Keeping Secrets (55 page)

We walked to the car and sat inside with the top pulled over. The wind was picking up and it was getting colder all the time. Keith sat back. “Here, you can lean against me,” he said, and held out his arm. I never thought we'd fall asleep, let alone sleep for such a long time, but when we awoke the sky was purplish pink with puffs of gray splashed against it.

Arms and legs aching and weary to the bone, nonetheless we both got back to work under the house, by the light of Edwin's lantern. Finally I struck something hard, like metal, and called excitedly to Keith. I'd hit one of the hinges of a suitcase. We dug it out and busted the rusty latches. It was full of limp, musty clothes. “Well, this is great, but it won't get the job done,” I told Keith. So back we went.

It must have been close to nine o'clock when finally Keith reached something else.

I rushed over behind him to watch. His face, lit by the lantern, grew more and more intense as he threw away the shovel and started moving clay-like soil with his hands. Then slowly and carefully—I would have never considered the danger of damaging or even destroying our find, as he did—he moved the dirt around with his fingers until at last he disclosed a skull, and leaned back momentarily, staring at it. Finally, with an effort at joviality, he said, “Ken would have a ball with that set of teeth.”

I was beside him then, ferreting out the one that must lie next to it, but I was on the left side and he discovered it, minutes later, on the right. “This is it, Camille,” he said excitedly. I peered over his shoulder as he smoothed away the dirt, and saw perspiration roll down the side of his face and drop off. The whole back of his brand-new white dress shirt was sopping wet and dirty. I reached out to touch him, but drew back my hand. Then I took a hanky from my pocket and wiped his face.

“Hold up the lantern,” he said, and as I did he slowly and carefully dug away the rest of the soil until the full skeletons were disclosed. By then my heart was thumping madly. Keith sat back for a moment to catch his breath, and I said, “If not for you, this moment might never have come.… I could be down at the bottom of the San Antonio River right now.…”

“Let's get out of here,” he said, and we crawled out and stood up. His whole suit was rumpled, and there was a big tear in one of the trouser legs. For the first time in my life I could think of no adequate way of expressing what I felt. I flung my arms around his neck.

He kissed me then, not a peck on the cheek like one buddy gives another, but long and hard, like a man kisses a woman he cares about.

“I guess we missed your birthday party,” I said breathlessly.

31

Adolph Tetzel was picked up by United States agents on March 2, as he boarded a train for Laredo. A lengthy wire he had sent to Mexico City, announcing his scheduled arrival and his plan to replace Cabot in the Barrista revolution, along with a special section regarding his provision of munitions, was used as evidence to hold him until the balance of proof against him was uncovered in the apartment of Giddeon Sparks. After hearing of this, I wondered whether he would really have harmed me. Then I shook my head and wondered if he'd remembered to take his homburg.

In her statement to authorities, Giddy claimed to have discovered Tetzel in his espionage work “far earlier than anyone else,” through a slip-up in one of his transactions at the bank. She then presented herself as willing to help him in exchange for the official position she so longed for—auditor of the bank. She became his distribution system for all the German funds we could never tie down by spreading the money over some twenty-five to thirty different fake business checking accounts, creating different signatures for each with her versatile talent for penmanship. She laundered the money through the books with ease, breaking down the substantial amounts into sums that escaped my early probes through the ledgers and files.

Tetzel assured her the position at the end of the war (apparently failing to mention that he intended ultimately to sell the bank and leave the country). At the close of her statement she remarked, “Just like a man, isn't it? I tried to warn him about Camille, but he wouldn't listen. If I'd worn trousers, it would have been different.”

Aegina Barrista and her boy friend Artemio were discovered as they loaded currency into electric-light-bulb boxes in the basement of an old warehouse less than two blocks from the arsenal. Her father, Fernando Barrista, was picked up by Mexican authorities but quickly released on the guarantee that he would take exile in one of the Latin American countries where he was so renowned, and take his daughter with him. All of his properties as well as the Cabot Consolidated Copper properties were confiscated by the Mexican Government for redistribution among the poor, with mineral rights reserved for the government. There was speculation by the press that if Carranza had not been so anxious at the time to make a name for himself as a peacemaker eager to spare any further bloodshed, and also reassure the United States that he had no knowledge of Zimmermann's plan, and wanted only friendly terms with his neighbor to the north, he might have dealt more harshly with Barrista. Of the Barrista family, Carlos alone was allowed to retain the properties which he owned for lack of evidence that he planned to participate in the revolution against Carranza.

When finally the safe-deposit box belonging to Emory Cabot was opened by authorities, a small box containing a man's gold watch and chain, a woman's pendant, and other jewelry was discovered inside. There was also some correspondence between Cabot and a private agency that had been engaged to locate his mother, Clove Cabot, beginning in early 1903. The final letter from the agency, dated in 1904, pinpointed her in Mill Springs, Texas, where she had married a man named Sam Arnesty. The letter further stated this was her fifth marriage, and there were no offspring discovered from this or any of her marriages following the first one, to Emory Cabot's father.

So Nathan, in the act of murdering Sam Arnesty and his wife, Clove, had unwittingly taken the life of Cabot's mother. And judging from my conversation with Nathan on the night he died, he never learned it was more than coincidence that brought Cabot to Mill Springs around the same time that he returned there, in 1904.

There was no note of confession by Nathan Hope among the papers in the safe-deposit box, which leads to speculation as to what happened to the note which he claimed held him in slavery to Cabot. Knowing of all the other circumstances, it seems likely the note did at one time exist. The only question is, for how long? Did Cabot keep it only long enough for Nathan to be assured it was in his possession, or did he keep it until the day he turned over his key to Adolph Tetzel, or destroy it at some point in between? It was not found among any of his things, nor among Nathan's possessions. The truth went down with Cabot to his grave among the cold depths, but I chose to believe he destroyed the note before he gave the key of the box to Tetzel, and perhaps I've always been just a bit soft for Emory Cabot, but I believe, too, that he intended to tell Nathan he'd destroyed it before he left for Mexico on March 1.

Would Nathan have believed him? Perhaps Cabot would have considered it a nice and final twist of irony that Nathan should never be sure, a sort of lasting punishment for his murder of Cabot's mother. This brings on a further question that will never be answered: when Cabot located his mother, what did he plan to do? Would he have murdered her himself? Surely not. One doesn't murder his own mother regardless of how badly she abused him. Yet, knowing Emory Cabot you simply could never be sure.…

Many times I have wondered about the night Nathan killed Cabot. I believe he must have taken the gun up the stairs, believing Cabot to be with a whore, and opened fire on both of them without even switching on the lights. He was deathly afraid of Cabot, and would not have dared given him a chance to react in time to win that final game. The ledgers that I had been so certain were of great importance showed nothing that Cabot might not have written down in his own behalf.

After I had left he must have wakened, certainly before daylight, and gone back to check again on the work he had done up there. Was it his discovery of Electra with Cabot that drove him to prepare his own destruction, or was she there at all? The muddy footprints on the stairs would indicate Nathan took one body down, then returned for the other. Or did he return for something else?

Electra's reservation at the Nueces Hotel in Corpus Christi was recorded, but she had not shown up to honor it. Days later, I was nearby when three charges of dynamite shocked the peaceful waters of the San Antonio River, down by the mill, as authorities attempted to draw her remains to the surface. With each rumble, my body stiffened a little tighter. Keith closed a hand around mine to steady me. The explosions availed nothing. Someone standing near us recalled the whirlpool close to the arsenal side.

When permission was obtained to open up the postal box still held in the name of Electra Cabot, we found three letters addressed to her and postmarked New Orleans, mailed between March and April of 1917. There was enough information in these letters to prove she was being threatened. We expected this, although we were puzzled by the fact that the letters reflected she owed around ten thousand dollars, not forty, the amount she tried to borrow.

What really surprised us, however, was that the sender proved to be the older brother of Emory. Upon tracing him to his boarding-room address in New Orleans, we were told by the landlady he had been thrown in jail a week or so before. She didn't know why. “Since last fall, he has roomed there more than he has here,” she said.

I was present during the questioning which followed, and it struck me his features resembled Nathan's description of Clove Cabot: “fat, with a little pig face,” he had said.

Mark Cabot told us that twenty years before, Electra had taken up with him after Emory went away. “I always thought she was a homely little twerp, and I used to pick on Emory about walking home with her from school.” He paused here and added, “I used to get the biggest kick out of makin' Emory mad—it was so easy to get him stirred up. Lordee, how he hated me … 'specially after Daddy died and I made him bring all his money to me.…

“But anyways, after he left town, in the next year or so, Leslie turned plum pretty and I took to her myself. She was a sly one all right. I tried to get her to run away with me, but she said I'd have to prove I could buy her all the things she wanted first.

“So I went out on the road, three or four towns away, and robbed a store. I took the money back and showed it to her one night. She was a'settin' on that horse behind me quick as lightning.”

From there, he explained, the two of them pulled a few robberies together, and finally held up a train with a shipment of cash on its way to an Army post out in West Texas. The take was forty thousand dollars. The law was on their trail quickly, but they managed to hide the money before they were apprehended, and made a pact that whoever got back to it first would take only half. Then they separated.

“Leslie got off as an ‘accomplice,' while I got a twenty-year stretch,” Mark said with a sneer. “She was out in two years, and I got off on good behavior in about fifteen. When I got back to the hiding place, sure 'nough the money was all gone.

“Took me a while to find her, but I had some friends along the way that helped me out. From what I heard, she must have waited quite a spell before she went back for the forty grand, and while she was goin' through it, she took care to spread it all over instead of spending it in one place. I don't know whether she become a whore before she went after the money or later, but she didn't start calling herself Electra until after.

“I guess you know the rest,” he said, and as we parted he added, “So you can't find her? She'll turn up again one day, you can bet on it.” Then he slapped his knee and started to laugh, and it seemed to me the laugh grew louder and louder as it resounded down the hall which led away from his cell, toward the exit and the afternoon sunshine.

In the huge inventory of clothing owned by the Cabots, it wasn't possible to account for every single item, and isolate the frock she may have been wearing had she escaped and fled. Lyla Stuttgart was asked by authorities to help, but declined and was excused on the grounds of her still delicate condition. Again impressed into a service I wanted no part of, I walked back into the house at Beauregard and Washington.

It was a cool, rainy morning yet the bedroom was stuffy. I opened a window to let the breeze off the river rush in and circulate through the room, then stood there for a few seconds, thinking how long ago it seemed since I came to San Antonio, hoping for a room of my own with a river view. Down below, the new leaves on the trees along the water path swayed to and fro, and birds made loops among them, calling.…

The big bed of the Cabots' had been stripped of its fine linen. Just as I gazed upon the stark sight of it, I thought I heard a noise from somewhere, and listened … nothing. I drew in a breath and started to work. I went carefully through Electra's things, trying to remember each of the stunning ensembles which I had so admired. Every one I could remember having seen was there, in her room. Stacked inside the wardrobe were boxes of garments she'd recently bought, including those she purchased from me at Joske's. In a drawer of the bureau, the black-aigrette headband was carefully folded and boxed. I could not look at it again without recalling the details of the party to which she wore it, the tango music that thrilled her steps to those of Cabot; and for a moment I thought it was just as well they died together, that last study in motion a fitting nocturne for two people whose lives were a swirl of shadows.…

I was more than ready to leave after replacing the headband and closing the drawer. I circled the room with my eyes, only then noticing a small chest just outside the bathroom. Probably nothing to worry about … still, I'd been told to be thorough.