Wild Justice
Page 16
She glanced down at her lapel watch. “I have an appointment with Nigel Morton, the attorney, in half an hour. Will you escort me?”
* * *
We hired a carriage to take us to St. Paul across the Mississippi River, which had carved a two-hundred-foot gorge, streaked black and gray with agate and red with iron. The city on the opposite bank was Minneapolis’ identical twin, rife with limestone lintels and Grecian columns. The nearer we came to the cusp of a new century, the farther its architecture retreated into the ancient world.
The firm of Morton, Winslow, and Morton occupied two floors of one such building, with its name chiseled in Romanesque characters across the front. We passed through a revolving door—only the second in my experience—and followed the echoes of our footsteps to a desk on the far end of a drafty lobby. The young man seated there heard our request, unhooked a tube attached to a hose, repeated Mrs. Blackthorne’s name into it, placed the tube to his ear, and replaced it on a hook.
“Room three hundred. You’ll find the perpendicular railway around the corner.”
This turned out to be a brass cage containing a trim young Negro in a pressed gray uniform, who worked a lever and lifted us off the ground floor with a hiss and a creaking of cables.
“How does it work?” I asked the operator.
“Hydraulics, sir. Except in the winter, when it doesn’t.”
A rail ran three-quarters of the way around the cage at waist height. I reached behind me and gripped it with both hands.
Gold-flecked numerals on pebbled glass identified Room 300. Inside, a female secretary—a handsome one for a change, unbespectacled and wearing a shirtwaist that hadn’t been starched stiff as a plank—smiled at us and said Mr. Morton would see us immediately. We passed through another door labeled PRIVATE and found a portly man of forty or so standing behind a polished desk in a morning coat and striped trousers. His face was as pink and shiny as a baby’s. He bowed from the waist to the widow and shook my hand. It was like squeezing a rubber toy.
“Mr. Murdock, yes? I knew you were accompanying Mrs. Blackthorne. I’ve been reading of your exploits for a week.” I’d expected his voice to squeak, but it was deep and resonant.
“Don’t believe it,” I said. “That twister in Nebraska already had a knot in it when I came along.”
“Of course.” He wasn’t listening. He waved us into a pair of chairs upholstered in blue leather. Mrs. Blackthorne sat as always with back straight and her hands resting on the black reticule in her lap. The usual refreshments offered and declined, Morton tossed his tails and seated himself.
A leather portfolio, blue also, was flayed open on the desk. He glanced down at it, more with the air of confirming its presence than to consult what it contained, and folded his hands on the top sheet. From that point on I wasn’t in the room.
“How much do you know of your late husband’s finances?”
The widow showed no expression. “He had an army pension from his service in the war with Mexico, and a promised stipend upon his retirement. As you know, he did not live to collect it. The house in Helena is government property. We were granted its use until such time as his tenure ended; which of course it has. Apart from our savings of some two thousand, there is nothing.”
“That is not the case. At the time of his, er, passing, his interest in the Pennsylvania Railroad came to”—he spread his hands and looked down at the sheet—“twelve thousand, four hundred sixty-eight dollars and forty-two—forty-three cents.”
“A mistake has been made, Mr. Morton. My husband refused to have any personal dealings with the railroads. The perception of influence was detrimental to a man in his position.”
“So he informed us, when we advised him to invest in the Northern Pacific when it began construction in Montana Territory in ’seventy-nine. We then suggested that an eastern firm would have little to gain politically from a relationship with a federal judge so far removed from its, er, sphere. He responded with a modest purchase—ten shares, to be precise—which when the line opened the Congressional Limited with a route between New York and Philadelphia in eighteen eighty-five, rose significantly in value, and have been in the ascendance ever since. Combine that with his holdings—”
Her fingers tightened on her reticule. “He had more?”
“Nothing else so impressive, I’m afraid. A large dairy farm in Ohio, an ice plant in New York State, a limited partnership in a Baltimore shipping firm: Some four thousand and change at last report, paying three percent per annum. Not a fabulous figure in terms of a Vanderbilt, perhaps; but sufficient to keep you in substantial comfort for the rest of your days.” He slapped shut the portfolio. “One thing more.”
“Indeed. I thought there would be no end.”
Morton rose, excusing himself, and pulled open a drawer in an oaken file cabinet. From it he took a small brown envelope with a gum flap, which he pried open with a rounded thumbnail and slid its contents onto the desk. It was a brass key.
Mrs. Blackthorne left it where it was. “I suppose that opens the door to the United States Treasury.”
“Not so grand as that. It belongs to a townhouse in Wilmington, Delaware. Judge Blackthorne authorized us to purchase it in your name six months ago. It’s ready for habitation at any time. At the Judge’s bequest, we’ve arranged for your furniture and other belongings to be transported from Helena at your convenience. I can assure you there will be no obstacles from Probate; you are the only living heir, the Judge was demonstrably of sound mind, and we here at Morton, Winslow, and Morton specialize in drawing up wills. We will proceed with the reading, but it was our client’s wish that you be informed of these details directly.”
“The old devil,” said Beatrice Blackthorne.
THIRTY-ONE
“The old devil,” she said again, when we were back in the carriage reversing our journey across the river. “All these years he let me go on thinking our existence was hand-to-mouth. ‘Our service is our reward, Bea,’ he said, more times than I care to remember. He made it sound as if we ran a vicarage.”
I watched a flatboat carrying logs downstream. They were stacked nearly as high as the bridge, with a man standing on top to make sure they cleared. “Now that I think about it,” I said, “I never heard him talk about money, except as a motive for whatever crime he was trying. It’s an intimate subject for some people, like religious devotion.”
“Did you ever know him to avoid a subject because of embarrassment?”
“No. He was a tough nut to crack.”
“Some nuts reveal their secrets when you hold the shells up to the light. I realize now that Harlan did not trust me to stand beside him in his commitment to duty. He thought if I knew he could leave the bench at any time, I would berate him until he surrendered.”
“He’d never have done that.”
“I must accept some of the blame,” she said. “I never made a secret of my convictions and my concerns. But I would have stayed.” The words were nearly lost in the clatter of hooves. “I would have stayed.”
We finished crossing the bridge in silence.
She gathered herself, squaring her hands on the bag in her lap. “We spoke of your future, back at the beginning. Have you arrived at a conclusion?”
“I’ve hardly had time,” I said.
“If I am as wealthy as Morton claims, I shall need someone to look after my interests.”
“I’m no banker. I can work a sum three times and come up with the same wrong answer each time.”
“I am certain the august firm of Morton, Winslow, and Morton will know whom to hire to keep the figures. The man I need is one who can ensure whoever does keeps to the straight and narrow.”
“Keep track of who comes into the office wearing a diamond stickpin on four hundred a year?”
“I did not say it would be as much of a challenge as midnight rides and fatal assignations in establishments where liquor is sold. I had the impression you were weary of that life.”
“I am not the pinchpenny the Judge was. You would be well compensated, and you need never worry about being dispatched to some forsaken place with no promise that you would return.”
“You make it difficult to say no.”
We’d turned down a narrow street I didn’t recognize, made nearly dark as night by the buildings crowding us on both sides. I looked ahead at the man holding the lines.
“Does that mean we have an agreement?”
I slid the Deane-Adams from my belt; lowered my voice. “That isn’t the man who drove us to St. Paul.”
The carriage stopped with a lurch that threw us both against the back of the driver’s seat. I looked at Mrs. Blackthorne to see if she was all right. That was a mistake. When I returned my attention to the man in the driver’s seat, I peered down the octagonal muzzle of a long-barreled revolver. I gripped mine tightly; but the back of the seat stood in my field of fire.
The driver had read my thoughts. “I’d not chance it, friend. This packs a lot more punch than that little Marston I tickled your toes with in the livery stable.”
I might have tried it, but as if to underscore his warning, he cheated the barrel to my left, where Mrs. Blackthorne sat huddled against me. I lowered my weapon and took the hammer off cock.
“Good. Pam said you were smart. I didn’t have time to mark it aboard the train; responsibilities of the job and that.”
I looked into his face for the first time. I’d expected Howard Rossleigh to have left his whiskers behind, but we who rode for the Judge knew about such things as ears and noses and eye color. None of them belonged to the journalist. The man wearing the cutaway coat and plug hat of a hired carriage driver was our lost conductor, known to us as Christopher Stedman, whose body had been found floating in the Missouri River near Bismarck.
* * *
I remembered thinking he was young for his job; but then everyone I’d met in recent years seemed to be positively blooming with youth. He was slim and tall—not so much as Rossleigh, but in form and figure they were close enough to pass for each other, provided the reporter’s beard was cut off and his features altered by bloat and ravenous fish.
We were stopped in an alley belonging to a residential neighborhood; not one that prospered. The backs of tenement houses were smudged with soot, layered as if by trowels from locomotives passing within a block. The rumble and squeal of steel wheels on steel tracks was almost constant, so that the odd silence between trains made my ears ache. There would be little street traffic during working hours, and jobless tenants wouldn’t mess with what happened outside their windows. It was as good a place to dispose of someone as the plains of North Dakota.
I laughed, a short bark. The thin face under the stovepipe crown went dangerously blank. He sat sideways with an arm resting across the back of the seat and his gun hand propped on the forearm. “Something funny, friend?”
“A little. All this time we’ve been looking for Howard Rossleigh, the murderer of our conductor, and all this time he’s been feeding eels.”
“A change of clothes and a razor bought us a breather. I spun that stowaway yarn to soften you up for what came. Rossleigh would still be scribbling if he hadn’t recognized me in the caboose; I seen it the first time, and the second when he placed me. I was a brakeman with the U.P. till I passed out drunk on the job and we jumped the tracks going too fast round a bend. Some people died; he covered my trial. The jury hung, so I didn’t. Quiet work, Rossleigh; I’m near as good with a blade as with a gun. Nobody’ll find the real Stedman. That wasn’t a body I wanted found.”
“Dear Lord.” Mrs. Blackthorne looked down, as if praying.
“What did Pamela Bower have to do with you?” I asked.
A smile split the thin face. It looked genuinely sad. “I see she talked before she croaked. Only the name ain’t Bower, either. She took mine when we hitched up.”
Mrs. Blackthorne raised her head. “You were married?”
“I don’t look good enough for her, I know; but she promised to write a series of pieces clearing my name. I couldn’t get a job with any railroad otherwise, and it’s the only work I know. In the meantime she was pretty to have around, and Hearst pays better than the rest, so I didn’t starve. I owed her plenty; still do.”
I said, “If you agreed to help her kill me, why didn’t you use your pistol in the stable instead of her Marston?”
“I wasn’t to kill you; though I could have, even with that toy. You get a lot of practice shooting rats from on top of freight cars; people are pigs when it comes to throwing their garbage alongside the tracks. She gave me her gun. She wanted the slug found. She knew you’d guess it came from that derringer. Why do you think she showed it to you aboard The Javelin? She wanted to make sure you knew who was out for your neck, keep you guessing why till she got the chance to tell you.”
I asked how they’d managed to conjure up a balloon.
He blew air from back in his throat. He probably thought it was a laugh.
“A stroke, that’s what that was. We could’ve caught up with you easy, but then that feller touched down by the lumber camp offering rides at a dollar a head, and Pam said we could pass you and catch you with your pants down. We got our money’s worth, once we was up in the air with no place for the feller to run out of range. He was happy enough to get shut of us once we passed you.”
“Pam’s dead,” I said. “Why keep it up now?”
The smile sloughed from his face. I thought his eyes glistened. “It’s the only thing she asked me to do when we got married. ‘All this,’ she said, ‘your rescue, my support, our companionship, in return for this one small thing.’”
Beatrice said, “You loved her.”
His features twisted, as if she’d slapped him. He lunged, snatched hold of her high collar, jerked her close, and buried the barrel of the big revolver in the flesh under her chin. “Drop it, Murdock!”
When I hesitated, his voice rose to a shriek. “By God, hers’ll be the shortest widowhood in the book!”
I opened my hand, letting the Deane-Adams fall to the floor of the carriage with a thump.
“Funny. I was going to say the same thing about you.”
This was a new voice. A man stood silhouetted against the sunlight at the far end of the alley, feet wide apart. His face and figure were a blank, but he wore a medium-brim hat with a low crown, a hip-length coat with the tails spread, and the light painted a bright line along the barrel of a carbine with the butt nestled in the hollow of his right shoulder.
The brakeman’s back was turned his way. His eyes were wild now. He tightened his grip on the woman’s collar, dug the muzzle deeper into her neck. She made strangling noises.
“Drop it!” bellowed the stranger.
Look to his eye. A dead man’s voice, advising me from a grave grown over for twenty years.
I said before it’s the hands you watch, not the eyes; but I knew where his hands were, and I’d forgotten that first time back in Helena. I spotted the moment when the hot irises shifted, toward the source of the shout. I backhanded Mrs. Blackthorne hard across the cheek. She cried out, jerking and knocking the gun away from her neck. As that was happening I snatched up the Deane-Adams and shot the brakeman through the left eye.
THIRTY-TWO
The beergardens of Minneapolis, if this one was any indication, were cozy dark caves, paneled and furnished in black walnut, with lamps shaded to an ember glow and a fug of tobacco smoke and bitter ale built stratum upon stratum over decades. Deputy U.S. Marshal Hosea Johnston and I sat in a leather-upholstered horseshoe near a fireplace where logs belched and crackled as they burned; it was spring, but there was a stiff wind scraping off Lake Superior, bringing in its chill every time someone opened the street door and brightening the flames in the glass chimneys. We had tankards in front of us, l
ike pirates in storybooks, and a thin cigar smoldered between my companion’s fingers. How he kept it burning was a mystery; I never once saw him bring it up to his lips after he got it lit.
He was in his middle thirties, although his face looked older, cured by sun and wind and smoked over campfires. A solid black bar of eyebrow gave a false impression of humorlessness; his sense of irony was sound. With it came a Quakerish beard, no moustaches, and the low-crowned hat I’d seen in the alley, inexplicably the headpiece of a town-dweller, pearl-gray felt with a modest brim and a silk band. His coat, at least, was rural, a mackinaw with faded squares and mismatched buttons. The nickel-plated star of the Brotherhood drooped from the flap pocket of his frayed shirt.
“I gambled it was you he wanted,” he said, turning the tankard between his palms without disturbing the ash on the end of his cigar. “You or Mrs. Blackthorne. When I found out Stedman’s wallet with his railroad card was wrapped in oilskin, I knew whoever put it there meant it to be read after they dragged the body from the water. That’s when he stopped being Stedman and started being Rossleigh.”
“Another gamble,” I said.
“Not so much. Two men dropping out of sight at the same time could be a coincidence. Three would be like drawing to an inside straight. No. You have to be certain about something, even if it turns out you were wrong. Am I right?” He lifted his tankard, skimming off the foam with his thumb as he did so, drank. “He could just as easily have dropped that hammer on the widow when you struck her in the face.”
“It worked once before,” I said, “a long time ago. I never said there was anything wrong with gambling. I didn’t know who you were, or what kind of shot, or if I’d have to deal with you after the brakeman. No one knows all the odds when he plays them.”
“I doubt the lady will see things that way. She’s going to have a honey of a shiner.”
“You don’t know this lady.”
He looked at the magic cigar, still lisping smoke. He tilted it into a brass ashtray, breaking off two inches of ash. “My mother named me from a book of the Bible. Maybe you know it.”