7

Berenice Urschel was gone. According to the maid, she’d been seen climbing out a second-story window and shimmying down a rose trellis before making a break for the garage. A couple newspapermen saw her get in a Hudson touring car that sure looked a hell of a lot like E. E. Kirkpatrick’s machine, although no one seemed to note the man behind the wheel. And so Jones stayed up waiting till damn-near eleven o’clock, like an old father worried that his daughter might lose her virginity in the heat of a summer evening. He was standing in the drive by the garage when they finally rolled back to the mansion, dimming their lights and crawling from the Hudson with long faces.

“Good evening,” Jones said.

“We couldn’t take the chance and tell you,” Kirkpatrick said.

“Tell me what?” Jones asked, Berenice Urschel not yet looking him in the eye.

“They asked for five thousand dollars and not to tell a soul,” she said, soft-like. “They said they’d bring his watch to prove it.”

“You get the watch?” Jones asked.

Kirkpatrick plucked his hands into his trousers and pulled out a wrist-watch, handing it to Jones.

“Ain’t even a watch,” Jones said. “The damn hands have been painted on.”

“We couldn’t take a chance,” Berenice said. “You’d have stopped us.”

“I wouldn’t have stopped you,” Jones said. The evening was alive with a radio’s music coming from a neighbor’s window, and crickets, and the continuous clicking from newspapermen on the dewy lawn, hammering out editorials on the kidnapping and updates on how Charles F. Urschel, Oklahoma City oilman, was still in the hands of the kidnappers, federal agents baffled.

“Makes you angry, don’t it?” Jones said.

Berenice walked past Jones and onto the worn path the kidnappers had taken and through the screen door of the back porch. The door slammed, and she sat in a chair with the lights off and just stared out into the empty darkness.

“The less said-” Kirkpatrick said.

“I don’t intend to punish the woman,” Jones said. “But five thousand is a lot of money.”

“They only got a thousand.”

“What did these chislers look like?”

“I don’t know,” Kirkpatrick said. “I drove her out to the corner of Broadway and Main. They told her to come alone, and so I let her out. She went into a chop suey joint called the New Bamboo right next to Branson’s cigar shop.”

“You see anyone leave the place?”

“They must’ve taken a back door,” he said. “When Berenice came out, she was crying. They’d taken her pocketbook and handed her that fake watch.”

“They rough her up?”

“Just scared her to death.”

The men heard the telephone ring from inside the Urschels’ house. A servant appeared on the back porch and called to Mrs. Urschel in the darkness. After a while she emerged through the porch doorway and walked to the men, the sadness replaced with the woman gritting her teeth. “The language. I can’t even repeat what I was just called.”

“Who?” Kirkpatrick asked.

“That filthy bastard who took my money,” she said. “He had the nerve to call here and complain that I shortchanged him after he didn’t produce Charles’s watch. I am just a fool. An absolute fool.”

“No, ma’am,” Jones said. “I’d say that filthy bastard’s the fool. We can find out right quick where he made that call and get your money back.”

“Vultures,” Kirkpatrick said. “Parasites.”

“Opportunists,” Jones said. “You mind if I take that watch, ma’am?”

THE PAIN HAD BECOME FAMILIAR AND AT LEAST BEARABLE. Charlie would sit in the same position for hours, back to the wall, left arm stretched up in chains to the high chair, listening to the sounds of the farm, for most surely it was a farm, with the rooster and goats, a pig or two, the squeak of an old well, and an old tin cup presented to him with water that tasted of minerals and rust. They did not talk to him, although he tried. He’d comment on the day and the time and how things were awful hot, but there was only the unlocking of the chain and movement to another section of the house, away from the sun, away from the west, and to another part of the old shack, with the creaky floorboards and the smell of dirty clothes and dirty dishes and pig shit.

That morning he’d been given a breakfast of canned tomatoes and canned beans with a tin of cold campfire coffee. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigar, would you?”

No reply.

“You get dust storms?” he asked.

“That’s down south,” said an old man. “ Oklahoma and Texas.”

“You got the time?”

“Yes, sir,” said a young man.

“Don’t see any harm in you tellin’ me.”

“Better check.”

“You got to check with someone to tell a fella the time?”

“I don’t have to check with nobody.”

“Hush up,” said the old man.

The boy returned to the room alone, hours after sundown, Charlie hearing his feet on the slats, and told him it was close to midnight. The hours went like that, although Charlie rarely dozed. “Why don’t you get some sleep, Mr. Urschel.”

“I can’t.”

“You want a spot of ’shine?”

“I’d like to use the facilities before I sleep. Is that okay? Or should you ask?”

The young man unlocked him from the high chair and bound the chains tighter at the wrist, checking the manacles on his legs. The boy prodded Charlie on with what he took for the butt of a shotgun, and would tell him to turn here and there, and then grabbed his elbow as they came to the porch and some rickety steps, Charlie nearly tripping over a baying hound awoken from sleep.

The outhouse smelled like a thousand outhouses he’d known, hastily slapped together in the oil fields, but he never had grown used to the stench. He was able to unlatch his pants and sit, and, with his hands loose, play a bit with the tape over his eyes, loosening the cotton a bit and readjusting, moonlight flooding through the cutout in the door. Tattered catalog images of women in their brassieres and slips had been tacked to the leaning walls, and old corncobs were placed in a box at his feet. Flies buzzed from the carved wooden seat and echoed deep within the hole and in the stench of it all, and Charlie Urschel began to plan his escape.

When he finished, with the cotton loose from his eyes, he unlatched the outhouse door and stumbled before the boy. He could see him now through the slits. A short, squatty fella with grease-parted hair and wearing a pair of Union overalls. The 12-gauge looked to have rusted shut long ago.

The boy reached in the overalls’ flap and pulled out a cigar. He placed it into Charlie’s hands and asked if he’d like him to light her up. Charlie said, “Sure, why not?,” and so the boy struck a couple matches and waited until the cigar got going.

Charlie stretched his legs and took in the layout of the little shack, the small hogpen and chicken coop. He saw the old well with a bucket, and in the far distance, perhaps a mile, he saw the lights of another house.

“How does she smoke, Mr. Urschel?”

“Thank you just the same,” Charlie said. “But not my brand.”

The boy remained sullen all the way back into the shack, where he told Charlie to change into a pair of pajamas. Charlie got settled back against the wall where he could get chained up for the night.

“Just how much of a cut are you gettin’, son?”

THE TELEPHONE CALL WAS PLACED FROM A SINCLAIR OIL FILLING station just across the Canadian River bridge west of the city. Jones interviewed the proprietor of the station near midnight, and the man told him right quick that it had been a couple beggars from down in Hooverville who’d made the call, even bumming the nickel from a customer. The man gave him a fair description of the two, and Jones told Berenice Urschel to wait at the station or he could call an agent to pick her up.