by Ed Gorman
“Did he spend much time here, aside from trying to court Martha?”
“No, not really. He looked through magazines sometimes but that was about all. And he only did that because he was waiting for Martha to be free.”
Grieves had become a legend in this town. But not all legends are good by any means.
“Was he always alone?”
She thought about this. “He always came in alone as I recall. But once I did see him talk for a few minutes to this little, nervous man who came in quite frequently. We never did get his name. Now, he was really a reader. The time Mr. Grieves talked to him, though, it didn’t look like they saw eye to eye much. They had words of some kind. They kept their voices down but it was obvious that they were disagreeing about something.”
“You said this little man came in frequently?”
“Yes. He’d always go right over to the newspaper section and take down the St. Louis paper. One day I asked him if he’d come from St. Louis and—Well, I can’t say he actually cried but I’m sure I saw tears in his eyes. And then he started talking about how nice spring was here but that it was even nicer in St. Louis. He described what it was like to see the flowers bloom and how orchestras played in the parks and how handsome the big ships looked coming into the docks. He sounded so lonely. I wondered how a man like him—he was obviously a very different sort of man than Mr. Grieves—how the two of them had ever gotten connected.”
While she wasn’t giving me any startling information, I was starting to get a sense of “the little man” who played some sort of role in the swath Grieves had cut through town there.
I saw two women come in the front door. They walked directly to the front desk where I was talking to the librarian. I turned and looked at them. “I’ll be done here right away, ladies.”
They didn’t look unduly happy about my presence.
“Can you remember the last time you saw Grieves?”
She hesitated. “Oh, at least two weeks ago.”
“More flowers for Martha?”
“No, I think he’d learned his lesson by then.” She snapped her fingers. “In fact, now that I think about it, he just stood right here at the front desk and looked around. You can see pretty much everything from here. He was obviously looking for somebody. I was thinking that it was that nice little man. But he wasn’t here. And I’m just as glad. I just had the sense that he shouldn’t be anywhere near Mr. Grieves. I just felt that Mr. Grieves was probably a bad influence on people.”
I smiled. “You could be right about that.”
I bid my adieus to the two ladies behind me—they looked very impatient—and then walked outside into the fresh air again.
One thing the little man was right about. It was hard to beat St. Louis in the springtime.
Chapter 13
Every once in a while you just walk into trouble. You don’t expect it, you don’t want it, you’d walk away from it double time if you had a chance, but there it is and through no fault of your own. Only later would I learn of the strange coincidence that had brought me to that place.
The name of the drinking emporium in the Lincoln Hotel was Time Out, the baseball reference being the motif of the place. The walls were lined with photographs of major league players of the day. There were at least six of Buck Ewing in his Troy Trojans baseball uniform (they needed an update; by then he played for the New York Giants); and Dude Esterbrook of the St. Louis Maroons; and Pud Galvin of the Buffalo Bisons who was, to me, the most overrated pitcher of the day. Bats, balls, even a catcher’s mitt or two were displayed in small lighted areas. The rest of the place was appropriately dark.
The customers were mostly couples, twenties up to fifties. They all looked prosperous. Most of them were laughing, enjoying themselves. There was a player piano that played discreetly bouncy music to set a merry atmosphere. And the waiters in their white shirts, red vests, red arm garters, and fancy mustaches did their best to convince you that they were just as merry as the music.
According to all the books I’d read on alcoholism, saloons were a dangerous place for a nonimbiber to hang out in. Made sense. But sometimes I just liked to sit there and drink coffee and roll cigarettes and watch people. And try to fight off the worst memories of my drinking days. The unforgivable way I’d treated people sometimes, the humiliation and debasement of my own doing, and all the ridiculous fights I’d gotten into. I was one of those drunks who’d argue over anything and while I wasn’t in danger of becoming a boxing champion, I had a violent urge to pound on somebody. Or maybe it was to be pounded on. Maybe punishment was what I was after, knowing what a shit I was.
The only couple not getting along was a pair to my right. A handsome couple, expensively dressed, she sober, he very drunk.
He was calling her some pretty filthy names. He was apparently under the impression that nobody else could hear him.
Except for kids coming to drag their dads or moms home, there’s probably not much more sorrow in a saloon than when a man begins attacking his woman with words. Drink makes you crazy suspicious and crazy suspicious is pretty ugly to see or hear.
“Why don’t you go table to table and screw every man in here, Nan?” the drunk said just as the waiter set down my coffee and beef sandwich.
The waiter, a stringy, bald fellow with big hands and raw knuckles, said, “You either keep him quiet, Mrs. Turner, or I’ll have to get the bat and throw him out.”
“Do you hear that, Glen? Are you happy now?” She was all too well aware of how everybody in the small place was watching the drama.
He responded like a scolded schoolboy. He hung his head and started shaking it from side to side.
“Don’t ever work in a saloon,” the waiter said.
For the next ten minutes or so, there was peace. Two couples got up and danced to the player piano. The talk was low. And the drunk just sat there staring at his drink, silent.
Then he turned to his left and took a look at me.
“Who the hell you think you are, lookin’ at my wife that way?”
“Oh, God, Glen, just turn around here. He wasn’t looking at me.”
“He wants to get you in bed is what he wants.”
He was more pretty than handsome and more whiny than threatening. He wore a black suit of Edwardian cut with a forest-green vest of silk. On a riverboat he would have fit in with the cardsharps.
She was an appealing blonde, not quite beautiful, but stylish in a gray suit cut to tastefully display her slender but elegant body. City woman, most definitely.
“Now you turn around here, Glen, and forget all about him, you hear me?”
Everybody was watching again and watching eagerly. Not even the best stage entertainment was this good. This was real.
“Why don’t we ask him to sit down with us?” Glen said, trying to sound crafty. He turned to me: “Come over here and sit down. My wife wants to meet you. It’s her birthday. Maybe you’ll be her present.”
“Glen!”
But you know how drunks are. Nothing less than a two-by-four across the forehead was going to shut him up.
“That’s right, everybody!” he said, mock-grandiose. “I am giving my wife the birthday present she wants most. Some dirty, uneducated, foul-smelling drifter!”
The waiter looked at me to see if I was going to respond. All I did was shrug. I’d been going to roll myself a cigarette but I figured now I’d be going.
“I’m very sorry about this,” the woman said to me. “He gets very jealous.”
“Oh, did you hear that?” the drunk said, again addressing the others at the tables. “‘He gets very jealous.’ As if she never gives me any reason to get jealous. She always pretends she’s this saint—but I think you know better, don’t you?”
He erupted from his seat, turning to me before the waiter had time to scurry across the distance separating my table and the bar.
It happened this way: The drunk turns toward me, waving a fist. The wife virtually jumps on him, tr
ying to stop him. I just sit there, waiting to see how to play it. The waiter cries for him to stop. The wife has such a tight grip on his coat sleeve that she tears it away. And that’s when he unloads. He spits an enormous gob of hot spittle right across my nose. Instinct ejects me from my seat. Instinct also starts to propel me toward him. And to make a fist that is instantly ready to throw.
And that is when the waiter grabs my arm.
And that is when the drunk, after a spectacular circus-like wobble, falls a bit to his left, his head smacking the table so hard he breaks the legs of it. With nothing to break his fall, he goes right on down to the floor.
I don’t take well to being spit upon. Probably a character flaw on my part. I wanted to smash his face in, do any damage his fall had left undone.
The waiter and a couple of male customers were dragging the drunk to his feet. I just wanted to be gone.
As I started toward the door, the drunk’s wife hurried up to me and said, above all the noise of dredging up her husband, “I’m sorry this happened.” And then she pressed a luscious breast against my arm. “And for what it’s worth, I really would like to sleep with you.”
Then she was gone, back to her drunken husband.
Three blocks down the street, I saw them. There weren’t that many of them, maybe four across and six deep, but they were men hardened and begrimed at the end of the day by the work they had just finished doing. They carried placards that read:
DON’T DESERT US
NO LOYALTY
WE HAVE FAMILIES
The streets were lined with citizens who looked as if they weren’t sure how to respond. Unions were still controversial. The tycoons had ordered their newspaper and magazine editors to make the whole idea of working people joining together something sinister and foreign. They usually meant Jews and Italians when they said foreign. Most of the time they went with the code word on the assumption that their readers would know what they meant.
The tycoons wanted people to think that working people weren’t smart enough on their own to resent their low wages and dangerous conditions. They needed “outsiders” to tell them that.
So the citizens stood and watched, not waving their agreement but not expressing any disagreement, either.
Somebody said, “I’m all for them.”
I looked down and there was Liz. She looked especially fetching in the dusk light. I particularly liked her blue hair ribbon. It was earnest and sweet and very very female.
“But I suppose you don’t agree.”
“No, I like to see people suffer.”
“You look like the kind who would.”
“In fact, I’d cut their wages in half and make them sleep outdoors in the winter.”
“The territorial legislature agrees with just about everything you say. The robber barons bought them off a long time ago.”
The picketers had begun to chant now: “Stay in town! Stay in town! Stay in town!”
“That’s the sad thing. They don’t get fair pay and the owner won’t do anything about the working conditions—but they want to keep their jobs, anyway. They don’t have any choice.” I rolled myself a smoke as I talked.
The crowd’s attitude had changed. Across the faces of the onlookers you then saw smiles and heard applause as the miners passed by us, headed for the end of the business district two blocks away.
The faces of the miners were less surly, too. Their work-grimed faces opened up with grins as they waved to friends and neighbors.
“It’ll be a ghost town, just like everybody says,” Liz said. Then: “Guess I’d better get back to work. I’ve got a little time tonight. I’ll look up those issues for you that Grieves wanted.”
I walked with her. “You ever been to the mansion where Grieves was staying?”
“You kidding? A working girl like me?”
“Exclusive territory, huh?”
“That’s what they’d like people to think. But they’ve got some pretty bad stuff going on out there. At least Grieves did. I hear he even brought in some very young girls.”
We stood in front of the newspaper office.
“There’s probably a good story in it. Folks were always curious about the place but Nickels, the man who owned it, never invited locals in. He figured owning a mine that was making a lot of money gave him the right to be a snob. He could barely put two English sentences together and even when he could afford Kentucky whiskey he preferred moonshine. But he didn’t want to traffic with anybody who reminded him of when he’d been poor.” She smiled. “I almost felt sorry for him. He’d give a few crumbs to the library and he’d always dress up in a tuxedo and top hat and give these long speeches about the arts. And people would snicker at him right in front of him. And when he’d finally leave, they’d laugh out loud and mock him. And then he went bust. He barely escaped with his life because by that time he owed everybody in town.”
She nudged me in the ribs.
“Don’t you be going out with any young girls.”
She went inside the newspaper office. I watched her friendly little bottom all the way in until it vanished behind the door.
Chapter 14
I sat up reading magazines until I started going in and out of sleep right there in the rocking chair. Then I decided to make it official. I went to bed. And then of course couldn’t get back to sleep right away.
I must have spent a long, useless hour trying to put together what I knew about Arnold Grieves’s time there in town. He sure wasn’t too concerned about his pregnant wife back home nor his assignment to find the counterfeiting ring working out in Junction City.
Finally, with no warning, sleep shut me down.
A furtive knock.
What the hell time was it?
Female voice: “Hurry. Hurry.”
Some sort of trap?
I got up, grabbing my Colt as I eased out of bed, and walked to the door.
Female voice: “Please let me in.”
I stood to the side of the door and opened it.
The only light was from a sconce in the hallway. She came in. She’d changed into a dark blue blouse and a long skirt. She had a fine body and groggy as I was my own body began to respond to hers.
I wondered where her husband was. Maybe he was waiting downstairs. Maybe she was just getting the door open so he could rush in and spit at me.
She couldn’t see me as yet. I stepped behind her, gave her a nudge into the room and then closed the door.
“It’s dark in here, Mr. Ford.”
I went over and turned up the oil lamp.
“You aren’t very talkative.” The lamplight played gently on the nice cheekbones and the nice breasts.
I went over and sat on the edge of the bed. I used the Colt to point to the rocking chair. She carried a golden pint of some liquid. It had a champagne color. “You still haven’t said a word,” she said as she sat down.
“Why’re you here?”
And she hiccupped. Just a little. Actually it was sort of cute. But that and the somewhat wobbly way she’d walked to the rocking chair spoke of a little too much alcohol.
“I came to apologize for my husband.”
“He send you?”
She smiled. “You think anybody as jealous as he is would send me up to your room?” She shook her sweet head. “No, he’s back in our hotel room, passed out as usual.”
“So you just decided to come up here on your own?”
“Yes, though now that I’m here, I’m a little nervous.” Then: “Say, would you be a gentleman and get us a couple of glasses?”
“I don’t drink liquor if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”
“On the bureau. The bottle I brought. Pure apple juice from back East.”
That actually sounded good. I was lucky to find two tin cups, no priceless glassware, of course.
I was pouring a cup for her when I heard the bed squeak. When I turned around she was lying on her side, an elbow propping her head up, looking just about i
rresistible.
“You’re crazy, you know that? Or do you just want me to help you get rid of your husband? You tell him you came up here, he comes after me with a gun, and I’m forced to kill him. You’re free again.”
I handed her her apple juice. I’d sniffed it to be sure that was what it was and then I half emptied my own cup. She tilted hers back, too. “Don’t you like it?”
“Tastes very good. Now you’d better get up and leave.”
“A federal man. It must get awful lonely.”
“C’mon, let’s go.”
She laughed. “You don’t sound very convincing, Mr. Ford. I’m not real sure you actually want me to leave.”
I couldn’t disagree. I couldn’t find much of a voice to argue with her.
She held a slender hand out and said, “At least come over and sit down next to me for a minute.”
“Dammit, now. You’re leaving.”
I took two more steps and took hold of her hand. She was ready for me. She yanked me right down on top of her. Well, maybe I didn’t put as much resistance in trying to stay upright as I could have. But then suddenly those kinds of thoughts went away.
I was lying next to her, hard against her, and she was pulling my head down to hers and we were kissing and—
I wanted to get even closer but—
“I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Ford.”
“How about calling me ‘Noah.’”
“All right, Noah it is. What you’re thinking is that I’m married—”
“—and drunk.”
“Not drunk. Well, not big drunk. Just a little drunk.”
“And maybe you’ll wake up in the morning—”
“You don’t think he cheats on me?” She laughed angrily. “He cheats on me every chance he gets. As long as he’s sober enough to do it, he’ll do it with anybody. And I mean anybody.” The words were still slightly slurred but I saw what she meant about being only a “little” drunk. “You want to do it and I want to do it, Noah, so let’s just do it.”
