The Year of Fear (16 page)

“Hell, no! We know all about your friend, we saw him on the train last night. You come alone and unarmed.”

“I’ll be there at 6:20.”

When Kirkpatrick hung up, Catlett insisted he go with him, but Kirkpatrick wouldn’t have it.

“It might be a fatal error.”

Similarly, he waved Catlett off when he offered to go in his place. He stuck a .380 Colt automatic in his belt, slipped on his suit coat, grabbed the Gladstone bag with the money and was off.

When he stepped from the cab onto Linwood Boulevard, he tried to look casual and nonchalant. Lighting a cigarette, he tipped his head back to exhale and scan the street. Two large cars were parked across the street with three men in each. From the corner of his eye he saw another with the window down and what looked like a shotgun barrel resting on the doorframe.

Walking toward him was a tall, stylishly dressed man in a fashionable summer suit wearing a turned-down Panama hat. He wore two-tone shoes and a two-toned shirt with a perfectly knotted tie. He approached Kirkpatrick on his right.

“I’ll take that grip,” he said looking past Kirkpatrick to see if the fool had brought his buddy along or some federal Cub Scout for protection.

Kirkpatrick hesitated.

“Hurry up!”

“How do I know you are the right party?” he asked, trying to stall.

“Hell, you know damned well I am.”

“Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money. We are carrying out our part of the agreement to the letter. What assurance have we that you’ll do what you promise?”

“Don’t argue with me.”

“Tell me when we can expect Urschel home. I am going back to the hotel to telephone his wife. What shall I tell her? Tell me definitely what I can tell Mrs. Urschel.”

“Urschel will be home in twelve hours. Now you turn and walk to the LaSalle Hotel and don’t look back.”

Kirkpatrick, his mind racing with second thoughts, doubts and worries, did just that. He had just handed over the largest ransom in American history and now he was walking away without Charley or his money. He lacked the nerve to turn and see what scene was unfolding behind him. He’d rather just get shot in the back and not see it coming. When a car door slammed and the cover cars sped away, throwing dust and gravel as they made furious U-turns, he almost collapsed with relief. He had to steady his shaking hand to light a cigarette. At the LaSalle, he grabbed a cab to the Muehlebach. After relating the events to Catlett, he called Berenice.

“I closed the deal for that farm,” he said. “I will require about twelve hours for the lawyers to examine the abstracts, then the title will pass.”

“Thanks,” she said, and hung up.

Catlett and Kirkpatrick checked out and headed back to Union Station. Catlett was bound for Tulsa, and Kirk would get back on the Katy Limited to Oklahoma City for what he prayed would be a jubilant homecoming.

But when he arrived on Monday morning and made his way to Nineteenth Street, his heart sank. The press horde had returned and renewed their vigilant stakeout. Clearly, they had not been reporting about Charley’s safe return.

Berenice met him at the door.

“Charley’s not here,” is all she said. The mood inside the home had turned positively funereal.

Kirkpatrick tried to put a good spin on it. “The kidnappers probably want to wait until after dark, and besides, they may have held Charley a long way away. He’ll probably show up after dark.”

Gus Jones began grilling Kirkpatrick for details, descriptions, observations—anything he could put into his notes to make the prosecution stick.

After an hour or so, he’d gotten all he could. Kirkpatrick asked him, “What do you think? Will they release him?”

Jones shook his head and lamented that it wasn’t very likely, especially if the kidnappers thought Charley could identify the hideout. If so, he said, “he doesn’t stand a chance. They told you he’d be home within twelve hours. He isn’t. Their letter said they were going to hold him until all the money had been examined and exchanged. That could take weeks. The longer they hold him, the more dangerous it becomes for him. Dozens of things could happen that might make it seem necessary to kill him and get him off their hands.”

“Then you don’t think he’ll make it back?”

“No, I won’t say that. But I will say that if he’s not back by sunup tomorrow, he won’t be back.”

Kirkpatrick’s heart sank. He headed back to the living room and did his best to keep a game face on as the hours dragged by. It had been raining for most of the day and, as the afternoon slipped into the evening, it continued, adding a pall to the house. The phone had stopped ringing. The occupants could think of nothing else to say, and the gloomy silence began to deafen.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, Kirkpatrick decided to do a little extermination work. There had been a mouse running around on Charley’s expensive carpets, and he would have hated that. He decided he’d make a great show of bringing the rodent to justice and grabbed a mousetrap from the kitchen, baited it and brought it to the sunroom to slip under the divan. As he did, it snapped, scaring the bejesus out of the already jangled Kirkpatrick, who screamed an obscenity as he jerked back, flinging the trap skyward. As it flew through the air, the group shrieked and broke into a round of uncontrolled, spontaneous laughter—including Berenice, who hadn’t smiled in more than a week. She made a few wicked remarks at Kirkpatrick’s expense and decided it was the appropriate moment to head off to bed.

*   *   *

Back in Paradise, Kathryn was also fretting about the return of her husband. He should have collected the ransom and been home by now. She’d stayed behind to make sure Urschel stayed in place and nobody stumbled across him. She didn’t trust Mother and Boss with that job, and certainly that nitwit Potatoes could not be left to do any thinking on his own.

She ground out yet another cigarette in the ashtray that contained dozens and looked up angrily at Boss.

“Where the hell are they?” she demanded. “I should have gone up there with them, and I would have, too, if I could have trusted you to take care of things on this end.”

“Take it easy, Kat. They’ll be here.”

Bates and Kelly had been delayed by a persistent rainfall nearly all the way from Kansas City back to Texas. After years with virtually no rain at all, the kidnappers were being confounded by inextricable downpours at the most inopportune moments. With rain slowing their escape, they rerouted further and further off course and onto muddy back roads to avoid detection.

When they finally rolled in at about 2:00 p.m. on Monday, Kelly parked the car, Bates grabbed the Gladstone bag and they sprinted through the rain to the front porch, where Kathryn greeted them.

“Did you get the money?”

“Every nickel, baby. Every nickel,” he said, grabbing her around the waist and scooping her up. “We pulled it off, Kit! Two hundred thousand bucks, baby.”

“It was the smoothest deal we’ve ever made,” he said. “Kirkpatrick was scared half out of his skin. He only hesitated a second before handing over the money.”

In the house, they dumped the loot on the chenille bedspread in Kathryn’s room.

Two hundred neatly bound packets of $20 bills, each about four inches thick. They’d done it. Pulled off the most successful kidnapping in modern history. There it was, just lying on the bedspread, a fortune in used $20 bills. A small fortune, sure. But enough money to live like kings down in Juarez. No more small-time bank jobs, no more petty bribes to greedy cops. Kathryn swooned.

“Oh, George!” she sighed. “Think of the fun we’re going to have with this!”

She picked up one of the $20 bills and kissed it. “This one is for Kit’s new shoes. Mama needs a new pair of shoes, baby.” Mimicking her, Bates picked up a twenty and kissed it. “I know a mama who needs a few things too.”

Bates began scooping the packs up and started restacking them.

“I don’t like them just laying out like this.” He wanted to divvy things up and get back on the road, away from the hot farm.

“Suits me, Al,” said Kelly. “I have a nut to come off the top. It’ll cover that Buick we had to get rid of and the money I laid out for the Kansas City boys to cover us during the ransom delivery. Comes to $11,500.”

“Overhead, overhead,” Bates replied. “Still leaves $188,500 to cut two ways, right?”

“I’ll take care of Boss from my end and Boss can take care of Armon,” said Kelly.

“Then I know what Armon will get,” quipped Kathryn. “The experience!”

The two men took $94,250 each and flipped a coin to see who got to keep the handsome leather Gladstone bag.

Kathryn brought the levity back down to earth.

“Who is going to take care of Urschel?”

Kelly was incredulous. “What do you mean take care of him?”

“This guy is like a time bomb,” she argued. “If he walks out of here he’ll squawk his head off!”

“Yeah, I agree,” said Bates. “Let’s get it over with and hit the road.”

“You must be out of your minds. Look, we just went into business. Let’s not louse ourselves up with a killing we don’t even need.” Kelly was adamant. “What can he possibly say? He hasn’t seen any more of our faces than those idiots back in Oklahoma City, and look at the miserable descriptions they gave. He could never lead anybody back here. He doesn’t even know what state he is in.

“But buy yourself a murder rap against a guy with this sort of loot, and his family can hire the whole U.S. Marine Corps to come looking for us. The law will keep coming and coming and coming. They’ll never stop.”

“If you haven’t got the guts, I’ll do it myself,” said Bates.

“If this were the only job we had set up, I’d say fine,” said Kelly. “But don’t let’s forget those four sitting ducks we’ve got lined up on the pond in Oklahoma City. What about them? Now, what happens if we kill Urschel after his family has laid out the loot? How much do you think those families are going to pay off when they know what happened to Urschel? In order to operate, we’re going to have to let Urschel go,” he declared. “What the hell? It’s just good business.”

“When the hell did you get so noble?” wondered Kathryn.

Bates acquiesced. No reason to take any unnecessary chances. He wanted his cut and he wanted to get the hell out.

They drove out to Armon’s shack and told Urschel it was time to get cleaned up. They were taking him home. They walked him to a bench in the corner and sat him down and told him they wanted him to shave, but to do so without looking around. If they thought he was trying to identify them, or the location, they’d have to kill him. They removed the tape and gauze from his face and red light streamed in through his still-closed eyelids, which he was having trouble opening.

While he struggled, he began depositing fingerprints on everything within reach: the handle of the straightedge razor they wanted him to use, the water basin, the cracked hand mirror.

He squinted through his tearing, cloudy eyes at the dirty mirror and tried to run the blade over his beard. He hadn’t shaved in nine days and he couldn’t see what he was doing. He’d end up with a face full of nicks and cuts. He asked if he could keep his whiskers. But they wouldn’t have it. They wanted him looking as inconspicuous as possible. After retaping his eyes closed, they gave him a clean, short-sleeved sport shirt and a straw hat that didn’t fit too well.

Kelly poked him in the stomach with the barrel of a gun and twisted it maliciously. “Feel that?” he said. “That’s a sawed-off shotgun. Have you ever seen what one of these can do to a man’s face? If you give one bit of information to the cops, neither you, nor your wife, nor any of your kids will ever know when there may not be one of these waiting for you around the next corner or through the next door. And don’t imagine the cops can protect you twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your lives. We’ll get to you eventually. Each one of you.”

They walked Urschel to the car (he silently counted the steps along the way) and loaded him in. Boss Shannon came by, shook his hand and said he hoped he wouldn’t have any more trouble.

They put sunglasses over his taped eyes to conceal them and then drove circuitously for about eight hours. Toward the end of the journey, they crossed an old bridge, and the tires thumped along with a distinctive sound. Charley smiled inwardly with amused satisfaction. He knew exactly where they were. They were crossing the Canadian River on the old Purcell-Lexington bridge not far from one of his rural farms, which he used frequently for hunting trips with his buddies.

When they stopped the car a short time later, he knew he could not be far from Norman, a short twenty miles from Oklahoma City. Kelly then explained the situation to him. He asked Charley if he thought he could get home on his own without revealing his identity to anyone along the way. If so, they would turn him loose untethered. If not, they would chain him to a tree and phone in his location to the cops in the morning.

Urschel assured them he could find his way home without assistance.

Kelly gave him back his watch, wallet and ten dollars for cab fare. Then he helped him out of the car, explaining one last time that if he revealed anything about where he’d been held, or what had happened there, or any details of his captivity whatsoever, he and his entire family would be killed.

That, said Kelly, was a promise. “Wait until we leave to take off that blindfold, and don’t call anyone but the taxicab.”

Once they were gone, Urschel gingerly peeled the adhesive tape off the raw, blistered skin around his eyelids and stood, covering them with his hands as he tried to adjust to the light streaming in.

It was raining and he was exhausted from the ordeal and the eight-hour drive that had ended it, but he began marching off toward Norman in the direction his internal compass dictated on stiff legs and an empty stomach.

When he reached the fringes of the university town, he went into a nearly deserted roadside barbecue, ordered a cup of coffee and asked the guy running the shack to call him a cab. On the way to Oklahoma City, he made small talk with the driver and asked to be dropped off short of his neighborhood. He didn’t want the cabbie to realize who his passenger was and go selling his story to the paper and spooking the kidnappers down South.