Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

“That’s your right.”

  “Well, aint that somethin’? God Bless America,” Buster said, smiling at her with all of his horse teeth.

  “Uh, you can sit down now, Mr. McCaffrey.”

  Buster gave her a little salute with his index finger and turned to rejoin the other prisoners.

  “Dint kill nobody,” he stopped to say.

  “SIT…DOWN.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Visiting Days

  Lunch, at the Lame Horse County jail, was prepared by the inmates—as Marvin Mallomar himself had once suggested as a cost-cutting tip to Sheriff Dudival. The cook was chosen on a round robin basis. Today was Buster’s turn. He wasn’t feeling like doing much of anything lately. Real depression was setting in—an emotion he’d formerly thought reserved for the Mallomars. He had to be ordered off his cot. He half-heartedly prepared a salad Nicoise in honor of Mrs. Mallomar. The inmates, meanwhile, had hoped for chili and gave Buster enormous grief all through the afternoon about his “pussy” menu choice, but they couldn’t dish it out like Mrs. Mallomar. Over his many days in jail, Buster would often think of her and not in a sexual way. He wondered how she was. He wondered if she was wondering how he was. And he wondered whether she had told anybody.

  “McCaffrey!” barked the corrections officer. “You got a visitor.”

  Destiny Stumplehorst, two weeks after the untimely departure of Cord Travesty and his cocaine supply, was beginning to regain some color in her cheeks—although her nose still dripped like a gas station restroom faucet. She sat primly in a steel chair across the table from him in the ten-by-ten visiting room. She was wearing jeans, boots, and a fringe jacket. Buster took her wardrobe as a possible embrace of the good old days.

  “Hello, Buster.”

  “’Lo, Destiny. How are you?”

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Nice jacket.”

  “Got it at the This ’n’ That shop before they made it into the Cineplex.”

  “Raht,” Buster said, the they being Mallomar, of course. “Can ah fetch you a cuppa coffee or a cold non-alcoholrik bevridge?”

  “No thanks, I’m fine.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Destiny, ah ’ppreciate ya’ll comin down here ta see me today. Ah know the last time we met, we dint ’xactly leave thangs tip-top.”

  “I guess we didn’t.” Destiny tried to shift the weight off the buttock she’d been favoring. “You’re a big hero with Ma now.”

  “Now why, in heaven’s name’s, that?”

  “‘The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.’ Matthew thirteen-thirty-nine. Ma thinks you were my harvestin’ angel.”

  “Beg pardon…?”

  “You…” Her lips began to quiver, “…killed Cord Travesty and set me free from drugs.”

  “Oh.” The smile dropped from Buster’s face. He tried to push himself back from the table, but his chair was bolted to the floor. “Uh, Destiny, lissen here. Ah’m real glad yor mom has a favribull o-pinyin of me an all that, but ah dint kill Cord Travesty.”

  “I’m sorry,” Destiny said, quickly looking around the room. “It’s probably ain’t safe to talk here, is it?”

  “It’s per-fekly safe. Ah jes…did…not…kill…nobody. Why’s it so hard fer folks t’believe me?”

  “Okay, okay,” she whispered. “Sorry. That was stupid of me.”

  “People ’round here thank ah did a lot of thangs ah never did. That’s been goin’ on my en-tahr life.”

  “But you did sleep with Mrs. Mallomar. That’s somethin’ you did do, right?”

  Buster took a deep breath. She was dragging that up again.

  “Destiny,” he answered patiently, “Ah’ll tell you true, if ah could take back one dang thang in my life, that’d be the booger…but we all prolly have a thang er two we ree-gret doin’, now don’t we?”

  She hung her head and nodded. “Buster, why did this happen to us?”

  “You know, ah’ve had a lot of tahm sittin’ here thinkin’ ’bout that very same ishoo. What’d we do to have the whole world come crashin’ down ’round our ears? Ah rahtly don’t know. Alls we did was try to em-prove ourselves a bit. Is it a sin for folks lahk us to do that? Ah don’t think so. Ah reckon, the mistake we made was em-provin’ a mite too fast.”

  The corrections officer opened the door and came in—signaling their time together was up.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Ah’d be much o-bliged if you stopped in to see me once and agin.”

  “I will,” Destiny said in a broken voice.

  Destiny got up to make a quick retreat before she fell to pieces. Buster, obeying the dictates of Ms. Humphrey’s Manners for Men jumped to his feet to see her out.

  “Take care now,” he winked good-naturedly. Destiny burst into tears and just shook her head with the heartache of it all. After all this emotion, Buster was actually looking forward to going back to his cell.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Defense Rests

  The next day the sheriff dropped in to say hello. He brought, for Buster, the children’s illustrated version of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

  “Much o-bliged, Sheriff.”

  “What’s this I hear about you not wanting to speak to your public attorney?”

  “Oh, that ain’t true. Ah speak to him aplenty.”

  “But he says you won’t tell him what he needs to know to defend you properly.”

  Buster interlocked his fingers and stared down at the floor.

  “Sheriff, he wants to make this out as some kinda war between the Mallomars and the folks here.”

  “He’s just trying to get you out of this. See, people around here are under the impression that you’re trying to protect Mrs. Mallomar. Some people might even be thinking that she might have had something to do with Mr. Mallomar’s demise. What do you make of all that?”

  Buster took a deep breath. “Ah aint at liberty to say.”

  Dudival just looked at him blankly.

  “I’m going to ask you one last question. That night, did you happen to see Jimmy Bayles Morgan?”

  “Ah woont see her if she were the last man on earth!”

  “I mean, did you see her around the house that night?”

  “Heck no. Anyways, ain’t she too sick to go nowhere?”

  Dudival felt as though the two people in the world that he cared about most were strangling him.

  Buster remained obdurate in his refusal to implicate Mrs. Mallomar. Jimmy, it seemed, wasn’t going to die soon enough to allow the dignity of a post-mortem examination of her assassin’s career, so Sheriff Dudival drove back up to Lame Horse Mesa to the Big Dog Ranch to effect justice the only way he had left to him.

  At the reservoir, he brought two crutches from his cruiser and placed Jimmy’s cowboy boots inside them. He slipped out of his shoes and put on his bedroom slippers. Then he walked around the reservoir placing Jimmy’s footprints as well as fragments from the dynamite he had purloined from Jimmy’s workbench. He had covered for her and her grandfather his entire career, but would not do so at the expense of Buster’s life. When he got back home, Sheriff Dudival took off his slippers and unlocked his closet to retrieve an evidence box marked “JBM.” In it was the meticulously documented, twenty-three-year cover-up of Jimmy’s career as a serial killer. He proceeded to unload his pistol and lock it in the safe with his other weapons. He put on a clean shirt, swatted his trousers with a clothes brush. He poured himself a glass of water, then looked around the room for anything he’d forgotten. In the top drawer of his desk was a document the size of a novella, and a pen. He opened it to the last page and signed, This is my confession, Shepard Dudival. He placed the document and Jimmy’s file prominently on the desk so no one would have trouble fin
ding it. He unscrewed the cap on the bottle of arsenic that he had fiddled from Jimmy’s place and poured half of it into the glass of water. Dudival sat on the bed, raised the glass to his lips and opened his mouth. Then, his black dial phone rang. He lowered the glass and looked at it. It rang the irritating old-fashioned way. Exasperrated, he answered it.

  “Hello?”

  “Sheriff Dudival?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Poult.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m…having my lunch.”

  “Aren’t you going to the court house?”

  “I was thinking of skipping that today.” There was a pause.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Buster called upstairs. He specifically asked that you be there today.” Dudival did not speak. “He’s intending to be his own lawyer and thinks you’re going to be proud of him.” Dudival looked at the metallic grey water in the glass.

  “All right,” he said as he carefully covered the glass with a High Grade coaster. It would keep. He picked up the evidence box, put it in his cruiser and drove to town. Buster had been reluctantly approved by the court to act as his own attorney. The only meat left on the bone of this bizarre trial was Buster’s rambling and inarticulate closing argument about why he was innocent, how he originally met the Mallomars, and what happened that night sans the blue material. It was a story with so many backtracks, dead ends, and side trails—that after four and a half hours both the judge and the county prosecutor felt like their brains had been dragged through wild rose bushes and beaten with a Sears Roebuck crowbar. Buster, although admitting to the jury that it looked bad, asked them to believe that he loved Mr. Mallomar, who was in many ways the father that he never had—even though Buster had officially had five. Some of the jury were visibly moved by what Buster had to say and even willing to forgive him for taking such a long time to say it.

  It was the State of Colorado’s turn. The county prosecutor, in his summation, lost no time in painting Buster as a homicidal opportunist who had planned from the beginning to get his hands on land by hook or by crook. Buster’s seduction of Mrs. Mallomar, he said, was merely one cynical means to an end. Once he had won Mr. Mallomar’s trust, Buster proceeded to woo Mrs. Mallomar, to replace her un-attentive husband so that the two of them could live at the Big Dog Ranch happily ever after. Destiny Stumplehorst was in court that day, but stormed tearfully out the back door at this accusation.

  The jury was sent out to decide Buster’s fate, but not before Judge Englelander took the time to pedantically instruct them in the legal nuances of “reasonable doubt” and the weight of “circumstantial evidence.” They asked no further questions, nor did they request to see any of the evidence to review in their sequestered chambers. Even Court TV was surprised that, by the next day—Friday morning—they had reached a verdict. Outsiders had no way of knowing that Saturday was the start of Vanadium’s 4H Ranchers of Tomorrow Days, and everyone was eager to get back home to spruce up their animals.

  b

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?” Judge Englelander said, when the jury had returned.

  “Yes, your honor,” the jury foreman replied.

  “How do you find the defendant, Buster McCaffrey?”

  “On the charge of first degree murder, we the jury find the defendant…not guilty!” croaked a phlegmy voice. Everyone turned around to see who dared interrupt at this sensitive legal juncture—and there was Jimmy Bayles Morgan, gaunt and hollow-eyed, standing at the back of the courtroom wheeling a small tank of oxygen behind her.

  “Mr. Whoever You Are…” Everyone in the courthouse from Vanadium hee-hawed at the Judge’s ignorance of Jimmy’s gender. “You’re out of order. If you say another word, I’m holding you in contempt of this court,” said Judge Englelander.

  “Ah kilt him.”

  There was a gasp from the gallery.

  “No, she dint!” Buster objected.

  “Shud up, you mo-ron. Ah’m bustin’ you outta here,” Jimmy said out of the side of her mouth.

  “I’ll have to warn you…” said the Judge.

  “No, ah’m warnin’ you, lady. Ya’ll about to pur-tissi-pate in a miscarriage a justice. Ah killed that sonofabitch Mallomar as sure as ah’m standin’ here b’fore ya!” Judge Englelander banged the gavel to get everybody to quiet down.

  “Identify yourself.”

  “Ah’m Jimmy…Bayles…Morgan.”

  It was at this moment that Judge Englelander regretted not having attended law school. She’d earned her judge’s robes simply winning a local election by four votes. What was she to do? Everyone was waiting for her to say something. Her left eye, which was still a bit puffy from the surgery, started to twitch uncontrollably as if a grasshopper was trapped under her skin. She tried to suppress it with her index finger, but to no avail. Finally, she cleared her throat.

  “Mr. Morgan, why did you take so long to come forward with this information?”

  “Ah was feelin’ under the weather after ah’d done it—the murder that is—and taken to my bed.”

  “I see. Do you know the defendant?”

  “Yes, ma’am, ah most certly do.”

  “And what, sir, is exactly your relationship to the defendant?”

  Jimmy turned around and looked directly at Buster and managed only the faintest of smiles.

  “Ah’m his mother.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Jiminy

  At first, Buster wasn’t sure that he heard that right, nor did anyone else, for that matter. But as it set in, the pandemonium in the courtroom was so raucous that the soundmen from the media had to yank their headsets before their eardrums exploded. Jimmy turned around to face the courtroom, more specifically her old friend, Sheriff Dudival, who sat with Jimmy’s incriminating evidence box at his feet. She slowly wheeled her squeaking oxygen tank to stand beside him and said, “‘Gennelness and morill strength com-bined must be the sa-li-ent carakerstics of the gennelman’…Missuz Hump-freez Manners For Men.” Dudival put his head in his hands and cried. Jimmy placed a weather-beaten hand on his shoulder and patted him as if she were comforting Ranger.

  “Didja really think ah’d let anythin’ happen to him, ol’ soldier?”

  The next logical question that occurred to everyone was this: if Jimmy was the mother then who was the father? Slowly, everyone pivoted around in his or her chair to gaze upon Sheriff Dudival, whose eyes were still moist from Jimmy’s declaration. Twenty-five years of derision would now come to an end as he sat up proudly and looked with affection upon his old inamorata. Judge Englelander banged her gavel.

  “Order in the court!”

  Of course, none of the Vanadians took heed of her request. She considered her options for a moment then banged the gavel for the second time.

  “This court is in recess!” Judge Englelander said standing. “Mr…Ms. Morgan, Mr. District Attorney…come to my chambers now!”

  The corrections officer re-handcuffed Buster and began to lead him out. Buster looked incredulously at Jimmy, her skin waxy and yellow as a Yukon potato.

  “Don’t worry, son,” she said and winked with typical bravado. “No one knows the law better than a Morgan—and Grampie give me the playbook on this one.”

  Buster, more confused than ever, was led out to the alley where the transport was waiting surrounded by the media and reporters. Jimmy was pushed, somewhat roughly, into the judge’s chambers.

  “This better not be bullshit!” Judge Englelander said, encouraged by the outlandish events to use profanity. Jimmy turned off her oxygen and started to fire up a Commander. “What do you think you’re doing? You can’t smoke in here! This is a government building!”

  Jimmy smiled and, uncharacteristically of her, obeyed. She tossed the still-lit cigarette out the window. “All right, then.” Judge Englelander was flummoxe
d. She had no idea as to how to proceed.

  “Ah’m willin’ to waiver my rights to self-incrimination,” Jimmy offered, trying to move things along. The judge decided to take a page from the sheriff’s book—as the highest ranking elected state official present—and improvise.

  “Ms. Morgan, would you be willing to place your right hand on a Bible and say that everything you are about to say is the whole truth and nothing but the truth?”

  “Hell, yeah,” said Jimmy.

  Now the sheriff entered the room, standing against the wall.

  “Perhaps now you can tell me what exactly happened to Mr. Mallomar.”

  “Well, here’s what happened. Ah had a powerful hate for that man. He came here for an ‘Authentic Western Experience’ and then whaddaya know? The sonofabitch goes and changes ever’ damn thang! So I set a charge a dynamite to that there rezee-vor they got up there above the house. The resultin’ mudslide swept the fat-assed bastard away. And the rest, as they say, is history.” The judge looked to Sheriff Dudival.

  “Is what she asserts possible, Sheriff?”

  Jimmy looked sangfroid at her old co-conspirator. With Jimmy willing to stand tall on the Mallomar murder and Buster steered clear of the Dominguez and Cord Travesty homicides, a patch of sunshine was now shining over Lame Horse Mesa. “I would say, yes, that is entirely possible.”

  Of course, in Jimmy’s tale, the only murder she owned up to was one murder never committed. She had cagily excised the part of the evening that dealt with Cookie Dominguez and Cord Travesty. The way she saw it, there was no use confessing to something that Buster wasn’t on the hook for—thanks to Sheriff Dudival. But the judge still remained skeptical.

  “Ms. Morgan, it’s obvious that you’re gravely ill…”

  “Come down with cancer,” Jimmy said, instinctively reaching for a cigarette but then putting it back.

  “How can the court know that, having received a death sentence yourself, you’re not attempting to take the blame for your son?”