Last Days (25 page)

LAST DAYS

hand over his freckled scalp, then slapped the cap back in place. ‘Ain’t nuthin’ grown at this mine since seventy-five.

Not a thing.’

Kyle looked at the ground with renewed interest. Then pointed at the longest structure that had once been in the shade of a long line of petrified trees. ‘Those trees are dead too.’

Conway nodded at Kyle’s observation. ‘Mesquite. They was green once.’

‘Hard to believe anyone ever lived here.’

‘They was here two years and they kill’t it.’

Conway walked towards Dan and said, ‘Let’s git this show on the road.’ It was a command.

There were eight buildings still standing at the mine, varying from what looked like a general store with a high flat front, to a collection of smaller cabins, and one longer building about the size of a barn. White adobe walls were dried out and mostly peeled down to red brick on every structure.

Where roofs still existed, the corrugated iron was bent out of shape and dark red with rust, or bare black beams were visible, eaten into undulating patterns by insects. Porches sagged into the grey dust and dead grass. Lengths of strip-fencing started and stopped around the perimeter of the settlement, but never failed to lean anywhere but earthwards.

Kyle looked at Dan. ‘You ready?’

Dan’s entire face was wet; his massive chest heaved under the exertion of holding the camera. ‘Light might be too dim in some of the buildings. I’ve put the lights in the first one, like you said. Might have to move them along when we go static.’

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‘Perfect.’ Bright light burnished the inside of the longer white building they stood outside. ‘
That
night, this was the first building you investigated?’ Kyle said to Conway.

‘It was.’

Dan wrestled the camera into a better position on his shoulder. ‘Best if I walk behind Mr Conway. What do you say?’

Kyle agreed with a nod, then turned to the old cop. ‘Mr Conway. We can do this as many times as you want . . .’ He would have continued, but Conway didn’t appear to be listening to his preamble or direction. The old cop just stared into the doorway of the building with the same intensity as he’d stared at the dead trees.

‘Sergeant Matt Conway was the first police officer to arrive at the mining camp on the night of 10 July 1975.’ Kyle spoke from behind Dan’s left shoulder; Dan’s camera pointed at the old cop in profile as he stared towards the settlement in an establishing shot. ‘Mr Conway, can you take us through that night? As much as you can remember.’

Conway looked at Kyle like he was looking at an English halfwit, then looked away. ‘I remember it all. Night like that don’t end.’

Kyle glanced at Dan who grinned into the viewfinder.

‘Call came in at ten fifty to the station at Yuma. Fella at a ranch, five miles west of here heard gunshots. Name was Aguilar. He’s dead. Son has the place now. Owns this land too. Hope you boys all got permission to be filming out here?’

Kyle nodded. Dan suppressed a giggle.

Conway turned his back to the camera and pointed out across the desert ravine, towards the far slope of the valley.

‘Sound goes right through that valley and carries to his ranch.

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You can hear things down there, like this place is right next door. No phone at the mine. They was cut off up here. But Aguilar said he heard shots. Close together. Knew it was a rifle from the sound. The crack. And when he goes out of his yard and up the hill beside his place, he said he saw some mist over here. Kinda yellow. Aguilar heard dogs too. Whole pack of them real riled. Down here. And he said he heard some other things about them dogs, that sound damn foolish now, but not back then when I was out here, standing right where you is. I heard it too.’

Conway moved a few feet towards the big white bungalow and Dan followed him with the camera. The old policeman sighed, put his hands on his hips. Dan glanced at Kyle and raised his eyebrows; Kyle nodded once to indicate he should keep rolling.

A minute passed.

‘Call come in to my car. Unit 27. So I set out here with my partner, Jiminez, just after eleven. Once we were off the highway, we never set eyes on a single vehicle whole way out.

Was no one out here but Aguilar at his ranch and them hippies squatting in here. We get down that off-road a little ways, and we see the smoke too. Like mist with some dirty yellow in it. What was left of it. Like it was dying out. Flare I reckoned. But it was quiet except for the dogs. No frogs from that pond. No Elf Owl. Nothin’. Desert a noisy place at night.

But not here. ’Cept for the dogs, coming from far away. In the distance, like they were up high, above us, to the north.

Only there are no hills north of here. So I still can’t say where them dogs were. Aguilar said them hippies had a pack of them living with them, roaming wild. But he never saw one of them again after that night. Ask me, I was pretty sure they 223

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were above me and Jiminez’s heads. Sounded like they was in the sky, but moving away.’ Conway suffered some kind of self-conscious episode following his conjecture about the position of the dogs. ‘Desert can make a fool out of anyone.

‘Anyways, we pull up and this whole place is in darkness.

Not a single light on in any of the buildings. No fires, nothing.

They used kerosene lanterns and open fires to light the place at night. Aguilar told me. No electricity here. And you can still see the big pit they used over yonder. But the whole place was lights-out when we pulled up that night. Fire pit was cold.

‘Well, Jiminez walks over, real careful like, towards this building here. It was the closest to us, and the biggest thing here. Door wide open too. An’ I remember him walking through this mist with his flashlight. And he goes right up to that door. And he shined the torch through it once. And then he turned round and he came running back to the car. And I saw his face in the headlights and I knew trouble was right here, jus’ waitin’ on us.

‘And he says to me, “Partner, call paramedics, backup, we got injured, maybe fatalities”. So I make the call. An’ then I get the rifle we keep in the back, and Jiminez gets the shot -

gun and we go back at the building. We got thirty minutes minimum till backup rolls in, so we’re in no hurry to get ambushed. We go in slow. One from either side, up to that porch.’

Conway stopped speaking and stepped onto the porch of the long white building. He assumed a crouching position beside the empty window frame on the left of the porch. He imitated the holding up of a flashlight, his palm facing the 224

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ground. ‘Jiminez is across from me. Other side of that window.’ Conway nodded at the window on the right side of the gaping doorway. ‘And I call out, “Police!” And there is no answer. Not a sound. And we can’t go around the outside of the building to check the back, ’cus we’d get sighted from the other cabins you can see here on either side a’ this one. We got to check this one’s clear first. Do them one at a time. So I shine my flashlight through this window. Like this.

Down and inside.’ Conway lowered his hand and touched the splintering wooden frame gently. ‘And I see the bodies inside. I count five, straight off.’

The ex-cop straightened up and stepped inside the room.

Dan, then Kyle, carefully followed him through the door. A layer of dirt covered indistinct wooden planking that boomed beneath three pairs of feet. There were crushed beer cans inside, some plastic bags and an instant gust of stale urine.

The building was divided by a white wooden wall, with a doorway and open counter hatch, offering darkness in the second half of the structure.

‘In here there was mats. And five of them hippies. They was wearing the robes we all seen them wearing around town. And there was some blood in between them. Two was kneeling up, like they was praying. The others had fallen sideways onto each other. The blood on the floor was dark and getting thick, so they’d been killed a while before we got here.

I reckoned maybe an hour, maybe more. And I remember looking for where their bodies started and where they ended, and that’s when I saw a throat. Cut deep. The head was dropped forward and the eyes of the victim were closed, but the laceration went right back to the ear.’

Conway exhaled and shook his head. ‘Lined up, all five of 225

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them, in a row. Four of them had beards. And they was facing that wall. Like they’d been arranged this way by whoever killed them. Didn’t look like they resisted getting their throats cut neither. Hands weren’t tied.’

Conway settled into another silence with his little eyes closed. Kyle heard Dan swallow, and suddenly felt a great sympathy for the old man, and also a terrible guilt at what they had forced him to remember in the stinking wreck of a building.

Looking up, composed again, Conway walked towards the dividing wall. ‘They had been living back in there. The second room. There was mattresses in there. Old blankets. Books.

Not much else. I remember we was trying not to step in the blood out here, because this was now a crime scene. So we tiptoed real careful around the bodies to this room here, to make sure the whole building was clear. Which it was. No one alive inside the second room. Just five bodies in the first room. And it was back here, when we came on through, heading for the door, that I noticed the smell. It’s like I’d shut my sense of smell off, and was just going on my ears and eyes in the dark as we come in. But when we come back through, I said, “Jimi, you smell that?” And Jiminez nodded.

He said “Burst pipe”, but I remember thinking, this place ain’t plumbed. But he was right. Place smelled of sewage, and something been dead longer than them hippies. But it weren’t comin’ from the victims. No, sir.’

They were all glad to get back outside. The curious smell of stagnation and decay had not been mentioned in the Irvine Levine book. And for a few seconds after Conway’s revelation, Kyle couldn’t feel his legs. His sense of self seemed to blow away, into the wide wastes of the desert. He felt ter-226

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ribly vulnerable and frail; a range of emotion he usually twinned with a loss of control. But this time it had nothing to do with his debts or scratching around trying to make a film for twenty quid; this was caused by a recurrence of the matter of his own safety, and of his mental robustness before such coincidence, such a dreadful synchronicity threatened more than implied by Conway’s innocent disclosure. Kyle glanced at the side of Dan’s face and could see that the feeling was mutual.

Conway turned away from the camera again and faced the desert. Dan moved and recorded him from the side. ‘We didn’t know that one of the fatalities was their leader right then. No one knew till later when Homicide rolled in. Sister Katherine. But she was the big one in the middle, who had rolled sideways and knocked two of the others down. I remember thinking later that if she hadn’t fallen, they would have all been kneeling up when we found them. Four with their throats cut, and her in the middle with her head in her lap.’

From the murder scene, in an uncomfortable silence which seemed to suit Conway, they moved to the second building, built at forty-five degrees to the murder site. A rusted iron canopy had collapsed on to the porch; once supported by two thin tilting wooden poles that gave the whole building the impression of falling sideways. White paint or plaster had flaked off the external walls of the main structure, leaving weathered bricks exposed to the air. Peeling upwards like the lid of a sardine tin, the roof had come loose.

‘In here, we found the kids. We stood outside and we shone our torches at the door first, and we could see it was all shut up and bolted from the outside. But we heard movement.

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Like a shifting sound. Inside. Maybe dogs. We called out and we heard some whimpers and whines and then I was sure it was dogs. I was thinking the killer had locked some of them up because of the ruckus they was causing when he was going about his work. So we decided we’d come back to this building because it was already secure and we didn’t want any dogs running around a crime scene. But right before I was about to head over to the next cabin, Jiminez shone his flashlight through the little window there, on the side.’

Conway walked slowly around to the small window in the side of the building. ‘And Jiminez looked at me, and he was more shocked than he was when we found them dead hippies. And he told me there was kids inside. So I got up and looked inside myself, and there was five kids. Four crouching down by the floor. Real dirty with long hair, but wearing street clothes. And the other one, who was about two I reckoned, was just standing up and staring right back at my flashlight. Two of the dirty kids was real scared and pressing into each other, other two just looked plain crazy in the eyes.

But the little blondie was just like an angel. Big blue eyes.

And he was clean. Naked, shivering. Which didn’t add up because the others were filthy. But he just stood right there, in the middle of that room and looked back at me. I think he was in shock. I asked them if they was OK, but got no answer.

‘Least they was safe in there, so we moved off to secure the other buildings.’

Conway paused and wiped again at his scalp, this time with a brilliant-white handkerchief.

‘Shall we break here?’ Kyle asked. Conway nodded.

*

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‘In this building we found the killer, Brother Belial, though we didn’t know his name that night.’ It was the smallest of the remaining structures; no bigger than a tool shed. ‘Door was closed, but we could hear a man praying inside. Least it sounded like praying. And he didn’t stop when we challenged him through the door. So Jiminez kicked it in, and shone his torch through. Right onto this face. Which I’ll never forget.

‘This guy was bearded and wearing a dirty robe. Kneeling down. His robes kinda blended with the wood in there, so all we could see clearly was this face. Real wild-looking.

Crazy hair all mussed up and these eyes. Just kinda staring through us. Seen the same thing on junkies. And he was just sat there talking to himself. To God, I ain’t sure. Couldn’t get a reaction outta him. Then Jiminez sees his hands. They’re covered in blood. And his wrists too, where they was pokin’