Fatal Elixir

by William L. DeAndrea

  “That’s very interesting,” I said. And it also tied in with what Lobo Blacke wanted me to obtain next.

  “Would you mind printing an alphabet for me?” I asked. “In case any more notes show up. You are a good representative of the Hastings system of education, aren’t you?”

  He grinned at me. “Not according to the lady herself. She still has no use for me. Still, she never complained about how I made my letters.”

  “Very good,” I said. “I have a piece of paper here,” I said, “but nothing to write with.”

  “Oh, the lady who runs the place just made out my account. I’m sure she’d let us use a pen for a few moments.”

  “I’m sure she would,” I agreed, “but for this to be right, it really should be in pencil.”

  Now, I had a pencil in my pocket, but I was under instructions from Blacke not to take it out unless I absolutely had to. Pencils, being expensive and wasteful, were not all that easy to come by in Le Four.

  But Junior didn’t let me down. He said, “Of course,” and reached into the pocket of his coat. “I should have realized,” he said. “I have a pencil right here.”

  It was a strange-looking pencil at that, stubby and short, and not round or hexagonal in cross section, but rectangular. The lead inside was rectangular, too.

  “I never seen a pencil like that before.”

  He looked at it. “Oh. Of course. This is a special pencil for carpenters. Great tool to work with—short, to fit in a pocket, and square, so you can put it down on the work without worrying if it’ll roll away.”

  “Where do you get them?”

  “A company in Massachusetts makes them. I discovered them just before I moved to Denver. I had Trimble, who used to own the general store, order a dozen boxes for me, I was so in love with the idea. A lot of woodworkers still use chalk or charcoal, but the line is imprecise and sloppy.”

  He had now taken a small folding knife from the same pocket the pencil had come from and expertly carved the wood of the implement into a neat pyramid of brown wood topped with a tiny one of black.

  “Terrific,” I said. “Now, if you’d just print an alphabet, I’ll let you go.”

  He gave me his ingratiating grin. “Out of the clutches of the law, eh?”

  “Precisely.” When he was done, I shoved both pieces of paper in my pocket for later examination.

  “Come on,” I said, “I’ll walk you to the station.”

  But Junior was in for a major disappointment at the station. That day’s train to Denver had been canceled, and there wouldn’t be another until Thursday.

  I told him it was a tough break and walked him back to the boardinghouse, then I stopped in at the office of the Witness to report developments to Blacke.

  Blacke wasn’t in the composing room when I came in. That was in sole possession of Merton Mayhew, who was sitting at the checker table with some paper, a pen, and an inkwell, scribbling furiously. It might have been homework, but I doubted it because of the enthusiasm and concentration with which he went about it. He had ink stains on his hands and face, but somehow the pink tip of tongue that always protruded from the left corner of his mouth when he was writing had so far remained unscathed.

  “What’s the story, Merton?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Simpkins came by and told Mr. Blacke she’s going to use her husband’s money to set up an orphanage on some land she owns out of town. The place is to be run on...” Merton consulted some notes. “ ‘... the soundest and most modern custodial, nutritional, and pedagogical techniques, with plenty of good food, light, air, and exercise for all the children. Furthermore, White, Indian, and mixed-breed children will be accepted alike, so that the more enlightened race may have a civilizing effect on the aboriginal one.’ ”

  Merton looked up at me. “I asked her if some people weren’t going to be bothered by that, she gave me a hard stare and said, ‘Young man, don’t you believe an Indian child can be civilized by the proper influences?’

  “I told her that most of the Indians I’d ever met didn’t need that much civilizing.”

  I thought of Daisy Herkimer and her dead brother. “No more than anybody needs, I guess,” I said.

  “Well, Mrs. Simpkins just sniffed at me and said she hoped I would learn better before I was grown.”

  I smiled at him and told him he was doing fine. “Where’s Blacke?” I asked.

  “In his office. He said he wanted to talk to you as soon as you came in.” Realizing what he’d just said, Merton looked sheepish and said, “Sorry.”

  Just then, the door to the office opened, and Blacke bellowed, “Booker! Stop distracting poor Merton from his work and get your duff in here.”

  I didn’t dawdle on my way to the office, but I didn’t scamper either. A man has a certain amount of dignity he’s got to maintain.

  “Hello again,” I said with a smile.

  “Yeah, yeah, hello. What have you got?”

  “Well, he had a pencil, just as you predicted. A kind of an odd one.”

  “Odd how?”

  I described the pencil first, since he was so eager to hear the details, then I filled in the whole story of my morning with Junior Simpkins. When I was finished, I handed over the note Harold Collier supposedly received and the alphabet Junior had done.

  Blacke sat musing over them for a minute or two.

  Without looking up, he asked, “How did he take it?”

  “Like a lamb,” I said. “Wrote the letters without a word of complaint. If he had any suspicions of what I was after—not that I have any myself, you understand. But if he had any, he didn’t show them.”

  “I don’t mean that,” Blacke said, still comparing the notes. “I meant how did he react to the train being canceled?”

  “He took that pretty hard,” I said. “He even went so far as to say ‘damn,’ which for him is a tirade.”

  I mused for a few seconds. Blacke looked up impatiently, but if he could drift off in the middle of conversations, so could I.

  “You know,” I said, “life is endlessly fascinating. Here’s a man who could take being cut out of his father’s will—or at least mostly cut out of it—with hardly a qualm, showing no rancor for the father in question at all. Then he gets more upset than I’ve ever seen him by the knowledge that he has a few more days to spend in our lovely little town.”

  Blacke grunted. I took it as a signal to keep talking.

  “By the way,” I said, “you’ll have to fire me from the Witness. Since I took up being a lawman, my journalistic skills have eroded sadly. In all the hubbub at the station, I never did find out why the train was canceled.”

  “I know why it was canceled,” Blacke said.

  “Care to share the knowledge with me?”

  “Sure,” he said. “It was canceled because I sent a wire to the president of the Great Northern in St. Paul asking him to get it canceled.”

  I was impressed. Not at Blacke’s nerve in holding up several hundred railroad passengers who had their own lives to get on with merely to help his plan—Lobo Blacke has the nerve to do just about anything. I was impressed that the railroad had gone along with it. I knew that Blacke had twice been offered a job as chief of security for the railroad, and had twice turned it down. Apparently they still wanted him. Either that, or they were so flabbergasted by his gall that they said yes under a kind of mesmerism.

  “I thought it would be best,” Blacke said unnecessarily, “for young Simpkins to be handy to us for a while. Things are coming to a head, and he’ll want to be around for the finish.”

  “They are, are they?”

  Blacke took a deep breath, slapped a hand on the table, and said, “Yep, they are.”

  “You don’t sound especially pleased by the prospect.”

  “No, by God,” he said. “I am not. There’s still too much going on, too much up in the air, too much that can go wrong. These letters, for instance—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What about them?”

&nbs
p; He shoved them across the table to me. “Look for yourself,” he said.

  I held the note and Junior’s alphabet side by side and compared them.

  “Well,” I said, “the printing is nothing alike, except that idiosyncratic N and W that Mrs. Simpkins taught them in school.”

  “When you get a chance,” Blacke said, “tell me what ‘idiosyncratic’ means.”

  “It means—”

  “Not now. Take a closer look.”

  It took me a moment, but I saw it. “Thick and thin strokes,” I said. “On both of them.”

  Blacke was nodding. “It had to be. You see, once I remembered Junior was a carpenter, I remembered carpenter’s pencils.”

  “What do you know about carpenter’s pencils?”

  “I’ve had quite a bit to do with carpenters in my time,” Blacke said. “For one thing, whenever I’d ride back into town, it was usually time to build a gallows.”

  I admitted I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Anyway,” Blacke repeated, “I thought of carpenter’s pencils. And it occurred to me that after the first stroke or two, when the point wore down even a little, you were writing with a lead that was wider one way than it was the other. What did Henry call it?”

  “Broad nib,” I said.

  “Yeah. Like that, so you’d have to look more closely to see it. So you established that Junior uses the things and has for years.”

  “Are you saying Junior wrote the note after all? That he might be the killer? It doesn’t make any sense. If he wrote the note to Harold Collier, he disguised his printing, either then or today.”

  “So?”

  “Why would he do that, and keep those Ns and Ws there? And then call my attention to it?”

  “I can’t answer that,” Blacke said. “I didn’t say anybody disguised anything, did I?”

  He made a face. “Anyway, that’s not what I’m working on at the moment.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “I’m working on a way to get you face-to-face with Paul Muller.”

  28

  DAISY PUT MY HAND on her breast and let me feel it swell as she breathed in.

  “I’m glad you came here,” she said. “A girl doesn’t like to be a one-time thing, you know.” She giggled.

  I kissed her, then smiled back. “I didn’t want to take advantage of your grief.”

  “Hell,” the princess drawled. “I’ve had my grief. Grief is about dyin’. Bein’ a man and woman together is about livin’.”

  About living, yes. That’s why I was there. In a little while, I was going out to face Paul Mullen. Lobo Blacke had arranged it, and he had a plan.

  I had a conviction I wouldn’t survive the night. So if I was going to die, I decided, I wanted the memory of a woman’s embrace fresh in my mind at the end.

  I didn’t share these thoughts with Daisy Herkimer, but I don’t think I imposed on her, judging from the enthusiasm of her embrace, the warmth of her sweet brown mouth, or the magnitude of her shudders when the climax came.

  “Oh, golly,” she said, “it just gets better, doesn’t it?”

  “Daisy,” I said, “don’t let anybody ever civilize you.”

  She scowled at me. “You sayin’ I ain’t civilized?”

  “No, no. I used the wrong word. Never let anyone refine you. Don’t let contact with any kind of people change you from the way you are.”

  “If you don’t want me to, Quinn, I won’t.”

  “Good.”

  “How soon before we see if we can make it even better?”

  I kissed her throat. “I don’t know, Princess. Not tonight. I’ve got something to do.”

  “Dang,” she said. “You hurry back when you’re done.”

  “If I can,” I said.

  I rolled off the bed and dressed slowly. I bent to kiss her one more time, then left the room.

  I got my badge and my gun from the office. Dr. Herkimer was asleep, and I left him that way. The jail would be guarded tonight, but from the outside. Stick Witherspoon was already planted on a rooftop across the street, just in case Blacke’s big rendezvous should be used as a decoy.

  I left and locked up behind me and made my way to the Witness building, through the alley, and around to the back.

  There was a low porch back there, and Blacke was on it in his wheelchair, tapping his finger on his knees and grumbling to Merton and Rebecca, who were waiting with him.

  “You’re late,” Blacke growled.

  “I am not,” I replied. “You said sunset, and more than half the sun is still up.”

  “Any fool knows that sunset starts when the sun first touches the horizon.”

  “And it isn’t over until it disappears completely.”

  “Stop arguing,” Rebecca said. Her voice was quiet, but she demanded attention. If the circumstances of her life had worked out differently, she might have made an excellent schoolteacher.

  Blacke and I shut up. It was a stupid argument, anyway.

  Merton, as evidenced by his barely suppressed grin and the involuntary bouncing on the balls of his feet, was, as usual, vicariously excited by the possibility of impending violence. One would think that Merton, being the son of his father, would be more aware than most boys his age of the consequences of bullets and blades, and therefore less bloodthirsty than was usual for someone his age. In Merton’s case, however, nature never failed to conquer experience, and usually without a struggle.

  Rebecca wasn’t taking the trouble to conceal anything of her emotions. Her blue-green eyes flashed apprehension, and anger at us for making her feel it.

  “Do you insist on going through with this nonsense?”

  “Mind your manners, Becky,” Blacke said, with some asperity.

  She ignored him and looked up at me. “Mr. Booker. Quinn. It’s useless to argue with Uncle Louis about this, I know. When he gets an idea in his head, he is little better than a madman.”

  Merton Mayhew gave a snort of laughter, which he managed to turn into a coughing fit. A fairly convincing one, too. Apparently he had learned something from being the son of a physician.

  Rebecca ignored him, too.

  “You, on the other hand,” she said to me, “are young, educated, and still retain, perhaps, a vestige of sense. You are riding out to meet the most dangerous man in the territory, on his terms. And one of you probably won’t even be able to remain on the horse.”

  That last remark was unfair. We’d spent a good part of the previous day trying various ways of getting Blacke on the back of a horse so he’d stay there, and at length, we’d come up with one that worked pretty well. Of course, since the notion that a cripple would be riding anywhere was our ace in the hole according to Blacke’s plan, we’d been limited in our experimentation to the area in back of the Witness. Still, while I had plenty of doubts about the rest of the proceeding, I was fairly sure he’d stay on the horse.

  I stepped onto the horse and took Rebecca’s hand.

  “Rebecca,” I said. “I know we’re taking big risks, and I’m scared to death.”

  “Bah,” Blacke spat. “You’ll be safe as a church.”

  This was Blacke’s night for being ignored. Or maybe it was just the night he had decided to stand for it. Maybe he was a little scared, too.

  “But so far, fifteen people are dead, and even though there hasn’t been any mob action for a while, the town is getting ugly. I’m not happy about wearing this badge, but I’ve got it, and I’ve got to do something to bring the situation to a head, and Blacke is the only one who has even a glimmer of a plan to bring that about.”

  “Why the blazes do you keep talking about me like I’m not here?” Blacke demanded.

  “Because this would be an easier conversation to have if you weren’t here,” I explained. “Now, shut up.”

  Blacke’s mouth dropped open. He wasn’t used to being told to shut up, and he was going to blast me for it, but when he saw the tiny smile flit across Rebecca’s lips, he let it go. On
e aspect of Blacke’s genius was his ability to gauge when a man knew what he was doing.

  I possessed no such gift. I had to get by on faith.

  I tried to explain as much to Rebecca, concluding with “When you come down to it, wheelchair or not, Lobo Blacke is the most dangerous man in the territory.”

  “Dangerous enough to get you both killed!” she cried. Then she virtually jumped into my arms and embraced me. She broke loose a second later, bent over Blacke, enfolded him in her arms, and gave him a very thorough, un-niecely kiss on the mouth, then ran inside as tears began to spill from her eyes.

  “Wow,” Merton Mayhew said, scratching his head.

  I could find very little to add to that observation.

  Blacke sat for a second rubbing his mouth, as though it tingled.

  He looked up at Merton. “Son,” he said, “do you understand what just happened here?”

  “No, sir,” Merton said earnestly.

  “Well, boy, no matter how long you live, you never will.” Blacke shook his head as though to clear it. “We’d better get going, Booker. Merton’s already saddled the horses. Would you get them, please?”

  I went to the small stable behind the yard and led Posy and a stallion named Domingo near the porch. Merton, meanwhile, had fetched additional help in the form of Clayton Henry and Mrs. Sundberg.

  Together, the four of us lifted Blacke up to Posy’s back and into the modified saddle there. Peretti, the cobbler and saddler, had made a high back to the saddle and had bolted a belt to it. Blacke strapped himself in and pronounced himself happy with the arrangement.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Not until we take care of your legs.”

  I handled that part of it personally, tying short lengths of rope that bound his ankles into the stirrups and his knees to loops Peretti had added to the saddle.

  It was the first time I’d touched Blacke’s legs, and it was amazing, considering how heavy and robust the top of him was, to feel them thin and stick-fragile under my hands.

  The idea of a man with no feeling in his legs or rump sitting a horse is, of course, ridiculous. With any other man than Lobo Blacke, and any other horse than Posy, I should have refused to have anything to do with it. But I had seen it work earlier, and I knew Blacke would bring it off. I knew we’d get to where we were going. It was what was to happen after we got there that made me nervous.