Doom Weapon (7 page)

I
had two messages waiting for me at the telegraph office. One was from D.C. The boss was informing me that he’d gotten word that several foreign agents who operated out of the capital had been sniffing around people in our office for information about Grieves. He said that Grieves had apparently put his name in the foreign-agent circuit indicating that he was ready to do business and that he had something that every agent would want to bid on. The boss said that this information had come to a German agent via a telegram from Grieves dated six days earlier. But that apparently none of the foreign agents had heard from him since.

Every major capital in the world had spies thick as fireflies on a hot summer night. The agents seemed to have special powers for sensing that certain classified information or weapons were on the contraband market. They were rarely violent, they didn’t have to be. The men and women selling the secrets were greedy for money. They were only too happy to deliver the goods without any fuss.

But I wondered if this particular set of agents mentioned in the telegram weren’t out of luck. By the time
they’d figured out where Grieves had been, the matter would have been closed. At least I hoped so.

The second telegram was from Grieves’s wife. “You are the only hope my children and myself have of finding my beloved husband and their father. As you know, I am expecting another baby, too. I’m praying for you every waking moment.”

I felt like a shit. She was back at home well into her pregnancy worried that her “beloved” husband might have suffered an accident or something. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her the truth. That, I would happily leave to somebody else. I’d file my final report and that would be that.

Rogue agents weren’t all that uncommon. A fair number of temptations were put in our paths, everything from woman flesh to real gold. And just about everybody was susceptible at one time or another. The number of rogue agents was a lot higher than our government liked to let on. It wasn’t any different from the way police departments covered up rogue cops. A few years back in Chicago more than seven hundred cops had been fired at the same time for being crooked. As one of the local newspapers had pointed out, given the pool from which the cops were drawn, a good number of the new officers would be just as corrupt.

I stood at the table in the telegraph office trying to figure out how to respond to Mrs. Grieves. What I came up with was:

I knew it was a chickenshit telegram but didn’t the woman deserve at least a sliver of hope? The “beloved”
Grieves was probably in some whorehouse at that moment. His wife deserved some pleasure, too. A little false optimism was all I had to offer.

I took a chance on Swarthout not seeing me in his bank. He seemed to be out on the street a lot. Or maybe he’d be in a meeting. If he found out what I wanted, he’d ask me a lot of questions I didn’t want to answer.

The bank clerk was a young man straight out of a Horatio Alger novel, those yellowbacks that always featured young men who rose from humble circumstances to become scions of industry. His celluloid collar was so tight you could see the red marks on his neck. He’d battened down his cowlick with axle grease.

“My pleasure to serve you, sir. Good morning!”

“I need to speak to an assistant manager.”

“Perhaps I could help you, sir.”

“Sorry. Say, is Mr. Swarthout in?”

“Sir, Mr. Swarthout is out on one of his community calls. He makes a point of locating people in need and helping them. We’re very proud of him.”

I wanted to add a few red marks of my own to the kid’s neck. I believe the word is strangulation.

“Then please find me the assistant manager.”

“May I say what your business is about?”

“Just say it’s federal business.”

An invisible fist punched the kid in the belly. “Federal? Say, that is something.”

He went away and came back with a beleaguered-looking man with a weak handshake and dog-sad brown eyes.

“Norm said ‘federal’ business, sir?”

I showed him my identification.

“Maybe you should come back when Mr. Swarthout is here, sir.”

He hadn’t even asked me what my business was.

“Afraid I’m in a hurry. Is there somewhere we could talk?”

I was adding to the sadness in his dog eyes and I didn’t feel good about it. I imagined that Swarthout was probably an imperious boss and would work this poor little bastard over pretty good for talking to a federal man.

With great resignation, as if he knew that the noose was about to be placed around his neck, he said: “Very well, sir. Very well. Let’s step into my office.”

As he slipped behind his desk, he said, “Philip Axminster is my name. Guess I should’ve introduced myself out there. But I’m nervous about this. Nobody divulges any sort of information—other than the routine things, I mean—without Mr. Swarthout’s approval.”

“I’m told he used to run slave ships.”

“I beg your pardon?” He’d been startled.

“That was a little joke.”

“I apologize. I’m just a little anxious about this.” Then, in a childlike voice, after an enormous gulp, “Am I in any position to refuse answering questions?”

I was tempted to make a joke—try to calm the miserable little man down—but I didn’t seem able to amuse him.

“I’m only going to ask you one question. And, yes, much as I hate to say it, you can refuse to answer until either Swarthout is here or you have a lawyer present.”

“I sound like an old stick-in-the-mud, don’t I?”

“You sound like a man who probably has a wife and children and needs to worry about keeping his job.”

He smiled nervously. “You’re very polite for a federal man. And I appreciate it.”

“If you’re talking about Mr. Grieves, that’s who I’d like to talk about.”

“Oh, dear.”

“What?”

He thought a moment. “It’s just—well, he and Mr. Swarthout and the widow Ella—well, they seemed sort of thick for a time.”

“Thick?”

“You know, friendly.”

“I see. You mean going out to dinner and things like that.”

“Exactly.” He hesitated again. Glanced at the closed door as if somebody might have an ear pressed to the other side. “I’m told Grieves even went to the widow Ella’s for dinner several times.”

I rolled myself a cigarette. “What I’d like to know is if Mr. Grieves opened a checking or savings account here.”

A tic appeared beneath his right eye. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Confidential information. If I gave that out without Mr. Swarthout’s approval—”

“He’d put you on the slave ship?”

The tic stayed but at least the smile was wide and genuine. Then decorum got the best of him. “Confidential information is something we hold sacred here.”

“That’s good to know. I’d expect the same from my own bank.”

“I’m sorry.”

But he’d answered my question. He wouldn’t have looked so put upon if he hadn’t wanted to keep something secret from me. Something like a savings or checking account.

“You gave the impression that Swarthout and Ella and Grieves might have had some sort of falling out?”

“I did?”

“You said they were thick ‘for a time.’”

“Oh, yes. I see. Well, that’s correct. They spent a lot of time together—or so I’m told, you know how whispers spread in a workplace, people love gossip—but then apparently they stopped going around together.”

“And you have no idea why?”

“Well, I’m not privy to that sort of information. Mr. Swarthout doesn’t confide in me.”

I stood up and shoved my hand over to him. He had an unexpectedly strong handshake. “I appreciate your time, Mr. Axminster.”

“I hope I was helpful. I mean without divulging anything. I mean if you should ever have a conversation with Mr. Swarthout I hope you’ll—”

“I’ll tell him you refused to cooperate in any way.”

“But that I was pleasant about it. Mr. Swarthout has a fit when his employees aren’t polite.”

“I’ll bet Swarthout’s unpleasant to his employees, though, isn’t he?”

His face burned with all the anger he’d stored up for his boss. “Please don’t put me on the spot.”

“You weren’t helpful in any way and you were one of the most polite gentlemen I’ve ever dealt with.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d say exactly that.”

“That’s exactly what I’ll say. Thanks, Mr. Axminster.”

One place I’ve learned to stop by when I’m tracking somebody is the library. Not that the people I’m after are usually book readers but people on the run have need of different kinds of information and in most towns that means the libraries.

That’s only one of the reasons I stop, of course. As much as I have great need of getting out of Washington after only a week or two there, I like to find out what’s going on back in D.C. And libraries usually have the best collection of newspapers and magazines.

The size of the library in Junction City surprised me. It had the floor space and selection you’d expect in a much larger town. It was also busy for a weekday.

The librarian was a handsome woman of fifty-something, her gray hair done in a bun and her red dress possessing a touch of the regal. She had a smile like a beacon.

“Good morning, may I help you with something?”

“Yes, I’d appreciate that. You’ve got a real nice library here.”

“Well, thank you. A wealthy farmer was thoughtful enough to remember us in his will. I taught him how to read and I guess he never forgot it.”

I discreetly showed her my badge. I didn’t want to attract any attention.

“My, federal. That’s something we don’t see much of around here.”

“I’m actually looking for another federal man.”

“You must mean Mr. Grieves.” She had a wry, intelligent smile. “He took a liking to one of the young women who works here—a widow—and he sent her flowers every day for five days. That’s something else we don’t see much of around here. We’ll be talking about that for years, I imagine.” She was obviously amused by Grieves’s grand gesture. “But Martha—who is very pretty, by the way—is no young naïf. She knows a professional ladies’ man when she sees one.”

“So she never went anywhere with him?”

“Wouldn’t even let him walk her home. Her husband was something like that, a nice man but an eye for
the ladies he couldn’t control. Poor Martha suffered through their whole marriage because of that. So when Mr. Grieves tried courting her—he brought back too many unpleasant memories. So she shared the flowers with the churches around town. I doubt Mr. Grieves would’ve liked that if he’d known about it.”

“Did he spend much time here, aside from trying to court Martha?”

“No, not really. He looked through magazines sometimes but that was about all. And he only did that because he was waiting for Martha to be free.”

Grieves had become a legend in this town. But not all legends are good by any means.

“Was he always alone?”

She thought about this. “He always came in alone as I recall. But once I did see him talk for a few minutes to this little, nervous man who came in quite frequently. We never did get his name. Now, he was really a reader. The time Mr. Grieves talked to him, though, it didn’t look like they saw eye to eye much. They had words of some kind. They kept their voices down but it was obvious that they were disagreeing about something.”

“You said this little man came in frequently?”

“Yes. He’d always go right over to the newspaper section and take down the St. Louis paper. One day I asked him if he’d come from St. Louis and—Well, I can’t say he actually cried but I’m sure I saw tears in his eyes. And then he started talking about how nice spring was here but that it was even nicer in St. Louis. He described what it was like to see the flowers bloom and how orchestras played in the parks and how handsome the big ships looked coming into the docks. He sounded so lonely. I wondered how a man like him—he was obviously a very different sort of man than Mr. Grieves—how the two of them had ever gotten connected.”

While she wasn’t giving me any startling information, I was starting to get a sense of “the little man” who played some sort of role in the swath Grieves had cut through town there.

I saw two women come in the front door. They walked directly to the front desk where I was talking to the librarian. I turned and looked at them. “I’ll be done here right away, ladies.”

They didn’t look unduly happy about my presence.

“Can you remember the last time you saw Grieves?”

She hesitated. “Oh, at least two weeks ago.”

“More flowers for Martha?”

“No, I think he’d learned his lesson by then.” She snapped her fingers. “In fact, now that I think about it, he just stood right here at the front desk and looked around. You can see pretty much everything from here. He was obviously looking for somebody. I was thinking that it was that nice little man. But he wasn’t here. And I’m just as glad. I just had the sense that he shouldn’t be anywhere near Mr. Grieves. I just felt that Mr. Grieves was probably a bad influence on people.”

I smiled. “You could be right about that.”

I bid my adieus to the two ladies behind me—they looked very impatient—and then walked outside into the fresh air again.

One thing the little man was right about. It was hard to beat St. Louis in the springtime.

E
very once in a while you just walk into trouble. You don’t expect it, you don’t want it, you’d walk away from it double time if you had a chance, but there it is and through no fault of your own. Only later would I learn of the strange coincidence that had brought me to that place.

The name of the drinking emporium in the Lincoln Hotel was Time Out, the baseball reference being the motif of the place. The walls were lined with photographs of major league players of the day. There were at least six of Buck Ewing in his Troy Trojans baseball uniform (they needed an update; by then he played for the New York Giants); and Dude Esterbrook of the St. Louis Maroons; and Pud Galvin of the Buffalo Bisons who was, to me, the most overrated pitcher of the day. Bats, balls, even a catcher’s mitt or two were displayed in small lighted areas. The rest of the place was appropriately dark.

The customers were mostly couples, twenties up to fifties. They all looked prosperous. Most of them were laughing, enjoying themselves. There was a player piano that played discreetly bouncy music to set a merry atmosphere. And the waiters in their white shirts, red
vests, red arm garters, and fancy mustaches did their best to convince you that they were just as merry as the music.

According to all the books I’d read on alcoholism, saloons were a dangerous place for a nonimbiber to hang out in. Made sense. But sometimes I just liked to sit there and drink coffee and roll cigarettes and watch people. And try to fight off the worst memories of my drinking days. The unforgivable way I’d treated people sometimes, the humiliation and debasement of my own doing, and all the ridiculous fights I’d gotten into. I was one of those drunks who’d argue over anything and while I wasn’t in danger of becoming a boxing champion, I had a violent urge to pound on somebody. Or maybe it was to be pounded on. Maybe punishment was what I was after, knowing what a shit I was.

The only couple not getting along was a pair to my right. A handsome couple, expensively dressed, she sober, he very drunk.

He was calling her some pretty filthy names. He was apparently under the impression that nobody else could hear him.

Except for kids coming to drag their dads or moms home, there’s probably not much more sorrow in a saloon than when a man begins attacking his woman with words. Drink makes you crazy suspicious and crazy suspicious is pretty ugly to see or hear.

“Why don’t you go table to table and screw every man in here, Nan?” the drunk said just as the waiter set down my coffee and beef sandwich.

The waiter, a stringy, bald fellow with big hands and raw knuckles, said, “You either keep him quiet, Mrs. Turner, or I’ll have to get the bat and throw him out.”

“Do you hear that, Glen? Are you happy now?” She
was all too well aware of how everybody in the small place was watching the drama.

He responded like a scolded schoolboy. He hung his head and started shaking it from side to side.

“Don’t ever work in a saloon,” the waiter said.

For the next ten minutes or so, there was peace. Two couples got up and danced to the player piano. The talk was low. And the drunk just sat there staring at his drink, silent.

Then he turned to his left and took a look at me.

“Who the hell you think you are, lookin’ at my wife that way?”

“Oh, God, Glen, just turn around here. He wasn’t looking at me.”

“He wants to get you in bed is what he wants.”

He was more pretty than handsome and more whiny than threatening. He wore a black suit of Edwardian cut with a forest-green vest of silk. On a riverboat he would have fit in with the cardsharps.

She was an appealing blonde, not quite beautiful, but stylish in a gray suit cut to tastefully display her slender but elegant body. City woman, most definitely.

“Now you turn around here, Glen, and forget all about him, you hear me?”

Everybody was watching again and watching eagerly. Not even the best stage entertainment was this good. This was real.

“Why don’t we ask him to sit down with us?” Glen said, trying to sound crafty. He turned to me: “Come over here and sit down. My wife wants to meet you. It’s her birthday. Maybe you’ll be her present.”

“Glen!”

But you know how drunks are. Nothing less than a two-by-four across the forehead was going to shut him up.

“That’s right, everybody!” he said, mock-grandiose. “I am giving my wife the birthday present she wants most. Some dirty, uneducated, foul-smelling drifter!”

The waiter looked at me to see if I was going to respond. All I did was shrug. I’d been going to roll myself a cigarette but I figured now I’d be going.

“I’m very sorry about this,” the woman said to me. “He gets very jealous.”

“Oh, did you hear that?” the drunk said, again addressing the others at the tables. “‘He gets very jealous.’ As if she never gives me any reason to get jealous. She always pretends she’s this saint—but I think you know better, don’t you?”

He erupted from his seat, turning to me before the waiter had time to scurry across the distance separating my table and the bar.

It happened this way: The drunk turns toward me, waving a fist. The wife virtually jumps on him, trying to stop him. I just sit there, waiting to see how to play it. The waiter cries for him to stop. The wife has such a tight grip on his coat sleeve that she tears it away. And that’s when he unloads. He spits an enormous gob of hot spittle right across my nose. Instinct ejects me from my seat. Instinct also starts to propel me toward him. And to make a fist that is instantly ready to throw.

And that is when the waiter grabs my arm.

And that is when the drunk, after a spectacular circus-like wobble, falls a bit to his left, his head smacking the table so hard he breaks the legs of it. With nothing to break his fall, he goes right on down to the floor.

I don’t take well to being spit upon. Probably a character flaw on my part. I wanted to smash his face in, do any damage his fall had left undone.

The waiter and a couple of male customers were dragging the drunk to his feet. I just wanted to be gone.

As I started toward the door, the drunk’s wife hurried up to me and said, above all the noise of dredging up her husband, “I’m sorry this happened.” And then she pressed a luscious breast against my arm. “And for what it’s worth, I really would like to sleep with you.”

Then she was gone, back to her drunken husband.

Three blocks down the street, I saw them. There weren’t that many of them, maybe four across and six deep, but they were men hardened and begrimed at the end of the day by the work they had just finished doing. They carried placards that read:

DON
’
T DESERT US

NO LOYALTY

WE HAVE FAMILIES

The streets were lined with citizens who looked as if they weren’t sure how to respond. Unions were still controversial. The tycoons had ordered their newspaper and magazine editors to make the whole idea of working people joining together something sinister and foreign. They usually meant Jews and Italians when they said foreign. Most of the time they went with the code word on the assumption that their readers would know what they meant.

The tycoons wanted people to think that working people weren’t smart enough on their own to resent their low wages and dangerous conditions. They needed “outsiders” to tell them that.

So the citizens stood and watched, not waving their agreement but not expressing any disagreement, either.

Somebody said, “I’m all for them.”

I looked down and there was Liz. She looked especially fetching in the dusk light. I particularly liked her blue hair ribbon. It was earnest and sweet and very very female.

“But I suppose you don’t agree.”

“No, I like to see people suffer.”

“You look like the kind who would.”

“In fact, I’d cut their wages in half and make them sleep outdoors in the winter.”

“The territorial legislature agrees with just about everything you say. The robber barons bought them off a long time ago.”

The picketers had begun to chant now: “Stay in town! Stay in town! Stay in town!”

“That’s the sad thing. They don’t get fair pay and the owner won’t do anything about the working conditions—but they want to keep their jobs, anyway. They don’t have any choice.” I rolled myself a smoke as I talked.

The crowd’s attitude had changed. Across the faces of the onlookers you then saw smiles and heard applause as the miners passed by us, headed for the end of the business district two blocks away.

The faces of the miners were less surly, too. Their work-grimed faces opened up with grins as they waved to friends and neighbors.

“It’ll be a ghost town, just like everybody says,” Liz said. Then: “Guess I’d better get back to work. I’ve got a little time tonight. I’ll look up those issues for you that Grieves wanted.”

I walked with her. “You ever been to the mansion where Grieves was staying?”

“You kidding? A working girl like me?”

“Exclusive territory, huh?”

“That’s what they’d like people to think. But they’ve
got some pretty bad stuff going on out there. At least Grieves did. I hear he even brought in some very young girls.”

We stood in front of the newspaper office.

“There’s probably a good story in it. Folks were always curious about the place but Nickels, the man who owned it, never invited locals in. He figured owning a mine that was making a lot of money gave him the right to be a snob. He could barely put two English sentences together and even when he could afford Kentucky whiskey he preferred moonshine. But he didn’t want to traffic with anybody who reminded him of when he’d been poor.” She smiled. “I almost felt sorry for him. He’d give a few crumbs to the library and he’d always dress up in a tuxedo and top hat and give these long speeches about the arts. And people would snicker at him right in front of him. And when he’d finally leave, they’d laugh out loud and mock him. And then he went bust. He barely escaped with his life because by that time he owed everybody in town.”

She nudged me in the ribs.

“Don’t you be going out with any young girls.”

She went inside the newspaper office. I watched her friendly little bottom all the way in until it vanished behind the door.