The Floor of Heaven (7 page)

Since his days with Clubfoot Hall, it had been one of Soapy’s ambitions to be the fixer, the ringleader of his own crew. Now, as crooks and bunco men from across the West drifted into the shiny city of Denver, it wouldn’t be long before they’d hear about Soapy Smith. He was a man, rumor had it, who always had a con or two in play. And so they’d track him down in a saloon or at a faro table with the hope of finding work. Soapy, taking to his kingpin role, would make a show of buying the applicant a glass of “the best Irish” and in the short course of the drink would take measure of the man. If he liked what he saw and heard, Soapy would explain that he demanded only one quality from his associates: total loyalty. They must be willing to lie, cheat, steal, or, if the occasion warranted it, kill on his command. If that didn’t strike the prospective gang member as too onerous an obligation, he’d welcome the fellow on board. There was no contract, or even a discussion about how large a share of the weekly take they could expect. A firm handshake would be sufficient to seal the vague but tightly binding deal. If you entered Soapy’s world, the expectation was that there’d be honor among thieves—and bloodshed if there wasn’t.

The recruits became known as the Soap Gang, and what a collection of cunning, broken, and just plain criminal sorts they were. Reverend—the title, naturally, was one more con—John Bowers was their “grip man.” By nature a bookish individual, the self-ordained good reverend had put in some long but ultimately valuable time memorizing the fraternal greetings and handshakes of a large variety of secret societies. Now he would patrol the hotels and train stations looking for the telltale lapel pin or ring that identified the bearer as a Mason, or an Odd Fellow, or a Knight of Pythias, or any of a half dozen other orders. Offering the prescribed salutation and the appropriate handshake, the pious-looking man of the cloth would greet his fellow brother. In the course of the ensuing conversation, he would volunteer that he would be only too eager, one brother to another, to show his new friend around Denver. Inevitably, their destination would be a con or a rigged card game that Soapy had in play.

Syd Dixon’s role was to give the mark the breakdown. He’d pose as a man of means and he’d encourage the mark to invest, as he already had, in an opportunity that was too good to miss. It was a part for which Dixon was well cast since, like all the best cover stories, it was grounded in a small bit of truth. There had been a time when handsome, bright, smiling Syd, the pampered son of a wealthy father, had lived a cushy life back east as a well-heeled lawyer. His reputation as a ladies’ man had been famous. But in the twisting course of the long downward spiral that eventually brought him to Denver, he’d squandered his inheritance, gotten disbarred, and had acquired a taste for opium. These days his remaining Jim Crow eastern suits were shiny from wear, and he looked to Soapy to help him earn the money that would buy him his next opium pipe.

“Judge” Norman Van Horn was another disbarred lawyer, and, like Soapy, he had the smooth gift of telling the tale with eloquence. He also had a impressive knowledge of the law and, no less handy, was an expert on how to wiggle his way around it. His specialty was fixing juries and bribing the police.

“Old Man Tripp”—Van B. Tripplet was his proper name, but it had been long forgotten—was a white-bearded prospector with a weary face as creased as the seat of a hard-ridden leather saddle. He had spent a lifetime looking for gold and silver, but had never managed to strike the mother lode until he had hooked up with Soapy. Now he had great success as a roper, steering his fellow prospectors into Soapy’s conniving clutches.

Then there was “Professor” Turner Jackson. While the academic title was an unwarranted boast, there was no denying that the professor knew a great deal about mineral deposits and mines and, more important, how to talk authoritatively about these subjects. Prospectors new to the West would put great stock in his advice—and only realize too late that they were being gamed.

With so many cons in play, it was to be expected that a few of the resentful, gun-toting marks might come looking for Soapy with the hope of evening the score. But Soapy had enlisted a small army to protect him. The chief enforcer was a dull, brutish thug known throughout Denver as “Ice Box” Murphy. He’d earned the nickname (and a lifetime of ridicule) after his attempt to rob the payroll of a local meat market. His plan had been to sneak into the building in the dead of night and then blow the safe. In the darkness, however, Murphy had inadvertently fixed his sticks of dynamite to the door of the meat locker. The force of the explosion left sides of beef scattered about, while the payroll remained locked tightly away across the room in the solid steel safe.

Working under “Ice Box” was a hard crew of veteran gunslingers. “Big Ed” Burns and “Texas Jack” Vermillion wore their holsters low on their hips, and were as coiled and dangerous as a pair of rattlers. They had fought beside Wyatt Earp in bloody Tombstone, Arizona, and the fact that they had survived was proof of their talent. “Shotgun” Tom Collins had earned his nickname from the cannon of a shotgun he toted; one blast could blow a man in half. While “Sure Shot” Tom Cady was a beautiful pistol shot; his draw was quick, and his aim perfect.

It was a very efficient organization. Soapy would set the cons in motion, and his gang would help make sure they came off without a hitch. The opportunities were enormous. “Denver,” as Soapy would boast with a larcenous pride, “never had a chance.”

BUT IT wasn’t all scheming and scamming. Denver was a bright, good-time city, and Soapy, accompanied by his deferential retinue, liked to strut through the downtown saloons and dance halls and have himself a hurrah or two. One of his passions was faro. Many evenings he’d join the other punters “bucking the tiger,” as the faro players called their sport, sitting at the long baize-covered table at Big Ed Chase’s Arcade. He didn’t play with chips, like the rest of the bettors. Instead, he’d dig deep into his pockets and pull out the day’s earnings. Then he’d wager twenty-dollar gold pieces on each draw from the box as if they were nothing more than bars of soap; which, of course, they might as well have been, considering how Soapy was making his money. But as fast as he was raking it in on the streets, Soapy was squandering it at the faro table. His huge losses had people talking. Soapy, however, never seemed to complain. A few hours before dawn he’d walk out of the Arcade with his pockets empty, nod a polite good night to Chase, and by noon that day he’d be out again with his tripe and keister.

Fortunately for Soapy, he wasn’t recklessly spending money at the faro tables every night. On Blake Street, Chase, who had a keen sense of what people craved, had used some of the profits from his gambling parlor to build a large red brick building for the Palace Theater. The Palace had 750 seats, and most nights they were filled. There were comics and vaudeville acts, but the real draw was the parade of young women who opened each show in frilly skirts short enough to expose their knees. When they kicked their legs up high in unison, many of the men in the crowd sighed as if they were catching their breath. When they weren’t performing, the ladies were required to mingle with the audience; and if the mood and the gratuity were agreeable, there were heavily curtained boxes flanking the stage where the mingling could run its course in private. The West was a lonely place for the men who had come in droves from somewhere else to create new lives and find their fortunes; unattached women were in short supply. In Denver, the frolicking pretty ladies of the Palace caused quite a sensation.

Suitors flocked to the stage door, and fellows with dash, wit, money, or simply luck would often find an evening’s company. Sometimes, though, the attractions would run deep, and marriages would ensue. No less a longtime womanizer than Ed Chase would marry Frances Minerva Barbour, one of the glamorous Barbour sisters, after first listening to her sing at his theater. Bat Masterson—the very man who years earlier had hurled a beer mug at Charlie Siringo’s skull—had followed the money to Denver and wound up marrying Emma Walters, a long-limbed Palace dancer.

Soapy’s affections, however, never moved in such a direction. He was content simply to pursue his fancies. And unlike his fortunes at the faro tables, here his luck ran strong. Then one night he was standing, as was his sly practice, in the wings off the Palace stage when he witnessed an event that caused his temper to rise. A gambler he knew from the Arcade backhanded one of the singers as she was heading backstage. It wasn’t a hard blow, just a mean, quick slap. But Soapy didn’t like men who mistreated women. On instinct, he rushed over and, with a single punch, knocked the gambler down. The man scrambled to his feet, but the wild, resolute look on Soapy’s face discouraged him from pursuing the matter. He simply turned and walked away.

That night Soapy accompanied the grateful singer to the boardinghouse where she was staying. Her stage name was Allie, but she told him that her friends called by her real name, Mary. Mary Noonan had long blond hair, which she wore wrapped in a high bun, and a face that was friendly and reassuring rather than beautiful. Yet while many of the pretty dancers and singers Soapy had courted from the Palace were seemingly uncomplicated women, frank about their hopes to the point of brazenness, Mary was a different sort. She was reserved, even a bit standoffish. She behaved as if she had no time for or interest in Soapy. She didn’t respond to his attentions with the immediate intensity of feelings that Mamie had so freely offered to Charlie Siringo. Then again, Mamie had been a sheltered fifteen-year-old without either experience or guile; Mary had met enough of the West’s lonely men to be guarded. Besides, a showgirl learns not to put too much trust in romance.

Mary made it clear that she wanted nothing from Soapy and that, in fact, she would find the offer of a “present” insulting. Perhaps those rebuffs were what attracted Soapy and first set his mind spinning. Whatever the reason, he intensified his pursuit. And in time Soapy came to realize that she had taken hold of his heart in a way no other woman ever had.

They were married in February 1886. Within a year, their first child, a son, was born. Soapy’s life, he understood, had changed dramatically. Yet he attempted to navigate through the responsibilities of love and fatherhood as he did the rest of his tangled enterprises: He played a complicated con. He settled with his bride and baby in a house on Curtis Street in one of Denver’s new residential neighborhoods, but he still spent his days and nights working the downtown streets with his crew. There was, as a consequence, an aspect to his life that was seeped in larceny, corruption, and, when necessary, a casual but effective violence. And there was another filled with family happiness, a place that was comforting and where he was comforted. In the end, though, this was one con that was too difficult for even Soapy to play for very long.

YEARS LATER, Soapy, ranting with bitter thunder, would still put all the blame for his comeuppance on Colonel John Arkins. And it is true that Arkins possessed several qualities that made him a relentless and effective adversary.

First, he was motivated by a “vision,” to use the colonel’s own ardent, deliberately ecclesiastical word, of what Denver could grow to become. He’d realized that the Wild West was rapidly becoming a memory, a reckless and violent era that would live on only in the pages of dime novels. If Denver were to grab its place as the premier city in the new West, it needed to become a destination where newcomers could go about without being harassed, where working men did not need to fear that they would be preyed on by unscrupulous gangs, where families would not have their peace disturbed by louts and villains.

Second, the colonel was a dedicated newspaperman, an editor who, he’d boast with pride, might just as well as have been born with printer’s ink running through his veins. After serving in the Civil War as a corporal—“Colonel” was only an honorific title—Arkins had traveled around the Midwest working as a printer. Following the prospectors to Leadville, he’d established the Evening Chronicle. By 1880, however, he had realized that the boomtown’s time had come and gone. He sold the Chronicle and used the proceeds to buy a piece of the Rocky Mountain News, Denver’s oldest newspaper. The News had started out in a rickety log cabin, but it was now housed in a substantial brick building downtown on Patterson Street and had distinguished itself as a crusading civic voice. Yet the colonel had still larger ambitions for his paper, and he saw in Soapy a way to help realize this success. Bandits, he appreciated, were never boring, and front-page stories reporting the exploits of the Soap Gang and its kingpin were a surefire way to sell copies. The nearly daily articles boosted the News’ circulation, and in the process they made Soapy a larger-than-life villain.

Finally, and not least, the colonel was fearless. When, for example, an argument at Joey’s barroom on Curtis Street turned heated and his adversary drew a nickel-plated revolver, Arkins did not hesitate. He stepped forward and, quick and decisive, knocked the man’s silk top hat off with a dismissive wave of his hand. Intimidated, the man backed off. The colonel explained with a smirk, “Any man who carries a nickel-plated revolver will not fire it at anybody.”

And so the pages of the News beat a loud and insistent editorial drum: “Soapy, in the language of the fly-by-night fraternity ‘has’ Denver”; “The city is absolutely under the control of this prince of knaves”; “His skin games in town are flourishing, he gets his percentage from those to whom he furnishes protection”; “There is not a confidence man, a sneak thief, or any other parasite upon the public who does not pursue his avocation under license from the man”; and on and relentlessly on.

But while there’s no getting around that the colonel had it in for him, in the end it was all largely Soapy’s own doing. Soapy had no one to blame but himself for the raw anger that overwhelmed his customary calculating and coolheaded demeanor. What happened was that Arkins, trying to keep his long-running story alive, came up with a new angle. He reported that Mrs. Mary Smith was summering with her three children in Idaho Springs under false pretenses. The families in this pleasant summer colony believed that the popular Mrs. Smith was the wife of a prosperous Denver businessman. However, the reality, Arkins gleefully revealed, was that she was married to the notorious Soapy Smith.