Desert Wind (32 page)
He gave her an apologetic smile. “Well, now, Miss Jones, I already answered them same questions as best I could for them detectives who talked to me. They videotaped the whole thing. Me, in the movies! Ain’t that a stitch? Anyways, them detectives had me write it all down on a yellow pad of paper, too, and when I was finished, I signed my John Hancock to the whole thing. I’m guessing they’ll give you a copy if you ask nice. Maybe even a copy of the tape.”
“I won’t be able to get my hands on those materials for a while. Since Mr. Olmstead has already forked over a big check to your new attorney, why don’t you make it worth his while by telling me what I need to know? Specifically, why did you shoot Mr. Donohue? Oh, and while you’re at it, tell me about the firearm you used, whether it was a rifle or a handgun.”
The interview room was air-conditioned, but it felt like the thing wasn’t even running because sweat started dripping down his body. He hoped he wasn’t stinking up the place. Not that the law would care, but he didn’t want to offend this pretty girl. She sure didn’t stink. Smelled like lilacs and soap, she did. There’d been a touch of lilac in Abby’s Evening in Paris perfume, too, and he’d always been a sucker for lilacs.
Mindful of his language, he said, “You know, Miss Jones, when you get to be my age, your memory starts going, just like your hearing. I told that to the detectives, and they gave me a bad time about it, but what can you expect, ’cause the ages of both them boys together don’t add up to mine. They don’t know the first thing about getting old. I’ll tell you what I told them, that the only thing I can remember is followin’ that Donohue fellow up to Sunset Point, shooting him, then kicking his body over the ledge. That’s pretty much it.”
“You do remember what firearm you used, don’t you?”
“Can’t help you there, either. Might a been that old hunting rifle I’ve had since God was a pup, might a been that pistol I won in a poker game over in Sparks, Nevada. All I can remember is a big bang, then Donohue falling down.”
“Where do you keep your firearms?”
No wedding ring on her left hand. What was wrong with men today, letting a fine woman like that get away? Were they blind or just plain stupid? To ease a heart that had to be lonely, he gentled his voice like he’d do with a skittish mare. “Well, Miss Jones, I keep my guns in my room, in the barn, sometimes in my truck. It all depends on what I’m gonna do during the day. Like most of them boys out at the ranch, I like to do me a little target shooting from time to time.”
“Where are your firearms now?”
Talk about a one-track mind. Abby’d been like that, too, never letting him get away with anything. Knowing what she was like, he’d always behaved himself around his sweet girl, ’cause if he didn’t, he’d never hear the end of it. That was a woman’s job, wasn’t it, keeping her man walking the straight and narrow. Once Abby was gone, look what had happened to him. If it hadn’t been for the Duke setting him on the right path…Well, Hank Olmstead came in for some of the credit, too. He’d never forget what that man did for him—gave him a chance for redemption and he sure wasn’t about to blow it.
He smiled real sweet-like. “Hmmm. Where are my firearms now? You know, that’s a mighty good question. I kinda remember leaving them out there in the desert after I shot Mr. Donohue, but I don’t know exactly where that was ’cause it was dark and ou know how things look around here when it gets dark. Can’t see a thing.”
“I’ve had some experience with that. Are you sure you can’t remember anything else?”
“Hate to disappoint you again, ma’am, but nope. Oh, there’s that conversation I had with the Duke that night, of course. I always remember talking with him.”
“The Duke?”
“John Wayne. The Hollywood actor. He drops by regular to see how I’m doin’.”
She gave him a slit-eyed stare. “How does that work, Mr. Boone? I was under the impression that John Wayne died some time in the seventies.”
“The Duke stopped breathing the air of this Earth on Friday, June 11, 1979, at 5:35 p.m. But that don’t mean he ain’t still walking around, visiting with his friends, giving them the advice they need. Sometimes advice they don’t think they need.”
“What kind of advice has the long-dead John Wayne been giving you, Mr. Boone?”
He could tell she didn’t believe him and he didn’t much care. “Oh, that a man’s gotta sit tall in the saddle, be a stayer not a quitter. Words to live by.”
She scribbled something in her notebook. He wasn’t all that good at reading upside down, but it looked like “crazy” was one of the words. Having been called crazy more than a few times in his life, it didn’t bother him.
When she spoke again, her voice had changed. Now she sounded like she was talking to some addle-brained kid. “Did John Wayne tell you to kill Mr. Donohue?”
He looked up at the ceiling. The fly specks hadn’t gone away. There even seemed to be more of them. When he looked back down, he repeated the same answer he’d given the detectives. “The Duke would never tell somebody to do that, not without just cause, anyway. When I killed Mr. Donohue, I did it for my own good reasons. You see, people as old as me, we collect grudges. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Donohue once kicked Blue, my dog. Bet if a man kicked your dog, you’d shoot him, too.”
“I don’t have a dog.”
“Your cat, then.”
“No cat, no ferret, no goldfish.” She gave a deep sigh, the same kind Abby used to give him when he’d done something she didn’t much like. “Mr. Boone, you didn’t kill Ike Donohue, did you?”
Gabe didn’t answer right away, just studied the beauty of her. The blond hair, the green eyes, the back as straight and strong as that of a good horse. A woman a man should value, not lie to. But sometimes a lie was truer than the truth.
Crossing what was left of his fingers under the table where she couldn’t see them, he said, “Miss Jones, I killed that man as sure as you and me is sitting here enjoying the kind hospitality of the Walapai County Jail.”
Gabe Boone was the worst liar I’d ever met.
As a detention officer escorted me back to the lobby, I understood why Hank Olmstead had hired me to help the poor old thing. I doubted if he was capable of killing anyone other than by accident, and he’d “confessed” for the sole purpose of springing Ted Olmstead from jail. In a way, it was almost gallant.
Didn’t Boone realize that if he stuck with his lame story he’d wind up spending what little time he had left in prison? It might provide him with three hots and a cot, but the prison gangs would eat him alive. However, his compromised mental state gave me hope. The man was in the full grip of dementia, possibly Alzheimer’s, and might be sentenced to a mental health facility. Not the best of all possible worlds, necessarily, but better than prison.
I stood there in the jail’s reception area for a few minutes, trying to figure out whom to call first. Olmstead and Jimmy would still be celebrating Ted’s release from jail, and I didn’t want to interrupt their fun. Tomorrow morning would be soon enough. Same for Anderson Behar, Boone’s new attorney.
Feeling more optimistic, I walked across the street to Ma’s Kitchen and ordered a meatloaf sandwich and fries to go. While waiting for my takeout, I looked into the dining section and saw Olivia Eames sitting at a deuce, pushing a salad around on her plate. When I waved, she motioned me over.
Now that I was closer, I saw how depressed she looked. “Salad no good?” I asked, then promptly regretted it. The too-thin reporter displayed all the symptoms of anorexia, and discussing food with anorexics was never wise.
“It’s delicious, but I’m not as hungry as I thought,” she answered.
“Happens to all of us at one time or another. Say, while you were collecting information for your Black Basin story, did you come across any mention of Gabriel Boone?”
“The cook who confessed to murdering Ike Donohue? There’s no connection that I know of. When I heard about the confession, I did try to get in to see him but they wouldn’t let me. As soon as I’m through eating, I’m going to camp out on their doorstep until they grant me an interview. I’m the press, for God’s sake! They have to let me in.”
There’s nothing like watching a reporter sensing a story in the making; she looked like a wolf smelling prey. Maybe she thought she could somehow connect Donohue’s murder to Tosches’, and by extension, to the Black Basin Mine.
“Is it true the man’s in his eighties?” she asked.
When I nodded, she vented an obscenity that drew frowns from nearby diners. Oblivious, she said, “So now we’ve got an octogenarian sitting in a jail cell, confessing to murder. Jesus, what a mess.”
“You can say that ag…” Before I could finish, Tara, the cute waitress who had a crush on Jimmy, came over with my to-go order, so I bade Olivia goodbye and followed Tara to the cash register.
When I arrived back at the Covered Wagons, I discovered that while I’d muted the television before driving over to the jail, I’d forgotten to turn it off. The John Wayne marathon continued in full bore.
True Grit
had finished and now an older, more exhausted-looking Wayne was shooting up a saloon that reminded me of the motel’s restaurant. Had the Covered Wagon’s decorator used the saloon as a model? Amused by their similarity, I unwrapped my takeout, un-muted the TV, and climbed onto the bed for a little light entertainment.
A few minutes later, Wayne took a bullet. Then another. And another. Shot full of holes, the weary warrior collapsed behind the bar and died. After the credits rolled, the marathon’s host said, “As we’ve just seen in
The Shootist
, J.B. Books, the character played by John Wayne, was dying of prostate cancer, which is why he’d provoked that final shootout. In real life, Wayne himself was dying of cancer, and
The Shootist
turned out to be the last movie he starred in. You can see by his appearance that he wasn’t feeling well.”
The host’s expression grew more serious. “Three years later, in January of 1979, after being in constant pain for months, Wayne went into the hospital for a gallstone operation. Instead of gallstones, the surgeons discovered that the lung cancer he thought he’d licked back in 1964 had metastasized to his stomach. They removed his stomach, but five days later, tests came back showing he also had cancer in his lymph nodes and intestines. John Wayne died six months later, mourned by millions of fans.”
Having suffered my allotment of gloom and doom for the day, I grabbed the remote and was about to change the channel when the next thing the host said froze my hand.
“This brings us to
The Conqueror,
said to be the worst film Wayne ever made because with his rugged Western looks and swagger, he was simply unbelievable as Genghis Khan.
The Conqueror
was filmed in 1954 in Snow Canyon, a recreational area outside of St. George, Utah. This is the movie so many of Wayne’s fans believe was responsible for his death. Of the two hundred and twenty Hollywood actors and crew members who worked on that Utah set, ninety-one contracted cancer. Most died, including John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendariz, and director Dick Powell. Why? The prevailing theory is that they died because three years before filming began on
The Conqueror
, the U.S. military started above-ground nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site, ninety miles southwest of the film set.”
I frowned. Yes, I’d heard about the A-bomb testing. Who hadn’t? It had even been mentioned in one of my high school history textbooks. How could the tests be connected with all those deaths, especially Wayne’s? From what I’d heard, Wayne had been a heavy smoker and drinker, habits that seldom contributed to a long life.
The TV host’s next words cleared up my confusion. “Because of the prevailing western winds, the fallout from numerous nuclear bombs—many bigger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—blew straight into Snow Canyon. The tests turned the picturesque canyon we saw in the movie into a radioactive hotspot the film crew was subjected to for thirteen weeks. To make matters worse, Howard Hughes, who bankrolled the film, had sixty tons of the red-tinted Snow Canyon dirt shipped back to Hollywood so that any retakes necessary would match the scenes shot on location.”
He paused, then added, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, here is
The Conqueror
—infamous as ‘the movie that killed John Wayne.’ ”
A bite of meatloaf tumbled out of my mouth and onto my lap.
Snow Canyon was less than sixty miles from Walapai Flats.
Brushing the wayward meatloaf onto the floor, I jumped off the bed and ran to my laptop.
***
Ten minutes later I was punching in Olivia’s cell phone number.
“You were raised in this area,” I said, the second she picked up. “Walapai Flats received nuclear fallout from the Nevada Test Site, didn’t it?”
There was such a long silence that I thought the call had dropped, but then she said, “Well, well. So somebody finally broke the code of silence. Who was it? Earl Two Horses? He always was the wild card.”
“Code of silence? What are you talking about?”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how people clam up when…Wait a minute.” On the other end of the line I heard a man’s voice, then Olivia’s again. When she came back on, she sounded excited. “I just received permission to see that Boone guy for fifteen minutes, and it’s going down right now. Gotta go, but I promise to call you back as soon as I’m done.”