Wild Justice Page 12

  The inside of a cheek got chewed. The action caved in that side of his face. I decided his skull ended just south of the bridge of his nose. “She won’t be any better protected if I arrest you for violating the town ordinance against purchasing hard liquor.”

  “Finlay won’t like that. I’d have to name him as the man who supplied it. You’d have to shut him down and turn all his loyal customers out into the street. When do you come up for re-election?”

  “I asked for your help as a sworn officer of the law. You turned me down. I don’t reckon anybody’ll squawk if I jail you for obstruction of justice.”

  “I hate to disappoint you again, but the Judge won’t keep while I wait for you to build a jail.”

  He slammed shut the breech of the shotgun.

  * * *

  A dime novel I read—hell, all of them—placed a lot of store in watching a man’s eyes for the instant when he was going to act. None of those writers had ever stood face-to-face with an armed opponent. Eyes don’t kill; hands do. I was watching the hand at the end of the arm Karl Lundegaard had rested his scattergun on, open at the breech so it wouldn’t discharge by accident when he stepped in a gopher hole. The tendon extending from his wrist to the base of his thumb twitched just before he palmed up the forepiece of the weapon, closing the breech and bringing the hammer into position to strike the shell in the chamber; I saw the skin stretch, because I was watching for it.

  He found himself looking down the muzzle of the Deane-Adams.

  I said, “Now what would the good citizens of this community think if their guardian of justice and a federal officer blew each other to bits in the middle of a potato patch?”

  He gnawed on his other cheek, considering the odds. Finally it occurred to him they didn’t fall on the side of a part-time lawman. He lowered the shotgun.

  I let the revolver drop to my side. “Common theft falls under your jurisdiction,” I said. “If it’s your hide you’re worried about—”

  “I ain’t worried about that!”

  “Sure you are; think I’m not? The lady had only a belly gun the last time I looked. At any range that puts you one-on-one with her accomplice.” I didn’t add how good the accomplice was at range.

  What I’d said shook him to the soles of his big clumsy feet. “Lady?”

  TWENTY-TWO

  I scuffed the edge of one of the smaller tracks with the toe of my boot. “That belongs to a woman’s pump. If it’s the woman I’m thinking of—and another in this story seems too much like coincidence—when it comes to Remingtons, my hunch is she’s a better hand with a typewriter than a firearm. Her name is Betsy Pike; she’s a reporter for the Hearst press.”

  “Betsy Pike? Now I know you’re spinning one.”

  “It’s an alias. She endorses her bank draughts with the name Pamela Green. That is, if she didn’t make that one up, too. Everything she told me is open to closer inspection since I came across her dainty footsteps in this plot of dirt. But maybe she did grow up on a farm in Ohio, at that. It can’t be easy to walk in unturned earth in heels without stumbling unless you’re used to the terrain.”

  I told him about our conversation aboard The Javelin. I’d already gone over the simultaneous disappearance of our conductor and Howard Rossleigh, but I touched on it again. There was no reason to fill him in, except he was in a way a colleague, and he struck me as honest.

  Then he swept his hand at a gnat buzzing around his head, forgetting he was holding a shotgun and clouting himself on the temple.

  Rubbing the spot with his other hand: “Why’d a reporter throw in with somebody who’d attack a railroad conductor?”

  “Why would another reporter attack a railroad conductor? I’ll ask him when I find him; or you will. Right now my responsibility is with Mrs. Blackthorne and that box in the caboose.

  “We’ll be in St. Paul tonight,” I went on. “She has an appointment with a lawyer there, so we’ll have to stay over until tomorrow. Why don’t you round up a party and see if you can find out where those stolen horses went? You can wire me there with what you find out.”

  “You mean a posse?”

  It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to me the unmade bed of his face brightened at the use of the word.

  * * *

  Somehow, lacking speech, Caspar had managed to persuade a merchant to open his store on Sunday and sell him some tinned fruit and a sack of baking powder, and when I got back to the train it smelled of warm peach cobbler. Mrs. Blackthorne and I spent the entire conversation over the treat commending the chef’s skill. After we shook our heads at the offer of a third helping, I brought her up to date.

  “She must be under Rossleigh’s heel,” the widow said. “I do not entertain the possibility that a woman would willingly assist in such a crime.”

  “Your late husband sentenced a woman to hang for stabbing her own infant daughter to death in her cradle.”

  “I remember the decision. He agonized about it for days, and for nothing. The sentence was commuted to life by order of the U.S. Congress. I wrote a letter to President Garfield protesting the misplaced chivalry, but that man Guiteau shot him before he could respond. In any case that woman was deranged. Everything you have told me about the Green woman indicates she is as sane as you or I.”

  “In ’eighty-nine I arrested a buffalo hider for crushing his partners’ skulls with a shovel. He was convinced they were demons. The jury acquitted him on the grounds of lunacy and he was committed to a madhouse in Washington State, where he did such a good job pretending to be sane the staff released him. A week later he set fire to a hospital. I never found out if he thought the doctors and nurses there were demons or if it was the patients, because he was burned up along with them. Just because someone’s crazy doesn’t mean he isn’t clever enough to hide it.”

  She shook her head. “You have been too long at what you do. Your dinner-table talk is revolting.”

  “I’ve had complaints. I think Pamela Green has her head screwed on tight enough and then some. If I’m right, you and I have been thinking about this all wrong, believing Rossleigh to be the one in charge. Whichever one of us is the target, getting rid of the man in charge of our train didn’t require any thought. Conductors do more than punch tickets. Young as ours was, he’d be trained in dealing with unwanted passengers, hoboes and such. Face-to-face fighting is more a male specialty, and if anything went wrong, the brains behind the operation remained safe away from the scene.”

  “You misjudge the feminine advantage. A man accustomed to expelling tramps might hesitate in the presence of a woman, especially one dressed as daintily as you described. As you pointed out so graphically, the shedding of blood is not restricted to the male.”

  “She could also be a fair hand with a gun; but it wasn’t her in the livery.”

  “You said it was a small round, such as hers would fire.”

  “I did. It was. But the shoes don’t signify. Whoever took that shot might have climbed into the loft wearing ladies’ pumps, but couldn’t have scrambled out the opening afterward; there wasn’t time to avoid snapping an ankle. If she’d brought along a pair more practical, why didn’t she have them on when she walked across that field? I’ve met them both, and she was the one who struck me as the more dangerous thinker.”

  She looked out the window, at the smoke drifting from the locomotive. “The woman who established your opinion of the fair sex must have been Jezebel incarnate.”

  I gave that some consideration. Then it was my turn to shake my head.

  “Not quite as wicked, maybe, but smarter. In the end, the original schemed herself into getting thrown out a window. But it’s Pamela Green we’re talking about now. She was smart enough anyway to let her partner take all the risks while she waits for her chance.”

  “But at what? Or should I say at whom?”

  “Right now only she knows the answer to that one. Meanwhile we’ll continue east.” I rang a note off my dish with my fork. “At leas
t we don’t have to go looking for them.”

  “Because I am a helpless old woman and cannot be left alone.”

  “You’re wrong, and not just about being helpless. We don’t have to go looking for them because they’ll come looking for us. As long as we stay aboard this train, we’re rolling bait.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Our talk might have continued, but then the wind freshened, snatching away the smoke. Afternoon sunlight carved deep hollows under her eyes. By neither word nor signal would she have pleaded for rest. I was about to excuse myself when the car shifted under a heavy set of feet.

  Our engineer announced himself before we saw him; he smelled like an unswept chimney. When he peeled off his cap, it left a precise line where the soot that blackened his face ended. Pink scalp glistened in a way that seemed vaguely obscene. He was holding his turnip watch in his other hand, face up on the palm like a compass.

  “Beg pardon, missus, but there’s a freight due through here in half an hour. We best get going if we don’t want to be stuck on a siding.”

  Mrs. Blackthhorne read the answer on my face, nodded.

  I was strung too tight to sit in the chair car. I went back to the caboose—automatically touching my hat as I passed the coffin—and went out onto the vestibule, gripping the rear railing as the little cluster of buildings that stood in for civilization in that part of Minnesota shrank into the horizon. The steeple of Grace Lutheran Church was the last to withdraw. It seemed a week since the widow and I had attended services there.

  It was farther east than I’d been in years; long enough anyway to see the changes that had taken place while I was doing the same thing I’d been doing since I left cowpunching; and there’d be no going back to that even if I’d cared to. The big ranches that seemed they’d go on raising cattle for a hundred years were cut up into dirt farms. The straight Western Union posts had been replaced by rune-shaped telephone poles, the wires that had carried news of Lee’s surrender, Custer’s massacre, and the Oklahoma land rush now borrowing a ride below sundry jabber. A plume of dust caught my eye—were any stagecoaches still running?—but it turned out to be chasing a steam thresher across a plowed field. A freight wagon stopped at a crossing, its bed piled with gas pipes intended for some town prosperous enough to turn up its nose at coal-oil lamps. Most of the horseflesh we’d seen since leaving Helena was hitched to buggies and buckboards. In a few years a man sitting a saddle would be a sight worth noting. Someone had told me there was an Oldsmobile dealership in St. Louis. The West had gone and gotten itself young while I was busy getting old.

  It was well past dark when we rolled into Minneapolis, and it had changed most of all. On my last trip I could have drunk a whiskey in all its saloons—they called them beergardens there—and still walked a straight line. Now I couldn’t visit half of them dead sober without wearing my heels all the way to my ankles; and they weren’t the most plentiful establishments in the city. Long after Creede and Cheyenne had rolled up their awnings, the windows of the German village I remembered were as lit up as Saturday night in Barbary, with loiterers in straw boaters smoking on every corner.

  There was no sign of a brass band; one benefit of not keeping Prosecutor Callaway apprised of last night’s stopover.

  A pudgy kid in a uniform with the tunic buttoned wrong stepped onto the platform as the train whooshed to a stop and I knew on the instant he was there for me. There was no conductor to set up the step-stool, so I hopped down from the coach, startling the messenger.

  “I’m Murdock,” I said. “Is that for me?”

  He looked down at the yellow envelope in his hand as if I’d just conjured it up. Then he nodded and raised it. I took it and slipped a nickel into the same palm. He touched the visor of his cap with the fist he’d closed around it and got out of my life.

  REMAINS YOUR CONDUCTOR FOUND MISSOURI RIVER STOP WIRE ME BISMARCK FOR DETAILS

  HOSEA JOHNSTON

  DEPUTY US MARSHAL

  I was dithering over whether to share the news with Mrs. Blackthorne until I knew more when she made the decision for me, addressing me from the door of the coach. I reached up the telegram. She read it at arm’s length.

  “That settles it, then,” she said. “Howard Rossleigh killed the man.”

  “I can’t say yes or no until I get the rest; but the simplest answer is usually the right one.”

  She consulted the tiny gold watch pinned to the lapel of her traveling suit. “I am meeting Lawyer Morton tomorrow in St. Paul. In order for me to prepare for whatever he has to discuss, it would be a significant relief if I were to spend one night away from this train. It is not one of your responsibilities, but do you suppose you could arrange accommodations?”

  I asked the station agent to recommend a hotel.

  He glanced up over the tops of his hornrims. “The Railway Arms is just a five-minute walk.”

  “Now recommend one with hot water and no ticks.”

  “Mandan’s the best in town.” A pair of mud-colored eyes evaluated my duck coat with its colony of cinder burns. “It ain’t cheap.”

  I put my forearms on his counter and leaned in close. “I’m Jay Gould’s bodyguard. Don’t let it get around.”

  I got directions, and stopped at a post office on the way to wire Deputy Johnston, directing him to respond at that office. I didn’t know the name; but he would be assigned to whatever federal court claimed jurisdiction over the Dakotas.

  The Mandan Hotel, a pile of sandstone guarded by noble savages carved across the lintel, opened to me at the service of a red-whiskered Irishman dressed in a bone vest, breechclout, fringed leggings, and four turkey feathers stuck stiff as pickets in a gaudy headband. His feet were broad and flat in machine-made moccasins and he had to wrestle a feathered lance into his other hand in order to open the brassbound door. Inside, terra-cotta tiles with thunderbirds and other totemlike symbols embossed on them stretched for a quarter acre. I waited half a beat for a second brave to escort me to the desk before I realized it was carved from cedar and holding a fistful of unsmokeable cigars.

  All this was, I supposed, intended as a kind of post-apology to the Mandan tribe of Minnesota and the Dakotas, an entire Indian nation wiped out by a smallpox epidemic borne by white visitors. Imperfect prints of George Catlin’s paintings of early Indians decorated the walls of the foyer in redwood frames carved into primitive designs the actual primitives wouldn’t have recognized. The foyer swarmed with Indians, except for the guests lounging in the club chairs.

  The clerk behind the desk gave my clothes the same evil eye I’d gotten from the station agent. When he craned his neck to see I wasn’t carrying a bag, the waxed points of his wiry moustache twitched. I was all out of drollery, so before he could summon Geronimo from outside the door to show me out at lance point I palmed my star and told him I wanted to book two adjoining rooms in the name of Beatrice Blackthorne.

  The Judge’s name had legs enough to reach that far across the continent. The clerk retracted his moustache-tips, spun a ledger the size of a family Bible around on its swivel, dipped a horsehair pen in a pot of ink, and handed it to me with all the ceremony of a tanktown mayor presenting President Arthur with the keys to the city.

  I signed for both of us and accepted two keys with copper tags embossed with numbers. “Suites four-twelve and four-fourteen, sir. I trust they meet with your approval.”

  I told him it was Mrs. Blackthorne’s approval he had to be concerned about, and left to fetch her.

  Nearing the train station, I heard a steam whistle. A small locomotive was slowing from the west. Hearst’s Javelin had caught up with us once again. I wondered if Pamela Green and Howard Rossleigh had stepped down from their stolen mounts to board it or if they’d ridden on ahead and waited for it to whisk them away from another encounter; and if they intended this one to be more final than the last.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Unholy Alliance wasn’t likely to attempt anything in as public a place as the Minneap
olis train station, but just to be safe I made sure Mrs. Blackthorne was secure (she looked up from the valise she was packing with a quizzical expression; I shrugged unfeigned ignorance), then searched the train from end to end; not overlooking the Judge’s coffin.

  Using a pinch bar the late conductor had kept probably to inspect suspicious crates of cargo, I pried off the lid, wondering what the Penalty was for disturbing the dead. If it was chains, I was in for a fortune in scrap iron.

  It was no stowaway tucked away in the satin lining. The Benedictine Brothers hadn’t skimped on embalming agent, but the man in the box had sunken in on himself in places, most noticeably the mouth, the lips pleated in the absence of teeth. If anything he looked even more Satanic than he had in life.

  “Beg pardon, Your Honor.” I replaced the lid and tapped the nails back into their holes with the blunt end of the bar. Then I retired to the dining car to spread out the flimsy pages I’d brought back with me.

  Evidently the latest Panic hadn’t reached North Dakota. I’d stopped again at the post office on my way back, not really expecting a reply yet from Hosea Johnston, but he must have had something prepared, and whoever he answered to was no skinflint: I found a wire four pages long waiting for me at the telegraph desk, written in a code different from the one Judge Blackthorne had invented, but similar enough in approach for me to work it out at the table with the help of my Bible, memorandum book, and stump of pencil while the widow was packing for her overnight stay.

  The marshals’ service wasn’t any more devout than the Department of War, but the King James Bible was more easily obtainable than even Ben Hur, and the numbered chapters and passages remained constant throughout every edition. Notwithstanding the quaintness of the language, the Word, rearranged of course, expressed itself clearly in every state and territory of the Union, if you knew the key.

  In sum, the message informed me that our conductor, one Christopher Stedman, had been found bobbing in a backwater of the Missouri by a fisherman, and had been identified by the rags of his uniform and what the water had left of an employee card in his wallet. Fish and bloat had gotten to him, making him unrecognizable to even a close relative, but his build matched the description that had been sent out by the railroad. The cause of death was undetermined (and likely would remain so, given what the coroner had to work with). I was satisfied that he’d been stabbed; strangling doesn’t spill blood, and even if I’d missed hearing a gunshot, that method was risky. Anyone who managed to commit murder aboard a train carrying a deputy United States marshal and carry away his victim’s corpse without anyone the wiser wasn’t the careless sort.