Black Hats

by Max Allan Collins

  BLACK HATS

  Also by Max Allan Collins from Brash Books

  The Perdition Saga

  Road to Perdition

  Road to Purgatory

  Road to Paradise

  Red Sky in Morning

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2007 Max Allan Collins

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

  without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 1941298923

  ISBN 13: 9781941298923

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line #253,

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  FOR STEVE LACKEY—

  who fired the first shot

  This is funny.

  —Doc Holliday’s last words

  There are those who would say it all breaks even

  because the rich get ice in the summer

  while the poor get it in the winter.…

  —Last words written by Bat Masterson

  Suppose, suppose.…

  —Wyatt Earp’s last words

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: PLAY POKER*

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  PART TWO: BUCK THE TIGER*

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART THREE: MONKEY WITH THE DEADWOOD*

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  TIP OF THE BLACK HAT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  PLAY POKER*

  *gambler lingo for: get serious

  APRIL 1920

  ONE

  The night those bastards shot Virgil, it was storming like this. Sky darker than the inside of your fist, rain slanting in from the east, slashing at will, unseen till lightning gave it away.

  Wyatt Earp, not in particular reflective, found his memory bestirred by weather, most often. And back in Tombstone, what? Almost forty years ago? That craven crowd had ambushed Virgil, a marshal making his midnight rounds, maimed him, ruined his left arm forever with their buckshot and cowardice.

  Now Wyatt was doing the ambushing, and his nightly rounds were hardly marshal’s work. He did have a badge in his wallet, a private detective’s star courtesy of his friends at the Los Angeles Police Department, for whom he occasionally did jobs.

  Not this job, though.

  Lowman’s Motor Court on North San Fernando Road consisted of a dozen pink adobe cabins, six facing six across a graveled courtyard, where tiny pools glimmered in the sky’s occasional shouts of white. The other night—this was Wednesday, that had been Monday—when Wyatt had stopped here, the foothills of the green Verdugo Mountains had conspired with a blazing orange sunset to provide a majestic backdrop for this sordid little assignation village.

  Tonight the hills were just shapes, dark shoulders that couldn’t be bothered to shrug in this downpour. Wyatt knew how they felt.

  A damned domestic case.

  Wasn’t exactly dignified work for a man, was it? City of Angels coppers, at least, always gave him real jobs to do—hauling back wanted men from Mexico, sub rosa; putting the boot to claim-jumpers in the wilds of San Bernardino County. Hell, getting an investigative operator’s license had been only to please Police Commissioner Lewis. Wyatt had never had no intention of hanging out a shingle and becoming a goddamned bedroom dick.

  But word had gotten round that Wyatt Earp himself, the Grand Old (for Lord’s sake!) Lion of Tombstone, was doing detective work; and the occasional client would find him at his rented bungalow on Seventeenth Street.

  Not that this job came from the “occasional” client. This was the kind of thankless task that he would do only for a friend. He’d had very few real friends in his life, but when one came around asking a favor, Wyatt Earp was not the kind to say no.

  He stood beneath a palm tree, the tree swaying, Wyatt not. He’d positioned himself between that tropical excuse for vegetation and the teal Model T that William S. had loaned him—Wyatt had learned to drive ages ago but had never owned an auto—hands in the pockets of a black rain slicker and wearing a wide-brimmed black Stetson that funneled the sluice nicely. Slender, six one, with Apache cheekbones, unblinking sky-blue eyes and snow-white hair with a well-trimmed matching mustache, Wyatt Earp might have been fifty-five. But he was seventy.

  In this weather, a man like Earp—legendary lawman, gambler, buffalo hunter, prospector, Indian fighter, survivor of more bloody encounters than even the Wild West might be expected to throw at a body—should darn sure feel that moisture in his joints, be well and truly plagued by phantom pulsing pains from all those wounds.

  Had he ever been wounded.

  Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp—who had shot it out with drunken cowboys and notorious outlaws, gone toe-to-toe with the Clantons and McLaurys at the gunfight near the O.K. Corral, been through countless Indian raids and rode posses against cattle rustlers and tracked stagecoach bandits, whose brothers Virgil and Morgan had been shot down in the streets of Tombstone—had thus far in his lifetime suffered not a single bullet wound.

  That time with Curly Bill Brocius, Wyatt wading across that stream with his damned fool cartridge belt slipping down around his knees and turning him into a waddling duck of a man, answering Bill’s shotgun with a sixgun, that time? That time he’d come close to a cropper, skirts of his coat shot all to pieces, pretty well riddled to shreds. And a horse had died. Also Curly Bill.

  Wyatt had never been one to wear a gun unless he was on marshaling duty, or maybe carting a big sum—the latter leading to that embarrassment when a police captain on security detail disarmed the former frontier marshal going into the ring to referee the Fitzsimmons/Sharkey bout in ’96.

  This bounty huntering for the Los Angeles blue boys, however, had him hauling the long-barreled Colt .45 out of mothballs. The ungainly old girl cleaned up good; she’d been a gift in Dodge City days from a dime-novel writer, an eccentric who’d pumped Wyatt for info, then never wrote a damned word about him!

  Anyway, Wyatt had always prized the weapon, especially the way he could sight down that ten-inch barrel; but it was awkward as hell in a shoulder-rig. So, tonight, he carried her in a stiff-leather holster on his left hip, cross-draw, border-style—like Doc used to.

  Something near a smile worked at the line of his mouth, summoned by the thought of his deceased gambler friend. Most people, back then, had hated Doc Holliday, mean drunken consumptive that he was. But Holliday’s dark sense of humor had always tickled Wyatt.

  You’d be hurting in this wetness, Doc, Wyatt said to his friend, in his mind. Coughing like a schoolgirl getting her first taste of whiskey.

  I like the rain, thank you very much, Wyatt, Holliday might well have drawled back in his Southern gentleman’s way. And what would you know of schoolgirls, or whiskey for that matter?

  The lights were still out in cottage number four. Wyatt found the notion distasteful of interrupting the couple, in flagrante delicto. He would wait for them to finish. It was the Christian thing to do.

  Just over a week ago he’d gone to Bill Hart’s home in rural West Hollywood. For a mov
ie star’s diggings, the place was modest, a ranch-style ramble with some horses in a corral and a barn no bigger than Wyatt’s bungalow. The former deputy marshal and the current Western film star sat in Hart’s study where the walls were lined with books about the old days and authentic artifacts from back then were displayed in glass cases as if something precious—six-shooters and buffalo guns and assorted Sioux Indian junk.

  Flames whipcracked in the big stone fireplace over which hung a Remington painting of a Blackfoot war party on horseback. This unseasonably chill April day in California almost justified the fire, and Wyatt couldn’t blame his actor friend for indulging himself. Big comfortable leather chairs with rough-wood arms angled toward the warmth.

  The deeply tanned Hart—Wyatt had a card player’s pallor—possessed the long narrow face and craggy hawkish features of the gunfighters and Indians he so often portrayed. An inch taller than Wyatt and just as muscularly trim, William S. Hart struck a handsome figure on the silver screen, but Hart was no young leading man, and would never see fifty again.

  Still, Bill was a hell of a horseman, and made the only of these so-called “Western” pictures Wyatt could sit through.

  Nonetheless, Hart was not his only actor friend here in Hollywood—he and Tom Mix associated, too. But that silly-ass nonsense Mixie dished out in those gaudy childish white-hat outfits, Wyatt wouldn’t waste his time on, though Tom was an even better rider than Hart. Not that stunt riding had anything to do with anything except Buffalo Bill Wild West Show bunkum… whereas Bill Hart’s Old West rang damned near true—good guys threw down liquor, fought with fists more than guns, gambled, chewed (and spat) tobacco, and the clothes were nothing fancy, except on the saloon girls.

  Of course Wyatt was always willing to go to a film set as a paid consultant, and had done so for Mix as well as Hart. This was a lean enough time that Wyatt Earp could scarce refuse offers from either the LAPD or Hollywood.

  Right now Hart wore an orange, green, white and black plaid shirt and denim trousers with turquoise-buckled wide leather belt and tooled brown-leather boots, while Wyatt wore a white shirt with black suspenders and no tie, gray slacks and black Oxfords.

  Hart’s gray-blue eyes under heavy black brows seemed to look inward; the hard lines and sharp angles of his face were heightened by the reflection of the fireplace that provided the study’s only light.

  Melodrama was the stock-in-trade of a fellow like Hart, so Wyatt couldn’t hold the theatrics against him.

  “I am a fool with women,” Hart said.

  “Not a small society,” Wyatt said.

  Hart’s eyes found his friend’s. “I don’t mean to say that I… dally freely.”

  Wyatt managed not to smile. Of all the actors he’d known—and he’d known many, from Eddie Foy playing the Commy-Kew in Dodge to Charlie Chaplin losing at faro to him last month in a private, slightly rigged game—Wyatt had never known any of these hams to be such a puritan as Bill. Little drinking, no wild parties, with stud poker the star’s only vice.

  But not his only failing: Hart had a habit of falling in love with his leading ladies, and had asked his latest one to marry him.

  “I am having second thoughts,” Hart admitted.

  “Better now than later.”

  “I…I hate to listen to gossipmongers. You know how malicious the rumor mill can be in this town.”

  Wyatt nodded.

  “So the bad things that are being said about Millie, I should really ignore, but…Wyatt, is it ungracious of me to question her sincerity?”

  “No.”

  “When we had dinner last night, at Musso and Frank’s, I suggested, perhaps, that we should spend more time together before we formally announce our engagement…you know, away from the set and the seductive hurly-burly of filmmaking.”

  “Yeah. Hurly-burly can get away from you.”

  His nostrils and eyes flared. “And do you know how she reacted?”

  “No.”

  “She covered her hand protectively—the one with the diamond ring I gave her! As if I might snatch it away! And she said that if I embarrassed her, if I thought I could make a public fool of her, we would just see what the lawyers and the reporters thought about it.”

  “Sweet gal.”

  Hart swallowed. Sighed heavily. Gestured more dramatically than he allowed himself on screen. “I assured her that alienating her affections was the last thing on my mind, and in my heart.”

  “That settled her down?”

  “Yes. Yes, it seemed to.”

  “…How much did the ring set you back?”

  “Three thousand.”

  Hart had said three thousand like three bucks.

  Wyatt shifted squeakily in the leather chair. “Bill, what can I do for you?”

  “I’d, uh…like you to find a graceful way out of this entanglement.”

  Wyatt nodded. “Have you looked into her past at all?”

  He shook his head. “She’s from Chicago, she says. Told me money was no concern—her father was in the meatpacking business.”

  “Well,” Wyatt said with a lift of an eyebrow, “that covers a lot of territory. He could own a stockyard or a plant. Or he could be the dub who mops the slaughterhouse floor.”

  Hart turned to the fire, its flickery dancing reflections making a mocking movie screen out of his long mournful mug. “I don’t want to hurt her, or embarrass her.”

  Wyatt said nothing. The lay of it said the twist intended to do just those things to Hart.

  Hart’s gaze went back to Wyatt, painfully earnest. “Use a…a delicate touch.”

  Wyatt nearly reminded Hart that as a lawman in Wichita, Dodge City and Tombstone, pistol-whipping troublemakers from behind had been about as delicate as Marshal Earp was known for.

  But instead he leaned forward, the fire a little too warm on his face, and said, “Could cost a few hundred. I need twenty-five a day, and information from the cops can run higher than an old warhorse like me.”

  Hart waved it off.

  “All right.” Wyatt sat back and folded his arms. “Then if money is no object…”

  “It isn’t.”

  “…I have a suggestion.”

  “Go right ahead. By all means.”

  The actor had approved the strategy, and now, several days later, Wyatt—standing between a palm tree and a Ford car, raindrops pearling the parchment of his impassive visage—prepared to put his plan into motion, as the light in the window of cabin four finally winked on.

  He strode quietly across the graveled courtyard, avoiding puddles. His black “fish” (as Tombstone lingo had dubbed rain slickers, so long ago) had metal snaps and these he undid as the slanting wet trailed him, and the white flashes of lightning did their best to betray him.

  For a few seconds he stood on the stoop beneath the overhang outside the cabin door. The path of the rain was such that the overhang provided scant protection, but at least with his back to the spatter of liquid bullets, he could get the lengthwise folded manila envelope from out of his waistband, and the room key out of his pants pocket, in a dry way.

  The envelope was in his left hand and the key—which had cost him (or, anyway, Bill Hart) a finif from the motel’s night clerk—was in his right.

  Wyatt worked the key in the lock and pushed the door open—a thunderclap accompanied him, but the two in bed would have probably sat up in surprise even without it.

  “Stay put,” Wyatt said, shutting the door behind him, keeping his back to it, “and just listen.”

  Rain pelted the window behind the curtains, echoed by moisture dripping from Wyatt to the hardwood floor.

  The room was nothing special, walls of pale pebbly plaster, with a framed print of desert landscape, heavy on the cactus, over the double bed. A dark-wood chest of drawers at Wyatt’s right, no mirror, and a pair of nightstands, both with yellow-shaded lamps, one on, one off. Bathroom door open, just past the bedroom area, the sink in sight, the stool not. One of those motel rooms with sp
ace enough to walk around either side of the bed, and that was about it.

  Millie had been curled up facing the wall, her back to her agent, Phil Gross, who was propped up with pillows against the headboard, smoking a cigar and reading Variety—or anyway, had been. The paper had dropped to his lap, partially covering his red-and-white-checkered shorts; he also wore an athletic t-shirt and black socks with garters. The cigar drooped in his mouth like an uninterested pecker.

  Wyatt’s pecker managed not to be interested in Millie—he was, after all, a professional—but he could have hardly blamed it, had it perked. Millie, like Gross, was atop the covers and she wore only a lacy off-white chemise that didn’t hide much of her peaches-and-cream complexion and a full figure that a screen vamp such as Theda Bara might well envy.

  No wonder Bill had cast her.

  Gross was less attractive than his cabin co-star, but Wyatt figured the feller wasn’t bad for an agent—not tall but muscular in his upper torso, with masculine, regular features and dark hair, mussed from recent attention. Hairy arms and legs.

  All of this Wyatt took in, in half a second or so.

  “Who the fuck are you supposed to be?” Gross said, eyes traveling from the floor to Wyatt’s Stetson. “Wild Bill Hickok?”

  “No. Wyatt Earp.”

  Gross, who was still on his back on the bed, raised his eyebrows and the cigar finally tumbled from his lips. He brushed it off of him, sparking, onto the floor.

  Millie, not a particularly modest girl, was grabbing on to Gross’s nearest arm, stealing glances at Wyatt as if afraid to allow her eyes to light on him longer than a second.

  She was saying, “That’s that gunslinger! That friend of Bill’s from Tombstone!”

  Wyatt took a step forward. He held up the manila folder. “Take a look at these.”

  He tossed the folder onto the bed.

  Gross snatched it up and withdrew the photos. Millie sat on her legs, pretty knees winking at Wyatt as she crowded near her agent, taking in the photos like a kid Sunday morning reading the color funnies. Full breasts under the chemise bobbled, like they were trying to get a look, too.