Black Hats (7 page)

The bastard thought Wyatt was the ghost of the man he’d murdered!

“No,” Wyatt said. “And you won’t be seeing him where you’re headed.”

Stilwell bolted to his feet and his wild-eyed face was inches away when he grabbed Wyatt’s shotgun by its barrels—desperately trying to wrest the weapon away instead of jerking the holstered sixgun at his side…

…and Wyatt let go with both barrels, so close to the Cowboy, the roar was muffled and the man’s shirt caught fire.

Stilwell rose off the ground a little, just a little jump, and tumbled backward into a formless pile, flames around the wound crackling and then dying themselves.

Suddenly Doc was at Wyatt’s side and the gambler’s nickel-plated revolver barked four times, downward, hitting the dead man in selected places.

Wyatt gave his friend a curious look and Doc shrugged. His smile was awful.

“Can’t let you have all the fun,” Doc said. “Much less credit.”

They looked for Ike, but the yellow cur had as usual skedaddled, and soon the train was on its way, Wyatt and Doc walking along either side of the car. Before the train pulled from the station, Wyatt looked up at the mournful face of Virgil in his window and raised a forefinger, and mouthed, “One for Morg.”

More would follow.

The lookout, Indian Charlie, Wyatt gave a fairer chance than Morgan had received—an
uno
dos tres
before sending one two three bullets into the bastard who’d taken twenty-five dollars to make sure Morg’s killer, Stilwell, wasn’t interrupted.

And of course Curly Bill, at the Iron Springs shoot-out, with assorted other Cowboys also cashing in. Finally Johnny Ringo, whom he and Doc had taken out, though few knew how they’d managed it, the law calling it suicide.

Wyatt shut the curtain on the steam-drifting depot and lay back in the berth. Not by nature a reflective man, he could not at first fathom this rush of memories; finally he guessed it was Kate Elder showing up and springing a Doc Holliday, Jr., on him, and the prospect of seeing Bat Masterson, and a ride through Arizona where, like Frank Stilwell in that Tucson trainyard, a man could expect to see a ghost or two.

Then he was asleep again.

The rest of the trip brought occasional memories—such as when the
Limited
passed Trinidad, New Mexico, where Bat had been sheriff, and Wyatt had to ask him to go fetch Doc in Denver on a phony extradition so the Tombstone murder charges didn’t catch up with him.

And also Dodge City, Kansas, which had put Wyatt on the map, and maybe vice versa.

But, mostly, he dozed in his seat between big, wonderful meals, and played poker half the night with men of means who were just delighted to lighten their wallets for the chance to sit down at cards with a real American hero like Wyatt Earp.

Who was he to contradict the sons of bitches?

Four

A SEVERAL-HOUR STOP IN CHICAGO—WHERE HE had come into LaSalle Street Station but had to walk over to Dearborn Station to catch the 20th Century—meant Wyatt Earp did not reach New York City till late afternoon Friday.

Alligator valise in hand, he made his way from the platform into the elegant cavernous echoing concourse with polished marble everywhere and afternoon sunlight slanting in like swords in a magician’s box through windows taller than most buildings. Grand Central Terminal had been built only six or seven years ago, on the site of the old one; but this grandiose gateway to New York already felt like it had been here just a little longer than Egypt’s pyramids.

The crowd was considerable, a mix of travelers coming and businesspeople going, with the red hats of colored porters bobbing in the bustle. How odd to be in a station with no smell of smoke, no carbon fumes, the trains themselves hidden away like poor relations. The vast vaulted ceiling was nighttime blue with the expected stars, though slowing to squint up at these indoor constellations, he thought they weren’t quite right. Were they backwards?

Shrugging, he skirted the central circular information booth past ticket booths and up the gentle slope toward the street, past the glass of restaurants, bars, barbershop, drugstores, and more. On his way, he was jostled without apology perhaps half a dozen times, but no one had tried to pick his pocket, which was politeness of a sort.

Frontier reputation aside, Wyatt was no stranger to a big town—he’d lived a good ten years in the City of Angels, and Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis and even Chicago had been his gambler’s stamping grounds. But hitting the sidewalk at the corner of Forty-second Street and Vanderbilt Avenue on a cool spring afternoon, he was not fully prepared for
this
big a town.

With its shifting sea of pedestrians and its bedlam of motor and streetcar traffic—horseless carriages outnumbering horse-drawn by a wide margin—Midtown Manhattan stopped Wyatt Earp in his tracks. He stood as motionless as the Greek statues that surrounded the massive clock surmounting the imposing terminal, frozen heroes who towered over him even as the buff skyscrapers towered over them, like tombstones in the graveyard of God’s sky…not that he could make out much sky.

The taxi driver who took Wyatt to the
Morning Telegraph
at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue provided plenty of local color along the way, including that the newspaper was quartered in what had been an old streetcar stable, back before the cars had been electrified.

“You wouldn’t expect to find a paper this far uptown,” the hackie said, a little hook-nosed feller in a blue plaid cap, about two blocks from their destination. “You heard of Park Row?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s Newspaper Central in this burg. Most of the other dailies are down there. Of course, the
Telegraph
is not your typical rag.”

“That so.”

“Well, you’re going there. You must know.”

And he did know: the paper his old friend Bat worked for specialized in theatrical, financial and sports news, with horse racing edging out boxing by a nose.

He did not reward the chatty cabby with anything more than the nickel tip he’d intended, and soon he and his valise were threading through a second-floor city room adrift with blue tobacco haze and alive with typewriter clatter and littered with small cluttered desks at which shirtsleeved scribes toiled and smoked, except for a poker game on the periphery, where copy was being proofed between pots. Passage was made difficult by a variety of humans in the aisles, loud guys with louder clothes sporting derbies or boaters and sucking ciggies or chewing stogies and who belonged either to the gambling or show-business worlds, while bobbed-haired chorus girls sat perched on desks displaying plenty of calf and patiently filing their nails, waiting for reporters banging away at the keys in a hurry to rush through work before coming out to play.

Wyatt didn’t ask directions of anybody, since few of these people worked here. Besides, he could see Bat through the glass in one of a quartet of window-and-woodframe offices at the far end of the city-room chaos. Bat’s back was to him, but the oval skull was unmistakable, as were the broad shoulders on the medium frame. No typewriter for those gunfighter’s hands: Bat was working with pen and ink, scratching away at foolscap.

Wyatt knocked on a sliver of woodframe, rattling the window that said sports editor but lacked Bat’s name, and Bat swiveled on his chair and the familiar light-blue eyes widened under the thick slashes of dark eyebrow.

From the start they’d been dissimilar in appearance—Wyatt tall and slim, Bat a good four or five inches shorter with a broad chest and compactly muscular. When they’d met in the buffalo camps in ’72, Wyatt was at twenty-four an old hand at frontier life, Bat at seventeen a greenhorn.

But not enough years could pass to prevent Wyatt recognizing those blue-gray eyes—intelligent, perceptive, sharp and, when called for, cold. He recognized them because he had them, too. Doc had once commented on the effect the two “spooky-eyed lawmen” could have, side by side, upon some “poor pitiful miscreant.”

In his shirtsleeves, a dark brown Windsor-knot tie loose around his collar, and crisp-creased light brown trousers (a matching coat hung with a black flat-topped derby on a coat tree), Bat was out of his chair like a man shot out of a cannon. He ushered Wyatt in, shaking his hand pump-handle-style and guiding him to a leather-cushioned couch under the row of windows, putting the city room to his guest’s back. Hands on his hips, Bat grinned and shook his head and chuckled, as he appraised his old friend.

“Wyatt,” Bat said, “you just don’t change—your hair goes white, and that’s about the sum total. I know it sure as hell isn’t clean living!”

Bat, considering he was in his late sixties, hadn’t changed much, either—a slight paunch and his hair was more salt than pepper, and the trim mustache was gone. But even now Bat had a snub-nosed, dimple-chinned boyish quality.

“Bartholomew,” Wyatt said, “you look well-fed.”

Half a smile dimpled a cheek as plump and rosy as a baby’s. The wordsmith seemed to appreciate the layered insult expressed so succinctly, starting with Bat despising his given name “Bartholomew” and having long ago affected “William Barclay” Masterson.

Bat drew his swivel chair up and sat facing Wyatt with hands on knees and both sides of the smile going, now. “If you’re implying I’ve gone to seed, I’ll have you know I cleaned the clock of a younger man just last week, in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria.”

“I was thinking more along the lines you’d got fat. Who was this crippled youth?”

Bat drew a package of Lucky Strikes from his breast pocket, did not bother offering a cigarette to Wyatt, knowing his friend smoked only cigars, and lighted up. “Remember Colonel Dick Plunkett? Arrested Ed O’Kelly in Crede for killing Bob Ford?”

“I remember him. I don’t remember him being a colonel.”

Bat let out a smoke-exhale laugh. “He was just another deputy. Deputies were a dime a dozen in those days.”

“Yeah, and we were two of ’em. Only this Plunkett’s surely no youngster.”

“No, but he was in the company of a cocky young editor from some Texas paper or other, feller setting up interviews. The two were telling every reporter in town except yours truly, of course, that Bat Masterson was a fraud and a fake and a phony and held in low opinion by
real
Westerners.”

“A shame,” Wyatt said.

Bat shifted in the swivel chair. “I believe the point was to get Plunkett enough publicity to land himself a spot in a Wild West Show. Which is a fine place for a broken-down nobody like Plunkett and I would not begrudge him—but making a goat out of me to get himself some glory? Would I put up with that?”

“Likely not.”

“Anyway, Plunkett was carrying this old six-shooter with him, and you know, I still carry a marshal’s badge in the state of New York, Teddy Roosevelt arranged it some years ago…it’s mostly honorary now, but as I say, I showed the ‘Colonel’ the badge and shoved him, just a tad…. Are you listening?”

“I can listen with my eyes closed.”

“Oh. I thought maybe you dropped off for a nap there, elderly gentleman that you are.”

Wyatt opened his eyes. “No, I was just trying to picture this fascinating tale. Maybe with Bill Hart in the lead.”

Bat grinned and the cigarette almost fell from his mouth as he said, “You know, he’d be good as me. That would make a hell of a movie, Bill Hart playing me. Where was I?”

“Shoving some codger around in the Waldorf lobby.”

“Right. Well, the young pipsqueak from Texas, the editor, name of Dinklesheets…Dinklesheets! What the hell kind of name is Dinklesheets, anyway?”

“A stupid one.”

“This Dinklesheets hauls off and pastes me one.”

“Do tell.”

“So I pasted him back, knocked him down. Promptly, he was hearing birdies tweet and bleeding out his mouth. But old Plunkett still had that gun on him, so I shoved my hand in my jacket pocket and indicated I had the drop on him, and the old boy just put up his hands and didn’t even bend to dab the blood off from the corners of his companion’s damaged mouth.”

Wyatt said, “You still carry a gun?”

“Time to time,” Bat said, then lifted the deck of cigarettes from his breast pocket again, “but I was just pointing a pack of these at ’im. That’s about the whole story. Hotel detective came up and requested I leave.”

“And of course you’re not one to stay where you’re not wanted.”

“Not me!” He tapped cigarette ash onto the filthy wooden floor. “Listen, your timing is good as ever. I just put the finishing touches on my Sunday column. The evening stretches out ahead of us in possibility like an endless prairie.”

“I don’t mind you being a writer,” Wyatt said with a frown. “But please God don’t talk like one.”

Bat ignored that, slapping his thighs, getting to his feet. “You’ll stay with Emma and me at our apartment, of course.”

“I’m not one to impose…”

“Of course you are, but you won’t be. Emma has a fondness for you resulting from never ever having spent much time with you. And I’ve misled her, because I speak so highly of you since, of course, it only enhances my standing.”

“Of course.”

“Let me just arrange for an office boy to walk your bag over to the apartment—just a few blocks from here, but we’re not headed that way.”

“Where are we headed?”

But Bat didn’t answer, stepping out of the glassed-in office with Wyatt’s alligator bag and returning in two minutes empty-handed, having sent a harried-looking lad off with it.

“Hope you didn’t eat on the train,” Bat said.

“Not since lunch. After four days, even Fred Harvey’s cooking gets tiresome.”

“Well, we’ll have a wonderful meal, take in a fight, and along the way I’ll fill you in about this kid of Doc’s. Chip off the old block.”

“A mean drunken lunger with a nasty sense of humor?”

Bat shook his head. “Not a chunk, a chip—grab your hat…. Couldn’t you have worn a Stetson?”

“This is a Stetson.”

“No, I mean a
Stetson
, with a nice wide brim. I’m going to be introducing you around as Wyatt Earp and in that goddamned homburg, you just don’t look the part.”

With this, Bat snugged his tie and donned his trademark derby; he seemed to have abandoned the other trademark, his gold-topped cane, but Wyatt noted the limp from the King gunfight was still present.