by Bill Brooks
Yrs. affectionately,
Liddy Winslow
No. 24 Front St.
Deadwood, D.T.
Cole placed the letter back on Ike’s desk.
“Who is she, Ike?”
“The only woman I ever loved, other than Hester,” he said. Cole saw in his stare the pain a man can have in remembering a woman he’s loved and lost. He saw it because he’d had the same pain come and go ever since Zee Cole.
“She was young, Irish, beautiful,” Ike said as though he’d been asked to describe her. The pain melted into wistfulness. “It was in Dodge City, the last herd I took up there,” he continued. Cole listened as Ike let the words flow out, carrying his thoughts, his memories of her. He looked up, his blue-gray eyes watery, hurt. “You know I lost Hester in ’Sixty-Eight, then three years later I lost Wayne . . . you remember Wayne, don’t you?”
Cole did. Wayne had been a handsome boy, good-natured, russet hair like his mother, sea-green eyes like hers. He had been killed in Wichita, Kansas on a hot summer afternoon by a deputy city marshal who had said the boy was drunk and firing his pistol off in a dangerous fashion. A coroner’s inquest was held and the shooting was termed justifiable. The deputy had quit and left town right after and just before Ike had arrived.
Ike picked up the tintype that was sitting on the corner of his desk and stared at it for a time; the pewter frame shone dully in the low light. Cole of course had seen the picture before; it’d been taken in a Denver photographer’s gallery: Wayne sitting against a painted background, wearing a pair of Angora chaps and a wide-brim hat, a cigar in one hand, a Colt Peacemaker in the other—photographer’s props. A sly grin on the boy’s face revealed just how innocent he had been. He had been a sweet and gentle boy who the prairie came to claim long before it had a right to him.
“Anyway, I went a little crazy after that,” Ike said. “After Wayne’s killing, I turned to whiskey, and I went looking for the lawman that killed him, only I couldn’t find the man. So I found other men instead and took it out on them. Didn’t matter who. I just needed to take it out on somebody.”
Cole knew that, but he didn’t say anything, just listened.
“I took one last herd up to Dodge, that’s when I met Liddy. She was working out of one of the houses, you know the ones I’m talking about. I had my pay and my saddle and a bottle, and it was all I figured I needed. Then I met her.” He set the tintype back down carefully from where he’d taken it. His eyes still held onto it long after his fingers set it free. “She was different, Liddy was. For one thing, she was smarter than most. She had dreams and ambition. Dreams was something I’d long forgotten about. But she had something else, too. She had a special way about her, a tenderness I couldn’t touch with my anger. And that broke me down.” He finally looked away from Wayne’s image and down to his own hands. “You know what it’s like, a woman that can do that to you? That can be all the things you need, that can see into places so dark in your soul you’re afraid to look at them yourself?”
There had been one for Cole, too, his late wife, Zee. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what it’s like to be with a woman like that.”
“Then you know why I fell so damn’ in love with her?”
Cole nodded, pulled the makings from his shirt, rolled a shuck, and smoked it there in the dimness of his office, the quiet sucking at their bones for a little while.
“I asked her to marry me,” Ike said, his lips curving slightly. “You know what she said?”
“No.”
“She said she wouldn’t marry a cowboy if a cowboy was the last living man on earth. I asked her why not, and she laughed till she cried. She said she loved me. She said I was the first man to come along that took her heart, but she wouldn’t marry me. I asked her why not, and she said . . . ‘Don’t ask me that if you don’t already know.’ Well, I already did know. I mean, hell, what’d I have to show for my life? What’d any cowboy have to show?” He was staring at something in the room only he could see. “The truth was, John Henry, she had brains and ambition and wasn’t about to settle for anything less in life than what she wanted, and I couldn’t hold that against her. How can you fault a person for knowing what they want? She changed me. Changed me in ways I didn’t expect. And by the time we parted, I had lost my hate and taste for getting drunk and mean. I did it because I couldn’t touch a person like her with all my force and will, and I knew then and there that there was no point for me trying to go on like I had been. It was time to get up and get moving. Do something worth a damn in my life. It’s when I decided to become something, make something of myself, just like she wanted to do for herself. I couldn’t fight that. Hell, I admired her.”
Then he reached in a drawer and took out a bottle, wiped the dust off with his hand, and handed it to John Henry Cole.
He took it and looked at Ike Kelly.
“I quit drinking for the wrong reasons,” Ike said. “This one’s for her.”
They each took a pull, and then he corked it and placed it back in the drawer.
“You still love her?” Cole asked.
He looked at Cole for a long, full moment, thinking about what he’d just said. Then he smiled and answered: “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t, but I can’t say I love her in the same way. Too many years have passed.”
“Are you going to go and help her with her problem?”
“I want to, but the thing is, I’ve got several commitments I need to attend to right here. I’ve given my word to men, and my word is my bond. I’ve agreed to handle certain matters for them. I can’t just drop everything and go to Deadwood, not just yet.”
Cole could feel it coming. “You want me to go?”
His look said it all.
Cole thought about the last part of her letter, the part that talked about how she would advertise in the papers. Then Cole thought about the type of men an advertisement like that would attract. He looked at the postmark on the envelope. “This was mailed nearly a month ago,” he said.
Ike nodded gravely. “I know.”
“I was thinking about men like Fisher and Kip Caine,” Cole said.
“Just to name a few,” Ike responded. “If Liddy has advertised in the territories, that’s the sort of men that will show up. That’s another reason why I’d like you to get up there as soon as you can.”
“I was thinking mostly of Fisher,” Cole said. “He swore he’d kill me the next time we clashed.”
“Then I guess, if you run into him, you better shoot him first,” Ike said.
“I was hoping I’d left that sort of business behind me in Del Río,” Cole said.
Ike smiled politely and said: “You don’t ever leave it behind you, John Henry. Not entirely.”
Cole knew he was right, of course. A man does what he needs to do, and along the way he makes enemies. King Fisher was one Cole had made in Caldwell, Kansas several years back when Fisher was the law and Cole was a cowboy. It was their first run-in. Then, a year later in Tascosa, Cole was the law and Fisher was the cowboy, and that time Cole had returned the favor by busting him over the skull with a self-cocker for being drunk and disorderly. Fisher hadn’t said it to Cole directly, but word spread around later that the next time they met, Fisher would finish him. The last Cole had heard, King Fisher was doing stock detective work up in the Montana Territory, shooting rustlers in the back with a long-range rifle. It was the sort of work that fit him, shooting men in the back.
“Maybe if you could just go and buy me some time,” Ike suggested. “Until I can break free here and come up myself.”
Cole knew Ike Kelly wasn’t a man to ask favors lightly. “I suppose you want me leaving on the next stage out?” he said, half as a joke.
He smiled. “The ticket will be waiting for you.”
His handshake was enough to let Cole know Ike appreciated the decision. But something also told Cole they might not see each other again.
Chapter Three
“The Cheyenne and Black Hills st
age leaves in the morning. I’d like you to be on it,” Ike Kelly said as Cole turned to leave.
Cole thought that the thought of two-hundred and forty-six miles riding in a Concord had all the appeal of being bludgeoned with a Walker Colt, but he knew Ike wouldn’t have asked if he’d seen any way around it. “I’ll send a wire when I get there,” he said.
“Keep a low profile, John Henry. Anyone that would murder women is a man lacking charity. I can’t afford to lose another detective. I’m down to my last one.” It was a weak effort at humor, dark as it was. “I’ll have to leave for Laramie and tell Patterson we brought Frank back,” Ike added glumly. “I don’t think it’s exactly what he was hoping for, buying a dead man.”
Phil Patterson had hired the agency to find Frank Straw and return him to Laramie—it had to do with Phil’s daughter, Mary, who Frank’d left with an unwanted gift. Mary wasn’t the best-looking woman in the territory, or the youngest. Phil had figured the least Frank was going to do was to marry Mary and make an honest woman of her and be a father to the child she was carrying. The way Cole had got the story was that after Mary gave Frank the bad news about her condition, he stole Ira Priest’s roan Quarter Horse to make his escape. He also robbed the First Bank & Trust but only got $75 dollars for his effort. But robbing a bank was enough to have a Reward poster for him throughout the territories. That reward was what attracted men like King Fisher and Kip Caine.
As Cole opened the door to step outside, Ike said: “You’ll have to tell me the rest of that story about Frank when you get back.”
It had stopped raining. The miners, gamblers, prospectors, and teamsters that earlier had been driven indoors by the weather were now drifting back outside again and the town was beginning to get its rhythm back—the rhythm like a defective heartbeat. Cole made his way to the room he kept at Sun Lee’s. Sun ran a laundry and let out a back room. Cole thought it more private than the boarding houses, and quieter than the hotels. He walked his gelding over to the livery on the way and had him put up. He saw Ira Priest examining the blaze-faced roan that Frank Straw had stolen from him—the one on which Cole had brought Frank back from Julesburg. Ira was a barrel-chested man with a thick head of carrot-red hair and freckled hands.
“Thanks for returning my horse,” Ira said. “I’m glad you killed that son-of-a-bitch. He deserved shooting for stealing my horse.” Then he added: “I heard he was wearing a dress?”
Cole didn’t bother explaining that he hadn’t killed Frank, or the reason for the dress. He was too weary and his bones felt like they still had rain water in them. The barn had the sweet smell of hay and horse and held a warmth that made his weariness even deeper.
Sun Lee was eating watery soup with a spoon when Cole came in. His dark, beaded eyes glistened within the folds of his narrow lids. His long, sallow fingers held the spoon in the way a child would. He was wearing a red silk jacket and cotton pants. He was a man of indeterminate age. The only clue to him was the iron strands that streaked their way through his hair and wispy chin whiskers. Cole calculated him to be several years older than Ike Kelly. That would have put him somewhere in his sixties, but he might as easily have been a hundred.
“Ah, Mistah John Henly . . . you back, eh? You catchee your man?”
“Yeah,” Cole answered, not wanting to go into it. To explain how it was that Frank Straw was wearing a dress to a man with Sun Lee’s orderly mind was more than Cole had in him at the moment.
“Your loom leady, like alays,” he said, a smile like that of an emaciated jack-o’-lantern creasing his face. “You wanne some lice soup?”
“No thanks, Sun. I had something more substantial in mind . . . something that started out with horns and hoofs.”
Sun Lee’s laughter was a series of short, hard cackles like the laughter of a man who didn’t understand something but was happy to laugh anyway. “Ah, Mistah John Henly, you a funny fellow!” The soup sputtered from his lips. It would be hard not to like a man like Sun. He was kind, decent, and hard-working—and he laughed at just about anything Cole said. Cole counted him among his friends.
Leaving Sun to his soup, he went to his room at the back of the laundry. It was small, but clean and well maintained by the old Chinese, and it had a window that looked out on the back alley—not much of a view, but a window nonetheless. He heard the tinkle bell ring out front over the door, heard Sun talking to someone about their laundry, heard the bell ring again, and the door close, then he heard Sun sit back down, heard the rattle of his spoon against the bowl.
He propped his Winchester rifle in the corner, dropped his saddlebags on a chair, and made sure not to lay his hat on the bed. A woman in Ardmore had once told him it brought bad luck, laying a hat on the bed, although he didn’t think himself superstitious. Then he removed his Remington self-cocking revolver that he wore in a cross-over holster and the Colt Thunderer he used as a backup, feeling ten pounds lighter. It was a lot of hardware to carry, the Winchester and the two pistols, but not when you needed them. The next order of business was a hot bath and dry clothes.
The barbershop and bathhouse were just two doors down. He took a set of dry clothes along with him and asked Sun if he’d dry out his boots by the stove.
“Oh, yes, Mistah John Henly . . . certainly. Ha, ha, ha.”
Ed Harris was a man who could talk milk out of a bull, but he knew how to cut hair and his baths were hot, and, if you got there early enough, the water was still fairly clean. A dollar would get you both a bath and a haircut. Cole preferred to do his own shaving. Ed plied his trade while his man, an old curved-back fellow known as Wayback Cotton—who claimed (every time he was sober or drunk enough to tell it) that he had fought the Blackfeet up in the great Stony Mountains and trapped enough beaver to make all the hats east of the Mississippi River—rasped in a breath that would cause a mule to faint: “I’m fond of fruit wine, you know.”
Ed warned him not to disturb the clientele. Cole gave Wayback four bits and thanked him for hauling the water.
“You ought not pay that old man a tip,” Ed warned. “It’s like feeding a stray cat . . . he’ll keep coming back for more.”
“Maybe he really did fight the Blackfeet,” Cole said.
“The only Indians Wayback ever fought were wearing doeskin dresses . . . speaking of which, I seen you brought Frank Straw in. What was he doing in a dress and dead as last week’s fish?”
“It’s a long story. Remind me to tell it to you sometime. Right now, I’d just like a little privacy and to soak the ache out.”
Ed was still fighting the temptation to persist when a gambler came in seeking a haircut and shave. It was someone Cole hadn’t seen before, but then, that wasn’t unusual with the way Cheyenne was filling up with new faces. It was on the road to the gold fields up in the Black Hills and about everything with two legs, a deck of cards, a gold pan, and dreams of growing rich was pouring through.
Cole sank into the water to his chin, then closed his eyes against the steam and let it drag all the weariness out through his pores. It felt like a thousand tiny pinpricks against his skin, but for him it was one of the best feelings in the world. He tried not to think about the long ride to Deadwood. He tried not to think about someone who would kill young women, no matter what the reason, and wondered if maybe the killings had something to do with their profession. Though Liddy Winslow hadn’t said exactly what her business was in the letter, Cole had a good idea what it was judging from what Ike had said of her past. He thought of all the names working girls were called by the men who used them: brides of the multitudes, soiled doves, Cyprians, and whores. He thought of another name he’d heard them called, too—fallen angels. Nobody should have to fall that far, he thought, not even angels.
Maybe it was the hot bath water soaking into his tired muscles, but memory took him back to the day he’d received Ike’s letter asking him to come to Cheyenne and work for the agency. He had been in Del Río at the time, wearing a badge for the past nine months for a man na
med Jess Benson, who headed up Del Río’s Peace Commission, such as it was. Actually, the Del Río Peace Commission was just Jess and another man named Junebug Brown. The town was scarce on politicians. A week after they hired Cole as city marshal, Junebug Brown got drunk and fell from a wagon and died of a broken neck, leaving the commission a little smaller.
Cole had drifted to Del Río to escape the winters farther north; December and January in the Texas Panhandle can ruin a man on winters. For a time, being the law in Del Río was a nice change of pace from what’d he’d been doing—drifting. The weather was warm, the tequila good, and the señoritas plentiful. One in particular held his attention. She was a working girl, tall and beautiful, with long black hair and deep brown eyes. Her name was Juanita Delgado, and she was all a man could imagine himself wanting or needing. As it turned out, he wasn’t the only man who wanted or needed her, nor had he been the only man she had eyes for. That was when the beginning of the end came, the day she introduced him to Francisco Guzman, a border bandit who plied his trade up and down both sides of the Río Grande, but never in Cole’s town. Either he had been too blind, or too trusting of Juanita when she said Francisco was a cousin she hadn’t seen in a long time. They had spent lots of nights, the three of them, laughing and drinking and going to the local dances.
Cole remembered asking Francisco one night why he’d never pulled a crime in Del Río. He had said the reason was because of the old man, Jess Benson—the one that had hired Cole. Francisco had said he respected Jess and he would never do anything to dishonor him, such as committing a crime while the old man was head of the town’s peace commission. He had said Jess used to come to the village when he was a boy and give him and the other children candy, and that Jess and Francisco’s mother had once spoken of marriage after Francisco’s father had been murdered by the rurales in a gunfight.
“Well, that’s good to hear,” he remembered having told Francisco. “I thought at first it was because you might be afraid of me.” It had been a joke between them at the time, but Cole remembered the slightest twisting of his lips as Francisco had replied: “No, my frien’, I am not afraid of you.” The exchange had been lost in a blare of music, as Francisco had swept Juanita to her feet and onto the cobblestones of the square where the bailes, the local dances, were held.