The Milagro Beanfield War (15 page)

Harlan wished Mercedes would go back to chucking stones at him. In fact, he often caught himself silently begging her to revert to her old form of harmless torture.

But maybe Mercedes' feeble mind still knew a thing or two about psyching out her opponent. In any case, she stuck to her guns, and come rain or come shine, whenever Harlan Betchel was crossing the plaza area she was out there, silently frowning and glowering and running the white pebbles through her fingers, mercilessly driving the café manager toward an early grave.

And somehow it all connected up to—in fact Mercedes' cruelty and cunning were savagely focused by—the existence of Joe Mondragón's pathetic little beanfield.

*   *   *

After the meeting in the governor's conference room, Kyril Montana went to work. First, he requisitioned the Bloom file. There wasn't much on the lawyer. A native of Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard Law, Bloom had been married once before, to a rich young Bostonian named Sherri Pope, a Radcliffe graduate with a master's in education. Divorced nine years ago, they had one child, Miranda, who lived with her mother and stepfather in the suburban Boston area. The divorce had apparently been a drawn-out, sticky affair, but the file contained few details.

Bloom had been in the state five years and was presently married to a young Chicano woman, Linda, maiden name of Romero, whose hometown was in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Their children, both girls, were six and two and a half years old, respectively—Pauline and María. The file had been started on Bloom at the time he defended a vocal land-grant heir, one César Pacheco, a part-time plumber from Ojo Prieto, sixteen miles west of Milagro. Pacheco, considered a militant activist by police agencies in the north, had been arrested on a drunk-driving charge, possibly authentic but probably not, and during the course of the arrest he had stabbed a county police officer—Pete Sandoval—once in the chest, inflicting a minor wound.

Bloom had created an imaginative and effective defense, something few lawyers would have dared, considering the political overtones of Pacheco's involvements, not to mention the fact that he had stabbed a cop. Starting with the assumption that Pacheco had attacked Sandoval in self-defense, Bloom put together a string of witnesses, testimony, and circumstantial evidence which had so incriminated Sandoval that the trial almost became a forum for protests against police brutality in the north. In the end, of course, Pacheco was convicted of resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon, using obscene and abusive language, being drunk and disorderly, and so forth, and he was presently serving a five-year term in the state penitentiary.

The cursory check on Bloom's character and background that had been run during and after the Pacheco trial produced several memoranda covering two discussions the undercover arm of the state police had had with state bar officials concerning Bloom's qualifications and credentials, all of which were in order. At the time, pending further development of Bloom's career—which up until the Pacheco trial had been orderly and quiet—it was decided that nothing should be done, no pressures brought to bear on Bloom or on his practice, such as it was, by the Bar Association. In general, the various people in the capital, in Milagro, in Colorado, and in the East who'd been contacted about Bloom had opined that he was no crusader and that he would not follow up the Pacheco case with more of the same fire and brimstone. This turned out to be an accurate appraisal of the lawyer's then immediate future, now his receding past. After the Pacheco case and up until this Joe Mondragón thing, Bloom had once again comfortably immersed himself in the endless petty squabbles, divorces, and mundane litigations of the poor people of Chamisa County.

After going through the file Kyril Montana picked up the telephone, and the first calls he placed were to Boston and Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Once he had defined what he was looking for to his contacts in the East, he put on his sport coat and left the office, walking twelve blocks across town to the
Voice of the People
office, which was on a quiet tree-lined street not far from the veteran's cemetery.

Curiously, although there was nobody in the four-room building, the front door was open, and so the agent walked inside. In each room he found a desk, an electric typewriter, a telephone, and a mess. Mounds of paper were scattered around, ashtrays and wastebaskets were filled to overflowing, and, where visible, the flat olive carpeting was freckled with cigarette burns. Back issues of the
Voice
in cardboard boxes lined the hallway leading to a bathroom in the rear. Beside the bathroom, in a large closet-type area, was a lot of darkroom equipment, including a valuable photo enlarger. Across one wide desk that apparently belonged to the business manager were scattered a half-dozen open envelopes: among them were notices from the phone company, from an office-supply rental firm, from the landlord, from a printer, and from the Library of Congress Copyright Division. Skimming the contents of each envelope, Kyril Montana learned that the
Voice
owed the Sierra Bell Telephone Company $197.53, and that their phones would be turned off if they didn't make arrangements to fork over the cash immediately; the office-supply firm was threatening suit to obtain $503.00 for back rent on three electric typewriters; the landlord wanted last month's rent; the printer was demanding $670.40 for the past two issues; and the Library of Congress Copyright Division wanted $108.00 for failure to pay the $6.00 filing fee for the last eighteen issues of the magazine.

Kyril Montana jotted this information down. Then he went from cardboard box to cardboard box selecting back issues, and within minutes he left the office carting twenty old issues of the magazine under one arm. Stopping for coffee and two burritos with green chili in a café near the central plaza, he leafed swiftly through all twenty magazines, marking the stories that carried a Charley Bloom by-line. Back in his office he skimmed through each Bloom article, underlining paragraphs here and there, and after that he composed a short profile of the lawyer's largely innocuous subject matter which he typed up on his own machine.

This done, the agent read through the Xerox of the typewritten article on Joe Mondragón's beanfield that Rudy Noyes had given him at the meeting in the governor's conference room; he made a few notes on this, had another Xerox of it run off and placed in the Bloom file, then contacted both the local FBI office and the Treasury Department's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division to see if anyone had a photograph of the lawyer, but there he struck out: until this moment, apparently, nobody had ever seriously considered Charley Bloom a dangerous person.

Toward the tail end of the following afternoon phone calls came in from both Massachusetts towns, and the scoop on Charley Bloom was everything the agent could have hoped for. During one seven-year period the lawyer's tax returns had been audited, challenged, and taken to court annually. He had paid fines galore, and the whole business was not yet straightened out. He had messed up regularly on his alimony payments, too, and there was still a great deal of confusion in the matter of who in the family could declare the daughter, Miranda, whom both Bloom and his first wife had named as a dependent on their returns for six years.

Their divorce, as the file indicated, had been a doozy. First, Sherri Bloom had contested it. Bloom's lawyers had countered by threatening to take Miranda and have Sherri declared insane, or at least incapable of being a parent. Bloom's wife then accused him of adultery; in return he accused her, first of frigidity, then of sexual promiscuity with at least three other men. In the end Sherri Bloom's side had concocted an atrocious lie, threatening to accuse Bloom in court of attempting to have sexual relations with his eleven-year-old daughter. They never had to make this fabrication a matter of public record, however: their letter to Bloom accusing him of this deed did the trick—he finally dropped out of the fight as if poleaxed. At the time of the divorce the Blooms had been eighty-three thousand dollars in the hole; there followed bankruptcy declarations and a substantial loss of valuable suburban property. It had been a very ugly situation, a bad divorce. Obviously, Charles Morgan Bloom had come out West in order to begin a new life.

Kyril Montana wrote all these things down, then he typed them up for the file. After that he made one phone call to a particular person, and finally, a little after 6:00
P.M
., he said good-bye to several men in the office and drove home. On his way he stepped by the
Voice of the People
office, which, though dark, was still unlocked. When he arrived home the agent made a last short business call, then changed into sports clothes and went out to have a cocktail with his wife beside the pool.

That night the
Voice of the People
offices were routinely burglarized, the three rented electric typewriters and the enlarger stolen. These machines were discovered by the police the next day abandoned in a dry arroyo on the western edge of town. Although the typewriters were brought in unharmed, the enlarger was hopelessly smashed. The typewriters were not returned to the
Voice of the People,
but instead were handed over to the rental company that owned them. That same day the rental company filed suit against the
Voice
for its $503.

Still, three days later the
Voice
published an issue. The day after that the magazine was mailed out to one thousand, two hundred, and eleven subscribers, half of whom had not renewed their subscriptions but were getting the magazine anyway, and during the next four days about fifteen hundred copies of the paper were distributed to eleven towns located in the top northern quarter of the state.

The issue turned out to be the most successful ever in terms of newsstand sales. In fact, within several days it was almost entirely sold out. But the
Voice
staff didn't know this. Once the magazine was inefficiently hauled from town to town and drugstore to drugstore in a rattletrap pickup driven by a vague long-haired poet named Jamey Carruthers, nobody from the
Voice
kept track of it until Jamey Carruthers came around again a month later to collect and distribute once more. So no one, least of all Charley Bloom, realized that the magazine had been quietly bought up by three men traveling in one car over Jamey Carruthers' route, nor did the
Voice
staff realize that the copies, once bought, were to be quietly burned in the backyard barbecue pit of a Capital City man named James Vincent who occasionally did odd jobs and the like for the undercover wing of the state police.

This James Vincent, a portly and nervous son of a bitch, lugged all the cardboard boxes of bought-up
Voices
into his backyard, which was dominated by a huge concrete barbecue pit flanked by feathery tamarisk trees. Vincent set down the last of four cardboard boxes with a grunt, then went inside for some lighter fluid. On his return, he carefully lifted all the magazines from the boxes and set them in separate piles atop a redwood picnic table beside the pit.

It was a windless, absolutely clear and sunny day. Although in an understandable hurry to incinerate the magazines, Vincent paused for a moment to stare at a tiny yellow-breasted warbler flitting about in the green mist of the left-hand tamarisk tree. Relaxing for a moment, he started to relight his cigar.

But as James Vincent touched a match to the tip of what Mrs. Vincent always called the “permanent pig turd” clenched between his false teeth, a miniature tornado—known locally as a dust devil—twirled down the street, whipping up little cones of last autumn's Chinese elm leaves and making neighborhood dogs slink off on their bellies. The dust devil suddenly veered off the pavement into the Vincent yard, grabbed up the yellow-breasted warbler, the pyrotechnician's cigar, and all one thousand, four hundred, and eighty-one copies of the
Voice
in its voracious little wind funnel and, after that, with a graceful hop it sailed over the right-hand tamarisk tree heading toward one of the capital's main thoroughfares.

“Wait a minute!”
James Vincent cried.

And he had only just plunged into the house to make a frantic phone call when a frantic phone call was placed to him.

“Are you out of your mind?” Kyril Montana said icily into the phone. “Did you hire a plane to scatter them all over the city?”

“I can explain,” Vincent stammered in terror.

“I wouldn't make book on that,” the agent hissed sarcastically.

“It was a dust devil. No shit, I'm not kidding. A fucking goddam dust devil!”

“That's hard to believe, Mr. Vincent. Very hard to believe indeed.”

“Could I lie about it?” James Vincent wailed. “Man, how
could
I lie about a crazy thing like this?”

“Well, we've got eight people over in the La Loma–Manzanillo area picking up those magazines. But some of them fell into backyards, onto portals, and roofs—”

“I couldn't help it,” James Vincent moaned. “It happened so suddenly. It was an act of God. I was just gonna start drenching them with lighter fluid. How could I help it, I'm some kind of supernatural weatherman? I never saw it coming. The chances were ten million to one a thing like this could happen.”

“Well, I assume we've got it under control,” the agent said disgustedly, and hung up.

“Luck,” James Vincent groaned to himself, to nobody, not in his wildest dreams realizing how prophetic his statement would turn out to be: “I got the kind of luck even a rattlesnake wouldn't strike at.”

Kyril Montana sat at his desk, slowly shaking his head. He was perplexed, also pissed-off. He hated allocating jobs, he wished he never had to depend on other people to perform some of the services necessary in his work.

But by the time he picked up the jangling phone in order to receive a broadside in his right ear from his boss, Xavier Trucho, the agent felt better; so much better, in fact, that when Trucho finally paused to suck in a gasping breath, Kyril Montana, who by nature was a fairly humorless man, found himself laughing.