Evan would take her away. He would go back to Ector, get her the hell out of there, and the two of them would somehow disappear. Rebecca would have the child, and Evan … Evan would change everything. He could be a good man, a good father, and Carson could go to hell, for all he cared.
Evan showed up at the Excelsior Hotel, little more than a flophouse on the west side of Austin, at around six that evening. It was a regular haunt for those late nights when he couldn’t make it back to where he was staying, or had no place to stay. They knew him there, not only a regular face but a regular tab that they let run to thirty or forty bucks before turning away. That evening they took him in. He was drunk, but Evan was always drunk. No change there.
Evan Riggs lay on a cot in a first-floor room. While the ceiling swam in circles above his head, he put his life back together, if not in reality, at least in his imagination. Tomorrow he would go back to Calvary. He would straighten it all out. He would make everything good. He could do that. He really could do that.
It was with a sense of positive optimism that Evan responded to a knock at the door. He was feeling a little better. It was still early. He could clean himself up, go out, have just another drink or two. Tomorrow was the demarcation point between the past and the future. Tomorrow the bottle would be part of his history.
The man in the hallway was a stranger to Evan Riggs.
“Mr. Evan Riggs?” the man said.
Evan nodded. “Yeah … who are you?”
The man held out a sheaf of papers. Evan instinctively took them.
“You’ve been served, buddy,” the man said.
“Served? What the hell?”
The man took a step backward. “Go within three hundred yards of Rebecca Riggs, speak to her, call her, attempt to gain entry to the hospital, and you will be in violation of that injunction,” the man said. “Okay?”
The man started to turn.
“Hey,” Evan said.
He turned to face Evan.
Evan threw the papers at the man.
The man was implacable, had seen it all before. “Buddy, you’ve been served. That’s just the way it is.”
Evan took another step forward, pushed the man’s shoulder.
“Okay, now you’re crossing another line, my friend. I am an officer of the court. Touch me, and you’re in deeper shit than you could even imagine.”
“Take your goddamned papers!” Evan snapped, the anger surging inside him. How dare this stranger tell him that he could not see Rebecca. How dare he ferry a message from Carson and think that this would carry some weight. What the hell did he think was happening here?
“Seriously, you need to think about what you’re doing, buddy boy,” the man said. “Back the hell away. You raise your voice or your fists to me, I will have you arrested right here and now; then you will be dealing with an assault charge as well as whatever other bullshit you’ve caused for yourself.”
“How dare you come in here—”
“Hey,” the man said, raising his hands. “This is not me, mister. This is due process. You can’t tell me anything I ain’t heard a thousand times before. You are just one more sorry asshole who fucked up his life, and I am not the target here … You deal with whatever you gotta deal with, and you keep me the hell out of it.”
Evan was incensed. He took another step forward, his fists raised. “You take those papers back to my fucking brother and you tell him—”
“Okay, that’s it,” the man said. “I’m outta here. Next stop for you is the drunk tank—”
Evan swung, connected hard. That fist came like a runaway train and caught the man on the jaw.
The man went down hard, and Evan was over him, fists flying, a drunken rage powering every muscle, every vein, every nerve, every sinew.
Evan could see nothing but Carson’s face in that final moment outside Ector Hospital, the way he looked down at him, the condescending sneer, the knowledge that Carson would do everything he could to keep Evan away from Rebecca, from his own child.
Evan Riggs was no flyweight. Lessons learned at Fort Benning were not forgotten. The process server didn’t have a chance. He may well have been a fair-minded and decent man, a good father to two small boys, a faithful husband, a hard worker who believed that doing the right thing was always the easiest way out of any trouble you might experience in life, but he was no fighter. He served papers to recalcitrant husbands, loan defaulters, errant wives, folks who missed payments on mortgages and cars, and on weekends he liked little more than a barbecue and a couple of beers in the backyard, his pretty wife in a cotton print dress bringing hot dogs and corn for him and the boys.
His name was Forrest Wetherby, and the papers he’d delivered had come from Warren Garfield at the request of Carson Riggs. How Wetherby had found Evan Riggs was part experience, part dogged persistence, part sheer luck, but those papers were the very last he would serve.
Evan Riggs couldn’t have hit him more than a half dozen times, but they were decisive blows, driven by a fierce and uncontrolled rage. The throat, the chest, the solar plexus, finally some blows to the head that put Wetherby back against the wall. The final strike caught him full in the face, and it was the thunderous impact the back of his skull made against the wall that precipitated the fatal hemorrhage.
Forrest Wetherby’s legs gave way like those of a newborn heifer. He was dead before he hit the worn-out linoleum hallway on the first floor of that Austin, Texas flophouse.
The hotel people found Wetherby right where he’d fallen, blood running from his ear due to the sustained trauma to which he’d been subjected.
Evan they found sprawled across the mattress in his room, drenched in sweat, his clothes spattered, his knuckles raw.
Every other room was empty. No one had entered or exited the building following Wetherby’s arrival.
Evan didn’t even realize what had happened until he woke in a cell three hours later with a murder charge on the books. He’d already been booked for drunk and disorderly the day before, said he didn’t remember a thing. Coincidentally, he went back to the seventeenth, and they held him there for arraignment. A public defender was assigned, and he came down on Monday the twenty-second. By that time, Evan Riggs had lost whatever semblance of self-possession he had formerly maintained.
Evan Riggs was done for. He knew it. He reconciled himself to fate, and had it not been for the intervention of Governor Shivers, he would certainly have gone to the chair. Forever after, folks would listen to
The Whiskey Poet
and hear a man confessing, even though those songs were written long before Evan Riggs crossed paths with Forrest Wetherby. Maybe a man could confess in advance, seek forgiveness for something he was yet to do. Maybe some people just knew that bad things were on the way, things they would do and things that would be done to them, and they were getting ready for it ahead of time. As had been noted so many times before, people were always of a mind to think what they wanted, and there was often no relationship between that and the truth.
Rebecca Riggs gave birth to a daughter in the second week of November, 1949.
It was Grace Riggs who got word to her younger son that he was now the father of a beautiful girl called Sarah.
Carson had expressly forbidden Grace to contact Evan and did not learn that his mother had gone behind his back until after Christmas. By that time he’d already found her a place at Ector County Hospital, her committal papers countersigned and processed by Roy Sperling and Warren Garfield. The last will and testament that William Riggs had authorized before his death—the very document that William had delivered into Garfield’s hands after learning what Carson, Garfield, and Sperling had done to Rebecca—was conveniently lost. An earlier will was processed, a will that left the house to Grace, also financial provision for the remainder of her life, the land then divided into equal parts between Carson and Evan. Evan was already in Reeves, would be there for life, and thus by law he had no defensible position. Carson Riggs called in a longtime favor from Alvin Lang’s father, John. John Lang, not only the eldest son of Congressman Chester Lang but a significant authority in the Texas Department of Corrections, had words with the Redbird County DA. The DA made a call to Warren Garfield. Warren Garfield was unreserved in his willingness to cooperate, and any right Evan Riggs might have had to contest Carson’s decisions about the land were summarily waived.
The Riggs farm was broken up into lots. Before Grace Riggs was even admitted to Ector County, Carson had signed away every one of those lots to the Naval Petroleum Reserves Department. A good number of people became a good deal richer with a single signature. Proceeds from that sale found their way into the pockets of both Chester Lang and his son, John. Warren Garfield and Roy Sperling were taken care of generously. George Eakins, Clarence Ames, and Harold Mills, all three of them members of the Calvary Residents’ Charter, were impressed upon sufficiently to overrule a petition to revoke the drilling rights granted by Carson Riggs.
Carson Riggs ran for sheriff again, once more uncontested and unchallenged. Where questions might have been asked about the veracity and fairness of that election, those questions were answered with contributions to church renovation funds, civic projects, licenses issued by the Redbird County Sheriff’s Department for roadworks to be undertaken, construction permits granted, building certificates authorized. A great deal of money found its way into a great many hands. Those payments served to tuck in corners and tidy away any unsightly threads. All was well that ended well.
Sarah Riggs was taken from her mother when she was four days old. Between that day and the day Rebecca died in June of 1951, mother and daughter did not see each other again.
That was Carson Riggs’s wish. He was sheriff of Calvary, had been for five years, and it looked like he was going to be sheriff for as long as such a position was available. He knew people, he had money enough, and all that had happened with Evan was a matter of history. People knew not to speak of it, and so they did not.
That history would remain right where it was until one Tuesday in May of 1972, when Warren Garfield’s heart stopped in the middle of a telephone conversation. Perhaps it was the burden of guilt that finally killed him, not only for what had happened with William Riggs’s last will and testament, but the committal of Grace, of Rebecca, and his collusion with Roy Sperling and Carson Riggs in a matter that went back many years earlier to a time when America was calling on its loyal sons to fight the good fight in the European theater of war. No matter what Carson might once have said about the Second World War never reaching the United States, it had done so, and those who did not volunteer were ever aware that conscription might remove any power of choice.
With the death of Warren Garfield, a closed chapter was opened. Despite that Garfield had conspired to overturn Williams Riggs’s final wishes as to the division of land and wealth, Garfield’s final wishes were honored, one of them being the dispatch of a letter to Evan Riggs at Reeves County Farm. Ironically, it was Roy Sperling who insisted Garfield’s wishes were abided by, perhaps to mitigate the burden of guilt Sperling himself had carried for as long as memory served.
That letter arrived just a little while before Evan’s cellmate was due for release, and it was to this cellmate that this letter was then entrusted.
“This is for my daughter,” Evan Riggs told Henry Quinn. “Her name is Sarah. That’s all I know. I need you to find her and give her this letter. Start in Calvary. My brother is the sheriff there. He will know where she is.”
Calvary was where it all started, and Calvary was where it would end.
Roy Sperling possessed no uncertainty. He knew his nose was broken, his left wrist, too. He was a doctor, after all. He had fulfilled that position in Calvary for as long as anyone could remember.
He sat in a chair in his own kitchen. Blood had coursed down his chin and soaked the front of his shirt. He looked much the same as Henry when Henry had been admitted to triage.
“We’re done for,” he told Carson Riggs. It was not the first time he’d said such a thing. The second time had prompted the swift right hook that broke his nose.
“Shut the hell up,” Riggs had told him. “John Lang is gonna come down here and fix things up.”
“You really believe that, Carson? He’s a functionary in the Department of Corrections. What the hell—”
“Shut the hell up. This is gonna get fixed.”
“That kid has screwed you, Carson. Evan sent that kid down here and he has screwed you. Screwed both of us. Only reason Warren isn’t getting screwed is he had the good fortune to fucking die before the shit hit the fan.”
Carson Riggs, face like a hammer, stood with his back against the sink and looked at Sperling.
“I am not going down,” Riggs said. “And if I do go down, you and the rest of them go with me.”
“Ha! You are an arrogant asshole, Carson. Always have been, always will be. You are dealing with the lieutenant governor of Texas, you dumb son of a bitch. You think he’s gonna let some small-town sheriff from the middle of nowhere fuck his life up? He may very well have hailed from here, but he is a big shot now, Carson. Politically, that man is even more powerful than the governor. What happened was nearly thirty years ago. His sons are long grown-up. The war is over. Jesus, you are living in a world entirely of your own creation.”
Carson Riggs raised the gun in his hand and pointed it at Sperling’s face.
Sperling looked back at him, his expression less of surprise and more that of someone anticipating the predictable.
“You’re gonna shoot me? Is that what we’ve come to, Carson? Alvin Lang is dead, or did you forget that already? His father isn’t coming down here, no matter what the fuck you say or do—”
“He is coming down here. Chester Lang, too … They’re gonna come down here and sort this out.”
Sperling started laughing, and blood bubbled from his nose. “You are just downright crazy, Carson Riggs. You and that lunatic fucking brother of yours. Jesus, why the hell me and Warren ever got involved with you, I do not know.”
“Because you were greedy and you wanted the money, that’s why … Same reason as everyone.”
“Ironic though, wasn’t it … ? You and your dumbass brother. He beats some poor schmuck to death and spends the rest of his life in jail. And Charlie Brennan may very well have been a fucking useless sheriff, but he didn’t deserve what you did to him. You beat Charlie to death in just the same fucking way … beat the poor son of a bitch’s brains out because he wanted a bigger cut and you wanted his fucking job. Well, you got the bigger cut and you got his job. You also got a dead wife, a crazy mother, and a brother in Reeves. And what the hell has happened now, huh? Some poor naive kid who doesn’t know his ass from his elbow comes wandering in here with a letter, and your whole fucking world falls apart. Hell, you don’t even know what’s in that letter, do you? I bet that’s been driving you fucking crazy …”
“Shut the fuck up, Roy! Just shut the fuck up,” Riggs snapped. “You don’t know a goddamned thing about this—”
“Is that so?”
Riggs’s expression changed for just a split second. He sneered at Sperling. “You don’t know a goddamned thing about what’s in that letter.”
“You think? You don’t think my oldest and dearest friend, Warren Garfield, didn’t tell me that he was gonna screw you sideways over a barrel if anything ever happened to him? He always knew you were crazy as a shithouse rat, Carson. He guessed that one day you might even try to kill him. Well, he died anyway. His heart gave out … And you know what I did? You wanna know what I did? I followed his last wishes exactly, and one of those wishes was sending a letter and a very interesting document out to your brother in Reeves—”
Riggs lunged forward and grabbed Sperling around the throat with his left hand. He held the gun close to Sperling’s face. Sperling looked back at him implacably, a response that seemed to anger Riggs even more.
“Fucking shoot me. I am done, Carson. I am gonna die right here and now, or I am going to jail for the rest of my life. Hell, I might even get to room with your brother—”
Riggs let go of Sperling’s neck. He swept the gun sideways and brought it back to connect with Sperling’s cheekbone. Sperling both heard and felt it crack. He nearly passed out as the lance of excruciating pain almost took his head off his shoulders, but within moments he was looking back at Riggs with that same determined and defiant glare.
“That will your daddy wrote when you put your wife in Ector … That’s what Warren sent to your brother, Carson. He sent him the last will and testament of your father, the one you overruled, the one you thought would never come to light. That was Warren’s dying wish … that the truth of what you did came out. You fucking killed Charlie Brennan. You beat the poor, greedy, stupid, dumbass son of a bitch to death, and I falsified the death certificate. You got what you wanted. You got the land, you got the oil rights, you got all the money, and you’ve paid your way into the Sheriff’s Office for the last thirty years. Well, fuck you, Carson. It ends here and now. That kid is gonna find Evan’s daughter, and he is gonna give her that letter, and she is gonna find out who you are and who her daddy is and how you robbed her of her inheritance. Because that’s what your father did, Carson … He left everything to Evan’s daughter. You betrayed him, you betrayed your ma, your brother … You betrayed everyone far more than Evan ever betrayed you. Your daddy knew that, and he took everything away from you. He wanted you to have nothing after what you did to Rebecca and that baby. You killed Charlie. You saw your own wife dead after what they did to her up at Ector, and you might as well sign your own mother’s death certificate, because she is gonna die up there soon enough—”
“Shut the hell up, Roy! You shut the goddamned hell up right now. There ain’t no will—”
“There is. I seen it, Carson. I seen it with my own eyes. I was the one who got it in the mail after Warren died, and I knew exactly what I was doing. And I am fucking glad, Carson … I am fucking glad. I made a lot of money from what we did back then, but you have held court and controlled this town and told us what to do ever since, and it ends here—”
Riggs grabbed Sperling by the throat again, squeezed it hard, a cruel and fierce madness in his eyes as he looked down at the bleeding man on the chair in front of him.
“Kill me, Carson … and then if I were you, I’d kill yourself. Them Langs … man, they are not gonna let you bring down their family. They have way too much power and way too much money. Hey, I bet you they even got it rigged that you killed Alvin. Shee-it, I bet you that’s the way it’s gonna turn out in the papers. Would they want a suicide on their hands? No siree, Bob. Suicide makes it looks like the Lang family has got something to hide. Deputy sheriff of Calvary shoots himself for being complicit in what? Hell, I don’t believe they want that kind of scandal slurring their upright and prestigious family name. But Calvary sheriff goes crazy, shoots his deputy, shoots the town doctor, and then shoots himself … Well, man, it’s the South. These things happen. Three weeks and no one will even remember that you knew the Langs.”
“You were in this as much as me, Roy,” Riggs snarled. “You were right in there with Warren and me. We did what we did for the Langs. We arranged everything, covered everyone’s tracks—”
“Sure we did, Carson … and you got Alvin’s daddy on your side, and he called the Redbird DA, and Warren destroyed the last will … or so he said, and you got the farm and the oil rights and more money than you knew what to do with. But it was never about the money, was it, Carson? It was about the authority and the power and being able to do just what the hell you liked. Christ, man, you’ve spent your whole life getting revenge on people for things you made them do!” Sperling started to laugh, but the pain shot through his face and he grimaced. “We cooked up those medical records and affidavits, my friend. We did what we did. We hid both of Chester Lang’s sons behind a veil of lies so they wouldn’t have to go to war. We did it for Chester Lang and for anyone else who had the money. Go take a look in the cemetery. Memorial down there for all our brave boys who died in the First War, but is there anything for the Second? Hell, no. Fucking ironic that the only one with any balls when it came to the war was your dumbass brother. Second irony is that the most powerful and influential families in West Texas are still the most powerful and influential families in West Texas. They had the money to pay us, and we did what they asked us. You think they’re gonna let some greedy small-time sheriff expose their cowardice? You think they want the world to know that they paid to keep their kids out of the army? You think they are gonna admit what they did and say sorry and be all ashamed? Hell, you are even fucking crazier than I took you for—”
Riggs hit Sperling again. “You shut the fuck up—” he started, but his words were interrupted by the voice of Ozona sheriff Ross Hendricks. That voice came loud and clear through a bullhorn, and the message was unequivocal.
“Sheriff Riggs! You hear me in there, Sheriff Riggs? This is Hendricks out of Ozona. We got some kind of trouble here, and we’ve come down to try to sort it out. Now, whatever the hell has happened, we can straighten it out, but I am told that you and Doc Roy Sperling are in there and there’s some kind of problem. Well, I am a reasonable man, just like you, and we can straighten it all out. You come on out here and we’ll get to talking, and you might be surprised how easily we can fix whatever the hell is going on.”
Sperling tried to laugh again. “Jesus Christ in a chariot, they don’t have the faintest goddamned idea of what you did, do they, Carson?”
“You did the same, Roy … You did the fucking same, and you are going down, too …”
“Difference is, Carson, that I know I’m done for and I don’t care. I’ve had enough. Shoot me, or let them shoot me. Put me in Reeves and throw away the key. I’ll just tie a bedsheet around my neck and hang myself. It’s over, Carson. Warren bailed out. I’m an old man. I don’t think of anything nowadays but what we did to your wife, how they drugged her and stuck things in her brain and whatever … all to make it look like she was crazy so she would never have a hope of taking that land and that oil off of you. I just have to close my eyes for a second and I can see her screaming her head off in the back of that hospital car as they drove her away. ”
From out in the street, Hendricks was hollering through the bullhorn. “Sheriff Riggs … Carson … you gotta come out of there and talk to me. I don’t wanna have to come in there, my friend.”
“Lang will come,” Riggs said, his tone desperate, as if he was now struggling to believe what he was saying. “John Lang will come to find out what happened to his son … and if he doesn’t come, then Chester will send someone, and this will all get straightened out.”
“They’re gonna find the girl, Carson. They’re gonna find Sarah. Hell, she lives no more than twenty miles from here. Terrible shadow that must have been. Keep her close or send her far away. How that must have tormented you. Well, it wouldn’t have mattered, because that dumbass kid from Reeves is gonna deliver that letter. This whole house of shadows will come crashing down around you … and you won’t even hear it. Only person they’re gonna send, even if they do send someone, is gonna be here for one reason and one reason only. To make sure you never say a goddamned word about the Langs and what we did back in forty-four. John Lang, Robert Lang, the Webster boys, the Deardens, the Wesleys, all of them fit and well, all of them more than eligible for armed service, and we hid them all. While honest German people were hiding Jews from the Nazis, you were hiding the sons of the rich and powerful so they didn’t have to go to war. You really think the lieutenant governor of Texas wants America and the world to know what we did?”
Riggs looked at Sperling like he was facing his own executioner.
“Carson Riggs!” Hendricks’s voice bellowed through the bullhorn. “Come on out now, or we’re comin’ in!”
“It’s all over, Carson,” Sperling said, and then Carson Riggs raised the gun once more and shot him in the chest.
Even from the kitchen, Carson Riggs heard the response to that single gunshot. It sounded like an army was advancing from the street.
He looked at Sperling. He looked at the gun in his hand. He had just murdered the doctor. That, if nothing else, would see him in Reeves for the rest of his life.
And it was that thought—the thought of seeing Evan every day—that turned the tide of his thoughts.
He looked once more at Sperling, and then he turned toward the door.
Sheriff Carson Riggs went out there, gun raised, pulling the trigger even before he’d exited the house, and the sound that welcomed him was something Vernon Harvey—he of Snowflake, Arizona, he of the pocket watch that Evan himself carried to a different war—would have recognized. It was a cannonade, an assault, and Carson fell forward from the veranda and never got up.
Ross Hendricks came through into the kitchen.
Doc Sperling stirred.
Hendricks hesitated for just a second, and then he was hollering for a medic, a doctor, an ambulance.
“Sto-o-op,” Sperling slurred. He tried to raise his hand, tried to motion for Hendricks to come close.
Hendricks went to the man’s side.
“Too l-late,” Sperling gasped. “He-Henry Qu—”
“Henry Quinn,” Hendricks said. “He’s here. He’s outside.”
Sperling seemed to smile then. “G-get h-him h-here. Get h-him h-here. Need to tell hi-him … tell him wh-where th-the girl i-is …”
Hendricks sent for Henry Quinn. Henry came at a run. Evie, too, the two of them kneeling beside Doc Sperling to hear the last halting syllables that left the man’s lips before his eyes rolled white. He died right there in his own kitchen, and with him went the truth of how Carson Riggs had held sway over him and Warren Garfield for nearly thirty years.