The Floor of Heaven (10 page)

Charlie took an immediate liking to him. Pinkerton, too, felt easy in Charlie’s company. Perhaps the detective sensed a spirit similar to his, hard-driving yet at the same time affable, often gregarious. Or maybe he was taken with Charlie’s trail boss manner, a quiet authority that came from his having led men through some prickly scrapes. Whatever the reason, Pinkerton apparently made up his mind in a flash. After only a short preliminary conversation, he asked if Charlie could provide the names and addresses of a few references.

Charlie had already given this some thought. The previous night he had sat at a table in the boardinghouse writing down what he hoped would be an impressive list, and now he reeled it off. It included David Beals, his boss at the LX ranch, who had recently become the president of the Union National Bank of Kansas City; Jim East, a celebrated Texas lawman with whom Charlie had cowboyed in the days before East had put on a tin star; and Pat Garrett, the man who had slain Billy the Kid after the outlaw had escaped from jail. Never one to be shy about his own accomplishments—or to hesitate, for that matter, to give them an aggrandizing twist—Charlie couldn’t help mentioning that Sheriff Garrett would remember the time he had ridden with him into New Mexico in pursuit of the Kid and a few hundred stolen head of LX cattle. The way he embroidered the tale, Charlie left the impression that not only had he been with Garrett the day the Kid had surrendered, but that the sheriff would’ve come up empty-handed if Charlie hadn’t been around.

Pinkerton dutifully wrote down all the names and addresses. Soon as I hear back from them, we can make things official, he said. But as if to demonstrate that he considered the letters of reference a small formality, he shared what he’d been thinking since the moment Charlie had sat down.

The agency, he revealed, had plans to open a new office in Denver, Colorado. Now that the West was growing civilized and attracting families and men of substance, it would need some serious policing. “A cowboy detective,” he said, “might be just the sort of man who can get the job done.”

A cowboy detective? Charlie had resigned himself to working out of stuffy offices in Chicago or maybe even New York, an operative in a suit and a black homburg riding streetcars in pursuit of big-city scallywags. But now the prospect of galloping over the plains in his Texas boots and spurs, his big Colt resting on his hip, a cowboy detective, to use William Pinkerton’s immediately appealing phrase, chasing down bandits and cattle thieves, well, Charlie was near to rejoicing. This was shaping up better than he could have previously suspected. Still, he wanted to sound professional, like the Pinkerton man he hoped to become. He wanted to say something that he could imagine reading in the Police Gazette. “The East is too tame for me,” he agreed. “No doubt ’bout it. The West would better suit my wild cowboy ways.”

And so it was settled. Once it was established that there was nothing troubling in the replies from Charlie’s references, he would begin training. Pinkerton explained that Charlie would need to learn how to tail a suspect without being spotted and how to assume undercover identities. He further expected Charlie to study the agency’s Principles, a pamphlet that outlined the rules of an operative’s conduct; for example, “the ends justified the means” as long as the actions were “for the accomplishment of justice” and that it was forbidden for a Pinkerton to take on a divorce investigation. Principles also instructed the operative on how to submit his expenses. And it made clear there was no salary, only a per diem fee while on a case. Within two months, Pinkerton predicted, Charlie would be cleared to report to the new Denver office.

Excited, Charlie rushed back to the boardinghouse. It was only as he was playing out in his mind how he’d break the news to Mamie about their leaving Chicago and heading back west on a new adventure that something else occurred to him. Sure, maybe he had given fate a shove or two by taking it upon himself to walk into the Pinkerton offices and by having had the foresight to have secured a banker’s testimonial. But still, there was no getting around it: He was about to become a detective. And that was precisely what the blind phrenologist had predicted.

EIGHT

ctually, Charlie Siringo’s arrival in Denver might not have happened without Soapy Smith’s help. It seemed that months before Soapy had fled town in the aftermath of his caning of Colonel Arkins, he and his gang had put the screws to a couple of local private detectives. And it was the bloody beating of those detectives that had convinced the Pinkertons to open an office in Denver.

Soapy, of course, had no inkling of the repercussions from his violent outburst. To him, all that mattered was that his actions were entirely justifable.

In his world, the only man worse than a cop was a private detective. Police, whether patrolman or chief, could be bought, and Soapy had paid many a divvy in his time. He’d also put a fair share of private detectives on his payroll. He had no trouble buying them, too. The problem, though, was the cost. Experience had taught him that a private detective would always be wanting a fat wad in return for looking the other way or joining up with the Soap Gang for a little dicker. For that expensive reason, he’d not truck with them at all. Their greed irked him. So when he learned that some skunk detective was spreading a disrespectful tale about him, Soapy was doubly agitated. He went straight off to settle the score.

It all came about because Joe Matthews wanted to make a name for himself. Matthews had just been hired by the Glasson Detective Agency, and his first assignment was to assist the city patrolmen in reining in the bunco men and gamblers crowding downtown Denver. The police had no heart for this work; and, anyway, Soapy was paying them to be lackadaisical. But Matthews was new to the job and full of grit. And when an enterprising reporter for the civic-minded Rocky Mountain News interviewed the detective for a story about the crackdown, Matthews couldn’t help himself. He bragged about a beating he’d given the notorious gambler: “Smith was finally thumped until he had been condemned by the meat inspector.”

That it was not true, that he had never landed a blow on Soapy, let alone pounded him so badly that Soapy’s face resembled a piece of raw meat, was one thing. But that some of Soapy’s sporting friends were relishing this tall tale, that Soapy couldn’t walk down Seventeenth Street without being teased, without, as one of the fellows smirked, “having the life guyed out of him,” was another. That was unforgivable. It scarred his pride. And it threatened his business; intimidation was another ace carried up his gambler’s sleeve. Furious, Soapy assembled his army and went to war.

John Bowers was the gang’s “grip man.” Wearing a reverend’s collar and an ingratiating smile, he’d spot a mark displaying a fraternal pin or ring, greet him with the prescribed handshake, and then steer the sucker to a gaffed game of chance. Yet when the need arose, Bowers, compact but sparky like a terrier, was handy with his fists and with a blade. “Cap” Light, though, was a full-time hard case; he’d hurt people if given the opportunity, and kill ’em if his blood was boiling. Cap was married to Soapy’s sister and had come to Denver leaving a trail of murderous gunfights and brawls behind him. On a Saturday night, Soapy had Cap and Bowers follow him up the stairs to the second-floor Glasson Detective Agency offices. Another three of his gang were ordered to wait nearby, outside the opera house. He’d signal if help was needed.

It wasn’t necessary. Soapy charged through the unlocked door hurling curses at Matthews. Before the astonished detective could get his hands up in self-defense, Soapy threw the first punch. He continued hitting Matthews, going at him with his fists and his feet; and very quickly Matthews was too beaten to fight back. Then the real punishment began. Soapy pounded away until the skin was torn off his own knuckles. The detective lay in a pool of blood like a dead animal. In the next room, Cap and Bowers had pulled Detective Gavitt from his bed and gone after him savagely. He, too, was left crumpled on the floor. Yet their fury remained undiminished. There were no other detectives present, so they attacked the offices. Ledgers, files, lamps, desks—all were subjected to their spiteful rage.

Nearly an hour after they’d burst into the Glasson agency, the trio was strolling down Seventeenth Street, blood staining their clothes and boots, tin detective stars pinned to their coats. They took their time. Soapy wanted the sporting crowd to see him; he wanted them to understand that disrespect was a matter that would provoke serious consequences.

Three days later William Glasson officially closed his offices. He left Denver and never returned. And it was the absence of any detective agency in a fast-growing city like Denver that helped convince William Pinkerton and his brother, Robert, that they’d found the perfect location for a new branch office. In fact, when they discovered that the old Glasson agency offices were available and, since they were a bit worse for wear, could be rented on the cheap, the brothers quickly signed the lease for the second-floor suite. Fresh paint, new furniture, and the Pinkerton name on the door—they were confident that this would make all the difference.

“LET THIS Mr. Soapy Smith come calling,” Charlie Siringo told his new boss, William Pinkerton, after he was informed of the events leading to the abrupt shuttering of the Glasson Detective Agency. “He wants to make a war dance, he’ll find himself a partner.” But by the time Charlie and his family had taken a Pullman sleeper out of Chicago and arrived at Union Station in Denver, Soapy, with the assault charge on Colonel Arkins hanging over him and a shoot-out in an Idaho train depot giving him further concerns, was on the run. And anyway, Charlie was too busy to give him much thought.

That winter Charlie rented a house on the other side of town from the Pinkerton offices, and Mamie began to unpack and order fabric for curtains. William Pinkerton had instructed the superintendent of the Denver office to break the new operative in slowly, to get him accustomed to acting and thinking like a detective. So Charlie was assigned to investigate a ring of streetcar conductors who were suspected of duplicating their punched tickets. The practice allowed the shady conductors to pocket an extra ten to twenty dollars each day—until Charlie, riding the horse-drawn streetcars across Denver for weeks while all the time keeping watch with a keen eye, documented how the conductors worked the scam.

Of course, riding streetcars wasn’t Charlie’s idea of high adventure. But he did his best to show enthusiasm and to be tolerant of this tutelage. He was confident the agency would have more challenging cases in store for him once he proved his mettle. So he did what he was told; bided his time; and in secret proceeded with a plan of his own that was much more to his liking.

Charlie’s first step was to give himself an alias; he didn’t think a Pinkerton operative should attract attention by taking part in what he had in mind. On the Texas cattle ranges, his nickname had been “Dull Knife.” The boys had settled on it because when they borrowed his pearl-handled bowie knife, the blade was barely sharp enough, they complained, to slice a fried breakfast egg. Charlie would explain that he used the bowie to kill rattlesnakes. Perched high on his saddle, he’d hold the point between his thumb and forefinger, then throw it down at the snake. He’d pin the snake, but he’d also wind up burying his knife in the ground, too. It was a practice that was certain to dull a blade, he told the boys. After a demonstration, they believed him. But the nickname still stuck. So now, when he was searching for an alias to use when registering for the Cowboy Tournament at River Side Park in Denver, it popped into his mind.

He entered the steer-roping and wild-horse-riding contests, and he gave the crowd quite a show. A newspaper reported: “When Dull Knife rode in armed with pearl-handled pistol and knife, a gold embroidered Mexican sombrero on his head and mounted on a beautiful, quick-reined, white pony he was such a perfect and graceful type of Texas cowboy that the audience gave one spontaneous Ah-h-h! of admiration.”

Charlie was the only man that afternoon to succeed in roping and throwing his bronco on horseback, and he wound up winning a $15 check for “Skillful Cowboy Performance.” But more important to Charlie than the crowd’s cheers or the money was whom he had become in his own mind. As if in an instant, he’d finally shed all the lingering embarrassments and melancholy of his merchant’s life. Galloping on his white pony, lasso twirling in the air, he was once again the cow-roping top hand depicted on the sign he had hung from the battlement of the Bluff Creek bridge. Once again he was a man who could walk tall.

IT WASN’T long after the rodeo that Charlie was back in the saddle: The agency sent him out on his first cowboy operation. Bill McCoy had been set to hang after shooting a deputy in Lusk, Wyoming, but had broken out of jail. The outlaw was on the run, and Charlie’s assignment was to bring him in.

In Cheyenne, Kalter Skoll, the district attorney, told Charlie he’d a pretty good idea where McCoy might be hiding. Before his arrest, McCoy had been riding with Tom Hall and the gang of Texas outlaws who were holed up at the Keeline Ranch, a vast spread on the Laramie River. One problem, though, was that the Keeline cut through some rugged, high-peaked terrain. A man could hide out forever in those hills without fear of being found. An even more troubling concern, the district attorney explained, was that Charlie was going up against a hard proposition. Three men had already been sent off to get in with the gang, and two of them had turned up dead. The third had hightailed it back to New Mexico.

The next day Charlie bought a horse and saddle and let people at the Cheyenne livery know that he was striking out for Fort Douglas, about a hundred miles north. But that was just what he wanted people to think. He’d no intention of going anywhere near Fort Douglas. In fact, a plan had already started churning in his mind. It involved getting drunk, and then breaking his leg.

Getting drunk was the easy part. On his second day riding north, when the snow lay deep on the ground and the trail took him near the Laramie River, Charlie stopped for lunch at the Round Up No. 5 Saloon. The place was run by an ex-policeman and prizefighter from Cheyenne and his wife, a former dance hall girl back in the rip-roaring Black Hill days. Both Mr. and Mrs. Howard were growing old, but they hadn’t lost either their fondness for drink or, as Charlie soon discovered, their ability to hold their liquor. When Charlie suggested they share a bottle with him after his meal to kill the time, they gladly brought two glasses over to his table.