by Bill Brooks
But something most unexpected occurred when the letter slipped from her fingers: it felt as though the last thread connecting her and James Butler Hickok had been snapped. An odd empty feeling rippled through her very spirit, and tears flooded her eyes. She could only pray that such a feeling was nothing more than the mad imaginings of a worried wife.
Chapter 3
It had risen from the ashes of a terrible fire that swept over it during the time he’d been in the West. He’d read about it in Leslie’s Harper’s Weekly and sent a telegram asking if his family was okay, and his father sent one in return saying, yes, they were, and everyone was determined to rebuild, for that was the strength and will of the people.
He hardly recognized this risen city when he stepped off the train under a cold rain that pelted his Stetson.
A hooking wind brought with it the stench of the stockyards and slaughterhouses, and it wasn’t the same stench as in the feedlots of Kansas and Texas. No, this was a smell that had blood mixed into it, and he didn’t care for it much.
Rain stippled the gray waters of the Chicago River, and later, when the hansom drove along the curve of Lake Michigan, he could see the rain dimpling its flat calm surface. He went straightaway to the great house and stood out front for a time trying to decide whether to go in or turn around and head back to the train station. The house seemed to leer down at him like a stranger, and he thought he saw movement behind one of the curtains on the second floor. He went up and lifted the brass knocker and let it fall against the heavy oak door.
His mother’s name was Mary. She greeted him wearing a wreath of dried flowers round her head, and he could see she had become slender and that her cheeks were rouged and her eyes happy.
“I can’t believe it,” she said.
“I know I must look a sight,” he said.
She hugged him and wept. The rain chased them inside. Flames danced in the parlor’s fireplace, and a man stood up from an armchair, a book in his hand, a piece of red ribbon marking the page he’d been reading. He came forward and said in a English accent, “My name is Fletcher Devonshire.”
The man offered him a hand as smooth and delicate as his mother’s.
Her dress of lace was beaded with pearls. Wearing it, she seemed soft and airy and hardly a woman in mourning.
“Fletcher is a poet friend of mine,” she said.
He wore a velvet jacket and trousers.
They had lunch in the atrium toward the rear of the house, and even the rainy gray light seemed somehow less gray there. Fletcher asked him to tell them about the West.
“I’d someday like to go there myself,” he said. “They’ve all sorts of wild Indians and things, I hear.”
Teddy felt disinclined to tell them much, but Mary begged him and so he told them stories, but none of them true.
The true stories he kept to himself. He did not tell them about Ed Ferguson, who accidentally walked his horse into quicksand on the Canadian River then drowned trying to save the screaming creature. He did not tell them about the charred body of Jack Beck they’d found after he’d been struck by lightning, his spurs fused together. And he did not tell them about Pedro Garcia—the one they called Pretty Pete because he was so handsome even the whores would give themselves to him for free—who was killed with a pitchfork by a jealous mush head.
No, such stories were not for dinner conversation or, as he could see by their stolen glances, lovers still freshly in their love.
He was given his old room to sleep in, but could not sleep because the night sounds of the city were different than those of the cowtowns and the prairies. And down the hall he could hear laughter followed by closing doors, and it wasn’t his father who was causing her to laugh but an English poet in a velvet suit.
He took a hansom next morning to the cemetery and found the graves of his brother and father. A pair of ornate marble headstones the color of evening light along the Pecos marked their resting place.
He sat cross-legged on the ground the way he’d learned to on the plains whenever he ate or palavered with his pards.
“Well, boys, I’ve been to see the elephant and back,” he said.
But the dead never answer, nor tell their secrets, and did not with him.
“It’s about ruined me on this place.”
A crow hopped along the ground, its curious black bead of an eye fixed upon him. The bird cawed once and hopped atop a small stone obelisk with the name CHARLES carved into its base.
“I’m different now,” he said, then pulled a silver flask that had once been his father’s and took a swallow of the finest bonded whiskey money could buy. “I guess you’re different too…”
He poured a bit of the whiskey over each headstone and watched it run down their names like two small lost rivers seeking refuge.
“To old pards,” he said, then took another swallow.
The sky was like a dome of pewter. The air had in it the taste of coming winter. The crow, satisfied the obelisk wasn’t something to eat, flew off to the upper branches of a robust elm whose limbs the wind had gleaned bare as old bones.
“I’d sure like to know the whole story,” he said. “Who it was killed you…killed us all. Did you know she’s in love with an Englishman? Wears velvet pants. A poet, of all goddamn things. Calls herself a libertine. Shit, I don’t hardly know what that means other than she wears her hair cut short like a man’s and smokes cigarettes and…”
He finished off the last of the liquor, thinking it was about the only thing better here than out there where he’d spent the last three years, where the only whiskey he’d ever drunk was the busthead in the rowdy frontier saloons and the kind they made from cactus called tiswin.
“Well, boys, she’s all changing. Nothing’s what it once was, but I guess you already know that, don’t you.”
He set the empty flask against the old man’s stone, and it looked like some sort of fancy canteen. Instead of some precious objet d’art.
Then he left and wandered the streets that seemed now foreign to him from everything he knew. He felt lost and empty and without reason, and such a feeling was foreign to him too.
His mother told him the evening before about the discovery of his father, how she’d come home to find him in the carriage house, hanging. She told him that Horace’s death had left him irretrievably depressed and how he had hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate Horace’s murder because he did not trust “the crooked Chicago police.”
“They were friends, you know, Mr. Pinkerton and your father,” she said. “Through their mutual friend the late Mr. Lincoln.”
No, he didn’t know.
She explained that his father had gone every day to the detective agency to check on the progress of the investigation, but that clues were scant and led nowhere, and his father had grown more and more morose.
“It was as though the bullet that killed your brother passed through his flesh and bone and into your father’s very soul,” she said. “If he had loved me like he once did, love might have saved him. But he gave up on life after Horace’s death and your leaving. He gave up on me and himself and everything else.”
He resisted spilling his heart to her. She was, after all, now a libertine.
He wandered the city streets without thought or direction. And as if by some fated plan, he ended up standing outside a three-story building over whose edifice hung a sign that read: PINKERTON’S NATIONAL DETECTIVE AGENCY—WE NEVER SLEEP. There was a large eye painted in the center.
He went in and asked to see Mr. Pinkerton, and was told that Mr. Pinkerton was at his New York office. He explained why he had come, and the fey young man sitting at the desk directed him to a door down the hall, saying, “Mr. Bangs is Mr. Pinkerton’s associate.”
George Bangs rose to greet him. A short stocky man of middle age, with a black beard wired with gray and dark suspicious eyes. Teddy told him who he was and how he’d come to be there.
“So you are the prodigal son,” B
angs said. “Your father talked about you a great deal.”
“I don’t know about being a prodigal. I’ve been three years gone to the West, and if that makes a prodigal then I guess I am.”
“I guess it does. How may I help you, Mr. Blue?”
Teddy asked about the progress on the investigation into his brother’s death, and Bangs offered him a wary look beneath a broad furrowed brow.
“We’ve made some progress, I can tell you that, sir.”
“I’d like to know what exactly.”
Bangs sat in his chair and said, “Why not have a seat” and when Teddy sat in the oak chair opposite, the detective checked the time on his pocket watch before responding to Teddy’s inquiry.
“It’s all somewhat complicated by the fact that the police did their own investigation, of course, since Horace was one of theirs. They’ve been quite closemouthed about it and won’t let us have access to their reports. But we have our own methods of gaining information…”
“I didn’t come all this way to dosey-do, Mr. Bangs.”
“No, I don’t suspect you have. But you must understand this as well, Mr. Blue. That what makes our operatives—and therefore our entire operation—as efficient as it is, is dependent on keeping confidences. I understand quite well your position and desire to know the facts, but until we have things nailed down, I can’t risk our investigation by showing you what we have. You can understand that, I hope.”
“No, I can’t. My father paid for this investigation, it would seem—”
The detective cut him off with a wave of a meaty hand.
“Were you to take some piece of information I might show you and go off half cocked in search of some sort of justice, you could jeopardize the entire investigation and possibly forewarn your brother’s killer, allowing him to slip the net of justice.”
“Can you at least tell me what he was doing in a cathouse in the first place?”
“What men usually do in such places, I assume.”
“He wasn’t that way.”
George Bangs arched an eyebrow. “You mean he was more saintly than to visit a whore? Perhaps he was, perhaps he’d gone there on official business of some kind or another. I can tell you if that was the case, we’ve not learned of it yet. But I’ll make no effort to besmirch the memory of your brother, sir. My only obligation is to find the truth. Isn’t that what you want as well?”
“Horace was the most decent man I ever knew. He wouldn’t need to visit a whore if he needed a woman’s company.”
“That’s all I can tell you about the matter, I’m afraid.”
“Then I’ve wasted my time, and obviously my father wasted his money hiring your agency.”
Teddy started to stand, feeling as he did a bit dizzy.
“Perhaps you’ve not wasted your time at all. There’s a matter I’d like to discuss with you. Please,” Bangs said, indicating Teddy retake his chair.
When he did, Bangs said, “Do you mind if I ask you if you found the West to your liking?”
“Good enough, I suppose.”
“As I recall, your father said that you were attending law school before you went out to that country?”
“Yes.”
“And have you made plans to return to law school?”
“I don’t think so. That country has a way of ruining a man on doing any sort of inside work.”
“Does it ruin him as well on the law?”
“Not necessarily. But I admit it alters your thinking some about the law. Most men in that country have to become their own law. Out there, laws aren’t so much written down as carried on a man’s hip. He either abides by a code of conduct, or he doesn’t. He either enforces the law or breaks it. Pretty simple stuff.”
“Do you think you’ll go west again?”
“I’m seriously considering it. Thing is, some of it is getting about like it is around here: tamed, run by men with paper collars and paper contracts. Cowboying is a dying business. I’d have to catch on with some outfit. That, or rob banks, maybe.” Teddy thought wryly of old John Sears. Laid up maybe in some hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico—a place John often talked fondly of—with maybe a bank bag of cash and a couple of señoritas.
George handed Teddy a cigar and a cutter. Instead of taking the cutter, Teddy bit the end off the stogie and spat it into the spittoon by the desk, then struck a match with his thumbnail and lit the cigar.
George Bangs lit his own after cutting off its end, then took an envelope out of his desk drawer. “If you had something to catch on to, would you go?”
“It could be.”
“I might have a proposition for you then,” George said, pushing the envelope across the desk toward him. “Read this.”
“This genuine?” Teddy said upon reading the letter.
“I sent Mrs. Hickok a telegram, and she confirmed it was indeed genuine and she’s quite desperate to hire us. Did you ever meet her husband out in that country?”
“No.”
“Do you think you could locate him?”
“A man with Wild Bill’s reputation wouldn’t be all that hard to find.”
“I’ll be honest with you, Teddy, you possess the qualities we look for in our operatives. You know that country and you know the people in it. I’d like to hire you for this assignment. Would you be interested?”
“In becoming a Pinkerton?”
“There are worse things you could do.”
“I’m not interested.”
He got up to leave. The liquor was wearing off and the world was starting to feel too real and he could hear the trolleys clanging their bells out on Michigan Avenue, and he didn’t care for it much.
But before he could open the door, George Bangs made him a proposal that stopped him dead.
“If you were a Pinkerton, I’d be able to show you the file on your brother’s case. You’d know everything we know. I’m also sure that Allan himself would take a special and personal interest in finding your brother’s killer. He’s the best detective in the country and he is a genuine bulldog when it comes to family—something that you’d be considered as, were you one of us.”
“Sounds like blackmail,” Teddy said.
“No. If I knew who the murderer was, I’d tell you. But not until I was sure who that person was would I show you the file. Unless of course you take the job and sign the usual confidential disclosure clauses and so forth.”
“Why not offer me the job of finding my brother’s killer then? Why assign me out West to another case?”
“Because I need you there and not here. Once I tell Allan the situation, you can be sure he’ll get directly involved—and frankly, he’s a lot better at being a detective than you are. Trust me, I know what I’m doing here, Mr. Blue. You’d be better served taking the Hickok assignment.”
“You mean you would?”
“Yes, as would the Pinkerton Agency.”
Teddy felt anger, felt like he was being manipulated, unnecessarily so. He wanted to reach across the desk and show this fellow what it felt like to be hit by a cottonwood fence post—something old John had said that time they got into a scrap with a few cowboys from the Lazy H one drunken night in Hays. Teddy had swung on this lanky fellow and missed and hit old John by accident. John went down but got back up and said, “Feels like you hit me with a cottonwood fence post.” Teddy asked John why he was so specific on the type of wood, and John said, “’Cause cottonwood’s about the hardest goddamn wood there is.”
He wanted George Bangs to know what it felt like to be hit by a cottonwood fence.
“Let me ask you something else,” Bangs said, taking advantage of Teddy’s hesitation. “What if your mother had written this letter instead of Agnes Hickok? What if it was Horace that needed protection and I could have sent somebody to save him but the man I could have sent refused me, and that fellow was you?”
“From what I’ve heard of Bill Hickok,” Teddy said, some of his anger tempered now, “he can well take care of hims
elf.”
“As was Horace such a man, but it didn’t save him from assassins, and it won’t save Bill Hickok from them either. Not if he’s going blind, as his wife states he is. You’ve a chance to do something worth doing here, and help yourself in the process.”
“I don’t care for your politics, Mr. Bangs.”
“Of course you don’t. Nobody on the other side of that desk ever does. But I’ll apply any politics I need to in order to see the job done we’re hired to do. Including finding your brother’s killer and protecting the likes of one Wild Bill Hickok. I make no apologies for my politics, sir.”
Teddy remained silent, running the possibilities through his mind.
“Ask yourself, Mr. Blue, what do you really have to lose by accepting the position? And then compare that with what you have to gain.”
“Let me see the file.”
“I’ll consider your handshake as your bond.”
Bangs held forth a hand. Teddy shook it.
As Teddy looked over the retrieved file, George commented: “Our informant has him visiting a lady named Desiree Drake. Most likely an alias, of course. But she’s since disappeared out of the city. That is where the trail runs cold. Unless we could locate her, of course, which we haven’t been able to so far.”
There in the file was a photograph of Horace in his police uniform. Below it, a description of Desiree Drake:
5 feet 2 inches tall. Weight approximately 110 pounds. Raven hair. Green eyes. Strawberry birthmark in the shape of a star on left hip. Prior arrests for solicitation and prostitution. No known address.
Teddy stared into the eyes of his brother, then closed the file.
So it was that he found himself on the train the next morning heading west again. Only this time he wasn’t so sure of himself as he had been the first time. He told himself a dozen times he was wrong to take the job, that he could do nothing to protect a man like Wild Bill. But George Bangs had played to his sense of guilt about Horace, and to his vanity as well, by making it seem like Teddy was his last recourse. Of course that wasn’t true, but Bangs made him feel that way, for Bangs understood about the ways of men—it was his job and he was good at it.