Wrath in the Blood

by Ronald Watkins

  “What are you going to do, Ranger?” he asked, awestruck at the assignment.

  “Some special work. I won't be in the office for a while so you see to things as best you can.”

  Goodnight informed the director of his decision to conduct the investigation single handedly and cautioned him to say nothing to anyone, even in the office.

  “You don't trust the Rangers?” Ober said incredulously, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief.

  “Not with this. It's too close to home.”

  Ober's jaw had worked itself silently then finally he simply nodded his head in agreement.

  The actual investigation only took two weeks, which in light of the repercussions seemed a surprisingly short time. Goodnight asked the mayor to send the reports he had by messenger since he didn't want to risk being seen at city hall. He'd studied them, then made telephone calls to cops he knew and trusted, asking general questions about some of his suspects, not letting on what he was up to. In some cases he acted in fact as if he was thinking about recruiting the men into the Rangers and was grateful to receive cautionary replies. Finally he picked up a city detective, Jimmy Wiengart, on his day off and took him to a hotel room on south 24th street Goodnight had rented for interrogations and equipped with a reel to reel tape recorder.

  Wiengart had been on the force six years and had made detective after only three. Goodnight reasoned he had been very malleable. Since making detective he had been Cluff's partner. For six hours Goodnight questioned Wiengart, never once giving him his rights, never suggesting he might want a lawyer. He had put the sweating detective into a chair and towering over him in his black suit, cross draw heavy Smith and Wesson revolver prominently displayed on his hip and had described Wiengart's future if he didn't cooperate.

  “They'll kill me, Ranger!” Wiengart wailed repeatedly.

  “Hell, Jimmy. If you don't make a deal with me I just might kill you myself.”

  Finally he convinced the cop that someone was going to talk and it might as well be him. “I'm on it now, boy. You don't think I aim to let go, now do you?” He promised Wiengart no prosecution and no disciplinary action for any wrongdoing if he rolled over, and if he cooperated by wearing a body mic. Once the tape recorder was rolling Goodnight gave Wiengart his rights most politely and suggested he might like a lawyer before talking.

  “Damn, Ranger,” Wiengart answered, “if I can't trust a deal with you, who can I trust?” For five more hours Wiengart poured out every detail he knew about police payoffs, naming names, identifying pick up locations, incriminating half a dozen seasoned fellow officers and implicating dozens more. He left the hotel room with a body mike and for ten days wore it whenever he was on duty. After each shift he dropped the tape off at Goodnight's house and received a fresh one.

  With Wiengart's written permission Goodnight placed a recorder on his home telephone and the final two days of the investigation had him call the bad guys, including Cluff, and discuss the dirty deals they had done in the past.

  Goodnight was not so much shocked as saddened by what he learned. The tentacles appeared to spread into every precinct of the police department and partially up the command chain, but Goodnight only had hard evidence on Cluff and seven others. He decided making an example of them might do the trick for the whole department.

  What he found especially disgusting was the extent of personal decadence on the part of his dirty eight. Cluff's crooked cops had several party pads where prostitutes entertained them and they smoked marijuana and hashish they had seized. More than one, according to Wiengart, was wired on speed. They were dividing four thousand dollars a week between the eight of them. From shaking down pimps and drug dealers they had moved into protecting certain drug deals. In one of those a dealer had killed an undercover cop. Cluff and his men were so deeply involved themselves no arrest was made and they worked hard in the coverup. As a result the cop killer walked away scot-free.

  Goodnight conducted his entire investigation and deal making with Wiengart without ever once talking to a prosecutor.

  He hired a court reporter he knew and trusted, the retired widow of a former ranger, to transcribe the tapes at his house, then delivered them in person to the state attorney general. It was the hottest potato the career politician had ever received and he was none too pleased about it. Photogenic and obscenely ambitious, he read the ten page summary of allegations Goodnight had prepared then shouted, “Who gave you the authority to make a deal with this... this Wiengart character?”

  “He's not a 'character', as you put it,” Goodnight said easily. “He's a respected police detective with two citations for bravery. And if I'd involved anyone else I wouldn't have a case.”

  The attorney general acted as if that would have been just fine with him. If he actually prosecuted he'd lose the endorsement of the statewide Chiefs of Police Association. “You can't promise no charges to this guy! Your deal is he won't even be disciplined by the police force. You had no authority to do that!”

  “If I hadn't, there'd be no case. I picked Wiengart because he was the weakest of the group. I figured he'd crack and he did. Now are you going to indict, or am I taking this case to the County Attorney?”

  The state Attorney General blanched at the question. The County Attorney was a member of the opposite political party and was already positioning himself to run against him. How would it look if the attorney general was known to have refused this case? Knowing Goodnight's reputation there was no reason to doubt for an instant that it wouldn't come out.

  The attorney general gave Goodnight the first of many dirty looks he would receive over the following years then said, “I'll prosecute the bastards, Ranger. And I'll find some way to get the city to go along with your deal – but I don't have to like it.”

  That afternoon Goodnight returned to his office and resumed his duties as captain of Rangers. Ten days later all hell broke loose.

  SEVEN

  From his desk Goodnight called the three insurance companies involved in the Swensen case and asked them to forward to him copies of the insurance policies and anything else in their files bearing a signature. After that he worked on the McGuire report until he noticed it was growing dark outside. He took a final pull on his cigar and shut down the word processor. In the kitchen he ate a sandwich standing over the sink, and since it was Friday night, climbed into his jacket, put on his Stetson, slipped the .44 Special Smith and Wesson back into place out of sight and locked the front door behind him.

  Outside he closed the wooden picket gate to his yard, turned left, then strolled casually down the sidewalk along Greenwood Street where he had lived for nearly four decades. In the late 50's when he and his wife, Florence, had bought the red brick two bedroom, single bath house, it had been located in the heart of the white middle class district of the city. In those days the affluent section was still edging northward towards the north mountains and to the south, across the ugly scar of the dry Salt River bed, was the small black district, the larger Hispanic laying just west of it.

  But during the 70's and 80's a complete transformation had taken place. Where Goodnight now lived was nearly entirely Hispanic and on evenings such as this when he heard the familiar rhythms of Latin music coming from the homes, observed the children playing soccer where his son had once played stick ball, and nodded in greeting to his neighbors sitting on their porches to enjoy the day's end, he could almost imagine himself in a more prosperous district of any fairly large city in Mexico.

  Goodnight had no problem with the change in character of his street. He had been raised along the border and spent nearly as much time as a boy south of it as he had north. The Mexican border was then as it is now a country of its own. He spoke Spanish as well as he did English, though, he was told, with a more pronounced western accent. All he had ever asked of neighbors was that they have jobs, mind their kids and keep up their houses. The ones he had these days did all of that just fine.

  At the corner he turned lef
t again and walked 100 feet along the busier street then entered Rosa's Cantina. He nodded at the bartender, the deceased Rosa's husband Arturo, then went to the end of the bar where it turned towards the wall and assumed his usual stool. Arturo, a slender, mustached man who should be enjoying retirement but missed his bar too much to take it, placed before him an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels along with a shot glass and water as Goodnight extracted a Te Amo Lonesdale cigar from the outside pocket of his suit jacket. As he bit off the tip he pulled his battered Zippo lighter from the right lower pocket and carefully lit up.

  He had bought the lighter at the PX in San Francisco when he was 21 years old and in a hurry to board the troop transport that took him to Korea. Once he had left it behind in a hotel room in Bisbee and had turned the car around to drive two extra hours just to be certain he got it back. It just seemed like bad luck to lose something that had been everywhere with him since he was a young man. The Zippo lighter had its share of nicks and dents, far fewer than its owner had picked up over the same years.

  Trio Los Panchos were singing Nosotros on the Wurlitzer jukebox. Goodnight liked the group and sometimes played them at home. Their perfect harmony came from a lifetime of singing together. Sometimes a Mexican singer with a guitar came into Rosa's and with Arturo's permission unplugged the jukebox to sing for his money.

  When he and Flo had been young and struggling they had often come to this same bar on Saturday nights. In those days it was called Nicky's Cafe. Flo and he would sit where he sat alone now and drink nickel a glass beer, sipping it so three glasses a piece lasted the evening. They'd slow dance in front of the jukebox to Benny Goodman or Perry Como, laugh and talk with friends from the neighborhood, then, at midnight, walk home arm and arm in the warm spring night.

  In their bedroom Goodnight would open the windows to let in the breeze then stretch his long frame on the bed as he watched Flo slowly undress and prepare for bed, taking longer than needed because she knew the pleasure it gave her husband. Their foreplay could consume an hour because he could never get enough of the feel of Flo's flesh, the softness of her skin, the warm wetness of her kisses. When they coupled she would struggle never to make a sound no matter how good she felt and when her orgasm overcame her, the sound from her throat was deep and guttural like the last moment of life. Afterwards, more often than not, she was embarrassed by her display of passion, as if it wasn't natural for a woman to enjoy the pleasure God had given to both men and women.

  Sometimes sitting here, looking over at the same jukebox, though now with very different music, he could nearly visualize how it had been then. At times like this on a warm Spring night it was almost as if Flo were still alive and would step out of the lady's room with that generous smile that never failed to bring a matching grin to his face. Sometimes it seemed those days had been a 100 years ago.

  Goodnight had been born and raised on the family ranch in the southern region of Arizona, distant neighbors to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner's family spread, high desert with too many cattle working over too few grass areas. In the years before the war it had been an isolated existence. Times and the land were hard. Adobe ranch houses sat miles apart, without electricity or running water. Horses were as indispensable for staying in touch with civilization as they were for working the herd. There were still ranches out there like that, even settlements with generators for electricity, towns that didn't appear on most maps, places where time was unmoved.

  In his grandfather's days the family had grazed cattle on both sides of the border. Even in the 1940's when Goodnight worked as a cowhand most of the help had been vaqueros from Mexico. Whereas the Anglo cowboys tended to be drunks and drifters, the vaqueros brought with them a genuine love of the life. They carefully saved their money and returned every winter to their families.

  Goodnight learned to smoke and drink hard liquor with those men, to sing romantic Spanish ballads by camp fires, how to work a horse in tight with a troublesome maverick. It had been the vaqueros who insisted on making a man of him, as they put it, the summer he turned 15 by taking him to the Mexican brothel at Agua Prieta south of the border and talking the giggling girls there into spending the night for free with the awkward, gangly Anglo cowboy.

  Goodnight had been born too late for World War II, had lost the older brother he adored at Iwo Jima and as a tribute to him had enlisted in the national guard. When Truman activated the unit and he was sent to Korea it had seemed in his youthful mind a way to make up for the loss of the brother he had idealized though his father had lectured him repeatedly on the senselessness and utter waste of all war.

  Goodnight had seen more than his share of action, enough to learn for himself the waste and futility of war, then been shot in his left leg. He'd argued with the doctors in the field hospital in Korea to keep the leg that still gave him trouble from time to time. Convalescing in Japan they'd pinned some medals on him, the Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and in a most embarrassing scene General Wainwright himself had presented him with the Medal of Honor. It seemed to Goodnight every soldier who had taken part in the action deserved the same or better, if there was any, but as he was the only survivor they'd picked on him.

  Once he was back home he'd shown the medals to his father who'd cautioned him not to let his mother know because she'd been afraid he'd taken too many chances and this would only confirm it. He placed the bright metal and bits of ribbon in a forgotten cigar box on the ranch and never told anyone about them. When Flo was unpacking his things as they moved into the house in Phoenix she ran across the medals and made him tell her what he'd done to earn them.

  It was the only time he recalled her ever being angry with him. “You're a goddamn fool, Johnny! A goddamn fool!” Then she'd cried until he promised he'd never take such chances again. He often wished he'd been better at keeping that promise.

  Loving horses and the freedom of the open range as he did ranching had still not been for the family's surviving son and John Goodnight had worked first as a deputy sheriff in Santa Cruz County, the job he held when he finally persuaded Florence Ann Pirie to marry him. That had been in 1953. Four years later he was recruited into the Rangers, relocated to Phoenix, and with the increase in pay the couple had bought their house on Greenwood.

  The Goodnight ranch had gone in the 60's, victim of prolonged drought, debt and low cattle prices. His father had died of a broken heart two years later followed by his mother within months.

  Flo had come from a big family and wanted many children, but it wasn't until 1966 when they'd pretty well given up on the thought that their son Luke was born, named for Goodnight's long dead older brother.

  Goodnight removed the seal on the bottle, poured an amber shot into the glass, then, as was his custom, threw the first drink of the night back on his throat. He poured another before taking a sip of water.

  It was early yet and there were only two couples at the other end of the bar, sitting in a tight circle around one table. Marty Robbins' clear, distinctive voice suddenly filled the air from the jukebox, singing the only English language song in the Wurlitzer. It was the one about El Paso and Goodnight thought it was there because it was about a mythical Rosa's Cantina, but whenever it was played it was always the barmaid, Conchita Herrera, who was responsible. He looked over as she walked up and took the stool beside him, smelling of a fragrant perfume.

  “Como estas, Ranger?”

  “Muy bien, Conchita. Y tu?”

  “Muy bien.”

  Conchita's family came from Las Cruces, New Mexico, but she had been raised in the adjoining neighborhood and had worked at Rosa's for six years. She was in her late 30's, unmarried and childless. Her boyfriend, Emilio Lopez, who was unable to find a lasting job, kept promising marriage but never seemed to find the time. Goodnight thought that was just as well since he was one of the meanest sons of bitches Goodnight had ever known. Why a fine looking woman with such a sweet disposition as Conchita would take up with a man like that was one of life
's mysteries he had long ago stopped trying to puzzle out. She just did.

  “No date tonight?” she asked in English. Conchita was a bit shorter than average, with a slender, pleasant figure and rich, black hair worn long. Her eyes were luminous green pools, probably some Irish in her, and her smile dazzled with bright teeth. Most of all she possessed a deep, hearty laugh, quite out of character with her rather dainty appearance, and Goodnight had never known her not to be in a good mood. Given her childhood he suspected that a current of unhappiness ran deep in her.

  Since Flo's death from cancer seven years before there had been no dates. Conchita knew that but asked anyway. “Not tonight. Just a little whiskey and some thinking.”

  “Why do you smoke those stinky cigars? They make me sneeze.” As if to make her point she placed her forefinger under her nose and sneezed, sounding like a chipmunk as she did.

  “Where's Emilio? I didn't see him last week either.” Usually her boyfriend hung around so she could buy him drinks and to make certain no one flirted with his woman.

  “We are finished. He hit me one time too many.”

  “Does he know it’s over?”

  “I don't care what he knows, O.K.? Bring a date next week, Ranger. It's not good to be alone so much.”

  “You can be certain that when I find a woman as fine as you this is the first place I'll bring her.”

  Conchita laughed and hit him in the arm as she went to a waving customer.

  Goodnight was pretty certain Conchita didn't know that he had once seen her as a young teenager. She, her sister and mother lived two streets over in those days. Some drunken gang members had mistakenly shot up the house one night when drive by shootings were still rare, killing both her mother and sister.