Wild Justice Read online

  I was as contented as I’d ever been. I hadn’t a thing to lose, and that is a liberating feeling.

  On hands and knees I returned to the room where services were conducted, went sideways, and stood with my back to the wall behind the pulpit. Again I tugged back the hammer, not far enough to lock it, keeping it from snapping forward with the tension of my thumb; expecting the trigger to be in working order was testing faith beyond acceptable limits.

  Now I had a clear view of the street door just as it opened and four men came through. One had a lever-action repeater with its butt braced against his hip; the others held out long-barreled revolvers at arm’s length, shoulder high, all aimed my direction. I couldn’t describe any of the men, not after all these years or at that moment, but I could report the make and model of each weapon.

  One of them smiled, at least; I saw that much. The sight of that ancient weapon was the funniest thing he’d seen that day.

  And ever would. I let go of the hammer and opened my path to salvation.

  FOURTEEN

  “Was it absolutely necessary to kill your prisoner? Could you not merely have rendered him insensible a few minutes longer?”

  “I had a train to catch.”

  “One more impertinence and I’ll find you in contempt. My court is wherever I am.”

  We were in the Judge’s kitchen. Regardless of his caseload—which at its lightest would break Jumbo’s back—he never entered the courthouse on the Sabbath. Mrs. Blackthorne was conducting a meeting of the Lewis and Clark County Ladies Civic Improvement League in the parlor, and with the chef away on his day off we had the room to ourselves. It was large and square, with a low discolored ceiling, a massive six-lid stove, an ice box to match, and a long cedar table scoured as white as scraped bone. The floor was solid stone and the lath-and-plaster walls, once painted green, had taken on a saffron color, a visual memory of thousands of meals prepared there, along with the ghosts of grease, onion, sauerbraten, and brook trout turning the air as thick as lard. Blackthorne, in his waistcoat with his cuffs turned back past his thick forearms, was slicing a salami the size of his thigh with a knife sinister-looking enough to have been borrowed from the attic evidence room above his chambers. (It might have, at that; he disliked straining the court’s budget with personal expenses.)

  “I wasn’t being impertinent, Your Honor.” Not entirely. “The odds against my clearing town in a position useful to the court couldn’t be bigger unless he came around while I was facing his cohorts.” There was some diplomacy in my choice of vocabulary; cohorts was one of his favorite terms for the men and women he’d been appointed to prosecute; he preferred—or pretended—to consider himself a nineteenth-century bulwark between the citizens in his jurisdiction and the legions of wicked old Rome. Substituting useful to the court for leaving Portland alive was similar strategy. A deputy never went wrong reminding the old man of his service to the judiciary.

  He used the knife to spear the slice he’d cut, poked it into his mouth, and pushed the salami my way, impaling it with the knife. He chewed and swallowed before continuing; Washington manners prevailed even in Helena. “You killed two men, maimed a third for life, and I expect to hear any time of the demise of the fourth. The others evidently fled after the explosion.” He poured slugs of brandy into two snifters, took a sip from one, and wobbled it around his mouth before committing it to his system. “Why pennies, incidentally? Dimes are the usual choice when shot is scarce.”

  “It’s a poor congregation.”

  “Ah. It’s a shame you didn’t wander into a Presbyterian. As I was saying. I should bill you, if not for those burials, then for the man Corrigan, whom you slew in cold blood.”

  He appeared to weigh the matter, swirling the thistle-colored liquid in his glass and reading my future in its depths; but I’d seen his performance on the bench often enough to know that was theater. His serious decisions were always made in private. The die was cast before I’d entered the house. I helped myself to a nervous gulp from my glass regardless. Taking him for granted would earn me another hour on the carpet.

  “However,” he said; and I felt the warmth of the word crawling up my spine along with the spirits. “He was sought dead or alive for the murder of a shotgun messenger, so at all events his life was forfeit. Apart from the collateral damage in the press about defiling the sanctity of the church, I cannot find serious fault with your decision, although if I found myself in those circumstances I should have considered an alternative. The journals and I are old adversaries; this court is no worse off for the affair.”

  I nodded, biting into the slice of salami I’d cut for myself. It was an appropriate enough response on my part that meant nothing. I didn’t tell him I hadn’t been aware of Corrigan’s dead-or-alive status until that moment.

  * * *

  A lurch woke me in the day coach; I’d grown accustomed to the sensation of the train coming to a stop. I was back in the world post-Blackthorne. My window was dark. I thought we’d stopped in a tunnel, but night had fallen. I hadn’t slept that long or that deeply during the day in years. I felt a sting of panic, of having let down my guard in a tense situation. That, too, was recent. Had all my stores of instinct based on experience played out just because my service was coming to an end?

  In my lap, one hand still held my Bible open to Lamentations (“The yoke of my transgressions is bound by His hand: They are wreathed, and come up upon my neck; He hath made my strength to fall, the Lord hath delivered me into their hands, from whom I am not able to rise up”), the other the Deane-Adams, which I’d left in its holster when I sat down. My reflexes, at least, were still in force.

  I looked around. The lanterns were lit, probably by Caspar, the only member of the paid crew whose duties didn’t nail him to his station. The engineer must have taken him into the fold. I could feel the locomotive breathing in and out, as if I were straddling the back of a beast at rest. There was no sign of Mrs. Blackthorne. I put away the Bible and got up, holding the revolver snug to my hip.

  A window near the front of the car gave me a better view of our surroundings. Steam from the jets drifted in front of flames crawling in a stone pit, the light limning a block-shaped building and figures carrying something heavy on their shoulders in the direction of the train. A sweetish smell of fresh-cut pine told me we were in the wood camp just across the border. Another obstruction stood on a railroad siding, coughing thick balls of smoke toward the stars, obscuring them at ragged intervals; this was no pale woodsmoke, but the tarry exhaust of hard coal. When the wind shifted, redirecting the flames, I got a glimpse of what it was. I straightened and went looking for the widow.

  We nearly collided in the sleeper. She wore a thick flannel robe over a nightgown whose plain gray hem came to the insteps of old suede slippers, worn to the shapes of her toes. She and I retired and arose on separate schedules, so it was the first time I’d seen her with her hair down, wound into a plait and draped forward over her left shoulder. Silver strands glistened among the white in the muted light of one of the two lamps that illuminated the car fore and aft. Even so, she looked younger with the pins out. A phantom of the comely girl she’d been glimmered behind the creases in her face. I had enough of my own, without the beauty.

  “We have stopped,” she said.

  “For fuel. We’re in Minnesota.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I didn’t look. Not late, I don’t think.”

  “That means we will be in St. Paul before tomorrow evening. We must see Morton, the lawyer, first thing the next morning.”

  “A lot can happen between now and then,” I said. “Hearst’s Javelin is here.”

  Her face assumed an expression I’d seen on the Judge’s face when a counselor tried to bat something past him. “Will that pestilence never abate?” She nearly spat the words.

  “Just now they may have more to tell us than we them.”

  “I cannot imagine what that could be.”

  “Are y
ou sure? Everywhere we’ve been, they’re either already there waiting for us or minutes behind. I want to ask Howard Rossleigh which they were when our conductor disappeared.”

  FIFTEEN

  I took a stroll through the camp. The laborers helping the fireman load the tender paid less attention to me than to the gnats dancing woozily around the chunks of wood on their shoulders. They smelled of honest sweat, sweet chaw, frying onions, and smoke from the fire pit they used for cooking. Those odors mingled with the scents of fresh-cut pine, cedar, and sycamore; the men breathed them in like fish filtering oxygen from water. To them, the swift little yard engine dozing on the siding was all of a piece with the hognose locomotives that bore logs from the sawmill to flatboats and from them to the world beyond. Very little came between men who sawed and chopped and portaged the materials that built a nation and their day’s work.

  Not that The Javelin was designed to blend into any wilderness. Inspired apparently by the gaudy White Train that carried Buffalo Bill’s Wild West between coasts, the publisher had enameled it from caboose to cowcatcher till it shone like alabaster. A brace of flags flapped fore and aft: to the right Old Glory, to the left the spread-eagle masthead of The New York Morning Journal embroidered in blue and white on a field of red. Forward-leaning italics bore the train’s name in a continuous frieze along the sides of the cars, with a javelin underscoring it in case the meaning was lost on the casual observer. Everything about this whorehouse on wheels glistened, even the costly blue coal heaped in the tender.

  I sauntered around the boiler. Block letters painted in a semicircle on the front of the boiler read W. R. HEARST, PROP.

  I’d seen his kind before, nursing their gout in Scottish castles set on a thousand acres of prairie in Wyoming, smoking six-bit cigars in gentlemen’s clubs in Denver and St. Louis, soaking in porcelain tubs in private railroad cars on the Oregon high line, flashing gold teeth dug from their own mines in San Francisco; fat jaspers who’d either inherited their wealth or piled it up so quickly and so long ago they couldn’t distinguish between a cartwheel dollar and a trunk filled with double eagles. This one had stepped from the cradle into a ton of silver, built on the back of a forty-dollar mule long since repossessed for payment of a delinquent debt owed by his father. Since then, the son had trebled the family fortune, opening newspapers in most of the major cities across the U.S., then cut it in half buying putative medieval furniture, ancient Spanish chapels to be disassembled and shipped across the Atlantic, and exotic animals he let roam free on his many estates. When his private parlor car kept waking him up during train-changes, he bought a train. He would pay a hundred thousand dollars for an armoire reputed to have stood in the king’s bedroom at Versailles (but made in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with wormholes bored with a brace-and-bit manufactured in Detroit), but he couldn’t quote you the price on a piece of penny candy.

  There’s no arguing it: All the people who know how to be rich aren’t.

  A basset-faced engineer sat with his elbow on the ledge of the cab opening, leaning out to read a folded newspaper in the light of the lamp mounted on the side of the engine, moving his lips over the columns of gray print. I walked past without stirring him, climbed the steps to the vestibule of the only passenger car, and knocked on the door. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever done that aboard a train. A low-register female voice called an invitation from inside.

  It was a private coach a step or two down from the top of the Pullman line, paneled in blond ash with machine-woven carpeting, a walnut secretary with a leaf that dropped down like the trapdoor in the seat of flannel underdrawers, a berth folded up against the curved ceiling, and a pair of club chairs upholstered in green plush. The woman seated in front of the secretary wore a pale blue linen shirtwaist starched stiff as clapboard siding, an ankle-length gray wool skirt hitched up on one side to prevent tripping over the hem when the train was in motion, and a flat-brimmed straw hat pinned to a pile of upswept hair that caught the lamplight in haloes of red. Her nails were trimmed short of the current fashion, probably to expedite the blurring motion of her fingers over the pearl-inlaid keys of a black iron typewriter on the dropleaf. The strikers hit the sheet rolled onto the platen with a noise like pebbles hitting a snare drum.

  She went on typing without looking up until a bell rang and she masher-slapped the carriage back into place. A pair of hazel eyes under green-tinted lids found mine through pinch-nose spectacles. She unclamped them and rubbed at the little dents they’d made on her bridge.

  I showed her my star. “I’m looking for Harold Rossleigh.”

  “Me, too, along with every stringer between here and New York.” Those low-hanging tones reminded me of someone, though I couldn’t place her just then. The West seemed to be filling up with women who commanded attention without raising their voice. “You’re Page Murdock.”

  It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it. “You’ve lost your boss reporter?”

  “I’m the boss reporter. Betsy Pike.” She got up and came over with her hand out, perpendicular to the elbow, the way a man offered his. As she rose, her skirt came down, cheating me of a closer look at a smoothly muscled limb shrouded in sheer black.

  Since it was right there in front of me I took the hand. She had the grip of an athletic boy. The tips of her fingers were callused.

  “What name do you use when you cash a bank draught?” I said.

  She flushed slightly—I thought; her coloring was naturally high. “Pamela Green. The byline was the Chief’s idea. Mr. Hearst?” She went on as if I’d reacted to the magic name. “He never choked down having to send a reporter to interview Nellie Bly—right name Elizabeth Cochrane—when she finished her round-the-globe trip for The New York World in fewer than eighty days. The Journal and Mr. Pulitzer’s World have been at war since Hector was a pup.”

  “I’m a poor substitute for the Grand Tour.”

  “The Chief carries his apery only so far. He might steal a competitor’s idea, or even his staff, but he won’t trail him across old ground. Meanwhile The Javelin was wasting itself switching cars in a railyard in Sacramento. It was like hitching Pegasus to a milk wagon.”

  “What did you mean about everyone looking for Rossleigh?”

  “Just that. He got off in Bismarck to join the reporters aboard your train during the stop and never came back. Our esteemed colleagues didn’t see which way he went after they separated to file their stories. I had to convince the Chief they actually saw him leave your train; he was all fired up to force Grover Cleveland to order your arrest by the Secret Service.”

  “I’ve been arrested before. I understand they eat well in Leavenworth. How much do you know about Rossleigh?”

  She breathed on her spectacles and wiped the lenses on her sleeve. They’d sparkled even before that. “Don’t let my gender cloud your reason. I’m a reporter. It’s my job to ask questions, not answer them.”

  “Mine, too; before this damn trip.”

  “Let’s trade. What difference does knowing Rossleigh’s character make to you?”

  Age had mellowed me. In earlier days I’d have gotten what I wanted by force. Gender had never clouded my reason; not in that area. “Who’s asking, you or your rag?”

  “I’ll warn you before we go on the record.”

  “I guess I’ll have to accept that. If you agree to tell me everything you know about Howard Rossleigh.”

  “Agreed. I should tell you it isn’t much.”

  “That makes us even. All I know is our conductor went missing somewhere between here and Bismarck, leaving behind a jigger of blood.”

  “His or someone else’s?”

  It was important to put aside the frills and frippery and remember she was a reporter. “A prairie hen, for all I know.”

  “And you suspect my partner just because he vanished around the same time?”

  “I suspect your whole damn train. It’s been on ours like whitewash since we left Helena. Start with how a man who works for t
he Montana Press Association came to represent a chain of newspapers based in New York City.”

  “Seven years ago, when the territory became a state, he wrote a series of articles about the importance of the process. The wire services picked it up and spread it across the country. It was Independence Day week, so all the major papers jumped all over it in the name of patriotism. The Chief was impressed enough to take him on as a stringer. Personally, I found his writing full of stale platitudes, split infinitives, and dangling participles; but the man I work for couldn’t distinguish between a first predicate and the Tenth Commandment.”

  Neither could I, nor just what a platitude or infinitive or participle was; but to interrupt her would be ungentlemanly.

  “Harlan Blackthorne’s death,” she went on, “put Rossleigh in the saddle of the story of the year. He intends to ride it all the way to a position as managing editor of the Journal. He might, at that. The bold stroke is the coin of Mr. Hearst’s realm.”

  “But not yours.”

  “I don’t have a realm, or the scepter necessary to rule it.” Spinning her spectacles by the end of their ribbon, she searched my face for comprehension of just what she’d said. She got nothing; I’d served the court across as many poker tables as I had across the Great Plains.

  The eyeglasses swung to a smacking stop in her other palm. “In the perfect world, I’d be conducting interviews aboard Blackthorne’s funeral train instead of correcting Rossleigh’s grammar and syntax. However, the world isn’t perfect, even on the frontier, where a colored man is judged by the quality of his work, while a woman is but a woman, white or otherwise.”

  She returned to the desk and sat, her skirt and petticoats rustling like wind stirring a field of corn, and placed the spectacles astraddle her nose. “So you see, Marshal, Howard Rossleigh has no interest in depriving your party of a conductor. I’m not suggesting he isn’t capable of the worst of crimes; only that in this case there’s no percentage in it for him.”