Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  Cavandish looked at the shotgun in his hands as though seeing it for the first time. Harve looked at Cole and said: “John Henry, how you been?”

  “You didn’t get my wire not to come?” Cole said.

  “What wire?” Ledbettor said with a mischievous grin.

  Cole knew it was pointless to say anything more about the man’s arrival.

  “I was just going to shoot Long Bill,” Cavandish said.

  “Why?” Ledbettor asked as he took a closer gander at Long Bill, then wrinkled his nose and added: “This feller’s putrid.”

  By now, the crowd was beginning to grow restless, unsure of whether there was going to be a show or not. Some had disappointed looks on their faces, realizing that they might not get a good story to tell their grandchildren about how a drunken undertaker dug up a dead man and shot him right there on the streets of Cheyenne. They would say it was the result of the terrible winter, how it turned men crazy, even men like Karl Cavandish, who was a paragon of propriety. There would be lots of stories to tell about that winter, but none would be quite so interesting as that of seeing a dead man shotgunned. So they were growing a little restless, waiting for Cavandish to fill Long Bill full of buckshot.

  “Of course he’s putrid,” Cavandish said. “He’s been dead since last autumn.”

  Ledbettor shook his head as he continued to inspect the corpse. “I heard you had a bad winter up here,” he said. “Just never knew how bad until now. Did he pop up out of the ground himself, or did someone dig him up?”

  “What difference does it make?” Cavandish said.

  “None that I can see,” Ledbettor said, then looked at the pistol in Cole’s hand. “He must have been a bad piece of work for you to have dug him out of the ground so you could both shoot him.”

  “This is foolish,” Cole said. “Karl, give me that shotgun before you shoot your feet off.”

  Without so much as a word, Cavandish handed Cole the shotgun. Then Cole asked some of the men to get a wagon and take Long Bill back up to boothill. Turning to Ledbettor, he said: “If you came here to help, you can start by helping me get Karl sober.”

  “Hell, I knew the minute you sent that wire,” Ledbettor said, “you were ass-deep in trouble of some sort or other.” He took an arm and Cole took an arm and together they marched Cavandish to his house where they tried to pump him full of hot black coffee.

  Cavandish sputtered and cursed and carried on, then passed out on the bed from exhaustion.

  Ledbettor looked at him a long minute, then said: “Do you think he’s passed over?” He put his ear to Cavandish’s chest and listened, then added: “Nope, he ain’t dead.”

  “Why’d you come, Harve?” Cole said. “I sent you a wire telling you not to.”

  Ledbettor produced a silver flask, unscrewed the cap, and took a pull, then handed it to Cole who declined. “I’ve not had my breakfast yet.”

  “This is breakfast, son. A cowboy’s breakfast, or have you forgot?”

  “It’s been forever since we were drovers, Harve.”

  “It ain’t been that long, son. We ain’t that far removed from what we was. Look at me. I’m a rich man, but I still spit in the street. And look at you, you ain’t changed a lick. Still tall in the saddle, restless as tumbleweed. Why ain’t you married and settled down with a bunch of ankle biters?”

  “You look like you’re doing OK for yourself, Harve … that fancy jacket and the new boots,” Cole said. “And that hat had to cost you thirty dollars. And if you came here to talk old times, you’ve wasted a trip.”

  Ledbettor took another pull, looked at the flask, which had HHL, Esq. engraved on it, then said: “That’s twenty-dollars-a-bottle firewater, son. Sweet as honey, smooth as a woman’s teat, but it’ll sneak up on you and kick you like a mule.” Then he smacked his lips and flapped his good arm and the empty sleeve that held his stump, crowing like a rooster. “Look here at this piece of iron old Ned Buntline gave me. Son-of-a-bitch will shoot the eye out of a gnat at a hundred paces. I came loaded for bear, son. Came to help you do some killing.”

  “Who said anything about killing?” Cole demanded.

  Ledbettor looked at Cavandish, passed out on the bed, then at Cole, his whiskey flask in one hand, his Buntline Special poking down along the leg of his trousers and said: “If I know anything at all about you, I know we’re going to do some killing.”

  Chapter Six

  A strong wind blew out of the north and Ledbettor said: “Jesus Christ, this is cold country.” He pulled at his flask. “Twenty-dollar whiskey,” he said with a shudder. “God damn, never thought I’d be drinking twenty-dollar whiskey.”

  “You want to tell me what you learned that made you hop a northbound freight and come all this way?” Cole said.

  They had left Cavandish stretched out on his bed, snoring peacefully, and had walked over to Shorty’s Café. Katy O’Brien was hustling flapjacks and slabs of bacon to some of the same faces Cole had seen in the crowd a few minutes earlier who had been waiting to see a dead man get shotgunned.

  “That’s a fine-looking woman,” Ledbettor said, watching Katy O’Brien hustle tables. “Lot’s of hip and thigh to her.”

  “You mind?” Cole said.

  “Soirées, John Henry?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s what the rich people do in their free time … attend soirées. Zerelda, God rest her soul, loved nothing better than to throw a soirée and she threw lots of them.”

  “Harve, if you caught the flyer up here just to tell me about Denver social life, I’m not interested.”

  Cleopatra came from behind the counter where she’d been cooking and ventured over to them. Harve ran his gaze over her like she was a piece of grazing land he had in mind for a thousand head of hungry longhorns. She eyed him askance and shook her head. “You boys want coffee?”

  “Just enough to spill some of this sipping whiskey into, sis,” Ledbettor said.

  Cole glanced across the room and saw Katy O’Brien waiting on a fat man and several of his cronies, one of which was Jim Levy, who had his back to them. He saw Levy reach out and take her by the wrist and pull her toward him, then say something to her before loosing his grip.

  “Why dilute good whiskey?” Cleo asked, referring to Harve Ledbettor’s admiration of his liquor.

  He snorted and lifted the flask in a salute and said: “Sis, you’re just the ticket.”

  “You’d not be the first one to come along and try and charm the bloomers off me, mister.”

  He found that humorous. Cole found it distracting. “Bring us coffee, Cleo, and don’t turn your back on this one-armed reprobate.”

  “Cut off my other arm,” Ledbettor said, “and I’d still have eyes.”

  “Tell me what you found out about the murder,” Cole said. “Before you wear my ears out.”

  Harve snuffled and leaned forward. “Those soirées I was trying to tell you about,” he said, “are where the rich and powerful let their hair down, and sometimes their drawers. A man can learn a lot of dirt by just listening.”

  “You know, Harve, listening to you get the facts out on the table is like riding to Austin backward on a bony mule. Spit out what you’re getting at.”

  “You’ve gotten irritable in your old age,” he said.

  Cole leaned back and rolled himself a shuck while waiting for his coffee and Harve to tell him what he knew about the murder.

  “Judge Beam and Chief of Police Tommy Murphy was among the regulars who attended Zerelda’s soirées, so I knew them about as well as I cared to. And it was Murphy who led the investigation into the judge’s boy’s murder. The boy’s name was Tyron and he was just the opposite of the judge in every respect when it came to his morals and reputation. They say he liked to beat up whores, for one thing. Maybe that had something to do with them fi
nding his body in the red-light district.”

  Cole felt a dull throbbing just behind his eyes.

  “And there was something else, too,” Harve said. “His ears was missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “Somebody cut them off and took them.” Ledbettor had a vacant look in his bloodshot eyes like he was trying to see a dead man without any ears. “You ever hear of a wild hair called Gypsy Davy?” he said.

  Cole told him about Teddy Green and how he had dropped the same name on him.

  “Seven shades of humanity,” Harve said, spilling some of his whiskey into his coffee cup, then adding three spoonfuls of sugar.

  “What’s this man have to do with the killing?” Cole persisted.

  “Gypsy Davy is a ’breed, but worse than that, he’s an educated ’breed … went to Harvard, which is somewhere back East. The boy has himself a law degree and they say he was also some sort of a doctor, too. Dark-haired and dark-eyed, handsome devil and women fall all over themselves at the very sight of him.”

  “This doesn’t sound like the same man Teddy Green told me about,” Cole said.

  “He tell you Gypsy Davy is a stone killer?”

  Cole nodded.

  “Well, he is that, too.”

  “How do you come by this information, Harve?”

  “Gypsy Davy was … until the murder … the most popular feller in Denver. Hell, Zerelda and all the other rich matrons in the city couldn’t wait to invite him to a soirée, that’s how I come to know him.”

  “So the thinking is that he killed the judge’s boy, this Tyron?”

  Harve shrugged his shoulders. “Well, he was arrested for the killing, then broke jail. Word has it he said this woman was to blame, that he was innocent.”

  “Tell me about her,” Cole said, feeling a coldness trickle through his blood.

  “She was a looker,” Ledbettor said, smacking his lips after sipping his coffee.

  “What was her name?”

  He squinted the name into memory. “Ella, I believe it was,” Harve said. “That’s all the name I got on her. She was seen in his company at one of Zerelda’s soirées and between the pair of them, you didn’t need no gaslight to see by. They lit up the room.”

  Ledbettor described her and Cole was having a hard time denying that it was Ella Mims, the same woman he’d fallen in love with.

  “What about this business with the ears?” Cole asked.

  Harve shifted his weight in his chair. “They say Gypsy Davy keeps himself a necklace of ears from the men he’s killed. I think that’s what put Chief Murphy onto him as a suspect … the kid’s missing ears and that necklace.”

  “Tell me you’re pulling my leg on this one, Harve.”

  Ledbettor shook his head. “Wore ’em once to one of Zerelda’s soirées. Looked like black prunes. Only he claimed he’d bought them from some natives in Borneo when he was traveling the world.”

  “How the hell does such a man get invited to rich folks’ parties?” Cole asked.

  “The rich are easily bored, John Henry. Anything out of the ordinary, they’re interested in it. And a fellow like Gypsy Davy with his handsome looks, fancy talk, and educated ways fits right in. That string of ears helped make him a curiosity. Sorta like a big rattler, dangerous and fascinating as hell all at once, if you know what I mean.”

  “Tell me something. Why isn’t a man like that swinging from the end of a rope instead of drinking champagne and rubbing elbows with the wealthy?”

  Harve looked at him, then said: “That’s a good god-damn’ question and I don’t know, except to say that wealth brings its own perversity to the table.”

  There was a commotion and a shattering of glass and Cole looked around in time to see Katy O’Brien stumbling backward and Jim Levy rising out of his chair, his face flushed red. He didn’t have time to push her again before Cole hammered him over the head with the barrel of his pistol and dragged him outside.

  He sputtered and struggled like a man hell-bent on getting himself killed will do, but Cole had a good grip on him. When Cole turned him loose, Levy landed in the mud. He managed to struggle to his knees and feel around for the knot on the back of his skull before recognizing who it was that had done the damage to him.

  “Cole! You son-of-a-bitch!” His fingers came away, smeared with blood, and this incensed him even more. He managed to rise halfway before Cole hit him again, cracking the barrel atop his collar bone and that put an end to his cursing. He howled like a scalded dog.

  “Next time you want to get rough with somebody, Levy, come see me,” Cole said, and turned to go back inside the café. Several diners had followed them out and stood there with napkins stuffed in the collars of their shirts. If they weren’t going to get to see a dead man get killed, maybe they could at least see one or two live ones end up dead.

  Somebody yelled something and before Cole could turn back around, two pistol shots cracked the air almost at the same time. The plate glass window behind Cole shattered into a rain of broken glass. He looked that way and then down, where he saw Jim Levy lying face down in the mud, smoke curling from the barrel of a pistol in his left hand. Ten feet away stood Teddy Green with a policeman’s model Colt still aimed at the back of Jim Levy’s spine.

  Cole watched as Teddy Green slipped the revolver back into the shoulder rig under his greatcoat, then tipped his plug hat in Cole’s direction.

  “You should have killed that man when you had him down,” Teddy Green said. “Lucky thing I came along or it’d be you in the soup, and I’d be out a man to help me find those people I’m looking for.”

  Those people, Cole thought.

  Harve Ledbettor was right. There was going to be killing and it had already begun.

  Chapter Seven

  That night John Henry Cole drank a whiskey alone in the Blue Star and thought about the train ride to Ogallala the next morning. He had a lot of questions to ask Ella Mims, or was it Ella Green? Whoever she really was, she’d done a damned good job of capturing his heart. And he wondered if it wasn’t a case now that he’d just been too lonely for too long and had let himself be blinded by a pretty lady with a soft voice and a warm bed. He hated himself for even thinking that way about her. The whiskey tasted good but it wasn’t doing its job of making him forget.

  Earlier, Harve Ledbettor had gotten drunk by noon, and Cole had let him pass out on the bed in his room behind Sun Lee’s laundry. It was just as well. Cole didn’t crave company, his or anyone else’s. He thought about the men who were after Ella, thought about what Teddy Green had said about Colorado Charley Utter and the assassins the judge had sent to find Ella and make sure his own brand of justice was carried out. Cole thought about Gypsy Davy and wondered how it was Ella had come to be involved with a man who would wear a necklace of dead men’s ears.

  Cole had kicked around for a lot of years and never heard or came across anything to match the things he was hearing now. He thought of Texas and the old friend he’d shot down there near the border over a woman, thought about his late wife and son. He was a man with no home and no place to go and the last good thing he’d found in life was a woman named Ella Mims who people were now telling him was involved in an ugly murder with some really bad company. He didn’t want to believe it and he wasn’t going to believe it until he heard it from Ella. That was if he could find her before Judge Beam’s assassins did. Teddy Green sat at a table in the far corner by himself, and Cole knew he was dogging Cole’s every move, but unless he walked up and shot him, there wasn’t much he could do about it. He grabbed the neck of the Jack Daniel’s and walked over to Teddy Green’s table.

  Green didn’t say anything. Cole poured out two whiskeys and set one before him. “It’s not much for saving my hide out there on the street today.”

  Green nodded and tossed the liquor back before wiping off his mustache. “You were the l
aw down in Del Río at one time,” he said.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I heard about the killing. You did the state a favor by putting that hombre in a deep hole.”

  He was talking about Francisco Guzman, the old amigo and border bandit Cole had killed over a faithless woman. “We ever meet before?” Cole asked.

  “No, but word gets around. I was with Company A of the Texas Rangers back then, running down the last few wild Comanches that still had enough fire in them to raise hell.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m still a Ranger, but I’m not chasing down Comanches any longer. Rounded up the last of them in Palo Duro Cañon. They went home to roost and we caught them there.”

  “Just chasing women these days.”

  “One woman,” Green said. He eyed the bottle in Cole’s hand, and Cole poured him another drink, the liquor like amber oil under the yellow light, and watched as he washed his throat with it.

  “If you don’t mind my prying into your business,” Cole said, “what happened between you and Ella that she would leave you?”

  He offered a tight smile. “I was off chasing wild Comanches, remember.”

  Cole nodded, tossed back a glass of Mr. Daniel’s sipping whiskey, and rolled himself a shuck.

  “We were young,” he said. “Put a young woman out alone on the Texas frontier, you can’t expect much good to happen.” His eyes crinkled in the corners, the skin permanently burned by wind and sun. He stared off into the past, seeing old memories flame to life again. A spot just below his right eye ticked. “We were married less than a year,” he went on, his voice now a rough whisper. “I’d been gone on a long campaign, and when I came home, she told me she was leaving. I helped her pack, bought her passage to Denver. She’d always wanted to live in Denver. I reckon that’s where she must have first met this Gypsy Davy.” He found a cigar in the pocket of his greatcoat and bit off the end and held it between his fingers a while before lighting it. “She wrote me a couple of letters. But then they stopped coming, and I never heard from her again or anything about her until I was up in Dallas and read about the killing in the Dallas Herald, saw her name.” He shifted the cigar to his mouth. “I learned she ran a hat shop here in Cheyenne, but it burned down. I wondered maybe, if the fire had something to do with the killing in Denver.”