City of Widows (7 page)

“I am.”

“He holds the opinion that my presence alone will draw customers away from the women at the Mare's Nest.”

I looked at him. “You said that?”

“Not first thing,” he said. “They will all want their turn, women of easy virtue being an improvement over a knothole in the side of a buckboard, if you'll disregard my coarse language, ma'am.” He'd have tipped his hat if he were wearing it. “My guess is you haven't seen the Mare's Nest women yet.”

“That bad?”

“Coyote girls, the lot. You know, when you wake up to find one laying on your arm and you chew it off to get away. Once they have all had their turn they will come here to look at something that reminds them of a female. Don't forget these are men who will ride forty miles to see a picture of Lillie Langtry. All the renovation we require is to paint ‘Poker Annie' in big yellow letters under the Cold Beer sign and they will bet on there being fifty-three cards in a standard deck just for the opportunity to sit across the table from Mrs. Bower and tell their friends about it back in camp.”

I grinned. “Junior, how is it no one sold you the governor's palace in Santa Fe on your way down here?”

He looked blank. “I came by way of El Paso.”

Colleen reached across the sofa to pat his knee. “You're a ring-tailed dreamer and that's why I took you up on your proposition and came here. Boomtowns attract good-looking women. In six months I will look like
Señora
Castillo next to some of them. Ask Murdock.”

“That's true enough. They follow the market.”

“Lumber is cheap now,” she said. “We need to expand, build a gaming room in back. That will allow more than just faro and poker and free up space here for more drinking and a stage. I know a theatrical agent in Saint Louis who can supply talent, singers and tumblers and Shakespearean companies. It would surprise you to learn how starved these illiterate tinpans are for
Troilus and Cressida.
Next month they are auctioning off the fixtures at the Crystal Palace in El Paso. The owner shot himself over a marital misunderstanding and his widow needs cash. We can pick up a hickory bar and brass pulls and a chandelier with gimcrackery and doodads. Items like those are bound to impress the rubes clean out of their overalls and everything in the pockets. People will read about the Apache Princess in Boston.”

“I have a line on a bar.” Junior was petulant.

“What will we use to acquire all this elegance, besides a six-shooter?” I asked.

“We can borrow the money and offer the saloon as collateral.”

Junior bared his teeth. “Borrow from who, Geronimo? The nearest bank with that kind of capital is in Santa Fe and it won't gamble on anything this close to the border. It's the first place I went when I decided to become a saloonkeeper.”

“There has to be someone in the vicinity with means and the itch to increase them. A rancher.”

He shook his head. “That'd be John Whiteside, but everything he has is tied up in cattle. I doubt he would invest in an enterprise in town anyway.”

“Frank Baronet.”

Four eyes met mine. Junior's treadle-shaped jaw fell open. “That diamondback son of a bitch? Your pardon,” he said to Colleen.

But she wasn't listening. “Who is he? Does he have money?”

I told her who he was. “Sheriffing is a porkbarrel job out here. He gets to claim a percentage of the taxes he collects, and the registration fees and whatnot he imposes by his own order probably go into his personal war chest. On top of that he has the gaming concession at the Orient in Socorro City and who knows how large a piece of how many others. It's his county, he answers to no one but the governor, and he doesn't answer to this governor. Then his brother is a desperado, a dead one officially but alive probably, and successful. Brothers share. Yes, I would say he has money.”

“You don't make him sound like a friend. Would he be interested in investing?”

“I've only known him a short time. With some people that's all you need. My impression is if this place has as much potential as you say, he'll find a way to cut himself in even if we don't invite him. Especially if we don't. This way at least we'd have some of his money to play with.”

“And his hand in our pocket till Gabriel blows.” Junior stood and tugged on his hat. “You know my position. The notion of cutting Frank Baronet in as a fourth partner don't sweeten the tea.”

“That's one vote. Murdock?”

“I've sided worse. At least we can trust Baronet to deal us dirt if he sees the chance. It's the not being sure that makes most arrangements go south.”

“Call that a vote yes. Carried. We'll discuss the details tonight. I'm dealing.”

I was looking down at her now. “Friday is the first good night of the week. I might have known you'd claim it.”

“The Princess has more than one table, and I have my own board and cue box. Deal or don't.” She lifted a book off the arm of the sofa and opened it. The title on the pebbled cover read
The Gentleman's Guide to Percentages in Games of Chance.

Outside, Junior asked, “Are you really fixing to climb into bed with Baronet after what he done to you in Socorro City?”

“That was personal. This is business. The protection of his office is worth something. Anyway he'll nickel and dime us to death if we don't.”

“I'm opposed to it.” Suddenly he grinned; his disposition had more varieties than the weather in Montana. “I thought for a minute there you and Colleen was going for your irons.”

“I wish you'd told me she was the partner.”

“Swear to God, you spend a winter with a man in a line shack you think you know him. I never suspected.”

“Suspected what?”

“That you could fall in love so hard.”

7

A
S IT HAPPENED
, Colleen Bower and I didn't have the chance to discuss renovations that night. Early on the gamblers were stacked six deep at her table to play and watch, and later I had to kill a man, which makes concentration difficult.

I dealt a few hands of faro and finished ahead, no slight accomplishment when you consider it's the serious ones who keep track of the cards who will sit at a man's table when someone like Poker Annie is dealing in the corner. Tonight she had a silver comb in her hair and a red silk choker around her neck that just naturally drew the eyes down the front of her dress, which was some kind of layered thing of lace and percale that made you think it was cut lower than it was, anchored at the shoulders by two simple bows. It was a rare bettor who could pay attention to the pasteboards when it looked like one of those bows would work loose any second, spilling her femaleness out over the table. Men have no understanding of costume architecture.

About ten o'clock I ran out of dedicated players and went to spell Irish Andy behind the bar. You couldn't have pounded a shim between customers there and for half an hour Junior and I were too busy washing and filling glasses to talk. When at last there was a lull he mopped his face and slung the towel over his shoulder. “I always wanted a job with a collar,” he said. “I never thought I'd be sweating into it so much. I might as well be roping and throwing.”

“This pays better and doesn't smell as bad. How are we doing?”

“Not as well as she is. What do you suppose it is makes a man bet so foolish with a woman he can't even have?”

“Judge Blackstone told me once there's no desert harder to cross than the two feet that separate a man's brain from his penis. He was hanging a man for rape at the time.”

“It ain't my business asking what soured you on her.”

I drew a beer for a miner at the end of the bar, sliding it down the side of the glass to cut down on foam, and skidded it into his hand. “She is too much cards for me. There were three sides to take in Breen and she laid side bets with all of them. If I lived she won. If I got killed she won too. A situation like that is hard on a man's good opinion of himself.”

“Might could be you were expecting too much.”

“No might-coulds about it,” I said. “But I won't compound the mistake by repeating it.”

“I don't know. Some of my best mistakes was made on the second run. How's the keg?”

I pulled the bung-starter out of its socket next to the sawed-off and gave the beer keg a couple of raps. “Better have one ready.”

“First one generally lasts past eleven on Friday. You have to stop being so generous, running the beer down the glass that way. We charge the same for air.”

I was putting away the starter when three fresh customers came through the flap door. Trouble clung to them like wolf scent.

Men had been coming in and going out, but when they arrived in a bunch they either stayed together or split between the bar and Colleen's table. This crew peeled off in three directions. One, puny and consumptive-looking in a duster snagged with nettles and a miner's cap made of greasy ticking, went straight to the table without pausing. Another, larger and bulkier in a slouch hat and a hide coat too heavy for the weather, stepped to the side wall and placed his back against it, the one spot in the room that yielded an unobstructed view of the tables, the bar, and the door to the street.

The third didn't look like he belonged with the first two. The shortest of the three and stocky, he wore a corduroy shooting coat with leather patches, a black plug hat with a feather in the band, and a cartridge belt slantwise across his chest loaded with rifle shells belonging to the .45-70 Springfield drooping lazily in his left hand. There was something about the set of the bones in his face, with its neat beard and swooping moustaches, that reminded me of someone, but that wasn't the thing about him so much as the way he took in the room, rotating his head without moving his eyes, and the easy unhurried way he stationed himself at the door, looking as if he had just stopped there to search for a familiar face.

I figured he was the one with the orders, but it was the man in the hide coat with his back to the wall I chose to favor. Any heavy wrap worn out of season is likely to conceal something you'd rather not have exposed. While I groped for the shotgun the man by the table tugged an 1860 Army Colt with a Theur conversion out from under his duster and pointed it at Colleen Bower's head, crackling back the hammer in the same motion.

“Lay back or she gets it.”

This from the man in the hide coat, who took advantage of my instant's hesitation to bring up a full-length Greener with both barrels already cocked. At that range the Apache Princess stood to lose two part owners, a number of paying customers, and several feet of bar. I laid back.

The room was quiet, painfully so after the rumble of male voices and thump and rustle of human activity that had been constant since just after sundown. Colleen was motionless behind her cue box.

“You.” Hide Coat gestured at Junior with the Greener. “Put the cash box on the bar and slide it down towards the door.”

Junior hung on a second, then lifted the tin Beacham's bread box into which he'd been stuffing notes and cartwheels all night off the shelf under the bar and placed it on top. It turned a little after he pushed it, upsetting a shot glass and splashing the lanky young cowboy whose drink it was. He did nothing. The box now was within reach of the man with the Springfield but he made no move to pick it up.

Duster spoke for the first time. His speech was a shrill twang, the opposite end of the scale from Hide Coat's half-humorous baritone. “Now you, honey. Toss over that purse.”

It was the white leather reticule, resting in her lap. Something might have fluttered over her face as she reached for it, the shadow of the reflection of the ghost of a smile, but then I was a gambler too and I noticed those things.

Irish Andy chose just that moment to come in from the back.

His close-cropped head was tilted down and he was tying his apron as he walked, unaware as yet of the silence in the room and what it signified. Hide Coat, startled by the sudden development, jerked his shotgun in that direction. I swung up the sawed-off, backing up a step to clear the top of the bar, and squeezed the rear trigger. Colleen fired at the same time but I didn't look for the result. Hide Coat was off his feet and headed for the wall backward, propelled by a pattern of buckshot as solid as a croquet ball, when I swung the second barrel on the man with the rifle, my finger wrapping the front trigger.

He was braced for a hipshot, both hands on the Springfield steadied alongside his pelvis with the hammer back. I saw him calculate the odds in an instant, a single rifle ball against shotgun spray, and I watched his muscles relax. Then he raised a palm in a brown jersey glove with the fingers cut out and backed away through the door.

“Du lieber Gött.”
Irish Andy goggled, his hands still behind him on his apron strings.

Junior was the first to move. As he strode to the end of the bar to rescue the cash box the tension broke apart in two halves. Voices and creaking floorboards came through the space between.

“Jesus. Christ Jesus.”

Duster was still standing by the faro table, bent over now with his hands pinned between his knees. A pattern of fresh dark circles kept changing and growing on the floor between his feet and I couldn't tell which hand was hit. His Army Colt lay under the table. Colleen's bag rested on the table with her hand inside, smoldering from the powder flare of her pocket pistol.

Hide Coat was still alive and squirming in a muck of blood and sawdust on the floor, making wet sounds. I couldn't tell how much of his midsection remained beneath the mess I'd made of the hide. I came around the bar and stooped to pick up the Greener. I knew of two lawmen who'd been killed by men already dead for neglect of that chore.

The flap door opened. I swung that way, a shotgun in each hand. Rosario Ortiz stumbled in pulled by the weight of a Walker Colt as long as his forearm, a cap-and-ball model designed to ride in saddle scabbards and anchor rowboats. He had traded his overalls and cavalry tunic for a gray suit buttoned at the top of the coat and vest and nowhere else. His white-shirted belly hung out almost beyond the brim of his sombrero. The bent star sagged from the buttonhole in his lapel like one of his yellow roses.