Wilde West Part 17

"Yeah, sure, of course. Whatever you say. Naturally. I mean, there's no need to get yourself in a tizzy."

"I am not in a tizzy. I have never been in a tizzy in my life."

Quagmire of a mind.

Swamp, Oscar thought. Swamp would've been better. Has it even once penetrated that swamp you call a mind.

Still, all in all, it had gone off very well.

Poor Vail had been absolutely terrified. As well he should've been. He had revealed himself as possessing the mind of a ferret. He deserved defenestration.

Has it once penetrated that bog you call a mind.

Swamp. Yes.

"Mistuh Oscar," said Henry. "This 'pears to be the place, ahead here."

Oscar looked. Ahead, on the right side of the narrow dirt roadway, a ragged crowd of ragged people was sluggishly milling about, slowly eddying before a tiny gray ramshackle building where three blue-clad policemen stood morose silent guard.

"Police not gonna let you in there, Mr. Oscar," Henry said.

"No, of course not. What we want now is a public house." He leaned forward and called to the driver, "Is there a saloon nearby?"

Over his shoulder, the driver grumbled in a sour voice, "And how would I be knowin'? This bein' me first time in this h.e.l.lhole of a place?"

The Irish, Oscar thought. Ever amiable.

"Do you suppose you could find one?"

The man grumbled, shrugged.

Oscar sat back. If anyone could locate an establishment where whiskey was served, even in h.e.l.l, it was an Irishman.

Oscar looked around. h.e.l.lhole was in fact an apt description.

He had been silent throughout the trip, fuming, still furious at Vail, looking up only now and then to notice vaguely that the streets were growing more narrow, the houses more slovenly and shoddy.

But this, this Shantytown, this was worse than anything in London, worse than Spitalfields or Whitechapel. There the buildings, squalid though they might be, were at least made of brick and stone; here they had been thrown together, hastily, with bits of tin and tarpaper and strips of mismatched timber clearly torn from packing crates. Some of the structures had been painted, quickly, slapdash; but all of them were coated with a dull coat of grime that seemed, despite the temporary character of the buildings themselves, ageless and ineradicable. Looming in the alleyways and empty lots between the buildings were piles of rubble and rubbish-empty liquor bottles, tin cans florid with rust.

The sky overhead, which in the rest of Denver had promised rain, here threatened apocalypse. A thick, shapeless, yellow-gray fug lay over everything, leaching away the light and stinking of sulfur.

The wind had begun to blow, moaning and whistling as it swept around the shanties, sending sc.r.a.ps of paper tumbling down the desolate roadway; but it left untouched the blanket of gray overhead.

How, in a country so rich in resource and promise, could a place like this exist? How could anyone permit it to exist?

The carriage pulled up alongside a low rambling wooden edifice which was as dreary and dingy as the rest, but which had apparently been constructed with some small hope of permanence. A thin yellow light quivered behind the two small windows in the clapboard front. Over the door, swaying in the wind, a weathered wooden sign identified it as the Devil Dog Saloon.

The driver turned, his wrinkled red face pinched with displeasure. "Two dollars," he said.

Oscar took the money from the pocket of his topcoat and handed it to the man. "Would you mind waiting until we return?"

The man snorted. "Wait? Around here? Are ye daft? Close me eyes for a minute and some ruffian will be off with me wheels and me horse. Ye wanted Shanty town, where the poor bawd got herself killed, and here ye are, and that's an end to it. I'll be off now, and good day to ye."

Oscar smiled. "You'll be a Galway man, by your voice."

The driver narrowed his eyes. "Will I now? And just why, exactly, would you be thinkin' that?"

"I've connections there. To the O'Flaherties and the O'Flynns."

"Course you do," said the driver. "And me own b.l.o.o.d.y name is Prince b.l.o.o.d.y Albert. Pull the other one, why don't ye."

The wind snapped at Oscar's hair. "The name is Wilde. OscarFingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. You've heard of my mother, perhaps. Jane Francesca Wilde. Speranza."

Still dubious, the driver said, "The poet lady? Of Dublin?"

"The very one."

"And how is it, then, that ye talk with a mouthful o' b.l.o.o.d.y English plums?"

"Ah well," Oscar smiled. "The result of a youth misspent at Oxford University."

The driver considered for a moment. Then he said, "Speranza's son? You'd not be lyin' to me?"

Oscar smiled. "May the good Lord strike me dead in my boots."

The driver suddenly grinned. "Well, why din't ye say so?" He swiveled farther around on his seat and stuck out his hand. "O'Hara. Benjamin J. O'Hara. Of Galway and Denver."

Oscar shook the hand and the driver leaned toward him, his face abruptly serious. "But now listen, young Mr. Wilde. This shebeen here, 'tis a nasty place, not fit for decent folk. There are hard men hereabouts, thieves and killers and the like. I've heard me some terrible stories."

"It can't be helped, I'm afraid. I've some business to transact. But there's a fiver in it for you, Mr. O'Hara, if you'll wait the carriage for us."

"Git away with your fiver. Take money, would I, just for standin' about? No, I'll be waitin' for ye, never fear. And if ye find yerself in some difficulty, you just give me a holler and I'll come runnin'."

"I'm sure of it." Oscar turned. "Henry, shall we go?"

Henry, his face as expressionless as always, looked from Oscar to the driver and then back to Oscar. "Yes suh, Mr. Oscar."

PLEASE INFORM ME ANY RECENT DEATHS PROSt.i.tUTES YOUR AREA.

Short and sweet, thought Grigsby.

He looked up from the sheet of paper, sipped at the bourbon in his half-full water gla.s.s, and called out, "Carver?"

Through the closed door, he heard a sharp clunk from the anteroom as the legs of the deputy's tilted chair slammed to the wooden floor. The chair squeaked against the floor, chalk on blackboard, and a moment later the door opened and Carver Peckingham loped into Grigsby's narrow office, brushing lank brown hair from his eyes with thin eager fingers.

"Yes sir?"

Grigsby sat back in his chair. "I got a job for you. Couple jobs."

"Yes sir?" Tall and slump-shouldered, the deputy stood at eager near attention in front of Grigsby's desk. One thing about Carver-he wasn't any great shakes when it came to brains, but he was eager as all get-out.

"Here." Grigsby handed him the sheet of writing paper. "I want you to take this over to the telegraph office. Talk to Mort. Have him send it off to the mayors of these here cities." He handed Carver the list of cities he'd copied from Wilde's itinerary. "And also the mayors here." He handed over a second list, western cities that Wilde hadn't visited. "Have him sign all of 'em with my name, and make sure he puts down Federal Marshal."

Carver looked through the two lists. "Golly, Marshal," he said. "There must be thirty or forty of 'em." He looked down at Grigsby. "That's gonna cost more, probably, than we got in petty cash."

"That's why I want you to talk to Mort. He'll put it on the cuff."

Carver was reading Grigsby's message. He looked up. "How come you want to know about prost.i.tutes, Marshal?"

"Somethin' I'm workin' on. Special survey for the attorney general. Top secret, Carver, so don't you go jawin' about it to n.o.body."

"No sir, Marshal. Mum's the word. You can count on me. How come the mayors?"

Grigsby frowned. "How come the mayors what?"

"How come you're sendin' it to the mayors?"

Grigsby swallowed some bourbon. "Well, Carver, some of those cities got sheriffs, and some of 'em got city police. Some, maybe, only got a justice of the peace. Take me forever to find out which was which. Now s'pose I send it to the sheriff, and there ain't no sheriff. Maybe no one'll ever read it. But they all got mayors. There's always some poor sonovab.i.t.c.h wants to be mayor."

Carver grinned. "Yes, sir. Reckon that's so."

Grigsby handed Carver another sheet of paper. "And I want Mort to send this off, too."

Carver read from the sheet. "'The New York Sun.' What's that?"

"Newspaper."

Carver read slowly: "'Par ... tic ... u ... lars.'" He looked up. "What're they, Marshal?"

"They're like details. You go ahead now, Carver."

"Yes, sir. And I won't say nothin' about the survey to n.o.body, Marshal. Mum's the word."

"Good, Carver. Appreciate it."

As Carver loped quickly off, Grigsby stood and walked over to the window. Peering out it, looking down at Main Street, he rolled himself a cigarette.

There was an outside chance that the killer wasn't traveling with Wilde. Grigsby doubted this, but it was a possibility. Like Wilde had said, if even a single hooker had been killed in a town the tour hadn't covered, then everyone on the tour was pretty much in the clear. The cities on Grigsby's second list were close enough to the other cities, the cities where hookers had been killed, for the killer to reach them in the time available. If no hookers had been killed in any of them, then Grigsby was back where he'd started. With the people on the tour.

He snapped a match alight with his thumb.

Naturally, it was possible that if the killer wasn't connected to the tour, he could've killed off a hooker in some other town somewhere, some one-horse place too small for Grigsby's list. And Grigsby would never know about it.

But how many of those small towns had hookers anyway? And even if they did, how many of the hookers had red hair?

Grigsby puffed at the cigarette. He could hear the wind sliding around the corners of the Federal Building, growling low in its throat. Outside, down in the street, the gusts kicked flurries of dust at the bent figures who scurried along the sidewalks, their heads tucked low, their hands hooked at their hats.

Exhaling smoke, he glanced up at the rooftops opposite. Dark clouds, swollen and sullen, still bellied their way across the sky. The rain would arrive soon, curtains of it, each one swaying dull and cold behind the other.

A memory came to him then, a summer afternoon riding with Clara, a storm coming up, the two of them too far from town to make it back before the shower hit, but racing for it all the same, Clara laughing with excitement, her brown hair flung behind her like a banner. The downpour starting cold and shivery, fat round raindrops hard as pebbles slapping at his thighs, the smells of earth and gra.s.s suddenly draped across the cooling air, and he and Clara making a final sprint for an empty barn in a huddle of trembling pines. And there, standing in the opened doorway, both of them dripping wet, the horses softly shuffling in the shadows, they had come together, mouth to mouth, hip to hip, the clean smell of Clara's soap mingling with the sweet barn smell of hay, and right there, Clara's back arched against the pinewood jamb, they had taken each other.

Grigsby swallowed, sucked a quick staggered breath into a chest abruptly too tight. It still surprised him, the pain, by how swiftly it could sneak up on him, and how real it was, how physical, as though some great gray claw had lurched between his ribs and ripped away his living heart.

Even a storm could bring the pain. Almost anything could. They had so long been together, he and Clara, or maybe so intensely together, that everything in the world had been touched and shared by the two of them. They had left, the two of them, their imprints on everything. And now, in those hollows, a kind of poison had welled up, as bitter as acid, and the world had become a precarious place, crowded with dangers. A s.n.a.t.c.h of music. A child's laugh. A flicker of rose in the sunshine. A rainstorm. Almost everything he saw, or heard, or smelled, was tainted now.

He stepped over to the desk, lifted the gla.s.s of bourbon and finished it off. Setting it back down on the desktop, he heard footsteps in the anteroom. He turned. Carver, as usual, had left the door open.

A thin man walked into the office, holding himself as upright as if he wore a corset somewhere beneath his gray suit and topcoat. His bristly white hair was so short that the pink scalp shone through it. He looked at Grigsby, nodded stiffly, and said, "You are Marshal Grigsby?"

"Yeah."

"Wolfgang von Hesse. Mr. Vail suggested to me that I see you."

"Well now, Colonel," said Grigsby, sitting back in his chair. "That's a mighty fine story. I've always been a sucker for stories about graveyards and storms and such. But I'll tell ya, that corporal of yours, it doesn't surprise me none that he tried to claim he was innocent. Just about every lowlife I ever met tried to tell me the same thing. I know of a fella, Jake Lindstrum, five different people saw him gun down his partner in broad daylight, and he was still claimin' he didn't know a thing about it when he got hung. Prob'ly believed it himself by then."

"Ach, yes, of course," said von Hesse. "But I speak here of something quite different, Marshal. Consciously, this corporal would never have done what he did."

"Crazy people do crazy things," Grigsby said. "That's what makes 'em crazy."

Sitting across the desk from Grigsby, his back very straight, von Hesse had given him a precisely detailed account of his activities last night. Dinner with Wilde and the Countess from nine-thirty to eleven. Escorting the Countess to her room at eleven-ten. A single drink-a brandy-in the hotel bar, which he finished by eleven thirty-five. Reading in bed until twelve-thirty. Asleep by quarter to one.

While von Hesse talked, Grigsby had tried to picture the man wielding a knife over the body of Molly Woods, cutting and slicing. He hadn't been able to. But he hadn't been able to picture any of the others doing it, either. Even though he'd seen the results with his own eyes, he still couldn't picture anyone doing that.

And now von Hesse was trying to sell Grigsby on an idea that made no sense at all.

"There are many forms of madness," said von Hesse.

And this was one of them, Grigsby thought. "So what you're tellin' me here," he said, "is that any one of these people could be the killer, and not even know about it."

"Yes, exactly," said von Hesse, and nodded. He looked toward the bottle and the gla.s.s, full once again, on Grigsby's desk. "Marshal, I see that you are a man who enjoys the occasional drink."

Grigsby looked at gla.s.s and bottle, smiled bleakly. "I been known to indulge."

"Have you ever, in the course of an evening, perhaps lost a few moments of time? I mean to say, have you ever, on the following day, been unable to recall certain events of the night before?"

Grigsby nodded. "Once or twice."

"But yet, during the time lost to you, you moved about, you spoke, you acted and reacted."

Grigsby shrugged. "Never killed no one."

"But still, in a sense, during that period your conscious self was somehow absent. In a sense, another part of you had taken over."

Yeah, Grigsby thought. My p.e.c.k.e.r.

He said, "So you think this fella's a big drinker." Like O'Conner.

"Ah," said von Hesse, sitting back. "I mention the drinking as an example only. Perhaps alcohol would have this effect, perhaps it would not. The corporal I spoke of, he drank nothing at all."