Mr. St. John

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You forget I was one once.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  St. John left him adjusting his Kodak and went inside, where Marshal Kendall was pouring himself a third drink from the bottle he kept in his desk.

  “Council’s going to have my balls for supper,” complained the peace officer. “There’s developers looking over railroad property south of town. I been telling ‘em how there ain’t been gunplay in Pinto Creek in ten years. They walked away from the same deal in Cheyenne when Tom Horn got hung there three years back.”

  “Some things can’t be helped,” St. John said. “Anyway, we got your automobile back without a scratch.”

  “You can buy a new automobile. You can’t buy back a man’s life.” He waved his glass at Pierce, who was watching the swelling crowd through the shattered window. George and Edwards labored sweating to keep things orderly while the Mexicans stood clear, spectators as usual. A man in manure-stained overalls held up a little girl under the arms so she could see over the grownups’ heads. “Preacher there could of helped it,” said Kendall. “You yelled at him not to shoot.”

  “If you ever thought you had to stop someone in a hurry, you’d know it isn’t easy to listen and draw at the same time.” The old lawman was irritated. “You got Wood’s personal effects?’

  Kendall drained the vessel in his hand and burped. “Locked up in the woodbox out back. Just his riding gear and a Springfield rifle. Want me to bring it in or what?” His voice was beginning to slur.

  “I’d be obliged as all hell if you would.”

  “Goddamn errand boy,” muttered the marshal, setting down the empty glass. He lurched out through the back door.

  “Why’d you shoot?” St. John asked Pierce. “You knew Bill and George were outside.”

  “He pushed me.” The Sunday school teacher spoke without turning from the window. The light was starting to fade. An electric glow sprang on in a window across the street.

  “Isn’t there something in that book of yours about turning the other cheek?”

  “That’s the New Testament.”

  Kendall returned, lugging the rifle and a flaking saddle under one arm and saddlebags and a blanket roll under the other. He dumped everything atop the desk. The half-full whiskey bottle wobbled and tipped over. St. John caught it in midair and replaced it in its glistening ring.

  “He had a buffalo robe too,” grumbled the marshal. “Didn’t bring that or the bridle. You want them too?”

  “Thanks, I got one of each.” The old lawman examined the Springfield. It was one of the old Army .45-70s, with some rust on the outside of the barrel and a stock that had been shattered and wired back together. It hadn’t been fired in a while. He laid it down and turned his attention to the saddle. Bits of bark and sawdust clung to the old dry leather. The initials L.C.U. had been burned into the latigo of the saddle with a hot iron. He asked Kendall about the u.

  “I seen that. I thought he just didn’t know how to make a W.”

  St. John made no answer and opened one of the saddle bags.

  Kendall said, “You won’t find nothing interesting in there. I been through it once.”

  “You keep it all or did you have to split with someone?” St. John rummaged through the debris inside. Tobacco and paper, a stubby pencil with no eraser and most of the yellow gnawed off, a rabbit’s foot, two dime novels with curled yellow covers, both about the James gang. The illustrations billowed with gunsmoke.

  “You calling me a thief?” Having just understood St. John’s remark, the marshal laid a hand on his Smith & Wesson. Leather squeaked behind him. He turned, saw Pierce sighting down his outstretched arm to the end of his Colt, and dropped his hand. Slowly the hammer was replaced, Pierce’s gun went home to leather.

  “No need to get riled,” said St. John, lifting the other bag. He hadn’t looked up from his work. “What do they pay you, thirty a month and a nickel for every rat and stray dog you shoot inside the town limits?”

  “About that.” Sullenly.

  “That’s not much for someone who could take a bullet next time he turns a corner. Judge Parker paid that and two cents a mile, and if we had to kill the man we went out to get, we buried him out of pocket. There were times if I didn’t get a good price for the dead man’s horse and gear, I didn’t eat.”

  “Not me. My wife raises chickens and sells the eggs. Weekends I work in the mill, when my deputy ain’t sick and can cover for me here. Council pays for the oil and gasoline I bum in the Reo.”

  “Maybe Wood buried it,” Pierce suggested.

  “Buried what?”

  “Around eight thousand dollars, if the robbery reports aren’t exaggerated and he got an equal cut.” St. John burrowed through the second bag. More dime novels—the Daltons and the Wild Bunch this time—a worn Remington revolver, three cans of sardines, a razor and a cake of brown soap, and a sheaf of yellow papers thrust carelessly inside. This he removed for closer examination.

  “Telegraph flimsies,” he said. “What you suppose he wanted with these?”

  Kendall shrugged. “Lots of folks grab a handful when they send a wire. Saves time next go-round. He was putting ‘em away in front of the Western Union office when I arrested him.”

  “You said you arrested him at the livery!” St. John was red-faced.

  “Didn’t say such a goddamn thing.” The marshal rose to the accusation. “I said the livery man called me. He sold the horses and left before I got there. I caught up with him after.”

  St. John sighed. “Did it ever occur to you to ask the telegraph operator who he sent a wire to or what was in it?”

  “It occurred to me. That’s all. They can’t tell you by law. It’s like opening somebody else’s mail.”

  “Well, it can’t hurt to ask.” The old lawman dropped the blanks on the desk and crossed to the empty doorway. Pierce fell into step behind him. Kendall hesitated, then put on his hat and followed. He tripped on the threshold but caught his balance before falling on his face.

  “You’ll just be wasting your time,” he said.

  “It’s my time.”

  The Western Union office shared a building at the end of the street with the post office and the telephone exchange, separated from them by a green-painted partition that fell two feet short of joining the ceiling. At the door to the building St. John swung around and blocked the marshal’s entrance.

  “Wait here,” he said. “A man of your deep integrity shouldn’t see this.”

  Kendall’s muttonchops bulged. “It’s my town. I’m going in”

  “Testament?”

  Pierce, who had been standing off to one side surveying the street, turned dreamy eyes on the peace officer. They were the eyes Kendall had seen behind the Navy Colt. The marshal’s jaw relaxed. St. John stepped inside.

  The operator was a small man in his late fifties or early sixties with pale red hair above his green visor and a face like lead foil crinkled and left to fade in the sun and rain. Most of his colleagues were of his generation; the spread of the telephone had driven youth away from the telegraph, with its stigma of antiquity. He had a hump the size of a melon on his left shoulder that bent him and cocked his head to the right, giving him a sly look as he listened to St. John’s request.

  “Sorry.” He left the dusty counter and scuttled back to his chair at the key. A copy of the New York Herald was open to “Buster Brown” on the little table.

  St. John dropped a ten-dollar gold piece on top of the counter. The clunk and wobble brought the operator’s head up from the page as if a string had been jerked. The coin was buzzing to a rest when his wrinkled hand covered it and scooped it without pausing into the watch pocket of his vest.

  “Time I started organizing.” Stooping, he removed an untidy stack of handwritten yellow sheets from a shelf under the counter and plumped it on top. “Got to squirt,” he said. “Don’t look at these here while I’m gone.” He went on through a narrow door at the back pasted over wi
th outdated bulletins, walking sideways like a crab.

  It was the fourth one down. St. John knew it at once, even though it was just signed “Carroll” and the message, medium length, made no sense to him. It was addressed to someone named John Bitsko in Denver. He memorized the number and street and returned it to its place in the stack just as the operator got back. The latter’s expression was blank.

  “You still here? Sorry I can’t help you.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks for your time.” On his way out, St. John thought he heard a dry chuckling behind him, but it might have been just paper rustling.

  “How you feel about a trip to Denver?” he asked Pierce when he was back on the street. The marshal was standing nearby.

  “He told you?” A fat blue vein pulsed on Kendall’s temple. “Maybe I got an arrest to make.”

  St. John raised his eyebrows. “What for, going to the bathroom?”

  The marshal’s brow puckered.

  “I’ve never been wanted in Denver,” Pierce assured St. John.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Cheyenne Station

  The Cheyenne office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency occupied the ground floor of a new brick-front building downtown. There were electric lights and telephones and potted plants and female typists in starched white blouses and black skirts and piled hair and the rattle-bang of new black-and-silver Remington typewriters everywhere. The man who greeted Rawlings and St. John outside the door of his office was forty, going gray on one side of his longish chestnut hair, and wore a thin moustache and a prickly suit of a neat European cut. He introduced himself as Geoffrey Halloran. His accent was British and he spoke in italics.

  “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. St. John.” He pronounced it “Sinjun.” His handshake was firm and over with quickly. “I say, Rawlings, you’re looking fit. Regular David Crockett, what?”

  Rawlings murmured something noncommittal. There were few things in life he resented more than his immediate superior. The Englishman sensed this and, attributing it to the other’s Scottish origins, delighted in bouncing hoary Anglicisms off him whenever they met. Rawlings would have hated him if he came from Edinburgh and wore kilts.

  The visitors were fresh from a bath and shave at a hotel, St. John in his politician’s clothes and the Pinkerton in his checkered suit. His beard was trimmed back to its former closeness.

  “Rawlings said he called you from Pinto Creek,” reported St. John. “He said you said to look in on you when we got in. We got a train to catch. The others are waiting on us at the station now, getting set to load the horses.”

  “This won’t take long, I assure you.” Halloran pushed open his office door and ushered them in ahead of him.

  It was a large room, with a thick maroon leaf-print carpet and built-in bookshelves stuffed with leather-bound volumes on law and the Wyoming penal code for each of the sixteen years since the territory had achieved statehood. The works of Dickens filled the only shelf not devoted to legal matters. Indicating two black stuffed leather armchairs for his guests, Halloran hiked around his huge Empire desk and inserted his narrow buttocks into a chair with a high back mounted on a swivel behind it. In back of him a window as tall as a door looked out on the city and the plains beyond. Isolated white clouds lay like stones on a steel-blue sky.

  “I love this life,” said the chief Pinkerton. He opened a carved redwood humidor on the desk and offered them each a cigar. St. John declined, displaying his pipe. Rawlings didn’t smoke. Shrugging, Halloran took one for himself and snipped off the end with a tiny pair of silver scissors on the end of his watch chain. “Used to work at the Yard, you know. Helped bring some of the more sensational developments in the Ripper case to light. London’s ghastly this time of year. Damned strangling yellow fog. Give me the clean air out here.” He finished lighting the cigar and puffed great clouds of urine-smelling smoke into the clean air.

  “You didn’t ask us here to talk about London.” St. John got his pipe chawing.

  “You’re quite right. You Americans do tend to live up to your reputation for directness. Very well then. Rawlings told me you killed a man yesterday. I suppose it was unavoidable.”

  “If it wasn’t, we’d of avoided it.”

  “I suppose all the others in your colorful past were equally unavoidable. Sixteen, isn’t it? Or am I behind the times?”

  “St. John didn’t kill the man,” said Rawlings, his ire rising. “It was Midian Pierce. And you knew how many men he’d killed when you suggested we engage his services.”

  Halloran’s brows arched. They were black, a startling contrast to his reddish hair. (Rawlings had always suspected he used a grease pencil to keep them that way.) To St. John: “You appear to have made a conquest. As I recall, Rawlings was your most outspoken critic when your name first came up.”

  “My opinion remains unchanged.” His subordinate bristled. “But I do have a strong sense of justice. St. John tried to prevent the incident from happening, as I explained to you over the telephone.”

  “Yes. You said he told his man to hold his fire. Is this the way all your inferiors react to your orders, Mr. St. John?”

  “Let’s cut through all the crap, Mr. Halloran.” St. John leaned forward, speaking around the pipestem in his teeth. “Am I being fired?”

  “Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t mean to imply that.”

  “Then I reckon you’ll have to tell me what you did mean to imply. It’s all that clean air out here; you get used to breathing it and you get so you can’t understand gibberish.”

  “There’s no need to be hostile. I’m merely trying to establish whether or not the killing was indeed necessary.”

  “It was.” The old lawman sat back.

  “Very well. I’ll accept your word this time. But if there are any more such incidents I’ll have to insist that I be notified in writing, along with written statements signed and sworn to by witnesses.”

  “And if there don’t happen to be any witnesses handy, then what?”

  “My advice would be that you find some.” Halloran’ s expression went from firm to apologetic. “I want you to know that I have nothing to do with these strictures. The Washington office is—”

  “Particular,” finished St. John. “I heard.”

  “More so now than ever. This agency has a reputation for launching its investigations with a microscope and ending them with gunpowder. It’s an image we’re eager to change. A successful case finishes with an arrest and conviction. Every dead man marks a mistake.”

  St. John sucked on his pipe and said nothing.

  Halloran changed the subject. “So you think Race Buckner is headed for Denver.”

  “I never said that,” returned the other. “I think it’s more than likely that he’s not. Not dead-downtown, anyway. Not yet.”

  “But according to Rawlings—”

  “Rawlings talks too much. I’m thinking of leaving him here this trip and letting him do his talking among friends.”

  Rawlings gathered his long legs under him. “Do that and you can say good-bye to that twenty thousand. I said at the start the offer was conditional that I accompany you.”

  “That’s not quite true.” Halloran’s lips made popping sounds on the end of his cigar, expectorating thick beige spheres out the burning tip. “The condition was that a Pinkerton field operative go along to observe and report to this office. It needn’t be you. Would you prefer a replacement, Mr. St. John? I have several capable young men not engaged at present. If you’d like I can arrange interviews.”

  St. John considered. “No thanks, Mr. Halloran,” he said after a moment. “I’ll stand pat.”

  For the first time the chief Pinkerton showed irritation. “Then what was all that about leaving him behind? I confess that after five years on this side of the water you Yanks still manage to baffle me.”

  “I just wanted to see what you’d do if I made a hole. I’d of bet my gold tooth you’d jump through it, and I’d of
won. I don’t think we can do business, Mr. Halloran.” He put his hands on the arms of his chair.

  The other started out of his own seat. “Just a moment! I’m afraid I still don’t understand.”

  “I used to be a businessman, Mr. Halloran. It didn’t take, but I was in harness long enough to learn that a man who won’t stand behind his employees can’t be trusted. How do I know if I deliver the Buckners and Shirley tied up with a big red bow, you won’t find some excuse not to pay me the money we agreed on?”

  “My integrity has never been questioned!”

  “I believe that. I also believe no one ever asked a rattler if it bites.”

  They watched each other across the clear expanse of desk, the American stiff-jawed but calm, the Englishman red in the face and getting redder. Suddenly Halloran exhaled explosively. Rawlings smelled his ashtray breath five feet away.

  “You’re going directly to the station from here?” The chief’s voice was subdued.

  St. John said they were.

  “I’ll send a messenger around in twenty minutes with a cashier’s check in the amount of five thousand dollars. That should buy me some of your time at least.”

  St. John rose, extending his hand. Halloran hesitated, then got up to accept it. His palm was moist.

  “Hold on to your money till I’ve earned it,” said the old lawman. “There isn’t much call for cashier’s checks where we’re going.”

  The Englishman blinked. Then, tentatively: “You were making a hole again, is that it?”

  “That’s it. Only this time you went through her the right way. Keep your powder dry, Mr. Halloran. That’s an American expression.”

  “I’m familiar with it. We never did business this way at Scotland Yard, I have to say.”

  “Maybe you should of. If you had, maybe that Ripper fellow would be in the ground right now with a stretched neck.”

  “Perhaps… . Oh, by the way.”

  St. John and Rawlings were at the door. They looked back. Halloran’s posture behind the great desk was rigid. “I met with officials of the Union Pacific this morning. They’ve agreed to place a special train with a private Pullman at your disposal. It’s at the station now, with the compliments of Mr. E. H. Harriman.”