City of Widows (2 page)

“His niece took a course in Chicago.”

“Comely, no doubt. I knew his wife when he was courting her.”

“She's his sister's child.”

“Oh.” He unstuck his pen from the blotter, dipped it, and signed his name to the bottom of the letter. “I won't guarantee its efficacy in Socorro County,” he said, sprinkling sand on the ink from a little glass container bearing the United States seal. “Frank Baronet is the sheriff. He and his twin brother Ross rode for the Dolan-Murphy syndicate during the late unpleasantness in Lincoln County. Ross was wounded in a raid on a ranch house that left a small cattleman and his wife slain and is believed to be either recovering and in hiding or dead somewhere below the border. No witnesses came forward to connect Frank to the raid but he rode off anyway and got himself elected down there; Jimmy Dolan has friends all over the territory and they throw a wide loop. My predecessor was a Dolan man. You can draw from that the extent of my influence in that country.”

I thanked him for the letter and put it away. “I shouldn't have too many dealings with him after this one. He's in Socorro City and the Apache Princess is in San Sábado.”

Rising from his seat, he hesitated. “That is a harsh place to spend your retirement from law enforcement. The town has a rough history. It's sheltered bandits and revolutionaries since the time of Cortez. Three times in the past, vendettas have wiped out its male population. The Mexicans call it
La Ciudad de Las Viudas.
”

I stood. “I didn't get much opportunity to practice my Spanish up in Montana.”

“It means The City of Widows.” He extended a grave hand. “Go with God, Deputy.”

2

Sheriff's Office

Socorro County

City of Socorro, N.M.T.

Aug. 15, 1881

Mr. __________:

Your Presence is requested at the Execution of HERNANDO PADILLA

For the Murder of Ernestine “Mexican Red” Grosvenor. To take place in the Yard of the Socorro County Jail on

Monday, August 22, 1881.

(signed)

FRANCIS S. K. BARONET, Sheriff

About a dozen of the invitations, printed on coarse gray stock with a black border, stood in a pile on the yellow oak counter separating the customer's side of the office from the side where the serious business was conducted. It was a big swept room smelling of oiled wood and sun, uncluttered, with lath and plaster over the adobe and two big brick-framed windows in front. The door to a hallway leading to the cells in back stood open. There were two desks with chairs and a big worktable supporting a parchment-colored map of the county, its corners held down by odd office items and an empty tequila bottle. Wanted readers and telegraph flimsies layered a corkboard like shingles and a buffalo gun with an octagonal barrel shared a wall rack with matched Winchesters, a Henry, and a Stevens ten-gauge cut back to within an inch of its usefulness. It looked like every other place on the frontier where the local law was upheld. I think I must have missed the issue of
Harper's Weekly
that set the standard.

“Go ahead.”

It occurred to me as I turned that I was getting out of marshaling just in time. I hadn't heard the owner of the voice coming in behind me. He was at least half Indian, or all Mexican, which that close to Chihuahua amounted to the same thing. Short, thick, and brown, he had eyes as black and shiny as beetles in slits without lashes and a wide mouth with triangles of moustache at the corners. He wore a Stetson the way it had come from the factory, with neither dent nor dimple in the crown and as flat in the brim as a tortilla, a clean white shirt buttoned to the throat, and striped trousers reinforced with leather and stuffed into the tops of stovepipe boots. His age was indeterminate. A Smith & Weston .44, the Russian, with the slim black rubber grip and a bow spur on the trigger guard, rode high on his hip in a left-handed holster and he was carrying a Remington Creedmoor rifle with a folding sight. The brass star on his shirt bore no engraving.

“Go ahead,” he repeated, “take one. Be sure and fill in your name before you present it.”

I said, “I don't expect to be in town on the twenty-second. Do you always give out invitations to whoever blows in?”

“Not as a matter of general practice. The sheriff likes a good crowd for a hanging—he says that's what separates a lynching from a legal execution—but Nando was the town barber and a good one and nobody much wants to see him dangle. Jury might not have convicted him except the town needs whores more than it needs barbers. Mexican Red had a following.” He leaned his rifle in the corner by the front door. “You'd be the fellow from the train. Oz Alanson at the freight office seen three people get off. You don't look like a pipe drummer from Detroit and you sure ain't Ernst Schwimmer's wife Gretchen.”

“Page Murdock.” I grasped a hard sandy palm with more strength in it than he was bothering to employ. “If you're Frank Baronet, I have a letter for you.”

He showed me two gold teeth. “Hell, you ain't that much bigger than me. What kind of wages is that Satan paying these days?”

“I hoped that hadn't got down this far.” At that moment I wanted that half-dime novelist standing in front of me more than a woman.

“Oh, we get all the latest since the A.T. and S.F. came through. The name's Jubilo, I'm the full-time deputy. This time of day you'll find Mr. Baronet at the Orient. He owns the game there.”

“Just Jubilo?”

His face now looked as if any smile that tried to light there would curl up and blow away. “I don't use the other. It was just my mother's.”

I thanked him for the information and went out to find the Orient.

Walking felt good after another eighteen hours in the cars. I'd dropped off my necessaries at a hotel named for the town and county, visited a bathhouse that brushed suits while you washed, and with a shave and a change of shirts I felt closer to civilized man than I had at any time since Montana. My interview with Governor Wallace in Santa Fe had been just brief enough to allow me to catch the next train south, which was how my luck had been running lately.

Socorro City showed all the signs of a town on the grow. Buckboards and buggies outnumbered saddle horses on the street. Frame buildings were clattering up among the adobe and lumber was stacked everywhere, some of it under armed guard because by the time it was cut and milled in the mountains to the west and transported by wagon to the building sites it was worth nearly as much as a shipment of silver. Four men in shirtsleeves and paint-drizzled overalls were at work in front of a sign shop, where a dozen fresh placards were already curing against the side of the building. Most of them seemed to advertise real estate brokers. There were a stove works, a billiard hall, and four saloons on a main street as wide as a pasture. Prospectors came there for supplies and trail herders stopped there to cut the dust on their way across the border to borrow cattle from the old Spanish grandees.

The pride of the Orient, and likely the inspiration for its name, seemed to be a paneled bar as long as an express car, lacquered black with cherry blossoms painted on the front. Antelope heads decorated the back wall and a six-foot painting of a belly dancer in a frame crusted over with gilt cupids dominated one end of a room built along the lines of a shotgun to accommodate a narrow lot. At that afternoon hour all the tables were occupied. When I asked for Frank Baronet a bartender with a strawberry mark on his forehead and a bulldog pistol standing in a water tumbler at his right elbow pointed out the faro table.

“You playing?” he asked.

“Not today.”

“You'd best wait then till he finishes off that fellow. When it comes to kibitzers Frank is no Christian. There's an empty chair at that corner table if you're drinking. Billy the Kid sat there when he shot Feeny MacAdo last December. Straight through the heart at fifty-four feet.”

“This Kid must have been hell on a stick. It can't be twenty feet from there to the door.”

“Nineteen and a half. Feeny was eating his breakfast in the Chicago House across the street when Fate struck him down.”

I left the corner table to the Kid's ghost and went over to watch the game.

A sallow-faced man in a bowler and fresh collar that made his skin look even more unhealthy was bucking the tiger. He had a large stack of chips and eyes that never left the board except to follow the dealer's movements when he slid a counter in the cue box. The dealer was as lean as a lodgepole and sat as stiffly, with an embroidered pillow doubled behind his back for support. He was sheathed in a black vest and green-striped shirtsleeves with garters to match the stripes and parted his black hair in the center. He had modest handlebars, a predatory nose, and an odd habit of batting his eyelids rapidly, like a sporting lady. It seemed a clumsy signaling device, but as there was no one standing behind the player I assumed it was some kind of tic. They say Jesse James suffered from a similar affliction.

A counter moved. The player studied the board, sucked on his cigar. He put it down and slid a stack of reds onto the five of spades. The dealer drew two cards out of the box and laid them face up on the table. The first was the deuce of hearts. The second was the five of spades.

The dealer exhaled softly. “Sid, you are part Irish today. I never saw such a run.”

“How many turns left?” Sid asked.

“Nine.”

“Wrong again, Frank. It's ten.”

“Well, why the hell did you ask if you knew the answer?”

“I got a side bet with Lyle Ring on just how big a liar you are.” He moved his chips to another card. “Draw again.”

“Sheriff Baronet?” I said.

The dealer winced and reached back to adjust his pillow. Three points of a nickel-plated star poked out of a pocket in his vest. “Later, mister. I have just ten more chances to bust this gentleman out. After that you just might be bringing your business to Sheriff Sidney L. Boone.”

I recognized the name. “The real estate broker. I think your sign's done.”

The player picked up his cigar and drew on it. His attention remained on the board.

“I'm Page Murdock,” I told Baronet. “I guess you know me better around here as Satan's Sixgun.”

“Give me a minute, Sid.” The player shrugged and sat back smoking and glowering at the board. Baronet blinked, regarding me. “You're a lot south of your pasture, Marshal. We've had our sorrows with that cow crowd, getting drunk and shooting up innocent greasers they take for Don Segundo's vaqueros, but we are on top of it. It never was a federal matter.”

“That's all behind me,” I said. “I'm fixed to go into private enterprise in San Sábado. Junior Harper has sold me half of the Apache Princess. I'm here to see if that's all right with Socorro County.”

“You no longer keep the peace?”

“Only my own.”

He counted his chips. His other hand dangled off the back of his chair near the pillow. “I'm concerned about this yellowback business. It might draw fire. Some pissant
pistolero
reads his nickel's worth and decides to find out for himself if you sizzle on the griddle. He shoots you or you shoot him. Either way somebody has to dig a hole. The newspapers forget all about Tombstone and here I am sitting on six hundred thousand square miles of sand and scorpion shit and no prospects. It's happened in milder places than this.”

“Maybe they'll decide to publish this instead.” I handed him Governor Wallace's letter.

He read it quickly and handed it back. “That carpetbagger. Things were just becoming settled in Lincoln County when he brought in the federals and stirred them back up. It killed my brother, Ross.”

“I heard he was wounded in some kind of raid.”

“He ran wild, I don't deny it. Ross hadn't my temperament or he would not have lashed out. He died last month of the blood fever in a cave in Chihuahua.”

“I saw him three weeks ago in Juarez,” Sid Boone said. “He looked fit to me.”

“You're mistaken.” Baronet batted his eyes at me. “I went through there on my way to bury Ross. We were twins. People confused us often.”

“Ross is two inches shorter and twenty pounds heavier. I guess I can tell you apart.”

“Someone else, then.”

I put away the letter. “What about the partnership?”

“The Princess has a quiet reputation,” Baronet said. “Anyway the ordinance against any new saloons expired last week. I look forward to trying my luck at your table.”

I thanked him, hesitated. “How large is the caliber in that pillow?”

He had good teeth behind the moustaches, blue-white against the New Mexico tan. From behind the embroidered pillow he drew a Remington Rolling Block pistol with a fifty-caliber bore. I could have reached inside with my fingers and plucked out the ball.

“I didn't know buffalo came this far down,” I said.

“Single-shot.” He turned it sideways, admiring its lazy-J lines. “I've found that in indoor shooting, one slug this size is sufficient. What's that you carry?”

I pulled aside my coattail to show the chicken-bone butt of the five-shot in the dropover holster. “Deane-Adams. English gun. It fires Colt's forty-five, but only if I load the cartridges myself.”

“Frank.” Sid Boone put out his cigar.

The sheriff laid down the Remington and dealt two cards. I thanked him again and left.

The Socorro Hotel was one of the older adobe structures on a side street. My room was cool in the daytime desert heat but included a scooped-out fireplace for the chilly evenings. A Navajo saddle blanket did for a rug on the planks. There was a crucifix on the wall above the iron bedstead and a cornshuck mattress that felt like spun clouds when I stretched out on it in my clothes, and to hell with the rustling and scratching when I turned over. A Mexican as old as cornmeal and frijoles, shriveled down no bigger than my thumb in peasant cotton and rope sandals that slapped his feet like shutters, came in at sundown with an armload of sticks and started a fire. When he left I got one boot off and dropped into the warmest blackest hole I had been in since childhood.