Chapter 15. The Command Center

"Ok, boys and girls, can we get serious, now?" Bill asked, as he tossed the take out bag in the garbage bin outside the motel reception office.

"Come on, boys and girls. Let's get this scenario up and running! We need a command center here. Come on. My room."

Ralph and Pam were beginning to show signs of fatigue after the long day.

The flight to Saint Louis... The long drive to Sikeston... The research and interviews... The search for a motel room... The flying food.

"Command center, Bill? I was hoping more for 8 hours of Pleasant Dreams."

"Sorry kids, but I can't sleep... not with hot biscuit grease dripping down my brows..." Bill replied, with thick sarcasm. "And if Uncle Bill don't sleep, neither does Superman and Lois Lane..."

Pam looked at the two men in disgust. Grabbing two small bags from the trunk of the car, she motioned to Ralph to follow into Bill's room.

"Ok, let's see what we've got." Bill tossed down an envelope on the bed, then pulled off his jacket and tie. "Ralph? Anything at the library."

"Not much," Ralph said, accompanied by a long sigh. He stretched out on the spare bed, next to where Pam was sitting. "An obituary...about a month after... you know." Ralph pointed up to the ceiling, invoking the space ship.

"May 15th, they find his car," Bill reads from his notes. "May 18th, he's listed in the obituary column."

"Three days, huh?" Pam noted. "They didn't wait long."

"Who writes an obituary when there's no body?" Ralph asked. "Who announces someone is dead when they are supposedly still just missing."

"It's not typical, is it?" Pam joked.

Bill chuckled. "So, every time someone takes off for a week without telling their wives, it looks like the plague's in town...Humph! A perfect correlation of obituaries to Shriner's Conventions...Come on. What else ya got?"

"And a few pieces in the paper about a case or two he was working on..."

"Yeah... yeah..." Bill said knowingly, as he flipped through his notepad. "The Price Landing thingie..."

The two men looked at each other, realizing that they both came up with the same clue. Pam, however, didn't catch the reference.

"Pam, you see McDonald was helping in the investigation of some important cases. Money laundering, pollution, big business corruption... He helped solve some of those cases."

"Yeah, and boy he was in it deep." Bill looked up at Ralph and jumped in.

"He was taking on to many cases..."

Bill shook his head at his partner. "He was pocketing money from the cases..." Bill corrected Ralph. "He had an ever expanding bank account..."

"...that his wife never knew about..." Pam said, also jumping in. "Maybe someone was helping someone set someone up?" Pam speculated.

Ralph looked confused, as he tried to process what the other two were implying. "You think he was somehow banking money from these scandals? That there was some under the table wheeling and dealing? That doesn't make any sense!"

"I know!" Bill added, reading his notes again. "But how else does a country lawyer make fifteen thousand extra big ones? Back in 1968, no less!"

"There's something really strange going on here," Ralph said, uncomfortably. "If this guy, Charles McDonald, was so bad, why would the green guys give him a suit?"

Bill quickly responded, bitterly noting that they gave a suit to Beck, too.

"But the gave Beck a suit before he went bad!" Ralph reasoned. "Charlie got a suit AFTER these scandals, right?"

"Honey, it doesn't look good to old Charlie. He had lots of cash, completely unaccounted for. Witnesses say he also had a girlfriend on the side..."

Bill chuckled at the thought, thinking of the square bowtie and thick rimmed glasses in the FBI file photos. "It was probably some broad he picked up on the side of the road, with all that extra cash..."

Ralph and Pam looked at each other, remembering the text in the big black book.

"The hitchhiker..."

"What about him?" Bill asked.

"No," Pam said, slowly, reviewing Margaret's tale of Charlie's rendezvous. "Not him, Bill. Her. Charlie's partner, the other person in the car with him... she was a woman..."

Bill chuckled harder this time. "What are you talking about, Davidson? Don't be ridiculous..."

"That makes sense, Bill" Ralph added.

"It does?"

"If Margaret ..."

"Who's Margaret?" Bill asked again, uninterested.

"Listen, Bill. We know they saw the ship on April 17th. Then, just a few days later, McDonald is spotted eating lunch with an unknown woman. A stranger in town. There aren't many strangers in a small town like this, Bill! Certainly not back then... You may not know everyone in town, but you'd know if it was a stranger. So, it's gotta be the hitchhiker? And... and..."

Pam tried to remember the whole story. Slowly she pieced it together again. "She was complaining to him. She said that he was trying to walk away. And he couldn't just walk away... They were both involved. Ralph, maybe he wasn't trying to walk away from her? Maybe he was ..."

"Trying to run away..." Ralph finished her sentence, as he looked at Bill. "He wanted to run away from the suit. He was terrified, Bill! He was afraid of the green guys, the whole thing...He couldn't handle it..." He raised a knowing eyebrow towards his partner, a subtle reminder of the night that Bill ran, leaving him alone in the desert with suit.

"They gave him a choice, like they gave us, and he didn't want to take it," Ralph continued. "And McDonald is working on some big cases, blowing the lid off them. The green guys would know this - that he was busting these cases, and that he was a good guy, helping fight for justice! For the common good!"

Unconvinced, Bill tried to dismiss the whole scenario. "There's lots of money at stake. Whoever was involved was probably trying to shut him up. You know ... hush money."

"No..." Ralph said, pacing across the room as he thought. "No, that doesn't make any sense. If you're getting paid off, you aren't going to put that kind of money in a bank account... Certainly not under your own name! And not where the sheriff, the cops, and the IRS are all going to find it!!"

Bill paused, then quickly picked up his pad again, and flipped frantically through the pages. The kid was onto something.

"Someone wanted that money to be found, Bill!" Ralph concluded, stopping dead in his tracks. "Bill, Charlie was being set up! Someone wanted it to look like he was he was corrupt."

"And later on...they try to discredit him by convincing everyone that he was insane! They say he saw aliens, and so people think he is crazy." Pam added, remembering Frances and Margaret's theory that he was murdered."He's murdered, but they say he committed suicide, confirming his instability."

"And four years later," Pam adds, "in 1972, someone calls Fields and tells the story to him for his book. It's a way to confirm that McDonald was going nuts. All of a sudden, you have UFO watchers flocking to Sikeston, Missouri for the alien stories."

"And the whole town is trying to cover up a murder," Ralph said in a Eureka moment. Pam and Ralph stood up, elated over their keen detective skills.

"Noooo, Ralph," Bill responded slowly, as he read over his handwritten notes. "Not the whole town..."

"Of course, not the whole town, Bill! No, just a few guys, maybe who were involved in the scandals. Maybe the sherif." Ralph was still proud of himself for cracking the case.

But Bill looked up at Ralph, disappointed.

"Well, then, there's just one other little problem with this whole scenario, boys and girls..."

Expressions of joy falling from their faces, Pam and Ralph quickly questioned Bill.

"What?"

"The problem is, the story they told Fields wasn't just some crazy schlock. Was it?" Ralph and Pam looked shocked, and embarrassed that they had forgotten the entry in the Big Black Book.

"It all happened... Right kids? Remember? The space ship, the radio, the suit? The sketch of the symbol in the book."

Ralph looked at Pam, worry clearly etched on his face.

"He's right, Pam," Ralph conceded. "You couldn't make all that up and be right. So, Charlie did call Fields!"

"Or..." Bill prompted his troops.

"Or..." Pam continued. "Or the hitchhiker..."

With one finger, Bill made a circular motion, as if directing them to run through the scenario again.

Pam began. "Charlie cracks a few cases..."

"Someone tries to set him up..." Ralph continued.

"He's in and out of town. So one day he picks up a cute cookie off the road..."

"Bill!" Pam disapproved.

"Well... you said it was some broad, right?"

Ralph rolled his eyes, but followed through. "The green guys try to help him out, so he can crack the case, with a little help from some Magic Jammies. But he doesn't accept them..."

All three of them looked at each other, and the room went silent. Each wondered in their own minds what might have happened if Ralph had not accepted the suit.

"A month later he's dead..."

"No Ralph," Bill corrected him. "Maybe he's dead. Or maybe alive. All we know is that a month later, someone's saying he's dead, and wants him gone quickly. And that's all we know..."

"Well, we know that we have one lawyer, unaccounted for..." Ralph added, "and one hitchhiker...unaccounted for."

-continued-