“Why not?”
“He’s too rich to need it.”
“Nobody’s too rich to need three million dollars.”
“Three million? Good Lord, is it that much?”
“Who is he?”
Brawley frowned at me. “Look, I’m sure it’s not the man you want. This man is very rich, very prominent. He’s an old friend of mine, and I must say a lucrative patient—he’s a notorious hypochondriac.”
“The name, Doc.”
“Baragray.”
“John-Ben Baragray?”
He nodded, tight-lipped.
I said, “Well I’ll be damned.”
John-Ben Baragray was a sort of ambulatory national monument. I had never seen him, let alone met him, but I was well versed in the Baragray folklore. He was a mossy-horn Texan who’d made his first fortune in east Texas oil then come west. One of those sleepy old back-porch kingmakers who owned half the land and most of the politicians in his rural bailiwick, he lived on a sixty thousand-acre ranch in the next county, fifty miles from the city. His fortune allegedly measured in the hundreds of millions. Among other things he was one of the state’s most powerful bankers. His wealth was mostly tucked away in a variety of tax-dodge foundations that owned not only most of his own county but half the capital city as well.
When I stopped to think about it, it seemed only natural there could be a connection between a man like Baragray and the Madonna-DeAngelo-Aiello mob. Both were exponents of political bossism; both exemplified the feudal way of life.
It took me an hour and a half in the Jeep to reach the gate of Baragray’s fence. It was a working gate, thrown across a cattle guard, built into a four-strand barbwire fence that stretched in both directions along a straight line to the horizons. This eastern county of the state was plateau land, six-thousand-foot high country carpeted in tall yellow grass. Darker spots on the distant hills were Hereford and Brahma cattle grazing. Three small airplanes buzzed around in the sky—modern cowboys, air-dropping rock salt, herding cattle, reconnoitering the herds.
Beef-raising, for those in the know and those rich enough to do it on a scale of massive efficiency, was one of the most highly profitable ventures available to a man with large capital—certainly by far the most lucrative of all agricultural pursuits. John-Ben Baragray, on this ranch and seven others scattered throughout the West, was one of the country’s biggest cattlemen.
I drove several miles on Baragray’s property, on a road he must have paved at his own expense, before I reached his headquarters. It was more of a village than a ranch. There were an airfield, a filling station, a company store with post office, and a town-sized scattering of small but sturdy frame houses for married employees, as well as a bunkhouse and a far-flung litter of workshops, barns and miscellaneous outbuildings. A forest of windmills sprouted throughout the camp. Most of the vehicles in sight were pickups, Jeeps, trucks and power wagons. There were a few souped-up automobiles.
It was, all together, a nice little baronial empire, all belonging to one man. The master’s mansion was in keeping and in scale. It was a three-story splendor of sprawling wings, screened-in verandahs and balconies.
The ground floor of one wing was a garage, its five doors open against the heat. All five stalls contained cars. A Rolls or Bentley, an Alfa Romeo, a Jeep station wagon and two Cadillacs.
Neither Cadillac was pink.
A butler, in livery, answered my knock and looked me up and down without expression. It was the first time in my life I had ever met a liveried butler. I gave him my name. He asked what it was with reference to. I said it was personal and private and I had been sent by Dr. Brawley. He said I could wait in the parlor, showed me in and went.
The walls were studded with Renoirs. It was the sort of house which could easily have been ugly and baroque, but whoever had decorated it had owned taste enough to stop well short of that. Impressive as it was, the house—at least as far as I could tell from this part of it—had been designed with one paramount purpose: comfort. The furniture was massive, upholstered, but not overstuffed; most of it was covered with leather. The high ceiling was supported by dark beams at least eighteen inches thick. The carpet was the most enormous Chimayo Indian rug I had ever seen.
The room was cool, fanned without drafts by unobtrusive central air conditioning. The far wall, to which I walked now, was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
By their books shall ye know them. John-Ben Baragray had a catholic collection on his bookshelves. Philosophy, science, literary scholarship, and one section very heavy on military history. There were three shelves of novels, but none of them could have been classified as light reading. All the books looked as if they had been read. None seemed to be rare or expensive editions; they were books that had been accumulated by a reader, not a collector.
There was a deep leather reading chair, well worn, and a chair-side table that supported two cork coasters and a collection of pill bottles. I bent down to look. There were nitroglycerine pills, stimulants, depressants and amyl nitrate capsules. I frowned. Brawley had called him a hypochondriac—but you didn’t prescribe nitro and amyl-nitrate for psychosomatic disorders. Those were remedies for severe heart disease. A violent murder, transportation and burial of the body—all these committed by a man with a weak heart? It didn’t—
“Mr. Crane? Simon Crane? Do I know you, sir?”
The voice was a deep round boom. I straightened up and turned.
He was an enormous old man. He towered over me. He wore shirt and trousers of what looked like death-wish black. His hair was a full gray mane; he had a sweeping mustache. His face was crosshatched with weathered creases, and his hand, which he offered, was powerful and horny.
“I’m John-Ben Baragray. You mentioned Fred Brawley’s name.”
“How are you?” I said by way of greeting.
He answered the question literally: he made a good-natured groan, which resonated off the rafters, and said confidentially, “Truth told, I’m a sick man. A very sick man. You were looking at the pharmacy over there—I’ve got a bum ticker of course. If I was a building the doctors would condemn me. Do you know how close I am right now to having a coronary? But to hell with it. Modern medicine—hogwash. Of all the false gods we worship, the most false is the idea that man progresses. An African witch doctor has as high a percentage of cures as the highest-priced physician in the world today.”
He lowered his head to examine me from beneath his heavy unruly eyebrows. “You’re not falling apart with sympathy at all. Hell, that’s the penalty for being an oversized man—you don’t get appreciation of your misery when you’re ill. Well, if you let me I’ll spend the whole day talking about my numerous ailments, and I suspect that’s not what you came here for. You’ve had a long drive in an open Jeep under a goddamn hot sun and therefore I deduce it must be something too important for the telephone. Can I get you a drink?”
He was already walking, with short paces for a long-legged man, to a bar beyond the front window. I said, “Just beer, if you’ve got it.”
“A man shouldn’t drink anything but beer on a day this hot,” he agreed. He removed two bottles of beer—some foreign brand I’d never heard of—from a small concealed refrigerator. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d opened the bottles with his teeth, but he used an ordinary five-cent church key, handed me a bottle without bothering about a glass, and lifted his bottle in toast. “I drink to you, sir. Your life expectancy is longer than mine.”
That was doubtful. I tasted the beer and it was excellent. John-Ben Baragray pointed to a chair. We sat, facing each other; I said, “I’ve got a crapshooter’s instincts and sometimes I play by them. I came here with something in mind but I’ve changed my mind.”
“You’re not a doctor, of course, even if Fred Brawley did send you.”