Both his eyebrows went up. “Yeah, and those left behind can have ‘a clear conscience,’ because you caused your own murder.”
“And the text of the note got in the papers?”
“Oh yeah.” His eyes narrowed. “Carbon monoxide MO sure makes it sound like one guy is doing this.”
“It does. One guy among several in a dirty business, elected to cleanup duty.”
He nodded, then asked, “So what now?”
“You’ll need to handle this on the Chicago end. That garage is a very old crime scene, but give it a gander. Talk to neighbors and see if anybody saw anybody around that night who didn’t belong, or anything suspicious. And get the police files on this thing, look at the photos if there are any, talk to the dicks who worked it, see if you can locate the coroner who called it suicide.”
“What I would do without these work tips? What about you, Nate?”
“Well, I’m taking the advice I’ve been given so often by so many.”
“What advice is that?”
“I’m going to hell,” I said cheerfully. “And Texas.”
Chapter 5
The boy in me had been expecting a rambling mission-style structure with a hitching post for horses, while the grown-up me figured on an anonymous modern building with an American flag and parking lot of patrol cars. What the Waco branch of the Texas Rangers turned out to be was a pair of crowded, cluttered rooms among half a dozen others at the rear of the first floor of a defunct department store in a section of the downtown that looked like a war zone.
What lived up to expectations was Captain Clint Peoples himself, a rangy hombre in his fifties with dark graying hair in a military-short cut and a ready smile that didn’t keep me from noticing that those steady blue eyes didn’t blink much. One of the two rooms was his, half as big as the bullpen shared by nine two-man desks, counting his secretary’s just outside his office door. About eleven Rangers in plainclothes were making phone calls, typing reports. This might have been the bustling bullpen of a precinct house in Manhattan, except for the drawls.
Right now we were shut inside the captain’s office, the door muffling but not defeating the bullpen clamor. With his back to a scarred old rolltop desk shoved against the wall, Peoples sat facing me in a visitor’s chair. There wasn’t much else to the room except a quartet of metal filing cabinets and a bulletin board of WANTED posters. No framed photos or citations on the cracked-plaster walls, despite this man being a celebrated lawman, veteran of countless arrests leading to convictions, and shoot-outs leading to dead perps.
A window air conditioner chugged in this room, as did one in the outer room. It was ninety degrees outside, and humid, and if this was fall in Waco, I wasn’t anxious to summer here. The heat hadn’t taken a toll on me, though, as I’d moved rapidly from an air-conditioned car into the cooled building. I was casual in a yellow Ban-Lon and a lightweight brown H.I.S. suit, the coat of which my host had already invited me to hang on the coat tree in the corner, where his own jacket and a multi-gallon Stetson worthy of a Texas Ranger already resided.
Like his Rangers, he wore street clothes — a short-sleeve white shirt with dark-brown tie, cowboy boots glimpsed under tan chino trousers; but a small gold CAPTAIN badge was pinned just above his breast pocket. A.45 automatic with fancy ironwood grips rode high on his right hip, and he was smoking a cigar, a big one. The air conditioner cut the smokiness in the air, and anyway it was a good cigar, so I wasn’t bothered.
We had already gone through with the handshaking ritual, and his secretary, Ruth, delivered us both cold bottles of Dr Pepper (“The native drink,” Peoples said). It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon, after I’d driven down in my rental Galaxie from Dallas, where American Airlines had deposited me around eleven. I’d checked into the Statler Hilton, freshened up, and made the ninety-minute drive to Waco on Highway 77. The ride had been surprisingly rolling and green, Waco itself a modern city dropped into a big bowl formed by low hills. An ancient suspension bridge bisected the town, taking me over the muddy Brazos at South First Street and Austin Avenue.
“I appreciate you seeing me at such short notice, Captain,” I said.
“That was some high-powered advance scout you sent lookin’ for me,” he said, blowing out a little smoke signal of cigar smoke, his eyes amused.
“It was nice of Senator McClellan to make that call,” I said.
“Impressive, you workin’ for him and Bobby Kennedy on that rackets committee.”
“More impressive if we’d sent Hoffa to jail.”
He nodded, smile fading. “Now and then a big one gets away,” he said, as much to himself as to me. Then his smile returned. “But the senator is one of the good ones. He tried damn near as hard as we did to put a certain party away.”
“What party is that?”
His smile turned sly and he rolled the big cigar around in it as he rocked. “We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. Mr. Heller, what do you know about the Texas Rangers?”
“Pretty much what I’ve seen in the movies and on TV. Which I figure is about as accurate as what you’ve seen about private detectives.”
He let out a laugh. “We’re not a Wild West show anymore, Mr. Heller. We’re with the Department of Public Safety — us and the Highway Patrol and licensing bureaus and so on. We’re essentially the state’s detective division — we help out sheriffs and police departments, if investigatin’ a major crime is beyond their means. And of course we handle fugitive apprehension, since a fleein’ felon doesn’t confine himself to county and city boundaries. Roadblocks, aerial reconnaissance, all your standard modern police methods.”
“What, no horses?”
“Oh, we still have horses, Mr. Heller. There are lots of places left in Texas where it takes a horse to get there.” He shifted in the chair. “I do apologize for these cramped quarters. When I spoke of ‘modern police methods,’ I was definitely not referrin’ to these sloppy surroundings.”
“Are they temporary?” It had that feel.
“They are now.” He shrugged and puffed cigar smoke. “When Company F got relocated to Waco, a few years back, all we got was these couple of rented rooms, some cast-off office furniture, and a cleaning crew that comes in once a month, if the mood strikes ’em.”
I jerked a thumb toward the street. “You know, this looks like a nice place to live, college town, trees along the river — lots of industry, I understand. Must be close to a hundred-thousand population.”
“Not quite yet. Gettin’ there.”
“So why does your downtown look like East Berlin? This building included.”
He half-turned to tamp cigar ash into a glass tray on his desktop. “That’s a sad one, Mr. Heller. Terrible tornado blew through here in ’53, right down the middle of town. Killed well over a hundred. Chewed up hundreds of buildings and spit ’em out. This downtown was one of the main casualties.”
“Well, they obviously rebuilt it.”
“Some of it. Some they never got around to. And in the meantime a new shopping center went in. That killed the downtown deader than the tornado.”
“That’s happening places where there hasn’t been a tornado. But Waco’s disaster was ten years ago — what makes these quarters ‘temporary’ now?”
He grinned. Those blue eyes even granted me a blink. “Remember how you got here, Mr. Heller? How you made your way back to us through the driver’s license testing area, and those offices with pretty young girls and callow young men in them?”
“I believe my memory goes back that far.”
“Well, we took to walkin’ various suspects through there for questioning back here in No Man’s Land. On a fairly regular basis, we rounded up some fairly unsavory types, on prostitution and vagrancy and drug dealing and such like.”