The Killing Machine

by Ed Gorman

  I was being dismissed. But I had the idea that she was facing an even sterner fate. He’d obviously overheard us talking. Obviously.

  The next place I stopped was to visit Thomas Brinkley and Giles Fairbain, the other two men who’d been dealing with my brother for his new machine gun. They were staying at the Excelsior Hotel, which was a bit finer than where I was staying. The halls had been waxed and smelled of sweet polish. The maids scurried rather than walked, and smiled rather than merely nodded.

  Neither man was in, as the rather disapproving gent behind the desk told me after grudgingly giving me their room numbers. Apparently, my sling displeased him. Must’ve given him the impression that I was some sort of ruffian—that was the prissy word his kind would use—and therefore not the sort of man one would expect to stay at such a refined hotel as this. Too bad I didn’t have some fresh horse shit on my boots. I could have given his Persian rug a little more color of the brown variety.

  I walked over to the marshal’s office. Clarion was clearing off the front desk for the day. Most of the items went into the wastebasket. “You looking for the marshal?”

  “Yep. He in?”

  “Anything I can help you with? He’s pretty busy with paperwork.”

  “Why don’t I just walk back there?”

  He said, “Believe it or not, we have a system here.”

  It wasn’t worth pushing. He was doing his job. “Ask him if he’ll see me.” We stared at each other a long moment.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said. He walked back and spoke to the marshal in a low voice.

  Clarion came back and said, “The marshal said c’mon back.”

  I walked back. Wickham’s door was open. He sat behind his desk, staring at a small photograph. I couldn’t see the side with the chemical on it, the side with the actual picture, but even so he hurriedly got rid of it. Opened the middle drawer of his desk, dropped the photograph in, slid the door shut.

  “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Ford.”

  He nodded to the chair in front of his desk. “Sittin’s free this time of day.”

  “Who could turn down an offer like that?”

  He leaned back in his squeaky desk chair, folded his hands over his stomach. “I’ll bet I know why you’re here.”

  “You a mind reader, are you?”

  “Nope. A snoop is what I am. Well, not personally. But my men are. And one of them told me James’s wife came to see you in the hospital.”

  “That right?”

  His chair squawked when he leaned back. “I imagine she told you the same story she told me.”

  “You want to go first?”

  “Don’t bother me none. She doesn’t think that your brother and her husband and Tib died because of that gun. She thinks James was blackmailing somebody.”

  “And you don’t believe that?”

  “You mean was he blackmailing somebody? Hell, yes. But he was never into big money. Just enough to keep food on the table.”

  “Where’d he get the money for the new house?”

  “Maybe he saved his money. Maybe he got lucky one time. But if he was blackmailing somebody that important around here it would’ve had to involve some kind of crime. And if it involved some kind of crime, I would’ve heard about it by now.”

  “When’s the last murder you had here before my brother?”

  “Over a year ago.”

  “Rapes? Major robberies?”

  “About the same.”

  “Why would the blackmail have to be local?”

  “James rarely left town. All the people he blackmailed were local.”

  There wasn’t much left to cross swords over.

  “Besides, the gun’s gone, Ford. Whoever did the killing took the gun. And whoever took the gun would have to be somebody who knew how to unload a piece of stolen merchandise that a whole bunch of powerful people were looking for.”

  “Meaning one of the four men who came here to see my brother David?”

  “Can you figure it any other way?”

  I started to say that, no, I couldn’t. Mrs. Andrews’s story hadn’t struck me as particularly sound to begin with. Now it sounded even less so.

  I was about to say that when Frank knocked on the door. “Curly Holmes fell off the wagon again and he’s shootin’ up his house. His wife’s afraid he’ll shoot out all their windows again. Says she can’t afford to buy new ones. Says she don’t want me to go with her ’cause Curly gets mad every time he sees me. So she wants you to go with her.”

  Suddenly, with gunshot clarity, a woman began sobbing in the outer office.

  “That fuckin’ Curly,” Marshal Wickham said, standing up. “I guess you’ll have to excuse me, Ford.”

  We shook hands briefly. I went out the back door. I never know what to do around weeping women.

  The hotel clerk remembered me from earlier in the day.

  “Mr. Fairbain and Mr. Brinkley came in about an hour ago. But you might like to wet your whistle first. In fact, I think you may find Mr. Brinkley in there now.”

  Helpful fellow. Managed to hook me up with the two men I wanted to see and shill for the hotel’s saloon at the same time.

  “I’ve never met him,” I said. “You happen to remember what he’s wearing?”

  The clerk leaned forward, glanced around and then tapped his cheek. “Small birthmark on his right cheek. You’ll see it right away.”

  The saloon strove hard for dignity. The two men behind the bar had slicked-down hair, fancy mustaches, and starched white shirts with snappy red arm garters. The clientele looked to be free of ruffians: mostly businessmen, local and passing through. The serving woman was older and therefore not the kind to get pinched. And the bug-eyed man on the high stool in the corner used his fiddle to soothe rather than excite. In other words, the place looked boring as hell.

  Only one man bore a birthmark on his cheek. He looked New England rather than Western. One of those stern, thin-lipped men who disapproved of just about everything that passed in front of him.

  “Mr. Brinkley?”

  He sat by himself, tucked into a corner beneath a small painting of an elegant ballet dancer with a pretty, wan face.

  He just stared at me. No hello.

  “The name’s Noah Ford, Mr. Brinkley.”

  “I was afraid of that.” His celluloid collar looked sharp enough to be a weapon.

  I smiled. “They warned you about me.”

  No offer to sit down.

  “I didn’t care for your brother. You won’t get any sympathy here.”

  “I don’t want any sympathy, Mr. Brinkley. I just want to know where you were the night he was murdered.”

  Uninvited, I sat down.

  “I’m not in the habit of murdering people, if that’s what you mean.” He still showed signs of youthful acne, though he had to be fifty. There was a dead quality to the gray eyes that could scare the hell out of kids on a Halloween night.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I don’t intend to answer your question. It’s ridiculous.”

  The serving woman came. I ordered coffee.

  “I’d prefer it if you’d drink that somewhere else.”

  “Well, I’d prefer it if you’d tell me where you were the night my brother was murdered.”

  “There weren’t many people who liked him.”

  “I’ll bet there aren’t a whole lot of people who like you, either, Mr. Brinkley. I don’t know why, but I kind of have that feeling.”

  The dead, gray eyes were on me full force now. Not anger; disapproval. “I might as well tell you, we had an argument that afternoon. He went back on his word and I didn’t like it.”

  “His word about what?”

  Skeletal fingers wrapped around his schooner. “He told me that if I gave him a thousand dollars—a bribe—he’d let me know what the other bids were in advance.”

  “I thought they were sealed bids. How could he know in advance?”

  He smiled w
ith tobacco-stained teeth. It wasn’t pretty. “You mustn’t have known your brother very well.”

  “We had a difference of opinion about the war.” I couldn’t resist: “But then as a leading Copperhead, you must know all about that.”

  “The South had a right to make its own rules.”

  “I’m not here to argue the war. I’m just saying that you went against your own government and so did I. That gives us something in common, I guess.”

  “Yes, your brother said you were a spy for the North. I wouldn’t be proud of that. And I resent your saying that we have anything in common. I’m a man of principle.” He took a long drink of beer. I realized that the birthmark was below a crusted area of acne. He was an ugly man, and you could almost feel sorry for him if the ugliness hadn’t extended to his soul.

  I leaned back and sighed. “He cheated you. He pulled a very old trick on all four of you. He told each of you that if you’d give him a thousand dollars, he’d tip you to the other bids. So he pockets four thousand dollars the easy way and then sells to the highest bidder, anyway.”

  “He was a despicable man, your brother.”

  My sudden anger surprised me as much as it did him. I reached over and grabbed him by his greasy hair and lifted him off his chair. I knocked over his beer in the process. The beer ran off the edges of the table. The serving woman hurried over. People began to watch. I shoved him back in his chair.

  “Whatever he was, whatever I am, he was my brother. So keep your tongue off him. He wasn’t perfect and neither am I. And neither are you, Brinkley. You’re an arms dealer, which isn’t exactly a higher calling in my book.”

  I forced myself to calm down—long intakes of breath.

  Brinkley gathered himself with a kind of funereal dignity, planted his gaze on the front door so that he would have no eye contact with anybody, and proceeded to leave the saloon.

  I was frozen in place for a while. Everybody staring at me, everybody speculating on what had happened. Embarrassing now that the fury had quieted in me. The nice thing about rage is that nothing embarrasses you. Then comes the aftermath when you begin to second-guess yourself. Maybe I didn’t have to get quite so mad…There were times when somebody else took over my mind. Somebody who sounded like me and thought like me, at least for the most part, but somebody who…There were times I didn’t like to remember or think about.

  I waited till their attention went back to whatever they’d been talking about before. Then I got up and walked out just the way Brinkley had. No eye contact with the drinkers who’d had a few minutes of minor violence and major thrill. And they hadn’t even had to buy tickets to see it.

  I remembered that Fairbain’s room number was 204. I nodded to the clerk, who was apparently still innocent of the little scene I’d caused in the saloon, and went on up the stairs, passing a couple of drummers and a pair of old men who wore some kind of red lodge caps I’d never seen before. Until I found a lodge that regularly served free women, I was not about to join up.

  A narrow strip of new carpeting ran down the center of the hall. The flooring was some kind of blond wood, which seemed an odd choice for a hotel, with all the shoe marks, carpetbags being dropped, and winter mud. Not to mention spills and the occasional vomit-spewing drunk. But that was their problem.

  I knocked on 204 twice before I saw it, and I probably wouldn’t have seen it then if the smell hadn’t stung my nostrils. There are some folks who’ll tell you that it doesn’t smell at all. These are people, take my word for it, who’ve never been around it much. To me it’s the stench of wet metal. That’s as close as I can come to a physical description of it. A somewhat tart smell.

  I walked down the hallway.

  I didn’t knock on Brinkley’s door. We’d do a little dance, and I was in no mood for a little dance. I’d tell him who it was, and he’d say go away, and I’d say I needed to talk to him, that this was urgent, and he’d still say go away, and so I’d end up using my burglar’s pick anyway. So what the hell. I used the pick, swung the door inward, and went for my gun before he could even drop the newspaper he was reading.

  I didn’t want to take the chance of him having a Colt lying on his belly behind the newspaper.

  “Get up.”

  “You could be arrested for breaking in here like this.” He sat on the bed with his back to the wall. His suit coat and celluloid collar were off, as was his cravat. His right white sock had a hole. His big toe peeked through. He had a violently discolored toenail. Some kind of fungus.

  “I said to get up. If you don’t, I’ll drag you.”

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  I didn’t tell him. I left the room. He followed in his stocking feet and caught up with me. When we reached the door, I said, “Watch where you step.”

  When he saw what I was talking about, he said, “My Lord. That’s blood. From under the door.”

  “Sure is.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been in his room. I knocked but there was no answer. So I thought we’d find out together.” I gave him my best harsh laugh. “Unless you killed him. Then I guess you’d know what we’re going to find, wouldn’t you?”

  I used the pick again and we went into the room.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 9

  Fifteen minutes later it got awfully crowded in Fairbain’s little room. Two heavyset men with a stretcher came up and took Fairbain to the hospital. They weren’t the gentlest of fellows. One of them banged the center of the stretcher against the door as they were going out. The scrawny doc with one brown glass eye rolled the good one and said, “He’ll live, unless you two boys kill him on the way over.”

  The thing with head and face wounds is that you can bleed a whole hell of a lot without being mortally wounded. Whoever had worked Fairbain over had worked him over with a sap of some kind, mistakenly assumed that he was dead, and then left. Fairbain had other ideas. He’d managed to walk or crawl across the room to the door. Unfortunately, he’d collapsed before he could get it open; collapsed in such a way that the blood from his head wounds drained between the bottom of the door and the floor.

  Given the blood, I’d assumed that he’d had his throat cut, the way my brother had. The use of the sap, though, made more sense in this circumstance. No matter how deft you are with a knife, there’s a fair chance the victim will have time to scream at least once before your blade opens up his throat. But if you surprise him with a sap—you can render him unconscious before he can say a word, and then ease him to the bed or the floor where you can continue to work him over quietly.

  You don’t want anybody screaming in a respectable hotel at the dinner hour, not unless you want to attract a lot of attention.

  “What’s going on here?” Marshal Charley Wickham said after the room started emptying out.

  “Looks like somebody tried to kill him.”

  “That wouldn’t be you, would it, Mr. Ford?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t like arms dealers, but I didn’t kill this one.”

  Wickham regarded me thoughtfully for a minute, then went over to the closet door.

  “Man hides in here. Waits for Fairbain. Fairbain opens the closet door. Man hits him so hard, Fairbain’s out. Then the man goes to work on him.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  Wickham turned back to me. “Or somebody knocks on the door. Fairbain knows him. Fairbain opens up, man saps him, knocks him out, drags him back inside the room and goes to work on him.”

  “That also sounds reasonable.”

  “I’m not finished yet.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Man thinks Fairbain’s dead. Leaves hotel believing his work’s done.” Then: “Or.”

  “I knew there’d be an ‘or.’”

  “And this is pure speculation, I’m not saying it happened this way.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But just for the sake of argument, say it was you who attacked Fairbain
and thought he was dead.”

  “Just for the sake of argument.”

  “You know what you’d do if you were smart, and you are smart, Ford, that’s obvious to everybody.”

  “If I was smart—and again, just for the sake of argument since we both know I’m innocent—if I was smart, I’d go down the hall and get Brinkley and tell him that I hadn’t been in Fairbain’s room but that I suspected something was wrong.”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth.”

  “And you know what, Wickham? That sounds reasonable, too. Everything you’ve said sounds reasonable. Except I didn’t try to kill him. As he’ll tell you when he’s conscious again.”

  “You know what the doc said. He said no guarantees. Fairbain might not ever recover.”

  A gentle knock on the half-opened door. The desk clerk. “Marshal, you asked me to round up everybody who was in his room for the past hour or so. I’ve got them all in 212, at the west end of the hall.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”

  The desk clerk went away.

  “You’re thorough, Wickham.”

  “I’m glad you approve. A Federal man like you coming out to a Podunk town like this one and handing out compliments, wait’ll I tell my deputies. They’ll be proud of me.”

  “Especially that nephew of yours.” I walked over to the door. “I’m told that a professional lawman always hires his relatives. Sure sign of somebody who knows what he’s doing.”

  A reluctant smile. “You know, Ford, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that you don’t care for me any more than I care for you.”

  “Oh, now, Marshal, I don’t know where you’d get an idea like that.”

  I left, making sure to step around the blood that had yet to be wiped up.

  I went down to the hotel saloon for some coffee. New customers had replaced the ones who’d watched me and Brinkley argue. Even the barmen had changed shifts. I took my coffee to a corner table and sat down.

  Sipped my coffee. One thing Wickham hadn’t mentioned was the gun that I felt was obviously involved in my brother’s murder. And it was also likely involved in the assault on Fairbain. Attempted murder on Fairbain, actually.