Behind the Iron

by William W. Johnstone

  “Gawd!” roared the younger, thinner reporter, who shoved his pencil and pad into the pocket of his sack coat and raced down the depot.

  The fat man started toward the train, too, but stopped and looked back.

  “Thirty minutes?” he asked.

  MacGregor nodded. “Maybe a little longer, but I’ll be here. I always have time for the working press. It’s the policy of the American Detective Agency to support the free press.”

  That left the woman, who smiled.

  “You sure I can’t show you the way to the prison?” she asked.

  MacGregor smiled. “You’d miss the big story back there.”

  “Something tells me the bigger story is right here.”

  That caused the young detective to laugh.

  “I’ll see you here in a half hour. If I see you before then, I’ll forget the American Detective Agency’s policy and you’ll be out of luck.”

  She grinned. “Very well.” She looked at Fallon. “And maybe I can talk to you.”

  Fallon said: “I don’t know much, ma’am.”

  “How long will you be behind ‘The Walls’?”

  “Four years is his sentence,” MacGregor answered. “But with luck he will realize the error of his ways, reform himself so that he is fit to return to society and be a credit to the Missouri State Penitentiary’s rehabilitation.”

  The woman laughed. “Mister,” she said, “you don’t know anything about ‘The Walls.’”

  “A half hour,” MacGregor said.

  “Very well. I look forward to talking to you, Daniel J. MacGregor, American Detective Agency, Chicago, Illinois.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And you as well.”

  Fallon was already walking.

  She called out to them as they began their way down the steps off the platform. “I’m Julie Jernigan. Kansas City Enterprise. That’s Kansas City, Kansas. Not Missouri.”

  “Thirty minutes,” MacGregor said. “Or better yet, why don’t you meet me at the saloon at the Hotel Missouri on Jackson Street.”

  “They don’t allow women inside the hotel’s bar, Mr. MacGregor. Not in Missouri.”

  “Then maybe my room,” he said.

  “I’m staying in that very hotel,” she said.

  “Then . . .” Dan MacGregor looked hopeful.

  “But I think it would be better if I just meet you here,” Julie Jernigan said. “In thirty minutes.”

  Laughing, MacGregor turned Fallon’s shoulders down Water Street, and they headed toward those towering walls.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MacGregor released his hold on Fallon as they crossed the street to the boardwalk on the other side. At the first corner, the detective told Fallon to stop. Fallon obeyed and saw MacGregor looking back toward the depot.

  “Nobody’s following us,” he said after a moment. “At least as far as I can tell.”

  He waited another full minute before he appeared satisfied. “Let’s go,” he said, and they crossed the street.

  The buildings were a mix of wood and frame, some two stories, a few one, all overshadowed by those dark towering walls of the prison. “The Walls,” people had called it in Jefferson City. The name seemed fitting, especially as Fallon and MacGregor approached the massive prison and its towering walls. Fallon spotted the guard towers, the barbed wire. They crossed over to Main Street and kept walking.

  Fallon’s leg throbbed. He wished MacGregor would have hailed one of the cabs or hopped aboard an omnibus.

  He didn’t. He took Fallon down an alley, then back to Water Street—and none of this made sense to Fallon. The detective had told all of the reporters that he was escorting Fallon to the state penitentiary. They didn’t have to follow the two. They could easily walk or ride to the prison’s gates and wait for them there.

  When they turned onto Lafayette Street, they remained on the other side of the street from the massive building of graying rock walls. They passed the entrance and now Fallon understood why MacGregor wanted no snooping inkslinger to follow them. The young detective did not take Fallon inside the prison. Instead, they stopped at a home across from the foreboding structure, a home that looked comfortable, inviting, new—unlike the prison across the street.

  The building was a wooden frame, though the foundation appeared to be limestone. The walls were painted red with white trim along the windows, below the roofline, and on the wooden columns, balustrades, and handrails. The roof pitched like waves, one chimney of brick rose above the shingles, and a rounded tower jutted out on the opposite end. There were two porches on either side of the house. First MacGregor checked up and down the streets, and even across the street at the prison. Feeling clear, he nodded at the path to the porch farthest away. Fallon walked ahead of him, came to the door, and stepped aside, enjoying the shade.

  Most of the houses and buildings Fallon had passed in the city were old, the paint beginning to chip or the stones or bricks showing their age. This one couldn’t be more than five years old, Fallon guessed. Maybe ten, but that seemed unlikely. It sat on the corner, a nice lot with plenty of shade trees along both sides of the house. The lot next to it was vacant, as was the one beyond it.

  Daniel MacGregor found the blackened brass hammer and knocked several times on the door.

  Footsteps sounded inside, and the front door opened. An elderly black man dressed in the gray uniform of a prisoner studied MacGregor and looked at Fallon twice.

  “Yes, suh?” the old man said.

  “Daniel MacGregor,” the detective announced. “We are expected.”

  “Yes, suh,” said the Negro, and he stepped aside and motioned both men inside.

  Once the door closed, the man locked the door at the knob and slid a bolt for extra security.

  Fallon looked at the walls, finding no photographs or paintings. No samplers. Just wallpaper. A grandfather clock stood in the corner.

  “If you gentlemen will jus’ follow me, sirs. You all can hangs your hats there.” He nodded at the corner across from the grandfather clock.

  The coatrack was empty, but this was a rather warm day, and the humidity from the Missouri River didn’t make things any cooler. Fallon hung his hat, turned, accepted MacGregor’s and placed it on the other side. The old man was already moving toward the staircase, and Fallon and MacGregor followed.

  There were no hangings on the walls of the second story, either, and the old Negro stopped at an office. It would be the one with the balcony, Fallon knew, over the first porch. Fallon had noticed the door and windows. A man sitting up there would have a good view of the state penitentiary.

  “Yes,” came an authoritative voice from behind the thick, dark door.

  “They’s here, suh,” said the old butler in a convict’s uniform.

  “Show them in, Homer.”

  The old convict nodded at the men and opened the door. He held it open as Fallon and MacGregor walked inside, their boots softening as they left the hardwood floors and stepped onto a Persian rug.

  “That’ll be all, Homer,” said the man sitting behind a big desk. It wasn’t as big as Sean MacGregor’s monstrosity in his office in that flatiron building in Chicago, but it was not small. The door closed, and the man, still sitting—not offering his hand or greeting—nodded at two wooden chairs with padded seats of red leather in front of the desk.

  “Have a seat,” the man said.

  He was a grave-looking man, his thinning hair a mixture of gray and gold, with long Dundreary whiskers that had not started to gray falling off his face and onto his shoulders. He wore a green jacket and red silk tie over a white shirt. He removed his silver spectacles and dropped them on a tray.

  Fallon settled into his chair and stretched out his wounded leg. It felt good to be off his feet again. That had been a long, hot walk.

  “Some excitement on the train, I hear,” the man said. He still had not offered his hand or any acknowledgment. Nor had he offered either of his visitors any of the water in a pitcher
to his right. Or any of the Scotch or brandy from the bottles on his left.

  “Yes,” MacGregor said.

  “Too bad you didn’t kill that scoundrel Linc Harper,” the man said.

  “Well . . .” MacGregor grinned at the joke he must have just come up with. “The American Detective Agency did not wish to deprive you of enjoying Linc Harper’s company, warden, for the rest of his natural life.”

  This was the home of Harold Underwood, warden of the Missouri State Penitentiary. Of course, Harry Fallon had made that assumption when they first walked up to the house. Who else would live this close to one of the worst prisons in the United States? Fallon figured even the warden did not like living here.

  “I prefer director instead of warden,” Underwood said.

  MacGregor nodded. “My apologies, Mister Director.”

  Underwood picked up some papers on his desk, looked at them without help from his eyeglasses, glanced over the tops at Fallon, then let the papers slip back to the top of his desk.

  “This is the man you wish for us to accommodate,” he said to MacGregor but kept his eyes on Fallon.

  “Yes, sir. I’ve explained everything to him. He knows what he has to do. And he knows that he’ll have to do it alone. With no help from you.”

  The warden—that is, director—frowned and turned to study MacGregor.

  “You make it sound, Mister Detective, that my guards have no control over the inmates.”

  “Not at all, Mister Director . . .”

  The man turned in his chair and pointed at a framed certificate on the paneled wall behind him. Unlike the rest of the house, the penitentiary’s director’s office was covered with paintings and certificates or diplomas and even a couple of clippings from newspapers and even Harper’s Weekly.

  “This has been presented to us. We ran the most efficient prison in our United States. Housing these criminals, keeping them healthy. Making them work. Feeding them. And we do it for eleven cents a day, per inmate.”

  “Impressive,” MacGregor said.

  “Damned right,” said the warden. Fallon decided he didn’t care much for the title director. He wasn’t sure that Harold Underwood even deserved being called warden.

  Eleven cents a day. For bed and grub. He could hardly wait to step inside his new home.

  “How long will we have”—Underwood glanced at the papers on his desk—“the pleasure of Harry Fallon’s company?”

  “Just as long as it takes him to get what we need. Two months. No longer than four. With luck, much less than two months.”

  “And you think you can find out information about that last payroll and train heist that Harper’s bunch managed to pull?”

  “That’s our objective.”

  The warden’s eyes returned to Fallon. “And this is the man you think can get this job done?”

  “He’s a good man,” MacGregor said.

  “Well, if you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. MacGregor, he looks like we just dragged him out of the dungeon underneath A-Hall. I sure hope, sir, that you are not bleeding on my rug.”

  “I’m trying not to,” Fallon said. Maybe Harold Underwood deserved neither warden nor director. He certainly didn’t rate a sir.

  Underwood returned his attention to MacGregor. “So what do you need from us?”

  “Just let Hank do his job. I’ve told him that he’ll have to figure out a way to become one of Doctor Gripewater’s trusties himself, although the beating he took during Harper’s attempted train robbery, and that cut a bullet carved across the calf, that should, at the very least, get him inside to see the good doctor.”

  “All of our prisoners are first examined by Doctor Gripewater,” the warden said.

  “Right. But we don’t want to make things look too convenient.”

  “You didn’t have any women detectives you could send in?” Underwood said. “That would have made things a hell of a lot easier.”

  MacGregor shook his head. “We have no female operatives in the American Detective Agency.”

  “Pinkerton has some.”

  MacGregor bit his lip and shoved his fingers underneath his thighs. “Well, I don’t think Hank will pass as a woman, so we’ll have to let him do his job.”

  “He barely passes for a man, the shape he’s in.”

  “Yes, sir. But Hank mends fast. Really fast.” MacGregor leaned forward in his chair and pointed in the general direction of the papers on the warden’s desk. “There are two men, you’ll notice in our report, that we’d like to keep away from our operative, Mr. Fallon.”

  The warden nodded. “Kemp Carver and Ford Wagner. I’ve read your report.” His gray eyes turned back onto Fallon. “They have some problems with this former deputy marshal, I see.”

  “Yes. It’s just for Fallon’s own protection. So he can focus on his job of finding out what we think Missus Harper might know.”

  “I’d say your man Fallon needs all the protection he can get.” The warden laughed at his own joke, but quickly turned serious. “And what, if you don’t mind my asking, is in this for us?”

  “If we get the money,” MacGregor said, “as soon as the express agency and the other companies who lost money pay that reward, you will get fifteen percent of what we earn.”

  “Just fifteen?”

  “It’s rent, Mister Director. You’re renting out space for Fallon. Fallon puts his life on the line, and the American Detective Agency has spent a lot of money trying to set this all up. As you well know.”

  The warden smiled, and then chuckled. “And we thank you for your donation.” The smile and laugh died quickly, however, and Underwood said: “And if you don’t get the money from the robbery, or you don’t capture Linc Harper alive? Or dead, for that matter?”

  Fallon held out his hands and shrugged. “Then you, sir, are out eleven cents a day for a few months.”

  The warden nodded. “And if Hank Fallon here gets killed?”

  “Surely, you won’t allow that to happen.”

  “As long as both of you know the risks.” Underwood waved toward the French doors that led to the balcony. “And there are many, many risks once you step into ‘The Walls.’”

  “We understand,” MacGregor answered for Fallon and himself.

  “Good. Then you won’t mind signing this little slip of paper my attorney prepared.”

  They both signed the waiver, and after that the warden poured a snifter of brandy for MacGregor, and himself, and grinned at Fallon. “It wouldn’t seem right, you see, if Doc Gripewater or some of the inmates smelled liquor on your breath, Hank.”

  Fallon thought: Only my friends call me Hank.

  “All right.” Underwood was taller than Fallon had expected. His long legs carried him quickly across the Persian rug to the door. He opened it and called downstairs for the prison trusty who served as the warden’s valet, butler, or something.

  “Homer will see you out the side entrance, and take you to the deputy warden, who will oversee Hank’s introduction to the prison. The deputy warden, Mr. Fowlson, will be waiting outside the main entrance with two guards.”

  The warden started back inside but was stopped by Dan MacGregor.

  “Any questions, Hank?” At least Dan MacGregor offered his hand.

  Fallon shook. “If I need to get out in a hurry?”

  MacGregor looked to Underwood for an answer.

  The warden shrugged. Footsteps sounded on the stairs. “The guards can’t know. I’m the only one who knows. You’ll just have to think of a way to get to the hospital, where you can get word to me. That’s the best I can do. You’re dealing with a woman, a young kid, basically, but this is going to be quite the dangerous assignment.”

  Harold Underwood seemed to enjoy the look on both faces. He turned back outside, and gave his instructions to the trusty, and held the door open as Fallon and MacGregor stepped out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The closer they got, the higher the walls to the prison grew. The deputy warden,
Mr. Fowlson, and two men in black coats, pants, and hats stood outside the main entryway along Lafayette Street.

  That high wall down the side seemed to run forever.

  “My word,” MacGregor said, “this place must cover five or six city blocks.”

  “It’s not the jailhouse in Dodge City,” Fallon said.

  “Forty-seven acres, right? Isn’t that what they said? Forty-seven bloody acres.”

  They stopped at the front steps, and the deputy warden and the men in black came down from the heavy doors. Fallon looked at the ivy growing up the column to the left of the main entrance. He didn’t think a prisoner would try to climb down on ivy. It wasn’t that thick. And, well, the prisoner would have to cut through the iron bars over the long, narrow windows first.

  “MacGregor?” the deputy warden said. Fowlson was smaller than Underwood, a good deal younger, with dark hair, darker eyes and a thick mustache and beard. He shook the detective’s hand and looked at Fallon. “This is your delivery?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have all the paperwork?”

  MacGregor pulled several folded sheets of paper and passed them to Fowlson, who glanced at the first few pages, smiled, withdrew a few greenbacks, and slipped those inside his pocket.

  “Sentenced to Joliet instead of Detroit and now put here.” The deputy warden handed the papers, but not the money, to the nearest man in black.

  “The judges had some sympathy,” MacGregor explained. “Before he became a bad apple, he was a good federal deputy for Judge Parker.”

  “Yeah. Well . . .” Fowlson spit between his teeth. “I don’t like apples, sweet, sour, crisp or rotten. And I sure don’t like lawmen who cross the trail.”

  “He’s yours for the duration of his sentence or he is paroled.”

  “Yeah. That’s usually the case.”

  “And,” MacGregor said, “we know he has sour relationships with two of your guests, Kemp Carver and Ford Wagner.”

  Fowlson’s dark head bobbed up and down. “A lot of us have sour relationships with those two. But they are harmless compared to most of our guests.” He spit again.

  “There might be others who hold a grudge against Fallon,” MacGregor said.