“I figure it has to be Paul Muller,” I said casually.
Jenkins’s voice was bitter. “That bastard,” he said. “That miserable bastard.”
I shrugged. “Like you said, someone who’s just lost an only child is apt to do anything. Try not to touch that bandage, Mr. Jenkins. I’m no expert, and it may come loose.”
He jerked his hand away from his head.
“You have to wonder, though,” I went on.
“There’s no sense wondering about what a madman does.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Crazy people start from a different place from the rest of us, but they usually follow the same rules once they get started.”
“I’ve got a headache.” He closed his eyes.
“You shouldn’t go to sleep, either,” I said.
Jenkins growled.
“Help me with this. Suppose Muller is mad with grief, or injured pride, or whatever it is. Why should he want to kill you of all people?”
Jenkins narrowed his eyes at me.
“And it was you he was trying to kill,” I assured him. “He had numerous chances at me, and never bothered. And he mentioned you by name at the end, and said it was for his son.
Jenkins said nothing. I scratched my chin.
“You never so much as laid eyes on his son, did you?”
Jenkins started to shake his head, winced, then said, “No.”
“I didn’t think so. The only thing you ever had with either him or his family was to steer his wife to a place where she could make a decent living for herself and the boy. And even then, you had no idea of her and Paul Muller, isn’t that right?”
Jenkins mumbled a reply.
“What’s that?”
“That’s right,” he said, loud and clear.
“So how,” I mused, “could he possibly have you on his revenge list?”
“I don’t know,” Jenkins said. “Could you please shut up for a while, Booker?”
“Don’t go to sleep now.”
“I won’t.”
I gave him about three minutes. Then, at last, I said, “You know what I’ll bet it is? Muller’s heard how Le Four is practically your own little private fiefdom, and he holds you responsible for everything that happens in it. I’ll bet that’s what it is.”
I put a happy little smile on my face and lapsed into silence once again. This time, we sat there long enough for the afternoon shadows to have lengthened perceptibly, and Jenkins didn’t take his shrewd black eyes off me the whole time.
I tried not to let on that I noticed.
Finally, Jenkins cleared his throat and said, “Booker?”
“Yes, Mr. Jenkins? I’m sure the doctor will be here before too long.”
“To hell with the doctor. I’m not worried about the doctor. I want to ask you a question.”
“Certainly,” I said. “I’ve been asking you questions all day.”
“How much does Blacke pay you?”
That caught me by surprise. My brain raced for a few seconds, trying to decide what I ought to say, and then I just told him.
Jenkins sneered.
“That’s not enough,” he said. “I could double that.”
I snorted. “You could pay five times that.”
“Don’t be greedy, Booker.”
“I’m not being greedy, I’m just stating a fact. With the money you’ve got, you could pay a monthly salary five times what Blacke pays me and never miss it. You probably spend more than that on cigars.”
Jenkins made a sour face. “I don’t suppose you’d let me have a cigar, either.”
“Nope. I saved your life, I feel kind of responsible for it. Let’s see what the doctor says.”
“I could triple it,” he said.
“Before we go any further,” I said, “let’s get things all straightened out. Are you offering me a job?”
“Of course I am.”
“Doing what?” I demanded. “The only thing I know how to do is write.”
“You’re smart. And despite your ridiculous eastern ways, you’re savvy. And you’ve got the guts, if only for the way you mouth off to me all the time.”
“And I just saved your life,” I pointed out.
“There’s that, too. Nobody can say that Lucius Jenkins doesn’t pay his debts.”
A mad impulse led me to see just how much he admired my “bravery.”
“I’ve been intimate with your daughter, you know.”
The look that flashed over Jenkins’s face made me glad that my courage had not extended to telling him this while he had access to a gun or a horsewhip, or even when he was in sufficient shape to jump off the furniture and strangle me.
He took a deep breath and calmed himself.
“I know, I know. Do you think I’m a fool? One way or another I’ve been able to control everyone I ever met, except Abigail and her mother. At that, I suppose you’re better than some of the specimens she used to sneak around with.”
I wanted to thank him, but I didn’t think it would be such a good idea.
“Anyway,” he went on, “if you want to work for me, you might even be able to marry her.”
“I don’t think your daughter has the slightest interest in me as a husband.”
“Just being around me, Booker, seeing how I work, helping me, could make you a very rich man.”
“If I had wanted to be a very rich man,” I told him, “I could have stayed in New York and gone to work for my grandfather.”
Then Jenkins asked who my grandfather was, and I told him that, too, and he was impressed.
Before the conversation could go any further, Dr. Mayhew showed up. I told him what had happened, and he went immediately to the patient, checking his eyes and his reflexes.
“Is he going to be all right, Doctor?” I asked.
“He’s got a mild concussion. That’s a nasty wound on the scalp, though. He would have bled to death in an hour if you hadn’t found him.”
Gracious, I thought, I did save his life.
“I’m going to dress his wound now,” Mayhew said. “And then I’ll get him shifted up to his bed.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll hang around and ride back to town with you.”
I had a wound dressed by Dr. Mayhew before, and had seen plenty of others, and I needed no further lessons in his technique. I left the parlor and went to the little drawing room in which Abigail and I had said good-bye less than a week before.
I had a seat and thought about Jenkins’s offer. It was obvious that the “job” in question was nothing more than a bribe, but a bribe to do what?
I hadn’t even to begun to think about it when noises came from the other room. Not screams exactly. Lucius Jenkins wasn’t the kind of man who’d let himself scream. These were the noises of a man who wouldn’t scream getting a scalp wound bathed with carbolic.
26
“GREAT,” LOBO BLACKE SAID. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you wound up with a bullet in your back now. Or dead.”
We were sharing our evening beer, alone this time, in the Witness office. I had just reported my day’s activities.
“I thought I did a fairly good job.”
“Oh, you did an amazing job,” Blacke said. “You were positively cogent.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“I think you might have put yourself in real danger.”
I put my beer down so I wouldn’t spill it and goggled at him. “And this bothers you? You, the man who sent me off to a gunfight when I’d never drawn a gun in my life? You, the man who insisted I pretend to be the sheriff in a town with at least two mad killers running around loose?”
“That was different,” Blacke said.
“What was different?”
“The fact in neither of those cases was I putting you directly up against Lucius. You did that all by yourself.”
“Well, I couldn’t just pretend not to notice. I’m not that stupid, and Jenkins knows it.”
The sour look on Blac
ke’s face matched a couple I had seen from Jenkins.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You were stupid enough to admit you’d been with his daughter.”
I scratched my head.
“Yeah,” I admitted. “In retrospect, I’m pretty amazed about that one, myself. I think I was testing to see how eager he really was to hire me—that is, to pay me to shut up about the Muller connection.”
“Why? The fact that he tried to pay you off at all was a major breakthrough.”
Blacke fell silent. He did that when he thought of something new. He dropped right out of the here and now and pursued the thought as far as he could.
“You know what else it was?” he said after a couple of minutes.
I was used to Blacke by now, so I had no trouble picking up the thread.
“No. What else was it?”
“It was a major mistake. A very basic mistake.”
“I can’t see that,” I said. “Jenkins has probably been spreading money around to get people to do what he wants ever since he’s had money to spread. Certainly works in this town, from what I’ve seen.”
“Open your eyes, Booker, the blizzard’s over.”
“That’s colorful,” I said. “But what does it mean?”
“It means you’re forgetting what else you’ve seen. For instance, who isn’t Jenkins paying off in this town?”
“That we know for sure?”
“I’ll take it that way.”
“Dr. Mayhew,” I said. “And you. And I suppose Big Bill Simpkins had enough of his own to stay off the payroll.”
“Very good,” Blacke said, one finger raised. Up until that moment, I would never have imagined there could be anything schoolmasterish about Lobo Blacke. “Now, why hasn’t he tried to pay off Mayhew and me?”
“Because you’re both men of integrity, and of real achievement. It isn’t the kind of achievement that leads to great wealth, but it pays your way, and it’s satisfying work.”
Blacke was nodding. “That was a little flowery, but it makes the point. Mayhew and I, each in our way, would spit in his face if he tried to buy us. So here’s the question, genius. What did Jenkins think was wrong with your integrity? Why did he think you wouldn’t spit in his eye?”
“But I didn’t.”
“You didn’t, huh? Listen, Booker, that crack about his daughter was a big, warm, sticky goober if there ever was one. You spit in his eye, all right.”
Blacke drank some beer.
“All I’m trying to say here, Booker, is that Lucius misjudged your character. Badly. He didn’t get in the position he’s in by making that kind of mistake.”
“Maybe he thinks any Big City slicker from the East is bound to be corrupt,” I suggested. “Or maybe he hasn’t been getting by on his own judgment.”
“That’s colorful. But what does it mean?”
“Martha Jenkins strikes me, on an admittedly short acquaintance, as a remarkably shrewd woman...”
Blacke was staring at me as though I’d just grown a set of antlers.
“By God, Booker,” he said, “maybe you are a genius. That woman has always supplied the ambition behind Lucius—why shouldn’t she supply some of the brainpower?”
“Or even all of it.”
Blacke frowned. “No, no,” he said. “Remember, I’ve known Lucius since before he ever met Martha, and too much of what I’ve seen over the years is pure Lucius. The timing, the tactics, the tricks—all straight out of marshal days.
“I’ve been assuming all these years that Martha just said ‘I want,’ and Lucius sold another ounce of his soul to get it for her. But you could be right. It could be a lot more than that. She could—and she would, by God, as determined to be a great lady as she is—lay out general campaign objectives. And she damn well could be there using her intu—What the hell do you call it?”
“Intuition,” I said. “Woman’s intuition.”
“Yeah.” Blacke showed a crooked smile. “I used to think that was all buncombe until I started living under the same roof with Becky.” He nodded. “Martha may be a lot more of a helpmate than I ever imagined.”
“Does this mean we’re out to get her hanged, too?”
“Nice of you to say ‘we,’ but no. Lucius is enough of a project for now.”
“At least now we can be sure he is connected with Paul Muller.”
“That is something,” Blacke conceded. “Of course, it would be a lot bigger something if we had our hands on Muller. But what’s got me worried is that he knows we—or specifically you—know it. He’s tried to win you over with money, and it didn’t work. That was a huge mistake, and he knows that, too.”
“What’s wrong with his knowing he made a mistake? It might make him nervous,” I said.
“I don’t want Lucius nervous, dammit,” Blacke barked. “That’s when he gets dangerous.”
27
THAT CONVERSATION MARKED THE end of Louis Bowman Blacke’s vacation, or whatever it was he thought he was doing.
From that moment on, he stopped letting me flounder around pretending to be a lawman, and really started to work on things. He still played the game of “Booker the Lawman” enough to couch his orders to me as suggestions, but since I was sick of the game, anyway, and didn’t have the first idea of what the hell I ought to be doing, I snapped up each of his suggestions like a frog after a piece of red flannel, even if they made no sense at all to me.
Today, for instance, I was paying a call on Junior Simpkins with a rough script laid out by Blacke. As far as I could figure, the plan was to find something incriminating about Junior himself, who, some wires had shown, had a cast-iron alibi that put him in Denver at the time of his father’s (and everybody else’s) death or about Harold Collier, whom (I thought) Blacke himself had cleared pretty convincingly of connivance of the crime.
Still, I told myself, mine not to reason why.
It was a good thing I got to the rooming house when I did, because I saw Junior in the lobby just bending over to pick up his carpetbag and leave after settling up with the proprietor.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
“Oh, Mr. Booker. Yes, I am. Back to Denver. Everything I needed to do here has been done, and I’ve got business to tend to back in Denver. Taking the ten o’clock train.”
I consulted my watch, a real beauty given to me by Blacke to celebrate the success of our book.
“You’ve still got plenty of time,” I said, clicking the lid shut. “Can you spare me a few minutes?”
“Is it important?”
“It could be,” I said.
“Does it have to do with my father’s death?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
We went into a little sitting room off the parlor. It afforded privacy, but no comfort. Not that the place was barren, by any means. With lace and polished wood, and chintz and flocked wallpaper, it was the kind of room one expected to find only in Bellevue—and, I supposed, in Mrs. Simpkins’s place, once she’d done away with the last of Junior’s influence.
The trouble was that all the chairs were tiny artifacts of carved wood, shaved so thin by enthusiastic artisans that they looked as if they’d collapse if a fly lit on them. Someone my size, or someone the size of William Simpkins Jr., who was even bigger, seemed beyond the realm of possibility.
We eyed the furniture warily.
“I like your approach to this stuff much better,” I said.
“Thank you.” After a pause of a second or two, he said, “Well, I’ll try it if you will.”
Slowly, we lowered ourselves onto a couple of the toy chairs. We wound up sitting exactly the same way—with half our fundaments hanging over the edge and our feet planted solidly, ready to jump if the chair gave way.
“What is it you wanted to see me about, Mr. Booker?”
“Harold Collier.”
“Harold Collier? You mean the Harold Collier I knew here in Le Four? The one I went to school with?”
“Tha
t’s right,” I said. “You were taught by your stepmother, weren’t you?”
“She wasn’t my stepmother then. But yes, we were.” His face took on a distant expression. “Gosh, Harold Collier. I haven’t thought of Harold for years. How is old Harold?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?” Junior asked blandly.
Once I had a chance to think about it, it made sense. Junior had been away from Le Four since before the blue man came to be, and most folks had had other things on their minds since he’d come back.
So I told Junior Collier’s sad story, and how he had come to be, however briefly, a suspect in the poisonings. Then I told him of my visit to the blue man, and of the note he’d gotten luring him to the fatal medicine show.
“In fact,” I said, reaching into my vest pocket, “I have the note right here.” I pulled it out of my pocket, and still holding on to it, showed it to him. Actually, it was something Blacke had our artist copy when we were looking at the envelope.
“Does that look like Harold Collier’s hand?” I said.
“Good God, Mr. Booker. I don’t know if I could ever recognized block letters made by Harold Collier, but heavens, I haven’t seen the man in fifteen years, and our school days were longer ago than that.”
I tried to sound more disappointed than I felt. Disappointment was minimal, mainly because I knew that Lobo Blacke could not possibly have been such an ass to expect Junior to identify the block letters on the note.
Now, to move on to the next mysterious step. “Of course,” I said, “you understand we have to try everything.”
“Of course.”
“Now,” I went on, “if you will just do one more thing for me—
“I can tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“It could have been Harold.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, it could have been printed by any of hundreds of people who went to school here in Le Four. But it was written by somebody who learned their letters from Miss Hastings.”
“Now the widow Simpkins,” I said, just to make sure.
“That’s right. Look at the letter N. See that little horizontal line at the end of the letter, the upstroke? She used to teach us all to make that to remind us not to keep going and make an M out of it. She had the same thing about Vs and Ws. I thought everybody did it that way, until I got out of town.”
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