Territory (44 page)

“Do you know if Mrs. Holliday is in?” she asked the desk clerk.

He was a young man with thinning dark hair, and his mouth was pinched as if disapproval were his natural state. “She ain’t in her room,” the clerk said without checking the key box behind him. Instead his eyes went to the saloon. “You want to leave a message for her?”

“No, thank you.” Ladies did not go unaccompanied into barrooms, ever. Not even in pursuit of the truth. Mildred straightened her spine, filled her lungs, and headed for the elaborate spindle-work doors of the saloon.

The room was thick with the odor of cigars long smoked or snuffed, beer long drunk or spilled. It was a smell she knew from passing open doors on Allen Street. But here it was uncontested and joined to the rainy-season smell of damp wool and mildew. New smoke lay in strata like layers in rock, from just above the heads of the patrons all the way to the high ceiling. The air seemed a better barrier than the saloon doors were.

Kate Holliday stood at the bar like a man, in near solitary splendor; the men themselves were farther down the rail, watching her warily out of the corners of their eyes like spooky cattle. Was that because she was Doc Holliday’s woman, and they had a healthy sense of self-preservation? Or was it fear of the unknown: an elegantly dressed woman in their preserve, ignoring them as a lioness might a flock of crows?

Association with the lioness might shield her from potential insult. Mildred crossed the room to Mrs. Holliday’s side. “Good evening, Mrs. Holliday.”

The woman turned a cold face on her, with no recognition in it. Then her eyes widened. “It’s—Mrs. Benjamin, isn’t it? Good God.” There was a glass on the bar in front of her, almost empty. Mildred smelled gin and lemons and sugar on Mrs. Holliday’s breath.

“Might I talk to you for a few minutes?”

Mrs. Holliday stared at her thoughtfully. She didn’t look or sound drunk, but Mildred thought she was. At last she let out a puff of breath that might have been a laugh. “I don’t suppose you want to do it here.” She turned her hand to indicate the bar, a graceful gesture.

“If it’s the best we’ve got,” Mildred replied, though her heart sank an inch.

Mrs. Holliday smiled and shook her head. “It ain’t fit. We’ll go to my room.” She sailed out through the lobby doors, dignified as a senator, and Mildred followed. When the doors swung closed behind her, she could hear a buzz of conversation spring up on the other side of them.

Kate Holliday’s handsomely furnished room was untidy and impersonal, and looked like a place in which its inhabitant didn’t plan to stay long. Mrs. Holliday dropped onto the mahogany bed, folded her arms on the carved footboard, and rested her chin on them, looking at Mildred. “Well, what is it? Oh”—and she raised her head to nod toward the bureau—”d’you want a drink?”

There was a half-full bottle of bourbon on the bureau, and a glass beside it. No need to go to the saloon to drink; Mrs. Holliday had been making a statement. “No, thank you,” Mildred replied.

“Sorry I don’t have tea,” Mrs. Holliday said, with the hint of a sneer.

“Mrs. Holliday—” Mildred closed her lips on the rest of the sentence. “No, I’m not going to rise to that bait. Nor any other, I hope. Mrs. Holliday, did your husband really help stop the Benson stage in March?”

Mrs. Holliday returned her chin to its place on her crossed wrists. “You’re here because I said so, aren’t you?”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Who says I have to give you one?”

“No one.” Mildred twitched a petticoat off the padded seat of an ornate chair, hung it over the chair’s back by its drawstring, and sat down. “Maybe you don’t want to talk about that.”

Mrs. Holliday just stared at her, a little crooked smile on her lips. In the silence Mildred heard thunder mutter, miles away.

“Would you talk to me about what happened at the ball the night of the Fourth?”

The smile hardened like candy. “There was a lot of dancing.”

“There’s a lot being done right here and now, too. Mrs. Holliday, something happened between your husband and Wyatt Earp. What was it?”

Mrs. Holliday closed her eyes. “Call me Kate,” she said. She seemed ten years older than she had a moment before. “Have you asked your gentleman friend? I wager he knows a little.”

She felt a little cold jab at her insides. “He was with me. He wouldn’t know any more than I do.”

“If you think that, there’s no point in my talking to you.”

Mildred realized that her hands, which she’d folded in her lap, were clenched on each other, nails digging in. “You said something to Earp, something like, ‘He told you we were going.’ ”

Kate nodded. “And Wyatt can’t have that, not now. He’s going to squeeze Doc like an orange until he’s empty. Without Doc, he can’t bring anything off.”

“Squeeze him how? What do you mean, empty?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“But if you’re concerned for Dr. Holliday, why did you swear to Sheriff Behan that he was a party to murder?”

“They’ll put him in jail. They’ll stick him in Yuma prison. And I defy even Wyatt God-damned Earp to get at him there.”

Mildred sat limp in her chair as the statement sank in. “You accused him of a felony to keep him
safe?”

“I won’t let ’em hang him. But my God, hanging might be better. Quick and clean.”

Kate was unquestionably drunk. But she was telling the truth. She’d blamed Doc Holliday for the stage holdup to get him arrested and imprisoned, so he’d be out of reach of Wyatt Earp.

“What do you want to keep him safe from?” Mildred asked.

Kate stared at her from under drooping eyelids. Mildred thought of the lioness, watching circus visitors through the bars, dreaming of how it would be if the bars were gone.

“Is Earp engaged in illegal activities?” Mildred added desperately. “Is he involving your husband in them?” There was no halo over Doc Holliday’s head; but it was possible for a man to draw the line somewhere, then find himself dragged across it.

Kate dropped her forehead onto her arms and made a sound. For a horrid instant Mildred thought it might be a sob—what was she to do if Kate turned maudlin-drunk? But the sound continued, and Mildred realized she was laughing. “Damn,” she said, raising her head. “It’s just the way you said that, as if nobody would have guessed. Hell, yes, to both questions. But I don’t give a Chinaman’s curse about that.”

“What, then?”

“If he’d chosen this, I could stand it, do you see? I always say he can go to Hell by his own road. If this was his choice, I’d bear it, though it makes me sick.”

“If he’d chosen
what?
What is he being forced to do?”

Kate’s eyes held Mildred’s, fixed and intense. No drooping lids now, no drunken wandering. “Have a drink,” she breathed, “and I’ll tell you.”

“I don’t like bourbon.”

“That’s all I’ve got. Have a drink, or we’re done talking.”

It might be pure devilment—Kate might be playing with her; there might be nothing more to be told. But Mildred felt something moving around them, a deep secret thing just beyond sound or sight. She rose and poured a little bourbon into the glass. She started to carry it back to the chair. But Kate was watching her as if she wanted to see through to her bones. Mildred stopped, took a deep breath, and swallowed the bourbon in a gulp. It tasted like sugar mixed with kerosene. By an effort of will, she neither gasped nor coughed.

Kate nodded at the glass. Mildred poured more bourbon and handed it to her. Kate emptied the glass and sighed. Then she sat with it cupped in her hands, her hands in her lap, her head bent. Had the glass been a posy of flowers or a photograph, she might have been sitting for a sentimental painting.

Mildred sat down, straight-backed and businesslike. She opened her mouth to ask her question again. Then she closed it. The conversation was no longer hers to direct. She was the audience now; Kate would tell the story, or not.

The curtains were open. It was full dark outside, or close enough that the only thing to be seen in the window was the reflection of the room, lit by the lamp beside the bed. Where her own face was shadowed, it disappeared on the window glass, as if she were a puzzle with pieces missing. This time the thunder was close enough to make the glass shudder in its frame.

“There’s people in this world,” Kate began slowly, “that have a power about them. Most of ’em only have a little, and don’t know they’ve got that much. But when a preacher makes you cry and shout and clap when you don’t believe a word he said, that’s one of ‘em. When a salesman makes you buy something you don’t fancy and can’t use, that’s another.

“Then there’s those that have a lot of that power, but don’t know it, and can’t use it for anything. Some of those kind take hurt from it. It makes ’em sick, or crazy, or makes ’em try to hurt themselves.

“But there’s a few that have it, and know it, and use it. They’re the ones in the fairy tales turning men into beasts, or making water run uphill.”

“Those things are impossible.” Mildred’s voice sounded thin in her ears.

Kate looked up from the empty glass. “Sure they are. But what do they mean?”

Mildred frowned at her.

“You saying you never knew a person to be changed? A friend made into an enemy, a good man into a monster?”

“That’s nothing … strange.”

“Not always,” Kate said, and looked down again, smiling. “Most people will brush right up against the powerful ones, and never know it. They might be brother and sister, or husband and wife, even. But those powerful ones, you watch, they try to never be alone in the world. They keep their friends or family around them. That’s their strength.”

It could be metaphor, Mildred thought. All leaders were made strong by their followers. The Earps believed in strength in numbers. “That’s just the way a community works.”

“Are the Earp brothers a community? My God. I don’t suppose you heard about Bessie’s little girl.”

Did she mean Hattie? Mildred shook her head.

“Jim Earp found out she’d climbed out her bedroom window to go for a buggy ride with some fellow, the night of Fourth of July. He’d’ve been within his rights to switch her when she got home. Instead he calls in his brothers. You could hear the strap and her screeching from down the block, and Wyatt—Wyatt!—shouting at her. And her Bessie’s daughter from before she met Jim, and not even Wyatt’s blood kin! There’s your
community
.”

Mildred felt sick. However much the Earp clan might object to the McLaurys, it couldn’t justify that. “I still don’t understand why you’re afraid for your husband.”

“He’s one of those who has the power and can’t use it. But Wyatt Earp can. That’s what happened on the porch of Schieffelin Hall that night.”

Perhaps it was the bourbon, but Mildred was angry at the nonsense, the waste of time, the seduction of the tale. “If these powerful people seem perfectly normal, why do you know this? How could you possibly know that any of this was happening?”

Kate frowned, her face full of the dull puzzlement of drink. “Most people don’t see the truth. But people like us see some of it.”

“Like us. Who …”

“You and me,” Kate said. “I wouldn’t have talked to you if you didn’t know some of it already.”

People like us see.
Wyatt Earp, crouched solicitously over his friend—or Earp framed in the doorway, netted with something that gleamed black and silver like hematite, but
alive,
moving and flickering and finally disappearing
as if melting into his clothes. If reality lay with the first choice, why had she seen that other, that impossible thing?

“You’re drunk,” Mildred whispered.

“Hell, yes. I couldn’t say all that without a few strong ones in me.” Kate showed her teeth in a smile. “When I’m sober, I don’t even like to think about it. Gives me the shakes.”

Mildred stood up. “If this is what your affidavit against your husband is based on, I’d go to Behan tomorrow and withdraw it.”

Kate threw back her head and laughed. “My God, you want to make me out a liar, don’t you? You don’t want to see it. Then you’d better stay away from that gentleman friend of yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“Fox. He’s got it. And I’d say he knows it. Worse, I’d say Wyatt knows it. You better be careful.” And Kate laughed until she fell backward on the bed, snorting and whooping, and the empty glass rolled out of her hand and dropped to the rug.

Mildred let herself out of the room and went down the hall toward the stairs. At the head of them there was a window, its drapes drawn back in swags. For a moment the lamps backlit her, so that, in the reflection of the hall, she was an empty darkness. Then she passed under the chandelier, and the light seemed to re-create her like a summoned ghost.

She would give Harry an edited version of Kate’s motives. She’d tell him that Kate lied to get Doc away from the Earps’ plans and influence. But she knew what he’d say. The
Nugget
couldn’t give credence to a drunk woman’s angry slander … unless it told the story the editor already believed. And why Kate had done it didn’t matter, anyway; she’d done it, and the court would convict Holliday or it wouldn’t. Harry would be more interested in that, as evidence that the Earps had the judge in their pockets.

She was almost jealous of him. For Harry the case at hand was about crookedness, influence, politics, jockeying for office. It could be described in a language he spoke. But if Kate was right, what language had words for what was happening in Tombstone, and who spoke it?

Besides, apparently, Jesse Fox and Wyatt Earp?

She remembered Earp’s overtures to Jesse in the ice cream parlor. She’d been certain something was wrong. But not this. Let it not be this.

Outside, she hurried to Fifth and turned toward Safford Street and Miss Gilchrist’s. She was barely to Fremont when the sky opened up like a burst dam.

Of course she’d forgotten her umbrella in the
Nugget
office. She ran for an
overhang and the lamp that hung under it, swinging in the wind. It was Crab-tree’s Livery Stable, she realized. Jesse Fox kept his horse here.

There was no reason why he should be at the stable. And the rain was coming off the overhanging roof hard enough to splash her waist-high. Lightning slashed sideways across the sky and dragged a deafening crack of thunder close behind. That settled it. She opened the door and went in.