Ragtime Cowboys (28 page)

“You're just too modest to say you don't agree with Mr. Hammett about dirty money.”

“Not modest, just the opposite. A lot of folks think you're a fool when you're honest, so you learn not to advertise it.”

“What do you think will happen now?”

“I got to decide betwixt tin and wood shingles, and you can afford to blow up that pile of firewood you call Wolf House. I reckon Becky'll marry someone who ain't afraid of willful women and Hammett'll write
Moby Dick.
”

“I don't mean that. I mean Teapot Dome.”

“Nothing can stop that, now. We're all going to get sick reading about it. Some of the small fry will lose their jobs, that's sure, and one or two big shots for show. It don't signify, because this time next year or the year after, another gang of bandits will be in the saddle. Kennedy wasn't lying about folks' short memories.”

“Do you think he'll get his presidency?”

“He didn't strike me as the kind to give up riding the first time he got throwed.”

“Me, neither. How can I ever thank you for what you've done?”

“You won't let me court you, so let's just forget it.”

“I wish you'd known Jack. He'd have liked you.”

“Maybe. I ain't a Socialist, though.”

“I've a confession to make. I have only the vaguest idea what Socialism is all about.”

“It's an
ism.
That's all I need to know to ride clear of it.”

“Do you ever wonder what it all means?”

They were at the corral now. They leaned their elbows on the top rail and watched the new stable boy leading Washoe Ban around the track. A puff of breeze brought the sweet smell of grain from the silos and blew a lock of Charmian London's black hair across her cheek. She reached up to push it away. Siringo smiled at her.

“This here,” he said. “This right here is what it means.” He kissed her good-bye.

*   *   *

Becky asked Hammett how he was feeling.

“I've been thrown off a train and almost off a silo, shot, hit on the head, and forced to listen to a political speech. Under the circumstances I'm swell. How about you?”

“I'm short of breath and my heart is pounding. I haven't felt like this since my father was alive.”

“Maybe you've got the Spanish flu.”

“What are you doing?”

He got up from his chair, levering himself with his bamboo cane. “I'm getting saddle sore like Siringo.” He spun the cane's crook. “This is a peachy thing to carry. I think I'll hang onto it after I heal.”

“I've treated you very badly, I'm afraid.”

“Not as bad as the eel. But you were kind of rough on me just because I saw a pretty girl I liked.”

“I think you're going to give your wife a hard time.”

“You don't know Jose. She's a rock.”

“Don't count on that just because she looks like she is.” Her lower lip trembled.

He leaned over her chair, took her chin between thumb and forefinger, and tilted up her face. “I hope you find what you're looking for.”

“You, too. I suppose you think I want some version of my father.”

He let go. “I've got the advantage there. I never knew mine.”

“Neither did Daddy, really. His father never acknowledged him. But he survived. Will you?”

“I've had plenty of practice.”

She rose, went up on her toes, and gave him a brief peck on the lips. Hers tasted of a single sip of beer.

“First kiss?” He gripped her upper arms.

She smiled at last.

“Wouldn't you like to know.”

He grinned.

“You're good. You'll be okay once you climb out from under your old man's ghost.”

“As will you, once you get over the conviction the world owes you something because of a little cough.”

*   *   *

Charmian called for a taxi. Siringo turned to look through the rear window at the two women standing on the front porch of the cottage.

“They didn't wave,” he said, turning back around.

“Good. I never saw the reason for it. We said our good-byes.”

“You ain't a sentimental man, Hammett.”

“Nuts to that. I'm a romantic. I've got a question.”

“Some detective. I got hundreds.”

“When you go under the blanket and change your name, how come you always keep Charlie?”

“It's just smart. You never know when an old pard might see you and sing it out when you're with folks who think you're somebody else. Also you answer to it quicker. They take it suspicious when you don't right away.”

“That
is
smart.”

Hammett rolled a cigarette, concentrating on the operation.

“My first name's Samuel, you know. My friends call me Sam.”

“Bully for them.”

“Maybe I'll use it in a story.”

Siringo reached for his pipe, then remembered. He let his hands drop in his lap.

“My middle name's Angelo. I don't use it anyplace. I'm part Mexican.”

“Which part?”

“The middle part. Wasn't you listening?”

They rode for a while in silence, miles of vines rolling past the window.

“You going to get that new roof or drink up what Kennedy paid you?” Hammett asked as they turned onto the main road, leaving Beauty Ranch behind.

“Come see me next year and we'll find out.”

Hammett grinned.

“Charlie, are you inviting me to visit?”

“Don't call me Charlie, you bomb-throwing bastard.”

*   *   *

They sang, startling the driver:

“Oh, see the train go 'round the bend,

     
Good-bye, my lover, good-bye;

She's loaded down with Pinkerton men,

     
Good-bye, my lover, good-bye.”

 

HISTORICAL NOTE

The Teapot Dome scandal exploded during the election year of 1924, as a congressional investigation discovered that Mammoth Oil magnate Harry Sinclair had advanced $260,000 in Liberty Bonds and Edward F. Doheny of Pan-American Oil had advanced $l00,000 in cash as “loans” to Interior Secretary Albert M. Fall in return for receiving access to the vast California and Wyoming oilfields originally intended for the U.S. Navy; Fall was revealed to have persuaded President Warren G. Harding to transfer ownership to the Department of the Interior.

Under oath, Doheny testified that he had indeed sent his son to deliver the cash in a “little black satchel” to Fall, and remarked that he saw nothing wrong in lending money for personal profit.

The investigation resulted in criminal trials. Fall was sentenced to a year in prison for accepting a bribe from Doheny, but Doheny was found not guilty of paying any bribes. Sinclair, too, was acquitted, but years later was jailed on one count of contempt of the Senate and one count of contempt of court for hiring a detective from the Burns Agency, a rival of Pinkerton, to follow the jury panel around in one of his trials.

Although Sinclair was found to have made massive contributions to the Harding campaign, the president himself was never subpoenaed; he died in 1923—in California—of reported apoplexy, and was succeeded in office by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, in a providential move that may have been chiefly responsible for a Republican victory that November. Rumors still persist that Harding was poisoned, either by officials in his administration hoping to defuse Teapot Dome or by his wife, Florence, out of jealousy over her husband's longtime affair with Nan Britton, who claimed to have borne his illegitimate daughter. (Although there is no evidence to confirm it, the last theory sheds a sinister light on Florence's comment when told Harding had secured the Republic nomination in 1920: “I can see but one word written above his head if they make him president: ‘Tragedy.'”)

Whatever the circumstances of his death, Warren Gamaliel Harding remains the standard against which every succeeding president is measured. He is considered our worst and most ineffectual chief executive, and Teapot Dome our worst national scandal, although there have been several runners-up.

Joseph P. Kennedy, of course, lived—barely—to see his second son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, become the first Roman Catholic president of the United States. (His first choice, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., was killed while serving with the armed forces during World War II.) Before that, the only serious Catholic contender, former Governor Al Smith of New York, was defeated in 1928 by Herbert Hoover, who lost his reelection bid to Franklin D. Roosevelt, under whom Joseph Kennedy served as ambassador to the Court of St. James. Although nothing but this work of fiction suggests the elder Kennedy tried to quell an oil scandal in which he had no part, his activities in the bootlegging trade during Prohibition are legendary, and it may be significant that after John was elected, Rose, Joseph's wife, was quoted as saying that she saw nothing wrong with the family having bought her son's election.

This is a work of fiction. Apart from partnering two men who probably never met, I've taken certain liberties with the order of events in 1921, moving up the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the first rumblings of Teapot Dome, and Hammett's move to San Francisco prior to his June marriage by a matter of months. However, the particulars of the lives of the two principal characters were as reported: While Charles A. Siringo and Dashiell Hammett were political opposites, both men left the Pinkerton National Detective Agency because they became disenchanted with its bullying tactics. Throughout his adventurous and literary life, Siringo, who had witnessed the bloody Haymarket riot in Chicago firsthand in 1886, despised radicals of any kind. Hammett, who deplored his time as a strikebreaker for the Agency, invoked the Fifth Amendment more than eighty times during questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, refusing to divulge details about his connection with the Communist Party, and served six months in federal prison for contempt of Congress. Wherever one stands on these matters, both men were remarkable for the courage of their convictions.

I ask the reader to forgive my use of literary license and to accept the truth of the historical personalities herein—particularly Becky London, who was so very kind to me in her final years.

Glen Ellen, best known to readers as the
Valley of the Moon,
is still home to Beauty Ranch, Jack London's last home and final resting place at the end of his colorful life, social activism, and influential literary career. It's maintained for tourists by the California state parks system and the Jack London Foundation, founded by the late Russ Kingman, Jack's biographer, proprietor of the Jack London Bookstore, and landlord pro bono to Becky London in her energetic old age, and Kingman's late wife, Winnie.

Wyatt Earp, whose name is synonymous with the gunfighting West, denied any intention of a career in law enforcement. He went from boomtown to boomtown hoping to get rich in the tradition of robber barons Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller, and pinned on a star in order to carry a firearm to protect his interests. He died, deep in debt, in a rented bungalow in Los Angeles in 1929. His widow, Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, spent the next fifteen years polishing his reputation.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett, the man who gave us such icons as Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick and Nora Charles, served in the U.S. military in both world wars, beat tuberculosis, and lived to revolutionize the detective story. He died January 10, 1961, in New York City at the age of sixty-six.

Charles Angelo Siringo, the “cowboy detective,” who befriended and hunted Billy the Kid, infiltrated Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, wrote and published seven books based on his experiences as a working cowboy and private investigator, and in his last years helped adapt his memoirs for the silent screen, died October 19, 1928, in Hollywood, California. He was seventy-two years old.

He never did fix his roof.

 

BOOKS BY LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

Kill Zone

Roses Are Dead

Any Man's Death

Motor City Blue

Angel Eyes

The Midnight Man

The Glass Highway

Sugartown

Every Brilliant Eye

Lady Yesterday

Downriver

Silent Thunder

Sweet Women Lie

Never Street

The Witchfinder

The Hours of the Virgin

A Smile on the Face of the Tiger

City of Widows
*

The High Rocks
*

Billy Gashade
*

Stamping Ground
*

Aces & Eights
*

Journey of the Dead
*

Jitterbug
*

Thunder City
*

The Rocky Mountain Moving Picture Association
*

The Master Executioner
*

Black Powder, White Smoke
*

White Desert
*

Sinister Heights

Something Borrowed, Something Black
*

Port Hazard
*

Poison Blonde
*

Retro
*

Little Black Dress
*

Nicotine Kiss
*

The Undertaker's Wife
*

The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion
*

American Detective
*

Gas City
*

Frames
*