I wanted to keep searching, but I stopped when I heard footsteps and saw a great flop of a detective eclipsing the doorway, his corpulent frame a miracle in a town so familiar with starvation. Jacob was the son of Sam Bailey and carried the weight of his father’s life like a millstone around his throat. He was gluttonous, corruptible, and cranky, and if you’d asked most people about him, they’d say he was a worthless son of a bitch, but he was also my oldest friend and you look past certain foibles when you’ve shared so much history with a man.
“What you doing?”
I raised Miss Constance and snapped one last photograph—O’Leary in Repose. “Searching for something to mourn.”
“Find anything?” He took off his hat, put it to his heart. “Because I sure as hell can’t. Christ knows what I’ll say if the preacher asks me for a eulogy.”
“His mother loved him.”
“Some time ago, maybe. Hasn’t let him eat at home in a long time.”
Like me, Jacob had run with O’Leary in the old days. But Jacob was never prone to sentimentalizing the dead.
“He’d have been a good man,” Jacob went on. “If someone shot him twenty years ago.”
Sunlight spread across Jacob’s patent leather shoes, which were tattered like old bandages. “Got to ask where were you last night between the hours of two and six?”
“Bored and frigging myself blind,” I said. “Why? You find my fingerprints?”
“No just saw there’s blood on your shoes and a little on your tie. Fresh blood at that and you smell like cigarettes and booze like you’ve been seeking solace for a sin, and most damningly, the rope around O’Leary’s wrists is a bowline and I remember the day your father taught us to tie that very knot.”
“Nice work, but it all proves is that I was in McGuffey’s this morning and that the killer might have worked on a ranch.”
“Strange Roosevelt sent you, seeing as you and O’Leary had a history.”
“Hardly knew the man.”
“Except that your pa killed his pa.”
“Except that,” I said. “Where’s my uncle? I figured he’d be here.”
“Church,” Jacob said. “Wanted God to forgive O’Leary’s soul.”
“He’ll be a while. He say anything else?”
“Said O’Leary was a waste of the Lord’s mud and even in death he couldn’t serve the world. But don’t write that. You know, for his ma.”
We wandered out into the dirt lot and I could still smell Clyde on my shirt.
“Why’s he naked?” I took out my notebook and pen.
“Can’t figure that out. Doesn’t look like he was raped.”
“I’m gathering he was knocked on the head at the door, then dragged inside.”
“Then disrobed, tied up, and shot,” Jacob said. “In that order.”
“Prisoners gone?”
“Yeah, Seamus’ horse thieves.” Jacob said.
A week earlier a pair of Seamus’ prized Appaloosas went missing. Clyde arrested a family of Mexican migrants, even though they didn’t have any horses with them.
I fanned myself with my hat, and then coughed. The coal smoke turned the sky colorless like dull wet gravel that smelled of sulfur and filled our lungs with a tar worse than tobacco. Toward the west, dark storm clouds climbed over the top of the mountains. They always seemed to be there, struggling, stopping, and then evaporating. But once in a while they made it down to New Sligo. When they did, it could snow for days.
“One man.” Jacob pointed at a set of footprints leading in from the cornfields. “Know what people are going to say. Seamus even mentioned him.”
“He’s in Europe, you know?” I tapped my notebook. “Was O’Leary drunk?”
“Very, but don’t write that down either. His ma and all.”
I stepped beneath the hanging tree, fanned myself with my notebook.
“Do you think it really was a jailbreak?” I said. “What if they were here for O’Leary?”
“Doesn’t winnow things much,” Jacob said. “Range would be endless. Mexicans, Negroes, Jews—”
“Women, children, livestock.”
“I know,” he said. “But easy enough to narrow down.”
“How you figure?”
“Hate to break it to you like this, but Clyde wasn’t the most honest Sheriff New Sligo County’s ever had.” Jacob grinned. “Blackmailing half the town. Had files on all you rich folk, but then you already knew that, didn’t you?”
He’d found a ledger out behind the jakes with names, dates, and dollar amounts. He read off the highlights: Roosevelt, Lazy Eye, Forest, Tillie, and me.
“Quite a list,” Jacob said.
He smiled back at me in that sort of way they teach you in cop school, a smile that makes you soil yourself. “But I don’t think you did it. You’re not much of a shot. Am curious what you’re hiding though?”
“Bedded a German girl during the war,” I said. “Treasonous what I did to her.”
“You keep to that story, because I got to imagine that it has to be an awful secret for you to give a goddamn what anyone thinks. You ain’t easily shamed.”
I thought for a moment of my sister. I wasn’t surprised her name was in there. She was a doctor and brilliant, but she practiced the sort of medicine, helping out the sort of girls whom the town’s pious thought shameful.
“Wasn’t Tillie either,” I said. “No way she could get the drop on Clyde.”
“Whatever you say.”
We went out to the road when we heard the roll of wheels on gravel and saw a brand new black Ford galloping toward us.
“Christ,” I said. “I thought he’d be a while.”
“Just glad I’m not related to you two.”
When my uncle emerged from the dark of his car, he slid his revolver into his holster and put on his derby and it felt like the wind shifted from west to east and the air was suddenly full of brimstone and the Holy Spirit, but I might be imagining that. He wasn’t a bad man, not in any classical way. And he didn’t hate me, though it may have seemed like it later on. No, Seamus Rahill loved me, almost as much as he loved God, but not nearly as much as he loved money.
My uncle came to us, light on his feet like some evangelical hoofer, his long gray beard framing his pink Irish face, making him appear, if you didn’t know better, like a gentle country preacher. But it was his Colt ’45 that gave him the menace of an ordained mercenary.
“Mr. Rahill,” Jacob said, removing his hat. “How are you?”
“A looming strike, a dead Sheriff, and an anarchist on the loose,” he said. “Just one disaster after another, but I know the Lord wagered on me.”
“My father isn’t back,” I said. “That’s crazy talk.”
He touched my shoulder like he was blessing it and looked at me with those gray eyes that made me feel small and forgettable. “You’re at the edge of the cliff, Neal.”
“I’m fine.”
“Well, we define that term differently, I imagine,” he said. “I’m surprised to see you out here.”
“Wouldn’t miss seeing O’Leary’s corpse for the world.”
He smiled. “On that we can agree.”
“Almost done in there, Mr. Rahill,” Jacob said. “Know more in a few hours.”
“Any theories?”
Jacob told him about the ledger, about who was in there, including Tillie and me. I had to expect it. Jacob and I went back a long ways, but he wasn’t going to put himself between my uncle and me.
“Blackmailing a dozen people,” Seamus said. “That boy demonstrated industry, you have to credit him for that. It’s a holy miracle no one shot him sooner.”
He turned to me, sizing me up. “And your offering to the young O’Leary was awful decadent.”
“Misbegotten youth,” I said. “Figured you
’d appreciate the discretion.”
“That I do. That I do,’ Seamus said. “There is no shock about your sister.”
“She’s still family.”
“I know what she is.”
He told me to head back to the Eagle. “Roosevelt knows how to handle this sort of thing. We have to put it to the people delicately, so they understand the truth of the matter. Otherwise, they get confused.
“And Neal,” my uncle said. “If you see your father, do the honorable thing.”
My uncle lived in the wrong century. No one talked of honor anymore, not after the war, but what could you say about the war to a man costumed in a Derby and a Colt?
“You’ll be the first man I call,” I said. “But he’s not coming back.”
My uncle smiled: I wasn’t sure if it was assent or just recognition. He wandered over to the jailhouse, whistling a bar from Wagner, thinking in anachronisms.
—4—
When I got back to the Eagle, I left my film with the art editor, and then found my desk and wrote up my story as fast as I could. I went through my mail, mostly outraged letters from readers. They called me my uncle’s lackey and they were right. At the bottom of the pile, I found a letter with no return address, just a name: Miss Esther. It was a joke of O’Leary’s, a memory from our shared childhood. Every month on the first, I sent O’Leary a check, and every month, after that check cleared, I received an envelope containing another piece of evidence from the file he kept on me. Usually, it was a government document of some sort like Lorraine’s birth certificate or our wedding license. Yet, O’Leary did have some sense of fairness. He promised that after he’d sent me the last piece of evidence—a photograph of Lorraine and me—our business was done with.
So when I opened the letter, I expected to find a legal document, something like Lorraine’s death certificate, but this time was different: a check for five thousand dollars made out to Henry O’Leary, dated June 18, 1904, the day he died.
Signed, Jesse Stephens.
The check confused me. Clyde had mailed it to me just a day before his murder and he hadn’t included a letter explaining why I was paying for this. I figured it was just another part of the file he had on me, just another piece of blackmail.
I didn’t consider it for long. Instead, I went to Roosevelt’s door, knocked, and when no one answered, I walked inside. Roosevelt was dictating his editorial to a copy girl.
“It is the opinion of the Eagle,” Roosevelt said, “that any man who wishes to assume the position of labor organizer has forsaken his right to American citizenship because he has chosen treason over patriotism, slavery over liberty, vengeance—no—madness over justice, and, therefore, we call upon the great people of our Republic to strike down Godless labor, burning the likes of Debs and Kaslovsky in a pyre of their heathen pamphlets. End editorial.”
The girl put down her pen, and then repeated back what he’d just said.
I glanced at the typewriter bound to his desk, which rested beside a dozen file folders, a stapler, a pair of scissors, a trimming board, a box of Roebuck dry plates, photo paste, a bundle of pens, and a six-shot revolver. A lot of people wanted to kill Roosevelt, mostly union men like Forest Kaslovsky, the head of the New Sligo local. They had their reasons. Roosevelt had accused the union of every sort of crime imaginable: prostituting their own daughters, complicity with the Germans, and, most recently, spreading the Spanish flu amongst the townspeople.
When the girl finished reading, Roosevelt smiled and touched the tip of his incredible moustache. “What do you think?”
I shrugged and lit a cigarette.
The girl smiled. It was forced and if I remember right, she had some kin who dug coal. “Very nice, sir.”
“Thank you, dear. Now, would you mind taking that to Norman and telling him to run it on page one above the fold?”
He stood, and then hobbled over to the liquor cabinet, pouring himself a whiskey. It helped ease the pain in his polioed hips.
“How’s O’Leary?” he asked.
“Dead.”
“You’re a born storyteller. Crane hasn’t got a damn thing on you.”
He glanced at the copy on his desk, and then shook his head. “It’s an article on why Jesus hates unions. Something that pansy Marcus came up with. Got a priest to say that the disciples’ real mission was to obey. What do you think?”
It was a big question. “Well that seems to be a matter of faith, not—”
“On the strike, genius. The strike.”
That wasn’t complicated. I knew it was a fool’s errand. Forest and the rest of the union would be lucky to hold out through the week, but that’s not what Roosevelt was asking. He didn’t care about my political insights. He wanted my feelings. I told him the truth.
“I don’t care,” I said. “It’s just a story.”
“Good man. That’s the company attitude. Take pictures, get quotes, and type. Let H.L.-I’ve-got-a-Goddamn-flagpole-up-my-ass-Mencken have opinions. Real newspapermen don’t need them. By the way, I hear that Miss Ida is putting up a show of your pictures tonight. What a fucking racket.”
“I take it you’re not coming.”
“Of course not. Your pictures are the art of a born charlatan, especially that hack job you call The Trench Angel. I don’t know what you did, but I’ll figure it out Stephens.”
“Believe whatever—”
“And besides Miss Ida and I are no longer on speaking terms.”
“Heard you gave her the clap.”
“The consequences of a well-lived life.” He pulled from his desk a bottle of mercury pills. “Your sister was kind enough to help an old bastard out.”
Tillie doctored all sort of ailments.
“That reminds me,” I said. “Jacob found O’Leary’s ledger. Your name is in it.”
“Of course it is. O’Leary broke his blackmail cherry on me.”
“Means you’re a suspect.”
He tapped his awful cane against the linoleum. The handle was bronzed and molded into an image of his own face. It made him look like a demigod.
“Who else?”
“Me and Tillie.”
“I’d have been shocked if you two weren’t.” He laughed. “Forest?”
“Yeah,” I said. “For one hundred a month.”
Roosevelt whistled. “That’s enough to pop the little weasel in his weasely mouth.”
“Come on,” I said. “We don’t know that.”
“You just accused me.”
“You’re a son of a bitch. Forest has principles.”
“Principles? They’re damn excuses, justifications for a crime against America and the principles we were—”
“Stop it. You don’t care about the strike.”
“I care about keeping your uncle happy,” he said. “Let’s see your shit story.”
Roosevelt took out a gold pen—a gift from my uncle—then, with increasing force, crossed out half my sentences.
“You write like a goddamn fairy,” he said. “No real man uses colons, dashes, and semicolons like this.”
“What do you want me to change?”
He handed the story back to me. I read it aloud:
“Sheriff Clyde O’Leary, 29, was gruesomely murdered last night while bravely protecting the New Sligo Jailhouse. The Sheriff’s office believes union leader Forest Kaslovsky, along with his accomplice Jesse Stephens, the notorious anarchist, murdered the valiant O’Leary in order to incite discord and fear in the hearts of patriotic New Sligoans.”
I looked it over one more time. “This is horseshit.”
“It has a symmetry that would give Dickens a half-stock.”
“I don’t care.”
“Fair enough, Stephens. You know you’re not the worst hack I’ve got on staff, just the laziest. I’ll give you a peace o
ffering for helping send your daddy to the gallows.”
He wanted me to photograph tomorrow night’s debate between Seamus and Forest. It was ostensibly a forum for debating ideas, but we all knew it was no such thing: Seamus was telling the town the consequences of the strike.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
At the time I believed that I wanted to hear what Forest had to say, perhaps the man’s last public words before the strike blew up in his face, but now I know it wasn’t my only reason. There was too much going on to simply hang around and watch from a distance. With a dead sheriff, I figured there was something happening beneath the surface and it had something to do with me. But even without that gut feeling I would have wanted in, because out on the prairie there was a file with my name on it and I needed to find it before my uncle got a hold of it.
—Paris—
Others have written about the night the Rite of Spring debuted. Historians have chronicled how the crowd booed the dancers, throwing oranges and cursing mothers, and how the night represented the end of the fin-de-siècle, a foreshadowing of the bloodshed to come. Those theories might be true, but those people are part of another old man’s memory. What I saw was this: the lights outside the Théâter Champs-Élysées illuminating the rain falling upon my alpaca suit, while Miss Trixie, a generous camera, waited beneath an awning, safe and dry. It was a young man’s mistake.
An ancient, hunchbacked woman materialized from the dark rain. She wore a bandana and a patchwork skirt and no teeth. Most people saw her as nothing more than a beggar, but there seemed something romantic about her, something specifically Parisian. Perhaps it was the child she held.
She swung the infant from her hip in such a careless way that I was sure she’d drop it and I’d have to watch a child die. Instead, she laid it in a puddle of rainwater.
The Trench Angel Page 3
