That Night at the Palace (37 page)

FOREST

NORTH OF ELZA, TEXAS

1:20 a.m., December 7, 1941

Cherokee-One-Leg was sitting on a wooden chair in an old broken down barn. Around the room hung oil lanterns that put out a dim orange glow. Friends of his grandfather had built the barn nearly a hundred years before. It sat on what was once a thriving piece of farmland but had long since been overgrown by trees and brush. The nearest home was almost a half-mile away.

A dozen men surrounded the old warrior; all the men were black. A shirtless Richard Crawford hung suspended before him. His hands were tied to a crossbeam above. Each leg was tied to a rope that wrapped around a pulley. One pulley was connected to the wall to his right and another pulley to his left. Every five minutes two men pulled on the ropes and his legs were stretched apart another inch or two, and the man would scream in agony.

The door opened and Mert Davis walked into the barn. His face and hair had showed considerable age since the day Bucky was lynched. Mert looked at Cherokee, who nodded. Mert then walked in front of where Crawford hung.

“You were there? You were there when Bucky got hanged?” the old man asked.

Richard was in obvious agony, to the point that he hardly heard the man. It took him a moment to realize what he was being asked.

Richard looked at Mert and shook his head and said, “No.”

Cherokee looked over at the two men holding the ropes wrapped around the pulleys and nodded. The men gave the ropes a tug and Richard screamed out.

“Stop,” he pleaded. “Yes, yeah, I was there.”

“You watched, knowing that Bucky was innocent?”

Richard looked at the man in terror. After a moment he nodded.

“Who raped that girl?”

Richard hung his head in silence. Cherokee looked over at the men with the ropes and they gave it another tug.

“Stop,” Richard yelled. “We did it, me and Pete, my brother. But it wasn’t any rape. She was one of those girls, you know. They like that.”

Mert looked at him in disgust. “She was beaten to a pulp. No girl likes that.”

“No, no, we were just playin’.”

Cherokee nodded, and the men holding the rope gave it another tug until the man screamed again.

“You dumped her on the side of the road and made her tell folks that Bucky did it,” Mert said with a blistering look in his eyes.

“Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”

Mert was repulsed as he turned to look at Cherokee. The years since Bucky’s death had paid a toll on the man, but it had also softened the rage. Five years earlier he would have gutted the man and left him to bleed to death, but now all he felt was disgust.

“Give him to the law. We ain’t murderers. If the law don’t do it, though,” Mert said as he looked back into Crawford’s eyes, “then we bring him back here, split him in two, and feed ‘im to the pigs.”

Chapter 14

MCMILLAN’S STORE

ELZA, TEXAS

2:45 a.m., December 7, 1941

A
1940 model Dodge panel van with the words
Houston Examiner
printed on the driver-side door pulled to a stop under the awning in front of McMillan’s. The driver hopped out with a bundle of newspapers and sat them on a wooden box next to the front door.

Most Sunday editions of the Houston
Examiner
showed up in places like Elza late Sunday morning or even in the afternoon. The
Examiner’s
primary customers were, of course, residents of Houston and the immediate vicinity. A normal run would be loaded on trucks and sent to the delivery points where the papers would be given to paperboys who either delivered them to subscribers or sold the papers by hand on street corners.

The second run would go to outlying areas where the papers often didn’t reach their destination until late morning. In most cases, Elza being no exception, the papers would be put in a wooden box on the front porch of a local store. Since the store was normally closed on Sundays, there was a slotted, locked coin box sitting next to the wooden paper box where customers purchased the papers on what was nothing less than an honor system.

From time to time, when there was a major news event or story that warranted it, the
Examiner
would print a Special Edition. An SE, as it was called among journalists, could sometimes double or even triple the sales of a normal run. There were times when the SE way outsold expectations. On those occasions the paper would make a second run, which was a newspaper editor’s dream and nightmare at the same time. It was a dream because they made a lot of money; it was a nightmare because some board member would want to know why the editors had missed potential sales because they miscalculated demand. To prevent the latter, the editors made every effort to get the papers to the circulation points as early as possible. Then, hopefully, they could estimate the need for a second or even third run by the sales of the first.

The Sunday of December 7, 1941 edition of the
Houston Examiner
promised to be an edition that might possibly warrant a second or even third run. In fact, the editors of the paper were so excited about their exclusive on the “Alligator Murders” that they printed up fifty thousand extra copies in the first run.

#

PARKING LOT

STAFFORD’S BAR

LUFKIN, TEXAS

9:30 a.m., December 7, 1941

Irwin Stoker awoke in the front seat of his Chevy pick-up. He had the worst taste in his mouth that he’d ever had and a headache to match. Fortunately he had four and a half bottles of Old Crow to help with both.

In his pocket he had two dollars left. Apparently the bartender hadn’t charged him for the hamburger or the first two drinks. The various folks in the bar paid for the other ten or fifteen drinks.

As he recalled, somewhere back toward town there was a railcar diner, and the only thing he needed as much as another drink was a few flap-jacks.

In ten minutes he was in Saddler’s Diner eating a much-needed breakfast when a man he had most likely met the night before but for the life of him couldn’t recall walked up and told him how sorry he was about what had happened to his little girl. He said that no one should die like that, and he couldn’t believe that the papers printed those pictures.

“What pictures?” Irwin asked.

A moment later the Houston paper was lying in front of him. In large letters the headline read, THE ALLIGATOR MURDERS. Below were two of Bobby Weatherholt’s crime scene photographs side by side. One of Cliff’s mangled body and the other of Jewel lying face up, impaled on a tree-stump. The following pages were filled with stories and theories and more pictures. All the stories implicated, if not outright convicted, Jesse Rose of the killings. The stories quoted unnamed sources close to the investigation that claimed that the judge on the case was going to great lengths to protect the wealthy young defendant. One of the stories questioned the judge’s integrity, suggesting that the judge was related to the defendant. Another story detailed the wealth of the defendant’s family, indicating that the judge might be profiting from the case. All the stories mentioned the name of the County Attorney on the case and how the C.A.’s office was working tirelessly to ensure that justice would be served on behalf of the victim’s families.

Irwin took one look at the picture and began to weep. He never even saw the stories. In minutes everyone in the diner was crowded around the old farmer.

Finally, one of the men put his arm around poor Irwin and invited him to come down to church with him. He said that the best thing for a man at a time like this was to be near some people who would pray with him.

By the time the eleven o’clock service started, everybody at the Old Union Road United Methodist Church, Reverend Braswell included, had told Irwin that they loved him and were praying for him and hoped that justice would be served against that rich kid that, “went and killed his little girl.” Reverend Braswell completely tossed out his planned sermon on how Joseph resisted temptation with Potiphar’s wife so the entire congregation could gather and pray for Irwin in his terrible time of suffering. Of course, Reverend Braswell got a sermon in, it just wasn’t one that he had written in advance. This sermon focused on how the true Christian can’t sit back and allow injustice, like what was happening up in Rusk with the killer of Irwin’s daughter.

In the parking lot after the service, the gatherings were somewhat different than usual. There had been rumors that some good citizens around town were thinking of going up to Rusk to see to it that the pig-headed judge up there didn’t let that murderin’ kid go free.

Twenty minutes later Irwin was sitting in a Dodge pickup between two men whose names he couldn’t recall, in a line of other pickups headed up to Rusk to make sure that justice got served for poor Irwin’s little girl.

Irwin, of course, had no idea that all across East Texas, groups of good citizens who had seen the morning paper were also headed up to Rusk for the same reason.

#

CHEROKEE COUNTY COURTHOUSE

RUSK, TEXAS

10:00 a.m., December 5, 1941

Living the life of a hobo taught Shakes a great deal over the years. He learned, for instance, that there are good times and bad times to get arrested. Contrary to what most people might think, getting arrested wasn’t always a bad thing. In jail a fellow could find a reasonably warm and dry place to sleep. Jail was also an excellent place to get a couple of good meals. Granted, the food might not be particularly tasty, but when one was living off the generosity of the public, one can’t be particularly choosy.

Shakes also learned the best time to get arrested. Smart hobos never get arrested in the morning. If you get picked up in the morning, by mid-afternoon you may be working a chain gang. On the other hand, if you get hauled in during the evening, you will probably get to spend the night before seeing a judge. The best time to get arrested, as any self-respecting hobo knows, is always Friday night. Judges, all judges, take weekends off. That means that if you got arrested for some small offense, you could sit the weekend out in the city jail or a county holding facility until Monday morning when the judge would then decide if it was necessary to send you on to the county farm. With a little luck, the judge would release you for “time served” and you’d never spend a minute in the county lockup.

Shakes usually got arrested for things like drunkenness or loitering. Most of the time he’d be taken to see a judge on Monday and then sentenced to a couple of nights in jail. By Monday he would have already served a couple of nights, so normally he’d be released.

This time was a little different for Shakes Blankenship. He was in for a drunken and disorderly charge, but he had not been drunk, and he was only disorderly because he had made every effort to appear like he was drunk. Shakes was not the man he had been a few years ago.

He’d heard a lot of talk around the country about the murder in Elza. Every newspaper carried something about the “Alligator Killer.” On the rare occasion when Shakes was where he could hear a radio, there was always mention of the frighteningly violent killing. Now there was a second killing.

More and more, Shakes was hearing talk that if the court didn’t do the job, then someone else would have to do it. He didn’t know anything about the killings in Elza. He hadn’t even been in town when the first one had taken place. All he knew for sure was that the kid in the cell across from him didn’t do it. Shakes didn’t know why he was so sure, but he was confident in his position.

“You awake, Jesse?”

“Yeah,” Jesse replied from the other cell.

“You want to talk?”

“There’s nothin’ else to do,” Jesse answered.

A minute later Jesse was sitting in a swivel desk chair outside Shakes’ cell with his feet propped on the cross section of the cell door.

“What’s up, Shakes?”

“You don’t remember me, do you, Jesse?”

“Should I?”

“Not really. It was a long time ago. I was just a hobo. Folks don’t remember hobos.”

Jesse looked at the man, trying to recall.

“You once handed me a watermelon,” Shakes said with a break in his voice.

Jesse sat up in the chair. “What are you talkin’ about, Shakes?”

“You and your buddy and a girl brought watermelons to that little shantytown outside Elza when you were kids. I was there.”

Jesse smiled. “I remember that day. Me and Cliff got in a bunch of trouble for doing it. We had to plant a whole new crop for Mr.
McAlister ‘cause of that.”

“That day changed my life, Jesse.”

Jesse, brow wrinkled, asked, “What do you mean, Shakes?”

“Do you remember goin’ out to New Birmingham?”

Jesse’s heartbeat quickened. He remembered a lot of things about New Birmingham.

“I used to live there,” Shakes continued. “I still do, at least part of the time. I made a little apartment in the back of the Southern Hotel. I was there the day you three kids came walkin’ through.

Shakes had Jesse’s full attention.

“I grew up here in Rusk. I was valedictorian of my High School class. My dad owned the hardware store on the square.”

“I’ve been in there,” Jesse said.

“It doesn’t surprise me. Just about everybody around came in at some point. I hated that store. My sister and her husband run it now.

“It took a lot of work, but I managed to go to college up in Chicago. I did every kind of odd job you can imagine in those days. I even worked for the county coroner for a time. When I finished school I got a job as an investment counselor. People paid me a lot of money to bet on the markets for ‘em. I did good. I made my clients a lot of money. I made a lot for myself, too. I got so busy and full of myself that I didn’t even go to my parents’ funeral. I felt like I didn’t have the time. All I wanted to do was make more money.

“Of course, my sister hated me for that. I can’t really blame her. What kind of person doesn’t have time to go to their parents’ funeral? I gave her my half of the store. I guess that kind of helped make up for the fact that I didn’t have time to come back down. The fact is that I didn’t want that store. I didn’t need it. I was doing too good in Chicago to waste my time on a little hardware store in a back-wood East Texas farm town.

“Not long after my parents died, I met a girl and got married. She was beautiful, but all she cared about was my money. When the market crashed, she sued me for a divorce. She took everything. In just a few weeks time I went from living in a luxury Michigan Avenue apartment to a south side hotel that was infested with rats and cockroaches. I lost everything - my wife, my money, my job. All I had left was a suit and a hat.

“Somewhere along the way I started drinkin’. I don’t remember when. Before long my hands started to shake. When I drank, my hands would calm down. At least that was my excuse. I think I just liked the escape that booze gave me.

“That’s when I started ridin’ the rails.

“When you’re hoppin’ on trains you sometimes know where it’s goin,’ but other times you don’t. It doesn’t matter ‘cause, well, when you’re a hobo you’re not really goin’ anywhere. I got to the point that I didn’t care where the train was headed. I just got on a train to take me to another town where I could do an odd job to buy a meal or two.

“One day I got off a train and realized that I was just a couple of miles from home. So, I walked into Rusk to see my family. I was so used to askin’ for handouts by that time that I thought I’d see if I could get one from them. I saw my sister right out there on the square. She pretended that she didn’t even know me. I deserved that.

“I was walkin’ back to Elza when I remembered exploring New Birmingham as a kid. I wandered up there and found a room in the back of the Southern Hotel. Before long I had me a decent place to live. Only I separated myself from the rest of the world. I felt like I no longer needed anyone else. I felt like no one needed me. The world had kicked me aside, like I was worthless. The truth was, I thought that I was worthless. So I lived most of the time in my private little town where no one would ever come to bother me. It was great. Once in a while I’d go to the shantytown and try and get some food, or I’d catch a train someplace and do some day work. But most of my time was spent in my private little utopia.

“Then one day I was in my little apartment reading a book when I heard some voices. I got off my bed and looked out and saw the three of you. I was hiding in the shadows when you walked onto the porch of the hotel and looked in. I followed when you three went down to look into the old mineshaft. I was across the street while you were looking into that hole.

“I was angry. And I was afraid. You had invaded my home. I had gotten away from the world, and you three brought it back to me. The way I saw it, if someone saw me, the cops would run me out, and I’d be back to living in railcars and shantytowns.