The Whipping Boy

by Speer Morgan

  From against the back wall, he heard something from an upstairs window that sounded familiar, a snapping followed immediately by muffled expulsions. He realized what it was, and his fear walked out of him. He opened the back door and went through a big indoor kitchen into a hallway. In the hallway he saw stairs and went for them. Men were visible through two doorways in a room, where most of them were at the front, looking through windows. When he was halfway up the stairs, Peters, the large salesman, appeared above him on the landing.

  Peters looked down at him with alarm. “What are you doing here?”

  Tom aimed the shotgun at him. “Go back up and don’t talk.”

  “What are you doing? You can’t come up here.”

  Tom cocked one of the hammers on the gun.

  “God—” Peters raised his hand and waved it at him as if to say no, erase that word, I didn’t say it. Tom herded him down the hall, with him still waving his hand, walking backwards.

  “Go in there,” Tom said, waving his gun at a door.

  “Look, I can’t—”

  Tom gave him a look that encouraged him to do as he was told. Peters twisted the knob and backed, stumbling, into a barely lit room where he rammed against a man sitting in a chair.

  “Wha?” Peters yelled, jumping away from him. “Goddamn!”

  It was Jake, with his head bloodied and one of his eyes swollen up. Tom got out the pocketknife that Jake had given him and sawed him loose.

  “Sorry, Tom. They tied me up until I had to pee on myself.”

  “Don’t worry.” Tom picked him up gently and carried him over and set him on a bed.

  “Hell, Jake! What’s been going on up here?” Peters said with fake-sounding concern.

  Tom took a step closer to him and said, “Sit down in that chair.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with this. I’ve just been doing what they tell me.”

  “Sit down and be quiet. Don’t talk, and don’t move.” Tom sounded dangerously patient, and the fat salesman sank into the chair.

  “Where is she?” Tom asked Jake.

  “Other room. I don’t know which one, Tom. The Deacon took her. I don’t think you should—”

  Tom went back to the open door and from there heard steps hurrying around downstairs. He kept an eye on the staircase and walked down the hall, as quietly as possible opening doors. He looked at the crack below for light. None. He checked another—dark again.

  He was at the end of the hall, crouched over, when a door exploded open. There was the black-clad Deacon, holding Sam against him, with a handkerchief tight around her mouth, stripped to the waist and with red cuts all over her neck, her shoulders, her breasts. The barrel of the Deacon’s pistol tried to find Tom. Having no clear shot, Tom dived to the other side of the hall. Two shots went off, missing him, and at that moment Leonard LaFarge appeared at the top of the stairs and thundered, “Sir! It’s over! Stop!” and the Deacon turned and shot him. LaFarge fell to one knee, and Sam flopped like a sack of potatoes to the floor in front of the Deacon. Tom raised the shotgun, pulled a trigger, and nothing happened. The Deacon was swinging back to him, and Tom reached the other trigger and the shotgun bucked so hard that it almost flew out of his hand and the Deacon was lifted up and thrown backwards down the hall. He started squirming toward the pistol that he’d dropped, and Tom cocked the other barrel and walked over to him. The Deacon fell over on his side and rolled onto his back, and Tom put the shotgun right above his eyes, which vibrated as the light went out of them.

  LaFarge remained on one knee on the landing, and Tom went over to him and helped him up. Tom carried him into the room Jake was in. Peters was still sitting there.

  “What did you run into, Jake?” LaFarge asked. “You don’t look well.”

  Jake was sitting on the edge of the bed. “You don’t exactly look like the queen of England yourself. Where’d he get you?”

  “Left shoulder. Tom, there are six men downstairs. Some of them will use guns.”

  Tom went back out into the hall and put Sam’s shirt over her. She had been severely whipped. She looked up at him and smiled, and she said in a confused, longing voice, “Tom . . .” Blood immediately came through the blouse that he laid on her, and Tom was staring at it when someone called nervously up the stairs, “Deacon! Come down here! Deacon! Boss wants to see you!” It was McMurphy, somewhere downstairs, and he sounded afraid.

  Tom heard Ernest Dekker whispering, urging him, “Tell him to come down now, goddamnit. What’s going on up there?”

  Tom had always been physically strong, but his strength had sometimes been obscured by his clumsiness. It did not seem hard now for him to pick up the carcass of Deacon Miller and send it downstairs. He did not think about whether he could do it. He just did it—and the Deacon did not touch the three-and-a-half-foot railing. No part of him touched it. It was as if he flew or was shot out a cannon, into the high common hall, past the dangling rope where a chandelier used to hang, down the fifteen or twenty feet where he made an ugly sound hitting the floor below. Someone—McMurphy, he thought—screamed in unabashed terror. Doors downstairs were opening and slamming, and men were running across the floor.

  Without any hesitation, Tom picked up Miller’s pistol and held it out to Jake. Jake took it, and Tom then descended the stairs. “Wait a minute, Tom!”

  Jake went after him. On the one landing below, Tom turned and said to him plainly, “Stay upstairs.”

  Jake followed him nevertheless, holding tight to the railing. McMurphy was standing in the hallway with a rifle, but he didn’t so much as raise it. Instead, he turned and joined the men who were making an unceremonious exit out the front door, who included Loop, the secretary, Pete Crapo and Marvin Beele, salesmen, and the two city-dressed men Jake had heard talking in the hall. The sight of the flying corpse of Deacon Miller had knocked off all their feathers, and they were scattering.

  Ernest Dekker didn’t run. If his expression was any clue, he was frozen with terror. He had a burning cigarette in the black ivory holder in one hand and a pistol in the other. Tom hadn’t raised the shotgun, but he reached the bottom of the stairs and walked straight toward Dekker, not caring at the moment whether he lived or died. Tom stopped five feet from Dekker. Jake dragged up beside him.

  “What happened to Joel Mayes?” Tom asked.

  “What?” Dekker looked stunned.

  Dekker’s right hand twitched, and Jake said, “Don’t raise that pistol, Ernest. You can’t get both of us.”

  “What happened to Joel?” Tom repeated.

  “Who’s that?” Dekker said, sticking the cigarette holder between his teeth.

  “He worked for you.”

  “I had nothing to do with that.”

  Tom took a step and tore the cigarette holder out of Dekker’s mouth with such viciousness that a large chip of one of his front teeth popped out with it. “You had nothing to do with what?” Tom said furiously.

  Dekker’s eyes got very wide. He put up a hand in front of his mouth. “I didn’t tell him to do it. That woman was askin the boy questions about my bidness! The boy gave out private information! I’m tellin the truth. I didn’t tell him to do it.”

  Tom slowly raised the shotgun and aimed it at Dekker’s watch chain. Dekker’s revolver clattered to the floor, and Tom heard a faint hiss.

  “He killed him. He did it.” Dekker pointed across the room at Miller’s corpse.

  “Darn it, Ernest,” Jake said, smiling grimly, “look what you did to your britches.”

  28

  JAKE HAD a couple of knots on his head, a lot of bruises, and two shiners that made him look like a raccoon. He had a “concussive swelling,” which for a few days caused him to have blackout spells. But soon he emerged from the fog, nourished by Mrs. P’s chicken soup. Jake had the impression that Leonard had been running around busy while he was recovering. Tom had stayed nearby, and they’d already talked a little about what had happened. Jake noticed that he wasn’t here this mor
ning.

  “You among the living, old man?” Leonard asked, sitting beside his bed and looking him over with a gaze so gentle and considerate that it almost worried Jake. Leonard was wearing one arm in a sling, and he had a pocketful of newspapers. Being sober seemed to cause Leonard to get down to the details faster. “Do you want to talk about this? You already know most of it.”

  Jake didn’t like Leonard’s emphasis on “most.”

  “Feeling well enough?”

  “Yeah,” Jake said warily. “Unless you know something I don’t. Where’s Tom?”

  “You were a little amnesic for a few days, but there’s no harm in that. I’ve been amnesic for several years at a time and look at me now.”

  “You risked your hide for Tom, didn’t you?”

  Leonard shook his head as if to discount it. “I don’t know whether you heard, but they’re finally bringing Mr. Haskell’s body here tomorrow. Mr. Potts says he wants him buried close to the spot where he’s going to be buried, so he can keep an eye on him.” With his little squint, he said, “There are a couple of things we need to discuss.” He handed Jake a newspaper article.

  Reading it, Jake had a moment of dizziness. “What is this?” The article was about the murder of the principal of Armstrong Academy.

  Leonard told Jake the story of the money that had been destined for Federal Judge John Crilley. “The packet didn’t get delivered, and it seems that a little visiting committee went down to the Armstrong Academy to repay this man for his kindnesses in the past.”

  Jake laid down the newspaper. “Tom?”

  Leonard combed his hair with his fingers. “I haven’t questioned him in detail, but he had something to do with it. The long and short of it is that if all of this starts untangling, I’m not sure Tom ought to be around here. There’s another problem, too. Word’s already spreading that Tom is the man who finally broke Deacon Miller’s medicine.”

  “So?”

  “If Tom stays in this neck of the woods, he’ll be dragging a pretty big deed behind him. People are calling him a gunfighter.”

  “Oh, bull shit,” Jake said disgustedly. “Do you listen to that kind of crap?”

  “Tom’s the one who has to listen to it, not me. He’s already had to listen to it. Three or four pimply boys have been hanging around in the street trying to catch glimpses of him.”

  “He was with that kid Hack in order to find out about Mr. Dekker. This is my fault for sending that goddamn telegram.”

  Leonard shook his head. “I don’t think you had that much to do with it. I went to the Paris Hotel and asked some questions. That place has more morphine addicts and happy-dusters and drinkers of Dr. Thompson’s Eye Cure than Butte, Montana. The word there was that this kid Hack was a case.”

  “Cut that finer,” Jake growled.

  “He was a young man with a desperate purpose. Maybe he’d been bullied into the relationship, it’s hard to say, but he was living with the Deacon, learning how to swagger, talking a lot about revenge. He seemed to have decided to apprentice himself to the trade.”

  Jake was incredulous. “Gunplay?” The idea of a literate young man choosing the low life was beyond him.

  Leonard glanced down at the newspaper. “This Reverend Schoot apparently made Christian soldiers of his orphaned savages by whipping them daily. I suppose that could either break you or do a lot to the willpower. Maybe Hack thought he needed to attach himself to somebody who was meaner and bigger and more cold-blooded than the Reverend. I don’t know.”

  Jake threw back the cover on his bed angrily, knocking the newspaper onto the floor. “The bastard got what he deserved.” Leonard looked worriedly at him. “Do you realize that you are cursing a lot? Is it the head wound—?”

  “Get to the point.”

  “The point is that I think that Tom was involved in this.” He picked up the newspaper and folded it with his one good hand. “He almost wants to talk about it. Which is another reason why I think he shouldn’t stay around here.”

  “Where is Tom?” Jake started to get up, but a spell of dizziness hit him.

  Leonard held out a hand as if to steady him. “Calm down, Jake. Schoot was killed where he lives, at night. You don’t kill teachers or preachers, and he was both. He worked for the Presbyterians for almost twenty years. He was sleeping in his own bed. Tom’s a half-breed with no family and no pull in the tribe.”

  Jake’s face flushed with anger.

  Leonard got up and walked over to the window. “I can see I shouldn’t have brought this up, but now that I have, let me finish. I’m working my way to the touchy part.”

  Jake felt another gorge of anger rising. “What touchy part?”

  “The undelivered bribe that Tom brought back. We handed it over to Judge Parker.”

  Jake blinked at him.

  “You were out of commission. We had to decide what to do. We ended up in Tahlequah the other night—do you remember? You got out of the buggy and fell down in the mud, so you probably don’t, but it took every trick this old scoundrel could muster to get the lighthorse to put Ernest in the hoosegow, even though he was a babbling wreck by the time we got there.”

  “I remember some of it. Where is he now?”

  “He’s in jail here. Parker brought him over, but he wouldn’t have if Tom and I hadn’t given him that delivery packet. Over two thousand dollars in cash and a letter in Ernest’s hand bribing a federal judge was a pretty good something to show him. Ernest just might end up being Parker’s last case, Jake.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Parker’s sick. I didn’t notice it the first time, but he’s got that look in his eye.”

  Jake’s brain was working better now, and he didn’t like the conclusions he was reaching. “Tom’s in trouble. That what you’re telling me?”

  “This thing could play out a lot of different ways when all the guilty parties start pointing their fingers at everybody else. But Tom wanted to turn over the packet. Day before yesterday, he dumped the money and the letter onto Parker’s desk himself. Parker read it. You should have seen him when he read that letter. I thought his white hair would catch on fire.”

  “What’d it say?” Jake asked flatly.

  “There was a case before Crilley which tested the right of a white holder of improvements on Indian land to alienate mineral rights. That’s what it came down to.”

  “You mean sell the right to drill for oil?”

  Leonard nodded.

  “To who?”

  “To an oil company headquartered in Pennsylvania. The ‘contribution’ to Crilley was for him to come to a favorable decision on that and to remain generally friendly toward Ernest Dekker, and it said so in the letter. It was Tuesday noon when we went to see Parker. That afternoon Dr. Eldon of St. John’s Hospital sent over his report describing the upper torso of Miss Samantha King: ‘Severely and mercilessly beaten by a cutting whip,’ it read. That did it. You’d have thought that report was being read by half of the town before it was even in Parker’s hands. All the gophers started running for their holes.”

  “What do you mean?” Jake grumbled.

  “Before closing time Tuesday, they started trying to cut their losses at the bank. Chief Teller Bradley was fired by Chairman Shelby White. Yesterday, White put on a great show of outrage in the newspaper. He said that he ‘suspected’ the teller to be engaged in a ‘highly speculative scheme that endangered the assets of the bank.’ And today—” Leonard brought another newspaper out of his pocket and held it up.

  WHITE RESIGNS BRADLEY ACCUSES HIM OF BEING IN CHARGE OTHER LOCAL MEN INVOLVED IN LAND SCHEME DAWES COMMISSION LAWYERS MAY BE IMPLICATED

  Leonard grinned. “All over town they’ve got out the soap. I’ve never seen so much hand-washing at one time among the better class of people.”

  Jake again hazarded to stand up, and it took a minute to get his sea legs. He started to dress. “Where’s Tom now?”

  “Probably back to visit Miss King again. He’s b
een watching over both of you. That’s the other thing I wanted to talk to you about. Something’s going on between Tom and that woman.”

  Jake felt like a hog on ice. His head would only turn slightly, and his right arm didn’t want to raise more than shoulder-high. He looked at himself in his glass and decided that with two black eyes, at least he’d better shave.

  “He’s gone to visit her several times,” Leonard went on. “He comes back here every time looking as if he had the measles.”

  “He’s in love. Haven’t you ever seen that?” Jake stropped his razor on the belt hanging down from the cabinet. He used the bowl of water already there to make up a handful of soap.

  Leonard fell into a meditation while Jake wielded his razor. After a while he said, “Do you still believe that Ernest or one of his shooters killed old man Dekker?”

  Jake shaved his throat, not answering.

  “You know, I have a feeling that may be one of the things on Tom’s mind.”

  Jake looked at him in the mirror.

  Leonard shook his head. “It doesn’t quite make sense. Forty thousand dollars or thereabouts gets burned in his fireplace downstairs, but he dies in his bedroom upstairs in a way that either was—or was made to look like—suicide.”

  “Burned in his fireplace?” Jake squinted at him through the glass.

  “That’s right. Tom found the ashes when we were still running around over here worrying about what to do about you. He told Haskell and me on the way to Park Hill. I went over and looked yesterday. He was right.”

  Jake continued staring into the mirror for a minute, thinking about Sam’s description of going to see Ralph and getting thrown out. She’d said that she had no idea where the money was. “So who did it?”

  “I’ll answer your question with another question,” Leonard said. “Can you imagine old Ralph burning his life savings?”