Almost Midnight (43 page)

“I knew Darrell growing up,” a pretty, heavyset blond woman said. “He and my dad were good friends. It wasn’t Vietnam that changed him. It was Lloyd and the drugs. Before that he was laid-back and friendly. He was a regular good ole boy. But then he turned real different, real strange. One time near the end my dad was standing outside the Nite Hawk with some people. Darrell pulled up in a limousine with tinted windows and got out. My dad grabbed his arm in a friendly fashion and said, ‘Hey Darrell, how you doing?’ He’d known Darrell all his life. Darrell looked at him like he didn’t recognize him, broke his arm loose, and just walked away.

“And another thing,” she went on, “a lot of people around here believe Darrell had help with the murders. They believe there was somebody I won’t name—somebody he was crazy about—down there doing the shooting with him. Darrell confessed and took the fall because he didn’t want this particular somebody to take any heat. I believe this myself. I believe this to be the case.”

A young guy who’d been shooting pool off to the rear with friends, a young slim raffish guy wearing boots, jeans, blackbrimmed
hat, and black vest with no shirt, walked up to the bar, smiling crookedly.

“Did I hear somebody over here bad-mouthing Darrell?” he said.

“Nobody’s bad-mouthing Darrell,” the barmaid said.

“Anybody bad-mouths Darrell in here, I’ll shoot him.”

“I told you, nobody’s bad-mouthing Darrell.”

“Because here’s the thing, outside of my father Darrell’s the best man I’ve ever met.”

“Darrell’s a better man than your father ever was,” a grizzled guy in a trucker’s cap said.

“My father wouldn’t appreciate an outsider coming in asking questions about Darrell.”

“Problem with you, you’re too much like your father.”

“Darrell’s a great man. He’s one of my heroes. There was a price on his head and he took care of business. He did what needed to be done.”

“I haven’t heard anybody here say anything different,” the barmaid said.

“Anybody bad-mouths Darrell, I’ll shoot him—”

He flicked open a switchblade and swiped it through the air.

“—or maybe I’ll just stab him. And if I don’t get around to it”—gesturing toward his friends by the pool table—“somebody else’ll be happy doing it for me.”

“Don’t worry about him,” the barmaid said, as the young guy sauntered off, first to the shuffleboard table, and then to the bathroom. “He’s really a teddy bear. Problem is, he’s sometimes meaner than a rattlesnake.”

Outside in the parking lot, past midnight now, a middle-aged guy in jeans and a plaid shirt was standing by a dirt-caked pickup trying to fire up a lighter.

“He didn’t do it,” he said.

A pause while he gave up on the lighter and fished in his pockets for matches.

“I was in there drinking my beer and listening to everybody say their piece—”

He reached through the open window of the pickup, snapped up a packet of matches from the dash, and lit his cigarette.

“—and I’d normally just as soon keep my mouth shut. But I’m telling you that Darrell didn’t do it. It doesn’t figure. I know the guy. I’ve hung out with him. I don’t think he has a malicious bone in his body. A guy like Darrell going down there and killing three people in cold blood? One of them a crippled kid? You tell me: How could such a thing have happened? And we’re supposed to believe he used a shotgun? A guy who’d always been a pistol man? It just doesn’t figure—none of it. A lot of us around here don’t believe he did it. We believe he’s been covering for someone.”

He stamped out his smoke, got in the truck, and started it up.

“All right,” he said. “I’ve said my piece. You can take it or leave it.”

It’s true—a lot of people in the Reeds Spring area don’t believe that Darrell did the triple homicide, or at least don’t believe that he did it alone. They don’t believe it because they can’t afford to. The idea of someone they’d always liked and respected, a guy who’d seemed the very embodiment of toughness and courage, the idea of Darrell lying in wait and ambushing three people—it’s more than merely disturbing, it’s downright subversive. It runs counter not only to their image of Darrell but also to their most cherished notions of masculinity. Hiding behind a blind and blowing three people away? Not confronting them, or challenging them—but simply blowing them away? One of them a defenseless teenager, all of them unarmed? This wasn’t the way things were done in the hills. People settled scores, but not like this. And surely Darrell, a local boy through and through, would have done it differently.

So how indeed—how
could
such a thing have happened? The easiest answer is that it happened due to a conspiracy of circumstances. Take away Vietnam and it almost certainly doesn’t happen. It was there that Darrell discovered drugs, and returning home his life began to unravel. Take away the dismal marriages, from which he emerged bruised, bereft, and aggrieved—it doesn’t happen. Take
away his baleful foray into the crank subculture of southwest Missouri—it doesn’t happen. And take away Mary, their falling in love, and his subsequent fear for her safety—it
absolutely
doesn’t happen.

Take away any one of these, and events follow a different course entirely. Then consider some additional factors: the culture of vigilantism in which Darrell was raised; his suspicion of local law enforcement, which sent him even farther over the edge; Mary calling home from Arizona and having it confirmed that Lloyd was on the prowl; the cultural idiocy whereby someone barely out of high school can waltz out of a gun shop with tools of death in hand; the run-ins with authority, the state trooper in California, the police in Cottonwood, that came to naught during that first nerve-jangling road trip. Alter just one of these factors and the entire business comes out otherwise.

As is so often the case with such matters, the crime was largely episodic. Everything—all these circumstances, all these biographical and cultural conditions—absolutely
everything
had to fall just so in order for things to go so tragically wrong. Remove one link from the lethal chain and there’s very little chance that Mary ever drops Darrell off on Bear Creek Road.

Add to this Darrell’s paranoia—the constant psychological backdrop to the entire saga. A by-product, possibly, of Vietnam and his two marriages, the paranoia was kicked into overdrive by crank, and then it raged completely out of control during those fateful first months on the road. The “danger urges” that would come upon him out of nowhere, like warning lights on a moonlit highway; the bizarre encounter with the park ranger in Arizona; the frantic scrambling to and fro—the enemy was everywhere, rapacious and devouring, lying in wait around every corner. Soften this just a bit, and Darrell and Mary might have set up house somewhere in California and eventually forgotten about Lloyd altogether.

But this is too easy, all this calculating and tallying, this enumerating of circumstances and conjecturing about states of mind. As explanation it falls sadly short of the mark. It maybe tells us why
Darrell returned to Missouri and took that long walk up Bear Creek Road. It maybe even tells us why he killed Lloyd. But it doesn’t tell us what we most need to know. Why Frankie? Why Willie? And why, afterward, the point-blank blasts to the head? Why six pulls of the trigger rather than just one—or none at all?

It’s one thing to list the circumstances without which the triple homicide could not imaginably have occurred. It’s quite another to say why in fact it did occur. Add up all the relevant circumstances, multiply them by three: this still doesn’t explain why Darrell carried it out. All the circumstances in the world can’t account for this. At the very most they put Darrell at the scene of the crime. Then Darrell himself takes over and does the rest.

It took courage for Darrell to return to Missouri fully realizing he was a marked man. It took courage for him to go up to Lloyd’s farm with every expectation of facing not just Lloyd but also the hired help. At the moment of truth, however, courage seems to have given way to something else. Lloyd was unarmed—yet Darrell shot him anyway. And then Frankie and Willie. Why? Partly, no doubt, it was simply the stone-cold logic of killing. Once started, killing can be a hard thing to shut down. The occasion of killing takes on a brutal imperative all its own. Stalking the property all that time, his nerves jumping out of his skin, Darrell pounced at the first opportunity. He locked onto the job at hand, and once Darrell locked onto something he locked on for good. He didn’t stop until
after
the killing was already done. He shot Lloyd, Frankie, and Willie, and then, having already passed the point of no return, he took the logic to its cruelest, most desperate conclusion with those last three shots to the victims’ heads.

There was also, quite likely, another kind of logic at work: naked self-interest. Darrell killed Lloyd, his great nemesis, and then he turned the shotgun on Frankie. If he’d stopped with Lloyd, Frankie might have reached a phone and interfered with his escape plans. And when Willie turned back along the trail? What then? Easy: here we have Darrell’s own admission. “The only thing I hate about this is Willie,” he told Lee Stephens on the exit ramp to Springfield.
“Willie would have recognized me. I had to do him, too.” Darrell shot Willie because Willie was a potential witness.

Unadorned self-interest is seldom a pretty sight. Taken to these lengths, it’s impossibly ugly. Which is why many of Darrell’s old friends refuse to believe he committed the triple homicide. They don’t remember Darrell as ugly. They remember him instead as a regular good ole boy—one of their own. They prefer keeping it that way.

Darrell’s mom doesn’t take refuge in denials of this sort. Hers is a strictly spiritual refuge. Lexie fully believes her first-born son did what he confessed to doing, and she believes he did so because, in her words, “Darrell was born for death row.” Otherwise, she says, how could he have learned firsthand the evils of capital punishment? The triple homicide was God’s mysterious way of preparing Darrell for a teaching ministry against the death penalty.

A mother’s love is a boundless thing.

I
T’S THE ONLY
sign of its kind for miles around: a neon silhouette of a nude dancer off U.S. 160 just north of Reeds Spring Junction. Spank—no one calls him anything other than Spank—had it installed some years ago when he converted his gas station and convenience store into a strip club. With all the tourists flocking into Branson, a strip club—even an out-of-the-way one—had seemed a good idea. Surely at least some of those tourists would be itchy for a little after-hours action.

The years passed, however, and the tourists never came. Reeds Spring Junction was too far out of the way for all but the hardiest, and even the hardiest weren’t hardy enough for Spank’s. It was one thing driving by and admiring the sign; quite another working up the nerve to go inside. Spank makes a fair point when he says the tourists don’t know what they’ve been missing. His place has an affably raunchy charm, and most nights it’s actually one of the tamer spots around. Spank discovered early on that a five-dollar cover
charge was all it took to discourage the worst of the local troublemakers from making a habit of stopping by.

Late that same Saturday night, after the rowdiness of the Eagle’s Roost, Spank’s place seemed practically sedate. With the jukebox pumping classic Southern rock, two young women in G-strings were working the tables, swaying languorously, prying smiles out of their worn faces—trying their half-hearted best to coax a customer or two into the back room for a private lap dance. Three other women in skimpy outfits lounged at a small table near the bar, two of them nibbling on takeout fries loaded with ketchup, the third knitting a baby’s sweater. Spank—big, bearded, and rosy-cheeked—was holding court at one end of the bar. At the other end two scraggly middle-aged guys who’d been staring into their beers jumped at the chance to talk about Darrell.

“Darrell’s just about the only genuine prophet we’ve got down here,” the first guy said.

“Darrell’s an outlaw.” His buddy.

“Yeah, he’s that, too. But he’s still a prophet.”

“He’s an outlaw prophet.”

“He called it, you know. Nobody can say Darrell didn’t call it.”

“He swore he wouldn’t get executed. That’s what I heard. It looked bad for him, but who’s going to argue with the results?”

“Yeah—and who believed him?”

“Not me. Not at first I didn’t.”

“How do you believe something like that?”

“You believe it when it happens.”

“And now he says he’s walking out. Who’s betting against him now?”

“Not me. It looks bad for him, though.”

“You don’t bet against a proven prophet.”

“And you don’t bet against that pope.”

“Yeah—how about that pope?”

“The pope saved Darrell’s life.”

“John Paul. He saved Darrell. What can you say about that pope?”

“I’ll tell you. That pope—he’s a good ole boy.”

“John Paul—a good ole boy. That fairly nails it.”

T
HE POPE AND
Darrell. The Ozarks is a region rich in legends, fanciful tales of larger-than-life characters caught up in events not entirely of their own making. This particular legend has the advantage of being completely true.

AFTERWORD

I
N LATE JANUARY
1999 a reporter for the
New York Times
called my home in Toronto. He asked if I’d been following the papal visit to St. Louis. I said that I was only dimly aware of it. He asked if I knew anything about Missouri governor Mel Carnahan and his views on capital punishment. I said that Carnahan’s name barely rang a bell. He asked if the name Darrell Mease rang a bell. I said no; it certainly didn’t.

The reporter told me about the big news just then breaking in St. Louis. The pope had spoken personally with Governor Carnahan, asking him to commute Darrell’s death sentence. He asked if I thought such a commutation would have a significant social impact. I said that his guess was as good as mine.