one thing, I’d quickly grown tired of Houston during my five years there while attending the University of Houston. For another, it appeared that the market was pretty well cornered on the investment racket there by the late 1980s, about the time I graduated and was looking around for a way to make some money in my chosen profession.
And what’s my profession?
I help people.
Some of my clients have run into legal trouble-or maybe they want to avoid running into legal trouble, whatever the case may be-and I help them.
I’ve found that people fall into two categories. Cash rich, in which case they need to dump some of it-or cash poor, in which case they need some. That’s where I come in.
But we were talking about history.
Aside from all the required college classes with desiccated old instructors doling out daily chapter assignments, a certain amount of required outside reading and the re-interpretation of tax law changes that each student must digest and regurgitate, some of it going back to the nineteenth century, college for me had one saving grace: in my junior year I took a course in Criminal Syndicates of the Southwest, taught by an overweight and edgy former trial lawyer who had been in a car collision years before that had left him a paraplegic. However good or not so good he may have been in court in days gone by-and let me tell you, after the first day of class that year, I was certain that he’d been a god-he did one thing well: he made the men and the times of his favorite era-the Great Depression-live and breathe. Since that class I’d held a grim fascination for historic Texas criminals, some of the notorious gangsters of the 1920s and 30s, and not just Bonnie and Clyde, who had little more going for them than a species of dumb luck and a tad more than their fair share of press. All by way of saying that there were other folks running around back then along the unpaved Texas back roads and through open range country. For instance, Raymond Hamilton and Joe Palmer were an unlucky pair who were once confederates of Clyde Barrow up in West Dallas. At one time Ray was public enemy #1. Both Ray and Joe were put to death in the electric chair about eight minutes apart back in 1935 for the killing of a prison guard during their escape from Eastham prison farm. At one time they’d had the entire nation looking for them. Ray and Joe were also confederates of Whitey Walker and Blackie Thompson, two of the worst desperadoes ever to hit the Southwest. In 1926, Whitey, Blackie and a fellow named Matthew Carpin put together one of the most successful though short-lived crime syndicates in U.S. history by taking over a mining camp called Signal Hill up in the Texas Panhandle. For one brief year they ran the illegal moonshine trade, set up gambling houses, whorehouses, master-minded and staged robberies, and took a cut from every job that went down within a hundred miles of the place. Things got so bad that Governor Moody had to declare martial law, and sent a detachment of Texas Rangers to bring some semblance of social order.
I recall noting the description by one of the Rangers as he topped the last North Texas hill just after sunset and looked down upon the mining camp. From the hills and valleys surrounding the sprawling, thrown-together patchwork town there rose a black pall of soot from the carbon black plants that had sprung up after the oil strike. And within a hundred yards of each well head there was a continuous plume of fire rising into the night, the burn-off of the escaping natural gas. The ranger scratched his head, turned to his companion and said: “My friend, all my life I have kept in my mind an image of what hell must look like, and now I have found it.”
That was Signal Hill. And in those days “Signal Hill” and the name “Carpin” were rarely spoken very far apart from each other. That name wasn’t exactly one of the nicest family names to carry around. I wondered how his offspring had turned out.
The original Carpin had made a fortune at Signal Hill. And some of that money must have stayed around. And that was another thing I’d have to check into on my suddenly growing list.
Signal Hill had existed for a brief while some eighty years ago. There were ghosts up there in those hills, the bad and restless spirits of equally bad men who when alive had valued human life slightly less than they valued a middling poker hand.
I found myself asking myself why I should be worrying over men dead these many years gone by.
I could have answered myself, right then and there that Tuesday morning as I held my car door open for Julie and tossed a travel bag into the backseat. I could have reminded myself that while times change and mankind appears to progress, there are some who still abide in the dark and heed no law except the grim laws of survival and revenge.
We rolled up I-35 toward Georgetown, Texas. Our destination: a new strip mall that was under construction and a visit with a very old friend. Julie still wore Notre Dame, her hair once again in a ponytail and the bitch-glasses perched forward on her delicate nose. She: beautiful. Me: practically a dead man.
She was trouble. Green eyes and reddish hair. And she
So I had to start thinking about Hank Sterling.
Back around 1988 when I was first struggling to make it-or die in the attempt-one of my clients was Hank Sterling.
Hank was a different breed, an aging Vietnam veteran who liked to drink beer, build things, and blow them up. Like many of my clients, he had the Midas touch. He ran a one-man construction and demolition company out of his house in Killeen, Texas, did perhaps one job every year or two, and in the meantime welded spare parts together in such a way as to call the result art. For instance, there’s a megalithic piece of his work entitled “Dreams of Flight” out in front of the courthouse in my home town. The thing looks more like a melted pterodactyl that it does an airplane-not exactly the kind of thing I would have spent county money on, but that’s just me. The interesting thing was that
Hank called me up one day with a special problem. He had half a million in cash and he needed to get rid of it. A certain IRS agent had been nosing around in his business and Hank wanted to make sure certain revenuer didn’t catch the scent of undeclared greenbacks.
After that I put Hank in contact with an accountant who could manage his money, help him legally avoid paying more than he had to, and who could handle his sudden bouts of alcoholism and wildcatter fever. But, being Hank, from time to time he still had need of my services, and I was never the kind of fellow who could turn down a friend in need.
In 1989, there was a knock on my door in the middle of the night. Two men in black suits and sunglasses were there on the doorstep of my apartment and they had questions for me. Not about myself or what I did for a living, but about Hank Sterling-his whereabouts, his routine, his habits, and the possible location of the IRS agent who had taken an interest in him. Apparently the man was missing.
What did I know about it? Nada.
After that the two of us were never as close, but he still called me when the need was great.
At the moment I needed his advice more than anything; and it never hurt to have a friend in your corner, especially someone who knew how to fight.
*****
North Hills Shopping Center in Georgetown was mostly complete, even though the marquee twisted in the wind, suspended by cable from a mobile crane outfit sitting on a new parking lot. A Randalls grocery store and a Walgreens had already moved in, along with a few specialty stores.
I parked near the construction zone and Julie and I got out into the morning sunshine. There wasn’t so much as a wisp of cloud in the sky and the breeze felt fine.
We found Hank. He was nailing wooden studs in place with a pneumatic nail gun. His shirt was sweat-soaked and his jeans were torn at the knees, which was about his usual attire. Anyone who didn’t know him would have asked where the boss was. The fact of the matter was that Hank
When he saw the two of us he grinned really big giving us a toothsome smile. He put the nail gun down, walked over to me and shook my hand in an iron grip.
“Damn good to see you, Bill,” he said.
“You, too!” I said.
“Who’s this?”
“This is Julie.”
They shook hands.
