Abandoned Prayers

by Gregg Olsen

  Ruston took the television and an antique mantel clock that had belonged to Ida and Eli and put them in his car while Hunter started to close up the place.

  “I’m not leaving this stuff here for someone to just walk in and take,” Ruston told Weaver.

  Weaver was glad to leave. She felt nervous, as though someone had been looking over her shoulder.

  The next day Ruston and Weaver made a second trip to the house. Ruston was scared and refused to go without Weaver. Her sister loaned her a truck, and they went after the sofa Stutzman had told Ruston that Weaver could have, several weeks before.

  The place had been ransacked and most of the furniture was missing. Paper littered the floor like the remnants of a parade. It appeared that looters had come and helped themselves to whatever they pleased.

  Weaver and her sister aimlessly wandered from room to room. In the dining room, the shelving running the length of the wall was still full of the glassware and crystal that they presumed had belonged to Stutzman’s dead wife. In Danny’s room, they discovered that someone had opened the trunk of Amish clothes.

  Who did this? Weaver wondered. What were they looking for?

  The Amish trunk had been placed up against the wall, with a toy chest sitting on top of it. Both had been moved with no regard for their contents.

  Weaver knew Eli Stutzman wasn’t coming back.

  Each time Weaver came upon something of Ida’s or Danny’s she felt an incredible wave of sadness. Her sister felt it, too. Both of the women were repeatedly drawn to the boy’s room, then to the dining room, and back again.

  When she first saw the Amish clothes scattered in and out of the trunk, Weaver started to take them.

  “I felt it was obscene to leave them there. I wanted to take them and take care of them. Her stuff. And the little boy’s stuff. What was going on in that house was like raping her. I couldn’t believe someone coming in there and taking her stuff,” she later said.

  She also felt sad about the little boy. His father was involved in a big mess, and he was dragging the child through the mud with him. It seemed cruel.

  When it was time to leave, Ruston gave Weaver a house-plant from his collection.

  A few days later, Weaver and Ruston went out to Banton for the last time. Stutzman had kept a few chickens in a coop in the back, and Ruston thought they should feed and water them. The chickens were gone.

  Everything in the house, except the desk, the kitchen table and chairs, and the refrigerator, was gone. The crystal was gone. The Amish clothes were missing.

  Personal papers, meaningless to the two of them, covered the floor. Weaver picked some up, but tossed them down again.

  The place had been gutted.

  Over the next couple of weeks, Weaver watched as Ruston grew even more irresponsible and erratic than she had initially believed possible. He hit the bars every night, picking up strangers one right after the other. He was edgy and anxious. The only thing that kept him in Austin was the fact that he was broke and that he had to wait for his check from Pizza Hut. Everything he had—except the clothes he was wearing—was packed in his car, ready to go when the paycheck came.

  Just before Ruston left he told Weaver that he had VD. She threw her hands up and told him he should get to a clinic immediately. Ruston said that he didn’t have time, that he’d take care of it in California once he got there.

  “You’re crazy,” she told him. “That’s what you get for going around picking up people you don’t know. You don’t know what you’ve got.”

  Weaver was relieved when Ruston finally left town. Even though this whole Eli Stutzman murder thing was intriguing and in a way had kept the summer interesting, she nonetheless hoped she’d heard the last of Eli Stutzman.

  Leona Weaver was working at the back of the Pizza Hut, organizing and preparing the condiments for the salad bar, when the phone rang. The caller said he was Eli Stutzman. His voice, soft and tentative, filled her with so much fear that it surprised her.

  “Do you know where I can find Denny?”

  Weaver stammered and said that Ruston had left for California and that she didn’t have a number for him yet.

  “Well, I need to talk to him really bad. I’ve got to get hold of him,” Stutzman said.

  Weaver truly didn’t know exactly where Ruston was, but damn well knew that if she had known, she wouldn’t have given the information to Stutzman. Ruston had been emphatic when he left: “Don’t tell Eli where I’m going. Don’t tell him anything.”

  She asked for Stutzman’s number—in case Ruston called her. Stutzman refused to leave one and said he’d call later.

  Weaver went to her manager and told him, “It’s him! What am I gonna do? He’s gonna call me back!”

  Her boss urged her to call the Travis County sheriff. With a little reluctance, she dialed their main number.

  Detective Cutler, dressed in the “plain” clothes of a homicide investigator, yet looking every bit like a cop—Weaver figured it was his attitude that gave him away—came to the Pizza Hut and plunked himself down in a booth. Armed with his nice and easy Texas voice, Cutler was as casual as a sweatshirt. With a few pleasantries to break the ice and soften his potential informant, he hit Weaver with a proposition that stunned her.

  “If you could get Stutzman to give you a phone number so that you can call him back, would you be interested in taping him? He might talk. Maybe he’ll tell you something.”

  Say what? Weaver thought. You want me to tape some probable killer’s confession?

  Weaver’s initial reaction was to say no, but for some reason—no doubt the would-be mystery writer and the detective in her—she agreed with one stipulation.

  “As long as you keep my name out of it, I’ll do it. I don’t see how I could get hurt. I’ll do it for you,” she said.

  Cutler smiled and told her he would be over to the Reinli Arms with the recorder and the tape in a day or so. Weaver smiled nervously and warned Cutler not to make too much of a show of being a cop when he came over.

  “I have neighbors that wouldn’t be too crazy about the law coming around, you know.”

  A day or so later, Stutzman made another call to Weaver at the Pizza Hut. Weaver was determined to get him to leave his telephone number this time.

  “Listen, I can’t talk to you on this phone,” she told him in a half-whisper, hoping he would infer that the line had been bugged by the sheriff’s office. “They’ve been coming around looking for Denny, and maybe we shouldn’t talk on this phone.”

  Stutzman said he understood and gave her a number. The area code was 505—New Mexico.

  Weaver called Cutler, and the following day he brought the recorder to her apartment to show her how the set worked—though they had to improvise, since Weaver couldn’t afford a telephone of her own at the time.

  As if Gary Cutler’s presence had been broadcast via megaphone, word got around that the police were talking with some lady in the apartments. A few bikers even moved out of the Reinli Arms when they heard that a Travis County sheriff’s detective was visiting Leona Weaver.

  Cutler, who did not want to have the taped conversations blow up in his face later in court, was careful and did not offer Weaver any tips on how to get Stutzman to talk. He made no suggestions on what she should say. It was up to her. His only advice: “Keep him talking and get him to say something.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  June 27, 1985

  After a first attempt yielded nothing but frazzled nerves, Weaver took Gary Cutler’s mini tape recorder over to Evelyn Martel’s apartment at Cameron Green. The women waited on the steps of the complex’s laundry room for it to clear out. When it did, Weaver went inside and dialed the telephone number Stutzman had left at Pizza Hut.

  So nervous she could scarcely breathe, Weaver started the conversation by saying that she had recently talked with Ruston, but that he wouldn’t tell her where he was because he was scared.

  Stutzman wanted to know why.
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br />   “I don’t know,” Weaver said. “I thought he was more or less off the hook because they confirmed that he was in Iowa the weekend Glen left.”

  “Tell him it’s important that he calls me. And tell him to make sure and not to give out my phone number,” he said.

  The next few minutes were spent on the status of the Amish furniture. Stutzman wanted to know where it was, and Weaver offered little help. Her uncertainty seemed to annoy Stutzman. She did confirm, however, that she and Ruston had taken the clock, TV, and couch.

  “What about the papers, ah, and stuff—the mail, papers, and stuff I had in my furniture?”

  “I don’t have any idea about that. I didn’t see any of that,” she said.

  Stutzman thought the Travis County Sheriff’s Department had taken his personal things. The idea was absurd, but Weaver played along with him to keep him talking.

  “Well,” said Stutzman, “everybody keeps telling me that they can’t legally do that, but my attorney says, knowing Travis County Homicide, they’ll do anything . . . they’ll have to give it back once it’s straightened out.”

  “What are you going to do, Eli? Are you gonna stay gone, are you gonna come back or what?”

  “Well he keeps—my attorney—keeps telling me to hold off and wait. But, see, Cal had told me all of my furniture was gone. I’m getting to be confused.”

  Stutzman admitted he hadn’t been able to reach Hunter for several days.

  “I don’t know,” Weaver said, trying to keep the conversation on track. “It looks pretty bad to me. I mean, you know.”

  “Right.”

  “I mean your situation looks pretty bad to me.”

  “Talking about a mixed-up mess,” Stutzman offered, as though none of what had transpired was his doing. He was a helpless victim.

  “I’m telling you. I don’t under—” Weaver stopped and tried again. “You know, Denny was real freaked out about it and everything, and so we talked a lot about it, and he’s really . . . still freaked out.”

  She wanted Stutzman to think she knew everything, as if Ruston had told her the truth—whatever the truth was.

  Stutzman indicated that Denny could have come with him to New Mexico and that “nobody would have known.”

  “. . . That’s what I told him earlier,” he said. “But then he must have left the . . . but he did tell me the last time I talked to him, he can’t stay in the house no more, he can’t take it. . . . I said ‘Well, I understand that.’ But he didn’t tell me he was leaving town.”

  How many times had Ruston talked with Stutzman after Eli left town? Weaver wondered.

  “Yeah. Well you know he was real scared over there,” she said. “He felt like he was being watched or something. Ah . . . he came over to my house, him and Sam both came to my house about one-thirty in the morning.”

  Stutzman brightened a bit. “Oh, really?”

  “And they stayed over there. Yeah, they slept over there at my house.”

  “Golly,” he said.

  Stutzman said he didn’t know why Ruston was frightened. “. . . I knew he was scared earlier, but I didn’t think it was that bad, and I felt kind of odd. . . . I just kind of felt like I left him in the middle of the mess.”

  Weaver’s hopes rose again. Maybe Stutzman would spill it now and tell her exactly what the mess was.

  “And I wanted to talk to him,” he continued, “but the main reason . . . was because of my little kid. Some of the stuff they asked him downtown was really obnoxious.”

  “What do you mean? You mean about being homosexual and stuff like that?” Weaver asked, straining to hear every word and hoping that the tape was recording every nuance.

  “This was one scared dude on the phone,” she later recalled.

  “Yeah, that, and also about the whole murder case, the whole bit. And my attorney says, you know, they had no right questioning a kid that age.”

  If what Stutzman was saying was true, Weaver felt that he was damned right about it.

  “And see,” Stutzman said, “they tried to do that around my and Sam’s backs. Sam was with me downtown too. They questioned him in the lobby—well I heard part of it, and Sam did too. So when this is all over they’re gonna pay for it. And, ah, those guys from homicide are really crooked is the only thing I can tell, and they’re gonna pay for it.”

  Stutzman’s soft voice made Weaver’s skin crawl.

  “Well,” she said, trying to get something definite out of him, “they obviously must have a case against you or they wouldn’t be after you, huh?. . .”

  In shrugging off her question, Stutzman dropped a bombshell. “They think they do. See, ah, it’s pretty obvious that Glen, this guy, was murdered with my gun.”

  Now we’re going somewhere, Weaver thought. Come on, confess!

  “That doesn’t say that I did it. Now, ah . . .”

  “Maybe they’re trying to get you for accessory or something,” Weaver said. “Like maybe you knew about it or you tried to cover it up or something.”

  Stutzman hesitated, and Weaver tried to twist the blade deeper. She hoped he’d be frightened enough to say more.

  “They can do that you know,” she said.

  “Well, that might be it, maybe that’s what they are after, I don’t know. But I and Sam both made that very clear, that we didn’t even know he was missing.”

  Didn’t know he was missing? Even Leona Weaver knew Stutzman’s story about Glen Pritchett going up to Montana to take care of his injured son, and how he’d called down and talked with Stutzman on the phone.

  “The first thing they jumped on us for, ‘Was he reported missing?’ ” Stutzman recalled. “I said, ‘I had no idea the guy was missing.’ ”

  Weaver fumbled for the right words to get him to think she knew more than she really did. “Well, you know, Denny said they had some work orders, and they claimed they have some forged, that it’s a forged signature on them. That’s what Denny told me.”

  “Who had work orders?”

  “The cops do.”

  “Then it must be time sheets.”

  “Yeah, time sheets.”

  “Uh . . . Forged time sheets?” Stutzman said, his voice full of surprise—not over the fact that the police had the doctored time sheets, but that they had any time sheets at all.

  “Yeah. One with Glen’s last signature. . . . You know, for that . . . ah . . . what’s the date? I can’t remember the date . . . April.”

  “They said it was forged?”

  “No, this one wasn’t,” Weaver said. “April twenty-seventh. April twenty-seventh was the date on the one, I believe, and then on the next one, the next pay, the next time sheet was, oh, May fourth, but the signatures where he signed them was different.”

  “Huh,” Stutzman said. “I didn’t know about that.”

  “That’s what Denny was telling me. That’s what they told him.”

  “Huh, well that’s a good one. So . . . so they do have the time sheets?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I had told him to go ahead and give them to them if they want them because I said, you know, that’s proof that he had worked.”

  The comment interested Weaver, because it indicated that Stutzman and Ruston had talked about the time sheets. Stutzman had told Ruston “to go ahead and give them to them.” Denny Ruston had never told Wiggins or Cutler that he had seen or talked with Stutzman since being questioned by the sheriff’s office.

  “Well, what are you gonna do, Eli? You can’t keep running forever.”

  “What am I gonna do?”

  “I mean, obviously, you know, you’re gonna have to do something about this.”

  “Well, my attorney has been telling me to blow it off. . . . See, he thinks it was Jay, another guy that had worked for me for a short period of time and I fired him. And I think so myself, because I don’t know who else it would have been. Because he was the only person I know of that knew where my guns were at. That’s the only other person, because Denny
didn’t know where they were at. Sam didn’t know where they were at, and they confirmed that Denny had been with his parents that weekend when Glen left.

  “But . . . then, also, my attorney keeps telling me there are two different fingerprints other than mine on the gun. Whose are the other fingerprints? I have no idea.”

  That was a new one.

  “Well, see,” he continued, “I didn’t know that till a couple of days ago. The information keeps coming through real slow.”

  “Yeah,” said Weaver. “They haven’t talked to me yet or nothing. I don’t think they even know anything about me except that Denny was staying at my house.”

  Again, Stutzman was surprised. “They do know that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh-huh, well if they come after you, make sure they don’t get this phone number.”

  Weaver promised to keep it a secret.

  Stutzman told her that Cal Hunter had taken some things out of the house on his behalf—before the furniture was taken. Stutzman asked that, if he came over to Weaver’s place to pick up the television and the clock, would she let him have them. She agreed.

  This would keep all the rest of his stuff away from the law, Stutzman implied.

  “Whatever they don’t already have. Uh, I’m not real sure what this is going to boil down to. If they keep going on . . . see, when I left I thought it was only going to be for two or three days,” he said.

  Stutzman said he had talked with his attorney twice in the last twenty-four hours.

  “I may have to go back to Austin and face trial just to prove that I’m innocent.”

  “Yeah. You may have to. The longer you run the harder it’s gonna be on you.”

  “Right. But . . .”

  “It just . . . it really looks bad that you ran, you know.”

  “Right,” he said softly.

  “Not necessarily that you did it maybe, but you knew something about it,” Weaver said, pushing again. All she wanted was one little confession, one little bit of information that would complete the puzzle.

  “What I’ve done, I painted a real bad picture for them. But see, I didn’t know all this stuff, and when I left it was supposed to be a matter of a couple of days. Well, it’s gone totally out of proportion since then. But . . . what has happened is, I think, well, my attorney says, is that Travis County homicide had found out about Jay also, they weren’t supposed to find out about him.”