C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FIVE
That was about the biggest bunch of people I ever did see, and they kept coming. The more the Watch and Warders agitated to drive the show away, the more people flooded to Ralston’s box office. They were all sorts, not just cowboys off the ranches. Some had come from little places far away, itching to see a real variety show. Others were just curious people, who heard stuff about the show and wanted to see with their own eyes. They kept coming, and I knew Ralston and the Follies would have themselves a sellout again.
I was keeping watch. So far, it was peaceable enough. All them show-goers lined up to buy tickets, and the Watch and Ward ladies stood out of the way, heeding what I told them about disturbing the peace and not trespassing. What’s more, the ladies weren’t hollering, or taunting customers, or slapping them with signs, or misbehaving. They had their signs, all right, all about keeping Doubtful “clean and pure,” and “Motherhood for Decency,” and stuff like that.
I kept waiting for something bad to happen, because I couldn’t get that hint of trouble in Delphinium’s rebuke out of my head. But nothing much happened. The theater had a few extra buckets ready, and had filled the rain barrels. And Rusty was quietly patrolling the back and sides of the theater, as well as the alleys and buildings around there, but no one was setting fire to anything, and no one was even lurking around. I began to think maybe it’d be a quiet night after all, even though I couldn’t get my worries out of my head. Before showtime I’d checked with Sammy Upward to see if he’d picked up any rumors, and he hadn’t. There wasn’t any bar talk about the show.
I’d watched all them showgirls walk in through the stage door, including Ambrosia, and wished I could be inside for the show. I’d never get tired of watching those beautiful gals, or watching the dances or the singing, too. This here Follies was a magic lantern show, and I’d never seen the like. But this time I’d stay outside, keeping an eye on everything while the show went ahead in there. They were all trusting me to keep them safe, and keep the peace, so that’s what I intended to do. Ambrosia smiled at me as I stood at the stage door, and I nodded back. I sure wasn’t fixed to marry her for a month and pay her way east.
Delphinium, she lowered her sign, which had a single word on it, DECENCY, and headed my way, so I braced myself for trouble.
“We’ve followed your directions exactly,” she said.
“Yes, you have, and it’s been peaceful tonight.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how deeply this theater offends every honorable woman in Doubtful,” she said. “We go to bed weeping for our city.”
I hardly knew what to say to that, but I tried. “If it ain’t to your liking, ma’am, there’s the city council and the county supervisors. They make ordinances and laws. That’s how it’s supposed to work. They’re elected.”
“By men,” she said. “What chance have we against men?”
She had a point there.
“We’d like our town to be like a beautiful garden planted with roses,” she said. “We’d like a town filled with happy homes, good husbands wellemployed, good wives and mothers, good sons and daughters, church bells ringing joyously every Sunday. Picnics, pot luck suppers, Fourth of July parties. Safety. No crime. Moral courage, character, grace. We’d like that, but we’re powerless to change a thing.”
She was speaking earnestly, and the funny thing was that I kind of liked her, talking like that. It really was the first time we’d just talked a little, and not got on each other’s nerves.
“You’ve already got some of that, Mrs. Sanders.”
“Very little of it. Women can’t vote. And men don’t want the town to change.”
“You’ll have your gardens some day, ma’am.”
“Not as long as you’re sheriff,” she said.
The crowd was pretty much in the opera house now, and the rest of them gals were ready to quit.
“Thanks for your cooperation, ma’am.”
She eyed me. “I don’t want to know what’s going on in there. It’s not just the tawdry women who are ruined. It’s the fine young men, who’ll never look upon womanhood in the same way, and who will never admire virtue again. Good evening, sir.”
She and her Watch and Ward crew marched off into the sinking sun, oddly quiet and less militant than before.
“She’s a magnificent woman,” said a voice all too familiar.
Ike Berg was standing just behind me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, eying his waist. He was not visibly armed.
“Waiting for you to get yourself fired. I want your job.”
“You won’t have it.”
“You might keep the tin star, Pickens, but I will enforce the law.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“There are higher laws, and there are man-made laws. I’m bound to enforce higher law.”
“Such as?”
Berg simply smiled with them dried-up lips, which annoyed me.
“You tell me what higher law, and how you’ll enforce it.”
“Wait and see,” he said.
“Where are you from? You got a family?”
“They’re all dead. I am alone.”
“You got someone close, a relative or something?”
“Pickens, I am a man without a country, a man who has no safe harbor, no friend, no profession, no religion, no trade, no destination, no future or past. I hear the voice of the universe, the music of the divine, the thunder of Judgment.”
“You ain’t told me what law you’ll enforce.”
“Nor will I. It is for you to discover.”
He turned away, and I stood there, trying to absorb that entirely unrewarding exchange. If there was one thing to know about Iceberg, was that he was a mystery and intended to stay one. I had no more notion of what he wanted from life, or what he intended to do to Doubtful, Wyoming, or who he was, than before. I watched him vanish into the twilight, which is where he belonged. He didn’t belong in night or day, but he lived in some perpetual twilight, a shadow creeping here and there, making the world worse. I didn’t think I ever met a feller I understood less than Ike Berg. I could see why he had hooked up with Delphinium Sanders, but not Luke the Butcher. If he intended to enforce his own higher law, why had he tried to be a sheriff, enforcing man-made law? Was he simply mad? It sure made me uneasy, and I didn’t have a clue about what made him tick. But I’d sure keep an eye on him.
I could hear that show cranking up in there. The opera house had a vent in the roof that let the summer heat out, but also the music, which drifted over the empty alleys of Doubtful. The town got real lonesome when that show was running. There was a few old soaks in the saloons, and a few ladies sewing by lamplight in their houses, but no one on the streets. In the twilight I saw not a soul between courthouse square and the far side of town. No one, not even on a soft summer night.
I thought it might be a good idea to rattle doors, so I started down Main Street, checking every door of every dark business. Sometimes a storekeeper forgot to lock up, and then I’d have to fetch him, and also look around the place. But each door was tight this night. I tried the mercantile, the ice cream soda parlor, the milliner, the law office of Attorney Stokes, but they was all tight and clean. That was fine with me.
I headed over to Turk’s, and found no one in the livery barn or out back in the pens, or in the loft. I always checked Turk’s place because that’s where vagrants and cutpurses and drifters would sort of end up, bunking in the hay. They’d pinch a bottle from a saloon and didn’t have the sense to get out of Doubtful, but would head for Turk’s hayloft to guzzle it down, and I’d let them enjoy a night in my iron-bar hotel for their trouble.
It sure was quiet. I headed back to the opera house in time for the intermission, and saw them cowboys out in the street for a smoke between acts. Ralston was in his box office, doing some arithmetic, so I drifted that way.
“Sellout,” he said, “Fifty-five standing room tickets. Biggest night ever here.”
“I would’ve liked to see the show again.”
“It’s hot in there, even with the vent. The girls are sweating.”
“With nothing on?”
Ralston laughed. “Heat got to Jardine, and he’s indisposed. He’s turned the show over to his substitute, whatever his name is.”
“He’s a card, that Jardine. Makes the show go right along.”
“He stopped here to get the box office take, and then went to his hotel.”
“I hope you fellers make some money, after the rough times around here.”
Ralston sighed. “We won’t even break even.”
There was a clanging of a cowbell, sort of, and all them dudes was putting out their coffin nails and drifting back. After watching some of them acts, I’d need a good smoke too.
The music cranked up, and I drifted away, keeping an eye on Doubtful. I thought I’d better check with Rusty, so I headed up toward the courthouse square, and the sheriff’s office.
Rusty was in there, reading a Captain Billy Whizbang magazine by the light of a kerosene lamp. That was the sort of magazine that Delphinium Sanders wouldn’t want in Doubtful.
“All quiet,” he said.
No sooner had he said it then we heard a thump, muffled but plain.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Beats me,” I said.
I stepped outside to see if a June storm was coming up, but the night was soft and starry, and I didn’t see any flickers of lightning. Just a mess of glitter pasted up there.
“It ain’t a thunderstorm,” I said. “But I’ll go scout.”
I headed into the June night, full dark now, and sure didn’t see much. The Beanery was black. The bank was black. I eyed it close, and couldn’t see any trouble there. I checked around, one business after another.
Maybe it was the bass drum in the opera house booming away for something or other.
I headed back to the bank, for no reason I could explain, and rattled its front door and its rear one. They were tight. But there was something in the air that smelled familiar, like maybe cordite, so I pushed my face against an iron-barred window, but I couldn’t see anything in there. I stepped back and studied the windows, and sure enough, a high-up one was cracked and some glass was out of it. I found a few shards on the ground.
I headed back to the sheriff’s office and got a reflector lantern.
“Bank’s locked but something’s wrong,” I said.
Rusty and me went across the square and shone the lamp into there. It was murky, like maybe there was something in the air.
“Something got blown,” Rusty said. “I get a whiff of powder or something.”
“I’ll get Sanders,” I said. “You stay here and stay armed. Don’t know what’s in the building or the bushes.”
Rusty doused the light and sat on the steps. I had to hike to the north side of town and that big place I was ordered never to enter. The house was dark, even though it was hardly nine. Them two were “early-to-rise and early-to-bed” types. I bet they had separate bedrooms at opposite ends of the house.
I banged away with the brass door knocker, and after a long time Sanders appeared, in a bathrobe and slippers, a lamp in hand, and a dour look on his granite face.
“I need you to come to the bank. Something’s haywire.”
“Are the doors locked?”
“Tight,” I said. “Both doors and the barred windows. I shook every one.”
“Then why are you bothering me?”
“There’s some broken glass.”
“The windows are all barred. You say the doors are locked.”
“There’s a smell, like something had been set off.”
He smiled grimly. “You’re full of ill-founded notions. The wicked flee when no man pursueth.”
“You want to lend me a door key?”
“Oh, all right. And I’ll follow along in a bit.”
I took the brass key and hiked back to the bank. Rusty was sitting there on the stoop, a revolver in his hand.
He lit his lamp and I unlocked, and we walked into a wall of acrid air. Something sure wasn’t right. I headed for the safe. It wasn’t a big one, but about as tall as me and all that was needed in a town like Doubtful. We stepped over a large, tangled tarpaulin lying on the wooden floor. I thought I knew what that was for. Pull it over a charge that’s going to go off and it dampens the sound even as it’s blown away.
The door of the black-enameled safe hung open.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SIX
We peered into that safe while Rusty held the lamp close. There was paper stuff on the bottom shelves. But greenbacks and gold were missing.
“Gone!” Sanders said. “All gone! Nothing here but some securities I hold for people.”
“What’s gone?” I asked.
“Our operating cash. Greenbacks. Our gold.”
“How much?”
“I know it to the penny. It’s on my desk. I did the ledger only a few hours ago. Of gold there was about five thousand, three thousand in doubleeagles, two in eagles and half-eagles. Of bank notes, there were seven thousand and something, in all denominations, singles, twos, fives, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds. All used. We have little call for currency.”
“Wrapped in any fashion?”
“In gum paper packs of ten, mostly. It’d all fit in a canvas postal bag.”
“Coins?”
“Locked in cash drawers at the two teller stations. Every penny accounted for.”
Rusty threw the lamplight on the drawers and tugged at them. They remained locked.
“I’m ruined. The bank’s ruined. Doubtful’s ruined. I cannot pay demand against deposits. The town’s gone to Hades. I’m a debtor, an outcast. Poor Delphinium, doomed to penury.”
“Not yet,” I said. “That money’s not gotten far. That blast happened just an hour ago. That cash don’t fly away. It gets hauled. It gets packed. Gold ain’t light. It takes some sweat to carry that load out of town.”
“Ruined. I knew the instant you let that theater company into town, it would come to this. Open one door, and all of hell rushes in.”
“You think they did it?”
“Who else? No one in Doubtful would even think of doing such a dastardly thing.”
“You think someone in the company came here and stole the cash while the show was running? Still is running? That company’s still on stage.”
Sanders drew himself up and addressed me. “Yes, exactly. Sin begets sin. Evil begets evil. This town turned dark and mean, and it spelled doom for us all.”
“Then the loot’s still here,” I said. “We’ll track her down.”
“I’m ruined,” he said. “Even if you find the money, I’m ruined.”
I motioned Rusty to shine the light on that door and the safe. Someone with a good drill had widened the crack where the door fit against the safe, and poured blasting oil in there and then ignited it. I knew a bit about that stuff from the miners around Doubtful. They called it nitro, and most of them were scared of it because it was unstable. They mostly preferred dynamite, which was a type of clay soaked with this nitro for safety. But you couldn’t squeeze sticks of dynamite between a safe door and the frame of the safe. Someone who knew a lot about this had been in here and done it.
“Blasting oil,” I said. “Poured into that hole. Then it spread down inside there.”
“I don’t know blasting oil from chewing tobacco,” Rusty said.
“See?” Sanders said. “You’ve always had incompetents in your office. If you don’t solve this you’ll be out on your ear, and I will celebrate.”
“Thanks for helping me out,” I said. “Who’s got a key? Them doors were locked.”
“I have the original. Mrs. Sanders has copy number one. And one of my trusted men, the cashier, Ovid Larousse, has copy number two. It opens both doors.”
“Larousse, is he the hairy one?”
“You’d call him that, I suppose. I’d say he has fine muttonchops of a sandy hue.”
“Where does he live?”
“He’s impeccable, Sheriff, and I’ll not have you harassing an innocent man. He’d guard this bank with his life. He’s a missionary, you know.”
“That’s what I’m worried about. Where does he live?”
“I won’t tell you. I’ll not have you casting a cloud over his life. I’d even trust him with my wife.”
“You mind if I go talk to him?”
“Certainly I do.”
“Who might Mrs. Sanders have lent the key to?”
“She might lend it to Sheriff Berg, a man of impeccable stature.”
“Did she lend it to him?”
Sanders was getting more and more annoyed. “I’ll end this foolish line of inquiry and tell you that you’ll not harass my wife, nor shall you speak to her, nor shall you speak to either of our guests, Mr. Berg and his deputy. You will proceed to the opera house, find out who has taken the bank’s entire cash and gold assets, and make an arrest. Right now.”
“Is there any other way into the bank?”
“Someone picked the locks, obviously.”
“Someone, meaning someone in the Grand Luxemburg Follies, picked the lock, entered, blew the safe door loose, took the bills and gold, exited, picked the lock shut after the robbery, and hightailed away.”
Sanders lifted himself up again, which gave him height. “Exactly,” he said.
“My ma, she always said everyone’s got a theory.”
“Someone in that company’s a demolition expert.”
“There’s miners around Doubtful that have the knack.”
“But the one who blew my door was a safecracker.”
“What’s the difference?”
“That’s why you should resign, Pickens. Any competent peace officer would know the difference.”
“Well, whoever got the stuff is no more than an hour away. I guess we’d better start local. Rusty, get the blown-up tarpaulin. Maybe it belongs to someone. Mr. Sanders, you got a list of what got took?”
“It won’t do you any good. I’m not sure you know how to count.”
“You want to name who took it, long as you seem to know?”
“Ralston. I never trusted the man.”
“He’s sitting in his box office.”
“That’s what I’m saying. He’s got the loot in there.”
I didn’t see what more could be said to that feller. I was going to start with Ovid Larousse. Someone with a key got in there. Maybe someone borrowed a key. Maybe a lock picker with a couple of wire tools flipped the bank door open and flipped it tight later. That seemed a little farfetched, but I’d let smarter fellers decide that. When money’s missing, look for it. That’s about all I ever knew.
We left the banker to ponder his fate in there. He stood staring at his blown safe, fingering the steel where someone muscular had swiftly cut down to the crack between the door and its frame and pumped some juice in there. Larousse had better have a damned good explanation or I’d be tearing his rooms apart.
“You know where that cashier lives?”
“Yeah, he’s got a suite above the Sampling Room. He’s a gambling fool. I’ve seen him lose his shirt to Cronk, the dealer in there. Night after night.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
We passed the opera house. The show was just winding up, and a few people were drifting out ahead of the curtain calls. Ralston wasn’t in his box office. Everything at the theater looked normal. The bank had been entered, its safe blown, the loot removed, and the door locked behind the thief, while the popular show was playing and the streets were deserted.
“I sort of admire that feller,” I said. “Blowing that safe so fast.”
“You think it’s Luke the Butcher? He’d have access to Delphinium’s bank key.”
“He cuts meat, not metal, but who knows? Let’s rattle the cashier’s cage first.”
“Do you think we should tell the county supervisors first? Maybe the county lost some money.”
“Don’t see how. This was cash and gold.”
We turned into Mrs. Gladstone’s Sampling Room. That was a mean place. There wasn’t no cowboys in there. Another type, mostly rough drifters, they were drinking red-eye neat. This was a place where they’d slip some poor dude a mickey and clean out his purse before he woke up in the back alley. I thought maybe to talk with Cronk, the tinhorn at the green baize table at the rear. He was running a faro game, and pulling cards out of the faro box on his table for two players.
He eyed me coldly.
“You seen Ovid Larousse?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said, pulling the second card.
“He buck the tiger much?”
“Who did you say?”
I saw how that was going, so I lifted his faro box off the table and got fixed to throw it at him.
“Hey!” he yelled, reaching for his pepperbox. Then he saw Rusty’s iron aimed at his cheating heart, and settled down.
“He was in here after the bank closed. I haven’t seen him since.”
“Was he in some kind of mood?”
“He’s always in a mood, Sheriff.”
“He upstairs?”
“Go to hell,” Cronk said.
I set down the faro box, and them gamblers looked like they had swallowed spit.
“I could have won on the jack,” Rusty said.
I headed up the stairs at the side of the joint. We knocked, no answer, and busted in. The place wasn’t locked. It was dark. We lit a lucifer, and fired up a lamp, but all we saw was Larousse’s orderly room, not a feather loose, not anything. Not a razor, not a comb, not a brush. In fact, he’d pulled out. That sure was interesting. Empty armoire, not one dirty sock in a corner.
“Dead,” Rusty said.
“Naw, dead people leave smelly socks around,” I said. “He packed his underwear.”
“Would you say that about me if I disappeared?”
“I’d say your underwear killed you off,” I said. “We’d better see what Turk has to say.”
If Larousse got a horse or two from Turk’s Livery, that might explain a lot. We headed that way, passing the crowds heading for the saloons after a night with the Grand Luxemburg Follies. That bank heist was well timed, if the object was to do the job while much of the population of Doubtful was in the opera house.
I found Turk drunk as a skunk in the stinking office he lived in. He wasn’t one to bathe, and usually dipped in a horse watering trough in the middle of the night. But tonight he was clutching a flask of Old Orchard.
“You rent any nags or a wagon tonight?”
“I wouldn’t rent you a nag if you begged me,” he said.
“That cashier, Larousse, he been around here?”
“Nah, and I wouldn’t rent him a nag. I don’t think he’s ever sat a nag. He arrived by coach.”
“Anyone around here tonight?”
“Just the usual rummies,” he said.
“Anyone head out with a horse or wagon?”
“What do ya take me for, an idiot?”
I didn’t know what was paining him. “You see anything unusual?”
“Caterpillars crawling all over the place. And earthquakes. And tidal waves. I’ve been slapping horseflies all night.”
“And after you sucked on that bottle, everything quieted down, right?”
“How did you know that?”
“Come on, Rusty, let’s head for Sanders’s place.”
“You don’t even thank me,” Turk said, settling back in his grimy bunk.
We weren’t doing real good at finding the thief. But I had a notion he might be up there in Sanders’s carriage house, laughing at Hubert and Delphinium and maybe laughing at me. So we headed for the north side of Main Street, where all them comfortable dudes lived, the ones that were always telling me I didn’t know my job. My thinking was that Iceberg and Luke the Butcher and maybe the cashier had pulled a heist right there, getting in with Delphinium, getting the bank key, blowing the safe, and then hiding all that cash and gold right there in the safest hiding place in town, the banker’s own carriage house. After a while they’d split up the loot, and get out. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like that’s what happened.
“You think Larousse is up there, too, with all that swag?” Rusty asked.
“I don’t know what I think. My ma used to say, quit thinking and start looking, so that’s what I’m fixing to do. Maybe we’ll nail the crooks right in Sanders’s own yard.”