Ask Not

Chapter 5

The boy in me had been expecting a rambling mission-style structure with a hitching post for horses, while the grown-up me figured on an anonymous modern building with an American flag and parking lot of patrol cars. What the Waco branch of the Texas Rangers turned out to be was a pair of crowded, cluttered rooms among half a dozen others at the rear of the first floor of a defunct department store in a section of the downtown that looked like a war zone.

What lived up to expectations was Captain Clint Peoples himself, a rangy hombre in his fifties with dark graying hair in a military-short cut and a ready smile that didn’t keep me from noticing that those steady blue eyes didn’t blink much. One of the two rooms was his, half as big as the bullpen shared by nine two-man desks, counting his secretary’s just outside his office door. About eleven Rangers in plainclothes were making phone calls, typing reports. This might have been the bustling bullpen of a precinct house in Manhattan, except for the drawls.

Right now we were shut inside the captain’s office, the door muffling but not defeating the bullpen clamor. With his back to a scarred old rolltop desk shoved against the wall, Peoples sat facing me in a visitor’s chair. There wasn’t much else to the room except a quartet of metal filing cabinets and a bulletin board of WANTED posters. No framed photos or citations on the cracked-plaster walls, despite this man being a celebrated lawman, veteran of countless arrests leading to convictions, and shoot-outs leading to dead perps.

A window air conditioner chugged in this room, as did one in the outer room. It was ninety degrees outside, and humid, and if this was fall in Waco, I wasn’t anxious to summer here. The heat hadn’t taken a toll on me, though, as I’d moved rapidly from an air-conditioned car into the cooled building. I was casual in a yellow Ban-Lon and a lightweight brown H.I.S. suit, the coat of which my host had already invited me to hang on the coat tree in the corner, where his own jacket and a multi-gallon Stetson worthy of a Texas Ranger already resided.

Like his Rangers, he wore street clothes — a short-sleeve white shirt with dark-brown tie, cowboy boots glimpsed under tan chino trousers; but a small gold CAPTAIN badge was pinned just above his breast pocket. A.45 automatic with fancy ironwood grips rode high on his right hip, and he was smoking a cigar, a big one. The air conditioner cut the smokiness in the air, and anyway it was a good cigar, so I wasn’t bothered.

We had already gone through with the handshaking ritual, and his secretary, Ruth, delivered us both cold bottles of Dr Pepper (“The native drink,” Peoples said). It was just after two o’clock in the afternoon, after I’d driven down in my rental Galaxie from Dallas, where American Airlines had deposited me around eleven. I’d checked into the Statler Hilton, freshened up, and made the ninety-minute drive to Waco on Highway 77. The ride had been surprisingly rolling and green, Waco itself a modern city dropped into a big bowl formed by low hills. An ancient suspension bridge bisected the town, taking me over the muddy Brazos at South First Street and Austin Avenue.

“I appreciate you seeing me at such short notice, Captain,” I said.

“That was some high-powered advance scout you sent lookin’ for me,” he said, blowing out a little smoke signal of cigar smoke, his eyes amused.

“It was nice of Senator McClellan to make that call,” I said.

“Impressive, you workin’ for him and Bobby Kennedy on that rackets committee.”

“More impressive if we’d sent Hoffa to jail.”

He nodded, smile fading. “Now and then a big one gets away,” he said, as much to himself as to me. Then his smile returned. “But the senator is one of the good ones. He tried damn near as hard as we did to put a certain party away.”

“What party is that?”

His smile turned sly and he rolled the big cigar around in it as he rocked. “We’ll get to that. We’ll get to that. Mr. Heller, what do you know about the Texas Rangers?”

“Pretty much what I’ve seen in the movies and on TV. Which I figure is about as accurate as what you’ve seen about private detectives.”

He let out a laugh. “We’re not a Wild West show anymore, Mr. Heller. We’re with the Department of Public Safety — us and the Highway Patrol and licensing bureaus and so on. We’re essentially the state’s detective division — we help out sheriffs and police departments, if investigatin’ a major crime is beyond their means. And of course we handle fugitive apprehension, since a fleein’ felon doesn’t confine himself to county and city boundaries. Roadblocks, aerial reconnaissance, all your standard modern police methods.”

“What, no horses?”

“Oh, we still have horses, Mr. Heller. There are lots of places left in Texas where it takes a horse to get there.” He shifted in the chair. “I do apologize for these cramped quarters. When I spoke of ‘modern police methods,’ I was definitely not referrin’ to these sloppy surroundings.”

“Are they temporary?” It had that feel.

“They are now.” He shrugged and puffed cigar smoke. “When Company F got relocated to Waco, a few years back, all we got was these couple of rented rooms, some cast-off office furniture, and a cleaning crew that comes in once a month, if the mood strikes ’em.”

I jerked a thumb toward the street. “You know, this looks like a nice place to live, college town, trees along the river — lots of industry, I understand. Must be close to a hundred-thousand population.”

“Not quite yet. Gettin’ there.”

“So why does your downtown look like East Berlin? This building included.”

He half-turned to tamp cigar ash into a glass tray on his desktop. “That’s a sad one, Mr. Heller. Terrible tornado blew through here in ’53, right down the middle of town. Killed well over a hundred. Chewed up hundreds of buildings and spit ’em out. This downtown was one of the main casualties.”

“Well, they obviously rebuilt it.”

“Some of it. Some they never got around to. And in the meantime a new shopping center went in. That killed the downtown deader than the tornado.”

“That’s happening places where there hasn’t been a tornado. But Waco’s disaster was ten years ago — what makes these quarters ‘temporary’ now?”

He grinned. Those blue eyes even granted me a blink. “Remember how you got here, Mr. Heller? How you made your way back to us through the driver’s license testing area, and those offices with pretty young girls and callow young men in them?”

“I believe my memory goes back that far.”

“Well, we took to walkin’ various suspects through there for questioning back here in No Man’s Land. On a fairly regular basis, we rounded up some fairly unsavory types, on prostitution and vagrancy and drug dealing and such like.”

“Ah,” I said.

“I’d already been hounding the Powers That Be about the need for a separate facility for Company F’s Rangers. And I have a few influential friends in the community, including a former mayor or two and assorted Chamber of Commerce folk.”

“So when do they break ground?”

He grinned around the cigar again and his eyebrows flicked up. “Next May, Mr. Heller. Next May. Now, you didn’t come all this way to hear about my problems — at least not my problems with these cramped quarters.”

“No.” I sipped Dr Pepper. Not bad for a regional drink. “I’m told, by Senator McClellan among others, that you’re the man to talk to about the Henry Marshall ‘suicide.’”

“It’s an interesting story, Mr. Heller.” He wasn’t rocking. “And I would be glad to tell it. But there’s another story — at least as interesting as that one — that you really should hear first.”

“By all means,” I said.

Let me tell you about another Texas boy, Mr. Heller. Born in Mount Pleasant, Texas, back in 1921. Name of Malcolm Wallace, “Mac” to most. His daddy was a hardworking man, a farmer who later signed onto road crews, and he must have been proud of his boy, making good grades and keeping out of trouble.

By high school, Mac stood a broad-shouldered six foot, and kept right on pulling down high marks, and was popular enough to get elected vice president of his senior class. Something of a football star, too, till he hurt his back and had to quit. After he graduated high school, the boy joined the Marines, this was before the war, around ’39... oh, you were in the Marines, too, Mr. Heller? I was a bit too old to serve myself, I’m afraid.

Anyway, Mac Wallace served on the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier, but he took a tumble off a ladder in 1940 and, wouldn’t you know it, injured his damn back again. Got himself a medical discharge, and... you, too? No kidding, Mr. Heller. Section Eight, huh? Guadalcanal? That’d do it. Still, I bet you jumped right smack in the swing of things, back on the home front.

So did Mac Wallace. He enrolled at the University of Texas, over in Austin, and was active in student groups, some of a type that a less charitable man than myself might term pinko. But he wasn’t no oddball or nothin’, no. He was elected student body president, and kept pullin’ down top marks. When the university’s president was fired because of his socialist ways, Mac headed up a student protest, led eight thousand kids in a march. The movement failed, but it got in all the papers. He was for sure a young man worth watching.

Here’s a picture of him — you can have that, Mr. Heller, I had that made for you. That’s him about 1945 — handsome devil, look at that curly dark hair, those moody dark eyes, regular Tyrone Power type, but kind of studious-looking too, don’t you think, in those wire-rim glasses. Later on he preferred black-rimmed jobs. I got an older picture of him, which you can also have. But I’m gettin’ ahead of myself.

Brainy as he was, it still took him something like seven years to get his degree, partly ’cause he switched majors a bunch of times, finally settling on economics. Plus, he was working his way through, taking various jobs, at least till the G.I. Bill kicked in, in ’44. I should mention he was chosen to belong to the Friar Society, sort of the Texas version of Yale’s Skull and Bones, if you’ve heard of that. Figured you had. Anyway, that put this fast-rising young man on a path to the highest reaches of business and government in the Lone Star State.

The Friars’ is probably how he met up with Edward Clark, LBJ’s man, his top legal counsel and financial adviser. Later on, Clark would introduce Mac to Lyndon, but I’m gettin’ ahead of myself again.

Where was I? Oh, after graduation Mac married a good-lookin’ gal named Mary Andre DuBose Barton. Her daddy was a Methodist preacher, but they had some powerful relatives up and down the family tree. Unfortunately for Mac, his young wife was a wild one. You know how preacher’s daughters can be. In divorce proceedings against her, years later, Mac said she was a sexual pervert. He told me himself that she was a whore and a homosexual. And frankly there’s evidence to back him up.

What kind of evidence? Well, Mary Andre Wallace was picked up on several occasions by police at notorious make-out spots, public parks primarily, with other women. Stripped down to their undergarments. Apparently Mary Andre liked both boys and girls, and Mac didn’t like that at all. I won’t bore you with all the ins and outs... that didn’t come out right, did it?... but he up and hauled the little woman off to New York, where he did a couple of semesters at Columbia, going for a doctorate. Top marks again. He was doing some teaching, too. They had a kid, and then the gal got pregnant again, and she would get real wild during the pregnancies, boy howdy. Her own mama called the police on her for having sex with both men and women in Zilker Park.

Anyway, Mary Andre claimed Mac got violent with her, hitting and raping her and so on, and she filed a divorce petition, and Mac didn’t bother fighting it. But he must have carried the torch, ’cause he remarried her some time later. My apologies for this mixed-up chronology, but Mac Wallace led a pretty mixed-up life after college. Not that he wasn’t doing respectable work. Taught at two or three colleges, winding up back in Austin, where his wife took their young son.

Finally Mac got tired of Mary Andre’s catting around, and took a big step toward respectability and the kind of career he had seemed headed for, before his ill-fated marital union. His connections with President Johnson, of course he was Senator Johnson then, led to a job in Washington, D.C., with the Department of Agriculture. Once again, seemed like Mac was going places.

There’s another interesting LBJ tie-in, by the way — while he was separated from his wife, Mac dated Lyndon’s sister, Josefa. This may indicate that Mac was his own worst enemy, since Josefa was herself a wild child who caused LBJ considerable embarrassment — divorced twice, a heavy drinker who liked to dally with both men and women, even worked in a brothel for a time.

This is where a feller named Doug Kinser comes into the story. We’re going to set Mac Wallace aside, just temporarily, and take a look at Doug, an Austin boy who grew up loving the game of golf. He realized a dream when his brother went in with him to open up a little pitch-and-putt nine-hole golf course by the downtown lake in Austin.

Now, golf wasn’t Doug’s only enthusiasm. He also loved theater. He even went to New York to give acting a whirl, which is where he met up with Mac and his wife Mary Andre. All three were involved in some amateur theater there, when Mac was studyin’ at Columbia. But by 1950, Mac was in D.C. working for the Department of Agriculture, while back home in Austin, Mary Andre was gettin’ involved in local productions with Doug. Josefa Johnson was part of that thespian group, also. Kind of funny how some people get those two words confused — thespian and lesbian?

Well, those words got confused a lot when Doug was pursuing his other enthusiasm — having sexual affairs with willing ladies. He particularly liked what the French call ménage a twat. That means a threesome, but I can tell by your silly grin that you knew that already.

So now if you been keeping score, we got Mac Wallace havin’ an affair with LBJ’s wild-gal sister, Josefa — well, Mr. Heller, I call it “an affair” because Mac was still married to Mary Andre at the time. She dropped her divorce petition, though they weren’t living together, at least not steady. Hell, any way you look at it, it was a mess. Particularly considering that Mary Andre and Josefa were both having affairs with our friend Doug, sometimes two at a time, sometimes all at once.

Now here’s an item that may or may not be significant. As a law-enforcement officer, I will caution you that it is not even close to evidence. But it sure as hell is suggestive.

Some time during or in between pillow talk with Josefa, Doug asked her to try to get her brother Lyndon to loan him some money to pay off some outstanding debts that were threatening his new pitch-and-putt enterprise. Apparently she went to Lyndon, got turned down, and went back again a couple times, after Doug pressed the issue. It’s possible Lyndon might have viewed this as attempted blackmail. Possible.

Now, Mac was living in D.C. at the time, or anyway in Arlington, and late October 1951, he drove down in his shiny new blue station wagon to Dallas, where he borrowed a little .25 from an old college roommate of his, who happened to be in the FBI. That always makes me smile. He spent a couple of days talking to Mary Andre, and asking her to be a better wife, a more normal wife, and just what the hell had she been up to lately? Who’d been doing what to whom, he wanted to know, and that kind of thing. By all reports, he was calm and cool and collected. No talk of him slapping her around this trip. Anyway, he wound up in Austin a few days later, and drove to Butler Park, where the pitch-and-putt golf course was.

It was a lazy afternoon, sunny, kind of breezy, grass turnin’ yellow with winter on the way. Golfers were fooling around nearby on a putting green, but that didn’t faze ol’ Mac. He walked right in the pro shop and confronted Doug, who was at the cash register, and a few words were exchanged. Then Mac shot Doug point-blank five times and killed him very damn dead. Well, yeah, Mr. Heller, I guess that does sound like “overkill,” but remember, it was a little gun, so Mac was probably just makin’ sure.

Anyway, when he come out with his shirt covered in blood, Mac waved the gun at the golfers nearby, told ’em to stay back, and then he drove off in that blue station wagon, a Pontiac. The witnesses saw the license plate was Virginia, not something you see every day in Austin, and they got the number and wrote it down. Mac got picked up right away, and there was some jurisdictional nonsense between the Austin police and the county sheriff, so the Rangers got brought in. It became my case, which is why I can tell you all this in an insider kind of way.

Mac was charged with murder, and right off the bat, he resigned his government job. Shortly after that, he got released on thirty-grand bail, thanks to a couple of LBJ’s financial backers, and an attorney of Lyndon’s, John Cofer, out of Ed Clark’s office, showed up to defend Mac. Cofer’s the same guy who defended Johnson for ballot-box stuffing in 1948.

Mac did not testify in his own defense. Hell, Cofer acknowledged his client’s guilt — after all, we had the car, the bloody shirt, and a damn .22-caliber cartridge in the suspect’s possession. What had me shakin’ my head, though, was when the district attorney stated he could find no motive for the murder.

That’s right, Mr. Heller. Nothing about the sex stuff came out at the trial, and certainly not that Josefa Johnson had been in a sex triangle with the murdered man and Mac’s wife. Or I guess it’s sex quadrangle, if you count Mac.

No evidence at all was introduced from either side about cause or extenuating circumstances. After a trial that lasted less than two hours, the jury found Mac guilty of “murder with malice aforethought.”

Guess what he got for killing a man in cold blood? A five-year sentence — that is, a five-year suspended sentence. Not exactly the “Texas justice” you hear so much about, like the kind all those colored boys on Death Row are waitin’ on. First suspended first-degree murder sentence in Texas history. Maybe the only one.

I hadn’t been a Ranger very long, but I’d been a deputy sheriff and a highway patrolman, and could recognize the whiff of politics. The stench of it. Do I think LBJ directed Mac to kill a blackmailer? Hard to say. But any way you slice it, Mac sure did Senator Johnson a favor by shootin’ a par five at the pitch-and-putt.

Peoples took a deep puff of his cigar, which had largely been forgotten in his ashtray while he spun his yarn.

He expelled some smoke, then said, “Hell’s bells, that’s rude of me. Would you like a cigar, Nate? I got a box of Senators right here. Made over San Antonio way.”

Somehow a Texas Senator seemed fitting, but I said, “Thanks. Smells fine. But I’m not a smoker.”

“Clean-cut fella, huh?”

“Not exactly. But I haven’t smoked since I was in the Pacific, and then just cigarettes.” I only got the urge when I was in a situation that recalled combat.

“Then can I have Ruth fetch you another Dr Pepper, Mr. Heller?”

“No thanks. But maybe you should call me ‘Nate.’ I’m starting to feel like we know each other.”

Peoples grinned; even those blue eyes seemed to have warmed up. “Only if you call me ‘Clint.’”

“Okay — but I thought the only Westerners called Clint were on TV.”

That made him smile. “Nate, I ain’t never been mistaken for Cheyenne or Rowdy Yates.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Clint.”

He blew a smoke ring, just showing off, and rocked some more. “So let’s talk about the late Henry Marshall, Nate. You know the basics, I believe.”

“The very basics.”

“The facts are easily laid out. Marshall was well-regarded, both as a man and a public servant. He worked for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Committee.”

“That’s a mouthful.”

“It is. He traveled a lot, and he worked hard — lived over in Bryan, nice family, who incidentally don’t buy his suicide, neither. Had a ranch in Robertson County, which was a mostly a hobby of his. Place to get his mind off work, mending fences, seeing to crops, feeding cattle.”

Peoples gave me a quick refresher on the case. After discovering that LBJ’s pal Billie Sol Estes had been raking in over twenty million a year for “growing” and “storing” nonexistent crops of cotton, Marshall made his report to Washington, recommending a full-scale investigation and more stringent regulation.

“Suddenly Marshall gets offered a higher-up position in another department,” Peoples said, “including a hefty pay raise, that would not so coincidentally make the Billie Sol matter none of his concern.”

Marshall rejected the new position and instead spent the next several months meeting with various county officials in Texas as well as the farmers who’d been drawn unwittingly into the scam, and just generally spreading the bad word about Billie Boy.

Shortly after, Henry Marshall turned up dead in a pasture on his ranch alongside his Chevy Fleetside pickup truck.

“No suicide note, by the way,” Peoples said.

I asked, “How can anybody buy a suicide shooting himself five times?”

“It was a .22 rifle,” Peoples said with a shrug, relighting his cigar, puffing it back to life. “What the sheriff and coroner didn’t think of — or if they did, conveniently forgot about — was that Marshall’s rifle was bolt-action. He’d have had to hold the damn thing at arm’s length to work the bolt to reload after every shot, getting wounded every time — two of ’em ‘rapidly incapacitating’ wounds, our staff coroner said. And here’s the kicker — ol’ Henry had a bum right arm, from an old farm injury. Couldn’t hold the damn thing out straight if his life depended on it.”

Or his death.

I said, “Sounds like the exhumation brought all the evidence out. So is it murder on the books now?”

Peoples shook his head glumly. “No. There was a ringer on the grand jury, a relative of the sheriff’s, who wouldn’t budge. Either the sheriff was bought or just didn’t want to look stupid. Also, an FBI agent came in, looked at the evidence, and called it suicide, too.”

“And those guys are generally pretty good,” I said. “That’s a hard one to figure.”

“Your Senator McClellan couldn’t get anywhere, either, even after he stood up at his committee hearing with the rifle and showed how hard it would be to work the bolt action at arm’s length without a bum wing.”

“So it’s a closed case.”

“Not from where I’m sitting.” His frustration dissolved into a sly grin. “You wondering yet, Nate, why I started by telling you the sorry tale of Mac Wallace?”

“You know I am.”

“Here’s that later photo of Mac I promised you.” He handed it over. “That’s still over ten years old — he’s camera-shy, our man Mac.”

Wallace no longer looked like a college kid — the glasses were black-rimmed, the eyes cold, hair still dark, the strong jaw resting on fleshy support, eyebrows dark and heavy, but still a broodingly handsome man.

“Latest photos available come from the Doug Kinser murder trial in ’52,” Peoples said. “But take a look at this sketch.”

Though crude, it resembled Wallace, all right — black-rimmed glasses, similar hair.

“Where does this come from?”

“A sketch artist of ours drew it from a description provided by a gas station attendant who gave directions to a man looking for the ‘Marshall place’ the afternoon of the killing.”

I sat shuffling through the two photos and the police sketch, feeling the hair on my arms prickle and it wasn’t the work of that window air conditioner.

I said, “You’re saying Mac Wallace killed Henry Marshall.”

“I have not a single solitary doubt. Would you like to hear how I see it? My reconstruction, as the big city lawmen say?”

“Clint, you know I would.”

It’s a beautiful Saturday, with birds twittering and flittering, in a part of Texas that looks green and lush in late spring. Marshall — who earlier drove around stopping to talk to some farmer friends, who found him in fine fettle — is puttering around the ranch.

Mid-afternoon, after stopping at a gas station for directions, Mac shows up unannounced at Marshall’s little spread. It’s possible he tries to reason with Marshall, maybe offers him another, bigger bribe. Might be he threatens him and his family. Maybe it turns into an argument — Mac’s a volatile fella, real bad temper. My guess is, he pistol-whips Marshall, dropping him to the ground with his head cut along one side and his eye bruised up real bad.

Mac rigs a plastic liner to the exhaust of Marshall’s pickup, and starts the truck. And now I’m just guessing, but I think something spooks our man — maybe traffic on the country road nearby.

Marshall’s .22 bolt-action rifle is in the back of the pickup, stowed there for getting rid of varmints. Impatient with or unsure of his murder method, Mac uses the rifle to shoot Marshall five times in the side of the lower torso.

Here’s the best part, Nate — the next morning, Mac goes back to that filling station, and tells the attendant that he changed his mind yesterday, and never did go out to the Marshall place.

Enough to make you wonder how he got those high marks in college.

“That gas station attendant is lucky to be alive,” I said, shaking my head. “And Wallace has never been brought in for it?”

“For what? A suicide? But I can tell you this, Nate. Mac Wallace has no alibi for the Marshall murder, and those other ‘suicides’ — that accountant in El Paso, the building contractor flying out of Pecos, the indicted business partner in Amarillo — he has none for those, either. I believe he got a lot better at staging suicides. And he was in Texas at the time each of those kills occurred.”

“You think Wallace is, what? A kind of hit man for the Johnson crowd?”

“My guess is LBJ is way above the fray. But he has had some big bad nasty folks backing him from day one — oilmen, industrial folk, powerful lawyers. Or it could be Billie Sol reaching out from behind bars. He’s appealing his sentence, you know. Dead witnesses have a certain eloquence, but they don’t get called to testify.”

“I have another for you,” I said, and I gave him the information about Joseph Plett’s suicide.

He wrote it all down on a spiral pad.

When I was finished, he frowned at his own notes. “This Plett fella — the date of his death, why that’s just one day after we exhumed Henry Marshall.”

“Yes it is.”

He sighed wearily. “Well, this one’s out of state. I won’t be able to check on Wallace’s whereabouts on this ’un. Maybe you have people who could do that.”

“Why, doesn’t Wallace live in Texas?”

“He works for a Texas firm, Ling Electronics, in Dallas, but they transferred him in 1961. Oh, he comes back a lot, for reasons that probably don’t always have to do with helping somebody kill their self. One possible item of interest, he was in Dallas on November twenty-two of last year.”

“Clint, you can’t be suggesting—”

“An individual known to be a hatchet man of LBJ’s was in town, is all I’m saying. On the other hand, ol’ Lyndon benefitted much as anybody from that particular hit.”

I was starting to think maybe Captain Clint Peoples needed to be fitted for a tinfoil Stetson.

“Since movin’ out of state,” Peoples was saying, “Mac Wallace has spent a hell of a lot of time back home in Texas... visits that correspond to some nasty, suspicious deaths.”

And deaths didn’t come any nastier or more suspicious than JFK’s, I had to admit.

I said, “Where did that electronics company move Wallace to?”

“Mac’s workin’ for the Ling branch on the West Coast.”

Now the hair on my neck was prickling. “Where on the West Coast?”

“Southern California,” Peoples said. “You know, Disneyland and movie stars — the Los Angeles area.”