Hell's Half Acre

by William W. Johnstone

  The woman frowned. “It’s not what happened, it’s what’s happening. Tom Mulvane is beating up on his old lady again. I swear he’s gonna kill her this time.”

  “Are you a neighbor?” Jess said.

  “Yes, I am.” The woman grabbed Jess’s arm and pulled. “For God’s sake, let’s go. Hurry.”

  The woman led the way to a dilapidated tenement on 13th Street, a timber building that leaned badly to its right, as though the entire structure was drunk and ready to fall over at any moment. A knot of shawled women stood huddled together at the entrance to the common hallway that led to the stairwells.

  “Are they still at it?” Jess’s guide said.

  “Oh, aye, Maggie,” said a plump woman with a Scottish accent. “He’ll do for her this time for certain. Poor wee lassie. Is that a constable you have there?”

  “He’s the sheriff,” the thin woman said. She turned to Jess. “Annie Mulvane’s place is on the third floor.”

  “Ye’ll hear them before ye see them, I’ll be bound,” the Scottish woman said.

  * * *

  Tired as he was, Jess took the rickety stairs two at a time. A rat squealed and scurried out from under his foot and he almost tripped and fell. Above him on the next floor he heard a man shout and a moment later a woman shrieked. Jess reached the door, thought about knocking politely, but decided instead to force it open. The sickly stink of the squalid dwelling hit him like a fist, the loathsome stench of poverty.

  A man in a collarless shirt held a woman against the kitchen wall and his fist was cocked back, ready to land another blow. The woman, who might have been pretty once, already had one eye swollen shut and a trickle of blood ran from her mouth.

  Totally oblivious to Jess, the man said, “Where did you hide my damned money?”

  “There is no money, Tom,” the woman said. “I already told you.”

  The man pressed his forearm into the woman’s throat. “Give me my money, Annie, or I’ll kill you, by God,” he said.

  “You!” Jess yelled. “Get away from that woman!”

  The man swung on him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “The law,” Jess said. “And you’re under arrest.”

  Tom Mulvane’s voice took on a whine. “She hid my money. I need it for whiskey.”

  Annie pushed herself off the wall. She flung open every cupboard in the kitchen, then she cried, “Look! There is no money! And there’s no food! You’ve drunk away all our money, every last cent.”

  Mulvane lunged for his wife but Jess stepped between them. “You’re coming with me, Mulvane,” he said. “You can sleep it off in a cell.”

  “Damn you,” the man said. “I need whiskey. I need it bad.”

  Jess grabbed Mulvane’s arm, but the man wrenched away and threw a straight left at Jess’s chin. But Jess had anticipated and he moved to his right, drew his Colt and slammed it into Mulvane’s head. Half drunk, the man fell without even a whimper.

  “I’m getting real good at that,” Jess said, his voice flat.

  “What?” Annie Mulvane said. She had beautiful brown eyes, startling in her bruised, hardship-ravaged face.

  “Nothing,” Jess said. He picked up Mulvane by the back of his shirt. This time the man groaned and a long string of saliva hung from his bottom lip. “How can you live with a man who treats you like this?” Jess said.

  Annie said, “Well, he’s a very good dancer.”

  “Maybe it’s time you changed partners, lady,” Jess said.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Jess Casey released his prisoner the next morning after Tom Mulvane promised to abstain from demon drink and stop beating his wife. Promises easily made are easily broken and Jess didn’t expect much, especially since Mulvane’s wife was waiting for him at the sheriff’s office door and the two walked along the boardwalk hand in hand.

  For the next few days Jess was involved in routine police work.

  A four-hundred-pound matron caught her equally obese husband in bed with their slim young maid. Irritated, the wife cut loose with a pepperpot revolver and pumped five .22 shorts into her cheating spouse. The man’s fat slowed the little bullets some, but Dr. Sun had to pry them out of belly blubber with forceps, the fat man bellowing the whole time.

  Two whores got into it at Jessie Reeve’s Female Boarding House on 11th Street and one was cut up some. The assailant was fined ten dollars and warned to behave herself or she’d spend the night in the hoosegow. A vagrant was caught stealing a chicken from a coop on waste ground behind the St. John’s Hotel. Jess gave him five dollars and told him to get out of town and never come back, adding that he’d shoot him on sight. There was a shooting scrape at the Saracen’s Head saloon. No one was hurt but the combatants, one of them a church deacon, the other a warehouse clerk, were fined fifty dollars each.

  Then on the third day three men robbed the Jewelry Exchange of Fort Worth and the female manager was shot and seriously wounded.

  “It’s in your bailiwick, Jess,” Kurt Koenig said. “I’m giving you four of my boys to back you up, one of them a breed tracker. Bring those robbers in, dead or alive.”

  “Should I be grateful for your trust in me, Kurt?” Jess said.

  “Nope. Maybe I’m hoping that you’ll get your fool head blown off.”

  “Just so I know where we stand.”

  “Jess, I have big plans for this town and you can be a major part of them. It’s time you saw reason,” Koenig said.

  “We’ve had this discussion before and my answer is still no. I don’t want to profit from the human misery caused by opium and morphine.”

  “You know, you’re still alive only because I like you,” Koenig said. “Can you understand that? You make me laugh, Jess. I mean, a used-up cow nurse who looks like General Custer playing lawman is funny.”

  “You’re easily amused, Kurt.”

  “Well, maybe so. But we’ll talk again, Jess. I don’t want to be your enemy.”

  “We’ll talk again if I come back alive from this manhunt.”

  “You’ll come back alive. Lost-in-the-woods pilgrims like you always do.”

  * * *

  The breed, the result of a Kiowa woman’s liaison with a Canadian trapper, led Jess Casey and his men directly to the jewel thieves.

  The three young men had stopped in a dry wash ten miles west of town to divide the loot. Although they carried belt revolvers they didn’t make a fight of it, the breed’s scattergun intimidating them into surrender.

  Two of the youths carried morphine syringes in velvet-lined Moroccan leather cases and all three were arrogant and not in the least penitent.

  “Harm any of us and you’ll answer to my pa,” the oldest, a sneering redhead with freckles said. “He owns the only sawmill in town.”

  One of Koenig’s men, a man with a black handlebar mustache, said, “The kid’s name is Benny Locke and he’s right about his pa. Adam Locke supplied the timber that built most of Fort Worth.”

  “What about the other two?” Jess said. Sweat ran from under his hat. The afternoon was hot and the deep, sandy wash was stifling.

  “The one with the black hair is Manus Gallaher. His pa owns the Excelsior, the best hotel in town. The towhead over there with the bad attitude is called Tim Convery. He’s Hank Convery the lawyer’s son.”

  “You boys are in a heap of trouble,” Jess said. “How old are you?”

  “I’m eighteen,” the redhead said. “The other two are both sixteen.” He smirked. “How old are you?”

  “Old enough that when I was your age I’d been up the Chisholm Trail and back four times,” Jess said.

  “My pa says you’re not a real sheriff,” the kid said. “He says you’re just a stove-up old cowboy that Kurt Koenig keeps as a pet. I wish Mr. Koenig had arrested us. He’s a real peace officer.”

  Jess nodded. “Yeah, and if the woman you shot dies, he’s the one who will hang you.”

  “You talking about Addie Brennan?” Tim Convery said. “Who cares abou
t that old prune?”

  “I do,” Jess said. “Now mount up; I’m taking you back to town.”

  “You’ll be sorry, mister,” Convery said. “Kurt Koenig isn’t gonna like this.”

  He didn’t.

  * * *

  “Jess, you arrested the sons of three of Fort Worth’s most prominent citizens,” Koenig said. “These are rich men, very influential in city politics.”

  “You told me to bring them back dead or alive,” Jess said.

  “That was before I knew who they were,” Koenig said. “And hell, all the jewelry was recovered.”

  “Is Addie Brennan still alive?”

  “Dr. Sun says she’ll pull through. She’s a tough old bird.” Koenig stared hard at Jess, then grinned. “The boys’ fathers are deeply ashamed at what their sons did and they say they’ll make it up to Addie. Each of them is putting a thousand dollars into the pot.”

  “Addie gets three thousand dollars for getting shot by three rich kids out on a lark. Is that it?”

  “Jess, Jess, Jess, boys will be boys,” Koenig said, smiling. “Don’t you remember your own boyhood?”

  “I never was a boy,” Jess said. “I was pulling my weight as a man on a two-by-twice farm from the time I stood knee-high to my pa.”

  Jess opened a desk drawer and tossed the two syringe cases on the table. “Did you know the boys were using morphine?”

  “Says who?” Koenig said.

  “Look on the desk.”

  “They could have found them. Boys treasure such things.”

  “Are they your customers, Koenig?”

  “Friends don’t call each other by their last name, Jess.”

  “They were probably drugged when they robbed the jewelry store and shot Addie Brennan. Who supplies their morphine?”

  “It’s easy to find morphine in the Half Acre.”

  “But you control the opium and morphine trade in the city.”

  “I don’t know all my customers.”

  “What about the three boys I have in the cell? You seem to know them well enough.”

  “I don’t know who sold them morphine. If anybody did.” Koenig motioned to the cases on the desk. “That proves nothing. The boys found them, that’s all.”

  “They won’t tell me who pulled the trigger, but if Addie Brennan dies I’ll charge all three of them with murder.”

  “You’ll never get a jury to convict them in this town,” Koenig said.

  “A United States marshal could see things differently,” Jess said. “He may say we can try them in some other town, probably Austin.”

  “You want to make things happen, don’t you, Jess?” Koenig said.

  “Yes, when it comes to law matters.”

  “What the hell do you know about the law? You’re a damned cowboy and nothing else.”

  Koenig stomped to the door and flung it wide.

  “Jess, you’re walking a dangerous path,” he said. “Don’t push things any further than you already have.”

  * * *

  “When you get hungry enough you’ll eat it off the floor,” Jess Casey said, looking around him at the three tin plates of beans and bacon that had just been tossed through the bars of the cell.

  “The hell we will,” Tim Convery said. “My pa is a lawyer. Why isn’t he here?”

  “I guess he thinks you’re guilty as hell, huh?” Jess said, grinning.

  “Of what? You can’t prove nothing,” Convery said.

  “All we did—”

  “Shut the hell up, Manus!” Convery said. “Tell him nothing.”

  “I’m planning to wire for a United States marshal,” Jess said. “Maybe you’ll be glad to talk to him.”

  Jess didn’t know it then but he’d just uttered what he later realized was a foolish, empty boast.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The nice man at the door told Molly Brennan that she was wanted urgently at Dr. Sun’s office regarding some new medication for her ailing sister.

  “But I understood the doctor was coming here later tonight,” Molly said. “He told me he’d drop in to check on Addie several times a day.”

  “Dr. Sun has been delayed,” the man said. He had yellow hair and a nice smile. “I believe a difficult birth may delay him the rest of the night.”

  “Oh, the poor woman. I do hope she’ll be all right,” Molly said. Like her sister she was a middle-aged spinster who laid no claim to beauty.

  “I’m sure she will be now that Dr. Sun is with her,” the man said. “And we must always remember that the pain of childbirth is not remembered but the child is.”

  “What a perfectly sweet thing to say. Now I must get my coat,” Molly said.

  “Dr. Sun left the medication with his assistant,” the nice man said. “Just knock on the door. She’ll know who’s calling.”

  “Have you seen that young girl’s face?” Molly said. “Poor thing.”

  “Ah yes, but she has turned her scars into stars,” the man said.

  “What most singularly lovely things you say, sir,” Molly said. “Are you a poet?”

  “Alas, that is my cross to bear,” the man said. “Now you must hurry.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Molly said. She hurried into her coat, checked on her sister, and returned to the door. “Addie is sleeping comfortably. Dr. Sun said she’ll pull through. What a perfectly awful thing to happen to her.”

  “Indeed,” the nice man said. “And now, dear lady, I must wish you good night. And I will write a poem in your sister’s honor this very night.”

  Molly quietly closed the door. “And then you must read it to me,” she said.

  “I will,” the man said. “Be assured of that.”

  He and Molly walked together for a few yards and then parted ways. But after the woman was out of sight the man returned to the Brennan sisters’ modest little home. He opened the unlocked door and silently stepped inside.

  The door to the left of the short hallway was ajar and the nice man saw the flickering crimson flames of a fire reflected on the ceiling. He stepped into the bedroom.

  Addie Brennan lay on her back sound asleep, and in the red-tinted semidarkness she looked almost pretty. The man smiled to see such a sight. It was, he considered, quite touching.

  He then picked up the pillow that lay beside Addie and pushed it into her face. How softly he laughed as her kicks became more feeble until finally she lay as limp as a dishrag. The man removed the pillow and saw that dear Addie still looked as though she lay in peaceful sleep. He plumped up the pillow, stained with just a little saliva, and placed it gently beside her again.

  Norman Arendale, the failed Shakespearean actor now considered to be the finest hired murderer in the nation, had claimed his one hundred and fifteenth victim.

  * * *

  Dr. Sun wakened Jess Casey from uncomfortable shallow sleep. He said, “Ha, you don’t care to slumber with your prisoners?”

  “They’re a noisy bunch,” Jess said, sitting up in his chair. “They’d make sure I was awake all night. What can I do for you, Doc?”

  “Addie Brennan is dead. Her sister just brought me the news.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Jess said. “Then I will charge those three clowns with murder.”

  “Perhaps,” Dr. Sun said.

  “What do you mean, perhaps?”

  “Addie Brennan was left alone tonight because a man, a nice man she says, told Molly Brennan to come to my surgery on a matter of some urgency regarding her sister’s medication. I sent no such message.”

  “So Addie was alone for a while,” Jess said.

  “Yes, and that was when she died. But I think it could have been murder.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I think she was suffocated with a pillow. It is a difficult diagnosis to make. The main telltale sign of suffocation is that the victim’s eyes become bloodshot. Addie’s eyes were very red.”

  Dr. Sun reached into a pocket of his coat and produced a piece of folded
white writing paper. He opened it carefully and laid it in front of Jess. “What do you see?” he said.

  “A hair,” Jess said.

  “That is all? You can’t tell me more?”

  “Well, it’s fair, about three inches long. From the head of a man, I’d say.”

  “Indeed. I found it on Addie’s pillow,” Dr. Sun said. “But would Addie Brennan, who has black hair tied back in a bun, have entertained a fair-haired man in her bed recently? Or in fact at any time?”

  “From what I hear, she and her sister are a couple of old maids,” Jess said. “I don’t think men entered into their thinking.”

  “Exactly, and they couldn’t afford servants, blond or otherwise,” Dr. Sun said. “I believe Addie was murdered by a man with light hair. But can I prove it in a court of law? Bloodshot eyes and a single hair will not impress a jury.”

  “If she was murdered, then the question is why?” Jess said.

  “Think about it, Sheriff,” Dr. Sun said. “It’s not hard to figure out.”

  “To silence her. Addie could identify the three lowlifes I have in my cell as the men who robbed the store and tried to kill her,” Jess said.

  Dr. Sun said, “It’s the most likely possibility.”

  “Do you think Kurt Koenig was behind the woman’s murder?” Jess said.

  “Everything points to him, but it’s such a clumsy crime. One would think that Kurt would have handled it with a little more finesse.”

  “What does that mean?” Jess said.

  The little physician smiled. “I really don’t know. It’s just that smothering a sick woman with her own pillow is not Kurt’s style.” Dr. Sun’s smile grew wider and a network of wrinkles spread across his face. “Kurt would have shot her and then shot her again and to hell with the consequence. Addie’s murder was expertly planned and carried out.”

  “If not Koenig, then who?”

  “Sheriff, I have no idea,” Dr. Sun said.

  Jess sat bolt upright in his chair. “She could have had an assistant.”

  “I beg your pardon,” Dr. Sun said. “I’m not following you.”

  “Did anybody else work in the jewelry store besides Addie?”

  “Yes, in fact someone did,” Dr. Sun said. “Dorothy Mills—she’s what, sixteen or seventeen? The girl worked there but only part-time, two or three days a week. Dorothy has dreams of becoming an actress, another Lillie Langtry, that’s why she worked in the jewelry store, to raise money for a trip to New York. But she probably wasn’t in the store on the day of the robbery, since nobody mentioned her being there.”