Wilde West

by Walter Satterthwait

  Apparently, it didn’t sound too threatening to Ruddick, either. He only shrugged, and then he turned and flounced from the room.

  Grigsby stood looking down through the window at the street below him, a shallow brown river dimpled with raindrops, shivering beneath gusts of wind. The storm was easing up, the clouds were feathering away. A few people, most of them in flapping yellow slickers, dashed along the sleek black sidewalks.

  Poor Dell.

  Poor Dell was right.

  Grigsby had known Dell Jameson for nearly fifteen years. He was a good man, hardworking, dependable, and a good father to his kids. And brave as a bull—three years ago he had gone barreling through a burning house to grab old Mrs. Cartwright and carry her out to the street. He had come staggering onto the sidewalk and set her down soft as silk on the ground, then taken a step or two back toward the house and keeled right over.

  Jesus Christ. Dell Jameson.

  How the hell was Grigsby supposed to handle this?

  Hey, Dell, how’s Barbara, oh, and by the way, about what time last night you finish cornholing the lulu-belle from San Francisco?

  Grigsby frowned.

  Goddamm it, Dell. How could you do this to me?

  He sighed.

  Well, shit. Maybe it was time to pack it in. Let Sheldon and Greaves take over like they wanted to. Looked like they were about to do that anyway.

  He frowned again.

  Greaves. Who had gone whining to Greaves?

  Wilde.

  It had to be Wilde. Couldn’t have been von Hesse or Ruddick, because Greaves had known too soon. If it’d been O’Conner, he would’ve told Greaves about the shooting, and Greaves hadn’t mentioned that. Henry had no reason to talk to Greaves, not that Grigsby could see. It had to be Wilde or Vail, and Vail and Grigsby had struck a deal.

  So. It had been Wilde.

  Grigsby tried to work up some anger at the Englishman, and discovered that he couldn’t do it.

  He really didn’t care anymore. About much of anything.

  It was beginning to look like he’d never get to the bottom of this Molly Woods thing. The whole business was a mess. Greaves and Sheldon butting in. Nances coming out of the woodwork, everywhere you looked. (Including, Jesus, poor Dell Jameson.) Drunken reporters and crazy German officers. French countesses.

  French countesses. Grigsby remembered the round breasts, the pouty mouth, and felt a familiar tingling tightness in his crotch.

  Leave it be, Bob, that one’s too classy for the likes of you.

  Right about now, Grigsby would’ve given his left arm for an uncomplicated shoot-out. Two drunken cowboys drawing down on each other for the simple satisfaction of blowing each other off the face of the earth.

  Someone knocked on the office door.

  Grigsby turned. “Yeah?”

  The door opened and Carver poked in his head. “Doc Boynton is out here, Marshal.”

  Sitting opposite Grigsby, Boynton raised his glass of bourbon in a hand that was small and stubby and yet somehow delicate. “Health and wealth and pretty women, Bob, and the time to enjoy them all.”

  Grigsby raised his own glass and smiled. “Too late for all of it, Doc.”

  The doctor was short, round, and bald. His eyebrows were bushy and gray and so was his mustache. His cheeks were red; his eyes, behind shiny round spectacles, were light brown. He wore—as he had always worn, for as long as Grigsby had known him—a gray three-piece suit. Only the lower portion of the trousers were wet, so he must’ve worn a slicker and hung it up on the coat rack out in the anteroom.

  Boynton sipped at his glass, sighed happily, lowered the glass to his shelf of stomach, and held it there between his fingers, daintily, like a spinster careful not to spill a drop of sherry. He lifted his head slightly and sniffed at the air, then turned with a grin to Grigsby. “Are you wearing toilet water these days, Bob?”

  Grigsby smiled. “Tryin’ to improve myself.”

  Boynton grinned at him. “Or maybe you’ve got a fancy woman hiding in the closet?”

  “Wish I did. Okay, Doc. What can you tell me about Molly Woods?”

  Boynton frowned. “Well, for one thing,” he said, “she couldn’t get any deader than she is.”

  Grigsby smiled bleakly. “Yeah. I reckoned she wasn’t gonna be makin’ no recovery.”

  Boynton shook his head. “Jesus Christ, Bob. I’ve been a doctor for more years than I care to think about, and I’ve never seen anything like that. Have you? Ever?”

  “Nope. When do you figure she got killed?”

  “Sometime early this morning.” Boynton adjusted his spectacles. “Probably not much earlier than two or three, I’d say.”

  Which meant that any of the men in Wilde’s tour could’ve killed her. Including Ruddick, after Dell Jameson had left his hotel. Which meant that maybe Grigsby wouldn’t have to talk to Dell Jameson after all.

  “What’s the latest time it coulda been?” he asked Boynton.

  Boynton shrugged. “Four or five, maybe. Not much beyond that.”

  Grigsby nodded—any later than that and there would’ve been people up and about, even in Shantytown. “There were some parts missin’ from the body?”

  Boynton looked at him. “How’d you know about that, Bob?”

  “Molly Woods wasn’t the first hooker this sonovabitch has cut up.”

  Boynton frowned, thought for a moment, took a sip of whiskey. “That doesn’t really surprise me. It seemed to me that he knew what he was doing. He knew what he was looking for. Who else has he killed?”

  “Three others. Not here in Denver. What do you mean, he knew what he was doin’?”

  “He knows his anatomy, Bob. He cut out her uterus, cut it out and took it with him when he left. And did a fairly neat job of it, too.”

  “You sayin’ he’s a doctor?”

  Boynton took a delicate sip of bourbon. “I’d be inclined to doubt that. The wound was neat, but it wasn’t professional. And a doctor would’ve used a scalpel, probably. The knife this fellow used had a narrow blade, about seven inches long. Single edged, something like a carving knife. Very sharp. He takes good care of his tools.”

  Grigsby smiled bleakly again. “So how come he knows about anatomy?”

  Boynton shrugged. “If he’s done this three times before, he’s had plenty of opportunity to practice. And the uterus isn’t a difficult organ to locate.”

  Grigsby swallowed some bourbon. “Why do you reckon he’s cartin’ away pieces?”

  “Mementos?”

  “Mementos? Somethin’ to remember the hookers by? That’s pretty fuckin’ sick, Doc.”

  “So is your killer.”

  “But why the uterus?”

  “I couldn’t say. Did he remove the uterus from any of the others?”

  “From all of em, looks like.” Grigsby frowned. “How much time would he need to do that to Molly? Everything he did?”

  “An hour at least. Closer to two.”

  Two hours of hacking and slicing. “So what can you tell me about him, Doc?”

  “Well.” Boynton smiled faintly and adjusted his spectacles. “I’d say that he’s not very happy with women, or at least with prostitutes. The others were all prostitutes?”

  “One was a storekeeper’s wife, but maybe she was hookin’ on the side. Somethin’ else, though. All of ’em had red hair.”

  Boynton shrugged. “Then I’d say that he’s not very happy with redheaded prostitutes.”

  Grigsby said, “Some redheaded hooker maybe gave him a dose of clap?”

  Boynton frowned thoughtfully. “I’d guess it was something more than that, Bob. He was like a kid with a brand-new toy. He really enjoyed himself. He was having fun. You saw what he did to her breast? On the table there?”

  Grigsby nodded. He swallowed some bourbon.

  “I can picture him,” Boynton said. “I can see him dancing around the room with those strips of her—”

  “Dancin’?”

  “He lef
t bloody footprints all over.” Boynton frowned. “You were there, Bob. You didn’t notice that?”

  Grigsby shook his head. “Too busy forcin’ myself to look at Molly.”

  Boynton nodded. “Sure. Well, you could see from the prints that he’d been up on his toes, jumping from place to place. Like he was doing some crazy kind of dance.”

  Grigsby sat up. “Hold on there a minute. He took his shoes off?”

  Boynton nodded “In places you could see the outline of each separate toe. I think he was probably naked the whole time he was working on her. Would’ve made it easier for him to clean himself off, afterward. There was bloody water in the basin under—”

  “Anything funny about the feet? Missin’ toes?”

  “No. Just a normal pair of feet.”

  “Big feet? Small feet?”

  “Average.” He shook his head. “No help for you there, Bob.”

  “Did Greaves get somebody to trace an outline of the prints?”

  Boynton shrugged. “I couldn’t say. It’d be the obvious thing to do, though, wouldn’t it?”

  Grigsby nodded. If he could get hold of one of those traced outlines …

  “Anyway, like I say,” said Boynton, “I can picture him dancing around, and laughing and giggling while he played with pieces of Molly. This one is a real can of worms, Bob.”

  “So from the footprints, you reckon he’d be about average height?” That would eliminate Wilde.

  Boynton nodded. “But footprints can be deceptive. I knew a miner once who was six foot six and weighed two hundred pounds, but he wore size nine boots. It was always a wonder to me how he managed to stand up without falling flat on his face.”

  Grigsby told himself to take a look at Wilde’s feet next time he saw him. He glanced down at his own size twelve boot and he frowned. He looked up at Boynton. “You think this sonovabitch could be a nance?”

  Boynton frowned. “A homosexual? What makes you ask that?”

  “I got some suspects, and a couple of ’em are nances.”

  Boynton thought about it. “Why not?” he said finally. “I’m not saying that he is, now. There’s nothing in what he did that would indicate he was a homosexual. But I don’t see any reason why he couldn’t be.”

  “What turns a fella into a nance, anyway, Doc?”

  Boynton smiled. “Just the luck of the draw, I’d guess.”

  “You reckon they’re born that way?”

  “Probably. But I’d say that the culture has something to do with it, too. You know that in some societies, homosexuality was actually encouraged. In ancient Greece, for example.”

  Grigsby smiled. “You ain’t goin’ nance on me, are you, Doc?”

  Boynton laughed lightly, comfortably. “Not a chance, Bob.”

  Grigsby suddenly remembered that Doc Boynton had been a bachelor all his life.

  WHERE WAS SHE?

  An entire day had passed and Oscar had neither seen nor heard from her.

  It was all very well to go gadding about the slums of Denver, to spend time chatting with professionally colorful old dipsomaniacs about dead prostitutes, to bandy pleasantries with the mysterious Doctor Holliday (how on earth had the man managed to materialize just then?); but finally, desperately, he missed the violet eyes, the titian hair, the sly supple sensual smile of Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

  Lying in his pajamas atop his bed, really quite spectacularly alone, he realized that this mission for which he had volunteered, establishing the identity of the killer, had actually been a means of busying himself, of distracting himself from the dull aching void within him.

  Was there really any likelihood that he could discover who was killing these women? He had spent, after all, an entire hour with that muddle of an old man, and learned nothing more substantial than that the dead woman had possessed red hair. A snippet of information so irrelevant as to be utterly useless.

  Could he really credit von Hesse’s theory—that one of the men on the tour harbored, without knowing it, a homicidal self? Earlier, the notion had seemed persuasive, so much so that Oscar had appropriated it, made it his own. But now, at the close of a long and dreary day, it seemed as hollow as Oscar felt.

  A long and dreary day indeed. He and Henry had gotten drenched when they returned to the hotel. With the wind sweeping great hissing gouts of water around the snapping cover of the carriage, the journey back had seemed to take fully as long as Oscar’s crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. At the hotel, his hair sopping wet, his clothes cold and sodden, he had stood elaborately dripping onto the front desk, a minor storm shower himself, to learn that Vail had in fact arranged a change of room for Henry. Afterward, he had dismissed Henry for the day and tramped upstairs, his shoes squeaking, to his own room. There he had stripped, showered, scented himself with rose water, donned dry clothing (gray trousers, powder blue shirt, vermilion cravat, the lune du lac coat) and gone out in search of Vail. It was time, Oscar decided, for a bit of bridge mending.

  He had found the business manager in the bar downstairs, slumped in a chair at the corner of the room. A nearly empty bottle of whiskey stood on the table before him, and Vail, glaring glumly off into space, appeared not to notice as Oscar sat down to his left. Vail’s toupee was aslant, the halibut’s head contemplating Vail’s right eyebrow as though about to peck at it. Oscar found himself wanting to screw the thing round to the front; it was one temptation he was able to resist.

  “Vail,” he said, “I think we should talk.”

  His head resting back against the flocked red wallpaper, Vail turned to Oscar an unblinking pair of glassy gray eyes. “Have you come to attack me again?” he said in a low, resonant voice. “Have you come once more to heap iniquities upon my head? To smother me beneath the weight of your scorn?”

  Oscar felt a chill go fluttering down his spine. The voice was so unlike Vail’s in timbre and tone that it seemed to be issuing from some sinister stranger buried deep within the business manager. He said, “I beg your pardon?”

  Vail blinked, frowned, sucked in his cheeks, and then smiled sadly. “Oscar boy,” he said, his voice all at once Vailish again.

  “What was that you were saying?” Oscar asked him.

  Vail blinked again, like a man having difficulty awakening. “Huh? Oh.” He spoke slowly, distractedly. “Something from a play I was in. A real stinker.” He smiled sadly once more. “You didn’t know, did you, Oscar boy, that I used to be on the boards myself?”

  “No,” said Oscar.

  “No,” agreed Vail. His eyes misting over, he sat forward, lifted the bottle, poured the remaining whiskey into his glass. “Course not. How would you know? Why would you care? Far as you’re concerned, I’m just greedy old Jack Vail. Am I right? Sloppy old greedy old insignificant old Jack Vail.”

  “Come now, Vail, I’ve never thought anything remotely like that. But I do think that we should—”

  “You can’t judge a book by its cover, ya know.”

  Oscar smiled, sensing an opportunity. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve always maintained that a cover reveals more about a book than—”

  “I had dreams once too, ya know,” said Vail to his whiskey glass. He turned to Oscar. “I was young once too, ya know.”

  “I’ve never doubted that for a moment.” Never having for a moment given it a thought.

  Vail nodded. “Yeah. Dreams. I wanted to play Hamlet. The Melancholy Dane.” He raised the glass to his lips, swallowed some bourbon. “Alas, poor Yorick,” he said.

  “You’d have made a capital Hamlet.”

  “I would of been terrible,” Vail said. “Fact is, I wasn’t much good in the stinkers.” He looked at Oscar. “But at least, ya know, back then I had my dreams. Dreams are important, Oscar boy. You got to hold on to them as long as you can.”

  “Nicely phrased.”

  Vail nodded and narrowed his eyes. “You’re okay. You’re okay, Oscar boy.” His eyes misted over again. “But really, ya know, you shouldn’t ought to talk to me like you
did before. I mean, what I did, I did it for the tour, Oscar boy. The tour’s the thing, am I right?”

  “Well, yes, up to a point.”

  “Absolutely,” Vail nodded. “I was only thinking of you, see, you and the tour. That’s my job, isn’t it? I didn’t mean anybody any harm.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So’re we friends again, Oscar boy? Huh?” Vail held out his right hand. Oscar took it, and Vail squeezed his hand and clapped him heavily on the shoulder. “We friends again?”

  “Of course we are. But don’t you think you ought to get some rest? Tonight’s the last lecture here in Denver. Come along, I’ll walk with you upstairs.”

  “Great,” said Vail. “Great idea.” He released Oscar’s hand, started to rise, then sat back and looked at him mournfully. “Tell me one thing, though, Oscar boy.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What you said. Upstairs in Henry’s room. You wouldn’t really of thrown me out the window, would ya? Not your old friend Jack. You wouldn’t really of done that to old Jack, would ya?”

  Oscar smiled. “Well, yes, Jack, I’m afraid I would.”

  Vail looked at him for a moment and then he laughed. He slapped his hand down on Oscar’s thigh. “That’s what I love,” he said. “That wit you got.”

  And so Oscar had escorted Vail up the stairs to his room, the business manager cheerfully bouncing from time to time against the wall, then watched almost fondly as Vail toppled into bed and immediately began to snore. (So helpless and harmless did he seem that Oscar completely discounted the small frisson he had felt when a stranger’s voice had rumbled from Vail’s mouth.)

  Oscar had gone back downstairs to eat. After an extremely depressing meal of dismembered chicken drifting in a pasty gray gravy, he had gone to his own room to nap. But sleep did not come. His stomach gurgled and grumbled in protest at the swill fermenting inside it. His brain attempted, and failed, to visualize any of the people on the tour as a deranged murderer. And images of old men in tattered overcoats and of burly bullying giants in buffalo fur blended with the recurring image of a smiling Elizabeth McCourt Doe in nothing at all. Finally, at seven-thirty, he had arisen and returned to Vail’s room. No one answered when he knocked, and the door was now locked, so Oscar had proceeded to the Opera House alone.