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  PRAISE FOR BLOOD AND MONEY

  “Un-put-downable.” —People

  “Thompson’s uncanny skill at evoking a sense of place still had the power to shock me years after I read Blood and Money. . . . Remarkable.” —Ann Rule, bestselling author of The Stranger Beside Me

  “An extraordinary book. So absorbing and so suspenseful that even the most jaded reviewer will find it difficult to put down. In comparison, In Cold Blood seems shallow.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “A thoroughly absorbing epic of revenge. It has, as they say, everything—from gossip to grisliness, from savagery to suspense.” —The New York Times

  “Required reading.” —Houston Chronicle

  “A brilliant work of reportage.” —Larry McMurtry, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove

  “Thompson has done a terrific job on this gaudy story, which can hardly be surpassed for crass opulence, crude energy, and morbid fascination.” —Newsweek

  “The most gripping reading of the year.” —Los Angeles Times

  “A massive, detailed book . . . [that] reads like a novel. . . . Thompson has, one feels, presented it fairly, dispassionately and skillfully. He may have a bestseller on his hands.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “The most complex and interesting of any Texas murder except the Kennedy assassination. Thompson has done a superb job.” —Dallas Times Herald

  “The legal reverberations of these events are still sounding through the Texas courtrooms. A formidable nonfiction thriller.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Thompson covers every twist, turn and dark secret of the sordid tale.” —Time

  “The best [true crime book] I’ve read.” —Roger Ebert, bestselling author of Life Itself

  “[Thompson’s] most assured and ambitious book . . . A drama as tight as a sudden adhesive tape over your mouth in bed. Nondecaffeinated all-night reading.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “The high society of Houston’s ultra rich is the setting of a spellbinding account of a mysterious death and the bizarre consequences set in motion by the murderous grudge it produced. A variegated, brilliantly woven documentary.” —Library Journal

  “The suspense is continuous. What happens in terms of the law, punishment, and death could, finally, perhaps only happen in real life. Stunning.” —Publishers Weekly

  Blood and Money

  Thomas Thompson

  This is for my brother,

  Larry D. Thompson—a good

  friend and a good lawyer.

  Book One

  JOAN

  “… Behold a pale horse …”

  ONE

  During the night an early spring rain washed the city and now, at dawn, the air was sweet and heavy. Remnants of fog still held to the pavements of Houston, rolling across the streets like cobweb tumbleweeds, and the windshields of early commuters were misted and dangerous. The morning seemed sad, of little promise.

  In his bed, the old man sweated and tossed. This night had been worse than most. He had awakened over and over again, and each time he checked the clock. He was impatient for the new day to commence so that he could order the flowers. One hundred perfect yellow roses would surely please his daughter. Not until he saw her laugh again would he sleep well.

  Once, during the long darkness, he turned on the light and looked at the photographs which surrounded his bed. Above his head was Joan from a quarter century ago, when she was a child in best white organdy, her knee saucily crossed. To his right, on the wall, was Joan in her late teens, her beauty frozen by soft focus, her features glazed, the classic debutante. And to his left, on the old Grand Rapids dresser, was Joan in recent years, her face ablaze with the triumph of yet another win in the show ring. There were a thousand like these in the big house, filling the walls, pasted into scrapbooks, stuffed into drawers, spilling out of closets. Joan and her horses had become favorite subjects of photographers across the land, and the old man’s home was a museum of her image.

  But even these familiar suspensions of time could not push away the scene from the night before. Each time he bolted awake, sitting up in bed, throwing a hand across his face to smear the dampness from his eyes, it was still there in all the torment.

  “Joan, honey?” He had crept a few steps into the hospital room. It smelled of sterile potions and pain. Two nurses were busy about his daughter with tubes and medical contraptions.

  “Pa?” she answered weakly. Normally her voice could boom clear across a cornfield. Her pillow was slightly raised, and on it her hair spilled thin and lifeless, no longer silver white and electric like a noon sun.

  “They won’t let me stay, honey,” he said, fumbling for comfort. “You hurry up and get well, now, and tomorrow morning when you wake up I’m gonna fill your room with yellow roses.”

  Joan tried to smile. “I’d like that, Pa,” she murmured.

  “Daddy’s gonna do that, Joan,” he said. “You know Daddy’s gonna do that.”

  Then one of the nurses pushed expelling hands toward him and he left the room. He stopped for a moment outside and leaned his heavy body against the wall. His heart pumped in alarm. Hadn’t the doctors said she would be all right? They had, he reassured himself. He went in search of another one just to hear the words again.…

  When the door chimes rang just before 6 A.M., the old man heard them. For an instant, in his bed, he opened his eyes and wondered who could be seeking entrance to his home so early, so unexpectedly. But he was weary, not yet ready to wake, and when he heard Ma stirring, he closed his eyes and fell back.

  The old woman padded to the front door and opened it with good will. Perhaps, she thought, a neighbor is in distress. But when she saw the people with the gray and tragic faces standing at her threshold, looming out of the mist and fog, her knees buckled. They did not have to speak a word. She knew. She knew exactly what they had come to tell her.

  “Oh, my God,” the old woman managed as she fell. Pitifully she began to retch, throwing up the whiskey that had helped her find sleep the night before. Her son-in-law, John Hill, watched, but he did not reach down to pick her up. Although a doctor, he lacked the will at this terrible moment. One of the friends who had come with him, another physician, knelt to help Ma. He grasped her gently and lifted her and walked her to the living room. There she fell, breathing hard, onto the sofa. John Hill watched her for a few moments, then he took a tentative step toward the back bedroom where the old man was sleeping. Clearly he dreaded to make this short journey.

  It was not Ma’s nature to command anyone, for she was a woman who lived an obedient step or two behind her husband and her daughter. Her world was their shadows, and drawn blinds. But now she threw out her hand with an edict.

  “Don’t wake Pa,” she said urgently. “For God’s sake, let him sleep. This is the last night he ever will.”

  And they all sat and waited, fearfully, for Pa to wake and rise and hear the news.

  TWO

  He was a paradox, the old man, Pa. With one clenched fist rising in the direction of the beyond, he cursed God, for he had no tolerance for the foolishness of religion. Yet with the other he touched—in wonder—one of his most beloved possessions, an ivory Madonna that Christian warriors had borne through the Crusades, h
er back smoothed and worn from the frightened kisses of those seeking divine blessing. With one breath he scoffed at the notion of an afterlife. “An awful lot of SOBs sit on the front row of the church house,” Pa often said, “and if I had to spend eternity with them, you couldn’t drag me into heaven with six mules!” But with the next, he likely as not would tell of his fascination for the ancient royal houses of Egypt and his knowledge of their elaborate preparations for the journey to the other side.

  When Joan was tiny she often sat in Pa’s lap and heard him speak of Radames and Nefertiti and Tutankhamen: “They tell me that old King Tut was buried in a coffin that weighs twenty-four hundred pounds and is pure solid gold. Imagine that, Joanie! Solid gold! We’ll see it someday. You and me are gonna see it all!” Across the map of Egypt marched his twin fingers, strong and gnarled from the rocks and earth of the fields he explored in search of oil, whisking father and daughter across the seas.

  Now if you stood the man against the wall and measured him, he was, on surface viewing, the stereotypic model of the Texas oil creature from the wide-brimmed felt hat down to the gleaming black Lincoln automobile he drove at hurtling speeds about the freeways of Houston, a cassette of Eddie Arnold’s country melodies soothing him from the tape deck. A quail had slight chance if it flew past the sights of his shotgun, nor did many wide-mouthed bass swim on if they chanced to nibble at his line. His politics veered to the right of Calvin Coolidge, and liberal Democrats, to his thinking, were as dangerous as a snake in his swimming pool. He would not invite a black man to sit at his dinner table, or even enter the house through the front door, but should one arrive with a load of earth to freshen his azalea beds, he might sit in the sun and talk for hours of children and creaking bones and browning blossoms, like a life of rich promise so suddenly going away. He began most every morning with several cups of strong hot coffee and an hour or two of spirited talk with a table full of affluent cronies, in assemblage at the Houston Club, a Klatsch of elderly men whose breast pockets might contain, side by side, the report of a new East Texas gas well, the photograph of a grandson, and the vial of digitalis. But there was more to Pa than gold and vinegar. There were secrets he kept from the others. Had he faced a firing squad and been told that his life would be spared only if he could quote from memory great chunks of Longfellow and Keats and Shakespeare, then he would walk away free and alive. He could read a little Greek, and Latin, and might hold his own in the company of scholars. But Pa insisted on presenting himself as a robust buccaneer, and he would never admit to the others at the coffee table that Evangeline could still make him weep.

  He was a strong, fine-looking Southern colonel kind of man, even at seventy, with a head of thick white hair and a muscled body that had stayed well shaped until the years broke down his belly and pushed it out and over his belt. Only his eyes betrayed him. They were not the eyes of a man content with his lot. Bewilderment lived in the tired and yellowing eyes, as did furtiveness, and suspicion, and an occasional flash of pain, the kind that comes to a man when he realizes that nobody—save his wife and child—will really give a good god damn when he dies.

  His name was Ash Robinson. And though its very sound held flair, conjured visions of romantic novels, his life for seven decades had not been one that veered from the ruts of the ordinary road. Nor would he have seemed in the winter of his life to be a man around whom tragedy would break and swirl.

  This is not to mean that Ash courted, as some men do, the anonymity of shadowed places, or that he had accommodated himself to a place in the crowd, as most men eventually do. Because he had believed, from the earliest years of his memory, that Ash Robinson was special, that he possessed the talent and breeding and drive to climb somehow up the summit and once there claim a place in history. But though his life for seventy years had been an interesting and occasionally vivid one, there was nothing notable enough to set it aside for other men to mark and examine. But then came the misted March morning in 1969 when they arrived to tell him the news of Joan.

  Always Ash had drawn nourishment from his money and his blood. He was the child of Southern aristocracy, both reigning and deposed. His mother, he liked to say, was “a great beauty and very possibly a genius.” She was a gentle, kind young woman named Eunice Olive Davis, one of whose antecedents signed the Declaration of Independence. Her father was master of Sunnyside Plantation, south of Alexandria, Louisiana, a place where thousands of acres obediently bore sugar cane and cotton. Not even the Civil War drastically altered the orderly pattern of life at Sunnyside or ravaged the coffers of the family wealth. As the daughter of rich and doting parents, Eunice Olive journeyed to boarding school at the proper St. Mary’s Episcopal Academy in Dallas where she won gold medals for scholarship, music, and manners.

  Ash’s father was less fortunate in his legacy. He would have been heir to another great plantation, a few hundred miles east of Sunnyside, at a place called Robinsonville, Mississippi, so named because only one white family, the Robinsons, lived on that particular slice of the bounteous delta. They were owners of a huge slave population which they considered well treated. But after the Civil War those former slaves who had not run away linked hands with the carpetbaggers to ravage Robinsonville, stripping it in the late months of 1865 as bare as a pecan tree in the path of locusts.

  Sherwood Robinson, dauphin to a suddenly destroyed kingdom, left his ancestral home and went in search of a new life. In Louisville, Kentucky, he enrolled in medical school, paying for his tuition and keep by summoning one of the graces of plantation life, writing calling cards in elaborate script. His flourishes were in demand by the nouveau riche, eager to purchase his handiwork at twenty-five cents the dozen. With diploma in hand four years later, Dr. Sherwood Robinson wandered about the South, looking for a place to practice general medicine. New Orleans and Baton Rouge both were flush with physicians, but north, near Alexandria, he found the village near Sunnyside Plantation bereft. Not long after hanging out his shingle he received a summons from the largest house in the region. The owner’s daughter, Miss Olive, was ill with influenza. In the best tradition of crinoline and magnolia blossoms, the young doctor not only treated his patient, he married her.

  And in 1898 on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, their first child, a son, was born. He was named Davis, after his mother, and Ashton, after a neighboring family who owned another sugar cane plantation across the way. Early in life Davis Ashton Robinson demanded that he be called Ash.

  Dr. Robinson moved his wife and fast-growing family, soon to number three sons, across the border into Texas, a state that at the turn of the century was heavy with promise. Its Gulf Coast was attracting thousands of rice farmers and cattlemen and they were earning money enough to pay for a doctor. The Robinsons by-passed Houston, for it was a dirty, swampy place pestered by the foulest heat and mosquitoes, settling instead in Eagle Lake, sixty miles west. There the family prospered; Dr. Robinson became the pre-eminent physician for a hundred miles around.

  In the manner especially peculiar to Southern men, Ash was drawn to the earth. He wanted to own land, study it, peel back the layers of time and speculate on the creatures that had walked therein. “If I had it all to do over again,” he often said, well after he had passed seventy years and was semi-retired from a successful career in the pursuit of oil and gas, “I’d be an archaeologist.”

  Ash was a loner and a dreamer. And something of a schemer. He pretended to enjoy the medical books his father gave him to peruse. But Ash only skimmed across an occasional page, absorbing a fact here or there, enough to win the five dollars his father would occasionally award for a bit of scholarship tossed out at the dinner table. In secret he was going to the school library and finding books that told of ancient Egypt, shutting his eyes and fantasizing of how he would someday cruise the Mediterranean in search of the ruins of lost civilizations.

  When it was time for college, Ash went to Tulane where he easily studied the liberal arts program. And, in a move which he would never
fully understand, he enrolled to study dentistry. “I suppose it was a compromise for my father,” he would say in later years. “I didn’t give a damn about pulling teeth, but it was medical, and it seemed to please the family.” Dutifully he completed a three-year course and successfully passed the state licensing board examination. But then the school informed the young dentist that an additional three months of study were newly required before he could begin practice. “I wasn’t about to spend one more day of study on something I hated,” Ash recalled. “A fellow can learn all he needs to know about dentistry in a few weeks, anyway. It’s not much better than barbering.”

  Other things were pressing for his attention—well-tailored clothes from a Canal Street tailor, French wine, the girls from Sophie New-comb College, the horses running at the New Orleans race track. The doctor’s son from the flyspeck town in South Texas was eager to lie down on the softest pillows. He sent word home in a letter that he had decided not to be a dentist. In fact, he was going to loaf awhile and examine his options. Saddened by the report, Dr. Robinson summoned his son to Eagle Lake. He had a surprise.

  Did the boy remember family stories about the sugar cane borer, an insect that destroyed Sunnyside Plantation in 1907?

  Yes, of course. Often the disaster had been discussed at family gatherings. Most of the plantation owners in central Louisiana had been bankrupted by the devastating insect.

  Did the boy also know that his mother had received one sixth of the profits from the forced sale of Sunnyside Plantation, divided between her and five other brothers and sisters?

  No, Ash did not realize that his now dead mother had received any moneys from the sale.

  “She left you a goodly sum to be delivered upon the occasion of your becoming an adult. I am carrying out my beloved wife’s wishes,” said Dr. Robinson. He presented his son with a check for $69,000, the extraordinary sum rolling on and on in the flourishes of his father’s fine script.