sports universe. He never chided athletes for their faults. That
would have been the pot calling the kettle black, considering
Frank had written two books—one about his marriage as a
full-time sportswriter, the second about his divorce as a fulltime sportswriter.
“I think the Knicks are looking to acquire a backup point
guard for a playoff push. Maybe I can claim this Bonney guy
is coming up in trade talks.”
“You should do that,” Jonas said. “I bet most of your
readers would believe it, too.”
“My readers could beat your readers to death with one arm
tied behind their back.”
“I could throw your readers a tube steak and they’d forget
all about it.”
Frank leaned forward, half his body over the table. “Are
you calling my readers stupid?”
Jonas shrugged. “If the GED fits.”
“Fuck you, and fuck this kid, Parker,” Rourke spat. “I’ve
been at this paper twelve years, I ain’t never been so much as
given a handkerchief by you assholes. Now we’re sucking his
dick about all this ‘groundbreaking’ reporting? Please. Once
this twelve-year-old milk monitor earns his stripes he can
come in here. Until then I’m not listening to this shit.”
Rourke stood up and made a grand spectacle of tucking in
his shirt, shooting his cuffs and storming out. There was
silence for a moment. Jonas’s face showed a combination of
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pride and white-as-a-ghost fear, as though Rourke might be
waiting for him at his desk with a pair of brass knuckles.
“Are we through?” Wallace said. “Because time is wasting
and every other paper in town is looking for us to trip so they
can pass us. I want a push on all fronts. Our early morning
newsstand numbers are our highest in six months. Henry, I
want you to stay on the murders. Jonas, I want you to look
into the attempts made by Largo Vance and others to test the
DNA contained in Billy the Kid’s grave. Deborah, you look
into the effects it could have on the present day economics of
Fort Sumner and other towns such as Hamilton that are supported by this industry. I want all discoveries to be shared
directly with the office of Chief Carruthers.” Wallace paused
a moment. “Most importantly, there’s still a killer out there.
If we can, in any way, aid the investigation and incarceration
of this sick man, we owe it to the citizens of New York to do
so. Err on the side of caution. If you think you have something that would be of use to investigating officers, run it by
me and I’ll make the final call. But get out there and report
your asses off, and have your staff do the same. This is a story
that reaches back over a century. And if you’re like me, you
all have that feeling, your pulses are racing a bit, you have
that zing in your step because you know you’re on the verge
of a great discovery. Grab it. Let’s make a great paper. Good
luck.”
And with that, Wallace dismissed us. I walked out with
him. He put his arm around my shoulders, made it clear so
the newsroom could see. This public display of solidarity
was to let the newsroom know he was on my side.
“You’re the lead dog on this,” Wallace said, soft enough
so only I could hear it. “But stay the hell out of the battle zone.
The job of a journalist is to report the news, not become it.
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241
I’ve read too many briefs regarding your run-ins and injuries
this past year.”
“That’s not my fault,” I said, agitation in my voice, my
blood pressure rising. “What happened last year was out of
my hands. What happened yesterday won’t happen again.”
“You say that like a stupid kid playing in traffic just sure
he won’t get hit by a car. Until he does. You’re a reporter,
Henry, nothing more. It is your job to write and investigate
the news. Neither Harvey Hillerman nor I want to see your
name appear in the Gazette in any capacity except as a byline
for the foreseeable future. If you can’t comply with that, we
can find a position here that will keep you safely behind a
desk. Evelyn’s assistant recently left to get her MBA, I’d be
happy to put in a good word.”
Being Evelyn’s assistant held the same appeal to me as
mopping up the public toilets at Shea Stadium. I knew
where Wallace was coming from, but if a freak wanted to
break into my house and Ginsu my hand, there was only so
much I could do about it. Then again, if the Gazette had to
keep defending me, readers would be smart enough to
realize that the lady doth protest too much. It would only
be a matter of time before my byline overshadowed the
story I was telling.
“I’ll be careful,” I told Wallace. “This is too important to
me. I won’t muck it up.”
“You’re damn right you won’t. So report it right. Now
get to work.”
I went back to my desk, mentally riffling through all the
work I had to do in order to get a fuller picture of Brushy Bill.
As I walked past the other desks, I noticed most of my coworkers were gathered by the pantry. As I rounded the corner,
they made an awkward attempt to stop giggling. I started
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Jason Pinter
toward them to see what was up, but then smelled something
unmistakable in the air.
I looked over at my desk, noticed a paper bag sitting on
my keyboard. As I got closer I noticed that a) my desk smelled
absolutely rancid, and b) there was a small brown splotch at
the bottom of the bag. I didn’t need to get any closer to know
somebody had put a bag full of shit on my desk.
I forced a smile, picked up the bag, walked it to the pantry.
The other reporters parted as I approached. I dropped it in the
trash, washed my hand, and said, “Looks like someone forgot
their lunch.”
I wasn’t laughing as I returned to my desk. A killer was
still out there. And despite what Wallace hoped, he wasn’t
planning to stop.
37
“Last time we spoke,” Paulina said, “you told me you were
closer to Henry Parker than, let’s see if I recall, ‘white on rice.’”
James Keach loosened his tie and thanked God he was
wearing a suit jacket because he was sure the pit stains on his
blue Oxford were visible from across the street. “There’s different kinds of rice,” he stuttered. “There’s brown rice,
chicken fried rice. It’s not all white.”
“You said white. White on rice. So why the fuck is this
Billy the Kid exclusive in the Gazette and we’re sitting with
another Britney crotch shot on page one?” Paulina’s face was
red, but James couldn’t tell if it was from rage or more Xanax
than usual. He hoped it was the latter, but doubted it.
“Parker was attacked in his apartment,” Keach said, trying
to regain his confidence. “The cops have assigned two protection details, one for Parker and another for this Amanda
&
nbsp; Davies girl. I tried waiting down the street from his apartment,
outside a bagel shop, but one of the cops spotted me and
started walking toward where I was standing. He was looking
at me, Paulina! So I pretended I was buying a bagel and got
the hell out of there. Better that than they knew who I was,
right?”
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Jason Pinter
Paulina closed her eyes, rubbed her forehead with her hand.
“And so Parker finds this crackpot Vance, and he snags the
story while you’re slurping cream cheese. James, do you
know how close we are?”
“How close we are in what?”
Paulina rifled through some papers on her desk, pulled out
a white sheet with a bunch of indecipherable numbers.
“These are the latest circulation figures for all five major
New York newspapers, along with rates for the top twenty
newspapers in the country. The latest numbers show the
Gazette’ s circulation lead over the Dispatch at less than five
percent. Five percent. That’s less than yearly inflation these
days. One major story can turn the tide, my rice-loving friend.
So I don’t care if you have to channel Houdini himself, you
shadow Henry Parker like your life depends on it. Because I
can sure as hell make sure your job does. That is all.”
38
Icould sense the men following me even though I couldn’t see
them. I knew they carried guns, had their eyes glued to my back,
and sized up every person who came within five feet of me.
I told the cops the killer had already done what he came
to do, that their efforts would be better used fighting terrorism or searching for the killer himself. They disagreed. I told
them the guy who cut up my hand wasn’t stupid enough to
go after me in broad daylight, that he had actual targets. He
had a motive, a purpose, wasn’t some fly-by-the-seat-of-hispants, run-of-the-mill murderer. He picked the Winchester for
a reason. Stole it from that museum in Fort Sumner for a
reason. Came to my apartment and tried to scare me off the
story for a reason.
In the days since, I wondered why he didn’t just kill me.
The man had already killed four others. He clearly wasn’t
averse to murder. There was a story he wanted to stay buried,
and leaving me alive was just one more shovel that could keep
digging. I guessed he just didn’t know how driven—or
stupid—I was.
To uncover more about the legacy of Brushy Bill Roberts,
I had to start at the end. Roberts had lived in Hamilton, Texas,
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and died in Hico. Roberts had since become Hico’s only
claim to fame, bringing in thousands of dollars in tourism
every year. If Fort Sumner lived and breathed the legend of
Billy the Kid, Hico lived on the whiff of conspiracy brought
on by their most famous former resident.
I had to get out of the office and do research away from
the madness that had become the Gazette newsroom. With the
increasing battles between the Gazette and the Dispatch, I
could tell Hillerman had come down hard on Wallace to make
sure his reporters knocked this story out of the park. And if
that was the case, I was his Babe Ruth, stepping to the plate
and calling my shot, hoping for a moon rocket rather than a
whiff.
The New York public library was quiet, had the same
Internet resources as the Gazette, access to LexisNexis, and all
the historical newspapers on microfiche I needed. I wanted to
view the Roberts case from every media angle: not only Hico,
but by the major metropolitan papers in Texas, New York, Los
Angeles and elsewhere. You could get a good grasp of how a
story penetrated the national consciousness by how widely it
was reported, and with what veracity the conspiracy was given.
It was a crisp summer day and the steps outside the library
were teeming with people reading, hanging out, and even a
few sleeping on the stone. The NYPL itself is a behemoth that
takes up two full city blocks. The entrance is guarded by two
stone lions named Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after John Jacob
Astor and James Lenox, both generous patrons. In the 1930s,
they were renamed Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello
La Guardia. Patience guards the south steps, Fortitude the
north. As I passed them by, I hoped they’d grant me both. The
three main doors are bracketed by six carved stone columns,
which lead into the great reading room where I’d spent many
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247
hours wrenching my back while poring over old texts. The
massive room is lit by grand chandeliers and surrounded by
thousands of volumes. I was here to use CATNYP, the online
system allowing subscribers access to the library’s huge collection of journals, periodicals and newspapers.
I jogged up the steps and entered, making my way to a
computer stall where I took a seat, cracked my knuckles, looked
to see if the two cops had followed me inside. They hadn’t.
I logged on to CATNYP and ran a search for Texas newspapers containing stories pertinent to the Brushy Bill case. I
typed slowly with my index fingers, my right palm aching
from the stitches. Guess I’d have to settle for old-fashioned
two-fingered typing for the time being.
The first article I came across was from the Austin Chroni-
cle, a story about one Judge Bob Hefner who, in 1986, published a booklet claiming Brushy Bill had in reality been the
real Billy the Kid. The booklet gained notoriety when it was
picked up by the Dallas Morning News. According to
Hefner’s story, “Brushy Bill had no children and was at the
end of his life. Fame and fortune were not a consideration for
the old man.”
Hefner continued, saying that Roberts desired only to be
granted the pardon promised by Governor Lewis Wallace to
the Kid years before. Hefner claimed that Pat Garrett had
actually killed a friend of Billy the Kid’s that night in 1881,
solely for the purpose of collecting the five-hundred-dollar
bounty on Bonney’s head.
It seemed strange that Brushy Bill Roberts would suddenly
decide, after years in hiding, that he wanted to be pardoned
for crimes committed in the 1880s. I noted that Hefner currently ran the Billy the Kid museum in Hico, making it two
different states with two different museums claiming to be the
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final resting place for Billy the Kid. Of course he had financial motivation for keeping the theory alive. But that didn’t
make him a liar.
I then found an article published by the New York Times in
1950, concerning the spectacle surrounding a man who
claimed to be the real-life Jesse James. James had been
assumed murdered by two brothers named Bob and Charley
Ford back in 1882, but in 1950 a man named J. Frank Dalton
claimed to be the real James. After a media carnival descended upon the 102-year-old man during a hospital stay,
Dalton died. Yet the rumors persisted. Finally in 1995, the
body of Jes
se James was exhumed from its grave in Missouri
and the DNA was found to match 99.7 to that of James’s
family. Supporters of the Dalton theory did not give up hope,
and in 2000 a court order was granted to exhume the body of
J. Frank Dalton to end the speculation. Unfortunately the
wrong body was exhumed, and attempts to discredit Dalton
were halted. Dalton’s actual body was never exhumed nor
tested. I wondered if this botched exhumation was part of the
reason Largo Vance was unable to do the same for William
H. Bonney.
The article was accompanied by a photo of an elderly man
with a long, scruffy beard lying in a hospital bed with two men
standing by his side. When I saw the attribution given to the
second of the two men, my heart nearly skipped a beat. He
was wearing a leather jacket and bore a look of concern on
his face. He was identified as one Brushy Bill Roberts, ninety
years old, at the deathbed of J. Frank Dalton. The man thought
to be the real Billy the Kid next to the man suspected of being
the real Jesse James.
I ran another search, this time to determine whether Jesse
James and William H. Bonney knew each other. According
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249
to news reports, Jesse James and Billy the Kid had met only
once, at the Old Adobe Springs Hotel near Las Vegas in July
of 1879. The two were seen having dinner by an associate of
Bonney’s, though the witness’s story was widely discredited.
People simply couldn’t believe history’s two most famous
outlaws had ever crossed paths, let alone met for a friendly
dinner.
The Austin Chronicle, in a later story, said this “chance”
meeting was even more unlikely considering James’s daughter had been born merely ten days earlier.
I kept searching, and soon discovered another photograph,
dated 1942, again of Brushy Bill Roberts and J. Frank Dalton,
this time of the two men standing side by side. The picture
clearly identified the two men by the names they went by at
the time—Brushy Bill and Frank Dalton. According to
records, it was not until after Dalton’s one hundred and
second birthday that he claimed to be Jesse James. Additionally, Roberts denied that he was Billy the Kid at first, only
admitting to it after being confronted.
There were a slew of websites and conspiracy theory
pamphlets printed and posted on the web, many claiming
The Guilty (2008) Page 23
