by Lou Cameron
Stringer pointed at the nearby player piano to ask, “Has it occurred to you that I found Tiger Twain drinking here and that Indian agent was gunned right there by a growly cuss who must drink here often enough to have pals who covered up for him?”
Tilghman nodded and said, “It has. Tiger Twain was up on that hill destroying oil wells at the time of the killing. He talks more Ohio Valley than Texas as well. As to the killer being a regular whose pals covered up for him, that need not be the answer. Davis drank here regular. The cuss who gunned him needn’t have. Clay Allison used to gun gents in saloons regular and just walk away, leaving no witnesses who wanted to testify against him. He wasn’t popular. He just scared the wits out of calmer gents. It takes guts as well as a good reason to face a killer in court and point him out as a man worth hanging. There’s always the chance that he’ll get off and, even if he don’t get off, he might have friends just as mean. The death of Davis has all the earmarks of a paid assassination. The discussion of his musical tastes being just the excuse some such bastards seem to feel they need. Had the killer been just a nasty drunk, the boys might not have felt so shy about discussing him. In any event, Tiger Twain don’t work as the one who gunned Davis, and if he was after you he ain’t no more. So what are we arguing about?”
Stringer insisted, “Before I was so rudely interrupted, I had plans to beat some answers out of him. I know he wasn’t the one who tried to kill me the first night I got here, and the late Jack Holt has a pretty good alibi for what happened out on the range today. If Tiger didn’t gun Davis that means there’s a gang of them and, damn it, we could still catch up with the one we know of at the depot!”
Tilghman shook his head and said, “He’d deny it, whether you’re right or wrong, and beating confessions out of a man ain’t my style. It’s been my experience that if you pain most anyone enough, they’ll confess most anything. I’ve always considered the Salem Witch Trials mighty poor criminal investigation. I likes to have some solid evidence afore I haul an old lady afore a judge and jury on the charge of riding on broomsticks. It’s easier to run such pests out of town.”
Stringer had calmed down enough by now to grin sheepishly and say, “You know, I once wrote an exposé on a sheriff who used brutal methods. But how many arrests do you get to make as such a gentle cuss, Bill?”
Tilghman shrugged and said, “Not many. Like I said, I consider myself a peace officer, with the sworn duty to keep the peace. I ain’t out to get famous as a town tamer. That’s likely why I never gunned my own deputy by mistake, the way old Bill Hickok did that time.”
He sipped some more beer before he added, modestly, “I’ve never been one for gunning drunk and disorderly cow hands. I done what I had to when Judge Parker ordered me, old Chris Madsen and Heck Thomas to clean up the Cherokee Strip. In the end, we brung in over three hundred killers and Judge Parker had to sentence about half of ’em to hang, of which only eighty-eight really got to do the rope dance, the higher courts being even more gentle than we was. Some of the old boys we brung in are still with us, considerably reformed. There’s nothing like a few nights staring out through the bars at the gallows to reform a wayward youth.”
He finished his beer, put the empty glass firmly down, and added, “Don’t make me have to calm you down that way, old son. Sometimes, when they say they’re going to hang you, they really do it. It ain’t a dignified way for a man to die, even if they get it right and snap your neck the first time they drop you.”
Stringer grimaced and said, “I’ve covered a few public hangings. I’ll try to be careful about going after the wrong man and, if I mess up, maybe you’ll be kind enough to just shoot me, Bill.”
Tilghman shook his head morosely and said, “I don’t consider that professional. I pride myself on bringing my killers in alive. So just don’t kill nobody unless you’re damned sure you can prove self-defense and we’ll say no more about it.”
An hour later even Stringer felt he might have been hasty in accusing Tiger Twain, albeit he was damned if he could see who else it might have been. Bluefeather hadn’t known he was on his way out until he’d gotten there. There were no telephone lines following the wagon trace out to the Rocking Tipi, even if the friendly Osage had something to hide. The hands at the livery had known where he was going, but they hadn’t seemed to mind until he came back without their livery mount or saddle. Nobody else had known where he was going, save for old Bull Durham, and he made less sense as a suspect than Walter Bluefeather. In either case, he hadn’t found out anything either man could possibly want him not to know. So it kept boiling down to Tiger, but, yeah, it could have been just a killing grudge on the part of a man who’d proven he could be reckless as well as nasty. So there was a good chance Tiger had been acting on his own and, if so, it was over.
He was headed for his hotel, meaning to ask Irene if there was any way to trace telephone calls between the pay phones near the depot to, say, an office or private home Jack Holt might have checked with just before that shoot-out, when he became aware of two other gents walking in step with him on either side. He’d put his .38 back on before leaving the Pronghorn, of course, but after his talk with the law he thought it best to just ask politely if there was anything he could do for them. The one on his left, who looked like a full-blood dressed like an undertaker, smiled pleasantly and said, “The lady we work for would like a word with you, MacKail.”
Stringer said, “Well, I just love to talk to ladies. But does she have a name, ah, Chief?”
The Indian in the frock coat scowled and warned, “Easy on that chief shit. You can call me Hank if you have to call me anything. We’ll be swinging left at the next cross street. If the lady wants to tell you her name she will. If she decides she likes you, you may live. So keep your hands polite for now and talk nice to her when we get there, hear?”
Stringer assured them he’d been raised to be polite to ladies and as soon as they turned off Main Street the one on his right helped himself to Stringer’s six-gun, observing, “Nice sidearm. Double action, and I see you had the grips reshaped to your fancy when they filed the front sight down for you. I’m a .44 man, myself. Do you find a .38 has all the stopping power you might need?”
Stringer explained, “If you aim right they do. A cannon ball won’t do the job if you aim wrong.”
The friendly son of a bitch who’d disarmed him chuckled and said, “I reckon that rascal you gunned in the depot the other night would agree.”
Then the Indian on the other side of Stringer said, “We want to go up them stairs now.”
Stringer wanted to mount the flight of steps running up the side wall of that two story frame whatever about as much as he wanted to mount the gallows Bill Tilghman had been warning him about, earlier. But as many a man before him had no doubt discovered, there were times one seemed to have no choice. So they just went on up. The Indian opened the door and shoved Stringer inside, calling out, “We got him, Cousin.”
A she-male voice trilled sweetly, “In here, Cousin Henry.” So they entered a well-appointed sitting room where a very pretty, if somewhat pleasantly plump, young gal was seated on a maroon plush sofa behind a silver tea service aboard a low slung rosewood table. Considering she’d just called a full-blooded Indian her cousin, she seemed mighty palefaced. Her hair was light, henna tinted, and the roots weren’t any darker than her peaches and cream complexion called for. She patted the sofa beside her ample hips and said, “Sit right down beside me, Stringer MacKail. We’re going to have us some tea whilst we talk. I’m Pearl Starr. You’ve heard of me, or at least my famous momma, of course?”
Stringer said he surely had as he did as she asked, wishing she used less perfume. The odors of violets and Darjeeling tea, while both expensive, just didn’t go too well with one another.
As she poured with her pinky raised in a refined manner, the two gunslingers who’d fetched him started to leave. Pearl Starr told the one who’d disarmed him to leave the .38 on the sideboard across the
room. The Indian frowned and asked, “Are you sure, Cousin Pearl?” and she smiled sweetly and said, “Do it,” in a no-nonsense tone. So they did it, and left her alone with Stringer. He was too polite, and too smart, to ask if the one she called Cousin Henry could possibly be Henry Starr, the nephew of the late Sam Starr, wanted for everything but the common cold. She asked if he liked cream and sugar with his tea. He said he liked his tea and coffee neat. She dropped four lumps of sugar in her own cup and leaned back with it, saying, “Now let’s chat. I know your rep, Stringer. They say you never write fibs about anyone. What were you planning to write about me and mine?”
He sipped some tea and told her, “I hadn’t thought much about it until just now, Miss Pearl. The San Francisco Sun only buys news that’s fit to print.”
She dimpled at him and said, “Naughty, naughty. I’ll allow I have some whores working for me, as my sweet mamma had before me. But neither of us have ever whored, personal. I’d just like to get my hands on that mean writer who writ my poor old momma sold her body as well as moonshine and livestock at the old homestead down at Younger’s Bend. I’d just scratch his eyes out, and I want you to know that none of the gals here in Tulsa with us are real whores, neither. So don’t you go calling them that, hear?”
He smiled down into his cup and said, “I never intended to. Some of our readers are easy to shock, and such doings in a far away town are of little interest in Frisco to begin with. We have plenty of wicked ladies of our own if we wanted to run a scandal sheet. But since you were the one who brought it up, I do have a couple of questions you might care to answer.”
She said, “Swell, I just love to get interviewed, if only you boys wouldn’t twist everything I say. My momma never gave one interview to nobody and they still keep calling her a bandit queen. Have you any notion how that got started, Stringer?”
He knew exactly how the legend had begun. But he didn’t think she’d want to hear about the free-lancer who’d been getting a haircut in Fort Smith when a townee drifted in to report someone had shot crazy old Belle Starr at last, or that when the newspaper man had asked who they were talking about and been told it was an old trash-white gal shacked up with an Indian in the peckerwoods, period, the hungry newspaperman had invented Belle Starr, the beautiful bandit queen, on the way to the telegraph office to ask for space rates. You got paid that way according to how much newspaper space you could manage to fill up. So the first inkling the outside world had of Belle Starr nee Shirley had been a humdinger. But of course a lot of other hacks had come up with more details ever since. Stringer could see the poor old hag’s now-grown daughter liked the legend better than reality. So he just said, “Well, they did dig up some records of her having appeared in court a few times for various misdeeds. Nobody ever proved your stepfather, Sam Starr, was much more than a carefree Cherokee given to bending the rules a mite.”
Pearl Starr nodded and said, “That’s what I keep trying to tell folk. I’ve never robbed a train, neither. You say you have some other questions to ask?”
He nodded and said, “We both know how marrying an Indian for fun and adventure with oil leases works. I know an Osage who told me he’d made such a marriage of convenience with a white gal. Not trying to judge the rights or wrongs of such a deal, I was wondering if any of the ladies you’ve been dealing with might be calling herself Mrs. Walter Bluefeather at the moment.”
The young madam reached for a little black book on the nearby lamp table, cracked it open, and scanned through it as she read off, half to herself, “Let’s see, now. There’s Mrs. Rogers, Moody, Scraper, Duck, all married to Cherokee. Then there’s the ones married to Creek gents answering to Patsalinga, Pasgaloosa, Shawmut and Oswasa. Creek like to stick to original Muskogee names, not having as much white blood. I don’t see anyone married off Osage. Are you saying someone else is in the same business as us? That might account for it, and they say them Osage have a lot of oil under their range, too!”
He said, “I’m sure more than one lawyer working with the wildcatters knows a gal or more he can call on to marry a rich Indian in name only. You work with a lawyer, don’t you?”
She looked away and asked if he thought it looked like rain outside. He didn’t press it, since he knew the answer in any case. He said, “I can see why your gals find it so easy to fall in love with gents of the Creek persuasion. Most of Tulsa lies above Creek claims.” To which she answered, primly, “In name only, as you said. I don’t know much about Osage but the Cherokee are almost white and you know what they say the Creek are, don’t you?”
He nodded but said, “The Creek I’ve seen here in Tulsa look no more colored than any other breed or full blood, Miss Pearl.”
She shrugged and said, “Don’t never say that to Cousin Henry. He likes to brag that Chief John Ross was almost a Scotchman.”
He smiled thinly and said, “I wonder what Chief Mackintosh of the Creek might have been. I thought it was the Seminole who took in runaway slaves the most in the old days.”
She shrugged and said, “Them, too. They all talk Muskogee so they’re all the same to me and I’ll have you know my daddy Cole Younger, rode for the South. My mamma’s daddy was a judge from the South as well.”
He didn’t argue. He could see that her father had been white, whoever he might have been, and it was poor old Cole Younger, not him, who kept threatening libel suits about that particular detail of the legend of Belle Starr. Pearl Starr’s family tree was of no concern to him or his readers. So he just nodded and said, “The important point is that since none of your gals married any Osage or half the Creek and Cherokee dealing with the oil trust, there could be any number of folk in the business of sponsoring Indian in-laws and to tell the truth that might not be it.”
She asked what might be what and he explained the troubles he’d been having since he got to Tulsa. As a born plotter, she decided, after some thought, that Bill Tilghman could be right. She said, “You got the one you know was after you for a fact, and the one who might have just been sore at you has been run out of town.”
He asked, “Then why did someone murder an Indian agent just after I’d been asking questions at the BIA?” to which she answered with a knowing smile, “Hell, nobody likes Indian agents! Didn’t they run me and my poor mamma’s other white kids off our dear old homestead in the Indian Nation once our last Indian step-daddy lit out? The BIA is always messing in things that’s none of its durned business. That agent they shot could have been up to most anything mean. Have any such agents you know personal been gunned?”
He sighed and said, “You may have a point. I don’t want any more tea, Miss Pearl. Was there anything else you wanted to talk to me about?”
She said, “Not about what you’re up to in Tulsa, as long as you don’t intend to write mean things about me and my girls. But would you like to earn a thousand dollars? That’s my long standing offer to any man who can tell me who shot my mamma in the back that time, and they do say you’re good at digging up such facts.”
He stared at her incredulously and replied, “I’d have to be to solve your mother’s murder at this late date! No offense, but wasn’t she shot a dozen or more years back, and didn’t a lot of folk agree at the time that she’d likely been shot by a jealous Cherokee whose name escapes me at the moment?”
She nodded and said, “Blue Duck was his name. He swore to us that he never shot mamma, and the law couldn’t pin it on him, neither. A dark mysterious stranger had been seen lurking about just afore momma was found dying on the wagon trace. He was a white man. So what was he doing in the Strip in the first place and where did he go, afterwards?”
Stringer replied that he just couldn’t say. So Pearl Starr said, “Momma’s last words, as she lay dying, were something like, „Whoever would have thought it.’ I’ve always figured she meant she was surprised at who’d killed her. That lets Blue Duck off. He was mean as hell. Wasn’t there a dark mysterious stranger killing lots of women in London about the same time?”
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br /> Stringer managed not to laugh as he replied, “Jack The Ripper murdering Belle Starr would be a headline indeed, coast to coast.” He was too polite to add that only the choice of victims on opposite sides of the ocean made it remotely possible. He said, “I’ll study on your offer, Miss Pearl. But I can’t promise anything at this late date.”
She nodded and said, “Good. It’s been nice talking to you, then. You’ll want to reload your gun before you put it back in its holster.”
He rose uncertainly, and stepped over to the sideboard to pick up his .38. He checked and, sure enough, they’d removed every round in the cylinder before leaving it there so temptingly. He grinned down at her and said, “You were testing me, I see.”
She coyly hauled up her skirts, allowing him to see the whore-pistol strapped to one shapely calf, as she giggled and said, “A girl can’t be too careful. But I reckon I can trust you. Do you trust me?”
He assured her he did as he hastily reloaded with fresh rounds from his cartridge loops and let himself out. He trusted her about as far as he could trust any other habitual criminal. But that would have been neither polite nor wise to say.
He saw nothing of the two men who’d grabbed him off the street to interview the sassy young madam, so he made for the exit to the outside steps while the going still seemed to be good. The space between his shoulder blades tingled all the way down the stairs and he didn’t feel halfway safe until he was back on Main Street. After that he just got to wonder what that had really been all about. Pearl Starr hadn’t told him a thing that didn’t seem to be common knowledge and he’d be switched if he could think of a thing he’d told her that could be any use to crooks. He decided to take the odd conversation at face value for now. For, if anyone connected with her gang was after him he’d been treated mighty gentle just now. Two grown men, one a known killer, had had the drop on him and only invited him to tea. If she’d put anything but tea in his cup he’d know it any minute, now. So far, he felt just swell.