Wild Justice Read online

  “Dear Page,” it began, and my heart sank. He’d addressed me by my Christian name only when he had some particularly unpleasant duty in mind. It had invariably come with my life in more danger than usual.

  Since you’re reading this [he wrote], I’m dead, and you, in defiance of all the odds have survived me. Congratulations.

  Beatrice—who doubtless will bury us all—will have broken the glad news that you are to join us on the pilgrimage to the place of my eternal rest.

  I employ the phrase “glad news” without irony. Throughout the long term of our professional relationship, fate has demonstrated that every assignment you have undertaken on behalf of myself and the people whom I serve has provided a welcome distraction from your monotonous existence as a friend of the court. I have no reason to believe that this latest will disappoint.

  I leave you, the boldest of all my knights, with this one last adventure. Savor it, as it’s unlikely any others will come along to compare.

  Yours most sincerely,

  The Honorable Harlan Amsdill Blackthorne

  Knights; he put it in writing, and on the threshold before coming face-to-face with the Great Imponderable, in one fell swoop paying me one of his damned satirical compliments and crowning himself King Arthur.

  What did I tell you? A first-class son of a bitch.

  THREE

  The visitation at Benedictine’s was private, reserved for friends and close associates. The following morning the Judge was removed to the courthouse—whose bricks he’d practically laid single-handed—where he reposed in state throughout the day while hundreds of mourners passed, pausing briefly to look at the small man in the plain box, then were chivvied along to make room for the others, the way they said the Beefeaters prodded tourists past the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.

  Some came to gaze one last time upon the features that had for so long represented the face of justice in Montana, others to see them for the first time. Men in frock coats and faded flannel, ruffles and overalls, hand-lasted boots and Montgomery Ward’s brogans peeling at the toes, women carrying babies, whole families. (Ma and Pa grabbing Junior by the arm and thrusting him up to the bier: “Remember, boy! The Great Man himself! There’ll never be another like him. Hanged little boys who didn’t clean their plates and wouldn’t go to bed when they were told. See that broad brow, the whiskers of a philosopher. Commit every last detail to memory so’s you can tell your grandchildren what they missed. Now run on home and shovel out the barn.”) The line stretched out the door, down the street, and around the corner for a quarter-mile. The crowd was kept inside the bounds of good manners by a detachment of mounted city policemen, pound-for-pound the worst horsemen west of anywhere, but their horses were too fat and lazy to take advantage of it.

  Not everyone had come to pay homage; which was where E. Z. Gottlieb, Blackthorne’s bailiff, earned his day’s dollar. He stood five feet, five inches in his thick-soled boots, a solid fireplug of a man in starched gray twill and glistening Sam Browne belt, a proper harness bull, gripping a hickory truncheon in both fists across his waist, eyes restlessly prowling the line all the way to the street. The moment he spotted a face from his mental identity file of known “wrong-os,” or a stranger who fidgeted and kept looking around to see who was watching, Gottlieb would leave his station, approach the party, and shielding the motion from the others with his square body, ram the truncheon so deep in the man’s belly the fellow had no choice but to flee outside to avoid disgracing himself by vomiting in public. Whether he’d come just to spit on the guest of honor, or to work more sinister mischief, was all the same to the bailiff; he’d brook no breach of the ceremony’s dignity. In the six years the little troll had served the court, putting down commotions of every description, I’d never seen him draw his sidearm, or actually swing his club; in his hands it was a lance, not a bludgeon, the act performed underhand, with minimum effort to maximum effect. He could kill a man that way if he chose—or if he just miscalculated. The latter event was the more unlikely.

  All the deputy marshals—those not out on assignment—showed up to file past in their turn. They wore the homely cut-out star in a pin-on shield with its dull finish, with a thin black ribbon tied around it in a simple bow. An entrepreneurial local tailor had placed a black-bordered notice in The Herald, offering the bow, pre-tied, to sworn officers at the special discount price of a penny apiece. It didn’t cover the cost of the advertisement, but it provided an opportunity to acquaint the customer with the other goods he had in stock. Once the first of them appeared wearing this sign of respect, of course the rest had to follow suit, myself included; although I wasn’t as uncomfortable with the bit of fluff as I was with the badge itself. I hadn’t worn it since the day I was sworn in. It caught the light and made a mark to shoot at.

  Some attended who had retired from the marshals’ service. I recognized a few of the old guard—a number of them younger than I—from personal acquaintance, identified others by their posture, their gait (a kind of sailor’s roll, developed in the saddle), the way their gaze swept the room directly upon entrance, the flat weary tragedy in their eyes, like weathered tombstones erected over the remains of their ideals. I saw it every day I shaved, when I had the luxury of a looking-glass. Men old before their time; not beasts, but no longer quite human, and a long way from certain that survival was worth its price. They didn’t wear the ribbon. They had no star to wind it around, having turned it in when they resigned. I wondered whether they’d have worn it in any case.

  The ribbon was profiteering, plain and simple; but it was discreet compared to the trinkets and cartes de visite that were being hammered out, put up in windows, and hawked on the street to capitalize on the solemn proceedings. Some of the visitors fanned themselves with palm-shaped paper cutouts promoting the Benedictine Brothers Mortuary in respectable black capitals without serifs. Bruno, youngest of the clan, stood outside the door to hand them out. The day was unseasonably warm for April and the air hung heavy inside.

  So the day wore on, soporifically and in near-silence, the shuffling feet and low murmurs swallowed by the coffered ceiling, fractured at every hour and half hour by the tolling of the three-thousand-pound bell in the clock tower.

  “Barbaric.”

  I looked at Mrs. Blackthorne beside me, seated in a wicker chair to spare her the ordeal of standing to accept condolences from those who chose to approach. She’d barely breathed the word, and I couldn’t tell if she even knew she’d said it aloud. Nor could I decide if she was passing judgment on the fans and other frippery or on the entire affair. In her weeds, a heavy veil concealing her face, she made a black blot like the ones the Judge had made when he overloaded his pen before signing a death certificate or an eviction order.

  On her other side, hands folded at his waist, stood Eugene Staples, the current federal marshal. He’d been in office only six months, and I hadn’t enough experience of him yet to take his measure. He was young, had had something to do with getting out the Democratic vote in Cincinnati or somesuch place in the last election, although not enough for a plum plundering appointment like collector of the tariff, but if he resented being exiled to the back of beyond he was stoic enough not to show it. His expression seemed passive, as if he too was pondering his future now; as I said, I hadn’t the chance to study him to confirm anything based on appearances. Maybe he was wondering if the Chinese laundrywoman the Judge recommended to all his people would scorch his shirts. (She would; I took mine to an Armenian across from the library.)

  I performed my wooden-Indian act without rancor, only boredom; which contrary to what you may have read in Beadle’s Dime Library comprised most of the work in keeping the peace. I’d already had my look at the exhibit, yesterday at the mortuary and again when I’d arrived at the courthouse riding with Mrs. Blackthorne in her phaeton. He lay with a velvet cushion supporting his head, an old eagle in profile with his hair and beard combed the way he’d worn them in life—the widow had directed tha
t part of the operation personally—in his favorite mulberry-colored Prince Albert coat and gray figured waistcoat with a platinum watch chain describing a W across his spare belly, hands folded on Maine’s Ancient Law, a slim volume bound in worn supple leather. A pin of native quartz fixed his cravat to his shirt (The Independent, an opposition newspaper, would call it a “two-carat diamond,” with all that implied). His fob was the stylized square-and-calipers of the Freemasons and his belt fastened with the buckle he’d had made from the medal of valor he’d earned in Mexico; or so he’d claimed.

  At first glance the day before, it had looked like the Judge, then it hadn’t. It had taken me most of an hour to nail down what was wrong. He’d worn the tight-lipped smile I knew too well, but the Benedictine who’d shaped it had neglected to take out his teeth. He’d worn them only when court was in session, where he’d maintained the stony mien of a vengeful pagan god carved from granite. They must have been as uncomfortable to manage as a mouthful of marbles; whether they’d contributed to the severity of his decisions might have exposed the trials to review, although none of his officers, knowing the cases as well as they did, let a word of the situation reach anyone outside the service.

  This morning, I saw that his wife (it could have been no one else) had corrected that. Now he looked eerily natural, as if he might open his eyes any time and skewer me with that diabolical grimace that masqueraded as amusement. I almost wished the adjustment hadn’t been made. With the ivories pushing out the lower half of his face he’d appeared almost comical, as if he’d forgotten to swallow the canary.

  Which I’d taken as a lucky sign. If the old ogre came back to haunt anyone, it would be the undertaker.

  But even after all those years I still hadn’t plumbed him to his depth. I was, and am still, the primary target of his ghost.

  FOUR

  The locomotive was a monster, big as a bunkhouse, ten feet tall at the cab by twenty-five long from coupling to cowcatcher, black and hot and glistening with oil, inhaling and exhaling steam in a husky cadenced rhythm like a buffalo bull sleeping on its side. Ten or so years earlier I’d lived aboard a train for weeks, slicing through the heart of the most primitive region of old Mexico on a mission of assassination sanctioned by Blackthorne; but that engine, tough little nut that it was, had borne no more resemblance to this one than a baby carriage did to a beer wagon.

  The rig seemed excessive considering what it was pulling: the tender, a day coach, a dining car, a Pullman sleeper, and the caboose, which was where the Judge would be riding, his veins pumped full of embalming agent, practically a wax replica of the original. Red-white-and-blue bunting swagged the sides of the passenger cars just below the windows, with black crepe twisted cunningly around it, in case some uneducated observers might mistake it for a whistle-stop campaign vehicle for some presidential hopeful. It still struck me as gay for the journey’s purpose. I couldn’t see Beatrice Blackthorne’s hand in it. Callaway, the federal prosecutor, had made all the arrangements, including wiring ahead to every major city we’d be passing through, partly out of respect and partly as a pre-launch maneuver in his race for governor. The Judge’s funeral train was his version of a black ribbon.

  It would get worse.

  I couldn’t foresee it then, and maybe Callaway couldn’t either. Blackthorne’s command over his pet bull terrier would grow fainter with each mile that separated the one from the cadaver of the other, and the lawyer’s boldness increase from tie to tie.

  We—that is, the widow—did manage to best him on one point. When Callaway suggested that a party of married deputy marshals and their wives join us aboard, in the interest of avoiding unseemly suggestions concerning the spectacle of a bereaved matron traveling with a single officer unchaperoned, the bereaved matron cut him off, as abruptly as her late husband quelled disturbances in his courtroom.

  “I am seventy, Erasmus. I put away such things long before you came here. Did you think thirty years of name-calling, finger-pointing, calumny, and offensive caricatures in the press were borne by Harlan alone? The infernal responsibilities of his office drove him early to his grave. [I held my tongue at this point in her harangue; she and Holy Scripture differed on the subject of man’s allotted span.] If the jackals are still unsatisfied and would turn their slings and arrows upon his widow, does it not reflect more upon their characters than mine? And who are we to prevent an ass from exposing himself as an ass?”

  I’d heard the old man say something along the same lines more than once: “Never interrupt an enemy while he’s making a fatal mistake.” Callaway went pale to the roots of his burnsides and said no more on the matter. They were more words than I’d heard her express in twenty-one years. For the first time I realized the extent of the part she’d played in forging the iron fist that had pounded the law so deep into an untamed territory.

  The train was an express, the way cleared along the entire route by order of the cabinet official in charge, stopping only to take on wood and water and give the yokels along the way the chance to crane their necks at the vessel transporting the Judge’s mortal coil. No one was to board except reporters connected with journals selected by a lottery draw, and they were permitted only to observe, photograph, and sketch the plank box; Mrs. Blackthorne was not to be bothered unless she invited an interview.

  The third member of our party, not counting a superfluous conductor, was our cook. In this, my companion had acquiesced to the prosecutor’s wishes. She’d intended to use the services of Henry, a convicted bigamist and a Negro the Judge had released from the territorial prison and employed as the couple’s personal chef. But his face, disfigured by a scar from surgery to remove a tumor from his cheek, lifting a corner of his lip into a snarl, might cast a sinister shadow on the enterprise if a photographer should happen to capture it through a window. The job fell to Caspar, from the kitchen of the Last Chance Hotel. He was afflicted as well, although not in a way that was visible so long as he kept his mouth closed. As the story went, after failing the seminary back East, he’d drifted in a whiskey fog into a house of doubtful reputation in St. Louis, where to spare himself from the sin of lust he bit off his tongue.

  “Caspar’s the superior baker, so I saw no cause to object,” Beatrice confided to me. “There is an advantage to be gained by letting Erasmus think he has won.”

  I responded with a shrug. Serpentine thinking was the Blackthornes’ strong suit, not mine. At all events it hardly mattered that the hotel chef couldn’t speak, as I doubted we had much to talk about.

  The funeral service, in the evening following the display in the courthouse, had dragged on, with one luminary and near-luminary after the other grappling his way to the altar in St. Sebastian’s to stake his claim to a special acquaintance with the departed, some lively passages from Revelation—the Judge’s preferred book of the New Testament, gloomy as it was, and certainly approved by the fighting pastor, and enough “braes” and “bairns” sung by a paroled tenor to the accompaniment of the booming organ to run Robbie Burns himself out into the street to rest his ears. No bagpipes, praise God; that was one opinion the old man and I shared.

  The congregation, which had been lulled into a stupor by lyrics belonging to a language that meant as much to most of those assembled as back-country Farsi, perked up when the opening chords sounded of a song that had swept the continent from coast to coast for five years, and then that clear piping ex-convict voice sang:

  After the ball is over;

  after the break of morn,

  After the dancers’ leaving,

  After the stars are gone.

  Many a heart is aching,

  if you could read them all;

  Many the hopes that have vanished,

  After the ball.

  The tune had taken the Judge’s fancy—which rarely directed itself toward anything that smacked even slightly of novelty—the first time he’d encountered it. He’d been overheard humming the melody between witness testimonies and while studying
transcripts in his chambers, and on the occasion of their fortieth anniversary his wife had presented him with a perforated disk that played it on the music box in their parlor soon after it became available. The song, about good things ending but their sweetness lingering on like a regretful ghost, contained just the sort of romantic melancholy that appealed to a man of his character.

  Had I known how many more times I’d be forced to listen to that blasted air over the next two weeks, I’d have hunted down every publisher that issued it on music sheets and burned the building to the ground.

  The first chorus was the signal for the pallbearers to take their stations. We were all six deputy marshals, and we all knew one another, with varying degrees of liking and respect—starting at zero—but every one long in the service, the longest being myself. We stood in our frock coats and white cotton gloves while the pastor slid the cushion from behind Blackthorne’s head, laid him flat, and placed the lid on the box, separating us from him for the last time. I felt a tug—of fresh resentment. I’d drawn front right; those damn instructions again, as if I hadn’t carried the old devil on my shoulder for most of a generation. I was surprised, however, when we took hold of the strap handles and hoisted the box, at how little it weighed. He’d held down the lid on the boiling kettle of the last circle of hell for so long it should have been like carrying a thousandweight of pig iron. I was convinced then, if any such confirmation was needed, of the existence of the soul, and that it had substance, noticeably missing from its parcel on earth.

  He left the church, as he had every Sunday for three decades, but this time to the strains of a ballad still popular in New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, and San Francisco, and not under his own steam. Laverne Waters’ hearse, a fine one of black lacquer and glass panes, with drawn sere curtains, rubber tires, and the only team of matched whites this side of Pierre, was waiting out front. In early days, when the turnover in the population was less frequent, Waters had made the vehicle serve double-duty as a jitney taking passengers to and from the train station, but the city had grown to the point where he made a steady living renting it out to all the local morticians. That had deprived the citizens of the entertainment of observing newcomers’ reactions upon finding a funeral wagon ready to convey them to their lodgings; but such is progress.