Mr. St. John

by Loren D. Estleman

  Kendall returned the warrant. “Talk to Carl at the livery stable. Tell him I sent you. If you don’t, he might try to stick you with one of them beat-down animals the old man brung in.”

  “Do it,” St. John told Edwards and counted out fifty dollars from a roll into the reformed outlaw’s outstretched palm. Kendall snorted.

  “Carl ain’t never let a horse go for fifty bucks yet.”

  “Carl ain’t never done business with me.” Edwards grinned and left while the marshal was looking for the key to the cell.

  They jostled him up, ratcheted on a new pair of handcuffs with a spring lock provided by the Pinkerton, and escorted him, sleep-drunk and stiff from the chalk in his joints, downstairs to the office. While the square-built man in charge read and signed the receipt, the prisoner raised his shackled hands to his face and rubbed vigorously, the chain jingling, arranging his senses by main will. The Indian was at the door and the other two, the little preacher and the bearded detective, stood on either side of him.

  Carroll had found himself in this position several time before. Though none of the young squirts he had been riding with believed it, he had known Frank and Jesse and Bob and Cole and the rest, had thawed the frostbite out of his bare feet next to Jesse’s at the campfire, had smelled their horses’ manure and they his, had breathed the rotten-egg stench of spent black powder in Gallatin and Corydon and at the fairgrounds in Kansas City, where that little girl had come running out from nowhere as they were leaving and he hadn’t time to turn his horse. Now and then he still woke up with her screams buzzing in his skull. His first arrest had occurred soon after, but he had managed to wriggle out of his bonds and flee on foot while the posse was camped and even the man on watch had fallen asleep. He’d had luck in those days.

  Then there were the bonds from which he had not escaped. A year in Yankton for possession of a running iron. Six months on a Union Pacific work detail for attempting to drive Texas cattle over the quarantine line. Two years and two months in the Missouri State Penitentiary for receiving stolen horses, which had led to his meeting Gentleman John Bitsko, the Kissing Bandit. (He wondered if John had got his wire.) Forty-four months in captivity had taught him patience, but more important, they had taught him to watch for his opportunity and throw his noose over it as it galloped past.

  They were waiting for the tall one to come back with a horse for him. Outside the window two Mexicans with bandoleers under their coats were fooling around with the marshal’s motorcar, one in the driver’s seat wrenching the steering wheel left and right, the other standing on the running board, gesturing for him to slide over, that it was his turn. The automobile sagged under his weight.

  “George, get them away from that thing before they bust it will ya’” asked the man in charge.

  The Indian stepped outside, and Carroll started tingling. A warm sensation, it started in his toes, the toes he didn’t want anyone taking pictures of, and crept up his legs to his stomach, chest, and head, driving the rheumatism before it like paste from a foil tube. He had always said that a man takes courage from his feet, not his heart, which was another reason why he believed in treating them with respect. He braced himself.

  The Mexicans were fighting over the steering wheel when George reached them. One of them bumped the shifting cane and the vehicle started rolling backward, down the gentle decline in front of the office. The man on the running board jumped off. The car picked up speed. George grasped the edge of the frame and tried to brace himself, his boots clawing for traction on the slimy street surface. Kendall cursed and said the car was town property. The leader said, “Son of a bitch,” and sent the Pinkerton out to help. He and the marshal watched from the door.

  Carroll pivoted on his left foot, swinging his doubled fists sideways and up at the preacher’s jaw. He undershot, missing bone but thumping neck muscle hard with the steel cuffs. While his victim was off balance he followed through with his shoulder, spilling him. The lawmen at the door were turning when he struck them with both shoulders and forced an opening between them. He bounded across the boardwalk, past the men grappling with the automobile, toward the startled horses hitched out front.

  “Don’t shoot, Testament!” St. John roared.

  Pierce—hatless, hair in his eyes, scrambling to his feet—didn’t hear him. The long Navy Colt was out of its holster and his finger closed on the trigger. Flame leapt from the barrel. The room throbbed. The plate-glass window shivered, fell in silence, its noise swallowed by the deafening aftershock. He fired again.

  Carroll didn’t hear the second shot. He lay face down in the mud. The back of his coat smoldered.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Magdalene’s Children, I

  Chloe Ziegler was a survivor. When election time came in Cheyenne and the mayor’s people padlocked her front door, she cut a new entrance into the side of the building and was in business again that evening. When a curfew was declared with her in mind, banning all male visitors to the homes of single women after 9 P.M., she hired three wagons and delivered. And whenever the ladies of the Women’s Alliance for Temperance and Morality reached for their axes and black bonnets, she repaired to the country trailing a list of clients as long as the Jubilee Trail.

  She was nearly forty but looked fifty, a wiry woman less than five feet tall with hair the color of house dust springing out in stubborn wisps from a bun behind her head and a chest like a man’s. But she dressed like a frontier woman in sturdy white blouses and dark skirts that swept the ground when she walked, and she walked a lot, always hurrying, leaning forward like a farmer chasing his hat, her high-heeled pumps clicking like a telegraph key on plank floors and boardwalks. Her face was thin, with dark thumbprints under the eyes and sharp lines from nose to mouth. None of these things stopped customers from asking for her, however, and the most insistent were those who had been with her before. Women in her profession who inspired respect as well as lust came at a premium.

  She was the illegitimate child of a waitress in a Memphis restaurant and a circuit rider from Kentucky. Her stepfather, a ferryman on the Mississippi River, claimed her virginity when she was eleven, after which she left home and learned her trade in the brothels along the river before heading West at thirteen to pan the pockets of gold and silver miners around Leadville, Colorado. From there she had followed rumors of riches to Virginia City, north to Skagway, and finally south to Spindletop, Texas, before tiring of the nomad’s life and opening shop in Cheyenne. Along the way she had suffered two abortions and a broken arm when a jealous rancher from near Lake Tahoe caught her with one of his cowhands, and had her belly slit open by a crazy Mexican whore in a Beaumont saloon. She still carried the scar, running in a thin, crooked white line from her navel to the right side of her pelvis. When men asked about it she told them she’d had her appendix removed.

  This year she was set up in a house that had been built by a retired New York State Supreme Court justice and cattleman, dead now, below the Colorado border, on the outskirts of Louisville. It was a three-story frame building with a veranda all the way around and a balcony on top like the ones town girls used to stand on to entice cowboys on their way in from the range. But those days of open solicitation were over. Since Chloe’s agreement with the authorities in Louisville called for her not to advertise, she had declared the balcony off limits and turned away sign painters who came to her door looking for work. Instead, her trademark, a stuffed rooster posed in the attitude of crowing, was placed in a front window on the ground floor. Past customers who hadn’t been in since before her last move had only to ride around until they spotted that straining silhouette with a lamp burning behind it. Chloe’s business sometimes faltered, but it never stopped.

  On the afternoon Carroll Underwood died, Jim Shirley’s Cherokee squaw was sitting on the front porch of the Louisville house in her man’s clothes, cracking the shells of sunflower seeds with her teeth, spitting them out, and chewing the woody meat. Pieces of shells covered the ground ar
ound her heavy farmer’s boots. When cowboys drifting in from nearby spreads asked her what she charged she said nothing. When they persisted she showed them her knife and they went inside. No one entered or left the house without her seeing. Caruso sang in the parlor through Edison’s genius, the Neapolitan’s golden tenor nasal and crackling like dry paper. The snatches that reached Woman Watching through the thick panes of glass in the windows reminded her of the death chants heard during her youth in Oklahoma. She spat out shells and chewed the woody meat.

  In a room yellow with afternoon light on the top floor, Race Buckner lay under a thin quilt listening to Caruso and watching Chloe hook herself into her corset. The stays scraped together the spare stuff of her breasts and forced it into modest hills over the edge of her chemise. She had a moon-shaped birthmark on her upper right arm that leapt and twitched as she drew the cord taut and tied it. Her arms were muscled like a Sioux brave’s. Her body was younger than her face and lighter in color.

  “I wouldn’t say it was bad, exactly,” she grunted, stepping into the coarse folds of her skirt. “The problem with outlaws is none of ‘em ever take off their boots.”

  He frowned down at his boots leaning drunkenly against each other beside the bed.

  “I didn’t mean it literally.” She put on her blouse and buttoned the cuffs. “If you ride horses the way you pay attention to women, it’s no wonder you got to replace them so often.”

  “What do you know about how I replace horses?” he asked quickly.

  “The Friday after that railroad paymaster got held up in Utah you, Merle, and the cripple were here wrinkling my bed sheets. I ain’t been away from a saddle so long I forgot no horse can go two hundred miles in four days without working up a lather.”

  “Every time a train or a bank gets robbed it don’t mean it was us done it.”

  Glancing in the dresser mirror, she tucked a graying tendril behind one ear. “I only see you when you got hundred-dollar bills, and I only see hundred-dollar bills after something’s been robbed. I hear three men hit a train in Elephant Crossing last week.”

  He watched her sorting through the bills in his wallet on the dresser until she found a twenty and separated it from the rest. It vanished down the neck of her blouse.

  “You think too much, Chloe. It ain’t healthy, for you or me.”

  She looked at him, her eyes like a lady butcher’s reading a scale. “If you’re scared I talk to the law when you ain’t here—I do. When the law ain’t here I talk to you.”

  “Loyal.”

  “All I owe you’s what you pay for,” she flared. “I was loyal to a stagecoach robber in Virginia City. He comes around two days after the robbery flashing fifty-dollar gold pieces, and when the marshal showed up next morning asking about him, I kept my mouth shut. I was sixteen, I thought that was expected. The posse tracked him from my tent to a cave in the Walker Range and shot him sitting on a Wells Fargo strongbox. They set fire to my tent while I was in town shopping. I left with just what was on my back, but I learned my lesson. No one’s burned me out of anyplace since.”

  “It don’t seem right,” he said dejectedly. “When I was a kid I read all the dime novels about Jesse James and the Daltons and the rest, and I never read where they was ever give up by a woman. They gave their women money for their rent and stuck up the landlords to get it back, and when the posses come around, the women always sent them in the wrong direction.”

  She came over and placed a hand on his cheek, caressing the fine stubble. Her palm was soft but the fingers were strong, as if piano wire ran through them.

  “I like you, Race. If I didn’t I’d just send you to one of the girls when you asked for me. You’re smart, but you can be awful dumb. I’ve had fourteen-year-old farm boys that knew more about the world than you.”

  He jerked his head away. She reached over and patted the cheek. “There’s a razor and soap in the bathroom. I’ll tell Violet to bring you some hot water.” She left, trailing a sharp-sweet scent of sandalwood and woman.

  The bathroom was a converted closet under the staircase on the second floor, just large enough for a sink and toilet in matching bone-white porcelain. Baths were still taken at ground level in a cast-iron tub with water heated on the stove and brought by girls scarcely past school age. The house had no automatic water heater. After shaving, Race went downstairs to the parlor, where he found Merle and Jim Shirley seated on the sofa going over their map of Colorado, stained and cracking at the creases.

  “We was just starting to worry about you,” Merle greeted. He, too, was freshly shaved and smelled of bath salts. Shirley had bathed and had his whiskers scraped off by Woman Watching in a stream outside of Louisville before riding in and was starting to look seedy again.

  The phonograph had wound down. Race cranked the handle vigorously and returned the needle to the beginning of the wax cylinder. Caruso sang.

  Merle made a place for his cousin on the sofa. “You must like that grand opera.”

  “It’s loud,” said Race. “Next time you plan a job in a public place, make sure there’s a lot of noise to drown you out. Better yet, don’t do no planning except in private.” Ignoring the other’s gesture, he drew up an overstuffed chair and sat down opposite his partners. Unlike the parlors in most similar establishments, this one was spartan—a few pieces of comfortable furniture and an upright piano with a shawl on top and a vase of flowers. The Edison was ten years old, one of the less expensive models. No lace doilies or antimacassars for Chloe Ziegler. A portrait of the martyred President McKinley hung over the mantel, left over from the late justice’s residency.

  “We wasn’t planning, exactly,” Merle muttered. “Just talking.”

  Race said, “Let’s not do any talking till we see Carroll’s man in Denver.”

  “Hell, half the fun of these things is talking about them before. Jim thinks we should hit the ore train going in. I say we hit the coin train coming out. Coins are easier to carry and get rid of.”

  Race shook his head. “Gold coins are worse than bearer bonds. These days most folks use paper money and silver.”

  “You can’t bum gold coins.”

  The cousins glared at each other. Caruso sang.

  “I know a fellow in Canada will buy all the ore we can bring him,” put in Shirley. “Runs his own assay office and smelter.”

  “What’s he pay?” Merle growled. “Half a buck on the dollar?”

  “Forty cents.”

  “That stinks. We take all the risks, bust our asses hauling it clear up there, and he makes all the profit.”

  Race said, “The guard won’t be so heavy on the ore run.”

  “That’s because they know no one’s stupid enough to try and rob it. You know how much that stuff weighs? We’d need a wagon and a six-horse team.”

  “Two wagons,” corrected Shirley. “Double reinforced. And two four-horse teams.”

  “Two!” Merle goggled. “How the hell much gold you figuring on stealing?”

  “A ton’d do it. Figured it out last night, in my head. You get pretty good at that when you ain’t got hands to cipher on paper. Comes out to roughly half a million, not counting the slag.”

  The cylinder ran out. The thorn needle crunched rhythmically over naked wax, louder than anything else in the room. Race stirred finally, getting up to start the cylinder yet again. Then he rejoined the group.

  They conversed in murmurs, bending so close over the map spread out on the tea table that their heads almost touched. Each time Caruso finished his aria Race or Merle left his place, wound the phonograph, and set the needle back at the beginning. The tenor grew fuzzy, the high notes lost definition. The light outside the window became golden and then gray. They argued, they planned.

  “What you reckon them three are talking about?” whispered the thin blonde with whom Jim Shirley had spent part of the afternoon. She stood next to Chloe in the curtained entrance to the parlor. Her left eyelid drooped, a congenital defect. It gave her a
lazy look.

  “We’re better off not knowing.” The madam was looking at Race. Her features were carved from old wood, time-battered and dark.

  “That one with the stumps scares me. He wouldn’t take off that trick gun in bed. All the time we was together I was scared he’d blow my head off.”

  “It ain’t their guns you should worry about,” Chloe told her. “It’s the ones come after them you need to watch.”

  Outside, darkness came to Woman Watching and grafted her to the shadowed porch.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Personal Effects

  “Leave him his boots,” said St. John. Working swiftly while he still had light, Emmett Force Rawlings had had the door to the marshal’s office taken off its hinges and leaned against the hitching rail to support the body of the man they knew as Wood, which he and George had arranged in the attitude of standing with his hands folded over his stomach. His eyes were half open, still shining with fluid but beginning to soften to a dull, moist glaze. There was mud on his clothes and a dot of blood in one corner of his mouth. They had washed his face with water from a nearby trough and combed the clots from his beard. He looked as if he were waiting for someone.

  “Let them be, I said.”

  The Pinkerton, who had stooped to pull off the dead outlaw’s boots, looked up at St. John. People trickled between them, staring at the corpse. “I have to remove them or the measurements won’t be accurate. Washington’s particular.”

  “Look close, son. Don’t I look particular to you?” Rawlings straightened. The old lawman was glaring down at him from the boardwalk, feet spread, fists swinging loose from his worn coat sleeves.

  “He’s dead,” said the detective. “What’s the difference to him who sees the holes in his socks?”

  “Just let the boots be.”

  “The dime novelists don’t mention your soft spot for criminals.” It came out sneering.