MISTER ST. JOHN
Loren D. Estleman
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2012 / Loren D. Estleman
Copy-edited by: Darren Pulsford
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Meet the Author
Photo and biographical profile by Deborah Morgan
Since the appearance of his first novel in 1976, Loren D. Estleman has written nearly 70 books and hundreds of short stories and articles. Among those books: Writing the Popular Novel, from Writer’s Digest Books; the second in a new series featuring Estleman’s Los Angeles film detective, Valentino (Alone, featuring Greta Garbo, December 2009); Burning Midnight (the 22nd Amos Walker novel, June 2012); Roy & Lillie: A Love Story (between a reprobate Old West judge and
a celebrated British beauty, August 2010); The Confessions of Al Capone (his largest project to date, October 2012); and a novel about hanging judge Isaac Parker, The Branch and the Scaffold (April 2009). There are several short stories in the hopper, and proposals for future novels in both the mystery and historical western genres. He recently finished writing the 23rd installment in the Amos Walker P.I. series, and is currently working on another standalone novel.
Estleman has received fan letters from such notables as John D. MacDonald, The Amazing Kreskin, Mel Tormé, and Steve Forbes. He has acquired a loyal cult readership across the United States and in Europe, and his work has appeared in 23 languages.
An authority on both criminal history and the American West, Estleman has been called the most critically acclaimed author of his generation. He has been nominated for the National Book Award, and the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award.
He has received twenty national writing awards: the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement from Western Writers of America, The Barry Award from Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, four Shamuses from the Private Eye Writers of America, five Spurs from the Western Writers of America, two American Mystery Awards from Mystery Scene Magazine, Outstanding Western Writer, 1985, from Popular Fiction Monthly, two Stirrup Awards for outstanding articles in the Western Writers of America magazine, The Roundup, and three Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. In 1987, the Michigan Foundation of the Arts presented him with its award for literature. In 1997, the Michigan Library Association named him the recipient of the Michigan Author’s Award. In 2007, Nicotine Kiss was named a Notable Book by the Library of Michigan.
In 1993, Estleman was Guest of Honor at the Southwest Mystery Convention in Austin, Texas. He was Honored Guest at Eyecon ‘99 (Private Eye Writers of America Convention), held in St. Louis in July of that year. In June 2001, he was Guest of Honor (the first American chosen) at the Bloody Words Convention in Toronto, Canada.
He has been a judge for many literary honors, including the prestigious Hopwood Award given by the University of Michigan. He has written book reviews for many newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, and in 1988 he covered the filming of Lonesome Dove for TV Guide.
He’s worked hard to get where he is, beginning in the unheated upstairs of the 1867 Michigan farmhouse where he was raised. His fondest childhood memory is that of curling up in his robe with a mug of hot chocolate in front of the television to enjoy such grand western series as Maverick and Gunsmoke.
When he was fifteen years old, he sent out his first short story for publication. Over the next eight years, he collected 160 rejections. He attributes his tenacity to ego, and he’s earned that, too. He and his brown-bag lunch commuted to Eastern Michigan University to cut expenses after his father was disabled and his mother went to work to support the family.
Estleman often says he’s not a fast writer. He is, however, consistent, spending an average of six hours a day at his typewriter. He polishes as he goes, consuming a prodigious amount of cheap typing paper; a process he refers to as “writing for the wastebasket.”
His favorite writers — and those who have inspired his work — include Jack London, Edgar Allan Poe, W. Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, and Edith Wharton.
A sought-after speaker and a veteran journalist of police-beat news, Estleman graduated from Eastern Michigan University in 1974 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature and Journalism. On April 27, 2002, EMU presented him with an honorary doctorate in letters. He left the job market in 1980 to write full time. He lives in Michigan.
Visit the Author’s Website
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Mr. St. John
Chapter One
Bankers’ Hours
The first time Mr. Thorson met Donald Quix his faith in the youth of America was restored. In his mid-twenties, on the short side but solid, Quix had pale yellow hair with just the suggestion of a cowlick to soften the effect of his city attire, and was clean-shaven but for a pair of dark burnsides. His boiled shirt was so white it looked blue under the electric lights. He had a warm smile and his grip was firm and dry, two things in which the executive placed much faith. He carried a shiny black leather briefcase.
Once inside the railing that separated Thorson’s cubicle from the rest of the bank, Quix identified himself as a local contributor to the Cheyenne Detective Quarterly and asked the portly manager if they might discuss the precautions his establishment was taking against robbery for an article Quix was planning on modem law enforcement. When Thorson hesitated, the young man produced a card printed on handsome pebbled stock and invited him to call the number in the lower left-hand corner for confirmation. The manager used his new telephone to speak with a man named Roland A. Rockaway, periodicals editor for Great West Publications, who said, yes, he did employ a writer named Quix who was researching crime prevention in southern Wyoming, and described him down to his cowlick and burnsides. Thorson thanked him and rang off, all smiles. The home office had been after him for some time to do something about the branch’s image.
For half an hour the manager held forth on vault thicknesses, alarm systems, and guard selection while his guest scribbled in a pad taken from the briefcase and interrupted occasionally with a question about schedules and money movements to and from the bank. Afterward Thorson escorted him through the building, introduced him to the second guard inside the vault, and demonstrated the time lock. The journalist was impressed. He thanked his host and left after shaking hands, with a promise to return the next day with a photographer.
A representative from the bank’s home office dropped in shortly after closing that evening. Told of the interview, he flew into a rage, accusing Thorson of rank stupidity or criminal collusion or both and threatened an investigation into his personal finances. The manager was surprised and incensed. He took up Q
uix’s card, banged the telephone down in front of the representative, and suggested he find out for himself that the stranger was who he said he was. The call was made, but no one answered. Thorson pointed out that it was after five and that the offices of Great West Publications were no doubt closed. Perhaps, said the other, then rattled the prong and asked the operator to connect him with the sheriff.
When the doors of the bank opened at nine the next morning the man from the home office was inside along with Thorson, the sheriff, and two of his deputies, with two more stationed in front of the building and a fifth in back. Business proceeded as usual until half past ten, when Donald Quix arrived in the company of another young man wearing a U.S. Army knapsack over one shoulder and carrying a camera and tripod. They were stopped at the door and searched, but no arms were found. The knapsack proved to contain photographic plates and a can of flash powder, which the deputies were warned against opening for fear of igniting the contents. This was confiscated unopened. The back was removed from the camera to reveal nothing of dubious nature inside.
Quix was disappointed but cooperative, unlike his companion, who had to be restrained at first lest he strike one of the lawmen and who later proposed to the writer amid much profanity that they withdraw and offer immortality to some other bank. Though the fellow was taller and darker than Quix and wore a moustache, Thorson noticed a definite family resemblance, and supposed the two were brothers.
Despite their innocence of weapons the sheriff was disposed to jail the pair for questioning, but Quix suggested that they try again to reach his editor. Reluctantly the peace officer raised the receiver and asked for the number. For some moments he listened, while observers noted from the whitening of his lips and the snarling from the earpiece that he was getting hard advice from Roland A. Rockaway. He hung up, turned to the man from the home office, and released his pent-up fury in a remarkable display of non-repetitive obscenity, before which the executive withered. The sheriff left then, with his deputies in tow.
Pale and shaking, the home office representative stammered an apology to the journalists and instructed Thorson to see that they were extended every courtesy. Then he too went out, nearly colliding with a customer coming in, a cripple with no hands. At this the photographer laughed nastily.
For the first shot, Quix wanted all of the bank’s employees gathered in front of the open vault with the manager in the middle. The guard on duty in the lobby handed the can of flash powder to the photographer while his counterpart was summoned from the vault’s interior. The writer spent some time arranging the tableau, then stood back to inspect his handiwork, bantering gaily to break the ice formed by the journalists’ rude reception and the employees’ nervousness. At length he nodded to the photographer, who finished adjusting his tripod and tugged the lid off the powder can. From inside he drew a short-barreled handgun, cocking it as he pointed it at Thorson.
There was a short, shocked silence. Then the lobby guard slapped at his side arm. A swift movement nearby checked him. He turned toward the man with no hands to see the muzzle of a large revolver peeping out of his sleeve, fixed somehow to the stump, with a gold coin attached to the end of the exposed trigger. The other stump was poised to strike the coin.
“Smile,” said the man who called himself Donald Quix, relieving the two guards of their weapons.
When the time lock finally delivered Thorson and company from the vault into the sheriff’s hands, the manager estimated the bank’s loss at fourteen thousand. A posse was formed and descriptions of Quix and his companions were relayed by telephone and telegraph to peace officers throughout the state and beyond the borders, but no arrests were made. The telephone number of Great West Publications was traced to a public booth in Cheyenne. Four days after the robbery, both bank guards were dismissed and Thorson was relieved of his duties as manager. He was replaced by a hard-liner from Denver who shot two toes off his left foot eight weeks later while cleaning his revolver in the office. By that time two more banks and a Union Pacific payroll clerk had been robbed in Colorado and Utah. With some variations, the same basic technique was used in all four operations.
Chapter Two
Election Day
Silk streamers littered the lacquered floor of the hotel ballroom, sad gay scraps trodden and forgotten among the squashed cigar butts, empty whiskey bottles, and other debris of human self-indulgence. Silence had crept in like the jungle reclaiming an abandoned city on the heels of the last emigrant, swallowing whole the visitor’s echoing footfall and serving as a cruel reminder of what lay at the end of all men’s endeavors. Behind a dais draped with red, white, and blue bunting, a placard the size of a barn door foretold VICTORY in foot-high letters over the portrait of a middle-aged man with confident eyes and a brittle smile under a drooping black moustache shot with gray. Under that, like a children’s book illustrator’s rendition of shrunken Alice, the man himself sat slumped on the edge of the platform with his back against the speaker’s stand. His collar was sprung comically, and though he was facing the door he seemed unaware of his visitor’s approach. As the gap narrowed he helped himself to a healthy swig from a steel flask in his hand. Whiskey fumes edged the air.
“Mr. St. John?” inquired the visitor.
The seated man glowered up at him. He had a rectangular face, darker and more weathered than it appeared in the portrait, with sharp high cheekbones and an angular jaw beginning to lose definition beneath sagging folds of flesh. His hair was grayer than his moustache and growing thin at the temples. He looked older than his fifty years.
“What time is it?” His voice was rough but his consonants remained unslurred.
The other hesitated, then drew out his watch. “A little before twelve.”
“It’s still today, then. Amazing. Got something to write with?”
“I think so.” Putting away the timepiece, the visitor patted his pockets and came up with a pad and pencil.
“Write that on November 6, 1906, Irons St. John, Democratic candidate for the House of Representatives from the great State of Missouri, got clobbered by a Massachusetts carpetbagger half his age by a vote of three to one. Write how his friends and loyal supporters made a dash for the door when the vote tallies started coming in.”
The other wrote. “What do you want done with it when I’m finished?”
“Bury it.” The flask gurgled. “Just like they did with that stuff at the St. Louis Fair. Maybe somebody will dig it up a hundred years from now and I’ll be famous.”
“You’re famous now.”
“Popular, too. Have some champagne. There’s enough there to float a buffalo.” He waved an arm toward a table bristling with unopened bottles.
“Could be your friends and supporters don’t like self-pity.”
St. John looked at him again, his eyes in focus this time. “Man in the Nations died for saying less than that to me.” His tone was flat.
“Jack LeFever,” said the visitor. “He called you a liar and you blew his belly out his backside with a twelve-gauge shotgun. You were jailed in Fort Smith, but the jury voted for acquittal because LeFever was a known rapist and Judge Parker needed deputy marshals. It was either hang or raise your hand and say ‘I do.’”
For a space the ex-candidate studied him without speaking. His visitor was a tall man twenty years his junior, with a bold bent nose and a red beard cropped so close it looked at first glance like a week’s worth of neglect. He wore a homburg tilted rakishly over one brown eye and a three-piece suit with a quiet check. No overcoat; it wouldn’t be needed in that part of Missouri for another month.
“You’re pretty good,” St. John said at length. “Even the Republicans didn’t find that, and they dug. Anything else, or is that your load?”
“Hardly.” The bearded man paged back through his notepad. “You were born in Rockville, Maryland, March 12, 1856, the son of Thomas and Victoria Venable St. John. Your mother died when you were eleven and your father took you to Illinois to live with relat
ives and returned home.
âYou never saw him again. At the age of sixteen you ran away to Mexico to fight for President Juárez against Diaz and lost. The following year you were seen running with a number of border gangs in Arizona and New Mexico, and you were arrested two years later in Austin for the robbery of the Texas & Pacific Railroad, but the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. Then came the LeFever killing, and then your service for Parker in the Nations. As a peace officer you’re considered in the company of Heck Thomas and Bill Tilghman. As an outlaw, well,â—he shrugged, flipping shut the pad.
The primordial silence that had greeted the visitor strained at the rafters. Finally St. John spoke. “Pinkerton, right?”
Nodding, the other traded the pad for a leather folder and displayed his badge and identification. “Emmett Force Rawlings. I’m a field operative based in Cheyenne.”
“Wyoming?” St. John’s face took on an oriental cast. “Who hired you, my wife? Tell her I’m not coming back till that mother of hers makes an honest effort to drag herself through death’s door. I waited eight years and gave up.â
“I don’t know your wife. My agency has been engaged by the governor of Wyoming to investigate a series of robberies that have taken place there and in the neighboring states recently. I’m sure you’ve heard of Race Buckner.”
“I haven’t heard of anyone or anything since January. I’ve been sort of busy getting ready to go to Washington.”
“The Union Pacific will pay five thousand dollars for his capture, dead or alive. Two weeks ago he and his gang stuck up a railroad paymaster in Utah for six thousand. We have positive identifications in the other robberies as well.”
“Keep talking, Mr. Force.”
“Rawlings,” corrected the Pinkerton. “I’ve been authorized to engage you to gather a posse for the purpose of running down and apprehending the Buckner gang.”
“Sorry you came all this way.” He tipped up the flask.
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