Authors: Ed Gorman
The railroad depot was noisy, crowded, and smelly. One thing nobody’s figured out—unless you’re traveling in a private rail car—is how to keep very clean on long train rides. So on a substantial trip, body odors of various kinds begin to accumulate. The railroads advertise that things are a lot better than they used to be but then we know about advertising, don’t we?
The cigars being smoked didn’t help the depot atmosphere much, either. It seemed everybody over the age of two was puffing away.
Several elderly Comanches, an enormous family of Irishers, three middle-aged men in the loud suits and dusty derbies of drummers, and various weary-looking single travelers of just about every age filled the benches
where passengers waited to depart. And then there were the kids. With their fresh faces, their noisy games, and their laughter, they looked as if they belonged to a species separate from the one the adults belonged to. A new species, these kids were, one that neither travel nor boredom could wear down. Their energy was almost threatening.
“You work days, sir?” I said to the buzzard-like face behind the ticket cage. The man was scrawny inside his gray uniform shirt and beneath his blue cap with the railroad logo riding bold above the bill.
“And you’d be who?” Then he stopped himself. “You’d be that federal man.”
“And you’d be the man who works days?”
“I would be. If it’s any of your business.”
“You always this friendly?”
“I don’t like federales.”
“Well, I guess we’re even up. I don’t like cranky old bastards.”
He spat some chaw down into an unseen spittoon. Either that or he had a hell of a messy floor.
“The name is Duncan Winters in case you want to write it down in that little book of yours. And don’t call me Dunc. I hate Dunc. Teacher give me that name way back when I lived in New Hampshire when I was seven. I figured I’d have a new start out here, telling everybody to call me Duncan. But my little brothers and sisters kept calling me Dunc, so it started up here all over again.” He thought a moment: “And you want me to tell you what?”
I smiled. “Maybe you’re not as much of an asshole as I thought. Maybe you’re going to cooperate and I won’t have to take you outside and slam your head against the tracks.”
He smiled right back. “You do and I’ll sue you federales for every penny you got.”
“A federal man sleep with your wife one time, did he?”
“Damned near. He shot my brother in the back and got away with it.”
Not much anybody could say to that. “I’m going to take your word for that, Duncan. And I’m going to apologize for it.”
“And don’t give me that one bad apple bullshit, either. Federales are as bad as Texas Rangers. Outlaws, all of them. I had a Mex wife and them Rangers never let me be.”
You heard this just about everywhere in the West, people with grudges, a lot of them deserved, against various law enforcement men.
“Duncan, I’m here to ask you questions about another federal man named Grieves.”
“Grieves. Now there was an asshole if there ever was one.”
“He give you trouble?”
“No trouble. Just walked around like he owned the place.”
“You see him more than once?”
“Just a couple times. But that was plenty for me.”
“I was going to ask you if you remember the day he came.”
“The way he treated the colored help? We all get along here. He was snappin’ his fingers and orderin’ everybody around. Even called Harry over there a dirty name a couple times.”
Good old Grieves. I was getting a picture of a man who made it even easier to hate federal men.
“You say you saw him a couple of times. Why’d he come back?”
Another well-fired volley of chaw. “Wanted to know about the Pine Lake Resort.”
“What’s that?”
“Place rich people used to stay. Cost more to stay there a week than I make in three months. We even got a few famous people goin’ there until all the trouble started.”
“What happened?”
“They had murders and then they had cholera. Two days and somethin’ like forty people died. And then they had a fire that burned down about a fourth of it. Lit like a message from the Lord. Shut the place down and it’s never opened again.”
“He didn’t seem to know that?”
“Oh, he knew it was shut down. He wanted to know if there was any kind of train that went even close to there. Hell, no, there isn’t.”
“Wonder why he wanted to know that?” I was talking to myself.
“You ’bout done gabbin’, mister?”
The voice came from behind me. A formidable older man who would probably be formidable on his deathbed. That big, that much mean in his eyes.
“You didn’t see him again?”
“No,” Duncan not Dunc said, “and I never want to again, either.”
Noah Ford had been in Junction City a while before Grieves heard about it. So the federales had finally come looking for Grieves. This gave great secret pleasure to Dobbs.
Apparently this Noah Ford was a man Grieves feared. On the night he got the news, Grieves told Dobbs about several of Ford’s successes as a human tracker. Grieves seemed to have no doubt that Ford would find him. And very soon now.
Grieves spent the rest of the night in the vast, empty resort talking to the gunny he considered the best he’d hired. A man named Parsons. Parsons was eager for the job. His eagerness sickened Dobbs. Parsons exhibited the same kind of childish excitement Grieves had when he’d killed the horse.
By this time, Dobbs felt that he was surrounded by several evil and insane children. But he had to be careful. Just about everything he did and said in those days seemed to irritate, even infuriate Grieves.
He had to be very, very careful or Grieves would turn on him.
B
rothels come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, just like the girls and women inside. There was a madam who had a whole chain of whorehouses in soddies out in North Dakota Territory. She served mostly buffalo hunters and railroad workers. One of the agency’s best informants was a seventy-year-old woman who operated from under an alley stairwell and took care of men who preferred the company of, apparently, the elderly.
Brandy Bowen, madam, resembled a witch. The sharp features, the wild dark hair, the imperious blue eyes. She wore a severely cut black dress that only emphasized her skinny, angular shape. She opened the front door then stood in it, as if blocking it.
“The girls don’t come down for another hour.”
“It’s actually you I wanted to see.”
She looked startled. “You want to go upstairs with me? I’ve got to be honest with you, mister. I’m workin’ on a bad case of the clap.”
Now it was my turn to be startled. The seventy-year-old started sounding a lot better than the woman in front of me.
I showed the badge.
“We pay Terhurne. He said that included federales.”
“I’m not here for a payoff. I’m here to ask you about a federal agent named Arnold Grieves.”
She whinnied. That’s the only way I can describe the sound. A whinny. “I sure hope you spend money like he does. He’s a party man. Boom boom boom.”
“‘Boom boom boom.’ I guess I don’t know what that means.”
“I was just drinking some coffee. You want some?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Some brothels are simply shacks or weathered old houses without the mercy of decoration. Some, like those in San Francisco, are fussily decorated to resemble Parisian parlors for the wealthy. Brandy’s resembled a standard American home, right down to the bad paintings you could order three for two dollars from the Sears catalog if your town didn’t yet have a store. A couple of windows were open. The air smelled clean. She took me out to the kitchen. A rather hefty woman in a nightgown that displayed pretty much everything was pouring herself a cup of coffee. “You opening early this morning, Brandy?” she asked.
“Copper,” Brandy said.
“Trouble?”
“Nope. Scoot.”
These two had reduced verbal communication to a minimum.
The woman scooted.
“Name’s Dot if you’re interested.”
“I’ll pass.”
“You like girls?”
“Most of the time. Right now I need to talk about Grieves.”
She served us coffee. We sat at a small table. The room was sunny, clean, well organized, new cabinets,
counters, well pump, and large ice box. The double stove bore the Sears name.
“Nice place here.” I was falling into her own minimal way of talking.
“Spic and span. Clean as a whistle. Like brand new. That’s why I resent having the clap. I always give the girls hell if they miss their monthly checkup with the doc in town and then I’m the one that goes and gets somethin’. Pisses me off. Doc says he can clear it up fast and all but it still sets a bad example for the girls.”
The coffee was good.
“One more thing about Dot. She spent some time down in Mexico. She learned some pretty unique tricks down there.”
“You’re a pretty good salesman.”
“I’ve got the best girls in three hundred miles, is what I always say. I’ve got a fatty goes nearly three hundred pounds and I’ve got a skinny that looks like she’s about fourteen. And the skinny one’s got a beautiful face on her, too. Angel face. Her problem is tits. She’s about the flattest little thing I ever saw.”
“How about Grieves? He pretty flat?”
She whinnied again. “I like a man with a sense of humor.” She sat back. In the sunshine through the windows her hair looked like a fright wig. Only now did I realize that it was badly dyed. She was probably gray.
“He was pretty loud. At least when he was here. Liked to make believe he was at this big party. Some of the customers liked it, others kind of resented he took over everything down here. That’s the part that pissed me off. A shy little man comes in, he’s nervous about being here in the first place, he don’t want somebody like Grieves makin’ him drink toasts and sing songs and everything. We got a piano in the parlor and Bobby the colored bouncer, he plays a fine piano. Grieves was
always givin’ him money to play one song or the other. And he was forever yellin’ that ‘boom boom boom’ thing.”
“What was that all about?”
“Couldn’t tell you. One night he brought this real quiet guy along. Guy seemed embarrassed about bein’ here. We get our fair share of them. He kept tryin’ to get the shy one to join in all the singing and such but he wouldn’t—until Grieves gave him some wine and then the shy one got as loud and obnoxious as Grieves. Grieves also kept huggin’ everybody and sayin’ ‘boom boom boom’ and then he’d say nobody was better at ‘boom boom boom’ than his friend here.”
“When’s the last time Grieves was here?”
“I’d have to think about it.”
She sat and sipped her coffee. “Two and a half weeks ago.”
“Where’d you get that figure?”
“Marie. Her birthday. The big one I mentioned. She’s got her own little stable of regulars and they all showed up to help her celebrate. Grieves was here with his friend again. The ‘boom boom boom’ one. He was pretty drunk and ugly. He made some remark about Marie’s weight and this big guy who likes Marie—he claims to have been a bear wrestler in the Yukon—he grabbed Grieves and told him to apologize to Marie. Grieves showed the man his badge but it didn’t matter. Man wasn’t impressed. He made Grieves apologize. Then the two of them got real shit-faced and became best buddies in the world. You know how drunks are.”
“How about describing the quiet guy?”
She picked something from between her teeth with a craggy fingernail. She examined it. I thought maybe we’d have a discussion about it, the time she spent on it. Then she lowered her hand beneath the table top,
made a wiping motion and brought the hand back up again. “Sandy haired, little, dark, but his name wasn’t Eye-talian or nothing. And one of his eyes is glass. Blue. Except it doesn’t fit exactly right. He plays with it a lot around the edges of his eye.”
Not an easy fellow to miss.
Dot came back. “Excuse me but Hattie’s sick to her stomach again. You want me to take her to the doctor?”
“Better not be that damned influenza. That costs me more money than clap.” Then: “I better get upstairs, Mr. Ford.”
I told her where I was staying.
“You should take advantage of my gals while you can. Soon as the mine shuts down for good, we’ll be long gone.”
She never stopped plugging.
I was about half a block away from the good madam’s when I heard the slap-slap of small feet. Being the distrustful sort, my hand dropped to my Colt—people with bad intent can have small feet, too—and I turned to see who was coming so fast at my back.
The rest of her was as small as her feet, a freckled prairie girl in a blue gingham dress and pigtails. “I heard you talking back there, mister.”
When she caught up with me, she grabbed my arm and leaned against me, all out of breath.
She looked up at me smiling as she tried to get her wind again. “I never was much of a runner. My brothers back on the farm always made fun of me.”
“Feeling better now?” I asked after a minute or so.
“Sorry,” she said, taking one last gasp of ragged
breath. Then she seemed to be all right. “I wanted to tell you about Grieves’s friend.”
“Grieves’s friend?”
“Uh-huh. See, when Brandy said he was sort of a bad drunk, he was. But he stayed with me and kind of sobered up. And then he was real nice. I heard you askin’ questions about him so I figured I might as well add my part, too.”
She slid her arm through mine. “You mind being seen on the street with a lady of ill repute?”
I laughed. “Not unless you mind being seen on the street with a
man
of ill repute.”
“Then I guess we’re even up, huh?” She gave my arm a little squeeze as we walked amidst the shade trees and the noisy knots of wee ones playing all sorts of wee-one games. You could smell wash on clotheslines, that heady clean scent, and pies on window sills cooling off for supper. A smart-looking carriage went by driven by a little old lady who wielded a pretty savage whip.
“He was sweet. After he started sobering up, I mean.”
“He talk much?”
“A lot. He told me about New Hampshire where he grew up and how his first wife died and how he was coming up on fifty and had never gotten to do much with his life. And then he started crying.”
“That’s strange. Don’t you think?”
“Not so much, really. A lot of men cry when they see us girls. They tell us things they’d never tell anybody else.”
“Mind if I ask what he was crying about?”
“Look at that butterfly. I’ve never seen one like that before.” Then: “Got sidetracked, sorry. Well, what he was crying about, he never really got specific, you understand, he just said he’d done something he shouldn’t
have and that he wished he could get out of it but that Grieves wouldn’t let him.”
“He didn’t seem to like Grieves?”
“He was afraid of him and didn’t trust him. And that’s just how he put it. He said that Grieves was a very dangerous man.”
“But he didn’t tell you what he’d done that he wished he hadn’t?”
“Just that he was thinking of going back home.”
“Did he leave with Grieves?”
“Yes. I was wondering—after all he’d said about Grieves—how he’d act around him when they met up downstairs again. It was sort of sad. When they had their last drink in the parlor it was right after dawn and Grieves was in this real bad mood and made a lot of cruel jokes about him. I thought maybe he’d stand up for himself. But he didn’t. He just sort of took it and didn’t say much but you could tell everybody down there was embarrassed for him. But nobody said anything. Grieves was real scary, real hungover and angry. Then they just left.”
We’d come to the end of the long block.
“Well, I just wanted to tell you that. Thought you should know.”
“I appreciate it.”
She slid her arm from mine. In the sunlight her freckles made her look thirteen or fourteen, though around the eyes now I could see the faint wrinkles that started with age twenty or so.
“You wouldn’t want to come back and help me do my laundry, would you?”
“You do your own?”
“Are you fooling? Every girl does her own. Her clothes and her sheets. Brandy runs the place like a boot camp, though she’s actually a nice woman.”
“Thanks for talking to me.”
She nodded and turned back toward the brothel. I watched her for a time, a sunflower of a girl. For a few yards there she even gave up walking and took up skipping.
I stopped at the livery and asked the man there to draw me a map to Swarthout’s mansion that Grieves had stayed in. He said he’d have it ready by the time I got back.
My next stop was the newspaper where Liz Thayer was at the counter sorting a large stack of flyers into numbers of what appeared to be twenty-five. She was alone in the ink-smelling shop. The press sat like a mute animal. She didn’t look up to see who I was. She just shook her head not to be disturbed. She would have given the president and the pope the same dismissive shake of the head.
When she was done, she looked up and said, “Oh. You.”
“More or less.”
“You’re wondering if I had time to find those two back issues that Grieves was interested in.”
“That’s one reason to be here. Another is to say hello.”
Her eyes smiled. “You never give up, huh?”
“I’m not that old. And I can bring affidavits signed by mostly respectable women if you’d like to see them.”
“The key word there is ‘mostly’ I suspect.”
“None of us is without sin.”
She laughed. “You’re full of beans, you know that?”
“Just a lonely pilgrim trying to find shelter from the storm.”
This time she giggled. “You are hopeless, Ford. You know that? Anyway, you could do a lot better than me.”
She’d just started to say more when the front door opened up, the bell above it ringing, and a middle-aged woman in a bonnet and matching gingham dress came in.
“Just a minute, Noah. I’ll be right with you, Mrs. Carstairs.”
She hurried over to a desk piled high with books, papers, and pamphlets. The pile looked about to capsize and slide to the floor. She didn’t even try to search through it. She went instead to the chair that was pushed into the desk. The pile there was much more modest. There was actual hope of finding what you were looking for. She only had to go through it twice.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Carstairs and I had one of those strained conversations that people feel compelled to have.
“Nice day.”
“Sure is,” I said.
“Last year this time we had a blizzard.”
“Blizzards. I’ve had enough of them for a lifetime.”
“My husband got lost in one once.”
“Did they ever find him?”
She looked affronted. “Gosh sakes, yes. You don’t think we’d just leave him out there, do you?”
Liz rescued me. “Here are the two papers he was interested in.”
“I owe you anything?”
“I’m in sort of a hurry,” Mrs. Carstairs said.
“Her husband was lost in a blizzard once.”
“Yes, I know, Noah. I was ten at the time and I was one of the searchers.”
“That’s why we always bring our printing business here. Because her whole family searched for him. A lot of others turned back because it was so cold and bitter. But not the Thayers.”
Longsworth caught up with me as I left the newspaper office and turned into an alley that was a shortcut. As always he carried the briefcase that appeared to be loaded down with bricks. He also carried his eternal frown.
“I suppose you know what’s going on.”
He made it sound like an accusation.
“Nothing’s going on, to answer my own question. Nobody’s trying to find out who murdered that girl and her uncle.”
“Well, I’m trying to find out.”
“You are?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “Terhurne didn’t tell me that.”
“Where’d you see Terhurne?”