Cottonwood (28 page)

“That’s it. Come on over about five or so and we’ll feed you. Renée still does her own cooking, you know. You’re fixing to stay, aren’t you?”

“Haven’t decided yet,” I said.

“You better. Things are happening in this town again. Good place to be for a man like you.” He slapped me on the back again and strode away down the sidewalk like a man with places to go, the opposite of my own condition. I hadn’t had my hair cut since a couple of weeks before leaving San Francisco, so I walked back to the northwest corner of Seward and Second, where I’d earlier noted a barber shop. There were two barbers, both of them tall, lanky fellows who may have been brothers. The one nearest the door was free, and I sat in his red leather chair and started listening. He was sure he’d never barbered me before, and wanted to know if I was new to town. The easier answer to that was yes, so that’s what I told him, and that got him started on the subject of Cottonwood. He was a real tub-thumper for it, having arrived there from Indiana in ’76, and he considered it the best town since the Garden of Eden disincorporated.

“Fastest growing city in the region. More churches per head than any other town in the state, and you can look that up in the 1880 census if you don’t believe me. No reason to think that’ll change with this year’s count, either.”

“Is that so?”

“You bet. You heard of the Cottonwood Mills?”

“That the big building east of town?”

“That’s the new one. The old one, out northwest of town, that’s the biggest mill in this part of the state, makes close to three thousand sacks of flour a day. New one out east next to the brick works is going to be bigger.”

I wished he’d shut up, but at least he didn’t expect me to keep up my end of the conversation. Before he’d gotten very far along the front door opened and Ed Feeney walked in.

“Howdy, Ed,” the chatty barber called out, and Ed waved and sat in one of the chairs against the wall. The other barber was just finishing up a cut on a mustachioed fellow who looked like a banker; neither of them had spoken a word since I’d walked in.

“Howdy, Mort, Hal, Mr. Gintley.” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “How’s by you, Bill?”

“Just fine, Ed.”

“I heard you were in town, haven’t had a chance to come by and talk. Just walking past I saw you in the chair, thought I might get an interview for the
Optic
.”

“That’s fine with me. You mind doing it while this fellow lowers my ears?”

“That’s all right.” He pulled out a small notebook and a pencil. “Now how’s about telling my readers where you’ve been all this time?”

“Points west.”

He scribbled and, getting no further answer, forged on. “And what exactly kept you from staying last time, Bill?”

“Wanderlust,” I said.

“Aha. And it wasn’t a belief that charges would imminently be filed against you for the attempted killing of Marc Leval, prominent citizen of our town and husband of a woman you were known to visit in his absence?”

“Not at all,” I answered. The barber’s scissors had quit snip-ping, and he spun me around to face him.

“You aren’t Bill Ogden?”

“I am,” I replied.

He tore the sheet right off of me. “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll cut another hair of yours. Everybody knows it was you crippled Mr. Leval, not those Benders.”

The other barber spoke for the first time. “Calm down, Mort. You can’t leave it half-finished.”

“Not to mention what you did to his poor wife.”

“Now hold on a minute. What am I supposed to have done to Maggie?”

“I won’t cut another follicle. Out,” he said, holding the sheet and pointing to the door. He called to mind a Spanish toreador attracting a bull, and I stood, fixing the cruelest scowl I could muster to my face.

“Listen here, friend, I mean to get my hair cut before I leave.”

I was taller than he, but his mind was made up. The banker was getting down from the other chair, though, and the other barber waved me over. “Come on, mister, I’ll finish it for him.”

“I thank you kindly,” I said, and sat down. Mort went over to a chair in the back corner of the room and sulked, refusing to look at me or Ed or his colleague.

Ed hadn’t stopped taking notes. “So in your opinion are the two women in custody in fact Ma and Katie Bender?”

“Haven’t seen them.”

“Herbert Braunschweig seems to be convinced it’s them, and he knew ’em pretty well. He was fucking Katie for a while, is what I hear.”

“I didn’t know that. Not surprised, though.”

“Hell, I fucked her a time or two myself,” Ed said, and the barber behind me was laughing.

“Is that so?” he said. Mort, still sulking in his corner, was looking very superior to the likes of us fornicators and murderers.

Ed probably wished he hadn’t said it. “Hell, half the men in town did, just about. You didn’t though, did you, Bill? I seem to remember you didn’t like her. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. Those women aren’t the Benders.”

“How do you know that?”

“You know how they found them? This crazy woman up in Michigan claims her laundress was telling her fortune, giving her all kinds of advice on her life, told her secrets from her past, all that sort of thing.”

“That sounds like Katie.”

“Sure, but they stopped getting along, and Mrs. McCann says that Mrs. Davis started trying to strong-arm some money out of her.”

“That sounds like Katie, too.”

“Sure does, but Jesus, Bill, you ought to meet this Mrs. McCann. Bats in the belfry, no shit. Talks to the spirits and they talk back. So trying to intimidate her, the laundress said ‘you’d better do as I say, my mother’s Ma Bender.’ ”

“That was enough to extradite?”

“Didn’t take much more than that. First Mrs. McCann wrote the county commission here and said, ‘look here, the lady does my laundry is Katie Bender and her mother is Ma Bender.’ So Herbert Braunschweig went up there. He came back and said yep, it’s them; they’re in the county jail, and if we can put together the funds to extradite and prosecute we can hang the bitches. He said that to a meeting of the county commission. I was watching the stenographer, she’d never heard such a word pronounced in court before.”

The barber was done cutting and he started the shave. “Want me to wax that mustache?” he asked, and I told him no.

Ed and I left together, and heading across Seward I stopped cold at the sight of the tall, angry fellow I’d seen with Maggie, looking smart in his fur coat and a silk top hat. Again the look he gave me was full of frank hatred. He turned from me and hurried around the corner to Main Street, and Ed laughed at the look on my own face as I watched him go.

“Who the hell was that?” I asked.

Cackling, Ed headed up Seward, calling over his shoulder, “That’s George Smight, he’s Leval’s factotum. I’d say he’s taken a dislike to you.”

3

LABETTE COUNTY, KANSAS FEBRUARY, 1890

Two Gentlewomen

The Braunschweigs’ house was bigger than the Leval-Rector mansion, and though staffed with several maids there was, as Herbert had boasted, no cook, and the lady of the house did make all of the meals. Long since converted from its original design, it still retained traces of its origins as a bordello, in particular a large number of small bedrooms upstairs, each of which Herbert felt obliged to show me while Madame Renée finished dinner.

“Now look at this here, Bill,” he said, pulling down a framed lithograph of Abe Lincoln from a wall of one of the bedrooms. It hung at a peculiar height, seven feet or so off the ground, and behind it was a small hole, angled downward, through the bedroom wall. Standing on a chair I looked through it and had quite a nice view of the bed in the room next door.

“There’s three of these that I’ve found. This must have been one hell of a whorehouse. I was already with Renée by the time it opened, and she’s got the second sight, so if I’d’ve tried anything like that she’d have killed me.” He shook his head sadly at the waste of it all. “You know, you ought to be staying in one of these rooms instead of the hotel.”

“That’s all right, Herbert,” I said, a little put off by the peep-hole in the wall; still, I wasn’t making any money for the moment and if I spent too much of my cash reserves I’d have nothing with which to establish another studio.

“Hell, you stay here. I’ll tell Renée and she’ll by God make you.”

“All right, I’ll bring my things by tomorrow morning.”

“There you go.”

He slapped my back for the fourth time that evening and we headed downstairs for a glass of whiskey before dinnertime. We took our seats in the parlor and he leaned forward. Outside it had begun finally to snow, and big chunky flakes drifted down outside the window. The door was closed, and he kept his voice low. “Listen, I don’t know what happened with you and Leval, but he told everybody it was the Benders what shot him.”

I nodded. “It wasn’t, though. He shot at me first.”

“We heard it, me and Tim. We’d rode out as far as we thought we could and we was about to turn around when all of a sudden someone fired on us from a thicket down by the water, hit Tim in the thigh. He kept fighting, though, and we held ’em off for a while until they rode away.”

“It was them?”

“Sure as hell was. I saw the old man plain as day when they mounted. If Tim hadn’t been hurt I woulda rode after ’em.”

“How’s old Tim, anyway?”

“Shot to death in ’84.”

“How’d it happen?”

“He’d married him a gal from Fort Scott, opened up a lumberyard up there. Payroll robbery. They hanged one of his men for it, looked like old Tim’d recognized him even with the masks they had on. He never did admit he’d done it, pissed himself before they even got the noose over his head.”

“Sorry to hear that. Tim was a good man.”

“ ’Course you know I got a brickworks myself and part of a flour mill. We’re building another mill, too. And I’ll tell you something else about what’s happening here right now, all this is real. Not like Leval’s cattle trail.” He took an angry puff of his cigar, getting freshly worked up over it. “I’ve been in business with old Marc for a while now, and he’s all right. But if I’d known about business then what I know now I’d have seen right through that son of a bitch.”

“Probably would.”

“Anyway, why don’t you come down one of these days to the brick plant and I’ll show you around. You ought to think about staying, and I’ve got a job for you if you do.”

“What kind of job?” I asked, picturing myself stoking a giant kiln for ten hours, ending up sunburnt in January with my hair dry and brittle as wheat straw.

“Hell, I don’t know. Something good. Something pays better than taking pictures.”

I was about to protest that I’d made a good living at it over the years when a servant girl knocked at the door and stuck her head in. “Madame’s got dinner ready to serve.”

The main course was blanquette de veau, and it was as good as anything I’d had in a restaurant anywhere in the west. Madame Renée was pleased to hear me say it, and she patted my hand. Like Herbert, she’d been fitted with a glass eye since I’d seen her last, and its effect was more disconcerting than the dead, frosted one had been. She told me about her son, who worked for the department of wells and quarries for the city of Paris. He had provided her with six grandchildren, none of whom she had ever seen.

“Your boy didn’t waste any time knocking that gal of his up,” Herbert said.

“Baby’s due in May, I think.”

“Dites-donc,”
Madame Renée said.
“Vous avez déjà vu Maggie ou
pas?”

“Goddamnit,” Herbert roared, and he pounded his fist down on the table so hard some of the blanquette splashed over the rims of our plates. “Talk English!”

There followed an argument of such intensity and volume that I was tempted to excuse myself. When I rose, though, they both froze and looked at me.

“Where you going?” Herbert said.

“I thought I’d leave you in privacy,” I said, and they both looked at me like I was crazy. The storm had passed for both of them, though, and they regarded me with the same pleasant, mild curiosity as before, and Renée repeated her question in English.

“I saw her on the street yesterday and she looked at me like I was covered in flies and cowshit.”

Herbert was soaking a crust of bread with the sauce of the blanquette. “You know, Bill, when she came back the
Optic
printed a whole pack of goddamned lies about you and Maggie both. The
Free Press
tried to defend her but that just made it worse for you.”

I shrugged. “There’s not much the papers can say anymore to help or hinder my reputation locally,” I said, and we let it drop. I made a mental note to go and see Ed tomorrow, though, and have a word about it.

In the morning it was still snowing, and it had drifted to such a degree that carriage traffic was slow and walking difficult. I hired a dray and had my effects moved from the hotel to the Braunschweig mansion, into a bedroom I was relatively certain was free of spy-holes. After luncheon I set off for the offices of the
Optic
, where I found Ed setting type himself. He assured me that he’d be at it for only a few minutes more, and I sat down at his writing desk to wait.