Death Rattle

by Jory Sherman

  “There were two other men who rode to the clinic for treatment of broken bones and bruises,” Brad said. “They were single, but they told much the same story as Ruben. They were beaten by men wearing hoods and told to pay up or get out of town.”

  The room went silent as Brad’s words, added to those of Wally, soaked in.

  “At least there was one good thing that happened this night,” Felicity said.

  They all looked at her as if she had uttered a blasphemous phrase in a Sunday-go-to-meeting assembly.

  “Pilar and Julio are having a baby,” she said. “That’s why we came to town. It was touch-and-go for a time.”

  “That’s good news,” Pete said in breathy relief. “Is Julio in town, then?”

  “He is,” Brad said. “You might say I was killing two birds with one chunk of a stone. I knew we couldn’t take on this gang of cutthroats with just the two of us.”

  “That’s why Quince is here, too. He’s another gun we might need.”

  “Well, that lessens the odds a bit,” Brad said. He counted heads. “We are six against maybe less than a dozen.”

  “There is more to this Golden Council thing than a dozen men extorting money from the townfolk.”

  “Oh?” Brad said.

  “I think the banker, Adolphus Wolfe, is in this up to his hat brim.”

  He told Brad about the silver bars, his talk with Wolfe’s secretary, Elizabeth Andrews, and the heavy bags Wolfe carried out of the bank.

  “That might explain the two percent,” Brad said. “Only a banker would put that kind of number to wholesale extortion.”

  “That’s what I figure,” Pete said.

  Pete stood up, walked over to the bureau, and brought back two handfuls of cups. He began to pour coffee.

  “Is there some legal way we can brace Wolfe where he lives?” Brad asked.

  “I’m going to see Judge Leffingwell tomorrow morning and ask him to swear out a search warrant. But I won’t tell him that there’s no way we can trace those silver bars to the Panamint. They’ve been re-smelted, melted down, and stamped ‘GC.’”

  “Maybe that’s enough,” Brad said.

  “There’s a wolf’s head underneath those letters,” Pete said as he handed cups to outstretched hands. He carried one to Felicity, who smiled at him in gratitude.

  “A wolf’s head pretty much ties the banker to the theft,” Brad said.

  “Wish me luck with the judge.”

  “What bothers me most about this gang,” Brad said as he sipped the steaming coffee, “is this thing with the Mexicans. It sounds like our banker wants to drive them all out of Leadville. That’s even worse than the stealing.”

  “I agree,” Pete said, looking over at Carlos.

  “That Jigger hates Mexicans, that’s for sure,” Wally said.

  “But he’s working for Wolfe, I think,” Brad said. “He was slickered into office mighty quick. Somebody had to grease the skids on this one.”

  They all sat silent for a time, sipping their coffees. Pete’s brows were knitted in thought, and Brad had a faraway look in his eyes as he gazed around the room, fixed on the black windowpanes that quavered with faint moonlight and the pale light of the bedside lamp.

  “Do you have a plan, Pete?” Brad asked as he raised his cup to his lips.

  “We don’t know who all the members are of this Golden Council. Maybe I can get Wolfe thrown in jail for theft or conspiracy. With Wally as witness, we should be able to bring Jigger to the gallows for murder. You know where their hideout is, but they’re probably prepared for any assault we might make. None of this is going to be easy.”

  He looked at Brad, who set his empty cup on the table.

  “An eye for an eye,” Brad said, so softly the others barely heard him. “Divide and conquer.”

  “Huh?” Pete said.

  “We hunt them down, one by one. You said you saw the men I sent back to town bare-assed, Pete. There’s two we know by sight. Quince there knows Earl Fincher. For the others we don’t know, it will be ‘guilt by association.’”

  “By the book?” Pete said. “Legal?”

  “Look at the law here. Alonzo Jigger. Where there is no law, we are the law.”

  “You think that?”

  “I do. One thing: Wally has to quit being a deputy sheriff. And Jigger’s mine. He goes first, legal or illegal.”

  “He’s mighty fast,” Wally said. “Why, I seen him grab flies out of the air and mash ’em plumb dead. So fast his hand was like a blur.”

  “Catching flies fast is not the same as jerking iron,” Brad said.

  “Divide and conquer,” Pete said. “I kinda like that.”

  Brad stood up.

  “We’re going to get some shut-eye. Meet you down at the dining room around nine. Okay?”

  “We can meet then, sure. Get some sleep. We’ll do the same.”

  “Hide that badge, Wally. Long as you show it, you’re on the wrong side.”

  Wally took off his badge and buried it in a pocket.

  Brad grinned and helped Felicity to her feet. They and Carlos left the room.

  As she and Brad climbed into bed, she held him tight against her and they kissed.

  “I’m scared, Brad,” she whispered. “That Jigger. He sounds dangerous.”

  “Falling off a horse is dangerous, too, Felicity. I don’t plan on falling off my horse.”

  There were whispers in the darkness as the two fell asleep, their room ticking faintly as it cooled in the mountain chill and the fresh breezes that blew against the boards and windowpanes.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Quince met Brad at the entrance to the hotel dining room, just off the lobby, the next morning a little before nine A.M.

  “You’re a wanted man, Brad,” he said. “Those flyers are all over town. They’s even one in the hotel window.”

  “At least it doesn’t have my picture on it. Pete here yet?”

  “No, he’s over at the courthouse trying to get a search warrant. Wally’s here, though.”

  “Carlos will be down pretty quick, and Julio will join us for breakfast.”

  “I got us a big table,” Quince said, and the two men entered the dining room, which was warm from the burning logs in the fireplace, the sunlight streaming in through the windows. They walked through a maze of white tablecloths to a large round table near the center of the room. Wally raised a hand in welcome, and the two men sat down. A waiter appeared right away and laid out printed breakfast menus.

  “Coffee?” he said.

  Brad and Quince both nodded.

  The waiter glided away on polished black shoes, headed for a side table where white coffee cups sat on saucers and a large pot of coffee boiled its cinnamon fragrance into the room.

  Their small talk mingled with the hum and murmur of other voices in the room, the women dressed in their spring finery, wearing straw hats decorated with fake stuffed birds, the men with their purple and white vests, and ranchers in town to sell beef or buy grain. Young dandies in tight pressed pants and striped cravats wooed other men’s wives and single women laundresses wishing to be counted among the gentry. They were all there, diving into fried hen’s eggs, cutting into slabs of ham or thin strips of beefsteak, chugging down buttermilk and whiskies, their faces burned rosy from days in the sun, their noses shining from strong drink.

  “You’re a wanted man, Brad,” Wally said. “Me’n Jigger tacked posters offering two hunnert bucks for your capture.”

  “That seems to be the topic of the morning,” Brad said. “Quince here already told me.”

  “Well, you saw them flyers in Pete’s room last night.”

  “Yes. Felicity has one for a keepsake, in fact.”

  “Ain’t you worried?”

  Brad turned to look at Quince.

  “Quince here is going to claim that reward,” Brad said.

  “Huh?” Quince said.

  Wally’s jaw dropped a centimeter or two. He stared at Brad gape-mouthed li
ke a kid seeing an oddity in a carnival sideshow.

  “Yep,” Brad said. “Quince is going to walk into the sheriff’s office carrying one of those dodgers and tell Jigger that he knows where I am and he wants the two hundred bucks in reward money.”

  “I am?” Quince’s collar seemed to tighten around his neck, and he poked a finger inside the lining to loosen it.

  The waiter brought a tray filled with cups and saucers and a silver pot of coffee with a spout as graceful as a swan’s neck. He set the cups and saucers before each man, adding small spoons that clanked against the porcelain saucers, and poured each cup half full. He set the pot on a folded napkin and bowed slightly.

  “Would you care to order now, gentlemen?”

  “There are more coming,” Brad said. “We’ll wait.”

  “At your service, sir,” the waiter said and, with an officious air, minced away from their table to attend to other diners.

  “Are you a good actor, Quince?” Brad said. “You have to convince Jigger that he can take me in without a fight.”

  “You tell me what to say, Brad, and I can lie like the best of them.”

  “He’ll be suspicious,” Brad said.

  “He probably won’t buy it,” Wally said. “Jigger’s been around the Horn a time or two, I reckon.”

  “I’d lie to my own mother if it would get me candy,” Quince said, his lips curving in a slight smile. “One thing I was born with was the gift of gab.”

  “You’ll need that gift,” Brad said and lifted his cup to his lips. He blew steam across the surface of the hot coffee and drank. Ideas flowed through his mind, bobbing up like corks on a stormy sea, some to be rejected, others to be examined and refined. Quince had the easy part, he thought. Brad would need all his senses and skills to lure Jigger into a gunfight.

  And the fight had to be fair, he reasoned.

  The fight must have a witness, as well.

  That witness would be Quince.

  The only question is, he thought, which man will he see die?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Pete met Betty Andrews on her way to the bank. She was surprised to see him.

  “I have a big favor to ask of you, Betty,” he said as they walked along Harrison Street toward the bank.

  He carried a thin brown satchel in one hand, took her arm with the other, and turned her around.

  “Pete, what are you doing?”

  “You’re going to be a little late to work this morning.”

  “I’ll get fired.”

  “No, you won’t. I promise.”

  “Where are we going?” she demanded.

  “Your blue dress matches your eyes,” he said. “And I like that little necklace with the blue stones.”

  “Pete,” she exclaimed.

  “We’re going to see Judge Dewey Leffingwell.”

  “What for?”

  “You’ll have to wait. I don’t want to taint my witness.”

  “Witness?”

  “Enough questions,” he said. “Just trust me, will you?”

  “Trust you? When you’re practically kidnapping me?”

  “I’ll make it up to you, Betty. You won’t regret this, I promise.”

  “I’d better not,” she said.

  “I like your spunk, Miss Andrews,” he said with a grin.

  They stopped at the notary public’s office and went inside.

  Horace Killbride looked up from his desk, where he had been examining a stack of papers through horn-rimmed glasses.

  “You again,” he said.

  “I told you I’d be back, Horace.”

  “Look, Mr. Farnsworth, I’m already in a heap of trouble, and I notarized those statements for you after you got me out of bed at dawn this morning.”

  “Just need you to make a statement or two before Judge Leffingwell,” Pete said.

  “Oh, no. Not without a lawyer I won’t.”

  “Suit yourself, Horace. Who’s your lawyer?”

  “Stephen Finwoodie. His office is across from the courthouse.”

  “We’ll stop in on our way to see the judge.”

  And so they did. Pete, Betty, and Horace entered the law offices of Finwoodie and Leadoff. Stephen Finwoodie was a muscular, tall man in his forties with a thick square beard salted with strands of gray hair. He put out his pipe and agreed to accompany Horace to court.

  “Mind telling me what this is all about?” Finwoodie asked Pete after the detective showed him his badge.

  “It’s all about a conspiracy,” Pete said.

  “Horace involved?”

  “Indirectly. He’s not the one who’s in trouble.”

  “That’s a relief,” Horace said, mopping his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief.

  “I’m not so sure, Horace,” Finwoodie said. “I’m going in blind.”

  “Your eyes will be opened, Mr. Finwoodie,” Pete said as they all headed across the street to the courthouse.

  Horace, a thin, nervous man with a slight tic under his left eye, looked like a prisoner being escorted to the gallows, with his short slow steps holding up the rest of them as they climbed the steps to the entrance.

  There were people sitting on benches outside the courtroom, others leaning against the dirty plastered walls with dark prints and etchings in varnished frames hanging along both sides.

  Pete led them into the courtroom where a few others sat waiting for the judge to convene the day’s calendar. He walked to the judge’s door and opened it. A clerk rose from behind his desk.

  “Hear, hear,” he said. “You can’t come in here.”

  “I’ll see Judge Leffingwell,” Pete said, flashing his badge at the clerk, a young man in his late twenties wearing a striped shirt, high collar, thin dark suit coat, and gray slacks. “I’m Detective Farnsworth.”

  “Yes, sir. One moment, please.”

  The clerk emerged from the judge’s chambers a moment later.

  “You may all go in,” he said.

  They all entered Leffingwell’s office, and the clerk closed the door behind them and returned to his desk, noticeably shaken by the experience.

  Leffingwell had already donned his robe. He stood behind his desk, his jowls sagging like a bulldog’s, his close-set eyes pale as robin’s eggs and bulging from their sockets as if he had just swallowed a carafe of poison. He was not an imposing figure, but the robe gave him the look of authority and menace.

  “This is highly irregular, Mr. Farnsworth. I’m due in court in less than fifteen minutes.”

  He looked at Horace and Stephen, whom he knew, but his eyebrows arched when he saw Miss Andrews.

  “What do we have here?” he asked. He sat down slowly in his high-backed baronial chair and tapped his fingers on the ink pad that floated atop his cherrywood desk.

  “I’ll make this brief, Judge,” Pete said. He opened his satchel and pulled out a sheaf of papers.

  “What’s all this, then?” Leffingwell asked, making no move to examine the papers with their handwritten lines scrawled across the white surfaces.

  “Number one,” Pete said, “is a sworn affidavit from Deputy Sheriff Wallace Culver, attesting to the murder of three men to which he was a witness. The murderer is the new sheriff, one Alonzo Jigger.

  “Number two,” he continued, “is a sworn affidavit by Notary Public Horace Killbride attesting to the circumstances involving a warrant for the arrest of one Brad Storm for murder.

  “Number three is my witness here, Miss Elizabeth Andrews, secretary to one Adolphus Wolfe, the president of the Leadville Bank and Trust, and my sworn affidavit, to wit, that Mr. Wolfe received property in the form of silver bullion from two known criminals and has these aforesaid silver bars in his possession.”

  “You should have been a lawyer, Mr. Farnsworth,” the judge said icily.

  “Furthermore, Judge,” Pete continued, “there are affidavits among these documents that demonstrate that there is an ongoing conspiracy involving Wolfe and several named and unnamed individuals
to not only extort money from businessmen here in Leadville but to drive members of the Mexican race back to their homeland.”

  “These are all serious charges, Mr. Farnsworth,” Leffingwell said as he began to look through the stack of affidavits. “Mr. Finwoodie, what is your interest in all this?”

  “Beats me, Dewey. First I’ve heard of any of this.”

  “Do you know of any such conspiracy, Stephen?”

  “I’ve heard rumors ...”

  “They call themselves the Golden Council,” Pete said. “And they use intimidation to force businessmen to pay protection money, which they call ‘insurance,’ and when someone does not pay up, they perpetrate violence on their persons while wearing yellow hoods. I have other witnesses willing to come forth and testify once these men are charged and arrested for their crimes.”

  “As I said, Mr. Farnsworth, you should have taken up the law.”

  The judge read though the papers while Horace fidgeted, Betty sat there with her hands folded over her purse, her legs drawn tightly together under her blue dress, and Finwoodie cleaned his eyeglasses with a clean handkerchief, wiping beads of sweat from the tops of the lenses.

  “I do not see any affidavit from Miss Andrews in here,” Leffingwell said. “But I do see a petition for a search warrant of Adolphus Wolfe’s home and office. Good lord, man, he’s the president of the town council and the president of the bank.”

  “He’s also the head of the Golden Council, I believe.”

  “I don’t know why I’m here, Judge,” Betty said. “Honestly.”

  “Judge, Miss Andrews can testify that her boss, Adolphus Wolfe, has access to a secret bank account involving the Golden Council and that he removed several bars of stolen silver from the bank. And I can testify as to who delivered the bullion to him and that he did, indeed, transport those bars from his bank and probably has them in a secure place in his home. I need that warrant to prove my allegations about Wolfe.”

  “Shit,” Leffingwell said. Then, to Miss Andrews, “I’m sorry. It was just a slip of the tongue.”