Authors: A. E. Hotchner
"But how do you know about those men? That it's your account?"
"Why would two auditors be working in the middle of the night? Of course it's my account." "But what have you done? What will they find?" "Hotch, when they want to get you, they get you." We had pulled into the Christiana, which adjoins Chuck Atkinson's supermarket and is also owned by him. Duke helped me carry my bags to my room while Ernest waited in the car.
"Hotch, you've got to do something," Duke said desperately. "Nobody's doing anything and let me tell you, somebody has got to
do
something."
"But what can / do, Duke?"
"You see how he is. Everybody whispers about it, but. . . Jesus!"
When we got back to the car, Ernest asked me to come up to the house in the morning as soon as I could for breakfast. "I'll be watching for you," he said. "I'll come early," I said.
Those first few days in Ketchum, Ernest's close friends sought me out, one after the other, and confided their worries and fears about him. He had changed so. He seemed depressed. He refused to go hunting. He carped about old friends. He no longer invited a Friday night group to watch the fights. He looked bad.
In the beginning I naively tried to deal with Ernest in a straightforward and logical way, as a month before Bill and I had dealt with his anxiety over his excess baggage. But he refused to talk either in his house or in my room at the Christiana because both were bugged, so we put on our jackets and walked a little way up the hill beside his house, along the bank of the rushing Wood River, until we found a log to sit on. Ernest began by repeating most of the things he had said the night before. The Feds were after him because of Honor. The Feds were immigration agents and they were getting the goods on him. For what? Impairing the morals of a minor. I pointed out that Honor and he had never been together in the United States—only in Spain and Cuba—so United States Immigration could not possibly sustain any such charge against him, even if it were true, but he just got up and began walking around the log agitatedly, saying that she had just functioned as his secretary and there was absolutely no truth in the charge but they were out to get him and rather than go through any more of this he would turn himself in and get it over with. I led him back over the illogic of his surmisal, but the more I tried to dissuade him, the more irritated he became with me for challenging the danger that he was sure threatened him; I finally realized that he was using the phrase "impairing the morals of a minor," not for what it specifically meant, but for its menacing sound. The phrase could just as well have been "murder with intent to kill" or "with malice aforethought," almost any words that could be strung into the evil noose that the Feds were attempting to slip around his neck.
He wanted to know whether I had been questioned by the immigration agents about Honor and him, and when I said I had not he gave me a look, his face totally disbelieving, and my stomach was hit by the awful realization that in Ernest's eyes I too had now become part of the conspiracy.
Ernest sat down on the log again. He wanted to know whether, as he had asked me to, I had told his lawyer about declaring his four-thousand-dollar winnings on the Johansson fight. I said I had and that it was being included in his return. "Well, it's too late," he said gloomily. "You saw those auditors at the bank. They're on to it." I said that there could not possibly be an infraction, since this was the proper year in which to report the winnings, and since there was more than enough in his tax account to cover it, the men at the bank could not possibly be interested in that. Ernest said summarily that I was wrong—gambling winnings had to be reported the moment they were received and he was definitely in arrears and the evidence had been turned over to the Feds. Then he warned me that Vernon Lord was not to be told any of this because Vernon was a great guy and had taken very good care of him and he did not want to get him into any trouble. That was why, he said, he had not let Vernon come to the station to meet me.
"But, Papa," I said, "Vernon is your doctor. His communications with you are privileged. You don't have to worry about him." He said he
did
have to worry about him because a doctor is not privileged in a federal court. I decided to make my stand on this. Ernest knew that I had practiced law for a brief time, so I attempted to force him to see that at least in this one matter his anxiety was unfounded. The more I documented the fact that doctors are as privileged in federal courts as anywhere else, the more Ernest battled me, his arguments veering from allegations about the federal courts, as if they were Star Chambers, to attacks upon my knowledge of the law and, eventually, my fidelity to him. But I did not give ground. I did not try to mollify him. We were both off the log, pacing about. Finally he turned on me and said in deadly accusation, "Let's get it straight, Hotch. Either you make me out to be a liar, or a crazy—which is it?"
His head was thrust forward; his chin was unsteady and his face drained of color. "I'm sorry," I said. "Let's have a walk and forget it." We started back to the house.
I tried to get Ernest to go hunting, but every day he had some flimsy or imagined obligation that kept him from getting out; having to write a single letter to his lawyer or publisher was reason enough. I felt that if I could get him out of the house and away from his worries, doing one of the things he enjoyed the most, it might improve his entire temperament; that the beauty of the autumn fields and the excitement of stalking the big brilliant birds might loosen him up so we could get through the tenseness that was blocking everything out. Eventually I did get him to go on a pheasant shoot but its dismal conclusion convinced me that it should be my last effort.
I had assembled all his favorite hunting pals: Bud Purdy, Pappy Arnold, Don Anderson and Chuck Atkinson. You need at least that many guns to hunt pheasant in the open field properly. Pheasant was scarce that fall but we drove down to Picabo, where Bud Purdy had a farmer friend who had given him permission to hunt his fields. It was huge acreage, some of it containing dried corn stalks, which, as we knew from our previous experiences, often attract pheasant.
When we reached our destination and got all our gear ready and our guns loaded and started over the barbed wire that bordered the field, Ernest balked. Going into that field was trespassing, he said, and he didn't want to be shot. In addition to the fact that Bud knew the owner and had talked to him, it was also the custom in that wide-open country that fields could be hunted unless they were posted, and these were not posted. But Ernest said he could not afford to let the Feds get anything else on him. He wanted us to go ahead while he waited in the car. It took us a half hour to coax him onto the field, but even then he remained desultory.
Pappy Arnold took the first shots at a pair of cocks that broke a little out of range; Ernest insisted on waiting to see if anyone showed up to protest the shots, and again it took coaxing reassurances to get him moving. We were fanned out in an arc, about thirty yards apart, Ernest holding down the left wing, and had been combing the fields for almost an hour without results when three absolutely wonderful cock pheasant suddenly winged up not more than ten yards from Ernest's position. It was a hunter's dream and with Ernest's ability to reload quickly he had a good chance at a triple; he flicked off the safety and snapped shut the breech in one move as he snugged the knurled butt of the gun into his shoulder and cheek, now swinging with the birds, that graceful and effortless fluidity of his locking the gun into the flight of the cocks.
But he did not fire.
The birds rose fast and disappeared. "I'll be goddamned if
I'll get myself shot as a trespasser for a couple of lousy birds," he said, breaking the breech and removing the shells.
We all stood there for a few minutes, not able to say anything; then Bud suggested that we hike to the farmhouse, which was a tiny roof on the horizon, and recheck about the permission. Ernest was agreeable to that. Nothing flew up on the way there, but I don't think any of us would have shot if it had.
Bud knocked on the kitchen door and the wife of the farmer greeted Bud, who introduced Ernest and the rest of us. She said her husband had gone to the market in Twin Falls but that it was perfectly all right to hunt the fields. She suggested an old corn field not far from the house.
When we started again, spread across that corn field, a single bird broke out in front of Chuck and he put him down on the rise. Ernest went over to look at the dead pheasant. He said he was still spooked about hunting there because it was one thing to get permission from the farmer's wife but what if the farmer came driving in and saw them shooting up his field, mightn't he just take a shot at them as trespassers? Ernest said emphatically that he thought we shouldn't hunt any more but should wait at the farmhouse until the farmer got back.
I felt beaten by an accumulation of hopelessness. Not just this afternoon, but the days before, and the fall and summer before that; I had reached the moment of facing up to serious reality about Ernest. I did not want him to see my thoughts, so I turned my head down and looked at the desiccated soil; the others were also helplessly silent, except for Bud, a gentle man, who took over and said, "To tell you the truth, Ernest, there aren't enough birds in there to bother about. Let's drive over to my place and have some cider."
That was the evening that Ernest had agreed, out of consideration for Mary's long kitchen duty, to let me take them to the newly opened Christiana Restaurant for dinner. This was the first time Ernest had been out of the house in the evening since his return. It turned out much the same as our last restaurant venture at the Callejon.
Ernest had one cocktail and one glass of wine with his meal (a regimen he was strictly adhering to); he seemed at ease as he pleasurably recounted some amusing stories about his days in the old Ketchum when there was gambling and it was as wide open as a gold-rush town, when he suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and said we had to pay up and go. Poor Mary, who had been so enjoying her evening out, her meal only half-eaten, asked what was wrong. Ernest gave his head a little nod toward the bar. "Those two FBI men at the bar," Ernest mumbled. "That's what's wrong." Mary asked how he could possibly know they were FBI men and Ernest told her to keep her voice down. "Don't you think I know an FBI man when I see one?" he said. "We've got to get out of here, Hotch."
I went to find the waiter and on the way passed a table where Chuck Atkinson and his wife were having dinner. I asked Chuck whether he knew the two men at the bar. "Sure," he said. "They're salesmen. Been coming through here once a month for the last five years. Don't tell me Ernest is worried about
them.''''
He shook his head sadly.
When I told Ernest they were salesmen, he scoffed, "Of course they're salesmen. The FBI is noted for its clumsy disguises. What do you think they'd pose as—concert violinists? Come on, Mary. You can have coffee back at the house."
Mary had been anxious to speak with me from the time I had arrived, but Ernest had made it very difficult. He had become hypersensitive to the critical reactions around him, and whenever he saw any of his friends talking to Mary he was certain that they were discussing him—in reality, they probably were. Mary was understandably nervous and distraught; she had been subjected to Ernest's accelerating anxieties since his return from Spain and she was exanimated from inability to cope with him. On our way out of the Christiana that evening, she was able to tell me, without Ernest hearing, that she would be shopping at the supermarket at eleven the next morning.
We had our talk over a shopping cart in back of the cereals. Mary said she was desperate. She showed me a letter she had found on Ernest's desk the day before; it was addressed to his bank, the Morgan Guaranty in New York. The salutation and first sentence were in order but then the words became gibberish, as if he had been experimenting with a new language.
Basically, Ernest's ability to work had deteriorated to a point where he spent endless hours with the manuscript of
A Moveable Feast
but he was unable to really work on it. Besides his inability to write, Ernest was terribly depressed over the loss of the
finca
, and although Mary had suggested that they get an apartment in Paris or Venice, or a new boat that could take them on a long sea voyage, there was no way to get a reaction from Ernest that could relieve the bleakness out of which the constant delusions and hallucinations seemed to rise. His talk about destroying himself had become more frequent, and he would sometimes stand at the gun rack, holding one of the guns, staring out the window at the distant mountains.
I told Mary that I thought it was perfectly obvious that Ernest needed immediate and thorough-going psychiatric help, and even went so far as to suggest Menninger's, but she registered concern over what effect such publicity might have. I then suggested that if she wanted me to take over, I would go back to New York immediately and contact a very fine psychiatrist whom I knew; she urged me to act as soon as possible, and reiterated her fear that Ernest's threats to destroy himself might become a reality.
Before leaving, I arranged to see Vernon Lord, because if Ernest was to receive treatment it had to be with his own consent and approval and Vernon, I felt, was the key to achieving this. Vernon told me that Ernest had given him a note to be opened after his arrest. Vernon said he had already read the note, which contained instructions for taking care of Mary and rabid disclaimers intended to protect Vernon from imagined prosecution. Some of the note, Vernon said, was garbled and made no sense; he was as fearful as Mary about Ernest's condition.