Shadow of a dead man, p.24
Shadow of a Dead Man, page 24
“All that hammer-poundin’, you mean?” Johnny said, blowing smoke rings. “Ain’t that Rocky Burnette puttin’ a new porch on the Black Widow?”
“Pshaw! You know what all that hammer-poundin’s about. It’s about . . .” Kinnon glanced over his shoulder at Jonah Flagg kicked back in his office chair, pretending to be asleep beneath his hat, and the two deputy U.S. marshals sitting around the potbelly stove in their fur coats, sipping coffee from steaming stone mugs and playing a desultory game of cribbage. “It’s about them fellas playin’ cat’s cradle with your head!”
Jonah Flagg opened a swollen, black eye poking out from beneath his ratty hat and said, “You heard the man, Johnny. That’s what it’s all about, all right. Listen to that.” Flagg grinned and gave a luxurious sigh. “Ahhh—music to my ears!”
Kinnon turned on the milk stool he was sitting on outside of Johnny’s cell. “Marshal Flagg, is it not my prisoner’s constitutional right to be able to confer with his attorney in private?”
“Nah,” Flagg said, his eyes closed again, boots crossed on his desk, hands laced across his bulging potbelly. He had a big, white bandage over his nose, and his lips bristled with a dozen stitches. The broken nose gave him a high nasal twang. “The constitution’s done been changed since you last practiced law, Homer. You wouldn’t know ’cause you been three sheets to the wind for the past twenty years. Besides, I ain’t listenin’ to anything you been sayin’. I been asleep.” He lifted his chin to call to the two federals. “Hey, Halsey, Antrim—you boys ain’t been listenin’ to Johnny and his lawyer’s private conversation, have you?”
“Hell, no,” said Deputy U.S. Marshal Jeff Halsey. “That’d be against the law.”
“Besides,” added Deputy U.S. Marshal Burt Antrim, moving a peg on the cribbage board while he rolled a sharpened match stick between his furred lips, “can’t you see we’re all involved in our game here?”
“Hey, Flagg,” Johnny called from his cot.
Flagg looked at him, scowling. “What?”
“How’d you get that fresh bandage on your ear?”
Flagg’s scowl deepened and his eyes darkened as he swept his hand across the fresh, bloodstained bandage over his right ear. The marshals snickered to themselves.
Flagg cast them a wicked glare then shuttled the glare to Johnny. “I cut myself shavin’. Now, shut up about it, or I’ll grease you right there on the cot, and save the hangman the trouble!”
He pulled his hat down over his eyes again.
“Shavin’, huh?” Johnny said, scrutinizing the man dubiously.
Kinnon grumbled and turned back to Johnny, who blew another smoke ring. The attorney wagged his head then, scowling, rose heavily up from the stool, and turned to Flagg. “Marshal, you said you have an eyewitness who will testify that Johnny shot Rance Starrett in cold blood. I think it’s high time you produced this so-called witness of yours!”
Flagg poked his hat up onto his head again and turned his battered face to Kinnon and Johnny. “I got a coupla fellas out lookin’ for him right now. Teagarden, too. He seems to have wandered away from Inter-Mountain despite the nice big three-room suite the town provided for him. He’s likely over at one of your preferred haunts, Kinnon—a sour-smellin’ whore’s crib on the wrong end of town.”
Flagg and the marshals chuckled.
Kinnon cursed Flagg tartly until the marshal looked at him crossways and said, “Don’t you curse me, you old reprobate. If it weren’t for me, you’d still be muckin’ out saloons after dark for drinkin’ money. The taxpayers are payin’ you good to represent this cold-blooded killer though why the law thinks he needs defendin’ after all his depredations is way beyond me! But since it says he does, you’re here. Don’t make me regret that fact or I’ll . . .”
He stopped when voices rose just beyond the office door and boots drummed on the boardwalk fronting it. All heads turned toward the door as it opened and a tall man in a torn blanket coat came in, spurs ringing.
“We found him,” he said as the door banged back against the wall. He grinned as he walked over to the fire and put his back to it, shivering. “Found him over at Miss Dove’s place.”
Behind the tall man a much smaller, older man shuffled in. Johnny recognized him as Winky Peters, the man who was said to have seen Johnny kill Rance Starrett in cold blood. Peters was in his late fifties though he looked at least seventy. His clothes were rags, including the rabbit fur hat with earmuffs hanging loose against his bony jaws, and his old wool coat, which bore the ancient sour stains of only God knew what, and even he didn’t want a sniff. He was a little larger than Mean Mike, with a round owl’s face and a single brow. A thin beard, like the coat of a mange-ravaged coyote, clung to his red-splotched, liver-spotted cheeks.
Two men followed Peters into the room. They, like the tall man who’d entered ahead of them, were dressed in the worn, dung-splattered range garb of out-of-work cowhands likely wintering here in Hallelujah Junction. One more man entered behind them, and in his tailored outfit complete with steel-gray beaver hat and sleek cinnamon bear coat and black horsehair gloves, he looked like a golden goose swimming with mud hens.
This was the county prosecutor, Warren Teagarden.
“Miss Dove’s place!” intoned Jonah Flagg, who’d climbed up from his chair and regarded his primary witness with amused incredulity. “Whatever possessed you to think you could patronize Miss Dove’s whorehouse, Winky?”
Everyone around knew that Miss Sylvia Dove ran the toniest parlor house in Hallelujah Junction. Now, that wasn’t saying much, of course. But the fact remained.
“That’s what you get for stuffing his pockets full of silver certificates,” chuffed Teagarden, shouldering two of his raggedy-heeled associates aside so he could soak up some of the heat from the potbelly stove. Apparently, it was a cold day.
“That was for room service over at the Inter-Mountain!” objected Flagg.
“Well, he decided to go over to Miss Dove’s and get him some o’ that high-priced stuff. When Miss Dove kicked him out before he even got beyond her porch, one of the girls slipped him a bottle, and ole Winky retreated to the woodshed for a party by himself—just him and a quart of labeled bourbon.”
“Labeled bourbon?” Flagg asked.
“The girl must’ve felt sorry for him.”
“Winky, dammit!” Flagg berated the little man who stood looking around the room as though he’d just awakened from a dream and couldn’t quite get shed of it. “You were makin’ me as nervous as a cat in an attic full of rockin’ chairs. You know you’re the primary witness to Starrett’s killin’. The judge needs you high an’ dry! Now, for cryin’ in Grant’s whiskey, plant your skinny butt in the Inter-Mountain until I come fetch you for trial! If you want a woman, I’ll send you a woman. Hell, I’d send you two or three at a time if I didn’t think even one under the age of fifty would kill you!”
Laughter all around.
Even Johnny had to smile at that one.
“Hey, look at that,” Flagg said when the laughter had settled. He’d glanced out the window and now turned full toward it, his back to where Johnny remained on his cot, resignedly smoking his quirley.
“Look at what?” asked one of the federals.
“That there.” Flagg moved to the window to the left of his desk and whistled. “Is that who I think it is?”
“Is who, who you think he is?” Antrim said, and rolled the matchstick from one side of his mouth to the other.
Flagg sucked a breath and tightened his shoulders. He was turning his head slowly from left to right, apparently following someone moving in that direction along the street before him. “Sure enough. I do believe it is . . .”
“Oh, fer chrissakes, Flagg!” yelled Deputy Halsey.
Flagg turned, his blue eyes wide in their swollen sockets and his lower jaw hanging. “I heard he’d been seen in town though I ain’t seen him myself... until just now. He done went into the Silver Slipper. Just seein’ the man purely lifts the hair on the back of my neck.” He shivered and swiped a hand at his collar, as though to dislodge a spider. “I swear if it ain’t like havin’ someone step on your grave, or feelin’ a cold wind—”
Antrim waved a stick of split firewood and bellowed, “Flagg, if you don’t come on out with it, you’re gonna need another visit from Doc Albright!”
“Jose Ramon Cordobés,” Flagg said, enunciating each name carefully and with no little dark foreboding in his softly pitched voice. “El Cuchillo.”
No one said anything.
The two federals looked at each other.
“Ah, hell,” Antrim said, and dropped the stick back into the wood box.
“He ain’t what we’re here for,” Halsey said, flushing as he shifted uncomfortably around in his chair. “Besides, I don’t get paid near enough to tangle with that rabid Mexican polecat. Maybe . . . if I was to get a raise . . . a big, big raise . . . I’d think about it.”
Antrim turned the matchstick end over end in his mouth and grumbled, “Yeah, well, my wife’s due to drop our sixth kid in a couple weeks, so let’s forget about it an’ get on with the game. Besides, I think Shotgun Johnny scrambled Flagg’s brains around an’ he’s seein’ ghosts. I heard the Arizona Rangers killed El Cuchillo down around the border a couple years ago.”
“Ah hell.” Flagg had returned his attention to the window.
“Now what is it?” complained Antrim in a huff. “Don’t tell me John Wesley Hardin done just rode into town, now, too!”
“No,” Flagg said. “Worse.”
He turned to the federals sitting around the stove. “It’s Mrs. Starrett. She just pulled up in front of the office. I think she’s comin’ in.”
Antrim and Halsey stared at Flagg, expressionless.
Garth Starrett had been feared far and wide. But he’d been a newborn kitten compared to his wife. Joke had it that just whispering her name could make a baby cry in the next county.
Finally, Antrim spit out his toothpick, laughed, and turned to look over his shoulder at Johnny. “Hear that, Johnny? No point in finishin’ that gallows. The she-wolf’s here for blood!”
CHAPTER 31
Johnny blew one final smoke ring then dropped his cigarette butt into the chamber pot beneath his bunk. He picked up his makin’s sack and started to roll another quirley. He didn’t really want another smoke, just something to do.
As he pulled out a fresh Brahma Bull wheat paper, he watched Flagg move a little uneasily to the jailhouse door and pull it open. She was standing there in the doorway as though she’d been waiting for one of her lessers to open the door for her, so she wouldn’t have to soil one of her black-gloved hands on the knob.
“How do, Miss Starrett,” Flagg said, awkwardly removing his hat and holding it over his chest. “Sure am sorry for your loss, ma’am. I mean, um . . . losses.”
Murron Starrett looked at Flagg, whom she was nearly as tall as, then slid her moody gaze around him to the other men in the room—Johnny’s so-called attorney, Homer Kinnon, the two U.S. marshals and Teagarden, the prosecuting attorney, as well as Winky Peters and the three out-of-work range hands who’d hauled him out of the woodshed behind Miss Dove’s parlor house.
The men sat in awkward silence until Flagg loudly cleared his throat. All the other men in the room, except Johnny, snapped into action. Those who’d been sitting—the marshals—lurched to their feet and removed their hats. The standing men fumbled their hats from their heads, held them over their chests, and muttered their condolences to the most powerful woman in the county if not most of northern California and all of western Nevada.
Johnny slowly dribbled chopped tobacco onto the wheat paper troughed between his fingers.
“That sure is tough, ma’am,” Flagg said in his halting, wheedling tone. “Losin’ both your son and your husband . . . Mr. Starrett. I still can’t quite wrap my mind around—”
She cut him off with: “Are you going to invite me in or make me stand out here on the street, Marshal Flagg?”
“Oh, Christ almighty—of course, of course. I mean . . . well . . . pardon my French, but do please come in out of the cold, Mrs. Starrett!” Flagg almost literally leaped backward, jerking the door along with him, raking the door against the toes of his badly worn boots and stumbling back onto his jangling spurs. “We got him all locked up. You can see for yourself. He ain’t goin’ nowhere. No, sir! The only place Shotgun Johnny’s goin’ is over to the Silver Slipper for his trial . . . just as soon as the judge ar rives . . . and then straight from the Slipper to the gallows. He’ll be dancin’ with the devil by noon day after tomorrow, sure enough. You’ll be resting easier once we get his filthy carcass in a grave up on Boot Hill, ma’am. Again, Mrs. Starrett, I sure am sor—”
“Flagg, would you please shut up?” she said, not looking at the town marshal before her but around the smoky potbelly stove and through the crowd of men standing stiffly around it.
She stared at Johnny rolling his quirley closed on his bunk.
Murron Starrett moved into the room, the men hastily, awkwardly making way for her. She was dressed in a long mink coat under which she wore a hooded black cape with a red inner lining. The hood was pulled up over her head. She wore her silver-streaked hair in a wind-blown mess tumbling down the front of the sleek, black coat. She was a handsome mature woman with crazy witch’s eyes, and Johnny could not look away from those eyes boring into his as she moved through the room toward his cell.
As she did, he saw several of her ranch hands, who’d apparently accompanied her to town, one having driven her chaise, milling around outside on the boardwalk. A well-dressed gent stepped into the office, following Murron.
He wore a fox fur coat that hung to his knees, and a stylish beaver hat that matched the light tans and browns of the coat. What was really impressive about him were his combed sideburns and waxed handlebar mustache, all of which were snow white, in contrast to the russet color of the man’s handsome though aged face, the parchment skin drawn taut as a drumhead across the sharp, nicely chiseled bones.
He appeared somewhere in his late fifties, early sixties. A white-stemmed pipe with a cobalt china bowl protruded from a corner of his mouth. Instantly, the spiced aromatic tobacco filled the office as the man followed Murron in his leisurely gait, poking at the floor with a scrolled wooden cane capped with an obsidian horse head.
The other, more rough-hewn men in the room regarded the tony gent with quick, furtive, scowling glances, shuttling querying glances among themselves.
Murron stepped up to Johnny’s cell and gazed in at him, her eyes piercing but a faint, bemused smile creasing her mouth corners.
“How are they treating you, Johnny?” she asked.
Johnny struck a match to life on a cell bar to his left. “Me, I feel like a robber baron holed up at the Park Avenue Hotel.” He indicated the dapper gent standing to her left. “Who’s your friend? I like his coat.”
“This is Mr. Sterling Woodward from Reno. I’ve hired Mr. Woodward to be your attorney.”
A silence so heavy came over the office that if it weren’t for the sounds out on the street, including the hammer blows of the gallows construction, you could have heard a mouse fart beneath the floor.
Woodward narrowed his tobacco-brown, deep-set eyes in a bemused smile at Johnny and in reaction to the speechless reactions of the other men in the room. Beside him, resembling a scarecrow in contrast to the Reno attorney—one who’d seen more than his fair share of seasons in the cornfields, at that—Homer Kinnon made a whining sound deep in his chest. Flagg moved toward the cell, canting his head to one side and frowning—or what was probably a frown though it was hard to tell given the swelling around his eyes and nose.
“Uh . . . who’d you say he was, Mrs. Starrett?”
Murron turned to regard the men staring hang-jawed at her, and tipped her hand to indicate the dapper fellow beside her, who also turned to face the room. “I have hired Mr. Woodward to defend Mr. Greenway.”
Homer Kinnon had finally conjured up enough gumption from what little remained inside him to say, “I’m . . . why . . . I’m . . . Johnny’s . . .” Letting his eyes run up and down Woodward’s well-attired frame, Kinnon let the objection trail off to oblivion, just as his eyes settled on the floor near the toes of Woodward’s fox fur boots, and stayed there.
“You see,” Murron continued, “I want to make sure that Shotgun Johnny is given a fair shake in court. I want there to be no question that, after the final fall of the judge’s gavel, all has been done officially and properly, that the statutes have been followed to their last gilt letter. We wouldn’t want anyone to call into question the veracity of these proceedings—now, would we Marshal Flagg?
“We are a growing city as well as a growing county, and we wouldn’t want anyone to accuse us of allowing sham court proceedings—even when it comes to the murder of two men from a prominent family—now, would we, Marshal Flagg? That would be an insult to justice everywhere, and specifically an insult to the brand of justice we serve up here in Hyde County and in Hallelujah Junction. The West is growing more and more civilized by the day, and we here don’t want to be called a backwater—now, do we? Holding back the refinements of progress wouldn’t be good for any of us.”
Flagg studied her closely, as did the other men in the room, as though they were awaiting the kicker of a joke. They seemed to be trying to figure out if she was kidding or not, or maybe just playing up the officiality of things for the dapper little gent in the fox fur coat and whatever eastern stringers might be scribbling in notebooks just outside the open door.
Surely, she wasn’t serious.
Finally, Flagg laughed, as though getting the joke and wanting to play along.
“Hell, no!” he intoned. “Uh . . . pardon my French again there, ma’am. Rest assured that ole Shotgun Johnny is gonna get a letter-o’-the-law court trial over at the Silver Slipper in advance of our hangin’ him. He’s already got him a lawyer. Court appointed, don’t ya know. Leastways, I appointed Mr. Kinnon on the court’s behalf, just to save time. A man is supposed to get a fair and prompt trial. Leastways, that’s what I always heard.”
