He put a bill on the bar. Several faces turned to him.
“And for these fine gentlemen as well,” he said. “No man will accuse McKenna of being exclusive in his friendships—not least of all to a fiddler!”
He bought more drinks, told stories of Ireland and New York. The room felt hot. He could feel his jaw moving, his words coming out; he could see the words change the faces of the men around him. He shook hands with Pat Dormer, who was indeed a giant with a hard face and hard hands. That face, other faces, gathered around him, listening, drinking the liquor he bought, clapping as he made himself dizzy dancing a flying hornpipe, staring as he sang a ballad: too-old men very quietly staring at their hands, at burning candles.
“You’ve a fine stack of bills for a man so modestly dressed,” Dormer said to him.
McParland smiled, winked. “Artwork is one of my many talents,” he said, and the men around him laughed. “There’s many a government, shall we say, collector interested an acquiring an original McKenna.”
This will be dangerous and long, he thought, but they will trust me soon. He told them he was on the lam from Buffalo. Later, he told Dormer it was for murder.
He joined a game of cards, laughing, buying more drinks. A thick-faced fellow named Frazer, who had bragged that he liked to thrash every newcomer, palmed an extra card.
“You take six?” McParland asked him.
The table hushed. The yellow gas light flickered.
“You’re a liar,” Frazer said.
“Am I?” McParland said, grabbing Frazer’s hand. The fiddle music still playing, the men looking back and forth between him and Frazer now, Frazer’s hand moist and thick. He forced Frazer’s palm open and the extra card slipped to the table.
“Outside,” Dormer said.
The room emptied into the back alley, the rushing of the men and scraping of the chairs almost a cheer in and of itself; they gathered in a circle around McParland and Frazer. McParland took a right under the ear and fell down: dirt, dust, the lights of the alley spinning, the cheers of the men spinning. He got up, aligning himself against the bulk of the enormous Frazer, watching Frazer’s eyes. He landed a right, a combination, sidestepped, landed a left to Frazer’s jaw that put the man down. Five more times he put Frazer down and, on the seventh fall, Frazer didn’t get up. The crowd cheered him, taking him inside to buy him a drink. Even Mrs. Dormer and her eldest daughter, broad-faced, fair women with tired and cheerful eyes, came forward to congratulate him.
A week later, at Dormer’s sister’s wedding, McParland laid out on a bench pretending to be drunk, listening to Dormer and other Mollies talking about passwords and signals. Easy, the trust part. Too easy. Simple-minded oafs.
In time he took a letter of introduction from Dormer and moved to Shenandoah to work with Muff Lawler, whose name had come up over and over. Lawler, black-haired and bent, rock-faced.
Easy again. He remembered the night he knew they’d make him a Molly for sure. He’d traveled with Lawler to Big Mine to visit an old Molly who was dying and in the sick room McParland had hung back as Lawler leaned over the sick bed, the wife and daughters of the sick man coming and going with water, cloths, another blanket.
There was a crash at the door, followed by a scream, and into the room burst a wild-eyed, filthy man brandishing a carving knife and a pistol.
“Lawler!” the man cried out, advancing.
“Here,” McParland yelled from the corner.
The man turned to him and in that second Lawler was out a side door, his footsteps pounding down stairs.
McParland remembered the faces, hanging for an instant in the dim light: the attacker, twisted, scowling; the sick man gasping; the wife and daughters recoiling.
The attacker turned to where Lawler had been, cursed, turned back to McParland.
“If I can’t kill Muff, I’ll kill you,” he said, raising his pistol.
But McParland was on him, pulling a pistol from his waistband and putting it to the man’s face.
“We’ll see about that,” McParland said.
Again, stillness, faces. The wife raised a hand to her mouth.
The man dropped his pistol and knife. McParland cocked his pistol and looked him in the eyes.
“I don’t like to kill you in the presence of a sick man and these ladies,” he said. He put his pistol up and the man ran.
Not long after that, in a room above Muff Lawler’s saloon, McParland had been sworn into the Mollies. Again, faces, now becoming familiar to him. Again, dim yellow light, now becoming familiar to him.
That night he wrote Gowen a triumphant report and lay on his narrow, iron bed; through the window there was nothing between him and God but the clear, bright stars.
But you could doubt God, he found, as you plunged hundreds of feet into the earth with a lamp on your forehead and then worked hour after hour, day after day, bent double, hacking coal from rock. And you could hate God every time another worker was blown up or maimed and the miners prayed and kept working, sending the coal to the top as if, as McParland wrote once to Gowen, the devil himself were up there and could never have enough fire. After one day in a mine McParland’s body had hurt more than he’d thought it could; after several days it was worse. He would straighten his limbs and back even when the pain was unbearable because otherwise he’d be bent forever. How did these men do it, he wondered, for years and years until their black lungs gave out or they, too, were killed or maimed.
He drank with Lawler and the miners and helped with their schemes and wrote letters to Gowen. Late at night, his reports finished, he smoked and stared at the sky and shifted his crooked limbs, thinking with satisfaction that he was doing his job. He was one of them, a member of a brotherhood united to defy suffering and the devil. He left his reports for Gowen’s agent to pick up.
He was with them six months; his body changed, he got hard and used to the work. On Sunday afternoons when he had nothing to do he relished coffee and smokes in a way he, who had always worked hard, had never imagined before.
He was with them a year; he got skinny, his hair began to fall out from the stress of the mines and the undercover work. He took to wearing an over-sized blonde wig, and the miners took to calling him “the man with the big head.” He could not stop coughing. He often threw up when he tried to eat. The Mollies prepared a strike and McParland fed Gowen information about it; the Mollies destroyed a mine or killed a landlord and McParland fed Gowen information about it. Sometimes he knew of a murder in advance and could do nothing to stop it without compromising his position. But then a miner and his family were killed and McParland saw their bodies: the miner, probably had it coming, but his sister? She’d been pregnant, visibly pregnant. Who killed them? He demanded an explanation from Gowen—women and children now? Gowen would not give a satisfactory answer, so McParland wrote directly to Pinkerton:
I am sick and tired of this work. I hear of murder and bloodshed in all directions. The very sun to me looks crimson; the air is polluted, and the rivers seem running red with human blood. Something must be done to stop it.
Pinkerton convinced him to stay a few weeks longer, to gather as much information as he could about a coming strike, but his situation was increasingly complicated. While some Mollies suspected him of being a detective, some citizens thought he was a murderer for the Mollies, so people on both sides wanted him lynched.
Soon rumors of his own treachery reached him and he knew the Mollies would kill him.
Don’t hesitate, he told himself. Attack.
He went to Jack Kehoe, one of Lawler’s assassins and one of McParland’s loudest accusers, and accused him of treachery. They were standing outside, their breath visible in the cold air. A light film of frost and snow covered the ground.”
“Me? A spy?” Kehoe spat.
“Ahh, you’d rather like to say it’s me?” McParland said. “Well, I’ve heard the charge before, and I’m tired of it.”
“Who else, then?” Kehoe said.
>
“I’m tired of it,” McParland said. He thought: Of squeezing myself underground to hack at walls of rock everyday, of making friendships only to learn secrets. His face was shrunken, his eyes hollow. For a moment he almost didn’t care if they killed him. His joints ached.
Kehoe agreed to a meeting of all the body-masters in the county to conduct an investigation.
“You whores,” McParland said. “Turning on your own.”
“We’ll see,” Kehoe said, nodding. “You can come right now and write out the notices for the meeting.” His face pressed close to McParland’s; his eyes widened and his lips crinkled in a smile.
McParland breathed out slowly through his mouth. He went into Kehoe’s saloon, upstairs to where the family lived. Mrs. Kehoe, a stout woman with a wide face sitting by the stove, sewing, greeted him with a nod. Kehoe put pen and paper in front of him and he began writing the notices; a moment later Kehoe came in with a glass of soda for his wife and a hot whiskey for McParland, put the glasses on the table, and left.
McParland reached for the whiskey but Mrs. Kehoe started. Her eyes flashed to the door and back to McParland. She took his glass from him, threw it in the stove, and burst into tears.
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “Please.”
McParland shook; he steadied himself and thanked her and left.
Very close, he thought. He felt sick.
The day of the inquiry he stepped off the train slowly, his body stiff but his eyes alert for an ambush. A nervous, thin Mollie passed him and said quietly, “Kehoe ain’t here, but he’s got sixteen men waitin’ for you.”
McParland nodded. He stepped inside the small waiting area and was out the other side quickly, running full speed, the cold air hurting his already aching lungs; as he ran across twilight-snow he could hear the enraged cries of the Mollies chasing him, cursing, hatchets and sledgehammers aloft. The moon and stars seemed to brighten in the closing evening, to hang low as if to guide his enemies. But he made it—somehow, his decrepit body made it through those woods to safety.
The next time he’d seen Lawler and Kehoe had been in the courtroom, more than a year later, when he testified against them and got them hanged. Soft, pale Gowen had prosecuted the men himself, speaking of the security gained by all of society when men like the Mollies were condemned.
“And to whom are we indebted for this security?” Gowen asked the jury. “To whom do we owe all this? Under the divine providence of God, to whom be all the honor and all the glory, we owe this safety to James McParland: and if ever there was a man to whom the people of this county should erect a monument, it is James McParland, the detective.”
McParland didn’t flinch through this final pronouncement of his heroism, through Gowen’s description of his service to mankind. He looked over at Kehoe and Lawler for the only time since he’d been on the stand; their eyes bled hatred. So help you God, McParland thought. May God have mercy on your soul. Then he thought the same of himself, too.
Now, in the lobby of the Wormley Hotel in Washington, D.C., years later, he remembered all of it in the course of swallowing the last of his whiskey. After the trials he had gone to Pinkerton’s ranch in Idaho to rest and had resolved never, as long as he lived, to second-guess himself. But for years he had been unable to avoid it and, eventually, he’d undertaken his own investigation of Gowen himself.
He saw Gowen, maybe a shade more plump, his hairline an inch or two higher, leave the restaurant in the lobby. Two minutes later, McParland tucked his folder under his arm, followed Gowen up the stairs, and knocked firmly on the door of room 57.
Gowen, pasty with surprise, fat with lunch, fat with land and time, opened the door. His face narrowed. “Ahh, Mr. McParland,” he said, unable to keep from his eyes a nervous squint. He opened the door wide and motioned McParland to a chair. The room was dim, the furniture plush; fringes hung from the lampshades like dripping shadows. “Time has treated you well, McParland,” Gowen said. “What brings you to Washington?”
“You do, Mr. Gowen,” McParland said. He found Gowen’s forced tone—that of ancient comrades happening into each other—distasteful. And Gowen’s surprise at seeing him underscored Gowen’s guilt: if they had really been honest comrades, not murderers, Gowen would not look at him now as if his very arrival was an accusation. “I understand that you are to testify on the Railroad Standard Time Act,” McParland said.
Gowen nodded. “The most important piece of interstate commerce legislation of our lifetime, McParland. Drink?”
McParland shook his head. He could see that in talking about the legislation Gowen found his own importance and was able to put aside his surprise at the sudden arrival of—what—an old assassin.
“Important to your coal? Or railroads?” McParland asked. “Or to both?”
“To the economy, to the men—”
“No, please,” McParland interrupted, placing the folder, tied with pale ribbon, on the coffee table. The afternoon sunlight played on the dark wood furniture; a small fire sputtered in the fireplace. Sparks and dust.
Gowen sat down, lighting a cigarette. “McParland, have a—”
“No,” McParland said. He nodded at the folder and started talking, wondering even as he did if he was most angry about the injustice of the murdered women and children or at Gowen’s assuming he could be used so completely, that the great detective would never turn his skills on someone who had paid him.
Colorless, Gowen flipped through the papers in the folder. He read one or two of the letters carefully; he smoked and licked his lips. “How did you get these?” he asked. “Look, McParland,” he said but his voice faltered.
“No, Gowen,” McParland said. “I know. I have studied and watched you, sir. And if I am disgusted with myself, imagine what I feel for you. I know which murders you ordered. I know—”
“There was no murder, McParland,” Gowen said. “We hung them together. Without your testimony we had no case.”
McParland took his pistol from inside his coat and pointed it at Gowen’s head.
“Do you know, Gowen, that in my career I have heard, more than once, of informants and criminals who have cut their own throats rather than fall into my hands?”
Gowen swallowed, his eyes moving.
Yes, McParland thought, that is the most interesting moment, right there: on the men in the courtroom when their sentences were read or as they climbed the gallows; the moment at which a man sees his own death come into view.
“You were paid to uphold the law,” Gowen said, trying to toughen, trying to stare it down.
“Yes, I was. And you paid others to kill when you thought I wouldn’t do it. Did you think I was a good enough detective to bring down the Mollies but not to find out the whole picture, Gowen?”
“The Mollies were cutthroats, McParland.”
“Women and children, sir,” McParland said. “Someone has to pay for their lives just as the Mollies paid for the lives they took. I have the whole picture now, it’s taken a long time but I know. And I know about your current financial and… personal arrangements.
Gowen’s eyes went to the folder and then back to McParland.
McParland nodded. “I am here to offer you the same relief taken by the least of the cutthroats and informants who decided not to face me.”
“McParland. Listen,” Gowen said, leaning forward.
“No, sir. You will not be saved. Your wife and children may yet be.”
Gowen slumped. The papers he held fell to his knees; some fell to the floor. Seeing that McParland remained motionless, he said, “Have pity, McParland. You don’t know—I’m ruined—I’ve lost nearly everything.”
“Nearly,” McParland said. “But you’ve stolen enough to keep going.”
“Stolen?” Gowen said. He sat upright. “How—no, that I have not done.”
McParland rested his pistol on his knee and sat back in his chair.
“Look,” Gowen said. “There’s money enough—I can—what do you want
?”
“No, there is not money enough.” McParland shook his head. “And if there was, do you imagine I’d take it from an embezzler, a landlord—a common cutthroat.” He poured Gowen a drink and handed it to him. “Courage, Gowen,” he said. “If you leave this hotel room today, I will find you and kill you. In the meantime, I’ll turn my investigations over to the Philadelphia papers and your family will share in your ruin. Thank God for a good life, and that your family will never know any of what I’ve found.”
Gowen’s eyes were red. He pulled at his hair. “You’re scum, McParland,” he said. “Traitorous Irish scum.”
“Indeed, Gowen. Someday I, too, will answer for all of this. I have no doubt of that.”
“Have you no mercy?” Gowen asked.
“This is my mercy,” McParland said, drawing the curtains so Gowen sat in the dark. He tucked the folder under his arm and said, “Courage, Mr. Gowen. I will be downstairs, and when I know that you have finished in here I will destroy this.”
He left Gowen in the chair, head in hands.
McParland waited in a doorway a few feet from Gowen’s room. He wanted to claw at his own skin; he felt filthier than even on the day he’d found out about the murdered miner’s family, but he told himself there was no such thing as “filthier”: once you are involved in taking human life you are in filth and can only hope that there is some justice in the deaths you create. You can’t hope to feel clean.
He heard a shot and went to the lobby and sat at the bar and drank. The House detective ran past, police officers rushed in. He heard people talking—there had been a shooting in room 57.
McParland swallowed the last of his drink and left.
Chapter Six
Pinchbecks
Ernest Pinchbeck, a thin man with a perpetually runny nose and blonde hair pasted to his head with gel, guided his dark-green SUV on to the narrow paved road that ran between the edge of the woods and the lake. Slowing down, he turned his head to look out over the green water.
“See that?” he said to his wife.
THE GHOST DETECTIVE: Boston Page 5