“What the hell is that?” I yelled over the crackling of the flames.
“It’s light to work by,” Clay said. “I can’t build no platform in the dark, let alone a ramp.”
Junior was almost apologetic. “You said you wanted to attract a crowd.”
I looked around and saw that there were already faces in the window, looking at the fire and at the construction project. And, I sheepishly admitted to myself, it had never occurred to me that the men would need light to see by.
“Good,” I said. “Carry on.”
I went to walk on, but Junior asked me to wait a minute.
“I want to talk to you about that ramp. I’ve got an idea about that...”
By the time he finished telling me, I was grinning. I told him to go ahead, then I went to tell Blacke that everything was in hand.
32
BY TEN O’CLOCK, WHEN the platform was finished (there was no ramp), a crowd had gathered that was so large, I almost wished I had something to sell them. Enterprising merchants were moving among them, selling pies, lemonade, and parasols against the sun, and anything else they could turn a profit on. It was something to see.
From my vantage point from my third-floor window, I could see all the milling around. If I opened the window, no doubt I could hear a choice selection of rumors, too, but I didn’t want to show myself.
Every few seconds, I looked down the street toward the Witness office, waiting for the signal that Blacke had decided it was time to start.
As usual, Blacke was delaying long enough to drive me crazy. He always said he did it to unsettle his opponent, but all I know for sure is that he unsettled me.
I scanned the crowd for familiar faces, and they were all there. Lucius Jenkins was sitting on a buckboard on the far side of the street, still too dizzy to stand for a long time. Junior Simpkins was talking to him, and Lucius looked sour. Stu Burkhart was wandering, whispering in ears. He looked as if he hoped he’d get another chance to lynch somebody. And, I was glad to see, Harold Collier had heard about this and had come to town to see the end of it. He had decided to brazen it out, his blue face and hands quite pretty in the sunlight, if you could forget what color they were supposed to be. Harold was eating a piece of pie and talking to old Mrs. Simpkins, who was smiling benignly at him.
She wasn’t the only relative of a poisoning victim in the crowd; they were all there, as far as I could tell, even a grim-faced Jennie Murdo, who had either fled or been let out of Dr. Mayhew’s house. I could ask him; the doctor was in the building, pressed into service once more, but I decided it didn’t matter. If anyone should be there for the finish, it should be Jennie Murdo.
I checked the Witness office again. Merton Mayhew came out, looked at my window, and waved his cap.
“All right,” I said to the emptiness of the room. I took a deep breath and turned away from the window.
At Daisy Herkimer’s door, I knocked and said, “It’s time.” I unlocked the door, and she came out, demurely dressed in one of Rebecca’s frocks.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“You look wonderful. Let’s go.”
“I’m a little scared,” she admitted.
So was I, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I said, “There’s nothing to worry about,” and reminded myself of Lobo Blacke. “After this morning, it will be all over.”
“I hope so.” She gave me a little kiss, and off we went.
Theophrastus Herkimer was shaved pink, and his clothes had been brushed, and instead of the frightened little man he’d been over the past few days, one could almost see the “miracle worker” who’d first come to town.
He and Mayhew were discussing various ways of reducing a fever when Daisy and I appeared, and Herkimer broke off the discussion to run to his daughter and take her in his arms.
“Darling, the doctor says we are to have complete confidence in Mr. Blacke and Mr. Booker; that they are geniuses in their way, and will not fail.”
I looked at Mayhew. “Laying it on a bit thick, aren’t you, Doctor?”
The cadaverous face was impassive. “I am a man of science. I report what I see.”
Stick Witherspoon was standing by the door, looking at his nails. A Winchester, twin of the one Blacke had used last night, was leaning against the door frame. It was Stick’s assigned task to start the show, but if he felt nervous about it, it wasn’t evident.
“Ready, Stick?”
“Been ready,” he replied.
“Go ahead, then.”
He began to unbolt the door as I came to join him. I handed him the rifle, then let him out, quickly closing and relocking the door.
Stick walked quietly to the side of the platform where the stairs had been built, and mounted to the top. From behind, I could see him standing there, rifle in the crook of his arm, looking at the crowd, ready and formidable without being overly threatening.
Stick’s appearance on the platform changed the nature of the crowd noise, but the appearance of Lobo Blacke hushed them completely. Blacke wasn’t wearing his usual business garb, suit jacket, vest, and tie. He was wearing a gray shirt and a battered black hat on his head. Even with the gray blanket across his legs, it was easy to imagine the lawman who had brought to justice some of the West’s worst outlaws.
Rebecca pushed the wheelchair through the crowd, which parted for him like the Red Sea before Moses. Blacke paid no attention to anyone, but stared grimly straight ahead.
Seeing the deadly dignity of that stare and the effect it had on the crowd, I began to worry about the little trick I’d pulled about the ramp.
Junior Simpkins’s idea had been to build, instead of a ramp, which would take metering and sanding and many other things I did not understand and that were difficult to do by firelight, a platform hoist to majestically elevate Blacke to his speaking perch.
And in practice it worked out that way. Blacke understood instantly, had Rebecca wheel him onto the lift, and sat like a sultan while Clay Becker and Junior winched them smoothly to the top and held them there while Rebecca wheeled him onto the platform proper. Then she went down the stairs and took her station there.
And once again, Blacke waited. We could only see him from behind, but I knew he was staring out at the crowd with that look he had that made you wonder what you ought to be afraid you did. The silence was deafening, and the tension immense.
Then, at the point at which it was taking all my strength not to open the door and scream “Get on with it!” he began to speak.
“What brings you out here today?” he asked conversationally. “Curiosity, or bloodlust?”
Blacke had the kind of voice that could fill whatever amount of space it needed to. It not only filled Main Street, it filtered through the doors and windows of the jail with no trouble at all.
There was a murmur from the crowd.
Blacke cut them off with a wave of his hand.
“Don’t bother to answer,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. This morning, Mr. Booker and I are going to satisfy both. And in the process, change this town back from a pack of nervous animals to the decent place it was before this tragedy happened.
“Now, I’m going to bring out to this platform the people you tried to kill the other night, two people I can now prove are perfectly innocent. So at least you don’t have that on your consciences.
“Booker! Bring out Herkimer and the princess!”
I was already opening the door. I had my gun out of my holster and into my hand. Dr. Mayhew had a spare in his hand. He looked ludicrous with a gun, but he assured me he knew how to use it, and would, if necessary. I expected some more sarcasm, along the lines of what I’d heard last night when I brought him the corpse of Paul Muller for autopsy, but apparently the seriousness of the current situation restrained him.
As soon as the door swung open, Stick, on the platform, snapped the Winchester to his shoulder and scanned the crowd through its sights.
As the four of us walked the short distance f
rom the door to the platform stairs, I looked around for Stu Burkhart and found him whispering urgently to a couple of his neighbors, who were simultaneously ignoring him and trying to edge away from him. That was a good sign.
At the bottom of the stairs, Rebecca came forward and pressed Daisy’s hand encouragingly. Daisy gave her a little smile in reply, and then the doctor stayed at the bottom of the stairs looking vigilantly for someone who needed to be shot, while Herkimer, his daughter, and I joined Blacke.
We stood off to Blacke’s left while Stick, on his right, slowly lowered the rifle to its previous position.
“These are the people,” Blacke said, “that you wanted to string up without a trial. Wanted to hang them, even though five minutes of thought would have shown you they were the least likely people to have poisoned the medicine.”
He went on to explain how Herkimer had never been to Le Four before, could have no grudges against the place or anybody in it, and how it would be total stupidity to put the poison in his own elixir.
“But suppose he did. Suppose he poisoned the mixture, knowing that before the night was out people would begin to start dying of it. What would he do then? Run for his life? Or calmly eat a meal, and go to sleep in the exact spot he’d doled out the poison from?”
Blacke leaned over the arm of his wheelchair and spat on the fresh clean wood.
“But you people didn’t want to think. You just wanted to do something to make yourselves feel better. I don’t blame the bereaved as much as I blame the bloodthirsty fools who led the mob. As much as I blame, say...” Blacke’s voice was suddenly a lash. “You, Stu Burkhart!”
I could actually see Burkhart’s legs begin to quake. “You got—”
His voice was a squeak. He swallowed hard and tried again. “You got no call to talk to me like that, Blacke.” It was a little better that time.
“I’ll talk to you any way I damn please,” Blacke told him. “Not only are you a bloodthirsty coward for leading a lynch mob, you’re a fool. You saw the actual killer sneaking out of Herkimer’s wagon, but you didn’t care a damn about that. You just wanted somebody hanged.”
“I just wanted justice,” Burkhart said.
“You keep your mouth shut, little man,” Blacke said, “or you may get it someday.”
That brought a nervous laugh from the crowd.
“I don’t know if Burkhart ever got around to telling any of the rest of you, but he told Deputy Booker even before anyone was poisoned that he saw a small figure in a long, hooded coat, slipping out of Herkimer’s wagon and into the shadows of the grove.”
A voice came from somewhere on the far side of the street. “Stu would tell anybody anything if it made him look like a big man.”
“He could be ten feet tall, and nobody would mistake that pissant for a big man,” Blacke said. “But in this case, we can believe him, because another witness claims to have seen the same thing.”
He let that sink in for a few seconds, then said, “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Simpkins.”
The old woman blushed and murmured something about not wanting to be singled out.
Blacke gave her a big grin. “Nonsense,” he said. “Just think of all of us as a big class. Dr. Mayhew, help her up on the platform so everyone can hear her.”
She tried to demur, but no one would have any of it, so to the sound of applause, the ex-schoolmarm climbed up to the platform.
33
IN DEFERENCE TO MRS. Simpkins’s age, a chair was produced for her from somewhere, and she sat down next to Blacke. At his urging, she repeated her story of the figure leaving the wagon, confirming in every detail Stu Burkhart’s story.
“So,” Blacke concluded, “Stu may be a blowhard, but in this case I’m sure he’s telling the truth. Mrs. Simpkins, please stay right there, because I’ll have to ask you another question later.”
Blacke took off his hat for a second and mopped his brow on his sleeve. He put the hat back on and addressed the crowd again.
“Next, we come to Harold Collier. Mr. Collier!”
While Blacke was talking, the blue man had been relatively free from the curious stares of his neighbors. Now, with the mention of his name, all eyes were on him, and he seemed to shrink away from them
“Mr. Collier,” Blacke said again, “we’ve not met before, and I want to tell you what a pleasure it is for me. There are many kinds of heroism, and you’re showing us one kind today, and not the easiest kind, either.”
“I just got tired of hiding,” Harold Collier said. His tone and gestures would have gone perfectly with a blush, but of course that was impossible to tell.
“That’s all right,” Blacke said. “Practically everything that gets done in this world happens because somebody gets tired of something or other. This little gathering is taking place because Deputy Booker got tired of watching his back in case the hopped-up fools in this town got violent again, and we’re all tired of breathing the same air as the killer, aren’t we?”
There was a murmur of assent.
Blacke led Collier to tell about the note, and how curiosity and pent-up anger led the blue man to come to the medicine show.
“But it wasn’t the one who’d sold you the tainted medicine, was it?”
“Hell, no. Never saw this one before. Or since, until this morning.”
“All right. I want to talk about the note you got. You people listen carefully.”
He hadn’t had to tell them that. They were so silent, you could hear the horses whicker and the birds sing.
“For one thing, it was an out-and-out lie. And the only thing it achieved was to get Harold Collier out to the grove. Why go to the trouble? Just a precaution. Someone else for you to suspect—and possibly lynch—if for some reason the innocence of Dr. Herkimer was obvious.”
Blacke let them think about that for a minute.
“The sending of that note shows that this murder was already planned. It was planned at least as soon as it was known that the medicine show was coming to town. Most probably, it had been planned weeks before, and was just waiting for a medicine man to show up.”
“But why?” It was Jennie Murdo. Mindless of the bumps and jostles to her injured arm, she was fighting her way through the crowd to get closer to the platform.
“Why?” she demanded again. “My boy never hurt anybody in his life. He was a good boy, and friendly. Why would someone plan for weeks to kill him? And all these other people? What could somebody possibly gain by killing my boy?”
“Confusion,” Blacke said simply. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but like thirteen of the deaths, your boy was killed by chance, more or less at random, to provide a smoke screen for the murder the killer really did want to commit.”
“My God,” Jennie Murdo breathed, and staggered back. Dr. Mayhew ran over and caught her and had her sit down in the steps.
Blacke wheeled himself forward a foot or two to make sure she was all right, then resumed his prior position and went on.
“Thirteen killed so that a fourteenth could safely be killed. Early on, Booker realized he was dealing with a monster without conscience, and it would take all his efforts to bring this monster to justice. He could have used more help and trust from the town, but forget that for now.”
He certainly was rubbing it in, I thought. Still, maybe if he did it enough, the lesson would take. I also liked his reconstruction of my mental processes. I hadn’t realized I was so brilliant.
“But,” Blacke said. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m still talking about the note. There are a couple of things you’ll have to take my word for, but the jury will get a good look at them at the trial.
“First of all, the letters are made the way Mrs. Simpkins taught children to print around here for years. That means the killer has to be at least thirty years old, and someone who’s been around Le Four a long time.
“Second, the note is written in pencil. Now, pencils aren’t unknown in our fair community, but they’re rare. But there’s more. By c
areful examination, Booker decided that this note was written with a special kind of pencil, rectangular instead of round, or, you know, with six sides. Makes a special kind of mark, you see, when you use it to make letters.
“Of course, the killer wasn’t used to making letters with it.”
There was a bit of a commotion behind the platform, nothing much. I was sure Junior and Clay Becker would call for help if they needed it.
Blacke must have been thinking the same way, if he heard it at all, because he kept right on.
“Now, it so happens that there’s somebody in town who knows all about this kind of pencil—”
“You son of a BITCH!”
I turned to see Junior Simpkins clambering over the edge of the platform, his eyes red with anger, riveted on Lobo Blacke.
Quickly, I stepped in front of the charging carpenter. He reached out a hand to my chest, as though he were going to push me aside like a swinging door. I grabbed the hand, stepped sideways, and yanked hard.
That pulled him off balance, and got his attention. He looked at me dully. All right, his eyes seemed to say. If he had to deal with me before he tore Blacke limb from useless limb, so be it.
He pulled back a hard right hand and aimed it for my face. Big as Junior was, it might have killed me if it had landed, but it took longer to get there than the Prairie Comet takes to get from St. Paul to Le Four.
I ducked the first and sent a right hand into his stomach. It went in a long way, but it didn’t seem to affect him very much. I planted one on his nose that did better.
It was in moments like these (and very seldom otherwise) that I was grateful for my father’s incessant training in boxing and other forms of fighting, clean and dirty.
For his part, Junior’s smarting nose convinced him that boxing wasn’t the way to go, and growling something about being set up and trapped, he wrapped me up in a bear hug. He didn’t, however, pin my arms, and I was able to give him an open-handed slap on both ears, forcing air in against his eardrums. He shouted in pain and twisted around, just before, still holding tightly to me, he fell backward off the platform.
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