Clearly the man had been in a hurry—there had been a perfunctory effort at cleaning up but it was easy to reconstruct what had happened: Maggie struggling with her attacker, breaking away, grabbing the pistol, then wrestling with him till he shot her. Maggie was a fighter, she wouldn’t have gone easily …
Liam went back to her body and knelt next to it again, fighting his emotions until he could examine her coolly. Her right hand was balled into a fist, and there was a glint of gold between the fingers. Liam pried them open carefully against the resistance of the deepening rigor mortis, noting as he did that Maggie’s carefully tended fingernails were broken and that she had shreds of bloody flesh under them—whoever it was hadn’t gotten away scot-free, she had definitely left her marks on him.
Then, as her hand opened the rest of the way, Liam saw what she’d been clutching in her fist: a gold souvenir medal from the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The killer must have been wearing it around his neck on a chain, and Maggie had gotten the medal and a scrap of chain in the struggle without his noticing it. Probably so fired up by then he wouldn’t have noticed if his nose was missing. Then a painful twinge as Liam noticed the inscription on the other side: “Love from Mags.” She must have torn it from around the killer’s neck. It took him a moment or two to get his mind cold again; after all, they’d both had plenty of other lovers before they met, and they’d both known it and not cared a damn.
He shook his head hard, clearing it: don’t be a hypocrite, McCool… Then he closed his eyes to check his memory picture again … something was out of place, something he missed the first time around … He turned and headed unerringly for a corner of the carpet at the other end of the room, rucked up slightly as if somebody had kicked it passing by.
Liam grabbed it and jerked it the rest of the way, already certain what he’d see: Yes, damn it to hell! Once they had decided to make their break for San Francisco Liam had asked Maggie to be their banker and she had kept their nest egg under a doctored floorboard—a half-dozen big Mason jars filled with silver dollars, a substantial number of gold eagles and some bits of jewelry, all the spending money they would have blown on foolishness in the days before they threw in together.
All gone. Just the empty jars and a couple of forlorn silver dollars that attested to the killer’s hurry. Liam sat down hard on the floor next to the cache, thinking it was a good thing he’d kept aside a money belt full of gold eagles as a secret reserve against bad luck but having to work hard to keep from yelling with anger at the thought of their vanished nest egg. All that work building it up all those months, all the fun they’d shared as they squirreled away a tidy grubstake, the money to buy the restaurant that Maggie planned to make California’s finest, the money that Liam had meant to use to let him buy a nice little house for his Gran not far from him and Maggie and start a bookstore that would someday put Brentano’s to shame. All those happy dreams stolen. Stolen by the same low-life son of a bitch who’d stolen Maggie’s life.
He shook his head briskly. It wouldn’t do to carry this black rage around inside. If he was to honor Maggie and their dreams he’d have to clear his mind and start over, to be as cool and determined as he’d ever been until he managed to get back to the city where he could see Mike and the boys. Once he was back they could pull a few jobs to help him rebuild his grubstake and give him time enough put his hands on Maggie’s killer. Then and only then he’d get out from under that old bastard Pilkington, collect Gran like he’d planned to do with Maggie and vanish like a puff of smoke, leaving the Eyes and the coppers scratching their heads. Up and at ’em, Liam me boy!
He got to his feet, walked over to Maggie, knelt down and kissed her gently, then stood again and walked over to the door.
“Good night, darlin’,” he said to Maggie. Then he turned the gas off and left.
Outside, the prints of the pointy-toed shoes were clear in the moonlight, sharply indented in ground that was still a little soft from the day before’s rain and still showing the murderer’s haste: heavy at front and light at back as he ran, with a distance between them that made Liam re-assess his guess at a small man. Small feet, but longer legs than he’d thought. And something else, what the hell was that? A furrow cut by something catching, skipping over the ground until it caught deeply again, cutting at an angle to the footprints and going on around the side of the house where it looked for sure like it would intersect with the running footprints …
Liam picked up his own pace until he turned the corner of the house and came to a sudden, disgusted stop as he reached a clearing there where Maggie had planned to build a garden shed. Fresh marks of torn bark showed white on a string of trees, right up to one that had a deeper gouge and the prints of a chain pressed into it.
The murderer had come here from who knew where, in a Stanley Flyer, a neat little two-seat airship with a super-quiet engine and a handy steam winch you could use to drag your anchor until you hooked a tree like a fish. Then all you had to do was hit the winch to pull you slowly and quietly down to the ground, where your Flyer would wait patiently till you were ready to jump aboard and soar off into the night.
He stood there for a moment, stewing. Then he was snapped out of it by a new series of hoots from Henderson’s emergency whistle, along with the distant clangs of the volunteer fire wagon. By now, everybody in town from the drunks in Maloney’s to the few peaceful and sober citizens to be found in Henderson’s Patch on a Saturday night would have turned out to watch the fire and read the “Coffin Notice” that he and the others had left on Henderson’s front gate.
Slipping back into the darkness of the woods and crossing himself against the return of the wolf-thing, he took off at a steady jog. By this time tomorrow, he would be in New York—as for the rest of it, he’d just have to take it one day at a time …
Chapter Four
That one trip down Henderson’s mine had been enough to last him a lifetime. He hadn’t had to, it wasn’t any part of the job Pilkington had set him, but he’d been drinking with the lads after one of the Mollies’ Lodge meetings, arm-wrestling and showing off and playing the fool one way and another, until finally someone challenged him to work a shift down there like the rest of them.
His heart had clutched right up like a fist and the sweat had started running down his armpits; he’d been deep underground once before, in 1872 when they were digging the caissons for the Brooklyn Bridge, and it had nearly done for him. A sandhog who was a cousin to one of his pals in the Butcher Boys had needed help talking to a foreman about some back wages and three or four of the boys had gone down together to make sure the man saw reason, Liam not knowing then how bad he’d be hit by his fear of being closed in. He had learned fast enough and he’d only gotten out with Mike Vysotsky carrying him on his back.
But, like a fool, there he’d been five years later in Pennsylvania on a job he hated going down a hole again like it was a stroll in Washington Square. And no, he hadn’t healed miraculously in the years between and he’d only ended his suffocating panic by pretending to trip on a rock and knock himself cold against an ore car so they’d have to send him back up. You’d think he’d learn, but Micks have hard heads.
Now, that little experiment had made two times down a hole and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t survive a third, so just what in blue blazes was he doing in a mine a third time, way to hell and gone away from anywhere at all, not a soul to be seen, not a spark of light, and nothing but a THUMP! THUMP! THUMP! and a giant throbbing in his skull like he’d been dropped all the way down the shaft and landed on his conk? If he didn’t get out of here soon, if that damned thumping didn’t stop, if he could only … open … his … eyes…
“WHAT?” Liam bellowed, stumbling out of bed and nearly going head-first into the wall as he scrabbled at the latch-key with sausage fingers. What miserable, pea-brained lowlife had such important business they couldn’t wait till he woke up and washed his face?
Finally he managed to tear the door open
, throwing it wide and cocking his fist to pound whoever it was to a jelly. But instead of the expected drunken miner or lodge brother from the Mollies, someone he could cheerfully pop in the beezer, his tormentor was a sort of plump, smiling Mr. Pickwick—the most innocent-looking of callers, a cheerful, clean-shaven middle-aged man with red cheeks, a fringe of graying sandy hair, a big nose and very sharp brown eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles, his brown checked suit and waistcoat adorned with a pewter watch chain and a gold badge that said he was a Chief Inspector in the Coal & Iron Police.
“Mighty sorry to raise such a ruckus,” the newcomer said with a foxy-grandpa smile. “I knocked just as nice as could be for a bit there, but I guess you must have made quite a night of it.” He pulled a big turnip watch out of his waistcoat pocket and looked at it with feigned astonishment: “Land o’ Goshen, it’s a quarter past noon already!”
“Mmf,” Liam grunted. He was as naked as a jaybird and he felt like his head had been filled with boiling oatmeal. Grabbing the sheet off the mattress to make himself a toga, he saw that the bottle of rye he’d bought to hold his private wake with had just about a finger left. He picked it up by the neck and held it out to his caller.
Pickwick smiled apologetically: “Not before lunch.”
Not bad, Liam thought. The old boy could manage a tone of mild reproof as nicely as a parson, not something you’d expect from your run-of-the-mill flat foot. He definitely remembered this Pickwick bird from somewhere, and if the fog in his brain would just clear for a moment … ah, there it was! He nodded and smiled a little, which made his visitor narrow his eyes suspiciously.
It had been back in Five Points, Liam recalled: the new Police Headquarters building at 300 Mulberry Street, not long before the Draft Riots. Liam’s Pa had dragged him there by the ear to complain he’d stolen his watchchain, only the drunken shite-pot had been so far gone that Liam had already palmed the chain back into his waistcoat pocket before they went inside.
Then, as soon as Liam had seen he had the coppers’ attention, he out-hammed John Wilkes Booth playing the heartbroken little tyke and making a fool of his blowhard Pa. And Pickwick? He’d been one of the coppers looking on and tsktsking over the sorry spectacle. Liam stifled the beginning of a grin, keeping the memory to himself for a tactical advantage.
“What can I do for you, Inspector …?”
“Barlow,” the man said with an avuncular chuckle, “Amos Barlow, and pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. McCool.”
This one could be dangerous, Liam thought, returning the Inspector’s smile with one of equally false bonhomie and raising him a jolly wink and a handshake.
“If you don’t mind …?” he said, gesturing to his toga.
“Of course, of course,” Barlow said good-humoredly, “in fact, I was about to suggest we take a little walk so I expect you’ll be wanting your shoes and pants.”
He turned politely and made a point of examining the few small shelves of Liam’s library while Liam scrubbed his face at the washstand and put on some fresh clothes. He had bought three cheap dark suits before he left New York, but the open window was telling him it was already hot out and he decided on a pair of corduroys and a cambric shirt. Let Barlow sweat in his nice thick brown suit and waistcoat!
“My, my!” the Inspector was saying with a look of amiable astonishment, “seems you do have the gift of tongues, eh Mr. McCool? Here’s Goethe and Les Misérables alongside Mr. Twain and Mr. Dickens, and … Heavens above, what’s this?”
Liam had a talent for languages, all right, and an even better one for reading tones of voice: what was that odd little shading at the bottom of Barlow’s wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly geniality? Something sharp and avid, like the yip of a hound tracking an escaped convict …
Sending the sweetness and light right back at him, Liam raised his eyebrows innocently and said: “Why, that’s Russian, Inspector Barlow, Mr. Tolstoy’s last book ‘War and Peace.’”
And my pal Mike Vysotsky stole it for me from some dimwit Grand Duke in the Fifth Avenue Hotel who never even cut the pages, he added mentally, unable to keep a satirical smile from popping to the surface.
Either the tone or the smile piqued Barlow’s attention and he threw Liam a sharp look:
“Rooskie, eh, fancy that! I expect you can speak the lingo with our Little Russia neighbors on the other side of the Mississippi, then. The ones that keep sending us their crazy anarchist bomb-throwers …” Then, a nicely-timed moment later, with an air of sudden inspiration: “Say, I don’t suppose you’d be related to Francis McCool, now, would you, Mr. McCool? The famous Fenian agitator?”
That was more like it, thought Liam, the copper’s needle-jab. “I would,” he said cheerfully, “and I hope the Devil has set a whole army of bluecoat imps to thumping him sober with their billies. But if you’re aiming to put me in the frame as a spy for New Petersburg you can think again—I’ve no more use for their brand of baloney than I do for the Fenians.”
“Ah,” said Barlow with a frankly appraising look, “your old man put you off politics, did he?”
“You could say so,” Liam said. “Of course, thirteen years of drunken beatings and blather about Free Ireland may have helped with that, not to mention him putting my Ma in Bellevue with two black eyes and a handful of broken ribs just before she died. Whoever it was that put a bullet in him saved me being a murderer someday.”
“I didn’t much care for him myself,” Barlow said, “though I wouldn’t have shot him over it.” He put on a look of doleful sympathy: “There were a lot of bullets flying in the Draft Riots, I don’t expect I have to tell you, it could have been anybody pulled that trigger.”
Liam shrugged. “If you meet the fella that did, tell him I’ll buy him a drink. Otherwise, let’s stop fooling around—are you here about Henderson’s house or Maggie’s murder?”
Barlow nodded and chuckled: “I like a man that isn’t afraid to take the bull by the horns.”
Liam shrugged. “If there’s any bull around here it isn’t me throwing it.”
Inspector Barlow smiled a little, nodding absently as he weighed that.
“What do you say we have our little stroll now, Mr. McCool? I took a quick look at Miss O’Shea’s place before I sent for the Coroner, but I need to give it a good going-over before too many people tromp across it. If you’d really like to help catch the fellow who did it you might as well come along and keep me company.”
Liam opened the door to the hallway and gestured: “After you, Inspector.” And to himself: Mind how you go, Liam-me-lad, this dog bites!
Outside Mrs. Finnegan’s Boarding House, a beautiful Spring morning was giving the lie to gloomy visions of dynamite and murder. To Liam’s tenderized senses the explosion of birdsong, glaring sunshine and shouting kids was just about the limit, and Barlow smiled as he watched him out of the corner of his eye.
“They tell me you and Miss O’Shea were sweethearts.”
Liam grunted, trying to squint his eyes enough to shut out most of the sun without letting himself trip over something.
“Don’t use the hard stuff much, do you?” Barlow sounded amused.
Liam looked like he was fighting the urge to throw up. “My idea of drinking is a stein or two of Ruppert’s while I’m watching the Punch and Judy at Harry Hill’s.”
“Can’t say as I blame you pining for the big city, not after six months in this one-horse burg.”
Liam threw him a sharp glance, then nodded to himself; whatever was going through his mind, it gave him a sardonic little half-smile.
They walked in silence for a bit, each of them throwing an occasional covert glance at the other. After a few blocks Barlow started showing a slight limp and Liam couldn’t resist a jab:
“Sprain your ankle chasing the Molly Magees, Inspector?”
Barlow frowned. “That’s a poor sort of joke, young McCool. Fact is, I was chasing rebs at Gettysburg and caught a Minié ball instead.”
Liam heard the tone of mild r
eproof again and he grinned: “You do that Parson Brown turn just about perfect, Inspector. Yessir, you could have been a daisy of a confidence man—I’d say you missed your calling.”
Barlow smiled sourly. “I wouldn’t be making jokes about the Mollies if I were you. Maybe they didn’t do all the murders and destruction the prosecution said at the trials, but somebody must have done something or they wouldn’t be hanging ten of them in Pottsville next week.”
Liam looked solemn. “Words of wisdom, Brother Barlow. Shall I lead the hymn now?”
That one finally got through the grizzled copper’s guard and a choleric flush ran up his plump neck and into his jowls; Liam moved to cut off an angry retort:
“I tell you what, Inspector—you quit trying to catch me off balance and treat me like somebody that’s been around the block a few times, I’ll return the favor, OK? And be a sport, don’t wave the bloody shirt at me over Gettysburg, I had my fourteenth birthday on Little Round Top, chasing Rebs with the 20th Maine.”
This time it was Barlow that gave Liam a sharp look. “You were at Gettysburg?”
Liam laughed. “How about that? Imagine not knowing a simple thing like that, and you one of Stanton’s Eyes.”
That one jarred the Inspector to a standstill. He turned and stared at Liam as if he didn’t believe his ears. “Just what are you trying to …?”
“Come on, Barlow,” Liam said impatiently, “Like you said, I’ve been down here in the coalfields for six months, and I never saw a C & I that came within a mile of you for brainpower. Those boys are all local hayseeds happy to take Mr. Gowen’s two bits for thumping miners with their billies and cadging free drinks from Boyo Boylan. Anyway, I happen to know that once upon a time you were a New York harness bull and never mind how.”
“You do, do you?” Barlow bit off the words with a snap, glowering.
King of the Cracksmen Page 3