The Book of Murdock

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

BOOK: The Book of Murdock
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To Lydia Morgan Hopper:
God bless the child
For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.
—ECCLESIASTES 7:20
And the seventh angel sounded … And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament; and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.
—REVELATION 11:15–19
 
 
 
 
On the last
day of my life I went into Chicago Joe's Coliseum and ordered a cognac. The place had another name now, but those of us who remembered when the town was put together with canvas and tobacco spit still called it Chicago Joe's, or just the Coliseum if a lady was listening. It was fitted out more like a private parlor than a saloon, with brocade curtains covering the passage to the separate room where ladies sent their serving girls to have their pails filled with beer, but once you knew the place you could never look upon mahogany and flocked paper again without getting thirsty. The cuspidors were lined with blue porcelain and there was a brass call box on the wall at the end of the bar where the staff kept track of orders from upstairs. None of its pointers had been moved off level; it was late morning, with floaters drifting in shafts of sunlight, and all the hostesses were asleep.
The bartender was a hairy-fisted relic of tin-pan days, a veteran of bare-knuckle fights in the camp. Scar tissue blistered his face and his milky right eye moved independently of its mate, like a cue ball rolling aimlessly on a billiard table at sea. “What's the occasion? Old Gideon's more your taste.” He poured a swallow of French into a cordial glass and restopped the bottle right away; evaporation cost dear.
“Today's my birthday.”
“Which one?”
“The latest.”
“Many happy returns.”
He didn't try to sound sincere and I didn't pretend he was. I'd arrested him once for selling cigars without a federal license and shot a generous customer over some official matter I'd forgotten. The man had lived but lost the use of an arm, and after that he'd counted his change more closely. There was no guild for stove-up ranch hands, and consequently no pension.
But despite past differences the bartender was in decent humor when I slung back the drink and ordered another. I fancied there was even a twinkle in his blind eye. For the world had come round: A mail robber I'd chased into a ravine, shattering his mare's cannon, had been released by congressional intervention and was in town looking for redress for the loss of a favorite horse. The common wisdom was he was the better marksman and his reflexes were superior, he being younger. For once the common wisdom was right. I'd have been better off if I'd deprived him of a brother or a friendly banker, losses more easily forgotten; but pipe dreams ran higher than cognac.
I took more time with the second drink, pooling it on my tongue and letting it glide down, scraped a fifty-cent piece across the bar, and pocketed every penny that came back.
“And no more than justice it is,” I heard the bartender mutter as I pushed out through the doors.
It was a clear crisp day—a regular Montana Particular—a little flinty with the wind skidding off the snowcaps on the Divide, setting my face tingling, flushed as it was from the good liquor. It wasn't cold enough to cover my best suit of clothes with bearskin or even heavy twill. The sky hurt to look at.
It depressed me beyond language. I'd buried my father on just such a day, and as I leaned on the shovel all I could think of was the splendor he'd missed. How much better to go into the ground with the clouds as black as weeds and weeping.
But no day is a good day to die. The Indians were as wrong about that as they were about everything else.
The local loafers were all out enjoying the first stretch of pleasant weather since the sodden thaw, smoking, yarning, scratching at the lively activity in their longhandles, and admiring the golden-brown arc their spittle made as it cleared the hitching rails and splashed into the muddy street. I knew a few of them to talk to, but they all withdrew inside or down the boardwalk as I approached, as nonchalant as spooked antelope. What I had was worse than smallpox. I tightened my left arm against my ribs just to feel the solid lump of the Deane-Adams in my armpit.
A water wagon passed, spilling its inevitable leakage from staves inadequately treated with pitch. I waited for it to clear, then stepped off the boards to cross Bridge Street. I'd just come out of the shade of the porch when the shock came.
I heard the crash and identified it even as I was falling. I hadn't counted on a carbine, or that it would be fired from a second-story window of the Bannack Hotel on the other side of Main. The echo growled in the mountains as I lay in the mud pedaling one leg for a purchase I couldn't find. A crowd gathered around. There's always a crowd to be had, no matter how empty the street at the start. You can't beat blood or free beer for civic interest.
I hoped they'd get the dates right on the stone. Hickok had made it only as far as thirty-nine, and mine is a competitive spirit.
Judge Blackthorne's Epistle to the Texicans
“
How much do
you know about the Bible?”
“It's black, isn't it?”
Judge Harlan A. Blackthorne and I were seated in the library of the Helena Stockmen's Club on Fuller Street, drinking claret with a shard of rye, the Judge's own concoction, called Old Thunder's Gavel by the deputies who served him. The only book present was a hollowed-out copy of the
Montana Territorial Code
containing the pocket model Colt the Judge carried in response to the latest threat against his life. The club's reading material stood in presses in the dining room, clearing space for its much larger liquor supply inside oak cabinets in the room where we sat.
His expression betrayed a piety that didn't match his Satanic features and pitchfork beard. But as usual he shifted his annoyance to a less revealing subject. “Damn it, Deputy, I know your prejudice against displaying the badge of office, but you might pay me the respect of wearing it in my presence.”
“Yes, Your Honor.” I foraged it from a pocket and pinned it on. Blackthorne scowled whenever I addressed him by any title other than Judge. Anything else didn't quite fit my mouth, although I could get out a proper “sir” in times of admiration; and I did admire him, but I'd take a bullet through the star before I'd say it. He was a vain old rooster who never forgot an insult or a compliment.
He dismissed the shaft with a gesture that told me how deep I'd struck. I'd just returned from a messy errand in Oregon that had reflected badly on us both as well as on the federal court, and I hadn't scrupled to remind him I'd been against it from the start. That I was there at all when I should have been on leave while tempers cooled said he needed me for something unpleasant, and I was determined to let him twist until he got to the point.
“Do you seriously know nothing of Scripture?” he asked. “I'd expect someone of your frontier stock to have been brought up on sourdough and Jesus.”
“Dugouts are designed for getting snowed in. There was always plenty of Jesus when the bread ran out. I caught a case of devotion, but it was like measles. You don't get it twice.”
“Have you no faith apart from your oath to the Union?”
“I took it with my hand on a Bible. If I thought it was for more than show I'd have sworn on my pistol. I've seen good men die and bad men prosper, but never an angel to tip the scale. If I ever was going to, it would have been at Murfreesboro.”
“Are you an atheist?”
“I never liked the ones who claimed to be. They all tried to convert me.”
“An agnostic?”
“I don't know.”
He frowned as if I'd made an inappropriate jest. The truth was I didn't know what the word meant. I learned later it was of recent coinage.
“But you can sham belief,” he said.
I'd no idea where the conversation was headed, but already I didn't care for it by half. The Judge was a regular-attending Presbyterian; whether that was for community relations or because he thought as much of his immortal soul as he did of the bench wasn't something he shared with those of us who provided him with defendants, and I doubted he was any more forthcoming with his prosecutor or the local leaders he met with formally and at poker. I'd have suspected him of leading up to a dire announcement if I weren't certain he intended to live forever.
I said, “I can be an eagle or a duck. Which one depends on the job.”
“I haven't said there is a job. You're on inactive duty.”
“That's true. As long as we're just chewing the fat, where do you stand on Pharaoh's daughter finding baby Moses in the rushes? She spun a good yarn, but that was the last time anyone believed a story like it.”
“That's blasphemous.”
“You ought to know. You're using Holy Writ to recruit me for work.”
“You're hopeless.”
“If I didn't have hope I'd be dead in Oregon.”
The forbidden subject jerked him back onto the rails. He rang for the steward, a bald, leathery Scot in a rusty tailcoat who'd navigated for Lewis and Clark and Noah, and asked him to fetch the big atlas from the dining room.
When he returned lugging a cloth-bound volume the size of a saddle blanket, Blackthorne opened it across the arms of his chair, made heretical marks on one of the watercolor maps with a gravity pen, and sat back. I rose and circled behind to study it over his shoulder. With a sinking heart I recognized the outline of Texas, my least favorite place after Dakota; which to be fair to Dakota had only been the place where I'd almost been slaughtered by the Cheyenne Nation. Even worse, the marks he'd made were in the panhandle, a spot that existed because the same incessant wind that blew it away daily blew in fresh dirt from Mexico. The panhandle would disappear when the sand ran out.
“I've marked the sites of five armed robberies that have taken place in the past six months,” Blackthorne said. “Two banks, an Overland stage, two trains. The banks aren't our concern, but mail was stolen from the Overland and one of the trains, and that is.”
“What's the matter with the federal court in Austin?”
“Its deputy marshals are spread thin over a jurisdiction the size of France. The Texas Rangers, who normally can be depended upon to fill the gap, are busy patrolling the border of Mexico for
bandidos
. Governor Ireland has asked us for our help, after Isaac Parker in Arkansas turned him down for obvious reasons.”
Parker was the only U.S. jurist who was more put-upon
than Blackthorne, with seventy-four thousand square miles of Indian Territory to tame by way of two hundred deputy marshals and a gallows in Fort Smith the size of a frigate. The two despised each other for reasons unknown to me, but they were united in their contempt for interferers from Washington.
“Still, five robberies. We can scrape up that many in parts of Montana most seasons. What's our end?”
“Method of operations was nearly identical in all five. That suggests the same band. At the pace they're going, they'll fish out their current waters in short order and relocate. I'd rather we fought them on Texas ground than ours. Innocent bystanders there are spread out more and less likely to take a stray round.”
That was thin even for him, but I didn't press the point. If he were going to confide the truth to me, he wouldn't have bothered to put up even so transparent a lie. In any case we were interrupted by the antique steward, who'd returned to ask if we wanted more refreshment. To my surprise the Judge nodded, and the Scot took from a cabinet a cut-glass decanter and from another a bottle of Monongahela and mixed their contents in our empty glasses. Blackthorne was a one-drink, one-cigar man by order of his physician, who had seen him through a heart attack, and no one who answered to the Judge had ever asked for seconds in his presence.
Except me, of course; but this was the first time he'd joined me in the rebellion.
If the steward noticed that a valuable book from the club's collection had been defaced, his expression didn't show it, and he left without remark. Membership was restricted to
owners of ranches exclusively, but although Blackthorne held no title to a single square inch of real property, an exception had been made in his case because he'd tried and convicted rustlers with such Old Testament fervor that not so much as a stolen pair of horns had crossed the territorial line in more than a year. It stood to reason that until one did, he could scribble dirty pictures all over the walls of the reception room on Ladies' Night without a mark appearing against his name in the register.
He closed the atlas and slid it over the arm of his chair until it leaned against the side. For a few moments I watched him shifting his weight on the cushions in search of a compromise between his bony angles and the arrangement of horsehair in the upholstery. The only seat that really suited him was the one behind the high bench in the courthouse. Just because he was physically restless, however, didn't mean he wasn't complacent in his mind. He knew I would raise the subject sooner or later.
I took a long draught of the Gavel and gave him his way. “The Bible.”
“I take solace from it often. The beauty of the Song of Solomon stands out against its background of war, plague, and human sacrifice. I was reminded of it when ‘Whispering Hope' swept through town last year; I was trying a case of rape, murder, and dismemberment, and the strains came through the window as an eyewitness was testifying. I was comforted by the reflection that ugliness and beauty—hell and redemption, if you will—have abided side by side on earth since the beginning. All the changes are superficial. I wonder if the Israelites gathered in the courtyard of the palace
to predict Judgment Day the way our street philosophers do on Catholic Hill?”
“If so, and Solomon's father David was in charge, he'd have stuck them in the front lines and given them the first look.”
“So some of the Word remained with you after all.”
“Not enough to get me from the Kingdom of Israel to the panhandle of Texas.”
He ran a finger around the top of his glass, drawing a dull hum from the crystal. He made some kind of decision and set it on his chairside table untouched. “Each of those robberies took place within three days' ride of Owen, a former buffalo-hunting center more lately concerned with sheepherding, with all the complications that represents with the local cattle interests. Full-time brigand is passing out of fashion. Increased numbers of law enforcement officers and the Pinkertons' stranglehold has forced many road agents into the cover of legitimate employment. Jesse James and the Youngers scorned the life of the working ranch hand, but most of the later breed has come out of line shacks and the bunkhouse and fly back into them between raids. My theory is you're more likely to find these highwaymen rounding up strays in Palo Duro Canyon than hiding out in some cave planning their next outrage.
“The challenge, of course, is to penetrate that close society without raising the alarm—sending them into flight or open confrontation with their loyal friends at their side. A band of officers would bring about the former, and a single man poking about would almost certainly end up bleaching his bones somewhere on the Staked Plain. However, there is
one profession that thrives on a healthy knowledge of the lives of the members of his community without arousing suspicion, and without prowling beyond his station and the various tables where he is invited to break bread.”
I saw where he was heading then, and felt a nasty grin splitting my face. “I can stand for a cowhand because I've been one, and they took me for a saloonkeeper down in New Mexico because I know my way around a bar, but the first time I thump a pulpit, they'll smell brimstone clear to Chicago.”
“You fail to appreciate the proposition. Men confide in their barbers, women in their dressmakers, but both sexes trust their ministers. In addition, the many social affairs that surround the church place the pastor in the best possible position to monitor gossip. No one knows his community better than the man who serves its spiritual needs.”
“Get Ter Horst. His wife teaches Sunday school, and that sheep face of his belongs at the Last Supper.”
“I considered him first, but he thought the plan profane. He threatened to resign.”
“Whereas my soul's up for grabs. The star draws fire like a bottle on a fence rail, but I put it on when you ask. I won't reverse my collar for you. I never met a man struck by lightning who was decent company after we got past the obvious.”
He smiled then, close-lipped without the teeth he wore only in the courtroom. “I felt certain once I scratched that infidel's hide I'd find a believer. You're too hard on yourself, Page. You have an ecclesiastical mien when you discuss a subject that arouses your passion. The rest is costuming.”
That was when I knew I was beaten, although I argued my case a few more minutes just to make the conversation as disagreeable for him as it was for me. When Judge Blackthorne addressed me by my given name, there was no slack left in the leash.

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