Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (35 page)

But, astute as he was, apparently he did not at first recognize the role Bayne was playing in the corruption, for it was Grayston who suggested the superintendent take a room with his wife’s family. Could William then only have read a quatrain from his father’s funeral ode to him, “Though Dead, He Speaks,” he might have lived longer. The lines confirm David’s perception of the truth:

His home, selected for its lair,

Foul serpent had been coiling there,

Watching to make its deadly spring,

A loathsome, filthy, deathly thing.

Waterworks superintendent Bayne did not move into the Payton home to get cheaper quarters; he arrived as a lackey mole to look for means to force Grayston to shut down an investigation getting too close to him and his confraternity. Most of Joplin knew about the separations of the prominent couple, and every lawyer had heard of voluble William’s hopes for reconciliation and his deep concerns for his daughter. The men who hired Bayne to run the water plant knew Grayston’s vulnerability lay in his devotion to family, and they understood his heartstrings were attached to his Achilles’ heel: his potential for intemperate response. Sooner or later, the oligarchs might be able to pull those strings in a way to rein him in.

Although the stooge Bayne was in the Payton house at first simply to gather information, as gossip developed, his confederates realized they might play rumor into a conclusive manipulation of Grayston. Their first tactic was to incite, pay for, and encourage the divorce petition, while at the same time discouraging Pearl from following through with it. To keep it hanging over Grayston could serve better to force him to desist in his inquiries.

The Lords of the White Tablecloth, shrewd as they could be nefarious, surely also saw they might be able to use against him his reputation for bold confrontation, widely recognized among Joplin lawyers; such volatility in the face of malfeasance could make him susceptible to a cunningly conceived provocation, a ploy to inflame him into irrationality. Here was a man who, said his own attorney, “fought his law cases with a good deal of heart,” always refusing to back away from public misdeeds.

The protagonist in a blood tragedy must commit a deadly error of judgment, and even the names here seem suited to a drama: a house of lords sending a bane into the home of a man of will and his beautiful pearl. Had Grayston kept his plan silent until actually exposing the culpable, he would have had a protective shield of truth, and it would have been too late to silence him. But, as friends and foes alike testified, William was “quite a talker.”

At last, the lords could not afford to wait longer; there was no more time for a subtle, restrained response. It had come down to Grayston or them, and they decided, if I may phrase it so, to pull the trigger. The hand to do that job was already perfectly placed and the true motive for the homicide conveniently concealed by rumors and Grayston’s public statements of there not being room enough in Joplin for both himself and the superintendent. All the plot needed was something to force William to make the first move, a deed to be forced in broad daylight before dozens of witnesses who would, by their very presence, provide a cover of justifiable homicide. Grayston was too prominent — especially after his announcement — to be taken to a mine shaft and dropped in, a dark exit of some lesser Joplin men.

I believe Bayne’s collaborators, neither thugs nor mobsters, and not at heart murderers, were (to use an old phrase) “just crooked enough to have to screw their hats on,” mere businessmen with lucrative connections bringing in graft and bribes, people fearful of losing what they had connived diligently to get. Their motive, beyond continued greed and retention of their gains and power, was avoidance of prison. With the elimination of a single man, the lords and abettors and even the executioner could emerge innocent, with their ill-got gains intact. Aware that Grayston was a man of frontal assault and not one “to creep up from behind to blow a head off,” they knew he had evidence to make a few heads roll.

The lords selected the hour and the arena and put all the actors in place, got every action ready to proceed as scripted: a gladiator with a derby for a helmet, an overcoat for a buckler, his sword a clenched fist. The crowd would be there when the emperor gave the thumbs-down, and as the man from Sparta fell, the rough-edged throng could almost hear a
Hoc Habet!
“Now he’s had it!”

The immediate postmortem events and trial went as flawlessly as the perfectly placed bullets:

•   The mysterious “doctor” who appeared from nowhere to take William’s pulse and then vanish.

•   The sudden arrival of the killer’s lawyer through the milling crowd just as the police seized the murder weapon.

•   The unqualified
acting
coroner getting to the body before it could be taken to the undertaker.

•   His manipulation and destruction of evidence.

•   His attempt to get motive inserted into the verdict.

•   The killer not even for a moment being manacled or placed in a cell but instead taken by a fellow lodge-brother to their hall for supper and then to a comfortable hotel room.

•   The absurdly minimal bail.

•   Timing the trial for the heart of the growing season.

•   Stacking the jury with farmers sure to be restive and eager to get back to their animals and crops, men with no inclination to argue their way into a hung jury that could lead to a retrial and a change of venue, ill-educated men struggling to interpret the judge’s needlessly convoluted instructions precluding any verdict requiring serious punishment.

All of those measures were probably enough. But, given how much was riding on the outcome, the lords took no chances on anything they could control, including the prosecution:

•   Its plan to pursue a verdict impossible to win.

•   Insistence on trying to establish an adulterous relationship the victim himself had disproven.

•   Reliance on insubstantial and refutable testimony from fourteen-year-old girls.

•   Refusal to challenge repeated conjectures, speculations, and hearsay.

•   Failure to point out that many of the witnesses for the defense belonged to the same secret orders as the killer.

•   Failure to put forward that the victim was shot once while bending over to pick up his hat and a second time in the back.

•   Failure to demonstrate that the defendant, allegedly intending only self-defense, did not attempt to aim for a leg or an arm or to fire a warning shot or merely to brandish his weapon in the face of an unarmed man.

•   Failure to discover what caused Grayston to turn around on Main Street — such as a threat to his daughter — and, after eighteen months of clandestine opportunities, to choose instead the most crowded of public arenas to confront his nemesis, a man who could have prevented the violence simply by boarding a streetcar for a home in lovely Carthage where, after all, he would go immediately following the murder.

But, the most convicting evidence of a corrupted trial is the refusal of the prosecution to introduce Grayston’s sustained inquiry into municipal corruption involving the city council and the editor of the
Globe
(a man the
Carthage Press
called “Boss” Barbee when it printed a map showing his private, covered walkway into the House of Lords). William’s investigation established a clear motive for his murder, considerably more convincing than the simple contrivance of a jealous husband who on his own public testimony had exonerated his wife of adultery.

This last failure of the prosecution virtually indicts Grayston’s brother and partner: are we to believe William never discussed with him his extended probings so deeply connected to his life? Given William’s years of studying scientific method and inductive procedures, given his professional awareness of the crucial importance of prima facie evidence, can anyone believe he kept no records to prove the dangerous charges he was about to announce? Who, we must ask, above all else would know about those records and their whereabouts? Who would have last access to them? Where did they go?

There is but a single plausible answer.

If that is not enough, then what are we to conclude from George Grayston’s indifferent, listless, and occasionally slighting testimony supposedly in defense of his murdered brother? What about his comments immediately following the trial? “I desire to express my positive and complete satisfaction with the work of the attorneys for the state. . . . Their work was not only able but brilliant and showed the high order of legal forensic ability possessed by them.” An able and brilliant prosecution with high forensic ability that could not even produce a hundred-dollar fine against the killer of his brother?

Consider a final pair of questions: What’s the implication of the younger Grayston being appointed as city attorney only two years following the murder? And beginning soon after that, what are we to infer from his long professional association with the Joplin Waterworks?

Could I make my summary argument before a new jury, this would be it: William Grayston was descended on, laid into, sold out, and done in. He was set up to be shot down. He died in a political assassination executed so cleverly, the truth lay buried for more than a century, with only two innocent women and their daughters serving a lifelong sentence.

I, fair-minded reader, rest my case. You and all readers who come after you are now the jury.

The aftermath: Brother Grayston later served as counsel to corporations and wealthy Joplinites before succumbing at age fifty-nine — a life twenty years longer than William’s — to appendicitis. The week he died, the circuit court closed for a day to honor him.

George Bayne, the man who refused to move out of a crowded boardinghouse, soon began moving from town to town, getting involved in a water department lawsuit in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and somehow slipping out of that one too, before returning to near his boyhood home in Illinois, accompanied by his new wife, the purported Pearl Grayston look-alike, who there bore him a son. The killer lived into his seventies, dying just three months after my birth (Q: “Did you pass word there wasn’t room enough in 1939 for both of you?”). He died not on a public sidewalk but in his own bed, wife at his side, of a myocardial infarction. The undertaker’s record gives his occupation as “mausoleum owner.” George Grant Bayne, as if fulfilling his surname, at last found honest means to make money from what he was good at: as a minister of death. It is in that mausoleum where he lies today, shielded from the elements, his mummified cadaver safely locked in until the granite walls come down. To the very end, he proved adept at self-preservation.

Mrs. Anna Pearl Grayston worked as a bookkeeper in Joplin for several years before remarrying. Her daughter with William, the little girl whose education and future he was so worried about, a concern which fueled his investigation, became a schoolteacher.

William’s other daughter, his first child, Gertrude, like her mother, was divorced not long after losing her second child at birth. She took her firstborn to Kansas City, San Diego, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and back to Kansas City where he, like his grandfather, became a lawyer, a man once described by another lawyer as “too honest to be a good attorney.” Gertrude worked as a single mother for some years, usually as a manager of large, urban apartment-buildings, until she remarried well in her forties. But the lasting trauma of a father brazenly shot down on a street, a mother’s hysterical coffin-side confession, a stillborn child, and her own growing mental frailty — those demons she fought but couldn’t escape.

Thirty-six years after her father’s assassination, Gertrude began writing more frequently to her mother (who had learned to gain strength from adversity), opening every letter with “Dearest Mother” and often closing them with “Heaps and heaps of love.” But each month revealed increasing expressions of her failing will to live. In June 1937, in words strangely reflecting the last letter her father wrote, she said:

[My illness] has been a so-called nervous collapse. Now you may think this all very silly, but it’s been very serious. I am better today, but what I suffer I shall not tell you for you have your troubles too and [bear] them alone, but Mother, mine have been coming the past few years and possibly for years and years. Now I can look back and see how I should have handled some matters quite differently for my future’s welfare. At any rate, I am sorry I didn’t overcome worry in my younger days and take life and other’s affairs less seriously. I’m trying to now. So dearest, you do the same, for [doing otherwise] does not bring happiness or health.

Only two weeks later, on the third of July, almost exactly thirty-five years to the day of the acquittal of her father’s murderer, at about three in the morning, she persuaded her nurse, Edna, to leave the bedroom so that Gertrude might rest quietly in the heat. Her husband, to give his ill wife greater repose, was asleep upstairs in the tall apartment-building a few blocks from Forest Park in St. Louis, a well-situated neighborhood.

Sometime in the predawn, Gertrude rose from the hot bed and stepped to the bathroom, to open a small window. At four a.m. and again at five, Edna looked in to see Gertrude apparently lying quietly under a sheet. An hour later, checking once more, the nurse noticed her patient still in the same position. Tiptoeing to the bed, Edna found under the sheet not Gertrude but two pillows neatly arranged like a resting body. She knocked on the bathroom door. No answer. Knocking again, opening the door, she found no Gertrude. Edna started to leave when she felt a morning breeze from behind the shower curtain. Her heart in her throat, she drew back the curtain slowly, and,
Oh, thank heavens!
No one was in the tub.

She leaned over to close the small window opening to the alley-side of the building. But, seeing the screen unlatched, she stepped up on the edge of the tub to peer out a window so narrow a child would struggle to squeeze through it. Looking straight across the alley, she saw only the city. Then, pulling herself up so she could look directly down ten floors to the concrete roof of the parking garage, Edna saw it: the thin housedress in disarray over the bloodied, broken body.