Epitaph (43 page)

I will never drink again, she thought. It was a vow she had made before. This time she meant it.

“Kate! Damn you, open the door!”

She recognized the voice. It was Wyatt Earp's. And he had just cursed her. Wyatt never cursed.

She tried briefly to open her eyes, but daylight felt like a knife in her skull, and she sank onto the pillow.
Ó, Krisztus!
she thought. What have I done this time?

“Doc?” she called in a tiny voice. “For pity's sake, get the door.”

There was no answer.

Out in the hallway two men were exchanging tense, quiet words.
A key was fitted into the lock. An instant later, the door was flung open with such force that it slammed against the wall, and there stood Wyatt like an avenging angel, his face twisting when he smelled the puke.

Next thing she knew, he was jerking her upright, not caring when she cried out in pain and fear. “You are trouble,” he said, his voice low and mean. “You've always been trouble, but you have really done it this time. Get up and get dressed.”

She was still drunk. Her fingers were clumsy on the buttons, her mind three steps behind what was going on. Glimpses of the past thirty-six hours flickered by.

Champagne, she remembered. She and Doc had started with champagne.

No. Not champagne. They had started with dismay.

She'd given no thought to appearances while running the boardinghouse, working in comfortable cotton dresses, leaving her corsets and silks stored away until the day she packed for Tombstone. Doc had always had an eye for fit and registered the straining fabric around her middle, but if she had waxed, he had waned. They were the same age—not quite thirty—but he was gray and thinner than ever. She had forgotten how bent he had become, his bones weakened by his disease. My God, she'd thought, he's an old man! And he knew what she was thinking. And yet, within moments, all that was forgotten. There was the quick, murmured banter in French and Latin and Greek: shared amusement at absurdities they saw all around them in that striving, busy, bumptious town. A swirl of hotel staff. The door closing behind them, the bed before them . . . His merry cry, “Not dead yet!” in the laughing, breathless aftermath, and the drowsy ease that followed. Room service, and the first bottle of champagne. And then what? What went wrong this time? Something about her being a walkin' abacus. “I can see you addin' it up in your head! It's my money, darlin'. I'll spend it as I please.”

Later, he had to go to work, and she went with him to the Alhambra. And then . . . Oh, Jesus. That girl! Kate thought, as Wyatt gripped her
arm and propelled her down the hotel stairs. It was about that girl!

Small, dark. Wild curling hair. Flashing eyes, and a great show of “Aren't I adorable?” The little tramp showed up at Doc's table, saying something about “I'm always lucky when I play you, Doc,” and Doc said, “Luck has nothin' to do with it, sugar.” That must have been when the fight began.

“Please,” Kate begged Wyatt when they passed by the hotel bar on their way to the lobby. “Let me have one drink. Just one!”

“Shut up,” Wyatt snapped, pausing at the desk only long enough to tell the clerk, “Collect from Behan. He checked her in. It's his bill.”

Behan? she thought. Who's Behan?

The sunlight was catastrophic. Wyatt steered her off the boardwalk and across the crowded street. “You're hurting my arm!” she cried. “Where are we going?”

“To court. You're going to take it all back.”

“Take
what
back? What's going on?”

The courtroom was already filled when Wyatt marched her up the aisle and sat her down in the front row. A bailiff called, “All rise for Judge Spicer.” Thoroughly frightened now, she looked around, trying to make sense of all this, but her eyes went wide when Doc was brought in. Unshaven. In shirtsleeves. Shackled.

“Goddammit, Behan,” Virgil Earp cried. “Take those things off him! You should have had Luther King in irons, not Doc Holliday!”

“Once bitten, twice shy,” the sheriff said reasonably. “I don't want another murder suspect escaping.”

Murder suspect? Kate thought. Wait!
That's
Behan?

Suddenly the argument over that girl came back to her. Kate knew faro mechanics when she saw them—the sleight of hand, the nudge of bets from one card on the layout to another. Most dealers cheated punters that way, but Doc was feeding money
to
this little bitch, and Kate demanded to know why. The girl was just a friend, Doc claimed. He helped her out now and then. And if Miss Josephine
were
more than that, he muttered, Kate had a hell of a nerve expectin' monogamy
from others. And then . . . what happened then? A lot of yelling.

She left the Alhambra, went looking for a way to get back at Doc. There was a saloon just down the street. The bartender there hated Doc's guts, too, and showed her his crippled hand. Suddenly there was a handsome, half-Irish charmer at her side. Johnny, he said his name was. And he was so sympathetic, keeping her glass filled, asking why she was angry at Doc. When she told him about that little tramp, his eyes went small. “Infidelity is a terrible thing,” he said. Commiseration. More whiskey. They were two jilted lovers, taking comfort in each other's company, but at some point Johnny started talking about that stagecoach robbery, suggesting things about Doc. None of it made any sense, but she didn't care. She just kept drinking, agreeing with Johnny about what a louse Doc was, the way Johnny had agreed with her about what a slut Josie was.

“Mary Katherine Harony, approach the bench.”

She was sworn in, shown a piece of paper, asked if that was her signature scrawled on the bottom.

“Yes,” she said, “but I don't remember signing nothing.”

She was told to be quiet. Her statement was read to the court. Dr. John H. Holliday had planned the Kinnear stagecoach attack. He was a deadly shot. She'd seen him kill dozens of men. He told her he'd killed Budd Philpot and the passenger, both. The Earps had inside information about Wells Fargo shipments and they knew when the strongbox would be full. They were in on the robbery, too, and wore disguises; that's why Bob Paul didn't recognize them. She'd seen the disguises in a steamer trunk in Doc's room. The disguises were made of black rope tied to look like long beards.

That was when people started to laugh.

“I never said none of that!” she cried as the judge banged his gavel. “I don't know nothing about that robbery! Doc would never steal!” She twisted in her chair. “Judge, please! We had a fight. I was mad at him, that's all! If I signed that paper, I didn't know what it said. I was drunk!”

“
That
, Your Honor,” said Doc's lawyer, “is the first thing out of this woman's mouth that my client will not dispute.”

“Doc, please! I didn't say none of that!” Kate cried, but Doc wouldn't look at her, his thin, lined face ashen in the harsh morning light. “I'm sorry! Please, Doc! I'm sorry!”

“Oh, for heaven's sake,” Judge Spicer muttered. “Sheriff Behan, I can't hold this man on a statement given by an angry, drunken woman. There's no
evidence
here.”

Weeping, she barely understood the legal maneuvering that followed.

The sheriff, making a case for setting bail at $5,000: “He's a suspect in a capital crime, Your Honor.”

Doc's lawyer, protesting: “Your Honor, my client doesn't have anything like that kind of money!” Something about “a continuance, if it please the court.”

Virgil Earp shouting something at Johnny Behan. Doc being taken out of the room, irons clinking. Morgan calling: “We'll raise the money, Doc!” Wyatt and another man, talking to the bailiff.

Spectators, laughing about “black-rope beards” as the room emptied.

The sound of her own sobs, filling the silence that was left.

SHE WAITED FOR DOC
in front of the jail on the day he was bailed out, trying again to apologize, to explain. Doc wouldn't even look at her. Wyatt Earp spoke for him. “Go back to Globe, Kate. And don't come back.” She tried again at the Alhambra. Morgan Earp stopped her before she could get to Doc's table. At the back of the room, Doc went on dealing, his eyes on the layout, his face expressionless. She sat outside his boardinghouse next, until his landlady threatened to have her arrested for loitering.

In the end, she went to see James and Bessie Earp, hoping they would intercede, but Bessie was a southerner like Doc, and she saw no way back.

“They laid hands on him, Kate. They put him in irons, and they set his price like he was a field hand. You sold him down the river for a bottle of whiskey.”

“If those charges stick, he'll hang,” James said.

“In the meantime, he has to live here,” Bessie continued, “among men who are draggin' his name through shit. He has to swallow their insults and tolerate their jokes—”

“Because if he talks back,” James said, “Behan will throw him in jail again. And if he jumps bail, it'll bankrupt Wyatt and me, both.”

“Against all that,” Bessie said, “sorry don't count for much.”

Kate opened her mouth, but there was nothing more to say.

“Go back to Globe, honey,” James advised. “That'll be best for everyone.”

THE NEXT MORNING,
sitting side by side on a bench outside the Oriental, Cochise County sheriff John Harris Behan and Tombstone city councilman Milton Edward Joyce watched Doc Holliday's woman climb aboard the morning stagecoach and settle herself for the long journey north.

Even at a distance, they could see the marks of prolonged weeping. The swollen eyelids, the puffy face.

“Doc Holliday is a cruel, cold man,” Johnny murmured. “I believe he has broken that poor child's heart.”

“The dear girl was a gift from Jesus to us both,” Milt said solemnly, “and I'm that sorry to see her go.”

“We had a wonderful evening together,” Johnny confided, straight-faced. “Not that she'd remember it. Christ, but she was drunk!”

Milt smothered a laugh—not very successfully—and for a few moments the two gave themselves up to quiet, elbow-nudging glee as the coach pulled away.

“And now she's left the wicked Doc Holliday here in Tombstone,” Johnny observed, “hung like a millstone around Wyatt Earp's neck.”

“God bless her! What's next, then?” Milt asked cheerily.

Johnny stood and stretched luxuriously before surveying the busy street before him. Mule-drawn ore wagons, delivery vans, saddle horses. Pedestrians hurrying to accomplish as much as they could before the heat of the day set in. “Word is, Wyatt Earp just mortgaged everything he owns to post bail for Doc Holliday.”

Milt stood, too, and came to Johnny's side. “So we know exactly what his property is worth at current market prices.”

“County taxes ought to be adjusted accordingly,” Johnny said.

“I imagine,” Milt murmured, “it would do no harm if I were to mention that to the city assessor.”

“At your earliest convenience, if you please, Councilman.”

“Shall we go after John Meagher, too?”

Meagher owned the Alhambra, and he'd helped Doc post bail.

“Leave him alone for now,” Johnny said, “but . . . Perhaps the city ought to reconsider the valuation of James Earp's tavern.”