Black Hats

by Max Allan Collins

  She touched her forehead, where the wide-brimmed bonnet shaded the skin. “I’m…I’m sorry, Wyatt. I haven’t spoken to anyone of John. Anyone from the old days.”

  “John? You mean…Doc?”

  “I mean John. John Junior.”

  Wyatt’s eyes narrowed and he sat forward. “Was that the blue-eyed child with you, in Rock Creek? I thought that was that feller George’s boy.”

  She nodded, then immediately contradicted it with a head shake. “George took the boy on when he took me on; Johnny was part of the package. Probably had to do with why the drunken bastard beat me so.”

  “Under what name was the boy raised?”

  “My maiden name—real name, Haroney. There’s a birth certificate says John Henry Holliday, Jr., but it’s tucked away, and is neither here nor there. Anyways, George refused to lend the boy his name. He…he hit Johnny, too. Would get lickered up and, when I wasn’t handy, take all his worldly woes out on my young boy. That was partly why I left the man.”

  Doc Holliday’s son.

  Wyatt had been with Sadie for many years, and their marriage had been a good one, but childless. At times Wyatt—whose family had been large, five brothers, two sisters—found his and Sadie’s life limited; but their nomadic bent had always been aided by the lack of offspring. Footloose and fancy free, he was. Even today. At seventy.

  “He’s a good boy, Wyatt. Good man. You see, I’ve fared well. About twenty years ago, I became housekeeper to a rich widower. We grew…close. We’ve never married, but I live with him, I care for him. I have all the comforts a woman could ever crave.”

  “Happy for you, Kate.”

  A tiny smile pursed the lips, near a kiss. “My…my benefactor’s name is John—like Doc…like our son. And he took to my boy from the start. Saw to it that he got the kind of upbringing a young man needs.”

  “Well, that’s just fine, Kate.”

  Even with the smile, and such positive words, her gloom was apparent.

  She went on: “My son was very bright, like his father. Always first in his class. And my other John, my…benefactor John, he put my son through dental school, in Denver.”

  “Ha! Junior’s a dentist, too?”

  She managed a small smile. “Wyatt, it’s my fault. He always wanted to know about his real father; and I told him his papa was a Southern gentleman, an educated man, a professional man…a doctor of dentistry. And even from childhood, my boy wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.”

  “Well, I think that would please Doc.”

  In the bonnet brim’s shade, her forehead clenched, and finally she showed some wrinkles worthy of her age.

  “Wyatt, Johnny never knew his father was Doc Holliday. I told him of an imaginary Dr. John Haroney, who was Doc, in a way…but a Doc who never caught tuberculosis, who never turned to gambling and drink and…and women like me. Who wielded only dental tools and not knives and sixguns and shotguns. A Doc stripped of his faults but overflowing with his merits.”

  Wyatt, frowning, said, “A boy has a right to know who his daddy was.”

  Her eyes tensed. “I know. I know. And…and he does, now.”

  “…Someone told him?”

  “I did, Wyatt.” Her expression grew grave now. “I finally did.”

  He grunted a thoughtful, “Hmmph,” then asked, “What changed your mind?”

  She swallowed hard and then she reached down for the black purse, brought it to her lap, snapped it open and fished out a big white hanky with no lace at all. Purely functional.

  And its function, right now, was for her to bust out crying in.

  Wyatt watched, uncomfortably, while she bawled; down the block the neighbor on the piano was mangling “Look for the Silver Lining,” and Earpie had stirred from his slumber to look up sympathetically at their weeping guest. Stealthily the spitz crept away from Wyatt and curled up near Kate’s feet, careful to keep his tail out from under the rockers—that lesson had long since been learned.

  Finally, as the waterworks were letting up, Wyatt asked if she wanted a glass of lemonade or maybe something harder.

  She shook her head, the bonnet flopping a bit. “Wyatt, I’m sorry for losing my…my composure.”

  For a foreign-born, Kate sure knew some four-dollar words.

  “You see, two years ago Johnny was married to a lovely girl named Prudence. He had a dental practice in Bisbee, and he met her there—her father owns a big hardware store, downtown. Very well off. Very well-to-do, for Bisbee. The girl studied out east, some fancy female school, and came home and met Johnny at a local dance at the First Methodist Church.”

  “The Methodists are holding dances now? Times have changed.”

  “It was a square dance at a social. Nothing sinful, Wyatt Earp. But that’s where they met. And they bought a nice little house with a big yard and a picket fence.”

  “A white one?”

  “Now you’re teasing. But it was white, the fence, and so was the house. Prudence was a slip of a thing, pretty as a pansy patch, but not strong. Last summer…last summer…”

  She raised the hanky again but managed not to start the bawling back up. Just blew her nose, in a fairly ladylike manner, apologized for it, and went on.

  “Last summer, Prudence died in childbirth. The little girl died, too.”

  Wyatt drew in a breath. “I’m sorry.”

  “Johnny took it hard, as you might expect,” she said, and commenced to telling him how.

  But Wyatt wasn’t listening. His mind carried him to a place he rarely visited, and never cared to, which was the bedside of his own young bride, Urilla. He was twenty-two and she was twenty, a beautiful slender dark-haired thing with a teasing smile and serious brown eyes. Lamar, Missouri, where he took his first lawman job. Where Urilla’s father owned the hotel, and where he and Urilla had their own little house and their own picket fence.

  Until, a year after they were married, more or less, the typhoid took her in childbirth, and their baby son.

  “Wyatt? Wyatt, are you listening?”

  “Yes. Yes. Hit your Johnny hard, this loss.”

  Kate was staring into nothing. “He began drinking. He’d never so much as touched a drop before, and now…now he was living in saloons, drinking till he got tossed in the street. He… he closed up his practice. Everyone figured it would be just till he got past the grieving; but months went by, and his father-in-law got a hold of me and said I should come and be with my boy. To get him over this terrible rough patch.”

  “And you went to him.”

  “I did.” She closed her eyes. “And I made a terrible, terrible mistake.”

  “You told him he was Doc’s boy.”

  “I…I told him.” Her eyes remained closed. “I told Johnny that drink had ruined his father. That his father had been a brilliant man, an intellect, a gifted dentist, who gave in to his demons when the world didn’t go his way.”

  “Kate, Doc was dying. He was too sick to practice his medicine and, God, woman, you drank him glass for glass.”

  Her eyes popped open. “Do you think I don’t know that! I didn’t want that boy going down my road, either…at least, not the first leg of it. I managed to come back from that dark place, Wyatt. I wanted to keep him from going there at all!”

  Wyatt sighed. Then he asked, “And how did your Johnny react to this news about his true heritage?”

  Her smile had little to do with the usual reasons for smiling. “It gave him a new purpose. He told me, bitter as coffee grounds, that he would do precisely what I had dreamed of him doing—he would follow in his father’s footsteps! And he sold his house and took all of his savings and he began to gamble.”

  Wyatt laughed humorlessly. “And lost it all.”

  Her eyes flashed. “No! Would that he had—perhaps this terrible episode would be over.” She shook her head despairingly. “He’s as brilliant as his father, he can hold the odds in his mind, he can read the character of those sitting with him, he can win with the be
st of them.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.” He resisted saying, Doc would be right proud.

  “More than likely you will be damned, Wyatt Earp, but I refuse to let my Johnny be.” She sat forward, her expression dreadful earnest. “If you will go out there, and talk reason to him…discourage him from the saloon life, the gambler’s life.… He’s heard the stories—who hasn’t? He knows that you and his father were fast friends. That you faced down death, side by side. He may listen to you.”

  “Is…is this the New York job?”

  “It is.” She snapped the purse open again and withdrew a thick bank-banded wad of cash.

  Both Wyatt’s eyebrows went up.

  Her smile had something feral in it. “I thought that might perk you up—five hundred dollars, Wyatt. Plus I’ll pay for the train, and your hotel, and you can keep an expense account on meals and incidentals.”

  Trying to think past all that money, Wyatt managed, “What the hell is Johnny Boy doing out New York City way?”

  A disgusted sound came up from her chest. “He wound up there because on a visit he got into a high-stakes poker game at the Hotel St. Francis with a famous gambler name of Arnold Roth.”

  “Arnold Rothstein,” Wyatt corrected.

  “Rothstein, yes, that’s right. Anyway, Johnny won some kind of nightspot out there, close to Broadway I understand, a fancy layout that would make the Longbranch look sick. My only son is riding high on the hog, Wyatt, turning that joint into what they call a ‘speakeasy.’ ”

  The Volstead Act, the Eighteenth Amendment, had passed last July, but hadn’t really gone into effect till just a few months ago—January 16, to be exact.

  Wyatt nodded. “This Prohibition is making a lot of men wealthy.”

  “It’s also making a lot of men dead,” she snapped. “The competition is fierce. New York is full of gangsters, and Johnny has that same death-be-damned attitude as his father—he’s laughing off the murder threats from these Italian brutes who are trying to…to…”

  “Muscle in?”

  “Muscle in. Indeed.” She shifted in the rocker. “I’ve spoken to Bat about it, on the long-distance telephone.”

  Bat Masterson, Wyatt’s best friend alive, had years ago traded the West for the East, and was successfully writing a sports column for some bigtime New York rag.

  “Bat? Where does he figure in?”

  “He’s kept me filled in—you don’t think Johnny’s talking to his mother about all this, do you?”

  “Was it Bat’s idea, you coming here?”

  “…Let’s just say he wasn’t against it. He says Johnny has been threatened by one of the most dangerous of a dangerous lot. Bat says…how did he couch it? Says this tub of guts Black Hand bastard has put Johnny ‘on the spot.’ ”

  Wyatt’s eyes narrowed. He knew the term: it meant marked for death.

  “Will you do it, Wyatt? Will you go?”

  Wyatt Earp—who once upon a time had gone on a months’-long drinking binge after losing his own wife and son, and who in those dark days had stolen a horse and almost got hanged for it—said, “Yes, I will go.…By the way, Kate—what’s this Black Hand bastard’s name?”

  “Alphonse Capone,” she said.

  Wyatt shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

  THREE

  Except for the telephone poles alternating with palms, this might be Baghdad; or maybe a twister had plopped a Moorish palace down in Los Angeles, between First and Second Streets. Either way, the garish reddish rambling rococo structure on Sante Fe Avenue, with its towers and spires and golden central dome, would be Wyatt Earp’s portal to the East; but not by camel, or magic carpet: beyond the archway labeled la grande station, the Atchison, Topeka and Sante Fe’s California Limited would pull that trick off.

  Wyatt, in a black suit with four-in-hand tie and a black homburg, could have been a preacher or perhaps undertaker, as he and his alligator valise threaded through the diverse bustle in the station—from overdressed wealthy wives attended by sleep-walking husbands in impeccably tailored suits to the poorest Mexicans and Indians in ponchos and flimsy cottons. The station interior wasn’t so fancy, not a harem dancer in sight, though the pretty, white-aproned waitresses of the lobby’s Harvey House restaurant did their best to tempt travelers, abetted by the aromas of dishes almost as attractive as they were.

  With a 1:10 p.m. train to catch, Wyatt would hold out till dinner on the dining car, also the domain of famed restaurateur Fred Harvey (though onboard Harvey’s equally famous “girls” were replaced by colored stewards); and anyway, Sadie had fixed him an early lunch—weenies and sauerkraut, which you might call her specialty if any of the four or five meals she knew how to cook could be considered any way special.

  He hadn’t married the woman for her culinary talents. When he’d first seen Sadie—Josephine Sarah Marcus, Josie to some, Sadie to most—she’d been in Tombstone performing Pinafore on stage at Schieffelin Hall, a cabin “boy” who did a captivating hornpipe dance. He’d only admired her from an audience member’s perspective, as this was not long after he and his brothers and all their wives rolled into town.

  And Wyatt did have a “wife” at the time, Mattie, a dance hall wench he’d taken up with in Texas who had soon become a drag on his good nature with her incessant nagging, not to mention penchant for liquor and laudanum. He was not proud of breaking it off with Mattie, but neither was he ashamed. Few men could have resisted dusky Sadie in her day, with her full bosom, slim waist, full hips, and that lovely face, big dark eyes, and dimpled chin.

  Furthermore, Sadie had been fun and spirited and adventurous, the only human on God’s earth who could make Wyatt Earp laugh, besides Doc Holliday. Older now, with more heft on her, hiding it in loose shapeless dresses, she could still toss a sparkling-eyed smile at Wyatt and make him see the dangerous dusky Jewess he’d gone head over heels for. But Mattie—in his mind’s eye—why, he could barely form her picture.

  She was gone now, since ’88, died of the drugs and drink, and he felt some pity for her; some.

  Not that Sadie couldn’t be a handful herself, what with her gambling habit and suspicious nature. The latter came from Wyatt’s weakness for women, a hankering that had lessened with age. The former, well, Sadie could just not understand why Wyatt, an affirmed gambler himself, could begrudge her the occasional bet.

  “You’re just not a smart gambler,” he’d tell her. “And you have no business risking your money that way.”

  And some of it was her money, at least when Wyatt’s fortunes were on the ebb not the flow. When money got tight, Sadie’s sister would send a check. In a way Sadie’s sibling owed the Earps a little support, since Wyatt helped her establish that oil well claim near Bakersfield. But living off his wife’s sister did not sit right with Wyatt.

  When he looked back on his life with Sadie, he knew his fortunes had fluctuated, but mostly they’d lived well enough, and even flourished. These last three decades or so, he’d combined prospecting with saloon-keeping as they chased the money dream from one boomtown to another.

  Sometimes that meant a mining camp, like Coeur d’Alene in Idaho in ’84—he and Sadie ran a saloon there—and other times it might be a city, like San Diego with its land boom in ’87, where Wyatt wound up owning four saloons (two with gambling halls) and a string of harness horses. The latter he’d loved, connoisseur of horseflesh that he was, sometimes driving a rubber-tired sulky himself, traveling the racing circuit from Chicago and St. Louis to Escondido and Tijuana.

  There’d been horse stables in San Francisco, and two saloons in Nome, Alaska, where during that gold rush he’d hobnobbed with playwright-sportsman Wilson Mizner and famous book writers Jack London and Rex Beach, and palled with Tex Rickard, Jack Dempsey’s first fight promoter.

  Sometimes he and Sadie lived high, enjoying the best quarters in mining camps as saloon-keeper Wyatt concentrated on digging the gold from miners’ pockets via drink and gambling; other times, when the Earps were thems
elves prospecting, a camping-out style of life ensued, which Sadie didn’t mind at all, hearty gal that she was.

  Finding both copper and gold at the Happy Days mine had provided good income at first—supplanted by Wyatt going into Needles to fleece the troops on payday—though the cost and toil of all that underground work, dropping shafts and such, was considerable, particularly for Wyatt and Sadie, who were getting a little long in the tooth for that kind of work.

  Through all the days of horses and saloons and cards and gold, Wyatt had from time to time taken up his long-barreled .45 for local law work or to rent himself out to Wells Fargo or some mining company or even the Los Angeles coppers. Though he thought of himself as a professional gambler, and entrepreneur, Wyatt knew his reputation as a gun-toting Western lawman always followed him.

  Hell, he had capitalized on it—often hanging a big sign on his saloons saying wyatt earp, prop.—and ever ready to let card players know they were sitting down with a sagebrush celebrity. His attitude was not one of arrogance or pride, but with fame the bane of his existence as it was, he figured he might as well get something out of it.

  And, no denying, he was good at lawing. He’d done police work of one kind or another since he was a kid back in Lamar, Missouri, and between his skills and reputation, carrying a badge—whether public or private—remained a trade he could always fall back on.

  This was why he’d allowed himself to get back into the detective game, of late. A few months every winter at the Happy Days hadn’t amounted to much in several years. And the cards hadn’t been running much better for him than for Sadie, though he felt confident luck would turn his way. This meant the occasional lie to his darling girl: she thought the Bill Hart job had paid one hundred dollars, when four hundred was the true tally.

  He had given her the C-note, while the other three C’s were currently residing in his left boot. The Sante Fe’s much vaunted speed meant he’d be in Chicago, late morning, third day out—with another twenty hours on the 20th Century Limited before reaching New York. Three hundred was a good stake for the poker games he hoped to encounter on his four days of train travel.