Behind the Iron

by William W. Johnstone

  “And he was The Mole?” Fallon asked.

  Gripewater sipped his gin. “Yes. He tried to escape a number of times. More than anyone in the history of this pen. And each time, he was put into solitary. But as you know, solitary is not just being alone in the Missouri State Penitentiary. It is alone in utter, total, and terrifying darkness.”

  The doctor sighed, and the matron picked up the story.

  “The first time was six days. The next was a month. Then two months. I don’t know how many times, or if he ever was sentenced to longer stays than sixty days. By the time he finally got out, the last time, he could barely see. And no one thought that Cain ever learned how to swim. So he tried. And he drowned.”

  “Was Underwood the warden then?”

  “Assistant warden,” the matron replied. “Or deputy warden or whatever they called it.”

  “The warden before Underwood was killed, too,” Gripewater said. He shook his head. “Murdered. His head smashed to bits with a hammer.”

  “They say,” Eve Martin said, “that Killer Cain committed that crime, too.”

  Fallon decided that he could use more coffee, so he found his cup and took a healthy swallow. “So if The Mole is dead,” he began, “who was it in that cell with me?”

  “Nobody,” Eve Martin answered. “It was your imagination.”

  Fallon stretched his leg out so that the doctor and matron could see it.

  “And who patched that up?” he asked.

  “You did,” Doctor Gripewater told him.

  Fallon studied them, and slowly shook his head. “Ma’am, Doctor, my imagination isn’t that good. And my skills as a seamstress or surgeon are even worse than my imagination.”

  “Doctor.”

  The soft, easy voice startled the three. Fallon was the one who rose, though, and nodded respectfully at Jess Harper. She stood over the table upon which Ford Wagner lay.

  “He’s awake,” she said.

  “Good,” Gripewater said, finished his gin, and rose from his chair. “Come have a seat, Jess.” He started toward the sick man.

  “Doc,” Fallon whispered, and when Gripewater looked over his shoulder, continued: “He doesn’t know about Kemp Carver.”

  “And he won’t learn it from me. Missus Martin.” His crazy-haired head turned to the matron. “Would you be so kind as to go find a couple of guards and have them escort our guests, Fallon and Wagner, back to their cells.”

  The big woman looked horrified. “Doctor. What about all that’s going on outside?”

  Gripewater gave her a dismissive wave. “Darling, there hasn’t been a peep outside for more than an hour and a half. Looks like old Underwood has put down another potential firestorm. And that’s a damned shame.”

  * * *

  The matron was gone. Jess Harper sat in the good doctor’s vacated chair. Fallon stood at the table, gently helping Ford Wagner into an upright position. Gripewater again listened to the thin man’s breathing, his heartbeat, and stuck a thermometer in his mouth.

  Wagner’s eyes looked tired, but every few blinks would lock hard on Fallon.

  “What do you know about consumption?” Gripewater asked. He kept one hand on Wagner’s pulse and held a stem-wind pocket watch in his other hand.

  Fallon shrugged.

  “I’ve seen enough of it,” Fallon said, “but not enough to know that much about it.”

  “Any family of yours?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nor mine.”

  Wagner turned his head and coughed, but this time there was no blood, but an ugly, thick phlegm of a sickly white color.

  “And how would you treat it?”

  “I don’t think there is any treatment. There was a man down home in Gads Hill. The doctor there always bled him. But back then, they bled everyone.”

  “And killed most of them,” Gripewater said. He lowered his watch and released the wrist of Wagner that Fallon had not broken.

  “Aren’t there sanatoriums now?” Fallon asked.

  Gripewater’s eyes brightened. “Indeed. In my day, I have seen the preferred method move from bleeding, or purging, to resting, to sending folks to the dry desert country. Indeed, that seemed to help a little. People once thought this was something you inherited. A hell of an inheritance, if you ask me. But a Frenchman many years back proved that this came not from your blood, your ancestors, your ma and pa, but was contagious. And in the past decade, a German discovered Mycobacterium tuberculosis. If someone with this lung illness happened to cough on you, even sneeze on you, that could send hundreds and hundreds of these bacteria into you. And then you, my good, healthy young man, could soon look like this wastrel. So now we have sanatoriums. To send these untouchable creatures off to die. Although, I should point out, that some of these sanatoriums are not death houses. This”—He waved around him, meaning, Fallon thought, the entire prison and not just the prison hospital—“This is a death house.”

  Gripewater snorted and looked at Wagner. “Can you put on your socks and shoes? They’ll be here to take you back to your cell in a few minutes.”

  The prisoner answered in a hoarse breath. “I . . . guess . . . so . . .” And he let Fallon help him off the table and onto a low couch.

  The door opened a few minutes later, and Fallon was surprised at the escorts who entered the hospital. Harold Underwood followed Eve Martin. Fowlson and Captain Brandt came in behind.

  “Doctor,” the warden said.

  “I’m surprised,” Gripewater said, “that I have had no other patients today.”

  The warden shook his head. “You may have some in the morning, Doctor. If and when the cell doors are opened.”

  “You could try to treat these men decent,” Gripewater said.

  “They don’t know the meaning of the word, Doctor, and they shall get no mercy from me. Are these two men ready to go?”

  “Yes.” Gripewater pointed at Ford Wagner. “This man, though, should be isolated . . . and I don’t mean in the basement of A-Hall.”

  “No one is in the basement of A-Hall, Gripewater,” Underwood said, but he kept his eyes on Fallon when he spoke those words. “Not in years. But your recommendation is sound, Doctor. Isn’t it, Captain?”

  “I’ll see it done,” Brandt said. “He’ll be alone. But not in one of our basement cells.”

  “I’d bring him back here tomorrow after breakfast,” Gripewater said.

  “As you wish,” Underwood said. The warden nodded, and Brandt tapped his line stick against the base of Fallon’s neck.

  “Up,” the captain said. “Up you stinking piece of fresh fish. Up and at attention before I get mad.”

  “We don’t get mad here, Captain,” Gripewater said.

  “Captain . . .” The warden used his most placating voice. “There are ladies present.”

  Fallon was standing though, waiting for that studded stick to crash against his skull, his shoulders, his back.

  “Let’s go,” the warden said.

  But before they reached the door, Thaddeus Gripewater said, “Aren’t you forgetting something, Mr. Underwood?”

  The men stopped, with Mr. Fowlson’s hand on the knob to the door, and all turned except Fallon and Wagner.

  “What?” Underwood was tired of trying to pretend that he had a heart, that he gave a damn.

  “It’s customary,” Gripewater said, “and mandated by law, that all dead prisoners be examined. A certificate of death is to be filed, you remember. Things have changed since . . . oh . . . the days of Coleman Cain.”

  Fallon would have loved to see the expression on the faces of Underwood, Fowlson, and Brandt.

  “Yes.” The warden’s voice had turned to ice. “But no one died today, Doctor.”

  “That’s good to know,” Gripewater said. “Because I’m being visited by a handsome young reporter from some newspaper in Kansas City. Kansas. Not Missouri. And she’s accompanying me the day after tomorrow to examine the prisoners. Cell by cell.”

  “I do
n’t believe I granted permission for such an interview.”

  “You didn’t,” the doctor said. “The governor did. It’s an election year, you know. And he prides himself as a candidate for reform.”

  “He’s an ignorant fool.”

  The warden regained his composure and painted a false smile on his face. “I am sure you will have a delightful interview, and that your reporter friend will give our prison glowing praise. Mr. Fowlson? Would you take Wagner to his cell? A cell he will have to himself tonight.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fowlson was happy to open the door. Wagner stepped out. Fallon started to follow.

  “No,” the warden said. “Leave Fallon here. Captain Brandt will take him to his cell.”

  “Very good, sir.” The door closed.

  And once the footsteps of the deputy warden and the dying consumptive faded, Harold Underwood raised a finger and jammed it underneath the doctor’s nose.

  “You’d be smart to consider retiring, Doctor Gripewater, after your remarkable service to our fine state and this superb institution of rehabilitation.”

  The doctor shoved his hands in his coat pocket. “Just make sure Kemp Carver’s body is brought here so I can examine the poor, dead man, Harold. I’m sure all the witnesses will swear that his death was an accident.”

  “Yes,” Underwood said. “Both guards and even a convict—Fallon here—tried to save the man’s life. Tsk, tsk.” The warden’s tone turned bitterly cold, though, as he continued. “Wagner doesn’t know his relation is dead, does he?”

  “Of course, not,” Gripewater said. “I do my best to keep my patients alive. You should try that.”

  “You should try to keep your big mouth shut.”

  The doctor’s head shook. “A lost cause.”

  “Isn’t it, though?” Underwood nodded, the door opened, and Fallon, Brandt, and Underwood stepped into the prison air. But before the captain of the guards could close the door, Doctor Gripewater called out. “And, by the way, Warden. Please make sure Fallon is brought back here the day after tomorrow. I’d like to check on his stitches. I’m just not sure my sutures hold up as well by the braided hairs of a man with really, really long hair. That pretty reporter is in our fine city for a few days. If I don’t see Fallon day after tomorrow, if I don’t see Fallon alive, I mean, well, then I might have to tell that fine journalist.”

  Brandt answered. “Fallon will be here, Doctor.” The guard chuckled and pressed the top of his line stick into the small of Fallon’s back.

  * * *

  They walked in silence, with Fallon, knowing his place—especially with that hardcase Brandt right behind him—and keeping his head down. He could still see, of course, and he took in the inside of the prison compound. Nothing seemed out of order.

  That was even the case when they stepped back inside A-Hall, although Fallon spotted a handful of guards overseeing two prisoners as they mopped the floor at the spot where Kemp Carver hit the floor.

  Mr. Fowlson was coming down the stairs. He stopped, out of breath, and saluted the warden.

  “Is Wagner alone?” the warden asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Thinking doesn’t get things done, Fowlson.”

  “He says he’s good.”

  “Very well, find a place for Fallon. Then meet me in my office. This place is about to burn like hell, and we need to put out a few fires.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  He lay on his bed in the cell next to the one he had originally been given. Twelve-by-eight feet, crammed with four men, including Fallon. There was a chamber pot to be shared. The bed was mattress filled with straw, but there wasn’t enough straw inside the ticking fabric to say it was filled. Few people could claim they felt any difference between lying on the bed and lying directly on the hard, dirty floor.

  “You need anything, Fallon?”

  At this time of night, the cell was pitch black. Fallon lay with his head propped up against the wall near the door. Bone tired he might be, but he kept remembering several scenes from this day over and over again. Things that did not make a lick of sense. Well, that’s what he kept trying to figure out, but one of his three cellmates kept jabbering.

  “It can get hard on a man, his first time in the cell. Mighty hard. I’ve heard men scream and scream and scream. So I’m just here to help you. Anything you need, Fallon, you just ask me. But don’t wait too long. I’m getting out of this rock pile in three days.”

  The convict’s name was Charley Muldoon. He had been born in a log cabin a few miles outside of Neeleyville, down south in Missouri not far from the Arkansas state line. The cabin had burned down when Muldoon was fourteen. Muldoon had gotten a hell of a whipping for playing with matches and almost burning alive his ma, pa, dog, and twin sisters. The next year, the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway depot in town burned down. No one ever figure out how that happened . . . until the schoolmaster’s rented house went up in smoke just before school was set to start. That’s when Charley Muldoon had hightailed it out of Neeleyville, but not before he torched the livery stable.

  And thus Charley Muldoon had left a trail that was easy to follow because of the ashes, embers, and charred ruins. A four-seat outhouse behind the hotel in Poplar Bluff. A dog house in Piedmont. A summer kitchen in Ironton. The undertaker’s office in Leadwood. The Methodist meeting house in De Soto. The lumberyard in Cedar Hill. And a riverboat in St. Charles. That’s when Charley Muldoon had learned that some men would actually pay Charley Muldoon to do something he loved more than life himself: Lighting things on fire.

  In St. Louis, Troy, Hannibal . . . across the river in Quincy, Illinois . . . up toward the Iowa line in Unionville . . . down to Trenton . . . and the opera house in Gallatin. What had landed Muldoon in the Jefferson City pen was an abandoned shack in Arrow Rock, for which he had done to satisfy himself and not for pay. Which was probably the only reason Charley Muldoon would be finishing his sentence in three days and be free to buy a box of matches and go back to getting his thrills.

  “You scared?” Muldoon asked. “Is that on account you can’t sleep?”

  “He can’t sleep, Muldoon, because you don’t know how to keep your damned trap shut.” That would be Frenchy Brodeur, just starting his eighth year of a fifteen-year sentence. Brodeur spoke without a trace of French accent. The other prisoner, Tom Worsnop—Fallon knew the name and the man’s crimes—snored contentedly.

  Worsnop was back in the Missouri State Penitentiary for his second round, which told Fallon that he, Worsnop was not a very good counterfeiter. Or maybe he was. He just wasn’t good at staying out of prison. But word was that if a prisoner needed anything, Tom Worsnop, better known as Tom What You Need Get It in a Snap—maybe the lamest handle Fallon had heard—would get it to him. For a good markup, but credit was available for fresh fish. Tom Worsnop could get contraband from one cell to another, one building to another, right under the eyes of the stupid guards. Because Tom Worsnop had the perfect partner.

  Which Fallon figured to be one of the prison guards.

  Maybe that’s why Tom Worsnop slept so peacefully.

  Still, Fallon could think of no reason he would need Worsnop or Muldoon.

  At least, Brodeur’s reprimand had made Muldoon lower his voice. “What about it, Fallon? What do you need? Like I said, the first time . . .”

  “Charley,” Fallon said, “this isn’t my first time behind the iron.” Wasn’t that the damned truth! He had not forgotten—and never would forget—his time spent with The Mole down in the basement of A-Hall. “And it’s not my first time in prison.”

  “Oh.”

  A cold silence filled the room.

  “Thank God,” Frenchy said, and rolled over on his makeshift bed, adjusted his razor-thin mattress. When that was over, the silence lengthened, except for the snores of Worsnop and the heavy breathing of Charley Muldoon.

  Fallon welcomed the relative
silence. He put his mind back to what he had heard.

  He pictured the terror in Kemp Carver’s face as he hung on for dear life from the catwalk’s support beam.

  I swear to God, Fallon! I didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. I swear to God. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.

  Fallon sighed. Didn’t have a damn thing to do with . . . what? What on earth could the one-armed man have meant? It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. What did Carver think Fallon knew? What had Carver done? For that matter, why had Ford Wagner, sick as he was, immediately attacked Fallon when he first saw him? Because of what had happened all those years ago, the death of Daniel Huntington? No, Fallon just didn’t think that to be the reason. Both Wagner and Carver had attacked Fallon, but not for revenge. It seemed to Fallon that they had attacked because of . . . could it be ... ?

  Fear?

  I’ll tell you everything, Fallon! Everything! Fallon could still hear the desperation in Carver’s voice. And later, repeating: It wasn’t me, Fallon! I swear it wasn’t me. And finally: But I know . . .

  Which is when Captain Brandt had come into view. And that was when the true fear registered in Kemp Carver’s face.

  But Fallon could not make anything out of that. Kemp Carver was scared to death of Captain Brandt. Well, that likely would not put Carver in the minority. Fallon realized that if he wanted to make Charley Muldoon keep quiet, all he likely needed to do was mention Brandt’s name.

  Still, none of this made a lick of sense, at least for the time being. Fallon tucked the final words of Kemp Carver, and how the convict had died, into the recesses of his mind, and tried to make sense of all that Doctor Thaddeus Gripewater had told him. About The Mole. And Coleman Cain. Gripewater could be a valuable source for Fallon, not to mention a friend and colleague that Fallon desperately needed. Fallon twisted his leg just to feel the stitches and the bandage. There was no ghost in that basement cell. And Fallon did not believe he had dreamed up or hallucinated The Mole. The wound in his calf had been stitched with braided human hair. How someone could do that amazed Fallon. And that someone might have done that in a blackness darker than the ace of spades was even more . . . amazing? Preposterous? Insane?