“My ma would make a good sheriff,” I said. “She’d arrest me if I busted the law.”
Rampart stared and stared, and smiled.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-THREE
I was in Rampart’s courtroom at nine, and so were Ralston and Jardine, all ready to testify. But them old gals never showed their faces, and Rampart, he finally fined them the amount of the bail, and that was that. I thought he was glad that the biddies didn’t try some weepy theater in his courtroom.
Outside, I asked those fellers how the show went.
“There were some empty seats,” Ralston said. “All that trouble scared people off.”
“I’ll try to keep the peace tonight, but no telling what the dingbats will do,” I said.
“The show went well enough, all things considered,” Ralston said. “You have to give those showgirls credit. They’d been jailed all night, and barely made it to the matinee, and then did an evening show, too.”
“You tell Ambrosia I’m ready anytime she is. I’ll get Rampart to tie the knot.”
“Pickens, I don’t think she’s very fond of Doubtful,” Jardine said. “But good luck stealing my star from me.”
“Doubtful’s a real nice town,” I said. “She’d be real happy here. I can put up a cabin near the creek.”
“Doubtful’s the second-worst town we’ve ever played,” Jardine said. “Sorry to disparage your grand metropolis, but it’s been a hard haul here.”
“What’s the worst town, Alphonse?” Ralston asked.
“Unquestionably, Livingston, Montana. There’s a town to peel the hide off a bull.”
“What’s the trouble with it?”
“It’s a railroad town, and that should tell you what you need to know. If you think cowboys are wild, just try some drunken track-layers. Cowboys are sissies compared to that bunch.”
“I guess I’m sort of dumb, so tell me,” I said.
“They shut me down every night, stole the box office, tore the theater apart, stole all my girls and impregnated every one, so I had to sell the girls to them and get a new cast back in New York.”
“That’s not so bad,” I said. “Doubtful’s worse than that.”
“All the founding mothers of Livingston are showgirls,” Jardine said.
“I wish I was lawing up there,” I said. “I could have made off with Ambrosia.”
“Not if you want to keep your gray guts inside your tender pink belly,” Jardine said, “and your privates attached to the rest of you.”
“Maybe Ambrosia has talents I never thought about,” I said. “But I’d still marry her.”
Them fellers went back into their theater, and I went back to sheriffing. Now that the town was sort of cooled down a little, maybe I could work on that murder, the knifing of Pinky Pearl a few days earlier. The man lay buried in Doubtful’s little plot for the dead, but I’d not caught the killer. I pretty well knew who I was looking for, but that kind of knowing, and proving it, were different deals.
If Iceberg and Luke the Butcher weren’t hanging around where there were rooms to let, then someone was putting them up, and I knew where to start now. I had unpinned my Puma County badge and washed it real good and put it back on. The last time I’d got spit at, it was a mad raccoon under a porch, but that fracas was settled with a piece of canvas. This time I got spat at by Doubtful’s nobility, and it had me thinking that the Sanderses had them a carriage house behind their big house, with carriage and stalls below, and a hayloft above, just right for summertime visitors. I was pretty sure that was where them two were hanging.
The Doubtful Bank was the fanciest building in town. It started as a frame structure but then it got gussied up with yellow sandstone, with white enamel doors and windows. In a town that was still half frontier, it looked like it was permanent. It proclaimed that Doubtful, Wyoming, was here to stay. It cast a reassuring and benign glow upon the town. Some had argued that it shouldn’t be called a “Doubtful” bank, but others said that the name was just right. There it was, a sandstone monument to Doubtful, radiating good will, providing financial services to the businesses, cashing checks, doling out cash for the tills of stores and saloons, and reminding everyone on Main Street that Doubtful was civilized.
I hardly went into the place. A forty-a-month sheriff hardly needed a bank. I got paid in greenbacks in a manila envelope by the county clerk. I paid Belle her rent, and kept thirty-five cents out for a haircut, and tucked a dollar in my boot since I usually went dry before the next payday. So the place wasn’t one I usually visited. But today I wished to talk to Hubert Sanders, the bank’s founder, president, and sole owner, not to mention the most influential man in the county. A word from Sanders was enough to change supervisors’ minds, reverse judicial decisions, start a reform, or stop one.
I stepped into its cool quiet, the thick sandstone shielding the lucky fellers inside against the summer sun. There were two teller cages, but Sanders’s office was over in a rear corner, where he could discreetly keep an eye on his customers while not being obvious about it.
There was a little wooden gate that kept the hoi polloi like me out of his walnut-walled office, so I approached one of them tellers, whose wife had just gotten bailed out.
“Feller, I’d like to talk to the boss in there,” I said.
He reminded me of a glacier ready to calve a new floe, but then headed back to Sanders’s lair, only to return a moment later.
“Sorry, he’s busy.”
“It’s a law matter, so I guess I’ll just let myself through there,” I said.
He looked fit to lose a wisdom tooth, but I unhooked that little walnut gate and headed over to the boss man.
Sanders peered up at me, removed his spectacles, and pouted, without so much as a greeting.
“I got a request. You’ve got a couple fellows in the loft of your carriage barn I need to talk to. It’s a law matter. So I’m looking for your okay on it.”
He looked pained, like he was passing a prune pit. “If it wasn’t acceptable for you to come in here without my permission, then you can imagine my answer to your intrusion on my house and grounds.”
“I thought maybe you could help me solve some crimes around here.”
“You’re the only crime in sight,” he said.
“One of them fellers in your barn, he might be dangerous to you and your wife.”
“If your goal is to persuade me of something, bringing up my wife is certainly impolitic.”
“I never did hear that word before. It sounds as bad as a kidney stone.”
“Out!” He actually waved an arm and pointed a finger, something entirely out of character for him.
“I may have to go in there anyway if I get the goods on the feller. Name’s Luke the Butcher, and he’s a menace to Mrs. Sanders, and everyone else around here. You don’t want him on your place. You don’t want that phony lawman, either.”
“Out!”
He reached into his desk drawer and produced a small, shiny revolver.
“Shoot the sheriff and you’ll swing,” I said. “Put that thing away before I get serious.”
But he just aimed at my navel. I reached across and slapped his hand to the left, and then just yanked the thing out of his mitt. It was a thirty-two caliber five-shot lady gun.
“You can pick it up from me or Rusty tomorrow,” I said.
He looked a little cooked around his gills, so I just left him to stew.
I took the revolver back to my office and handed it to Rusty. “It belongs to Sanders. He’s lucky I didn’t pinch him. Give it back tomorrow.”
Rusty eyed me. “You favoring the rich suddenly?”
That got under my skin. The truth of it was, if someone in the saloons had pulled a weapon on me, he’d be cooling his heels in my guest cages. But I’d let Sanders go. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to rile up the supervisors just now.
“Yes,” I said.
Rusty, he was sort of eyeing me crooked-lipped.
I bulled across the town square to the courthouse looking for a supervisor, any supervisor, who was going to listen to me for a moment or two.
Ziggy Camp was sucking Old Orchard from a desk bottle when I barged in.
“I just took Hubert Sanders’s revolver from him. He can have it back tomorrow.”
“Well, now that ain’t politic, right?”
“He was aiming it at the Puma County sheriff. I didn’t charge him. So maybe I was politic after all.”
“He took offense, did he?”
“He was wishing I’d depart from his altar. I wanted permission to get onto his place. He’s harboring Iceberg and the Butcher, and I have some business with the Butcher. Like who and what did he kill? And rob?”
“She’s the one harboring them, Pickens. You shouldn’t have cut her loose.” Ziggy was smirking. “She’ll be back at her post this eve, so you can arrest her again.”
“If she stops traffic in or out of that opera house, I will. And if that costs me my badge, then it’s my tough luck.”
Ziggy’s eyebrows caterpillared upward and downward. What he was registering was a change in the Puma County sheriff, from a live-and-letlive lawman to a mean sonofabitch.
“My ma, she always said don’t hide in the bullrushes,” I added.
“I think she was referring to Moses.”
“I don’t know who she was talking about, but if Delphinium breaks the law, she’ll get whatever she’s got coming.”
Camp, he just smiled blandly and lifted his pint and sucked long and hard, and wheezed a couple of times. “Doubtful sure is entertaining,” he said. “You gonna pinch Ralston and that showman, Jardine? They’ve gone naked again. There’s a mess of bare-ass ladies prancing around in there, robbing Doubtful of its cash.”
“Show me the law, right there on the books, and I will.”
“Well, ah, maybe Lawyer Stokes can. He’ll sound out the letters for you.”
“I already asked him. If there’s a law, he ain’t told me about it.”
Camp sighed. “Your type don’t vote. The ones that vote in every election are all like Delphinium Sanders.”
“Then let them vote for supervisors who’ll pass a law against bare-ass beauties.”
Ziggy Camp choked some on that. “Don’t be hasty,” he said. “We’re studying it. I’ve been over there to that show twice now, studying on it. I’m in no hurry to enact some ill-considered legislation that we’d all regret. It’s harder to get a law off the books than on it, and that means we have to act carefully and judiciously. I’m going over there tonight and I’ll take notes, and maybe after this Follies leaves town, I’ll bring up the ordinance and we’ll have at it, carefully and with proper weighty consideration.”
“You sure are a bull pecker, Camp.”
He smiled at me.
“I’ve proposed to Ambrosia,” I said. “She’s the star of the show.”
“And?”
“She’s not keen on Doubtful.”
Camp, he laughed and sucked his Old Orchard, and I got out of there. A feller hardly knew where he stood around Doubtful. One moment I was in hot water, the next moment I wasn’t, and the next moment everything had switched around so that them that liked me became them that wanted me out. Well, I had a job to do, which was keep the law and keep the peace, and that’s what I would do, no matter what it cost me. I’d enforce laws I didn’t like, and treat people I didn’t like fair and square, and if it came to that, I’d tell my bosses in the courthouse to cool it if they wasn’t following the rules.
“Hey, guy,” the redhead said. “You want to talk?”
It was Ambrosia. It took me a moment to recognize her because I was so busy watching the rest of her on stage that I didn’t pay no attention to her face. She was wearing a gauzy green dress, neck to toe, but it didn’t hide her real hard.
“You talking to me?”
“You could buy a girl a cup of java.”
“I thought you were gonna pay me a million dollars.”
“Okay, you’re cheap. I’ll buy you a cup. Take me to your favorite joint.”
I could hardly believe it. I sort of polished my star with my fingers to make it shine, and escorted her to the Beanery, where the two of us got into a corner and everyone in there could stare at me and wish they was me. I just nodded and smiled, and she smiled back.
“I hear you want to marry me,” she said. “So let’s talk.”
I spilled the damned coffee. And then I was ready to talk.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-FOUR
If I had false teeth I would have swallowed them. But I still have most of my choppers, and the gaps don’t bother me none. But there was Ambrosia, sitting right beside me, telling me we should talk about holy matrimony. I could scarcely imagine it. Worse, my ma didn’t have no advice on this one.
“So what’s the deal?” I asked. That was the most romantic thing I could think of to say.
“I’ll make you happy. I know how to make a man real, real happy.”
“Right now?” I asked. There was no sense waiting around. “I’ll buy you a cup later.”
“Pretty quick,” she said, and sipped a little. This was going to drive me bonkers.
“Name your deal,” I said, patting her arm.
“I just want to know you’re real serious,” she said. “I wouldn’t marry just anyone.”
“How serious do I need to get?”
“Why are you patting my arm when you could be patting my knees under the table?”
I sure never had a babe talk to me like that. It was like listening to a red hot horseshoe making water hiss.
I guess I was too addled to think, so I just sat there and waited. She finally figured out that she should tell me the deal.
“I’ll marry you for one month,” she said. “I want to leave the show. You’re my way out. I’m tired of it. That night in the jail sure did it.”
“One month?”
“Yessirree, pal, one month, and you can have me every day and night, weekdays and Sundays. After that you divorce me.”
“Divorce you?”
“You betcha. You get Judge Rampart to tie the knot, and then get him to sever the knot.”
“But that’s not marriage.”
“Hey, I usually marry for two weeks. After we split, you pay for stagecoach down to the Union Pacific, and for a ticket to Chicago. I got friends there. And I get into a new show.”
“I don’t think I could swing that. Maybe if I didn’t pay Rampart to marry and divorce us.”
“What do you think I am? I don’t believe in free love.”
“You’re expensive, all right.”
“Is there a druggist here?”
“There’s not even a decent doc. You have to go to Laramie for that stuff. We’ve got a faith healer though.”
“I need some Williams Tooth Balm real bad. Mine got stolen when I was stuffed in your jail.”
“What’s that?”
“It stops my gums from hurting. It’s little pills of cocaine. Take one and my gums are fine. Take two and my elbows don’t hurt. Take three and my tits don’t hurt either.”
“Do they hurt?”
“All the time. They get too much fresh air.”
“You’d have to wire Laramie and get the stuff by stage.”
“Not me. You. If you want to marry me you got to keep me in pills.”
“How much would marrying you for a month cost?”
“Oh, food, tickets, pills, marriage and divorce, maybe three hundred.”
“I’m a forty-a-month sheriff, not a bank.”
She eyed me. “Most sheriffs make lots more, one way or another.”
I sighed. “I can’t marry you but I’ll give you a free sample.”
“You know anyone wants to marry me?”
“My free sample’s better than anyone else’s.”
“I’ll pay for your coffee,” she said, slapped the cup in the saucer, dropped some change on the table, and hightailed out of the Beanery. People sure were watching.
I felt about two feet tall. My biggest chance for happiness had flown the coop. I’d never have a chance like that as long as I lived. It was like Ambrosia came down from heaven, and I threw the deal away, and she went back up to heaven again. My pa, he would have said I had nothing between my ears.
I should have married Critter.
Doubtful didn’t have any help for the lovelorn, so I decided to get back to work even though my heart was scraping dirt. I had a criminal in town, Luke the Butcher, and he was given sanctuary on the banker’s property, and I had to get him out of there and nail him one way or other. He deserved to hang, and not just for cutting Critter’s throat. He’d killed a man, too. All I had to do was prove it.
I was fixing to relieve Rusty long enough so he could visit the county outhouse, but as I passed the Wyoming Hotel, I saw a mess of familiar carriages and buggies. And one of them was that ebony buggy that Delphinium Sanders drove around Doubtful. But there were a few more I spotted, the victoria owned by the Wallers, the surrey operated by the Maxwells, and a few more. I knew exactly what was going on in there. Them Watch and Ward gals were planning the next assault on the Ralston Opera House, and sipping tea and eating crumpets. I don’t know what crumpets are, but that’s what ladies have in hotel dining rooms. I thought maybe to just walk by, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought this was a chance to straighten out a few items.
All I needed was the courage to walk in there and interrupt their meeting for a few minutes. But that ain’t easy. Walking into a tea and crumpets meeting of the Watch and Ward ladies is like committing one’s self to jumping off a cliff. I began to sweat, and it wasn’t the summer heat, neither. It was the terrors. It was the farts. But there was no cure for it. Once I set my feet toward the hotel doors, I was a cooked goose. I’d have to go in there and get it over with.
I got as far as the door, and thought maybe Rusty needed me real bad at the office, but I got my courage together, entered, and sure enough, the dining room door was closed; all them ladies in lavender were in there, and Delphinium was holding court. I broke into a real sweat, and felt it blacken my armpits. I’d rather ride a bronc or lasso a bear than do what I had to do, but I got up my dander and opened up, and stepped in.
The whole Watch and Ward bunch was in there, sipping tea from those little one-finger china cups with saucers under them for the spillover. There was a mess of perfume in there, and it pretty near knocked me flat. I’ll put my nose in a rose once in a while, but what hit me was about an acre of lilacs, or something like that. My ma used to say if a woman wears perfume, it’s to hide something. Them Watch and Warders was doing a lot of hiding.
All them gals just plain stared my way, like they’d seen two horns and a tail and some feller in red underwear. I looked around there trying to see a crumpet, but I didn’t see anything that would answer, so I just cleared my throat five or six times, and finally Delphinium, she says, “Sheriff, this is a private meeting. Good afternoon.”
Well, that was more civil than usual, maybe because all them gals was keeping her civil, so I licked my lips a little, and said I’d just like to talk a moment and then I’d vamoose.
“Leave now, Sheriff,” she shot back. She sure wasn’t going to put up with me.
It was do or die, or both, as a matter of fact.
“I guess you nice ladies are making some plans for the theater tonight,” I began. “I’m here to keep the peace, and there’s some things that need saying. If Mr. Ralston don’t want you on his property, it’s his right. So don’t trespass. And don’t harass them people going in or coming out. That’s disturbing the peace. And don’t try to block doors. That’s not safe, and I’ll stop it. Now, you want to shout and wave your signs, that’s your right. That’s what you’re free to do, long as I’m sheriff. You can holler away, and them you holler at can holler back, far as I’m concerned. But if anyone starts hitting on anyone else, that’s inviting a trip to my jail, no matter who.” I paused. “I guess that does her.”
“No, it doesn’t do it,” Delphinium said. “This society is going to remove that theater from our community, and wipe free the stain upon our virtue and reputation, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”
“Ma’am, you stay within the law, and you’ll be fine. You step outside, and you’ll be facing a judge.”
“Judge Rampart is a friend, and wholly approves, and will free us, just as he freed us before.”
“Well, as long as you’re taking that sort of view of it, I’ll swear in extra deputies, and they’ll be on duty at the theater for this performance and the final matinee and evening show tomorrow.”
“If there’s a theater left, Mr. Pickens.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You heard me, sir.”
She stared from them deep blue eyes that matched her name, and didn’t blink, and I couldn’t see into them eyes; there was a wall there that blocked me out, like she was a china doll and not a person, and them china doll eyes were painted on and didn’t see a thing.
“Doubtful’s pretty much made of wood, ma’am, and that won’t change until time passes and the first buildings get rebuilt with stone and brick. The only stone building now is the bank, but that wouldn’t survive either, because there’s wood on all sides of it. So don’t do nothing foolish.”
“When one lives in Hades, sir, one struggles to get out, by whatever means. Now, then, are we done with this unpleasantness?”
“You Watch and Ward over this town proper, and folks will thank you, ma’am. A good watchman, a good warden, those are things we all need.”
There was an odd pause, and then the ladies started sipping from those one-finger cups, and I saw that was how it ended, so I left. I guess I didn’t make any new friends there.
They’d been warned, but now I had some more warnings to give.
I found both Ralston and Jardine in the little office offstage.
“You got much fire protection around here?” I asked Ralston.
“Not unless Doubtful starts a fire department and buys a fire engine.”
“You got some water buckets stashed around?”
“Rain barrels at each corner of the building.”
“That’s it?”
“Doubtful’s a wooden town, Sheriff. A fire two blocks away will turn me to ash.”
Jardine peered up at me. “Why?”
I told them about visiting the tea party, and the threat I thought I’d heard.
“We can add a few buckets,” Ralston said. “And I’ll see about keeping some sharp eyes outside.”
“Not during a performance, but at night, or early morning, or something like that,” I said.
Ralston shrugged. “I sometimes get the idea that they’d like to lock up the whole company and set fire to us all. Now then, what will you be doing about it? I have ten thousand in this structure.”
“I’m going to talk to a few husbands.”
Jardine smiled crookedly. “They are helpless against female intransigence. I run a show that’s three-quarters female, and am usually in the caboose.”
“I don’t think they’ll want their stores burned down,” Ralston said.
“They might simply start a fire elsewhere,” I said. “When the town fire bell rings, everyone heads for the flames. Including everyone in the theater.”
“Are you certain the ladies were talking about fire?” Ralston asked.
“Nope, but that’s what sort of hung there betwixt my two ears.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m heading for the courthouse and telling the supervisors what’s brewing. And if Judge Rampart will see me, I’ll give him an earful.”
“We’ll take some measures here, Sheriff,” Ralston said. “But if you don’t know what’s in the cards, you can’t play the aces.”
I headed for the courthouse and couldn’t find any of the supervisors, and tried Rampart, but he’d gone fishing for the weekend. It was looking like me and Rusty, we’d have to keep Doubtful from boiling over, or burning down, or lynching the whole theater company. And we didn’t have much manpower for that.
I headed for the Last Chance Saloon, and found Sammy Upward busy serving, so I waited a while until we could talk. When he began swirling his bar towel in front of me I asked him to keep an ear peeled, and warned him there could be trouble in Doubtful, big trouble like the town burning down. He nodded. “We’re Gomorrah,” he said.