Wilde West Part 33

Irritated, Grigsby said, "You think I won't?"

O'Conner's face went blank and he held out his hands. "What do I know?"

Grigsby reached for his drink, nearly stopped himself once more, and then s.n.a.t.c.hed it up and tossed back what was left of the whiskey. Why the h.e.l.l try to prove anything to O'Conner. "How's the book going?"

O'Conner, watching Grigsby drink, had been smiling. Now he frowned, puzzled. "What?"

"The book you're writin' about Wilde."

"Oh." The reporter nodded. "Good. d.a.m.n good, I think. I've already written a couple of chapters. Taken a lot of notes. I think it's really going to turn things around for me."

He sounded convincing, maybe because he had convinced himself. But Grigsby remembered what he'd seen in the reporter's notebook, the only thing he'd seen in the reporter's notebook: O. Wilde.

Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

He said nothing. Lying about some book you were supposed to be writing wasn't against the law.

Neither was self-deception. If it had been, probably everyone in the world would be in jail.

Grigsby felt sour and sad and used up. The night had started off so G.o.dd.a.m.n well. The telegram had lifted his spirits by suggesting an ulterior motive for O'Conner's joining the tour. And in fact there had been an ulterior motive; it just hadn't involved killing hookers.

Of course, the whole story could be a pa.s.sel of lies. Tomorrow Grigsby would talk to Vail. And send a telegram to San Francisco to check up on the rest of it.

And even if the story turned out to be true, that didn't mean that O'Conner was off the hook. Maybe his wife's death had unbalanced him; maybe he'd decided to start taking revenge against the world by cutting up women.

But Grigsby was discouraged. He'd traveled from possibilities to likelihoods and back again to possibilities. And O'Conner depressed him. Grigsby felt both sorry for the reporter and angry at him. He wanted to grab him by the shirt front and shake some sense into him. But he knew that self-pity was as unshakable as self-esteem, maybe more so. There was nothing he could do for the man; and nothing, right now, he could do about him. Besides, it was nearly twelve o'clock and Mathilde would be waiting. "I'm gonna check up on all this," he told the reporter.

O'Conner nodded. "Like I said, it's all on record."

"Telegrams?" said Mathilde.

Propped up against the pillows, they both lay naked on the bed, each holding a gla.s.s of calvados. Grigsby was smoking.

"I sent a bunch of telegrams to the cities Wilde stopped in before he got to San Francisco. And I sent others to cities where he didn't stop, out West here. Askin' if any ... uh, prost.i.tutes got themselves killed."

"Yes? And?"

"None, so far."

"Which would mean?"

"Which'd mean that so far the only killin's are the ones I already know about. San Francisco, El Paso, Leavenworth, and Denver."

"So. This suggests that the killer, he is indeed one of us. But also-no?-that he must be Mr. O'Conner. It cannot be Wolfgang, and Mr. O'Conner joined with the tour in San Francisco."

Grigsby shook his head. "Nope. See, I haven't heard yet from all the cities I sent the telegrams to. One problem, see, with the cities that Wilde didn't visit, is I'm tryin' to prove that something didn't happen in any of 'em. That's generally a pretty tough row to hoe. You're always gonna have your element of doubt. And second, this fella coulda come all the way from New York to San Francis...o...b..fore he decided to start cuttin' up women."

"So he could, then, be Mr. Vail."

"Yeah. Or even Henry."

"Henri?" She smiled, her eyebrows furrowed in surprise. "You suspect Henri?"

"I gotta suspect everyone till I know different." Grigsby sipped at his apple brandy. "But, fact is, I can't really picture Henry. I reckon he's a little too slow on the uptake to pull off a thing like this."

" Ah." She set her gla.s.s on the bed table and then rolled herself over to face Grigsby. "You still believe that some other person could not be responsible? Someone not traveling with us?"

"Be a pretty big coincidence."

And yet Doc Holliday, for example, had been in all four cities at the same time as Wilde and the tour.

But Doc was a gambler before he was anything else, even before he was a gunman-he was a gunman, mostly, so he could protect himself and his winnings. And it made sense to Grigsby that Doc had followed the tour in order to light onto some high-stakes games.

It made sense, but naturally it didn't have to be the truth.

Problem here was that Doc was a wild card. Unreadable, a mystery. There was no way to know what went on inside his head. That was why Doc had winnings to protect.

So the story about the games might be pure bushwah.

But if it was, why would Doc invent it? And in the six years that he'd been floating through Colorado, no hookers had got themselves cut up, that Grigsby knew of.

Suppose Doc had gone off the beam for some reason? Suppose he'd gone crazy? Suppose ...

Nope. Doc was strange, maybe, but as far as Grigsby could tell, he wasn't crazy.

It had to be someone on the tour.

But who? Didn't seem like any of them were crazy either.

The more Grigsby learned, the less he knew. The more he thought about it, the more tangled the whole thing became.

Mathilde said, "If you are convinced that one of these men is responsible, why do you not a.s.sign some people to watch each of them?"

Grigsby smiled. "I got one deputy workin' for me, Mathilde. Just the one. No way the two of us could cover all of 'em."

"But what about here? Could you not ask the police of this town to a.s.sist you?"

"I don't get along real well with the sheriff here." Tim Drucker, the county sheriff, was a friend of Greaves's.

Grigsby sucked on the cigarette, exhaled a long slow sigh of pale blue smoke.

Mathilde said, "You are troubled tonight, Bohb."

"Just frustrated, I reckon."

"Tell me something." She put the tip of her finger against his chin.

"What's that?"

"Why did you and your wife separate?"

Grigsby's chest suddenly clenched up on him. He inhaled some more smoke, exhaled it. He shrugged. "Things just didn't work out."

"And why not?"

"It's a kinda boring story, Mathilde."

She smiled. "Which is to say, you do not wish to tell it."

He shrugged again. Why not? The whole town of Denver knew. "She found out I was seein' another woman."

She looked puzzled, head tilted, lips pursed, eyes narrowed. "Seeing?"

"Sleepin' with."

"She learned that you were making love to some other woman? And for this she left you?"

Grigsby didn't think it was fair to Clara for him to talk about her behind her back, even though her back happened to be a thousand miles away; but on the other hand he didn't think it was fair to Clara for Mathilde to start judging her, either. As nice a woman as she was, Mathilde was a stranger to the situation, and a foreigner to boot, with a foreigner's funny notions. "Well, see, what you gotta understand about Clara is that she was just naturally a real jealous woman. She's one of the smartest women I ever knew, maybe the most levelheaded woman I ever knew, except for this one little thing. This jealousy."

"You think of jealousy as a little thing?"

"Well, yeah. It was. At first, anyway. Everything else about her was ... just what I wanted." He had nearly said perfect, but in his experience it was seldom a slick move to call one woman perfect to another woman's face. Especially when the other woman's face was attached to a body you happened to be lying in bed with.

"If she was everything you wanted, why then did you make love to someone else?"

"Well, see, I didn't. Not for a long time." Grigsby turned, stabbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and lifted the tobacco pouch and a match from the table. He sat back against the pillow.

"After a while, see, it started to bother me. The jealousy." He drew up his feet and propped the balloon gla.s.s against his thigh, then poured tobacco into a slip of paper. "Every time I was a few minutes late for supper, she was sure I was off screwin' around."

"And were you?"

"No. Leastways not at first." He rolled the paper, stuck the cigarette between his lips.

"For how long were you faithful?"

He snapped the match alight, held it to the cigarette. "Five years."

"You were unfaithful only once?"

Grigsby inhaled, exhaled. "Nope. Maybe once a year for the next four years. I never looked for it, never went out huntin' it, but when it showed up on my doorstep, I didn't go runnin' away from it, neither."

"Five years," said Mathilde, "is a long time to be faithful."

He exhaled. "It is when you're hangin' by your thumbs. 'Cause the thing of it is, see, this faithfulness, it's not an item comes real easy to me. Problem is, I purely do love women. It's like a sickness with me, almost. Shoot, maybe it is a sickness. Clara surely thought it was."

"How do you mean, exactly, love them?"

"What I say. I love everything about 'em. I don't just mean the stand-out things, b.r.e.a.s.t.s and b.u.t.ts and all, although Lord knows I love all that, too. I mean everything. Their hair and their mouths and their ears. Their eyelashes, even. Their chins. Their noses."

He inhaled, slowly exhaled, and smiled at her. "You take noses now. Women got all kinds of noses. Big ones, small ones, narrow ones, thick ones, pointy ones, ones with a kind of b.u.mp in the middle, ones that got a kinda sideways turn to 'em, left or right. And the thing is, I love all of 'em. The only kind I'm not real partial to is the kind that twists up at the end and makes a woman look like she stands a good chance of drownin' in a downpour."

"Retrousse."

"Huh?"

"In French we call this type of nose retrousse. Turned up. Upturned."

"Whatever. But even there, see, I been known to make exceptions. It's just one little ole thing, and they got so much else, and I love it all. Like I say, everything. The way their eyes move and the way they hold a cup of coffee. They way they talk and the way they think and the way they smell. Smell, Lord, I'll tell ya. Sometimes I'll be walkin' along on the sidewalk, in the springtime, say, and the wind'll kick up a whiff of perfume and carry it on over my way and, G.o.d's honest truth, it's like I got kicked in the chest by a horse."

"Perhaps," she said, "you want their approval. Perhaps you feel you need it."

Grigsby grinned. "I want everything they got, and I'm plumb grateful for anything I get."

She smiled. "Did your wife not understand this about you?"

"Course she did. And that just made the jealousy worse. I'm walkin' around thinkin' I ought to be gettin' some kinda congressional medal of honor for bein' such a hero-for not screwin' around. And instead, ever' time I get home, she jumps all over me because she thinks I am screwin' around."

"So you decided, finally, that if you were going to be accused of infidelity, you might as well commit it."

Looking at her sideways, Grigsby smiled. "You heard this story before, huh?"

She smiled back. "Several times. Bohb, do you not see that this is exactly what I was talking about yesterday? How we are attracted to precisely the people who will provide us with pain?"

"Don't see it that way. I mean, I fell in love with Clara in spite of how she was jealous, not because of it."

"And she fell in love with you in spite of your womanizing, and not because of it."

"Right."

She nodded. "And now that you are separated, both of you are miserable."

"I can't speak for Clara. But me, I tell ya, sometimes I feel like I got a hole in my chest the size of Nebraska."

"But I believe, you see, that perhaps this hole was there even before you met your Clara. And that perhaps a part of you wished you to become aware of it, and so selected Clara."

Grigsby smiled. "And Clara chose me because I was gonna screw around on her?"

"Perhaps, yes. I think that jealousy has nothing to do with love. It has to do with fear, with the fear of betrayal. And I think that for many of us, our private wound is exactly this-a sense of betrayal, deep within us. It is perhaps common to all of us. Perhaps your Clara dealt with her fear of betrayal by expressing it as jealousy. Perhaps you dealt with yours by an inability to remain with only one woman."

"But I did remain with just one woman. I mean, for five years I was as faithful to Clara as an old c.o.o.ndog."

"And the woman with whom you remained was a woman of great jealousy. Do you not perceive that, on one level, a jealous woman is the safest of wives? If she is so preoccupied by the possibility of your betraying her, she is unlikely, herself, to betray you."

"Well, now-"

"And yet, of course, sooner or later the tensions become unbearable. The situation explodes. You betray her by making love to someone else, and she betrays you by leaving you. And you see, my belief is that, in a way, this was precisely the point of the entire exercise. For both of you to experience your inner pain. To feel it."