City of Widows

by Loren D. Estleman

  “No, we split up and I only heard about it when I come back here. I scouted some before Lincoln County. Before that I worked for Juárez.”

  “You fought in the revolution?”

  “The last part. I was just a yonker. This old one-eyed colonel stuck a Jaeger needle gun in my hands and showed me which end to point and which end to pull on and before I knew it I was knocking down federales like apples. Turned out I had a gift for it. Then the war went and ended.”

  “What does a sharpshooter do in peacetime?”

  “You’d never guess. Growing up on the border I had as much English as I had Spanish, so they gave me a job collecting taxes in El Paso del Norte.” He shook his head. “Gawd Almighty, don’t them butchers and barbers hate to pay their share. I shot one by accident and that’s when I decided to come north the first time. The revolution had went to hell anyway by then. Juárez didn’t turn out to be no better than what we had before.”

  “That why you threw in with the Baronets?”

  “You’re just down on Frank on account of he buffaloed you that time. That weren’t nothing. If he didn’t like you they’d of scooped up your brains with the horseshit.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “I guess not. Someone told me they got this fancy notion back East about always mounting a horse from the left. I figure they don’t ride much. Out here it don’t matter which side you climb up on. They’re both of them just as bad.” He watched me peering between bushes. “Don’t expect him back. Moving at night’s just smart in case there are other parties out haring around. They ain’t cowards, mind. That ain’t the reason he lit out. Those lazy sons of bitches get ants when something starts to look like work. I’m Comanche on my father’s side and I guess I know them.”

  “I’m glad you happened along. Dealing with them alone might have cost me another day.”

  “Not to mention your hair and both ears. Apaches are partial to ears. They string them around their necks so they can listen to the other side.”

  I reloaded the Winchester’s magazine. “I heard the same thing about the Sioux. Also the Nez Percé and the Cheyenne and the Blackfoot. I’ve fought them all and a few others whose names I can’t pronounce and I never saw an ear necklace on one of them.”

  “Well, if it ain’t true it ought to be. You can make a case for them tribes you mentioned defending their land and all. Patch got nothing to defend. Nobody wants this here desert country but him. There’s nothing meaner than an Apache brave, unless it’s an Apache squaw. Neither one will eat snake. They say it’s because of their religion. I say it’s professional courtesy.”

  “I’m starting to understand. You don’t like them.”

  “The other tribes don’t like them any better than me. That’s why they drove them out of every place worth living in.”

  “Going just by that,” I said, “you’re just as wicked as they are.”

  He smiled for only the second time since we’d met. “Well, hell’s bells. I never said I wasn’t.”

  That was the end of conversation. We settled in to wait for darkness. I didn’t want any more talk in any case. I was on the edge of liking him, and it would just get in the way when the time came to kill him.

  11

  WHICHEVER GOD LOOKS after snipers and saloonkeepers was on duty that night, and we stole away under a rustlers’ moon bright enough to show prairie dog holes but not us. Jubilo’s horse, a blaze-face roan fifteen years old, was cold when we stopped to strip it of as much gear as we could carry. The claybank didn’t encourage being loaded down with two full-grown men and their necessaries, but it seemed to sense how close it had come to sharing the roan’s fate and didn’t become obnoxious. We entered San Sábado at first light, iron shoes chiming against the empty hardpack street. In front of the livery we stepped down and I kicked the door until the Yaquí came out to take the reins. He wasn’t long coming and was fully dressed. I don’t know when he slept.

  He led the claybank to a stall and brought out a bay mare for Jubilo’s inspection. The deputy checked its teeth and fetlocks and looked in its ears.

  “Hundred,” he said.

  “Doscientos,” said the Indian.

  “It’s too early to dicker. Hundred and twenty-five.”

  “Doscientos,” said the Indian.

  “She’s twelve if she’s a day. If she was a woman I wouldn’t pay more than fifty cents for all night.”

  “Doscientos,” said the Indian.

  Jubilo looked at me. “That the only Spanish he knows?”

  “You’re the Indian expert.”

  “Hundred and fifty. Now, that’s the limit.”

  “Doscientos,” said the Indian.

  “Shit. I’ll give you a county marker.”

  The Indian shook his head. “Cash money.”

  He said shit again, unbuttoned his shirt, and unwrapped a money belt from around his waist. Thick white scars curled around his brown hairless torso from behind in a pattern familiar to me. I wondered whose lash it had been, Maximilian’s or Juárez’s.

  He gave the Yaquí another dollar to feed and rub down the bay and we walked out carrying our gear. “You can bunk in my room,” I said. “I guess I owe you a roof.”

  “I’ll spread my roll uptrail.”

  “I’m told I don’t snore.”

  “It ain’t that, it’s the being shut in. I got me a little room off the cells in Socorro but I don’t use it much.”

  We divided without a word in front of the Apache Princess. I didn’t know if we’d see each other again except through our sights.

  I caught two hours’ sleep and was shaving over the basin in the room when the door opened from the outside stairs. Ford Harper’s only son grinned at me sloppily past the barrel of the Deane-Adams. He had on his sheepskin over the paisley vest and was carrying a bundle under one arm. “Put it up, son,” he said. “I didn’t steal that much while you were gone.”

  I returned the revolver to the belt hanging from the bedpost. “You’ve been around these townies too long, Junior. In the old days it was knock or get shot.”

  “Knock on what? I’ve went through more doors to see you in the past month than I did all the time we punched cows. How was Laramie?”

  “Same as Virginia City, only smaller and farther north.” I scraped my throat.

  “Where’s the piano?”

  I hesitated. I’d almost forgotten the wire I’d sent from Socorro City. “They wanted too much.”

  “That’s a long way to go to come back empty-handed.”

  “Well, once you’re on the road.” I changed the subject. “I see you’re not in the same condition. What’s in the bundle?”

  He threw it on the bed. “You tell me. It came for you Friday on the Butterfield. Not knowing what’s in it I didn’t think it was safe to leave it in your room unattended.” He slumped into the room’s only chair, a Morris with faded tapestry cushions. “I hear you rode in double this morning with Baronet’s deputy. Run into trouble?”

  “He killed two Apaches. I killed his horse and we quit even.”

  “Is he as good with that rifle as they claim?”

  “He is if they claim he hits what he aims at.” I wiped off the remaining lather and reached for my shirt. “I hear Abel Freestone didn’t make it.”

  “The padre wasn’t happy. The ventilation is poor at the mission and there is not enough quicklime in the territory to kill the smell of putrification coming up from below during High Mass. He has asked Ortiz to find another place to store his prisoners.”

  “Has anyone heard anything of Ross Baronet?”

  “Someone stuck up a pack train outside Las Cruces Sunday and got off with six thousand in silver. They left eight Mexicans dead and the mules aren’t talking. My better judgment says it was not Jesse James.”

  “Eight dead. That’s raw even for a Baronet.”

  “Did I mention they were Mexicans?”

  “Still it’s taking a chance. Frank cannot have approved of it.�
��

  “Possibly not. Two of those killed were vaqueros hiring out before the fall drive. Talk is President Díaz will wire an official protest to Washington City by way of Governor Wallace. The vaqueros belonged to Don Segundo and guess who bankrolled the Díaz revolution?”

  “No wonder Frank insists Ross is dead,” I said. “It’s a fond wish.”

  “The business will come to nothing. Garfield is busy bleeding into a pan and Wallace can’t move without federal help. Meanwhile Ross is no concern for us. By now he’s in a cave in Chihuahua counting his booty.”

  I sat down on the bed with my back to him and pulled on my boots. He was a good poker reader and might see the disappointment on my face.

  “What’s Colleen about?” I asked. “Shot anyone lately?”

  “She’s out riding with Eille MacNutt.”

  I turned to look at him. His treadle jaw was set.

  “It started the day you left for Socorro City. She has the notion we can come to some sort of business arrangement with the Mare’s Nest. You will have to get it from her. Every time she explains it to me I get a headache.” He forked out a nickel-plated watch I recognized as his father’s. “They should be getting back about now. No buggy horse will tolerate hauling around a man of MacNutt’s size much past an hour.”

  “I thought the whole idea of this investment was you wanted to run a saloon. It seems to me all you’ve been doing is watching someone else run it.”

  “I admit I’m not the man you are, Page. I can’t manage a business and Poker Annie too.”

  I stood and put on my hat.

  “Ain’t you going to open your package?” he asked.

  “Later. I know what’s in it.” I went out.

  The Mare’s Nest conducted business in an adobe pile that probably dated back to San Sábado’s founding and showed every repair job that had ever been done on it in a hundred mottled patches like a topographical map. Its name was painted directly on its surface in large inexpert capitals without an apostrophe. At the moment an obese yellow cat was the only thing inhabiting the front porch, curled up in a splayed rocker wired together at the weak points. Thus far in my tenure I had never seen anyone else in the chair except Eille MacNutt. He was there when I came out in the morning and he was there when I climbed the Princess’s outside stairs to bed, and he never seemed to feel the urge to rock, really an inhuman feat when you thought about it. He couldn’t have weighed less than three hundred and might have gone four; I had yet to see him standing and so didn’t have a height to figure in. I was certain he’d taken on most of those pounds since coming to town, because I couldn’t picture him in his present state sitting on a wagon seat, much less a saddle. The very thought of him riding in a buggy, with or without female companionship, brought forth visions of a glacier on a velocipede.

  “Don’t be shy, long-tall. There’s lots more to see inside.”

  The woman slouching in the doorway of the building wasn’t the prettiest in a string not known for its beauty. Clad in an undyed muslin shift with enough sunlight coming in the back windows to show she wore nothing underneath, she was gaunt with bad skin and worse teeth that she covered with one hand when she talked. The paint she wore might have been applied by whoever had done the sign on the building, emphasizing all her worst features, and her brown hair was cropped suspiciously short, as if to discourage lice. She went by Clara California. I doubted she came from there. San Sábado was the kind of place you left behind on your way to California. She looked forty and was probably twenty-five. It was cruel work for the pay.

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “I’ve seen inside. And I’m not tall.”

  “You’re all of you the same height laying down.” There was Texas in her speech, or more likely the Nations. She had Cherokee bones. “Everyone else is asleep. You can have the morning rate.”

  “Thanks. I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Not that Adabelle. She’s all shine and no heat. It’ll freeze and fall off.”

  “Someone else.”

  “Too bad, long-tall. Too bad.” She withdrew inside.

  In a little while a green phaeton with ivory trim rattled up the street behind a gray and a black with blinders and stopped in front of the building. Actually it didn’t do much rattling. The ballast provided by the man in the driver’s seat pasted the wheels to the hardpack as solidly as a load of iron stoves. Eille Mac-Nutt was a tailoring challenge in several yards of crinkly seersucker and a straw skimmer with a red silk band, tilted rakishly over one eye. His features were crowded around a toothbrush moustache in the exact center of his big face like too little furniture in a huge room and when he winched himself up, using both hands and leaning the carriage far over on its springs, a thick cloud of lavender flooded my nostrils. I didn’t fault him for it. Fat men suffered in that desert heat and he had done what he could about the inevitable acrid odor with the help of the toiletry section in the Montgomery Ward catalogue.

  He got down to the street without help and reached up a hand to his passenger. Colleen Bower laid her gloved one in it, lifted her hem, and stepped down. She wore an embroidered wrap to protect her blue dress from dust and a wedge-shaped hat planted with flowers and secured by a plain white scarf tied under her chin.

  “Thank you so much, Mr. MacNutt. You’re a wizard with horses.”

  “I claim no credit. Your charming presence is more effective than any quirt.” His voice was callow. The weight made him look older, but he was probably still in his twenties. He saw me and nodded. “Murdock.”

  “MacNutt.” It was as much conversation as had passed between us since we’d met.

  “Good morning, Page. I hope your trip was pleasant.” Colleen raised a hand to let me help her up onto the boardwalk.

  I kept both of mine in my pockets. “I still have my hair. That’s pleasant for New Mexico.”

  MacNutt mounted the walk and performed the gentlemanly duty. “There’s no need to end this just because the animals are tired,” he told her. “I have a bottle of Napoleon in my office.”

  “Another time, perhaps. Thank you for an enchanting drive.” She took my arm and inserted pressure on the bicep. We started walking in the direction of the Apache Princess.

  “It’s at least a hundred yards to the door,” I said. “Shall I hitch up the buckboard?”

  A muscle worked in her jaw. “The first time I heard your name I thought it sounded chivalric. I had much to learn.”

  “Is that what it took to get you to go riding with the Great Divide?”

  “A trim waist is hardly a substitute for good manners.”

  “If you’re that smitten I’m surprised you didn’t take him up on the brandy.”

  “Do you want to hear the proposition I put to him or not?”

  “Does it matter what your partners want?”

  “It helps when they are here to consult.”

  “I am here.”

  “So you are. It occurred to me while you were gone that we are not in competition with the Mare’s Nest at all. Our customers come to drink and play cards. They can do that at MacNutt’s as well, but it is not their primary concern.”

  “Yes, Clara California gave me that impression.”

  “Oh?”

  “I interrupted you.”

  “So you did. I proposed to MacNutt that since we are not in the same business we could help each other by issuing vouchers. If they visit the Nest first and spend money they will receive a certificate to be redeemed for chips or a drink at the Princess. If they visit the Princess first and spend money we will issue them a token to be applied against the price of companionship at the Nest. As things stand, fully half our respective clientele winds up spending the entire evening at one establishment or the other. This way they will patronize both.”

  “At a discount.”

  “Just for one turn of the cards or one drink. If they stopped there we would have been out of business before this.”

  “It’s not the same with companionship,”
I said.

  “That’s the beauty of the arrangement. MacNutt’s head runs toward figures, not the nature of man. Most of the advantage is ours.”

  “Sooner or later he is bound to see that.”

  “By then there will be customers enough to go around. Meanwhile we will have more capital to invest in the improvements we discussed.”

  “And until then you intend to buy time by going riding with Eille MacNutt.”

  We were in front of the saloon. She stopped walking and intercepted my gaze. “Yes.”

  “What happens when he finds out what you’ve been doing?”

  “I grew up on the circuit,” she said. “I would not have done so had I not learned how to take care of myself.”

  “That purse pistol won’t get you out of everything.”

  “It has so far.”

  “Is this what you were up to when they ran you out of El Paso?”

  “That was a misunderstanding.”

  “Did it have to do with that band you’re wearing?”

  She touched it involuntarily; smiled, but not with her eyes. “For someone who no longer keeps the peace you are asking a lot of questions.”

  “You’re forgetting our silent partner. Frank Baronet is already worried about his brother’s banditry and what it may mean for his position as sheriff. A falling-out involving an enterprise he’s connected with could bring this whole thing down around us.”

  “Is that what you’re concerned about?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  “I thought perhaps you just didn’t want me going riding with any man who’s not named Page Murdock.”

  “That door closed in Breen.”

  “Doors have been known to open.”

  She went through one then, leaving me alone on the boardwalk with the cedar chief.

  12

  “NO, NO, SEÑOR Murdock. Es imposible. It cannot be done.”

  “Why not?” I said. “He’s wanted for the stickup at the Apache Princess. You identified him yourself.”

  Rosario Ortiz shook his head. I wasn’t sure if it was at the prospect of getting up a posse to track down Ross Baronet or the determination of the stalk of feathergrass he was grasping in both hands to hang on to its place among his yellow roses. He had on his gardening outfit of overalls, army coat, and sombrero, and the effort had him red and sweating. In truth I couldn’t picture the fat part-time lawman at the head of a mounted party of armed men.