“All we need to do is wait a few months, and then we can leave town with all this money. Tell Hollister that one of your relatives died and left you a farm in Missouri or somewhere. Even if he suspects, he can’t prove it. I’ll wrap the money in bundles and put it in a trunk and send the trunk on ahead to wherever we decide to go.”
When she finally turned and looked at me, she seemed sadder than I’d ever seen her.
“And won’t that be a nice life for Annie, Chase? Watching her father scared all the time because somebody might find the money he stole?”
“I won’t be scared, Gillian, because nobody will know except you and me. And it’s not stolen money, anyway, not really—it’s just what Reeves rightfully owes me.”
“Listen to yourself, Chase,” she said. “You’ve convinced yourself that what you’re doing is right. But all you’re doing is destroying this family. You wait and see. You wait and see.”
She started crying, and then she was running down the hill, pulling her shawl tighter around her.
I started after her but decided there was no point. Not right now, anyway.
All I could do was stand there in the bitter wind, feeling like a kid who’d just been scolded. I wanted to speak up on my own behalf, but I knew better, knew that no matter what I said or how long I talked, straight and true Gillian would remain straight and true.
After awhile I walked back down the hill to the house. Gillian was fixing stew at the stove. She didn’t once turn around and look at me as I got into my police uniform, or say good-bye as I stood in the doorway and said, “I love you, Gillian. You and Annie are my life. And this is all going to work out. We’re going to have the money and have a good life away from here. I promise you that, Gillian. I promise you that.”
But there was just her back, her tired-beaten shoulders, and her arm stirring the ladle through the stew.
Part 22
When I got to town, the funeral procession was just winding its way up the hill to the graveyard. A lone man in a Union uniform walked behind the shiny black horse-drawn hearse, beating out a dirge on a drum.
I went to the police station, checked over the sheet listing the arrests thus far that day, checked to see if the new and more comfortable shoes I’d ordered had come in yet, and then started out the front door. There was still time for a cup of coffee at the restaurant before my rounds began.
As I walked to the front of the station, I felt various eyes on me.
A cop named Docey said, “Some of us were talkin’ last night, Chase.”
“Oh?”
“There were six of us talkin’, and five of us voted that you should quit.” He was leaning against the front door, a pudgy red-bearded man with red freckles on his white bald head. “We got enough problems without people thinkin’ we’re crooked.”
“I didn’t slip that key to the robbers, in case that’s what you’re talking about.”
He grabbed me then. He pushed away from the door and took his big Irish hands and grabbed the front of my uniform coat. I heard the two other cops grunt in approval.
I couldn’t afford any more physical pain. I used my knee and I went right up straight and he went down fast and sure.
He rolled around on the floor clutching his groin and swearing. The other two started toward me but then realized that if Docey couldn’t handle me—Docey being a mean mick ex-railroad man—they couldn’t either.
I opened the front door, about to step out on the boardwalk into the bitter blustering day, and I saw her shiny black surrey pull up.
In her dark cape and royal-blue organdy dress, red hair caught beneath a small hat, Claire Hollister was not only beautiful, she was also exotic, like a frightened forest creature you see only once or twice a year for mere moments.
As she stepped down from the surrey, she nodded good day to me.
“Afternoon, ma’am.”
“Afternoon.” She smiled. “D-Did y-you h-happen t-to see that h-husband of m-mine in there?” As always, her eyes reflected her humiliation.
“I think he’s still at the funeral, ma’am.”
“Oh. W-Would y-you l-leave a n-note telling h-him I was h-here?”
“Sure.”
She turned back to her surrey. As she seated herself and lifted the reins, I saw how sad her face was even in profile. I couldn’t imagine why a woman like this—a woman I sensed was decent and honorable—would give herself to a man like Reeves. Sometimes I suspected I didn’t know anything about women at all.
After she was gone, I went back inside. I had to pass Docey and the other two cops, but they just scowled at me and let me go.
I wrote the chief a note and took it into his office. I started to set the note on his desk but then I noticed an envelope addressed to him. It bore the same handwriting as the note that had told him I was a jailbird.
I stood very still, staring at the envelope, making sure I was alone in the office, listening hard for any footsteps in the hallway.
I had to be quick. And I certainly couldn’t risk reading it in here.
I snapped the envelope up, stuffed it inside my serge uniform coat, and walked straight out of the office and straight down the hallway and straight to the door, where Docey was still standing up and grimacing.
“You’ll get yours, Chase, just you wait and goddamn see,” he said.
Snow was still on the wind. The people on the street didn’t dawdle now, they scurried like all other animals, trying to prepare themselves for the bitter winter soon to come. I imagined the general store, with its bacon and hams and coffee and cheeses and pickled fish and candy and tobacco and blankets and toys, was going to be doing a very good business the next few days as people set things in for the fury of winter.
I went over to the restaurant and ordered a cup of coffee. By the time the waitress came back with my steaming cup, I had already read the letter twice, and I sure didn’t like what Reeves had written.
Part 23
Dear Chief Hollister,
As an upright citizen of this town, I’ve warned you before about your man Chase. While everybody suspects he gave the robber the key that let him in the bank, nobody can prove it. Till now …
Ask Hartley, the night clerk at the Whitney, about the robbers and Chase meeting behind the hotel two nights before the robbery.
If he tells the truth, you’ll see that Chase was in on this meeting all along.
So Reeves had got to Hartley, the night clerk at the hotel where Lundgren and Mars had been staying. Wouldn’t take much to bribe a man like Hartley. Just as it wouldn’t take much to convince Hollister of Hartley’s story, that I had met with Lundgren and Mars to plan the robbery.
Even if I burned this particular letter, Reeves would send Hollister another one. And keep sending him letters until Hollister decided to put me behind bars … a perfect target for the lynch mob Reeves would quickly stir up.
I wanted to run. I thought about Mexico and warm blue waters and sandy yellow beaches and Gillian and Annie and I living in a fine stucco house …
But if I ran now, it would be like signing a confession, admitting that I’d been part of the robbery.
I sipped coffee. I smoke a cigarette. I thought things through.
I had only one hope. I had to strike a bargain with Reeves.
“YES?”
“Wondered if I could talk to you a minute, Chief.”
“About what?”
“I might be a little late getting to today.”
Hollister waved me into his office.
“By the way, your wife was here. I just wanted to make sure you got my note.”
“I got it. Now what’s this about being late?”
“Couple hours is all.”
“For what?”
“Some personal things.”
“Personal things, huh?”
“Not anything to do with the robbery, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He picked up his pipe. He’d been cleaning it with his pocketknife. Now he went back
to it.
“You’re not telling me the truth yet, Chase.”
“I am. You just don’t happen to believe the truth.”
“You’ve got those jailhouse eyes, Chase. You think you look like every other man in this town, but you don’t. Prison does something to people, and it sure as hell did something to you.”
“I didn’t help anybody rob that bank.”
He put the pipe in his mouth and drew on it. There was a sucking sound in the empty bowl. “You could always turn them over.”
“The robbers?”
“Lundgren and Mars are their names, in case you need help remembering.”
“I don’t know where they are.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t.”
“Take the two hours.” He sounded disgusted. “I don’t know why you’d want to waste a fine wife and daughter the way you are.”
“I’ll be back by four-thirty.”
“Don’t hurry on my account. I’m getting damned tired of seeing your face, in fact.”
Part 24
Even on a cold drab day like this one, Reeves’ Victorian house was impressive and sightly. I sat on my horse staring at it, trying not to notice that I was working up another fever and that my stomach was getting sick again.
Hanratty, the guard, appeared just when I expected him to, and leveled his carbine at me just when I was sure he would. He came out from behind the scrub pines, seated on a big bay.
“Nice uniform you got there, Chase. Maybe I could get Reeves to get me one like it.”
“Maybe if you did an extra-good job, he just might do that.”
Hanratty was bundled up inside a sheep-lined jacket, with his hat pulled down near his ears. He spat a stream of juice right near my horse’s foreleg. “He’d be real happy to hear you went for your gun and I was forced to kill you. That’s one way I could get me a uniform like that.” He grinned. “Every time he works that wolf of his these days, he’s always callin’ out your name. And that goddamned wolf goes crazy, believe me. Crazy as all hell.” He frowned. “Except the past couple days. Animal ain’t hisself.”
“All right if I go see Reeves?”
“It’s your ass, son. He might put a couple holes in you.”
I smiled. “I’m a policeman.”
“Where you’re concerned, I don’t reckon that would make a whole lot of difference to him.”
I rode up to the mansion and ground-tied my horse. Before going up the steps. I walked over the side of the house and looked at the wolf in his cage.
The wolf, crouched on the ground, watching me carefully, wailed out something that resembled a song, a wolf song, I guessed. I’d never heard anything like it. It was angry for sure, but even more, it was sad.
I walked a few feet closer to the large, oblong cage that stank of feces and raw decaying meat and I saw that Hanratty hadn’t been exaggerating about the wolf’s anger, either.
He got up on all fours, let out another terrible piercing sound, and then flung himself at the cage. His eyes burned with the same yellow glow I’d seen that night he’d killed my brother.
His bared teeth dripped with drool, and his entire body trembled as he slammed again and again and again into the wire, trying to tear through the wall to get to me. The reverberating wire made a tinny kind of music.
I had my gun in hand and ready, just in case.
“Maybe I’ll put you in there with him,” said a voice behind me, the words accompanied by the nudge of cold metal against the back of my neck. “What the hell’re you doing here, anyway, Chase?”
“Talk a deal.”
“Deal?” Reeves laughed. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you.”
He wore a riding costume, a fancy eastern riding costume, one of those things with jodhpurs and knee-length riding boots. He was real pretty.
“You’re really serious, aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes.”
He laughed again. “Then you’re a crazy bastard, Chase. A crazy, crazy bastard. Men like me don’t make deals with men like you.”
“If you ever want to see any of that bank money again, Reeves, you’d better invite me inside.”
The wolf was exhausted. He’d spent himself and lay now panting, his entire body heaving with hot breath, and making those funny sounds again.
“Something’s wrong with your wolf,” I said.
“You and that goddamned Hanratty. The wolf’s just got some kind of bug is all. Wolves get bugs just the same as humans. If he was really sick, he wouldn’t be able to throw himself against the cage that way.
“Be sure to wipe that mud off your boots before you go inside,” Reeves said. “I don’t want some hayseed tracking up my good hardwood floors.”
“I take it you’re inviting me inside,” I said, but when I turned around, Reeves was already up near the front porch, as if he didn’t even want to be seen with me, not even on his own land.
I turned back to the keening wolf and listened to his terrible sounds echo off the surrounding hills, like a distress call of some kind that nobody was answering.
“YOU HAVE TWO minutes, and then I want you the hell off my property.”
We were in his office, the same one where he’d coldcocked me that day.
“I have your money,” I said. He was behind his desk. He hadn’t invited me to sit down.
“I’m well aware of the fact that you have my money.”
“But I’m willing to make a deal.”
“You heard what I said about deals, Chase.”
“You get half and I get half.”
“I get half of my own money and you get the other half? That sounds like a hell of a deal, all right.”
“Otherwise you get nothing.”
“We’ll see who gets nothing, Chase. This isn’t over yet.”
I sat down. He didn’t look especially happy about it. “You want to hear about it?”
I could tell he did but he didn’t want to say he did—he didn’t want to give any sign that I was in control here—so I went on anyway.
“You get ahold of Ev Hollister and tell him you made a mistake about me. Tell him that you forgot that one day you hung your coat up over at the Whitney while you were having lunch, and when you got back, you found your wallet missing. The bank key was in there. But while you went to the manager to complain, somebody slipped your wallet back into your coat.”
“In other words, somebody had a duplicate key made?”
“Exactly.”
“And why would he believe this?”
“Because it’s you talking. Because you’re a prominent citizen and he’d have no reason to suspect you’re lying.”
“And for this I get half my money back?”
“Right.”
“And what do you get, Chase?”
“I get half the money and I get a chance to ease me and my family out of this town without this cloud hanging over me. I’ll buy a farm in Missouri and disappear for the rest of my life with Gillian and Annie.”
“Every jailbird’s dream.”
“I’m tired of your sarcasm, Reeves.”
He smirked. “A jailbird sits in his cell and dreams up all these sweet little stories about how good life will be after he pulls just one more job.” He leaned forward in his seat. “I should put a bullet in your face right here and right now.” His anger was overtaking him now. He started spitting when he spoke. “You’ve got my money, you stupid hayseed asshole, and I’m going to take it back and you’re going to regret ever having anything to do with me.”
He waved his hand, spitting and glaring, blood spreading across his cheeks. “Now get the hell out of here.”
“I figured out a peaceful way to end all this,” I said. “I thought you’d want to listen.”
He said nothing. Just glared.
I stood and picked up my hat and walked out of his den and down the hall, my boot heels loud in the silence, and out the
front door.
I put my hat on and watched the wolf a moment. He was still crying, still that high mournful call, and still crouching, as if exhausted—until he saw me … and then he was up on all fours and leaping into the air and hurtling himself against the cage.
“He sure don’t like you,” an old Indian cleaning woman said, as she beat a rug against the porch railing.
“I guess he doesn’t,” I said.
On the way out, Hanratty waved to me and called, “Good to see you’re still alive.” I waved and rode on.
I just kept thinking of what Reeves had said, how every jailbird sits in his cell and thinks of how pretty things will be after he pulls that final job. Not till the very moment he’d said that had I ever thought of myself as a jailbird—just as a kid who’d gotten himself in some trouble, was all—but in his hard, bitter words I’d recognized myself. And now I felt every bit the hayseed he’d said I was. Trying to make a deal with him had been very foolish.
After a few more days, I’d gather up Gillian and Annie and the money, and in the middle of the night we’d light out and never be seen by any of these folks again …
Part 25
The rain started just after dinner time. Except for the light in the saloon windows, the stores and streets were dark as I made my rounds trying doors, checking alleys, peering into storage shacks.
I was starting down Main, past three of the rowdier saloons, when I saw the two drunken miners weaving down the street toward me. They were laughing and stumbling their way home to warm houses and irritated wives and disappointed children.
Then they saw who I was and stopped and one of them said, “There’s that sonofabitch.”
“Who?”
“Goddamn cop who was in on that goddamn bank robbery.”
“No shit?”
“Where they killed the poor goddamned clerk with a goddamned double-barrel shotgun.”
“Poor sumbitch.”
By now I was abreast of them, making my way through the cold and the night and the lashing rain. They were too drunk to notice the downpour, or care about it, anyway.
There wasn’t much I could do about them not liking me, the two drunks. I’d feel sorry for myself a few minutes and then the whole thing would be over.
Then the first drunk hit me.
A Century of Great Western Stories Page 47