A Baylor Murder of Crows
ONE
In downtown Waco there is a bar, on Austin Avenue. The name of the bar is “Pat’s Idle Hour.”
Woody said “Welly well well Billy-me-lad. What will the rich gentleman be drinking this fine evening?”
He was yanking my chain. He knew I wasn’t rich. And calling anyone a gentleman is pretty often a sarcastic insult. But I played along. “Now Woody, you know full well I am not a gentleman. Just a successful research consultant.” I smiled indulgently. (Woody knew I had been unemployed two months back.) “As for being rich…” Indulgent smile again. “What is the most expensive whisky you have behind the bar in this dive?”
“Johnnie Walker Black. One-fifty a shot.”
“A HUNDRED AND FIFTY A SHOT?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “One dollar and fifty cents.”
“Oh, ha ha. Okay I thought that was a bit steep.” I grinned at him. “Let’s you and me try a few. In fact, Black Label for all! A round for the house on me.” There were three other guys in the bar.
Woody pulled out the square bottle and set it down on the bar. Woody really was a born bartender. He was savoring the moment, letting the anticipation build. We grinned at each other.
First he put three shot glasses on a little round tray for the three grad students sitting at a table near the door.
“If they don’t want whisky will you buy them something else?”
“Of course. Sure ssu-ure my good man. Rest assured. Don’t tell them I am paying. Make something up.”
He came back with an empty tray.
A middle-aged couple came in. I thought they looked like whisky drinkers. “I’m buying,” I told Woody. I laid a century note on the bar. “Let me know when this runs out.”
“I’ve seen your money. Pay before you go, or whenever. I keep a score. I will tell you when you get to a hundred.”
Ten mathematicians walked in. To the bar.
Sounds like a joke doesn’t it? Nope. They were really there. An egghead conference at Paul Quinn, apparently. You never knew in Waco. In 1962 or any other year.
Every one of those college professors took two shots of Black Label immediately. It was strangely ritualistic. Woody was the high priest of Scotland smoothly distributing communion— like magic elixir, to absolve the sin of being human (and off work.)
With the third round they raised a toast:
“Let x equal x…”
More folks drifted in, some smiling some laughing.
I sipped twelve year old scotch (later I found out it was far older than that) and let the tidbits of conversation drift in one ear and out the other…
“Enos passed away. That was one monkey that really got around…”(Laughter.)
“Lev Landau said…”
“Eleanor Roosevelt…”
“Aww…” Glasses clinking.
“He pulled his missiles out. That tells you something…”
“PT 109!”
I look in the mirror behind the bar and I see a guy standing at the bar near me. I turn and look at him. He is looking straight at me with a look that is tough to describe. He looked like he knew more about me than I knew myself. Awkward.
And he says, “I hear they have a supercomputer at M-I-T where they play a game called ‘Spacewar.”
And I’m thinking “Why tell me?”
§ § §
When I got home to the mysterious Hobbs Court house where I work and live— wait you don’t know about the Hobbs Court house where I live and work? I guess you didn’t read about how I solved my first murder mystery. The Baylor Family Murder Mystery.
Oh well. Anyway I had only worked for DANMAC for a few months. At first I thought it was a crooked game of some kind. Then I thought it might be a satanic cult.
There was a lot of deep mystery.
For one thing I had never seen my boss. I only heard his voice. Oh, there was lots of weird stuff puzzling the heck out of me. But when I turned off of Mecca onto Hobbs Court, I was thinking about that weird guy at the bar who wanted to talk about supercomputers. You meet a lot of weird guys in this world but this one took the cake. I turned and walked up the sidewalk to the front (or side) door of the house.
Something caught my eye. A tail twitching.
It was the big cat. Rex. He was watching me from the top of one of those pencil cypress trees in the front yard. If it was the front yard. I still wasn’t sure. But here was a mystery. My life was full of it.
The Mystery of How Did The Cat Get Into the Front Yard? In theory, Rex was confined to the interior of the house or the enclosed part of the backyard. In theory.
The front door had not been left open. It was closed. And I wasn’t ready to believe Rex had closed it behind him when he came out. He had some secret exit, I was sure of that.
Up at the top of the thirteen gorgeous steps, the front door swung open and I looked at the Housekeeper.
“Wicked Kitty!” she admonished Rex’s huge tail as he whisked between her feet, like some Majestic Jungle King on his way to the interior. I knew he was just going to his food dish in the kitchen.
But I still did not know how he got out.
The house was full of little mysteries like that. And also some moderately big mysteries. And one or two colossal whoppers.
I made a short list.
1. Why did we never see the boss?
2. DANMAC
A. What is it?
B. Who owns it?
3. Hobbs Court
A. Who built it?
B. What planet were they from?
The whole set up with just a voice and typewritten letters from the boss was fishy. And I can’t begin to describe how weird the Hobbs Court house was.
Some of the mysteries were… I mean, where the heck did all these fantasy architectural whimsies come from anyway? The castle. The ‘Moat House.’
Why do the streets have names like “”Mecca” or “Novice?” All this stuff together at once made me nervous. Not very very dreadfully but nervous just the same.
What the hell was DANMAC?
TWO
“It is a beautiful day for the murder.”
I don’t have the greatest poker face ever.
Somehow I was unprepared for a pretty Baylor foreign student with a volume of Shelley under her arm getting all bubbly about sunshine and murder.
So. She sees the shocked look on my face— and without further ado— runs away like a frightened young chipmunk.
I almost ran after her but it suddenly occurred to me that I shouldn’t be seen chasing Young Women International Students across the campus even if I had a good reason which I didn’t.
Of course I wanted to know what the hell she was talking about. What murder? What murder? Why today? Why tell me?
But most of all what bugged me was the way she smiled when she said it. Beautiful and murder don’t belong together in my book. There was something sick about it. CAWCAW
CAW the crowd of crows near the bench in front of the Armstrong-Browning seemed to think it was funny.
§ § §
The Housekeeper, Mrs. Baduhenna fed me breakfast lunch and dinner. And anything else I wanted.
I was required by my job to live at the Hobbs Court house. It wasn’t in the contract. Not a written contract, but I felt like an informal verbal contract held force. To wit, if I wanted to draw my fat paycheck I had to live at the office, literally.
How could I ever possibly describe those meals? I am not a great writer. But no one could describe those meals. You would have to experience them. Trust me.
I kept wondering how she warmed the coffee mug.
Breakfast was so good. It was so good. It was SO good. I thought about it when I went to sleep at night. And if I ever slept late? The smell of breakfast cooking came right into my third floor bedroom and woke me like a fire alarm. My god it smelled good! My belly felt like the empty hold of a cargo freighter. I flew down the staircase whistling like all seven dwarves.
There was money in the neighborhood around Hobbs Court. All those big houses had big kitchens. With chefs. I ate like a prince!
I guess there were twenty to thirty-ish big mansions with rich owners in and around Waco at that time. Just about every one of those mansions had a big kitchen. If you have a bowling alley in the casa you probably have an upscale kitchen, right?
Some called their cooks chefs and some called their chefs cooks. The fact is they were all artists. And they mostly stuck together, as local artists often will. In Waco or the East Village, artists make their own world to live in.
The Housekeeper had lunch every Monday at the Moat House, where the chef was a Cordon-Bleu graduate. In fact he was a former instructor. Julia Childs learned a thing or two from him!
So, Katerina Baduhenna was an artist when it came to cuisine.
(She also had an etching of Lord Byron in a turban, but that is another story.)
§ § §
By this time I had spent quite a few weird hours in the conference room on the second floor, where the framed photo of Kennedy watched over the odd drama of the ‘teleconferences’ we played out in there.
The first time I was in there, I kept waiting for someone to say “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!” but no one ever did.
That teleconferencing room was worthy of a good description. It was roomy, not cavernous. It was mostly neutral colors, browns, greens, olive and shades of gray. There was a framed eight by ten black and white photo of the President of the United States of America. The table was oval shaped and bare except for a black wooden box. There were three chairs on the side closest to the door. The other side just had one chair, larger and different from the rest. A throne for the Big Boss. I couldn’t help but feel the eery presence of the man in the empty chair.
Especially when he started talking. The first time he pulled that stunt on me I almost jumped out of my skin. This deep resonant male voice— out of nowhere. Damn.
It was a a nice voice, if a bit cold. It was just weird. There was an empty chair. But it sounded like the guy was right in the room. I thought it was creepy and I still do a little. But I admit I am getting used to it.
In early November of AD 1962 I was alone in the room with JFK. I didn’t know what was on the agenda. I was engaged in research. But it often seemed goofy. Mr. Invisible Smith kept giving me random multiple assignments.
“You want me to research the Alico Building here in Waco?”
“Precisely correct.” said Smith. “Nothing in particular, everything in general.
Also Cameron Park. Last item but most wanted— there was a recent Waco newspaper story about Ephraim Harris. I want complete information.”
I didn’t want to show off but I had already read that article. And I knew he wasn’t going to get anything like “complete information.”
Harris was privy to U.S. *Top Secret* material. Full stop.
What the hell was DANMAC getting me into?
I was proud of myself for keeping my trap shut for once. I have a little trouble with that.
A girl at a library once asked me “Do you always have to be such a smart-aleck?”
I didn’t really have a good answer for her. But then my mind wasn’t really on the question. I figured it was probably rhetorical anyway. English is a dumb language.
§ § §
When I came out of my bathroom that Tuesday morning at nine forty-seven Ay Em I felt ready. I went down the stairs to the floor below.
My friend Larry Brown was in the conference room. I call him my friend. I have long felt that way about him. Of course he was really a… well he was a friend, AND a Special Agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was precisely ten ay em when Smith spoke in that patented invisible baritone of his.
“Let us begin.”
Agent Brown had a lulu for me.
crime scenario:
On June 3 1962 Dallas County Sheriffs were called to West Lake Highlands Drive on White Rock Lake. Some picnickers had discovered a human body in the woods. It was identified as Chuck McCarthy, wealthy oil man.
Sillique Hawn
Ma Inganiese
Rube Ideum
Tunny Guestown
H.E. Liam
These were the five suspects on the Feds’ A list.
I won’t give you the B list, but I will tell you (off the record) that the killer was NOT on the B list.
White Rock Lake. For a number of years it had been a rich man’s hideaway. The wealthy had estates with big luxury houses. (They were bigger and richer than the also rich living in my neighborhood.)
They had yacht races on the lake. McCarthy’s corpse was found in a copse. Really it was just some woodland, just a bit of forest left over from at least ten thousand years ago, A grove of post oaks. But picnickers and millionaires and late night partiers had been cutting firewood off the trees and had just about stripped them bare. However, they were tough Texas trees, and they had come back to the point where they looked like trees again. That made it a copse.
McCarthy’s head was bashed in. That made it a corpse.
But he wasn’t quite a corpse when they found him. It was a gardener on his day off that asked the sixty-four dollar question— “Can you tell us who did this?”
The old oilman’s eyes fluttered open and he said “I can…(gasp.) Saw Ray Zorbak…” And died.
The nearest mansion to the copse belonged to Widow Hawn. Before she became Mrs. Hawn her name was Sillique Ravenscroft.
Silli had 14 cats all named Jacob.
Tunny said that at the time of the crime he was was watching Perry Mason on CBS. “The Case of the Dodging Domino.” (Tunny didn’t say how he knew the time of the crime.)
Ma Inganiese had a couple of Mercedes in the garage but no Rolls Royce.
Apparently she was some kind of political nutjob. Called herself a ‘free radical’ promoting ‘paramagnetism.’ Oh, brother.
Rube had a soft grey whitish beard. There was a photo from HS Football days. In shoulder pads & jersey. Number 37.
I stared at that picture for a long long time. Did he look like a killer?
About that time my invisible boss laid THIS on me— “Have you calculated the solution, Mr. Robinson?”
I knew Larry was looking at me. I was blushing like a fire engine.
“You know i could just make up a bunch of lies and y’all would never know the difference.”
“Yes.” said the FBI. Just “Yes.”
I said “I didn’t apply for this job. I don’t know anything about DANMAC. I have never seen Mr. Smith. I was initially hired to do pure research. I agreed to do clerical work for Mr. Smith, in addition to my research. I agreed to try and solve murder mysteries.
I confess. I think the whole job— the whole setup is screwy. I admit I don’t know what I am doing. I don’t know what I am doing. I think it is screwy. So.
Forgive me if I waste your time with my verbal maundering. I took this job and I am trying my best to do my job. I hope it is honest work, but—honestly? I don’t know enough about it to say.”
“You are doing fine,” said Larry.
“Your work is exemplary,” said the robot boss from outer space.
“I also admit that I can’t solve these mysteries at a a glance or do research instantaneously.
I need time.”
§ § §
I spent Christmas in my library. I ain’t religious anyway. I had no family. Literally, my parents were the last surviving relatives I had. Since they were gone, I felt like Christmas was all mine, and I could do with it whatever I wanted. I like libraries.
Whatever else I knew or didn’t know, I knew I felt grateful and thankful for the job I had. Smith was letting me stock a research library right there at Hobbs Court. I was doing *exactly* what I wanted to do in life, and being generously overpaid for it. Not to mention the food.
The Housekeeper and I exchanged gifts. I gave her French perfume, she gave me Czech beer. That stuff has a powerful kick! (Which stuff I mean I leave as an exercise for the student.)
In the library on Christmas day, all the news from December of ’62 boomeranged around my head and— I jotted notes. A long time later I read what I had scrawled on a scrap of notebook paper that Christmas Day. It was like a science fiction unpoem.
News from December
hard to forget
Norwegian rocket reaches space
Chinese rocket blows up scientists on ground
News. From December
The Boston Strangler strangled another
Jamaica joined the ILO, the Packers beat the Giants
British Tornados conquered America with instrumental Telstar
Venus called and is she hot!
The Times stood still, (the printers struck.)
News from December, easy to remember
Reading what I don’t even remember writing I began to wonder— Could a computer ever write poetry?
The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind.
§ § §
That was the week that was!
It was warm. Not any sign of any X-mas snow. Warm and sunny. And it stayed that way through the year’s end.
New Year’s Eve at the Idle Hour— I won’t even try to describe it. It was wild. Just wild.
It was New Year’s Day 1963 when it clicked for me.
I knew who stood behind Chuck on June third nineteen sixty-two at White Rock Lake, and smashed his head and made a corpse in a copse.
I didn’t have it all taped but I was pretty sure I had it figured out.
Special Agent Brown had delivered a large carton of documentation of evidence in the McCarthy murder case.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been unable to find even one ‘Ray Zorbak’ that could possibly be a plausible suspect.
However.
On the third (two days after the deadline Smith had set) I presented my final report.
The voice of Smith: “Let us begin.”
I said “Agent Brown. I don’t want to waste too much of your time. From my research I have formulated two likely avenues of further research.
In the statement of the off duty gardener, he says he heard someone calling ‘coo-ee,’ a common hail used mostly in Australia.
But a group of children from a family of picnickers stated that they heard a farmer calling his pigs.
I suggest the possibility that the call was not ‘coo-ee’ but rather ‘SOO-ee.’
There was a pause. And then Larry said “Holy shit. He’s getting away!”
The FBI jumped to its feet and ran off in pursuit of—
“But who does he mean?” asked the boss.
“Rube Ideum. Number 37.” I finished my report as follows:
Rube Ideum and Charles ‘Chuck’ McCarthy were classmates together in college. ‘SOO-ee’ was something they yelled at football games.”
“I see,” said the boss, right on cue. “So the final words he spoke did give us the identity.”
“Exactly.” I said. “It wasn’t ‘I can… I saw Ray Zorbak, he was trying to say. It was 'Ar-kan-saw Razorback.'”
§ § §
I had solved my second case.
I was feeling pretty damn proud of myself too.
Smith and I put the final wraps on it a few days later.
Even though Special Agent Brown had run as fast as he could (very) out of the Hobbs Court house and immediately called for an all-points-bulletin (APB)— the FBI did NOT put the collar on Old Number 37. He was already in Havana.
But the bureau at least managed to get the story. They even got the evidence. They just didn’t get their man. Wait, that is the Mounties. Never mind. He got away.
I gave Smith the story that Larry gave me.
McCarthy and Ideum were roommates and frat brothers in college. At the University of Arkansas. They didn’t play football and they didn’t graduate.
They went to the East Texas Oil Field.
That was when the ‘hot oil’ was running. Maybe Rube and Chuck tried a little pimping. But in any case Rube got a reputation as someone who would kill anyone. For very small sums of cash. Soon he was hijacking tanker trucks and starting well fires. He ditched Chuck. Chuck left the oilfields and drifted along the Gulf coast for a while.
Rube bought stock in Texaco. They hadn’t invented slant drilling yet. Nevertheless, Rube prospered. And almost every cent he made went straight into Texaco. He became wealthy. He bought a mansion. On White Rock Lake. One day Chuck showed up.
“Blackmail?” asked the boss, tonelessly.
“Well,” said I, “…he bought a nice place not far from Rube. And Rube payed for it.”
“Were they still friends.?”
“No. Not according to Larry. Rube hated Chuck’s guts.”
“Enough to kill him?”
“He was a killer. The deputies actually found the weapon hidden in his backyard. He didn’t use a rock. He had a short length of steel pipe. Filled with lead. It was exactly the kind of weapon he used to snuff wildcatters in the oilfields.”
“Well done Mr. Robinson.”
(He didn’t mention a bonus but I was doing alright. And after all, my report was two days late.)
“But… you fictionalized the real names of all the suspects. What system did you use?”
“Just like I told you in the first case— it is *elementary* my dear watson.
“You mean?” (pause.)
“Exactly.” I said.
After that my attention and the conversation kind of wandered around a bit.
“What do you mean by dated science fiction?” asked Mr. Smith.
“You know. Like Jules Verne. He had all kinds of flying machines but no airplanes. He wrote his stories before the Wright Bros took off. H.G. Wells. The science is out of date. He fights a “War of the Worlds” with nineteenth century artillery.”
Sometimes I got the feeling that DANMAC was doing research on ME.
Sometimes the whole deal was like a Doctor Who plot. A lot of the time.
“Are you telling me you are a robot that was modeled after a living person?”
“Not at all. A robot INTELLIGENCE that was structured using a certain person’s data. He passed away in 1956. His data was used for my programming. He was a college professor. At Baylor. British Literature.”
I just couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“I hear they have a supercomputer at M-I-T where they play a game called ‘Spacewar.”
§ § §
I wandered slowly as a cloud, down the stairs, headed for my library but I stopped short in the front hall. There was another door open.
There was another room.
Did I tell you about this crazy house? Nutz. The walls were straight. But not quite. They weren’t parallel. The didn’t always meet. No two doors that opened onto the front hall faced the same direction. Or opposite directions. Screwy. I don’t know how the place stood up. Even after a couple of months I had not seen all the rooms yet. I stepped in through the open door and looked around. Nice. It looked like a hotel lounge at a swank ski resort. There was no fire in the circular fireplace in the middle of the room. Indirect lighting. Snazzy. It took me a few minutes to spot the other door. I opened it. It wasn’t a closet.
If the first room was après-ski this one was Puritan Meeting Room. It was big enough for 25 pilgrims to stand in. Triangular. It was empty. Plain wooden floor. One whole wall was ceiling-to-floor drapes, like a theatre curtain. The opposite corner was a fireplace. The great grandaddy of all fireplaces.
I could write a book about that fireplace. A pilgrim could stand up in it. There was a fire laid, just waiting for a match to light it. There was even a wooden kitchen match on top of a full box, half-open. The kind with a striking surface on the side. I closed the box and struck the match but I didn’t light the fire. I wanted to make sure the damper was open. There was a handle over the mantle (over my head.) I slid it sideways and a big updraft blew my match out. I lit the fire then.
It was perfectly laid and one match was all I needed. (After the first one went out I mean.) There were about 30 one-inch oak twigs, 4-foot long on the massive grate. Stacked on top of those were nine oak logs four inches in diameter. and perched up on top two really massive logs over a foot thick.
Underneath the grate was a box, woven of thin strips of white pine, filled with dry fir shavings and a big pine cone. I dropped in my lit match and that was all she wrote.
Staring into a fire like that is magical….
Yep. Magical.
The Housekeeper walked in.
She clapped her hands. “Vunderful!” she said. “Aren’t you the clever one!” She sounded sincere. The fire was reflected in her eyes.
She crossed the room with her special gracefulness of motion and drew the drapes aside. I was flabbergasted.
It was a floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall plate-glass window, looking out on to the backyard. I could see Rex trotting house-ward.
There was something sparkly in the air, like tiny glitter too small to see clearly. As I sat in one of the two gorgeous armchairs, great big flakes of snow started drifting down, very, very slowly.
Beautiful.
Rex bustled in— and I don’t expect you to believe it— but he bumped the door shut with his butt.
The fire was roaring, and it was cozy in front of the big plate glass window. Kat sat in the other chair. We watched the snow.
And we didn’t say another word.
epilogue:
I happened to be looking at the definition of murder in the dictionary and I had one of those moments of enlightenment. A ‘crowd’ of crows? A group of crows was called a murder. A flock of geese; a murder of crows.
So the pretty foreign Baylor student at the library wasn’t even talking about homicide at all!
Why doesn’t anybody ever tell me these things? English is a dumb language. CAW CAW.
