“I was hoping you’d be willing to put it on the third finger of your left hand.”
She slipped the ring on her ring finger and kissed me and that was all we said on the subject.
Della was a good cook, one who believed in the traditional holiday turkey with dressing and all the trimmings. She was in the kitchen most of the morning, and we spent the rest of the day in a pleasant, overfed lethargy. After the New Year came we drove northward to Oklahoma and spent three days with Little and Annie. Each morning we rose to a big country breakfast, and in the evenings we sat by the fireplace in the living room and drank corn whiskey and listened to the radio. One evening we heard a live broadcast of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, returned after many years’ absence to play at Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa.
When we started to leave I tried to get Little to take my share of the money and split it with Lum Shamblin’s mother, but he refused. “That would be straying from my appointed course,” he explained. “And I done did that once in my life to my own regret.”
“What if you were to just give her my whole share?” I asked. “I’ve got a feeling that I don’t need to keep any of this money. A strong feeling.”
“I can do that,” he said with a nod, giving me a quizzical look. “You ain’t getting superstitious on me, are you?”
“Let’s say I’m convinced that keeping it would be straying from my appointed course.”
That was something he could understand. He nodded and shook my hand. “She’ll get every penny,” he promised.
“I know she will,” I replied, and climbed behind the wheel.
* * *
We bought a house near the park in Tyler and joined the country club and settled into the comfortable life of the small-town wealthy. I rented an office downtown in the Peoples’ Bank Building and pretended to practice law. Della had a cubbyhole there where she managed our investments. In the early ’50s she plunged heavily into IBM and we grew even richer.
During those years we traveled all over the world and made a trip to Europe almost every fall. Occasionally we went back out to West Texas. The town changed over the years, and not all the changes were for the better. The Weilbach went broke in the late ’50s and stood boarded up for years. Eventually the local historical society got title to the place and the last I heard they were trying to raise money to convert it into a combination museum and flea market. Whatever its fate, it will never again be the glittering place it was in the days of the Donner Basin Boom.
Except for Andy and Mona Wolfe, most of the people we knew from those days are dead now. Sheriff Will Scoggins’s case was moved to Sweetwater on a change of venue. He hired a flamboyant El Paso criminal lawyer named Durwood Kean, and went to trial in the late spring not long after we left town. Kean mounted a spirited defense, but no one who watched the trial had any doubt what the jury’s verdict would be. Scoggins would be going away for a very long time. The final arguments ended on a Friday afternoon, but the judge decided to wait until Monday to charge the jury and send them out for their deliberations.
It was Scoggins’s last weekend of freedom, and he and everybody else knew it. In those days Texas prisons didn’t segregate convicted cops in their own units as they do today. They were thrown in with the general population, something that was tantamount to a death sentence in his case. Early Saturday morning he sent his wife to her sister’s house for the weekend. That evening he sat in his den brooding and drinking Seagram’s Seven straight from the bottle. When the bottle was almost empty, he took his long-barreled Smith & Wesson from its holster, put it to his right temple and blew what few brains he had all over the room. Ollie Marne, who knew Scoggins’s history well, later told me that if you consider that by pulling that trigger he rid the county of one of its biggest thieves, you soon realize it was the only time in his long career that he fired a shot in the line of duty.
Chicken Little lived twelve more years, and Della and I visited him and Annie almost every spring. At last, at age eighty-two, his heart simply quit beating as he sat on his front porch one afternoon in early summer. Annie found him slumped there in his chair, an empty toddy mug in his hand, and the best she could determine, he’d died about the same time the sun set over the Cimarron River. She only survived him by three years, and they’re buried side by side in a little churchyard cemetery in the Cookson Hills not a mile from where he was born. Manlow Rhodes thrived for two more decades and managed the bank up until the day he went in the hospital to die of pancreatic cancer. I was a pallbearer at all three of their funerals.
Zip Zimmerman and his redheaded mistress were killed in a car wreck just a couple of years after we left town. Wilburn Rasco and Howard Northcutt both died of natural causes before a decade had passed, and Captain Bob Crowder was felled by heart attack in 1972 after a long and distinguished career with the Rangers. And I heard just last month that Simon Van Horn was still alive in Fillmore, but that he’d become something of a recluse, old and rich beyond imagining.
As I’d once told Ollie Marne, the 2 percent interest in the Havel lease never made him wealthy, but it made him comfortable and independent, and it sent his little girl to the University of Texas. After we left town, Ollie quit the Sheriff’s Department and banged around the house for a few months, getting in his wife’s way every time she turned a corner. Neither a reader nor a homebody, he was at loose ends. Finally he asked for his old job back. About five years after we left town he was killed in a shootout with a pair of robbers in the lobby of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank. Manlow Rhodes told me that he took a bullet he didn’t have to take, and thereby saved a customer’s life. I hope Ollie had time to laugh at himself before he died. He always did say the good guys were clowns.
After several months of legal wrangling, Clifton Robillard finally pled guilty to embezzlement in state court, maintaining all the while that he had returned every penny of the money in the weeks before the robbery. No doubt he was telling the truth, but the fact that only $94,000 had been found in the room at the Alamo Plaza made his contention appear ludicrous. The judge, unimpressed by his attorney’s appeal for mercy, gave him twenty-five years. The newspapers reported that he wept when he heard the sentence.
But his troubles were far from over. The federal prosecutor had him hauled out to El Paso on a bench warrant where he faced charges of bank robbery, conspiracy to commit bank robbery, and suborning a felony in violation of the federal penal code.
Tobe Perkins and Charlie Needam earned their money; on the stand they proved to be credible witnesses, and the jury bought their story. Robillard was found guilty on all three counts, which resulted in a total sentence of thirty years. Since federal law supercedes state law, the federal time would be served first.
Bob Crowder rode along with the two deputy U.S. Marshals who took him to prison. Years later he told me about that trip. It was a cold day in December of 1948, and the sky was gray as iron. A light sleet started falling just as they crossed the Kansas state line, icing up the roads and slowing traffic to the point that the last thirty miles took better than an hour to cover. Crowder said that the prisoner gasped when he saw the great walls of the Leavenworth Prison looming dark and grim on the horizon. The guard at the entry examined their papers, then picked up his telephone. A few seconds later the gates swung open to give Clifton Robillard his first glimpse of the harsh, pitiless world in which he would spend his final years on this earth.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
THE ROGUES’ GAME. Copyright © 2005 by Milton T. Burton. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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ISBN 0-312-33681-0
EAN 978-0312-33681-3
First Edition: July 2005
eISBN 9781466860636
First eBook edition: November 2013
The Rogues' Game Page 22
