Aces & Eights Read online

  “Why do you suppose Bill was so generous?” Scout asked.

  “Objection!” rapped Crandall. “Conjecture!” The judge sustained it.

  The prosecutor remained unruffled. “Was Hickok in the habit of giving away part of his winnings?”

  “Constantly. When he won, which he usually did,” added the saloonkeeper. “Bill was like that.”

  “I see. How did McCall react to his offer? Was he grateful? Angry?”

  “I would say angry.”

  “Resentful, perhaps?”

  “Objection! Leading the witness!” The General’s ruddy complexion took on a purplish tinge.

  “The witness has already answered the question, counselor,” Blair reminded Scout.

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor. No more questions.”

  “You said that Hickok was accustomed to surrendering a portion of his spoils,” Crandall began, when his opponent had returned to his seat. He was leaning back against the defense table, hands buried deep in his pants pockets. “What was his attitude on these occasions? Expansive?”

  “That is not the word I would use, sir,” Mann replied. He had crossed his legs and inserted his thumbs inside his vest pockets. His gaze met Crandall’s and remained steady.

  “What word would you use, Mr. Mann?”

  “‘Overbearing’ strikes me as appropriate.”

  “Objection!” Scout stood. “I fail to see what this has to do with the case at hand.”

  Crandall spread his hands with a bewildered smile. “I am merely exploring an area opened up by counsel for the prosecution, Your Honor.”

  “He’s right, Mr. Scout. Overruled.”

  As he sat down fuming, the prosecutor glanced at McCall, now staring intently at the man on the stand. For the first time he seemed to be taking an interest in the proceedings.

  “‘Overbearing,’ Mr. Mann?” Crandall pressed. “How so?”

  The saloonkeeper smirked, clearly relishing his moment in the sun. “When he had cleaned someone out, and especially when he had been drinking heavily, he would puff himself up like a rooster and flip a check at the loser. He didn’t mean to be humiliating, understand—he just liked to play the big butter-and-egg man. But that was the result.”

  “Was this his posture the night he offered Mr. McCall seventy-five cents and indicated that more might follow?”

  “Yes, sir, it was.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Mann.”

  Scout was caught off guard by the General’s abrupt conclusion. He had expected the defender to challenge Mann’s testimony regarding the shooting, or at least to bring up the matter of the type of revolver used. As it was, the prosecutor had barely got himself settled in his seat when his opponent went back to his own table. Blair was surprised too. There was a pause before the judge asked Scout if he cared to redirect. The prosecutor declined. Mann stepped down.

  “What was that about?” Scout whispered to his partner. Bartholomew shook his head. He looked worried.

  Captain William Rodney Massey was tall and well built, and as he approached the stand his rolling gait bespoke his extensive experience as a steamboat pilot on the Missouri River. Middle-aged, he appeared younger, with dark, wavy hair untouched by gray and a chestnut rectangle of beard not connected to his burnsides, adding length to his face. He wore a suit of an expensive cut not often found this far west. A solitary feminine sigh came from somewhere in the gallery when he turned around to be sworn in. Scout noted that he seemed to be making a favorable impression upon the all-male jury as well, a difficult feat for an attractive man.

  Under Scout’s questioning, the witness stated that he had been among the gamblers at Hickok’s table on the second, but that he had not seen the shooting itself. “I was looking down at the table when the pistol report came,” he said quietly. “I felt a shock and numbness in my left wrist and looked up to see the defendant backing toward the rear door, saying, ‘Come on, you sons of bitches.’ I got out quick as I could and did not see Wild Bill fall. I looked up at the pistol and my eyes passed him. The ball was not found on examination of my arm. It is there yet, I suppose.”

  “Had you ever seen the defendant before that afternoon?” asked the prosecutor.

  “Yes, I did. I saw the defendant come into the same room a day or two before and walk around behind Bill and pull his pistol about two thirds out. There was a young man with him who put his arm around the defendant and walked him toward the back door.”

  The spectators began buzzing. Blair rapped gently. When it was quiet again Scout asked Massey a few more questions to fix the details of the shooting, then turned him over to Crandall. The General approached the witness box on cat’s feet, as if he suspected a Confederate battery were concealed inside.

  “Do you consider yourself an observant man, Captain Massey?”

  The seated man smiled faintly behind his beard. “The number of small craft which ply the Missouri make a certain amount of watchfulness necessary,” he replied.

  “It would appear so, since you seem to be the only person in existence who saw Mr. McCall draw a weapon on Wild Bill a day or two before his death.”

  “Objection.” Scout kept his seat. “Is counsel for the defense making his summation at this time?”

  “Sustained,” said the judge. “You’ve been warned, General.”

  Crandall apologized. His eyes never left the witness. “Are you conversant in firearms weaponry, Captain Massey?”

  “Well, I do not qualify as an expert, but I am in the habit of carrying a side arm and fancy that I know one end of it from the other.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand, Captain.” The defense counsel sounded genuinely puzzled. “You say that you are observant and that you are no stranger to firearms, but if both these things are true then I fear that you are guilty of perjury. Are you aware of the penalties for lying under oath, Captain Massey?”

  Scout was up in a flash. “Your Honor, this is character assassination!”

  “Is that an objection, Mr. Scout?”

  “It is, Your Honor,” he replied, flustered.

  Blair turned to Crandall. “This is a serious charge, General. Can you back it up?”

  “I can, if Your Honor will direct the court recorder to read back Captain Massey’s answer to Mr. Scout’s first question regarding the shooting.”

  The judge nodded to the young man at the writing desk, who paged back through his notes and began reading in an emotionless monotone:

  “‘I was looking down at the table when the pistol report came. I felt a shock and numbness in my left wrist—’”

  “Go ahead a few lines, please,” requested Crandall.

  “‘I got out quick as I could and did not see Wild Bill fall,’” the recorder continued. “‘I looked up at the pistol and my eyes passed him. The ball—’”

  “That will be enough, thank you.” The General turned back to Massey. “Captain Massey, are you aware of the difference between a revolver and a pistol?”

  The pilot smiled in obvious relief, white teeth flashing in the dark beard. “Oh, that. Well, I was merely indulging in an expression.”

  Crandall’s head snapped around to the bench. “Will Your Honor please direct the witness to answer the question?”

  Blair did so, trying to conceal a smile. He had seen where the defender was heading.

  “Of course I am aware of the difference,” said Massey, nettled. “A revolver is equipped with a cylinder and can fire up to six times without reloading. A pistol is a single-shot and has no cylinder.”

  “Captain, two other witnesses have testified that a revolver was employed in the shooting. They can’t seem to agree on what type it was”—he glanced wryly toward the jury—“but at least they are of one mind that it was a revolver. You are the only one who has identified it as a pistol, just as you alone claim to have seen the defendant produce a weapon in the saloon before August second. Since you have demonstrated your knowledge of the difference between a pistol and a revolver, I can on
ly assume that somewhere you are lying. Or is it that you are not as observant as you think? That you cannot be sure that you saw what you think you saw on either occassion? Or were you drunk? Answer me, Captain Massey; were you drunk the day you claim to have seen my client make an aborted attempt on Hickok’s life?”

  “Objection!” cried Scout, springing from his seat.

  “Answer the question, Captain!” Crandall was shouting, his face inches from Massey’s. The pilot, his countenance now nearly as red as that of his tormentor, seemed on the verge of striking him and had half-risen from his chair to brace himself. The bailiff started forward from his position against the wall.

  “Objection! Objection! My opponent is badgering the witness!” Scout was almost shrieking, half in anger, half in fear that his witness would make good on his unspoken threat.

  “General Crandall!” Blair nearly cracked the handle of his gavel pounding it. “You cannot expect a man to answer a question until you give him a chance. Captain Massey, please sit down.”

  After a tense moment the pilot lowered himself back into his seat, glaring at Crandall. Savagely he swept back a lock of hair that had tumbled forward over his brow. The bailiff returned to his post but remained wary.

  “The witness is directed to answer the question,” said the judge.

  “It’s all right, Your Honor,” Crandall said, sounding pleased with himself. “I withdraw the question.”

  “But not the taint,” Scout muttered, not quite under his breath.

  “What was that, counselor?” snapped the judge.

  “Nothing, Your Honor.”

  “I will have no more of these asides. Proceed, General.”

  You had to hand it to Crandall, Scout thought, hating him. Rather than release the witness for redirect in time for Scout to remove the doubts he had planted in the jury’s mind about Massey’s reliability before they took root, the General spent another ten minutes asking for such things as a fresh description of the barroom and its occupants, knowing that any objections raised by the prosecutor would only delay things further. By the time Scout was allowed to ask the question his opponent had deliberately left hanging, Massey’s assurance that he had not been imbibing heavily at the time of either incident made no impression whatever. Crandall had succeeded in weakening the thickest part of the state’s fence.

  When the prosecutor started back toward his table after finishing with Captain Massey, Bartholomew smiled at him reassuringly, as if he had divined his partner’s thoughts. At times like this he reminded Scout of a favorite and rather dotty old uncle. Taking courage from this, he turned and caught the judge’s eye.

  “Your Honor, the state’s next witness will signal a new phase of its case, which will demand this court’s complete and undivided attention. If there are no objections on the part of my distinguished colleague, I therefore request that we adjourn until tomorrow morning after all parties involved have had a night’s rest.”

  “General?” Blair asked.

  “No objections, Your Honor.”

  “This court is adjourned until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.” The gavel banged.

  “Don’t make anything more of Crandall’s attack than it is,” Bartholomew told Scout when they were in front of the courthouse waiting for a cab. It had stopped snowing and dusk had begun to gather over rooftops cloaked in white. “We’ve lost a day or two of premeditation, that’s all.”

  “He’s got to be going for self-defense.” A cab was rattling toward them. The man at the reins, whose face was a cherry-red strip between a gray woolen muffler and his lowered hat brim, pulled in at Scout’s signal. The prosecutor started and backed away as a passenger he hadn’t noticed unfolded his lanky frame from the seat and got down to pay the driver. The man’s apology was perfunctory and tinted with a faint southern accent. He then strode briskly up the steps to the door of the court building, leaving Scout with the fleeting image of slim features vague in the failing light and a costly suit and overcoat either brand new or freshly pressed.

  “Eight to five he’s on his way up to see you,” said Bartholomew, boarding. “There’ll be time enough for that tomorrow if he’s anxious. Do you have plans for the evening?”

  Scout looked at him ruefully. “If I did, they’ve just been changed. I’ve a feeling we’ll be burning a lot of oil tonight.”

  They were two blocks from Scout’s second-floor apartment dwelling before Bartholomew spoke again. “All right, what is it?”

  “What’s what?” His partner was watching the scenery.

  “You’ve been skittish as a filly all day. Lorenzo Hickok, that boy with the telegram, and that passenger just now had you jumping. Something’s happened I don’t know about. Now, what is it?”

  Scout looked at him, sighed, and handed him a folded sheet he had taken from an inside pocket. “That was under the office door when I got in this morning. I didn’t want to bother you with it. I figured it was just a crank, but it’s been on my mind ever since.”

  The older attorney unfolded the note and read it. It was pieced together from letters clipped from a newspaper, and threatened Scout’s life if he didn’t drop the case against Jack McCall.

  Chapter 7

  “I thought you’d gone out.”

  Dora Hope, in her dressing gown, dark hair arranged in a braid draped over her right shoulder, was standing in front of the parlor door when her daughter came in from the veranda. Grace Sargent was wearing her black gown and a fur hat to match her stole and muff. She smiled in spite of her disappointment. “Julian had to change his plans,” she replied. “He came to say he’s working tonight and to apologize.”

  “That McCall case, I suppose. Well, if hanging a man is more important to him than you are …” She left it at that.

  “Don’t start, Mother.”

  Upstairs, undressing for bed, Grace thought about the conversation she had just had with Julian and was glad she hadn’t told her mother about the man she had seen watching them from the shadows beyond the street lamp on the corner.

  “That’s my bodyguard,” Julian had said shamefacedly when she clutched his sleeve and pointed. “He’s a deputy U.S. marshal. Tessie insisted on borrowing him from Burdick after that fiasco the other night. He’s a blasted nuisance.”

  He had assured her that he was in no danger, and so she said nothing more about it. But she knew there was more to it than what he had told her. Julian’s partner was level-headed in spite of his idiosyncrasies (Mother, disapproving of his snuff-taking, refused to have him in the house) and would not panic over an incident as foolish as the restaurant confrontation. Of course, given his ambitions, there was a bare possibility that he hoped to use the danger angle later as a political tool, but she doubted that even he was shrewd enough to be able to turn a belligerent drunk into a threat that would display his partner’s courageous sense of duty.

  Not telling her mother about the drunk had led to an ugly scene when it appeared in the Yankton newspaper. By the time Grace related their side of the story, Mrs. Hope had already been influenced by the press distortion; she ordered her daughter to stop seeing Julian, to which Grace replied hotly that she would take no orders, and a shouting match had ensued. They had only just begun speaking to each other again. Grace shuddered to think what her mother’s reaction would be if she learned that Julian had engaged a bodyguard, like a gambling czar or a dishonest politician.

  Now, seated on the edge of her matress in her chemise, removing her stockings, Grace decided that she couldn’t blame her mother for acting the way she had. It was Mother who had found Edgar the night the household was awakened by shooting, crumpled on the threshold of the open front door seconds after the killer had fled. Edgar always audited his own books late into the evening to make sure his bookkeepers weren’t stealing from him, and had apparently answered the door after everyone else had retired, collecting three bullets for his trouble. He had lived just long enough to describe his assailant to a deputy town marshal who rode with him to
the hospital. The killer, a young man from Massachusetts who had lost everything when work on the Great Northern Pacific Railroad had shut down, was found two nights later hanging from a ceiling beam in his quarters at a city boarding house, evidently a suicide.

  The tragedy had had a profound effect on Mother, though not the one Grace might have expected. She had developed a sudden morbid interest in violence and death, and had begun subscribing to several newspapers in which she read only those items relating to brutal crimes. Tragedy itself held a fascination for her, and though with casual acquaintances she professed a ladylike disregard for the subject, when alone with Grace she would discuss at length the details of some lurid murder that had found its way into the columns. Alarmed, Grace had persuaded a doctor to visit on a pretense and inveigle Mrs. Hope into a conversation upon her favorite topic, to determine her sanity. After an hour the doctor had taken his leave. Meeting with Grace later, he had told her that there was nothing to worry about, that her mother’s condition was temporary and had been brought on by shock over the manner of her son-in-law’s death. That had been two years ago, and murder was still very much on Dora Hope’s mind.

  The subject lost its appeal, however, whenever the conversation became personal. She would not discuss Edgar’s murder, and when Grace, confronted with the item describing Julian’s “brawl,” had told her of the other man’s attempt to draw a revolver, Mother had become hysterical. It was at times like this that Grace realized that the fence her mother had constructed around herself was made of brittle glass, easily shattered.