AHMM, November 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  [* In later years called a Ferris Wheel.]

  The next day's banner headline read, DEAD MAN AGREES TO TELL ALL. Aside from selling papers, a headline such as that lit a sizeable fire under the city fathers, whose minds were set on one thing and one thing only—the smooth running of their World's Fair. Murder trials weren't good for that business, and they wanted mine out of the way quick. Judge Carlyle Hooker agreed with them that justice should be swift and had me in his courtroom within the day.

  That wasn't fast enough to shake gawkers though. Word of my trial spread like summer lightning, and even a World's Fair can't compete with a defendant who's supposed to already be dead.

  * * * *

  The courtroom had three tables in it, and I got the smallest one. When Judge Hooker paraded in, they made me stand up and my knees nearly knocked the table over.

  Judge Hooker resembled a potbellied stove with a sooty beard. His eyes glowed like blowed-on coals, and he ran his court the way a steam locomotive holds to rails. When he rang out with what I stood accused of, I felt tied down to those rails.

  "Stanley Two-shot, you stand accused of the murder of Penrod Britches. What say you?"

  There wasn't enough spit in my mouth to say much of anything. That didn't slow anything down though, not with someone behind me calling out, “He says not guilty, Your Honor. He was way too busy being dead to have time for killing anyone."

  Gasps popped everywhere, as heads—mine included—snapped around to see who was spouting off. Sheriff Huck had arrived, though I had to look twice to be sure it was him.

  Parting the crowd with a cane, he stepped forward, wearing enough white to blind a blizzard. The gold watch chain hanging out of his white vest pocket only added to the glare, as did the silver knob atop his cane. ‘Course his hair and mustache were white as always, but waxed and combed to a glow too. A middle-aged widow or two got the fantods and nearly toppled sideways at the sight of him.

  "And who might you be?” growled Judge Hooker, not pleased at being upstaged.

  "Sheriff Huckleberry Finn, Your Honor. Come to rescue my poor deputy here who's too trusting a soul to mention that all these charges are as trumped up as the day is long. No doubt the court has been hoodwinked by an ex-deputy of mine who's been known to see best through the bottom of a jug of forty-rod."

  The sheriff had a point about ex-Deputy Tom doing his best thinking while under the influence—some might say his only thinking—but he was dead wrong about my not speaking up for myself. When it came to being charged with a murder I didn't do, I planned to share a word or two with the court, but before I had a chance to unload, ex-Deputy Tom jumped up.

  "I been dry going on four weeks, Your Honor,” he announced.

  "Out of thirty years,” the sheriff muttered under his breath but loud enough for spiders in the corners to hear.

  "Enough!” thundered Judge Hooker. “The business of my courtroom is justice, not frontier buffoonery. Sheriff Finn, if you're representing this man, sit down and hold your peace until I ask for it."

  So Sheriff Huck took up the empty chair beside me and dashed off a note that read, “Did you do it?"

  I didn't bother answering. The only one I knew of with anything near a reason for doing away with one of the Britches brothers? He was sitting right beside me.

  Next up, a St. Louis lawman marched in the jury. They came single file and seemed to number at least thirty, every one of them held up by a starchy black suit and tie and looking like merchants who knew the exact price of crockery and calico but were kind of sketchy on the cost of justice.

  What caught my eye more than the jury was the four spectators standing closest them. There wasn't much mistaking those heads of thick red hair, anvil jaws, and clenched fists. The Britches brothers—Pericles, Pembroke, Paxton, Palmer—had planted themselves just outside the jurors’ box. As the jurors filed in, the Britcheses looked every one of them in the eye and ground their teeth.

  I was about to rise up and ask the judge if something couldn't be done about such intimidation, when Sheriff Huck saw the direction I was headed and clamped down on my forearm to confide, “That's right where we want them.” Against my better judgment, I eased back, wondering what the sheriff had crammed up his sleeve this time.

  The way the prosecutor knew his way around that courtroom, even a blindfold wouldn't have slowed him much. A bald man with a broom-sized mustache, he scowled and spoke with a slight stammer that made his every word sound angry.

  "A-and where did you find your brother's remains?"

  The first witness he'd called was Pericles, oldest brother of the dead man and sheriff of Split Rock, Illinois. Naturally, he was wearing his spit-polished badge. When he was sworn in to testify, his mitt hid the whole Bible from view. Now he stared at me as if thinking hard about the part of the Bible that says eye for eye, tooth for tooth.

  "Down to the basin,” Pericles said. “In one of those gondolas, stabbed through the heart."

  "W-with this knife?"

  The prosecutor crossed to his table and pointed at a bowie knife identical to the one that Sheriff Huck had used to kill me.

  "Ask him.” Pericles dipped his square chin toward me.

  "D-do you have any idea who might have wanted your brother dead?"

  "Those two,” Pericles said, and he jabbed a thick finger, first at Sheriff Huck, then at me.

  "A-and why m-might they have wanted him dead?"

  "So's they could win the Olympic tug-of-war without having to go up against us."

  "Objection,” Sheriff Huck said, standing. “I was looking forward to winning that competition fair and square."

  "Balderdash,” Judge Hooker said.

  "That a legal term?” Sheriff Huck asked.

  The judge made a rattling sound in his throat before ordering Sheriff Huck to sit.

  "S-so it's your contention,” the prosecutor went on, “that the defendant wanted your brother out of the way to eliminate the c-competition in a sporting event. D-doesn't that sound a little farfetched?"

  "Not if you knew what a lily-livered fop he worked for."

  Everyone turned to see whether Sheriff Huck might object to that, but all he did was yawn and dig out a penknife to clean beneath his nails. That wasn't encouraging. He generally only dug out his nails when he didn't know what to say.

  Then it was our turn to cross-examine. Sheriff Huck glided up to the witness chair and said real casual like, “There any particular reason you went looking for your brother at the basin?"

  The question upset Pericles Britches more than I would have guessed and he sputtered, “Why ... ‘cause he liked the water."

  "Sure it wasn't something else?” Sheriff Huck asked.

  "Like what?” Pericles growled, hunkering down.

  Whatever the two of them were disagreeing about, it wasn't whether Tully Britches liked water. The sparks passing between them couldn't be explained by something so small. When I sneaked a peek over toward the jurors’ box, the other three Britches brothers were halfway out of their chairs.

  "Well I don't know,” Sheriff Huck said, turning all sunny. “I was hoping you could tell me."

  "He liked the water,” Pericles repeated, stubbornly.

  "Could he swim?"

  "Not with a bowie knife stuck in him."

  * * * *

  The next witness was a Mrs. Randolph Thademaker, who was head of the Ladies Auxiliary at the fair and was wearing more white than Sheriff Huck. Her hat, which was as big around as a rain barrel, trailed a snow plume at least three feet long.

  "F-five days ago, were you at the fair?” asked the prosecutor.

  "Indeed I was, at the Liberal Arts Palace."

  "W-what did you see?"

  "Two ruffians fighting. One pushed the other into the perfume fountain."

  "W-would he be in this courtroom?"

  "He would. Over there. The defendant."

  She pointed a white parasol at me.

  "A-and the other man?"

>   "He would be the poor unfortunate you asked me to identify at the morgue, Mr. Penrod Britches."

  "Did you hear words exchanged during their scuffle?"

  "Indeed, but none that I care to repeat."

  After which the prosecutor waved for Sheriff Huck to fire away. First off, the sheriff complimented Mrs. Thademaker on her good taste in color, which got a rise out of everyone but the judge, prosecutor, and witness.

  Next he asked, “Get many men at the perfume fountain?"

  "They are not our most frequent visitors."

  "Have any idea what brought Tully Britches around?"

  "Perhaps his nose?"

  Score one for the lady. The crowd did.

  "Had you ever seen him there before?” Sheriff Huck asked, fishing.

  "I had not."

  "Could he have been meeting someone?"

  That stirred the courtroom up plenty. The possibility of a tryst and a spurned lover made the room one big ear. The lady's answer stretched the ear even bigger.

  "Perhaps. The fountain was a popular spot for lovers."

  Right away everyone wanted to gossip about whether Tully and me had come to blows over some hussy. The judge had to go to his gavel.

  * * * *

  Then the prosecutor knocked the wind out of me by calling George Chasingbear to the witness chair.

  On the way up there, George called out to me, “You're a brave man, Stanley Two-shot."

  It was pretty much all downhill from there.

  Once sworn in, George told how I'd shown up on the run and he'd given me a bearskin to sleep under. (Actually, it'd been a deer hide.)

  "D-did he say why he was on the run?"

  "Said he was supposed to be dead,” George answered with a shrug.

  "B-but he wasn't?"

  "Not so's you could tell."

  The crowd was elbowing each other and acting as if this was more like it. Judge Hooker stopped them by raising his gavel.

  "D-did he say why he was supposed to be dead?"

  "Not so's you'd remember."

  "A-and you didn't ask?"

  "Didn't seem polite. But he did mention putting a knife in somebody who was after him. I heard him talking about it in his sleep. I did the same thing myself once, up to the Little Big Horn."

  Could there have been a worse time for George to start reliving past glories? And whatever knife he heard me gassing about in my sleep, it couldn't have been the one that ended up in Tully Britches. When I'd been sleeping beside George, Tully hadn't even been stuck yet, and I was still supposed to be dead. If I'd been talking about a knife, it must have been the one that Sheriff Huck had poured pig's blood on.

  On cross-examination, Sheriff Huck sauntered up to the witness chair, ran his tongue over his teeth once or twice, which usually means he's about to spring a good one, and said, “Do you always believe what someone says in their sleep?"

  "If they're an Indian,” George answered straightaway.

  That gave the sheriff another color to wear, namely blush red, which showed up along his throat and cheeks. When he moved on to pointing out that any talking I'd done in that teepee had happened before Tully Britches had been done in, nobody paid him much mind, especially after the prosecutor popped up to ask George if I'd said I'd already stabbed someone or was planning on stabbing someone. The particulars were kind of wobbly in George's memory.

  "Now what?” I said into the sheriff's ear when he returned to our table.

  "All shall be revealed,” he whispered back. “All shall be revealed."

  I'd heard him repeat himself that way before, usually when bluffing.

  The last witness called by the prosecutor was a St. Louis constable, who sat straight in the witness chair and with an Irish lilt identified himself as Sergeant Vincent Reilly.

  "A-and could you tell the court what brings you here today?"

  "That would be me special training from Mr. John Kenneth Ferrier of Scotland Yard, out to the Brit exhibit at the fair. He'd been teaching lawmen a new procedure called fingerprinting, which lets us identify criminals after they've flown the coop, as it were."

  That threw a spark into the leaf pile. Everyone in the courtroom looked at everyone else, and raised their eyebrows, and said what a dozen or more times, and twisted this way or that to see how I was taking the news. Well I was doing fine, seeing as how I hadn't had anything to do with Tully Britches's death, but I'm bound to say that Sheriff Huck was sagging some and looking a mite peaked, though he might have been playing possum. It's a game he knows.

  "H-how does this new procedure work?” the prosecutor asked.

  What Sergeant Reilly then described didn't hardly seem possible, but it appears that whenever people touch something with a hand they leave a print behind that can be seen by sprinkling dust on it.

  "Y-you mean,” the prosecutor said, “that this murder weapon—” and here he made a big show of pointing to the bowie knife on his table “—will contain the fingerprints of whoever held it?"

  "Unless he wore gloves or wiped them off."

  "A-and what good do these fingerprints do us?"

  "Well now, it means we can be comparing the prints on that knife to the prints of a suspect and see if they match. Everybody in the world makes a different fingerprint, you see, and the Brits have developed something called the Henry Classification System that lets you compare two prints to see if they're the same."

  "A-and when you find a match?"

  "You've found a murderer."

  "Y-your Honor,” the prosecutor said, “I propose we collect a fingerprint from the accused and compare it to the prints on the knife pulled out of the deceased."

  "Now just a dag-blamed minute!” Sheriff Huck objected, jumping up.

  I don't think I'd ever seen him jump so fast, not even the time that Rolly Spankum's coon hound had a chaw of his leg.

  But Judge Hooker said justice needed to keep up with the times—same as the scoundrels passing through his court did—and ruled in favor of fingerprinting me. So Sergeant Reilly had me dab all ten of my fingers in ink and roll them on paper. While that was drying, he dusted the knife's handle with a powder and pulled out a magnifying glass to squint through. All the squirming that went on behind us, you might have thought that every pant leg and skirt hem in the place was on fire.

  After the sergeant had triple checked everything, he straightened to say, “We have a match."

  The silence that followed that news pretty much deafened me. The prosecutor paced back and forth before his table four or five times, wanting to make sure that every eye in the courtroom was on him. If there wasn't an eye on him, it was only because it'd popped out and rolled away after all the revelations.

  "Y-your Honor,” the prosecutor finally said, “we believe that Stanley Two-shot faked his own death, as has been reported in the local newspapers, to provide himself with an alibi, and then proceeded to murder Penrod “Tully” Britches. H-his motive? Oldest in the world. Your basic love triangle."

  After that, the judge's gavel might as well have been a loose plank knocking in the wind. For a good minute or two nobody paid it much mind. Over to the side, the four Britches brothers were headed my way with a rope that had appeared out of nowhere. The end of the rope had a neck-sized loop in it. All that slowed them down was Sheriff Huck climbing atop our table and screaming out, “Hold on now! Hold on!"

  Everyone—even the Britcheses—froze before the sight of this man dressed all in white prancing atop a table. After the voices had all died away and the judge had quit banging his gavel, the sheriff continued.

  * * * *

  "First off, where's this mysterious woman that my deputy here and the deceased were supposed to have been scrapping over?"

  That gave everyone pause, though not for long.

  "S-she may show up yet,” the prosecutor predicted. “With a knife sticking in her."

  "Back to knives, are you?” said Sheriff Huck. “Before we move on to any new knives, I've got me a question
about this current one. There any other of these famous fingerprints on it?"

  Every head there whipped toward Sergeant Reilly, though none faster than my own.

  "Appears to be one,” he admitted.

  "One that doesn't match Mr. Two-shot?” the Sheriff asked, acting smug as someone who already knows the answer to his own question.

  "You'd be right about that."

  "So someone else had ahold of that knife too?"

  "Oh yes."

  "Possibly the murderer?"

  "Possibly."

  That took enough wind out of everyone's sails for Sheriff Huck to finally get around to presenting my defense.

  First off, the sheriff called up Joshua Farthing, a frontiersman left over from the old days, all flowing beard and fringed buckskin, or at least that's how he appeared at first glance. Once sworn in, Joshua turned out to be a peddler dressed up to sell his wares, which were knives. He had a small shop out to the fair, a buffalo skull hanging over the doorway.

  "Did you sell a knife to anyone in the room?” Sheriff Huck asked, back to cleaning his nails. “Take your time. Look around."

  "Don't need time,” the peddler answer. “Sold one to you."

  "So you did,” Sheriff Huck said, holding up his penknife. “Mighty fine one too. But is there anyone else hereabouts who bought some of your wares?"

  "Plenty,” the peddler said, and standing up, he visored his eyes with a hand, as if staring out over the vast plains, and pointed at Pericles Britches. “Him."

  There was some uneasy throat clearing from the crowd, which only grew as the peddler kept right on pointing and saying, “And him, and him, and him."

  He ticked off Pericles's three brothers. Judge Hook had to pretty near bust his gavel after that revelation, and no one paid much attention to Pericles's claims that their knives were all accounted for and they could prove it. As for me, I was remembering how busy Sheriff Huck had been spying on the Britches boys, maybe when they'd bought their knives.