Читать книгу Long Fall from Heaven - George Wier - Страница 20

[ 11 ]

“You promised to tell me the story of Harrison Lynch,” Micah said. They sat on the front porch of Cueball’s house, just as they had so many times before, enjoying the balmy darkness of the Gulf night.

“You know, in a couple of weeks we’ll have to move these sessions inside,” Cueball said. “It’s about to get too cool for late evening reveries.”

“Lynch, Cueball! Quit evading the subject.”

Boland laughed. “Where to start? Okay. I’d been on the force a year up in Dallas, but I was still a rookie by the old timers’ standards. It was my first week in a radio car all on my own when the call came in...”

• • •

Cueball talked and Micah listened.

According to Cueball, Harrison Lynch was a slim character with a shock of wavy blond hair, a hatchet-shaped face, and a pair of teal blue eyes that were devoid of any trace of humanity. In a word, Harrison looked hungry.

His first recorded professional foray into his career as a thief was a motel burglary off the feeder road to Interstate 20 on the outskirts of Pecos, Texas. The year was 1966, and Harrison was a mere twenty-two years old. The official incident report stated that the thief came in through a hole in the roof of the attached tool shed. He got through a steel door by using a hand-drill through the lock mechanism and into the room containing the motel safe.

The motel manager was known to begin drinking early in the afternoon and to lock up the place as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon. Then he would polish off whatever bottle with which he happened to be engaged, and pass out somewhere in the vicinity of his cot—any actual bed to be had having been employed for the sole use of the guests, should there be any.

The safe contained a week’s worth of receipts in the form of cash and traveler’s checks totaling $762—a remarkable sum for a run-down motel slap dab in the middle of hell-and-gone. This total, however, would be significant for Harrison Lynch. It was twelve dollars over the minimum limit for a felony conviction. The local prosecutor, a former washout from the Mercury Astronaut Program, was more than ready to nail Lynch to the wall.

Lynch was bonded out of jail by his family—the Penses—and removed from Pecos for good long before the trial was to begin.

He put in an appearance in Houston three weeks later when he burgled a downtown jewelry store in the middle of a hot summer night. The take was seventy thousand in diamonds, gold, watches, necklaces, and a small stack of St. Gaudens twenty-dollar gold pieces. Harrison was moving up in the world.

During his second heist in Houston, Harrison Lynch killed his first human being. This was three weeks after the gold and jewels had been siphoned through the network of black beer and whiskey joints that kept Houston’s Fifth Ward juiced and throbbing, converted to hard cash and spent on prostitutes of every ilk. His victim was an elderly night watchman, a black man, who came upon Harrison after he fell from the roof of a warehouse that stood along the Houston Ship Channel.

It was a hot, humid night in high summer during the dark of the moon. The night man, a sixty-six-year-old grandfather named Curtis Gray, heard the racket and the moaning and went to investigate. When he tried to help Harrison to his feet, Harrison pulled a knife and stabbed the man five times in the belly and once in the throat, then whined like a baby for twenty minutes over his scraped knee. When he finally pulled himself together, he took Gray’s keys and helped himself into the warehouse where he set off an alarm that caused permanent damage to both his ears. Harrison gained a set of keys, lost a knife and a good part of his hearing. It took Curtis Gray five days to die.

After the fingerprints were lifted from the knife, photographed and run through the FBI’s Houston crime lab, both the Houston Police and the Texas Rangers became interested in the whereabouts of Harrison Lynch.

Within days the mug shot from his booking at the Pecos County Jail appeared on WANTED posters in every post office and police station throughout the Southwest.

Harrison was arrested two months later.

It was the middle of the night. Cueball Boland responded to an alarm call at a storage facility near the newly-constructed North Central Expressway. He cut his red and blue lights three blocks away from the call, killed his headlights and coasted up to the place by feel in the close dark.

The manager, a twenty-one-year-old beauty school student named Veronica Hilliard, lived at the back of the storage facility in a trailer. The new silent alarm system had been going off randomly of late for no discernible reason, and she was tired of it. She came into the office and had the fatal misfortune of catching Harrison Lynch with a stethoscope held against the side of the company safe. Harrison had also apparently stolen himself a new knife somewhere along the way.

Cueball heard the screams and was out and running before he could begin to think about it. He climbed the chain link fence in nothing flat. He had his Smith & Wesson .357 in his hand before he crashed through the glass door of the storage office and got the drop on Harrison Lynch. The screamer was there with him, but she had stopped screaming—and everything else. Harrison was covered with blood. Cueball had about two pounds of pressure on his trigger with Harrison Lynch’s forehead resting comfortable in his night-glow sights. Instead, he eased off the trigger and reached for his cuffs.

The famous Henry Wade personally prosecuted the case. With Cueball’s testimony and photographs of the deceased, it took a Dallas County jury exactly seven minutes to decide that Harrison Lynch desperately needed to die in the state’s electric chair for the murder of Veronica Hilliard. For good measure they tacked on forty years for breaking and entering. A month later, a Harris County jury took approximately eleven minutes longer to give him a second death sentence for the Curtis Gray murder. Three hours after the judge’s gavel fell in Houston, Harrison Lynch found himself wrapped in chains and bound for Huntsville.