Wild Justice Page 13

  I returned to the sleeper, where my fellow passenger was bent over a lower berth, buckling the straps on a portmanteau. I told her the latest, including the arrival of The Javelin.

  She addressed the last part first. “Do you think Rossleigh and Green are aboard?”

  “They had enough of a head start after the livery to have beaten us here on horseback if they rode hard. My guess is they lay low and signaled the Hearst train to pick them up, then turned loose the horses.”

  “In which case we passed them on our way here.”

  “Even if we thought that was what they had in mind, we couldn’t be looking out the windows all the time, and anyway a train is an easy thing to hide from. One way or the other, they’re close.”

  “Should we recruit the local authorities?”

  “They’ve been too smart so far to try anything in as busy a place as this. I could be wrong, but if we clutter up the landscape with badges, they’ll go back underground. I don’t know about you, ma’am, but I’ve grown weary of waiting while they make all the decisions.”

  She slid her bag to the side and sat on the edge of the berth, her hands folded in her lap. From the side she’d look like a picture of a painting I’d seen of the artist’s mother, only a good deal less placid. “Mr. Murdock, I suspect you are hatching a plan.”

  “Sitting on it for now. I’ll tell you more when the shell cracks. Thanks to Johnston’s telegram, we know now what we only suspected before, that our conductor is dead and that Rossleigh and Green aren’t shy about using as much force as they need to get the job done.”

  “That is hardly progress, as we were in little doubt of the facts. I would breathe easier if we had some inkling as to what the job is.”

  I retrieved my own valise, as tarnished and travel-worn as I was, from the upper bunk where I kept it, and set it on the floor. I’d been living out of it since Montana; unpacking and repacking were luxuries I’d learned to live without long before I came to the court. “I’m hoping it’s me, because I’m used to that. But they threw away their best chance at our last stop, when they missed my heart by four feet. My money’s still on Rossleigh for that, but he had plenty of time to aim. What either of them hopes to gain from a game of cat-and-mouse has me up a tree.”

  “Perhaps it is I they hope to rattle.”

  “In which case, Mrs. Blackthorne, they don’t know you from the man in the moon.”

  “I have always fancied it is a woman,” she said. “Always faithful, but impossible to predict as to where and when she will choose to appear.”

  * * *

  A bellman—refreshingly dressed in ordinary brass buttons and dog-dish cap, no feathers—materialized in the terra-cotta lobby to take our bags, but I waved him off and climbed the broad carpeted stairs beside my companion, carrying my valise and her portmanteau.

  Chesterfield lamps set gold threads twinkling in the runner on the fourth-floor hallway. I had both keys; I unlocked 412 first.

  “I’m registered in four-fourteen,” she said.

  “I haven’t forgotten to open the lady’s door first. We’re switching rooms.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  More and more I knew why the Judge had chosen her for his partner. Few things needed explaining to her.

  There wasn’t a copper’s worth of difference between the two rooms. Each had a Brussels rug, one green, the other burgundy, a four-poster heaped with quilts, pillows, and bolsters and requiring a walnut sort of mounting-block to climb onto, marble washstand, chiffonier, writing desk, swags of velvet on the windows, and prints in frames, one set of Washington crossing the Delaware, studying a map at Valley Forge, saying farewell to his troops, and taking the oath of office, another of Grecian women bathing in chaste gowns. The Indian motif didn’t extend to the upper floors. Someone had probably decided the guests would sleep better if they weren’t surrounded by tomahawks.

  I handed her key to her, placed her bag on her bed, and left, pausing in the hallway to hear the latch sliding into the jamb. In 414 I threw my valise onto the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed and extracted the flask of Old Gideon I traveled with. I paused in the midst of drawing the cork, then rammed it home and put it back between my folded shirts. Whether Rossleigh and Green fell for the most transparent ruse in the world, or anticipated it and made their assault on the room Mrs. Blackthorne was actually sleeping in, I was better off leaving the fruit of the grain alone.

  I opened the connecting door on my side the better to hear what was going on in the adjoining room, took off my hat, and opened the Good Book to a random page:

  I will meet them as a bear that is bereaved of her whelps, and will rend the caul of their heart, and there I will devour them like a lion; the wild beast shall tear them.

  It wasn’t a passage I’d have chosen to retire on, and it led to things I wouldn’t have chosen to dream. And it was from the book of Hosea.

  I slapped the book shut. There was nothing in it that would guide me out of this limbo. A hunch took me. I’d learned the hard way never to dismiss one. They didn’t always turn out, but when they didn’t there was no harm in following them, and nothing but when they did and I failed.

  For the first time in my life I found a use for all the frippery the better hotels supplied to justify their confiscatory rates. The bolster stood in for a human torso, the various sizes of cushions and pillows for the head and limbs. With the counterpane pulled up over the approximation I achieved, anyone entering the room on the prod would have taken it for a sleeping figure. The trick was as old as Plymouth Rock, and just as sturdy. I turned down the lamp on the nightstand just enough to simulate repose and provide illumination for the opposite, pulled a Second Empire chair over to the door connecting to 412, and sat, tipping it back far enough to rest against the wall, but too far to avoid falling on my back if I didn’t stay alert enough to maintain balance, with the Deane-Adams resting in my hand across my lap. That was the theory, anyway. A body at rest finds a way to stay at rest against most odds, but the wakeful mind can take only so many precautions against its enemy, fatigue.

  If Rossleigh and Green fell for the second-oldest trick since the Pilgrims landed, expecting to take Mrs. Blackthorne in the bed that had been assigned to her by the Mandan Hotel, I was in the best position to bring this drama to an end. All I had to do was stay awake.

  Nothing new in that. I’d stayed vertical as long as I had by years of training, stringing out sleep two hours one night, six the next, and so on, until I could squeeze eight hours’ rest into fifteen minutes with my eyes closed. But that’s a young man’s game, and without thinking about it, the absence of the Judge had eroded my inner senses to the work of his Court.

  The nearly constant movement since Helena had worn away at my attempts at sleep. The sudden stop on solid earth must have its effect. I lost touch with the world minutes after I sat; and dreamt, of things past and done and beyond reversing.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  In the fall of 1881, Harlan A. Blackthorne’s bailiff was a frail ghost of a man named Platter, whose thick, black-rimmed spectacles were the only things that kept his face from blending into a whitewashed wall. He expired of a disease of the blood eighteen months after taking the post, but in that time he killed a shackled prisoner making a break for a window on the way into the courtroom and crippled another as he charged the bench intending to strangle the Judge with his chains; that one climbed the steps of the scaffold on crutches. Platter was as fast and accurate with either of his .36 Navy Colts as he was quiet in his speech. I had to rise from my chair outside court in order to hear what he was saying.

  “His Honor won’t be calling you today, Deputy.”

  I glanced at the Regulator clock clonking on the wall opposite. “He’s adjourning early?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He collapsed during proceedings and has been taken to his home.”

  The Blackthornes’ houseman, a former Deer Lodge Penitentiary trustee who called himself William Red Lion, met
me at the door.

  “Doctor’s with him.” He closed it in my face.

  I went from there to Chicago Joe’s, which dispensed all the latest local news along with liquor, cards, and women. The gents who bucked the tiger at the faro table knew everything worth knowing except how to satisfy their landlords. For the price of a beer I found out the Judge had been unconscious for an undetermined amount of time before the prosecutor appealed for a ruling on procedure and failed to get the usual lightning-quick answer. The case was rape and murder, and I’d been summoned to testify as one of the arresting officers. I’d been left outside to go over my testimony while Platter and a teamster who’d offered his services from the gallery carried the Judge out the back. Since it was unprecedented for a jurist in that bailiwick to exit the room without a formal adjournment, the opposing lawyers had spent twenty minutes discussing the legality of dismissing the principals without consent from the bench, and if so, which of them should be the one to do it. Platter took the responsibility upon his return. The last I heard, that irregularity was still making its way through the appeals process.

  “My blasted heart,” Blackthorne told me when he was permitted to entertain visitors. “It isn’t enough that I’m attacked in the Congress and assaulted by the defendants it’s my duty to try; now one of my own organs has decided to throw in with them.”

  It was the first time I’d been in his bedroom. He shared a sitting room with his wife, but this place was exclusively his. I wasn’t surprised to see that the gimcrack that existed throughout the rest of the house was entirely absent. His bed was large but plain, with a tall oak headboard curved like a tombstone, and shared the modest space with a dry-sink, a chest of drawers, a maple wardrobe, and a nightstand holding up a coal-oil lamp, his teeth in a glass of what looked like water but might as easily have been grain alcohol, and a copy of the territorial penal code the size of a paving block; even his bedtime reading tied into the demands of his office. In the weak light filtered through gauze curtains, his face was nearly as pale as the oversize pillow Mrs. Blackthorne had provided for him to sit up against, and his eyes behind the pince-nez seemed twice their normal size, but his hair and pointed whiskers were as chimney-broom black as ever, and the hands resting on the pile of court papers in his lap were brawny and corded. He wore his old purple dressing-gown and a plain nightshirt with the same solid dignity of his judicial robes.

  I drew a straight chair next to the bed and smiled sympathy. “Your heart’s not the only culprit. I talked to your doctor. Seventy hours a week working without a break makes you an accomplice, along with that high-toned tanglefoot you drink by the case.”

  “That charlatan. The only thing duller than his wit is his needles. The Hippocratic oath means as much to him as the one you swore when I made the mistake of recommending you to Dockerty.”

  U.S. Marshal Argus Dockerty had been in office when I joined the court. Only the marshal, a presidential appointee, had the authority to hire deputies; but even that early in his tenure, Blackthorne had usurped the privilege. He handpicked the men who rode for him, forcing them upon the tin-star politicians who came and went with each administration. That high-handed action came up every time Washington debated a budget for the western territories; one of the reasons he got away with such things was the list of grievances was so long it would take more than an entire session of Congress to discuss it in detail.

  “I keep my oath when it doesn’t get in the way of the job,” I said.

  “It’s up to me to say what the job is, Deputy.”

  “If you’re having second thoughts, I’ve got a standing offer from Chicago Joe to throw drunks out of her place. The pay’s the same, but the hours are fixed, and when they aim at me they’re too far gone to hit anything important.”

  “Twenty a month and all the Old Pepper you can drink. I can see you settling into that.” He almost sneered; but he’d have needed his teeth for that.

  “You’re forgetting the hostesses.”

  Worldly though he was, the old man had a Puritan streak that prevented him from pursuing that line of conversation. His expression struggled between rebuke and retreat before a spasm of some kind settled the point.

  “I’m told I’ll be six months recovering,” he said. “That’s time sufficient for this territory to revert to its savage origins. I will be back in harness significantly sooner, even if it means convening court in this room.”

  “You’ll need to tear out two walls to accommodate the spectators. There aren’t seats enough downtown as it is.”

  I didn’t intend flattery, but he appeared placated. His was the biggest show in the territory, and he took pride in the fact. When a capital case was under examination, there wasn’t a vacancy to be found that side of Butte.

  “How is Chet Arthur’s fair-haired boy getting along?”

  The president had appointed a surrogate to fill the hole in the judiciary. Dennis Kennedy had graduated Harvard twenty-second out of a class of twenty-five and had spent most of his time after clearing the bar running errands for a justice of the Supreme Court, including lining up escorts for celebrations of State; the Washington Press Corps referred to him as “the U.S. Procurer General.”

  I hesitated before answering. The last thing I needed on my conscience was another seizure. On the other hand, I’d never withheld official information from the Judge.

  “The jury hung this morning on Ballinger.”

  He’d pled cases before assuming the bench, so his poker expression remained in place. Only someone who’d been in close contact on many occasions would notice the nerve jumping in his left cheek.

  Lug Ballinger was the man Blackthorne had been trying at the time of his attack. When it came to molesting women, arson for profit, digging up corpses for the gold in their teeth, and selling alcohol unfit for human consumption to Indians, he’d been in and out of federal custody more times than the courthouse rat. This time I’d arrested him on the evidence of the widow of the copper miner he’d decapitated with the victim’s own shovel, then taken the woman by force. Her testimony on the stand had been emotional but courageous, and its effect on the jury visible.

  When at last he spoke, Blackthorne’s tone was calm. “You gave evidence?”

  “In pieces. Kennedy sustained the defense’s objections more times during my spell than you did all this year.”

  “I hope you’re exaggerating. Uninterrupted, the Honorable Lucius Venable could turn back Great Falls with his Latin.”

  “I heard it came to twenty pages in the transcript. Seemed like more.”

  “What about the instructions?”

  I was silent another moment, then drew the folded front page of the Daily Herald from my pocket and passed it across the counterpane. He snapped it open, found a foothold for his spectacles, and read the dense column in which Kennedy’s charges to the jury were quoted in full.

  When all the evidence had been given and the opposing counsels have delivered their summations, it was the jurist’s responsibility to explain the various degrees of the felonies involved, repeat admonitions to ignore portions of testimony that had been stricken from the record, and provide a translation of legal argot into plain English. I’d sat through Kennedy’s instructions, and it hadn’t taken training in law to recognize the confusion on the faces of the jurors. If I’d been seated on that panel, knowing everything I knew about the case, I’d have been at a loss whether to convict or acquit based on that advice.

  Blackthorne read to the end of the column without tipping his hand. Then he sat back, closing his eyes. A pattern of tiny blue veins showed on his lids. I’d never seen them before. They looked as thin and fragile as moth’s wings. “You’re dismissed, Deputy. I’ll rest now.”

  I got up and let myself out. I had the door almost closed behind me when I heard the harsh brittle noise of newsprint being crumpled into a ball; and I knew it wouldn’t be half a year before the Judge returned to his responsibilities.

  During Dennis Kenned
y’s tenure, the U.S. federal court with jurisdiction over the territory of Montana ran up a record nine hung juries, costing taxpayers three hundred thousand dollars in retrial fees and freeing three previously convicted felons when the prosecution elected not to press its case a second time. Blackthorne set his own record when he picked up the gavel again after less than six weeks in recovery, against his doctor’s strenuous objections. (Although he modified them when his patient promised to honor a regimen of daily exercise. The Judge bought a billiards table.) One of James A. Garfield’s first official acts as president was to appoint Kennedy to a cabinet position.

  * * *

  I heard a floorboard shift, and leapt fifteen years and a thousand miles to a hotel room in Minneapolis in less than a second. By the time someone tapped on the connecting door I was on my feet, the chair I’d been sitting on spun to the side, and the Deane-Adams gripped tight in my fist.

  “Mr. Murdock?”

  In the instant it struck me she’d never called my name questioningly; and I wasn’t sure at first it was Mrs. Blackthorne. The voice was pitched low, almost but not quite a murmur, which unlike a whisper seldom travels beyond the earshot of he who was intended to hear it. If it belonged to her, both the tentative nature and the register might have been signals that someone was standing close, most likely with a weapon at hand, expecting me to open the door to her if to no one else.