Wilde West Part 32

Quickly, abruptly, the drummer pushed in the chips. "I see you," he snapped. "Whatta you got?"

Using his left hand, Doc turned over his hole card. The ace of spades.

"d.a.m.n!" said the drummer, and he hurled his cards to the table.

Doc stood up. To the dealer he whispered, "Cash me in, Vance. Be back in a minute."

He turned to Grigsby. "Drink, Bob?"

"Sure."

"The bar?"

"A bottle and a table."

Doc nodded. Together they walked to the bar, where Doc picked up a bottle and two gla.s.ses from the barkeep, and then over to an empty table at the far side of the room. Doc took the wall seat, Grigsby sat to his left.

Doc filled their gla.s.ses, lifted his. "To dying in bed," he said.

Grigsby raised his gla.s.s and smiled. "But not tonight, Doc, if it's all the same to you."

They drank, emptying their gla.s.ses. It was good whiskey. Warm and smooth and tasting like a trip back home. Better stuff, for d.a.m.n sure, than that champagne at the mansion.

Doc filled their gla.s.ses again.

"You cleaned him out pretty good there," Grigsby said.

Doc shrugged, just a small movement at his shoulders. "If you're playing poker," he whispered, "and you haven't figured out who the chump is, you'd better start figuring it's you." It was a long speech for Doc. "What's up, Bob?"

Doc's eyes, Grigsby thought, were like gla.s.s. Shiny black gla.s.s, so dark you couldn't see into them. They didn't tell you a d.a.m.n thing more than Doc wanted you to know, and that was nothing.

He said, "The poet fella, Oscar Wilde. You know him?"

Doc nodded.

"Some hookers been getting killed. Killed and cut up. Whoever's doin' it, he's doin' it in the same cities where Wilde is giving his talks. Same time, too. One in San Francisco, one in El Paso, one in Leavenworth, and one last night back in Denver. Molly Woods. You know her?"

Doc shook his head. He sipped at his drink.

"I heard tell, Doc, that you were in all those cities. The same time Wilde was." Grigsby sipped at his drink.

Doc moved his mouth, quickly, just a little bit, a twitch that could've been a smile. "Heard tell from where, Bob?"

Grigsby shook his head. "Don't matter. Were you there?"

Doc sipped at his drink. "You asking me if I'm killing hookers?"

"Not yet."

Doc shrugged. "I was there. All those places."

Grigsby nodded. "Kind of a coincidence."

Doc sipped at his drink. "Killing hookers." His head made a small negative shake and he smiled his twitch of a smile. "Not my style."

"I wouldn'ta thought so, Doc." Grigsby sipped at the bourbon. "So how come the coincidence?"

For a moment Doc was silent, staring at Grigsby with those gla.s.sy black unreadable eyes. Then he whispered, "How long have we known each other, Bob?"

"Five years. Six."

It was true that for six years, off and on, Doc had drifted in and out of the territory, and Grigsby had known him well enough to say h.e.l.lo and shoot the breeze. He had even played cards with him once. (Once had been enough.) But truly know him? Did anyone truly know Doc Holliday?

Doc said, "I ever give you any trouble?"

Grigsby smiled. "Not yet."

Doc nodded. "Seems to me, Bob, that a man who doesn't cause trouble has a right to go just about anywhere he wants to, without having to answer for it."

Grigsby nodded. "Seems to me, Doc, that when people start gettin' themselves killed off, a marshal's got a right to ask some questions."

Another twitch. "Conflicting philosophies, sounds like."

Grigsby nodded. "Maybe."

Doc sipped at his drink. "How far do you want to go with this, Bob?"

"Far as I got to."

Again, Doc was silent for a moment. Then he said, "It's the wives want to hear the lectures."

Grigsby frowned. "So?"

"The husbands get dragged along. Afterwards, they're looking for a game."

Grigsby smiled. "If they can afford a lecture, they can afford a game of stud."

Doc smiled his twitchy smile. "Some of them seem to think so."

Grigsby nodded. "You been followin' the tour."

Doc nodded.

"Business is good?" Grigsby asked him.

Doc smiled again. "I get by."

Grigsby finished off the last of his bourbon. "I don't s'pose you know anything about the folks travelin' with Wilde."

Doc shook his head.

Grigsby stood up. "Okay, Doc. 'Predate it."

"Be seeing you, Bob."

O'Conner opened the door and his face sank.

"Howdy, Davey," said Grigsby, grinning happily. "Good to see you again. You gonna invite me in?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Not a one."

O'Conner stepped back and Grigsby shuffled into the room.

"It is Davey, ain't it?" Grigsby asked him. "I got that right? I mean, we never did get properly innerduced."

"David," said O'Conner. He crossed the room and sat down on a straight-backed wooden chair beside the small wooden table in the corner of the room. The table held a half-empty bottle of whiskey and an empty gla.s.s.

Grigsby said, "The same David O'Conner who's a hotshot reporter for the New York Sun? The one who's gonna get the president of the United States to start sendin' me telegrams?"

O'Conner lifted the bottle, poured whiskey into the gla.s.s. "You have something to say to me, Marshal?"

"Just so happens," Grigsby said, "I did get a telegram about you today. Wasn't from President Arthur, though." He reached into his vest pocket, slipped out the telegram, unfolded it. "Was from a fella name of Jackson B. Martindale. Ever hearda him, Davey?"

O'Conner drank from the gla.s.s. "You telegraphed him."

"I did. I did that little thing, Davey. I asked him for particulars about this hotshot reporter of his, David O'Conner. And you know what he wired back?"

"You're enjoying this," O'Conner said. He seemed neither surprised nor alarmed. He seemed only resigned.

"Some," Grigsby admitted. "What he wired back, Davey, was this-OCONNER A LIAR AND A DRUNK. STOP. NO LONGER A REPORTER THIS OR ANY OTHER NEW YORK NEWSPAPER. STOP. INFORM HIM LEGAL ACTION IF HE CONTINUES MISREPRESENTATION. SIGNED, JACKSON B. MARTINDALE, EDITOR, NEW YORK SUN." Grigsby looked over the telegram at O'Conner, and smiled. "Doesn't sound like a very friendly fella, now does he?"

"HAVE YOU TOLD WILDE yet?" O'Conner asked Grigsby with what looked like, and sounded like, casual curiosity. Grigsby knew it wasn't.

He sat down opposite the reporter. "I reckoned you and me oughta talk it over first."

O'Conner nodded. "Then I guess I owe you something." He smiled. It was a small, sickly smile, bitter and inward looking. "Would a drink do?"

"For starters." No point in Grigsby's quitting now; he already had a good strong buzz going. He'd quit tomorrow. If he decided tomorrow that he wanted to.

O'Conner stood, walked to the dresser, found another gla.s.s, brought it back to the table, sat down. He filled the gla.s.s, handed it to Grigsby. He raised his own gla.s.s, drank from it, and sighed. He looked away.

"Well now, Davey," Grigsby said. "Why don't you tell me why you're pretendin' to work for the New York Sun when you're not doin' any such a thing."

Without looking at him, O'Conner said, "It's a long story."

"That's the best kind."

O'Conner took another swallow from his drink. Still looking away, his voice flat, he spoke as though he were talking to the floor. "My wife and I moved to San Francisco last year. Things hadn't been going very well for us in New York, and Sonia had some money, so we decided to try California for a while. Get a fresh start." He smiled the bitter smile. "Well, things didn't go very well for us there, either. My fault. I admit it. I was. .h.i.tting the booze a little too heavily. I made a few mistakes." He turned to Grigsby, and now some emotion slipped into his voice: defensiveness. "Nothing big, nothing spectacular, but the newspaper business is like a great big dragon. As long as you're doing the job, getting in your stories, feeding the dragon, it lets you ride on its back. You're way up there, in the clouds. But make a mistake, and the dragon turns on you. It chews you up and then it spits you out."

Grigsby nodded. He didn't know much about the newspaper business, but as a lawman he did know a little bit about people making excuses for themselves, and he was pretty sure that he was hearing someone do that now.

O'Conner took another drink. "But it would've worked out. I had plans. I had a couple of good things lined up, a couple of real possibilities. I could've turned it all around." He shrugged. "And then Sonia died."

Grigsby nodded. "How?"

"Pneumonia. She went to bed with it one Monday morning and by Wednesday night she was dead."

"When was this?"

O'Conner smiled his wan, bitter smile. "Oh, you can check on it, Marshal. It's all on record. Sonia O'Conner, beloved wife of David. Died on November Seventeenth, Eighteen Eighty-one." He drank some more whiskey. "A week before Thanksgiving."

Grigsby nodded.

"Anyway, I went a little crazy there for a while." Another smile, one that tried for sarcasm and almost succeeded. "Not killing hookers. Just drinking too much. And then-in January, I don't even remember exactly how it happened-I met Vail. He remembered me from New York." Another small smile, bitter again. "From my days of glory. Anyway, we talked, and he came up with an idea. Why not write a book about the tour-this tour, Wilde's tour across America. Write a book showing how Wilde reacts to the country, and how the country reacts to him. The Poet meets the populace. Why not, I thought. A living dog is better than a dead lion. And besides, it was a good idea. No one's ever done it before."

"So Vail knows you're not working for the New York Sun?"

O'Conner nodded. "We've got a contract. He pays for the rooms I stay in, and he'll get forty percent of the money from the book." He drank some bourbon. "I pay for my own food and liquor. I had some money left. From Sonia."

"Wilde doesn't know about this."

"No."

"How come?"

"Vail's idea. He's afraid that Wilde'll want a percentage of the book."

So there was more to Vail-or maybe less-than met the eye.

O'Conner looked at him. "Listen, Marshal. I asked around, back in Denver. I found out about you. I heard about your wife leaving. You and I, we've got a lot in common. We've both lost our wives. Other people don't understand about a pain like that. They don't know what it can do to a man. How you can feel it all over your body, like the weight of the world, when you get up in the morning."

He raised his gla.s.s of whiskey and held it up between him and Grigsby. "And we've got this, too. Our one real friend. The balm of Gilead. The wine that maketh merry. Other people, when they get up, they don't know what their day's going to be like. Happy or sad, long or short. But you and me, we know exactly how its going to go. All we've got to do is look at our bottle. We can measure the day, before it even happens, by the amount of liquor left."

"Don't worry," Grigsby said. "I'm not gonna tell Wilde about your deal with Vail, if that's what you're leadin' up to. It's none of my business. But as for drinkin', scout, you speak for yourself." It was a shame about O'Conner's wife, a tragedy; but where did the reporter get off comparing himself to Grigsby? Grigsby had a job to do, and he did it. He had responsibilities, and he lived up to them. He wasn't lying around in a hotel room feeling sorry for himself and pretending to be something he wasn't. "Liquor's no big thing with me. I can take it or I can leave it alone."

O'Conner smiled. "When was the last time you left it alone?"

Today, Grigsby thought. For part of the day, anyway. A good chunk of it. And tomorrow, for sure, he was definitely going to quit. "Now listen, Davey," he said, "you just let me be the one asks the questions here, okay?"

O'Conner shrugged. "Whatever you say. And listen, I'm grateful. I mean it. For your not telling Wilde."

"Fine." Grigsby reached for his gla.s.s, stopped himself. "Tell me this. You're not even a reporter nowadays. Why'd you get so steamed up when I told you not to write about these killin's?"

O'Conner nodded. "That's right," he said, and his voice was flat again. "I'm not a reporter these days." He looked off, smiled to himself, then looked again to Grigsby. "But I thought, for a moment there I thought maybe I could pull it all together. It's a good story, Marshal. I can still recognize one when I see it. I thought, maybe, if I put my mind to it, I could write it and sell it to one of the New York papers."

He swallowed some whiskey. "And maybe I will." He smiled at Grigsby. Sarcastically again, and this time the sarcasm came off real well. "Later, of course. After you catch the killer."