Conspiracy of Silence Read online

  I followed tightly behind him, realizing that a bolder challenge could spell disaster for both of us. I wanted him alive, but I wanted myself alive even more. I was not so foolhardy as to risk aiming my own pistol anywhere in his direction; at the speed he was reaching in his mad desperation, even a gunshot to a tire might cause a crash that would instantly snuff his life out. Frankly, I was not interested in preserving his life—a life he had clearly wasted almost as thoroughly as his brother rotting in jail—except insofar as he could help me get to the bottom of this inscrutable case.

  As we headed up the narrow, winding dirt road up into the hills, I saw that trouble was brewing. Crawford was still going at such a hectic pace that he was increasingly unable to control his vehicle, and more than a few parts of this road teetered on the edge of precipitous cliffs that could easily send one plunging to a fiery death. Crawford’s frenetic pace caused him to skid almost out of control several times, but somehow he managed to retain control.

  Then something odd happened. Just as he was coming to the summit of the hill, his car slowed down, emitting barking coughs and puffs of smoke from its exhaust pipe. Then there was a massive shake, and the car came to a standstill.

  It was out of gas.

  But Crawford wasn’t. Leaping out like a crazed gymnast, he plunged down the steep, gravelly bank of the hill in what seemed an entirely random direction. Stopping my own car, I jumped out and followed. What exactly did Crawford expect to do now? Lose me by hiding in some hillside cave? I’m no athlete, but it was child’s play to follow him as he ran, stumbled, crawled, and almost rolled along the declivity. We were the only human beings in sight—there was no house, no road, no trace of human habitation anywhere in sight.

  The inevitable happened. At one point he stumbled, apparently over his own feet, and fell tumbling head over heels without the faintest ability to stop his downward plunge. His hands grabbed furiously for any kind of purchase, but all they came up with was loose sand and rock. Without warning his body glanced off of a withered tree clinging to the hillside; a grunt of pain and shock was forced out of him, and he came to a slow stop.

  I rushed to him to assess the damage. His eyes were closed, either from unconsciousness or exhaustion, and there was a thin trickle of blood dripping from the back of his head. His mouth hung open slackly, his tongue lolled out, and a thin stream of saliva coursed down his chin.

  I shook him gently, then slapped his face.

  “Crawford! Crawford . . . are you all right?”

  In a few minutes he opened his eyes.

  “What do you want with me, copper?”

  Odd that he would use the same expression that Maureen Dailey constantly threw out at me.

  “Crawford, I’m not a cop. I’m a private investigator. I just want to talk with you.”

  “Some other time,” he said, dropping off into oblivion.

  Chapter Thirteen

  That other time came the next day.

  I won’t bother you with the tiresome details of the laborious task of dragging Frank Crawford back to my own car and driving him back to the one hospital in Ojinaga. His head wound was slight, but he had apparently suffered a concussion, so I wasn’t able to speak to him that day. Even the next morning, as I was on tenterhooks to see him, the doctors advised that I not trouble him unduly. I didn’t know if that was possible, but I figured the best way to manage it was to let him talk while I listened.

  I did my best to explain my mission and what I’d found out so far—neglecting to mention my digging up of his empty grave. His only response, at the outset, was:

  “So Little Lizbeth is eighteen! . . . Yes, I guess she must be. Cute kid . . . I always liked her.”

  I said nothing, just looking at him in a way that he quickly understood.

  “Yeah, OK, Scintilla, I know what you want. I got some explaining to do, right? Well, this is kind of a long story, and my head ain’t so good, so you may not get this all at once.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Just spill the beans in your own way.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.” He took a deep breath and said:

  “Scintilla, you gotta understand something about my family. They’re not like me, and I’m not like them. For my whole life they’ve made that quite clear to me. . . .”

  As he lapsed into brooding melancholy, I said:

  “Who’s made that clear?”

  “Everyone,” he said, rather bitterly. “My mother, both my brothers—Bill and James—even my sister-in-law’s relatives, those Bislands from upstate New York. They all thought of me as a playboy, a wastrel, a do-nothing, know-nothing scoundrel. Well, after a while, I thought: If that’s what they think of me, then I’ll do my damnedest to be exactly that!”

  He looked at me defiantly, as if daring me to mimic the moral condemnation of his relatives. But I said nothing and looked at him blankly—perhaps with a bit of wearied impatience.

  “OK, maybe you don’t wanna hear all this, but it has a lot to do with . . . what happened. And I’ll tell you how.

  “Ever since I was a boy, all my family ever wanted to do was make money and be respectable. My father ground himself into an early grave by starting this rubber company—that was his whole world. And once she married into this pile of dough, all my mother ever wanted to do was to throw that money around in a way that showed everyone she was the queen of her little domain. Why do you think we stuck ourselves in the wilds of New Jersey? Because we knew that we didn’t have quite the money or the class or the blood to make it in the cut-throat world of New York high society! But, by God, we could be kings of Pompton Lakes! That seemed good enough for us.

  “Some of us, anyway. As for me, all I wanted was a good time. I’m no dummy, Scintilla: I went to Groton and Princeton, and I knew that it takes more than money to become a real aristocrat. You can buy all the objets d’art you want, but if you don’t have breeding, you just can’t cut it. No one in America knows what breeding is; just read some Henry James and you’ll find that out.

  “It was made clear to me right from the start that I was on the bottom rung of the totem pole. My sainted brother Bill was a war hero of hallowed memory; and when he died, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was a member of the Crawford family only by sufferance, and that all the hopes of continuing the line and the business rested with James. And that was fine with me—I wanted to have nothing to do with the business; it could go hang for all I cared. As long as it brought in the dough, that’s all I cared about.

  “I know what you’re thinking: Privileged rich bastard, not caring about anyone but himself. But, listen, Scintilla, I wasn’t asked to be born into this family. Hell, I think I might have been happier working as a stevedore at the Port of Newark! If you knew how every moment of my life at Thornleigh was one humiliation after another—a constant assumption that I’d amount to nothing—you wouldn’t be in such a hurry to condemn me.”

  I wasn’t aware that I’d done that, but I saw clearly that Crawford had a lot to get off his chest.

  “Being the youngest of three sons isn’t such a ball of wax, Scintilla. Mother and Dad had groomed Bill to run the business after them, and it was a real shock to Mother—Dad had already passed away by then—when he died. Family was in turmoil for months, maybe years. Anyway, then James was the next in line, and all hopes got pinned on him. If you’ve met him, you’ll know what a humorless cuss he is—it’s like he has a board up his spine. I can’t tell you the number of times he looked at me as if I was some kind of insect—as if I was somehow not a real Crawford, not worthy to lick his boots. But by God, what is life for but to have a little fun? All work and no play . . .

  “Yeah, sure, I liked the ladies. Why not? I could show them a good time, and they could return the favor. Money helps there, you know? Buy them little gewgaws, and they’ll do anything you want! Just make sure not to promise them too much! And before you write me off as a roué, just look deep in yourself and say to me honestly you wouldn’t do the same in my po
sition.”

  All I could say was: “What about Eva Dailey?”

  “What about her?” he shot back. “She was a nice squeeze, and I showed her as good a time as any man could. Look, Scintilla, I felt something for her—she was different. Sure, she was as far from the upper crust as you could get, but what did that matter? I don’t know that I ever thought of marrying her, but she was a good bedmate, and lots more besides.”

  A sinking feeling came over me.

  “Frank, are you telling me you don’t know what happened to her?”

  “What do you mean?” he snapped. “Of course I know. I got her knocked up. She told me that, and she was pressing me to marry her. But there was no way I could do that—you better believe Mama Crawford wouldn’t have allowed that before hell froze over. That’s why I had to . . . you know. I figure they dealt with the kid somehow.”

  “No one has told you what happened?”

  “No. . . . It’s not as if anyone writes to me very often,” he said petulantly.

  “Eva Dailey killed herself about three months after you bolted. She took her unborn child with her.”

  Frank Crawford’s face crumpled with pain and horror. It was twelve years ago, but I’ll give him credit for still having feelings for her. Maybe he wasn’t a total wretch.

  “Scintilla,” he said haltingly, “you gotta believe me . . . I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know, I tell you!” he repeated in a louder tone of voice—so loud that an orderly came in to see what was going on.

  I raised my hand in front of Crawford’s face. “Keep it down, man. I believe you.”

  He had lapsed into brooding again. “Poor kid . . . Scintilla, I did care for her. I’m sorry for what I just said—she was more than a good lay. She was sweet and kind . . . thought the world of me . . . Gawd knows why . . . I coulda done a lot worse marrying her. . . .”

  Then, after a pause, he blazed in anger again.

  “It was all Mother’s doing! That witch. . . . She couldn’t risk letting even her wastrel son marry a down-and-out waitress with no money and no prospects. And then, when it came out that Eva was pregnant, well, then Mother really hit the roof. A bastard child of the Crawfords! How could they ever live down the shame? So that was when . . .”

  He stopped abruptly, face screwed in puzzlement.

  “But there’s something that doesn’t click here,” he went on. “Why didn’t they just buy Eva off? They could easily have paid her a wad of dough to have the child and send it for adoption. No one would have been the wiser. Why go through this whole charade? . . .”

  “That’s exactly what I want to know,” I said.

  “Scintilla, you gotta understand . . . it was not my idea. If they really wanted me out of the scene, as a prodigal who would never reform his skirt-chasing ways, all they had to do was let me go off wherever I wanted and I’d have been happy to live out my life in peaceful anonymity . . . which is exactly what I’ve done these past dozen years. . . .”

  “So whose idea was it to fake your death?”

  “James’s,” he said promptly. “He managed to persuade both Mother and me that it was the only way to get Eva Dailey entirely out of the picture. In all honesty, it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, and it still doesn’t. But somehow he made it sound right. I think the idea was that Eva would be so distraught at my death that she would just crawl away in defeat and wouldn’t make any fuss. I don’t think anyone thought that she would actually . . . do herself in. That wasn’t in the cards. Even James wasn’t that cruel and vicious.”

  “So,” I said, “the idea was to pretend you were dead, and then you’d light out for parts unknown. What led you to come here?”

  “Several things,” he said. “First, I thought it best to actually get out of the country. Europe was too far away, and Canada was not my cup of tea. I don’t care for winter, Scintilla, and the climate here suits me a lot better. So do the women.” He cracked a crooked grin that showed me he was still just a mischievous little boy. “But I needed to be near the border for various reasons. I keep my money in a bank in Presidio and just draw out whatever I need. I figure you know I keep having to hound Mother for money. I can’t help feeling that, for her, out of sight is out of mind. I have a very strong feeling she’s pretending I don’t really exist, and I keep having to remind her that I do. Frankly, I don’t ask for much. . . .”

  “Forty thousand a year isn’t much?” I asked.

  “Not to her!” he shot back. “The company makes that much in about a week. I may not have a head for business, Scintilla, but I know the Crawford clan ain’t hurtin’ for dough. There’s plenty to go around.”

  He was getting agitated again, so I tried to calm him down. “OK, OK, I’m sure you’re right. So why don’t we get to . . .?”

  “Get to what happened that day in 1924?” he said. “Yeah, I figured you’d wonder when I’d get to that. Well, let me just say—things didn’t go quite according to plan.”

  He took a deep breath. “That doctor guy . . . Granger...had to be involved. Said he would give me something that would simulate death—or as close to it as anyone could tell—and then later some other drug that would revive me. So we had to contrive for him to come over . . . and all we could think of was a dinner party. In all honesty, we really didn’t want so many people there—those Bislands were there by accident—but time was getting on, and James (and Mother too, for that matter) wanted this taken care of sooner rather than later. Maybe it was tactless of me to invite Eva over . . . I really didn’t want to put her through that . . . but James enthusiastically endorsed the plan, because he said it would prove to her that I was definitely out of the picture.

  “That evening really was one of the strangest of my whole life. There I was, eating, drinking, and talking as if I didn’t have a care in the world, knowing that in a few minutes the whole house would be thrown into a tizzy because I had died. I won’t deny that the idea of playing a corpse tickled me—not that I could possibly be aware of what was going on.

  “Anyway, after dinner James and I slipped into the study, and after about half an hour we knocked over a chair to create the impression that I’d keeled over. James ran out of the room, shouting that I’d taken ill and begging Granger to come over. He came by, shot something into my arm, and that’s all I remember.”

  “It turns out someone saw him,” I commented.

  “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m not surprised. He was petrified at having to be involved in this whole business—said it would be the end of him if it ever got out. But I figure James or Mother had paid him well for his services. Paid off that bonehead police chief too—Myron Franklin, or whatever his name was. I knew he’d be shaking in his boots at even stepping foot into the palatial Crawford estate, and there was no chance he’d make a ruckus, if enough dough was thrown in his direction to shut his trap.”

  “So James’s wife, Florence, wasn’t in the know?”

  “Not a chance,” Frank said. “No need to involve people who didn’t need to be involved. As it is, we told Mother only because we were afraid she’d have hysterics if she thought I was dead. She may not have thought much of me, but I was still a Crawford, and she’d already gone through the death of one of her sons. So we had to let her in on it. But no one else if we could help it.”

  “Obviously not Eva Dailey.”

  “Well, obviously,” Crawford snapped—his look of irritation immediately giving way to a stab of pain. “We knew she’d have hysterics, and she did; but that couldn’t be helped. We were in a bind . . . at least, James convinced us that we were.”

  Frank Crawford took a deep breath and went on.

  “So the next thing I know is . . . I’m in a coffin in the undertaker’s back room, with Nathan Granger standing over me with a needle. He was looking a bit apprehensive, as if the shot he’d given me, whatever it was, wasn’t working. He knew he’d catch hell if I didn’t come out of the induced coma or whatever it was that that first injection had done to me.

 
; “The rest I learned later, of course—mostly from Granger and Mother. Days had passed, and we’d gone through the whole mummery of a service and everything. Man, I’d like to hear what my grieving relatives said about me then! A lot of bull about what a loving brother I was, what a credit to the family, blah, blah, blah. Hah! Those goddamn hypocrites. I was glad I was going to leave them in the dust. Let them have Thornleigh—I was, as you said, lighting out for parts unknown.”

  Crawford wallowed in self-pity before resuming.

  “We had to go through the whole service because we had to convince absolutely everyone concerned that I was dead. God knows, maybe Granger had to keep shooting me with whatever it was that had knocked me out the first time. And that undertaker—Harold Knowles, I think his name was; had been working for our family for years—was of course bought off. It was an open casket service—couldn’t hide anything at that stage.

  “So that was that. Granger woke me up, I walked out of my coffin, and hid in the house for a couple of days—Gawd knows there’s enough vacant space in that cavern of gloom that even the servants don’t go into much—before I headed out of town and out of the country. Mother tried to buy me off cheap, with a few thousand dollars for immediate expenses, but I knew she’d cough up more dough when the time came. I had her—and James—over a barrel, and they’d keep shelling out the loot so long as I didn’t, as it were, come back from the dead.”

  Crawford looked at me with a sudden intensity.

  “But look here, Scintilla: I was as bowled over as anyone when I heard that James had turned himself in as my killer. That wasn’t in the plan! Why should it have been? I harbored no hostility to him—I just wanted out. The idea was just to say I’d died of natural causes—‘heart failure,’ as I recall Granger chuckling. An all-purpose cause of death, which means nothing and explains nothing. But it would do. And who was there to question it? Why would anyone want to confess to a killing he didn’t commit?”