A Knife in the Heart

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Good.” Fallon exhaled. “I know how to send a telegraph.”

  “But”—Helen pointed her chin at the copy of the newspaper Fallon had tossed, unread, into the wastebasket—“if you would ever take time to read the paper, all the paper, you might have noticed that Warden Jackson happens to be in the capital talking to our governor about the need for a new prison, perhaps in Rawlings.”

  “He’s still in Cheyenne?” Fallon asked.

  “There are meetings with legislators tomorrow, and a speech to the women’s auxiliary Wednesday. I guess being a warden is a lot like being a United States marshal. Except for gunfights in front of banks.”

  “Do you know where Jackson is staying?” Fallon inquired.

  She shrugged but said, “If I wanted to guess, I’d say the Inter-Ocean Hotel.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know what the phone number there is?”

  “I can look it up. And, unlike you, I can even ask Mr. Bennett, our fine, upstanding operator, to ring the hotel for you. What’s the message?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  A heavyset man with white mustache and beard, well groomed, and bald on the top of his head, M. C. Jackson pushed himself from his seat, which took great effort, because Jackson was obese, to the extent that he had to request a chair without arms to sit to his morning feast.

  Fallon handed his hat to the man in the fancy suit and let another younger man, also dressed for a wedding or funeral, lead him to Jackson’s table, even though that was far from necessary because Jackson was waving and booming, “Fallon. Over here. Have a seat. The bacon is worth dying for.”

  After thanking his guide, and shaking Jackson’s clammy hand, Fallon settled into his seat, which had arms. Jackson had to ease himself down and quickly began sawing the thickest slices of bacon Fallon had ever seen while another young man in a suit appeared as if by magic at Fallon’s side.

  “What would monsieur like for breakfast today?” the boy asked. Monsieur? The Inter-Ocean Hotel deserved its reputation . . . for being overpriced and pretentious.

  “Coffee,” Fallon said. “Black.”

  Jackson, with a fancy napkin rammed inside his paper collar and dangling like a turkey’s wattle to his waist, managed to swallow half a pig. “Fallon. Order what you want. The state prison funds will be paying for this.”

  “Coffee’s fine,” Fallon said. “Christina made my breakfast this morning.”

  “Very well,” Jackson said, but when the waiter started to leave, he raised his head. “But I’ll have two more fried eggs, son, and a big slice of toast with that huckleberry jam that tastes so divine.”

  Eventually, the waiter returned with Fallon’s coffee, and that at least gave him something to do while the hog in front of him tackled the plates and bowls before him with great zeal. There was no break for conversation until the last morsel was finished—and before the servers returned with two more fried eggs and toast with huckleberry jam. As Jackson wiped his mouth with the napkin, Fallon set his cup on the table, a signal that he was ready to talk, too.

  “Wonderful. We don’t get food like that in Laramie and at the prison.” He laughed.

  “I trust your meetings are going well,” Fallon said.

  “Indeed. Now, your charming secretary yesterday said you wanted to talk to me, so here I am, at your service.”

  But the service had to wait because the eggs and toast arrived. It was a good thing, Fallon figured, that he didn’t have anything overly important on his calendar this day.

  “I hear”—Jackson began mopping up the remnants of his eggs with a chunk of toast—“that there was some sordid gunplay on the streets of Cheyenne late yesterday morning.”

  Fallon sipped more coffee, cold now. “I read something about it in the newspaper,” he said.

  Jackson swallowed, found some water, washed it down, and wiped his mouth again. “I detest newspapers. The ink gets on my fingers.”

  And you probably lick off the ink, Fallon thought. Hell, buster, you’d eat anything.

  “Alas, my understanding is that those eight men won’t be serving any time in Laramie. Dead. All dead. Shot down like the dirty dogs they were.”

  “There were only six,” Fallon said.

  Jackson looked up.

  “According to the newspaper,” Fallon said.

  “Well.” The last morsel of food vanished. “Be that as it may, how can I help you, Marshal?”

  Fallon pulled the paper from his inside coat pocket and found a place on the table not covered with dishes. Christina had written the name in her wonderful cursive this morning before Fallon left for his meeting with the warden.

  “One of the inmates at the Big House Across the River,” Fallon said, using the nickname for the big stone building. “Carlos Pablo Diego the Fourth.”

  Jackson read the name. “Horse thief.” His jowly face rose to meet Fallon’s stare. “Is he wanted for some federal crime as well as stealing horses?”

  “Not that I know of,” Fallon said. “Just a routine investigation. I’m just looking for any information you have, trial details, the crime, what kind of prisoner he has been.”

  Jackson watched a waiter carrying a tray of food to another table, ran a tongue over his lips, and turned back to Fallon. “Well, you do understand that I have only been at the Wyoming State Prison for three months.” He chuckled. “And we have a substantial number of convicts.” The laughter resumed. “Business is good for the state prison these days, Fallon, but, well, business is always good. Otherwise men like you and I would have no job at all.” Once he could control his chuckling, he said, “Let me just point out that I really do not know this Juan Chico character.”

  “Carlos Pablo Diego the Fourth,” Fallon corrected.

  “Yes. We do not have many bean-eaters in the Big House,” Jackson said.

  “Then you could find out a bit about him with no problem.”

  “You just seek the routine information. That is my understanding. Am I correct?”

  “Yeah. Whatever files you might have on him. Maybe ask a guard what kind of prisoner he is.”

  “Well, Fallon, since I am on an expense account, I can send a telegraph after my meetings at nine-thirty, ask my assistant to relay the information directly to you. Would that be satisfactory?”

  “I thank you in advance.” Fallon stood, extended his hand, shook, and left the fat man to his bill.

  The man at the front door was examining the bullet holes in Fallon’s hat.

  * * *

  Rachel Renee was bouncing on Helen’s knee when Fallon walked into the office after his dinner meeting—which, he thanked the Almighty, had not been with Warden M. C. Jackson.

  “Papa!” his daughter exclaimed.

  Fallon’s face brightened. “Hey there, Tiger. What brings you to the big city?”

  “Ma wanted to see you,” the girl said. “Look at me. Doesn’t Miss Helen make a good pony?”

  Fallon didn’t know quite how to answer that one, so he grinned and saw Helen pointing her chin to the office as her leg kept bouncing his daughter.

  Christina sat behind Fallon’s desk.

  “You were lucky,” she told him, and pushed herself up. “He was arrested in Laramie County. The trial was right here in Cheyenne. Three years ago.”

  Three years. The boy had been right. Fallon moved around the desk and saw the papers on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper, the judge’s sentence, noting the date.

  “You found all this out this morning?” Fallon asked.

  She shrugged.

  “Surely the American Detective Agency doesn’t have a file on Carlos Pablo Diego.”

  “I doubt if the Pinkertons do, either, not for a onetime horse thief. I just sniffed around in the county courthouse. You said the boy said he’d been in prison three years, so that gave me a starting point.”

  Fallon wet his lips, shook his head. “I don’t remember the trial.”

  “Why would you?” Christina said. “A routine horse thi
ef. Like you said, it’s not a federal crime, not your jurisdiction. As far as I can tell, even the Sun-Leader did not run any account of the trial. How was your meeting with the warden?”

  “Sickening.” Fallon found another paper, looked over it at Christina and said, “One more breakfast with that hog, and I’m not sure I’d ever be able to eat again.”

  She slid a piece of yellow paper toward Fallon. “This struck me as rather interesting.”

  Fallon picked it up. “He pled guilty.”

  Christina nodded. “Halfway through the trial.”

  “Ten years. Ten years for stealing one horse. And after pleading guilty.” Fallon shook his head. “That must have been one hell of a horse.”

  “And not a hell of an attorney.” She slid her finger to a name. “Remember him.”

  “Morrison.” Fallon sighed. “A blithering idiot.”

  “Who doesn’t speak Spanish,” she whispered.

  Their eyes met. Fallon understood. The headmaster yesterday had said that the boy did not speak one word of English when he started attending the Abraham Lincoln Academy. Which meant, almost without question, that Carlos Pablo Diego IV spoke exclusively Spanish during the trial.

  “A plea deal,” Fallon said.

  “Right,” Christina said. “He probably feared they would hang him for stealing a horse.”

  “Even though horse theft has never been a capital crime,” Fallon said. “Anywhere.”

  “Tell that to ranchers and cowboys in Wyoming,” Christina said. “Or anywhere in the West.”

  “Was there an interpreter in the courtroom?” Fallon wondered aloud.

  “Apparently,” Christina said. “They don’t name him, or her, in any documents I found, but you know what court records are like. Especially at the county level. But in the loose transcript”—She picked up a stack of three pages, shuffled to the second page, and began to condense the translation—“he said he walked out of the smithy and saw this horse that had wandered out of the corral. He was bringing the horse back to the livery, thinking it might have wandered from the corral, or one of the stalls, and that’s when a cowboy busted his head with the butt of a pistol.”

  “Did the cowboy testify?”

  Christina shook her head.

  “The livery owner?”

  Her head moved again.

  Fallon muttered a curse. “My guess,” Christina said, “is that Morrison, idiot that he might be, would have had both men outside the courtroom as witnesses.”

  Fallon picked up the thought. “And the prosecutor and the judge decided that, so as not to risk an acquittal, they would get Diego to plead guilty.”

  “Probably pay Morrison a little for his troubles, too,” Christina said.

  He found the indictment, jotted down the name of the livery stable where the arrest had taken place, and the name of the deputy sheriff, then wrote down the names of Morrison and the judge, and started to write the prosecutor’s name as well, before remembering that he had been run over by a streetcar three months earlier.

  Fallon stood, kissed his wife on the lips, thanked her, and moved to the door. “Marshal . . .” Christina said as the door opened.

  When he turned, Christina said, “It’s not federal business.”

  “I know. But I made a promise. That makes it my business.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  It felt good. Real good. Fallon hadn’t felt this way in years, at least, not professionally. Sure, when he had married Christina, and when Rachel Renee was born, those were wonderful times, but as a United States marshal, Fallon had been playing politics, trapped behind a desk, putting his John Hancock on documents and letters, giving speeches, playing that absurd game. Now he found himself with a purpose.

  And his nightmares had stopped. He had started sleeping in his own bed again, not on the chaise. Two nights ago, after Rachel Renee had go to sleep, Fallon had made love to Christina.

  Christina was helping, too, and Fallon believed she was feeling revived, motivated, more like a full-fledged contributor to society and not just a homemaker and mother. She probably had been longing to do something like this for five years. So they worked together, or separately, tracking down facts, witnesses, and documents.

  Two weeks later, he sat inside his office, looking over what kind of documents he had. Helen tapped on the door, then pushed it open. “You have a visitor,” she said. Her face told Fallon that it was someone he did not likely want to see. “The warden,” she whispered. “And he has company, supervisor Hector French.”

  Fallon nodded grimly. In some ways, he had expected this call, although he expected Warden M. C. Jackson to send him a nasty telegraph and not bring in the state attorney general in as a reinforcement, so Fallon slid his papers to his left and said, “Send them in.”

  He stood as the fat man and the slim, erudite, distinguished gentleman with silver hair and a well-groomed mustache walked inside, with Helen closing the door behind them.

  “Warden,” Fallon said, extending his hand. “Hector.” He shook hands with both men, waved at the jury chairs in front of his desk, and settled into his chair. “It’s an honor to see you. What can I do for you?”

  “You have been meddling in my affairs, sir,” the fat warden said.

  “Really.” Fallon leaned back.

  “That Mexican is not the concern of the U.S. marshal. He was convicted in a county courtroom.”

  “I wasn’t aware there are boundaries for justice,” Fallon said.

  “If you want to become warden in Laramie, you will find an opening soon,” Jackson said. The man’s face had turned so red, Fallon thought he might keel over from a stroke or heart attack at any second. “I have put in for the job of superintendent at the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They are building a new prison there, you know.”

  “You seem to be moving from state to federal,” Fallon said.

  “Hank,” Hector French intervened. “What do you have regarding this inmate . . .” He looked to Jackson for a name.

  “Delmonico,” Jackson said. “Carlos Delmonico.”

  “Carlos Pablo Diego,” Fallon corrected. “Delmonico is a restaurant.” He wasn’t sure if the jab at the warden’s obesity registered with M. C. Jackson, but the grin on French’s face said at least one of the visitors understood.

  “Yes, yes, yes. Diego.” Jackson had to find a handkerchief to wipe his sweaty face.

  “The Fourth,” Fallon added.

  “What do you have, Hank?”

  Fallon slid the papers to the center of the desk. Jackson tried to stand, but couldn’t without effort, and by the time he had pulled himself halfway out of the chair—it had arms, and the fat lout barely managed to squeeze between them—French had taken the stack and was finding his spectacles.

  “He pled guilty, Hank.” French looked over his bifocals.

  “I know,” Fallon conceded.

  “You can argue points of law,” French said, “look at improper evidence, perjury, bits of law. But a confession. . . a guilty plea. What brought all this about?”

  “His kid asked me to look into it,” Fallon said. “He’s a student at the Abraham Lincoln Academy here in town.”

  “And you did, of course.” French grinned, shook his head, and found another document.

  “Heck,” Fallon said. “To be honest with you, I thought it would be a waste of my time. Figured I’d check it out, realize the man was behind bars for a good reason, and go about my business. But the more I looked into the matter, the more I smelled a rat.”

  “I resent that remark, sir,” the fat man whined.

  “I was not talking about you,” Fallon said quietly.

  “You’re talking about taking away one of my prisoners!”

  “Shut up,” French said. He scanned the page, slid it back to the desktop, and looked at another paper.

  “Have you interviewed Diego?” French asked. The warden guffawed. “He doesn’t even speak English, the damned greaser.”

&nbs
p; The room turned quiet. Hector French removed his eyeglasses and slipped them back inside his vest pocket.

  “Exactly,” Fallon said, and slid two signed affidavits in front of the attorney general. The spectacles came out of the vest pocket, and this time French sat down to read. When he finished, he leaned forward and put the papers back on Fallon’s desk.

  “These men did not testify?” French asked.

  “Diego pled guilty, ending the trial.”

  “The interpreter?”

  Fallon shook his head. “From what Christina and I have learned, you and I speak better Spanish than he does.”

  French grinned. “Christina’s working on this one with you?”

  “Once a private detective . . .” Fallon shrugged and smiled slightly.

  M. C. Jackson tried to squeeze out of the chair, which Fallon hoped the fat man did not break.

  “What’s your next step?” French asked.

  “Cross some T’s and dot some I’s,” Fallon said.

  “Find an interpreter and head down to Laramie to visit Diego in the Big House. See what he has to say. If it feels right, then I bring it to you.”

  French nodded, then shook his head. “Ten-year sentence. For horse theft. After a guilty plea. Must have been a damned fine horse.”

  “That’s what Christina and I thought.”

  French stood, helped pull the obese warden out of the chair, and shook Fallon’s hand. “Keep me posted on this, Hank,” French said. “I don’t like thinking of innocent men behind bars.” His eyes locked on Fallon. “Do you ever think about that, about the men you arrested?”

  “I didn’t,” Fallon answered. “Until I wound up in Joliet.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jackson decided to say something. “Well, Diego won’t be my problem once I get the job in Leavenworth.”

  “And you won’t be my problem, either,” French said, and moved to the door, opened it, and called out, “Let me know if you need anything, Hank. Jackson, I suppose you’ll be joining me for dinner.”

  “By all means,” the warden said, and lumbered through the door.

  “My lucky day,” French said, and closed the door after the fat man exited Fallon’s office.