Bloody Season (6 page)

“And at the same instant the shooting commenced by Doc Holliday and Morgan Earp. The first shot taking Tom McLaury was fired by Doc Holliday, and the next one was fired by Morgan Earp, taking Billy Clanton. And Billy Clanton was shot with his hands in this position.” He sat up, raising his long callused palms level with his eyebrows. “Billy Clanton said, ‘Don’t shoot me, I don’t want to fight!’ And that was the last I seen of Billy alive.”

Matthews was idly drawing a human rib cage in the right-hand margin of his notes with a pencil. “At what point were weapons drawn?”

“When the Earp party come up they had their pistols in their hands. I saw Billy Clanton draw his pistol after he was shot down. I saw Frank McLaury draw his pistol after about six shots had been fired by the Earps. Tom McLaury did not have a weapon of any kind.”

The jury deliberated for two hours and returned to the hearing room murmuring among themselves and trailing cigar fumes. For the first time since the inquest was convened, all of the witnesses who had testified were assembled on the benches. Outside the window the shadows had lengthened to encompass the scene of the killings under examination.

Conversation sloped off as the jurors took their seats in the box. Matthews waited for complete silence, then turned to address saloonkeeper R. F. Hafford, seated in the corner nearest him.

“Has the coroner’s jury reached a verdict?”

Hafford rose, a tall, teamster-shouldered man with a round beard and his fingers curled under the hem of his black frock coat. “We have.”

“Please state it for the record.”

Hafford drew a folded sheet from an inside breast pocket and opened it, coughing into a pudgy fist to clear away phlegm. Ike Clanton, watching, stopped chewing.

“We the jury find that William Clanton, Frank and Thomas McLaury came to their deaths in the town of Tombstone on October twenty-sixth, eighteen eighty-one, from the effects of pistol and gunshot wounds inflicted by Virgil Earp, Morgan Earp, Wyatt Earp, and one Holliday, commonly called Doc Holliday.”

Ike resumed chewing. He leaned over toward Billy Claiborne, close enough for the latter to smell Levi Garrett’s on his breath. “Well, who in hell never knew that?” he whispered. “What’s it signify?”

Claiborne said, “I ain’t sure. I think it means the Earps and Doc are as good as hung.”

Chapter Four

T
he undertaking firm of Ritter and Eyan scrubbed down the bodies with lye and drained them of blood, pumped formaldehyde and glycerin in through the carotid and femoral arteries, and sewed shut the mouths with needles drawn between the upper lips and gums and out through the nostrils. They scoured and waxed Billy Clanton’s buck teeth, plugged the hole under Frank McLaury’s ear with flesh-colored wax, and pomaded the hair of all three corpses, finally applying rouge to the faces. From a fund pledged by Ike Clanton and Billy Claiborne and contributed to by cowboys still trickling in from San Pedro and Charleston, good suits of clothes were purchased from Myer Brothers at Fifth and Allen and stitched and pinned to fit as snugly as any Vanderbilt’s. At last their hands were folded on their breasts and powdered lightly and their cuffs were buttoned together to prevent the hands from sliding apart.

The day after the shooting the bodies were inserted in mahogany caskets with glass windows and silver trim and placed in the window of a general merchandise and hardware store on the south side of Allen between Fifth and Sixth with a wooden sign strung over them reading MURDERED IN THE STREETS OF TOMBSTONE. Camilius Fly captured the tableau in a whump and flash of magnesium powder.

The bodies were returned to the undertaking parlor the following afternoon. There, miners and townsmen come too late for seats lined walls ambuscaded with plaster cupids and death-angels and divided their attention between the service and the families and friends occupying the benches. These included cowboys in new denims and clean bandannas and too-tight boots and ranchers in store suits smelling of camphor and naphtha. Ike Clanton attended in his black inquest suit. With his chin whiskers trimmed and waxed and his hair arranged in a curl on his forehead he looked slightly less lifelike than his brother Billy; only the tobacco lump under his right ear moved. His sister Mary sat equally motionless beside him in the front row in the same black dress she had worn to bury their father three months earlier. Ike’s brother Phin sat on the other side of her in a stiff collar, and Billy Claiborne occupied a seat farther back wearing a calico shirt with striped braces and garters, his hands resting on his pinch hat in his lap. All three men sported black armbands.

The Tombstone-trained eye might have spotted Charleston notables Frank Stilwell and John Ringo among the cowboys standing in the rear with their hats in front of them, but for the most part the mourners were strangers to the deceased. Proper funerals were rare entertainments in an area whose cemetery contained more nameless corpses than Gettysburg’s.

The procession down Allen Street and north to the hill bore more spectacular distractions. The Tombstone brass band, plumed shakos and gold frogs on red velvet, led off with tubas, a trumpet, a bass drum, and a slide trombone, followed by twin eight-thousand-dollar hearses with glass sides and glowing side-lanterns and hard rubber tires; Ike and Mary in a hired trap with Phin Clanton riding the axle; Billy Claiborne following in a buckboard; and others strung out behind in buggies and on foot, the rest of the column deteriorating into a rabble with children kicking apart green horse-apples at the end and mongrel dogs snapping at heels and stopping to urinate against the boardwalk. Strings of firecrackers snapped and spat sparks, shying horses and starting small fires in the chaparral that were quickly tramped out. A bow-tied Sheriff Behan, Undersheriff (and Nugget editor) Harry Woods, and Deputy Billy Breakenridge accompanied the procession on foot with shotguns cradled.

On the rocky slope studded with Spanish bayonet overlooking town, two gravediggers in overalls with cuds in their cheeks leaned on their shovels and watched as the caskets were lowered by ropes into a hole twelve by eight by six and the last handful of earth thumped the lids. Then they came over and began tipping sand and gravel and clumps of yucca into the cavity. The wind pasted their brims to the crowns of their hats and caught and carried smoking dust from the disturbed earth, spreading it across the graves farther down. A shovelful landed in the middle of Tom McLaury’s face and skidded over the glass.

Ike Clanton shook hands and supported his sister’s elbow as Phin helped her up to the crest of the hill where the carriage waited. Ike hung back a little, watching the laborers. The hole was half-filled now.

“Well, Billy, good-bye,” he said. “You never did have the sense God gave a loafer wolf, to run when you’re outmanned and outgunned.” He pulled on his hat and turned away.

The band, playing “Tenting Tonight” as it left town, sounded tinny in the Oriental, where Wyatt Earp sat at the faro table in the gaming room dealing to Tom Fitch and flicking long white fingers at the sliding counters in the cue box to keep track of the cards dealt. He had on a black Prince Albert and an empty beer glass stood at his right elbow. Blue smoke from his cigar haloed his head and curled in the shaft of sunlight slanting through the leaded-glass windows.

Fitch bet and lost the last of a modest stack of chips. “Is there a room where we can discuss your case in private?” he asked then.

Wyatt waved his cigar around the room, appointed in brass and varnished mahogany with a Brussels carpet. “It does not get a deal more private than this.” At that hour they shared the establishment with a bartender polishing the white china beer pulls in the main room and a miner with his arm in a sling feeding coins into a bronze baroque slot machine in the corner. Little Egypt, clad in veils and beads, monitored his luck from a gilt-framed painting mounted high on the wall.

Fitch rolled his shoulders. Thickening in middle age, his complexion darkened and cracked from years of stumping for office on the Utah salt flats, the attorney had gray hairs like steel shavings in his impressive black handlebars but none in his heavy brows, which moved independently of the rest of his face and each other. They fascinated judges and distracted juries and he would sooner lop an arm than pluck a hair from either of them.

“Spicer has set the hearing for the thirtieth,” he said. “It fixes to be a long one.”

“How long is long?”

“Two or three weeks. I have never known one to last longer than a month.”

“That won’t do. I and Virge have placed all our mining and water interests on the block to stand this ten thousand bail. We cannot live on what the women take in sewing.”

“You have the gambling concession here, and your brother Jim has his saloon.”

“Lou Rickabaugh has the concession. I have a quarter interest. And no one is tripping over his spurs just now to play with me. They are all afraid that a ball with my name on it will smear their brains across my board.”

“That will pass.”

“I will tell Lou you said so.”

“How are Virgil and Morgan coming along?”

“Virge is walking some. Goodfellow says Morg will make out fine if Virge doesn’t kill him first.” Wyatt played with his chips, riffling them in the stack. His fair hair lay flat on his scalp and curled at his collar with red glinting in it. “Tom, how’s our chances of walking out of this hearing without chains on?”

“I don’t know. When this town was more adobe than timber the business would have been just a formality. A year ago it would not even have come to a hearing. Then it would have been judged a fair fight because all the holes were in front, and if you were not lynched first, no one would have volunteered to ride you all the way into Tucson for trial. But now that Tombstone is a county seat you are skidding pretty close to the mouth of the law.”

“I was under the apprehension that we are the law. Or was until Clum took away Virgil’s post.” The last words were bitten off.

“That was the council. You still have his support in the Epitaph.”

Wyatt belched.

“You have few enough friends here without throwing him off,” Fitch said. “As long as Behan and the cowboys have the Nugget you will need the vigilante sheet.”

“I am a businessman.”

Fitch brushed tobacco off his vest. “I approve of your attitude, about the four of you representing the law. If you keep to it I can get you through this. And it’s good news about Virgil walking. I’ll want him on the stand to back up your testimony.”

“What about Doc?”

“They will bring him into it anyway. I was fixed to study the law once and took to spending time around lawyers. I know how it’s done.”

“Let them. We will play down Holliday’s participation in the fight so that it won’t mean anything.” Aware of the clicking and whirring from the slot machine, Fitch leaned forward and dropped his voice. “You will testify that the first shot on your side came from your pistol. Billy Clanton shot first and you returned fire and those were the first two reports.”

“There will be others testifying different.”

“They will be sufficiently confused among themselves because it all happened so fast.”

“Thirty seconds by my count.”

“The strategy is that you and Virgil and the other two were acting in your authority as city peace officers. That will be easier to sustain if two temporary deputies did not start the shooting. Particularly two with their reputation for belligerence.”

“I never wanted things to come to that pass. Virge didn’t neither.”

“There is no help for that now.”

Wyatt’s cigar had gone out. He relit it, turning the end in the match flame. “I guess you know what you’re about,” he said, puffing. “I was not born in Illinois to hang in Arizona.”

“Stop by the office later. Your statement is being transcribed and I want to go over it with you before you sign it. I am planning to introduce a motion—”

Wyatt was looking past him. Fitch turned in his chair and saw Billy Breakenridge entering, blinking a little in the dimness after the bright sunlight outside. He was slender, and the skyward tilt of his hat on the back of his head and the upsweep of his dark handlebars lent him a joviality he didn’t possess. Two points of his deputy’s star showed past his coat. He looked around, nodded at Wyatt, then turned and took a seat in the main room, leaning his shotgun against the table. The bartender brought him a beer.

“Services must be over.” Fitch turned back, hoisting his brows. “Is that true what they tell about Breakenridge?”

“He is some tight with that Charleston crowd just like his boss.”

“No, I mean the other.”

Wyatt blew a ring and tapped some ash into his beer glass. “Leaves that many more women to go around.”

“That is what comes of bunking with cowboys, I suppose.” The attorney stood. “Shall I accompany you back to your house?”

“No, business will be picking up now that the planting is finished.”

“My advice is not to go out on the street alone.”

“I won’t be.” Wyatt gestured with his cigar toward the man at the slot machine, who turned and showed Fitch a blue muzzle resting inside his sling. The lawyer looked up then and recognized the ruddy face and red chin-whiskers, not of a miner, but of Sherman McMasters, a friend of the Earps who rode shotgun for Wells Fargo.

“I am a gambler,” Wyatt said. “Not some woolly-headed nigger.”

Fitch traded the muted opulence of the Oriental for the puckered street and its brassy sunshine. The wind was blowing from the direction of the Mexican quarter and brought with it a hot smell of tortillas and guacamole to mingle with the manure stench on Allen and sour mash fumes from the alleys behind Hatch’s and the Eagle Brewery. It was a ripe town, stinking of prosperity. He touched his hat to Kate Fisher, who was lifting her skirt above a surprisingly trim ankle to mount the boardwalk. She nodded and continued up Fourth to Fremont and let herself into Fly’s boardinghouse.

Doc was sitting at the cramped writing table in their room when she came in, using a steel card-cutter to trim the blurred edges off a deck he had been carrying since Prescott. He had won forty thousand dollars there, although most of it playing faro with someone else’s deck; but the town itself was lucky for him. Kate hung up her cape and bonnet.