City of Widows (6 page)

He laid his cards face up. He had a ten-high straight. I showed him a heart flush.

“One thing he don't want.” Junior sat back. “He don't want them cards coming off the wrong end of the deck. If you're fixing to keep on doing that in here, you best get a whole lot better at it fast. John Whiteside's hands will sew you up in a green hide and leave you out in the sun to cogitate on your sins.”

“I only cheat when it doesn't count. How about a new layout?”

“I have the catalogue. Pick out what you want and we'll order it. No billiard tables, mind. You will find all you need strung out along the Jornada del Muerto, complete with the bones of the wagoneers that tried to slide them past the Apaches. Those killers have got a Philadelphia Ladies League mad on against that game. Old Cochise must have had him a snookering.” He watched me laying out a hand of patience. “Did you make the acquaintance of our local James Butler Hickok?”

“Oh, Marshal Ortiz and I are old friends. He showed me his children and his roses.”

“Ten years from now those kids are going to make Quantrill's raiders look like
East Lynne.
We had the frame up on a schoolhouse when two of them burned it down. Almost wiped out San Sábado. Rosario only has the job because he will work for found. Did he tell you he killed his wife?”

“It came up during the conversation.”

“It generally does. It's the only thing ever happened to him worth talking about. Story I heard when I came was he caught her on the floor between pews in the mission with a Yaquí mine worker, missed him, and shot her clean to hell. Personally I think he done it by accident while seating a charge in that old ball-and-percussion pistol he uses to shoot stray dogs and coyotes. If them kids can't get him mad enough to beat the devil out of them I don't see how his wife could do it just by misplacing her vows.”

“You never married, I guess.”

“Did you?”

“I thought about it. I can see how it could make you mad enough.”

“Hell, yes,
you.
Not Ortiz.”

I placed a red deuce on a black trey. “Did he soak you five dollars when you registered?”

He nodded. “Eille MacNutt too, and a dollar for every whore besides. Our sheriff must have enough to retire on registration fees alone, when you figure in all the saloons and sporting houses in the county. Then there's the percentage he gets for collecting taxes.”

“That's a job of work. Cattlemen are a rough cob when it comes to paying their fair share.”

“Not when you have an assassin like that deputy of his siding you,” he said.

“Jubilo? He didn't strike me as the kind.”

“Nobody knows a Mexican but another Mexican. The talk is a firing squad's waiting for him across the border. Then there was that business up in Lincoln with both Baronets. Ross or Frank killed this poor dumb rancher, but they say Jubilo done for the wife. Spooner, their name was. Dave and Vespa. Shot dead in front of their own house.”

“I heard Frank might not have been in on that.”

“Ross never done a thing that Frank didn't know about it. If he wasn't there you can be damn sure he told Ross where to put the slugs. All them Spooners done wrong was to side with Chisum against Dolan and Murphy. I guess they were what you would call an example.”

“The sheriff seems to favor those.” I touched the swelling along my temple where he'd laid the barrel of his Remington.

“Frank done that? I noticed but I didn't want to ask. What did you do that stirred him up?”

“Not much. I threatened to kill a stable hand.”

He grinned and shook his head. “I swear, Page, you always did draw fire. I remember that time in Missoula—”

“So do I.” I went bust and gathered up the cards. “I sure do shine at picking a spot to settle down.”

6

I
WASN
'
T IN
town Friday when the stage came in from El Paso. A saloon is a low place to be mornings, with sunlight lying on the cheap stain that passes for elegant mahogany at night and the human debris hunched in the corners over the first glass of the day with their buttons all undone because their hands are shaking too hard to fasten them. No one is gambling, at least not with anything as meaningless and as much fun as money. I put on my trail clothes and rode out for some target practice in the bright blue open. The trigger pull of the Deane-Adams needed sweetening from time to time and so did my aim. Marshaling wasn't the only profession that required those things up to the mark. There were a lot of bad gamblers out there who weren't aware that money was meaningless and as much fun to lose as it was to win.

The claybank liked the snappy cold of a desert morning, arching its long neck and cocking its legs high as if running involved less effort than standing still. I tethered it to a low piñon tree and walked away fifty yards to pot at stones and elbows on branches, watching out the corner of my eye for its reaction to gunfire. It snapped up its head after the first shot, then reached back to bite an itch. John Whiteside, who had fought Indians and Mexicans and Johnny Rebs both on foot and from horseback, had trained it well.

The coach driver, around thirty with a full beard and that facial twitch you saw often in men who spent much of their time trying to keep arrowheads and bandits' bullets out of their backs, was checking the team for fistulas in front of the freight office when I returned. I saw that rather than waste one of his pretty Concords on a flyspeck like San Sábado, Mr. Butterfield had sent a common mud wagon, open on both sides with only canvas flaps between passengers and the weather. The seats were empty now and the luggage gone.

I found Junior conferring with the cedar chief in front of the Apache Princess, smoking a tailor-made with ladylike puffs to avoid drawing smoke too far into his finely balanced system. The day was warming up but he still wore a sheepskin over his frock coat and vest and a wideawake hat that made him look like something stunted in the shade of the great brim. “Our partner got in an hour ago and is waiting for us at
Señora
Castillo's boardinghouse,” he said. “The
señora
is one of our celebrated widows. Ugly as a washboard and cooks like one, but it's the only place to stay in town until we get a hotel built. I didn't know we'd need another room when I put up this place.”

“Who is he, Jay Gould? Why can't he meet us here?”

“You saw the stage. Would you feel like walking this distance once you finished scrubbing off New Mexico?”

“This rig okay to meet him in, or do I need a morning coat?”

“Let's go. You are the complainingest partner.”

The house was on an alley off the main street and was probably the oldest wooden building in town, built of barked logs with the chinking as thick in places as a man's wrist.
Señora
Castillo, older yet, greeted us at the door holding a straw broom in the fashion of a weapon. She was as dark and wrinkled as a chili pepper and bent nearly double in a coarse black dress with a dusty hem and hundreds of black bead buttons up the front. A plain gray scarf completely covered her hair. No eyes showed in the black crescent hollows between the puckered lids. I had seen more life in Aztec masks. When Junior told her what we were about she turned and led the way inside, dragging both feet with a sound like a locomotive champing at the platform.

The parlor was a combination of Mexican and Chicago Victorian. Oval portraits of bitter-faced men in whiskers hung on the log walls, a serape covered most of the worn spots on an overstuffed sofa, a tea table with yellow pottery on it stood on an earthen floor swept as bare as tile. The place smelled of extinct meals and dry rot.

“Good morning, Marshal. I suppose it is Mr. Murdock now.”

I stopped, letting Junior walk past me to the middle of the room. The voice coming from the direction of the sofa was husky for a woman, slightly roughened from years of calling for wagers in smoky barrooms full of loud men in a fever to lose their gold dust and coppers. She had aged some—her cheekbones were more pronounced and there was a vertical crease where before there had been only white forehead as smooth as glaze—but her hair, done up loosely, was still Indian black and the eyes, set just a shade too wide, were clear blue with tiny gold points floating in them like snowflakes in a crystal paperweight. The mouth was excessive too for fashion but well formed, the chin cut delicately but firm. Her dress was cambric, plain white and cut simply to her clean figure and closed at the throat with an amber brooch set in rose gold. The contrast with her black patent leather high-tops, and with the dark colors that surrounded her, was marked. But then I knew from old experience that it was her business to stand out.

“Just Murdock will serve,” I said. “Is it still Mrs. Bower, or have you gone back to Poker Annie?”

“I never went by it. That was a mistake on a circular that went out in Dakota and it stuck. The circular was a mistake as well. I see you are as sweet-natured as ever.”

“Mrs. Colleen Bower, Page Murdock,” Junior said. “The old man always insisted I was born a day late and managed to fall behind an hour a year. I had a notion you two were old acquaintances. It had to be more than just your reputation that almost backed Mrs. Bower out of the deal when your name came up.”

She had been dabbing at her throat with a lace handkerchief when we entered, blotting the moisture that surfaced in the dry heat through pores freshly open from the bath. Now she returned the pretty to the reticule in her lap, white satin with a black drawstring. “Breen, Montana, is a ghost city now. Lumber rats got the boards after the cattle interests pulled out, leaving just the foundations and broken glass where the saloons were. Two years ago it was wide open and filled with desperate men. Mr. Murdock held his own.”

“Mrs. Bower is a fair judge of that breed. She's known so many.”

“That's small even for a killer.”

I pointed my chin at the purse. “Do you still carry that pocket pistol in your bag, or have you stitched the holster to your petticoat by now?”

Junior interrupted. “A gentleman never discusses underwear with a lady. Anyway we are here to talk business. Sundays are for reminiscing.”

“Sit, Mr. Murdock. I assume you still bend far enough for that.”

I thought about answering. Instead I stepped past a walnut rocker and pulled up a ladder-back that someone had promoted from the trash pile and put back into use with splints and buckhide thongs. A thousand acres of dust had settled since the last time I had wanted to be comfortable in Colleen Bower's company.

“Now we are all friends.” Junior perched on the opposite end of the sofa, placing his hat in his lap. “Let's not show off our Spanish, by the by. The old hag has ears like a bat.”
Señora
Castillo had removed herself through a doorway behind a hanging shawl.

“I will come to the point. As I recall, you favor that approach over all the others.” Flecked blue eyes fixed me. “As Junior said, when we met in El Paso and he told me you were involved I considered withholding my end. However, my situation there was hardly an improvement.”

I nodded. “Poke Allyard was marshal there last I heard. He isn't the kind to be gotten around with paint and scent like the late peace officer of Breen.”

“The circuit is a cruel enough place for a man. Try being a woman and see if you don't employ what God gave you to keep you in biscuits and sardines. To continue. This is a business relationship as Junior pointed out. Men are finding silver all over this country and the butchers in Chicago are standing by the U.P. tracks with their knives out just waiting for that cheap Mexican beef. El Paso—”

“Cheap meaning stole,” Junior said.

“‘Every great fortune begins with a crime.' Balzac.” She kept looking at me. “El Paso is too far for these cowboys and miners to go to spend their money on cards and liquor. There are too many Apaches on the way to Socorro City and a bandit behind every piñon tree between here and old Mexico. San Sábado promises to become the next Tombstone. I'm certain you know what that signifies.”

“For starters I'm happy it's not my job to keep the peace. All the news I hear from Tombstone has hair and fangs.”

“A fine peace you kept in Breen.”

“It got kept. I didn't seek the post. Your benefactor strangled on a piece of gristle and Judge Blackthorne appointed me.”

“Beside the point. I should not have brought it up, What I am driving at is people are making their fortunes in Tombstone. We could make ours here if we will only forget the back trail and pull together between the traces.”

“I have nothing against making a fortune.”

“Then perhaps we should start by shaking hands.” She offered me one of hers.

I let out air and took it. It was as cool and smooth as I remembered, all except the small callosities on the fingertips from handling pasteboards and chips. She had been clutching her reticule with it, and when she changed hands I admired the plain band on the third finger of the left. I knew her as a self-made widow who didn't wear one. “I guess good wishes are in order.”

“Thank you.” She withdrew her right and placed it on top of the other, covering the ring. “Now that we have smoked the peace pipe, you can settle a point. For weeks now Junior and I have been burning up the wires arguing over whether the Apache Princess should be renovated. I hold that it should.”

“Why renovated? It's only just built.”

“That's what I said.” Junior pushed the dents out of the wideawake's crown and put them back in.

“You and I and Junior Harper are not the only people on the frontier with vision,” she said. “Once we begin separating these miners and cowboys from their pokes, just how long do you think it will be before this town has more saloons than widows? If we are going to draw more than just a grubstake to start over somewhere else when the others crowd us out, we must plan to meet the competition now. Junior informs me that you are adamant about not keeping whores.”