Wilde West

by Walter Satterthwait

  “For starters.” No point in Grigsby’s quitting now; he already had a good strong buzz going. He’d quit tomorrow. If he decided tomorrow that he wanted to.

  O’Conner stood, walked to the dresser, found another glass, brought it back to the table, sat down. He filled the glass, handed it to Grigsby. He raised his own glass, drank from it, and sighed. He looked away.

  “Well now, Davey,” Grigsby said. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re pretendin’ to work for the New York Sun when you’re not doin’ any such a thing.”

  Without looking at him, O’Conner said, “It’s a long story.”

  “That’s the best kind.”

  O’Conner took another swallow from his drink. Still looking away, his voice flat, he spoke as though he were talking to the floor. “My wife and I moved to San Francisco last year. Things hadn’t been going very well for us in New York, and Sonia had some money, so we decided to try California for a while. Get a fresh start.” He smiled the bitter smile. “Well, things didn’t go very well for us there, either. My fault. I admit it. I was hitting the booze a little too heavily. I made a few mistakes.” He turned to Grigsby, and now some emotion slipped into his voice: defensiveness. “Nothing big, nothing spectacular, but the newspaper business is like a great big dragon. As long as you’re doing the job, getting in your stories, feeding the dragon, it lets you ride on its back. You’re way up there, in the clouds. But make a mistake, and the dragon turns on you. It chews you up and then it spits you out.”

  Grigsby nodded. He didn’t know much about the newspaper business, but as a lawman he did know a little bit about people making excuses for themselves, and he was pretty sure that he was hearing someone do that now.

  O’Conner took another drink. “But it would’ve worked out. I had plans. I had a couple of good things lined up, a couple of real possibilities. I could’ve turned it all around.” He shrugged. “And then Sonia died.”

  Grigsby nodded. “How?”

  “Pneumonia. She went to bed with it one Monday morning and by Wednesday night she was dead.”

  “When was this?”

  O’Conner smiled his wan, bitter smile. “Oh, you can check on it, Marshal. It’s all on record. Sonia O’Conner, beloved wife of David. Died on November Seventeenth, Eighteen Eighty-one.” He drank some more whiskey. “A week before Thanksgiving.”

  Grigsby nodded.

  “Anyway, I went a little crazy there for a while.” Another smile, one that tried for sarcasm and almost succeeded. “Not killing hookers. Just drinking too much. And then—in January, I don’t even remember exactly how it happened—I met Vail. He remembered me from New York.” Another small smile, bitter again. “From my days of glory. Anyway, we talked, and he came up with an idea. Why not write a book about the tour—this tour, Wilde’s tour across America. Write a book showing how Wilde reacts to the country, and how the country reacts to him. The Poet meets the populace. Why not, I thought. A living dog is better than a dead lion. And besides, it was a good idea. No one’s ever done it before.”

  “So Vail knows you’re not working for the New York Sun?”

  O’Conner nodded. “We’ve got a contract. He pays for the rooms I stay in, and he’ll get forty percent of the money from the book.” He drank some bourbon. “I pay for my own food and liquor. I had some money left. From Sonia.”

  “Wilde doesn’t know about this.”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “Vail’s idea. He’s afraid that Wilde’ll want a percentage of the book.”

  So there was more to Vail—or maybe less—than met the eye.

  O’Conner looked at him. “Listen, Marshal. I asked around, back in Denver. I found out about you. I heard about your wife leaving. You and I, we’ve got a lot in common. We’ve both lost our wives. Other people don’t understand about a pain like that. They don’t know what it can do to a man. How you can feel it all over your body, like the weight of the world, when you get up in the morning.”

  He raised his glass of whiskey and held it up between him and Grigsby. “And we’ve got this, too. Our one real friend. The balm of Gilead. The wine that maketh merry. Other people, when they get up, they don’t know what their day’s going to be like. Happy or sad, long or short. But you and me, we know exactly how its going to go. All we’ve got to do is look at our bottle. We can measure the day, before it even happens, by the amount of liquor left.”

  “Don’t worry,” Grigsby said. “I’m not gonna tell Wilde about your deal with Vail, if that’s what you’re leadin’ up to. It’s none of my business. But as for drinkin’, scout, you speak for yourself.” It was a shame about O’Conner’s wife, a tragedy; but where did the reporter get off comparing himself to Grigsby? Grigsby had a job to do, and he did it. He had responsibilities, and he lived up to them. He wasn’t lying around in a hotel room feeling sorry for himself and pretending to be something he wasn’t. “Liquor’s no big thing with me. I can take it or I can leave it alone.”

  O’Conner smiled. “When was the last time you left it alone?”

  Today, Grigsby thought. For part of the day, anyway. A good chunk of it. And tomorrow, for sure, he was definitely going to quit. “Now listen, Davey,” he said, “you just let me be the one asks the questions here, okay?”

  O’Conner shrugged. “Whatever you say. And listen, I’m grateful. I mean it. For your not telling Wilde.”

  “Fine.” Grigsby reached for his glass, stopped himself. “Tell me this. You’re not even a reporter nowadays. Why’d you get so steamed up when I told you not to write about these killin’s?”

  O’Conner nodded. “That’s right,” he said, and his voice was flat again. “I’m not a reporter these days.” He looked off, smiled to himself, then looked again to Grigsby. “But I thought, for a moment there I thought maybe I could pull it all together. It’s a good story, Marshal. I can still recognize one when I see it. I thought, maybe, if I put my mind to it, I could write it and sell it to one of the New York papers.”

  He swallowed some whiskey. “And maybe I will.” He smiled at Grigsby. Sarcastically again, and this time the sarcasm came off real well. “Later, of course. After you catch the killer.”

  Irritated, Grigsby said, “You think I won’t?”

  O’Conner’s face went blank and he held out his hands. “What do I know?”

  Grigsby reached for his drink, nearly stopped himself once more, and then snatched it up and tossed back what was left of the whiskey. Why the hell try to prove anything to O’Conner. “How’s the book going?”

  O’Conner, watching Grigsby drink, had been smiling. Now he frowned, puzzled. “What?”

  “The book you’re writin’ about Wilde.”

  “Oh.” The reporter nodded. “Good. Damn good, I think. I’ve already written a couple of chapters. Taken a lot of notes. I think it’s really going to turn things around for me.”

  He sounded convincing, maybe because he had convinced himself. But Grigsby remembered what he’d seen in the reporter’s notebook, the only thing he’d seen in the reporter’s notebook:

  O. Wilde.

  Oscar Wilde.

  Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.

  He said nothing. Lying about some book you were supposed to be writing wasn’t against the law.

  Neither was self-deception. If it had been, probably everyone in the world would be in jail.

  Grigsby felt sour and sad and used up. The night had started off so goddamn well. The telegram had lifted his spirits by suggesting an ulterior motive for O’Conner’s joining the tour. And in fact there had been an ulterior motive; it just hadn’t involved killing hookers.

  Of course, the whole story could be a passel of lies. Tomorrow Grigsby would talk to Vail. And send a telegram to San Francisco to check up on the rest of it.

  And even if the story turned out to be true, that didn’t mean that O’Conner was off the hook. Maybe his wife’s death had unbalanced him; maybe he’d decided to start taking revenge aga
inst the world by cutting up women.

  But Grigsby was discouraged. He’d traveled from possibilities to likelihoods and back again to possibilities. And O’Conner depressed him. Grigsby felt both sorry for the reporter and angry at him. He wanted to grab him by the shirt front and shake some sense into him. But he knew that self-pity was as unshakable as self-esteem, maybe more so. There was nothing he could do for the man; and nothing, right now, he could do about him. Besides, it was nearly twelve o’clock and Mathilde would be waiting. “I’m gonna check up on all this,” he told the reporter.

  O’Conner nodded. “Like I said, it’s all on record.”

  “Telegrams?” said Mathilde.

  Propped up against the pillows, they both lay naked on the bed, each holding a glass of calvados. Grigsby was smoking.

  “I sent a bunch of telegrams to the cities Wilde stopped in before he got to San Francisco. And I sent others to cities where he didn’t stop, out West here. Askin’ if any … uh, prostitutes got themselves killed.”

  “Yes? And?”

  “None, so far.”

  “Which would mean?”

  “Which’d mean that so far the only killin’s are the ones I already know about. San Francisco, El Paso, Leavenworth, and Denver.”

  “So. This suggests that the killer, he is indeed one of us. But also—no?—that he must be Mr. O’Conner. It cannot be Wolfgang, and Mr. O’Conner joined with the tour in San Francisco.”

  Grigsby shook his head. “Nope. See, I haven’t heard yet from all the cities I sent the telegrams to. One problem, see, with the cities that Wilde didn’t visit, is I’m tryin’ to prove that something didn’t happen in any of ’em. That’s generally a pretty tough row to hoe. You’re always gonna have your element of doubt. And second, this fella coulda come all the way from New York to San Francisco before he decided to start cuttin’ up women.”

  “So he could, then, be Mr. Vail.”

  “Yeah. Or even Henry.”

  “Henri?” She smiled, her eyebrows furrowed in surprise. “You suspect Henri?”

  “I gotta suspect everyone till I know different.” Grigsby sipped at his apple brandy. “But, fact is, I can’t really picture Henry. I reckon he’s a little too slow on the uptake to pull off a thing like this.”

  “ Ah.” She set her glass on the bed table and then rolled herself over to face Grigsby. “You still believe that some other person could not be responsible? Someone not traveling with us?”

  “Be a pretty big coincidence.”

  And yet Doc Holliday, for example, had been in all four cities at the same time as Wilde and the tour.

  But Doc was a gambler before he was anything else, even before he was a gunman—he was a gunman, mostly, so he could protect himself and his winnings. And it made sense to Grigsby that Doc had followed the tour in order to light onto some high-stakes games.

  It made sense, but naturally it didn’t have to be the truth.

  Problem here was that Doc was a wild card. Unreadable, a mystery. There was no way to know what went on inside his head. That was why Doc had winnings to protect.

  So the story about the games might be pure bushwah.

  But if it was, why would Doc invent it? And in the six years that he’d been floating through Colorado, no hookers had got themselves cut up, that Grigsby knew of.

  Suppose Doc had gone off the beam for some reason? Suppose he’d gone crazy? Suppose …

  Nope. Doc was strange, maybe, but as far as Grigsby could tell, he wasn’t crazy.

  It had to be someone on the tour.

  But who? Didn’t seem like any of them were crazy either.

  The more Grigsby learned, the less he knew. The more he thought about it, the more tangled the whole thing became.

  Mathilde said, “If you are convinced that one of these men is responsible, why do you not assign some people to watch each of them?”

  Grigsby smiled. “I got one deputy workin’ for me, Mathilde. Just the one. No way the two of us could cover all of ’em.”

  “But what about here? Could you not ask the police of this town to assist you?”

  “I don’t get along real well with the sheriff here.” Tim Drucker, the county sheriff, was a friend of Greaves’s.

  Grigsby sucked on the cigarette, exhaled a long slow sigh of pale blue smoke.

  Mathilde said, “You are troubled tonight, Bohb.”

  “Just frustrated, I reckon.”

  “Tell me something.” She put the tip of her finger against his chin.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did you and your wife separate?”

  Grigsby’s chest suddenly clenched up on him. He inhaled some more smoke, exhaled it. He shrugged. “Things just didn’t work out.”

  “And why not?”

  “It’s a kinda boring story, Mathilde.”

  She smiled. “Which is to say, you do not wish to tell it.”

  He shrugged again. Why not? The whole town of Denver knew. “She found out I was seein’ another woman.”

  She looked puzzled, head tilted, lips pursed, eyes narrowed. “Seeing?”

  “Sleepin’ with.”

  “She learned that you were making love to some other woman? And for this she left you?”

  Grigsby didn’t think it was fair to Clara for him to talk about her behind her back, even though her back happened to be a thousand miles away; but on the other hand he didn’t think it was fair to Clara for Mathilde to start judging her, either. As nice a woman as she was, Mathilde was a stranger to the situation, and a foreigner to boot, with a foreigner’s funny notions. “Well, see, what you gotta understand about Clara is that she was just naturally a real jealous woman. She’s one of the smartest women I ever knew, maybe the most levelheaded woman I ever knew, except for this one little thing. This jealousy.”

  “You think of jealousy as a little thing?”

  “Well, yeah. It was. At first, anyway. Everything else about her was … just what I wanted.” He had nearly said perfect, but in his experience it was seldom a slick move to call one woman perfect to another woman’s face. Especially when the other woman’s face was attached to a body you happened to be lying in bed with.

  “If she was everything you wanted, why then did you make love to someone else?”

  “Well, see, I didn’t. Not for a long time.” Grigsby turned, stabbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and lifted the tobacco pouch and a match from the table. He sat back against the pillow.

  “After a while, see, it started to bother me. The jealousy.” He drew up his feet and propped the balloon glass against his thigh, then poured tobacco into a slip of paper. “Every time I was a few minutes late for supper, she was sure I was off screwin’ around.”

  “And were you?”

  “No. Leastways not at first.” He rolled the paper, stuck the cigarette between his lips.

  “For how long were you faithful?”

  He snapped the match alight, held it to the cigarette. “Five years.”

  “You were unfaithful only once?”

  Grigsby inhaled, exhaled. “Nope. Maybe once a year for the next four years. I never looked for it, never went out huntin’ it, but when it showed up on my doorstep, I didn’t go runnin’ away from it, neither.”

  “Five years,” said Mathilde, “is a long time to be faithful.”

  He exhaled. “It is when you’re hangin’ by your thumbs. ’Cause the thing of it is, see, this faithfulness, it’s not an item comes real easy to me. Problem is, I purely do love women. It’s like a sickness with me, almost. Shoot, maybe it is a sickness. Clara surely thought it was.”

  “How do you mean, exactly, love them?”

  “What I say. I love everything about ’em. I don’t just mean the stand-out things, breasts and butts and all, although Lord knows I love all that, too. I mean everything. Their hair and their mouths and their ears. Their eyelashes, even. Their chins. Their noses.”

  He inhaled, slowly exhaled, and smiled at her. “You take noses
now. Women got all kinds of noses. Big ones, small ones, narrow ones, thick ones, pointy ones, ones with a kind of bump in the middle, ones that got a kinda sideways turn to ’em, left or right. And the thing is, I love all of ’em. The only kind I’m not real partial to is the kind that twists up at the end and makes a woman look like she stands a good chance of drownin’ in a downpour.”

  “Retroussé.”

  “Huh?”

  “In French we call this type of nose retroussé. Turned up. Upturned.”

  “Whatever. But even there, see, I been known to make exceptions. It’s just one little ole thing, and they got so much else, and I love it all. Like I say, everything. The way their eyes move and the way they hold a cup of coffee. They way they talk and the way they think and the way they smell. Smell, Lord, I’ll tell ya. Sometimes I’ll be walkin’ along on the sidewalk, in the springtime, say, and the wind’ll kick up a whiff of perfume and carry it on over my way and, God’s honest truth, it’s like I got kicked in the chest by a horse.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you want their approval. Perhaps you feel you need it.”

  Grigsby grinned. “I want everything they got, and I’m plumb grateful for anything I get.”

  She smiled. “Did your wife not understand this about you?”

  “Course she did. And that just made the jealousy worse. I’m walkin’ around thinkin’ I ought to be gettin’ some kinda congressional medal of honor for bein’ such a hero—for not screwin’ around. And instead, ever’ time I get home, she jumps all over me because she thinks I am screwin’ around.”

  “So you decided, finally, that if you were going to be accused of infidelity, you might as well commit it.”

  Looking at her sideways, Grigsby smiled. “You heard this story before, huh?”

  She smiled back. “Several times. Bohb, do you not see that this is exactly what I was talking about yesterday? How we are attracted to precisely the people who will provide us with pain?”

  “Don’t see it that way. I mean, I fell in love with Clara in spite of how she was jealous, not because of it.”

  “And she fell in love with you in spite of your womanizing, and not because of it.”