I fanned out my lapels. “What’s wrong with it? It’s spiffy.”
“It’s cheerful, but this isn’t Easter dinner. It’s your trial.”
“It was the only suit the county had that fit me.”
Ritchie plopped down in his chair. “Fit you? Your cuffs are halfway up your arm.”
I shied. The suit was two sizes too small for my frame. I put my hands below the desk to hide my sleeves. “What about you and your purple duds?”
Ritchie, perpetually clad in some shade of purple, straightened his jacket. “It’s my trademark. And purple’s a sight different than orange. Doesn’t stop traffic when I cross the street. And speaking of stopping traffic, here comes the original stoplight himself,” Ritchie said with a smiling gesture as District Attorney Louie Black, head of the prosecution, made his way down the aisle in a new grackle-head blue suit. His burnsides were matched in volume only by his mustache. His wild hair mussed up in stylish disarray. A pair of octagon spectacles pushed into his doughy face. A young but obese lawyer known for his shrewd logic and outright lack of subtlety, he was born and raised in Biloxi, Mississippi, and spoke with a southern drawl as heavy as peach farmer.
When asked in an interview with the Omaha Evening Bee the week before, he had called Ritchie a “whippersnapper” and a “blatherskite.”
In response, Ritchie had weighed the comment with as much seriousness as a schoolyard taunt and stated, “If that’s the harshest dish that my esteemed brother-of-the-bar can serve up, why, he’d better go back to law school to learn some new jabs.”
Black offered his hand to Ritchie before settling in at his own table across the aisle.
“Well-hell, if it isn’t Mr. Purple, attorney-at-law,” he said.
Ritchie stood, and they shook furiously.
Black looked at me while he and Ritchie continued to pump hands. “How’s our famous child abductor doing today? He sure must feel fancy in that nice orange suit, no doubt. Two peas in a pod you both must be. Say, you know who else wears purple and orange together? The inmates on death row at Sing Sing.”
“You’re a goddamn idiot, Louie,” Ritchie said softly and finally released himself from the overlong handshake. “You know damn well your horse-raping cousin-in-law never wore any orange or purple, and he was on that row for eight years before they finally gave him the noose.”
Black laughed like a man lost of mind and grabbed Ritchie firmly by the shoulder to pull him close. “You make fun of my wife’s inbred but well-meaning family all you want, counselor, and I’ll return serve by pissing my own drawers out of glee when Mr. Crowe here strangles to death from a broken neck.”
I could smell the alcohol on this district attorney’s breath. I asked, “Just how much gin have you had this morning, prosecutor?”
“Oh, only a pinch and a shard if you fancy a strict breakfast as do I, and you both are going down in a blaze of brimstone unbeknownst to man even in the darkest scripture of our vengeful Lord. So let me save you a lot of undue heartache and national embarrassment and make you one last substantial offer of which will disappear in the next two minutes before the honorable, elderly, alcoholic Judge Sutton, with whom I play pilotta every Sunday, arrives and the offer is this: plead guilty to both the kidnapping and robbery, and the state will only ask for twenty meager years of Mr. Crowe’s dour life.”
Ritchie jerked. “Twenty years, huh? Have you seen your jury? Not one of them has a full set of teeth that belongs to them from birth.”
“Sympathy for the poor by the poor be damn, counselor. Your client will be hanging from the gallows if you don’t take a plea bargain right now, and you know I’ve never been one to fib. As they say in Biloxi, last chance for romance.”
Ritchie said, “By romance you wouldn’t happen to mean paying shoeshine boys five dollars for an alleyway tug after another lonely night of swilling pig vodka?”
Attorney Black chuckled at the insinuation. “You ought not go making light of a man on course to becoming an elder statesman come fall. Not a smart career move.”
“Yeah, I heard you’re taking a crack at the governor’s mansion. I’m sure you’ll have the vote of every monkeyshine in the city. But who am I to judge love?”
Black laughed again so fiercely his whole stomach shook. “Too bad you can’t judge that or anything else. We’ll leave that to my dear friend Josiah Sutton,” he said and, as if on cue, Judge Sutton entered the courtroom from his chambers. He instructed the bailiff to bring in the jury and momentarily glanced at me.
I smiled wholeheartedly in my orange suit.
The entire room hushed as if the spectators knew they were about to witness a drama that would soon vanish into myth.
A coin dropped on the tile floor.
A woman captured a cough in her hanky.
The most publicized federal trial in the history of the state was about to begin.
The jury consisted of fourteen men with two on standby in case of emergency or illness: seven farmers, a carpenter, a rancher, a poultry man, an oil station manager, and three insurance salesmen. Two of them wore their overall bibs with their ties because they didn’t own a suit. The judge’s bench was situated at the east end of the courtroom. To his left was the jury box and, to his right, desks for the court clerk and court reporter. The gallery was filled to capacity with newspaper reporters. Six bailiffs were on duty for the entire length of the trial, under the charge of Deputy United States Marshal Earl Little.
“It’s a funny thing,” Black said from his table across the aisle moments before court was called to order. He dipped a pen beak into an inkwell, scribbled something on a legal pad. “A real funny thing. Last week a scribe from the Bee wrote: ‘Everyone knows who kidnapped Edward Cudahy Junior. But what we of Omaha and the rest of the western world want to know is who kidnapped Patrick Crowe.’”
Ritchie feigned a smile. He massaged his eyes under his spectacles. “What in heavens do you mean?”
“What in heavens do you mean?” Black mocked in a fake, gurgled tone without looking up from his notes. He continued to scribble furiously. “What I mean is that the timing of all of this is curious. Hell, I don’t know. Curious is a generous word. Too generous. I’d say it’s conspiratorial. All of a sudden this Beef Trust baloney from President Bolshevik comes down the pike, and the elusive Pat Crowe miraculously resurfaces on his own after five long years?”
My attorney scoffed. “It wasn’t for lack of trying. The poor fellows of the distinguished Omaha police department. Don’t kick them around too hard. After all, every once in a great while one of them catches the trots.”
I laughed loudly.
“Something amusing to you, son?” Black asked me.
I said nothing.
Black stopped his scribbling. “An honest man would’ve come forth immediately. ‘Why, sir, I’ve seen my likeness pasted on street poles and winders all over town, and I can’t say why. Here I am.’ Like Uriah from the Bible staring down his own death, an honest man would’ve said, ‘Here I be. Here I am. I have done no wrong and yet you pursue me still.’”
The court came to order.
Black rose from his chair, as did the rest of the courtroom. He looked over at Ritchie and me while he drummed his pen on his open palm. Quietly he hummed with a smile: “Oh where oh where has Pat Crowe gone? Oh where oh where could he have been?”
VI
FROM SAN FRANCISCO, I set sail for foreign ports on a Pacific Mail ocean liner, with nine thousand dollars of the Cudahy money tucked secretly in a pair of specially tailored treasure pockets in my coat lining, a spare change of clothes, and the pearl revolvers I lifted off the dead sicario in Nogales.
First to Yokohoma, Japan.
Forty days it took to cross the gelid Pacific, the sea all the wrong color: sometimes as pale as frothed gin, other times as pink as blood in milk, but never the clear blue I’d seen in p
icture books. In storm, the ocean splashed the steamer about like a bath toy. Rain shifted directions every five minutes. Swells sluiced over the gunwale, settled inches deep in the sleeping quarters. The sun a useless ornament behind a pellicle of sea cloud. Twice a dead child was wrapped in a tarp and, after a ceremony was held, tossed overboard. The wail of bawling mothers and men stomach sick. Vomit in wooden buckets and knife fights over crackers and all the known world long vanished with a small measure of soggy thankfulness.
There was no staying hidden forever. Not even in Japan. For two weeks I stole frozen shipments of eel right off the dock while it was being unloaded and resold it by the yard on a different wharf two or three piers away. When that forgery ran its course, I boarded another vessel headed to Natal, South Africa. I arrived in the city of Durban on the steamship Ryndam in the second week of January, nineteen hundred and two.
The first sight of foggy coast in a month.
It took eleven weeks and a journey of thirteen thousand miles to separate myself from the Pinkerton thugs that lurked in nearly every city and the reward posters of my face plastered on nearly every street pole.
Here, half a world away, I might find a haven. There was some money hidden away along my ribcage, a rumor of diamonds in the hills, and not a soul on the lookout for my likeness anywhere on the entire continent.
The future was hopeful and empty all at once.
Not a few steps off the gangplank and I saw the streets swathed with Canadian and British soldiers as the Second Boer War neared its end. The final mop up of the rebel armies was the reported line in most of the newspaper cable dispatches. Soon all South Africa would be under the rule of Great Britain, another colony in which to plant their flag. War held little interest for me. All I cared for after nearly two months at sea was a heavy meal and a few cups of grog and a bed in a room of its own that didn’t sway in the belly of the ship. At a fancy wharf hotel, I ate a plate of salted cod with apricot jam, drank two bottles of banana wine, and hired a suite on the top floor.
I slept for a day and a half straight before setting out for supplies. A ragged village shop without a proper name advertised all sorts of wares: army surplus, canvas tents, gardening tools, hosiery, oils. Inside an elder English gentleman occupied the counter behind a single beer tap that was little more than an old sink pipe screwed into a barrel.
I approached with a handwritten list. “A little glass of whiskey, friend. I’m chilled.”
“Chilled, mate? This is high summer.”
“I’ll have a whiskey all the same.”
“None to be had. This isn’t a saloon. I’ve beer and I’ve tea and a little bit of gin from my own stores at top cost.”
“Gin, then,” I said.
The proprietor poured me a gargle from a dark blue apothecary jug and made note of the pearl repeaters on my hip. “Long way from home for an American cowboy. You’re not one of those mercenaries hired on by the rebels are you?”
“What if I was?” I said and brought the gin to my lips.
The storekeeper put his hand over the glass before I could drink. “Then I wouldn’t serve you good London gin or anything else. This store is property of Her Majesty’s army.”
I shooed away the man’s hand and drank. “I’m prospecting for diamonds.”
“Diamonds?” the clerk said rudely. “God blind me. In the middle of war country? What a cock-up. You won’t find any diamonds in Durban that aren’t under store glass.”
“Heading into the Drakensberg Mountains.”
“The Dragons? That’s a week’s ride, and rides are hard to hire into the interior. Lot of coin that’ll cost you. Friendly advice? You’ll spend more getting there than you will ever dig up even if you got lady luck on your side. Those mountains are picked clean.”
I ignored him and read the supplies from my list: a Winchester or another good name rifle along with three boxes of ammunition, a hammer, a handsaw, nails, a shovel, braided rope and pulleys for a windlass, lumber to build a headframe, two large buckets, a mining pick, and all the dynamite he had in stock. Vittles, too. Nothing snooty. Hardtack, beans, jerked meat, pickled eggs, anything that came in a can. A bedroll and pup tent. Matches, canteen, tinderbox. A map of the midlands, a compass. Fishing pole and tackle. A draft horse and a wagon to haul my goods.
“This isn’t one of your fancy New York City department stores. Do you see ten stories with a lift? What I’ve got on the shelves is all I have,” the clerk said.
I showed him a thick roll of Yankee greenbacks. “Not to mention I’ll have every drop of gin you got, too. I’d prefer whiskey or brandy, but since you ain’t got neither, I suppose a little of the queen’s eyewater will suffice.”
The clerk smartened up at the sight of the cash and helped me find what he had in stock. What he didn’t have, well, he knew where to get it. Recommendations at a cost, of course. This was war country, after all. Everything for a price, even directions. By midday, after stops at three other village shops and a lumber mill, I had finished my errands and loaded the supplies into a flatbed wagon with a dependable pony. I finally tracked down three bottles of smuggled whiskey in an old apothecary, along with a handful of stinkweed cigars. I hired a guide to take me into the interior, a Canadian fellow who was setting out across the Orange Free State that afternoon.
“What a merry coincidence that is,” the Canadian had said.
We sashayed off without delay, wagon to wagon, and rode until sundown over the rangeland of thorny acacia and tussock grass. Conversation was minimal. A few banal niceties and nothing more. For three straight days nothing but the endless flat of the veld. Land as empty as Nebraska prairie. Everywhere the stubble of low shrub and long aprons of scorched ash where wildfire had seared the veld down to stone. Here and there a sugar cane farm and a collection of grass huts. Once I spotted a pair of white rhinos, and the sight of the animals finally made the terrain feel extraterrestrial. Toward the end of the week, the landscape shifted to plateaus of hilly velvet. We came upon a thicket of alpine grassland along the Tugela River.
“This is where we part,” my Canadian guide told me. “If you head up that pass to the north you’ll find some good spots to dig in a day’s ride or so. Don’t stray too far east or your horse won’t be able to manage the climb back down.”
I stood in my wagon seat and shook his hand. “I appreciate you letting me tag along.”
“Don’t mention it, eh? Always been friendly with the yanks, I have.”
“I don’t see any mountains yet,” I said and nodded at the horizon so cottoned with cloud there was no way to tell the sun’s direction with a naked eye.
“Oh, they’re there. They’ll spring up on you once the weather clears out.”
“Good enough,” I said, touched my hat brim in farewell, and continued north until it was too dark to manage another mile. I made a fireless camp on a giant rock that night, and in the morning, sure as sunup, the Drakensberg Mountains were towering over me. Some of the peaks were as flat as tabletops, and others rose as singularly as cathedral spires. I had been in the foothills without knowing it. All the cloud cover wiped away as cleanly as a swept floor, the South African weather as mutable as it was in the Midwest. I rode on through an erosion gulley as narrow as a cart path to the northern cape where the basalt wall of the mountains rose steep as a wall hung by an expert carpenter.
Toward evening, the last hues of day coaxing purple, I settled on a spot that looked as good as any for shaft mining and had myself a little lonely celebration. Dinner cooked over a small twig fire: canned meat, rusk bread, red beans. Two days prior, I’d caught a fine mess of yellow fish with the Canuck, and I fried them up and ate them so scorching hot I could barely taste their flavor. The moon arrived on schedule and plenty of whiskey came along with it, whiskey that didn’t taste much like any whiskey I ever had before but still did the good work of turning my head humid. I smoked two
of my stinkweeds and put my bare feet up to the fire with my trousers unbuckled and thought to myself what a good old time I was having and boy wouldn’t Billy just be in stitches if he were still alive to share the moment.
A sudden donsie washed over me, brought on by the whiskey and pull-grass cigars that set my head spinning.
Poor goddamn Billy.
I drank another whiskey and lit a new stinkweed. My ragged hat, pushed low, covered my eyes. How much sadness could fit into one happy night?
Come first light also came sickness. I puked cold on rock. My stomach shriveled up like gut punch. Old fire a pile of ash strewn with bottle and can. The horse I paid for in Durban whinnied pitifully like a mother ashamed. I staggered to my feet and told the horse to fuck off.
There was work to be done.
For three days I set about constructing the headframe with the windlass for pulling up buckets of waste rock, with the hopes I might find a little scrap of precious stone among the rubble. I blew dynamite with extended fuses and dug out what had collapsed into the hole, digging sometimes nine and ten hours in a day.
By week’s end I’d created a shaft twenty feet deep and nailed some lumber into the hole to serve as a ladder. Fissure water leaked into the bottom of the shaft like a well and was as hot as if brewed. I hoisted the water and gangue rock and climbed back out of the shaft to breathe open air. Alone at night with a cup of whiskey and a wispy fire, I engaged in long talks with my horse. She neighed and hoofed rock and barely made a sound otherwise.
“Some conversationalist you are,” I said to her and chuckled twice.
The horse stared blankly, and I laughed again.
Every new morning I pushed on.
In the evenings I filtered the rock through a shaking screen while the sun drooped. I studied promising shards and chunks through a quizzing glass. All that alluvium sifted through in the hope of finding one scintilla of diamond but finding none. Ten days in and I would’ve taken a cheap hunk of iron for my efforts. Every morning the shaft filled again with a foot of water even though it hadn’t rained since my arrival. Day after day I came out of the hole gasping and soaked, my arms dead from swinging the pick. Three weeks passed. I was nearly out of alcohol and tobacco, and my spirit was failing.
World, Chase Me Down Page 23
