Conspiracy of Silence (9 page)

On the plane ride from Floyd Bennett Field to El Paso, I paused to consider where we stood.

Without letting her know of my discovery of the letters, I asked Lizbeth whether she recognized the name Félix Calderón.

She peered at me quizzically, as if I myself were some kind of suspect. She didn't like being kept in the dark.

“No . . . why should I?”

“No reason,” I said blandly. “Could he have been some kind of footman”—I wasn't even sure what a footman was, but I figured the Crawfords could have employed such a person—“or maybe a gardener, or chauffeur, or something like that?”

Her eyes narrowed even further. “What do you mean? Who do you think this person is? What possible connection could he—”

“That's exactly what I'm trying to find out, Lizbeth,” I said, a little more tartly than I had intended.

“You mean he could have been involved . . .?”

“I didn't say that. And I know you were only five years old when all this happened, but I'd really like to know who this guy was. If you don't know, maybe someone else does. How about Joseph?”

She shook her head vigorously. “I doubt that.”

At my silent look of surprise and skepticism, she went on: “He doesn't have anything to do with the other servants—it's not like he's their boss, or anything like that.”

“Who is?” I said bluntly.

“Grandma,” Lizbeth said.

“That's no good,” I said, discouraged. There wasn't a chance than Helen Ward Crawford would spill the beans about this Calderón fellow under any circumstances, even if he had nothing to do with the “death” of Frank Crawford. And I had to believe that he
did
have something to do with the whole affair: the timing was too convenient. He must have bolted out of here within weeks, perhaps days, of the incident.

Exactly what Calderón knew—and how he could have known it—were the things I had to settle. The large sums of money Helen was secretly paying out over more than a decade—I was confident the payments had continued beyond 1930, when the latest of the letters I had found was dated, and probably continued to this day—were some kind of hush money. Maybe Helen herself had contrived to repatriate him: if he was a Mexican, it was best for her sake that he get out of this country and go back where he came from. His liberal allowance would ensure that he kept his mouth shut.

It was faintly troubing to me that Calderón was exacting such a
large
sum of money. After all, what had presumably happened was that a murder had been
faked,
not that a murder had actually been committed. This made me wonder whether my assumptions on this point were even sound. Perhaps I was so keen on proving Lizbeth right that her father was innocent of murder that I was overlooking the plain fact that Frank Crawford's continued existence had not been proven, or even rendered likely. What if Crawford had somehow been killed later, for reasons unknown, and that this Calderón fellow had found out?
That
would justify the large amounts of cash that were being shoveled in his direction.

So I began to realize that Lizbeth—and James Allen Crawford—weren't out of the woods just yet.

The flight to El Paso was uneventful, but it was only the beginning of what would no doubt prove a long and tedious journey. For I now had to rent a car and travel a good two hundred miles to Ojinaga. I could have crossed the border right at El Paso, going across to Ciudad Juárez, but I decided to stick to American soil as long as possible. My only option was to take the long, winding road that hugged the Rio Grande, flanked as it was by a succession of rugged mountain ranges—Finlay, Guitman, Sierra Vieja, and Chinati—that loomed imposingly on my left.

I finally learned what Shakespeare meant when he talked about “the way to dusty death.” I'd never been this far south and west before, and was stunned by the parched, inhospitable terrain, which could as easily have been the surface of the moon. I was well south of the Dust Bowl, and recalled reading of the dismal “Black Sunday” of April of last year, when an immense dust storm had blanketed cars, livestock, and even whole farmhouses; things like that made you wonder whether Nature harbored some kind of innate hostility to human existence.

My car—a boxy Ford Model A of about 1930—was already well used, and the pounding it took on this problematical road seemed to add years to its life in a matter of hours. About halfway on my journey I had to stop for sheer respite, soothing my parched throat with a tolerably cold beer and wolfing down a sandwich of indeterminate contents at a ramshackle roadside bar that seemed on the verge of collapse. At that hour of mid-afternoon, I was the only occupant of the place aside from the grizzled owner. He could tell I was a foreigner—for him, anyone not from his immediate part of Texas was a foreigner—so he couldn't be bothered to exchange more than the barest minimum of words with me.

I hit the road again, finally reaching the small town of Presidio, just on this side of the border from Ojinaga, by mid-evening. There seemed no point in crossing over now, so I found what seemed like the only hotel in the town—an establishment that was probably decrepit when Texas still belonged to Mexico—and crashed in a room there. In a nearby eatery, a bowl of chili and crackers was enough for me, and it was all I risked ordering from the surly waitress.

The next morning found me in Ojinaga.

Nobody paid much attention to me at the border crossing; the guards were more concerned about who and what was coming from the other direction. Ojinaga itself was a surprisingly spruce little town that was doing its best to get through the worldwide depression. I was surprised to find that it had originally been a Pueblo settlement dating to as early as the thirteenth century; the Spaniards had arrived around 1535. It had been the site of several battles during the Mexican Civil War in early 1914, and a sad little cemetery just outside of town marked the victims of that conflict.

My goal, however, was the Palacio Municipal, on the corner of Zaragoza and Trasviña y Retes. I had no idea what kind of hoops I would have to go through to ascertain the current whereabouts of one Félix Calderón, especially given my rudimentary Spanish, but I wasn't confident that a little town like this would have an up-to-date phone book or city directory.

The thin, wiry, bespectacled young man who met me at what I took to be the tax office looked at me with skepticism when I finally managed to make my purpose known. I made no attempt to maintain that I was here in any official capacity, even though I could have pulled out any one of several quasi-legal deputy sheriff's badges I had garnered over a chequered career. Instead, it became clear to me that this fellow's tongue would loosen by more direct means, so I casually fished out of my pocket a wad of American bills that Lizbeth had pressed on me for the trip.

His eyes fixated on the tight green ball, and a few bills of medium currency did the trick.

To my surprise, I found three Félix Calderóns listed in the tax records. But two of them had been here for many years—had apparently been born here.

The third Félix Calderón had arrived on April 2, 1924.

He had moved several times in the past decade or so, and it appeared that he now lived in the far southwestern corner of town, in the Francisco Villa district, well south of the road that would take you to Chihuahua. It was the work of a less than fifteen minutes for me to leave the Palacio Municipal, get back into my vehicle, and pull up in front of what was presumably Félix Calderón's house.

It was a humble residence, but well kept. A well-used Ford was parked around to the left, and I could hear the cluck of chickens in a fenced-off area in the back. For some reason the place had been given a wide berth by its neighbors, and the nearest house was more than an acre away.

I marched up to the door and knocked.

I heard an odd scuttling inside whose purport I couldn't ascertain. After several minutes, the door opened.

The man who stood in the doorway, looking with ill-concealed suspicion and hostility at me, was tall, bronzed, and muscular. Something in his manner led me to think he was not alone.

But I knew at once that I'd seen this man before.

He was in a photograph that Maureen Dailey had shown me.

So all I could say was: “Frank Crawford, I presume?”

The response was like nothing I could have predicted. Leaping
backwards
in a manner I'd never seen before, Crawford almost crashed into a nearby table before falling down on hands and knees and scrabbling for a small wooden box on the floor. Out of it he pulled two revolvers, firing both of them wildly at me through the open door.

His aim was very bad, and the shots came nowhere near hitting me. Paying no attention to the woman's scream from the house's interior, I myself came close to doing a backwards somersault to get out of the firing line of this madman. My car was my only defense, for not only would it afford me a certain cover from more gunshots, but my own automatic was lying on the passenger seat, ready for just such an eventuality. I quickly opened the passenger door and retrieved the weapon.

I didn't return fire immediately: in the first place, my supply of ammunition was not unlimited, and in the second place, it was vital that I capture Frank Crawford alive. He would be worse than useless to me dead. But Crawford seemed in no mood to go quietly. Continuing to fire almost randomly in my approximate direction, he bolted out of the house and plunged almost head-first into his Ford, starting the car instantly and skidding off his property with a grinding of gears and a cloud of suffocating dust.

I had to waste several seconds circling my own vehicle to get into the driver's seat and head off after him. Crawford had headed due south, as I suspected he would have. There was no likelihood he would want to go north toward the U.S. border, for no matter how perfunctory the customs inspection might be, the inevitable delay would allow me to come close to seizing him. I didn't doubt that he knew the Mexican terrain a lot better than I did, and I suspected he would do his damnedest to give me the slip.

While following Crawford on the main road out of town, which quickly turned into a dusty and ill-kept road whose bumps and gulleys shook both our vehicles brutally, I did my best to penetrate the overriding purpose of his actions over the past twelve years. What led him to this obscure little town? Why here, of all the places in and out of the United States one could have chosen for a quiet getaway where no one knew or cared who you were or where you came from?

And, most puzzling of all,
why go through the bother of staging your own death when you could just leave the country without all these bizarre shenanigans?

Whether I would ever get answers to these questions depended on hunting down this frantic prodigal son. And he showed no signs that he wanted to be caught.

Crawford was driving as fast as his somewhat antiquated machine would take him, recklessly passing slower cars along the way and raising clouds of dust as he sometimes skidded off onto the shoulder. It quickly became apparent to me that he was heading toward the steep hills—tantamount to a low mountain range—that guarded the southern side of Ojinaga like some immense, looming crescent. What was beyond those hills I couldn't say, and how Crawford expected to evade me on this flat, barren desert road was beyond my powers of imagination. Now and then he reached his right hand over his left shoulder and fired his revolver crazily in my general direction, but the shots were far off the mark.

I followed tightly behind him, realizing that a bolder challenge could spell disaster for both of us. I wanted him alive, but I wanted myself alive even more. I was not so foolhardy as to risk aiming my own pistol anywhere in his direction; at the speed he was reaching in his mad desperation, even a gunshot to a tire might cause a crash that would instantly snuff his life out. Frankly, I was not interested in preserving his life—a life he had clearly wasted almost as thoroughly as his brother rotting in jail—except insofar as he could help me get to the bottom of this inscrutable case.

As we headed up the narrow, winding dirt road up into the hills, I saw that trouble was brewing. Crawford was still going at such a hectic pace that he was increasingly unable to control his vehicle, and more than a few parts of this road teetered on the edge of precipitous cliffs that could easily send one plunging to a fiery death. Crawford's frenetic pace caused him to skid almost out of control several times, but somehow he managed to retain control.

Then something odd happened. Just as he was coming to the summit of the hill, his car slowed down, emitting barking coughs and puffs of smoke from its exhaust pipe. Then there was a massive shake, and the car came to a standstill.

It was out of gas.

But Crawford wasn't. Leaping out like a crazed gymnast, he plunged down the steep, gravelly bank of the hill in what seemed an entirely random direction. Stopping my own car, I jumped out and followed. What exactly did Crawford expect to do now? Lose me by hiding in some hillside cave? I'm no athlete, but it was child's play to follow him as he ran, stumbled, crawled, and almost rolled along the declivity. We were the only human beings in sight—there was no house, no road, no trace of human habitation anywhere in sight.

The inevitable happened. At one point he stumbled, apparently over his own feet, and fell tumbling head over heels without the faintest ability to stop his downward plunge. His hands grabbed furiously for any kind of purchase, but all they came up with was loose sand and rock. Without warning his body glanced off of a withered tree clinging to the hillside; a grunt of pain and shock was forced out of him, and he came to a slow stop.

I rushed to him to assess the damage. His eyes were closed, either from unconsciousness or exhaustion, and there was a thin trickle of blood dripping from the back of his head. His mouth hung open slackly, his tongue lolled out, and a thin stream of saliva coursed down his chin.