“And what about what they call you?”
“Hell, what about all that big talk you gave me when you came courting with that fancy bottle of brandy? Where’s that guy with all the big friends in Washington? I’d like him to show face. That guy would get me outta this trap.”
“He’s right, Sammy,” Dennison agreed. “You know, the next time you want a good spanking, take it down at one of my clubs and not in that goddamn courtroom.”
Ritchie brayed. “I’m awful glad you’re so worried about it, Tom.”
“Yeah, you and that Louie Blue, you two are putting on quite the show,” Dennison said. “Yes, sir. That audience is getting to experience all sorts of thrills without paying a cent.”
“Louie Black. Not Louie Blue,” Ritchie corrected him.
Dennison clucked. “Well, gee woops, Sam. Like I give a sweet one what color his name is. Man’s a one-term district attorney who fell into the gig backwards two years out of the public defender’s office, and you’re piddling around in that courtroom like he’s the god of all thunder.”
“It’s you who ought to be paying more attention. Louie’s been the D.A. for two terms now with a strong push to be this state’s next governor,” Ritchie said.
Dennison laughed.
“What’s so goddamn funny?” I asked.
“The state’s next governor is exactly what he’s going to be,” Dennison said. “I’ve always found you can get yourself full by satisfying the appetites of other men.”
I paced my cell like a puma in a zoo cage. I sucked on my cheroot with a hungry compulsion, blowing smoke all over. “You know something? Most everything you say wouldn’t make sense to a crazy man.”
“Governor Black,” Dennison said. “Kind of has a ring to it, wouldn’t you say?”
I finally registered the plan. Louie Black wanted the governor’s mansion. Tom Dennison wanted to pick up the scraps of the stockyard empire after it crumbled apart following the Beef Trust trial. Cudahy was the linchpin. See him lose in Omaha, and the Big Six monopoly would get taken to task in Chicago. All Louie Black needed to do was step out of the way, and he’d find himself anointed the most powerful man in the state by the kingmaker who used the political system like a checkbook.
“Oh, that’s keen,” I said to Dennison. “That’s really something. You’re like a rat got into the wheat cellar. You know that? Nibbling and gnawing at everyone else’s stores.”
“It’s the best remedy,” Ritchie said and called for the turnkey who came over with a giant ring of keys and unlocked my cell gate.
Dennison stepped inside and handed me the garment bag. “It’s the only remedy.”
I stood there stymied. “What about good lawyering? Why not try that instead?”
Ritchie said, “This is lawyering, son.”
Dennison clapped me on the back. “Come now, Paddy boy. How about you get dressed and the three of us go make a new friend?”
XII
I FLED AFRICA as a stowaway on a hospital ship due for London, and paid a surgeon a considerable sum to properly mend the bullet wound in my back. From England I took the first Cunard liner to New York and did largely what I told old Mrs. Rutts I would do: booked the Randolph suite at the Astoria Hotel, ate an epicurean supper of bluepoint oysters and lobster thermidor, hired a hot medicinal bath, drank my fill of Benedictine, and dollied around with a strawberry-haired whore with a forty-inch bust and a rump like a horse.
The Boer republics, I learned from an extra edition of the Post, had fallen. The news struck me as gravely as if the headline reported the death of my sister. The rebellion was quite dead, but I was still somehow alive and not sure how thankful I was for that mercy. All told, I’d been away overseas for eight months.
I thought on good old Mrs. Rutts. On the morning I left, I didn’t wake her to say goodbye. I stopped in her doorway, watched her sleep, and was nearly overcome with the emotion to kiss her on her forehead. Instead I parted the same way I’d arrived: dizzy and swollen of heart, my leg and arm in little better condition, unable to find the right words. I left her nearly every dollar I still had secretly sown into my jacket. I took only what I needed to see myself through to the States with a little to spare for frivolity once I got there. She might burn it in her mud stove for kindling or bury it in her cornfield. But that was up to her, stubborn old gal that she was. At the very least, she would understand my gratefulness. Or so I hoped. I could not measure my gratitude by any other gauge besides maybe writing her a few lines of verse, but oftentimes even words full of poetry have no heart, for the heart has no tongue.
The rest of the money from the Cudahy ransom was still buried in a nectarine orchard in Nogales where Billy had died. I thought then I might never go back to retrieve it. Some things must simply be left buried.
From New York, I rode to Chicago and then on to Nebraska in the wheat car of a freight train and nearly froze in transit. The chilly springtime wind, gusting sometimes over forty miles an hour, hardened my clothes to bark. I switched trains at a division point, sleeping again in wild hay while enduring fierce wind, and gained Omaha for the first time in over two years since the kidnapping. I’d been harried across the globe, had not been seen or heard from in all that time. Still, when I stepped off the platform, there was my likeness pasted on circulars everywhere: PAT CROWE WANTED.
The fifty-thousand-dollar reward offered by Cudahy for my capture, dead or alive, was still in force. There was no point at which the man would give up the search. The Pinkerton thugs demanded a wage of a thousand dollars a week for their efforts and had found nothing, and still Cudahy paid them their salary. Burlington detectives still skimmed the hills and rode the trains and frequently stalked my old stomping grounds in hopes of apprehending me.
I was cautious, but not overly so. My appearance had changed dramatically since I was last in the city. I’d trimmed my beard to a Vandyke style, cut my hair above the ear and stained it with bootblack, carried thirty extra pounds in my gut. I donned simple clothing that gave me the look of a banker or a merchant. Still, I dared not dally on the streets and hired a suite in a pink hotel. A young bellhop brought me a supper of liver and onions and black coffee as strong as a doorjamb. Wheat was scattered all about the room from my time riding in the open freight car. It was in my hair, in my socks. I introduced myself as Jonathan Loveless. I told the bellhop I was in the wheat business and had been inspecting grain silos all day.
“Reason why I’m covered in all this pasturage,” I said and tipped the lad handsomely.
The boy smiled. He knew right off who I really was. My changed appearance might fool a man at a glance, but up close I was still unmistakable. I asked the bellhop to bring me two glasses of forty-rod and again gave him a nice gratuity.
“They’ve been snooping around here a lot, looking for you,” the bellhop said when he returned with the whiskey.
I peeled off a sock and shook it loose of wheat strands. “Who do you think I am?”
“Everyone knows who you are. And the police sure are set on nabbing you.”
“Do you favor them?”
“I favor the fifty thousand dollars they’re offering for your head.”
“And you really think they’ll fork it over if you squeal?”
The bellhop thought on that. “No. They probably might not.”
I unfolded another bill from my roll. “They probably might not is right. They’ll say you never said boo. But me? I pay cash up front to my friends.”
The bellhop snatched the money.
“Now, you wouldn’t be telling anybody about my residence here, would you?”
“No, sir. Not when you pay me twenty dollars for a fifty-cent whiskey.”
I laughed and shook out my other sock. “And there’s more where that came from. I’m not asking you to do anything illegal, but if you see any John Law snooping around, you come and knock o
n this door twice. Is that something you can manage?”
The bellhop smiled again. “Certainly so, Mr. Loveless.”
I relaxed some after that. Swallowed two thunderbolt pills for my splitting headache and slept like a dead man all day and far into the next night. About eight o’clock the following morning, the young bellhop came pounding on my door.
I jumped out of bed and into my trousers.
“They’re coming for you, old boy,” the bellhop said through the door and then fled down the hallway. I went to the window. Three posses were rallying on the hotel from every avenue. Some of the men were plainclothes detectives, some uniformed officers, and others were dressed like farmers.
I was hemmed in on all sides. I cinched on my gun belt and stomped on my boots and made for the roof of the hotel via a back staircase. From there I scaled down the lone fire escape and jumped to the lower roof of a nearby building. Once on the street, I bought a newspaper from a magazine stand and immersed myself in the pages as I walked among pedestrians starting out their day. Clear of the city sidewalks, I fled at a sprint toward the Missouri River.
Another score of men crept along the north edge of the river: local farmers with their double-barreled quail guns and a few piebald hunting dogs howling and some of the men mounted on sorry old cow horses that weren’t fit to pull a toy wagon. I guessed them to be thirty or forty strong. I bellied down in the brittle river cane and crawled for the bank. The river was sheeny with skim ice around the shallows and as blue as the deep ocean in others. I scrabbled through the slough while the posse from the north rode overland. A light drilling of spring snow started. Mud as trapping as quicksand. I heaved for breath and scanned the shore in every direction.
Past a low tailrace I spotted a huddle of fishing skiffs moored to a small dock. Wind whorled the new spring snow, but the sky was largely clear save for the leavings of a few battered clouds. The sun was well out and felt warm on my skin. My whole front half caked with cold mud. Yet another posse was on my trail from the opposite direction. They advanced in formation like trained infantry, and I could do naught else besides make a dash for the dock. There were three boats there. Flat-bottom punts used for fishing gizzard shad and walleye. I set two adrift and climbed into the third and rowed for my life.
The posse climbed down the bluff toward the riverbank on their stomachs and opened fire. I kept my sculls to the water. I rowed through the lacey ice with great effort until my skiff broke clear of the shallows and was out toward midstream. A few of the men shook off their coats and ditched their guns and swam for the boats I set loose. I quit my oar long enough to fire a few shots at the swimmers and hit one of them in the arm just as he was about to dive into water barely knee deep. I could have killed him with ease. I aimed my pistol and was about to make the man’s wife a widow and his children forever fatherless, but refrained.
Two of the other swimmers turned back to assist the man. I lost three hunters from my pursuit instead of just one by the simple abstinence of my pistol. I rowed faster. Precipitous gunfire echoed from a grove of cottonwoods so close to the shoreline that their roots grew into the river. More shooters crested a hummock overlooking the water and fired down upon me in brittle bursts but never came within twenty feet of my boat, as if I was under the protection of aegis. I nearly bent the oar with my effort and soon found myself with the advantage of the down current.
The ambuscade perched on the northern edge shouted and fired their pitiful flintlocks blindly. Buckshot scattered the water. The boom of double-aught-like musketry. A blessed thing they only had farmhands on the other end of those shotguns. If there had been one trained rifle among that mob, I would’ve been sunk. I rowed and the two posses sprinted along the banks to keep pace with my skiff. I returned fire in the hiccups of silence, volleying shots back and forth between hard bursts of frantic rowing.
Water began to fill the bottom of my skiff. Some lucky shot had put a hole in the side of the boat. I cursed and rowed harder. I paddled for the far shore as a keelboat approached from the south. Both posses were losing ground on foot. For a moment I thought I might be able to outdistance them all the way to Kansas, but then my skiff breached a sandbar. The Missouri was at dearth before thaw, shallow as the Platte in spots.
I could not pry the vessel loose. Bullets plowed all around me. I jumped into the freezing water and pulled at the bow and dug at the sand with my oar, using it like a crowbar to jack the boat free of the sand. It was no use. The punt was stuck but good. The water was so shallow in that part of the river that I could stand with it up to my chest. I was twenty yards from the Iowa shore, and I swam with my last energy for life and liberty.
I sprinted through a camass meadow and floundered my way through a thin line of blackjack trees, soaked and muddy still and every breath as tortuous in my throat and lungs as if I’d been keening all day. A flood of sunlight split the sky. I came upon a soybean field still to be planted and overrun with pigweed, and I slowed my pace to a walk. I could not run one more step. I was too spent to lace my shoes, which had nearly come off my feet from the weight of gathered mud.
Downriver, some members of the second posse had seized boats and were rowing across the Missouri. They were dogged in their pursuit. The promise of fifty thousand dollars will spur many a man to endure extremes and go to lengths he could not possibly brave otherwise. These men rode under the oriflamme of mammon and for nothing else. I jogged toward a secluded barn. It was a fatigued mile from the river, and I nearly collapsed upon reaching it. I chucked myself into the doors, barreling them open with a heave of my shoulder, and fell into more hay. If I never again lay in straw or paced another river with death upon my tail, I would live a happy remainder of my days.
There was only one pony in the stalls. A paint horse with pinto spotting. I saddled the animal with a pillion and crusty blanket and led it from the stables. Throwing myself upon it took my last ounce of energy. I was completely sapped and begged the creature for good speed. Just as I was riding out of the barn, a woman’s voice wailed from the farmhouse porch.
“Cletus! Cletus! Some sommabitch is stealing our nag!”
“Off to see the wizard, lady,” I screamed with shortened breath. “Back in a jiffy.”
I larruped the horse with my boot heels and rode the poor beast as hard as she would allow for near on fifteen miles until she was just as taxed as me. The horizon behind me an empty line. Even the men who had horses surely didn’t drive them over the river. I paced my stolen nag for the rest of the day, trotting over swards of exposed hardpan where the plain was as dusty as the desert and fields of early globe mallow had shriveled in the unexpected chill.
I walked the horse until night dropped. The moon rose in a sickle, and a brisk wind came with it. I could smell myself through my clothes. The odor as strong as ripening cheese. I neared Neola, Iowa, and turned south toward the Rock Island Railroad junction. I stopped outside the depot, which was vacant for the evening, hid the saddle in a ditch, and turned my stolen horse loose.
The pony loped after me, nickering somber tones in her nostrils that I’d never imagined possible from a horse. I embraced her. “You’re one true hussy, old cousin. I don’t want any goodbyes, either. I surely don’t. It’s a rotten charge, us parting. But that woman will be missing you, and those boys on my tail would know you from a mile away.”
I led the animal into a rancher’s paddock on the other side of the train station, closed the gate with a cinch, and ran for the rail yards, sprinting over the circuitous tracks. I’d missed the last passenger train for the night and would have to wait until morning before I could catch a ride out of the city.
XIII
TOM DENNISON’S TOURING car was the most beautiful machine I had ever seen: green as pulverized lime, with brass fittings, deep leather seats that could seat five more comfortably than most people’s drawing rooms, and eighteen actual horsepower. Dennison’s driver, a young mulatto wit
h a pencil-thin mustache, wore white leather gloves and a chauffer’s cap. We coasted over the icy avenues with the sluggish, confident pace of a canal barge. Slush splattered out from under the fenders like a continual sneeze. Snow as fat as soap curds fell from a bone pale sky. A gloriously crystalline morning. We tobogganed around a slick curve. Dennison chewed an extinguished cigar stump and studied a daily racing form. He liked a filly by the name of Kiss and Tell in the noon handicap at Tijuana.
Finally we came to the Jewish section of town. A little four-block stretch where the city, according to Dennison, kept its best delis and its stupidest lawyers. Enchantingly enough, Louie Black’s apartment was above a kosher delicatessen dubbed Zimmerman’s.
I exited the car after Ritchie and Dennison, into the talcum snowfall. We paused momentarily in front of the deli, and the sight of the shop brought back memories of my own butchery. I stood there staring through the shop windows like a dunce trying to make sense of an equation on a chalkboard. Stood there moon-eyed and full of heartsickness, grinning like an idiot. Lamb shanks as big as cavemen’s clubs hung on a rack in a neat row. Cheese wheels the size of wagon tires. Glittering bottles of sacramental wine. Barrels of gefilte fish. Knuckled pickles in jars of brine.
“Hey, wistful one,” Dennison called to me. “Time and tide tarry for no man.”
I shrugged snow off my shoulders. I followed Dennison and my attorney to the third floor, clomping up the staircase. Dennison stopped before Louie Black’s door. He cinched up his tie and pounded on the door like he was police. We waited for nearly half a minute before the door creaked open. The district attorney heaved behind the gap. He’d left the chain lock in place. I could see his left eye through the crack in the door. His blue iris orbited wildly.
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