The sergeant took a moment to answer, goggling. “Well, I should hope to kiss a pig,” he said finally. “Pardon me all to hell for staring, Counselor, but to what do we owe this unexpected pleasure, as the saying is?”
Pemberton glanced briefly in the direction of the booking room, letting everyone know he saw us.
“I have presented two writs of habeas corpus,” he said. “They are for the individuals listed, who are my clients. If you have either or both of them in custody, you will present them forth with before the Honorable Hilgard W. Bronson, magistrate of Farewell County.”
He turned his gaze back to the sergeant, who was still sag-jawed with disbelief.
“Well,” he prodded. “Do you have them?”
The sergeant finally came to life. “I be gawdam,” he said again, shaking his head. But he busied himself making notes from the faces of the two writs, and then motioned toward the booking deputy. “Bring ’em out,” he said, “and take ’em downstairs.”
Dana and I followed the old man out of the booking room and into the lobby. Pemberton’s expression didn’t change, but he led the way to the elevator and pushed a button that took us two floors down.
Setting bail appeared to be a cut-and-dried formality, and Pemberton was already signing the guarantor’s statement when Frank Ybarra entered the little courtroom and told him to forget it.
“No bail,” the sheriff said. “And no charge, and this is the second set of booking slips I have had to tear up for the same people and the same reason this week. Getting monotonous.”
Pemberton didn’t comment and Ybarra didn’t seem to expect it.
“For a man who just got into town a few days ago,” Ybarra said, “I swear you seem to have made one hell of a lot of friends in a hell of a hurry.”
“Basic charm and a dishonest face,” I said.
He nodded reflectively. “Desk clerk from the motel called me at home,” he said. “Told me you and the girl were getting arrested. No sooner hung up than old Mose Thieroux was on the line, purely raising hell for me to find out what kind of trouble you were in. Now I get here, and the counselor’s already on the scene, throwing writs around and posting bail.”
He was looking at me, waiting for an explanation, but the lawyer’s arrival had been as much a surprise to me as anyone, and I didn’t have any answers for him.
Dana did, though. “Telephone in the bathroom,” she explained. “I called my lawyer.”
She turned a tentative grin in Pemberton’s direction, and he surprised me by offering a kind of impressionist sketch of a smile in return.
“And Glenda Mae, on the switchboard, was listening in.” Ybarra nodded. “So she called me. Okay, I suppose I understand…all except the call from Thieroux.”
He was waiting for an answer again, but I decided there had been enough for the time being. No sense showing your hand if nobody’s paid to see it.
“Angels,” I said in my best prayer-meeting tones, “protect the just and the righteous.”
He snorted and the black eyes called me a son of a bitch.
But “By God if they don’t” was all he said.
“I take it my clients are free to go, then?” Pemberton said.
Ybarra nodded, then seemed to reconsider. “Miz Dana, yes,” he said. “But I’d like to talk to the Preacher, here, in my office for a minute. If that’s all right.” There was a moment of silence when I could see Pemberton preparing to object. But I was curious about what the onetime San Francisco detective might want to say to me. And besides, if he’d really wanted to give anyone a bad time that morning, all he’d had to do was stay home and not answer the telephone.
“Just pleasant social conversation,” the sheriff said with what he probably meant to be a reassuring smile. “No need to draw up another get-out-of-jail warrant, Counselor. You can wait right out in the bull pen if you like. Shouldn’t take too long.”
Pemberton shrugged. Reluctantly. “We’ll wait,” he said.
The rock that Ybarra had thrown into the wastebasket to check out my ersatz eye during our last session together was back on his desk—or he’d found a duplicate—and he busied himself hefting it from one hand to the other as he sat down, letting me settle myself uncomfortably in the visitor’s chair across the desk from him.
“You,” he said by way of opening the conversation, “are beginning to be a real pain in the ass.”
I don’t know what he expected me to say to that.
“Got you back up here,” he continued when I didn’t react, “with the doors closed and no fancy tape recorders running, to tell you that I am not real fond of private detectives.”
I sat quietly and let him go on.
“The kind that have licenses are usually semicompetent sleazeballs when they’re not outright blackmailers. And the kind that don’t have licenses are a bunch of goddamn amateurs who get in everybody’s way and mess up a professional investigation… when they’re not off getting themselves hurt. Or maybe hurting somebody else.”
The last five words, I decided, were the ones aimed directly at me, and they brought up a question or two that I had been wanting to ask ever since he told the judge that the assault charges had been dropped. But he didn’t give me a chance to ask.
“I dropped the charges against you and the girl,” he said, “because I am neither a fool nor an incompetent, no matter what you might think. I know that Commencement Brown—hell of a name to stick some kid with, isn’t it; no wonder he likes people to call him Boo—that the stupid little shit was looking to ambush you out on that road, not the other way around, and I am pretty damn sure I know why, too. But I can’t prove it yet, and you’re not making things any easier.”
I started to say something snotty like “Sorry about that,” but managed not to, at the last moment.
“For your information,” he went on, keeping the voice level but somehow edging it with ice, “and purely for the purpose of getting an idea through your thick head…you weren’t the only son of a bitch following Vollie Manion last night. I borrowed a specialist from the Albuquerque police force on the day Bobby Don Thieroux died, and he’s been keeping an eye on my deputy ever since. That’s how I damn well knew that Boo Brown didn’t get the worst part of his injuries in any accident. My man saw you coldcock him at Lupe’s café and waited around to see him wake up again and then go across the street and go riding in the car with his good buddy, Vollie.”
“Your man followed them from the garage?”
“Tried, but couldn’t. Vollie put the hammer down, and he was driving a pursuit car that I have reason to think is the fastest thing—on the road, anyway—in this part of New Mexico. They were out of sight before the Albuquerque dick knew what was happening.”
“And Brown turned up in the hospital, ready to go into a coma, after that?”
He nodded. “That’s how it went down.”
“But—”
“I told you: This is my investigation and I’ll handle it my way. I don’t need help from amateurs.”
I turned it around, looking at the situation from his point of view and understanding why he felt as he did.
“You seem to have the professional investigation in hand,” I said, keeping my tone noncommittal.
He sighed, flipping the little rock from hand to hand. “Well, then, since we understand each other so well,” he said, “maybe you’d be good enough to tell me why you don’t just haul your ass out of town and let me get on with it?”
It was a perfectly logical inquiry, but it wasn’t anything I could promise to do. So instead, I decided to use the opening to try to find out what else he knew.
“Why…I play poker for a living,” I said. “I thought you understood that; I came to your town to play in a couple of the games at the country club because I heard there were some fairly high rollers out there. Fact is, I believe there is going to be a game like that out there tonight. And if there is, I am going to play in it…unless there’s some objection.”
&nb
sp; He leaned back, still hefting the rock in one hand, and whistled quietly through his teeth. “You’re a liar,” he said after a while.
I thought it over. “Likely so,” I agreed. “But not about the poker.”
“Uh-huh.”
We sat that way for a bit, looking at each other and waiting for something to happen. But nothing did, and finally he leaned forward again, putting the rock down on the desk between his hands, and spoke his piece.
“You came to Farewell,” he said, “because Jake Spence knew you from a long time back, and he was wondering if that game out there at the club might be crooked, and since you are a pro he thought you could find out the truth for him.”
If he was fishing, he seemed to be at the right hole. But it wasn’t my business to tell him so, and I deliberately blurred the focus of my one eye to make sure that my face didn’t give him any answers.
“Well, you found out that the game is straight,” he said. “Illegal as hell—gambling is, you know, in New Mexico—but I checked it out first thing when I got to town and found out it was okay, at least in terms of poker. Which, now that I think of it, isn’t saying one hell of a lot.”
I think that was bait, too.
“And now,” he said, “we come to the Preacher. You say you make your money playing poker, and there are a lot of people who seem to agree with that. I know because I’ve talked to quite a few of them since the last time we sat in this room.”
“Sounds sort of boring.”
“Not at all. Like I said, I talked to some who thought they knew all about the Preacher—but then, damn if I didn’t come across some others who gave me a whole different slant on him…”
He smiled a little, just at the corners of the mouth, and I knew what was coming next, and it seemed to me that he could have skipped this conversation and been the better for it.
“What they told me,” he said, warming to the subject now that he had finally identified it for me, “was about a young guy, fresh-caught Episcopal minister he was, right out of that fancy big school they got back in Tennessee—Sewanee, the University of the South—and how he got into the army as a chaplain during the war over in Southeast Asia.”
“Look, Ybarra…” I began. But he didn’t seem to hear.
“Seems they shipped his ass over there, and he did a whole tour in the ’Nam and was sent back to the world without a single scratch on him. Happened that way for some. But about a month before he was due to come home, he got a telegram from the Red Cross telling him that there had been a sort of a war casualty in his family after all. His pretty young wife was dead. Shot to death by some damn-fool draft-dodging National Guardsmen during an anti-war demonstration…something like those shootings back at Kent State.”
I had heard enough and I wanted out of there, and I started to get out of the chair to leave the room, but Ybarra’s voice stopped me before I could move.
“You set still,” he said, still not raising the volume, but hammering out the words. “If you can live through it, you can sure as hell listen to it, Preacher.”
I took a deep breath and hated him and put my full weight back in the chair.
He was right. If I could live it, I could listen to it.
Any time.
“So the young chaplain wasn’t there the day his wife died, and he wasn’t there for her funeral, either,” Ybarra went on in a calmer tone. “And they even say he never went to visit her grave when he did get back stateside. But he did some other things that were sort of odd. Not what you’d expect. He resigned from the ministry and he resigned from the Chaplains Corps, told them to shove the captain’s commission he’d earned over there. And then he turned right around and joined up again. Enlisted. As a grunt.”
I looked at him and through him and far away, not seeing his face. Or anything else.
“He was qualified for OCS or for a lot of the other schools the army has. But instead, he volunteered for advanced infantry training and went through that, head of the class, and then they shipped him back to the ’Nam as a corporal…just in time to be sent up to Khe Sanh when they decided to reoccupy the old marine base there. That was a hell of a fight, they tell me, and this fellow got a Silver Star for his part in it. Some said it should have been an even more important gong, but that’s what he got… along with a Purple Heart he picked up as a flat-even swap: damn piece of ribbon with painted metal on it in return for his right eye.”
Ybarra paused for a moment. “All straight so far?” he inquired.
“You could tell it that way,” I said.
“Okay, then: At the hospital where they sent him, they began to wonder after a while if he was some kind of a nut case. Hell of a troublemaker. They were even thinking about getting him a transfer into one of the locked wards. But after a bit he seemed to pull himself together and quiet down enough that they could let him go. Some people, friends of his like Jake and Helen Spence and a few others, thought he would maybe have a change of heart and go back to being a priest.
“But he didn’t. Instead, what he did was take to playing poker. Professional. Not for fun. Wasn’t any too good at it in the beginning. Not enough experience, not enough patience. But he kept at it, holding jobs when he had to and paying his dues as he went, and finally it seemed like he sort of got the hang of the game and got to be one of the best in the trade, so they say.”
“Hell of a story,” I said.
“Ain’t it?” he said.
“But I know a funnier one,” I said. “See, there was this sheriff off in New Mexico and he got kind of bored with things around him, being used to a bigger town, and so he took to listening to every idiot story anybody wanted to tell him until he finally bored himself to death.”
“Damn pity.” Ybarra nodded and waited to see if I had anything more to say, but I didn’t, so he went on. “None of this would mean very much,” he said, “if the guy had just kept the money he won for himself, after he got to be good at the game, like anybody with good sense would do. But no. What the Preacher did with it was to buy up a whole little town over on the California side of the Sierra. Little place called Best Licks that used to be a mining camp and then was almost a ghost town for a while. Bought the whole shebang, mind you—houses, stores, equipment, even the old locked-up church—and opened it up as a kind of commune or refuge, or maybe just a hidey-hole, for people like himself that had a hard time fitting back into the world after spending time in some craziness like the ’Nam.”
He paused for breath, and I think he really wanted me to smile at him and relax and talk and explain…which only showed how little he understood of what he had heard.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Is it?” Ybarra’s eyes were bright. “Is it, now? I wouldn’t know, myself. Only what people tell me. But the story gets even stranger the further we go. Because one of the ones I talked to said that nobody staying up there at the Preacher’s place in the mountains even knows where the money comes from.
“Oh, they know he plays poker, all right. Sure! But they don’t know what he does with the money. Truth is, they think he’s some kind of high-grade hustler, ripping the government off for federal rehabilitation grants, and they think that is so funny that they will even come to the church he runs—holds Sunday services in the old church building he fixed up—because they think it’s part of the scam. Go to church because they think it’s all a game he’s running on the government. Now ain’t that the damnedest thing?”
I held my breath and waited out a long ten-count, but it didn’t help a whole lot.
If Ybarra could find out that much with just a few telephone calls, then the story could get back to the mountains. To Best Licks. And that could destroy the whole thing. One way or another, he had found out the one place where I was vulnerable, and that was bad news. But a poker player wouldn’t last long if he didn’t have at least a little alligator blood in his veins, and it was getting on toward time for mine to do some work.
I gave him my blandest smile. “H
ope you had a nice time telephoning here and there around the country and talking to people and all that,” I said. “But I’m afraid I just don’t see how any of this fits into what’s been going on here in Farewell, New Mexico.”
He smiled right back.
“Maybe it doesn’t,” he said. “Except it has come to mind that someone like the man these people told me about, like the Preacher, might remember that Orrin Prescott was a Vietnam veteran, too—just like the folks up there in his mountain town—and take the notion to sort of include him in the flock. One of his own, you might say.”
I stopped smiling.
Ybarra didn’t seem to notice. “So instead of just telling the Spences that the game was legit and letting it go at that, it seemed to me that someone like the Preacher might take to poking around sort of on his own, and get the idea that poker wasn’t the only kind of game being played in this town. He could even decide that if Prescott’s death wasn’t suicide and wasn’t an accident either, then it sure as hell had to be something like murder, because that helicopter jockey didn’t die of pneumonia or a heart attack. And, you know, I wouldn’t have a bit of a quarrel with that kind of thinking—except for one thing.”
Well, Jesus out of the boat.
“And what might that be, Sheriff?” I asked.
“The verdict of the coroner’s office in this case,” he said, “was death by misadventure, and the word is already out that the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency that decides about things like that, is going to say the crash was due to pilot error. But I flew with Prescott a few times, including once when it was foolish because even the birds were walking, and he was as good with that damn eggbeater as any man who ever lived, so I do not believe for one minute that he made the kind of mistakes that could turn everything sour enough to kill him. Not in daylight and clear weather and with the machinery in good working order. And I sure as God can’t see a man like him deliberately killing himself, neither, so that leaves nothing for it to be except murder, and I came to that conclusion all by myself, and I have been acting on it in my official and professional capacity… no outside help required.”
The Preacher Page 22
