Max Collins - Majic Man

The Chaves County Courthouse, on Main Street, was a neoclassical tan brick structure dating to 1912, the year New Mexico joined the Union. A green-tiled dome loomed imposingly over a massive entryway, and the interior sported equally impressive Greek-key-design tile floors, brass chandeliers and ornate plasterwork. But the adjacent office of the sheriff proved as shabby and nondescript as is customary, bulletin boards sporting Mexican, Indian and white suspects in unprejudiced array.

I wanted to keep things casual and unthreatening, so I’d dressed like a tourist, in a two-tone shirt-tan with blue collar and sleeves-and lightweight blue twill slacks and two-tone brown-and-white shoes. Taking off my straw fedora and slipping my sunglasses in my breast pocket, I checked in with a thin, young, dark-haired deputy-his name tag said Reynolds-and asked if I could see the sheriff, telling the kid briefly who I was.

“If this is a bad time,” I said, “I can make an appointment. I plan to be in Roswell for several days.”

“In all the way from Chicago, huh?” the deputy said. He had bright eyes and a ready toothy smile. “Fly into El Paso?”

“Sure did. Pretty drive up here.”

“Get a load of them white sands? That’s as close to Christmas as it gets around here.”

“Never saw anything like it. Low crime rate around these parts?”

He snorted a laugh. “About as exciting as pickin’ a flea off a dog.”

I had figured as much, as long as this was taking. Finally, the chatty deputy scooted his chair back, rose and checked with the sheriff, who saw me right away.

Sheriff George Wilcox stood to shake hands behind his tidy desk in his doorless cubbyhole off the main office, which was taken up by the booking area and his two deputies at their desks. In a short-sleeve khaki shirt with a badge and Apache-pattern tie, Wilcox was a sturdy-looking, square-headed, jug-eared lawman of maybe fifty-five; his dark white-at-the-temples hair rose high over dark careless slashes of eyebrow, and his large dark eyes were somewhat magnified by wire-rim glasses; blunt-nosed, with a wide, thin mouth, Wilcox had a no-nonsense manner, gruff but not hostile.

“What’s the nature of your business here, Mr. Heller?” he asked; his baritone was as sandswept as his county’s terrain.

I had already shown him my Illinois private investigator’s license and my Cook County honorary deputy sheriff’s badge; neither seemed to impress him much.

Settling into a wooden chair no harder than the expression the sheriff was giving me, I said pleasantly, “I’m doing some background research for a nationally known journalist.”

“Who would that be?”

“My client requested I keep that confidential.”

“Why?”

“Frankly, he’s got a controversial reputation and he doesn’t want people to be put off.” That was about as candid as I could afford to be.

Wilcox rocked back in his swivel chair, digesting that. Then he said, “What’s the nature of the article? You’re too late for Rodeo Days.”

“Sounds like that would’ve made a fun story, but this one’s fun, too. You know, this flying saucer fad, in all the papers a couple years now-my client’s doing a kind of wrap-up, sort of a postwar hysteria angle. Looking into the better-known of the so-called ‘sightings.’”

Wilcox said nothing; his eyes had gone cold, their lids at half-mast.

I pressed on: “You know, Roswell has a special significance-it’s the only time the Air Force officially recognized the existence of saucers; they even put out a press release saying the wreckage of a disk had been recovered.”

Wilcox was studying me the way a lizard looks at a fly.

“Anyway,” I said, shifting in the chair, crossing my legs, “I’ve come to see you for two reasons. First of all, I didn’t want to go poking around your town without you knowing.”

“Appreciate that,” he said, nodding slowly.

“Second, I’m hoping I can interview you, for the article. I understand this rancher, Mac Brazel, brought in some samples of the oddball debris, and that you’re the one who called in the Air Force…. You mind if I take a few notes?”

I was taking my small spiral pad from my right hip pocket.

“Put that back, son,” he said, waggling a thick finger. He wasn’t all that much older than me, not enough to be calling me “son,” anyway; but he made me feel about fifteen, in the principal’s office, just the same.

“Sheriff, if you don’t want to be quoted,” I said, the notebook still in hand, “I could still use some background information …”

“Mr., uh-Helman, was it?”

“Heller.”

“I’ll let you take a few notes, and you can use my name, too. This won’t take long.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“The Air Force said that thing was just an air balloon. That first press release … three hours later, they said it was a mistake.”

“Well, uh, Sheriff, mistake or not, there was quite a fuss-you had to field phone calls from all around the world, I understand.”

He nodded again. “I sat up all night, taking calls from Germany, London, France, Italy, all kinds of places, and probably every state of the Union. I told ’em what I’m telling you: talk to the Air Force.”

“That what you’re advising me?”

“No.” His tone was firm but not unkind. “My advice to you would be, move on to the next flying saucer story on your list.”

“Why is that?”

He nodded toward the notepad in my hands. “Now I am going to insist you put that thing away.”

“All right.”

“Don’t quote me. Don’t paraphrase me.”

“Certainly.”

Wilcox sat forward and placed both his hands on the desk; his tone shifted to a flatly ominous one that would have seemed ridiculous if it hadn’t been chilling. He said, simply, “Don’t look into this or you’re going to have real trouble.”

“Trouble from you, Sheriff?”

“Not from me.”

“Who from?”

“That’s all I have to say, on or off the record. Do yourself a favor, son-move on.”

“But, Sheriff, my understanding is that you saw some of this strange debris, even handled some of it. Was this stuff really as weird as has been reported? Thin metal that goes back to its original shape, if you wad it up? Unearthly hieroglyphics?”

Wilcox stood, slowly, smiling as benignly as a Buddha. “I appreciate your courtesy, Mr. Heller, stopping by to let me know about your inquiry.”

There’s a stage out of town at noon; be on it.

I sighed, stood, sticking my pad in my back pocket, nodding to him. “Thank you for your time, Sheriff.”

On the way out, the chatty deputy called to me, “Mr. Heller! Where are you staying, should we need to get in touch with you?”

I went over to his desk. “I’m at the El Capitan Hotel.”

“Over the drugstore downtown,” Deputy Reynolds said, nodding, writing it down. “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”

Then he extended his hand and I shook it, and felt a piece of paper there. His bright eyes narrowed and communicated something, and when I withdrew my hand, I tightened it over the note he’d passed me.

I didn’t look at it until I was out of the courthouse and onto the street: “Clover Cafe, two p.m.”

But right now it was barely ten, so I headed for the next stop on the list Major Marcel had provided Pearson; with the exception of the sheriff, everyone else was either expecting me or at least a chum of Marcel’s, and should be a friendly witness.

On the third floor of the Roswell equivalent of a skyscraper-a four-story brick building on Main Street-down on the left of a wood-and-pebbled-glass hallway, black stenciled letters on the door announced the HAUT INSURANCE AGENCY. I knocked, and a flat, midrange voice called, “Come on in!”