by Ed Gorman
Spenser laughed. “Well, at least you’re playing to the right one, Ford. Wayland here is a pantywaist. You should’ve heard him complaining all the time on the train. Too hot, too cold, too noisy, too dangerous. I don’t know how he ever got a job like this.”
Wayland surprised us all by making himself even more vulnerable. He stood up, threw down his cloth napkin, and said, “Because my father is a bully just like you, Spenser, and for some reason I’ll never understand I want to prove to him that I can be as successful at arms trafficking as he was.”
We sat in embarrassed silence until he left.
Spenser smiled around a mouthful of lamb, not a pleasant sight. He spoke mockingly: “There’s your killer, Ford. A sensitive nancy boy who just wants the love and respect of his father.”
“Oh, shut the hell up, Spenser,” Brinkely said. He didn’t seem the kind to take the part of a weak one like Wayland, but I liked him better for doing it.
Then it was my turn to stand up. “Maybe you two’ll do the world a favor and kill each other off.”
Spenser said, “Does this mean you don’t like us, Mr. Ford?”
You’d never have guessed that James Andrews was Cree, not by looking at his house you wouldn’t. It was a two-story white clapboard arrangement with a picket fence, flowers planted across the front of the house and a swing on the porch. In back and to the side were a small red barn, an outhouse, and a rope corral. There was a long windbreak of pines on the south side of the property and a clean, narrow creek running parallel to the north.
It was some house for a man like James. It would be some house even for an attorney of middling success. I saw why his wife Gwen was suspicious of where the money had come from. She’d left a note at my hotel for me to come see her.
Except for a breeze gently swaying the pines, the place was silent. Even the lone bay in the rope corral was napping.
I dismounted, grabbing my carbine from the scabbard as I did so. There had been a number of deaths in a short span of time in this town. The general feeling seemed to be that there would be more.
The family watchdog proved to be a sweet-faced border collie. I presented her with a tough decision. She knew she should bark, so she did, at least a bit. But she seemed more inclined to jump at me and lick my hand. She seemed starved for human company. She opted for the latter, running in circles around me till I relented, bent over, and started petting her.
She trotted alongside me as I went through the gate in the picket fence and made my way to the front door. Nobody answered my knock. I walked over to the window, my boots and spurs making way too much noise for the stealthy investigator. I peeked inside. Nicely furnished front room and behind that a small dining room. I expected the kitchen would be beyond, in the back. A yellow cat came strolling out of nowhere, walked to the center of the front room, extended its paws, had a nice stretch, a nice yawn, and then lay down and went immediately to sleep. If it had seen me, it hadn’t been much impressed.
A clattering sound came from the south, beyond the windbreak. A rickety old wagon of some kind, I suspected.
Gwen Andrews waved at me as soon as she reached the edge of her property. I’d walked around to the side of the house to wait for her. She had a young girl next to her on the seat of the buckboard. Everything on the wagon made a noise. You got the impression that someday the thing would just fall apart.
She pulled up, jumped down, grabbed the small girl in the gingham dress and matching bonnet. She set the girl down on her feet and then took her hand and brought her over to me.
“This is Julia.”
“Hi, Julia.”
She was a rough draft of her mother, Julia was. The same piquancy in the eyes and on the mouth. The same sinewy body, same tanned face and arms. A farm girl with an appealing, freckled, prairie face.
Julia didn’t say hi, just shyly stood next to her mother with her head down. She looked to be about five.
“I was going to come to town to see you,” Gwen said.
“Something come up?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you come inside? The little one here needs her nap and I need my coffee. How’s that sound?”
It sounded fine. Julia was asleep in Gwen’s arms even before we reached the back door of the house. A cider mill stood on the back porch, adding the scent of apples to other fall scents. Red, flawless apples filled the bin on top. On the handle, a brown cotton work glove drooped. No matter how efficient a given mill was, it could still give you blisters after a while. Next to the back door was a line of six clear glass bottles filled with the product of the mill.
Gwen put Julia to bed and came out to where I waited in the front room. I’d been studying a print of a fierce and noble Indian warrior. His eyes were terrifying, or meant to be anyway. He was supposed to be a mythic warrior, I suppose. But Indians aren’t any different from white folks. Dying is too strange and spooky to allow for myth. The bravest man of all will still cry out for his mother when he’s dying. That’s just the way the human beast is constructed.
“There’s cider, too.”
“Coffee, I guess.”
“Want to sit on the back porch? I’ll still be able to hear Julia if she cries. It’s such a nice day.”
We enjoyed the breeze and the cider smell. She sat watching a hawk sail on a wind current. She wore a work shirt and dungarees, her gray-streaked black hair pulled into a loose bun. She had quite the profile and almost perfectly uptilted breasts for a woman her age. I enjoyed looking at the profile and the breasts even more than I enjoyed the scents of wind and apples.
She excused herself a moment. She returned quickly, a group of white, business-sized envelopes in her hand. She sat down and handed them over to me.
I opened the flaps on each of the four. Empty inside. Then I saw, reading the return addresses, why she wanted me to see them.
“Fairbain,” she said, “New Orleans.”
“He lived there when he wasn’t traveling. Wife and son.”
“I think there were bank drafts inside.”
“What makes you think that?”
“One day when James was leaving, I saw him fold something and stick it in his pocket. I’ve been thinking about it since he was killed. I’m pretty sure it was a bank draft. A certified check, maybe.”
“I wonder why Fairbain would send him money. If he did, I mean.”
“No idea. But as I told you the other day, he did come into money all of a sudden.”
“Maybe Fairbain wanted him to steal the gun,” I said.
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Paid him in advance. Where’d you find these envelopes?”
“Pocket of his Sunday suit. The jacket. Folded over. I think he hid them there. You know, from me.”
“You said he kept secrets.”
Sad, slow smile. “I’ll never know the half of them.”
“Odd way to pay in advance, though. Four payments. Why not all at once?”
“Maybe Fairbain couldn’t raise the money all at once.”
“I know the people he worked for. They have plenty of money. For a chance at the gun they would have given him just about anything he asked for.”
“You can keep the envelopes.”
“Thanks.” Then: “You be OK?”
“Sometime in the not too distant future I will. It’s Julia I’m worried about. She’s had terrible nightmares the past few nights. I’m sure it’s because of James dying.”
I stared down at the envelopes. What did they mean? While the gun was still the focus of the investigation, the envelopes confused the issue. And I wondered about Wylie Hobbins, the odd, diseased man I’d met at David’s place. Hobbins said he’d taken David to a small island many times. That seemed overcareful on David’s part. Did he need to go to an island to sneak off with married women? Was the island used for something else as well?
“This has been a tough year for me,” Gwen said softly. “My best friend Louise died last year. One of the sweetest people wh
o ever walked the earth. Pretty, too. Very pretty. Slipped off a cliff and drowned.”
“Did she live around here?”
Gwen pointed to the west. “Had a small cabin over on an island. At first Louise really liked it there. Then her husband and son died a few years ago. Influenza came through here just like an invading army. Killed a whole lot of people. She had some insurance money to live on, though it would’ve run out sooner than later.” Her dark eyes glistened. “Anyway, I sure wish she was around to talk to.” Then she made a self-deprecating gesture. Waved herself off. “But you didn’t come here for that.”
Just then Julia cried out, sounding afraid. Maybe she was having nightmares in the daytime. “I’d better check on her.” She was off her chair in less than a second, headed toward the back door.
“I need to get back, too. Thanks for these envelopes.”
Julia yelped again. Gwen vanished inside.
Chapter 14
Twenty minutes later I was half a mile from town.
That was when my horse was shot out from under me. The shooter, hidden in some shallow woods to the south, had obviously meant to hit me but had missed.
This piece of road had buffalo grass on either side. No trees, no boulders, nowhere to hide. I had to lie flat on my belly, using the horse to hide as much of my six feet two as I could.
The first thing I did, once my heart and brain adjusted to what had happened, was shoot the animal in the top of the head. It had taken the shooter’s rifle bullet in its heart and was in misery. The second thing I did was yank my carbine from its scabbard on the poor dead animal. I now had some parity with the shooter.
Flies, loose bowels, and ghoulish twitches made the horse less than the ideal hiding place. The shooter got off two more shots.
He was firing from behind some hardwoods. There was enough forest shadow to obscure him completely. A couple times I caught a sun-flash of his rifle barrel, which helped me direct my own bullets.
He apparently didn’t like the idea that I was firing back, because after a quiet two or three minutes, I could hear his horse thrashing through a narrow path in the woods. And then, momentarily, the heavy thud of his horse in a clearing, pounding ground in escape.
When I was pretty sure it was safe, I stood up and began the hard and sweaty process of getting the saddle off. Try it some time, moving around the dead weight of an animal this size while trying to undo various straps and ties. I didn’t like to think of what scavengers would do to its body once I started walking to town. You’d think after everything I’d seen in the war that I’d have made my peace with the innocent horror of nature, of scavengers. But it’s difficult sometimes. You begin to resent animals for being animals, but it’s just their nature, and that’s a fool’s waste of time.
It wasn’t that long a walk, or wouldn’t have been, without the saddle slung over my shoulder. I was just at the town limits when a farmer in a buckboard headed in my direction stopped and offered me a ride. I laughed and said that I might as well walk the rest of the way since the livery was about half a block away.
Livery stables are the second most populated places for male gossip. Barbershops are first. Saloons are third, only because most of what is said is forgotten in hangover by morning.
I was almost at the livery when I saw Beth Cave, the mortuary secretary who’d tried to tell me something about a woman named—and then I made the connection. Louise. She’d been telling me something about a woman named Louise. Just as Gwen had been talking about a woman named Louise.
Given one arm in a sling, a saddle slung over my shoulders, and pretty damned weary legs, I hurried as fast as I could to the corner she stood on.
She made a little joke, which, given her prim, taut face, surprised me. “Isn’t a horse supposed to go with that saddle?”
But her joshing faded when I told her that my horse had been shot out from under me.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made light of it.”
I said, “You were telling me about a woman named Louise.”
Her cheeks turned scarlet. “I—I shouldn’t have said anything. Mr. Newcomb almost fired me.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d finish what you were going to say.”
Instead of a black dress, today she wore a black suit. She was so thin, she resembled a scarecrow. “I need my job, Mr. Ford. I’m the only support of my sick father. If I ever got fired….”
Tears in her eyes, her voice. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ford. Very sorry.”
She hurried away, her gait awkward and somehow lonely.
By the time I set my saddle down in the barn, there must’ve been a dozen men standing in the sun-blasted entrance, listening to me tell my story to the livery man.
You could sense the men were disappointed. Couldn’t I at least have been attacked by Indians or a bear or found myself trapped in a pit full of rattlers? Even with the horse dead, it wasn’t all that much of a tale.
Then they remembered what it was possibly all about and got interested for the first time.
“That gun.”
“Durn right. That’s what the shooter was after.”
“Probably figured Ford here was goin’ after it himself.”
“Wound him and make Ford take him to the gun.”
“Get the gun, kill Ford, and have the gun all to himself.”
“Live like a king the rest of his life.”
“Frisco and gals with tits out to here.”
Bret Harte had nothing on these men. In fact, if Harte ever wanted a collaborator, I knew just which livery stable to send him to.
To the livery man, as I was paying him for the horse, I said, “You could always send a wagon out there and pick him up.”
The man nodded. He wore a greasy old derby on top of a greasy old head. “Yeah. Don’t want his bones picked clean. Me’n the colored fella works with me’ll go get him now.”
“Thanks.”
After stopping by my hotel for gloves and a heavier jacket, I walked over to the river and a boatyard. It was a jumble of a place, filled with rowboats, schooners, rafts, and skiffs, some of which were being repaired, some of which were up for sale. That was up front. In back was a mountain of pieces of boats, schooners, rafts, and skiffs. I doubted the owner knew what all was in that towering pile.
A big man with a long, gray beard came hobbling out of the little shack that said SEECRAFT over the door. I hoped he was better at boating than he was at spelling.
In case you questioned his seaworthiness, he wore an eye patch, which might or might not have been for effect; and jerked about on a peg leg, which was very much for real. He might have lost his leg on a ranch or a city street, but who was I to question him? Better for both our sakes to think that he’d lost it on a pirate ship while raiding a Spanish galleon. I was like the men back at the livery. I liked a good story, too.
“He’p you?” he asked. He wore a black wool turtleneck and regulation Navy dungarees. On his right leg, the pegged one, the dungarees had been cut off right above the knee. He hadn’t shaved or bathed for a while.
“You rent boats?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Who wants to rent it.”
“For the hell of it, let’s just pretend it’s me.”
“Watch that mouth, mister, or I’ll throw your ass out of here. This is private property.”
A mangy old dog dragged himself out from beneath the mountain of parts, looked around as if to see if anybody was watching, and then took a crap. We were only ten yards away. Apparently he hadn’t seen us. Maybe he should have worn an eye patch, too.
“Look,” I said in my best civil voice, “I need a rowboat.”
“You got one arm.”
“You got one leg.”
“You need two arms to row.”
“I’ll be fine. Now do I get a boat or what?”
“For what?”
“I want to go to Parson’s Cairn.”
“For what?”
“For none of your fucking business, for what.”
He grinned. His teeth were so rotted they were more wormy brown than white. “I just like t’test people. See how much shit they’ll take.”
“Yeah, well, you picked the wrong one to test.”
“The cap’n, he’d always tell me to do that with the ones what wanted to sign on. Be as cranky as I could just to see if they could stand up to the way of the cap’n. He didn’t want no pussies goin’ to sea with us.”
“Good for him. Now, how about that rowboat? You got one or not?”
“I want twenty dollars.”
“Twenty dollars? That’s crazy.”
“How do I know you’ll bring it back?”
I waved him off, sick of him, and started to turn.
“Then when you bring it back, you get fifteen of it back.”
“You got one that doesn’t have any holes in the bottom?”
He grinned again. “I imagine I could find one somethin’ like that. Now let’s see your money.”
Some kids dream of running away to the circus; some dream of running away to Arabia, the land of scimitars and harem girls; and some dream of running away to sea. Personally, I never dreamed of running away to anyplace except Cindy Dunning’s gazebo, where I’d hoped to hide so I could see her undress every night.
The circus was too seedy for me, Arabia was too far away, and being on water for any length of time always had the same effect on me: I got queasy. I’d take watching Cindy Dunning undress any day.
Eyepatch was right about needing two arms to row. He sent his daughter with me. Daughter might evoke pictures of a scruffy young woman who, beneath the grit and grime, was a shy and appealing piece of womanhood.
I never did find out her name. She rowed. Her biceps were bigger than mine. She had a fist-broken nose, teeth like her old man’s, a baseball-sized plug of chewing tobacco laid against her right cheek, and a disposition that made Quantril’s seem saintly. She was probably forty, but looked sixty. Maybe it was the gray hair that had been chopped off short and the huge forearm tattoos that were various forms of the word FRED. I decided that it probably wouldn’t be a wise idea to bring up the subject of Fred, as it was obvious that she’d tried to scrub and scratch the tattoos off.
