The Crack in the Lens (20 page)

Or, We Try to Fill Bales In While the Town Gets Set to Rub Us Out

“You know, I threw two minutes out kinda off the top of my head,”

Gustav said. “It might take more time to talk through than that.”

Ten seconds into my brother’s bluff—if it was a bluff—and already he seemed to be losing his nerve.

Bales looked up from his watch and scowled at him.

“How about
five
minutes?” I suggested.

Now he scowled at
me.

“Four?” I tried. “Three and a half?”

The lawman tucked his watch away.

“Just talk,” he said to Old Red.

“Right.”

My brother took in a deep breath and shot me a look that said,
Remember, now—if this doesn’t work, it was
your
dumb idea
.

“One of the reasons it’s been so hard to get a handle on who killed Gertie,” he said to the marshal, “is there don’t seem to be no why to it, beyond sheer bloody-mindedness. But with Big Bess, the why’s plain as day. You’re lookin’ at it right now.”

He spread out his arms and swiveled first this way, then that.

Us in a cell.

“We been sniffin’ around, and someone wanted us to stop…wanted it bad enough to kill a woman just to get at us. And when you ponder on the
how
of Big Bess’s death, that tells you who it was.”

“It does?”

“Yup,” Gustav said. “Just take her innards, for instance.”

Bales suddenly looked like he really,
really
regretted putting away his watch.

“Her…innards?”

Old Red nodded. “You saw Big Bess on that bed. Her guts ’n’ such was spread out careful-like, orderly—and the slices up her belly was clean, not jagged. If there’d been any struggle, she’d have been hacked up every which way, and her bowels would’ve been spilled all over. So it wasn’t the guttin’ that killed her. It was that slit throat. She was awake when it happened, too—she wasn’t rapped over the head or nothin’ first.”

“How could you know that?” Bales asked.

Unless you were there when it happened
, he didn’t bother adding.

“Didn’t you notice?” my brother said, and I caught just a hint of the old curt cockiness that used to come over him when he’d get to stringing out deductions. “Her hands was covered in blood. After she was cut, she pressed ’em up over her throat. Only that didn’t do no good, of course. That was a deep slice. Clean, too. From here to here”—Gustav put a finger to the left side of his neck, then pulled it across to the right in one smooth motion—“straight as a razor.”

“That means something?”

“Well, of course, it does! Bess didn’t see it comin’. The feller who done her in—he was standin’ behind her. And if you think on that, you’ll see it weighs against me or Otto bein’ the killer.”

Bales furrowed his brow and cocked his head…then grunted and shrugged. “Alright, I’ve thought on it, and I don’t see how it means a thing.”

Old Red grabbed hold of the bars again, hard, as if he wished they were the marshal’s shoulders—so he could give the man a good shake.

He was getting riled up. Which was good news, I had to think. Like water to a fish or dirt to a worm, irritation is my brother’s natural element. Better to have him vexed than dispirited.

“I’ll just have to keep thinkin’ for the both of us, then,” he said. “Cuz here’s what ain’t occurred to you: Big Bess
let
someone stand behind her long enough to draw a blade and cut her throat. So she either trusted the man or had to act like she did, and she sure as hell had no reason to let her guard down around me and my brother. Surely even you’ve heard about the flap at the Phoenix Thursday night—and how we were to blame for it. Would she come to our hotel room, alone, after that?
Could
she, without her bosses knowin’ of it? No, sir. She was just payin’ a call on a customer, far as she knew. And that tells us who killed her.”

“It does?” Bales said. Or maybe “It does.” It was hard to tell if the question mark was there or not.

“Word is Stonewall’s gone missin’,” Gustav said with an off handed dryness I had to admire. “So who’d be escortin’ Big Bess to the Star? Who’s got an arrangement with the hotel for comin’ and goin’ on the sly—and probably borrowin’ passkeys whenever they need? Who’d love to see me and Otto strung up like piñatas on account of all the snoopin’ we been doin’?”

“Ragsdale and Bock,” I said. Not that we weren’t all thinking it already, but
somebody
had to come out and say it.

Old Red nodded. “It was Ragsdale slit her throat.”

“Why Ragsdale?” Bales asked. I liked the way he asked it, too. For the first time, it sounded as if he actually thought my brother might have a decent answer.

Too bad the answer he got was “Bess’s butt.”

Bales frowned, his eyes going into a twitchy squint, and Gustav pressed ahead fast before he could turn on his heel and leave.

“That caboose of hers had considerable size to it, you know. So much so that a feller like Gil Bock—a squat SOB with stubby arms and a tub gut—he couldn’t even
reach
Bess’s neck from behind, let alone cut it as clean and even as it was. Nah. It’d have to be a taller man with long arms. Bock was there, I’m sure of that. No one could hoist Bess’s body onto the bed without help, and him and his partner ain’t never any further apart than a pair of prairie oysters in the same sack. But it was Ragsdale did the killin’.”

Bales snorted and shook his head in amazement. “For someone who never used to talk, you can pull some pretty good flimflam out of your ass. But you’re forgetting one thing.”

“If it’s that ‘Texas Jack’ poppycock you’re talkin’ about, I ain’t forgettin’ it,” my brother shot back. “I just ain’t got to it yet, so thanks for bringin’ it up. Now, here’s the way you oughta look at it…”

He launched into a lecture just like his old deducifying self.

That old self being a smug little know-it-all, but I was pleased to see him nonetheless.

“Ragsdale and Bock wanted Bess’s body found in our room—and soon, too, before we could cause ’em more trouble. So they whipped up that note knowin’ Horace Cuff would bring it straight to you. As for the handwritin’ matchin’ my brother’s, that don’t mean diddly. You know Ragsdale and Bock got their grubby fingers in all kinds of nasty business around this town, and you can bet that includes forgery.”

Bales shook his head again—though this time he looked less amazed than disappointed. “That’s a mighty big stretch, Gus.”

“Well, let me shorten it up for you, Milford.” Gustav waggled a pointed finger at the staircase. “Our carpetbags are just down them steps, and in one or the other you’ll find a new detectivin’ tale my brother’s been workin’ on. He’s got him a contract with Smythe & Associates Publishing, Limited, of New York City, you know.”

As he spoke these last words, Old Red puffed himself up with a pride he’s usually loath to admit merely for
my
benefit. He even got the full company name right.

On a better day, I would have smiled.

“So that story of his was just sittin’ there in our room,” he said, “waitin’ for whoever might make use of it.”

“As a sample of your brother’s handwriting?”

“Yup.”

“Which Ragsdale and Bock took the time to study and copy…after disemboweling Big Bess on your bed?”

Gustav blinked. “Something like that,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster—which wasn’t much.

Bales didn’t seem much convinced, either. “Tell me again why Ragsdale and Bock would go to all this trouble on your account?”

“Tell him,” Old Red said, and as always he turned to me when there was yarning to be done. “About the
real
Texas Jack.”

I sketched it out quick as I could—and as vague, too, when it came to how we’d learned certain things. Bad enough that we had Big Bess hanging over us. We didn’t need Stonewall up there as well. One of the two alone was enough to crush us.

To his credit, Bales went a bit green as I told him of the chippies who’d been disappearing, one a year around the anniversary of Adeline’s death—and Jack the Ripper’s spree in London. Some part of him seemed to accept that it couldn’t all be lies.

“How’d you dig this up?” he asked when I was through.

I shrugged. “We tried.”

Bales looked stung. “If something like that was really going on at the Phoenix, wouldn’t Ike Rucker have noticed?”

“Feh,” Old Red spat. “You know the man. Would he
want
to notice?”

Bales dropped his gaze, staring down at the floorboards so long he almost seemed to have fallen asleep standing up.

The man was thinking. At last.

When he looked at us again, his eyes were neither friendly nor hostile. Anguished uncertainty, that’s what I saw there.

He was sitting on a fence—a wrought-iron one, hard and sharp and impossible to stay perched on long.

“You know all this sounds insane, don’t you?” he said.

“Any more insane than a madman comin’ back for a holiday in the very town he first killed in…with his kid brother along for the ride?” I replied. “Then leavin’ bodies lyin’ around even though the local law’s been givin’ ’em the evil eye?”

“Now
that
sounds crazy,” Gustav threw in. “It only makes sense if we came back to find the real killer.”

Bales combed chubby fingers through his close-cropped hair.

“I don’t know what makes sense anymore…”

A door creaked open down on the first floor, and the muffled buzz of low-talking chatter drifted up the stairs.

“Marshal,” Tommy called out, and after a few clomping steps his head poked up in the stairwell. “He’s ready for you.”

“I’ll be down directly. I’m almost done here.”

“Yessir.”

Bales turned back to us as Tommy stomped away. “The coroner’s downstairs. I’ve got to go.”

“You’ll think on what we told you?” Gustav said. “About what’s been goin’ on around here?”

“I don’t know, Gus. I gave you a lot more than two minutes, and even after all that…everything you said…you couldn’t
prove
anything.”

“Oh. Noticed that, did you?”

Old Red sighed and slumped up against the bars. He’d been given one last chance to Holmes us out of our pickle—and he’d failed.

“You know, Milford,” he said, “you might make a decent lawman yet.”

Bales turned and headed down the stairs without another word. As he went, Gustav trudged over to the cell’s small, barred window and stared down at the street below. I joined him.

Together, we watched Bales walk out with the county coroner.

Who was the county sheriff, too, remember.

Ike Rucker.

They were walking west down Fort Street the last we saw of them. Headed for the Star.

The marshal’s office was a narrow little affair across the street from the gold-domed county courthouse, and while we were watching Bales and Rucker stroll off together, I noticed a small crowd gathering on the courthouse lawn. It was mostly men milling about, maybe two dozen, but there were a few women, too, and a couple kids playing tag. It was hard to tell from a distance, but it looked like a strange mix of folks, a real gumbo. I could make out bowlers and bonnets and straw hats next to Stetsons and flat caps and even a lone sombrero.

One of the ladies spread out a blanket on the grass, and a dapper gent in tweed stretched out on it with a bottle of soda pop in his hand.

“Bit late in the day for a church picnic, ain’t it?” I said.

“They ain’t out for a picnic. They come for the
show
.”

“The show? What sh—?”

That’s when I noticed where those folks had chosen to gather: around the biggest tree in sight.

They were claiming front-row seats.

Sooner rather than later, they figured, there was going to be a hanging.

Or, Darkness Falls, and the Odds We’ll Live Out the Night Do Likewise

By the end of the afternoon, there were so many people clogging the streets around the courthouse you’d have thought the circus was coming to town. Indeed, the vendors who work the crowds at a parade weren’t ones to miss this opportunity, and the vigilantes-in-waiting feasted on peanuts and popcorn and Dr Pepper while waiting to see justice done.

And the pushcart men weren’t the only ones hawking their wares. Even from a distance, it was easy to pick out a Bible-brandishing Brother Landrigan gliding through the throng, eyes blazing like hellfire. I spied Horace Cuff, too, the lanky Englishman marching behind Landrigan so stiff-spined he could’ve been a soldier on review—a platoon of one. He eventually peeled himself from Landrigan’s coattails, though, pausing to pull out a notebook and interview local notables on hand for the evening’s entertainment.

Mortimer Krieger was there to record the proceedings for posterity as well, setting up a tripod-mounted camera atop the boxy, hard-topped wagon he’d arrived in. The camera, I couldn’t help but notice, was trained on the towering oak that seemed to be the maypole around which this grim fandango was being danced.

The men calling the tune were there for a time, too. Pete Ragsdale and Gil Bock spent nearly an hour strutting around the town square, mostly mingling with the cowhands who’d started drifting in as (I assumed) word spread to the surrounding ranches. I could see Ragsdale slapping backs, passing out flasks, waving a pointed finger at the very jailhouse window at which I stood. Bock just drifted along beside him, utterly impassive but for one fleeting moment—he must’ve spotted me watching, for he raised a hand and flipped me a pudgy little bird.

The cowboys, meanwhile, threw looks our way that went from dirty to filthy to (the more they partook from Ragsdale’s flasks) unprintable. They’d degraded Big Bess in a thousand ways, these dirty-faced boys, yet now they fancied themselves her champions—and avengers. What Bales and his buddies had been playacting at a couple nights before, these yahoos would gladly do for real.

I spotted Freckles the Kid, the itchy-fingered little so-and-so from the Lucky Seven, among them. My brother’s old pal Suicide Cheney, too. If Suicide was inclined to talk sense to anybody, it didn’t show, for he kept throwing back his head with flask in hand like the other punchers. I couldn’t really blame the man. Try to defend us once the rush came, and he’d just live up to his name.

All these observations I made alone, for not two minutes after Marshal Bales left the jail, Old Red was asleep on the bunk. It didn’t surprise me, exactly—he was going on thirty-six hours without a wink. Yet I found the timing difficult to fathom.

Sleeping through a lynching would be hard enough. But your own…?

As the light of day faded, the crowd’s restlessness grew. The gestures got bigger, the milling more frenzied, the noise louder. Whether they knew it outright or not—could admit it if it was put to them—the people gathered outside were waiting for the dark.

It was almost upon us.

Gustav stirred at last.

“I wouldn’t think an up-and-comin’ young city like San Marcos would tolerate lynchings on the courthouse lawn,” I said as he joined me at the window. “Ain’t good for their image.”

“Neither are mutilated whores,” Old Red pointed out. “Kill one in a back alley, whoop-di-do. Do God-only-knows with four others, that’s fine, too, long as you do it quiet. But all that?” He nodded down at the roiling chaos below. “That’s what you get when you’re gaudy about it.”

“What they got in mind ain’t exactly subtle.”

Gustav gave a grunt of agreement.

“So,” he said, “what’d I miss?”

I filled him in as the sky outside went from amber-orange to ashy gray to black. Before I was done, Ragsdale and Bock swaggered from the square, satisfied, I suppose, that the seeds they’d planted would soon bear fruit. And Mr. Krieger, having lost the light, was packing up his camera gear. He could always come back in the morning…provided no one had cut us down yet.

Yet despite these departures, the swarm kept swelling. People were arriving on horseback, in surreys and wagons, on foot—every which way but hot-air balloon. It was like the proverbial moths to the flame only backward, the irresistible enticement now being the anonymity of encroaching darkness.

“Y’know, we oughta be proud,” I told my brother. “Something finally brought the town folk and the county folk together…and it’s us!”

Old Red “Feh”ed me.

“They ain’t as far apart as they like to think,” he said. “Overalls or frock coats, it don’t matter. Hell, loincloths or crowns. Underneath the wrappin’, people are all the same.”

“Oh? I can name one feller who ain’t—and I betcha he’s down there this very moment.”

“The killer, you mean?” Gustav shook his head. “He ain’t so different. Everybody likes ’em a little blood. Him just a bit more than’s polite.”

“My word,” I marveled. “That is without a doubt the sourest thing I ever heard you say, and you’ve said some doozies.”

Old Red jerked his chin at the crowd below. “If that’s the way we’re gonna go, don’t you think I’m entitled?”

“Well, I can see how gettin’ lynched might bring out the cynic in a man,” I conceded, “but I’ve always believed it biases the judgment to theorize before you have all the facts.”

Gustav gave me that special glower he reserves for the rare occasions on which I quote Holmes back to him.

I smiled. “We ain’t hung yet.”

Not that I really gave us a snowflake’s chance in hell, let alone a whole snowball’s. But my brother was such a black cloud I couldn’t help but play the little ray of sunshine.

Then, with the suddenness of lightning or the flare of a photographer’s flash powder, the whole town square lit up. And stayed lit.

The streetlamps had all been switched on at once.

The swiftness of it left the crowd speechless, stunned, and looking down from above I saw a sea of open mouths and blinking eyes—hundreds of people rudely shaken awake from the same dream.

For a second, stretching out interminably into two, I allowed myself the hope that the mob-spell had been broken. In the stark white glare of the lamps, I thought, the men and women below might look upon each other, see themselves, and feel shame.

Sometimes you’re a little ray of sunshine.

Sometimes you’re just a fool.

I found out which I was pretty quick.

A chorus of voices rose up out of the silence, and though the words themselves I couldn’t pick out, the tune I recognized. It was the hymn “Lead, Kindly Light,” and I knew who was doing the crooning before I even spotted them.

Brother Landrigan and his choir had laid claim to the courthouse steps.

They soon had competition for the crowd’s attention, though. The cowboys congregating along the northern edge of the lawn—the side closest to the jail—responded with a sort of hymn of their own: the trail version of “Buffalo Gals.” And by “trail version,” I mean the one with lyrics that’d make a sailor swoon. Suffice it to say, the young ladies being serenaded (“San Marcos gals,” that night) weren’t being asked to
dance
by the light of the moon.

As the church choir and the ranch hands battled for the mob’s ear—and soul, Brother Landrigan would no doubt say—cackling laughter burst out here and there around the square, followed by a murmur of voices that quickly built back up to a roar. Soon enough, the carnival mood had returned full force, and all was as it had been before. The streetlamps had changed nothing, except to corral the darkness in spastic shadows that were all the blacker and sharper-edged for the harshness of the unnatural light that made them.

“God damn it,” Old Red muttered, and when I followed his gaze I noticed two familiar figures lurking at the eastern edge of the bedlam.

Lottie and Bob were back in town.

“At least they had the good sense to leave Squirrel Tooth at home,” I said.

“I
hope
that’s where she is. I wish that’s where they were, too.”

Gustav cursed again.

Hoping and wishing never had done much good, in his experience.

The cowboys’ serenade had long since disintegrated into guffaws, huzzahs, and wild, unintelligible howls, and now the choir’s “Lead, Kindly Light” faded away, too. Brother Landrigan stayed where he was atop the steps, though, launching into pop-eyed writhing that could mean only one thing: He’d converted the courthouse facade into a pulpit.

Again and again, he pointed a wagging finger toward the north.

At us.

“What do you think he’s callin’ us?” I asked my brother. “‘Snakes’ or ‘serpents’?”

Old Red didn’t answer.

“‘Snakes’ would get more of a rise out of folks. They got them things all over down here. ‘Serpents,’ though…it sounds more biblical-like, wouldn’t you say?”

Gustav did not say. Anything. He just stared down at the preacher as if hypnotized.

“Brother,” I said, and the somber tone of my voice was enough to break the spell, pull Old Red’s eyes away from Landrigan. “When you went up to the front of the church this morning. Repented, saved your soul, whatever you wanna call it. Was that a bluff or not?”

Gustav pondered on that a moment, then shrugged. “Can it be both?”

Before I could reply—with a firm “No”—three loud raps sounded out downstairs.

Someone was knocking on the marshal’s front door.

My brother and I froze, listening intently to muffled voices, the creaking of hinges, a sudden burst of sound as the din from outside came crashing into the office. Then the door slammed shut, and there was quiet again…for all of three seconds.

“Hey, give that back!” we heard Tommy shout.

“Butt out, kid,” someone snarled—a someone who was stomping up the stairs to the cells. “It’s time the grown-ups took over here.”

Ike Rucker appeared at the top of the steps. His right hand was clutching a large metal ring with two keys on it.

“Alright, boys,” he said. “You’re comin’ with me.”

Tommy came slinking up the stairs behind him.

“I can’t let you do that, Sheriff. Marshal Bales told me not to—”

“Shut up, kid,” Rucker said, and he walked over to our cell and tried one of the keys on the lock.

It worked.

“Let’s go.” Rucker swung the door open, then took two steps back and drew his .45. “Move.”

Gustav didn’t move. I didn’t move.

Tommy just watched from the top of the stairs.

“Go where?” I asked.

“To the county lockup,” Rucker said. “You’ll be safer there.”

“You dirty son of a bitch,” Old Red snarled.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

My brother didn’t take his eyes off Rucker.

“Where do you think the county lockup
is
, Otto?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it must be…a www, hell no.”

“Hell yes,” Gustav said.

Rucker’s jail was in the county courthouse.

Old Red had summed it up beautifully, so I borrowed his words.

“You dirty son of a bitch.”

“You can’t take them out there,” Tommy said, still not getting it. “That crowd’ll string ’em up for sure.”

“You just let me worry about that,” Rucker replied, and he flashed me and Gustav a toothy grin.

He wasn’t worried about any lynching.

He was counting on one.