The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

  “We won’t be no trouble,” I said. “No need to be nervous.”

  Tommy meant to wave the gun at me now, though he’d gone so slick with sweat I was almost more scared he’d throw the thing at me than shoot me with it.

  “Who’s nervous? You’re the one who oughta be nervous!”

  “Oh, I am, Tommy. I promise you. I am.”

  “Stop calling me Tommy!” the deputy squeaked.

  His boss might have seemed about as rough and tough as cotton candy, but compared to young Tommy, Milford Bales was Wyatt Earp.

  “Look…uhhh…friend,” I began.

  The sound of approaching footsteps silenced me.

  Bales rounded the corner from the alley. He was still in a black suit of the sort you might wear to church, but now there was a badge pinned to his sack coat and a holster around his well-padded waist.

  “What happened?” he asked Tommy.

  “They came sneaking out the back here not a minute after you left. I apprehended them.”

  “Oh, is that what you did?” I said. “Gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever been ‘apprehended’ before.”

  “Shut up,” Bales snapped.

  “Not just yet, thank you. I’d like to point out that none of this strong-arm stuff is necessary.” I stuck out my right foot and gave one of our carpetbags a nudge. “See that? We was leavin’ town, just like you told us to. You wanna escort us over to the train station, fine, but there ain’t no need for gunplay.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Bales bent down and pulled Old Red’s Peacemaker from its holster, then stepped up close and groped under my coat to relieve me of my Bulldog.

  “Think you can hold ’em here another couple minutes, Deputy?” he said once he had us unheeled.

  Tommy straightened up to his full height and nodded firmly. I almost expected him to salute.

  “Of course, Marshal.”

  “Alright. I’ll be back.”

  Bales marched back into the alley. If he was headed to the hotel’s front desk to get a passkey, it was all over.

  Or maybe, I realized with a queasy churn in my gut, it was all over already—because Bales had done in Big Bess, and we were caught in a web he’d woven for us himself.

  I nodded down at my brother.

  “Mind if I help him up?”

  I could practically hear the gears turning in Tommy’s head as he thought it through. What would a real lawman do?

  “You got the gun,” I reminded him.

  “Okay. But no tricks.”

  I got my brother to his feet. He was wobbly but surprisingly steady for a fellow who’s just had his hat nailed to his head.

  I wondered if he was steady enough to run.

  “Say,” I said to Tommy, “how long you been a deputy, Deputy?”

  “Shut up,” he barked. Or yipped, more like. He wasn’t so much a rottweiler as a shivery little Chihuahua.

  “Fine. You don’t gotta tell me. I thought you seemed a tad green, is all. Like you could use a few pointers. I’ve done some detective work, you know, so I could tell you a thing or two.”

  Tommy tried to shoot me a steely glare, but it merely made him look cross-eyed. “What are you talking about?”

  “How you got the drop on us, for one thing. That wasn’t too bad, the way you had yourself hid outta sight back here…except you almost undid it all comin’ at my brother like that. Believe me—I’ve had some experience thumpin’ fellers with gun butts.” I shook my head and tut-tutted. “And boppin’ a man over the brainpan when he’s wearin’ a big ol’ Boss of the Plains? Please. He may as well have had a pillow strapped to his head.”

  “So what would you do? Tap him on the shoulder and ask him to take off his hat?”

  I had to smile. The kid had some spunk after all. More importantly, he was starting to listen to me.

  “Actually, if you’re quick about it, you can take a man’s hat off before you hit him,” I said. “Just grab the brim and flip. Or if that don’t suit you, don’t hit the man at all. Most of the time, just tellin’ a feller you got a gun on him is enough. Though you’d wanna fix your stance first.”

  “My stance?”

  “Yes, your stance! The way you’re holdin’ your body—chest square to us, elbow bent, gun out. You fire a .45 like that, the kick’ll pop it right outta your hand. I mean, just look at how you got your feet set.”

  God bless the lad, he looked.

  I clenched my fist and started forward.

  A hand shot out and clutched at me, bunching up my shirtfront and holding me tight.

  It was my brother.

  He looked into my eyes and shook his head.

  Not yet.

  By the time Tommy looked up again, it was all over.

  “What’s wrong with my feet?”

  “On second thought,” I sighed, “your way’s as good as any.”

  The clatter of quick footfalls echoed down the stairs behind me, and a moment later the marshal came charging from the stairwell. We were about to find out if he’d gotten into our room.

  “You sick son of a bitch!” he spat, and he sent Old Red back to the ground with a roundhouse to the jaw.

  I took that as a yes.

  I balled up a fist again and started for Bales.

  “Don’t,” Tommy said, his Colt level with my head, and even with the shrill screech to his tinny voice, that was warning enough.

  “Why would you do it?” Bales roared at my brother. “Why? Why?”

  Gustav was sprawled out in the dirt, and when he rolled over and looked up, there was blood and grime on his face—and a crooked, sneering smile.

  “Feh. And you accuse me of playactin’.”

  Bales looked like he wanted to squash my brother like a scurrying bug.

  “Get these animals in a cell,” he said, and he whirled around and stalked back toward the stairs again.

  “What did you find up there?” Tommy asked him.

  Bales paused half in, half out of the darkened stairwell, rubbing the bruised knuckles of his left hand.

  “Another one. Just like before.”

  Then he stepped into the shadows and was gone.

  “Alright, you two—move,” Tommy snapped. I must admit, he almost sounded like a real lawman, for once. Which is to say, he sounded like he couldn’t stand the sight of us.

  “You alright?” I asked Old Red as I hauled him to his feet yet again.

  My brother put a hand to his chin and gave it a waggle. When he was sure his jawbone wouldn’t pop out, he shrugged.

  “Don’t hurt any worse than the top of my head.”

  “Well, that’s a relief. Who wants to get hung with a busted jaw?”

  “Go.” Tommy waved his gun at the alley. “That way.”

  We picked up our carpetbags and started off.

  “What’d the marshal mean when he said ‘just like before’?” Gustav asked. “Which ‘other one’ was he talkin’ about?”

  “Just shut up and walk,” Tommy said. “No distractions.”

  I looked back and gave him an approving nod.

  “Now you’re gettin’ the hang of it!”

  “The next one of you that talks,” the deputy said, “I’m shooting.”

  I kept my compliments to myself after that.

  Old Red and I spent the next few minutes on parade through the streets of San Marcos. No one could have known what we were accused of yet, but that didn’t matter. Marching at gunpoint was enough, and we passed under one cold, scornful stare after another.

  Once we’d withstood the disdain of what seemed like every upright citizen in the county, it was almost a relief to finally tromp into the marshal’s tidy little office…until we saw who was waiting for us inside.

  Leaning back in a swivel chair, his long legs propped up on what had to be Bales’s own desk (none other being in sight), was Pete Ragsdale. Like always, Gil Bock was beside him, as unshakable as a pudgy shadow. Both were dressed with their usual overformal flair�
��top hats, frock coats, ties, checked trousers—with a little something extra to show they were in a festive mood: Each wore a big yellow daisy in his lapel.

  “Well well well,” Ragsdale drawled through his perpetual lip-curled sneer. “Would ya look what the fudgin’ pussy dragged in.”

  Gustav started toward him fast, flying by me before I could get a hand on him.

  “You bastards—”

  “Hold it right there!” Tommy hollered, and I was relieved to learn my protégé could muster the menace to get my brother to stop. Packing a stingy gun’s an old mack tradition, and I was certain Ragsdale wouldn’t pass up a chance to claim self-defense.

  “I didn’t think even you had the gall for this,” Old Red snarled at him.

  Ragsdale threw up his hands and beetled his brow, putting on a show of mystified perplexity. “The gall for fudgin’ what? We’re just here to talk to the fudgin’ marshal. Three of our fudgin’ employees have gone missin’ in the past twelve fudgin’ hours.” He swept his feet off the desktop and sat up straight. “Hey…you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Gus?”

  “Exactly which employees are you talkin’ about, Mr. Ragsdale?” I piped up. “From what we’ve heard, you two have been losin’ ’em pretty regular-like goin’ on five years now.”

  Ragsdale’s smirk puckered and petrified, while Bock’s dead eyes finally came to life, widening ever so slightly as they darted toward his partner.

  We were closer to the truth than they’d thought—and they didn’t like it.

  Ragsdale recovered first, leaning back and throwing his heels up on Bales’s desk again.

  “So, Deputy,” he said, “whadaya got these two fudgewits in for, anyway?”

  “You can ask Marshal Bales about that,” Tommy said. “And you can get your ass out of his chair, too.”

  Ragsdale chuckled and raised his hands in mock surrender, as if he’d just been told “Stick ’em up!” by a four-year-old waving a pinewood gun. He did as Tommy told him, though, pushing himself to his feet and stepping away from the desk.

  I resisted the urge to give Tommy a round of applause.

  “Alright, let’s go.” The deputy jerked his head at a narrow staircase in a back corner of the room. “Up there.”

  Gustav and I dutifully trudged off toward the steps, passing so close to Ragsdale and Bock we were practically treading on their toes—and for a second there I was tempted to try it.

  “Don’t worry, Gus,” Bock said with his usual deadpan flatness. “You won’t be here long.”

  Ragsdale burst out laughing, though I had no idea what the joke was. I got the feeling I wouldn’t find it funny even if I did.

  A minute later, Tommy was locking us in upstairs. It was a small jail, with just two cells, each barely bigger than a horse stall. The one Old Red and I ended up sharing had but one bunk and one iron-barred window. I felt like a turkey crammed into a birdcage with a canary.

  After heading back downstairs with our bags, Tommy exchanged a few more words with Ragsdale and Bock, though all Gustav and I could make out were muffled mph-mphs. A door opened, there was another couple minutes of mph-mphing, and the door slammed shut.

  Then Milford Bales came upstairs alone.

  “Well, there you are, at last,” he said, glaring at my brother through the bars. “Where you belong.”

  “Don’t bother,” Gustav jeered back. He’d appropriated the bunk for himself, sitting atop it with his legs stretched out and his arms folded. “There ain’t nobody but us around to hear.”

  Bales shook his head sadly. The rage that had overtaken him back at the Star was gone. Now he just looked drained and disgusted.

  “I’m still willing to make this as easy on you as I can, Gus. For old times’ sake. Just come clean. Admit what you did. Then we can get this over with.”

  “Oh, come on, Milford,” Old Red said. “You got us where you want us, so you may as well cut the crap.”

  Bales blinked at my brother a moment. If he knew which crap to cut, he sure wasn’t letting on.

  “So you’re not going to own up to anything? Even now?”

  “Tell you what,” Gustav said. “You want me to start ownin’ up to stuff? Fine…only you go first.”

  The marshal gaped at him again. “You are one crazy SOB, you know that? Well, I guess it doesn’t matter if you can admit it or not.” Bales pulled a slip of folded paper from his coat pocket and gave it a little wave. “This is as good as a confession.”

  “Oh? And what is that supposed to be?”

  Despite Old Red’s sneering tone, he let himself be lured off the bunk. I joined him as he stepped up to the bars.

  Bales unfolded the paper. It was covered with scratchy-scrawled writing.

  “I guess you thought you’d be out of town by the time Horace Cuff found this slipped under his door at the newspaper,” the marshal said, “but then, you don’t know Horace very well, do you? If he’s not at church, he’s at his office. He went straight there after the service this morning. Then he came straight to me with this.”

  “Are you gonna tell us what the damn thing says or not?” Old Red growled.

  Bales shook his head and sighed. “Gus…this is getting ridiculous.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more, Marshal,” I said. “Tell you what, though—just for a minute, why don’t you pretend we don’t know what that is and read it out for us, hmmm?”

  Bales looked back and forth between me and my brother as if trying to decide which of us was the bigger loon. Eventually he cleared his throat and brought the note up to eye level.

  “‘From Hell (a.k.a. San Marcos),’” he read. “‘A woman’s work is never done, and neither is mine—except what I work on is women, ha ha. It’s been five years since I plied my trade here, and in that time I’ve picked up a trick or two. For proof, you can look to my lucky Star. Don’t bother looking for me, though. By the time you see this, I’ll be gone again. But fear not—or fear do, if you be a whore. As long as there are soiled doves to pluck, Texas Jack will be on the job. Send word to the barber: I’ll be back one day for another trim, snip snip.’”

  Bales refolded the letter and stuffed it back in his pocket.

  “It’s signed ‘T. J.,’” he said.

  While the lawman had been reading, my brother had sagged more and more against the bars, until now he gripped them with both hands as if they were the only things keeping him upright.

  “My God…it’s so obvious I didn’t even see it,” he said. “It looks like I killed Adeline.”

  “Looks like?” Bales scoffed.

  “That note don’t prove nothin’,” I shot back at him. “You know yourself Gustav can’t write a word.”

  “But you can,” the marshal said. “I talked to Mortimer Krieger this morning, too. He told me you and your brother dropped by yesterday. Came in with some wild story about being writers or sleuths or something, investigating a murder…wanting to see anything he had on the Whitechapel killer. You even joined the library so you could take a look at his Ripper book. And the membership form you filled out—for yourself, Otto?”

  Bales patted another of his pockets, signaling that the form was right there, safe and snug.

  “The handwriting matches the note.”

  There was a long pause while my brain worked through these words, rejected the only possible interpretation, tried again, came to the same conclusion, then finally ground to a smoking, spark-spewing halt.

  “That’s impossible,” I managed to mutter.

  Bales barked out a mirthless, incredulous laugh, like I’d just told him the same bad joke twice.

  “Oh, it’s possible, alright. So possible it’s true.”

  “You really believe that, don’t you?” Old Red said, eyes unfocused, voice hoarse. “You haven’t been tryin’ to run us off cuz you’re the killer or you’re coverin’ for him or any of that. You been doin’ it cuz you think I’m a killer.”

  “You actually seem surprised,” Bales
said, looking something close to astonished himself. “But…don’t you remember?”

  “Remember what?”

  “Five years ago. The last time I saw you before you left San Marcos. You came into my barbershop drunk, raving, practically foaming at the mouth.”

  Old Red’s knuckles whitened, tightening around the gray iron bars. He wasn’t just readying himself for his knees to give out anymore. It was more like the whole world was falling away beneath his feet.

  “That’s when you admitted it to me, Gus,” Bales said. “You told me you killed Adeline.”

  31

  Confessions

  Or, We Learn Why Bales Is So Bitter, and It Sours Me on Him Even More

  Gustav staggered back from the bars and plopped down onto the little cell’s lone bunk.

  “You really don’t remember, do you?” Bales said to him.

  “Of course he don’t,” I said. “Cuz it didn’t hap—”

  “Otto,” Old Red cut in, and when I looked at him he held up a hand and shook his head. “Tell me what you remember, Milford.”

  Bales scowled at him, nose crinkled as if at the smell of bullshit. A heap of it. Yet something drew the lawman on.

  “I was sweeping up in the shop one night, maybe four or five days after Adeline died. And I heard noise in the alley out back, off towards the Star. It sounded like shouting and sobbing. Some kind of argument. I tried to ignore it, at first. I didn’t want to go out there. Not after what I’d seen…”

  A fire lit up in the marshal’s eyes.

  I’d hoped it was the benefit of the doubt that had kept him talking, but it was looking more like a reckoning now. Bales wanted to rub my brother’s nose in his own dirt.

  “Oh, yeah—I saw the body,” he said. “When I came in to open the shop the next morning, it was still back there in the alley, waiting for the undertaker. Old Marshal Cerny had a deputy there, and the son of a bitch was letting kids take a peep for a nickel apiece. I went to chase ’em off, and that’s when I saw…”

  His eyes went glassy, losing focus. Or focusing elsewhere, more like. On a picture seared into his mind.