Beyond This Point Are Monsters (12 page)

“A large number of prints were lifted off the doors, walls, tables, benches, and so on. That was the trouble. Everybody and his little brother had been in and out of that mess hall.” Valenzuela paused, looking guilty, as though he'd committed a punishable offense by using language not condoned by the official rule book. “There were too many fingerprints in and around the building to allow for proper classification and comparison.”

“Now, Mr. Valenzuela, on November eight, nearly four weeks after Robert Osborne's disappearance, a man named John W. Pomeroy was arrested in an Imperial Beach bar. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was the charge?”

“Drunk and disorderly.”

“Was anything pertinent to this case found among Mr. Pomeroy's effects when he was booked?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was it?”

“A credit card issued by the Pacific United Bank to Robert Osborne.”

“How did it come into Mr. Pomeroy's possession?”

“He said he found it, and his story checked out. At the beginning of that week the valley had its first rain of the season. The river flooded—or, more accurately, it ap­peared—and a lot of debris washed down that had been accumulating for months. Pomeroy was a lifelong vagrant; searching through piles of debris was second nature to him. He picked up the credit card about a quarter of a mile downstream from the Osborne ranch.”

“Is Mr. Pomeroy available for questioning in this pro­ceeding?”

“No, sir. He died in the County Hospital of pneumonia the following spring.”

“Except for the credit card found in his possession, was there anything linking him to Robert Osborne's disappear­ance on October thirteen?”

“No, sir. Pomeroy was in jail in Oakland on October thirteen.”

“We offer in evidence exhibit number five, the credit card issued to Robert Osborne by the Pacific Union Bank . . . There is one more point I'd like to bring up at this time, Mr. Valenzuela. You stated a while ago that the blood on the butterfly knife was AB negative, an uncommon type found in approximately five percent of the population. Was Robert Osborne one of this five percent?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can you offer proof of that?”

“In the summer of 1964 Mr. Osborne underwent an appendectomy. Preoperative blood tests were routinely conducted and the hospital records indicate that Robert Osborne's was AB negative.”

Judge Gallagher had slumped further and further into his chair, his arms crossed over his chest giving his black robe the appearance of a strait jacket. For the most part he kept his eyes closed. The lighting in the courtroom had been cunningly engineered by experts to be too bright to look at and too dim to read by.

He said, without opening his eyes, “There is no precise law on this point, Mr. Ford, but in trying to establish the death of an absent person, it has become general practice to include an averment of diligent search.”

“I was coming to that, your Honor,” Ford said.

“Very well. Proceed.”

“Mr. Valenzuela, did you conduct a diligent search for Robert Osborne?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Indicate the time covered.”

“From eleven
p.m.
on October thirteen, 1967, to the morning of April twenty, 1968, when I submitted my resignation from the department.”

“And the area covered?”

“By me personally, or by everyone connected with the case?”

“The whole area covered during the investigation.”

“The full details are in my report. But I can summarize by saying that the search for Mr. Osborne and the search for the missing workers ultimately became the same thing. It spread out from the Osborne ranch to all the large agricultural centers of California where migrant labor is used—the Sacramento and San Joaquin and Imperial val­leys, certain sections of various counties like San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura. Out-of-state areas in­cluded places that had served as reception centers during the bracero program, Nogales, Arizona, and El Paso, Hidalgo and Eagle Pass, Texas.”

“Was there a particular part of the investigation for which you were personally responsible?”

“I checked out the names and addresses given to Mr. Estivar by the men who'd arrived at the Osborne ranch during the last week of September.”

“Do you have a list of those names and addresses with you this afternoon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you read them aloud to the court, please?”

“Valerio Pinedo, Guaymas. Oswaldo Rojas, Saltillo. Salvador Mayo, Camargo. Victor Ontiveras, Chihuahua. Silvio Placencia, Hermosillo. Hilario Robles, Tepic. Jesus Rivera, Ciudad Juárez. Ysidro Nolina, Fresnillo. Emilio Olivas, Guadalajara. Raul Guttierez, Navojoa.”

There was a brief delay while the court reporter checked with Valenzuela on the spelling of certain names. Then Ford continued: “Did anything about this list strike you as peculiar right from the beginning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tell the court what it was.”

“Well, Mexicans are very much family-oriented. It struck me as odd that no two of the men had the same name or even the same hometown. They were traveling as a unit in a single truck, yet they came from places as far apart as Ciudad Juárez and Guadalajara, nearly eighteen hundred miles. I wondered how such a mixed group had gotten together in the first place and how the truck they were driving managed to cover the distances involved. From Ciudad Juárez to the Osborne ranch, for instance, is another seven hundred fifty miles. The truck was described to me by vari­ous people as an ancient G.M., and on the stand this morn­ing Mr. Estivar said it was burning so much oil it looked like a smokestack.”

“Did you, on seeing the list, immediately sense that something was wrong?”

“Yes, sir. Normally a group of ten men like that would come from just two or three families, all living in the same area and probably not far from the border.”

“So when you started into Mexico to try and find the missing men, you already suspected that the names and addresses they'd given Mr. Estivar were fictitious and their papers forged?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you, in spite of this, conduct a diligent search of all the areas?”

“I did.”

“And you found no trace of Robert Osborne or of the men who'd been employed at the Osborne ranch?”

“None.”

“During this time other police departments in the Southwest joined the search and bulletins were circulated throughout the country.”

“Yes, sir.”

“At the end of November, Robert Osborne's mother offered a ten thousand dollar reward for information about her son, dead or alive.”

“You know more about that than I do, Mr. Ford.”

Ford made a quarter-turn to face the bench. “Your Honor, this reward was handled through my office at Mrs. Osborne's request. Notices of it were posted in public buildings, and ads were placed, in two languages, in news­papers both in this country and Mexico. There was also considerable news coverage on radio and TV, mainly in the Tijuana-San Diego area. I rented a P.O. box to receive mail and a special phone was installed in my office for calls. The reward generated plenty of interest—ten thousand dollars usually does. We had a lot of crank calls and letters, a couple of false confessions, anonymous tips, astrological readings, suggestions on how the money might better be spent and a few assorted threats. One woman even appeared at my office carrying a crystal ball in a bowling bag. No useful information was received from the crystal ball or any other source, so on my advice Mrs. Osborne withdrew the offer and all ads and notices were canceled.”

The judge opened his eyes and gave Valenzuela a brief penetrating glance. “As I understand it, Mr. Valenzuela, from October thirteen, when Robert Osborne disappeared, until April twenty, when you resigned from the sheriff's office, your full time was spent in trying to locate Robert Osborne and/or the men allegedly responsible for his disappear­ance.”

“Yes, your Honor.”

“That would seem to constitute a diligent search on your part.”

“Many others were involved. Some still are. A case like this is never officially closed even though the deputies are assigned to other jobs.”

“I believe it's legitimate for me to ask whether your resignation from the sheriff's department was due in part to your failure to locate Mr. Osborne and the missing men.”

“It wasn't, your Honor. I had personal reasons.” Valen­zuela rubbed one side of his jaw as though it had begun to hurt. “Nobody likes to fail, naturally. If I'd found what I was looking for, I would have hesitated before going into another line of work.”

“Thank you, Mr. Valenzuela.” Judge Gallagher leaned back in his chair and recrossed his arms on his chest. “You may continue, Mr. Ford.”

“Has diligent search been proved to your Honor's satis­faction?”

“Of course, of course.”

“Now, Mr. Valenzuela, during the six months you worked on the case you must have reached some conclu­sions about what happened to the ten missing men.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that they crossed the border, probably before they were even missed at the ranch and before the police knew a crime had been com­mitted. The men had a truck and they had papers. Once they were back in their own country they were safe.”

“How safe?”

“Let's put it in terms of figures,” Valenzuela said. “At that time Tijuana had a population exceeding two hundred thousand and a police force with only eighteen squad cars.”

“All vehicles are stopped at the border, aren't they?”

“The Tijuana-San Diego border is said to be the busi­est in the world, twenty million people a year. This averages out to fifty-four thousand a day, but in actual fact weekday traffic is much lighter and weekend traffic much heavier. Between a Friday afternoon and a Sunday night three hundred thousand people or more travel between the two countries. Numbers alone present a very serious problem to law enforcement agen­cies. There are also other factors. Mexican laws differ from U.S. laws, enforcement in many areas is inconsistent, brib­ery of officials is a general practice, policemen are few and usually poorly trained.”

“How much chance did you figure you had of locating the missing men once they'd crossed the border into their own country?”

“When I started out I thought there was some chance. As time went on, it became obvious there wasn't any. The reasons have been mentioned—generalized corruption, overcrowding and understaffing at the border, lack of training, discipline and morale among Mexican police officers. Such statements aren't going to make me very popular among certain people, but facts must be faced. I'm not inventing anything in order to justify my own failure in this case.”

“Your candor is appreciated, Mr. Valenzuela.”

“Not by everybody.”

Valenzuela's smile appeared and disappeared so fast that Ford wasn't quite sure he'd seen it and not at all sure it had been a smile. Perhaps it was merely a grimace in­dicating a twinge of pain in the head or stomach or con­science.

“One more item of interest, Mr. Valenzuela. There's been considerable talk about the blood found on the floor of the mess hall. Between the mess
hall and the bunk­house there's an area of blacktop. Was any blood found on it?”

“No, sir.”

“Near it?”

“No, sir.”

“What about the bunkhouse?”

“It was a mess, as the photographs in the file clearly indicate, but there were no bloodstains.”

“Was it possible to determine if anything had been taken from the bunkhouse?”

“Not that night. The following day a careful examina­tion was made with Mr. Estivar present and it was discov­ered that three blankets were missing from one of the bunks, a striped flannelette, more like a double sheet, and two brown wool, army surplus.”

“Did you connect the fact that no bloodstains were found outside the mess hall with the fact that three blan­kets were missing from the bunkhouse?”

“Yes, sir. It seemed reasonable to assume that Mr. Os­borne's body had been wrapped in the blankets before it was removed from the mess hall.”

“Why three blankets? Why not two? Or one?”

“One or two probably wouldn't have been adequate,” Valenzuela said. “A young man of Mr. Osborne's height and weight carries between six and a half and seven quarts of blood in his system. Even if as much as two quarts were found on the floor of the mess hall, there would have been enough left to cause a lot of trouble for the other men.”

“You mean the other two men who were involved in the fight?”

“Yes, sir—O, who left the fight early, and B, who lost a considerable amount of blood.”

“Your previous evidence indicated that both of these men were small.”