Max Collins - Ask Not

“You said ‘was,’ Lou — he’s deceased?”

“Heart attack two years ago. But that’s nothing to do with this, other than just the general bullshit and hardship that kid out there has been put through.”

“She’s a kid in her thirties, though, right?”

“I suppose. I don’t know her exact age. I just know her problem. And it’s tricky as hell. There’s a political aspect to it.”

“Local?”

“Local if you live in Texas. Also national.”

“Texas? I thought she was from Geneva, Illinois.”

He ignored the question. “You’ve read in the papers about this character Billie Sol Estes?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know chapter and verse. He’s some kind of con man, scamming the government. Pyramid scheme crapola. Pal of LBJ’s, right?”

“Right. He’s currently in stir. He bribed government officials, took advantage of federal loan programs for farmers, and made millions peddling mortgages for nonexistent fertilizer tanks.”

I laughed. “A genuine bullshit artist selling fake bullshit. Beautiful.”

He gestured offhandedly. “Well, you may want to chat about this with a couple of your old pals. Good ol’ boy Billie Sol was shaping up to be a major embarrassment for the Kennedy administration, before the assassination. No connection to them, but Johnson may have been an accomplice in those scams.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Not really. Johnson has a reputation for that kind of thing, and Bobby Baker and Billie Sol were scandals that quieted down all of sudden when he became prez. Never forget that Lyndon B. won his first election by having a ballot box stuffed. And I’ve heard he blackmailed his way onto the ticket when Jack ran.”

I shrugged. “That’s nothing I ever discussed with Bobby. You said ‘a couple’ of old pals?”

“Yeah, your old boss McClellan’s one of the guys who exposed Billie Sol.”

Senator John McClellan had been head of the rackets committee, a father figure to Bobby Kennedy and officially my boss, when I was on that payroll. I knew him fairly well. I could probably get him on the phone if need be.

I asked, “What does this have to do with that young woman out there?”

“Maybe plenty. Possibly nothing.” He sat forward again. “Estes is in jail, yes. But he’s kept his mouth shut. Refused to testify on his own behalf. Is apparently protecting whoever else is in this... maybe including the President himself.”

“Then why doesn’t the President just give him a pardon?”

“Maybe he will, right before he leaves the White House and heads back deep-in-the-heart-of. But I don’t think so. This is very dirty stuff, Nate. A pardon for Billie Sol would be an admission of guilt.”

“So what? Sleazy underhanded practices netted some shady politicians some greenbacks. That sounds like Texas, and it sounds like Chicago, and it sounds like Everywhere USA.”

But Lou was already shaking his head. “No, no, Nate, we’re talking murder here.”

I frowned. “Whose?”

“Well, we can start with a guy named Henry Marshall. He’s the Texas farm official who first blew the whistle on Estes. In June 1961, before he could testify about any of what he dug up, Marshall conveniently committed suicide.”

“People do that sometimes, under stress.”

He looked at me over his glasses. “Marshall must have been really stressed to shoot himself five times in the stomach with a rifle.”

“Oh. That kind of suicide.”

“There have been four more. In April of ’62, right after Estes was charged with fraud, his accountant committed suicide. Carbon monoxide, hose attached to his pickup’s tailpipe. But the guy also had a bad bruise on his head.”

“That’s one. What’s two?”

“A building contractor partner of Estes who died in a suspicious plane crash in early ’63.”

“And three?”

“Early this year, a major business partner of Estes, recently convicted as an accomplice, facing a prison term. He was ‘accidentally’ killed working on the exhaust pipe of his car. The tools scattered around him in the garage, around and under the car. Only they didn’t have a thing to do with the repair he was supposedly making.”

“Dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, too?”

“Yup. And bruised on the head.”

“That leaves one more.”

Lou nodded. “But I need to back up. This one’s not in chronological order, because it needs some context.”

“By all means. Context away.”

His hard dark eyes narrowed behind the wire-rims. “Seems the Marshall ‘suicide’ just didn’t sit well with a certain Texas Ranger name of Clint Peoples.”

“You made that up.”

“No,” Lou said, grinning, shaking his head, “this badge-wearing, horse-riding Texas Ranger did a shitload of investigation, and managed to get a DA on his side, and together they got a judge to authorize an exhumation. This was in March of ’62.”

“They dug Marshall up.”

“They dug him up. And the county coroner’s autopsy showed that, despite the five gunshots in the abdomen, the cause of death was actually carbon monoxide poisoning... administered after an incapacitating blow to the head.”

“Jesus. Somebody sure wanted to make sure this son of a bitch was deceased.”

Lou was nodding. “So it would appear. And now we come to the fourth murder... the fifth, counting Marshall himself. Which happens to bring us home, Nate. Sweet Home Chicago.”

“How so?”

“Seems Billie Sol wormed his way into owning a big piece of a company called Commercial Solvents. He bought huge quantities of liquid fertilizer from the firm, through the Chicago office. The office manager, a Joseph Plett, committed suicide in Evanston... the day after Marshall’s body was exhumed.”

“Carbon monoxide poisoning again?”

Lou nodded.

I held up four fingers. “Okay, four murders, maybe five.” I added a thumb. “One in Chicago. So what does this have to do with Jack Halloran’s daughter sitting out in our reception area?”

“She isn’t just Jack Halloran’s daughter, Nate. She’s also Mrs. Joseph Plett.”

She was the girl you fell in love with in high school, ten or fifteen years later, holding up just fine — blue-eyed, pretty smile — but if you looked close, you saw tragedy there. In the crow’s feet, in her slightly sunken cheeks and the gentle lines in her forehead that time would turn to grooves, possibly prematurely. She sat next to Lou across the desk from me, perched on the edge of the chair, hands folded in her lap, like a wallflower hoping for the next dance.

“I hope you don’t think I’m terrible,” she said, “being so concerned about money and everything. First and foremost, I want Joe’s name, his memory, cleared. We’re good Catholics, Mr. Heller, and I couldn’t even bury my husband in consecrated ground.”

Her voice was firm, her eyes clear. There would be no tears today. The death of her husband was over two years ago. This was about dealing with the aftermath.

“You have a right to worry about your own welfare,” I said, “and your children’s. That insurance policy would have brought double indemnity, making it...”

“Five hundred thousand dollars,” she said. It was a number she’d become familiar with. “As it was, we got nothing.”

I said, “No payout in the case of suicide is standard.”

“But it wasn’t suicide.”

“From what little I know so far, I’d be inclined to agree. But I’d like to hear more about why that’s your opinion.”

“Certainly.” She cleared her throat. “First of all, we have three children, Mr. Heller. Our son Alec is ten, Judy is six, and Beth is two and a half.”

“Beth was born shortly before Mr. Plett’s death?”