The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  “So you are a lawyer?” asked the puzzled Texan.

  “Like all questionable habits, the legal trade has its charms, sir, and I have returned for a comeback. If you should need my services, I offer reasonable rates. I am, as they say, between offices, so ask for me by name, Leonard LaFarge, contesting lawyer.”

  The Texan still was puzzled. “Another lawyer’s the last damn thing I need.”

  Tom noticed that Jake had turned away from Mrs. Oke and was listening to the exchange between the Texan and the lawyer. “Hello, Leonard,” Jake said. “What’s going on?”

  “Why, Monsieur Jaycox! I haven’t seen you in weeks, my man. Have you, too, abandoned our poor village?”

  Jake glanced at Tom. “Tom Freshour, meet Leonard LaFarge. And don’t listen to a word the old rascal says.”

  LaFarge smiled as he shook Tom’s hand. He said to Jake, “But your countenance is clouded, my friend. Is the hardware business all that bad? You couldn’t be as poor or as sober as I am. Shall we go off to a house of spirits where we can discuss these and other weighty matters?”

  “I quit drinking in the daytime, Leonard. But there is something I’d like for you to find out for me.”

  “Investigation is my true calling. What do you need to know?”

  “Deacon Jim Miller,” Jake said. “I need to know who he’s working for.”

  Leonard’s voice lowered. “Pray tell, why?”

  “I want to know what he’s doing now, who he’s worked for in the past, whatever you can find out about him.”

  “I can tell you in a word, Jake. Leave the man alone.”

  Jake told him an abbreviated version of what had happened while the lawyer stood quite still, his grey mane of hair blowing in the cold, dusty yard. Tom noticed how quickly LaFarge changed from jovial to serious. “The man’s life is hardly an open book. Anything I might find out would be susceptible to rumor.”

  “Anything’s better than nothing. Just find out what you can.” “At your command. I’ll try to have a report for you as early as tonight. Meet me at the Golden Wall.”

  Tom followed Jake as he departed from the yard. They walked on through town, past the newspaper building, where printing machines were whacking away, breathing out the sharp smell of ink. A newsboy stood outside selling an issue with a large headline: OPEN WAR IN ENID.

  They went to the telegraph office, where Jake sent a telegram to McMurphy at Dekker Hardware Company:

  NOT MUCH LUCK YET BUT AM SENDING IN CURRENT

  COLLECTIONS WILL CONTINUE TOMORROW IN

  CHOCTAW DISTRICT JAYCOX

  Tom glanced down at the note and tried to guess whether it meant that they were going south again. A surge of yearning hit him—all of the longing and feeling about Sam that he had avoided today washed over him at once. He wondered where she was now, whether on a train, and whether she was asleep or awake, or thinking of the scenery going by or of Jake or perhaps of him.

  13

  JAKE HAD NO intention of going back to the Choctaw district, but until he’d found out a few things, he preferred for Ernest not to know where he was. Ralph Dekker had asked him to go along with Ernest until he got back from his trip, and Jake guessed he’d try to follow instructions. He wanted to send a message to the old man to find out whether he’d returned from St. Louis yet, but it wasn’t safe to do it. Ernest cultivated a warm friendship with the delivery boys at the telegraph office. During the flood, Jake had happened out of the building one morning to see Ernest handing one of them a paper-money tip and the boy smiling and scraping like he was talking to the king of England.

  Guthrie was—or had been—one of Dekker’s few “overlapping towns,” for no logical reason belonging both to Peters and to Jake. Jake decided to call on his five most active customers today, for now shucking the whole funny business of the mortgage transfers. By late afternoon he and Tom had traipsed around and pulled in more than two hundred dollars. He discovered that Pete Crapo (the worst salesman on the staff) had been through town a couple of days earlier, putting pressure on customers to sign the transfers; two had signed, but two others who hadn’t given Crapo a dime did give Jake some money on their accounts. This confirmed to him that salesmen ought to be collecting money rather than trying to get mortgages on their customers’ property, and they ought to be doing it in their own districts. They should be making steady progress on the debt, not threatening to close people down.

  Jake would send Tom to Fort Smith tonight with the money and mortgage transfers that they’d collected. Tom could find out whether Mr. Dekker had gotten back from St. Louis. Jake’s one concern was that he might be sending Tom from the frying pan into the fire. But Fort Smith was surely safer than out here, and it wasn’t Tom whom Miller was after.

  Off and on all day, Jake had been wondering how much to tell Tom, and he finally decided that since he himself still didn’t really know what was going on yet, and since his own arrangement with the old man was still hanging fire, the cleanest approach was just to give Tom instructions and not burden him with too many confidences. Jake already knew that Tom had a good memory; anything he heard once he seemed to effortlessly remember.

  They stopped at the Quality Café, a smoky crowded place where a little man by the name of Stub Adder dished out the best twenty-five-cent suppers in Oklahoma Territory. Stub was always attending furiously to his cooking, and he wasn’t much for conversation, but he’d once told Jake that he was a “reformed range cook.” He used to work on ranches and on cattle drives, which he claimed had spoiled him because of the way cowboys protected and praised even a tolerably decent cook.

  Jake ordered two bowls of Stub’s goat stew, cooked with tomatoes, onions, brown sugar, peppers, and whatever else—and he was pleased to see the expression on Tom’s face as he tasted it and slipped into a trance of eating. Jake got a kick out of it when the kid enjoyed his food. Tom had been so rigid and skittish at the table when he first came to Mrs. P’s that Jake didn’t see how the boy could even digest his food. Although he was still stiff at the table, he looked like he might be uncoiling a turn or two.

  They had a cup of Arbuckle’s coffee and cobbler for dessert, and as they were finishing up, Jake told him how to proceed once he got to Fort Smith. He should be at the store at opening time to deliver the collected money and legal papers to the treasurer, McMurphy. He wanted Tom to keep an eye out for Ralph Dekker but not to ask about whether he was back from St. Louis. “Ask Edgar, maybe, but nobody else. As soon as Mr. Dekker’s there, talk to him alone and tell him what happened in Violet Springs. If he has any messages for me, he can send them with you. He may want me to come to town right then. I’ll be in Enid, which is north of here in the Outlet. You can tell the old man that, but don’t tell Ernest or anybody else. I told them I’d keep traveling in the south, and I’d just as soon they believe it. After you’ve talked to Mr. Dekker, buy your train ticket at the last minute, straight through to Enid. Meet me there at the Plain Talk Inn. Can you remember all that?”

  Tom nodded slowly. “Yes sir,” he said, but he looked confused. “Is Enid where they’re having the war?”

  Jake laughed. “They’re having a little dispute over where to locate the train station. It ain’t a war. Don’t believe everything you read in newspapers.”

  When Jake put him on the train, he repeated, “Enid. Plain Talk Inn.”

  ***

  After Tom was gone, Jake worried a little less about Deacon Miller showing up, but he still felt as restless as popcorn in hot oil. He kept seeing the boy’s face through the window as the train took off, imagining that he saw fear in his expression. Was he making a mistake sending him back there? He wandered over to the Christian Boarding Hotel with a newspaper but wasn’t able to read.

  As a hardware peddler, Jake was hardly the type to attract the attention of high-rent gunmen. Now and again over the years, he’d seen Deacon Miller in saloons, and he always wore the black clothes, and a lot of times he’d have a young aide-de-camp dressed up th
e same way trooping along with him. People would whisper all kinds of things about him—that he was mean as a scorpion but that he acted so polite about it that one of his many victims was said to have died saying “Thank you, Deacon.” Jake figured such stories to be mostly cock and bull, but whatever his manners were, it was probably true that the man was a professional killer. The question was who he was working for now.

  Sam was on his mind, too: her strange offer on the train yesterday, the way she’d gone distinctly cool toward him after he’d turned her down, the way she’d acted last night when Tom and her had been caught by the hotel clerk—not angry or ashamed or even defiant; on the contrary, more annoyed than anything. She was a real woman of the world, unafraid of what others might think, she made that clear.

  The sound of a piano floated through the window, and he set out for the Golden Wall Saloon to find Leonard LaFarge.

  Jake knew Leonard pretty well. He’d first met him years ago in a saloon in Fort Smith, where for a while Leonard had set up office for law-related tasks including everything from investigation to courthouse work. At some point, for reasons Jake never fully understood, Leonard left the area and became a traveler—a hobo, he called himself. After he returned to the border country from his wanderings, he and Jake got to be occasional drinking buddies, both in Fort Smith and in Guthrie. They were completely unlike in many ways but somehow enjoyed each other’s company. Lately, Jake had decided to try to keep himself a bit more sober in his dignified years, and he’d been seeing less of his old friend. Leonard had the brains to be a good lawyer, but he spent too much time philosophizing in saloons.

  He was sitting at a table in a corner of the Golden Wall without a drink, looking forlorn until he saw Jake come through the door. “Why Jake! You’ve arrived! Buy yourself a drink and get me one while you’re at it—tequila—he has a bottle for me.” He was very pleased when Jake returned, holding out the drink with its little worm in the bottom. “Con gusano, ah! Excelente!” He lowered his voice dramatically. “Beware the women. They’re as starved as wolves for business. One of them approached me this very night, offering her services in exchange for future legal representation. Of course, I told her that I deal strictly in cash.”

  “I hear you work for nothing half the time.”

  “Only for clients in extremis.” Leonard sighed. “Unfortunately, most of the people I know lately are in that condition.”

  Jake glanced around at the three women desultorily working the other tables. The Golden Wall was indeed pretty slow tonight. “Well, I can see they’re bothering you to death, Leonard.”

  “Museum specimens,” Leonard grumbled. “Famine reigns when the whores offer credit: one of the oldest rules of bad times . . . See the old biddy with the six-year-old pinafore and the fifty-year-old face, the one with her eyeballs protruding? She’ll be dead within the year. I tell her as much, too, just about every day. She’s a snowbird.”

  “Too bad,” Jake grunted, hoping not to encourage Leonard to launch into tales of his own years as a wandering hobo and morphine fiend. His stories of that part of his life were entertaining, but Jake always suspected him of inventing half of it. It was one of the rituals of their friendship for Leonard to bring it up and Jake not to act very curious.

  “Snow. Cocaine. An inferior drug with superior addictive properties. There is no honor among snowbirds. I’ve heard it on good authority that their brains turn into a black syrupy mass.” He held up his tequila and peered at it. “Ah, but this gentle fairy, I love her more than all my past mistresses.” He widened his eyes. “A worm is at all their hearts; hers, at least, is visible. But let us not be lugubrious. Let us talk about your would-be executioner.”

  “Let’s do. What’d you find out?”

  “Given more ample time and resources, I could have reconstructed the scoundrel’s entire biography, but with only part of a day, I have the following information: He came from Texas. He started to gain his notoriety around Ada, in the Chickasaw Nation.”

  “Hell’s Fringe,” Jake muttered. “He came after me in that vicinity.”

  “It seems that Ada is dominated by three cattle operations—three families who remain in a state of constant warfare with each other.”

  “That’s been going on a long time. I sold Ada when I had the south route.”

  “I happen to know a little about the place, too. There’s an attorney down there by the name of Moman Pruitt who’s achieved a legal record. He’s gotten three hundred men off scot-free of murder charges.”

  “Three hundred, huh?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “That’s probably only a couple of months’ work in Ada.”

  “Mr. James Miller, alias the Deacon, got his start in Ada working for one and then the other of these cattle outfits. How he avoided getting himself killed I don’t know, but they say that he was regarded as merely an instrument, a professional, someone who did the will of others. Some say that he had an office in town with a sign out front that said ‘Killer for Hire.’ One of the men in Marshal Nix’s office swears that’s true. Anyway, about eight years ago he left Ada and briefly went to work for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, which he quit, the story goes, because they were too slow and scrupulous for him—which is about like saying that General Grant was too concerned about the comfort of his soldiers to conduct warfare. Off and on, he has worked for the Paris Hotel in Fort Smith, that most democratic of whorehouses. He also worked awhile for one of my favorite humanitarian enterprises, the Santa Fe Railroad, doing what sort of iniquity I don’t know. So far as I can find out in an afternoon, he’s never been tried for murder.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know. I guess he plays the borders well.”

  “That all you found out?” Jake asked.

  Leonard shrugged. “All except that he’s apparently a King Lear.”

  “A what?”

  Leonard raised his expressive eyebrows. “Not a lover of the female gender.”

  Jake leaned back, frowning. “So you couldn’t find out anything about who he’s working for now.”

  Leonard shook his head. “Like I say, he’s been employed at the Paris. He may bounce the place in exchange for his board. Who else he’s working for I don’t know. I do hope you’re satisfied with my intensive investigation. My bill is your hospitable company, sir.”

  The mention of “King” made Jake wonder if by some chance Leonard knew anything about Samantha. “You lived in St. Louis, didn’t you?”

  Leonard took a sip of tequila and smacked his lips with pleasure. Leonard was a drinker who truly liked his drink. “Lived there? Of course I did. I did my apprenticeship with one of the most distinguished legal minds of St. Louis. Surely I have told you about Colonel Caruthers.”

  “Ever hear of a woman named Samantha King?”

  “They called the colonel merciless, but a more gentle man never walked the earth. He taught me all that I know . . . King, Samantha, what? No . . .” He frowned. “I do hear a dim chime in the dark abyss of the past, but I can’t place it.”

  “Was there some prominent family in town called King?” “Unfortunately, I didn’t rub shoulders with the prominent.” Leonard stared appraisingly at the worm.

  Jake remembered the stationery that Sam had written her list on. “What about this place?” He took it from his pocket and showed it to Leonard, who held it away from his face. At the top of the sheet, a luxurious banner with fancy lettering wrapped around a substantial-sized building.

  “The King Hotel! Why of course! The King was one of the more opulent houses in the city. The most opulent, no question of it. Considerably above my means at the time. Why do you ask?” “You mean it was a whorehouse?”

  “Oh, I’d hardly use such a crude appellation. A gaming and pleasure palace, it was.” Leonard looked fondly at the stationery. “Marguerite King, impresario of the demimonde. Politicians in her pocket, leaders of the merchant and banking world. The queen of the King. Even Colonel Caruthers spoke
admiringly of her, as I recall.” He handed back the paper. “You ask much of me, my friend—to look back three decades and remember such things. This is ancient history.” He took another sip, frowning. “But the King does come back. I recall it all the better because I never went there. I only dreamed about it. I thought it would be heaven to go just for one night. A Circean palace of voluptuaries. Thinly clothed temptresses whirling in torrid pirouettes, nymphes du pavé, cloud storms of perfume.” He looked at Jake. “You realize I am only speaking from rumor and youthful imagination. Why are you asking about the King Hotel?”

  Jake looked toward the bar. “I’ve met a woman—”

  “Sir! This is desertion! A woman? You are a lifelong member of the honorable fraternity of bachelors.” He rolled the little curl of worm around in the remaining tequila, grinning at Jake through his crooked teeth.

  “I wish you’d go ahead and drink that nasty thing,” Jake said. “I can’t stand the suspense.”

  Leonard obligingly took the rest of it, with the worm, in one mouthful. He scowled as he swallowed it, sniffed once, and looked more serious. “Start from the beginning, Jake. Tell me all. Unburden yourself. A woman? From the King?”

  They’d gotten through a second drink before Jake had finished telling about his brief acquaintance with Samantha King. Leonard was intrigued. “Where is she now?”

  “She left this morning to go back to St. Louis.”

  “So at first you thought she was merely an accident you happened upon, and you discovered by means of this piece of paper in her luggage that she was interested in business, your business—is that the sum of it?”