The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

  Funny thing, too. It worked.

  “Say,” I said. “That feller with the shotgun and the deep voice…”

  A word popped into my mouth I hadn’t been expecting, and I paused a moment to sample the taste of it. It tasted real, true, right. So I started again.

  “That feller with the shotgun and the phony voice. He held his reins here, didn’t he?”

  I held up my right hand.

  “And his scattergun here.”

  I held up my left.

  “He sure did,” my brother said. “A southpaw, I’d bet.”

  I thought back on the hand I’d seen all atremble as it hovered next to a holster the day before.

  A left hand.

  “Them fellers found us by askin’ someone in town,” I said. “Which means it probably wasn’t anyone off the Lucky Seven. They already knew we’d be passin’ thataway.”

  “That’s right—and didn’t you hear? When the two of ’em was on foot gettin’ the nooses on us?”

  I tilted my head and closed my eyes, as if whatever sound my brother was speaking of might yet be echoing around for me to hear. After a few seconds, I gave up.

  “I didn’t hear nothing.”

  “Exactly,” Gustav said. “No spurs. The rope was stiff, too. New bought. Never used. Them slickers didn’t have a spot on ’em, neither.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t seen it till just then, but there’d been clues scattered around like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs, and they led to one and only one conclusion.

  We’d been ambushed by townsmen. Not just that—one towns-man in particular.

  “Looks like your pal Bales went to an awful lotta trouble to put a scare in us tonight,” I said. “Makes me wonder why he’d bother.”

  “Makes me wonder, too. A lot.”

  Old Red turned toward the Star again. The morning light had spread now, and with it more detail emerged from the shadows.

  Warps in the wood. Chips in the paint. No old bloodstains yet, but maybe that was just a matter of time as the darkness lifted.

  “Like I said a while back—‘know’ is a mighty big word to bandy about,” Gustav said. “But ‘think’? ‘Suspect’?”

  My brother gave one quick, firm nod, like a straw boss giving his approval to a new-built corral.

  “Those’ll do just fine.”

  17

  Cuff

  Or, We Dig for Dirt on Bales but Dredge Up an Old Devil Instead

  Gustav’s gotten pretty good at picking locks with a length of wire—the one and only of his tricks he’ll credit to a magazine detective other than Mr. Holmes. (In this case, the rival being the American dick Nick Carter, whom my brother refers to only as “Blockhead Numero Uno.”) After less than a minute of fiddling, Old Red had us through the Star’s rear door, and we made our way to the second floor via a musty, unpapered back stairwell.

  Once we were in our room, our duties on watch were sorted out quickly.

  “Gimme two hours,” Gustav said, and he collapsed onto the bed already snoring.

  I tried to pass the time working on my new story for Mr. Smythe, but I didn’t get far with it. Every six words or so, my pencil would slip from my weary fingers—and my thoughts slide into half-dreamed horrors.

  A woman gutted-out hollow like a butchered hog.

  Baby-faced Milford Bales bathed in blood.

  My brother hanging from a tree, eyes abulge.

  Me herding goats.

  After falling asleep and jerking awake what seemed like a thousand times, I switched places with my brother and let the nightmares play out uninterrupted for the rest of the night.

  I first stirred around noon facedown in a pillow. When I rolled over to breathe, my tailbone sent such a lightning bolt of pain racing through me, my hair should’ve stood on end, and I nearly passed out again before I was even fully awake.

  “Still smarts, huh?” Old Red said.

  “Brilliant…deduction,” I gasped. “Sweet Jesus…I think I broke my butt.”

  “Better that than your neck.”

  I reached around and gently copped a feel of my right cheek. The slightest pressure was all it took to bring tears to my eyes.

  “That’s entirely open to debate,” I said.

  Once I’d managed to oh-so-gingerly drape my aching carcass in clean clothes, we limped off to the nearest gunsmith’s shop. We needed new artillery, and the quicker we got it, the better.

  For once, it wasn’t a Peacemaker I picked out for myself. On the spur of the moment, I bought a short-barreled Webley—a “British Bulldog.” Old Red glowered with obvious disgust as I slipped the gun into a new-bought shoulder holster that better suited the city duds I’d struggled into that morning.

  “Man’s gotta move with the times, Brother,” I said.

  Gustav gave me a “Feh” and put his own iron the only proper place for it, in his mind: in a gun belt, hanging at his hip.

  “Mind if I ask you a question?” he said to the gunsmith.

  “Cash-payin’ customers can ask anything they want,” the man said with a grin. “Cuz at least I know they won’t be askin’ for credit.”

  Old Red forced up a chuckle that sounded about as jolly as a cat ridding itself of a hairball.

  “It’s your town marshal I’m wonderin’ about. Milford Bales. What do folks ’round here make of him?”

  The gunsmith’s grin wilted.

  “Allow me to correct myself. Cash-payin’ customers can ask me about anything…except politics.”

  “It ain’t politics I’m interested in. It’s Bales.”

  The man crossed his arms and shook his head. “Sorry, cowboy. Gunsmiths can’t afford to choose sides.”

  “I ain’t askin’ you to…oh, forget it.”

  My brother spun on his heel and marched out the door.

  After that, we headed to a cozy little café not far from the Star. There we got eggs, bacon, hot cakes, coffee—and much the same answer when Gustav asked about Milford Bales.

  “Well, he’s always been decent to me, that’s all I know,” said the (till then) friendly fellow who’d been serving us, and he streaked away like a squirrel with its tail on fire.

  “Well, hell,” Old Red grumbled. “Ain’t there nobody in this town willin’ to say boo about Milford Bales?”

  “Oh, I’m sure there’s somebody.” I pointed a half-eaten strip of bacon at my brother’s clothes. “They’re just not gonna say it to a feller who looks like he oughta be bulldoggin’ steers. Tell you what—let me handle this.”

  “And exactly how do you intend to handle it?”

  I stuffed the rest of the bacon into my mouth. “Observe.”

  I scooted away from our table and approached a cigar-chomping gent dining by himself nearby.

  “Pardon the interruption, sir.” I pointed at the newspaper spread out before him—the San Marcos Free Press. “Would you happen to know where that’s printed up?”

  The stogie-sucker peeped up from the front page just long enough to confirm he wasn’t hearing voices. “East on Fort, north on Cedar, right side of the street.”

  “Thank you.”

  The man grunted.

  I could see why he was eating alone.

  “Well, there you go,” I said as I slid back into my seat. “Love Bales or hate him, the local newspaper’s gotta have something to say.”

  My brother gave me an approving—and begrudging—nod. “It’s gratifyin’ to see you actually think every once in a while.”

  “It’s gratifyin’ to hear you actually say something nice every once in a while,” I replied. “Too bad I’m still waitin’.”

  We found Free Press HQ sandwiched between a butcher shop and a Chinese laundry. The building was a small, creaky-floored, poorly lit affair chockablock with printing equipment, leaning towers of musty paper, and, buried here and there beneath the clutter, what I assumed were desks and chairs.

  Three men were hard at work on the next edition: one stooped over a typesetter’
s table picking letters from long trays, another cranking sheets off a clattering printing press, and a third—the only one not apron-clad and ink-stained—pacing back and forth between the first two, periodically peering over their shoulders to point out their mistakes.

  It wasn’t hard to deduce who was in charge.

  Despite the disorder all around him, the editor and/or publisher was an extraordinarily prim-looking gentleman himself. He wore a long frock coat, a double-breasted vest, and a red ascot wrapped around a starched collar so high it just about tickled his earlobes. His bearing was plenty starched, too: The man carried himself with a stiffness some would describe as “dignity” and others (mostly cowboys) as “having a corncob up your ass.”

  He didn’t hear my first demure coughs over the racket of the printing press. So eventually Gustav lost his patience and barked out a booming hack of the sort you’d expect from a tubercular mule.

  The gentleman turned to face us. “Yes?”

  He was exceedingly fair, I now saw, with thinning blond-white hair and sallow skin and a mustache so light and overtrimmed it could have been a stray strand of silk stuck to his upper lip. His pale blue eyes flicked from me to (with a noticeable souring of expression) my brother.

  “Good afternoon, sir!” I said. “My name is Otto Amlingmeyer, and this is my brother Gustav. We’re colleagues of yours, of a sort, and we’re hopin’ we might impose on you for a wee bit of assistance.”

  “What sort of assistance?”

  His accent was English.

  His sneer was universal.

  “Well, you see, sir…”

  A grin came to my lips I couldn’t keep down. Words were forming I’d waited a long, long time to speak, and my mouth just couldn’t get them out without a smile.

  “I’m a writer under contract to Smythe & Associates Publishing of New York City. At the moment, I’m workin’ on a story about San Marcos. Naturally, I figured this’d be the place to turn for insights into your fine community, and I only need trouble you for a few minutes to chat. Who knows? You might even end up in the story yourself!”

  The newspaperman pursed his lips so tight they went white.

  It took me a moment to realize this was his rendering of a smile.

  “Come with me.”

  He led us to his private office: a jumble-covered writing table jammed into a corner. The Englishman took the only seat, then held out his hand to offer us thigh-high piles of newspapers for our own (dis)comfort.

  Once Old Red and I were roosting precariously upon our perches, our host introduced himself properly. He was Horace Cuff, editor and publisher of the Free Press. He’d come to San Marcos from Dallas by way of New York and, before that, London, where he’d newspapered in a variety of positions he outlined for us in droning, catatonia-inducing detail. Apparently Mr. Cuff didn’t just think he should be in my story, he felt he ought to be my story.

  Fortunately he ran out of biography before either Gustav or I could topple off our rubbish heap dead asleep, and I was able to slip in a question. I thought it best to ease around slow to the real matter at hand—Milford Bales—so I began by asking about San Marcos. Cuff’s views were nothing new, though I must say the pomposity with which they were relayed was all his own.

  San Marcos was “maturating,” Cuff told us, moving from unruly youth into civilized adulthood. Soon the town would “wipe the last muck from its shoes” and claim its place as a proper little city.

  “Sounds like you’ll have paradise on earth once the cattlemen finally dry up and blow away,” I said.

  Like all humorless men, Cuff was armor-plated against sarcasm, and he answered with a fervor that made it plain he hadn’t noticed mine.

  “No, San Marcos will never be paradise. There’s only one of those, and the larger a city grows, the further it seems to drift from it. In fact, all the great metropolises, I’ve found, are far closer to hell than heaven. It’s something my friends here must guard against.”

  “Guard against how?” Old Red asked.

  Cuff eyed him as if wondering whether his dignity could survive parlay with someone so far beneath it.

  “By denying sin a toehold,” he said. “Crime, degeneracy, moral decay…London and New York are awash in it all, and it saddened me to find Dallas no better. It’s too late for them. Not so for San Marcos. Here, fortunately, it’s wickedness on the decline, not virtue.”

  “Who’s to thank for that?” I asked. “San Marcos cleanin’ itself up, I mean? The town marshal?”

  Cuff gave a reluctant nod. “To some degree, I suppose, but Brother Landrigan deserves most of the credit.”

  “Brother Landrigan?”

  Cuff nodded again, eagerly this time, and a rush of color came to his pinched, pallid face.

  “Yes. The man’s a dynamo—a dynamo powered by the Holy Spirit! It’s my great privilege to be a member of his flock.”

  I stole a rueful peep over at Gustav. He responded with a here-and-gone grimace.

  If there’s one thing we absolutely cannot abide, my brother and I, it’s having our souls saved. The way Cuff was starting to talk, a sermon couldn’t be far off.

  “Brother Landrigan is a tireless crusader for decency,” the Englishman enthused. And I mean really enthused—he didn’t so much say the words as “Hallelujah!” them. “He’s cleansing this town just as surely as he cleanses hearts of sin. Why, the marshal wouldn’t even be marshal if Brother Landrigan hadn’t backed him. It was Brother Landrigan who set the man’s sights on a higher purpose in the first place. The same could be said of me. I was languishing in despair until I heard Brother Landrigan speak. That’s why I took over the Free Press. He convinced me to come and serve His purpose here.”

  You could hear that capital H in “His” just from the way the word popped off Cuff’s mouth. What wasn’t so obvious was who he was referring to: Brother Landrigan or God. I almost got the feeling they were, to Cuff, one and the same.

  “Does Brother Landrigan do any street preachin’?” my brother asked. “With a choir, maybe?”

  “Indeed he does. You’ve seen him?”

  “We have been so blessed, yes,” I said.

  We’d not only seen Brother Landrigan, we’d been damned to hell by him: He was the fire-and-brimstone-breathing sky pilot spreading the Bad News outside the saloon the day before.

  Old Red and I traded sour looks again.

  This time, Cuff noticed.

  “So,” he said, “you say you’re a writer working on a magazine story.” He turned to Gustav—and turned frosty cold while he was at it. “Why is it you’re here?”

  “Oh, my brother travels everywhere with me,” I said. “You could call him my muse…but mostly he just totes the luggage.”

  I laughed at my own joke.

  If I hadn’t, no one would.

  “Tell me again,” Cuff said. “What sort of story have you come here to write?”

  “Local history,” I said. “Speakin’ of which, would you mind if I was to do a little perusin’ through your back numbers? To soak up more flavor of the place, you understand.”

  Cuff looked back and forth between me and my brother, weighing, I assumed, how much we’d worn out our welcome: just a tad around the edges or clear to tatters.

  “You’re sitting on 1892,” he finally said. He nodded at the papers propping up Old Red, then pointed at more piles strewn about willy-nilly nearby. “1891, ’90, ’89, ’88.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “I think we can manage from here.

  Wouldn’t want to take up any more of your valuable time.”

  “How…considerate of you.”

  Cuff made “considerate” sound like something you wouldn’t let a fellow call your mother.

  “Interestin’ bird, that one,” Old Red whispered as the man went back to browbeating his staff.

  “Yeah. Half peacock, half cuckoo,” I said under my breath. “So where should we start—under your ass or mine?”

  “Neither.” Gustav
reached out and patted the stack for 1888. “October third. That was the day after.”

  I didn’t have to ask the day after what. I just got to work.

  I found the October third edition quick enough. It was the headline I was hunting that was nowhere in sight. I scanned the October fourth and fifth editions with the same result.

  There was nothing, not a word, about the murder of Gertrude “Adeline” Eichelberger.

  “Any chance you’re misrememberin’ the date?”

  “No, there is not a chance,” Old Red snapped. “They just didn’t think it was news.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right. Still, long as we’re here I may as well…ahhh.”

  At last, I’d found something about Adeline…or so I thought at first. I’d spotted a couple of the words I’d been looking for, but the date, the story, the everything—it was all wrong.

  My “ahhh” became a “Huh?”

  Gustav leaned so far off his stack it nearly toppled over.

  “What is it?”

  I gave the paper in my hand a shake.

  “This here’s the Free Press for October second. Morning edition. Folks woulda got it more than half a day before Adeline died. And lookee here…”

  I pointed to the headlines. The words, of course, would mean nothing to my unlettered brother, but the placement of them would. They were on the front page, up top, big.

  “‘Whitechapel Fiend Strikes Again!’” I read out. “‘More Prostitutes Butchered.’”

  I glanced up at Old Red to make sure he’d caught the full weight of it.

  Indeed he had—right in the gut. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no sound came out.

  I went on. “‘Authorities Helpless to Stop—’”

  And here Gustav got his breath back enough to utter three words heavy with dread.

  Even an illiterate cowhand who couldn’t find all of England on a map—even he knew who the Terror of Whitechapel was.

  “Jack the Ripper,” my brother said.

  18

  The Sermon, Part One

  Or, Cuff Fills Us In on the Ripper—and Rips into Mr. Holmes