'Last time we spoke,' Paulina said, 'you told me you were closer to Henry Parker than, let's see if I recall, 'white on rice.''
James Keach loosened his tie and thanked God he was wearing a suit jacket because he was sure the pit stains on his blue Oxford were visible from across the street. 'There's different kinds of rice,' he stuttered. 'There's brown rice, chicken fried rice. It's not all white.'
'You said white. White on rice. So why the fuck is this
Billy the Kid exclusive in the Gazette and we're sitting with another Britney crotch shot on page one?' Paulina's face was red, but James couldn't tell if it was from rage or more Xanax than usual. He hoped it was the latter, but doubted it.
'Parker was attacked in his apartment,' Keach said, trying to regain his confidence. 'The cops have assigned two protection details, one for Parker and another for this Amanda
Davies girl. I tried waiting down the street from his apartment, outside a bagel shop, but one of the cops spotted me and started walking toward where I was standing. He was looking at me, Paulina! So I pretended I was buying a bagel and got the hell out of there. Better that than they knew who I was, right?'
Paulina closed her eyes, rubbed her forehead with her hand.
'And so Parker finds this crackpot Vance, and he snags the story while you're slurping cream cheese. James, do you know how close we are?'
'How close we are in what?'
Paulina rifled through some papers on her desk, pulled out a white sheet with a bunch of indecipherable numbers.
'These are the latest circulation figures for all five major
New York newspapers, along with rates for the top twenty newspapers in the country. The latest numbers show the
Gazette' s circulation lead over the Dispatch at less than five percent. Five percent. That's less than yearly inflation these days. One major story can turn the tide, my rice-loving friend.
So I don't care if you have to channel Houdini himself, you shadow Henry Parker like your life depends on it. Because I can sure as hell make sure your job does. That is all.'
38
Icould sense the men following me even though I couldn't see them. I knew they carried guns, had their eyes glued to my back, and sized up every person who came within five feet of me.
I told the cops the killer had already done what he came to do, that their efforts would be better used fighting terrorism or searching for the killer himself. They disagreed. I told them the guy who cut up my hand wasn't stupid enough to go after me in broad daylight, that he had actual targets. He had a motive, a purpose, wasn't some fly-by-the-seat-of-hispants, run-of-the-mill murderer. He picked the Winchester for a reason. Stole it from that museum in Fort Sumner for a reason. Came to my apartment and tried to scare me off the story for a reason.
In the days since, I wondered why he didn't just kill me.
The man had already killed four others. He clearly wasn't averse to murder. There was a story he wanted to stay buried, and leaving me alive was just one more shovel that could keep digging. I guessed he just didn't know how driven-or stupid-I was.
To uncover more about the legacy of Brushy Bill Roberts,
I had to start at the end. Roberts had lived in Hamilton, Texas, and died in Hico. Roberts had since become Hico's only claim to fame, bringing in thousands of dollars in tourism every year. If Fort Sumner lived and breathed the legend of
Billy the Kid, Hico lived on the whiff of conspiracy brought on by their most famous former resident.
I had to get out of the office and do research away from the madness that had become the Gazette newsroom. With the increasing battles between the Gazette and the Dispatch, I could tell Hillerman had come down hard on Wallace to make sure his reporters knocked this story out of the park. And if that was the case, I was his Babe Ruth, stepping to the plate and calling my shot, hoping for a moon rocket rather than a whiff.
The New York public library was quiet, had the same
Internet resources as the Gazette, access to LexisNexis, and all the historical newspapers on microfiche I needed. I wanted to view the Roberts case from every media angle: not only Hico, but by the major metropolitan papers in Texas, New York, Los
Angeles and elsewhere. You could get a good grasp of how a story penetrated the national consciousness by how widely it was reported, and with what veracity the conspiracy was given.
It was a crisp summer day and the steps outside the library were teeming with people reading, hanging out, and even a few sleeping on the stone. The NYPL itself is a behemoth that takes up two full city blocks. The entrance is guarded by two stone lions named Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after John Jacob
Astor and James Lenox, both generous patrons. In the 1930s, they were renamed Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello
La Guardia. Patience guards the south steps, Fortitude the north. As I passed them by, I hoped they'd grant me both. The three main doors are bracketed by six carved stone columns, which lead into the great reading room where I'd spent many
hours wrenching my back while poring over old texts. The massive room is lit by grand chandeliers and surrounded by thousands of volumes. I was here to use CATNYP, the online system allowing subscribers access to the library's huge collection of journals, periodicals and newspapers.
I jogged up the steps and entered, making my way to a computer stall where I took a seat, cracked my knuckles, looked to see if the two cops had followed me inside. They hadn't.
I logged on to CATNYP and ran a search for Texas newspapers containing stories pertinent to the Brushy Bill case. I typed slowly with my index fingers, my right palm aching from the stitches. Guess I'd have to settle for old- fashioned two-fingered typing for the time being.
The first article I came across was from the Austin Chroni cle, a story about one Judge Bob Hefner who, in 1986, published a booklet claiming Brushy Bill had in reality been the real Billy the Kid. The booklet gained notoriety when it was picked up by the Dallas Morning News. According to
Hefner's story, 'Brushy Bill had no children and was at the end of his life. Fame and fortune were not a consideration for the old man.'
Hefner continued, saying that Roberts desired only to be granted the pardon promised by Governor Lewis Wallace to the Kid years before. Hefner claimed that Pat Garrett had actually killed a friend of Billy the Kid's that night in 1881, solely for the purpose of collecting the five-hundred-dollar bounty on Bonney's head.
It seemed strange that Brushy Bill Roberts would suddenly decide, after years in hiding, that he wanted to be pardoned for crimes committed in the 1880s. I noted that Hefner currently ran the Billy the Kid museum in Hico, making it two different states with two different museums claiming to be the final resting place for Billy the Kid. Of course he had financial motivation for keeping the theory alive. But that didn't make him a liar.
I then found an article published by the New York Times in
1950, concerning the spectacle surrounding a man who claimed to be the real-life Jesse James. James had been assumed murdered by two brothers named Bob and Charley
Ford back in 1882, but in 1950 a man named J. Frank Dalton claimed to be the real James. After a media carnival descended upon the 102-year-old man during a hospital stay,
Dalton died. Yet the rumors persisted. Finally in 1995, the body of Jesse James was exhumed from its grave in Missouri and the DNA was found to match 99.7 to that of James's family. Supporters of the Dalton theory did not give up hope, and in 2000 a court order was granted to exhume the body of
J. Frank Dalton to end the speculation. Unfortunately the wrong body was exhumed, and attempts to discredit Dalton were halted. Dalton's actual body was never exhumed nor tested. I wondered if this botched exhumation was part of the reason Largo Vance was unable to do the same for William
H. Bonney.
The article was accompanied by a photo of an elderly man with a long, scruffy beard lying in a hospital bed
