I asked, "What's going on, Mel?"
Mel shook her head. "I don't know, but LaVerne in the sheriff's office said there was a murder out in the county. Probably has to do with that."
"Boy, you really did talk to everybody this morning. Who got murdered?"
"Somebody the judge knows. His name is Guesser or Guessner or something like that. He was apparently an artifact collector. On the Spiro Mound, I think."
I had heard of the Spiro Mound. Barely. A short newspaper article about it had appeared some months ago.
"The Indian mound? Arrowheads?”
”I guess."
"Did you learn anything else?"
"That's about all LaVerne said. She was just calling to pass the word. You know how it is over there."
Mel was referring to the fact that the only person in the sheriff's office who was even slightly interested in communicating with the prosecutor's office was LaVerne, and she did so out of sheer human decency-at times, I felt, endangering her own job. The sheriff himself operated with complete disregard for the prosecutor.
Mel was still looking at me. She wasn't afraid of settling her eyes on you and letting them stay a while. I stared into her young face, taking this in: the prosecutor rushing back to town, the murder of somebody the judge knew.
"You know, Mel, if I don't get out of town pretty fast, I'll never make it. I think maybe it's a better idea for you to drop by Harlan's in person and tell him about my car. Tell him I'll pay him extra if he can get it running today."
"I'll try," she said skeptically. In the seat between us was a newspaper, and she handed it to me as I got out, adding, "You might want to look at that."
I flapped open the newspaper, the Sallisaw Chieftain, and saw the headline:
LEADER PROSECUTED BY LAWYER
William ''Jay'' Goback, a leader in the business community of Eastern Oklahoma, is on trial in Fort Smith for inflicting injury to his wife in a domestic dispute in early May of this year. The wife reportedly was engaging in extramarital affairs.
The prosecutor in the case is Tom Freshour, an adjunct to the County Prosecutor in Fort Smith. Freshour is a half-blood Indian.
Freshour is currently employed as a bulldog for the Fort Smith prosecutor's office. Previously, he was employed for twelve years by the Combined Agency in Muskogee, where he gained quite a reputation as a litigator for allotment holders, particularly for the Negroes in the Glenn Pool and Cushing areas. Freshour was fired by the agency because of repeated disagreements with county judges, county governments, and county guardians, according to Dale Cotton, a lawyer at the Combined Agency. "Mr. Freshour was a competent lawyer at one time but got too radical," said Cotton.
I looked up at Melody. "An incompetent nigger lover. Smiling John's getting creative again."
"And a radical," she said. "Don't leave that out.”
”That's me," I muttered.
The clock on her dash said three minutes until nine when I got out and walked up the hot steps of the courthouse. A couple of days before, the temperature had reached 112 degrees. It hadn't rained for months, and the little courthouse lawn gave off an odor of well done grass.
Chapter 3
The defendant was out on a ten-thousand-dollar bond, and I noticed his car parked down the street. It was a red 1933 Series 90 Buick with a rubber-mounted straight eight, chrome trim on the running board, and an enclosed spare on the rear. It ran through my mind that in a better world, when you convicted somebody you'd get your choice of their earthly goods.
Hank Twist, court bailiff, was standing outside the front door.
Hank was an imposing man with white hair and a handsome, aged face who'd been a law enforcer of one kind or another since the horse-and-buggy days. He had been one of Judge Isaac Parker's deputies in the late '90s, and he had a couple of bullet scars on him from those years at work. Hank still wore a pair of fancy revolvers, pearl handled, that matched his hair, although he probably hadn't used either of them in the line of duty for years.
"Gettin up there again," he observed, staring off into the heat. I looked through the glass door at the crowded hallway. "You have a lot of customers today, Hank."
He almost smiled. "Yep."
I occasionally had a beer with Hank, who was a widower like me, and he was very capable of talking, but during working hours at the courthouse he was closemouthed. My theory about Hank was that he was one of those unusual people who, for whatever reasons of good fortune and biology, managed to be a happy man. There was something about the look in his eye and the way you felt when you were around him. He'd lived a good life, regarded every added day as gravy, and was now more than happy to serve as a functionary in the courthouse.
Inside, I saw that the crowd really had increased since yesterday. There'd been a growing number of regulars at the courthouse since '29, but this trial had gotten unusually popular. Some of them were carrying sandwiches and jars of water so they wouldn't lose their seats if we went to noon recess-which I earnestly hoped would not be the case. I walked into the courtroom right on the hour, hoping to lessen my chances of talking to the judge. I didn't want to get involved in any developing murder cases. Now that my vacation was finally set up, I wanted to take it. I put the newspaper Mel had given me on the table in front of me.
William Jefferson Goback didn't look very worried on the last day of his trial. He was a forward-leaning bull of a man with a muscular chest and arms. He normally sported a big diamond ring, which John had talked him into not wearing during the trial. Today he had on a stark white shirt with a tie pulled up awkwardly at his throat. A number of times during the trial I'd seen people flocking around Goback during recesses, kowtowing and nodding. Mostly they were folks from across the river, around Moffitt, Oklahoma, where he employed a large crew at his livestock sale barn in a blend of legit and illegit operations. Moffitt was and still is a place without law. It was unincorporated, and the only kind of police coverage it got was the LeFlore County sheriff dropping by the roadhouses for payments. If he had beaten up and shot his wife at home it would never have made it to any court. The stockyards in Moffitt were home to bootleggers, fencing operations, harboring, money laundering-and Bill J. Goback was in the middle of it.
I turned and saw his wife, Nora, in the front row, with her sister sitting beside her. Nora had bleached-blond hair, Jean Harlow style, and dusky skin. From a prosecutor's standpoint, she wasn't the best victim in the world. Young and good featured, she scarcely limped from the bullet wounds. Despite a swollen nose and lingering bruises over both eyes, she held her head high. She had a tinge of flapper about her but also the ragged, somber demeanor of east-side Oklahoma. As she came into the courtroom, the cameras popped and sputtered, and I was a little worried that the four matrons on the jury would get envious of all the attention to her. One good look at her haunted, bruise-shrouded eyes, though, and you knew there'd been too much liquor, too many disappointments, too many blows to the head and body. The pretty lady was a moth, and nobody could see it better than the middle-aged dames on the jury.
Goback had used a fireplace poker on Nora, fracturing a bunch of her ribs, and he'd shot her twice in the right thigh, close to the hip, just missing an artery. A few of the smaller Oklahoma newspapers were taking his side, saying that the trial concerned a domestic dispute sparked by the wild behavior of a reckless wife.
Smiling John Gillis, Goback's lawyer, was going around the room shaking hands like a politician. John had droopy, sad eyes but a grin so permanent that you worried his face might break apart like a china plate. He could actually display other expressions, including a frown, on top of this permanent grin. John's face had been useful in this trial because it distracted jurors from the murky, lowering expressions that his client cast around the room during the trial, particularly at the woman, his wife, whom he had attempted to murder.
John gave me a little glance with his soulful eyes that, if I hadn't known him better, I'd have interpreted as a small plea for mercy. Don't kill me, he appeared to be saying. It was true that a loss on the attempted murder charge would put him on the wrong side of a brutal man who definitely had ways of reaching out from the pen.
Getting people who were willing to risk life and limb to testify against Goback had been hard. He was an intimidator and arsonist. Arson was a tradition in Oklahoma, handed down from the Indian Territory days. Fire was generally a bigger part of life back then.
Lamps got knocked over. Gasoline stoves blew up. People driven off their land for delinquent taxes sometimes fired their houses before wandering on. Almost everybody had a fire in their past or their family's past. You got mad at a person, you burned them out. You failed at business, you burned yourself out. You had to escape and you didn't know how, you burned it, whatever it was. Whole towns burned down and were abandoned. Fire insurance rates were so high in Oklahoma that just buying it made you a suspicious character. Law enforcement was not very good at arson cases-one reason why somebody like Jay Goback was so successful at intimidating people.
The defendant was a burner, and he wasn't shy about people knowing it. A couple of men who worked at the stockyards had told me that Goback often crowed about taking over the cattle-auction market by burning out competitors.
Regarding Nora's shooting, I had furnished only three witnesses-a doctor at St. Edward's Mercy, a nurse, and Nora's sister-but they'd all been convincing. Goback had showed up at the hospital a couple of hours after the attack at Nora's sister's and had to be thrown out when he started yelling and threatening his then unconscious wife with the same pistol he'd used on her a few hours earlier. Nora's sister, who was an eyewitness, was absolutely solid-motherly, believable, and nobody's fool, least of all her bully brother-in-law's. John had pecked away at Nora's sister's testimony, but it did him more harm than good because she'd answered him with a vivid description of the blood all over her living room.
Smiling John had sniffed the wind and given up early on the idea of denying that his client had done it. He'd used the old standby in wife assault-the wife was a whore and deserved her treatment. He'd run through a half-dozen people testifying to what a floozy Nora had been to this decent, generous, long-suffering, hardworking husband. The total sincerity of all these witnesses wouldn't have filled a half-pint bottle. Most of them had sounded like grade school kids fumbling through lines in a school play. All of them made references to ailments that the defendant claimed to suffer-bad back, headaches, stomach problems-as if these were reasons for a man to shoot his wife.
All in all, John appeared to be hanging his own client, and my instinct was to give him all the rope he wanted. I'd made only a few hearsay objections, cross-examined defense witnesses with questions that established or implied a financial relationship to the accused, and bothered with little else. The jury could put two and two together. Basically, it was a stripped-down prosecution, which fitted what I had to work with and contrasted to the defense's line of bull. Bare facts: man beats the holy hell out of wife, shoots her twice, leaves her to nearly bleed to death, then tries to finish her off in the hospital.
The case appeared to be winding toward a conviction. Smiling John was smarter than he looked, though, and anything but lazy. He looked weak with his little country-lawyer bow tie and his silly smile, but he'd do just about anything to get his client through the door. He rehearsed witnesses. Most of all, he tried to get at you personally, get under your skin, break your medicine.
I glanced back again and saw that people were standing in the doors and sitting in the aisles, women with dusters around their hair, men in threadbare cotton jackets, some unwashed and unshaved. A lot of these people wouldn't have been here if they'd had the dime to go into a water-cooled movie house, but the thick limestone walls of the courthouse held the nighttime cool better than most places. Judge Stone looked on it as a kind of public service to let them into the courtroom. That summer we'd already had a few people faint during trials, but the judge hadn't yet taken the step of shutting the doors after the room was full.
When Judge Manfred Stone--Manny to his friends--walked in, he fixed his gaze on me over his half-glasses. The buzzing in the room lowered. The judge was in his fifties, a brisk, graying man, veteran of thirteen years on the bench. Hank started to call to order, but Stone waved him off and gave me a little nod. When I approached, so did John. Closer, I saw how tired Stone looked.
He said quietly, "I need to talk to you about another matter when this is over. Could you come by?" He glanced at John, who was now beside me at the bench, and said in a different tone, "Defense wants to bring another witness."
"What witness?" I said directly to John.
He hunched his shoulders down around his bow tie, looking almost contrite behind his smile. "The defendant, Tom. I'd like to put him on the stand."
"You're asking me to cross the defendant without any preparation?"
Smiling John looked as if he was brimming with sympathy. "I did try to call you. I think the man needs to speak for himself."
We went back and forth for a while, playing out our roles in front of Judge Stone, but calling unscheduled witnesses was a common ploy, and I was hardly surprised.
"Why didn't you schedule him?”
”Look, he is the defendant."
"You've been delaying this case, counselor. You know I'm supposed to leave town tomorrow, and you want me to choose between crossing him unprepared or putting off my vacation."
I was speaking to John but hoped that Stone was listening about not preventing my vacation.
The judge said, "If you aren't comfortable doing it today, I'll delay. It's up to you."
I wanted to say, "Hell no, I'm not prepared; he wasn't on the defense list," but John's grin inspired me to grin back-all teeth, not friendly-and say I'd take my chance. Turning to leave, I added quietly, "By the way, John, that business in the Sallisaw Chieftain? About me being an incompetent radical who got fired from my job at the agency? How much did you pay for that?"
He pretended to be shocked. "Tom, you know I can't influence what newspapers print."
The courtroom was beginning to heat up by the time Hank had called it to order. When John stood up and made his motion, formally asking to bring a final witness, I watched him-his expression and posture and the way he was acting-and I watched Jay Goback walk, slightly bent over, to the stand. He gave off a little theatrical wince as he sat down in the elevated witness chair and fixed his eyes ten feet in front of himself on some imaginary spot. John suppressed his smile to its lowest level and began asking his client routine questions establishing who he was and what his work was and how many people he employed, and I got the creeping feeling that defense wasn't just shooting in the dark. He got to the point fairly quickly.
"Mr. Goback, can you tell me what happened on the night of May fifth?"
Chapter 4
"I come home after workin twelve hours at the bam, and my wife wasn't there. She'd gone off to her sister's. I didn't have no dinner and no wife. My back was flarin up, so I took some whiskey. I've had a backache here, last five years."
"A backache for years, did you say?"
"Yes sir. About five years. It comes from wrestlin cattle.”
”Have you seen a doctor about this backache?"
"I seen an old root doctor, works there at the stockyards.”
”What do you mean, root doctor? Some people here may not know what that means."
"Indin doctor. Old man knows the old cures." Goback glanced at me again.
"Did this ... Indian doctor help you with your back problem?" John asked solicitously.
"He give me some powders to take. Told me to drink some whiskey with it."
There was a stirring in the courtroom audience, and someone laughed; sudden smiles on several jury members. With so many people packed in, you could feel the hunger to be entertained bouncing off the high plaster walls.
Goback winced again, as if suffering the back pain, although his delivery was otherwise deadpan. "It was worse'n usual that night. So I was lookin around for another bottle. Looked in my wife's top drawer, and I found somethin. Found somethin ... " He hesitated and frowned. "Proved she'd been foolin around again. It wasn't even hid. There it sat, right on the top."
"What did you find in your wife's dresser, Mr. Goback?”
”I ain't sayin."
"Mr. Goback," John said, dripping with concern, "it would help the jury better understand if you would specify-"
"I ain't sayin."
Goback's refusal to answer his own lawyer started a buzz in the courtroom. There was more stirring around and nervous laughter.
"May I ask why you won't tell us?”
”Because it ain't right to talk about." The courtroom went quiet.
"All right, sir. Let's say for the moment that you did find something in the top drawer of your wife's dresser proving what you already suspected, that your wife was having an affair with some other man."
John was begging me to object. He wanted me to demand that Goback specify the thing in the drawer (rubbers?) so it would appear to be forced out of him, and therefore true. I wouldn't take that bait.
"Do you know who the man is?"
Goback squinted his eyes and put on a great show of controlled fury. "I can tell you I better not know who they are."
"They?" John repeated, as if bewildered.
Another buzz, tentative laughter. John was getting them going, dramatizing the wronged husband by making a story and a joke of it. He and Goback had practiced well.
"Your wife was having affairs with more than one man?"
"I already knowed it," the defendant said flatly. "It just proved it.”
”What did you do after you found this ... evidence?"
"My back was seizin up. I went to the liquor store over by the bridge for a bottle, and when I was there, it hit me. My wife was doin wrong. I work hard. I'm a good husband. I drove crost the river to talk to her. She didn't do nothin but deny it. I went crazy, I admit it. But it was because of what she done."
"Let me understand you, Mr. Goback. You don't deny that in the process of rebuking your wife you injured her?"
"It ain't me sneakin around tryin to hide what I'm doin."
The judge leaned over the bench and said, "Answer the question directly."
Goback looked at his lawyer, blinked several times, and admitted grudgingly, "Already said I done it."
"Mr. Goback, I have to ask you a question that refers to what you said earlier. You said you saw an Indian doctor for your back problems. Why didn't you see a regular doctor?"
"I believe in the old cures."
"So you are an Indian yourself?"
"Well, I sure ain't Irish," Goback said without a smile.
More laughter and some of the tension seemed to go out of the room. I saw a flash of grins in the jury box. A couple of the men were shifting around, as if they were beginning to enjoy this.
"Would you describe yourself as a traditionalist?"
With a little flick of his eye toward me, Goback said, "I'm on the rolls."
"The Cherokee tribal rolls, you mean. But would you describe yourself as a traditional Indian?"
"I wouldn't know what you mean."
"Do you believe in the old ways? The customs and ethics of your tribe." John sounded as if he was talking to a child.
"Yessir. I sure do. I said that already."
"And are you a Christian, Mr. Goback?" John asked softly. "Hell yes I'm a Christian. What else would I be?"
Laughter again. Judge Stone was irritated but didn't intervene. "As a Christian and a traditional Cherokee Indian, do you believe that a wife-yours or any other-should be true to her husband?"
Goback hesitated.
"Go on," John coaxed.
"Well sure a wife ought to be true to her husband. What else should a wife be?"
There was an eruption of talk in the courtroom, and Judge Stone whacked his gavel down so sharply that it made even me jump. When Stone got mad he looked thicker, as if he was gaining weight in front of your eyes.
Smiling John went on, "You have stated that you are a Cherokee Indian. But your wife isn't an Indian?"
"Damn right she is."
Judge Stone used his gavel again. "Witness will refrain from cursing on the stand."
The audience kept murmuring and twisting and looking at the blond-haired woman. Nora was unmoving and expressionless with her dark-ringed eyes. Fleetingly, she reminded me of my wife, Laura-why, I don't know, except that she looked fragile, as if it wouldn't take much to make her vanish.
Pretending delicacy, almost simpering, John said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Goback, but your wife hardly looks like an Indian."
"She's got just as much Indin blood as I do. She colors her hair."
This caused a few titters, and one of the women jurors showed an open look of disapproval.
"Why does your wife color her hair?"
"I wouldn't know," Goback said grudgingly. "But she's ashamed of her blood, tryin to pass for white. And I know she's ashamed of me."
"How do you know that?”
”She told me. More'n once."
"I want to be absolutely clear about this. Your own wife told you that she was ashamed of you, personally, and that she wanted to pass for white."
"Yes sir."
Smiling John looked surprised at this. "And how did you respond?"
"I bought different clothes and a new car, but I can't keep up with her. I ain't nothin but an old cattle wrangler. I can't change that. Can't help what I am. But I figure I deserve to have a faithful wife like any man."
"That's all, your honor. Defense rests." Smiling John Gillis went around and alighted on his chair with a little flurry, like a church organist.
I didn't get up immediately. My unexpected fear about defense having something had proved unfounded. This was definitely applesauce, but he had scraped together enough scraps of this and that-bigotry, half-jokes about infidelity-to get some of the jury to relax and join the picnic, feel more comfortable with Goback, who wasn't such a bad guy after all. A simple type, an Indian, hardworking, plain-spoken, tortured by this honky-tonk hair-coloring whore of a wife. My internal meter was saying one or two of the jury might balk on the attempted murder.
Still hesitating to get up, I had a sour taste in the back of my throat. Losing the attempted-murder charge would be bad prosecuting. The man was a well-known thug. He'd barged in on an unarmed woman, beaten her up, fired two bullets close to the middle of her body, then showed up at the hospital to try again. A loss here would be failure. The other thing going through me was anger at the defense. Buying ten-dollar articles in newspapers, calling an unscheduled witness, messing with my vacation, playing the race card-it added up to crossing the line.
The courtroom was hot; handkerchiefs were out. It was one of those moments when what was normally just a day's work began to feel burdensome and personal. I glanced over at John's nonstop smile.
"Is there a cross-examination?" Judge Stone finally asked.
Chapter 5
"Mr. Goback, you've stated that on the night of May fifth you drove to Fort Smith and beat up and shot your wife. Is that right?"
"I didn't say that."
"You did it, though, is that correct?”
”You'da done the same if your wife-"
"What did you use to beat Nora with?"
"She was runnin around on me."
"Answer the question I asked you."
He shot me a look that suggested I'd better upgrade my house insurance. Oh, he badly wanted to say it aloud.
"I did it," he finally said, raising his nose.
"I know that, Mr. Goback. We all know that. My question was, what did you beat your wife with? Did you use a fireplace poker?"
"I hit her a couple of times with it." He glanced toward the evidence table. "But it wasn't like I carried it in there."
"Can you answer the question directly, please?”
”What question?"
"Did you beat your wife with a fireplace poker?”
”I hit her with it."
"Did beating this woman with a fireplace poker break three of her ribs, among other things?"
"I wouldn't know."
"Objection, your honor; the prosecutor has gone over all this already."
"Overruled."
"Did you then shoot your wife twice with a pistol?”
”You'da done the same."
I walked over to the table and picked up the fireplace poker and walked back toward the witness stand. I stopped three feet in front of him. "And did you bring the gun into the house with you, or was it already there?"
Defendant looked at me cunningly but didn't answer the question. I repeated.
"It's my gun. Why not?"
"Why did you carry the gun into the house?”
”What d'ye mean?"
"Mr. Goback, you are a successful businessman. Why do you keep pretending not to understand simple questions? The question is: What did you intend to do with the gun that you carried into Nora's sister's house on May fifth?"
"I always carry it when I'm out at night. You can't tell what might happen."
"So you just happened to have a gun when you pushed in your sister-in-laws front door, and you just happened to beat your wife, breaking several bones, with this rwo-and-a-half-foot-Iong piece of iron, and you just happened to shoot her twice with a gun that you just happen to always carry around with you. Then you went to the hospital, where you happened to try to do it a second time and had to get thrown out. That's a lot of just-happened-to's, Mr. Goback. You just happened to try to murder your wife, didn't you?"
"I wasn't tryin to murder nobody. Been tryin to do that, I'da done it." Goback flashed me a fierce, quick, malicious look, as if to demonstrate his certainty on that point.
I got very close to him and slowly raised the fireplace poker over my head. "When you beat your wife, did you raise the poker over your head like this, or did you do it this way, baseball bat style?"
"Don't know, I was so put out at her for what she done."
Goback still showed no obvious fear.
I went over and laid the poker on the evidence table and took up the .38 revolver, flipping open the cylinder and checking it. The room was quiet when I turned and walked back, quickly, to the same position in front of the stand. I cocked the hammer and aimed it at his groin. "Did you know what you were doing when you did this?" I pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped down and made him wince, which was what I wanted.
The courtroom audience exploded in spontaneous talking.
Smiling John yelled above the noise, "Ob-jection, your honor! The prosecutor is physically intimidating the witness."
"Please confine it to questions, Tom."
Nobody but the defendant and I could hear Stone in all the noise, but I was surprised by his use of my first name. In chambers, he was as informal as the next judge, but in trial transcripts he definitely wasn't a first-name kind of judge.
The courtroom audience kept up the commotion, a flashbulb went off, and I knew what would happen next. Hank Twist stood up and walked over to a position in front of the judge's bench, right hand on his gun belt. A drop of sweat went down his jaw. Hank had ridden down some bad men in his time, but even if you didn't know that, the old man had a surplus of natural authority.
"Settle down or I'll clear the court," he said. He pointed at the photographer and told him to give him the camera. The photographer did so, and Hank walked over and thunked it down on the witness table so hard that the bulb popped out onto the floor. He moved his chair so it faced the audience, which by then had quieted.
"You have testified that you are a part-blood Cherokee Indian.
Do I understand you further to have said that something about being an Indian-your training, or culture, or something like that-made you more likely to beat up and shoot your wife?"
"Objection. He's putting words into the defendant's mouth." Stone looked down on me wearily. "Can you explain this line of questioning?"
I was surprised that he didn't overrule. Was his mind drifting? "Your honor, defense asked the accused if he subscribed to the customs and ethics of his tribe. Apparently his meaning was that any good Indian man worth his salt would be predisposed to shoot his wife when he didn't like the way she was acting."
"My point," John said, "was that Indian men have very strict standards regarding their wives-"
"Calm down, counsel." The judge appeared to be thickening again, and I felt reassured. However hot and frazzled he might get, Stone didn't like messy proceedings. He overruled the objection.