The Death and Life of Strother Purcell

by Ian Weir

The traffic along McAllister Street was rattling along its way. Horse-drawn carts and trudging tradesmen, to-ing and fro-ing from Market Street nearby. But we’d begun to attract slantways glances. A flat-foot at the corner was stink-eyeing Young Weaver, who began to fear that he’d overplayed his hand.

  The bun-peddler’s daughter said at last: “So what’s in this for you?”

  You may have seen Missus Earp yourself—or believed so, anyway. There is a famous photograph. It depicts a young woman of formidable endowments in nothing but a diaphanous shawl, which she wears draped over the head and shoulders like a novitiate’s habit. Her expression is remote, the camera lens angling upward such that she seems to be gazing down from an enigmatic height. It shows you what truths the camera can exalt, Sadie Marcus being a woman who topped out at five-foot flat on the tallest day of her life. Or leastways it would show this, if the gal in the photo were actually Sadie Marcus. But probably it isn’t, despite claims you would later hear to the contrary. I say this as someone who saw the original in the flesh—saw her face, I should say, having no wish to create the wrong impression. Not while Wyatt Earp is still alive.

  The photograph dates from the early 1880s, a few years after young Sadie Marcus had run away from home to join a troupe of thespians that was travelling to the Arizona Territory with a production of H.M.S. Pinafore. A remarkable adventure, but no less than the truth, as she told it ever after. The production starred Pauline Markham, the noted contralto and celebrated beauty whose arms were once hailed by a New York critic as the lost appendages of the Venus de Milo. It must have been a memorable production, though curiously the name of Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus does not appear on the company rolls. Presumably she had adopted a stage name, but the omission was sufficient to set Rumour to work. There was one persistent whisper that Sadie Marcus was in fact listed among several young female passengers who travelled to the Arizona on a different stagecoach in the company of Hattie Wells, who was known at the time as the proprietress of a brothel on Clay Street. In 1878, this would have been, when young Sadie was seventeen.

  None of this was verifiable, of course. Or fair. But it goes to show you what a newspaperman can dig up, if you give him a couple of days and some incentive.

  “Friday,” Missus Earp had said by way of conclusion, that morning outside the leased house on McAllister. She said it tersely, as a woman might who did not yet trust Young Weaver one inch. “I’ll think about it—what you said. If I wake up Friday in a tolerable mood, you might find me taking lunch at La Tree-yest.”

  Her mood come Friday was downright vivacious.

  “I’m seeing three articles,” I told her over breadsticks. “Three at least—maybe four. Appearing on sequential Sundays.”

  “In the Examiner?”

  “Where else? The best newspaper west of New York—‘The Monarch of the Dailies.’ Ask Mr. Hearst. It says so right on the masthead.”

  I cocked the grin at a rakish angle. She dimpled pertly back.

  “But of course,” she said, “you don’t write for the Examiner. Do you?”

  We were sitting at a table in the window. “My usual table,” she had said to the maître d’ on arrival, sweeping in on a sparkle of vivacity and beckoning Young Weaver from the gloomy corner in which they’d stuck him. Quite frankly I couldn’t tell you whether she had a “usual table” at La Trieste or not. The maître d’—an oleaginous little Frenchman, all garlic and pretension—did look surprised to hear it. But there was immediately much beaming and mais oui-ing, and the ushering of Madame Earp and her guest to a prime piece of real estate at the front, which just happened to be unoccupied. Several other tables were unoccupied as well, owing possibly to La Trieste’s celebrated combination of bad food and extortionate prices. There she proceeded to hold court, elbows on the red-check tablecloth, regarding Young Weaver with a smile that would send every accordion in Paris into arpeggios.

  “You’ve never wrote for the Examiner, Mr. Weaver. Not since you got here—what was it?—almost a year ago. From Kansas, or some such.”

  “Kansas City.”

  “That’s the one.”

  The smile grew sweeter still. Evidently two days of research worked both ways.

  “Missus Earp? I will be honest.”

  “Sure,” said the bun-peddler’s daughter, encouragingly. “Give it a go—see how it feels.”

  “I do not at this moment write for Mr. William Hearst’s Examiner.”

  This may come as a surprise to you, Dear Reader. I confess that I may have given you a contrary impression. In fact, I did not write for anyone, just at the moment. Not since I’d chucked over the only job I’d held since my arrival, with a bi-weekly rag called the Bulletin. Since then I’d been limping along, picking up freelance work where I could and wondering if I had the heart for another novel.

  “I have never been employed by Mr. Hearst,” I admitted. “But I will be, once he reads these articles. Your husband’s career as a lawman in Dodge and Tombstone—the fearless exploits. The single-handed heroism and the Gunfight at O.K. Corral.”

  “The what?”

  “The shooting scrape, Missus Earp. With the Clantons and McLaurys.”

  “That mainly happened outside Fly’s Photography.”

  “No,” I said. “It didn’t.”

  She blinked. And saw. “The Gunfight at O.K. Corral,” she repeated. Trying it out in her mouth. “Yeah, that’s good.”

  “I write books, you see. About mighty deeds, and heroes.”

  The bun-peddler’s daughter eyed me appraisingly. Then she leaned forward, a little—a trick she had, and a good one; it drew you in closer. Her breath smelled of cloves.

  “How much?” she said.

  “How much will Hearst pay me?”

  “How much will you pay us?”

  “No,” I said. “No, see, you’re not...it doesn’t work that way.”

  “Yes, it does. Or else it don’t work at all.”

  She tilted her head in the prettiest way you could imagine. The waiter chose this moment to undulate up with the wine. Some manner of claret, ruinously priced, which Madame tasted and pronounced très bon.

  “Fine,” I said. “Ten per cent.”

  “Of?”

  “Whatever Hearst pays me. And your husband reads the articles first.”

  “My husband is a busy man.”

  “Well, that’s fine too. We’ll proceed on trust, and—”

  “I read them first. You make the changes. I read ’em again. But not for ten per cent.”

  “I could possibly see my way to twenty-five.”

  “A sharp-eyed fella like yourself? I bet you could see clear across to fifty.”

  “Fifty?”

  “If you set your mind. And a hunnerd dollars in advance.”

  I may have sputtered. “Where would I get money like that?”

  “Your relation might help. The one who sends you a bank-draft every quarter. A remittance, I’d be guessing. From a fond old auntie. Or is it your Ma?”

  This was outrageous, and I said so. It was robbery. Not that I used the actual word—not out loud, and not to the consort of Wyatt Earp, who thick as he was had shot the hell right out of the Clantons outside Fly’s Fucking Photography, and afterwards hunted down with terrifying ice-cold calculation the cowboys involved in the killing of his brother Morgan. Including—if Rumour told true—the gunslinger John Ringo, who was thought to be unbeatable until Wyatt caught him dead-drunk on an Arizona trail and put a bullet between his eyes. That was the tale I wanted to tell, though I’d leave out the part about Ringo being too drunk to see who was standing in front of him. I’d make it the duel of titans that it should have been in the first place, and would be ever after.

  And here sat Josephine Sarah “Sadie” Marcus Earp. As innocent as Cleopatra, having read Young Weaver so neat and quick you’d think his inmost secrets were as words scrawled out in crayon on a page.

  “Look,” I said. “You need to see—this is not about the m
oney.”

  “’Course it’s about the money. It’s always about the money. People who deny that are either saints or fools—don’t you find? And I wouldn’t of pegged you for neither one, Mr. Weaver. Or have I somehow read your nature wrong?”

  “Missus Earp...Sadie—”

  “Missus Earp is fine.”

  “I don’t have a hundred dollars. That is the truth. I have no way of getting a hundred dollars—not from my mother, and not from the Boy Wonder Hearst, leastways not until he hires me. If you have a better idea, I’d love to hear it.”

  Sadie cocked her head, considering. “In the old days, you could of sold some teeth. A dentist friend of my husband once told me about that. Doc John Henry Holliday. In the old days, he said, they made dentures of ’em—real human teeth. It’s all done with whatchamit now—porcelain, an’ so forth—so the market’s dried up. And of course George Washington’s was carved from wood. John Holliday tried to tell me it was cherry wood, presuming I was stupid—carved by young George himself from that tree he cut down with his axe—but I seen through that man from the get-go. He was a slinking little back-shooter with dead-fish eyes, Doc Holliday. Smelled of cabbage-farts—punk-rotten on the inside—but he knew his teeth. And you have yourself such a fine white set of ’em, too. You been smiling those teeth at me ever since we met, right up till just two minutes ago. I’d say you could part with ten or a dozen, and still have plenty of smile left over. So why not buck up, Mr. Weaver, and make me an offer?”

  Sadie Marcus’s teeth just now were tinted claret-red. She smiled them at me anyway.

  “Ten dollars,” I said. “In advance. And a sixty-forty split.”

  “Which way?”

  “My way.”

  “Make it my way, and we’re getting close.”

  “Fine.”

  “Call it eighty-twenty, and we got a deal.”

  “Eighty per cent?”

  “Plus twenty dollars up front.”

  “That leaves me with almost nothing!”

  “Depends how you reckon the rewards, Mr. Weaver. You said yourself, it’s not about the money. It’s being the man who told my husband’s tale. It’s fame and litterchure, and all the rest—not to mention getting hired by Mr. Hearst. Nice step up from The Further Adventures of Deadeye Ned.”

  I must have made some sort of face at that. Sadie laughed merrily. “Sure, I read your books, Mr. Weaver—or Mr. ‘B.W. Colton,’ should I say. I liked The Last Trail pretty much, else we wouldn’t be talking here in the first place. You can gallop a tale along well enough, though that hero of yours don’t have much to say for himself. Bit boring, if you don’t mind my personal opinion. You’ll want to do better with Wyatt. But I just know we’ll enjoy our dealings, Mr. Weaver. Do we have ourselves a deal?”

  I offered up a mouthful of fine, white, gritted teeth. “We do.”

  The bun-peddler’s daughter beamed her most radiant smile yet, and began to extend her hand. Then she broke off, seeing someone outside. “Why, look,” she exclaimed, raising the hand in a wave. “It’s Mr. Rourke’s nephew, from the bank.”

  I looked.

  There stood—God help us—Ichabod. My stork-legged adversary from the other night. He had stopped outside on the sidewalk, grinning bravely through the window at Sadie Marcus. He wore a banker’s woolen suit, but his face above it was deathly pale; and there was a clean white bandage wrapped clear round his head, exactly as if someone had clocked him with a beer mug.

  “Good golly,” Sadie Marcus said. “He looks to of had some sorta mishap.”

  Ichabod’s grin quirked wry and sheepish, as if he thought to offer some explanation, which Missus Earp might lip-read through the glass. Then he saw Young Weaver.

  “The manager’s nephew—do you know him?” the bun-peddler’s daughter was saying to me. “Mr. Rourke, at First Union. A great friend of my husband, and a finanshul associate.”

  That’s where I’d seen him. That’s why he’d seemed familiar, at the concert saloon.

  Ichabod stared back at me, like a harbinger of Apocalypse.

  3.

  There is a word to describe my prospects, from that moment onward. It is a fine old Anglo-Saxon word, and that word is “fucked.”

  It was the bank where I myself held an account. The First Union, a redoubtable brick structure on the edge of “down town,” where by day the men of business would stride with purpose, and of an evening the ladies would promenade past the blaze of light from store windows. This would have been bad enough, all on its own—the discovery that Ichabod, when not slumming with low companions in concert saloons, was a bank clerk that I might have to deal with. But reveal him to be a scion of wealth and privilege—the nephew of J. Pierpont Rourke, no less—and it went to hell completely. William Rourke could stalk stork-legged where he chose, entirely unconstrained. He could look down on Young Weaver from the wooden railing on the second level, where executive offices were located, with such seething combustion that a drier man than Weaver might burst into flame. Might shrivel right there in the line-up, and crumble to a cone of ash. Or if he chose—and this was even worse—William Rourke might greet Young Weaver with a cool and insidious pleasantry. “Ah,” he might say, “the fifteenth of the month. Remittance day. How is she, your Sainted Ma?”

  Young Weaver might try to eye him coolly back. “She’s well, I believe.”

  “Well, that’s good news. Your Sainted Ma, all the way back home in—where is it that she lives, exactly?”

  “New Brunswick.”

  “New Brunswick. Well, my golly. It’s a marvel to me, the places where people’s mothers live. And a regular remittance to her grownup boy—the fifteenth day of every quarter, without fail. She must be awful proud of you.”

  Then he would stork-leg it toward another wicket, with a thin cold smile that promised murder. This was America, after all. William Rourke would rise. In six months, he would have an office of his own on the second floor. In a year or two it would be a corner office, with a prospect onto the ocean and a filing cabinet stuffed with other people’s mortgages. By the time he was thirty, he would have a house on Nob Hill and a dim unhappy wife who had once gone riding with one of the Vanderbilt girls.

  Worse yet, he knew the Earps, who so desired the favour of his uncle. I’d seen it from that first moment in the restaurant. The Spectre of Ichabod staring in through the glass. The bun-peddler’s sharp-eyed daughter edging back from me, the beads of her inner abacus audibly clicking. “Do I take it you fellers are known to each other? ’Cause he sure seems to recognize you.”

  And there went my deal with Sadie Marcus. Within moments she’d discovered how time had flown, and was promptly out the door.

  And then it got worse.

  That same evening, I returned to my lodging to find the lock changed, and my miserable few possessions stacked up outside the door.

  “Evicted,” the landlord mumbled.

  He was a German, and not swinish by nature. I’d almost liked him, in his way, which was pink-faced and perspiring. A builder by trade, who had come to America to make something of himself. I’d caught him on his way out the back door.

  “Rent in arrears,” he said. This seemed to have something to do with it. “Un-zuitable tenant” was something else. “Drinkinks and carryinks-on.”

  “And you couldn’t just talk to me?”

  Apparently not. Because apparently it wasn’t his decision.

  “What do you mean, not your decision? You own the damned building!”

  It seemed he didn’t. Not exactly.

  He said something about “ze mortgage.” Something to do with “ze bank.” Something to do with “ach” and “Gott im Himmel.”

  By then he’d said enough.

  This was Ichabod’s doing. Ichabod’s revenge.

  4.

  You’ll have certain questions by now, I expect. Queries concerning your friend Weaver, and where he came from, and how he had managed to end up here: in San Francisco, in this sorry pass,
on the night of 26 April, 1892.

  I had those questions myself.

  “Jesus,” I said heavily, to Fat Charley behind the bar. “Jesus Christ, eh?”

  Fat Charley glanced briefly in my direction, then shifted along to serve another customer.

  I had gone to a saloon or two after my eviction, and now I was at Mulvaney’s, leaning disconsolately against the bar. Mulvaney’s was a comfortably seedy watering-hole, around the corner and down an alley from Will Hearst’s resplendent new Examiner Building on Geary Street. The Boy Wonder had erected this edifice as his personal riposte to the sky-scraping Chronicle Building at the corner of Market and Kearney, and Mulvaney’s was as such a noted redoubt for newspapermen. It was eight o’clock or so when I arrived.

  I’d had it in mind to seek out my friends from the Examiner. Because I knew those men—I honestly did. I knew some of them, at least. I’d been badgering Bill Lundrigan, the City Editor, for months, asking the man to hire me.

  “I swear, you would not regret it,” I had vowed to him on various occasions.

  “Well, perhaps we’ll talk about it,” Bill Lundrigan had replied. “Some other time, if an opening comes up.”

  “Did I tell you—? Wait—look here—I have a letter of reference, from an old pal of yours. Wally Palmer, at the Philadelphia Beacon. Did I ever show it to you?”

  I’d shown it to him on three separate occasions. Each time I’d tug the crinkled envelope out of my pocket and smooth the letter carefully. Wally Palmer was the City Editor at the Beacon. I’d worked there a few years previously—Philadelphia had been two or three papers before Kansas City, which was my last stop before coming out to San Francisco. I’d toiled for a good few newspapers, over the years; some of the situations had proven to be more congenial than others, and I’d never been a man for staying put when greener pastures beckoned. But Wally Palmer’s recommendation had been kindly, mentioning my can-do attitude and my potential. I had one whale of a potential, in Wally’s estimation. Yes, I had been seen by some as a Rising Young Man, in bygone days.