Hang Him Twice

by William W. Johnstone

  Quickly.

  The silver baron with the monocle spoke.

  “Marshal?”

  Dooley finished reading a paragraph, although he could not have told anyone what he had just read, folded the newspaper, deliberately took his time laying it on the table, took another sip of coffee and did not grimace, and stared at the one-glass man with that perfectly coiffured gray handlebar mustache and pointed beard.

  “Yeah?”

  The one with the ivory lion’s–head cane spoke. “What are your plans?”

  Dooley shrugged. He thought about answering, Trying to stay alive. Instead, he said, “Protecting the citizens of Leadville.”

  The silver-plated cane slammed against the table, and the silver baron with those cold gray eyes and long whiskers down his chin, bellowed, “That is not what we mean!”

  “Well, pardon me, but you’ll have to tell me exactly what you mean, mister.” Dooley’s eyes made those cold gray ones staring at him widen in surprise. Silver barons weren’t that used to having men speak curtly to them.

  “About your mine, Monahan?” said the last one, the rude one who could drop three-dollar handkerchiefs like Ol’ Dude Dvorak used to drop lice back when Dooley was working at that outfit in the Texas Panhandle.

  That took Dooley by surprise. “What about my mine?”

  “Well,” said the monocle wearer, “certainly a man with a silver mine as profitable as yours cannot lower himself to wear a badge.”

  “Even,” added the rude one, “if the badge is silver.”

  “But just plated,” said the ivory lion’s head dude. “Not solid.”

  “Like Jim’s cane,” he then added, and snickered while the silver-plated cane slammer’s face reddened and he clenched his fists till his knuckles whitened.

  “Dooley,” said the last one, finally, the one with the heavy gold-chained watch and spectacles—not just a monocle—and just a steel gray mustache. He had a pleasant voice, but Dooley figured he wasn’t a pleasant man to be in business with, or sit at a table with. “It is not fitting for a man of your wealth to wear a badge.” He shook his head. “To be a mere lawman. It does not look right.”

  “Did it look right when Buffalo Bill and I shot down those vermin who were about to take your money out of those banks?”

  The eyes behind the spectacles blinked. He straightened and looked across the table at the one-glass man, who popped his monocle out and stared at Dooley as if he were the dumbest person at the table, which, Dooley would have conceded, he likely was.

  The silver-plated cane smasher stopped grimacing and trying to stop his head from exploding and actually laughed. Well, it wasn’t quite a laugh, but more like an absurd snigger. The rude one’s jaw hung open to draw flies, which were plentiful at this time of day in this type of eatery in Leadville.

  The best dressed of the finely attired silver barons recovered first.

  “Marshal,” he said with a sly grin, “we certainly don’t keep our moneys in Leadville.”

  “Denver,” said the silver-plated cane whacker.

  “Geneva,” said the rude one.

  “New York,” said the ivory lion’s head.

  The pleasant-enough one kept his bank a secret.

  Dooley wondered what these distinguished gentlemen would say if he told them he buried his money out by his mine. “My mistake,” Dooley said. “But I bet the miners who risk their lives to make you all that fortune, they’re glad their life’s savings wasn’t taken.” Although he knew those dead robbers did not come to rob a bank, at least, not really. That was just a bonus. They had been paid to kill Dooley Monahan.

  But Dooley did not suspect the silver barons of being a part of that scheme. That was all George Miller.

  “We’d like to make you an offer for your property,” said the pleasant one. And he did. Immediately. Which caused Dooley’s mouth to hang open like an idiot and invite the flies.

  The rude one topped that offer considerably.

  The one with the ivory lion’s head cane tip whispered an insanely higher number.

  Silver-plated cane smasher cleared his throat, raised his hand, and started to say something, but quickly shut his trap and stared at his fancy cane. Dooley figured that a man who put his money in a Denver bank was out of his league when he was up against barons with banks in Chicago and New York and some unnamed city.

  The pleasant one grinned, leaned forward, and made another bid.

  No one topped that one. They waited for Dooley to recover.

  Which he did.

  “I’d like to keep my mine,” he said, “at least for a little while.”

  The rude one snorted and rose. “You might have only a little while to keep your mine, friend. To keep your mine and your life.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  That next morning was his first day on the job as Leadville’s town marshal. He ate at the hotel’s dining room, walked to the livery to fetch Blue, and ambled down the boardwalks to the bank, took the outside staircase, and saw that new sign hanging above the entranceway.

  TOWM MARSHAL

  Dooley wondered if Joe McCutcheon misspelled Town on purpose, but it was a rushed job, and, well, he doubted if most people could notice in a town like Leadville. The five-point star would probably let the illiterate know that the local peace officer did business upstairs, even if Dooley’s silver-plated badge had six points, instead of five. Besides, that sign wasn’t the most important one.

  The door was already open, and Dooley stepped inside, catching a whiff of fresh paint and all sorts of cleaning soap, sawdust, and the usual smells when folks are in a hurry to clean up after a bloody gun battle. A few carpenters busied themselves as they tried to patch up the gun shop. Dooley greeted them with a wave and a “Good morning,” and unlocked the office and let Blue go inside.

  He sat at the desk that had been lawyer Jonah Terrance Cohen’s, and as Blue sniffed every nook and cranny of the office, Dooley got an idea. He jerked open one drawer and sighed. It was empty. He moved to one of the filing cabinets. Those drawers were empty, too.

  Well, when a man leaves a town, he usually takes his property, Dooley thought, files and letters and all that kind of stuff.

  Yet, now he stared at the items hanging on the wall, items he had not really paid much attention to until this morning.

  Now a man leaving for a new opportunity might have no need of a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, or one of George Washington, and since he was leaving Colorado, he probably did not need a map of the state. But wouldn’t a lawyer want to take his diploma with him? Dooley looked at the desk and picked up a tintype.

  The woman staring back at him in the photograph was white haired and wrinkly, with a brooch pinned on a dark dress. Dooley found a bit of resemblance between her and J. T. Cohen. He couldn’t prove anything, but it just struck him odd that a man leaving town for a new career in a new town wouldn’t take a tintype of his mother, or grandmother, with him.

  Wouldn’t he?

  He went through another desk drawer, found some coins, trash, stationery, even postage stamps. He started to close that drawer, but stopped. He pushed away the stamps and stationery and stared at the brown stain. Another brown stain had run down from the desktop into the drawer. Dooley touched it. It wasn’t sticky. It was dried. And Dooley tried to remember if he had seen such a stain when he had sat on the other side of this desk and talked to the attorney-at-law.

  Blood, he knew, dried brown. Of course, he couldn’t prove that this was blood, and certainly he could not prove that this was a lawyer’s blood. He went back to the cabinets and looked through every drawer, closer this time, and then saw Blue sniffing and scratching at the floor underneath the desk . . . where a man’s legs would be when he was sitting and doing his lawyering.

  “Blue,” Dooley said impatiently, and grew impatient himself. He slammed the empty cabinet drawer shut and raced to the desk, pulled Blue away, and found himself under the desk. He plucked up some hairs that his dog had claw
ed away from other brown stains.

  “Son of a—” He didn’t finish his curse because he lifted his head and hit it against the desk. Then he did finish his curse as he backed out of the cavernous hole in the desk, rubbed his head.

  Remembering all those articles he had read in the Police Gazette and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, Dooley rose, found the chair, and positioned himself at the desk as if he were working, maybe talking to a client. Then someone clubbed him on the head, Dooley imagined, and he planted his face carefully where the biggest brown stain on the desk happened to be. He kicked the chair out from under him and dragged his nose across the brown stain that led to the drawer that held more brown stains.

  Of course, the drawer would have been shut then, but the blood could have run down as the fiends who had clubbed a harmless lawyer—if any attorneys could be called harmless—as they went through the desk drawers looking for . . . ?

  “For what?” Dooley asked out loud, and then remembered what he was supposed to be doing. His knees came to the floor, and Dooley laid his hands on the floor, then looking at the stains underneath the desk, put his head down there.

  He blinked. He came up, carefully this time, and fingered another stain. This one had a hole in it, but the hole had been packed with something. Dooley pulled out his knife and removed the filler. Dried tobacco mostly. Specifically, dried chewing tobacco. Of a low grade, Dooley figured, because he had read many, many articles at line camps from old and sometimes fairly new Police Gazettes. He put the blade deeper into the hole, but felt nothing. After closing the blade, he leaned closer and looked at the hole. He struck a match. He brought the match closer and saw the marks of a blade along the rim and edges of the hole. He put his finger on the hole and remembered that the Police Gazette had explained how a good lawman, a fine detective, could determine the caliber of a bullet by the size of a hole.

  This one appeared to be from a .44, not a .45, but someone had dug out the bullet from the hole.

  Dooley sat up, and Blue came over to be petted.

  It made sense, Dooley thought. It made a lot of sense. He just couldn’t prove it.

  Yet.

  The banker had said Cohen had given notice, looked happy, and dressed wealthy. So Cohen and Miller had reached an agreement. But . . . Cohen must have gotten greedy. George Miller had come in here. He . . . No . . . No . . . Dooley shook his head. That’s not what had happened at all. George Miller and somebody else . . . Harley Boone, most likely, had come in to talk to lawyer J. T. Cohen. One of the miserable swine—it had to be Harley Boone—had come around behind the attorney. The lawyer had taken money from Miller, and planned on leaving town, but likely wanted more money now before turning over Dooley’s will. So Boone had laid the barrel or the butt of his revolver on Cohen’s head, which had slammed across the desktop.

  Cohen then kicked the desk out from under him, fell to the floor, tried to stand or rise or maybe crawl away, and then collapsed on the floor, his head and chest underneath the desk. He had rolled over. That made sense. Dooley wasn’t the best tracker in the world, but those brown stains seemed to confirm Dooley’s suspicions. And Harley Boone or George Miller had asked the lawyer once more to tell them what they wanted to know. When the lawyer had refused, Harley Boone had put a bullet here . . . right through Cohen’s chest. At that range, a .44 slug would have gone right through the body, and the killers had dragged Cohen’s body out, probably rolled it in a bedroll, and taken him to some obscure burying ground.

  Then they had taken all of the papers, everything they could carry, out of the drawers, tried to take everything. They had burned the papers—maybe including Dooley’s letter and will, or maybe not.

  It was a strange feeling, Dooley thought. On one hand, he was quite pleased with himself. He was Dooley Monahan, a farm boy from Iowa who had become a thirty-dollar-a-month cowboy, a kid with not much of an education who had grown into a stove-up cowhand with a massive silver mine. And he had solved, sadly, a murder. But he had no way of proving it.

  The door opened, and Dooley reached for his holstered Colt .45 as he looked above the desk.

  Cigarette smoke reached him first, then the noise of a hacking cough. Joe McCutcheon, not bothering to take the half-smoked cigarette from his lips, said, “I got them other signs you wanted me to fix up fer you.”

  “Good.” Dooley stood up. Blue wagged his tail. Dooley tried to make it obvious that he had good reason for hiding on the floor behind his desk on his first real day as Leadville marshal. “Put them up.”

  McCutcheon reacted. For the first time since Dooley had known the man, he reached up and removed an unfinished cigarette from his lips, and not to light the smoke he had already rolled and tucked up above his ear.

  “You want me to what?”

  “Put the signs up,” Dooley said. “One at each road entering town. North. South. East. West. And the other right here, dead center of Front Street.”

  “Like hell I will,” the old man said defiantly.

  Dooley fished out some greenbacks.

  “That’ll pay for my coffin,” McCutcheon said.

  A double eagle dropped onto the paper money.

  The cigarette returned to McCutcheon’s lips, and he moved to the desk, scooped up the money, and walked out of the office.

  Dooley brushed the dust off his trousers, told Blue to stay, and walked out the door into the hallway. He could hear the pleasant chitchat downstairs in the bank, and the carpenters had gone, their work finished. Dooley walked to the gun shop. The door was open. The proprietor was inside, working on the mainspring of an old Colt cap-and-ball pistol. He did not smile when Dooley entered.

  Of course, the man had good reason. Dooley had practically wiped out his office, which must have cost the merchant a passel of money—at Leadville prices, mind you.

  Still, Dooley figured he would earn the merchant’s trust and maybe not friendship, but a bit of respect.

  “Howdy,” said Dooley.

  “What do you want?” the man said, putting the .36 caliber Navy and a screwdriver on the counter.

  Dooley pointed. “That Parker twelve-gauge there, but I want you to saw down the barrel to about here.” He motioned with his hands. “Ten boxes of double-ought buckshot. Do you have that many?”

  The man was beginning to take notice. “I think so,” he said.

  “Ten boxes of .45s for my Colt. Ten boxes of .44-40s for my Winchester. I need another Colt, too, in .45 caliber, even though I never was much for packing two pistols. And I was thinking that maybe a couple more pistols. That double-action there. Ain’t that one of those new Colts?”

  “A Lightning,” the merchant said. “Thirty-eight caliber.”

  “Good. Yeah. I’ll take that one. But only six boxes of .38s. And that little Sharps derringer. But only two boxes of ammunition.”

  The man suddenly grew suspicious.

  “I suppose, Marshal,” he said, “that I’ll be billing the town council for all this.”

  Dooley was already bringing out his wallet.

  “Not at all, sir. I pay my own way.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  A crowd had gathered around the sign that had just been put up on Front Street. Two businessmen nodded their heads approvingly, another shook his head and whispered something, a woman holding a basket of eggs said, “It’s about time,” and a gambler drew his six-shooter, thumbed back the hammer, and drew a bead on the center of the sign.

  “I’d like to see that star-packer take away my Smith & Wesson, that stupid little son of a—”

  He didn’t finish.

  Dooley slammed the stock of the double-barrel shotgun against the man’s silk hat, and he dropped without completing his curse. The woman gasped, the approvers-of and condemners-of backed away and stared now in silence as Dooley bent down and picked up the unconscious gambler’s .44.

  “When he wakes up,” Dooley told the nearest merchant, “tell him he can collect this . . .”—Dooley shoved the long-barreled thumb
-busting pistol into his waistband—“. . . at my office, after he pays the ten-dollar fine, and just before he leaves town.”

  The duly appointed town marshal walked away, leaving one man sprawled in the dirt and other transients and locals leaving the boardwalks to stare at the gambler but mostly at the sign.

  NOTICE

  The Carrying of FIREARMS,

  Concealed or In View,

  and the Discharge of ANY WEAPON

  are PROHIBITED

  in the City Limits.

  Below that, in smaller type, read:

  Subject to FINES OF $10 or higher

  and as much as 60 DAYS’ INCARCERATION

  chained to our Tree Jail.

  And in the smallest of type:

  By Order of Dooley Monahan, Leadville City Marshal.

  “Ten dollars,” Dooley told the gambler, who could not wear his silk hat on account of the thickness of the white bandages wrapped around his skull. Dooley hadn’t meant to hit the fellow that hard, but the tinhorn had it coming so Dooley didn’t feel bad.

  “Or sixty days.”

  The gambler grimaced.

  “Sixty days? Outside? Shackled to a tree? That ain’t rightly fair.”

  “Downright cruel and unreasonable,” Dooley said, “but it’s the law of the land.”

  “How do I . . . you know . . . ?”

  “Slop bucket.”

  The gambler shook his head, then regretted that move, and fished out his coin purse from the yellow brocade vest.

  He dropped a ten-dollar coin on Dooley’s desk.

  “Now I get my .44 back,” the gambler said.

  “On your way out of town,” Dooley said.

  The man gestured toward the side street. “My horse and grip are outside. Hell of a town. I’m going to Georgetown where the law’s more reasonable and tolerant of men trying to earn an honest living.”