Wilde West (29 page)

Grigsby said, “Some redheaded hooker maybe gave him a dose of clap?”

Boynton frowned thoughtfully. “I'd guess it was something more than that, Bob. He was like a kid with a brand-new toy. He really
enjoyed
himself. He was having
fun.
You saw what he did to her breast? On the table there?”

Grigsby nodded. He swallowed some bourbon.

“I can picture him,” Boynton said. “I can see him dancing around the room with those strips of her—”

“Dancin'?”

“He left bloody footprints all over.” Boynton frowned. “You were there, Bob. You didn't notice that?”

Grigsby shook his head. “Too busy forcin' myself to look at Molly.”

Boynton nodded. “Sure. Well, you could see from the prints that he'd been up on his toes, jumping from place to place. Like he was doing some crazy kind of dance.”

Grigsby sat up. “Hold on there a minute. He took his shoes off?”

Boynton nodded “In places you could see the outline of each separate toe. I think he was probably naked the whole time he was working on her. Would've made it easier for him to clean himself off, afterward. There was bloody water in the basin under—”

“Anything funny about the feet? Missin' toes?”

“No. Just a normal pair of feet.”

“Big feet? Small feet?”

“Average.” He shook his head. “No help for you there, Bob.”

“Did Greaves get somebody to trace an outline of the prints?”

Boynton shrugged. “I couldn't say. It'd be the obvious thing to do, though, wouldn't it?”

Grigsby nodded. If he could get hold of one of those traced outlines …

“Anyway, like I say,” said Boynton, “I can picture him dancing around, and laughing and giggling while he played with pieces of Molly. This one is a real can of worms, Bob.”

“So from the footprints, you reckon he'd be about average height?” That would eliminate Wilde.

Boynton nodded. “But footprints can be deceptive. I knew a miner once who was six foot six and weighed two hundred pounds, but he wore size nine boots. It was always a wonder to me how he managed to stand up without falling flat on his face.”

Grigsby told himself to take a look at Wilde's feet next time he saw him. He glanced down at his own size twelve boot and he frowned. He looked up at Boynton. “You think this sonovabitch could be a nance?”

Boynton frowned. “A homosexual? What makes you ask that?”

“I got some suspects, and a couple of 'em are nances.”

Boynton thought about it. “Why not?” he said finally. “I'm not saying that he is, now. There's nothing in what he did that would indicate he was a homosexual. But I don't see any reason why he couldn't be.”

“What turns a fella into a nance, anyway, Doc?”

Boynton smiled. “Just the luck of the draw, I'd guess.”

“You reckon they're born that way?”

“Probably. But I'd say that the culture has something to do with it, too. You know that in some societies, homosexuality was actually encouraged. In ancient Greece, for example.”

Grigsby smiled. “You ain't goin' nance on me, are you, Doc?”

Boynton laughed lightly, comfortably. “Not a chance, Bob.”

Grigsby suddenly remembered that Doc Boynton had been a bachelor all his life.

W
HERE WAS SHE
?

An entire day had passed and Oscar had neither seen nor heard from her.

It was all very well to go gadding about the slums of Denver, to spend time chatting with professionally colorful old dipsomaniacs about dead prostitutes, to bandy pleasantries with the mysterious Doctor Holliday (how on earth had the man managed to materialize just
then
?); but finally, desperately, he missed the violet eyes, the titian hair, the sly supple sensual smile of Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

Lying in his pajamas atop his bed, really quite spectacularly alone, he realized that this mission for which he had volunteered, establishing the identity of the killer, had actually been a means of busying himself, of distracting himself from the dull aching void within him.

Was there really any likelihood that he could discover who was killing these women? He had spent, after all, an entire hour with that muddle of an old man, and learned nothing more substantial than that the dead woman had possessed red hair. A snippet of information so irrelevant as to be utterly useless.

Could he really credit von Hesse's theory—that one of the men on the tour harbored, without knowing it, a homicidal self? Earlier, the notion had seemed persuasive, so much so that Oscar had appropriated it, made it his own. But now, at the close of a long and dreary day, it seemed as hollow as Oscar felt.

A long and dreary day indeed. He and Henry had gotten drenched when they returned to the hotel. With the wind sweeping great hissing gouts of water around the snapping cover of the carriage, the journey back had seemed to take fully as long as Oscar's crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. At the hotel, his hair sopping wet, his clothes cold and sodden, he had stood elaborately dripping onto the front desk, a minor storm shower himself, to learn that Vail had in fact arranged a change of room for Henry. Afterward, he had dismissed Henry for the day and tramped upstairs, his shoes squeaking, to his own room. There he had stripped, showered, scented himself with rose water, donned dry clothing (gray trousers, powder blue shirt, vermilion cravat, the
lune du lac
coat) and gone out in search of Vail. It was time, Oscar decided, for a bit of bridge mending.

He had found the business manager in the bar downstairs, slumped in a chair at the corner of the room. A nearly empty bottle of whiskey stood on the table before him, and Vail, glaring glumly off into space, appeared not to notice as Oscar sat down to his left. Vail's toupee was aslant, the halibut's head contemplating Vail's right eyebrow as though about to peck at it. Oscar found himself wanting to screw the thing round to the front; it was one temptation he was able to resist.

“Vail,” he said, “I think we should talk.”

His head resting back against the flocked red wallpaper, Vail turned to Oscar an unblinking pair of glassy gray eyes. “Have you come to attack me again?” he said in a low, resonant voice. “Have you come once more to heap iniquities upon my head? To smother me beneath the weight of your scorn?”

Oscar felt a chill go fluttering down his spine. The voice was so unlike Vail's in timbre and tone that it seemed to be issuing from some sinister stranger buried deep within the business manager. He said, “I beg your pardon?”

Vail blinked, frowned, sucked in his cheeks, and then smiled sadly. “Oscar boy,” he said, his voice all at once Vailish again.

“What
was
that you were saying?” Oscar asked him.

Vail blinked again, like a man having difficulty awakening. “Huh? Oh.” He spoke slowly, distractedly. “Something from a play I was in. A real stinker.” He smiled sadly once more. “You didn't know, did you, Oscar boy, that I used to be on the boards myself?”

“No,” said Oscar.

“No,” agreed Vail. His eyes misting over, he sat forward, lifted the bottle, poured the remaining whiskey into his glass. “Course not. How would you know? Why would you care? Far as you're concerned, I'm just greedy old Jack Vail. Am I right? Sloppy old greedy old insignificant old Jack Vail.”

“Come now, Vail, I've never thought anything remotely like that. But I do think that we should—”

“You can't judge a book by its cover, ya know.”

Oscar smiled, sensing an opportunity. “Actually,” he said, “I've always maintained that a cover reveals more about a book than—”

“I had dreams once too, ya know,” said Vail to his whiskey glass. He turned to Oscar. “I was young once too, ya know.”

“I've never doubted that for a moment.” Never having for a moment given it a thought.

Vail nodded. “Yeah. Dreams. I wanted to play Hamlet. The Melancholy Dane.” He raised the glass to his lips, swallowed some bourbon. “Alas, poor Yorick,” he said.

“You'd have made a capital Hamlet.”

“I would of been terrible,” Vail said. “Fact is, I wasn't much good in the stinkers.” He looked at Oscar. “But at least, ya know, back then I had my dreams. Dreams are important, Oscar boy. You got to hold on to them as long as you can.”

“Nicely phrased.”

Vail nodded and narrowed his eyes. “You're okay. You're okay, Oscar boy.” His eyes misted over again. “But really, ya know, you shouldn't ought to talk to me like you did before. I mean, what I did, I did it for the tour, Oscar boy. The tour's the thing, am I right?”

“Well, yes, up to a point.”

“Absolutely,” Vail nodded. “I was only thinking of you, see, you and the tour. That's my job, isn't it? I didn't mean anybody any harm.”

“Of course not.”

“So're we friends again, Oscar boy? Huh?” Vail held out his right hand. Oscar took it, and Vail squeezed his hand and clapped him heavily on the shoulder. “We friends again?”

“Of course we are. But don't you think you ought to get some rest? Tonight's the last lecture here in Denver. Come along, I'll walk with you upstairs.”

“Great,” said Vail. “Great idea.” He released Oscar's hand, started to rise, then sat back and looked at him mournfully. “Tell me one thing, though, Oscar boy.”

“What's that?”

“What you said. Upstairs in Henry's room. You wouldn't really of thrown me out the window, would ya? Not your old friend Jack. You wouldn't really of done that to old Jack, would ya?”

Oscar smiled. “Well, yes, Jack, I'm afraid I would.”

Vail looked at him for a moment and then he laughed. He slapped his hand down on Oscar's thigh. “That's what I love,” he said. “That wit you got.”

And so Oscar had escorted Vail up the stairs to his room, the business manager cheerfully bouncing from time to time against the wall, then watched almost fondly as Vail toppled into bed and immediately began to snore. (So helpless and harmless did he seem that Oscar completely discounted the small frisson he had felt when a stranger's voice had rumbled from Vail's mouth.)

Oscar had gone back downstairs to eat. After an extremely depressing meal of dismembered chicken drifting in a pasty gray gravy, he had gone to his own room to nap. But sleep did not come. His stomach gurgled and grumbled in protest at the swill fermenting inside it. His brain attempted, and failed, to visualize any of the people on the tour as a deranged murderer. And images of old men in tattered overcoats and of burly bullying giants in buffalo fur blended with the recurring image of a smiling Elizabeth McCourt Doe in nothing at all. Finally, at seven-thirty, he had arisen and returned to Vail's room. No one answered when he knocked, and the door was now locked, so Oscar had proceeded to the Opera House alone.

The lecture had been a disaster. His wittiest sallies stumbled into a blank wall of silence. His most profound observations met with uneasy titters or, worse, with the pachydermal trumpeting of some dunce emptying his sinuses into a pocket handkerchief. (Or more likely, given the caliber of the crowd, into his fingers.) Throughout the evening, Oscar was unable to prevent himself from glancing over expectantly at the box on his right, as though one of the two desiccated old harpies slumbering there, mouths agape, might magically transform herself into a regal presence swathed in ermine.

After the spotty and perfunctory applause, Oscar had left the Opera House and trudged back to the hotel. He had wanted to see, had wanted to speak with, no one. (Except of course Her.) But his stomach had recovered from its battle with the chicken—curious, and a bit vexing, how it could remain utterly indifferent to its owner's personal tragedy—and he had stopped downstairs for a bite to eat. There had been only a few customers in the bar, but one of them had been O'Conner, sitting with a bottle before him in the same chair that Vail had occupied earlier, and looking every bit as glum. Oscar had joined him.

“What do you recommend tonight?” Oscar asked him.

O'Conner, wearing the brown suit he had purloined from some scarecrow, looked at him balefully and said, “The whiskey.”

When the waiter arrived a moment later, however, Oscar ordered the night's special, something called meat loaf. (They had no tea here; he had asked before.) As the waiter left, Oscar asked O'Conner, “You've spoken with Marshal Grigsby?”

O'Conner made a sour frown. “Yeah.”

“What do you think of all this? These women being killed?”

O'Conner raised his glass, drank from it. “Some hookers got killed. Happens all the time.” He shrugged. “It's a rough line of work.”

Surprised, Oscar said, “You won't be writing about it, then?”

O'Conner shook his head. “Not my kind of thing.”

“I should've thought that any reporter would've found the story fascinating.”