Wilde West (42 page)

Grigsby nodded. “Seems to me, Doc, that when people start gettin' themselves killed off, a marshal's got a right to ask some questions.”

Another twitch. “Conflicting philosophies, sounds like.”

Grigsby nodded. “Maybe.”

Doc sipped at his drink. “How far do you want to go with this, Bob?”

“Far as I got to.”

Again, Doc was silent for a moment. Then he said, “It's the wives want to hear the lectures.”

Grigsby frowned. “So?”

“The husbands get dragged along. Afterwards, they're looking for a game.”

Grigsby smiled. “If they can afford a lecture, they can afford a game of stud.”

Doc smiled his twitchy smile. “Some of them seem to think so.”

Grigsby nodded. “You been followin' the tour.”

Doc nodded.

“Business is good?” Grigsby asked him.

Doc smiled again. “I get by.”

Grigsby finished off the last of his bourbon. “I don't s'pose you know anything about the folks travelin' with Wilde.”

Doc shook his head.

Grigsby stood up. “Okay, Doc. 'Predate it.”

“Be seeing you, Bob.”

O'Conner opened the door and his face sank.

“Howdy, Davey,” said Grigsby, grinning happily. “Good to see you again. You gonna invite me in?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Not a one.”

O'Conner stepped back and Grigsby shuffled into the room.

“It is Davey, ain't it?” Grigsby asked him. “I got that right? I mean, we never did get properly innerduced.”

“David,” said O'Conner. He crossed the room and sat down on a straight-backed wooden chair beside the small wooden table in the corner of the room. The table held a half-empty bottle of whiskey and an empty glass.

Grigsby said, “The same David O'Conner who's a hotshot reporter for the
New York Sun
? The one who's gonna get the president of the United States to start sendin' me telegrams?”

O'Conner lifted the bottle, poured whiskey into the glass. “You have something to say to me, Marshal?”

“Just so happens,” Grigsby said, “I did get a telegram about you today. Wasn't from President Arthur, though.” He reached into his vest pocket, slipped out the telegram, unfolded it. “Was from a fella name of Jackson B. Martindale. Ever hearda him, Davey?”

O'Conner drank from the glass. “You telegraphed him.”

“I did. I did that little thing, Davey. I asked him for particulars about this hotshot reporter of his, David O'Conner. And you know what he wired back?”

“You're enjoying this,” O'Conner said. He seemed neither surprised nor alarmed. He seemed only resigned.

“Some,” Grigsby admitted. “What he wired back, Davey, was this—
OCONNER A LIAR AND A DRUNK. STOP. NO LONGER A REPORTER THIS OR ANY OTHER NEW YORK NEWSPAPER. STOP. INFORM HIM LEGAL ACTION IF HE CONTINUES MISREPRESENTATION. SIGNED, JACKSON B. MARTINDALE, EDITOR, NEW YORK SUN.”
Grigsby looked over the telegram at O'Conner, and smiled. “Doesn't sound like a very friendly fella, now does he?”

“H
AVE YOU TOLD WILDE
yet?” O'Conner asked Grigsby with what looked like, and sounded like, casual curiosity. Grigsby knew it wasn't.

He sat down opposite the reporter. “I reckoned you and me oughta talk it over first.”

O'Conner nodded. “Then I guess I owe you something.” He smiled. It was a small, sickly smile, bitter and inward looking. “Would a drink do?”

“For starters.” No point in Grigsby's quitting now; he already had a good strong buzz going. He'd quit tomorrow. If he decided tomorrow that he wanted to.

O'Conner stood, walked to the dresser, found another glass, brought it back to the table, sat down. He filled the glass, handed it to Grigsby. He raised his own glass, drank from it, and sighed. He looked away.

“Well now, Davey,” Grigsby said. “Why don't you tell me why you're pretendin' to work for the
New York Sun
when you're not doin' any such a thing.”

Without looking at him, O'Conner said, “It's a long story.”

“That's the best kind.”

O'Conner took another swallow from his drink. Still looking away, his voice flat, he spoke as though he were talking to the floor. “My wife and I moved to San Francisco last year. Things hadn't been going very well for us in New York, and Sonia had some money, so we decided to try California for a while. Get a fresh start.” He smiled the bitter smile. “Well, things didn't go very well for us there, either. My fault. I admit it. I was hitting the booze a little too heavily. I made a few mistakes.” He turned to Grigsby, and now some emotion slipped into his voice: defensiveness. “Nothing big, nothing spectacular, but the newspaper business is like a great big dragon. As long as you're doing the job, getting in your stories, feeding the dragon, it lets you ride on its back. You're way up there, in the clouds. But make a mistake, and the dragon turns on you. It chews you up and then it spits you out.”

Grigsby nodded. He didn't know much about the newspaper business, but as a lawman he did know a little bit about people making excuses for themselves, and he was pretty sure that he was hearing someone do that now.

O'Conner took another drink. “But it would've worked out. I had plans. I had a couple of good things lined up, a couple of real possibilities. I could've turned it all around.” He shrugged. “And then Sonia died.”

Grigsby nodded. “How?”

“Pneumonia. She went to bed with it one Monday morning and by Wednesday night she was dead.”

“When was this?”

O'Conner smiled his wan, bitter smile. “Oh, you can check on it, Marshal. It's all on record. Sonia O'Conner, beloved wife of David. Died on November Seventeenth, Eighteen Eighty-one.” He drank some more whiskey. “A week before Thanksgiving.”

Grigsby nodded.

“Anyway, I went a little crazy there for a while.” Another smile, one that tried for sarcasm and almost succeeded. “Not killing hookers. Just drinking too much. And then—in January, I don't even remember exactly how it happened—I met Vail. He remembered me from New York.” Another small smile, bitter again. “From my days of glory. Anyway, we talked, and he came up with an idea. Why not write a book about the tour—this tour, Wilde's tour across America. Write a book showing how Wilde reacts to the country, and how the country reacts to him. The Poet meets the populace. Why not, I thought. A living dog is better than a dead lion. And besides, it
was
a good idea. No one's ever done it before.”

“So Vail knows you're not working for the
New York Sun
?”

O'Conner nodded. “We've got a contract. He pays for the rooms I stay in, and he'll get forty percent of the money from the book.” He drank some bourbon. “I pay for my own food and liquor. I had some money left. From Sonia.”

“Wilde doesn't know about this.”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Vail's idea. He's afraid that Wilde'll want a percentage of the book.”

So there was more to Vail—or maybe less—than met the eye.

O'Conner looked at him. “Listen, Marshal. I asked around, back in Denver. I found out about you. I heard about your wife leaving. You and I, we've got a lot in common. We've both lost our wives. Other people don't understand about a pain like that. They don't know what it can do to a man. How you can feel it all over your body, like the weight of the world, when you get up in the morning.”

He raised his glass of whiskey and held it up between him and Grigsby. “And we've got this, too. Our one real friend. The balm of Gilead. The wine that maketh merry. Other people, when they get up, they don't know what their day's going to be like. Happy or sad, long or short. But you and me, we know exactly how its going to go. All we've got to do is look at our bottle. We can measure the day, before it even happens, by the amount of liquor left.”

“Don't worry,” Grigsby said. “I'm not gonna tell Wilde about your deal with Vail, if that's what you're leadin' up to. It's none of my business. But as for drinkin', scout, you speak for yourself.” It was a shame about O'Conner's wife, a tragedy; but where did the reporter get off comparing himself to Grigsby? Grigsby had a job to do, and he did it. He had responsibilities, and he lived up to them. He wasn't lying around in a hotel room feeling sorry for himself and pretending to be something he wasn't. “Liquor's no big thing with me. I can take it or I can leave it alone.”

O'Conner smiled. “When was the last time you left it alone?”

Today, Grigsby thought. For part of the day, anyway. A good chunk of it. And tomorrow, for sure, he was definitely going to quit. “Now listen, Davey,” he said, “you just let me be the one asks the questions here, okay?”

O'Conner shrugged. “Whatever you say. And listen, I'm grateful. I mean it. For your not telling Wilde.”

“Fine.” Grigsby reached for his glass, stopped himself. “Tell me this. You're not even a reporter nowadays. Why'd you get so steamed up when I told you not to write about these killin's?”

O'Conner nodded. “That's right,” he said, and his voice was flat again. “I'm not a reporter these days.” He looked off, smiled to himself, then looked again to Grigsby. “But I thought, for a moment there I thought maybe I could pull it all together. It's a good story, Marshal. I can still recognize one when I see it. I thought, maybe, if I put my mind to it, I could write it and sell it to one of the New York papers.”

He swallowed some whiskey. “And maybe I will.” He smiled at Grigsby. Sarcastically again, and this time the sarcasm came off real well. “Later, of course. After you catch the killer.”

Irritated, Grigsby said, “You think I won't?”

O'Conner's face went blank and he held out his hands. “What do I know?”

Grigsby reached for his drink, nearly stopped himself once more, and then snatched it up and tossed back what was left of the whiskey. Why the hell try to prove anything to O'Conner. “How's the book going?”

O'Conner, watching Grigsby drink, had been smiling. Now he frowned, puzzled. “What?”

“The book you're writin' about Wilde.”

“Oh.” The reporter nodded. “Good. Damn good, I think. I've already written a couple of chapters. Taken a lot of notes. I think it's really going to turn things around for me.”

He sounded convincing, maybe because he had convinced himself. But Grigsby remembered what he'd seen in the reporter's notebook, the only thing he'd seen in the reporter's notebook:

O. Wilde
.

Oscar Wilde
.

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
.

He said nothing. Lying about some book you were supposed to be writing wasn't against the law.

Neither was self-deception. If it had been, probably everyone in the world would be in jail.

Grigsby felt sour and sad and used up. The night had started off so goddamn well. The telegram had lifted his spirits by suggesting an ulterior motive for O'Conner's joining the tour. And in fact there had been an ulterior motive; it just hadn't involved killing hookers.

Of course, the whole story could be a passel of lies. Tomorrow Grigsby would talk to Vail. And send a telegram to San Francisco to check up on the rest of it.

And even if the story turned out to be true, that didn't mean that O'Conner was off the hook. Maybe his wife's death had unbalanced him; maybe he'd decided to start taking revenge against the world by cutting up women.

But Grigsby was discouraged. He'd traveled from possibilities to likelihoods and back again to possibilities. And O'Conner depressed him. Grigsby felt both sorry for the reporter and angry at him. He wanted to grab him by the shirt front and shake some sense into him. But he knew that self-pity was as unshakable as self-esteem, maybe more so. There was nothing he could do for the man; and nothing, right now, he could do about him. Besides, it was nearly twelve o'clock and Mathilde would be waiting. “I'm gonna check up on all this,” he told the reporter.