Aces & Eights Read online

  “Do you think he’ll testify?”

  “Probably not. Under cross-examination he’d fold like a pair of deuces on a fifty-dollar bet. But in case I’m wrong you can hit him with his own statement about the blood money.”

  Scout sucked on his pipe in silence as though considering his partner’s advice. In reality he’d already thought about it, just as he’d anticipated almost everything else the older man had said. Eleven years before, Scout had come out of the war a green young lawyer with a raw brilliance for courtroom tactics that had manifested itself, unpopularly, in the court-martial of five soldiers of the 12th New Hampshire regiment accused of cowardice during the fighting at Cold Harbor, Virginia, in 1864. He had won their acquittal on a technicality at the expense of his reputation, as the five had already been convicted in the pages of every major northern newspaper, and after leaving the service he had found every law-firm door closed to him in four eastern states. Penniless, he was contemplating sneaking out of his Pittsburgh hotel to beat the bill when a telegram came offering him employment with the firm of Bartholomew & Hobbs, Yankton, D. T. The wire had been following him from city to city for six weeks, and included a bank draft large enough to settle his debts and make the journey west with some left over.

  Immediately he had become the protégé of Bartholomew, a former Minnesota public defender with a flair for politics, who began by instructing him to forget everything he had learned about due process. His next step was to enroll Scout in a dramatics course, where he was taught the techniques of oratory and, in Bartholomew’s own words, “the ancient and honorable art of lying.” After that the senior attorney had educated him personally in courtroom histrionics, demonstrating the ways in which a juror’s emotions could be played upon so that whatever points the opposition brought up, no matter how solid, were rendered meaningless—a practice referred to as “stirring up dust.”

  Scout’s first client after “graduation” was an illiterate ranch hand accused of hamstringing a neighbor’s prize racing stallion. His fee was guaranteed by the man’s employer. In the face of daunting evidence, through innuendo and delaying tactics which dragged the trial over four exhausting weeks, the young lawyer managed to obtain a hung jury. A second trial was planned, but nagging doubts raised by the amount of insurance the horse’s owner had taken out on his property shortly before the mutilation incident unnerved the plaintiff and the charges were dismissed.

  There were other cases, some of which Scout lost, but these were far outweighed by his victories. Two years ago he had been offered the appointment as federal prosecutor and, on Bartholomew’s advice, had accepted it. Shortly thereafter his mentor sold out his partnership and joined Scout’s unofficial staff, where he was paid from the prosecutor’s own pocket. A confirmed bachelor of simple tastes, he was more than able to afford his former teacher’s salary, a token amount since “Tessie” lived quite comfortably off his investments.

  Of late, however, their instructor-pupil relationship had become little more than a ritual, really a brainstorming session during which they developed strategy under the guise of Bartholomew’s tutelage. It was a comfortable, productive arrangment, and though both were aware that Scout had learned everything his friend had to teach, neither would say it aloud for fear of upsetting the fine balance. In addition, there was a conviction far back in Julian Scout’s mind that Bartholomew was holding something back, and that if they remained together long enough he would play it like a winning hand, to the profit of both.

  “One thing bothers me,” said the younger man. “If this General Crandall is so good, what’s he doing in the public defender’s office? Why isn’t he in practice for himself, where the money is?”

  Bartholomew smiled over his silver snuff box, a present from a wealthy and grateful client. “One might ask the same thing about you,” he replied. “The answer would be the same. The man loves the law, and the most interesting cases seem to involve people who can’t afford their own attorney.”

  “You make him sound dedicated.”

  “He’s that. He’s also in railroads and rich as Vanderbilt.”

  “When do we meet him?”

  “Not before eight o’clock Wednesday morning, when we select a jury.”

  Mention of time moved Scout to consult his watch. He started and rose, heading for the clothes tree beside the door. Upright, he had the advantage of nearly a foot over his partner, which never failed to disconcert him. He found it embarrassing being so much taller than most of the frontier heroes that people read about back East.

  “Going somewhere?” Bartholomew asked.

  “I’m having dinner with Grace Sargent. I’ve just time to bathe and dress.” He shrugged into his greatcoat and placed his narrow-brimmed hat on his head at a jaunty angle. After ten years he had yet to bow to convention and don western garb.

  “You’ve been seeing her for some time now.” The crusty old lawyer was smirking as if about to spring an important bit of evidence. “Do I hear the distant clatter of church bells?”

  Scout started through the door, ignoring him. Then he paused. “I just thought of something,” he said, turning. “Hickok killed men to make a name for himself. McCall shot him for his reputation. I’m out to hang McCall. What does that make me?”

  “Senatorial material.”

  Chapter 2

  Grace Sargent lived with her mother, or rather her mother lived with her, in a sixteen-room mansion in the city’s fashionable neighborhood, a three-story brick box which always reminded Scout, with its latticed windows, of the Yankton jail. It had been built for her by her late husband, an investor in the Great Northern Pacific Railroad, who had shared it with her for three weeks before he was shot to death by a man whose fortune had been wiped out by railroad manipulators during the Panic of 1873. Gray dusk was sifting over the manicured grounds as the prospector alighted from his cab and took the flag path to the front door. The air was raw and held the metallic odor of snow.

  The colored maid informed him that Mrs. Sargent would be down shortly and ushered him into the parlor to wait. As always, he felt a trap open in his stomach when he found Dora Hope standing among the settees, chairs, hassocks, and pedestal tables laden with knickknacks which cluttered the otherwise spacious room.

  “Mr. Scout,” she said, offering her hand.

  He accepted it, his fingers feeling the old work calluses only slightly softened by recent years. She was an attractive woman like her daughter, tall, with dark hair still untouched by gray and pulled back not too severely into a bun at the nape of her neck. The bones of her face were prominent and she had the clean profile and corseted bustiness that were the current standard of beauty, but Scout could never look into her crisp gray eyes without feeling inadequate. He muttered some inanity that required no answer, after which there stretched an embarrassing silence.

  Desperately, his eyes fell to the newspaper folded atop the tea table between them. “I see you’ve been reading today’s newspaper,” he said lamely.

  “Yes, I have.”

  “May I ask what you think of the case?”

  “Case?”

  Damn her, he thought, she’s playing games with me. “The McCall trial, of course.” He was painfully conscious of sounding like a self-centered ass.

  “Oh yes, that. I’m afraid lurid murder accounts don’t interest me.”

  “It’s become more than that. Hickok’s fame—”

  “—is of little account,” she finished. “It won’t survive the decade. Of what service is a man like that to society?”

  “As I was saying, Hickok’s fame has skyrocketed because of the circumstances of his death, and the country is of two minds regarding his slayer. The case is something of a cause célèbre locally.”

  “I find it difficult to work up any sympathy for the fate of a paid assassin, or for that of the man who served him his just deserts.”

  “The details of their lives are of no importance anywhere outside the courtroom,” he countered, warm
ing to the subject. “They’re part of frontier mythology now, and with the possible exceptions of women and politics, nothing has sparked more barroom brawls.”

  “You’re being indelicate, Mr. Scout. In any case, it’s an untidy business that will reflect poorly upon the reputation of everyone connected with it.”

  It struck him that for a woman who took no interest in the case, Mrs. Hope seemed quite knowledgeable about its details. “You know that I’m representing the people during the trial,” he said.

  “Yes, I know.”

  There was another uncomfortable pause. To Scout’s relief, Grace Sargent chose that moment to enter the parlor.

  She was shorter than her mother, somewhat plumper of build and fairer, with auburn hair that looked red in the sunlight and a fine dusting of freckles across the top of her cheeks, muted but not obliterated beneath an expert application of powder. Her eyes were more blue than gray and she wore a dress of old gold taffeta in marked contrast to Mrs. Hope’s drab trappings of no particular hue, beneath the floorlength hem of which flashed an occasional teasing glimpse of black patent-leather toe as the younger woman approached amid rustling petticoats—a sound that never failed to stir her escort. She wore her hair up beneath a crownless hat decked with ostrich plumes and secured at a rakish angle with an invisible pin.

  “Bending each other’s ear as usual, I see,” she said, smiling.

  Scout bowed over her proffered hand and commented upon her loveliness. She blushed prettily. Although he had known enough women to recognize this as an act, it always gave him a warm feeling in his chest.

  “I hope you haven’t been staring at each other all this time,” she said.

  “We were discussing the man Mr. Scout hopes to hang,” replied her mother.

  “That again.” She made a face. “Mother’s spoken of nothing else since that man McCall was captured. She takes six newspapers and reads them all. You’d be wise to make her your assistant, Julian; I’m sure she knows quite as much about the case as you do.”

  Scout smiled discreetly at Mrs. Hope’s discomfort.

  “There’s nothing else to do out here, except sew,” she said, rallying. “And I refuse to sew.”

  This time his smile was more polite. He found Grace’s rapport with her mother refreshing, but there was something about it that rang false, as if the two were craning their necks to see each other around something that neither wanted to acknowledge. He was glad when he and Grace took their leave.

  “Mother took in sewing to support us after Father died,” explained Grace, when they were in his cab rattling over the frozen street surface. She was huddled in a heavy wrap a shade darker than her dress. “She doesn’t like to be reminded of it.”

  “She doesn’t care much for me.” He charged his pipe and lit it. Grace liked the smell of tobacco, another reason he enjoyed her company.

  “You mustn’t take it personally, Julian. It’s this country she resents, not you. She’s afraid you’ll marry me and we’ll be stuck out here forever.”

  He glanced at her, startled. But she was watching the scenery roll past in the light of the street lamps, her cheeks flushed from the cold. For a moment he had thought she’d guessed his reason for asking her out tonight. “I don’t know what she’s got to be afraid of,” he said then. “You’ve spent most of your life out here.”

  “Not really. I was five when we joined the wagon train bound for Oregon before the war.”

  “All right, so I’m a liar for five years.”

  “More like twelve. Pneumonia killed Father when I was eight, after we had settled in Kansas. Mother sold the farm and we moved to a rooming house in Kansas City until she had enough money to send me back East to finish my schooling. No one was happier than she when I married Edgar because she was sure that we would all be living in Providence. Then Edgar decided to move out here so he could be near his investment.”

  “That must have made him popular.” He wished he could think of something to say that would change the subject. Her late husband was not one of his favorite topics.

  “Let’s say she was not amused,” she replied, smiling. “He built the house mainly to please her, not that it did any good. She’s cursed him for it ever since he was—ever since the incident because it’s too expensive to sell, and she’s got too much Scottish blood in her to go home and keep on paying servants to care for a house no one is living in, no matter how much Edgar left us. So she goes on hoping that a buyer will appear before ‘some western bumpkin,’ as she puts it, claims my hand.” She patted his arm. “You’re the culmination of her worst fears.”

  For a moment his heart soared, but then he realized she was only teasing. Somewhat testily, he said, “Why hasn’t she sent you back alone?”

  “Because I’m thirty years old, and no longer do everything my mother tells me.”

  He wanted to pursue the subject, but the cab had reined up before the restaurant and there was a spattering of people on the boardwalk within earshot. He climbed out, helped her down, and paid the driver.

  The restaurant was new, established with Yankton’s burgeoning carriage trade in mind. Rough language was not permitted, brass cuspidors were numerous and placed discreetly, and each table sported its own red-and-white-checked cloth and centerpiece of artificial flowers. To preserve the genteel atmosphere, a bouncer whose fine tailored suit did little to disguise his resemblance to a bull buffalo stood in the shadows at the back of the room beyond reach of the hanging Rochester lamps, scanning the clientele for trouble-makers. His attention kept returning to a couple seated near the kitchen door, the male half of which, thickset and strangling in a yellowing celluloid collar and wilted necktie, was conversing in a loud, drunken voice with his mousy blonde companion over a forgotten meal. She ignored him, intent on chasing a stationary brussels sprout around her plate with a swaying fork.

  Scout, a veteran of New York dining establishments that were long on atmosphere and short on edibles, played it safe and ordered roast beef for himself and Grace, with the house wine. He wanted nothing to spoil this evening. The beef turned out to be surprisingly tender if not particularly tasty, a condition which he suspected represented hours of pounding with a cleaver in this land of stringy longhorns. The wine was no more than adequate, but then he hadn’t expected much. When they had finished eating:

  “Julian, is it very dangerous?”

  “I’m sure it isn’t or they wouldn’t serve it.”

  “I don’t mean the meal, silly.” She shook her fist at him. “I mean the trial. I’ve been hearing rumors—”

  “—about McCall’s gang threatening to shoot up the courtroom? I’ve heard them too. Forget them. What kind of gang does a man need to swamp out a saloon?”

  “Not those. You know that there are a lot of men around the territory who were glad to learn of Hickok’s death. They don’t like the idea of his killer having to stand trial.”

  He touched his lips with his napkin. “You’ve been reading your mother’s newspapers. I don’t doubt that there are some demented souls out there who regard McCall as a hero, but they’re like him, cowardly. That kind is content just to harangue others over a cheap beer.”

  “McCall wasn’t.”

  “You’re beginning to sound like the heroine of a dime novel,” he said, grinning. “I’m not going out to fight a duel.”

  She looked embarrassed. “All the same, I wish you hadn’t let your partner talk you into accepting the case.”

  “What made you think he talked me into it?”

  “Don’t pretend with me, Julian. You know how he’s always pushing you. He never made it in politics, so he’s doing the next best thing. He wants to point to you someday and boast how he manufactured a congressman.”

  He remembered Bartholomew’s comment about his being senatorial material and grew angry. “Tessie’s a fine attorney who had the misfortune to be born a Southerner at a time when it was passing out of fashion. I’m his partner, not his puppet.”

 
She sipped her wine and said nothing. His anger turned inward; he hadn’t wanted the evening to go in this direction. He was grateful when the waiter returned with the check and commented discreetly on his excellent taste in companions. By the time he had departed to wait on another table, she had thawed visibly.

  “Someday I’ll find out how you arranged that.” Her smile was rueful.

  “Grace, your husband was an older man, wasn’t he?”

  “Older than what?” Unruffled by the blurted question, she beamed at him teasingly over her wine. The pale red liquid threw spots of reflected light up into her face.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “What I mean is, did it bother you to be married to a man who was so much more … mature … than you?”

  She watched him in silence, still smiling. He had seen comprehension dawning in her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed again, but not from cold or even embarrassment. It was her second glass of wine. He hurried on before she could answer.

  “For an attorney, I’m not expressing myself very well,” he said. “What I mean—”

  Her fingers touched the back of his hand, stopping him. “I know what you mean.” She seemed about to continue when the focus of her eyes shifted suddenly to something beyond his right shoulder. He turned his head to see a man approaching on unsteady legs.

  It was the drunk he had observed earlier talking to the blonde. He was a big man, too big for the suit he was wearing, the sleeves of which fell several inches short of the ends of his wrist and which was badly in need of brushing. He had undone his collar finally. His face was a beefy slab with brutal, half-finished features tanned as far as his forehead, where a pale band betrayed a crown unaccustomed to being naked. He was extremely bowlegged and wore high-topped boots with two-inch heels. Beyond his bulk, the prosecutor could see that the blonde had abandoned her pursuit of the brussels sprout and was sitting with her chin cupped in her hand staring into space.