Abandoned Prayers (33 page)

How many times had Ruston talked with Stutzman after Eli left town? Weaver wondered.

“Yeah. Well you know he was real scared over there,” she said. “He felt like he was being watched or something. Ah . . . he came over to my house, him and Sam both came to my house about one-thirty in the morning.”

Stutzman brightened a bit. “Oh, really?”

“And they stayed over there. Yeah, they slept over there at my house.”

“Golly,” he said.

Stutzman said he didn’t know why Ruston was frightened. “. . . I knew he was scared earlier, but I didn’t think it was that bad, and I felt kind of odd. . . . I just kind of felt like I left him in the middle of the mess.”

Weaver’s hopes rose again. Maybe Stutzman would spill it now and tell her exactly what the mess was.

“And I wanted to talk to him,” he continued, “but the main reason . . . was because of my little kid. Some of the stuff they asked him downtown was really obnoxious.”

“What do you mean? You mean about being homosexual and stuff like that?” Weaver asked, straining to hear every word and hoping that the tape was recording every nuance.

“This was one scared dude on the phone,” she later recalled.

“Yeah, that, and also about the whole murder case, the whole bit. And my attorney says, you know, they had no right questioning a kid that age.”

If what Stutzman was saying was true, Weaver felt that he was damned right about it.

“And see,” Stutzman said, “they tried to do that around my and Sam’s backs. Sam was with me downtown too. They questioned him in the lobby—well I heard part of it, and Sam did too. So when this is all over they’re gonna pay for it. And, ah, those guys from homicide are really crooked is the only thing I can tell, and they’re gonna pay for it.”

Stutzman’s soft voice made Weaver’s skin crawl.

“Well,” she said, trying to get something definite out of him, “they obviously must have a case against you or they wouldn’t be after you, huh?. . .”

In shrugging off her question, Stutzman dropped a bombshell. “They think they do. See, ah, it’s pretty obvious that Glen, this guy, was murdered with my gun.”

Now we’re going somewhere
, Weaver thought.
Come on, confess!

“That doesn’t say that I did it. Now, ah . . .”

“Maybe they’re trying to get you for accessory or something,” Weaver said. “Like maybe you knew about it or you tried to cover it up or something.”

Stutzman hesitated, and Weaver tried to twist the blade deeper. She hoped he’d be frightened enough to say more.

“They can do that you know,” she said.

“Well, that might be it, maybe that’s what they are after, I don’t know. But I and Sam both made that very clear, that we didn’t even know he was missing.”

Didn’t know he was missing?
Even Leona Weaver knew Stutzman’s story about Glen Pritchett going up to Montana to take care of his injured son, and how he’d called down and talked with Stutzman on the phone.

“The first thing they jumped on us for, ‘Was he reported missing?’ ” Stutzman recalled. “I said, ‘I had no idea the guy was missing.’ ”

Weaver fumbled for the right words to get him to think she knew more than she really did. “Well, you know, Denny said they had some work orders, and they claimed they have some forged, that it’s a forged signature on them. That’s what Denny told me.”

“Who had work orders?”

“The cops do.”

“Then it must be time sheets.”

“Yeah, time sheets.”

“Uh . . . Forged time sheets?” Stutzman said, his voice full of surprise—not over the fact that the police had the doctored time sheets, but that they had any time sheets at all.

“Yeah. One with Glen’s last signature. . . . You know, for that . . . ah . . . what’s the date? I can’t remember the date . . . April.”

“They said it was forged?”

“No, this one wasn’t,” Weaver said. “April twenty-seventh. April twenty-seventh was the date on the one, I believe, and then on the next one, the next pay, the next time sheet was, oh, May fourth, but the signatures where he signed them was different.”

“Huh,” Stutzman said. “I didn’t know about that.”

“That’s what Denny was telling me. That’s what they told him.”

“Huh, well that’s a good one. So . . . so they do have the time sheets?”

“Yeah.”

“I had told him to go ahead and give them to them if they want them because I said, you know, that’s proof that he had worked.”

The comment interested Weaver, because it indicated that Stutzman and Ruston had talked about the time sheets. Stutzman had told Ruston “to go ahead and give them to them.” Denny Ruston had never told Wiggins or Cutler that he had seen or talked with Stutzman since being questioned by the sheriff’s office.

“Well, what are you gonna do, Eli? You can’t keep running forever.”

“What am I gonna do?”

“I mean, obviously, you know, you’re gonna have to do something about this.”

“Well, my attorney has been telling me to blow it off. . . . See, he thinks it was Jay, another guy that had worked for me for a short period of time and I fired him. And I think so myself, because I don’t know who else it would have been. Because he was the only person I know of that knew where my guns were at. That’s the only other person, because Denny didn’t know where they were at. Sam didn’t know where they were at, and they confirmed that Denny had been with his parents that weekend when Glen left.

“But . . . then, also, my attorney keeps telling me there are two different fingerprints other than mine on the gun. Whose are the other fingerprints? I have no idea.”

That was a new one
.

“Well, see,” he continued, “I didn’t know that till a couple of days ago. The information keeps coming through real slow.”

“Yeah,” said Weaver. “They haven’t talked to me yet or nothing. I don’t think they even know anything about me except that Denny was staying at my house.”

Again, Stutzman was surprised. “They do know that?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh-huh, well if they come after you, make sure they don’t get this phone number.”

Weaver promised to keep it a secret.

Stutzman told her that Cal Hunter had taken some things out of the house on his behalf—before the furniture was taken. Stutzman asked that, if he came over to Weaver’s place to pick up the television and the clock, would she let him have them. She agreed.

This would keep all the rest of his stuff away from the law, Stutzman implied.

“Whatever they don’t already have. Uh, I’m not real sure what this is going to boil down to. If they keep going on . . . see, when I left I thought it was only going to be for two or three days,” he said.

Stutzman said he had talked with his attorney twice in the last twenty-four hours.

“I may have to go back to Austin and face trial just to prove that I’m innocent.”

“Yeah. You may have to. The longer you run the harder it’s gonna be on you.”

“Right. But . . .”

“It just . . . it really looks bad that you ran, you know.”

“Right,” he said softly.

“Not necessarily that you
did
it maybe, but you
knew
something about it,” Weaver said, pushing again. All she
wanted was one little confession, one little bit of information that would complete the puzzle.

“What I’ve done, I painted a real bad picture for them. But see, I didn’t know all this stuff, and when I left it was supposed to be a matter of a couple of days. Well, it’s gone totally out of proportion since then. But . . . what has happened is, I think, well, my attorney says, is that Travis County homicide had found out about Jay also, they weren’t supposed to find out about him.”

“Oh.”

“They’re not careful enough, and Jay knows that he is wanted. Therefore he’s much harder to find. But if this keeps . . . going on, what I’m gonna do is, ah, put Danny, my son, give somebody else custody of him—temporary custody. So they can’t get a hold of him and involve him anymore, just as they already have. And, ah, go back and do whatever it takes—just prove that I’m innocent. Because my attorney has said, you know, that he’s got enough evidence to prove that I’m innocent. That’s what he thinks, and he told me this morning to hold off a little bit longer to see if he can come up with Jay. And, ah, if they can, he’s gonna, you know, have me come back and go to trial or whatever it takes just to prove that I’m innocent.”

“Well,” said Weaver, “I think that you should. I think you should come back and face it and get it over with. Because if you didn’t do it, then you don’t have nothing to be afraid of.”

Stutzman indicated that the real reason he had fled Austin was because the police had harassed Danny.

“And I . . . I mean, it freaked me out with this thing, I mean, Christ, what’s going on, I mean, this can’t be. I said, harassing me is no problem, but my little kid is a different story. And my attorney says they had no . . . they should have never questioned him in the first place.”

Weaver agreed. “I don’t think they should have done that either.”

Near the end of the call, Stutzman hit on the subject of his mail.

“And one of the biggest things is, you know, so much mail that had come in that I just told Denny and Glen to never leave it in the house. And if the desk was gone they probably took the mail too.”

What could have been in the mail that was so important? Weaver wondered. What could have been worth more than the other things Stutzman had left behind?

He told Weaver that if Ruston called, to give him Stutzman’s number and have Ruston call collect.

“I don’t know what to tell you about calling me back,” Stutzman said. “If I do call you, what I’ll do is I’ll just leave a brief message where . . . ah, I tell you what, I’ll give you a code name.”

A code name? It seemed weird, Weaver reflected, but under the circumstances what else could she expect?

“If you’re not there, or you’re busy,” Stutzman said, “I’ll tell them that you’re supposed to call ‘Junior.’ I won’t mention my name.”

If Stutzman had known that his story was causing him more trouble than any physical evidence, he surely would have shut up. But there he was, running from Travis County, yet telling everyone that the gun used to kill Pritchett belonged to him.

Ballistics, however, had come back inconclusive. While it was confirmed that the bullet that killed Pritchett had been fired from a gun just like Stutzman’s, the slug was so misshapen from impact that it was unclear whether his gun had in fact been the murder weapon.

In court, ballistics would amount to nothing.

Only the killer—or someone with direct knowledge of the crime—would know that it was the right gun
.

Stupidly, Stutzman was concerned about his fingerprints being found on it. Since he had handed the gun to Wiggins, of course, his prints were naturally on the weapon.

None of this was lost on Cutler or Wiggins, but they needed more. No one was talking, and there wasn’t enough
to go on. This “Jay” to whom Stutzman kept referring didn’t exist, as far as they knew. Throughout the investigation, the sheriff’s office never questioned anyone with that name.

Cal Hunter had told investigators that he knew nothing.

By mid-July, the investigation had foundered, and Stutzman had vanished.

Stutzman and his son returned to the Four Corners area in late June. In Aztec, New Mexico, at the home of Stutzman’s old buddy, Chuck Freeman, Stutzman confided to Freeman and Kenny Hankins that his roommate had been killed in Texas.

“My gun was involved,” he said.

Freeman and Hankins hit the roof, but Stutzman assured them he hadn’t killed anybody.

“My lawyer told me to get my ass out of Texas until this blows over,” he said.

“That don’t make sense, Eli,” Hankins said. “You should go back. What kind of lawyer would tell you to get out of the state?”

“If I do go back they’ll arrest me, and, when they do, they will pick up Danny and send him back to Ohio.”

“To your folks?”

“Yeah. I’d much rather see Danny dead than have him live with the Amish.”

Stutzman made a number of calls to his lawyer. Each time he got off the phone he announced some atrocity committed by the Travis County Sheriff’s Office: they had taken his furniture, his money, his business.

Hankins asked who the attorney was, who was giving Stutzman all this bad advice—was he one of their lawyer friends from Durango?

“No, he’s from Texas,” Eli said, refusing to elaborate.

•    •    •

Danny Stutzman was showing signs of trauma. His stuttering had worsened dramatically.

“Danny could hardly spit a word out,” Kenny Hankins recalled. “The kid was a mess. He couldn’t do anything. He was like a baby. When he wanted to get a toy that was on the other side of the walkway, he just stood there and cried for his daddy to get it for him.”

Stutzman said he was going to take Danny to stay with his friends Dean and Margie Barlow, in Wyoming. “They’ll take care of Danny until I get situated and buy a house,” he said.

The next day Stutzman and his son boarded a bus bound for Wyoming.

Leona Weaver and Evelyn Martel listened to the tape twice before Gary Cutler returned to pick it up. Each time the women listened, they heard the same thing: Eli Stutzman was a nervous, evasive man.

In all fairness, Weaver would concede that she came off little better than Stutzman. She cringed each time she stammered.

Weaver played the tape for Cutler, who sat stone-faced in her living room. When the tape was over, all he said about its content was, “You did good. Real good.”

“He thinks it was the law who took his furniture and stuff. Did you take it?” Weaver asked.

Cutler shook his head. “What would we want with all of his stuff?”

Weaver also asked whether investigators had questioned Danny.

“We wouldn’t do something like that,” Cutler said.

Weaver didn’t tell the detective about the drugs she knew Stutzman had sold—she figured they knew too much about her and her habits already.

“Shoot,” she later said, “Cutler probably knew who I bought my little bit of pot from.”