Wilde West

by Walter Satterthwait

  Grigsby nodded.

  Greaves walked Brubaker out the door.

  Grigsby stepped over to the desk and poured himself another drink. His right hand was shaking so badly that he had to use his left to steady the bottle. Even so, a half ounce of whiskey splashed across the desktop.

  He raised the glass and swallowed. The rain rattled at the windowpane. Far off, thunder rumbled.

  Grigsby took another drink. His hand was still trembling.

  He looked down at the papers scattered along the floor. He set the drink on the desktop, then squatted down and gathered the papers together. He tossed them to the top of the file cabinet, returned to his desk, and lifted his glass.

  Someone knocked at the door and Grigsby wheeled around. A few dollops of bourbon sloshed onto his hand.

  A tall young man in an expensive tan topcoat. Curly black hair, a pale, narrow, clean-shaven face. “Are you Marshal Grigsby?” A soft fluting voice.

  “Yeah?” Grigsby growled.

  “I’m Wilbur Ruddick. Mr. Vail—”

  “Get your ass in here!” Grigsby bellowed.

  THE CEILING WAS LOW, made from unfinished planks of knotted pine supported by beams of stripped pine logs whose uneven, and dangerously splintered, lower ridges were no more than a few inches from the vulnerable top of Oscar’s head. Smoke had stained the wood a dull tobacco brown. Three oil lamps, shaded by funnels of oiled paper and hung from the beams on sooty metal chains, provided most of the illumination, musty yellow pools of light in which sat some rickety tables and some rickety chairs and two or three rickety-looking people. Most of the customers stood at the bar, which ran the length of the narrow room and which, like the ceiling and the floor, was constructed of raw pine, now stained and drab. More sawdust was scattered everywhere—whoever owned the sawdust concession in Denver was doubtless a millionaire by this time—and the thick, still air was cluttered with the smell of stale beer and mildew and perspiration.

  Oscar swept up to the empty space at the center of the bar, Henry following slightly behind him. The barkeep, a tubby little person who had been leaning over the low counter into a cluster of elderly men at the right, waddled slowly toward him, wiping his hands against the dirty apron, taut as a sandbag, that encased his belly. He glanced sidelong at Henry, bit his lip, and said to Oscar, “Sorry, mister, but we don’t serve no coloreds here.”

  Oscar smiled engagingly. “But I didn’t order one.”

  The barkeep shrugged, uneasy. “Sorry, mister.”

  “Mistuh Oscar,” began Henry.

  Oscar asked the barkeep, “Is that a local law?”

  The barkeep shrugged again. “It’s the principle of the thing. I’m sorry and all, but I got other customers to think of.”

  “Perhaps I should explain,” Oscar said, smiling again as he put his big hands on the bartop and leaned forward to look down at the barkeep. “Henry here is my personal attendant. I’m subject to fits, you see. Really quite frightful fits that cause me to foam at the mouth and leap about the room. I tend to break things, I’m afraid. Tables. Chairs. These attacks can come upon me at any time, and for virtually no reason at all. Henry is the only person able to cope with me. It’s a matter of precise physical pressure being applied to certain highly complicated neuralgic intersections. And, of course, in order to apply this pressure properly, Henry requires an occasional steadying drink of whiskey. Surely you can understand this?”

  The barkeep was frowning. “You’re not from around here,” he said.

  “Not originally,” said Oscar, “no.”

  The barkeep nodded toward Henry, whose face was blank. “He’s like a what? A nurse, kind of?”

  “Something like, yes. He studied with Hegel in Germany.”

  The barkeep scratched at his jaw. “Well, shoot, mister.” He shifted his glance, and then shifted his weight from one foot to the other. Once again he wiped the palms of his hands against his apron. He said, forlornly, “I got customers to think of.”

  “Of course. Foolish of me.” Oscar turned to the three old men on his right, all of whom were staring at him with undisguised interest. “Gentlemen, would you mind sharing a bottle of the best with me and my attendant? My treat, of course.”

  Grins appeared, two of them entirely toothless, and Oscar was suddenly reminded of the witches in Macbeth. “Set ’em up, by God!”

  “Get ’em a drink!” “Let ’em stay, Harry, let’s see the big dude throw hisself a fit!”

  “Drinks all round, then,” said Oscar to the barkeep, and smiled again. “Two whiskeys for us. And something for yourself.”

  The barkeep nodded. “Yeah. Well. Just this one time, right? But I mean, look, mister, these fits you get …”

  “Yes?”

  “I mean, you get them, you know they’re coming up ahead of time?”

  “Certainly. Never fear. And Henry will have me right as rain in an instant.”

  The barkeep nodded, turned away.

  Henry said quietly, “Mistuh Oscar, I don’ drink no hard liquor. Only beer.”

  “Ah.” Oscar smiled. “Well, Henry, under the circumstances, I think it might be best if we kept mum about that. Eh?”

  “Yes suh.”

  As the barkeep poured their drinks, Oscar said to him, “I understand that some poor young woman was killed near here.”

  The barkeep nodded. “Molly Woods. Hooker worked down the road a piece. Got diced up like stew meat, they say.” From his bored monotone, this might have been an everyday event. He leaned on the bar and said, with the seriousness of a Harley Street physician, “You been havin’ these fits for a long time?”

  “Since infancy. You knew her? Molly Woods?”

  The barkeep shrugged. “Everybody did. It’s kind of like that epilectics?”

  Oscar shook his head. “The medical term for it is pique. Did she have any particular friends? Someone with whom I might be able to speak?”

  “What for?”

  “Well, you see, I dabble a bit as a writer, and I’m doing a small monograph on the subject.”

  The barkeep seemed puzzled.

  “An essay,” Oscar said. “An article. On the subject of murder.”

  “Yeah?” said the barkeep. “A writer, huh? Any money in that?” He asked this like someone who had lately been mulling over a change of career.

  “Not really,” Oscar told him.

  The barkeep nodded sadly, as though his hopes, presumably never very high, had nonetheless been dashed. “Same thing everywhere, I guess.” He shrugged. “Talk to old Larson over there. He knew her. He’s the one found the body. Biggest thing ever happened to him.”

  “Splendid. Give us another bottle, would you? And another glass.” These the bartender produced; Oscar took them. “Thanks very much. Come along, Henry.”

  Old Larson was old indeed, a small wizened man whose long white hair hung, limp and yellowish, from a freckled pink bald spot and snaked over the frayed collar of a ruined overcoat several sizes too large. Beneath the overcoat he wore two more coats and a number of sweaters, creating a bulky mass from which his scrawny neck poked at an angle, like a turtle’s. He sat curled around an empty glass, holding it in a pair of hands ropy with veins and ligaments.

  “Excuse me,” Oscar said. “Would you mind terribly if we joined you?”

  The man’s head lifted and his eyes blinked, focusing. He looked from Oscar to Henry to Oscar again, and then to the bottle of whiskey. He sat upright. “You buyin?” he said, addressing the bottle.

  “It would be my pleasure,” said Oscar.

  “Grab yourselves some seats then, boys.” He licked his lips. Like the two at the bar, he was toothless. “Always happy to chew the fat.”

  Oscar and Henry sat, and Oscar placed the new glass in front of Larson and filled it. “The name is Wilde,” he said. “This is my friend Henry.”

  The old man nodded, grinning. “Howdy, boys. Carl Larson. Pleased to make your acquaintance.” He held up his shot glass. “Here’s to gals wi
th loose morals and tight privates.”

  “Yes,” said Oscar, raising his glass. “Absolutely.” Henry raised his as well, and the three of them drank. When they set the drinks down on the table, Oscar noted that the level of whiskey in Henry’s glass remained the same. Larson’s was empty.

  “Mr. Larson,” Oscar began.

  “Carl,” said the old man. “Mr. Larson, that was my pa. Dead these thirty years. And good riddance, too. Stubborn as a mule and twice as dumb. What you say your monicker was, son?”

  “My monicker?”

  “Your handle.”

  Oscar looked at Henry. Henry said, “Your name, Mistuh Oscar.”

  “Ah. Oscar. Oscar Wilde.”

  Larson considered for a moment and finally shrugged. “Well, a fella’s gotta take what his folks pass along, I reckon. Where you hail from, Oscar?”

  “Ireland. Mr. Larson—”

  “That a fact? We got a lot of Irish hereabouts. Good people, the Irish. Got nothing against ’em. Nigras, neither,” he assured Henry. “Me, now, I’m from Arkansas. God’s country, son. The sun hangs up in the sky twelve months at a shot and sometimes it don’t come down till leap year’s. Lakes’re so deep that every now and then we get a Chinaman floatin’ in one. Say now. That’s some mighty fine whiskey you got there.” He nodded to the bottle. “First one went down real good, I got to admit.”

  Oscar filled the man’s glass. “Mr. Larson, I understand that you knew Molly Woods.”

  The old man tossed back his drink, grimaced, and shook his head. “Terrible. Plumb terrible what happened to that poor gal. I been all over the country, Oswald, been up and down the Mighty Mississippi on keelboats, rode with Quantrill, lived in the mountains with the Cheyenne and the Arapaho. I seen my share of killin’ and blood-lettin’, Lord knows, but I never seen nothin’ like what happened to that poor gal. Seen a fella been half et by a grizzly once, and that was apple pie compared to what happened to poor Molly. It was me what found her, ya know.” He sat back and nodded once, a quick, self-important nod. “Yes sir. I was bringin’ her a pint of milk like I always do, she had a hankerin’ for her milk of a mornin’, Molly did, and she don’t answer like she always does. So I commence to open the door just a mite to see is she okay, and there she is—”

  He grimaced again, lifted his glass, saw that it was empty, and glanced slyly toward the bottle.

  Oscar lifted the bottle and filled the glass. He said, “What sort of woman was she, Mr. Larson?”

  “All spread out on the bed. Chunks of her all over the room, blood ever’where—”

  “Mr. Larson,” Oscar said quickly, “I’m more interested, really, in what sort of woman she was.”

  Larson frowned in disappointment. He tossed back his whiskey and shrugged. “Well, son, she had a heart o’ gold. Yes sir. That’s the way I’d tally it up. A heart o’ gold. Tell you one thing, Waldo. I ever find out who did her in, I’ll shoot down the yellow-bellied varmint myself, right where he stands, and that’s a brass-bound fact. An eye for an eye, the good book says. Exodus, chapter twenty-one, verse twenty-four. You know the good book, Waldo?”

  “I draw succor from it often.” Oscar refilled the man’s glass. “How old a woman was she, Mr. Larson?”

  Larson shrugged. “Middlin’, I reckon.”

  “In her twenties, do you mean? In her thirties?”

  Larson cocked his head and looked at Oscar curiously. “You know somethin’, Waldo? You don’t talk like no Irishman I ever heard before.”

  “I hail from the southern part of the country,” Oscar said. “How old was she, Mr. Larson?”

  Larson shrugged. “Pushin’ forty, I reckon.” He lifted his glass and drank down the whiskey.

  “And what did she look like?”

  Larson leaned toward Oscar. “Like I said, son, it was terrible. No face left a-tall, just this white ole skull a-grinnin’ at me from the bed, and then chunks of her—”

  “No, no,” said Oscar quickly, holding out his hand. “I meant before the tragedy.” He swallowed. “What did she look like then?”

  “Oh,” said Larson, frowning again. “Well, she was a right handsome piece of woman, son. Pushin’ forty, like I say, but still a handsome piece of woman. Still had all her equipment.” He frowned and shook his head. “A terrible waste. What kinda dirty, lily-livered, dung-suckin’ polecat would do a thing like that, anyhow? I ever find out, that varmint is dead where he stands.” He looked round the room with a determined glare, as though daring the killer to step forth and identify himself.

  “Was she tall?” Oscar asked him.

  Larson looked back at him, thought about this, finally said, “Middlin’, I reckon.”

  “Was she heavyset? Slender?”

  Larson thought about this. “Middlin’, I reckon.” He leaned toward Oscar. “Say now—” His face went momentarily slack, and then he frowned. “What was the name again?”

  “Waldo.”

  “—Waldo. How come you wanna know so much about ole Molly?”

  “I’m a writer for the Times of London, and I’m doing an article on murder in the American West.”

  Larson grinned happily. “That a fact? Well, Waldo, you came to the right man, you surely did. Why, in my time I seen just about every form of killin’ that one varmint can create upon another. You name it and I seen it. Murder by gunshot and murder by knife, murder by rope and fire and dynamite. ‘Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood.’ Know where that’s from?”

  “The good book,” Oscar hazarded.

  “Sure it is, course it is, but where in the good book?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t recall. But Mr. Larson—”

  Larson turned to Henry. “How ’bout you, boy? You know?”

  Henry nodded. “Yes suh. Isaiah, chapter fifty-nine, verse seven.”

  Larson’s lower lip buckled, his eyes narrowed. “Now how’d you know that?”

  “My father, suh, he was a minister.”

  Larson nodded and relaxed back into his chair. “Reckon that’s all right then.” He turned back to Oscar, expansive once again. “So what you want to know, Waldo? You want to know about killers? I seen ’em all. Rode with some of ’em. The James Boys. The Youngers. Doc Holliday. John Wesley Hardin. Billy Bonney.”

  “What I’d like to know, Mr. Larson, is whether Molly Woods preferred any particular sort of customer.”

  “Yessir, she surely did,” said Larson, and grinned. “She took a real fancy to the ones what had cash money a-jinglin’ in their pockets.”

  Oscar sighed. This was beginning to seem hopeless. Larson was more colorful than informative, and rather more fatiguing than colorful. “Was there anything about the woman, Mr. Larson, anything at all, that distinguished her? Any particular trait that would have enabled her to stand out?”

  “Sure, like I tole ya. She had a heart o’ gold.”

  “I was thinking, you see, more along the lines of some physical trait.”

  Larson shook his head. “Nope. ’Less you count her hair. Real proud of her hair, Molly was. It was red, and she had a mess of it.”

  “I don’t drink in no saloon as got niggers in it.”

  Oscar turned and looked up.

  Two men stood there. One was short and dark, with a lean wedge-shaped face in which a prominent bumpy nose jutted over a pair of narrow lips and a thin, receding chin. His beard, a few optimistic strands of brown hair curling along his narrow jaw, accentuated rather than concealed the pockmarks on his skin. He wore a black hat with a rounded brim, and a gray canvas duster, stained and battered, that reached from his narrow shoulders to the ankles of his mud-caked leather boots. His eyes were small and brown, like a stoat’s, and they kept sliding left and right, quickly, excitedly, as though they knew that something wonderful was about to happen and didn’t want to miss a single moment of it.

  The other man was enormous, a giant. Towering over the table in a long opened coat of dark, heavy fur streaked with grease, he stood with h
is thick arms akimbo and his big booted feet apart, his hard round belly ballooned against the soiled red plaid flannel of his shirt. A revolver was jammed into the top of his denim trousers. Below a matted thatch of brown hair, his head was globular, the massive forehead looming over the tiny, deeply set gray eyes and the hard, rounded ridges of cheekbone. His nose had been flattened back against his face, as though by a hammer, and two broad nostrils, bristling with black hairs, peered down at Oscar from above a wide fleshy mouth. He looked like the sort of person who would kill without a moment’s thought. He looked like the sort of person who would do everything without a moment’s thought.

  “Say now, Biff,” said Larson. “Leave it be, this boy’s all right, his pa was a minister. And this here’s Waldo, Biff, he’s from Ireland. Biff here hunts buff, and he’s from—where was it you was from, Biff?”

  The old man was chattering, obviously trying to entangle the giant in a rush of words.

  Without looking at him, his eyes and his nostrils still staring down at Oscar, the giant growled from the corner of his mouth, “Shut your hole.” To Oscar, he said, “I said I don’t drink in no saloon as got niggers in it.”

  Very much to his own surprise, Oscar felt a sudden bolt of fury go surging through him, as cold and as clear and as bracing as a mountain stream. Perhaps its source lay in the recent past, back in the confrontation with Vail, when he had (regrettably) refrained from hurling the business manager out the window. Wherever it had come from, it was definitely here now, a tumbling flood of it; and, with an eerie, cool detachment, he found himself sitting back comfortably in his chair, smiling blandly, and saying, “Well then. Why don’t you just trot along and find another saloon.”

  From his previous experiences with bullies, at public school and at Oxford, Oscar expected a more or less prolonged exchange of incivilities—dull and banal on the part of his hulking adversary, witty and scathing on his own—which gradually grew more heated until at last the two of them squared off and Oscar, much to his opponent’s astonishment, beat him to a pulp. Things here proceeded rather differently.