Or his death.
I said, “Sounds like the exhumation brought all the evidence out. So is it murder on the books now?”
Peoples shook his head glumly. “No. There was a ringer on the grand jury, a relative of the sheriff’s, who wouldn’t budge. Either the sheriff was bought or just didn’t want to look stupid. Also, an FBI agent came in, looked at the evidence, and called it suicide, too.”
“And those guys are generally pretty good,” I said. “That’s a hard one to figure.”
“Your Senator McClellan couldn’t get anywhere, either, even after he stood up at his committee hearing with the rifle and showed how hard it would be to work the bolt action at arm’s length without a bum wing.”
“So it’s a closed case.”
“Not from where I’m sitting.” His frustration dissolved into a sly grin. “You wondering yet, Nate, why I started by telling you the sorry tale of Mac Wallace?”
“You know I am.”
“Here’s that later photo of Mac I promised you.” He handed it over. “That’s still over ten years old — he’s camera-shy, our man Mac.”
Wallace no longer looked like a college kid — the glasses were black-rimmed, the eyes cold, hair still dark, the strong jaw resting on fleshy support, eyebrows dark and heavy, but still a broodingly handsome man.
“Latest photos available come from the Doug Kinser murder trial in ’52,” Peoples said. “But take a look at this sketch.”
Though crude, it resembled Wallace, all right — black-rimmed glasses, similar hair.
“Where does this come from?”
“A sketch artist of ours drew it from a description provided by a gas station attendant who gave directions to a man looking for the ‘Marshall place’ the afternoon of the killing.”
I sat shuffling through the two photos and the police sketch, feeling the hair on my arms prickle and it wasn’t the work of that window air conditioner.
I said, “You’re saying Mac Wallace killed Henry Marshall.”
“I have not a single solitary doubt. Would you like to hear how I see it? My reconstruction, as the big city lawmen say?”
“Clint, you know I would.”
It’s a beautiful Saturday, with birds twittering and flittering, in a part of Texas that looks green and lush in late spring. Marshall — who earlier drove around stopping to talk to some farmer friends, who found him in fine fettle — is puttering around the ranch.
Mid-afternoon, after stopping at a gas station for directions, Mac shows up unannounced at Marshall’s little spread. It’s possible he tries to reason with Marshall, maybe offers him another, bigger bribe. Might be he threatens him and his family. Maybe it turns into an argument — Mac’s a volatile fella, real bad temper. My guess is, he pistol-whips Marshall, dropping him to the ground with his head cut along one side and his eye bruised up real bad.
Mac rigs a plastic liner to the exhaust of Marshall’s pickup, and starts the truck. And now I’m just guessing, but I think something spooks our man — maybe traffic on the country road nearby.
Marshall’s .22 bolt-action rifle is in the back of the pickup, stowed there for getting rid of varmints. Impatient with or unsure of his murder method, Mac uses the rifle to shoot Marshall five times in the side of the lower torso.
Here’s the best part, Nate — the next morning, Mac goes back to that filling station, and tells the attendant that he changed his mind yesterday, and never did go out to the Marshall place.
Enough to make you wonder how he got those high marks in college.
“That gas station attendant is lucky to be alive,” I said, shaking my head. “And Wallace has never been brought in for it?”
“For what? A suicide? But I can tell you this, Nate. Mac Wallace has no alibi for the Marshall murder, and those other ‘suicides’ — that accountant in El Paso, the building contractor flying out of Pecos, the indicted business partner in Amarillo — he has none for those, either. I believe he got a lot better at staging suicides. And he was in Texas at the time each of those kills occurred.”
“You think Wallace is, what? A kind of hit man for the Johnson crowd?”
“My guess is LBJ is way above the fray. But he has had some big bad nasty folks backing him from day one — oilmen, industrial folk, powerful lawyers. Or it could be Billie Sol reaching out from behind bars. He’s appealing his sentence, you know. Dead witnesses have a certain eloquence, but they don’t get called to testify.”
“I have another for you,” I said, and I gave him the information about Joseph Plett’s suicide.
He wrote it all down on a spiral pad.
When I was finished, he frowned at his own notes. “This Plett fella — the date of his death, why that’s just one day after we exhumed Henry Marshall.”
“Yes it is.”
He sighed wearily. “Well, this one’s out of state. I won’t be able to check on Wallace’s whereabouts on this ’un. Maybe you have people who could do that.”
“Why, doesn’t Wallace live in Texas?”
“He works for a Texas firm, Ling Electronics, in Dallas, but they transferred him in 1961. Oh, he comes back a lot, for reasons that probably don’t always have to do with helping somebody kill their self. One possible item of interest, he was in Dallas on November twenty-two of last year.”
“Clint, you can’t be suggesting—”
“An individual known to be a hatchet man of LBJ’s was in town, is all I’m saying. On the other hand, ol’ Lyndon benefitted much as anybody from that particular hit.”
I was starting to think maybe Captain Clint Peoples needed to be fitted for a tinfoil Stetson.
“Since movin’ out of state,” Peoples was saying, “Mac Wallace has spent a hell of a lot of time back home in Texas... visits that correspond to some nasty, suspicious deaths.”
And deaths didn’t come any nastier or more suspicious than JFK’s, I had to admit.
I said, “Where did that electronics company move Wallace to?”
“Mac’s workin’ for the Ling branch on the West Coast.”
Now the hair on my neck was prickling. “Where on the West Coast?”
“Southern California,” Peoples said. “You know, Disneyland and movie stars — the Los Angeles area.”
Chapter 6
As the Galaxie made its way up Highway 77, through a rural landscape that might have been Illinois were it not for the occasional cotton field, the sun began to set in a vivid expressionist blaze, throwing long blue shadows across my path. Like a futuristic mirage, a skyline rose from the flat terrain, modern monuments to insurance and banking, cold stone and steel but with touches of color, the blue Southland Life towers, the red horse riding the Mercantile Bank.
I’d had much to think about on the drive back to Dallas, and a conducive atmosphere to do it in — traffic had been light, and the landscape soothingly monotonous. The panic I’d felt at hearing that murderer Mac Wallace was within easy reach of my son and ex-wife had faded — Peoples having told me that Wallace was currently in Dallas, doing a project at the Ling Company’s home base, and staying at the Adolphus Hotel.
“We kind of keep an eye on what ol’ Mac’s up to,” Peoples told me, “when he’s back in these parts.”
That was apparently a fairly new policy for the Rangers, else some “suicides” might not have occurred.
Or maybe they would have. It had only taken driving a few miles out of Waco into wide-open spaces under an endless sky to acquire enough distance to decide that Captain Clint Peoples had become a kind of rustic Ahab with a white whale called Mac Wallace. No question Wallace had killed that pitch-and-putt fucker, that was a matter of public record; but all Peoples had on Mac for the Henry Marshall murder was a crude police sketch, a lack of alibi, and a hunch.