Wyatt in Wichita Read online

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Well now that’s a damn shame,” Marshal Smith said. “That’s a melancholy shame indeed.” He pulled the sheet up to cover Dandi’s dead, collapsing face: her lips were drawing back, in rigor, shrinking to show her teeth.

  The room was warmer than a morgue should be, and there was another body, a shopkeeper who’d been trampled by a horserace he didn’t expect to find in the streets. The smell of death cloyed the room. Wyatt felt like forgetting his abstention from strong drink. He needed one. He was standing on the other side of the table from Smith and a young, brisk, plump-faced newspaperman, Dave Leahy, a reporter for the Wichita Beacon. Leahy wore a brown and black suit, stovepipe hat, and held a kerchief to his nose.

  “The question is,” Dave Leahy said, his voice a little muffled by the kerchief, “what are you going to do about it, Bill?”

  “Why ever would you ask such a question?” Smith asked, lighting a cigar. He blew smoke across the space between them as if trying to mask the smell of decay. “As night follows day, I’ll get on their trail, whoever’s done it. If they left a trail.”

  “We know they were Texan,” Wyatt said.

  Smith grimaced. “You don’t know that. Bessie Earp’s guessing. She only saw this man Brown once, if that was his name, which isn’t likely. I asked her about it: she said he had some kind of buckskin trousers. We see buckskin trousers on many men who come and go. Texas accent, if she’s right—so what? We have nigh as many Texans in town as Kansans. And there’s the possibility she killed herself—the whore could’ve hung herself on that sheet, it coming down at the end …”

  Wyatt shook his head. “I spoke to the Coroner. He found the finger marks on her throat. I don’t think she strangled herself.”

  Leahy grunted at Wyatt’s dry sarcasm. “Yes I suppose we can rule that out …”

  “You want to look at the finger marks, Marshal?” Wyatt asked.

  “Ah. No, I believe not. The coroner is a university man …”

  Wyatt looked at the body; an inert outline under a sheet. “Let’s get some air,” Wyatt said. Something bothered him more than the presence of a couple of corpses. He felt prodded, in some way, inside …

  The others readily agreed and they adjourned to the boardwalk outside, to stand mutely in the greasy yellow light from one of Wichita’s few oil-burning street lamps. Leahy puffed his cigar, watching a buckboard creak slowly by, driven by a farmhand, looking slumped and dispirited, probably from losing his sparse wages at the gaming tables.

  Finally, Wyatt said, “Well, I’ll nose around, see if I can get something more definite.”

  Leahy nodded at Wyatt with approval. But Smith squinted at him through a velvety coil of cigar smoke. “Did I appoint you some kind of town detective, young fella? I don’t think so. You’re barely a policeman here. I will see to this matter myself.”

  “Seems to me,” Leahy said, “that Deputy Earp here is already involved. He was on the scene, it only makes sense he should poke around a mite more.”

  “That house is run by Bessie Earp, I note,” said Smith, looking at his shoes with his lips compressed, as if unsatisfied with the shine. He leaned against a porch post and rubbed dust off the shoes on the back of his trouser legs, one at a time, as he spoke. “Bessie’s the wife of Wyatt’s brother. Now those folks can be seen as responsible for this girl, and she died when they should’ve been watching over her. I’m not so sure young Earp here can be … objective.”

  Wyatt felt anger rising in him, his arms and shoulders tensing. He often felt anger that way. As if his limbs wanted to be used to act on the anger. He held himself in check, but his voice was taut as he said, “What is it you’re suggesting, Marshal? That I would cloud the facts for my family? I will ask you to retract the imputation.” Wyatt had for a time studied to be a lawyer, and retained a store of such language.

  Smith looked at Wyatt with surprise, at hearing so formal and wordy a challenge from a man he’d taken to be a former farm boy turned moderately competent street brawler. “Now see here, Earp …” But the look in Wyatt’s eyes made him change his mind about his response. “Oh, I didn’t mean to suggest anything … just that people might, ah, misunderstand the connections … Well, anyhow, if you want to look into it a bit more, why, that’s no skin off my beezer. But you’ll report to me, and I’ll decide if there’s any arresting to be done, Deputy Earp.”

  And Smith scowled, hearing the reporter chuckle …

  * * *

  “I guess I did hear a name said, the night Dandi was killed,” Mattie said, softly. “Thinking about it last night, it come to me.” They were standing together on the porch of Wyatt’s hotel. In the quiet morning they could hear cattle lowing with worry from a crowded pen out on the edge of town, two blocks away.

  Wyatt had encountered Mattie on his way to breakfast. He was surprised to see her up so early—ten-thirty in the morning. But judging by her red, weary eyes, she’d had a restless night, and she’d probably given up trying to sleep.

  “What name did you hear?” he asked.

  “Just the name … it sounded like Joe Hand, or something like that. One of the men calling to the other. ‘Come on, Joe Hand, damn you, we’ve got to be gone from here,’ he says. That’s all I heard.”

  Wyatt nodded. It seemed he’d heard rumors of a Joe Hand, somewhere. A nickname for some pistolero. “Texas voices?”

  “Seemed to me. I sure hear enough of them to know.”

  Wyatt was thinking about what she’d heard … damn you, we’ve got to be gone from here. It seemed to Wyatt that was the cry of one guilty man to another. It spoke of fear and haste, and it seemed to implicate these hypothetical Texans even further. Not that Smith would think much of it.

  “Would you be embarrassed to have breakfast with me, Wyatt?” Mattie asked almost inaudibly, looking down the street toward Murchison’s cafe.

  “Would I be …? No! If you’ll meet me in Murchison’s, I’ll buy. My privilege. I’ve got one stop to make first …”

  He’d asked the hotel’s groom to saddle his horse, and it was waiting at the hitching post. He waved to Mattie, mounted, and cantered down the street, weaving through the morning freight traffic, buckboards and ice wagons and delivery carts. He had to give the stagecoach a wide berth, its big team of horses commanded much of the road—he looked for his brother Virgil riding up top, and saw instead a shaggy man in an old and dusty cavalry jacket. A different shotgun messenger, on this leg.

  Bessie’s place was only a quarter mile from his hotel, but he wanted to get there before any remaining sign was gone. He might see something he missed in the darkness.

  He rode the horse across the bridge, past two miserable-looking cowhands leaning on the rail and squinting in the cruel morning sunlight as they stared down into the shallow river. “Hell, Lemuel,” said one of the cow-hands, “there ain’t enough there to drown yourself in.”

  Wyatt circled around to the dirt alley between the two lines of buildings constituting the South side of Delano, and reined in a dozen paces from the back door of Bessie Earp’s place, not wanting his horse’s hooves to disturb any tracks that might remain. He dismounted, tied up his horse, and approached the low buildings, shaped like freight cars, where the girls plied their trade. The nearer one was where Dandi had died. Farther back was an out-house, and over to the edge of the property, on the edge of the prairie, was a shanty, ten by twenty, where Bessie’s black maid Agnes stayed with Henry McCarty.

  Mattie had said the men had gone out back, and down the alley, and Wyatt found the boot tracks in the dry, gritty earth, sure enough. There were three sets, however. One set coming around the corner of the building crossed the other two at a diagonal. Another set of boot tracks, coming from Bessie’s place, was followed by a dotted line in the dirt. The marks came and went with the texture of the ground. Rowel marks, he figured—big rowels, by the look of it. They didn’t make many that big.

  The tracks seemed to jitter in confusion for awhile, then
led past the out-house to the alley back of Delano’s main street. Wyatt followed the spur marks, and in the alley found only that plenty of horses and wagons had passed this way since, obliterating the tracks once they reached the alley. He returned to look at the tracks behind the cathouse.

  He decided to follow the diagonal set. They went to the reeking outhouse, which was presently unoccupied except by flies, and then trailed unevenly down the alley to the back of the livery.

  The marks led right up to Sam “Champagne” Montaigne. He was lolling over a couple of bales of hay, clutching his empty bottle and snoring.

  * * *

  “Your mind is somewheres in China,” Mattie said teasingly. She glanced out the window of the café. “You are surely not here. Maybe you’re in Louisiana. I guess you’re thinking of that poor Dandi.”

  Wyatt nodded distantly, and put his coffee cup down on the table, beside the remainders of his breakfast. Mattie was acting like she expected his attention as her due. Kind of early for that. Still, he had been feeling his loneliness for a woman and was tempted to keep company with her. She had made it clear, once more, over breakfast, that he was not to pay her. And the relationship would simplify things. He would not have to court anyone. He would have to see to it they never failed to use a “johnnie”—there was no telling if she’d been any more careful than Sarah.

  “Any notion who kilt that Dandi?” Mattie asked, suddenly.

  Wyatt shook his head. “Montaigne might’ve seen the one who did it—he was sleeping out back. I took him over to the jail so when he sobers up Smith can ask him.”

  He glanced at Mattie, wondering, suddenly, what Urilla would’ve thought of her. But he knew. He had been thinking of Urilla, since seeing Dandi lying there. It was foolish to compare the two—his wife had been a churchgoing young woman of determined respectability, despite her oafish brothers and her shabby father. But Dandi surely had not been a prostitute long—and she’d had Urilla’s delicate, brave vulnerability. And looked rather like her too. As if, seeing Dandi’s dead face, he were being reminded that he had indeed let Urilla down.

  Urilla had been healthy, when he had gone to St. Louis. He was there to serve a warrant for his father, and he’d ended up staying longer than he should have. After doing the errand, Wyatt found himself in a gambling hall, playing cards. He’d intended to play but a few hands. Apart from a hasty break for the piss-pots they kept behind a screen, it was twenty-seven hours before he left that table, having lost what he’d gained and forty-eight dollars more. Then, stunned with exhaustion, he’d rented a room and slept twelve hours through. He’d awakened realizing his wife had expected him back a day earlier.

  Wyatt had returned to Lamar quickly as he could—muddy roads made it slow going—only to find her already fallen ill. She’d been sick alone at home for a least a day and part of a night. She’d not wanted to leave the house, she’d said, for fear he would come home and she wouldn’t be there waiting.

  Suppose he’d been with her, when she’d first gotten sick? He would have brought the doctor far sooner. She wouldn’t have been weakened by fretting on the whereabouts of her husband. Maybe her brothers had been right after all…

  “Wyatt?”

  He looked up at Mattie, blinking, feeling like he’d flown back to Kansas from Missouri in the interval of a moment. “Yes … Mattie?”

  “It ain’t China anymore: You were sitting at breakfast with some other lady in your mind, just now,” she said—smiling, but chiding him all the same. “That sad look in your face …”

  He said, “Can I order you some more tea?”

  * * *

  Wyatt was leaning against the bar, waiting for Bat in Red Beard’s saloon, and had almost talked himself into breaking his liquor fast and having a serious drink. The bar that night was crowded with cowboys—and the occasional shopkeeper hoping his wife wouldn’t come looking for him. A barefoot saloon girl, who’d won the race, was banging away on the piano in the corner, caterwauling about the man on “The Flying Trapeze”. Wyatt was feeling restless, still seeing that other girl’s face in his mind’s eye; seeing Dandi’s lips receding in death. Maybe a glass of whiskey and water. Everyone else in Wichita drank a bit on duty. What was a drink or two?

  He signaled the bartender, pointing at a bottle. The bartender, a portly man with an apron and mustaches oiled into black curls, knew him well enough to look at him with surprise. But he shrugged, set the bottle up on the bar, a little to Wyatt’s right, and bent to get a glass …

  The bottle exploded, spraying amber liquid and spinning glass fragments. Wyatt had felt the air crease with a bullet and turned to see a giggling, pig-eyed, mutton-chopped cow-hand, sitting at a poker table, his seat turned to face the bar; a Dragoon pistol smoked in his left hand; in his right was a half empty shot glass of whiskey. He was wearing fringed batwing chaps and a wilting, sweat-stained trail hat—and he was cocking his pistol for another shot. The man sitting across the table from him was a gaping, pock-marked drummer who’d been selling patent medicines on Main Street earlier that day—the peddler stood up and backed away from the table.

  “Now,” said the cowboy, speaking carefully so as not to slur his words, “I am a-gonna hit that glass righ’ next to where th’ bottle was. Bartender, move yourself outter th’ way, and you, the tall som-bitch with th’ yeller mustache, you move too, and I’ll show you how we shoot in Texas.”

  Wyatt sighed. Texas.

  Noting the man was left-handed, Wyatt raised his hands and took a long step sideways, to the cowboy’s right, as if he were merely getting out of the way of the gun.

  “You don’t mind,” Wyatt said, “if I move away from the bar before you let fly, just in case there’s any ricochet after you shoot that glass?”

  “Why sure, boy, go ahead on,” the cowboy said, closing an eye and aiming the gun, as Wyatt glided around to one side of him. The cowboy tilted his hat almost to the back of his head and steadied his pistol, his tongue stuck out on one side of his mouth. The room got real quiet … The bartender ducked under the bar …

  Wyatt had less than two seconds to consider his options. He couldn’t let this man shoot up the saloon. It wouldn’t do to shoot the drunken fool, of course. If he hit him with his fist and didn’t put him down thoroughly with one punch, the cowboy would still have that gun and might use it on him. And if he grabbed for the gun, the cowboy might fire in a panic. Might hit anyone.

  It occurred to Wyatt there was one way to take the cowboy out of the action reliably, and fast, without shooting him. As the Texan was squeezing the trigger, Wyatt drew his own gun and raised it high with as much speed as he could put into the movement, and brought it down with a crack on the cowboy’s forehead. The cowboy’s eyes crossed and he went over backwards, chair and all, out cold.

  Wyatt scooped the gun from the cowboy’s nerveless fingers, uncocked it, carefully lowering the hammer. He stuck the gun in his own belt, then took the drover by his greasy collar and began to drag him to the front door.

  He was suddenly aware that the room had burst into a noisy response—and it was not a consistent one. Two men in silk high-hats—men he knew to be associated with importing dry-goods—were applauding, grinning from their table in the corner, and the bartender was applauding too. Three cowboys from Pierce’s bunch were swearing, and one of them spat at Wyatt’s boots as he dragged his charge toward the door. Other men at the tables were laughing, slapping the tables in their delight at the young deputy’s slickness. “Lookee there, he busted open his scalp! Boom! He’s bleedin’ like a stuck pig!” The dance hall girl had her own particular response, her breasts heaving, her lips parted.

  Wyatt dragged the cowboy outside. He found Bat strolling up with his hands in his pockets.

  “What’s this, another charitable contribution for the calaboose, Wyatt?”

  “It is. Promiscuous gunfire in the saloon and destruction of property. I’d appreciate it if you’d watch my back. He’s one of Pierce’s boys and there are oth
ers in Red’s place. Not too happy with me …”

  Bat put his hand on his holstered gun and followed along, walking backwards a ways to keep his eye on the saloon’s front door. The cowboys glared after them from the doorway, but no one followed.

  Wyatt was thinking about that drink—and the bottle. The bottle had exploded just before he’d reached for it. His mother would’ve called that the intervention of the Meek and Loving Jesus. Maybe—anyhow, that drover had done him a favor.

  Then again, if his drunken aim had been off, that cowboy could have put a .45 slug into Wyatt’s back.

  Wyatt continued on his way, dragging the unconscious cowboy down the street by the collar, the cowboy’s boots making two long skid marks in the dirt, all the way to the jail.

  * * *

  Mattie managed to just sort of run into Wyatt, stepping out of a doorway just as he was going into his hotel some time after two in the morning. “Wyatt—I need a new place to stay. I got in a tiff with the landlady. I wonder …”

  “Come along,” said Wyatt, who was feeling restless. Some feminine company suited his mood. She silently followed him to his room.

  But as she fell asleep beside him, some time later, he lay awake in the moonlight streaming through the window, wondering if he’d made a mistake. Still, there was something comforting about having her snoring softly beside him; about knowing she’d been there of an evening. His feelings for her were muted. There was some sensual desire, and something protective. But he was sure he’d never feel about anyone as he had Urilla. His ability to feel that much for a woman had died like that small shriveled blue thing curled up dead in a wicker basket.

  * * *

  They had breakfast about ten-thirty the following morn. It was blustery; the wind rattled and hummed at the eaves. Mattie complained at being awakened so early, but Wyatt had things to be about.

  She didn’t eat much breakfast. She was drinking tea, and looking out the dusty window. “I do think they might take some soap to these windows,” she said. Glancing at him sidelong—and then away. “Housekeeping’s important in a business. I wouldn’t mind keeping a café myself, some time.” She glanced at him again. And again away.