A Knife in the Heart

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  It was Elliott Jefferson who made the suggestion.

  “What about the chapel?”

  Looking at the young guard, Fallon considered that idea, and while he was debating the merits, O’Connor said, “It don’t get much use except on Sundays and Wednesday nights.”

  “What happens on Wednesday nights?” Fallon asked.

  “We got some boys who think they can carry a tune. They can’t. But they go to the chapel to sing songs from six to seven each Wednesday evening. The chaplain leads ’em.”

  “I’ve never heard them,” Fallon said.

  “You’re lucky. You go home at five or thereabouts.”

  Jefferson added: “The Reverend Pigate has an office. Sometimes he’ll meet with one of the convicts in there if they want to confess or pray or something. That doesn’t happen very often, but he can take them in his office. It shouldn’t interfere with any schooling.”

  “Good.” Fallon liked the idea.

  “I bet we got more than twenty convicts who need some schoolin’,” O’Connor said.

  “Well,” Fallon said, “I don’t want more than twenty men in with those women—even with two guards.” The idea struck him almost as soon as he finished the sentence. “But . . . if we do . . . have men who really want to learn, maybe we could have two classes. Not the same day. That’s too much work. But send twenty men to school on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And another class of students on Tuesday and Thursday.”

  The guards looked at each other, shrugged, and turned back to Fallon. Jefferson grinned and said, “They might write you up in Harper’s.”

  “Or the National Police Gazette if this goes wrong on you,” O’Connor said.

  “I’ll speak to the Reverend Pigate,” Fallon said. “But I’ve kept you two from your duties long enough.” He thanked them, shook their hands, and walked them to the door. Then he went back to his desk to work.

  * * *

  The first interruption came ten minutes later when guards Raymond and Wilson brought in four prisoners, all medium-sized men, three white, one black, heads bowed, holding their ugly prison caps in their shackled hands.

  “Warden,” Raymond said, “we caught these men rolling dice behind the walls to one of the cells being built in the first cell block.”

  “Boys,” Fallon said as a tough father addressing kids who had yet to reach their thirteenth birthdays. “Were you gambling?”

  “No, Warden Fallon,” one of the men whispered. “We was jus’ . . . exercisin’.”

  “Yeah.” Wilson reached into his trousers pocket and withdrew a wad of bills and laid them on Fallon’s desk, spreading them out so that he got a good look at the currency and the denominations of the bills.

  Fallon’s eyes widened, and he leaned forward, picked up what looked to be a freshly minted ten-dollar note. He expected the men to be shooting craps for cigarettes or snuff but . . . Fallon made a rough guess that he had more than one hundred and sixty dollars in front of him.

  “Where did you get this money?” He spoke sharply, and his eyes opened. “Heads up. Eyes front. Now where did you get this money?”

  None answered.

  “Having currency is forbidden. We keep all money in your accounts. You may draw it out once a week to buy certain items—but you know better than to have cash on your persons. Now, I’ll ask you again. Where did you get this money?”

  They were mute. If one had spoken, Fallon would have been disappointed. That was the ex-convict that ran through his veins. You never told a guard or warden or anyone anything. Once you became a rat, your life inside a prison was worthless. The guards wouldn’t give you any respect. Your fellow inmates would likely try to murder you.

  “Solitary,” Fallon told Raymond and Wilson. “Five days. All privileges revoked for one month. When they are out of solitary, put them to work in the quarry.”

  * * *

  Montgomery Berrien was Fallon’s next visitor, exactly forty minutes after he had departed—the man was punctual, Fallon had to concede—but his face had turned a yellowish tint, as though he had been stricken with jaundice.

  “Warden Fallon,” the man said meekly, “we have a problem.”

  Slowly, the bookkeeper came to Fallon’s desk and withdrew an order form and laid it gently on Fallon’s desk. Then his eyes almost bulged out of his head when he saw the money from the craps game still on the desktop. Fallon saw the heading on the paper: Halleck’s Mercantile, Hardware, and Sundries.

  He looked at the bottom number.

  “That’s not the price Halleck quoted me,” Fallon said sharply, and his eyes bored through the bookkeeper’s spectacles.

  “Y-y-yes,” Berrien stuttered. “I . . . I . . . kn-know.”

  “Did Halleck say why the prices have gone up?”

  “A robust economy,” Berrien said.

  “You mean he’s a crook.”

  The little man shrugged, sighed, and conceded, “He has been known to do this before.”

  “And I supposed if I went to the lumber mill or Benson’s Building Supplies, I’d find that their prices have increased, too—well beyond our means.”

  “They seem to be in . . . ummm . . . cahoots.”

  “They ought to be in prison.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Fallon’s eyes again met the bookkeeper’s.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Please,” the man begged, “I have no money left. I can’t.” He glanced at the money from the dice-rolling convicts.

  “It’s not enough,” Fallon told him. He swore and pushed back in his chair.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah.” He stood, sighed, and moved to the hat rack. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes, Monty.” He stepped outside the door, then came back inside.

  “Monty?”

  The bookkeeper turned and managed a pathetic smile.

  “There’s one hundred sixty-five dollars on the desk. It had better all be there when I get back.”

  * * *

  John Halleck stood in the giant brick storehouse of Halleck’s Mercantile, Hardware, and Sundries, barking orders at the teamsters unloading fresh-cut lumber from one of the sawmills. With the river nearby, and being this close to Missouri, Leavenworth had a lot more trees than what would be found on the western plains that stretched on to the Rockies. That’s one thing that made Leavenworth a little more bearable than Cheyenne. The wind blew. It always blew. Probably even blew harder than it did in Wyoming. But you could find trees in this part of the country.

  You could also find thieves. John Halleck was one of the biggest, Fallon had learned.

  The bald man with big arms and a bigger gut caught a glimpse of Fallon and gave a friendly wave. The kind of wave a dentist might give you before he pulled a tooth. He kept Fallon waiting as he instructed the teamsters, then wiped his hands on his coat and walked toward the waiting warden.

  “Good day to you, Mr. Fallon,” Halleck said, and held out his hand in what some might think as a peace offering.

  Fallon would have rather reached out to grab a coiled rattlesnake.

  Instead of shaking the merchant’s hand, Fallon handed him the new invoice for the building supplies.

  “This price isn’t what you quoted me the other day,” Fallon said.

  Smiling, John Halleck took the invoice while finding his eyeglasses in the pocket of his vest. The vest was made of fine yellow brocade, and the ribbon tie was a high-quality silk. After adjusting the glasses, Halleck read the figures, nodding, finally sighing, and returning the slip of paper to Fallon.

  “Yes, yes, those are the right figures. You know how things go, Mr. Fallon. Prices go up. The lumber, the masons, the quarries, even the price of iron. They all go up. They just happened to have gone up after I quoted you the prices last week.”

  “That’s quite an increase,” Fallon told him.

  Halleck did a little tsk-tsk-ing, and shook his head sadly. “Indeed. I was more shocked than you. After all, I have to pay higher prices t
o stock my store. It’s the sign of a . . .”

  Fallon filled in the words, “Robust economy.”

  “Exactly. You understand economics, I see, especially when you work for the federal government. But I’ve dealt with the federal government on numerous projects before, and I know they always come up with the money when it’s needed.”

  “I see.” Fallon saw. The man was willing to rip off the United States so he could wear an even more expensive vest and silk tie. He had met a few businessmen in Wyoming who felt the same way. He had refused to do business with those men.

  “Well, I supposed I could see what prices your competitors are charging.”

  “You should do that, Mr. Fallon. Talk to Richard, and Mr. Roosevelt. Talk to the Wilson brothers, too.”

  Yeah . . . it wasn’t just John Halleck. All these men were in on a little graft. Cheat the U.S government. Command the market. He wondered how much money Halleck had to pay the other merchants. Did they rotate this around and it just happened to be Halleck’s turn to reap the biggest windfall?

  “I could go directly to the lumberyards, the sawmills, the quarry, one of the freighters. Try to deal with them directly.”

  “You could,” Halleck said. He removed his glasses and began cleaning the lenses with a handkerchief he withdrew from his vest pocket. “You could indeed. But I think you’d find their prices would be even higher than mine. They usually don’t sell directly to the consumers, you understand, so when they do, they try to make even more money than they have a right to demand. Those men are crooks.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Halleck. I was unaware of such graft.”

  “Yes, graft, greed, and green. Greenbacks. That’s what drives business.”

  “So what are the chances that these prices will go up again?”

  The man grinned as he returned the handkerchief and then the glasses. “None. For at least six months. I can’t make any promises after that. No telling how much the nail factories will increase their prices, you see.”

  “I see.”

  Fallon smiled, looked at the invoice, and asked, “So . . . how much is in this for me?”

  The man faked his look of shock and surprise.

  “Mr. Fallon, I do not know what you mean.”

  “Sure you do,” he said. “But if I’m to buy into this scheme, this fraud, this conspiracy to defraud the United States government, I expect a percentage.”

  “Mr. Fallon!”

  “You’ve seen my little girl, Mr. Halleck. I’d like to be able to buy her a new doll for Christmas. And my wife . . . well . . . you know how things go these days. With women? Hey, I have two in my house, my daughter and my wife. What about you?”

  “I have two women, myself,” the man said lecherously. “But no daughter.” He winked. “There’s a wealthy widow I . . . well . . . you understand.”

  “Indeed.”

  They studied one another for a few minutes. Halleck scratched his nose, then looked behind him to make sure none of the employees were close enough to hear what was being said.

  “Could I see that invoice again, Mr. Fallon?”

  Fallon passed the paper over to him. “How would two hundred dollars sound?”

  “It wouldn’t sound as nice as four-fifty.”

  Halleck laughed. “Oh, we’re just talking about your first order, Mr. Fallon. You’ll need supplies down the way.” He winked. “That prison is going to take some time to build.”

  “Three hundred,” Fallon said.

  “Two-twenty-five. Don’t be greedy, Mr. Fallon. There’s enough money being printed in the Denver mint to keep us living high on the hog. And how long do you think it will take to complete the new pen?”

  “We shall likely retire before the final nail is driven.”

  “And we should have a small fortune by the time we retire. Retirement . . . well . . . it does not turn out so well for men who have not saved money for those golden years.”

  “Two twenty-five,” Fallon agreed, and held out his hand.

  They shook, and Fallon walked out. He quickly stopped at a water trough, grabbed his handkerchief, soaked it, and washed the filth he felt. He spit out the bile into the trough, threw away the piece of cotton, and stepped into the nearest saloon, walking straight to the bar and putting his boot on the brass rail.

  The bartender with a well-greased mustache came down from where two freighters were drinking and asked, “What’s your pleasure, Mac?”

  “Root beer,” Fallon said.

  “Root beer?”

  “You heard me. I need to get a bad taste out of my mouth.”

  The barkeep sighed. “Whiskey would do a better job than root beer.”

  “Root beer.” Fallon tossed a nickel on the bar.

  “Suit yourself. Let me go see if I can find some.”

  * * *

  Back in his office, Fallon saw the cash still on his desk. Preston the clerk and Montgomery Berrien the bookkeeper returned to his office. The clerk asked if Halleck had lowered the price.

  Fallon shook his head.

  “What does the state code say about businesses conspiring to fix prices or attempt extortion?”

  They stared at him blankly. Fallon waved as though he had been funning them. “I could bring this up to the U.S. attorney,” he said, sighed, and added. “But that’s not the way the American Detective Agency would handle this particular case.”

  “Sir?” the clerk and the bookkeeper said in unison.

  “Nothing.”

  “Does it mean your plans for the guards and everything will be canceled?” Preston asked.

  “I’m trying to think of a way to get justice,” Fallon said.

  “There are businessmen,” the clerk said, “in our town who are worse than many of the men wearing striped suits in our prison. But finding a way to put them behind bars is almost impossible.”

  “You’d need them to murder somebody. Or rob a store.” That’s what the embezzling little bookkeeper had to offer.

  “Murder is a state crime,” Fallon told them. “So is robbing a store. I’d like to get them in federal court.”

  “Good luck,” Preston said.

  “Yeah.” Fallon was almost ready to give up—on justice, and on his idea to help relieve the pressure and workload on the guards. “Well,” he said. “I might as well see if the Reverend Pigate is going to charge me to rent his chapel.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Fallon, Christina, and Rachel Renee had attended the prison services during Fallon’s first week on the job—just to see what kind of convicts went to church and what kind of church the chaplain ran. He had been impressed. Levi Pigate was a devout man of the cloth, a believer, but not pushy. He understood what his job was, and he kept his sermons short. They prayed. They sang. They read a bit of Scripture. Fallon did not even know what faith Pigate belonged to, but prisons could not afford chaplains of each denomination. They needed a preacher who could help the Mormons and the Catholics, the Jews and the Baptists, even the atheists and agnostics. Levi Pigate filled the bill.

  He was a good man.

  “That is an excellent idea,” the preacher said after Fallon explained his idea. “I tried that once with the previous warden, but he said there was no need in leading lambs to slaughter. I don’t know exactly what he meant, but I knew he was not going to allow me to teach school. And, to be honest, I would have made a lousy schoolmaster.”

  “I don’t know,” Fallon told him. “I’ve heard you preach, and I looked at the convicts sitting on our pew. You had their attention.”

  “You are too kind.” He opened a notebook. “So . . . you are thinking about classes beginning at what time?”

  “Nine in the morning,” Fallon said. “Till three in the afternoon. Six days a week. Like I said, you’d still have Sundays.”

  “Guards?”

  “Two. Unless you think more would be needed.”

  “I don’t think so, Warden Fallon. If the convicts are serious about learning.”

&n
bsp; “If they aren’t, they’ll be back to hard labor all day, and we’ll replace them with convicts who want to learn.”

  The chaplain wished Fallon luck, shook his hand, and saw him to the door. Fallon started back to the office, feeling slightly better about the school. That part was at least settled. Now Fallon just had to figure out a way to get around John Halleck’s greed.

  He slipped into the alleyway between the solitary cells and the laundry, heading back to his office, when two men appeared at the far exit. Fallon stopped, heard something behind him, and saw another man coming down that way. They wore the striped uniforms of prisoners. No guards could be spotted. The one coming from behind lowered a chain in his left hand, and let it rattle. The bigger of the two coming toward him pulled out a pair of knuckle-dusters and slipped them over the fingers of his right hand. The little cuss with a mangled left ear showed Fallon the homemade knife with the jagged edge.

  Fallon waved, smiled, and walked to those in front of him.

  “Hey, boys,” Fallon called out cheerily. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been looking all over for you.” He kept walking. The two men stopped, glanced at each other. Fallon said, “Did Linc Harper send you boys?”

  It was the first name Fallon could think of. Linc Harper, the notorious train robber out of mostly Missouri, could not have sent these men to do anything, since Fallon had killed him on the way to Jefferson City to serve time for the American Detective Agency.

  “So here’s what the plan is, boys, and here’s how I’m going to get you out of this hellhole. Yes, sir, we’ll be richer than the three kings with Mexican señoritas giving us more than we can handle. I hope you like tequila. I sure do.” He picked up his pace because he didn’t know how much more stupid banter he could think to say.

  The one with the brass knuckles and the one with the shiv separated themselves—which was the smart thing to do—but looked confused, especially when Fallon said, “I know you boys got the money. That was the test. Good job. That proves you’re exactly the kind of men we need for this little caper.”