Black Hats (3 page)

True, her nose was noticeable, long not big, her eyes crowding it some; but most considered her pretty, in her day—the eyes were dark blue and sparkled (still were, still did), her mouth a small girlish bud (thinner lips now). Damn, her face was smooth for her age.

In the 1880s, she’d had a lot of dark, lustrous hair; and even six decades along, no signs of white were apparent, or henna coloring either, for that matter—she had it pinned up in back, but he’d seen it flow.

She was settling her hands in her lap. “After all, it has been a while.”

“Twenty-five years,” he said. “Rock Creek, Colorado. You were married to that blacksmith—

George something-or-’tother. What became of him?”

“I divorced him. He drank too much.”

Wyatt was too much of a gentleman to point out that Kate had a leaning toward that ilk.

“You’re reading a book,” she said, as he set the thick little red-bound volume on the porch railing.

“You needn’t sound so surprised.”

“What is it?”

“
Hamlet
. Friend of mine suggested it.”

Bill Hart.

This seemed to amuse her. “What do you think of it?”

“This Hamlet feller is a talkative man. Wouldn’t have lasted long in Kansas.”

“Most likely not.” She glanced toward the house, revealing little white teeth that seemed to still be the original articles. “What a quaint little place. How charming.”

“Not hardly. It’s a rental.”

The living room turned into the bedroom when a Murphy bed came down, the kitchen was a sink and a stove in a corner behind a pull curtain, the bathroom tiny enough to make a crowd out of a sink, toilet and shower. Not much better than a cheap motel room. Like out at Lowman’s Motor Court.

“Just temporary,” he assured his guest.

Wyatt’s fortunes would turn; they always did.

“I heard that you and Sadie were working a mine out Vidal way,” Kate said, in a friendly if strained small-talk fashion. “That you work the mine and prospect around the Colorado River, winter months, and spend the rest of the year here in Los Angeles.”

His eyes searched the supposed innocence of her facial expression. “How is it you know that, Kate?”

“Well, your diggings are near Parker, Arizona, aren’t they?”

He nodded.

“And I live in Dos Cabezos; in fact, I’ve spent many, many years in Arizona…where it’s no secret who I am, or that is, used to be. People ask me about you. People tell me about you.

What you’re up to. They assume we’re friends.”

“People assume lots of fool things, don’t they, Kate?”

She glanced down, noticing the spitz who was sitting at her side, staring at her with that bright eye of his, apparently hoping for affection, heavy tail fanning. Kate rocked forward and scratched him around his ears and his collar.

She gave Wyatt a glance that was a little too friendly. “I heard you’re doing detective work again. Like in the Wells Fargo days.”

He sighed. “Some,” he granted.

“I thought perhaps you might do a job for me.”

Earpie was on his hind legs now, paws at the nice silk dress.

“Earpie,” Wyatt said sternly.

The dog looked over at its master who gave him hard eyes, and then the animal hung its head and returned to his place and curled up at Wyatt’s feet. Sullenly, but the dog did it.

Kate laughed. “So, Wyatt—everybody still jumps when you bark.”

Sadie didn’t, but he didn’t point that out.

“Even Doc jumped at your command,” she said, trying to sound light but bitterness edging in.

“I couldn’t make the funeral,” he said.

Funny to be making an apology over something that happened thirty years ago. Sort of just came out.

She gave him a sharp, surprised look that immediately softened. “You couldn’t have got there in time, and I couldn’t afford the ice. Anyway…you and Doc had your goodbyes, year or so prior, I understand.”

Wyatt had been in Denver, to gamble, staying with Sadie at the Windsor Hotel. Doc had heard the Wyatt Earps were in town and came looking for his old compadre. The two men had sat and talked in the lobby, but Doc did more coughing than speaking. His dapper friend had always been slender, but now was a skeletal apparition.

“Can’t last much longer,” Doc had said. His eyes were sunken, his cheeks, too; but the mustache was perfectly trimmed. “Wanted to see you one more time, Wyatt.”

“…Strange.”

“What is?”

“If you hadn’t saved my tail in Dodge that time, I wouldn’t be sitting here. And, Doc—I have no damn way to repay the favor.”

Doc’s eyes were moist; the sickness, surely. “You have repaid me myriad times, Wyatt. With your friendship.”

Suddenly Doc embraced him, startling Wyatt.

Then the notorious gunfighter got to his wobbly feet and managed a half-bow. “I will see you again, but not too soon, I hope…considering where I’m bound.”

And Doc moved away quickly if feebly. Next thing he knew, Wyatt had needed to dry his eyes with a hanky, feeling like a goddamned woman.

And this goddamned woman in the coral dress, for all her faults—and she had considerable—had loved that man, too. Of course, oftentimes Big-Nosed Kate had expressed her abiding affection by hounding Doc and trading drunken blows with him, shaking a gun at him while he shook a knife at her, and vice versa. Never had two people walked the line between love and hate more unsteadily than Doc and Kate.

In a way, Wyatt’s brother James bore the blame for bringing the two of them together, Doc Holliday and Kate Elder.

Saloonkeeper James and his wife Bessie ran prostitutes on the side, in those days, and Kate had been one of their soiled doves, a pretty sassy thing in her twenties when James and Bessie brought her (and a wagonful of other wenches) to Fort Griffin; and Doc, working the gaming tables, took to Kate right away, smart, good-looking, well-educated lass that she was, with that clumsy, graceful European accent of hers.

Kate had proved her mettle to Doc the night things got out of hand at Shannsey’s Saloon. Doc was playing poker with a local gambler, Ed Bailey, and Bailey started fiddling with the deadwood, the discards. Doc called Ed on it, Ed jerked a sixgun, and Doc slashed a blade across the cheater’s brisket.

Ed seemed to be dying (he survived but didn’t look he would), and the town marshal held Doc under house arrest at the Planter’s Hotel. Hearing of this later, Wyatt figured Doc had been betrayed by the marshal, because jail would have been safer, and the hotel gave a local lynch mob an easy avenue to the prisoner.

But spunky Kate had set fire to a nearby shed, and while the vigilantes transmogrified into a fire brigade, the pretty little whore waltzed into the hotel, drew down on the deputy sitting guard, and escorted Doc out to the waiting ponies.

Or so the story went, as Doc had so often grandiosely told it. Kate once denied the rescue, calling it a fairy tale; but Wyatt believed Doc. After all, if Doc said up was up, Kate would call it down.

“If you live in Arizona,” Wyatt said to his guest, who was gently rocking now, “what are you doing in Los Angeles?”

“Perhaps I came to call on you.”

“Just to see me.”

“To see you about doing a detective job.”

“All the detectives in Arizona busy?”

Her small mouth twitched a smile, but her eyes were nervous. “This isn’t a job that…just…just
any
detective could do.”

“Takes a Los Angeles one, then. Something out here?”

“Something…something in New York.”

Wyatt didn’t know what to say to that.

She sat forward, her hands clasped prayerfully tight in her lap. The smile disappeared but the nervous eyes remained. When she leaned closer, lines around her eyes and on her upper lip showed. Still, a smooth mug for an old gal, though.

“Doc and I…you know that we were together, at the hotel in Glenwood Springs, those last six months…?”

Wyatt nodded, and took any edge off his words. “I know that you were at his side. That you nursed him. That you comforted him, and for that I am damned grateful.”

She averted his gaze, nodded back, rather absently; then said, “Thank you,” very softly.

Then she sat in silence, for an eternity—perhaps thirty seconds. The spitz was snoring. Traffic noise thrummed, and down the block a neighbor was playing “Avalon” on the piano, badly.

Wyatt arched an eyebrow. “Kate?” he prompted.

She swallowed. “I did more than just…comfort Doc, Wyatt. I…
we
…had a son.”

Wyatt blinked. “The hell you say.”

“Doc never knew it. He had no interest in having any children with me or anybody else; he considered himself some kind of…dark soul, a strain of the Holliday blood best not continued.”

That sounded like Doc’s line of bull.

“I was expecting his child, at the time he passed,” she said. “You know we were married, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.

He knew she claimed it. Doc denied it, of course. God had not invented the subject Kate and Doc agreed upon.

Despite his assurance, her response was defensive: “My son is
not
illegitimate! I want you clear on that. I had a rough start in life, lost my parents to influenza back in Davenport, Iowa; left the foster home for a riverboat and wound up earning my keep on my back, just
sixteen
, Wyatt Earp! Sixteen and soft, pleasuring hard men like you!”

“Those are distant days,” he said, thinking that last sounded a mite rehearsed. “Nobody need be judged.”

Indeed Wyatt had been one of her customers—hell, she was his brother’s wife’s worker, using the last name Earp at the time!—but that had been before Doc, and their friendship, and Doc’s doings with Kate, for that matter.

She touched her forehead, where the wide-brimmed bonnet shaded the skin. “I’m…I’m sorry, Wyatt. I haven’t spoken to anyone of John. Anyone from the old days.”

“John? You mean…Doc?”

“I mean John. John
Junior
.”

Wyatt’s eyes narrowed and he sat forward. “Was that the blue-eyed child with you, in Rock Creek? I thought that was that feller
George’s
boy.”

She nodded, then immediately contradicted it with a head shake. “George took the boy on when he took me on; Johnny was part of the package. Probably had to do with why the drunken bastard beat me so.”

“Under what name was the boy raised?”

“My maiden name—real name, Haroney. There’s a birth certificate says John Henry Holliday, Jr., but it’s tucked away, and is neither here nor there. Anyways, George refused to lend the boy his name. He…he hit
Johnny
, too. Would get lickered up and, when I wasn’t handy, take all his worldly woes out on my young boy. That was partly why I left the man.”

Doc Holliday’s son.

Wyatt had been with Sadie for many years, and their marriage had been a good one, but childless. At times Wyatt—whose family had been large, five brothers, two sisters—found his and Sadie’s life limited; but their nomadic bent had always been aided by the lack of offspring. Footloose and fancy free, he was. Even today. At seventy.

“He’s a good boy, Wyatt. Good man. You see, I’ve fared well. About twenty years ago, I became housekeeper to a rich widower. We grew…close. We’ve never married, but I live with him, I care for him. I have all the comforts a woman could ever crave.”

“Happy for you, Kate.”

A tiny smile pursed the lips, near a kiss. “My…my benefactor’s name is John—like Doc…like our son. And he took to my boy from the start. Saw to it that he got the kind of upbringing a young man needs.”

“Well, that’s just fine, Kate.”

Even with the smile, and such positive words, her gloom was apparent.

She went on: “My son was very bright, like his father. Always first in his class. And my other John, my…
benefactor
John, he put my son through dental school, in Denver.”

“Ha! Junior’s a dentist, too?”

She managed a small smile. “Wyatt, it’s my fault. He always wanted to know about his real father; and I told him his papa was a Southern gentleman, an educated man, a professional man…a doctor of dentistry. And even from childhood, my boy wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.”

“Well, I think that would please Doc.”

In the bonnet brim’s shade, her forehead clenched, and finally she showed some wrinkles worthy of her age.

“Wyatt, Johnny never knew his father was Doc Holliday. I told him of an imaginary Dr. John Haroney, who
was
Doc, in a way…but a Doc who never caught tuberculosis, who never turned to gambling and drink and…and women like me. Who wielded only dental tools and not knives and sixguns and shotguns. A Doc stripped of his faults but overflowing with his merits.”

Wyatt, frowning, said, “A boy has a right to know who his daddy was.”

Her eyes tensed. “I know. I know. And…and he
does
, now.”

“…Someone told him?”

“I did, Wyatt.” Her expression grew grave now. “I finally did.”

He grunted a thoughtful, “Hmmph,” then asked, “What changed your mind?”

She swallowed hard and then she reached down for the black purse, brought it to her lap, snapped it open and fished out a big white hanky with no lace at all. Purely functional.

And its function, right now, was for her to bust out crying in.

Wyatt watched, uncomfortably, while she bawled; down the block the neighbor on the piano was mangling “Look for the Silver Lining,” and Earpie had stirred from his slumber to look up sympathetically at their weeping guest. Stealthily the spitz crept away from Wyatt and curled up near Kate’s feet, careful to keep his tail out from under the rockers—that lesson had long since been learned.

Finally, as the waterworks were letting up, Wyatt asked if she wanted a glass of lemonade or maybe something harder.

She shook her head, the bonnet flopping a bit. “Wyatt, I’m sorry for losing my…my composure.”

For a foreign-born, Kate sure knew some four-dollar words.

“You see, two years ago Johnny was married to a lovely girl named Prudence. He had a dental practice in Bisbee, and he met her there—her father owns a big hardware store, downtown. Very well off. Very well-to-do, for Bisbee. The girl studied out east, some fancy female school, and came home and met Johnny at a local dance at the First Methodist Church.”