Ragtime Cowboys

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I didn’t pay. I was posted at the back door to sing out if there was a raid. I got paid twice that day, once by the promoter and the second time by the Pinkertons, who were going to be the ones raiding the place, only Chicago backed out at the last minute. The Agency decided it didn’t want to start a war with Mexico just yet.”

  The ex-fighter stroked a badly sewn lower lip. “If this joint’s going to be a hangout for dicks, I’m off to the States Hof Brau.”

  Hammett said, “Bring me a couple of chops, Gus. Plenty of onions in the fried potatoes.”

  “I’ll have the same.” Siringo handed his menu to Hammett, who stacked it with his and gave them to the waiter.

  “You take chances,” he told Siringo. “There was a revolution on. Either side might have blundered on the side of caution and shot you for a spy.”

  “There’s been a revolution on down there since Sam Grant was a shavetail. Anyway, I like to keep an eye on my investments. I had fifty bucks on Dumphrey. I’d of broke even if the promoter didn’t stiff me on my pay.”

  “Well, you were working the double-cross.”

  “He didn’t know that.”

  The meals came, and they ate for a while without speaking. Siringo chased his drink with water, shook his head when Hammett offered to pour again from the flask. The young man’s water stood untouched while he drank more whiskey.

  “What’s my part in this historian story?” Siringo asked.

  “You’re my publisher. You said yourself you’re a man who looks after his investments.”

  “No wonder you ain’t in print. If you knew anything about publishers you’d know they never get up from their desks. Make me your researcher.”

  “It’s copacetic with me, if you don’t mind the demotion.”

  Siringo ordered coffee. When it came, he blew on it, set down the cup untasted, scratched his left eyebrow.

  Hammett caught the gesture; that much about the Agency hadn’t changed. He glanced over his right shoulder, as if looking for the waiter. The man Siringo had spotted was loitering by the narrow paneled hallway leading to the toilets, reading a copy of the Chronicle with yesterday’s date. He wore an out-of-season white linen suit, severely wrinkled, a Panama hat with the brim turned down all around, and had a dead cigarette hanging from a corner of his mouth. His face was even thinner than Hammett’s and sallow to the point of jaundice.

  “It ain’t that big of a newspaper,” said the older man. “It shouldn’t take you two days to get through it.”

  “He’s a cheap crook any way you look at it. Why spend a nickel when you can scoop it out of a trash bin for free?”

  “You know him?”

  Hammett nodded. “Mike Feeney. Runs errands for Paddy Clanahan. The kind that’s hard to muck up.”

  “Bootlegger?”

  “Boss politician. Eight years ago he was just a ward heeler, but when T.R. split the ballot with Taft and Wilson got in, the Democrats back East took notice. Everybody who got the vote out moved up a notch.”

  “Ancient history. Harding’s Republicans are in now.”

  “Everything comes back around. There’s an oil scandal heating up in Sacramento, with cabinet officials involved. Clanahan’s on it with both feet. If his timing’s right, he could be postmaster general.”

  “For an anarchist you know a lot about government.”

  “Marxist. When the wind shifts from the capital, you don’t have to be close to the governor to smell the stink.”

  Siringo frowned. “You think this fellow Feeney’s trailing you around to find out how much you know?”

  “All I know is what everyone does who’s got ears. But if Clanahan’s put Feeney on the job, it means I’m supposed to spot him: All you need to tell him is don’t get seen, and he’ll do the rest. That way I won’t look at who’s really trailing me.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “We’ll ask Feeney.”

  “Good luck with that. These fellows run like rabbits when you go to brace them.”

  “Why would I do that? He goes where I go; in this case the gents’ room.”

  “I never knew a case to draw fire this early. What else you working on?”

  “A story for Smart Set, but I doubt that’s the attraction. You?”

  “Not even that. Maybe it’s Earp they’re after. He’s sold gold bricks and town lots he had no claim to. This oil mess sounds like just his meat.”

  “If all he wanted was to scare somebody off, why bother with the horse-theft dodge?”

  “He knows I don’t do that kind of work.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Could be it’s an old complaint. Earp makes enemies the way Will Rogers makes friends.”

  “If Clanahan was ever to confide in people, he wouldn’t start with Feeney. But his invisible friend might know something.”

  Siringo borrowed Hammett’s flask, sweetened his coffee, and gave it back. He took a bracing sip. “What do you need from me?”

  “Nothing right now. Two of us might spook Feeney. Go back to my place and wait for me. I never lock up. What’s to steal?”

  “I reckon I’ll offer you my hospitality at the St. Francis instead.”

  “Got a bottle?”

  “How you feel about shine?”

  Hammett grinned wide.

  Siringo glanced Feeney’s way. He seemed to be reading the women’s page. “Don’t lean too hard. He looks brittle.”

  “These reedy ones can surprise you. They just bend where Sandow the Magnificent would break in two.”

  Hammett paid his half of the check, put on his hat and coat, and strode down the hallway, passing within inches of the skinny man in the wrinkled suit, who suddenly became interested in an article and pulled the newspaper up in front of his face. Siringo lingered over his coffee, looking at nothing in particular.

  After five minutes or so, Feeney began to fidget. He checked his strap watch twice, tore his paper snapping it open to the sports section, kept glancing down the hall toward the toilets. Siringo rose then, put a banknote on the table, and went out.

  He turned two corners, window-shopping, paying attention to the sights of the city, which had changed demonstrably since he used to report to the Agency office there. There was Telegraph Hill trailing its strings of cable cars like circus streamers, and down below the wharves, with more smokestacks than sails straining at the hawsers; but where were the opium dens, the almost-respectable gambling hells, the saloons built from wrecked ships, the girls working balconies wearing nothing but what God gave them? It didn’t seem possible that a little quake and some vigilante raids could have destroyed the Barbary Coast after fifty years of loyal service. Likely it had just gone underground, where a detective never knew where to start looking for what he needed to know. You had to leave a good source of villainy for seed; that was something the crusaders never understood.

  He stopped to light his pipe, turning into the doorway of a haberdashery to shield the match from the wind. He kept his back to the street and saw Feeney’s scrawny figure reflected in the glass of the door, hurrying along now in the direction Siringo had been heading with the day-old newspaper tucked under one arm. He was following Siringo, not Hammett.

  6

  “What do you make of it?” Hammett asked.

  The young man had come along a few yards behind Feeney, as Siringo knew he would; trailing him after he didn’t show up in the toilet, trailing Hammett. They remained inside the deep doorway.

  “It don’t signify. I ain’t been in town since before it shook itself to pieces. This fellow Clanahan don’t know me from Mrs. Bloomer.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “You ought to wear knickers or something so I don’t forget you’re still wet behind the ears. What’s his interest in me is the point I’m making.”

  “Well, we’ll get what we can when Feeney backtracks.” Hammett glanced up at the building, one of the newer ones designed without gimcracks to fall on pedestrians’ heads when
the ground got restless. “I’ve got an idea. Keep him busy till I get back.” He opened the door and went inside.

  Siringo knew better than to waste time asking himself questions. He stayed in the doorway, smoking, until the thin man in the white suit came hurrying back the way he’d come, swiveling his head from side to side looking for his quarry. Siringo stepped out in front of him suddenly. Feeney had to backpedal to avoid collision.

  The old detective asked him for a match.

  Feeney’s face flushed a deeper shade of yellow. He patted his pockets, then saw the smoke rising from the other’s pipe.

  “Well, what do you know?” Siringo stared at the bowl. “That last one caught finally.”

  The other made a sickly smile and started to step around him. He countered that with a step to the right.

  “Didn’t I see you on the train?”

  “Must’ve been somebody else, old-timer. I ain’t been out of Frisco all year.”

  “I don’t think so. I never forget a face.”

  “Look, you made a mistake.” He tried to circle around him again.

  This time Siringo flattened a palm against the man’s chest. He could feel his ribs through two layers of cloth. “We bumped into each other in the club car. I missed my wallet right after.”

  Feeney swept the hand away, reaching under his coat on the follow-through. He brought out a Colt Army semiautomatic that bent his wrist under its weight.

  “Say that again and you’ll be chewing lead.”

  “The smaller the fry, the bigger the talk,” said Hammett, coming up behind him. “Come back to my dump and help me patch up my dialogue.”

  The man jumped, started to turn the big pistol his way. Siringo drew the little Forehand & Wadsworth from under his belt and thrust it into Feeney’s stomach, where it nearly met his backbone. He cocked it in the same motion.

  Feeney hesitated just long enough for Hammett to reach over his shoulder, grasp the .45, and twist it out of his skeletal grip.

  “Like snatching a quarter from a blind newsie,” he said.

  “I’ll get you guys,” Feeney said. “You won’t always be twins.”

  “That ain’t bad.” Siringo grinned at Hammett. “Can I have it, or do you want it?”

  “Help yourself. I’m still working on that chewing-lead line. It needs a little something. Nice belly gun. I never spotted it.”

  “I got a little more belly than I used to. Where’d you drop from?”

  “Wrong direction. After the quake they rebuilt the neighborhood on top of a series of connecting cellars where the hopheads used to chase the dragon in old Chinatown. Some of the floors are original, trapdoors and all.” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder, toward a Christian Science reading room on the corner. “I may have turned a couple of readers into Methodists when I came up through the floor.”

  “I like them cellars. Used ’em yet?”

  “In a story? Not yet. Dibs.”

  “It’s yours anyway. I clerked in a store once and that was as close as I ever want to get to being buried alive.”

  “When you girls are through gabbing I got a bus to catch.”

  Hammett was still holding Feeney’s weapon. He shifted his grip to the barrel and tapped him behind the ear with the butt. Siringo caught him as he fell.

  “Now we get to lug him all the way back to your place,” he said.

  “I got bored. Feeney’s the original Johnny One-Note. We’ll go to your hotel; it’s closer. Just a second.” The young man stuck the .45 under his belt, took out his flask, opened it, hesitated. “The St. Francis has room service, right?”

  Siringo saw where he was heading. “No need to worry. I never travel dry.”

  “Swell.” Hammett removed the unconscious man’s Panama and dumped what was left in the flask over his head, soaking his white coat dark. He moaned a little but didn’t come around. Hammett stuck his hat back on him and took him by one arm. Siringo took the other.

  On the way to the St. Francis they passed another couple. The woman, wearing a cloche hat and a dead fox around her neck, waved a gloved hand in front of her nose. “I thought Prohibition was going to put an end to all that.”

  The man, built square in a striped suit and gray homburg, changed positions with her, placing himself between her and the two men carrying their reeking companion. “I’ll write a letter to the Examiner tomorrow.”

  The clerk in the paneled and potted-palmed lobby halted in the midst of sorting mail to watch the pair bearing a limp stranger toward the elevator.

  “I’m glad it’s you, Mr. Hammett,” he said. “Management has a strict policy about guests rolling drunks.”

  “Don’t count on that, Floyd. I’m one rejection slip away from picking pockets.”

  “Should I send up coffee?”

  “Pitcher of water,” Hammett said.

  “A big one,” said Siringo.

  “Glasses?”

  Hammett said, “Just two. And ice.”

  The elevator operator, trussed in a uniform two sizes too small, with dundreary whiskers and a little round hat like a Maxwell House coffee tin perched on his crown, glared from his milking stool at the unconscious man. “He gets sick, I won’t clean it up.”

  “Sure you will, Sol,” Hammett said. “You’ll do anything they tell you to stay out of San Quentin. You’re forgetting who got you this job.”

  “How can a man do that, when you keep reminding him?” Sol jerked the lever and the car started up with a jolt Siringo felt in his bad molar.

  “Is there anyone in this town you don’t know?” he asked Hammett in the hallway on his floor. The toes of Feeney’s shoes made tracks in the nap on the carpet as they dragged him along.

  “Only the respectable ones. They’re no use to me.”

  The room had a steel radiator that shuddered when the furnace kicked in, scraping the chill off spring in San Francisco. The particles of rust and dirt rattling in the pipes sounded exactly like an old Pinkerton clearing his throat.

  Which reminded him. His valise was still on the bed. He handed Hammett a Mason jar from inside.

  “What is it, blasting oil?” The clear contents distorted his features like a magnifying lens when he held it up to the light.

  “It’s the barrel aging adds color. My friend in Barstow’s clients won’t wait that long.”

  Hammett unscrewed the top, sniffed, shrugged, took a sip. He shook himself. “I was right the first time. You could blow a safe with a jigger of this stuff.”

  “That Canadian blend spoilt you.” Siringo took back the jar and helped himself. “What do we do with this?” He kicked an ankle belonging to the man they’d dumped in the room’s only chair, upholstered in green tufted leather. It made his suit look all the worse for lack of pressing. His hat had slid down over his eyes and he was breathing evenly.

  “We’ll let him rest a while. He’s an angel when he sleeps.”

  Just then Feeney’s mouth dumped open, exposing teeth like yellow tumbledown tombstones and taking in air with a rattling snort.

  A bellman came to the door, carrying a tray with two glasses, a brass ice bucket, and a pitcher that belonged with a washbowl. Hammett gave him a quarter and poured moonshine into the glasses, adding water and cubes to cut the bark off it.

  “Tell me about this Clanahan.” Siringo stretched out on the bed with his glass.

  Hammett leaned in a corner, pushing his hat to the back of his head and holding his glass. He looked down at it dubiously, like a diver judging his chances.

  “He came in on the boat, like all the rest of us. A little later than most, and they say he left a wife and three kids behind in Limerick. Sometimes it’s five, but it’s always just the one wife. As if that weren’t reason enough to leave, they say he got into some trouble with the authorities. He couldn’t come through Ellis Island with that on his back, so he shoveled coal in a tramp steamer all the way through Panama and swam ashore off Santa Barbara to avoid Immigration. A few years ago he bought
citizenship, which comes dear, but it was worth it to him not to get deported. There’s a rope waiting for him in Ireland, not to mention an angry woman saddled with three kids. Maybe five.”

  “I’d take my chances with the rope.”

  “Who wouldn’t? There’s no appeal from a butcher knife. He’s got himself a place on Nob Hill that looks and smells like a museum. Before that he did business in a packing-case parlor on a wharf, peddling whores. After a little it got to be the place where the money men and the board of supervisors rubbed shoulders, and that’s where he got his toe in.

  “They tried him out first as a messenger boy, carrying cash in a little black satchel between Ed Doheny and Sacramento, then had him knocking on doors, trading free coal for votes. I told you about his big break when Washington changed hands. Now Clanahan’s the one sends out the messengers. Our boy Feeney, for one.”

  “Who’s Doheny?”

  “Pan-American Oil.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “You would if you owned an automobile. Doheny invented the drive-in filling station. Before that, you needed gas, you had to buy it by the jar in a drugstore. Now he’s got them all over the country. And you’re likely to hear more about it soon. Pan-American’s merging with Mammoth Oil. Harry Sinclair?”

  Siringo drank, frowned, shook his head.

  “Well, it seems even the rich aren’t rich enough to have everything they want. They’re pooling their resources to buy leases on oil fields here in California—which is where Clanahan comes in, smack-dab in the middle—and in Wyoming.”

  “Where in Wyoming? I know every inch of that place.”

  “This one’s after your time, I think. Place called Teapot Dome.”

  7

  Siringo shook his head. “I don’t know it. It don’t even sound like Wyoming.”

  “It’s there, or everybody wouldn’t be scrambling all over it. The navy took over the oil reserves about fifteen years ago, when it started converting from coal. The talk is President Harding’s considering transferring them to the Department of the Interior.”

  “Interior of what? All I know about Washington is to stay clear of it.”