Wild Justice Read online

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Minneapolis was not Karl Lundergaard’s sleepy hamlet. The first shots had awakened most of the guests on our floor, and by the time the last finished echoing, the hotel was swarming with policemen in blue serge and brass. One, a burly middle thirties with black longhorn handlebars, a stiff helmet, and a badge the size of a tea-saucer pinned to his tunic, stood at the end of the hallway near the stairway landing with one arm wrapped around the waist of a struggling figure, the other a deep-bellied revolver pointed my way. The scene looked like an illustration on the front page of The Police Gazette.

  I stopped; of course. I stretched my gun hand out to the side, let the Deane-Adams drop, and raised both hands to shoulder height.

  “I’m a federal officer,” I said.

  “We’ll come to that. And who’s this?” His accent was Midwestern, flat as a griddle and as filled with emotion.

  This was slightly built in a loose corduroy coat, plain trousers, child’s-size brogans, and shapeless hat crushed down over the ears. As it squirmed to break free of that girderlike arm, the coat fell open, exposing a red stain on the pale blue fabric underneath, an inch above the waistline, spreading and changing shape in pace with the slowing of her resistance.

  It was a her. A sudden spasm jerked her head hard against the officer’s chest, knocking the hat askew and releasing a fall of hair, haloed red in the light of the Chesterfield lamp overhead. Her foot kicked the derringer lying on the carpet runner into a spin. The grips gleamed bone-white.

  I said, “She says her name’s Pamela Green, but she goes by Betsy Pike, a name you might have read in the papers. You’ll see it on the obituary page if you don’t get her to a doctor quick.”

  His gaze flickered down, then back up. For an instant there was confusion in it. Then a squad of men dressed as he boiled up from the stairwell, fisting revolvers and sticks, and he bundled the woman into the arms of the one closest. “Get her into the wagon. St. John’s.” To a dumbfounded face: “The hospital, man!”

  He returned his attention to me, his hogleg trained on my sternum.

  “Do not shoot!”

  I didn’t turn to see who was speaking. I knew the voice, its tone steady even in the wake of what she’d just been through.

  “Beatrice Blackthorne, Officer. My husband was Judge Harlan A. Blackthorne; you may perhaps have heard of him. This man is Page Murdock, a deputy United States Marshal assigned to his court. I am under his protection.”

  I took advantage of his hesitation, lowering one hand to fish the star from my pocket between two fingers. It was half the size of the shield he wore, but he must have seen one in the past. He lowered his weapon and seated the hammer.

  * * *

  St. John’s was a Catholic hospital. The nurses wore the black-and-white livery of the Church, moving along the whitewashed corridors in swift silence, the hems of their skirts gliding across the scoured floorboards as if they had bicycles hidden underneath. Novices, dressed less severely, carried brimming bedpans—the ammonia stench lingered moments after they passed—and pushed buckets and mops on carts, the rubber wheels squeaking. Under it all was a constant powerful throbbing of mysterious source. If I closed my eyes I might still be aboard the train.

  In a waiting room down the hall from where a team operated on Pamela Green, I talked. My audience was the big policeman—a sergeant named McGraw—a party in street clothes with a bitter-lemon face who introduced himself as Lieutenant Pohl, then went silent for most of the interview, and a female stenographer in plain gray wool, a chignon the size of a sombrero, and the first monocle I’d ever seen worn by a woman. The black ribbon attached to her lapel swayed in rhythm with the gravity pen racing across the writing-block in her lap. Mrs. Blackthorne had been excused from the session to dress in room 414 of the Mandan with a police guard outside the door and patrols circling the building at street level. Another detail had been assigned to keep reporters away from the waiting room. Within minutes of the shooting, the Blackthorne funeral party was as well-known as a visit from the president.

  “You’ve said nothing about why the Green woman and this Rossleigh want your hide,” McGraw said when I stopped talking to drink water from a plain glass. We were all seated on the kind of hard wooden bench such establishments provide to add physical agony to the ordeal of visiting the sick.

  “You’ll have to ask Miss Green, if she makes it. I’m not even sure it’s my hide they’re after. The kind of enemies the Judge made might have carried their grudge to his widow. Is there any news on Rossleigh?”

  “The building across the street belongs to a land office, which closes at six. Someone broke the lock on a back door and our boys found a window open on the fourth floor, almost directly across from the busted one in the room you, um, shared with Mrs. Blackthorne.”

  He stopped long enough for me to provide an explanation. I watched him without blinking.

  He moved on without a lick of embarrassment. “They smelt burnt powder. He had enough time to clear out after the shooting. We’ll get him, if the description you gave is any good.”

  “If he hasn’t shaved off that beard, he’s not as smart as I think he is.”

  “Our men know about such things as ears and noses and eye color,” Pohl put in. His speech was thick with gutturals. “A razor is no defense against our methods. We keep the peace with our eyes and our brains, not our trigger fingers.”

  I looked at McGraw. “Whose brother-in-law is he?”

  The handlebars spread. “Uncle, actually. Married to the deputy chief’s aunt.”

  “You’re insubordinate!”

  “Stating a fact. Sir.”

  Pohl stuck a long skinny finger at the stenographer. “Strike all that!”

  She drew several lines and waited for more.

  I said, “How long has she been in there?”

  The sergeant undid a brass button with a practiced flip and extracted a steel watch from his tunic. “Close on two hours. If I had to guess, I’d say the heavy door took some of the edge off—”

  The lieutenant, who was sitting opposite the door to the operating room, stirred. We stood to face a tall, stoop-shouldered man of fifty or so wearing an apron that reached to his knees. “Which one of you is Murdock?”

  I said I was. He removed a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles with fogged lenses, skewering me with intense blue eyes. “She asked for you. I was told it was you—”

  I said it was. He shook his head. “You made a thorough job of it. We extracted the bullet, but we got the bleeding stopped too late. Pointless to move her to the recovery room. She hasn’t much time.”

  “We’re going in too,” said the lieutenant.

  “You are not.”

  He glared at the doctor. “This is a local—”

  McGraw touched his arm. “Not much time, the man said.”

  The sour face darkened. He thumped my chest with one of his talons. “You’ll report what’s said. To us only.”

  “You, the Widow Blackthorne, and Grover Cleveland.”

  The doctor held the door for me. I went through alone.

  * * *

  The room was bright with light from electric bulbs. That explained the vibration in the walls. It came by way of a combustion generator chugging away in the basement. The atmosphere was oppressively hot, and the smell of alcohol and carbolic made my head swim. Beneath it prowled something more earthen: unpleasant, familiar, impossible to ignore. The patient lay on a leather-upholstered table under a thin sheet. Her face was bleached of all color and she looked as small as a child. Her chest rose and fell in uneven fits. Her breath whistled. I hadn’t seen her hair down before; it looked darker in that merciless glare, and clung wetly to her forehead and bare shoulders. A straw hamper on the floor next to the bed was heaped with bloodstained gauze; that was where the baser odor was coming from. A wheeled cart bore matching stains on the snowy linen cloth that covered it, from the disarranged instruments deposited there, shining steel slick with crimson
.

  I’d seen far worse, under moldy canvas in muck-covered battlefields where sluicing down a pine table with a bucket of water was as sterile as things got, with wounded men lying outside on stretchers beside corpses, amputated arms and legs stacked in cords awaiting burial, and everywhere the stench of sweat, offal, and vomit; but that had been many years ago, and if anything age had made me more sensitive to the consequences of keeping the peace; ludicrous phrase that it was. I’d violated it as much as anyone had that night.

  When I came in she was staring at the ceiling. Now her eyes moved my way. I could almost hear them scraping in their sockets. Dark purple indentations showed beneath them. It stirred something disturbing; a memory I couldn’t quite retrieve.

  She spoke barely above a whisper. I had to bend down and place my ear almost to her lips.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  It came out a word at a time, at a dollar apiece based on the amount of effort that went into the process.

  I thought for a moment she didn’t recognize me. “You’re Pamela Green; Betsy Pike to your readers. You told me, remember?”

  “And you believed it.”

  “I couldn’t come up with a reason not to.”

  “Fool!” The heat of her breath gusted in my ear. “I’m neither. My mother gave me her name. She had no other to give. My name is Pamela Bower. I’m Colleen Bower’s daughter.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  A hand stroked my cheek; the fingers were too soft to have dealt so many cards from the wrong side of the deck.

  “I hope it doesn’t scar,” Colleen said in her purring contralto. “You’re mean-looking enough without that.”

  “If that’s an apology, keep it to yourself. You weren’t so worried when you tried to put a hole in me.”

  Colleen Bower—Mrs. Colleen Bower, not that I ever had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Bower, if he’d existed—levered herself up onto her elbow, letting the rose-colored sheet fall to her breasts. In Breen, Montana Territory, in 1879—a boomtown, with no shortage of good-looking women working in their own ways to make a strike, they were as firm as any around.

  Whenever she studied something as closely as she did my face, the gold specks in her eyes spun like snowflakes. “I didn’t know who or what you were then. All I knew was I came back to my room to find a strange man in it, searching through my things.”

  “Would it have made any difference?”

  “I doubt it. But that early in our acquaintance, if the bullet had flown true, I wouldn’t have felt as bad as I would now.”

  “That’s not the same as saying you wouldn’t try to backshoot me again.”

  She’d buried at least one husband by that time, and would again: In ’84 or ’85, Harper’s Weekly published a cover piece on her under the title “The Widow Never Weeps,” saddling her with five tragic marriages and strongly implying that she’d had a direct hand in two of them and had brought the rest about through guile. She sued the publication for libel and won a large award; but the forbidden tree had borne fruit. Half a dozen “Lady Bluebeard” pamphlets sprouted within months from presses in the East. She couldn’t afford to take them all to court. My favorite was wrapped in red-and-yellow paper with an illustration of a woman in a black corset on the front, confiscated from a prisoner awaiting trial in the Helena jail. The woman’s hourglass figure resembled the mark on the abdomen of a black widow spider.

  “You rugged bulls make too much of backshooting,” Colleen said. “If I made a practice of meeting my armed enemies face-to-face on the street, like they do in sensational novels, I’d have been looking at the earth from the other side years ago.”

  “How many years?”

  “A gentleman doesn’t ask such things of a lady.”

  “Those two strangers aside, how long have you been tinhorning?”

  “How long have you been marshaling?”

  “Not long enough to know better than to turn my back to an open door. I should thank you for the lesson.”

  When she smiled, she paid tribute to the latest dental science in the East. Her hand crept round behind my neck. “I have so much more to teach.”

  She did, too. I was still learning, and she’d been in the ground for months.

  * * *

  A lot of towns had come and gone since that one. All that was left of Breen was a scatter of grown-over stones and a human bone or two, dug up by coyotes; but while it lasted, it was as hide-side out a place as any man ever saw back when cattle paid better than silver. The town had colluded with the Judge to back me into a corner, taking over as city marshal in the absence by death of my predecessor. I’d tamed it, more or less, but time had done the job more thoroughly, and all the blood that had spilled was like water drained away through fissures in the clay. Colleen had thrived on the sulfurous blend of brothels, black powder, and bad men; it had drawn me in the course of my work; and so our circles had overlapped again and again. But she was as dead as Breen. And so would her daughter be soon.

  If it was her daughter. One thing they had in common was a knack for polishing a lie until it glittered like gold.

  I straightened to get a better look at the woman dying on the operating table. Her forehead was high and white, her build slight but gently formed, and I’d seen the curve of one of her calves, slim and firm. Now that I thought of it, when she’d had full use of her voice its low musical scale had vexed me, like an idea that kept slipping out of reach.

  “Her eyes were blue.”

  Pamela met my gaze. When she spoke, her breathing was almost normal.

  “Yours aren’t.”

  THIRTY

  The tea room on the ground floor of the Mandan Hotel was decorated in shades of mauve and dusty pink, with cabbage roses the size of acorn squashes on the wallpaper and a massive chandelier dripping with glass pendants. A waitress dressed like Anne Boleyn refreshed our cups from a pot on our table and drifted on to do some other work of charity. At that early hour, Beatrice Blackthorne and I shared the place with two other guests, a pair of matrons in feathers and jet chatting over their cakes.

  I doctored my cup from the flask of Old Gideon. My companion touched hers with a gloved finger as I was replacing the cork. I poured a few drops into her tea.

  She was dressed younger than her years, but not to the point of self-flattery. Black, of course, made of some non-reflective fabric, with a placket concealing the buttons and a hat made of the same material suggesting the prow of a ship, the brim curled up on one side and fastened with a black satin bow. It rested at a slight angle in her upswept hair. Her face, nearly seamless, showed nothing of last night’s ordeal.

  Mine was another matter. Everything through the small hours of this morning had revealed itself in the mirror as I was making myself presentable in 412. The room itself, cleared of debris, the shattered door panel replaced with a piece of temporary birch and the window reglazed, had recovered almost beyond noting.

  “She grew up without a father, and so she blamed you.”

  “She says,” I replied, “said. I don’t know if I heard her right the whole time. By the end she couldn’t manage so much as a whisper. She said Colleen told her on her own deathbed. That seems to be the place of choice for confessions.”

  “And the Bower woman never told you.”

  “It might not have mattered if she had. My kind of work doesn’t lend itself to paternal responsibility.” My voice sounded bitter even to me. I helped myself to a dram. It boiled on the way down.

  “I am certain you believe that. To tell Pamela would only have deepened her resolve. Her mother has been gone a short while only. When she joined the press train assigned to Harlan’s journey—from what you said, she had advantages in the area of manipulation—she was consumed with vengeance. That was why Howard Rossleigh purposely missed shooting you in the stable. She wanted you to herself—after you’d suffered sufficiently, not knowing which of us was the intended victim. She might in time have tempered her hatred with mercy, as h
er mother did.”

  “Mercy isn’t a word I’d associate with Colleen Bower.”

  “We are all capable of it, even the worst of us. She spared you the last time you were together. A daughter has a right to know where she came from, but to burden the father after so many years would be to cause unnecessary regret. Whatever she was in life, she was gallant at the close.” She tasted from her cup, expressed her opinion of the adulterated brew by pushing it and the saucer away. “In Pamela’s case, there would be the added resentment that you never offered her mother your support.”

  “Colleen supported herself on the backs of nearly every man she ever met. I was the exception.”

  “And that told you nothing?”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Very well. How did Pamela manage to recruit Rossleigh?”

  “I didn’t get the chance to ask.” I had seen the moment when questions became useless. It hadn’t been the first time a life had drained away before me—it always showed in the eyes, like a cloud erasing the sun—but I knew this one would stay with me to the end. “She was her mother’s daughter, and Rossleigh is only a man.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “I told them she was too far gone when I got there.”

  “Was that wise?”

  “Not if it would help them find Rossleigh, but I don’t see that it would. This way they’ll divide their investigation between my possible enemies and yours. If they find out I’m the one Pamela wanted to kill, they’ll hang their entire department around my neck everywhere I go. I can’t do my job pulling a chain behind me.”

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s the reason you didn’t tell them.”

  I let that run loose and drank. She was right about the combination. I blamed the tea.