by George Wier
And what’s my profession?
I help people.
Some of my clients have run into legal trouble-or maybe they want to avoid running into legal trouble, whatever the case may be-and I help them.
I’ve found that people fall into two categories. Cash rich, in which case they need to dump some of it-or cash poor, in which case they need some. That’s where I come in.
But we were talking about history.
Aside from all the required college classes with desiccated old instructors doling out daily chapter assignments, a certain amount of required outside reading and the re-interpretation of tax law changes that each student must digest and regurgitate, some of it going back to the nineteenth century, college for me had one saving grace: in my junior year I took a course in Criminal Syndicates of the Southwest, taught by an overweight and edgy former trial lawyer who had been in a car collision years before that had left him a paraplegic. However good or not so good he may have been in court in days gone by-and let me tell you, after the first day of class that year, I was certain that he’d been a god-he did one thing well: he made the men and the times of his favorite era-the Great Depression-live and breathe. Since that class I’d held a grim fascination for historic Texas criminals, some of the notorious gangsters of the 1920s and 30s, and not just Bonnie and Clyde, who had little more going for them than a species of dumb luck and a tad more than their fair share of press. All by way of saying that there were other folks running around back then along the unpaved Texas back roads and through open range country. For instance, Raymond Hamilton and Joe Palmer were an unlucky pair who were once confederates of Clyde Barrow up in West Dallas. At one time Ray was public enemy #1. Both Ray and Joe were put to death in the electric chair about eight minutes apart back in 1935 for the killing of a prison guard during their escape from Eastham prison farm. At one time they’d had the entire nation looking for them. Ray and Joe were also confederates of Whitey Walker and Blackie Thompson, two of the worst desperadoes ever to hit the Southwest. In 1926, Whitey, Blackie and a fellow named Matthew Carpin put together one of the most successful though short-lived crime syndicates in U.S. history by taking over a mining camp called Signal Hill up in the Texas Panhandle. For one brief year they ran the illegal moonshine trade, set up gambling houses, whorehouses, master-minded and staged robberies, and took a cut from every job that went down within a hundred miles of the place. Things got so bad that Governor Moody had to declare martial law, and sent a detachment of Texas Rangers to bring some semblance of social order.
I recall noting the description by one of the Rangers as he topped the last North Texas hill just after sunset and looked down upon the mining camp. From the hills and valleys surrounding the sprawling, thrown-together patchwork town there rose a black pall of soot from the carbon black plants that had sprung up after the oil strike. And within a hundred yards of each well head there was a continuous plume of fire rising into the night, the burn-off of the escaping natural gas. The ranger scratched his head, turned to his companion and said: “My friend, all my life I have kept in my mind an image of what hell must look like, and now I have found it.”
That was Signal Hill. And in those days “Signal Hill” and the name “Carpin” were rarely spoken very far apart from each other. That name wasn’t exactly one of the nicest family names to carry around. I wondered how his offspring had turned out.
The original Carpin had made a fortune at Signal Hill. And some of that money must have stayed around. And that was another thing I’d have to check into on my suddenly growing list.
Signal Hill had existed for a brief while some eighty years ago. There were ghosts up there in those hills, the bad and restless spirits of equally bad men who when alive had valued human life slightly less than they valued a middling poker hand.
I found myself asking myself why I should be worrying over men dead these many years gone by.
I could have answered myself, right then and there that Tuesday morning as I held my car door open for Julie and tossed a travel bag into the backseat. I could have reminded myself that while times change and mankind appears to progress, there are some who still abide in the dark and heed no law except the grim laws of survival and revenge.
We rolled up I-35 toward Georgetown, Texas. Our destination: a new strip mall that was under construction and a visit with a very old friend. Julie still wore Notre Dame, her hair once again in a ponytail and the bitch-glasses perched forward on her delicate nose. She: beautiful. Me: practically a dead man.
She was trouble. Green eyes and reddish hair. And she was trouble. No way I could have run.
So I had to start thinking about Hank Sterling.
Back around 1988 when I was first struggling to make it-or die in the attempt-one of my clients was Hank Sterling.
Hank was a different breed, an aging Vietnam veteran who liked to drink beer, build things, and blow them up. Like many of my clients, he had the Midas touch. He ran a one-man construction and demolition company out of his house in Killeen, Texas, did perhaps one job every year or two, and in the meantime welded spare parts together in such a way as to call the result art. For instance, there’s a megalithic piece of his work entitled “Dreams of Flight” out in front of the courthouse in my home town. The thing looks more like a melted pterodactyl that it does an airplane-not exactly the kind of thing I would have spent county money on, but that’s just me. The interesting thing was that somebody liked it. And Hank himself was sort of like that. Same as his art he wasn’t for everybody, but for some reason the two of us had gotten along just fine over the years.
Hank called me up one day with a special problem. He had half a million in cash and he needed to get rid of it. A certain IRS agent had been nosing around in his business and Hank wanted to make sure certain revenuer didn’t catch the scent of undeclared greenbacks.
After that I put Hank in contact with an accountant who could manage his money, help him legally avoid paying more than he had to, and who could handle his sudden bouts of alcoholism and wildcatter fever. But, being Hank, from time to time he still had need of my services, and I was never the kind of fellow who could turn down a friend in need.
In 1989, there was a knock on my door in the middle of the night. Two men in black suits and sunglasses were there on the doorstep of my apartment and they had questions for me. Not about myself or what I did for a living, but about Hank Sterling-his whereabouts, his routine, his habits, and the possible location of the IRS agent who had taken an interest in him. Apparently the man was missing.
What did I know about it? Nada.
After that the two of us were never as close, but he still called me when the need was great.
At the moment I needed his advice more than anything; and it never hurt to have a friend in your corner, especially someone who knew how to fight.
*****
North Hills Shopping Center in Georgetown was mostly complete, even though the marquee twisted in the wind, suspended by cable from a mobile crane outfit sitting on a new parking lot. A Randalls grocery store and a Walgreens had already moved in, along with a few specialty stores.
I parked near the construction zone and Julie and I got out into the morning sunshine. There wasn’t so much as a wisp of cloud in the sky and the breeze felt fine.
We found Hank. He was nailing wooden studs in place with a pneumatic nail gun. His shirt was sweat-soaked and his jeans were torn at the knees, which was about his usual attire. Anyone who didn’t know him would have asked where the boss was. The fact of the matter was that Hank was the boss.
When he saw the two of us he grinned really big giving us a toothsome smile. He put the nail gun down, walked over to me and shook my hand in an iron grip.
“Damn good to see you, Bill,” he said.
“You, too!” I said.
“Who’s this?”
“This is Julie.”
They shook hands.
“Girlfriend or client?” he asked.
; “Both,” Julie said.
“Okay,” he said, and looked at me. Maybe it was the look on my face. I don’t know. “You want to talk, don’t you?”
“You have the time?”
“Sure.”
Hank preferred his own kitchen to a restaurant; one of the little quirks I’ve never understood about him. Go figure. It was getting up toward lunch and a quick poll from Hank showed three hungry people.
We ended up following Hank the thirty miles back to his home in Killeen. Every now and again Hank would attempt to sink his foot through the floorboard of his ’69 Ford Fairlane, and shoot ahead of us by a mile or more, then he’d slow down and let me catch up.
The land rolled by, the sun beat down relentlessly in the Texas spring, that spring like all others that I could ever remember. A spring, a week, a day of pure hell and beauty. I suppose that when I was a kid, I must have held a fervent wish that my life would go just the way it was going now, and to that kid, if he were watching, all this must seem about perfect.
CHAPTER FOUR
I parked my Mercedes across the street and Julie and I walked across a front lawn that was a couple of weeks overdue for mowing. The weeds slapped at our ankles and shins. By and large the whole place was pretty much as I remembered it.
The front porch was rickety, the paint peeling back in places, and there was a front porch swing that had the various parts of an old carburetor laid out on a large piece of torn cardboard, waiting for re-assembly at some future date. The screen door was off and leaning up against the side of the house. The remnants of abandoned mud dauber nests seemed to be everywhere. The doorbell appeared to be out of commission, hanging out several inches from the door-facing with wires going this way and that. Yep, some things never change.
Hank held the front door open for us.
“Come on in. Come on in. Don’t mind the mess.”
We followed him through an undulating pathway to the kitchen. Hank had become a collector over the years. The house looked like it had survived an endless series of failed garage sales, but only just barely.
Julie walked ahead of me, turning around a couple of times with arched eyebrows and a twisted, sardonic expression on her face. I almost laughed out loud.
We all sat down at the kitchen table. There was far less clutter in the kitchen.
We looked around as we took our seats. Up on the windowsill above the sink was a line of glass telephone pole wire insulators from the early twentieth century. On the counter stood an ancient toaster oven from about 1950.
Hank opened his refrigerator, reached in and brought out three Pabst Blue Ribbon beers and set them in front of us. While he was doing this I found myself wondering if the refrigerator was actually an icebox, one of the kind that required an actual block of ice from a deliveryman with a set of ice hooks. But then the transformer kicked in with a deep, gravelly, electric hum.
Hank sat there at his kitchen table with us in his antique-store house with a shit-eating grin on his face and basked in the glow of my green-eyed client. He shifted his innocent, blue Paul Newman eyes my way and dropped a knowing flick of a wink. I wondered what the hell that was all about.
“So. What brings you here, Bill?”
“Her,” I said.
*****
Julie’s story was believable-so believable, in fact, that the sheer detail of it had me re-creating it visually in my mind as she walked me through it.
Archie Carpin lived on a three-thousand acre ranch in North Texas along the bank of the Red River. There he kept quarter-horses and ran an underground still operation that could have rivaled any of the smaller commercial distilleries in Dallas or Milwaukee in sheer quantity of output. But he kept himself respectable in the eyes of his neighbors, which were few in number. He liked it that way. “The less seen, the less said,” was one of the little one-liners that he was likely to drop at any given moment.
Julie had met the man at a strip-club in Vegas, just off the main drag. After her show he’d motioned her over, bought her a series of watered-down drinks, engaged her services for the evening and once she was ensconced in his hotel room proceeded to ply her with drugs. And she was all too willing. Whatever it was he was after, it apparently wasn’t sex, as he hadn’t so much as laid a hand on her.
No. What the man was into was domination: the subjugation of the spirit and the life of a person-and like the fly to the Venus Flytrap, Julie was drawn in. He dripped money and played a covert game of mental and emotional warfare that in a short space of time drained enough of her life force to make her little more than his personal slave. She’d stayed with him for six months, leaving behind her life in Vegas and following the playboy to Miami-where he kept his drug connections-and Houston, where he kept his offices in a downtown high-rise oil company building, and finally to the North Texas ranch. Then, two months before our first breakfast together, Julie did something that only Julie could have done. She pulled the rug out from under Archie Carpin, robbed him blind, and didn’t bother hanging around to take his temperature afterward.
That first morning in my office I had wanted to break into a fit of uncontrolled laughter when Julie had told me what she had done. What I hadn’t known at the time was how she’d done it. After she was finished this time I no longer felt so much like laughing. For the first time I began to see things from Carpin’s point of view. And let me tell you, if it had been me, after the stunt she’d pulled, I’d have found her and very quietly shut her up for good, money or no money.
Here’s what she did.
A fellow cannot amass a great deal of ill-gotten wealth without making some enemies along the way, and this was definitely a fact in Archie Carpin’s case. Also, I have met few men who do not have a weakness of one kind or another. Carpin’s weakness was horses, and his chief enemy was a fellow named Ernest Neil, his chief competitor. Neil ran a quarter-horse ranch just south of Navasota, Texas and like Carpin, he ran some of the best horseflesh on the hoof. Neil and Carpin had been at each other’s throats since the 1970s when the only pari-mutuel horse-betting to be had was across the state line in Shreveport, Louisiana. On about the same day ten or more times a year during the spring both men loaded their horses onto their sleek trailers and trucked them two hundred miles across Texas and over the Louisiana border to compete against each other.
All this Julie had gleaned from Lefty and Carl.
And, of course, before I could ask it, Hank was asking her himself: “Who are Lefty and Carl?”
Julie loved horses. While she was at Carpin’s North Texas horse ranch she spent a good deal of time down at the stables, within spitting distance of the ruddy waters of the Red River. She loved to ride and it was the one bit of freedom that Carpin allowed her to enjoy, probably because he cared for the animals more than he cared for Julie, and she was kind to Carpin’s horses. She very soon learned all of the horses by name, and they, in turn, became used to her. She made it a point to get friendly with Carpin’s jockeys who were a pair of short yet irascible men named Lefty Jorgenson and Carl Sanderberry. Lefty and Carl soon had her giving them a hand mucking out the stables, keeping the horses’ hooves clean, feeding and watering them, grooming them, and the sundry other chores that are an everyday affair at any well-run horse operation. They had no way of knowing she was up to no good.
And, of course, she nosed around the still. When Carpin caught her at it he beat her within an inch of her life and confined her to his walk-in bedroom closet for a week and put her on rations of little more than water and cocaine.
After a week of pleading with him for freedom, she clammed up. The next morning Carpin let her out.
Thereafter, Julie spent even more time with the horses and, consequently, in the company of Carl and Lefty.
Carl liked to chew tobacco and spit. Also he liked to talk his head off. He would just as soon talk to himself if no one else was around, but if someone, or anyone, for that matter, happened to be handy, they were sure to get an earful. Carl-an aging Aggie from C
ollege Station-liked to try to tell stories of the old days with himself and a young Archie Carpin and the boys, but he usually managed to tell them wrong and Lefty had to correct him “just to keep the record straight,” as he would say.
One story that Julie heard again and again was how, in 1979, one of Archie Carpin’s best quarter horses foundered while at the stables in Shreveport on Friday evening before the Saturday race. Carpin blamed Ernest Neil for it, even though he had no proof of foul play. The horse, a two-year old stallion by the name of Julliard Dare had to be put down. The next day Ernest Neil’s horse, Pressure Cooker, came in first against some pretty long odds. And that’s where Julie got her idea.
I gave the woman some credit. She could be resourceful. Also, she understood men all too well. I found it more than a little intimidating.
As she coldly described how she set Carpin up I found myself wondering if I was possibly as gullible myself, or perhaps I was being gullible just by taking her story at face value when I should have ditched her from the get-go. The blood drained slowly from my head and pooled in my gut as I listened.
“So I said, duh! What’s this guy got? He’s got a half-million dollars worth of horses and he’s got a ten million dollar moonshine operation and there are greased palms from Texas all the way to Washington, D.C. He made money from supplying name brand whiskey knock-off for bars from Houston all the way to Chicago. Carl and Lefty talked a little too much. Archie’s payoffs came in installments. Also, because of his appetites-you know, horses and drugs-he was always one step ahead of bankruptcy. With his pay-offs coming in installments, they were vitally important, but vulnerable.”
