Vendetta Trail (13 page)

TANGELENO AND VIZZINI STEPPED DOWN FROM
the train on to the platform at the Bellefont depot. With their bowler hats and three-piece suits, they stood out among the farmers and cowboys—and even the townspeople.

To the casual observer, they looked like salesmen from the East, perhaps of spirits or ladies’ notions. No one could possibly believe that, between them, they could account for more than twenty killings.

The two men waited until their suitcases were offloaded from the train, then, picking them up, walked out to the edge of the platform to examine the town.

The first thing they noticed was the smell. The streets and roads of New Orleans were paved with brick and cobblestone, and they were swept clean every day so that the odor was kept down.

Here, the dirt streets were covered with layer upon layer of horse droppings, which, over time, broke down into an emulsified muck. The result was a stench that was so strong it overpowered everything.

“Holy shit,” Vizzini said, putting his hand to his nose. “What the hell is that smell?”

“You called it,” Tangeleno said with a little chuckle. “It’s shit, all right, but I don’t know how holy it is.”

Fighting the odor as best they could by breathing in short breaths, the two men crossed the street to check in to the Railroad Hotel. “I would like a room with a view of the depot,” Vizzini said.

The clerk chuckled. “That won’t be hard,” he said. “Most folks want to get away from the depot because of the sound. And will you be sharing a room?”

“Hell no. Put me in the back,” Tangeleno said.

“Very good, sir.” The clerk took a key down from a board of hooks and keys. “You’re in Room 22,” he said to Vizzini. “Go upstairs, then come all the way back to the front. And you will be in Room 28. It is at the very back,” he said to Tangeleno.

In his room Tangeleno took off his jacket, poured water into the basin, and washed his face and hands. Although it did not look as if he was armed, removing his jacket revealed a rather unique shoulder holster that kept his pistol covered by his jacket.

After washing his face and hands, Tangeleno combed his hair, then put his jacket on. Walking down to the end of the hall, he started to knock on Vizzini’s door to see if he wanted to go with him, but decided against it. He had spent the last several days with him on the train coming out. It would be good to be away from Vizzini for a while.

Downstairs, Tangeleno stepped up to the desk.

“Where is the closest place to get a drink?” he asked.

“That would be the Brown Dirt Saloon,” the desk clerk replied. “Go out the front door, then across the street. It’s three buildings down to the right. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.”

When Tangeleno went out front, he saw that the hotel was right next door to Smalley’s Mercantile.

Recognizing the name Smalley from the letters he and Vizzini had taken from the whore’s room, he decided to take a look inside.

A sign in front of the store read:

GOODS FOR ALL MANKIND.

QUALITY HIGH. PRICES LOW.

He went into the door and a young woman came to the front, answering the tinkling of the small door-activated bell.

When Louise Smalley saw Joseph Tangeleno standing just inside the door of her store, she stopped and put her hand to her heart. She knew who he was, because she remembered him from her days at the House of the Evening Star.

But what was he doing here? Had he come to expose her?

Louise wasn’t worried about him exposing her to her husband. Eddie already knew about her past. But if Tangeleno let the rest of the town know about her, it could cause problems.

Hesitantly, warily, she went up to him. She was very careful not to let him know that she had recognized him.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“No,” he answered. “I’m just new to your town and I am looking around,” Tangeleno said.

Louise smiled pleasantly. “Well, as you can see, we have quite a well-stocked store here. And if there is something you need that we don’t have, we can always order it and, by train, have it in within two weeks.”

“Nice store,” Tangeleno said as he continued to look around.

It did not appear to Louise that Tangeleno recognized her. Was that possible?

She had never, personally, gone up to her room with Tangeleno, but she had seen him in the parlor several times. Maybe, since they had never actually been together, he didn’t recognize her.

“I’m doing an inventory, but if there is anything I can help you with, let me know,” Louise said, anxious to get away before he started studying her too closely.

“Thank you,” Tangeleno replied. He walked around the store for a moment, paused to turn the crank on a meat grinder, shrugged, then left.

“Eddie?” Louise called.

“Yes, dear, what is it?” her husband answered, coming to the front of the store.

Louise was going to tell him about the Italian she recognized from New Orleans, but decided against it. Maybe she was concerned about nothing. After all, it didn’t seem that he had recognized her.

“Oh, nothing, here it is,” she said, picking up a pencil. “I just couldn’t remember where I left this.”

Eddie chuckled and kissed her. “You would lose your head if it wasn’t attached,” he teased as he returned to what he was doing.

Other than Eddie, the only people in town who knew about her background were the two “soiled doves” she had befriended. She would have to tell them about Tangeleno and make certain they didn’t give her away.

Tangeleno did not remember the name Louise, but he did remember having seen this woman before. He chuckled to himself. Here she was, passing herself off as an innocent store clerk. He was sure she didn’t want the town to know
that she was once a whore. That might provide Vizzini and him with a little edge if he needed her help in anything.

Once more picking his way through the malodorous ooze, Tangeleno crossed the street. Stepping up onto the boardwalk in front of the Brown Dirt Saloon, he made use of a brush shoe scraper that was nailed to the boardwalk, just for that purpose. He stood for a moment outside the batwing doors, looking in to the shadowed interior of the saloon.

Four or five rough-looking and unkempt men were in the bar when Tangeleno went in, and they looked at him pointedly, taking note of the way he was dressed. He knew from the expressions on their faces that they regarded him as a dandy, someone of no consequence. He hoped one of them would challenge him. If he was going to get any respect in this town, he would have to establish himself right away. And the easiest way to do that would be to respond to a challenge.

Unlike the polished bars in the saloons and inns of New Orleans, this bar was made of unpainted rip-sawed lumber. Its only concession to decorum was to place towels in rings spaced about five feet apart on the customer side of the bar. But the towels looked as if they had not been changed in months, if ever, so their very filth negated the effect of having them there.

When Tangeleno stepped up to the bar, the bartender, with a dirty towel thrown across one shoulder, moved down to him.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Chianti,” Tangeleno ordered.

The bartender was chewing on a snuff-dipping stick. “What’d you say?” he asked around the edge of the stick.

“I said I would like a glass of Chianti, please,” Tangeleno said.

“Chianti?” The bartender pulled the stick from his mouth and a little string of brown spittle stretched between the stick
and his lips before it broke. “Mister, I don’t have any idea in hell what a Chianti is,” he said.

“It is a wine,” Tangeleno explained. “An Italian wine.”

“Yeah, well, we ain’t got no wine here. All we got here is beer and whiskey. You want beer or whiskey, I can accommodate you.”

“I’ll have a beer,” he said.

There was a man standing at the other end of the bar, and he had watched the exchange between Tangeleno and the bartender with a look of amusement on his face.

“Hey, dandy man,” he called down to him. “Do you think you’re too good for beer or whiskey?”

Tangeleno looked at the man who had just challenged him.

“Are you talking to me?” he asked.

“Am I talking to you? Hell yeah, I’m talking to you. Do you see any other dandy men in here?”

“I prefer wine, but beer will do,” Tangeleno said.

“I don’t know any man who drinks wine,” the belligerent one said. “I know lots of women, but I don’t know any men who drink wine.”

“What is your name?” Tangeleno asked.

“What?”

“What is your name?”

“The name is Deekus. Not that it’ll make any difference to you. It ain’t like me’n you’s goin’ to be friends. I don’t make friends with dandy men.”

The others in the saloon laughed at Tangeleno’s expense.

“Deekus. Is that a first name or a last name?”

“It’s the only name you need to know,” Deekus said.

Tangeleno turned then so that he was directly facing Deekus. “Well, Deekus, my name is Tangeleno,” he said. “You can call me Mr. Tangeleno.”

“Ha! Like I’m gong to call you ‘mister,’” Deekus said with a raucous laugh.

“Deekus, I had hoped I was going to be able to make you listen to reason, but it is clear that I won’t.”

Tangeleno smiled, a cold, brittle smile, as he enjoyed the fact that Deekus had no idea what the words “listen to reason” meant to those who understand their significance.

Deekus, who had been laughing ever since this encounter started, now laughed so hard that he slapped his hand on the bar. “You want me to listen to reason, do you, dandy man?” He pointed at Tangeleno’s hat.

“Where did you find that thing?” he asked. “Under some whore’s bed? You know what I think, mister? I think that looks a lot more like a whore’s piss pot than a hat.”

Tangeleno took off his bowler and looked inside it for a moment.

“Lei ha ragione, sembra la pentola di piscia che io ho preso da sotto il letto della Sua prostituta di una madre.”

“What? What did you say? I don’t understand Mex talk.”

“It wasn’t Spanish, it was Italian,” Tangeleno said. “And I will interpret. What I said was: ‘You are right. It does look like the piss pot that I took from under the bed of your whore of a mother.’”

Deekus quit laughing and the expression on his face turned to rage.

“What? Why, you dandified son of a bitch! I’m going to blow you to hell!” Deekus said, drawing his pistol. He had the pistol about half-drawn when Tangeleno suddenly reached down into his hat and pulled out a knife. With barely more than a flip of his wrist, he threw the knife. It turned over once in midair, then buried itself in Deekus’s chest.

The expression of rage turned to one of shock as Deekus dropped his pistol and looked down at the knife that was protruding from his chest. Deekus collapsed.

“Deekus!” one of the other men in the saloon yelled. Hurrying over to him, he knelt beside the fallen cowboy. “Deekus!” he said again.

Deekus lay on the floor, his eyes open but sightless. The man beside Deekus stood up then and glared at Tangeleno.

“Mister, you just killed my brother,” he said.

“Did I? Well, he needed killing.” Putting his hand in under his jacket, Deekus wrapped his fingers around the butt of the small but deadly Belgian 7 mm Pinfire revolver that nestled in his shoulder holster.

“You ain’t goin’ to find me that easy to kill,” the brother said.

“Farley, you watched this go down same as did ever’one else,” the bartender said. “Deekus egged on this here foreign feller. Besides, Deekus drew on him ’cause he didn’t think he was armed. Now, why don’t you go down and get the undertaker so’s you can give your brother a decent burial.”

“I’ll go get the undertaker,” Farley said. “Soon as I take care of the Mexican here.”

“I’m not Mexican,” Tangeleno said.

“You are about to be a dead Mexican,” Farley said.

“Farley, if you kill him, you’ll be hung for murder, sure as a gun is iron. He’s done throwed his knife. He ain’t even armed now.”

“I can fix that,” Farley said. Bending down again, he picked up his brother’s pistol, then he put it on the bar and gave it a push. It made a scraping noise as it slid down the bar, where it stopped and rocked back and forth in front of Tangeleno. Tangeleno stared pointedly. “There you go, mister. Pick it up anytime you’re ready.”

“I don’t care to use that gun,” Tangeleno said.

“Yeah, well, you don’t have no choice,” Farley said. “It’s the only gun you’ve got.”

Farley stepped away from the bar, then let his right hand hang down, flexing his fingers open and closed just over the handle of his pistol.

“Farley, you don’t want to do this,” the bartender said.

“Stay out of this, Ely. This here ain’t none of your concern. This is between me and this here Mexican.”

“I’m not Mexican,” Tangeleno said again.

“Ain’t goin’ to do you no good to keep your hand under your coat like that,” Farley said. “I’m going to start countin’. And when I reach three, I’m going to shoot you whether you’ve reached for that gun or not. One.”

The confrontation between Tangeleno and Deekus had all happened so quickly that nobody in the saloon had time to react. But this was playing out with all the timing and choreography of a staged melodrama.

“Two.”

Tangeleno had still not taken his hand out from under his jacket.

“Three!” Farley shouted, going for his gun.

Suddenly, and to the total surprise of everyone in the room, Tangeleno took his hand out from under his jacket and there was a gun in his hand.

Farley halted in middraw. He had been keeping his eyes on the gun on the bar, and he was totally shocked to see a pistol in Tangeleno’s hand.

Tangeleno smiled, a cold, evil smile. He pulled the trigger and the gun boomed, the sound of the gunshot very loud in the closed confines of the room.

A hole appeared in Farley’s chest, and he looked down at it, then back at Tangeleno, his face registering the same surprise as had his brother’s a few minutes earlier. Smoke curled up from the barrel of Tangeleno’s gun, then formed an acrid-blue cloud to hover over the room.