by Lou Cameron
Anger flared in her eyes. “Your goddamned work! Don’t you realize your country is at war? Who cares about your scribbling? Your country is fighting for its life and you talk about your work. You’re right, I do hate the Mormons, especially that greasy vagabond who calls himself a prophet.”
Fritz said impatiently, “We’re wasting time, Cassie. Let me take him up in the hills and bury him. He’ll never be found.”
She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. “You heard what Fitz said? Is that what you want? Fitz can do it and get away with it.” She smiled. “He’s done it before.”
“I’m surprised you sent that other man instead of Fitz.”
She seemed puzzled. “What other man?”
“The man who tried to kill Rockwell. The man I killed.”
Her eyes darted to Fitz and then she smiled. “The heat is affecting you, Forbes. We didn’t send anyone. Now listen to me. You will do what I say or I will give you to Fitz. You’re closer to Rockwell than anyone in Salt Lake. I want you to report everything . . .”
“I won’t work for you,” I said. “I won’t work for Rockwell, or for you. I’ll say it again. I’m a reporter and that’s as far as it goes. I won’t betray you but I won’t help you. My word won’t mean anything to you, so I won’t offer it.”
“You mean you won’t help your country?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re an idiot, Forbes. The Mormons are a serious threat and must be subdued. There can be no argument about that. You heard Hickman and his talk of raising the Indians. The maniac son of a bitch wants to set the entire West on fire. How in hell are we going to fight the Confederates with all that going on?”
“I won’t work for you,” I repeated, not all sure I wasn’t the idiot she called me. “Kill me or let me go.”
Standing to one side of me, Fitz said, “It’s about time, Cassie.”
Cassie what? I wondered.
Fitz let McSorley in when he knocked once, then four times on the door, and I don’t know why I was surprised when he sounded the same as he always did. What did I expect him to sound like? Was I expecting him to lapse into the mellow tones of a popular clergyman? The tension must have made me lightheaded.
“Rockwell is looking for this feller,” McSorley said. “He went to his room, then to my place.” McSorley wasn’t scared but he knew Rockwell better than his associates. “It won’t be long before he finds somebody who saw him with Fitz. Then he’ll be back if he isn’t back already. Then you better look out is all I can tell you. But you’re the boss, you decide, only make it quick. We can take him out the back way, then kill him with a knife and hide the body till it’s dark.”
McSorley’s matter-of-fact manner was more frightening than Cynthia Mason’s threats or Fitz’s urging to murder. He went on with, “We can probably kill Rockwell if he barges in here, but then what? Connor isn’t here. They’ll stand us against a wall and shoot us.”
“All right, Mac,” Cynthia Mason said. “Go back to the saloon and tell Rockwell Forbes is here. If you see him, I mean. Don’t make a point of it.”
McSorley nodded. “You’re calling the shots, Cassie.”
“Clear out, Fitz.” Cynthia Mason said, replacing the derringer in her bag. “Clear out but stay close. I don’t want Rockwell to think this is a meeting. Don’t worry—she patted the bag—“I have two .45 caliber bullets in this. I’ll kill him if I have to. If you hear shots, get Forbes out of here and knock him cold. I’ll accuse Rockwell of attempted rape.”
We were alone now. “You still won’t help your country?” she asked.
I said, “Don’t start that again. Washington has enough spies. You don’t need one more. I won’t do it for reasons stated often enough to be boring.”
“You must be very brave or very stupid. Stupid is more like it. A sensible man in your position would have agreed to anything I proposed. You could have done that and still got word to Rockwell. All right! All right, for Christ’s sake. Let’s not go over it again. You’re a nobleman of nature and you won’t tell Rockwell. You’re so boring I’m ready to believe you. You want a drink?”
“No.”
“Please yourself. You don’t even consider what helping the government would do for your career. You’d be a hero, you idiot. We can’t take any credit for our work because we’re finished as agents if we get our names, and especially our faces, in the newspapers. You could be the fair-haired boy, Forbes. You could take all the credit.”
She saluted me with her glass of brandy and water and drank it down in two gulps.
I stared at her. “How did you get into this dirty business?”
“Spying? I’ll tell you what spying is. It’s a way of confounding the enemy, a way of saving our soldiers’ lives. It used to be a haphazard business, and badly organized. Lincoln’s Secret Service chief, Shepperton, has changed all that. Now we’re a branch of the military like any other and maybe we’re more important. When Shepperton started pushing for an organized espionage service he was told by old-school gentlemen like yourself, ‘Spying is the work of yellow dogs and dirty sneaks. No gentleman would be a party to such a thing.’ But Shepperton persisted and Lincoln agreed with him. Now we have our own appropriation, even our own building.”
“Don’t tell me any secrets. I don’t want to know.”
“No reason why you shouldn’t. Half of Washington knows about it. You want to know why I became a spy. My father was killed in the first days of war. That’s why. He was a newspaper editor and he could have stayed home in New Hampshire. But he enlisted at the age of fifty-five and he was killed. I was a spy in Virginia for a year but they caught me and put me in Libby Prison in Richmond. A few months later I was traded for another woman spy. I wanted to go back to the South, but Shepperton said no, the Rebels had taken photographs of me and my face was too well known. So he sent me here.”
I said, “There is a real Cynthia Mason. I’ve heard of her. Where is she now?”
She smiled confidently. “Where the dogs won’t bite her. Oh, I don’t mean she’s dead. A certain New York publisher offered her a lot of money to write a book on the political situation in Italy. She’s there now, will be for months. If she tries to leave suddenly she will be detained.”
“And you are—?”
A laugh followed my question. “I’ll be dead if you tell Rockwell, so what does it matter? Cassie MacKay, and I really do know something about newspapers, enough to get by. Didn’t I strike you as being a tough newspaperwoman?”
“Pretty much,” I answered. “You overdid it at times.”
There was a knock and she said sweetly, “Will you answer that, William?” putting her hand inside the bag.
It was Rockwell. His eyes were feverish and I wondered what was wrong. “I must talk to you, William,” he said with no apology for breaking on what might have been an intimate moment. “Talk to you right now.”
“Come in, Mr. Rockwell,” Cassie called.
I stepped aside to let him come in, but he remained in the doorway. The bag was open in Cassie’s lap and she was smiling. “Not right now, Miss Mason,” Rockwell said. “You coming, William?”
I looked at Cassie. “You men are so busy all the time,” she said. “Will I be seeing you later, William?”
“Yes, later,” I said.
Rockwell didn’t say anything till we were in the street. “They found Abby Brimmer’s body in the lake,” he said abruptly. “It was weighted with rocks but broke loose somehow. I’m going there now.”
“She was murdered?” A stupid thing to say.
“Come on,” Rockwell ordered.
We rode out to the lake, left the horses, and walked out on the long pier where boats were tied up. The sun was bright and the windblown waves broke against the pilings of the pier. A few boats were out on the lake; the voices of young people echoed across the water.
At the end of the pier a group of men were standing around a sheet of tarpaulin. One of them nodded to Rockwell. “I gues
s it’s little Abby,” he said. “Hard to tell with the face so bloated. I guess it’s Abby all right.”
The man threw back the tarpaulin. It was Abby, what was left of her. The body was naked and there appeared to be marks or bruises all over it, though it was hard to tell because of its condition. The saline water had retarded putrefaction to a certain degree, but neither Rockwell nor I had any difficulty in identifying the body as Abby’s. Some of the Mormons looked away when Rockwell separated her legs and inspected the vaginal area, which was badly torn. There was a livid bruise at the corner of her mouth, and her tongue, the tip all but bitten off, protruded from broken teeth.
Rockwell covered the body and stood up. “Who found her?”
“I did,” a boy answered. “I was rowing on the lake, far out, and my dog started barking. Then her head bumped against the side of the boat and I saw her. I was scared. There were ropes around her and when I stopped being scared I towed her here to the pier. Is this the girl you been looking for, Mr. Rockwell?”
“This is the one,” Rockwell answered. “Son, I’d be obliged if you’d run up to Fisk the undertaker and tell him I said there’s a friend of mine to be buried.” Rockwell gave the boy a silver dollar. “Tell Fisk to hurry it up. I don’t want her lying here on the dock. We’ll wait here.”
The Mormons drifted away and I was left with Rockwell and the body. The sun was bright and the treeless islands in the lake looked like roughly molded plaster of Paris. Far out on the lake boys in boats called back and forth, unaware of the tragedy, and all that remained of Abigail Martha Brimmer was a lump of battered flesh beneath a sheet of tarpaulin. All violent death is an outrage, but it isn’t all the same. When a violent man is killed by someone equally violent, some sense can be made of it. When a soldier is killed in battle his death can be filed, and therefore explained, under such headings as “duty,” “honor,” “love of country.” Such explanations may not be entirely satisfactory to, say, his wife; nevertheless, they are acceptable to the majority. But to rape and murder a young girl for—what?
I looked at Rockwell sitting on a barrel with his hands folded, his eyes unseeing. The mountains were all around us; to the south was the gap toward which Connor’s army was marching. I had no interest in Connor or the war. Behind us lay the city, the great vaulting spires of the unfinished temple, the fortress-like armory where Old Dan sat fretting. I wondered what Brigham did on Sunday afternoons. Walk upon the waters? Multiply loaves and fishes? Could he raise Abby Brimmer from the dead?
A warm breeze blew off the lake and I felt lonely. I thought of a line from a poet whose name I could not recall: “Where every prospect pleases, and only Man is vile.”
And the vilest of all was William Hickman.
I will kill him, I thought calmly. If Rockwell does nothing about this, I will ambush Hickman, shoot him in the back with my 16-shot Henry rifle. I am not his match, so I will fire fast and keep on firing until I am sure he is dead. I will learn his comings and goings, then I will wait for him. And what will Rockwell do then? Will he come after me? But I will do it, no matter what. And I will not run. I will clean the rifle and put it back in the closet at the hotel. But what will Rockwell do?
“You have nothing to say, William?” Rockwell said.
I stared at the lake. “No,” I answered. “Not now. It’s too late for talk.”
“Too late for regret,” Rockwell said. “Not for talk. I think the man who murdered her will have kept the pistol. I know that pistol. A fine weapon. It was mine before I gave it to her.”
“There are thousands just like it,” I said.
“There was something wrong with the cylinder stop,” Rockwell said. “I fixed it, so I’ll know it. I think the murderer will have kept it.”
“Hickman.”
“Yes—Hickman. I should have killed him long ago. But for the sake of my church I did not. Now I will find the pistol with my marks on it and I will take it to Brigham.”
“Suppose you don’t find it?”
“Hickman is a greedy man, taking everything, giving back nothing but evil. A good pistol is property, it has value , he will keep it, and I will find it. I will tell Brigham that Hickman has to die, not for Mountain Meadows but for the little girl over there. Brigham is a just man. He will see the sense of what I am saying.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
I looked at the boats while Rockwell remained silent. In a while, he said quietly. “I will kill Hickman no matter what anyone says. I will kill him and take the consequences.”
“What can happen?” I asked. “Won’t General Wells and people who liked Abby stand behind you? A lot of people must know that Hickman wanted Abby any way he could get her.” I nodded at the sheeted corpse. “He got her that way.”
“I don’t want other Mormons mixing into this. If I have to go against the church’s authority, I don’t want other Mormons to side with me.”
“I’m not a Mormon,” I said. “It’s all right for me to side with you. I want to be with you when you go after Hickman. I was going to do it myself if you didn’t.”
Rockwell stared at me. “I guess you would at that. Just remember I can’t guarantee how it’s going to come out.”
“Hickman is no match for you.”
“He’s match enough. But that’s not what I meant. If Brigham refuses to sanction the killing of Hickman . . . if I go ahead anyway. . . I’ll no longer be in good standing with the church. That’s the one thing I’ve always dreaded. I guess you belonged to some church at one time, but when you drifted away from it, it didn’t mean very much. With me it’s been different. The church is the rock my life is built on. I’m straying from the point though. If I kill Hickman, and I will, I could get shot for it. So could you, William.”
“You mean you’d let them shoot you? That’s what you mean, isn’t it? You wouldn’t walk in front of a firing squad if you didn’t want to.”
Rockwell smiled a bleak smile. “You give me too much credit. But you’re right. I could kill Hickman and get clean away. No man would follow me, for he’d know what to expect if he did. Run away from Utah? I can’t even imagine it. Where would I go? What would I do? I know many trades and could work at any one of them. I’m not far from fifty, William, so there won’t be any running for me. Here I am and here I stay. You think that’s foolish?”
Even at twenty-three I was wise enough to know he was right. By no stretch of imagination could I see Rockwell working for some other man back in the States, drawing his pay and living like any other citizen. The bull in the china shop would be less out of place.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think you’re being foolish. Hickman abused and murdered Abby, and if you can prove it, it’s hard to see why there should be any trouble for you. I know you don’t like Americans, some Americans, but for all their faults, the Americans would know what to do with an animal like Hickman. If the courts let him off the people would hang him to a tree and maybe burn him too. I wouldn’t mind burning Hickman, wouldn’t mind striking the match that set him on fire.”
Rockwell was back to staring at the lake. Little whitecaps dotted its surface, blown forward by the summer wind. “You’re more savage than I am,” he said. “I just want to know he’s dead. What made him become a Mormon I have no idea. I suppose it was the freedom here. A man’s past doesn’t matter if he proves his worth. Hickman used that. He’s rich now, very rich, but the evil in him still burns bright. He never was one of us.”
I turned when I heard the undertaker’s closed wagon coming from a long way off. It sounded like the end of something. I was in a elegiac mood, I suppose. Abby was dead and gone forever; Rockwell spoke of his life in the past tense, and even for me, at twenty-three, nothing would ever be the same. There is no permanence in life, I thought— none at all. Connor’s army was marching across the sun bleached desert to conquer or to destroy what the Saints had built from nothing. Behind me lay the sainted city in the sun. Would that vanish too? The world was littered with the r
uins of cities. The wind blew, weeds cracked the pavements, the desert or the jungle crept closer. Cities and civilizations, all gone, not even memories but legends. Too late; it was too late for everything when the world began.
Rockwell stood up as the undertaker approached with his death wagon. Not for him the half-baked ruminations of a twenty-three-year-old newspaper reporter, his head filled with melancholy. He was all business; a practical man who knew what he wanted and was willing to pay for it.
Fisk and his assistant jumped down from the box. Fisk was a thin man in his late sixties, an open-faced man inured to grief. “That her?” he asked Rockwell.
Rockwell should not have taken offense, but he did. “That is Miss Abby Brimmer, late of this city,” he said.
“Sure, Port,” the undertaker said uneasily.
“A friend of mine,” Rockwell went on. “I want her to have the best of everything. A nice white burial robe, the finest coffin you have. A lot of flowers because she liked flowers. A band because she liked music. When you get the band together, you tell me what they can play and I’ll decide what is to be played. I don’t want black horses, Fisk— Mr. Fisk. All white horses, Mr. Fisk, all with yellow plumes. Purple and black horses is too much for funerals.”
The undertaker fidgeted. “Who’s to pay for all this, Port?”
“Me,” Rockwell said. “And I want a stone too. Of a fair size but not too big. Of polished granite, and on it just her name—Abigail Martha Brimmer—and her dates. Is all that clear to you, Mr. Fisk? As to the spelling of the name, Mr. Fisk, I want you to get it right. If there is any question as to how it should be spelled, my friend—Mr. Forbes—will help you.”
“Yes, Port. Yes, Port,” the undertaker kept saying.
Chapter Fifteen
It was very early the next morning; the colors of dawn streaked the sky as Rockwell and I rode along the shore of the lake. The funeral, set for three o’clock that afternoon, was hours away. Pelicans beyond counting congregated in their peculiar way.
