Deadman

by Jon A. Jackson

  Driving back uptown, Lee explained that there had been a lot of ethnic neighborhoods in Butte, once upon a time. “Italians, Irish, Finns, Croats, Serbs, Poles, Cousin Jacks,” he waved his hand inclusively at the hills.

  “Cousin Jacks?” Mulheisen said.

  “Cornish, from Cornwall,” Lee explained. “They brought the pasties. They're all miners. Or were. A lot of the neighborhoods were gobbled up by the Pit and now, well you know how it is . . . a couple generations go by and the kids intermarry . . . the neighborhoods just kind of got all mixed up. But you still got a little of it. Hey, I'll take you to a good ol’ Cabbage Patch bar—Smokey's Corner.”

  Bernard Stover was inevitably known as “Smokey,” after a comic strip character from the thirties. It may also have had something to do with his involvement in occasional convenient fires later in his career, fires that resulted in insurance payments to acquaintances. He was a Butte lad, born and bred, right out of the Cabbage Patch—a largely Irish conclave on the shoulder of the Hill. In its early days the Patch was a rackety collection of shacks and cribs that harbored immigrant miners and their families, then was renovated with government projects and was now due for another urban renewal process.

  Smokey had come a long way from the Cabbage Patch, in a sense, although Smokey's Corner, the tavern that was the flagship of his not-very-far-flung enterprise, was located just a couple of blocks from where he'd been born. He was a good-sized feller, in the local parlance. In his seventies now, he was frankly paunchy, and his long face was jowly, the round blue eyes under that still-unwrinkled dome of a brow as innocently blue as a baby's. He still smoked a pipe, a new corncob every week, loaded with Union Leader tobacco.

  He was knowledgeable about the mines and the Company, as one commonly referred to the Anaconda Mining Company, the organization that had operated the great copper mines of The Richest Hill On Earth before closing down and selling out to ARCO in the eighties. There was still some mining in Butte, but not on the grand scale that had made this the biggest, richest town in Montana. Smokey Stover had never spent a single shift in the mines. From childhood he had worked the bars, peddling papers, running for beer, running for sandwiches for gamblers, whatever paid. Later he had run bootleg liquor. Nowadays he was into real estate and development, and he still ran his cranky old tavern, as unreconstructed as possible.

  The national mobs had never really had a foothold in Butte. It was hardly worth their trouble. Too few people, even in the heady days of nearly 100,000 population. Nowadays, with only 34,000 in the county, it was even less interesting. The old red-light district was gone and gambling was legalized. But they had always kept in good contact with some locals, primarily Smokey and his predecessors. There was a big Italian population in Butte, and possibly the mob had some contacts there, but it was mainly with Smokey.

  Smokey's Corner was as old fashioned as a bar could be in America in the waning years of the twentieth century. The door opened right off the street. The floor was unpolished hardwood and already at ten in the morning it was littered with peanut shells and cigarette butts, mixed with sweeping compound. There were three coin-operated pool tables placed in the center of the narrow room that ran back some sixty feet to the back room, with a row of tables and chairs against the outside wall. The tables and chairs were wooden, seemingly the original furniture—deeply scored from knives and keys, displaying initials, crude representations of genitalia and other more obscure images—but the original furniture had long since been smashed in brawls and whittled into sawdust; these chairs and tables dated from the fifties.

  The bar was original equipment, having been hauled by mule train out to the gold mining camp Alder, down in the Ruby Valley, back in the 1870s and thence to Butte when that camp folded. Along the inner wall the bar ran fully thirty feet with a tall mirrored back bar on which many bottles of whiskey were displayed. The top of the serving bar was deeply scored and gouged, and there were at least two verifiable bullet scars in its wooden surface, one of them not that ancient—a client had absentmindedly pulled out a .357 magnum pistol while searching his pockets for another dollar, and when he slapped it on the bar it went off, blowing away part of the bar and shattering a corner of the back bar. This had happened two years ago; Smokey had banned the perpetrator from the bar for a week.

  The old pressed-tin ceiling was still intact and repainted at least once a decade. Half of the brewery signs on the walls were of long-defunct brands. There was no attempt to make the bar look old, or traditional; it was just an old bar that had never been exposed to ephemeral trends of modernization. A very comfortable bar, actually, with a high ceiling that kept it from being too smoky, with fans that rotated infinitely slowly, with high, clear windows (rarely washed) that let in the fine mountain light. It had a kind of spaciousness that was pleasant. It didn't stink, either. While the floor was swept only nightly, the tables and bar and the sinks were kept clean and orderly. It was a regular old corner tavern, of a sort well known to Mulheisen from his youth in Detroit, but long since vanished.

  Smokey was in the bar when Mulheisen and Jacky Lee entered. Also in the bar was the woman Heather, sitting at a table in the back, wearing a ski jacket. They didn't notice her. Jacky introduced Mulheisen to Smokey.

  “From Detroit, hunh?” Smokey said with interest. He quit counting the take and wiped his hands before shaking Mulheisen's hand. “I know some guys from Detroit, they used to come over here once in a while.”

  “That so?” Mulheisen said. He looked around the bar, liking what he saw. “Did you know a guy named Mario Soper?”

  “Is that the guy you was asking me about, Jacky? Nah, I never seen him. If he came in here I didn't notice. See that guy over there?” Stover pointed to a gaunt, grizzled man who looked to be seventy or more, sitting by himself in one of the wooden chairs along the outer wall. He had a shock of stiff, silvery wire hair and black eyebrows. He peered through thick glasses at a newspaper. At his wrist was a glass of amber whiskey next to a beer chaser. “You should ask him. That's Dick Tracy. He was a reporter for the Standard for about a hundred years. If anybody seen him, it would be Dick.”

  The woman in the ski jacket passed Mulheisen and Lee as they sat down to talk to Tracy. Lee watched her leave but didn't comment. Tracy was a pleasant, soft-spoken man. He seemed pleased to talk to them. He thought he recognized Lee's photo of Mario Soper, but couldn't remember when or where he had seen the man. He didn't know anyone named Joe Service or Joe Humann, or Helen Sedlacek.

  “You're from Detroit, eh?” Tracy said. “You see much jazz back there?”

  Mulheisen was pleased to talk jazz with the old reporter. They shared an interest in Cozy Cole—Tracy had played drums in his youth, for dance bands, swing bands at the old Columbia Gardens, a long-defunct amusement park that occasionally had brought in groups like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller.

  “I sat in once with Ray Anthony's band,” Tracy said. “His drummer got drunk and lost some money in cards uptown and then he got noisy and finally his arm broke. So I sat in for him. It was unbelievable! What a band.”

  He went on to tell them what a villain old Smokey was. “Looks quiet now,” Tracy pointed out, “but later the bikers come and others. You can get killed just walking by. A guy was stabbed about six months ago, just walking his dog. He should have known better than to walk a dog by Smokey's Corner.”

  “Yeah, it can be bad,” Jacky affirmed.

  Mulheisen found it hard to believe. Compared to Detroit, Butte looked like a rest home. He asked again if Tracy hadn't seen Mario Soper, perhaps in conversation with Smokey. But Tracy didn't spend any time in Smokey's after about two P.M.

  “That's about as early as the bikers and thugs get up around here,” he said. “They stagger in here around three or so and knock back a few shots to get well. By then I'm up at the Helsinki—a much quieter bar, at that hour anyway. And then I'm home by eight. Your guy—what is he, a dope dealer?—probably would have been in later. But if he was a dope dea
ler, he was definitely in here, talking to Smokey. ‘Cause nothing like that goes down in Butte without Smokey.”

  He glanced up at the bar and hoisted his empty glass with a faint smile at Smokey, who brought the bottle of Old Forester and poured out a huge couple of shots. Mulheisen quickly threw down a fiver and was surprised to get a couple of dollars back.

  “He's a grand feller,” Tracy said, with a mock Irish accent. “We both took catechism at the same time from Father Keneally.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Did you see that great strapping butch who just strolled out? She's from Detroit. I was talking to her. She said she was looking for an apartment. Not a pleasant lassie, I can tell you. Hard, very hard. She's got hands like a navvy, as the old-timers would say. She and Smokey have their heads together every day. I saw him passing money to her. Maybe she won a bet, or something.”

  “She move out here?” Lee asked.

  Tracy said she had told him that she had taken a job in town. “Some kind of computer consultant, she says, but she doesn't impress me as a clerical worker. She's in and out of here all day. Someone said she was working at the hospital, saw her over there. Maybe she is a consultant, working on their computers. I guess she found an apartment, but I don't know where.”

  The old newsman rambled on about one character or another but nothing, including his dark suspicions of the dykey computer woman, caught the imagination of the two cops. They soon left.

  On the street, Mulheisen said, “Dick Tracy? Smokey Stover?”

  “Tom Tracy, I think,” Lee said, “and Clarence. But you know how these things are.” He shrugged. “I can drop you anywhere you want, Mul, but I've got to get back to work. We've been having a lot of arson fires lately, and everybody's got to concentrate on that. But give me a call, anytime, and I'll do what I can to get away if you need help.”

  Mulheisen had obtained a street map. He said he thought he'd just walk around, try to get a sense of the town.

  From his fourth-floor room in the Finlen Hotel, he could see a good deal of Butte. It wasn't a bad hotel, just a little old and dark with creaky floors. He went out for a stroll before dark. He walked all the way up the main drag, Park Street, to a kind of shoulder of the Hill where lay the campus of the School of Mines, or Montana Tech, as it was now called. He stood next to a bronze statue of Marcus Daly, one of the original Copper Kings who had built this western metropolis, and gazed out with Marcus at the city below. It was rather grand. He could see an awful lot of country from here: mountains to the south, mountains to the west, and of course the great wall of the Continental Divide to the east. He took a deep breath and exhaled. It was fine air, cold in the fall afternoon. It was the kind of country that made you want to take a deep breath.

  10

  Heather

  The minute she laid eyes on Cate Yoder, Heather was smitten. The lovely little blonde was wheeling a muffled patient along the sidewalk around the hospital to a place overlooking the large park that spread down the hillside. The patient seemed to be a young man, his face partially bandaged and hidden by dark glasses. His head was covered with a woolly cap, and he wore a warm coat over which was draped a thick plaid wool blanket. He didn't speak or even move.

  Heather approached them. “Nice day,” she said.

  Cateyo looked up, a little wary and defensive for some reason, but smiling. She too wore a woolly cap, and her lustrous gold hair escaped to cascade onto the shoulders of her own warm jacket, a colorful down-filled affair.

  It was, in fact, a brilliant, sunny day in October, the temperature barely 40 degrees Fahrenheit. There had been frost but by now, ten-thirty, it had gone.

  “Yes, it's lovely, isn't it?” Cateyo said. “I hope it isn't too cold for Paul.” She fussed with his blanket for a moment.

  Heather noticed the nurse uniform under the jacket and said, “Is this your patient?”

  “Oh yes, he is,” Cateyo replied, rather possessively, Heather thought. “This is his first time out.”

  Heather stooped and looked at the patient more carefully. “Hello,” she said. Her voice was low and soft, and in her warm ski hat she didn't look unpleasant. Cateyo was disarmed. The patient did not respond.

  “Paul doesn't speak,” Cateyo said. “Actually, his name isn't Paul. We don't know what it is, really. He's not been able to tell us.”

  “My goodness,” Heather said, straightening up. “Auto accident?”

  “No, no,” Cateyo said, carefully. “He was . . . a head injury. But he's getting better. Aren't you, Paul?” She laid her mittened hand gently on his shoulder. “He's just recovering from surgery.” She gestured at her jaw and ear, as if to indicate the surgical site. “He'll be up and about, one of these days.”

  “Poor man, what sort of head injury?” Heather smiled at the young woman. She really was delicious, Heather thought, taking in the rosy cheeks and bright blue eyes, the soft pink lips. The bulky jacket didn't offer a very good notion of the woman's body, but Heather was sure it was strong and supple.

  “It was a gunshot wound—not self-inflicted,” Cateyo hastened to assure the woman. “He was just left for dead, on the highway. Can you believe that people could be so cruel?”

  “Oh, I can believe it. Men are very cruel. That's why I had to get away from Detroit.”

  Below them, some mothers were watching and playing with several young children who were tumbling about the brown grassy hillside. Their voices rang in the clear air. Beyond the hillside and houses one could see in the distance huge white-capped mountains. A large black bird, much too large for a crow, sailed down across the broad hillside toward the Dumpster behind the IGA supermarket below them. Heather thought it must be a raven.

  “It's very pretty here,” Heather said, “and peaceful.”

  “Yes. You're from Detroit?” Cateyo asked.

  “It's awful back there,” Heather said. “I've just moved out to take a job here. I'm looking for an apartment. You wouldn't know of anything?”

  “There's usually lots of rentals available. Have you looked in the Standard?"

  “I looked, but I didn't really know what I was looking for,” Heather said. “I was kind of hoping for a roommate . . .”

  “Gee, I don't know,” Cateyo said, “I'm sure there are people looking for a roommate, but . . .”

  Their conversation faded in and out of Joe's consciousness. The word “Detroit” caught his attention, bringing with it an odor of alarm, but it faded away when the word wasn't repeated. His hands were cold. This new woman made him uneasy. Poking her huge face down into his. Why didn't she go away? He wanted Cateyo to talk to him, to stroke his hands, to sit and look at him as she generally did. He didn't even mind if she babbled on about Jesus. It was nice to be outside—the sun was warm on his face—but the breeze was chilling. He was worried. What if he got chilled? Cateyo looked after him very well, but she wouldn't know he was cold, especially if this awful woman kept talking and talking, as she seemed to want to do. His sunglasses were slipping and Cateyo hadn't noticed.

  He lifted his head slightly. Not much, only a millimeter or two, but even so, he did it carefully so as not to reveal that he could move at all. Through the dark glasses—somewhat blurry, unfortunately (was it his vision or were they dirty?)—he could see the new woman. She was, as his first view had indicated, quite awful. He hated her now. He wanted her to leave. He concentrated furiously, willing her to leave.

  Instead, she took hold of the near handle of the wheelchair, saying to Cateyo, “Here, let me help you with that.” There was a low curb over which Cateyo wished to move the chair so that it could be rolled onto the grass.

  “No,” said Cateyo sharply and struck the woman's hand away. It was done without thought, but forcefully. Cateyo was appalled. She hadn't meant to react so violently and she was immediately apologetic.

  “I'm sorry,” Heather said sweetly. “Of course, he is a patient and you are his nurse. You are responsible. I didn't mean to interfere. You take very good care of the poor d
ear.”

  The chair had lurched insignificantly, but Joe took the opportunity to groan as loudly as possible.

  “Paul! Are you all right?” Cateyo fell to her knees before him, clutching his hands and gazing up into his dark glasses. She pushed them up onto his nose properly.

  “Nnnnghhh,” Joe muttered.

  Cateyo stripped off her mittens and clutched at Joe's hands. “Oh lord, his hands are freezing! I'm sorry, Paul.” She tucked his hands under the blanket. “There, that's better. Let's just take a little stroll down along the path.”

  A narrow footpath descended on a long slant across the shoulder of the hill. There had been a hard frost in the night and the ground was quite hard underfoot. Cateyo began to push the wheelchair slowly but carefully along the path with Heather walking alongside, still chatting about apartments and the clear weather. Joe resisted the tendency to lean sideways, downhill, but then he gave the effort up and toppled. Instantly, the chair capsized and Joe, to his horror, was tumbled out. The brutal, hard earth flew up at him and he only just managed to twist so that he didn't strike his face on the injured side, taking the blow first on his right shoulder and then his right temple. The pain was fabulous and he blacked out.