Pa waved to a window of the hotel and after a few seconds Mayor Greentree stepped out of the hotel’s main entrance, followed by some other men. He gave Mother a big hug, talked down to her from his height while he kept his arm around her. Everyone was smiling, even Mother, and Millie had forgotten what that looked like too. Pa got a handshake from the mayor and the other men, then a can of snuff to pinch into. When the Pinkerton’s car finally braked to a stop next to Pa’s pick-up, Millie dared herself a little closer. She heard Pa introduce them. They talked for a few minutes while Mother looked around the streets. Finally, Pa opened the pick-up door for Mother, gave the engine a few cranks, got in himself. He stopped at the general store while mother went in for coffee, sugar and flour, most likely; with a sack in one arm, she shaded her eyes with her other hand to search the streets one more time before getting in, but when Millie didn’t want to be found, there was no one on earth—save Junior sometimes—that could find her. When the pick-up was moving out of town again Millie stepped out into the open, joined the crowd gathering around the mayor.
Junior followed her out from the stand of trees where he had been this whole time.
“Damnit-all, Junior! How long you been snooping around back there?” she said. He chuckled a little at her. She spat in the dirt. “Just so you know, I aint going one step toward home till I’m good and ready, not one second sooner.” But by the look on his face, Millie knew he was curious about the blind drunkard from the Pinkerton Agency too. So they followed along with the crowd, Millie elbowing and shouldering in closer to hear what the men said.
“Sure a pleasure to have a big-city detective right here in Price, Kansas. Welcome, welcome,” said the mayor as he nearly jerked the Pinkerton’s arm out of its shoulder socket. Mayor Greentree looked like a rock formation next to the Pinkerton. Two hands taller and as many wider. His Irish Setter hair was parted just over his left ear and combed down to his head in shining corduroy lines, but his eyebrows sprouted from his forehead like prairie scrub. He had muscles heaped across his chest and shoulders and big round belly to hold them up.
The mayor opened his hand to present the town. “And this here’s our Price, take it or leave it!” the mayor said. “Haw! Just a little joke around here, ketch’m? Follow me, I’ll show you around.”
Millie moved closer, right behind them where the Pinkerton man couldn’t see her—she wanted to measure him up without his know-so.
“Just before the war between the states, two fellows by the name of Price, Hiram and Hubert Price—preeze, or something like that, in German, p-r-e-i-s, or something—they bought up the land on either side of the Big Silky—it was running then. Brought their families here to get away from all that violence and rancorance along the border. Only a few of the real old-timers can still remember those free-soiler days. Bad times, all right, but you know what, they were good for the country. No offense, Mr. Sterno, hailing yourself from Saint Louis, but I pro-guess that it was all that blood spilled all over this Kansas soil that made America what it is today.” The mayor nodded and did something with his face to add respect and—what was it?—dignity, maybe, or maybe just assertion to the last comment.
The Pinkerton said, “Can’t argue with that.”
“These were hard times,” the Mayor said started up again. “Kansas wasn’t exactly an easy locale for homesteading after the war was over, nor to mention growing a community. Indians, drought, tornadoes, snakes, mosquitoes, black death, the ague, all those Missouri musket-humpers still bitter about losing the war, ketch’m?"
Good one, Mayor. Hah!
“Yeah, I’ll tell you, for a good long hunk or two of time, ol’ Hiram and Hubert Price didn’t know if they were going to make it. Then someone found oil up near Wichita, a little outcrop coal right here in Hope County—albeit-all south of here, down New Bremen way—and an underground lake in the limestone right underneath our feet. Then the railroads come through. Before you know it, the Price brothers look around them and see little sod houses popping up all over.”
“Might as well make a town out of it,” Mr. Neuwald said.
“That’s right, Jone, might as well. Mr. Sterno, meet Jonas Neuwald—Elks, Eagles, Lions and Rotary.” The Pinkerton man shook hands with the skinny, hawk-nosed, mustached man. The mayor went on: “And make a town out of it is precisely what they did, Mr. Sterno. They incorporated the next year, had a promotive plat made up, sent it around the state, into Missouri and Arkansas. Heck, back then? every six months there was another town out here closing down. Well, I’ll tell you, all those ghosts from all those ghost towns had to go somewhere. So pretty soon, before you know it, storefronts and hotels are going up, teams, wagons everywhere, kids running around Main Street—you got yourself a town.”
“Price, Kansas,” added Mr. Neuwald.
“That’s right, Jone,” the mayor said, looking around him, “our Price.”
The mayor stopped walking, hiked up his pants, let the crowd of men and boys surround them. This was the final stop on the nickel tour. Sheriff Jake’s jail. Over the door on one side of the one-story, brown-bricked building was a sign that said "JAIL." On the other half of the building's front side were bay doors, one of which was open to show an old Chevrolet up on stumps, pieces of its engine out on the cement floor around it. A few other cars and some engine parts littered the ground in front of the bay doors.
Sheriff Jake stepped out from the garage wiping his hands. Sheriff Jake looked like Jonas Neuwald’s bigger, stronger, meaner older brother—which was exactly what he was.
"Mr. Sterno, meet Sheriff Jacob Neuwald, brother to Jonas. Elks, Eagles, Rotary, and our town constable. 'Sheriff' is what we call him round here.”
"Follow me, mister," said Sheriff Jake, and spat. Mr. Sterno was led into the jail’s front door.
The crowd stopped in front of the jail, not sure what to do anymore, so they started passing a plug around and cracking jokes about the Pinkerton. Millie was surrounded by men’s pants and men’s shirts. She could barely move, much less see. This was her Pinkerton. This was her investigation. She had told Mother what to write when they were seeking help. Tommy was her brother, goddamnit-all. She had to think of something if she wanted to get in on this meeting they were having with her Pinkerton in there.
"I can't see jack-shit. Come on, Junior. I got an idea."
"H-y.”
She moved around to be behind Junior, who tried to turn his body with her. "Hold still, will you? Stop fussing. Face forward, like this." She aimed his front side toward the jail, placed the palms of her hands flat on each of his buttocks. After peering around one side of him to get her bearings, she dug in her heel, said to Junior, "Come on, now, stop fighting it,” and started pushing. Junior resisted, but not for long, and soon they were plowing steadily through the crowd toward the jail. "Beg your pardons, gentlemen!" she said as they moved through the shirts. Men moved aside, some chuckling. Millie grunted and cursed until Junior finally stopped fighting her. When she had cleared the crowd, she gave Junior a final push, causing him to stumble forward, then sprinted away from him in a direction that made it impossible for him to follow. She ducked in and out of men and went around the hotel to throw him off her scent, then back to the jail—this time around the back, to the single, high-up slat of a window. She placed a wooden crate upside down, stood on it. Not high enough. She placed a rusty old spiked wheel on the crate and leaned it against the wall. Carefully, she climbed the spokes of the wheel to stand on the highest part of the rim, until she had to crouch below the bottom sill of the window to not be seen.
Inside Sheriff Jake's office there were a desk and three wooden chairs. There was no cell. A framed map of Kansas hung on the wall across from his desk, alongside an older map of the Kansas Territory, stretching to the Rockies one way and northward into Nebraska. A big, open-mouthed bass with eyes that looked like spit wads was mounted on the wall over a pair of file cabinets. Hanging between the two framed maps was a picture of the Neuwald brothers, as
boys, on either side of the long legs of Buffalo Bill Cody. In the picture, the boys are holding sticks like pistols and are shooting the photographer.
Her Pinkerton set his hat on the desk and took his chair. Millie watched him as he looked around at the faces of the men of Price. Millie began to understand there was something happening in this silence; but there was always something happening in the secret world of adults, even when it was quiet. Sheriff Jake never had a nice face, what you could see of it from behind his thick black moustache and long black eyelashes, but now his face was downright mean. Jonas Neuwald had the same features but the shape of his face was oftentimes so different, softer, pointier, like a lizard's face.
"I'll get right to it, Mr. St—Sterno? Sterno….That a Jew name? Polack?"
"I'm an American, Sheriff."
"From Missouri…" the sheriff said under his breath. His brother's shoulders bounced in a silent chuckle. Millie suddenly felt sorry for her Pinkerton, near-sighted sot that he was. She didn't know why, but she felt like she ought to go back around front and get Junior to stand over there behind him.
"It doesn't matter if he's a Polack. Now come on, Jake, it's nearly nine o'clock and I'm ravishing," said Mayor Greentree, rubbing his stomach with both hands.
"Keep your belt on, Abner. Looky, Mr. Pinkerton man, I'm sorry that you had to waste your time coming all the way here for nothing, but there aint no crime here for you to be investigating in the first place. This whole thing is a bunch of silliness and wastefulness."
Her Pinkerton pulled out a readyroll cigarette, lit it. "This isn't a criminal investigation, Sheriff. I'm not here to step on anybody's toes. I was hired out privately, simply to check into the death of Thomas Donnan. Even if I did find something I would call suspicious, chances of any charges getting filed are slim. However, if I do discover foul play in this case, and I discover who is responsible, then you're the man who's going to bring the culprit to justice, not me." He tipped some ash onto the floor.
There were still silent things happening between the men. At last, Sheriff Jake put his feet up on his desk. He removed his derby. He gave it a flick so that it landed on the upraised point of one of his boots.
A truck went by behind her, loud and slow under its load of grain; she edged her head upward until she could hear.
"...simple as that, Mr. Sterno. This isn't St. Louie, where all the horses are half deaf from the noise and half stupid from being from Missouri. That horse of his was one tight-sprung animal. A backfire as loud as that one--"
"Plus the storm," the mayor put in.
"—And she spooked," Sheriff Jake kept going. "She spooked good."
Millie, listening intently to the conversation, didn't hear the little squeaks behind her until they were right behind her. She then felt a finger tapping her shoulder.
"H-y."
She sighed. Junior stood there balancing her bicycle. "Just a minute, Junior. Can you wait one shit-blasted minute?"
"What model was this man Aaronson's horseless carriage?"
"Hell if I know, a Knox? What difference does it make?"
"Where can I find Aaronson?"
"Not around here. He moved out of these parts some time ago. Somewhere down in Oklahoma. Some Injun-named town."
"Owasso. Owaska."
"Nah, something like Nowata."
"...Osage."
"Some Injun name, anyway. God knows why he'd want to move to Oklahoma."
"You can still hunt a cat down there, in some of those hills," the sheriff's brother said.
"Yeah, well you can still hunt a nigger in Mississippi, that doesn't mean I'm ever going to set a foot in that patch of shit again either," said the mayor.
A chuckle was had by all but her Pinkerton at this comment.
Sheriff Jake said, “Anyway, Aaronson aint been around here in a good spell. Comes back every once in a while, if there's a dance or a fair or something, showing off that piece of shit he calls a automobile like it's still nineteen-ought-two. He got him a few bunnies in the deer field, if you follow me."
This was followed by some shifting around, some coughing, but mostly silence. Junior was pulling at Millie’s dress. "I said one minute, Junior!" she said, slapping him away. “The goddamn hay can wait!” She dared her head to rise a few more inches, so she could see. She wiped dust from the glass of the window while her eyes adjusted to the darkness inside.
"How many of you gentlemen saw Donnan drinking?"
The men looked at one another.
“Sheriff?” her Pinkerton asked. “Did you see him drinking?”
“I could tell by his demeanors he was drinking,” the mayor said. “Crazy in the eyes, all wound up and in a rush about something, wouldn’t you say, boys? And I can tell you first hand he smelled real bad of whisky, what was left of him the next morning smelled of whisky, is what I mean.”
Her Pinkerton said, again, looking right at him, “Sheriff? Did you see him drinking, or didn’t you?” But the sheriff was too busy chewing tobacco to answer.
“Plus the way he whipping away at that poor filly of his—“
"All right, all right," said her Pinkerton. “How about this then, any of you follow the buggy out? See after the man at all?"
"Follow him out? What're you talking about, mister? There was a tornado coming. I had a whole town to look after. A grown man speeds off in a surrey in a goddamn tornado, that's his business."
"He was still standing in the seat when we last saw him," said Jonas Neuwald.
"Whippin' away on that poor horse," said Mayor Greentree.
"Where was he going in such a hurry?" her Pinkerton asked them.
Silence was his answer. They all seemed to be thinking about something. She was thinking too, about that day of the tornado. She’d been so damned angry at him, for not telling her he was leaving. So damn mad she let him ride off into a tornado by himself—then she never saw him again.
"So, if you didn't see him that night, then I assume you went out there next morning, Sheriff?”
"You aint so good at assuming, mister, I’ll tell you that. Jonas's boy Geshen come out to the house that morning to tell me what Braun Donnan found out front that morning. I couldn't do anything to help Tommy by then, so I tended to my farm and my house—I took on a lot of damage in that storm. I went in to town, but by then everyone knew already. Later that day I went out there, that evening, had me a look. The mayor had already been out there, same as Doc Rosen-zeeg, with his camera, of course—nothing dies in this county without Doc takes pictures of it. By the time I got there, Marnie Donnan had him wrapped up in a quilt in the front room, all cleaned off and wrapped up tight—what there was left of him. I saw the pictures later: what it looked like to me was a boy fell off his wagon. That's what it looked like, that's what it was. We get enough farm accidents, automobile and tractor accidents, what-have-you around here that we aint gonna throw a parade when someone falls off a horse—"
Millie was suddenly yanked from the wall upward and backward, then deposited firmly on the ground in her boots. The hulking presence at her back then moved to the side to block the hot September sun from her pink scalp.
Millie's face had gone pink too. The severe lines were back in her forehead and her chin had been pulled up into a walnut shell under her bottom lip. When she spoke, it was with a sneer. “Awright goddamnit-all, to hell with it. Let’s go get what’s comin’ to us.”
5.
The lobby of the Old Price Hotel was a holdout from the grand times of hotels, with huge paintings on the walls, two ornate chandeliers, high mirrors and parlor furniture. Two loose rows of neat, white-clothed tables lined one wall, at which town and country folks breakfasted in twos and fours. The hotel's staff was busy serving coffee, rolls, corn cakes, eggs, bacon, ham and fat links of sausages. The babbling of conversations left off little by little when Sterno and the mayor stepped into the lobby, as the members of the staff and the diners alike stopped whatever it was they were in the act of doing to take in the
mayor's guest. Then little by little the murmur of the dining room resumed.
"Good morning, Abner." This was from the woman who seemed to be running the room. "Hotcakes and ham this morning?"
He shook his head, clearly disappointed. "Wish so, wish so, but I got my hands full this morning. Tess Helmcamp, meet Charlie Sterno, a Pinkerton detective. Mr. Sterno, meet Mrs. Helmcamp. This is her place."
She wore a sheen on her brow, and her sleeves rolled up. Sterno liked her immediately for not noticing him, for not stopping to take in the gossip fodder. She was a worker. “Please to meet you, Mr. Sterno, I heard you were coming, but unless you want some coffee or a plate of eggs, I have no time for chit-chat."
"We'll be on our way," the mayor said. "Is Doc Rosen-zeeg in?"
She was already turned from him, cleaning a table, two dirty plates in one hand. With the other hand she pointed straight up. "You know the way."
Together the two men clopped up a loud wooden staircase with a worn down Oriental runner on it of the same baby blue as the bricks outside. A narrow hallway with one tall window at its end took them to room 214. Greentree simultaneously knocked upon and opened the door, led Sterno inside. The room barely resembled the hotel room it had been once. A gramophone in the corner by the window scratched out an opera. Cabinets filled with utensils, bandages, and pill and medicine bottles lined one of the four walls. The doctor's desk ran along the windowed wall, a hard wood table functioning as an examination table along another wall. Against the last wall was a table loaded with photography equipment and various tubes, valves, trinkets and mason jars filled with various powders, liquids and unidentifiable bits of things that looked like pickled flesh.
As they entered, the doctor was in the act of plopping a heavy cardboard file folder onto his desktop. He moved a chair over to be next to the other chair at his desk, then offered the empty seat to Sterno. Doctor Rosenzweig had thin, wispy whiskers the color of dirty snow covering his tapered chin, with tobacco smoke stains under the nostrils and crumbs of bread under his mouth. His wide-set eyes blinked non-stop, and were magnified hugely through his small silver spectacles.
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