“What does this mean?” Murdock asked Dinkler.
“I don’t know. I’ll request a meeting with the judge to get some clarification. I suspect that the judge is coming to the conclusion that Jesse is being railroaded so the C.A. can get some headlines.”
“But Jesse has to stay here?” Gemma asked.
“Yes. I don’t know what that’s about, but I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“I want you to get my son out of here right this minute,” Garvis said bitterly.
“Mom, please,” Jesse pleaded.
“You have no business staying in that filthy jail. Mr. Dinkler, I want you to march in to that judge’s office and demand Jesse be released.”
Murdock glared at her, “Garvis!”
“Don’t ‘Garvis’ me. I want Jesse out of that jail.”
“Mother, please. One of my best friends was murdered yesterday.”
“I don’t care. That has nothing to do with this. I’m sorry that poor girl is dead, but you don’t deserve what that judge is doing to you.”
“I do deserve it,” Jesse replied angrily.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Now, Mr. Dinkler, go in there and tell that judge that we’re taking Jesse home,” Garvis ordered.
“She’d be alive if it wasn’t for me!”
Everyone froze and looked at Jesse as he hung his head. Years of torment swelled up in him, and tears filled his eyes.
“She’d be alive,” he said softly.
The bailiff walked up and said, “Mr. Rose, you’ll need to come with me. Miss, Crawford, Judge Buckner said that you’re welcome to come along if you’d like.”
“I’m coming also,” Garvis stated, but it came out more like a demand.
Jesse stood with the bailiff, and Garvis made her way out from the row of seats behind the defendant’s table.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the bailiff replied. “The judge specifically said that Miss Crawford could come and go at will, but everyone else must sign in at the sheriff’s office first.”
Garvis stood fuming as Jesse and Gemma followed the bailiff out of the room.
#
The bailiff escorted Jesse and Gemma down to the jail in the basement of the courthouse. There he left them with a sheriff’s deputy who was sitting at a desk outside of a barred door. The deputy opened the door and led them into a hallway with jail cells on either side. He went to a cell and opened the door.
“The judge sent word that I’m not to lock this door so you can get out and walk around a little. He also said that you’re welcome to any visitors you want. He especially said that you can come and visit any time, Miss Crawford,” the Deputy explained.
“Do you know what’s going on?” Jesse asked.
“We’ve all been askin’ that. Judge Buckner’s never ordered anything like this before. The best anyone around here can guess is that he don’t think you’re guilty.” The deputy turned and headed back to his desk. “If y’all need anything, just let me know. That’s somethin’ else the judge ordered. Anything you want to eat, you just tell us and we’re to go fetch it.”
When the deputy was back in his office, Jesse and Gemma sat down on the cot next to each other. Neither spoke. Sitting for long periods of time without speaking was not unusual for them. Silence had quit being uncomfortable years ago.
Gemma had been thinking about what Jesse had said about Jewel’s death being his fault. There were things about all of this that had her confused. She didn’t have any reason to think so, but for some reason the events of her childhood kept running through her mind. She also couldn’t stop thinking about the night Jewel’s mother disappeared and how Jesse had said that he had been there and that instead of leaving, she really had died.
After a long silence Gemma finally asked, “What was that all about upstairs?”
Jesse sat quietly, trying to avoid eye contact as he searched for something to say. Finally he looked at her and answered, “I can’t tell ya, Gem.”
“This has something to do with that night - the night Mrs. Stoker died, doesn’t it?
Jesse sighed, “Gem, please don’t. I can’t talk about it.”
Gemma stood. “You can’t keep your secrets forever, Jesse. Whatever happened that night, it keeps coming back to haunt us. Who else has to die because of this secret? Me? Jettie? When does it end, Jesse? If we’re going to get married, you have to tell me everything.” She then walked out of the cell.
#
Cockwright stormed into his office, slamming his notes down on his desk. Prestwick, Coleman, and Vivian Yates had followed him upstairs into the suite, but each headed into their own offices.
“Staff meeting, now,” Cockwright ordered without looking back to see if anyone was listening. A moment later his three person staff came into the office and took seats across from the large desk where Nathaniel had settled into his chair, still fuming.
For the first five minutes, all four just sat there. Nathaniel was staring, almost at nothing at all. The other three kept glancing at each other and then looking at the floor. No one wanted to look Cockwright directly in the eye. With the mood he was in, he was likely to start firing people.
Finally Primrose couldn’t take anymore. “What are we going to do, Boss?”
Without answering, Cockwright turned around in his chair and looked out the window onto the town square that surrounded the Rusk courthouse. People were coming and going from the hardware store and drugstore. The events in the courtroom were the farthest thing from their minds. Judge Buckner was playing games with the prosecution of a killer, possibly a serial killer, and they hardly knew a thing about it. Then it dawned on him.
He whipped around in his chair, “Buckner may think that he can put this off, but if the people demand a trial, he’ll have to give them a trial. Until court resumes again, I want all three of you to fan out around the county. Hit every soda fountain, café, diner, and hamburger stand in every town you can find. Start conversations about how this judge wants to set free the most vicious murderer this county has ever seen. Tell people that he’s related to the kid. Tell them anything they want to hear. Just make ‘em angry.”
He then pointed at Coleman. “Get on the phone to that reporter in Houston. Tell him that I’ve got the biggest story of his life. Tell him that there’s been a second murder that was even more brutal than the first and it took place in the exact same spot. Tell him that the victim is the girl that the killer and the first victim had been fighting over. Tell him that if he will come up here over the weekend I’ll have him the lead story for Sunday, with photographs.”
Cockwright then turned to face Primrose. “Get over to Elza and-”
He paused and looked back at Coleman, who was still sitting in his chair. “What are you waiting for? Get on the phone!”
Coleman got up and walked out of the room.
Cockwright shook his head in disgust and then returned his attention to Primrose. “Go to Elza and get the photographs of yesterday’s crime scene from that two-bit police chief. Tell him that it’s imperative that we have them right away. Wait - don’t ask him for the pictures. He and that Ranger have been givin’ me the business from the very beginning. Park on a side-street somewhere and watch for him to leave the office, then break in and take the film.”
Primrose’ eyes widened. “Are you sure about that, Boss? That’s tampering.”
“I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with those two. Get the film. They’re rightfully ours, anyway.”
#
COLDWELL’S FARM CENTER,
TYLER, TEXAS
August 18, 1936
Stumpy Coldwell was an excessively overweight man approaching his mid-forties. Aside from his weight, there were two outstanding characteristics that could always be said about Stumpy - he never wore a coat of any kind, regardless of the weather, and he was never seen wit
hout a half-smoked cigar hanging out of his mouth. Like many men his age, he was losing his hair. At the moment he was also losing his temper.
When Stumpy came home from the Great War in 1918, he returned to the job he’d previously held at his father’s Farm and Ranch store selling feed, shovels, plows and even a few tractors. But Stumpy had much higher aspirations than making a meager living selling barbed wire gateposts. His route to France had taken him through New York, where he had seen wealth that far exceeded anything he had ever imagined from his father’s little store in East Texas. He also learned that there were ways of acquiring income that did not include hoping that some manure covered farmer in bibbed overalls, which were his biggest selling item, would come in and pay his outstanding bill.
Less than a month after returning from fighting the Hun, Stumpy, who had lost his left arm to an infected shrapnel wound, hence the nickname, approached his father, Buckhorn Coldwell, with an ambitious plan to expand far beyond the little storefront on North Broadway. His idea was to build a giant store out on the new Troup Highway and begin selling much more than just shovels and plowshares. Stumpy argued all night with his father about how the world was changing and how farming would soon be a mechanized industry. The tractor would soon replace the mule, and the merchant who understood that fact would be sitting on a gold mine.
Buckhorn admired his son’s aspirations, and even agreed that motorized farm machinery was going to become more and more important in a few years. What Buckhorn Coldwell didn’t have was the capital and credit to finance his son’s dreams.
That didn’t stop Stumpy.
Something else Stumpy had learned in the Army was that there were men almost everywhere with a few extra minutes and a couple of extra dollars who couldn’t pass an opportunity to spend those minutes wagering those dollars. It started with a late night craps game in the back of the Farm and Ranch store, but soon Stumpy had expanded his operation to the backs of pool halls and saloons. In time he added a numbers game, which was nothing but a lottery except payoff wasn’t likely since the odds were a thousand to one in favor of the house. Pretty soon he was also taking bets on the horses. Some eighteen years later, old Buckhorn was long since dead, and Coldwell’s was by far the largest Farm and Ranch store in all of Texas. Stumpy also owned the Ford dealership, and he was thinking of opening another store just to sell things like radios and washing machines.
But the stores were just a way to keep things looking respectable. The real money was in the gambling. There wasn’t a pool hall, roadhouse, or honky-tonk within ninety miles that Stumpy didn’t have a runner in. Put simply, if someone wanted to place a bet in East Texas, Stumpy Coldwell got a cut.
Stumpy bit down hard on his cigar as he looked out the window at the Plymouth sedan that passed the front of the farm store and circled around back. He’d had enough of the Crawford brothers. He had taken them in when they got out of prison because they’d come well recommended. Of course, they were recommended by another con, and a con wasn’t exactly the best reference. Stumpy had made a mental note to not make that mistake again.
Gambling, though not a particularly respectable business, was still a business, and like all businesses it required a certain amount of work. The degenerates who threw their money away on thousand to one odds sometimes needed coaxing. Money didn’t simply jump out of their pockets. Stumpy’s better runners, the ones who brought in the best money, could easily make a handsome living selling something more legitimate like cars or real estate. They not only had the knack, they also put in the effort to get the job done. Those two Crawford fools couldn’t sell water in the Sahara. They spent more time chasing whores than taking bets. The brothers dressed and strutted around like Cary Grant, but when it came to bringing in a dollar, they were next to useless.
Then the younger one showed up at the back door one night with a bullet in his gut. Stumpy should have left him to bleed out, but then someone would start snooping around, and before long the whole state would know how Stumpy Coldwell really made a living. So for two weeks Richard Crawford had been laid up in the back of Coldwell’s. Stumpy had a doctor on call for such a thing. It wasn’t unusual for one of his runners to get into a little scuff, but they usually were smart enough to go home and call for help, keeping Coldwell’s out of it.
Stumpy had an angry scowl on his face as Peterson Crawford came into the back of the warehouse section of the farm store.
“I want him out of here today,” Stumpy ordered.
“Did the doctor say he’s okay to leave?” Peterson replied.
“I don’t care if he is or isn’t. Get him out of here today.”
Peterson led as they walked past the stacks of feed to a small storage side room under a glassed-in office. Inside, Richard was lying on a makeshift cot on some burlap sacks of feed. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of slacks. He managed to sit upright when he saw his brother and Stumpy walking in.
“How ya feelin’ Rich?”
“Like hell. I still vomit after I eat.”
“Well, we got a problem,” Peterson began as he leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “Sarah’s disappeared.”
“Who’s Sarah?” Stumpy asked.
“She’s the whore that shot me,” Richard replied.
“Nobody’s seen her since that night.”
“You two idiots didn’t kill her, did ya?”
“She was alive when we left. I hit her and kicked on her some, but she was alive,” Peterson answered.
“Was anybody else there?” Stumpy asked.
The two brothers looked at each other.
“Good god you fools,” as he reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of dollar bills. “Here,” he said as he handed some money to Peterson. “Get him on the next train out of town. I don’t want to see his face for at least a year. No, make it two years. You listen to me and you listen good. Don’t you come around here ‘til this mess is cleaned up. If this thing comes back to my door, my boys won’t just kill ya, they’ll run ya through a cotton gin first.”
“I’ll take care of it, Stumpy,” Peterson replied.
“You make sure you do,” Stumpy said as he stormed out of the room. He’d put up with enough of this foolishness. The last thing he needed was to have those two fools blow his entire racket because they couldn’t keep their hands off an ex-prostitute.
“I can handle the kid. I’ll get him to tell me what happened to Sarah. She’s probably just run off,” Peterson said to his brother once they were alone.
“What if she ain’t? What if she’s dead somewhere?” Richard asked.
“I tell you, she ain’t dead.”
“Then where is she?”
“I don’t know. I’ll find out from that kid.”
“There were two kids,” Richard said.
“Two? I thought there was just the one.”
“No, there were two. And an old colored man.”
“Colored man?”
“Yeah, he was a cripple. He was hobbling on a crutch.”
Peterson leaned against the wall and thought for a moment.
“You know who he is?” Richard asked.
Peterson thought for a moment and then answered, “Yeah, I’ve seen him around town.”
“You’ve got to do somethin’ about them.” Richard insisted. “Because if somethin’ did happen to Sarah, they’ll pin it on us.”
Peterson took a long drag on the cigarette while thinking about the situation. He didn’t think he had kicked on Sarah hard enough to kill her. Even if he had, what had happened to the body? The kids knew something, but what was he going to do? He couldn’t just threaten those kids; they were likely to talk. Besides, they were always hanging out by the police station. That chief wasn’t the brightest cop in the world, but if one of those kids said something to him, this whole thing could send them both back to prison. The
old man was the key. Peterson could put some heat on him. If necessary, he’d kill ‘im. If he had to, he could kill the old man and the kids. Killin’ couldn’t be all that hard. It would probably put ‘im in good standing with Stumpy, too. The fat man needed people who weren’t afraid to get things done.
“I’ll take care of it. Let’s get you to the train station.”
#
TEXAS HIGHWAY 82,
ANDERSON COUNTY TEXAS
10:35 p.m., December 5, 1941
Chief Hightower pulled his prowler into the crowded parking lot of the County Line Roadhouse. Actually, he had no idea what the name of the place really was. It had no sign, but everyone in Cherokee county knew about it. Cherokee was a dry county, meaning that alcohol could not legally be bought or sold, although bootleg hooch was made and sold all over. But if someone wanted to have a good time at a roadhouse or honky-tonk, they had to drive over to Anderson County or down to Lufkin where the alcohol prohibition laws didn’t exist.
The County Line Roadhouse was exactly that – the closest place to get legal hooch. Nestled in thick woods, it sat no less than three feet across the Anderson County line and was by far the closest roadhouse to any city in all of Cherokee county. In fact, it was so close to the county line that the entire parking lot was in Cherokee county. Jefferson didn’t want to admit it to Ranger McKinney, but in his younger years he and his buddies had spent many a Saturday night dancing and drinking at “The Line” as it was called by almost everyone.
When Hightower found a place to park, the two lawmen sat in silence looking around the lot. McKinney was certain that Richard Crawford was in the place, but the chief wasn’t so sure. Crawford had all but disappeared. They learned that he was a regular at the pool halls in both Jacksonville and Rusk. McKinney had talked to his Ranger in Tyler and learned that Crawford ran numbers in that area and that “The Line” was the only roadhouse, so it made sense that he’d be there since he hadn’t been seen around the two cities.
A “runner” as the bookies called them, took the bets at saloons and pool halls and then took the cash to the bookie. The next day when the winning number was revealed in the racing forms, the runner would return to pay off any winners and take bets for the next game. Of course, with the odds that the bookies laid, it was rare that there was a winner. Most of the time, when a gambler actually got lucky, the “winner” lost it all on the next bet. For a bookie, a numbers racket was nothing but a way to print money.
That Night at the Palace Page 31
