Ragtime Cowboys (16 page)

Something wet dashed his face. He sat up, his lungs turning themselves inside out, and tasted coffee and grain alcohol. He looked up at Siringo, standing with his feet spread, the revolver in one hand and his empty cup in the other. The old cowboy was panting with his hair in his face.

“Never back a man into a corner,” he said. “He's got no direction to go but straight through you.”

Hammett finished coughing, got out his handkerchief, wiped his mouth, and studied the square of linen. Then he applied it to his temple and looked at the pink smear. He stuck the handkerchief back in his pocket. “Any other wisdom?”

“Always make sure your left hand knows what your right's up to.”

“Okay. Now I got one for you.” Hammett placed his palms flat on the floor and butted him in the crotch.

The cup hit the floor first, followed a moment later by the man who'd been holding it. He landed on his knees and tipped over onto his side, hugging himself between his thighs, one hand still holding the gun.

“He-he-he,” he said a minute later, in a voice that held no timbre.

“What are you laughing about, you old hyena?”

“I was thinking how bad this'd hurt if I still used it every day.”

Hammett laughed then. It brought on another coughing fit, and for a while there was no telling whether he was enjoying himself or hemorrhaging.

“You all right?” Siringo asked, when he fell silent.

“No. You?”

“Tell you when one of 'em drops back down.”

“Were you really going to shoot me?”

“I don't recollect. But it seemed to me you're pretty agile for a lunger.”

“You're lucky I'd parked the thirty-eight.”

“Not lucky. I seen you do it, though I wasn't sure about them persuaders you carry in your pocket.”

He reached into it, felt the brass knuckles. “I forgot I had 'em.”

“Then they're no good to you. See what I mean about dumb ideas?”

“You said yours was good for three reasons. What's the third?”

“I got it first.”

“So what?”

“So you know what they call a writer who steals his ideas.”

“Rich?”

 

PART THREE

THE BRASS KEY

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.

—Will Rogers

 

19

“See anything?” Siringo asked.

Hammett shook his head. “Just what I'm supposed to when it's the eel.”

They went to the cigar counter in the station, where Siringo bought a pouch of pipe tobacco and Hammett his makings. The eastbound train pulled in just as they were paying for their purchases. Hammett picked up his satchel. Siringo scowled when he heard glass clinking. Hammett grinned.

“I helped myself to your cache. I'll bring you back a couple of jugs from Carson City. I know a bootlegger there whose Canadian doesn't speak with a Spanish accent.”

“I can always get plenty. Just don't drink yourself overboard. Lanyard may take it into his head to split us up permanent.”

“I hope you're right and he follows me instead of you.”

“I know a trick or two if he don't. The Agency didn't start when you joined.”

“It didn't stop when you quit.” The whistle blew two short blasts. “There's Mother.” He shook Siringo's hand and raised his voice. “I'll send you a postcard from Anaconda.”

“Don't waste your penny.” Siringo spoke just as loudly. “Them things always get home before you do.”

He watched the young man board and took a step back on the platform to light his pipe, eyes working from side to side; but if Clanahan's man got on, it was in a scrum of last-minute passengers or under the cloak of steam as the train started rolling.

Six blocks from the station, he stepped onto a streetcar, walked all the way to the back, and got off on that end, without looking back to see if anyone followed. He entered an ice-cream parlor on the corner, a place of spotless chrome and enamel, ordered a strawberry sundae, and asked the counterman in the paper hat if he had a restroom.

“It's news to me if I do.” He used his scoop.

“What about a phone?”

“Down that hall.”

This was a narrow corridor with numbers penciled on the wainscoting next to the wall-mounted instrument. A tin sign read
FIRE EXIT
above a door at the end. He went through it, crossed an alley with trash cans bunched around the back doors of neighboring establishments, tried a door, found it locked, ignored the others as too time-consuming, and walked briskly around the end of the alley and into the first front door he came to. This belonged to a neighborhood movie theater. He bought a ticket to a William S. Hart western, took the aisle past the piano player, who was too busy trying to keep up with the action onscreen to notice, and let himself out a door reserved for employees. He changed cabs twice, kept the driver waiting outside his house five minutes while he packed some things, and watched out the rear window as they rattled away.

A Ford coupe fell in behind them after the first turn. It didn't have to mean anything, even if the eel had chosen the same model in a pickup truck when he drove onto Beauty Ranch; every third vehicle in California was a T. But some things never changed, not Butch Cassidy's proclivity toward dun horses (he claimed they were harder for posses to see in the scrub) nor Billy Bonney's liking for the small-framed Colt Lightning pistol that suited his lady hands nor Clay Allison's choice of Old Pepper when it came to a three-day drunk, like the one that finally broke his neck under the wheels of his own wagon. The Motoring Age just gave a detective a fresh handle on the preferences of outlaws.

He told his driver to make a right-hand turn, then another, and when the Ford stayed behind them, a third. At that point, the man behind the wheel of the cab squirted a stream of tobacco into the empty Quaker Oats box on the seat beside him and asked his passenger if he was lost.

“No, I'm arranging that for somebody else.”

But after they'd made that turn, the Ford continued on its most recent path and disappeared beyond the corner. Siringo told his driver to pull over against the curb. They sat there, the motor idling and the driver chewing and spitting, for three minutes while Siringo watched the street beyond the back window. During that time, a Ford passed them, but it was a touring car going in the opposite direction.

Satisfied, he turned his head forward and directed the driver to an address on Cahuenga Avenue. It belonged to a saloon running wide-open despite the law of the land, with its door open in the southern California spring heat leading to a narrow passage with bat wings barely visible in the indoor gloom at the far end. A group of lanky locals dressed in ranch gear leaned in the doorway and against the front of the building, smoking and rolling cigarettes and watching a man in similar attire hopping in and out of the loop of the lasso he was twirling. The man wore a baggy grin and his Stetson pushed to the back of his head to expose a lock of dark hair spilling onto his forehead.

“That's a wicked-looking lot,” said the driver. “You better slip the cash over the back of the seat. You don't want to flash no roll in front of that bunch.”

Chuckling, Siringo paid him, adding a fifty-cent tip to make up for the inconvenience of an unusual fare. “You ain't far off the mark. That fellow abusing the rope's Will Rogers, and I owe him money.”

Rogers looked up as Siringo approached; if anything his grin got broader and baggier, but he was spinning the lariat parallel to the sidewalk now and didn't falter. “How do, Charlie. You come to pay back that twenty?”

“You know goldarn well it's ten, you stump sucker.” He held out a banknote. Rogers snatched it one-handed and stuck it in a jeans pocket without missing a turn of the loop. “I'd of been sooner, but I was down to my last chip till recent.”

“I'm sorry to hear it: Your recent success, I mean. Lasky's getting set to shoot in Nevada and he needs a doughbelly.”

“I'd wear out my welcome in a week. I can't cook nothing but beans and biscuits.”

“I mean he's casting the part. He wants a stove-up old waddie with a bum leg. I don't know why I didn't think of you first off.”

Siringo didn't dignify that with an answer.

“What you about here?” he asked. “I thought you was too busy putting together your own picture outfit to mix with these phildoodles looking for work.”

“Hey!”

He squinted at the complainer, a gaunt man in flannels and denim with handlebars too black for the creases in his sunburned face. “Well, hello, there, Pete. I didn't recognize you in all that bootblack or I wouldn't of included you. Get too close to the lid when you was spitting in it?”

“I got to make out, Charlie. It ain't like the old LX, where they counted a man by his work. These directors don't hire you without cutting you in two first and counting the rings. I'm fighting these drugstore dandies for walk-ons.”

“How you fixed?” Siringo reached for his wallet.

“Thank you kindly, but Will beat you to it. I'd just spend the extra inside. But I'll be thirsty again next week.”

“I'll keep that in mind.”

Rogers stopped twirling and walked Siringo out of earshot of the loiterers.

“It was produce pictures or starve,” he said. “I'm a rope thrower, not an actor. But I try to get down here to the Watering Hole now and again. I don't want to come off all toney like Tom Mix. These boys show up here day after day, hoping a studio bus will come along, admire their hempsmanship, and scoop 'em up for a day's work on the set, just like ranch days. Only the bus don't come as often as it did. The western's shot its wad, they say: Harry Carey and Hoot Gibson has done beat that horse to death. Lasky's covered wagon picture is like to strand itself in the Nevada desert.”

“I was wondering why Tom Ince stopped poking at me.”

“He's shooting fox hunts on that spread of his.” He circled the rope through his fingers. “Anyways, I like to come down and cheer the boys up with a little face-licking and maybe a turn or two they ain't learnt.”

“And a stake.”

Rogers scratched the back of his neck.

“I'd be obliged if that didn't get around. Even when old Pete gets a snootful, he just brags on hitting pay dirt. I'm grateful for that. Once you get that tramp sign on your front gate…”

“I know it. When my first book came out I got right popular with some old pards I never knew I had.”

“I wisht somebody'd told me how expensive it is being rich.”

“That's 'cause back then we never knew nobody wouldn't tip clean over sideways if he had a nickel in his pocket.”

Rogers swung his lariat twice and missed the corner fire hydrant by two inches. “See it duck at the last second?”

“Horseshit. That was for the boys.”

“Folks like it when you slip up. I tried telling that to Chaplin, but he couldn't hear me from way up there. What about you, Charlie?”

“Oh, I slip up just for practice.”

“That ain't what I meant. You didn't take your dust to town just to square yourself with me.”

“I didn't, nor to wet my whistle, neither. I need a place to change my duds.” He indicated the valise he was carrying.

“You lose your billet?”

“Piece by piece, but that ain't the reason. I need to go in someplace Charlie Siringo and come out somebody else.”

“Well, you're too old to run from a woman, and if you can give me back my sawbuck you can buy yourself time from the sharks. You ain't back with the Agency, by any chance?”

“They wouldn't take me if I tried, and I wouldn't like me if I did. I'm gathering information for a friend is all.”

“A lady friend?”

“I ain't dead yet, Will.”

“Working alone?”

“No, but I sent him wide while I drag a dead skunk crosst the trail. I don't suppose you'd know a man named Paddy Clanahan? He hangs his hat in Frisco.”

“Not that I recollect, but I look forward to knowing him. I never met one I didn't like.”

“I'm satisfied you ain't met. What about Edgar Edison Lanyard?”

“How many's that?”

“Just one. Some folks call him the eel, not necessarily on account of his initials.”

“Nope.”

“I wouldn't recommend making their acquaintance unless you want to test your theory.”

“What are they, radicals?”

Siringo shook his head. When it came down to it, Rogers was just too amiable for this world.

“Don't ask too many questions, Will. It's the answers put you in the soup.”

Will Rogers grinned.

“It's me you're talking to, Charlie. All I know is what I read in the papers.”

 

20

The saloon Hollywood cowboys called the Watering Hole looked like it had been moved there by crane from a moving-picture location, complete with a half-naked woman reclining in a frame above the beer taps and brass spittoons along the foot rail. It was a piece here and a piece there of every cantina he remembered, all in one place for the first time. The only thing missing was the godawful stink of unwashed flesh and tracked-in horseshit.

The man behind the bar looked up as Siringo flapped through the bat wings, but not recognizing him as a studio representative went back to polishing glasses. Siringo put down his valise and ordered a shot of rye.

The bartender filled a jigger. He wore the uniform: striped sleeves, slick hair, waxed moustache.

Siringo paid for his whiskey. “Where's the rest of the barbershop quartet?”

The man glowered.

He drank, picked up the valise, and walked past Custer's Last Stand toward a pair of doors marked
WRANGLERS
and
MARMS
.
WRANGLERS
contained a pair of toilet stalls, a white porcelain sink, and a zinc trough where the men lined up like convicts to void their bladders. The room was unoccupied at present.