Cadillac Jack

by Larry McMurtry

  "Who else?" she said.

  "Oh well," I said. "I can't promise, but there's a chance I could get you the boots of Billy the Kid."

  "The boots of Billy the Kid?" she said, looking at me with real interest for the first time in a couple of hours.

  "Yep," I said. "His last pair. The boots he died in."

  Chapter IV

  No question of it: the Kid's name was magic still.

  Cindy's bright eyes, which had yet to cloud even momentarily with love of me, almost clouded at the thought of the media coverage she could get if she exhibited the boots of Billy the Kid at her gallery in Georgetown.

  "Yeah," she said, approvingly. Apart from "naw," it was her sexiest word. There was something kind of All-American about the way she said those words. I couldn't begin to resist it—not that I'm known for my powers of resistance.

  Then she looked at me closely.

  "Are you kidding me?" she asked.

  "Not at all," I said. "I know the precise location of the boots of Billy the Kid."

  Of course I neglected to mention that every other boot-and-spur scout in the West also knew their precise location: a bank vault in Clovis, New Mexico.

  "Finding the boots is no problem," I said.

  "Then what's the problem?" she said. "Let's go get 'em."

  I was so delighted I practically jumped out of bed. It was just what I had hoped she would say. In my eagerness to get started I was ready to overlook the actual problem, which was that the boots were the property of Uncle Ike Spettle, possibly the oldest and certainly one of the orneriest men in America.

  By his own admission Uncle Ike was one of those lucky people who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, which in this case meant being in the backyard of Pete Maxwell's ranch house in eastern New Mexico on a July evening in 1881. He was nine years old at the time.

  It was in that backyard that Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid.

  Fortunately for Uncle Ike, it was dark, and Pat Garrett was not immediately sure he had killed the right man. Not wanting to expose himself rashly, he retreated and waited awhile before going back to count coup.

  During that interval, Uncle Ike saw his chance and grabbed the boots. As outlaw buffs all know, Billy the Kid was found barefooted, a circumstance usually explained by the fact that he had been lolling around in bed with his sweetheart and had just gone out to the waterbucket to refresh himself when Garrett happened on him.

  However, it only takes a nodding acquaintance with the backyards of eastern New Mexico—the haunt of sandburs and scorpions, rattlesnakes and black widows—to convince one that a cagey man like Bill Bonney would have known better than to step into one of them barefooted.

  Uncle Ike, meanwhile, had devoted almost a century to hanging onto those boots—in themselves just a scruffy pair of black boots, somewhat run down at the heels.

  Long since superannuated as a cowboy, he had been for almost forty years a professional Old-Timer, driving buck-boards in rodeo parades and cheerfully telling lies on smalltown talk shows all over the West.

  I had visited him several times, plied him with steak dinners, and left a standing offer of $20,000 on the boots— modest when one considers that Bat Masterson's Colt recently brought $52,000 at auction—and he hadn't even really been an outlaw.

  In Uncle Ike's case, more than money was needed. After all, he had hung onto the boots for 99 years. What was needed was a grasp of the subtleties of possession, and that I had. The fact that Uncle Ike had kept the boots for 99 years didn't mean he would want to keep them for 103, assuming he lived.

  Love affairs with objects sometimes end as abruptly as love affairs with people. Beulah Mahony had the Valentino hubcaps for 40 years, but she sold them to me without the slightest flicker of regret. One day they simply lost their magic, after which it was just a matter of seeing that they were passed on to a worthy successor.

  In any case, a dash to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, to see Uncle Ike would accomplish my main purpose, which was to get Cindy out of town for a while. Once there, if the old bastard balked I could still run over to Amarillo and fill the car with emerald-encrusted substitutes.

  "I gotta get going," Cindy said, stretching. "It's Sunday afternoon. On Sunday afternoon I have tea with Harris and his mother."

  "Tea?" I said.

  Cindy looked defiant.

  "Ordinary tea?" I asked.

  "Of course," she said. "High tea would be a little ostentatious."

  "Why do you have to do it?" I asked, too surprised to dissemble.

  "Mrs. Harisse is testing me," Cindy said. "After all, I am Harris' fiancee. She wants to see if my manners are adequate."

  "Why should you have to be tested?"

  "Because I come from southern California and have a father who owns two thousand apartment buildings," she said, reaching out to get her watch off the breakfast table. Within two minutes she had arranged her shining hair into a surprisingly demure bun.

  Then she went to her closet and emerged with an equally demure tea dress, complete with a prim white collar.

  Before my very eyes the unconstrained woman of the California beaches transformed herself into Emily Dickinson. She even put on hose and sensible black shoes. The disciplines of social climbing were apparently unrelenting.

  "Hey," I said. "How long do you have to be tested?"

  "Probably about another year," she said.

  "Haven't you fucked up yet at all?" I asked.

  "Nope," she said with a grin. "So far I’ve been impeccably well mannered. I’ve never helped myself to the sugar cubes and I never eat more than two cucumber sandwiches. That's the hard part. I love cucumber sandwiches. I could eat about fifty, if I turned myself loose."

  "What if you lose control and snarf up eight or ten?" I said. "Is the engagement off?"

  "Sure," she said. "Mrs. Harisse would be horrified if I did that. But I won't."

  She scratched her armpit thoughtfully for a moment, before slipping on the tea dress. Then she came over and bit my earlobe. We nuzzled around a bit. Maybe Cindy was just making up for the restraint she would have to practice when the cucumber sandwiches were trucked in.

  Chapter V

  Although she lived several blocks from Harris and his mother, she firmly refused to let me give her a ride. It was obvious the engagement would be off in a second if Mrs. Harisse should happen to see her disembarking from a car like mine.

  Actually I felt a little better about my chances already. If Mrs. Harisse was worth her salt—and why wouldn't she be?—it would only be a matter of time before she penetrated Cindy's disguise. Even demurely dressed she didn't look much like a New England virgin.

  Precisely an hour and a half later I met her at her shop and we spent a pleasant afternoon pricing her newly acquired cowboyana. Then we went to a Chinese restaurant and Cindy put away an amazing amount of shrimp fried rice. I tried to get her interested in scouting by telling her stories about Zack Jenks, the world's greatest Coke-bottle scout, one of the simplest and most amusing men I knew, but it didn't work. Cindy wasn't interested in scouting. She was interested in eating a lot of rice, having a normal amount of sex, and getting her sleep, which is exactly the order in which things occurred.

  When I woke up for the second time in her bed she was already up and dressed, ready to bop off for the day to New York to buy some dresses for her dress shop. She looked beautifully organized and also beautiful.

  Once she was ready, she came over to the bed and scrutinized me thoughtfully, in the way that she had. She had a newspaper tucked under her arm and an elegant little Fendi briefcase in her lap, all ready to go.

  "What are you gonna do all day?" she asked.

  "Scout," I said.

  "Okay," she said, "but don't go too far away. Just buy things around here. I’ll be back on the four o'clock shuttle."

  I've always been a little intimidated by women who wake up early. It may have been why I got along so well with Coffee. Not only did she not wak
e up early: It could truthfully be said that she was seldom fully awake.

  Cindy Sanders was fully awake. "Did you hear me?" she asked.

  "Okay," I said, willing to agree to anything. "I heard you."

  "There's a party at the Iranian embassy tonight," she said. "We might go. Check in with me at the shop about five-thirty."

  The minute she went out the door I felt the need to be immersed in my own element again, my element being objects.

  Thirty minutes later I was downtown, in the thick of an auction, arriving just in time to buy the best quadripartite icon I had ever seen.

  Chapter VI

  When I say the thick of an auction I mean it literally: Nothing short of an execution will pack a crowd tighter than the chance to buy something.

  When I walked in the crowd was balled up around the auctioneer like Italians at a meat counter.

  As usual—though it was just a normal junky auction, of the sort held regularly in the estate-clearance rooms of big city auction houses—every conceivable kind of person was represented in the crowd. Perhaps there were no grandes dames of the ilk of Harris' mother, but excepting the crustiest of the upper crust, all America was there: ghetto mothers, hoping to get a wobbly table or a secondhand coat

  for a buck or two; lawyers in pinstripes, tired of lawyering; and bankers in camel's hair coats, bored with their banks; junk dealers; antique dealers; scouts and hustlers of every description; pimps and whores, killing a little time before hitting the streets; young stockbrokers hoping to find a good sporting print to go over their fireplaces; old ladies in raggedy furs, with their eye on a demitasse service or a nice footstool covered in needlepoint; finally, wives—wives of all ages, weights, and shades of chic, from suburban mothers in down vests and parkas, looking for a serviceable baby bed or a set of Swedish carving knives, on up to elegant matrons from Georgetown or Chevy Chase, each of them hoping to find something decent to spend their husband's money on.

  Mixed in with the wives was the usual heavy concentration of doctors, the world's most persistent bargain hunters, restlessly pawing through the junk in the hopes of finding something worth a hundred times what it would cost them.

  As a regular of such gatherings, I might detest the doctors, but the group I feared was the wives. The doctors, however rich, seldom had the courage of their instincts when the bidding got hot; but the wives, however dumb, bid with the absolute courage that accompanies absolute boredom. Wives are the bane of every scout: They welcome challenge and will pay any price for something they have decided they want.

  Actually, they just like the thrill of bidding. The crush and competition of the auction turned them on: All that greed is sexy. Their eyes would glow with passionate lights when they triumphantly secured, for five or six hundred dollars, some object any competent dealer would have sold them for two twenty-five.

  If there was anything about this particular crowd that bespoke Washington it was all the pasty-looking civil servants, wandering around like newly risen zombies. They wore beige trench coats and cheap little woolen hats, and there were dozens of them, GS-5s to however high GSs go, men so circumscribed in their styles as to seem neither dead nor alive. They stared at the assembled junk without interest, lacking the fever of the doctors or the passion of the wives. So far as I could tell they were only there because they had to go somewhere on their coffee breaks or lunch hours.

  Possibly one or two of them collected something exotic: the chess sets made from Ecuadorian Twaia beans, for example, but if so, whatever they were turned on by wasn't there and they mostly just stood around in front of the worn-out armchairs or the indifferent chinaware, watching the bidding dully, as if it were a sporting event whose rules and purpose eluded them.

  Somewhat to my surprise, Brisling Bowker, the owner of the auction house, was doing his own auctioneering when I walked in.

  Brisling Bowker was a huge man, with a permanently pained demeanor not unlike Jackie Gleason's.

  I nodded hello to Tuck Tucker, Bowker's amazing floor manager. Tuck was certainly one of the most formidable talents on the popcorn auction scene. When I walked in he was at the pay phone, taking one bid in his left ear while an old lady in a mink coat whispered another into his right ear. In the course of an all-day sale he would take and execute hundreds of bids, on everything from lawn mowers to verdure tapestries, gliding through the crush of the auction like a surfer who's just caught a wave.

  His job was to cover the floor, making sure the various hustlers and auction rats didn't stuff a camera or an ivory or some other valuable object into a two-buck box of junky bric-a-brac. He flicked his bids with the eclat of a world-class Ping-Pong player, bidding with a wink, a whistle, a snap of his fingers, the lift of an eyebrow—and he always hit his lot, whether it happened to be a cracked tea service some little old lady had decided to go to $20 on, or a diamond bracelet a lobbyist thought might impress his girl friend.

  Boog, who played auctions like some people play horses, reposed more trust in Tuck than he did in the President, the Chief Justice, and the leaders of both houses of Congress. Over the years Tuck had bought him everything from Amberina punch cups to Owo masks.

  I would have dallied an hour or two in Bowker's auction just to watch Tuck, but as it happened I had no immediate chance to do that. The icon came under the hammer just as I walked in.

  The sight of it affected me like a big squirt of adrenalin. Brisling Bowker had just finished selling a couple of rusty push mowers and a barrelful of rakes and shovels to two hillbilly junk dealers who were probably planning to take them back to West Virginia and parlay them into a fortune.

  Their lot sold for $4, and the lovely quadripartite icon was sitting there next to it, propped up between a worn-out washing machine and a pile of snow tires.

  I would have liked a moment or two in which to try and figure out if it could be a fake, but I wasn't going to get one.

  "All right, now we have your icon,” Brisling intoned, in a voice replete with boredom.

  Part of the boredom was real—selling push mowers and snow tires is not inspiring work—but most of it was calculated. Brisling looked ponderous, but he knew his work. He had been moving the junk along steadily, at the rate of three or four lots a minute, and it was plain he hoped to dispose of the icon without missing a beat

  "Do I hear forty dollars for your icon, now?" he asked, just as he happened to glance my way.

  "Forty dollars," I said loudly, tipping my hat

  Chapter VII

  Quadripartite icons, I should point out, are extremely rare. The few that turn up are normally auctioned at Sotheby's or Christie's, on a stand covered in velvet, to a crowd that will include most of the great dealers and collectors in America and western Europe.

  Seldom indeed will one be lotted between a barrel of rakes and a pile of snow tires. Moreover, it was early in the morning, when most of the serious antique dealers weren't even there yet.

  Obviously Brisling was hoping nobody would notice the icon.

  My arrival spoiled that little game, but Brisling, who had been an auctioneer for forty years and seen his share of icons come and go, didn't so much as blink.

  "Forty dollars I have," he said. "Forty-five dollars for the icon here."

  Thirty seconds later it was knocked down to me for $1,300. The game had had no chance anyway: Somebody else was onto the icon, if not several somebodies.

  The figure stunned the crowd, most of whom had not noticed the icon and were caught flat-footed when the bidding took off.

  The GS-12s looked slightly less blank, the sound of money being spent bringing a tinge of life to their pallid cheeks. Many of the wives looked puzzled and a little troubled, and several doctors looked mad enough to bite themselves, at the thought that some treasure had escaped their attention.

  Naturally they assumed that if a cowboy would pay $1,300 for the icon it must be worth $50,000.

  I would have liked to try to get a fix on the competition, but the bidding we
nt from $40 to $1,300 in thirty seconds, bids darting in so rapidly that I didn't dare take my eye off Brisling Bowker, who then calmly proceeded to sell the snow tires, bringing the hillbilly junk dealers to life again.

  I walked over to pick up my icon. Before I had gone two steps with it a doctor in a green overcoat was at my elbow, squinting at it.

  "It could be Byelorussian," he said. "I'll give you two thousand for it, right here."

  "Sorry, got a customer," I said, although I didn't. So far as I could remember, Boog didn't have any icons, although he could have been bidding on this one, through Tuck. I had no reason to think so, other than the fact that Boog is usually to be found, in person or in proxy, when the best things are being sold.

  Then I noticed someone who took the bloom right off the morning: Schoeffer Schedel was leaning against the Coke machine, wearing his usual malign grin.

  Schoeffer, known as the Baltimore Blinker, or simply Blink—after his manner of bidding—was the acknowledged king of American auction rats. He was small, bald, and bulletheaded, seemed to subsist on cigar stubs, and was always dressed in a dirty green suit, a white belt, multicolored shoes, and a blue tie whose knot was as big as an apple.

  Blink was not noted for his amiability. He favored everyone with the same malign grin. You felt he was only grinning because he knew you were about to be run over by a truck.

  This was indeed always a possibility, since the mysterious interests Blink represented owned a fleet of trucks. The trucks raced all over America, carrying the antiques Blink bought to mysterious warehouses in north Jersey. He seldom bothered with single items, but whenever possible bought estates or whole stores. I had encountered him as far afield as Tallahassee and Seattle, not to mention Harbor City, just south of L.A., where the single largest commercial flea market in the country operates practically full-time, like the casinos of Las Vegas.