Conspiracy of Silence Read online

  It was when I reached inside to flick the latch to open the window that disaster struck.

  In my haste, or carelessness, I moved too fast—and felt both suction-cups on my feet to be slipping. In a panic, I grabbed whatever I could—and that proved to be nothing more than the very narrow windowsill at the bottom edge of the window. I was now hanging precariously, three stories from the hard, frozen ground, my fingers clinging spasmodically to about two inches of wood.

  For a time my feet swung wildly beneath me. In spite of the cold, I felt sweat pouring from my face and, worse, from my palms. My hands were quickly losing their grip. Forcing myself to calm down, I affixed first one of my feet’s suction-cups, then the other, to the wall below the window. This lent me enough stability to pull my left forearm up to the windowsill, which restored my balance to some degree.

  I had, unfortunately, failed to flick that latch to open the window, so I was not in much better position than before. It would require a full three-foot extension to reach that latch: I attempted to touch it with my right arm fully extended, and found that I was still several inches shy. My only option would be to raise myself bodily to a higher level.

  Bracing both my arms on the narrow windowsill, I first pried off my left foot off the wall. Making sure it was now fastened at least half a foot above its former position, I did the same with the right. This had the result of allowing me to extend my arms at full length on the windowsill, as if I were doing some kind of push-up. But I was able to reach the latch, and I flicked it with a certain harried impatience.

  I wasn’t out of the woods yet. The bottom half of the window had clearly not been opened for years, and it stuck fast. I again forced myself to pause—not only to calm myself, but to gather my strength. It was impossible to use both hands simultaneously to open the window, so all I could do was to use the palm of one hand, then the other, to nudge the window upward.

  But it was no go, so I had to proceed to Plan B—to bring the upper part of the window down so that I could clamber in from above. The wooden frame around each of the six windowpanes afforded less than an inch of play, and the sweat on my fingers wasn’t helping matters. Nevertheless, after what seemed like an hour, I managed to get the upper window to descend in such a way as to allow my body to go through it.

  Almost before I was aware of it, I had stumbled into the room, falling heavily—but, I hoped, more or less silently—onto the floor.

  I hoped to heaven that that cut windowpane had survived intact in my bag, for I was intent on reattaching it when I left. But that was a secondary concern right now. I was in, and I had to make the most of my time.

  I felt it was safe enough to turn on the light-switch, which I could dimly make out near the one door in the room. What faced me when the light flooded in was a room piled high and in a certain disarray with trunks, papers, files, ledgers, and other miscellany whose function was not immediately apparent. From the dust encumbering virtually every corner of the room, it was clear that this was not a repository for any kind of current personal or business records. But if there was anything here after 1924, it might afford a clue.

  I do not have a head for business, so I was not able to make much of the immense ledgers that lay stacked in a far corner of the room. These ledgers did indeed date to the mid-1920s up to about 1930, but they seemed to contain nothing untoward. Their neat, feminine handwriting was, I gathered, that of James Allen Crawford’s mother, who was clearly running the show in his absence.

  What I was looking for were personal documents, rather than business records. Correspondence, diaries, anything that might shed light on what exactly had happened on—and subsequent to—that fateful night of March 19, 1924.

  My canvassing of the room finally focused on a large trunk that lay in another corner, beneath mounds of papers that didn’t seem of any interest. The lid of the trunk was locked, but that proved a minimal impediment. A lock-pick that I habitually carried with me made short work of that large and clumsy lock.

  What met my gaze seemed indeed to be a gold-mine, although in some senses it was an embarrassment of riches. The trunk was full of an immense mass of correspondence, all addressed to Helen Ward Crawford and extending back many years. It would take hours to go through this cache, so I did my best to sort through it by its apparent relevance. Many items could be put aside quickly—invitations to parties and weddings, idle chatter from fellow bluebloods, even some very old letters from Helen’s husband, dating from before the war. I was about to give up—or, rather, to conclude that this ocean of documents needed to be examined more carefully in a less compromising situation—when I came, near the bottom of the trunk, upon a series of letters, still in their envelopes, that had been neatly fastened with two rubber bands.

  Every one of the letters was postmarked from Ojinaga, Mexico. The addresses varied, and the postmarks ranged from the summer of 1924 to the winter of 1930.

  All were written by one Félix Calderón.

  All were, without question, requests—or demands—for money.

  Once again, I felt I had something—but I didn’t know what I had.

  Who was this Calderón? Why was he asking for money? Blackmail was the obvious answer—and the fact that this batch of letters dated to no earlier than the summer of 1924, a few months after the “death” of Frank Crawford, did not escape my notice.

  I quickly returned to the business ledgers. I found no record of any such payments to a Félix Calderón. And the payments would not have been insignificant: ordinarily he asked for about $20,000 every six months. This may still have been peanuts to a clan as well off as the Crawfords, but us ordinary folks it was a fortune.

  I pocketed the letters and closed the trunk, restoring the papers over it as best I could.

  I’ll not trouble you with my escape from this increasingly claustrophobic third-story room. My exit out the window; my closing the window and flicking back the latch; my reaffixing of the glass pane I had cut, with glue I had packed with me; and my ascent to the roof by means of my suction-cups—all went without a hitch. I descended through the trap-door and clambered down the ladder.

  Once again I found Lizbeth crumpled up on the floor, fast asleep in her gauzy nightgown.

  She awoke with a gasp when I touched her shoulder; I almost covered her mouth to make sure she didn’t cry out, but she gained control of herself quickly. She gazed at me with a poignant mixture of hope and apprehension; all she could say was:

  “Did you find anything?”

  “I may have,” I said. “I think I need to take a trip to Mexico.”

  Chapter Twelve

  On the plane ride from Floyd Bennett Field to El Paso, I paused to consider where we stood.

  Without letting her know of my discovery of the letters, I asked Lizbeth whether she recognized the name Félix Calderón.

  She peered at me quizzically, as if I myself were some kind of suspect. She didn’t like being kept in the dark.

  “No . . . why should I?”

  “No reason,” I said blandly. “Could he have been some kind of footman”—I wasn’t even sure what a footman was, but I figured the Crawfords could have employed such a person—“or maybe a gardener, or chauffeur, or something like that?”

  Her eyes narrowed even further. “What do you mean? Who do you think this person is? What possible connection could he—”

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying to find out, Lizbeth,” I said, a little more tartly than I had intended.

  “You mean he could have been involved . . .?”

  “I didn’t say that. And I know you were only five years old when all this happened, but I’d really like to know who this guy was. If you don’t know, maybe someone else does. How about Joseph?”

  She shook her head vigorously. “I doubt that.”

  At my silent look of surprise and skepticism, she went on: “He doesn’t have anything to do with the other servants—it’s not like he’s their boss, or anything like that.”

&n
bsp; “Who is?” I said bluntly.

  “Grandma,” Lizbeth said.

  “That’s no good,” I said, discouraged. There wasn’t a chance than Helen Ward Crawford would spill the beans about this Calderón fellow under any circumstances, even if he had nothing to do with the “death” of Frank Crawford. And I had to believe that he did have something to do with the whole affair: the timing was too convenient. He must have bolted out of here within weeks, perhaps days, of the incident.

  Exactly what Calderón knew—and how he could have known it—were the things I had to settle. The large sums of money Helen was secretly paying out over more than a decade—I was confident the payments had continued beyond 1930, when the latest of the letters I had found was dated, and probably continued to this day—were some kind of hush money. Maybe Helen herself had contrived to repatriate him: if he was a Mexican, it was best for her sake that he get out of this country and go back where he came from. His liberal allowance would ensure that he kept his mouth shut.

  It was faintly troubing to me that Calderón was exacting such a large sum of money. After all, what had presumably happened was that a murder had been faked, not that a murder had actually been committed. This made me wonder whether my assumptions on this point were even sound. Perhaps I was so keen on proving Lizbeth right that her father was innocent of murder that I was overlooking the plain fact that Frank Crawford’s continued existence had not been proven, or even rendered likely. What if Crawford had somehow been killed later, for reasons unknown, and that this Calderón fellow had found out? That would justify the large amounts of cash that were being shoveled in his direction.

  So I began to realize that Lizbeth—and James Allen Crawford—weren’t out of the woods just yet.

  The flight to El Paso was uneventful, but it was only the beginning of what would no doubt prove a long and tedious journey. For I now had to rent a car and travel a good two hundred miles to Ojinaga. I could have crossed the border right at El Paso, going across to Ciudad Juárez, but I decided to stick to American soil as long as possible. My only option was to take the long, winding road that hugged the Rio Grande, flanked as it was by a succession of rugged mountain ranges—Finlay, Guitman, Sierra Vieja, and Chinati—that loomed imposingly on my left.

  I finally learned what Shakespeare meant when he talked about “the way to dusty death.” I’d never been this far south and west before, and was stunned by the parched, inhospitable terrain, which could as easily have been the surface of the moon. I was well south of the Dust Bowl, and recalled reading of the dismal “Black Sunday” of April of last year, when an immense dust storm had blanketed cars, livestock, and even whole farmhouses; things like that made you wonder whether Nature harbored some kind of innate hostility to human existence.

  My car—a boxy Ford Model A of about 1930—was already well used, and the pounding it took on this problematical road seemed to add years to its life in a matter of hours. About halfway on my journey I had to stop for sheer respite, soothing my parched throat with a tolerably cold beer and wolfing down a sandwich of indeterminate contents at a ramshackle roadside bar that seemed on the verge of collapse. At that hour of mid-afternoon, I was the only occupant of the place aside from the grizzled owner. He could tell I was a foreigner—for him, anyone not from his immediate part of Texas was a foreigner—so he couldn’t be bothered to exchange more than the barest minimum of words with me.

  I hit the road again, finally reaching the small town of Presidio, just on this side of the border from Ojinaga, by mid-evening. There seemed no point in crossing over now, so I found what seemed like the only hotel in the town—an establishment that was probably decrepit when Texas still belonged to Mexico—and crashed in a room there. In a nearby eatery, a bowl of chili and crackers was enough for me, and it was all I risked ordering from the surly waitress.

  The next morning found me in Ojinaga.

  Nobody paid much attention to me at the border crossing; the guards were more concerned about who and what was coming from the other direction. Ojinaga itself was a surprisingly spruce little town that was doing its best to get through the worldwide depression. I was surprised to find that it had originally been a Pueblo settlement dating to as early as the thirteenth century; the Spaniards had arrived around 1535. It had been the site of several battles during the Mexican Civil War in early 1914, and a sad little cemetery just outside of town marked the victims of that conflict.

  My goal, however, was the Palacio Municipal, on the corner of Zaragoza and Trasviña y Retes. I had no idea what kind of hoops I would have to go through to ascertain the current whereabouts of one Félix Calderón, especially given my rudimentary Spanish, but I wasn’t confident that a little town like this would have an up-to-date phone book or city directory.

  The thin, wiry, bespectacled young man who met me at what I took to be the tax office looked at me with skepticism when I finally managed to make my purpose known. I made no attempt to maintain that I was here in any official capacity, even though I could have pulled out any one of several quasi-legal deputy sheriff’s badges I had garnered over a chequered career. Instead, it became clear to me that this fellow’s tongue would loosen by more direct means, so I casually fished out of my pocket a wad of American bills that Lizbeth had pressed on me for the trip.

  His eyes fixated on the tight green ball, and a few bills of medium currency did the trick.

  To my surprise, I found three Félix Calderóns listed in the tax records. But two of them had been here for many years—had apparently been born here.

  The third Félix Calderón had arrived on April 2, 1924.

  He had moved several times in the past decade or so, and it appeared that he now lived in the far southwestern corner of town, in the Francisco Villa district, well south of the road that would take you to Chihuahua. It was the work of a less than fifteen minutes for me to leave the Palacio Municipal, get back into my vehicle, and pull up in front of what was presumably Félix Calderón’s house.

  It was a humble residence, but well kept. A well-used Ford was parked around to the left, and I could hear the cluck of chickens in a fenced-off area in the back. For some reason the place had been given a wide berth by its neighbors, and the nearest house was more than an acre away.

  I marched up to the door and knocked.

  I heard an odd scuttling inside whose purport I couldn’t ascertain. After several minutes, the door opened.

  The man who stood in the doorway, looking with ill-concealed suspicion and hostility at me, was tall, bronzed, and muscular. Something in his manner led me to think he was not alone.

  But I knew at once that I’d seen this man before.

  He was in a photograph that Maureen Dailey had shown me.

  So all I could say was: “Frank Crawford, I presume?”

  The response was like nothing I could have predicted. Leaping backwards in a manner I’d never seen before, Crawford almost crashed into a nearby table before falling down on hands and knees and scrabbling for a small wooden box on the floor. Out of it he pulled two revolvers, firing both of them wildly at me through the open door.

  His aim was very bad, and the shots came nowhere near hitting me. Paying no attention to the woman’s scream from the house’s interior, I myself came close to doing a backwards somersault to get out of the firing line of this madman. My car was my only defense, for not only would it afford me a certain cover from more gunshots, but my own automatic was lying on the passenger seat, ready for just such an eventuality. I quickly opened the passenger door and retrieved the weapon.

  I didn’t return fire immediately: in the first place, my supply of ammunition was not unlimited, and in the second place, it was vital that I capture Frank Crawford alive. He would be worse than useless to me dead. But Crawford seemed in no mood to go quietly. Continuing to fire almost randomly in my approximate direction, he bolted out of the house and plunged almost head-first into his Ford, starting the car instantly and skidding off his property with a grin
ding of gears and a cloud of suffocating dust.

  I had to waste several seconds circling my own vehicle to get into the driver’s seat and head off after him. Crawford had headed due south, as I suspected he would have. There was no likelihood he would want to go north toward the U.S. border, for no matter how perfunctory the customs inspection might be, the inevitable delay would allow me to come close to seizing him. I didn’t doubt that he knew the Mexican terrain a lot better than I did, and I suspected he would do his damnedest to give me the slip.

  While following Crawford on the main road out of town, which quickly turned into a dusty and ill-kept road whose bumps and gulleys shook both our vehicles brutally, I did my best to penetrate the overriding purpose of his actions over the past twelve years. What led him to this obscure little town? Why here, of all the places in and out of the United States one could have chosen for a quiet getaway where no one knew or cared who you were or where you came from?

  And, most puzzling of all, why go through the bother of staging your own death when you could just leave the country without all these bizarre shenanigans?

  Whether I would ever get answers to these questions depended on hunting down this frantic prodigal son. And he showed no signs that he wanted to be caught.

  Crawford was driving as fast as his somewhat antiquated machine would take him, recklessly passing slower cars along the way and raising clouds of dust as he sometimes skidded off onto the shoulder. It quickly became apparent to me that he was heading toward the steep hills—tantamount to a low mountain range—that guarded the southern side of Ojinaga like some immense, looming crescent. What was beyond those hills I couldn’t say, and how Crawford expected to evade me on this flat, barren desert road was beyond my powers of imagination. Now and then he reached his right hand over his left shoulder and fired his revolver crazily in my general direction, but the shots were far off the mark.