P. K. Pinkerton and the Pistol-Packing Widows

by Caroline Lawrence

  “Yup,” I nodded. “That is a big old bloodstain.”

  Carrie took several steps back.

  I knelt down and examined the grisly mark on the path, but found no clews.

  I stood up & looked at the porch. Someone waiting there could easily have stepped out of nighttime shadows and shot the victim as he was approaching the house.

  “I saw Sheriff Gasherie here this morning,” said Carrie. She was holding her hand up beside the outside corner of her eye as a blinker, so she could not see the bloodstain. “He and his Deputy looked all over. He dug something out of that cottonwood you were hiding behind.”

  I went back to my tree. Sure enough, there was a hole in the splintered bark where a “leaden messenger of death” might have lodged. Now, most people would reckon that mark had been made by a .36 caliber ball like that of a Colt’s Navy. But I judged the bullet was a slightly smaller caliber, like a .32.

  I stood with my back to the tree & pointed my finger like a gun barrel towards the bloodstain & I found I was also pointing at the porch.

  I crunched back up the path & stepped over the bloodstain & mounted three stairs.

  According to the article, the porch “may have afforded concealment to the lurking assassin.” I stood there and looked back at the bloodstain on the path and pointed my pistol finger. Sure enough, the killer must have been standing here. I got down on my hands & knees & used my Indian tracking skills to examine the raw planks of the porch. I was about to leave when my sharp eye caught a movement in a pile of firewood by the front door.

  I brought my nose close & was just in time to see a shiny black spider with long slender legs and a red hourglass on her stomach disappear into a space between the billets of wood.

  It was a Black Widow spider! Was it a sign?

  As I moved away, I saw three pieces of thread caught on the rough end of one of the billets. I pulled these gently away. Two of the strands were kind of reddish purple and one was white.

  I stood up. If someone stood here wearing a puffy skirt, then the hem would brush that woodpile.

  “What have you found?” called Carrie.

  I took the threads over to her.

  “What would you call that color?”

  Miss Carrie Pixley looked at the threads in my palm and said. “That is Solferino taffeta and that there is champagne bobbin lace.”

  I thought, “Mrs. Violetta De Baskerville was wearing a Solferino ball gown last night at the wedding.”

  Then I thought, “Her Bosom Deringer takes thirty-two caliber bullets.”

  And finally, “Now I am sure Violetta was the one who shot and killed Con Mason.”

  I looked at Carrie. “I have got the bulge on Violetta. I must go and warn Jace!”

  I ran all the way to the St. Charles Hotel & through the lobby & past the startled face of the desk clerk & up the stairs & along the narrow corridor & I banged hard on the door of room No. 4.

  By and by, I heard noises from within & then footsteps.

  Jace opened the door.

  He was wearing a blue silk dressing gown & his hair was rumpled & his chin was unshaven. The room smelled of stale cigar smoke, sweat and violet toilet water.

  When he saw me his eyes got wider just a fraction and then narrowed. “What is it?” he said.

  “Jace!” I said. “I have come to warn you! I was at the wedding last night and I saw Violetta kissing a man and today that same man is dead, shot dead at about one o’clock this morning. Also, I found threads from a Solferino ball gown . . .” I had to pause for breath and when I did Jace spoke.

  “Are you accusing her of murder?”

  “Yes, sir!” I cried, still out of breath. “It had to be her. She must have done it last night. I came to warn you not to kiss her anymore or have anything to do with her—”

  “You are mistaken,” interrupted Jace. “Violetta has been here since about eleven o’clock last night.”

  He opened the door a little wider and I saw a sight that gave me the fantods. In the bed behind him lay Mrs. Violetta De Baskerville. She had the blankets pulled up to her neck & her dark hair fanned out all over the pillow.

  She was awake and smiling at me.

  Then she laughed her tinkling laugh and it sent a chill all through my body. I knew that Black Widow had caught Jace in her web.

  FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS I “kept my head down” so I could get into Jace’s “good books.” (That was the advice Jace had given me as I was leaving his hotel room.)

  But all the time I was trying to figure out how Violetta could have killed Con Mason without Jace knowing.

  Had she met with him on her way back from the wedding? But he had been killed at one in the morning. Had she snuck out while Jace was asleep? Then she must have dressed in the same Solferino ball gown. Plus Jace claims to be a light sleeper. Had she drugged him?

  Later, they arrested the man who found the body and accused him of the crime. But if he had shot Con, what about the threads from Violetta’s gown that I found on the porch?

  In the meantime, I still had to make reports for Jace.

  This was my daily routine: I would get up at 6 a.m., say my prayers, clean my gun and eat my cold potato, which Mrs. Murphy had agreed to leave at 6 instead of 7. Then I would go across the street & saddle Cheeya & take him for a ride. At about 8:30 I would take Cheeya back to the stables and groom him myself. (Brushing him made me feel calm & peaceful.) Then I usually stopped by the stagecoach office to send my daily report to Opal Blossom & sometimes a telegram to Ping to tell him that all was well. Finally, I would go to my room at Mrs. Murphy’s & eat breakfast on a tray at 9 a.m. & get dressed as a Jewish shorthand phonographic boy & then meet Barry up in the Council Chamber just before 10.

  I was getting better at writing Squiggly Worm Writing. I found that when I wrote down what the men were saying in that shorthand method, it helped me shut out background noise & cigar smoke & monkey shenanigans & everything else but the words. It corralled my thoughts and staved off the Mulligrubs. It was almost like Ordering a Collection.

  Each day after the Legislature adjourned, I would go with Barry to his upstairs back room and we would write up our reports. I kept my rough notes to send to Opal Blossom and I delivered my fair copies to Jace. I took them down to the St. Charles Hotel and gave them to a curly-haired night clerk who knew to put the pages in pigeonhole No. 4.

  When I dropped off my notes two nights after I had wrongly accused Violetta of bloody murder, the night clerk handed me an envelope addressed in blue ink to THE STENOGRAPHER. It said:

  Less detail. More summary.

  Which Legislators are allies?

  Which are enemies?

  —J

  That note surprised me.

  I guessed “J” stood for Jace, but the lettering seemed wrong. I had never seen Jace’s handwriting before but I would have expected it to be dark & clean & straight, like him. This blue handwriting made me feel strange. It made me think there was another side to Jace I knew nothing about.

  Then I had another thought. Maybe someone else, a woman for example, had written this for him, or even instead of him.

  The next night Jace left me this note:

  When someone proposes a bill, use this code:

  —(a spade) if you think they are sincere about the bill they are proposing.

  —(a heart) if you think they are proposing a bill for a friend or lover

  —(a club) if you think they are proposing a bill under threat.

  —(a diamond) if you think they have been bribed to propose a bill.

  —J

  When I read that, I knew the note was from Jace because he was using my own method of remembering cards where Spades stand for honesty, Hearts for passion, Clubs for violence and Diamonds for greed. I had only ever told three people about my method: Barry, Jace and Ma Ev
angeline.

  But I still wondered if Violetta was intercepting my notes. I had a feeling she was real clever. Almost as clever as Jace. Maybe even cleverer.

  The next time I brought my report to the St. Charles Hotel, I asked the curly-haired night clerk if Jace himself picked up the papers.

  “Yes, Mr. Montgomery picks them up himself,” he said. “I would not give them to anyone else.”

  “May I beg a favor?” I said. “Can you show me where he signed the hotel register?”

  The clerk frowned, then shrugged & turned the book so I could see the entries. He flipped back a page to get to Monday November 10th and showed me Jace’s signature:

  J.F. Montgomery, Esq.

  Sure enough, it matched the handwriting on the notes I had received.

  So I followed Jace’s instructions and wrote summaries of the day’s proceedings using the code. Barry & I would discuss which bills or discussions we thought had been important. We made a good team because Barry would tell me who was friends with whom and I could sometimes tell him who was lying or nervous.

  Every time we agreed that a bill might be important, I would make a quick note of it on a piece of paper. On days with lots of business, we did not finish until after midnight, but soon we got a kind of rhythm and it went quicker. With Barry’s help, I used my suit-of-cards code to give Jace information about who was friends with whom & who was bribing whom & who was threatening whom.

  In this way I gradually got to know the legislators and how laws were made.

  I was also beginning to understand the bills with animals or people or roads in them, because those are all things I can picture in my head. But I could not get a hold of one of the bills. That was the Corporation Bill. It was like a greased eel slipping out of my head.

  I reckoned it had to be important because almost every time it came up, the legislators indulged in verbal abuse or even fisticuffs.

  It was a complicated bill with clauses about head offices & dividends & trustees, which I could not picture. Finally, Barry helped me by giving the Corporation Bill a nickname. He called it the Do-Not-Let-the-Frisco-Fat-Cats-Get-Their-Paws-on-Our-Silver Bill.

  I knew a “Fat Cat” meant a rich businessman and “Frisco” is what some people call San Francisco.

  I still did not understand the ins and outs of the Corporation Bill, but at least I understood why it got people riled. It was designed to stop those rich San Francisco businessmen from taking over small Silver Mines, like they had done to Blue Supper.

  Each day, after Barry and I had eaten our supper and finished writing up our report of the day, I would send my rough notes to Opal via the stagecoach and take my good report straight to the St. Charles Hotel for Jace.

  I must have been doing something right, because the day before Thanksgiving I got a note from Jace asking for a secret meeting.

  THIS IS HOW I got my note from Jace.

  It was Wednesday November 26th. I was sitting with Barry in the Council Chamber taking squiggly worm notes when the Page handed me a slip of paper.

  “That is peculiar,” said Barry. “Who would be sending my silent cousin from San Francisco a message?” He called me “silent” because during the sessions I never said a word except sometimes as a whisper in his ear.

  It was a cold day & all the stoves in the chamber were going & I had been feeling drowsy from the warmth & the cigar smoke.

  One glimpse of the blue ink handwriting on the outside of my note brought me one hundred percent awake. I stared at the folded piece of paper, almost afraid to open it. It read: TO MASTER DANNY ASHIM, STENOGRAPHER.

  Jace knew about my disguise!

  I opened it & read it & folded it & put it down again.

  “Who is it from?” asked Barry.

  I said, “It is from the King of Spades.” Barry knew that was my nickname for Jace, which I used when remembering cards. I said, “He wants to meet with me.”

  “Now?”

  “Yup. You don’t mind if I slip out the back door?”

  “Do what you like,” said Barry. “You are a free agent,” he added.

  Jace’s note said to meet him at Dutch Nick’s in Empire at 2:30 p.m. He told me to wear my normal attire. I was not sure what he meant by “normal attire,” so I went back to my room at Mrs. Murphy’s and exchanged my black frock coat for my blue woolen coat with the brass buttons and my stovepipe hat for my slouch hat but without the feather. I wanted to be as nondescript as possible.

  I went over to the Livery Stable and saddled Cheeya. We had been out for our usual early-morning ride but he was always happy to see me.

  We set out at about 1:00 p.m. & stayed on the Toll Road all the way & arrived at Dutch Nick’s at about 2:15.

  I reckoned the reason Jace asked me to meet him in such an out-of-the-way spot was that he wanted our meeting to be secret. So I took Cheeya to the livery stable, where he would be out of sight, but I left his saddle on.

  Then I went into Dutch Nick’s Saloon & ordered a black coffee & sat at my usual table by the back facing the door. I took off my featherless slouch hat & black leather gloves and put them on the table beside me. The barkeep brought my coffee and I took a sip. A clock on the wall said it was 2:25 p.m.

  At 2:30, Jace sat down beside me. He had not come through the front door but via the back door.

  I did not move nor acknowledge him. I did not know what to do.

  The last time I had seen him he had been wearing a dressing gown with Violetta laughing in the bed behind him.

  “You had dinner?” he said.

  I kept my eyes on the table. “No, sir. I came straight here soon as I got your note.”

  Jace called the barkeep over and asked him what was good & the barkeep said fresh antelope steak, so Jace ordered two of those.

  While we waited for them to be cooked Jace said to me, “Your notes are getting better every day. I hear you taught yourself Old A.J.’ s shorthand.”

  I looked at him. “How do you know Mr. A.J. Marsh?”

  “We served together in the Mexican War. He was always talking about how his phonographic method would make him rich.” Jace took out a cigar & cut the tip & put it in his mouth & struck a Lucifer. Between puffs to get it going he said, “Is Miss Opal Blossom still paying you to shadow me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He stopped puffing for a moment. “Has she asked what female society I am keeping recently?”

  “Three times,” I said. “But I keep telling her you are attending the legislature by day and gambling by night, like you told me to say. I send her reports of the legislative business,” I added, “so she knows I am on the case.”

  Jace stared at me, still holding the lit match, then cursed as the flame reached his fingers. “You been telegraphing a Celestial courtesan reports of legislative business?”

  “Telegraph is too expensive,” I said, “so I send her my rough notes by stagecoach.”

  “And she is all right with that?”

  “Yes, sir. Yesterday she sent me another hundred dollars by courier. To cover my expenses.”

  Jace coughed in mid-suck and had to take a sip of coffee. “That is mighty peculiar,” he said.

  I nodded. “I also thought it strange that she was interested in legislative business. But then I reckoned she wanted to know more about the legislature because she loves you and is interested in anything that interests you.”

  Jace removed his cigar and examined it.

  “How about you?” he said. “You told me you found it boresome. Are you getting a grip on it all? The lawmaking, I mean?”

  “Yes and no,” I said. “The politicians still confound me, but I am beginning to understand the process.”

  Jace sucked his cigar. “Politics is mostly about money and power,” he said. “Keep that in mind, and you will begin to understand things.”
<
br />   “Ain’t it about making the world a better place?” I said.

  “Not as often as it should be,” he said, and looked at me. “You have probably figured out that Mrs. De Baskerville and I intend to get ourselves a Toll Road Franchise.”

  “A Toll Road Franchise?”

  Jace glanced at me. “Why do you think I play poker every night with the legislators and surveyors, and why do you think I let them win so often?”

  I said, “I did not know you were playing poker every night with the legislators and surveyors because you told me not to shadow you.”

  “Ain’t you heard rumors?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Dang.” He blew smoke down.

  After a moment he sat forward and stubbed out his cigar.

  “Well, that is what I am doing here in Carson. I am trying to get a nice rich Toll Road Franchise with Mrs. De Baskerville.”

  “Oh,” I said, and then, “Are you going to marry her?”

  My voice was kind of small & I reckon he did not hear me because he said, “I understand you got yourself a pony. Take him for rides most mornings?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Violetta told me she might ride out, too. She wants to scout out which trails might make the best toll roads. I would like you to make sure no harm comes to her.”

  I did not reply.

  “Digging your fingernails into the palms of your hands ain’t going to help any,” he said.

  I looked down at my hands. Sure enough, I was clenching my fists. I rested my hands flat on the tops of my thighs.

  I said, “When does she go on these rides?”

  He said, “She mentioned something about Sunday mornings. I imagine she will get her horse from Smith’ s, where you stable your pony. Follow her and make sure she comes to no harm.”

  Jace knew about Cheeya and even where I was stabling him! He knew everything.