That Night at the Palace (4 page)

Thomas Jefferson Hightower breathed a long sigh as he shut off the motor of his 1941 Ford Police prowler. The car was the only good thing about that job. Being the chief of a one-person police department had very few perks. The brand new car was, for all practical purposes, the only perk. Six months earlier the town council had given him a choice - they could get him a car, or they could hire a second officer. He opted for the car because it didn’t make sense to have a second officer to chase down a bank robber if they had to do it on foot. Not that chasing down a bank robber was an issue. Elza had very little real crime to worry about. Mostly he had some drunk doing something stupid, like Irwin Stoker walking into the Palace with a loaded shotgun. Still, it would be nice to have a second man to take a few of the midnight phone calls or block traffic for the occasional funeral.

For the most part, his ten years as the Elza Police Department hadn’t been all that bad, until today. For the second time in his career in law enforcement, Jefferson was in way over his head. He hadn’t had any real training. He’d been hired because his uncle Darrell was mayor and Uncle Darrell was only the mayor because Elza needed a city charter to get the state of Texas to give them money to put a traffic light where Highway 84 crossed Main Street. In the state of Texas, city charters required that there be an elected town council, an elected mayor, and a police chief.

It seemed like the best deal in the world at the time. It was a steady paycheck, and back in 1931 there weren’t that many steady jobs. It wasn’t hard work because there just wasn’t that much crime, and he got to carry a gun right out in the open. On the downside, until recently, he’d had to drive around in a worn-out
1928 Model AA Flatbed delivery truck that he bought second-hand with the words “Bradford’s Store” permanently faded onto the driver-side door.

It had been a long morning for Jefferson Hightower. First, at 5:36 a.m. on the one morning of the week that he got to sleep past five, his phone rang with Susie Tidwell on the line frantic because Clifford hadn’t come home last night. Susie had heard about the events at the Palace through the Cherokee County Party Line News Service, which is what Jefferson called the local rumor mill. The telephone was the most remarkable invention in history, but at the very same time it was the worst thing that had ever come along. Almost every phone in town was on a “party line,” which meant that a single phone line was shared by a half-dozen customers. This meant, naturally, that if your cousin in Memphis gave you a call, as many as six people were listening in, and within an hour, half of Elza would know that your cousin’s wisdom tooth fell out the same day his wife ran off with a dentist. On the good side, the night that someone tried to steal George Henry McMillian’s cash box, all it took was a single phone call and Jefferson was there in less than ten minutes. On the other hand, let some fool shoot off a scattergun at a coyote, and within thirty minutes Jefferson would be getting calls saying that no less than John Dillinger was robbing the bank. Never mind the fact that Dillinger had been dead since ’34. And then something happens like Irwin Stoker marching in the Palace, and it didn’t take an hour for most of Cherokee County to know that Jewel Stoker was pregnant with Cliff Tidwell’s baby and Irwin darn-near killed him over it. It took a good ten minutes to convince Susie that Irwin didn’t shoot Cliff because Irwin was sitting in jail sleeping off a fifth of back-forty hooch.

Then, just as Jefferson was about to sit down to his scrambled eggs and sausage, he got his second call of the morning. Apparently Cliff Tidwell’s noisy Ford coupe was crashed into the loading dock at Nickel Washington’s feed store out on Highway 84.

Ten minutes later Jefferson was looking at the second worst crime scene of his career. Nickel had said on the phone that there was blood and Jefferson had feared that Cliff might have knocked his head on the steering wheel. He rushed over because the poor kid most likely tried to make it home and was probably knocked-out, drunk, and bleeding someplace. Unfortunately, what had happened was a lot worse.

Jefferson hadn’t seen so much blood since Peterson Crawford got run over by that train. The passenger seat was almost black. He didn’t think it was really blood until he touched it. Sure enough, the seat was still wet and his fingers came up red as strawberry. The confusing part was that the stuff was only on the passenger seat and not on the driver side. Could there have been a passenger that got hurt? Only the car hadn’t crashed into the loading dock all that hard; the car just had a tiny dent. Even more confusing was that Cliff didn’t leave any footprints. The only tracks around the car were Jefferson’s and Nickel’s. The closest footprints that they could find were up by the highway, nearly a hundred feet away. Cliff must have gotten out of the car and let it roll down the hill into the dock.

Jefferson had responded to a lot of car crashes in his ten years as chief. He even had a couple with deaths, but he had never seen a crash that was anywhere near that bloody. And he certainly hadn’t seen a bloody crash without a driver around.

Though he was a one-man police force, Jefferson wasn’t completely alone. Back when Peterson Crawford got killed, it became clear that there were times when he needed some help, so the town council began to set a little money aside so Jefferson could pay temporary deputy police officers. Shorty Newman and Hobe Bethard had agreed to be on call for those times. It seemed like a good idea to get the car out of sight before the
Cherokee County Party Line News Service had half of Elza coming out to see the bloody seat. So, before he headed over to the Rose’s, he called Shorty and Hobe on Nickel’s phone and had them move the car over behind the jail and cover it with a tarp.

Chapter 3

ELZA, TEXAS

June 26, 1936

T
he summer of ’36 had settled into a regular routine for Jesse and Cliff. Like everywhere else in the country, Elza had been hit hard by what was being called the Great Depression. Jobs were hard to find for everyone and especially hard for a couple of twelve-year-old boys who were only looking for ways to make enough money for a few luxuries like soda pops and Moon Pies.

Cliff, though, was more enterprising than the normal twelve-year-old and managed to work out a deal with two of the merchants. As a result the boys started their day at eight in the morning at Washington’s Feed Store sweeping and stacking sacks of feed. Then they went to McMillan’s store where they swept floors and stocked shelves. Washington gave them five cents each but from McMillan they didn’t get any cash but they got two RC’s each a day and a Moon Pie each. George Henry McMillan, who had spent his entire life in the mercantile business, often remarked that he had never had to negotiate so long or so hard as he did with Cliff Tidwell, especially for a service that he really didn’t want or need.

Nevertheless, the two boys spent their mornings working at McMillan’s then would make their way down Main Street with ice-cold RC’s in hand and usually a Moon Pie or some peanuts. Generally by mid-morning they would meet up with Jewel, who spent the morning doing chores for her mother before joining the boys on the curb across from Anna-Ruth’s.

“What are we goin’ to do today?” Jewel asked as if they were loaded with options.

“We can go fishin’.” Cliff replied as if it was an entirely fresh idea.

Jewel rolled her eyes. “How long’s it been since the last time one of you caught a fish?”

Cliff and Jesse looked at each other and shrugged. “A couple of weeks.”

“You know why?”

The two boys looked at one another and again shrugged.

“You two are morons. It’s too hot. They don’t bite when it’s hot. Even I know that. If you went in the mornin’ you might get somethin’, but not now,” Jewel replied somewhat smugly.

“We gotta work in the mornin’s. Otherwise we couldn’t buy the RC’s.” Jesse responded.

Jewel shook her head, “I know you have to work, and I appreciate you bringing me a RC every day. I’m just sayin’ that it’s dumb to go try to catch a fish every afternoon when there isn’t a chance on God’s green earth that you’re gonna catch one.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s kind of like us sittin’ here every day when we know good and well that Romeo’s not going to go over there and talk to Gemma Crawford,” Cliff joked, causing Jewel to laugh so hard soda came out her nose.

“Sorry, Jesse,” she said once she regained control.

Jesse scowled at the two, “So what else is there to do besides fishin’?”

Cliff took a long sip of RC. “You guys want to go see a ghost town?”

Both Jewel and Jesse perked up.

“What ghost town?” Jesse asked, somewhat suspicious.

“There’s a ghost town north of the highway.”

Jesse and Jewel looked at one another and laughed.

“Honestly,” Cliff argued, “My pa told me about it. Back in the old days there was a mining town called New Birmingham.”

“What did they mine around here?” Jesse asked, sure Cliff was pulling one of his stunts.

“I think it was iron ore.”

“So what happened to it?” Jewel asked, becoming convinced.

“Pa said that the ore played out.”

Jewel’s smile grew wide with excitement. “How long will it take us to get there?”

“I don’t know, an hour or two. We follow the tracks to where they curve by the shantytown and then follow that old road ‘til it plays out.”

“My mom doesn’t want me to go out by the shantytown.” Jesse interjected, looking for a way out of following Cliff on another one of his adventures.

“We’ll cut through the woods?”

#

Southern Hotel,

New Birmingham, Texas

June 26, 1936

Darnell “Shakes” Blankenship was two weeks and a day past his thirty-seventh birthday when he moved into his “summer home” in the Southern Hotel in New Birmingham, Texas. The Southern was a fine hotel in its day, but unfortunately it had fallen into some disrepair as of late. The roof, for example, had fallen in twenty or thirty years prior, and the three floors of guest rooms had long since collapsed into the lobby, leaving an enormous hole. Shakes liked to think of it as his own private solarium. His room was what he assumed had previously been a kitchen behind the lobby next to what once was probably one of the finer restaurants in the little boomtown. He had to climb over the rubble to get there, but the section he used had a roof, and the walls seemed solid. All things considered, it was far better than sleeping on the damp ground in a shantytown.

Shakes was a hobo.

In the spring of 1921, Shakes, then known as Darnell, graduated at the top of his class from Rusk High School not fifteen miles away. That September he enrolled in Stephen F. Austin Teacher’s College in Nacogdoches where he studied mathematics. Most of the freshmen had their hands full just making grades, but for Darnell education was easy. When not in class he held down two jobs. Making money was important to Darnell. After two years he managed to save almost a thousand dollars and transferred to the University of Chicago where the tall, lean Texan earned a Bachelor’s degree in accounting.

After graduation, Darnell Blankenship secured a job with the firm of Lockyer and Hornsby, two of the founding traders on the Chicago Stock Exchange. Darnell was on his way. The young man had a quick mind and calculated numbers like a human abacus. As a result he rose fast in the firm. In just two years Darnell had already been written up in the Financial Times as one of Chicago’s bright young minds in the world of finance.

That same year he got word that both of his parents had been killed in an automobile accident on their way back to Rusk from a trip to visit relatives in Houston. Darnell wanted to go down there, of course, but he simply couldn’t spare the time. The firm was swamped with work. He knew that it would take at least a week to go down to Texas on a train, handle the arrangements, and travel back. A week at the Exchange was like a lifetime; things happened so fast in the market. More importantly, the competition for jobs like his was unrelenting. If he left, there was a good chance that there would be no job to come back to.

So after a long, heated, and extremely painful telephone conversation with his sister, most of which he could hardly understand from all her sobbing, Darnell managed to talk his way out of the trip. But it was costly. He promised to turn over to her all of his inheritance, which amounted to a house, his father’s hardware store, and what little money his parents had saved. Still, that wasn’t enough for his sister, who never wanted to see him again. He had to promise that if he didn’t have time to pay his respects to his parents that he would never come back to Rusk.

That part was easy. Darnell had no intention of ever going back to the little one-horse town.

That same year, he met her. Dianna Montgomery Bagwell. She was beautiful. What she saw in him - well, he knew exactly what she saw in him. Darnell was an “up and comer,” and Dianna liked the best of everything. They dined in the finest restaurants and danced and gambled in the best speak-easies. If there was something expensive to do in Chicago, Dianna wanted to be in on it. They socialized with Chicago’s finest and most notorious. On one occasion they dined just a table over from Al Capone himself at Coq d’Or in the Drake Hotel.

Their wedding was a simple affair. Only a few close friends and Dianna’s family were invited. Though having a taste for the finer things, Dianna, it turned out, came from quite humble origins.

The couple took the train up the lake and honeymooned up on Mackinac Island. It was July fourth, and the Exchange was closed for part of the week, so Darnell only missed two days of real work. A man only gets married once, so he reasoned that he could miss a couple of days.

Those first few months were the best of his life. They were newlyweds, and Darnell had a very healthy income. Dianna found them an apartment right on Michigan Avenue. It was expensive, but she argued it would do nothing but go up in value, and of course, a man of his stature couldn’t live just anywhere. She would have been right if nothing ever changed, but as Darnell “Shakes” Blankenship eventually came to know, in time, everything will change.

The first problem came when he got the bills for one of Dianna’s shopping trips. She had spent a thousand dollars on clothes. One pair of shoes cost two hundred American dollars! That was the beginning of a series of fights that culminated when Darnell came home from a trip to see the New York Exchange with the two partners. It had been rumored that the firm might open a New York branch, something it had shied away from over the years. But the partners were seriously considering it now that they had someone dependable and smart to run it. Darnell was full of excitement when he returned home, knowing that Dianna would love New York, and hoping the move would help them iron out the problems in their marriage.

When he walked into the apartment the place was crowded with people, none of whom he had ever met. Dianna had been to the theater earlier in the evening and was hosting a party. That angered him enough, but upon searching the apartment, he couldn’t even find her. Finally, she turned up in the bedroom, drunk, half-dressed, and with another man.

That night Darnell packed his belongings and moved into the Drake. The first thing the next morning he went to the bank to make sure Dianna didn’t get a chance to clean him out. He was too late. The way she spent money, she had probably emptied it out before he went to New York. He didn’t worry, though, because he only had a few thousand in there anyway. Darnell was a smart investor. He had money spread out all over the market. In fact, he had it so well spread out that her divorce attorneys would be hard-pressed to find out how much he had.

The divorce was as smooth as glass. Sure enough, her attorneys had no clue how much he was worth, and the settlement was based on less than half of what was really invested. She would keep the apartment, which he would pay for, and she would receive a monthly stipend for the next twenty years or until she remarried. Of course, Darnell made a grand performance, pretending that the stipend was far more than he could afford. But then, as soon as he walked out of the judge’s chamber, he made arrangements for the stipend to be paid from the interest generated from just one stock. He actually laughed at the thought of how well he pulled that off.

All things considered, getting rid of Dianna would cost a lot less than staying married to her. The settlement and all financial arrangements required to finalize it were signed and settled on October 23, 1929, twenty-four hours before what became known as “Black Thursday,” the day that millions of investors began to dump stocks.

The effects of the crash were devastating. Darnell had less than a hundred dollars in cash. His stocks had added up to something in excess of eighty thousand dollars. Now he had nothing but useless paper. At least that’s how some people saw it. But Darnell knew the market as well as anyone. As he saw it, the market had bottomed out. This, he argued to his clients, was the time to buy, even if you had to borrow to do so. And that is exactly what he did. Then, five days later, came the big crash. October 29, 1929. That date would go down in history as the infamous Black Tuesday.

Not only did the stocks drop even further, he had bought on margin, which meant that he had borrowed to get them. He wasn’t just broke - he was fifty thousand dollars in debt. Even if he could find someone to buy the stocks, he’d be lucky to come out with a thousand dollars for everything. Even that was a pipedream because anyone who had the money sure wasn’t going to spend it on stocks.

The only thing he could do was sit on it. Of course, he moved out of the Drake right away. Then he arranged a meeting with Dianna and her attorneys. They would simply have to understand that there was no money. This, he was sure, was a temporary setback and in a few months the market would bounce back. In the meantime, she would have to sell the apartment and lower the stipend.

Dianna and her attorneys didn’t understand. Dianna wasn’t about to let go of her apartment, and there was no altering the stipend. Well, that wasn’t completely true; it could be lowered, but it would be costly. It took nearly a month of negotiating during which Darnell was living in a south-side hotel where he shared a bath with five other people. He had long since fired his lawyers because there was no money to pay them. Actually, they had dropped him because they had seen his finances and knew full well what was about to happen. The stipend was cut, but to do so, he had to sign every stock he owned over to Dianna, and not just the stuff he had previously reported. They took everything, except the debt. Even when he turned everything over they weren’t convinced, so it was finally agreed that until the value of all of the stocks returned to what they were on the day the divorce settlement was agreed upon, one week prior to Black Tuesday, he would pay her fifty-five percent of his salary from Lockyer and Hornsby. They had him, and they all knew it. He had no option. It was difficult enough signing the new settlement, but to add salt to the wound, Dianna sat across the table with a smug expression while holding hands with her new boyfriend.

With payment on Dianna’s apartment and the “stipend,” Darnell would have almost nothing to live on, and he still owed the fifty grand. Yet he reasoned that he could hold off his creditors and manage living in the south-side hotel until the market began to climb back. He would eventually start collecting commissions again, and with some luck get his life back. At least that was his hope.

On New Year’s eve the partners called them all into a meeting where they announced that they were closing the firm, effective January first. They argued that there was no money to keep it up. There was some truth to that. Darnell hadn’t sold a single stock since October, but everyone was sure that it was just a matter of months or even weeks before things bounced back. Those two old crooks were simply covering their hindquarters. Unlike Darnell and most of their clients, Lockyer and Hornsby had invested heavily in real estate. It wasn’t the best of investments at the time, but they hadn’t lost everything from the Crash, and unlike almost everyone else in the country, they continued to collect revenue. Darnell, however, was out on the street.