I who rose from nothing to take
What is mine,
From my throne on dark waters
I deliver these kisses for my enemies …
Fade to black.
• • •
YVONNE WAS MESMERIZED. She recognized most of the names—all Carrasco’s men. “I have never seen anything like this.”
Julián ejected the DVD and slipped it back into its sleeve. “I like to think of it as a documentary set to music, a record of the damage you have done to Carrasco’s organization.”
“It is very professionally done.”
“A friend of mine made it,” said Julián with a self-satisfied smile. “He produces music videos. We got the photographs from the newspapers and police files. The video of the execution was shot by Marco with his own camera. Heraclio was the one who fired the pistol.”
“An interesting production from someone who was just lecturing me that violence does not solve problems.”
“I said it does not solve all problems. Think of this”—he waved the DVD in her face—“as psychological warfare. It is innovative. Everyone who sees it will see that Carrasco has lost control. It will disgrace him. A woman, the queen of dark waters, is stronger than he.”
“And how do you plan to do that?”
“We are going to mass-produce it. Distribute it all over. People with computers will download it, send it to their friends. Carrasco himself will see it eventually, I am sure of that. All we need is your approval to go ahead.”
“It’s brilliant, a brilliant idea, mi hijo.” She reached up and brushed his cheekbones with her fingertips. “You have your father’s eyes, but what’s behind them, that is all mine.”
Yvonne rose. She decided to take a much-needed nap.
Ben Erskine
Transcript of an interview with Timothy Forbes. Mr. Forbes,
68, is a retired newspaper reporter and now an adjunct
professor of journalism at the University of Arizona.
This transcript is the consolidated record of two
separate conversations that took place on June 12
and June 23, 1966, at the Arizona Inn.
“Last of Atascosa killers caught! Sonora mob attacks U.S. deputy! Mexican soldiers escort lawman, prisoner across border! Full story of daring arrest!—The third culprit wanted in the savage slaying of a couple in Atascosa was nabbed in Mexico yesterday by a bold lawman who flouted rules and regulations to bring the fiend to justice in the United States.” [Interviewer’s note: Mr. Forbes was reading the decked headlines and the first paragraph of a story he wrote for the Nogales Herald editions of April 7, 1922.]
Ouch! If one of my students turned in a lead like that, I’d tell him to take up plumbing. I might at least have written the alleged fiend.
The Atascosa murders were Ben’s first big case and my first big story. It made his name as a lawman, mine as a reporter. Not that being a star on a border-town daily meant I was Pulitzer Prize material. I came to Nogales after I dropped out of Harvard. Yes, Harvard. It was the oil to my water. Only thing I liked about the place was writing for the Crimson and the boxing team—I was light-heavyweight champ.
The Herald’s editorial staff consisted of the editor, Jason Childs, the deputy editor, and three reporters, two part-time, one full-time—me. Mostly I covered the crime beat and the county court. Nogales was a lively town for just five thousand people, so I wasn’t bored. Boxing was how I got to know Ben. He respected me because I could throw leather. Fancied himself as a fighter. Said he’d learned to box in the mining camps after he dropped out of high school, that some Irish blacksmith had taught him. One day not long after I’d started with the paper, I was checking the police blotter in the sheriff’s office. Ben was sparring with the jailer, who looked like he trained on enchiladas, and doing a pretty good job of batting him around. When they were finished, I mentioned that I’d done some fighting myself. Ben took it as a challenge. He said, “Take off your shirt and put ’em on, and let’s see what you’ve got.” I was just twenty-one and knew that he and Sheriff Lassiter—that would be Harold Lassiter—thought of themselves as red-blooded westerners and me as an eastern sissy. So I stripped down, put on the gloves, and corrected that misimpression. Don’t know what that Irishman taught Ben, but let’s say that as a boxer, he knew the words but didn’t hear the music.
That was the beginning of what I’ll call our friendship, for lack of a better term. He was a hard man to get to know. Something closed off and self-contained about him. Guarded. He was a man who expressed himself eloquently in action, not in words. He certainly wasn’t the introspective type. I remember only one time that he let his guard down and gave me a peek at his inner workings. I had written a hero-worshiping article about one of his exploits—he’d captured an armed robber—and said something like “Deputy Sheriff Benjamin Erskine appears to be a lawman who is afraid of nothing.” Ben scoffed at that overblown description. “I’ve been scared plenty of times, Tim,” he said to me. “Sometimes I’ve scared myself.” That was an unusual remark for him to make, and I asked what he’d meant by it. He seemed to realize that he’d stepped into unfamiliar territory and clammed up, so I was left to draw my own conclusion.
There did seem to be a kind of … oh, a—a tension in his manner, like he was keeping a tight rein on himself. A lot of the cops I got to know in forty years in the newspaper business were like that. That old saying, “It takes a thief to catch a thief,” what does that mean? That a cop who’s good at capturing criminals is good at it because he’s got some criminal in him. The lawman and the outlaw have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of us. You might say they share the same devil, but with a difference. The true outlaw is somebody who believes he’s beyond redemption and embraces his devil. The sociopath denies that he has one, and I suppose your devout, do-good Christian citizen tries to exorcise his.
What I’m saying is this, and it comes from knowing Ben for a good many years: he’d done something in the past—I didn’t know what and still don’t—that made him scared of himself. He knew that he had a devil. But he was a guy with a moral code that wouldn’t allow him to embrace it. He wasn’t a sociopath, so he couldn’t deny its existence, and he was no Bible-thumper, so expelling it was out of the question. All he could do was leash it—to a badge. I think he became a cop to avoid becoming a criminal. No, I can’t say we were friends. I was a reporter, he was my source, and after our boxing match, he made it a point to call the paper with news tips. I was grateful, and so was Childs. Lassiter held the press in contempt, and getting anything out of him was like getting a priest to tell what he’d heard in the confessional.
I remember the date—August 26, 1921. I was at my desk typing a story when Childs told me to get over to the sheriff’s office—the Atascosa post office and general store had been robbed, the postmaster and his wife murdered, and another woman injured.
I was running in as Ben was running out with another lawman, a county ranger named Curt Tibbets. County rangers were unpaid auxiliary deputies. Most of them were ex-professionals who’d left police work for one reason or another and then found out that they couldn’t stay away from it. I quote Hemingway—“Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.” Tibbets looked the part. Handlebar mustache, cat’s whiskers at the corners of his eyes, two pearl-handled Colt revolvers, and the air of someone who could summon up reserves of unpleasantness if the situation required it. That could describe Ben, too. Quite a team, that pair.
It was Ben who’d phoned Childs about the murders. When he saw me, he said, “We’re going out there now. Want to come along?” I could not think of a more unnecessary question to ask a reporter. We got into the sheriff’s touring car and picked up an ambulance at the hospital, then, at the train station, a fingerprint expert who’d come down from the Pima County sheriff’s office in Tucson. We headed wes
t toward Atascosa, the ambulance trailing. Ben was driving. Tibbets filled me in—the murder victims were Oliver and Margaret Palmer, both twenty-five; the injured woman—she’d been slightly wounded in the arm—was Meg’s younger sister, Dorothy Killian. There were two other survivors, Oliver’s nineteen-year-old sister, Ellen, and the Palmers’ four-year-old daughter, Catherine.
Atascosa was twenty-odd miles from Nogales, a typical Arizona mining town. Boom. Bust. Boom. Bust. In ’21 it was bust and looked like it was going to stay that way except for those five people. Five years before it had had a population of a thousand; now not a soul. Weathered frame buildings boarded up, an adobe schoolhouse, also boarded up. The mines up on the hillsides were shut down. An arid wind hissing down deserted streets, a windmill’s blades turning and making a sound half squeal, half moan, like some living thing in dull pain. Even if I hadn’t known what had happened there, the place would have given me the creeps.
You’re probably wondering why the post office and the general store were still in operation. It was for the convenience of local ranch families. Also, the post office had a telephone, the only one in about a hundred square miles. Inside it was a shambles—chairs overturned, drawers rifled, boxes, bottles, canned goods, flour sacks strewn all over, the phone ripped out of the wall. Oliver Palmer lay facedown in front of an open safe, two bullet holes in his back. Meg was the worst sight, still-staring eyes, her mouth open wide. All her front teeth had been bashed out, and her lips were blue-black and swollen and lacerated from heavy blows. There was a bullet hole to one side of her forehead, a neat perforation the size of a thumbnail. The exit wound was anything but neat. Blood spatters on a wall, bloodstains on the floor. God, I didn’t believe two bodies could hold so much blood. The Palmers had been lying there dead for twenty-four hours, and we had to cover our noses and mouths with whatever we had.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw, and I don’t think the others were either. We weren’t looking at a crime—it was an atrocity. For me, it was my introduction into what human beings are capable of when the restraints are off—conscience, the law, fear of punishment, whatever holds the beast at bay. I heard Ben mutter, “That little girl of theirs must’ve seen all this.”
Ben and Tibbets panned the wreckage for clues. The fingerprint expert dusted the wooden phone box lying on the floor. Ben pried a slug out of a wall with his jackknife. Tibbets picked up a cigarette butt outside the front door and noted that the smoker had snuffed it by snapping it in two between his fingers. There were three sets of footprints in the yard, the deep heel marks indicating they’d been made by men wearing cowboy boots. The corral next to the store was empty, the gate thrown open. Ben surmised that the gang had stampeded the Palmers’ horses—he turned out to be right about that. He was a helluva sign cutter, the man could decipher marks in the ground like a cryptologist cracking a code, and he soon sorted out the tracks of the killers’ mounts. We followed them down a street to the edge of town. As expected, they led south, toward the border. With a day’s head start, the gang would now be deep into Sonora. Following them in the car would be impossible. Tibbets said, “We’re going to have a daisy of a time catching them,” and Ben said, “Oh, we’ll catch them. If it takes ten years, we’ll see them swing.” Tibbets nodded, more to agree with Ben’s outrage than out of any certainty of capturing the criminals. He said, “Even if we do, it’s going to be next to impossible to get them out of Mexico.” Ben said it would be difficult, but not impossible.
What he meant was this—the United States did not recognize the Mexican government, largely because there wasn’t much of a government to recognize, and so there was no extradition treaty between the two countries. That’s why Old Mexico had become a refuge for every crook and killer who could get there and wasn’t prone to homesickness. A Mexican who committed a crime in the United States was guaranteed safety, but if the criminal was an American, what Mexican authorities there were might be persuaded to hand him over. And Ben had a hunch the Palmer killers were American. He pointed at the hoofprints and said, “These horses are American shod. An American horseshoe bends inward at the ends and the ends are rounded off. A Mexican shoe”—‘Messikin’ is how he pronounced it—“is a straight U and the ends are square. Might not mean a thing. Might be these sons of bitches stole their horses off some gringo’s ranch. But it might be they’re as red, white, and blue as us standing here.”
The ambulance drivers carried the bodies out and brought them to the county morgue. We went to the O’Donnell ranch to talk to Ellen Palmer and Dorothy Killian. Pretty tough cookies, those two. After the bandits fled, they and little Catherine walked eight miles across the desert in summer heat to get help from the O’Donnells—their nearest neighbors. That Dorothy made this trek with a wounded arm made it all the more remarkable. O’Donnell was the one who reported the crime, driving to the sheriff’s office down that miserable road in the middle of the night.
Dorothy had a bandage around her arm. She and Ellen were sitting on the couch, Catherine between them. I’ll always remember her, a little girl with ash blond hair, motionless as a large doll, a fixed stare, no expression on her face, not a sound from her. I wasn’t familiar then with the term “catatonic shock,” but that was the state she was in. Pretty soon we found out why.
It happened late in the afternoon on the previous day. Ellen and Dorothy had been in the living quarters in back, helping Meg with her chores and looking after Catherine, when Oliver called to his wife to come to the front. They had customers. Patrons were rare, and the two younger women went to the door to see who they were: three vaqueros, two Mexicans and an American—anyway he had fair hair and skin and looked like an American, though the girls heard him ask Oliver for tobacco and rolling paper in Spanish. One of the Mexicans was bearded, the other wore a mustache. Their curiosity satisfied, Ellen and Dorothy returned to the rooms in the rear of the building.
A few minutes later they heard a pistol shot, followed by a shotgun blast, followed by another pistol, all in about five seconds. Meg screamed. Catherine flew to the door and stood there for a moment, paralyzed by what she saw. Ellen grabbed her, pushed her under the couch, and squeezed in alongside her, cupping a hand over her mouth. Dorothy attempted to escape through a back door, but the mustached bandit spotted her, chased her down, and dragged her across the floor to the front. She cried out, seeing her brother-in-law sprawled in a pool of blood, his shotgun beside him. Meg screamed again, “Oh, please, for God’s sake! Stop!” The bandit let go of Dorothy and glanced at Meg and said “¡Oro!” Gold! Meg had gold-crowned front teeth. Mustache shot her in the shoulder. She fell facedown. Dorothy watched him roll her onto her back and force her mouth open with her fingers. Then, with the butt of his pistol, he bashed out Meg’s front teeth. She lay there, writhing and moaning, until he put a bullet through her head.
While Fair-Hair rifled through the safe—all they got, by the way, was a hundred dollars in cash and some stamps and a book of blank postal money orders—Mustache ripped the phone from the wall, and Beard tore canned goods off the shelves and stuffed them in a sack. Dorothy—this was one gutsy young lady—crawled to the shotgun and swung it to shoot the one emptying the safe, the guy who looked American. But he caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and shot her. She slumped to the floor and passed out.
After the last shot Ellen and Catherine, hiding under the couch, heard one of the bandits enter the back rooms. He and his accomplices must have thought they’d killed Dorothy and now wanted to make sure they’d left no other witnesses. He opened a closet door and made a quick search, then approached the couch and stood in front of it. Ellen could see the tips of his boots, inches away. I can still recall her exact words: “I thought he could hear my heart beating, so I made it stop. I did. And I will hear for the whole rest of my life the sound his boot heels made on the wooden floor and the jingling of his spurs.”
The Atascosa killings were the most sensational in Arizona’s history. Of course, Arizona
didn’t have much of a history in 1921. I was Childs’s wonder boy. He gave me a dollar-a-week raise. The thrill we get out of horror and tragedy is what makes us reporters so beloved.
Lassiter sent wanted posters all over the country, and a five-thousand-dollar reward was offered for each of the killers. Ranchers and cowhands in four counties saddled up to look for them—automobiles were useless. Childs sent me to join up with one of the posses. I got little news out of it, only what we call today a color story, but the color was enough. Vigilantes chasing notorious outlaws through the desert. Grim-faced men on horseback. Winchesters in saddle scabbards. Campfires under the Milky Way. I was living one of the Western potboilers I’d read as a kid. Hard to believe, me sitting here now, sipping a martini beside a swimming pool, that all that happened just forty-five years ago.
Back to Ben and Tibbets. They were checking out tips, talking to informants in Mexico. Ben was obsessed. He convinced Lassiter to take him off all other cases. The first big break didn’t come till the winter. Ben had a lot of friends in Mexico in high places and low, and one of them was a Major General Bracamonte, commander of all the military forces in Sonora. Back in those days the army and the cops were one and the same in Mexico. Ben had contacted him, telling him that the gang were in Mexico and to be on the lookout. In late November the general wired him. Some of his soldiers had quelled a disturbance in a cantina in a pueblo called Soric. It seemed a light-skinned man who spoke Spanish with an American accent had gotten drunk, bragged about robbing some place across the line, and then threatened a patron with a gun. Another customer ran to fetch soldiers from the army post nearby, but by the time they got to the cantina, the belligerent one was gone.
Crossers Page 33
