City of Widows (12 page)

“Same as Virginia City, only smaller and farther north.” I scraped my throat.

“Where's the piano?”

I hesitated. I'd almost forgotten the wire I'd sent from Socorro City. “They wanted too much.”

“That's a long way to go to come back empty-handed.”

“Well, once you're on the road.” I changed the subject. “I see you're not in the same condition. What's in the bundle?”

He threw it on the bed. “You tell me. It came for you Friday on the Butterfield. Not knowing what's in it I didn't think it was safe to leave it in your room unattended.” He slumped into the room's only chair, a Morris with faded tapestry cushions. “I hear you rode in double this morning with Baronet's deputy. Run into trouble?”

“He killed two Apaches. I killed his horse and we quit even.”

“Is he as good with that rifle as they claim?”

“He is if they claim he hits what he aims at.” I wiped off the remaining lather and reached for my shirt. “I hear Abel Freestone didn't make it.”

“The padre wasn't happy. The ventilation is poor at the mission and there is not enough quicklime in the territory to kill the smell of putrification coming up from below during High Mass. He has asked Ortiz to find another place to store his prisoners.”

“Has anyone heard anything of Ross Baronet?”

“Someone stuck up a pack train outside Las Cruces Sunday and got off with six thousand in silver. They left eight Mexicans dead and the mules aren't talking. My better judgment says it was not Jesse James.”

“Eight dead. That's raw even for a Baronet.”

“Did I mention they were Mexicans?”

“Still it's taking a chance. Frank cannot have approved of it.”

“Possibly not. Two of those killed were vaqueros hiring out before the fall drive. Talk is President Díaz will wire an official protest to Washington City by way of Governor Wallace. The vaqueros belonged to Don Segundo and guess who bankrolled the Díaz revolution?”

“No wonder Frank insists Ross is dead,” I said. “It's a fond wish.”

“The business will come to nothing. Garfield is busy bleeding into a pan and Wallace can't move without federal help. Meanwhile Ross is no concern for us. By now he's in a cave in Chihuahua counting his booty.”

I sat down on the bed with my back to him and pulled on my boots. He was a good poker reader and might see the disappointment on my face.

“What's Colleen about?” I asked. “Shot anyone lately?”

“She's out riding with Eille MacNutt.”

I turned to look at him. His treadle jaw was set.

“It started the day you left for Socorro City. She has the notion we can come to some sort of business arrangement with the Mare's Nest. You will have to get it from her. Every time she explains it to me I get a headache.” He forked out a nickel-plated watch I recognized as his father's. “They should be getting back about now. No buggy horse will tolerate hauling around a man of MacNutt's size much past an hour.”

“I thought the whole idea of this investment was you wanted to run a saloon. It seems to me all you've been doing is watching someone else run it.”

“I admit I'm not the man you are, Page. I can't manage a business and Poker Annie too.”

I stood and put on my hat.

“Ain't you going to open your package?” he asked.

“Later. I know what's in it.” I went out.

The Mare's Nest conducted business in an adobe pile that probably dated back to San Sábado's founding and showed every repair job that had ever been done on it in a hundred mottled patches like a topographical map. Its name was painted directly on its surface in large inexpert capitals without an apostrophe. At the moment an obese yellow cat was the only thing inhabiting the front porch, curled up in a splayed rocker wired together at the weak points. Thus far in my tenure I had never seen anyone else in the chair except Eille MacNutt. He was there when I came out in the morning and he was there when I climbed the Princess's outside stairs to bed, and he never seemed to feel the urge to rock, really an inhuman feat when you thought about it. He couldn't have weighed less than three hundred and might have gone four; I had yet to see him standing and so didn't have a height to figure in. I was certain he'd taken on most of those pounds since coming to town, because I couldn't picture him in his present state sitting on a wagon seat, much less a saddle. The very thought of him riding in a buggy, with or without female companionship, brought forth visions of a glacier on a velocipede.

“Don't be shy, long-tall. There's lots more to see inside.”

The woman slouching in the doorway of the building wasn't the prettiest in a string not known for its beauty. Clad in an undyed muslin shift with enough sunlight coming in the back windows to show she wore nothing underneath, she was gaunt with bad skin and worse teeth that she covered with one hand when she talked. The paint she wore might have been applied by whoever had done the sign on the building, emphasizing all her worst features, and her brown hair was cropped suspiciously short, as if to discourage lice. She went by Clara California. I doubted she came from there. San Sábado was the kind of place you left behind on your way to California. She looked forty and was probably twenty-five. It was cruel work for the pay.

“That's a lie,” I said. “I've seen inside. And I'm not tall.”

“You're all of you the same height laying down.” There was Texas in her speech, or more likely the Nations. She had Cherokee bones. “Everyone else is asleep. You can have the morning rate.”

“Thanks. I'm waiting for someone.”

“Not that Adabelle. She's all shine and no heat. It'll freeze and fall off.”

“Someone else.”

“Too bad, long-tall. Too bad.” She withdrew inside.

In a little while a green phaeton with ivory trim rattled up the street behind a gray and a black with blinders and stopped in front of the building. Actually it didn't do much rattling. The ballast provided by the man in the driver's seat pasted the wheels to the hardpack as solidly as a load of iron stoves. Eille Mac-Nutt was a tailoring challenge in several yards of crinkly seersucker and a straw skimmer with a red silk band, tilted rakishly over one eye. His features were crowded around a toothbrush moustache in the exact center of his big face like too little furniture in a huge room and when he winched himself up, using both hands and leaning the carriage far over on its springs, a thick cloud of lavender flooded my nostrils. I didn't fault him for it. Fat men suffered in that desert heat and he had done what he could about the inevitable acrid odor with the help of the toiletry section in the Montgomery Ward catalogue.

He got down to the street without help and reached up a hand to his passenger. Colleen Bower laid her gloved one in it, lifted her hem, and stepped down. She wore an embroidered wrap to protect her blue dress from dust and a wedge-shaped hat planted with flowers and secured by a plain white scarf tied under her chin.

“Thank you so much, Mr. MacNutt. You're a wizard with horses.”

“I claim no credit. Your charming presence is more effective than any quirt.” His voice was callow. The weight made him look older, but he was probably still in his twenties. He saw me and nodded. “Murdock.”

“MacNutt.” It was as much conversation as had passed between us since we'd met.

“Good morning, Page. I hope your trip was pleasant.” Colleen raised a hand to let me help her up onto the boardwalk.

I kept both of mine in my pockets. “I still have my hair. That's pleasant for New Mexico.”

MacNutt mounted the walk and performed the gentlemanly duty. “There's no need to end this just because the animals are tired,” he told her. “I have a bottle of Napoleon in my office.”

“Another time, perhaps. Thank you for an enchanting drive.” She took my arm and inserted pressure on the bicep. We started walking in the direction of the Apache Princess.

“It's at least a hundred yards to the door,” I said. “Shall I hitch up the buckboard?”

A muscle worked in her jaw. “The first time I heard your name I thought it sounded chivalric. I had much to learn.”

“Is that what it took to get you to go riding with the Great Divide?”

“A trim waist is hardly a substitute for good manners.”

“If you're that smitten I'm surprised you didn't take him up on the brandy.”

“Do you want to hear the proposition I put to him or not?”

“Does it matter what your partners want?”

“It helps when they are here to consult.”

“I am here.”

“So you are. It occurred to me while you were gone that we are not in competition with the Mare's Nest at all. Our customers come to drink and play cards. They can do that at MacNutt's as well, but it is not their primary concern.”

“Yes, Clara California gave me that impression.”

“Oh?”

“I interrupted you.”

“So you did. I proposed to MacNutt that since we are not in the same business we could help each other by issuing vouchers. If they visit the Nest first and spend money they will receive a certificate to be redeemed for chips or a drink at the Princess. If they visit the Princess first and spend money we will issue them a token to be applied against the price of companionship at the Nest. As things stand, fully half our respective clientele winds up spending the entire evening at one establishment or the other. This way they will patronize both.”

“At a discount.”

“Just for one turn of the cards or one drink. If they stopped there we would have been out of business before this.”

“It's not the same with companionship,” I said.

“That's the beauty of the arrangement. MacNutt's head runs toward figures, not the nature of man. Most of the advantage is ours.”

“Sooner or later he is bound to see that.”

“By then there will be customers enough to go around. Meanwhile we will have more capital to invest in the improvements we discussed.”

“And until then you intend to buy time by going riding with Eille MacNutt.”

We were in front of the saloon. She stopped walking and intercepted my gaze. “Yes.”

“What happens when he finds out what you've been doing?”

“I grew up on the circuit,” she said. “I would not have done so had I not learned how to take care of myself.”

“That purse pistol won't get you out of everything.”

“It has so far.”

“Is this what you were up to when they ran you out of El Paso?”

“That was a misunderstanding.”

“Did it have to do with that band you're wearing?”

She touched it involuntarily; smiled, but not with her eyes. “For someone who no longer keeps the peace you are asking a lot of questions.”

“You're forgetting our silent partner. Frank Baronet is already worried about his brother's banditry and what it may mean for his position as sheriff. A falling-out involving an enterprise he's connected with could bring this whole thing down around us.”

“Is that what you're concerned about?”

“Isn't it enough?”

“I thought perhaps you just didn't want me going riding with any man who's not named Page Murdock.”

“That door closed in Breen.”

“Doors have been known to open.”

She went through one then, leaving me alone on the boardwalk with the cedar chief.

12

“N
O, NO
,
S
EÑOR
Murdock.
Es imposible.
It cannot be done.”

“Why not?” I said. “He's wanted for the stickup at the Apache Princess. You identified him yourself.”

Rosario Ortiz shook his head. I wasn't sure if it was at the prospect of getting up a posse to track down Ross Baronet or the determination of the stalk of feathergrass he was grasping in both hands to hang on to its place among his yellow roses. He had on his gardening outfit of overalls, army coat, and sombrero, and the effort had him red and sweating. In truth I couldn't picture the fat part-time lawman at the head of a mounted party of armed men.

“To begin with, he is by now among the caves in Chihuahua. They are a honeycomb and have been known to swallow a platoon of cavalry for a week.”

“You don't know he's there. You're only guessing.”

“In the second place, he has nothing that belongs to you. You have the lives of two of his
compañeros,
in fact. If anyone should be hunting anyone, it is he who should be hunting you. But you see he is not. This is because he is a man of reason.”

“Tell me, does that star the city gave you mean anything?”

“Sí, señor.”
He gave one last tug. The stalk tore loose suddenly, leaving the root below the ground. He bared his teeth at the fragment in his hand, threw it aside, and sat back on his heels to take off the sombrero and drag a sleeve across his eyes. “It means five dollars a week and ten cents for every rat and stray dog I shoot in the city. Upon this and what I am paid for my work as a carpenter I put clothes on the backs and tortillas in the stomachs of eleven children.
Por favor,
look around you,
señor.
Do you see much carpentry work to be done? Do you see any?”

“Your front door has a broken panel.”

“I must be sure and pay myself to replace it. No,
señor,
San Sábado is not Socorro City. A man can live on the rats he shoots there. Here he must clean cisterns and hang doors and make repairs at the mission. He would sweep the floor there as well, except that is Yaquí work and if they catch him at it they will wait for him outside and cut his throat when he leaves. Having told you all this, I hope that you will excuse me if I do not spring into the saddle to run after a bandit who has not stolen anything.”

“The families of eight Mexican muleskinners may not agree with that last part.”