The Crack in the Lens

by Steve Hockensmith

  He spread out his hands and shrugged.

  Then…here we are. Making guesses.

  I held out a hand. “Lemme see that sliver.”

  Gustav pulled it from his pocket and dropped it into my palm.

  The glass was flat and smooth and thin. Most of it was stained red with blood, but the wider end—the part that hadn’t been buried in Ragsdale’s flesh—was clear as air.

  I pictured everything it could have come from. Spectacles, a drinking glass, a whiskey bottle, a hand mirror, even a magnifying lens of the sort Mr. Holmes used to favor. None fit. The glass was too even, too transparent, not warped or tinted in any way.

  I handed it back to my brother.

  “Yup,” I said. “That’s glass, alright.”

  I do what I can in the deducifying department. Which isn’t much.

  Gustav sighed and held the little shard up again, squinting at it with one eye. Then his other eye popped open, and suddenly he wasn’t looking at the glass. He was looking through it.

  He lowered the sliver and walked to the wall. There were pictures all around—Andrew Jackson and Grover Cleveland and Custer’s Last Stand and a sultan’s harem of lovelies blessed with ample flesh and decidedly unample attire to cover it.

  Yet one section of the wall was even more bare than those painted ladies. It jutted up into the clutter maybe eighteen inches across and three feet high. No battle scenes, no presidents, no pulchritude. Just gaudy red paisley wallpaper.

  Old Red stopped before the blank spot and ran a hand down the wall.

  “Hole…hole…hole…hole,” he said.

  I squinted at the wallpaper.

  “Bullet holes?”

  “Nope. Nails.” Gustav waved me over and pointed to a photograph hanging nearby. “What’s that say on there?”

  It was a group portrait of a dozen grinning men in baseball uniforms—and two very familiar gents in top hats and overcoats.

  “Looks like Ragsdale and Bock sponsored a local team. ‘San Marcos Gamecocks,’ it says on their jerseys.”

  There was a date on the photograph, too, written in by the photographer: April 1892.

  Old Red pointed at another framed photo hanging nearby. “How about that?”

  Again, it was a group picture, except now the men (much the same bunch as before, I noted) were toting tubas and trombones and such instead of gloves and bats. They all wore frilly, military-style uniforms except for the bandleaders, who were attired—as always—in long frock coats and black top hats.

  This time, the handwritten date along the bottom read “July 4, 1893,” and the name of the outfit was printed in fat letters on the side of a bass drum. I had to angle my head to the side to read it, as the glow from the nearest gaslight was throwing a glare across the photograph.

  “‘The Marching Beavers,’” I said. “Them two sure did rub the townsfolks’ faces in…what is it?”

  My brother had stepped up so close to the photo he nearly stubbed his toes against the wall.

  “Hel-lo,” he whispered.

  He tapped a fingernail against the smooth glass covering the picture.

  “It was one of the Marchin’ Beavers?” I said, craning my neck to see who he was pointing at.

  Gustav shook his head slowly, his expression going slack, distracted, like he was doing sums in his head.

  “It ain’t the Marchin’ Beavers that are important,” he said. “It’s the photo.”

  “Well, the photo’s of the Marchin’ Beavers, ain’t it?”

  “I said forget the damn Beavers! I’m talkin’ about the photo!” My brother pointed at the blank spot before us, giving each little hole in the wall its own jab. “And that one, and that one, and that one, and that one. One-two-three-four. The one that was on the desk, too—the thing. But most of all, I’m talkin’ about the man who took ’em.”

  “You mean the man who took ’em?” I pantomimed pressing a camera button with my thumb. “Or the man who took ’em?” I swiped an imaginary picture off the wall and tucked it under my jacket.

  “Good God, Otto—don’t you see how it all fits together?” Gustav said. “They’re the same man.”

  36

  My Constitutional

  Or, A Quiet Evening Stroll Turns into a (Search) Party

  “We ain’t got no choice,” Gustav said.

  “I know.”

  “Killin’ Ragsdale and Bock, collectin’ them pictures—he’s tyin’ up loose ends.”

  “I know.”

  “Whatever evidence there is to find, it’s gonna be gone forever lickity-split.”

  “I know.”

  “If one or the other of us don’t get over there quick—”

  “Oh, my God! I know I know I know! You can shut up about it now!”

  My brother pressed his lips together tight.

  For a few seconds.

  Then—

  “We ain’t got no choice.”

  I sighed.

  “I know.”

  It wasn’t me he was trying to convince. It was himself. And who could blame him, really? It’s not easy for a sane man to talk himself into suicide.

  “So?” I said, turning this way and that. I was wearing Bock’s shirt, tie, vest, frock coat, and top hat. His pants I couldn’t work with: They barely reached past my knees, and Ragsdale’s were too tight around the waist. So I was stuck with my own, though they didn’t match the rest of the suit. My hair and eyebrows were slick with thick-slathered black shoe polish retrieved from a drawer in Bock’s desk.

  Old Red gave me a look that drained the few drops of confidence I had in me.

  “Well,” he said, “don’t stand under any streetlamps.”

  “I wasn’t plannin’ on it.”

  I started toward the office door.

  “You remember how to get there?” Gustav asked.

  “More or less. Don’t worry—I won’t stop anyone to ask for directions.”

  “Alright, then. See ya there.”

  I paused in the doorway and looked back at my brother. This might be the last time I’d lay eyes on him, and I meant to leave with a few well-chosen words of parting.

  They didn’t come. Seeing Ragsdale and Bock stretched out in their soiled underthings sucked the sentiment right out of me.

  Old Red was pulling on Ragsdale’s coat, and it fit him like a glove…a huge, baggy, shapeless one draped over a midget’s pinky.

  “Don’t stand under any streetlamps,” I said.

  “Ha,” my brother grunted.

  I left.

  A moment later, I was back on the streets of San Marcos. They were deserted but for the occasional stragglers late for the lynching on the courthouse lawn. I passed them with head high and gait steady. No skulking for me, an upright citizen taking his evening constitutional.

  Gustav and I had to get halfway across town. Skulking would get us killed, we figured. Better to be individuals with nothing to hide than a pair creeping around like rats in the shadows. Maybe.

  When I hit Austin Street, I figured I was home free. It was the last major avenue leading down to the courthouse, and once I was across I’d have but a quarter mile of narrower, darker, tree-lined lanes between me and my destination.

  I moseyed out into the street whistling “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay.”

  I didn’t even make it to the first “boom.”

  A howl went up to the south like the roar of some monstrous beast, and when I turned that way I saw a crowd surging up the thoroughfare. As it approached, little rivulets of grim-faced men spilled off down side streets. Spreading out for a search.

  The lynch mob had discovered it had no one to lynch…and there I was frozen in the street before it. Under a streetlamp, no less.

  Run, and I’d be a coon with a hundred hounds on its tail. So I stood my ground and prayed anyone in the crowd I actually knew was off searching to the south, east, or west.

  A trickle of sweat and shoe polish ran down the back of my neck.

  “What’s goin
g on?” I called out when the throng was within hailing range.

  “Jailbreak!” a burly merchant type barked back. He was carrying a cheap revolver of the sort one orders from Montgomery Ward, and this, in his mind at least, made him the leader. “Have you seen two men come this way? Little fellow and a big one? Red hair?”

  I considered—for all of one second—pointing north up Austin and trying a “They went that way.” Best not to call attention to myself, though, even for a moment.

  “Haven’t seen a soul,” I said.

  The merchant scowled—and immediately took to eyeballing the dark doorways and alleys further up the street.

  The first wave of vigilantes swept past me.

  A group broke off and headed east, the way I needed to go. So I mingled in and joined the search for myself.

  As I marched alongside my new comrades, I noticed one—a wobbly-woozy man in a white seersucker suit—squinting at my clothes. I could only assume something about my duds struck him as familiar. It’d be just my luck to end up next to Ragsdale’s dentist or Bock’s cousin Buck.

  A distraction was in order.

  “What’d these desperadoes we’re after do, anyway?” I said.

  The man blinked, dragged his droopy-lidded gaze from my suit to my face, blinked again, then gave me a lopsided smile. “Damned if I know, but when we find ’em—whooooooeeeee!”

  “They murdered a whore,” someone said. “Cut her up something awful, I heard.”

  I half-turned my head and caught sight of Mr. B, the barkeeper Old Red and I traded gossip with our first day in town, tramping along behind me.

  See what I mean about my luck?

  “That’s terrible,” I muttered.

  I pointed my eyes straight ahead and did my best to keep them there.

  “Hey,” the seersucker man said. “Hey, let me ask you something.”

  I slipped my right hand under my coat. The fingertips brushed against the hard leather of my shoulder holster.

  “Yeah?”

  The man waved a floppy hand at the voluminous waistcoat covering my not-quite-so-voluminous waist. “Is that houndstooth?”

  “Uhhh…yeah.”

  The man nodded and grinned again. “Nice,” he said. “Who’s your tailor?”

  When I told him it was no one local, I’d bought the suit in Chicago, he looked genuinely disappointed. I couldn’t have been more relieved.

  Over the next few minutes, our party shrank considerably, splintering further at every intersection, and I managed to separate myself from Mr. B. Yet the fellow I really wanted to see again had yet to appear.

  Just as I reached Comal and Fredericksburg streets, a man stepped up beside me and matched his pace to mine. “Maybe we oughta go door to door,” he said. “Warn folks there’s killers on the loose.”

  “Good idea,” I said, and I had to fight back a smile as I said it.

  The voice I recognized. The face I almost didn’t.

  When I looked over at my brother, I saw that his mustache was gone.

  I tapped a finger against my upper lip.

  “Wallpaper scissors and soap,” Old Red whispered.

  “Ouch.”

  “You ain’t kiddin’.” Then, louder, “Why don’t you and me start over there?”

  We veered away from the last six or seven searchers, headed toward the home of Mr. Mortimer Krieger.

  Mr. Mortimer Krieger, who was the only professional photographer and framer in San Marcos.

  Mr. Mortimer Krieger, who had a sample of my handwriting thanks to the membership forms I’d filled out for his library.

  Mr. Mortimer Krieger, who knew our address in town thanks to those same forms.

  Mr. Mortimer Krieger, who could copy Jack the Ripper’s writing style because he had a book full of Saucy Jack’s letters.

  Mr. Mortimer Krieger, who’d kept an eye on us in church while Ragsdale and Bock did their dirty work at the Star.

  Mr. Mortimer Krieger, who’d done away with Ragsdale and Bock to keep his secret safe.

  Mr. Mortimer Krieger, who was a homicidal maniac.

  Or so my brother had deduced, all from a blank space on the wall and a sliver of glass. Proving any of it would be something else entirely. Which was why we’d risked everything to get to Krieger’s mansion.

  It was our last hope—and our last stand, too.

  37

  A Dozen Lucifers

  Or, Old Red Sheds New Light on Things, and I Make an Explosive Discovery

  This much my brother and I knew: Knocking on the door hat in hand would not be the best way into the Krieger household.

  “Fancy place like this,” Gustav murmured as we passed through the gate into the yard, “maybe there’s a coal chute.”

  “I’m too big.”

  We peeked back to make sure none of our fellow posse members were looking our way, then darted around the side of the house.

  “Storm cellar?” my brother said.

  “I don’t see one.”

  We passed a coal chute half-hidden between two rose bushes.

  “I’m too big,” I said before Old Red could point it out.

  “Servants’ entrance, then.”

  We circled around toward the back door—and nearly ran smack into Mortimer Krieger carrying a crate out to his photography wagon.

  As we hopped back the way we’d just come, a dozen reinforcements from the courthouse crowd turned onto the block.

  “Coal chute.”

  “I’m too big,” I said, “but what the hell.”

  We did a hunchbacked waddle-scoot to a small wooden flap low to the ground along the side of the house. We both stripped off our bulky overclothes as we went: This was going to be a tight squeeze.

  After a little fiddling, Gustav got the flap open, and we peered in at…nothing. It was so dark inside, we couldn’t even see the chute itself. I had to stretch my hand into the void and feel the ramp just to reassure myself it was even there.

  “You first,” I whispered.

  My brother didn’t argue. We could hear more voices from the street now, and one of them was saying, “I’ll go tell Krieger.”

  Old Red shoved his legs down the chute, wriggled for a moment, then slid into oblivion. I didn’t wait for any signal to follow. I just stuffed our coats and hats in after him, then dove in headfirst.

  There was only one problem.

  I was too big.

  Head, shoulders, and chest passed through just fine, but my midsection—alright, my gut—got jammed, leaving my legs jutting out betwixt the bushes.

  I writhed. I squirmed. I struggled. Yet there I stayed, stuck half in, half out of the house like the cork in a whiskey bottle.

  I heard a rusty creak behind me, then footsteps. Someone had come through the gate and was approaching the front porch.

  Hands clamped onto me tight.

  By the wrists, fortunately, rather than the ankles. My brother had climbed back up the chute and was trying to yank me down.

  “For chrissakes,” he hissed, “suck in your blubber.”

  I sucked, Gustav tugged, and a second later we were both sliding down into the coal bin.

  Or at least I assumed it was the coal bin. I still couldn’t see a thing, and it sure wasn’t lumps of coal I’d landed on. It was my brother.

  “Get off a me,” he whispered hoarsely.

  “Hold on.”

  We lay still, listening for the inevitable “They’re over here!” and “Anyone know how to tie a noose?”

  Instead we heard muffled knocking, footsteps on the floorboards, the low burble of distant talk.

  “I’m turnin’ to jelly down here,” Gustav groaned.

  “Hush.”

  The conversation faded away fast. Then the door closed and more footsteps click-clattered overhead. They were measured steps—unhurried, unpanicked.

  “I think we’re alright,” I said.

  “Speak for yourself,” my brother wheezed.

  I rolled off him onto w
hat felt like a dirt floor.

  “You got any lucifers?”

  Old Red drew in a deep breath before answering.

  “I did. I just hope they ain’t squashed to a pulp like most of me.”

  A moment later, a match flared to life.

  The bin we’d landed in, I now saw, was empty but for our borrowed coats and squashed-flat top hats. Nearby, a furnace gleamed dully in the dim light. Gustav knelt down beside it and tried to open the little door on the side, but it was rusted shut.

  “Hel-lo,” my brother said. Not like he was surprised, though. He was greeting something he knew already, something he’d expected to see.

  “Hel-lo what?”

  “Only rich folks would bother with one of those things this far south. Takes a lotta money to put one in, and they ain’t cheap to run, neither. But this one ain’t even been used in years.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “Just notin’ some data.”

  Old Red put out his match with a sudden snap of the wrist. For a moment, the world around us vanished. Then another tiny flame flared up, and my brother moved off, holding up his match like a wee tiny torch.

  We were in a low-ceilinged cellar, the far end swallowed in darkness somewhere beyond our sight.

  “We could cover a lot more ground if you’d share some of them lucifers with me,” I pointed out.

  “Maybe—but I ain’t got more’n a dozen of the things left, and I sure ain’t gonna waste any lettin’ you burn the place down.”

  I cursed myself for never taking up smoking.

  For the next minute or so, we shambled along the wall, passing hazy shapes and shadows that flickered and rippled in what little light we had.

  Cobwebs. Dust-smothered trunks. Sheet-draped furniture. A stand-up mirror, the glass cracked. A stuffed alligator, three feet long, spilling cotton from its broken tail. Shelves lined with Mason jars filled with…what?

  I stopped, staring at the pulpy purple-red clumps floating in amber fluid.

  “Tell me that ain’t what I think it is.”

  Gustav brought another new-lit match in close.