by Speer Morgan
WORKED FOR DEKKER HARDWARE
MURDERS MINISTER AND THEN
COMMITS LAST MORTAL SIN
FOUND IN POOL OF BLOOD
Tom tried to read it and couldn’t. His eyes and the words pushed each other away. He eventually looked up at LaFarge.
“Far be it from me to worry about one less Bible Jack in the world, but is this true? And were you with him, Tom?”
Just lie, Tom told himself.
LaFarge squinted, as if trying to see him through a clouded glass. “Can you answer me?”
Looking out the window into the grey daylight, Tom felt sweat running down his body. He took off the stiff buckskin shirt and went over to the washbasin, poured in water, and splashed some on his face and neck.
When he turned around, the lawyer was staring down at the floor, shaking his head. “We marched into his office! There we were, in the office of the most deadly judge in the United States, about to show him the goods, bragging about it! You were with this boy, this boy killed somebody, a preacher! And you now have the money that he was carrying! Tom, if we gave over that delivery parcel, it would seriously incriminate you.”
“I know that.”
“Well, why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me? No, no, don’t tell me anything. Nothing else. I don’t want to hear another word. Jesus Cristos! What have I gotten into?”
Tom heard someone in the hall, and Mr. Haskell came in without knocking. “I found my railroad man. He says that Park Hill is being used, all right. Some men from Fort Smith using it for some kind of business dealing.”
LaFarge seemed too exhausted to respond.
“I think we’re wasting our time,” Tom said. “We have to handle it ourselves.”
***
Unable to sleep any longer, Jake stood at the window, watching the night unbuild. A clear day was dawning. He’d been at this window awhile, trying to figure out their location, but there wasn’t much to go by. They were on the back side of the building, looking onto a scrub forest. He’d already been to the toilet, under the watchful eye of Jesse James, the gun-toting eighteen-year-old in the hall, and while sitting on the toilet he’d heard men talking downstairs, one with the deliberateness of an Indian speaking English. A rooster crowed somewhere in the distance, and, as if it had been a signal, someone could be heard sprinting up the stairs and through the hall. Hurried words were spoken, and then it sounded as if they both went back down the hall.
Jake waited a second and opened the door. Nobody was there.
He went over and shook Sam, who was still asleep. Her eyes blinked open. “The man outside the door is gone,” he said. “I’m going to look around. You need to wake up. If there’s a way out of here, we ought to think about taking it.”
Into the hall Jake walked, as if he knew what he was doing, to the unlit stairs leading to a foyer below. He stopped partway down and sat on the stairs. Below, to his left, the entrance hall opened through double doors into a big room. Several Dekker people were there, working around a long table. A prosperous-looking half-breed stood beside McMurphy, pointing at something on the table and talking excitedly, as if trying to please the unpleasable treasurer. Jake could hear a typewriting machine, and a brief burst of what sounded like Jack Peters’s high-pitched laughter. Into the foyer through the double doors walked two men who at a glance looked almost like twins—slight of frame, distant of gaze, wearing bowlers, high collars, and twenty-dollar suits. They came to a place below the staircase where he was sitting, their hats not four feet away.
“Just watch the count. That’s what we’re here for.”
“I think something’s wrong.”
“Look, it’s not our problem.”
“Those two are claiming three thousand acres. That’s twenty-five allotments!”
“These people all have twenty children. Don’t worry about it. They’re not asking us to check every allotment. Just keep your eyes and ears open. We report what we see. We’ll be gone from this place within the week. It’ll be in the boss’s lap.”
As they sauntered back into the big room, McMurphy looked up warily toward them and surely would have seen Jake if not for the dimness of the stairs.
Jake knew that if he and Sam walked together down these stairs and through the entrance hall, they would be caught before they got off the property. Outside, they’d leave prints in the snow. He got up and slipped back upstairs, to the end of the hall. He tried a couple of doors and found nothing but dusty rooms. He was going back to his room when he heard somebody rush up the stairs. Two men appeared in the hall, guns out, walking toward him. They took him by his elbows and escorted him back to his room.
As Jake entered, he saw Deacon Miller standing back, almost in a corner, as motionless as a statue. Ernest’s lawyer came in and shut the door. He sat down and offered Sam and Jake straight-backed chairs, which they both declined. The lawyer jammed the cigar into his mouth but seemed to make an extra effort to speak carefully around it. “You’re out here for an important reason.”
“What’s your name?” Sam said.
“I don’t care about no smart talk, ma’am. Give me any and I’ll have you took to another room and let the boys talk to you. They ain’t the gentleman I am.”
One of the two who had escorted Jake back to his room, the skinny eighteen-year-old, smiled menacingly.
The lawyer took out his cigar and gazed at it. “Now Jake, you and this woman have been scheming against Mr. Dekker. You was trying to work the old man into puttin yourself into his place. I know about that, and I know she’s been going around town asking all type of questions about his bidness. A certain courier told us that Miss King was going around asking questions. I also know you’ve been stealing collection money—”
“What?”
“While you’ve been consorting with this woman publicly all over the territory, setting up in fancy hotels, you’ve been taking cash from customers and keeping it.”
“That’s a lie,” Jake said.
“We have the witnesses. Nobody likes to see a good hard-workin man go down to a brazen woman,” he said with fake concern. “But if it goes to a jury, they’ll know you wasn’t the first one.”
“You little dirtwad,” Sam said. “You look like a jug with a cork in it.”
A fleeting look of anxiety crossed the lawyer’s face before he recovered and turned to Deacon Miller. “Take this here banty hen to another room, please, Deacon.”
Miller walked over, clamped her arm, and shoved her through the door.
The lawyer followed Miller into the hall and spoke hurriedly to him, then came back in. “Let’s get it over, Jake. The old man brought a considerable amount of cash money with him from St. Louis on Sunday or Monday last week, and that money is missing. You know where it is. Tell me and we’ll let you go, free and clear, no further trouble, long as you keep your nose out of Mr. Dekker’s bidness. Despite all the other things you’ve done to incriminate yourself, that there’s all we want from you. It’s your ticket.”
Jake could feel the flush in his face. “I’ll talk to Ernest.”
“Can you tell him where his money is?”
Jake didn’t reply.
The lawyer sighed and shook his head. “I don’t expect you to believe it, but I’m the one that’s trying to make this easy. I told him I’d try to talk reason with you. The money’s his. You know that. He’ll have it one way or the other. So let’s just git it over and done with.”
“I’ll talk to him. Not to you.”
The lawyer stood up. “Like I say, I hope you don’t intend to bring him in here and provoke him. I warn you, he’s in a mood.”
They tied Jake to a chair and left him, and the longer he sat there without food or the chance to visit the toilet, the ornerier he felt. By the time his bladder had reached its limit, it appeared to be near noon. Eventually he started yelling, “Let me loose, I have to pee!” The skinny one ambled in and started to put a neckerchief around his mouth. “Let me go to the toilet, mister.”
“Do any more yellin and I’ll tie them knots so tight your blood won’t move.”
Finally the little lawyer reappeared and they took off the gag. “He’s coming up. This is your chance. Tell him where he can find his money and we’ll cut you loose.”
“I need to go to the toilet.”
“Ain’t got time. He’s coming now.”
Ernest Dekker was hurriedly talking in the hall as he approached the room. “. . . You tell me. All I know is what’s in the telegram. Goddamn these fools!” The door burst open and he flew in as if he’d been shot out of a cannon. Fat Jack Peters was in the hall, but he caught sight of Jake and beat a retreat. Ernest came up close, his face red. He looked angry. “Jaycox, you know what I want.”
Jake looked him in the eye.
“You’re pitiful, hiring a whore to do your dirty work. Hiding behind her skirts.”
Jake stared at him for a minute. “If you’re referring to Samantha King, she ain’t a whore. She’s your half-sister.”
“I don’t want any bullshit from you!” Ernest thundered. “Don’t try to fiddle me around! I want to know where that money is. You’re a dead goddamn son of a worthless bitch unless you tell me. So is she.”
Jake looked at the lawyer and said, “Samantha King is Ralph Dekker’s natural daughter.”
The lawyer winced at this.
“Your father had an affair with a woman named Marguerite King, who lived in St. Louis. She had a child. That woman is your blood half-sister.”
The lawyer was still wincing, watching Ernest, who rolled his shoulders, showed his teeth, and assumed a false calm. For a moment he seemed to drift off into thoughts far away, then he turned his eyes down to Jake.
“Will you tell me where my money is?”
“I knew your father was going to St. Louis to borrow money, but I didn’t talk to him after he got home. I was in the territory and had no contact with him. I can get a hundred witnesses to tell you that. I was in Guthrie and Enid.”
“You did talk to him before he left?”
“Yes I did.”
“And you talked him into this little scheme.”
“I didn’t talk him into anything. Your father called me and told me what he was going to do.”
“What’s that?” Ernest’s voice could almost have been mistaken for calm.
“He wanted to pay off the debt, keep the store going.”
“And what else?”
“What else what?”
“What else did you plan besides paying off the debt?”
Jake was tempted to say “He planned to kick you out, Ernest,” but he knew that it would be asking for it. “I need to take a leak. Would you mind letting me go long enough to do that?”
“Listen to me. I’ve looked on every floor of the store, in every crack. I’ve taken apart his house. I’ve got a hundred and fifty thousand acres of land mortgages and land options and I’ve got to pay for twenty thousand more today, outright. You won’t stand in the way. I’m going to make this payment, and I’m going to make it on time. I’ve got a dozen people hanging by their fingertips. Bankers, investors, important people. And fifteen minutes ago I got a telegram saying that twenty-five hundred dollars that was supposed to be delivered to Muskogee was not delivered, and that the boy who was supposed to deliver it has been found dead, and the goddamn money is missing, and the man it was supposed to be delivered to is feeling very unfriendly toward me. That makes forty-two thousand five hundred goddamn dollars you’ve stolen from me.”
“Mr. Dekker, uh—” The lawyer tried to interrupt him.
“Do you understand me, Mr. Salesman? I am not in a mood to be fiddled around. I want you to tell me where that money is. If you don’t, I’ll get it out of that woman. I don’t care if she’s the lost sister of Jesus Christ.” Ernest put his face down close to Jake’s. “You were making deals with my father, you son of a bitch. Slippin around behind my back. And then you killed him, or had him killed.”
“I think we ought to stick to the subject, sir,” said the lawyer. Dekker looked at him with disdain, then back at Jake. “Our lawyer here thinks that you won’t tell me where the money is if I tell you that I know you killed my father. He thinks that’ll make you realize that you’re so far up shit’s creek that it’s no use talkin. I think, though, that we better get down to the nut cuttin. Either you or somebody hired by you did it.”
Jake was about to give up on his bladder. Even if they let him loose, he’d never make it down the hall.
“Now tell me where the money is, or the remainder of your life will be real unpleasant, Mr. Salesman.”
“Oops,” Jake said, cutting loose. “Now looky there, you scared the piss out of me.”
“Teach him some manners,” Dekker said, and was gone from the room.
27
TOM WATCHED the whitened landscape go by through a little barred window in the caboose. It was declining toward dusk, but with the blizzard passed, the air was warming.
Mr. Haskell’s friend who worked for the railroad had gotten Tom, Leonard LaFarge, and Mr. Haskell onto a freight train headed for Tahlequah. Starting out across the river, the lawyer filled Mr. Haskell in on a few of the details—the land scheme, the attempt to bribe a Muskogee judge—none of which surprised the old veteran much. They sat around a coal stove at the back of the caboose, Tom with the pistol that he scarcely knew how to shoot, Mr. Haskell with his bird-hunting shotgun, and LaFarge unarmed.
“Where’s your gun?” Mr. Haskell asked the lawyer.
“My tongue is my weapon, sir.”
“Paying these boys a social call, you ought to be carrying the difference.”
“In my case, the difference is here.” LaFarge tapped his head. “In the old brain box.”
Tom spoke over the clacking of the rails, his own voice sounding strange to him, as if it was someone else’s. “I know where Ralph Dekker’s money is.”
“You what?” LaFarge said. “For pity’s sake, Tom! Then we should have brought it!”
“It’s in the fireplace at the old man’s house. Burned up.”
LaFarge rubbed his stomach and stared. “Burned up? As in gone, evaporated? How do you know?”
“I went to his house. Stacks of hundred-dollar bills were put on burning logs. You can read the ashes.”
LaFarge stared at him. “Who’d burn up that kind of money? Are you sure?”
Tom shook his head.
“Anything else you haven’t mentioned? Do you know how this happened? I mean, since you know everything else.”
Tom looked out the little window again. That was all he wanted to say. “The money’s burned. They can see it for themselves. I don’t know how it happened.”
Gazing across the snow-covered land, Tom thought about Sam. Sam had been on his mind without cease from the first minute he met her, a steady, burning presence—she who had made herself an orphan, who had drifted and then taken her fate into her hands.
They were passing rows of squatters’ shacks and dugouts near the rail line. In places along the blackened rails the snow had melted, and at one point a single young child sat playing on an ash and coke pile, staring at the train as it roared by not twenty feet away. Tom wondered about the boys at Bokchito—whether the mission would send another principal, or whether they’d let the academy fall into the dust, where it belonged.
“Tom!”
He looked at the lawyer. He hadn’t been listening.
“That’s all you know?”
He nodded.
A brakeman was riding with them in the caboose, at the moment lying asleep on a bench, and Tom realized that this was the first time a train hadn’t made him sleepy. As they slowed, the brakeman woke up as quickly as a cat and without even glancing out said, “Okay boys, you got Park Hill coming around the bend. You goin huntin?”
“Might say that,” LaFarge said.
“Watch out about gettin too close to the old seminary,” the brakeman warned. “Can’t tell what might be goin on u
p there.”
“Why?”
“Some of the Indins in Tahlequah still use that place now and again for their little what you might call whoopie camp, if you know what I mean. There ain’t no regular passenger service to Park Hill, so the boys down at the station make arrangements, just like you done, gettin rides for girls. Some of em come out of the Paris Hotel, they say. I wouldn’t know about that. But I do know I have done rode this glory wagon with twenty of em packed in here tight as a tin of sardines.”
“That must be very painful for a Christian man,” LaFarge said.
“I tell you what. Cause even a old Christian man to get red in the comb.”
“So certain Cherokee politicians keep the old seminary building as an out-of-town whorehouse.”
“Well, it ain’t no church-meetin place and ain’t no stomp dance. This here’s hard drinkin and plain foolishness.”
The three of them got off in slush, a hundred yards from what looked like an abandoned station, and walked toward it as the train pulled on. They crept inside the old station, which currently was being used as a chicken house. The chickens were roosting. From the station they could see, over a hill, the tops of a couple of multistoried rock buildings, one of which appeared to be burned out.
Mr. Haskell looked out the window at the back of the station. “Smoke’s coming from the chimneys. I guess we’re in the right place.”
LaFarge got out his bottle of Dr. Poole’s Stomach Relief and drank it slowly, making faces between nips. “Park Hill,” he said. “The Cherokee Female Seminary. Isn’t this where they put out the Cherokee newspaper?”
“Yep,” said Mr. Haskell, finding a place not covered by chicken droppings to sit on. “Printed in Cherokee.”
In Cherokee? Tom wondered to himself. You could print in Cherokee?
LaFarge held up his bottle to see what was left. He took a final couple of nips, screwed on the top, and set the medicine bottle down carefully.
“So you think they’re here doing bidness with Cherokee politicians?” Mr. Haskell asked.
LaFarge looked vague. “They’re doing something nefarious. I don’t know what. And they’re doing it outside Judge Parker’s jurisdiction.”