Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  “I am Tomas Sanchez,” the man said; his accent was a curious combination of Mexican and Indian. “They call me Tom around here. I owe you some debt, Deputy. I carry no gun. He maybe have kill me.”

  Wyatt shrugged. “I just don’t want these boys debating with bullets, whoever they’re shooting.”

  “Anyway—I’ll be about, you need me to be. I owe you.”

  “Well—I don’t want you back in that bar, Tom Sanchez, not tonight,” Wyatt said. He didn’t say anything about Sanchez’s declaration of loyalty. It felt dangerous to him, somehow.

  Sanchez nodded, lifted his hand—and melted back into the shadow. Wyatt could see his silhouette at the back of the building, turning toward the corral.

  Wyatt started toward Red Beard’s place—and almost ran headlong into Bessie Earp, walking with another woman toward Bessie’s cat-house on the edge of town. The other woman he vaguely remembered from the night he and James had sent Plug Johnson on his way. She was compact enough to be almost doll-like. Young, not much above eighteen. The age Sarah had been in Illinois …”

  Her hair was piled up on her head, a bit unruly but shiny-brown, wavy; her pale skin contrasted with the rouge on her cheeks and lips. Wyatt stared at her in a kind of sickly fascination—she reminded him of Urilla even more than Sarah. The girl must be a prostitute, of course, if she’d been in Bessie’s place—something Urilla had never been, nor could have been. Urilla would have starved first.

  The girl stared at Wyatt. “I believe we have met, sir?” Her Louisiana accent was like a perfume on her words.

  “Dandi,” Bessie laughed, “that long skinny fella, you’ll notice, is almost as handsome as my James, and that’s because it’s his brother Wyatt. He was out to our house to help us with that scalawag waving the knife, the other evening. Wyatt, this is Dandi LeTrouveau, late of Kansas City. She got here on the stage just the day you saw her. She comes from Louisiana, some time before Kansas.”

  Still struck by the resemblance to Urilla, and the connection to Sarah, Wyatt found his voice was caught in his throat, so he merely touched his dark, broad-brimmed hat and nodded reassuringly.

  A smile glimmered on the girl’s petite lips. Bessie looked between Dandi and Wyatt, her eyebrows lofted. “You watch your back out here, now, deputy,” Bessie said. “We must be off.”

  Wyatt found his voice. “Have a grand evening, Miss … LeTrouveau.”

  Dandi nodded goodbye to Wyatt and followed Bessie, who took to the boardwalk, in her flaring floor-length gown and bustle, like a majestic ship sailing through a channel, making all lesser vessels steer aside. Cowboys stepped off the boardwalk, whistling as she went by, and Wyatt thought he heard her say, “All in good time, boys.”

  Wyatt sensed someone at his elbow, and found Henry standing there with a mug of coffee in his hand.

  “This coffee’s for Bat,” Henry said. “It’s gettin’ cold.”

  “What, I don’t get any?” Wyatt asked innocently.

  “Well—I reckon you could buy it from Bat.”

  Wyatt rarely laughed—but he almost did, then. “Bat’ll come for it. Let’s go in the café—I’ll get my own coffee and we’ll see about your dinner.”

  * * *

  “You got a firm way about you, in handling men, Wyatt,” Bat was saying as—nearly two hours hour after disarming Hoy—they strolled to the farther end of Delano, “but I’m not sure it’s the way to go every time. I mean the way you spoke at Pierce’s boys in Lowe’s. I’ll knock your heads together just to see what sound it makes? There’s a time to talk hard to ’em, my brothers say, and a time to gentle ’em up. Like training a horse.”

  “That was my ‘gentle’,” Wyatt said, looking up at the stars. It was good to see the glorious spread of stars over the prairie, more visible here at the edge of town.

  Bat laughed softly, deciding Wyatt was not serious. “Okay. But these boys are mostly just drunk …”

  “That’s why you got to speak to them with authority,” Wyatt said. “Nothing else much penetrates. They’re drunk with freedom too, when they get here. But there are limits to that. They have to know you’re not going to bend.”

  “Take no offense, Wyatt, I beg you, but you’re not as experienced as all that. This isn’t Lamar. And not everyone’s going to react the way Ben Thompson did. He’s got a temper but he’s no fool. Too many of these fellows here are fools with a gun.”

  “It is true, this isn’t Lamar, and I’m not an old hand at this job. But—it’s just the way I feel the job. It feels right that way.” He was weary of talking—this had been a good deal of conversation for him, and he fell silent as they reached the edge of the town. The prairie was a dark sea with prominences glazed blue-white by starlight: the occasional dwarfish tree, copses of grass, a rise in the ground like a low, frozen wave. He’d seen the sea, as a boy during the family’s sojourn in California; an awesome sight. He longed to see the Pacific, again, someday.

  At Wyatt’s back was the racket of the town, sounds that inflamed curiosity, made a man’s heart beat faster, while ahead was the peace of the prairie. He felt torn, for he was drawn to both. He remembered the seemingly endless, creakingly slow trip in the wagon train with his family, out to California—before his restless father, disappointed with the prospects on the California coast, had returned to the Midwest. Still, on that journey west Wyatt had looked out at the trackless plains, the mountains, the young naked body of the West with scarcely a human mark on it. A man could go in any direction he chose, out there, with no fences or toll roads. It was a land largely without borders—something that attracted him, and disturbed him both.

  The land didn’t need laws. But people did.

  He wondered why he had been attracted to “lawing”—for he had run afoul of it often enough. He’d started lawing early, in Lamar. It hadn’t been particularly rewarding work, not in any way at all. He had been tasked to chase down runaway pigs and he had dragged an occasional drunk to the jail. Once he’d caught a thief, and put him in their poky but it was scarcely more than a shed and the man had wormed his way out some loose boards in the night, and escaped. A dull and frustrating job, but not dangerous. And very exacting—he’d been slow to turn in some of the money he’d collected in taxes, just one time. He’d borrowed the money briefly to help his father out—without his father’s knowledge—and would have made it good in a few days, but the law saw it as theft and he’d lost the job. Now he knew, the law had been right. Still—he wasn’t sure he was right to be the law. In places like Ellsworth and Wichita and Dodge City a man stood a good chance of being shot dead by a drunk; his last view of the world could be spittoons and the muddy legs of the saloon crowd. The pay was middling at best. So why not go back to that freight venture?

  Wondering, he seemed to see his father’s face, again, grim and sorrowing, after that arrest in Arkansas. And he remembered how the judge in Peoria had looked at him—a round-faced judge with bushy side whiskers, who looked not at all like Wyatt’s father but who had nevertheless looked at him just the way his father would have.

  Maybe he had gone to work for Walton, on that boat, because he knew his father would not approve; because there was a kind of strange romance to the demimonde of brothels that seemed so in contrast to the black and white starkness of his parents’ view of the world; and having gone too far into that, finding himself mired and blighted, he had veered hard the other way. He had to prove to his father—to himself—which side he belonged on. Prove that he was, after all, the man his father had wanted him to be. Why not? It was like he was serving his own sentence, that way. It was just and fair that he should have to prove himself now …

  “Making sure they know you’re to be obeyed is good, Wyatt,” Bat was saying. He went on in his platitudinous way: “But making enemies isn’t. Now it seems to me—”

  “O! She’s dead, the child, she’s dead!” a woman shouted, from a house not far away. The voice sounded like Bessie Earp. And indeed it was the house run by Bessie Earp,
Wyatt realized, as he and Bat loped toward it. They were met at the door of the brothel by Bessie herself, a lantern in her hand—she’d been about to go and find help. She seemed surprised to see them rushing up.

  “There you are, quick enough, sent by Providence—come on, one of my girls is killed! And she did not die natural.”

  They followed Bessie’s bustle and the blob of lantern light through the dimly lit parlor, to the sparse kitchen and then along an enclosed boardwalk that went to the sporting buildings out back.

  In a room not much bigger than two horse-stalls, lit by a single candle-stub, they found the sprawled, barefoot body. The dead girl’s long wavy brown hair was loose, spilled over the boards of the floor. Wearing only a cotton shift hiked up past her hips, she lay on the floor beside a mussed bunk. Her eyes were slightly protuberant, her tongue caught bloody between her teeth; her throat swollen purple. There was a sheet twisted beside her.

  It was Dandi, the little woman Wyatt had seen on the street with Bessie. Someone had strangled her.

  Wyatt knelt beside the body, instinctively tugging her shift down to cover the girl’s groin, his other hand taking hold of her wrist. He confirmed what he’d already known: there was no pulse. The skin, though cooling, was not quite down to room temperature—it stood to reason she hadn’t been dead long.

  He withdrew his hand, rocked back on his heels and stared at the body, a sickening shiver running through him like a ripple along a whipped saw. He had lifted his hat to her on the street a couple of hours ago, and now she was murdered. He could not help but think of Urilla lying dead too. And of Prudence floating in the Illinois River, face down.

  His heart seemed to squeeze like a white-knuckled fist in him, and he looked away from her. “Who found her?” he asked hoarsely.

  “I did, Wyatt,” said a familiar voice—not Bessie’s. “I didn’t hear anything for so long … Bessie went out till just a few minutes ago …”

  He looked up to see Mattie Blaylock from Ellsworth. She was standing in the doorway, her makeup streaked by tears. She was wearing a dressing gown, hanging a bit too loosely for Wyatt’s liking. “Mattie! When did you get to Wichita?” “Just this morning. I was …” He suspected she had been going to say, I was looking for you and he was grateful she hadn’t, with Bat here. “I just started … started here this afternoon. This girl, she said she was going to take care of a couple of fellas. She heard them talking and said they was the ones she’d start with. Said it was her first go! I thought two was a lot for a first go …”

  “When was this?”

  “Why, not more than forty minutes ago. She went in here and—I couldn’t make out much of it. Some noises, but you couldn’t tell what kind of noises they was. If she was making the Go Darlin’ sounds or—”

  “The what sounds?” Bat asked. Wyatt, with his gunboat experience, already knew what she meant.

  Bessie, putting her arm around Mattie, smiled sadly. “Oh—‘Go Darlin’, it’s what we call it around here, noises to pretend they’re enjoying themselves when the gents are at their business.”

  “Oh! So you couldn’t tell …”

  Mattie shook her head. “There coulda been others too, was here. I thought I heard others. I was in the front room and I heard her talkin’ to somebody.”

  “Bessie—who was she with? Which man hired her?”

  “There were two men—a man used the name Johnny Brown to make the appointment for both and said there’d be another gent along. I don’t remember much about the man who set it up—didn’t know him. I wasn’t here when they showed up. Dandi let them in, I expect …”

  “An hour ago,” Wyatt said thoughtfully. “They’re long gone.” He glanced at Bessie. “Who else could’ve been here? How about Sarah? I mean … Sallie.”

  “Sallie!” Bessie called out, over her shoulder toward the main house. When there was no response she stalked back there, arms crossed.

  Wyatt pulled a blanket off the foot of the bunk, covered Dandi’s face with it. Two minutes later Bessie returned, her arm through Sarah Haspel’s, helping her walk. Barefoot in a nightgown, Sarah looked dreary and disheveled and pallid.

  “Wha’s’ it?” Sarah asked, her voice slurred, as she swiped a wisp of hair from her eyes. She squinted, seemed to be trying to see Wyatt; it was as if her eyes wouldn’t focus.

  “You didn’t hear all the commotion?” Mattie asked. “Bessie was hollerin’.”

  “No, I’m … I’m gone to sleep …”

  “The doctor gave her a powerful dose of mercury salts,” Bessie explained. “And something to sleep. She slept right through it.”

  Wyatt looked at Bessie. “You knew about that—the mercury?”

  “The girls can’t keep secrets from me long.”

  Wyatt nodded, thinking Sarah surely looked sickly. “So you heard nothing tonight, Sarah—saw no one?”

  Sarah shook her head. She looked at the figure on the floor and looked quickly away. She asked no questions. He figured she didn’t want to know.

  “You go on, then and … rest,” Wyatt told her.

  Sarah looked at Wyatt a long silent moment. Then she gazed, blinking, at the covered figure on the floor. And turned to drift away, back to bed. Bessie started to help her along but Sarah shook free, waved her away, and went alone.

  “You said they make appointments for this house?” Bat asked, from the doorway, frowning at the body. He sighed, and abruptly looked away from it. Wyatt guessed Bat was thinking of Molly Malone.

  Bessie leaned against the doorframe, nodding. “That is my preference. But sometimes they just show up—if they look like they got some real money, sometimes I let ’em in.”

  “But if there’re generally appointments,” Bat persisted, “then you know who she was with … maybe who did this thing.”

  “The appointment was to be with a small woman—but we didn’t have Dandi scheduled. She’d done some taxi-dancing in Kansas but nothing more. She just stepped into this appointment on her own. I didn’t know this ‘Johnny Brown’ at all, when he come to make the appointment. Just the name, a quick look. And he was bringing someone else with him.”

  “Now surely,” Wyatt said, standing, “’Johnny Brown’ was not his real name.”

  She waved a hand dismissively. “I don’t suppose it was. We are not much attached to real names, here. His voice, and the way he dressed—it seemed Texan to me. His name—who knows? Sometimes they use real names. But they always use fake names when there’s something special to do here …”

  “Something special?” Bat asked.

  “Oh you know. Like some of them, the men dress up like women—that’s more something you find out in Louisiana, where Dandi come from, or with men from London—and then some of the boys, they like to be spanked …”

  Wyatt blinked. “Spanked?” The gunboats had answered more basic needs. “Why would they …”

  “And some of them like to do the spankin’. And they’ll do more’n that. They can be pretty rough. Well this one had a request for something special, someone who seemed like a little girl. Dandi—she was more a housekeeper here. No real working here—I mean, not that way. She was to be a cook. But she must’ve decided to be the one for this man. She was small enough …”

  Bessie’s veneer of calm was cracking. Her lower lip quivered and she put her hands over her face. Mattie put her arm around her and both women began to cry.

  Wyatt pulled the blanket back, took a last look at the girl’s body. He saw nothing else useful of note. Then he draped the woolen blanket over her face again. He straightened up, and took a long, deep breath.

  Bessie was dabbing at her eyes with a white cotton kerchief. “She hadn’t been here long … to come out here and die like that …”

  Bat removed his hat and ran a hand over his hair. “Where’d you say she was from, Louisiana?”

  Bessie nodded, just once. “She said she was … Looking for someone.”

  Wyatt looked at her. “For who?”

 
Bessie opened her mouth—and then shut it, pursing her lips. She shrugged. “Oh I … don’t know really …”

  Wyatt thought she was keeping something back. He didn’t like to press her—she was James’ wife, after all. Given a little time, she’d come out with it on her own.

  He saw someone peering around the edge of the doorway, behind Bessie, mouth agape.

  “Henry,” Wyatt said, “come in here …”

  Wearing trousers, an untucked shirt, untied brogans without socks—he’d shoved them on like slippers—Henry sidled in, looking nervously at Dandi’s body.

  “Is that … who is that?”

  “That’s Dandi,” Mattie said.

  Henry’s looked at the body solemnly. “We talked, a few minutes, on this and that. She spoke kindly to me.”

  “You hear anything—anytime in the last hour?” Bat asked. “Like a fight over here, shouting? A name?”

  “I heard … somebody yelling let’s go. Maybe ‘Let’s go, Joe.’ I’m …” He shrugged.

  “You look out of your cabin, see anything?” Wyatt asked.

  Henry caught the tip of his tongue between his front teeth. He looked at the floor, as if thinking—there was something play-acting about it, Wyatt thought. “Well …” Henry said. “… No.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “Um … yes sir. I mean—no. No there wasn’t any … I mean yes I’m sure.”

  Bat snorted. “You sure you’re sure—or you’re sure you’re not sure?”

  Henry scowled. “I didn’t see nothing.”

  Wyatt knew that kind of declaration. People who lived on the rough had said it to him often enough, as if it were a matter of principle. He’d get nothing more out of the boy, even if there was more to get. “All right, Henry …”

  Henry slipped out of the room clomping away.

  Wyatt looked at Dandi again. His voice was steady when he said, “Let’s wake up the undertaker. And then we’ll talk to some Texans…”