Powder Keg (5 page)

I
was walking through the tiny lobby of my hotel when somebody behind a newspaper said, “Noah. Over here.”

Blue eyes peered over the top of the paper. I hadn’t come to Tom Daly; he’d come to me.

About four feet from him the smell became familiar. He had always used the same kind of slick stuff on his thinning hair. That, combined with the smell of the rye he preferred, gave off an unmistakable aroma.

I sat in the leather chair next to him. “These are nice digs, Noah.”

Men who drink the way Daly did are never quite sober. Even after a couple of days off the bottle, you see a faint trembling in their fingers and whiskey sorrow in their eyes. Even the big, loud drunks who always seem to be having such a great time when they’re up there—in their rooms in the hangover mornings they’re scared, confused, stomach-sick little children who ache to stop but can’t.

“There’s a train out of here at six tonight, Tom.”

“Not in this weather there won’t be.”

“The storm hasn’t hit yet.”

“The direction that train’s coming, the storm’s already there. There won’t be a train along for a couple days now.”

“You been hanging out at the depot, have you?”

Then he surprised me. “I checked it out, yeah.”

“You going back?”

He put the paper down, folded it in half, laid it carefully on the stand next to him. Even half-sober, he was a fastidious little man.

“I wired Susan. Told her I was coming home.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “So Tom Daly has finally come to his senses.”

“Maybe it’s not what you think, Noah.”

“I guess I don’t follow you. You’re going home, right?”

“Yeah, I’m going home. But I’m going home with something I stole from one of Pepper’s bags in his hotel room.”

The whiskey and the years had caught up with him. There in the sunlight-robbed lobby, sitting among the smells of stale cigars and dusty carpet, he looked small and old and finished.

“You know what I took?”

“This could be dangerous, Tom.”

“Yeah, dangerous for them. I took his bank statement from this bank over in Maryland. You should see it, Noah. He’s been on the take for years. The deposits are as much as two thousand dollars at a time. You know how we’ve always heard they were in the blackmail business? Well, this proves it. This is better than shooting them. This means a long time in
prison, Noah. And you know what else? I’ll bet I can talk the D.A. back there into getting them to admit they took the information the boss thinks I took.” The whiskey-wasted little fellow sat up straight, grinned and said in the happiest voice I’d heard him use in years: “They go to prison and I get my name cleared. I should’ve thought of this a long time ago.”

It made sense. The D.C. police and D.A. weren’t going to worry about how he got Pepper’s bank statement. All they’d care about was that it was authentic and that they could use it to show a jury that no rank-and-file federal agent could make that kind of money and still be honest. You didn’t become a federal man to get rich.

“You wanna go have a drink with me and celebrate?”

“Why don’t you celebrate by not taking a drink, Tom?”

“You would’ve made a hell of a good priest,” he laughed.

“Tell you what I will do, though. How about having supper? There’s that café down the street. I see they’re advertising Swiss steak in the window for tonight.”

“That sounds pretty damned good.”

He stood up before I did. Now that he’d told me about the bank statement, his demeanor had changed. He wasn’t some exultant braying fool. But damned if he didn’t look a few years younger and a lot less ashen; and damned if he didn’t have that old-Tom smile on him.

I cuffed him on the shoulder. “See you at five.”

T
om didn’t make it to the café. You know enough drunks, you know that at least 50 percent of the time they don’t keep their word.

I gave him twenty minutes and then went ahead and ate without him. Swiss steak and mashed potatoes wasn’t the kind of meal I expected in a mountain town but I was glad to get it.

I figured the café had about half again as many customers as it could handle. There were cowboys, workers, day laborers, drummers of every description, and a few folks who felt they were too far away from their ranches and farms to risk traveling. The smoke from cigarettes, cigars, pipes, and the grill put a fog-heavy haze across everything. And every single syllable uttered seemed to be about the weather, a subject I was thoroughly sick of hearing about.

Tom had been right about the train, anyway. We wouldn’t be getting out of there for a few days. And if the mountain passes got bad, I might not make it back to Denver for a week or more.

The man next to me got up from his counter seat
and another man took his place. We didn’t look at each other or speak. He ordered the Swiss steak and got his coffee fast from a sweaty and desperate waitress. She deserved a few days off after that night.

I had a piece of apple pie. I ate it in gulps. I wanted out of there. That press of people plus the smoke was starting to make me tense. I’m not much for crowds. I’ve seen a few of them turn on people and it’s always ugly. I’ve never seen a lynching but I have seen a crowd beat and stomp a man very close to death while six drunks held me so I couldn’t go to his rescue. Later on that night, in back of a saloon, I decided for no particular reason to kill the man who’d stirred up the crowd. Like most competent lawmen, I knew how to plant a gun so it looked like self-defense.

The man next to me at the counter said, “If you go after Mike Chaney, mister, I want to go with you. Name’s Jeremy Long.” He offered a massive hand and I took it. “I just want to see his face when we bring him in. Thinks he’s the big hero.”

Even with the din, Long’s voice was loud and angry. He was a fleshy man, short, balding, middle-aged, wearing a sheepskin over his work shirt. I don’t suppose he was all that tough when something personal wasn’t driving him. But there was obviously something between Chaney and himself that made him dangerous.

“I won’t be going after him, Mr. Long. Once the trains can run again, I’m leaving town.”

“Kip over to the sheriff’s office told me you was a federal man.”

“I am. But I’m not in town because of Chaney.”

He just watched me the way a human watches a type of animal he’s never seen before.

“Why ain’t you after Chaney?”

“I’m working on a different case.”

“You know what he done?”

“From what I hear, he robbed a bank.”

He sneered. “Oh, he done a lot more than that, mister. A whole lot more than that. One of the banks he stuck up—one of Flannery’s banks, of course—Flannery fired one of the clerks. Blamed him for not putting up a fight when Chaney robbed the place. Even kind of hinted around that the clerk might be in cahoots with Chaney. You know how old that clerk is? I’ll tell ya. He’s twenty-three. You know how many little ones he’s got runnin’ around? I’ll tell ya that, too. He’s got six little ones runnin’ around. And you know what else? He’s got a sickly wife, to boot. Can’t do about half the work she should; and even then she’s got these spells when she can’t do nothing at all. And so this here clerk I’ve been telling you about, now he ain’t got a job on top of everything else. And it’s all because of the big hero, Mike Chaney.”

Maybe I would have been more sympathetic if he hadn’t been spitting all over me as he worked his way through his moist rage. I took out my handkerchief and wiped my face.

“I just want to see his face when they put the handcuffs on him. Or when they kill him. Shoot him down. Because you know he don’t really care about the people he gives this money to. All he cares about is playin’ the big man to everybody. ‘Here I am. I’m Mike Chaney. I’m a hero.’”

Everybody was packed so tight at the counter that I kind of had to wriggle my way up out of the seat.

“I take it that clerk was your son.”

“You take it right, mister.”

His plight was one that most people never think about. You take any major crime like a bank robbery. It affects a whole lot of people, people you never think about. That man’s son, for instance, and his sick wife. And their kids.

“I wish I could help you, mister. But I’m afraid I can’t.”

Somebody was in my seat within six seconds of my lifting my ass off it.

I
decided to try the boardinghouse where Tom Daly was staying. Or at least had been staying unless he’d managed to get himself kicked out.

When I passed by the sheriff’s office I saw Nordberg talking to his wife. Even in faded blue gingham she was as pretty as a mountain sunset. The woman in the photographs in his office. She had a buffalo wrap over her shoulders. She carried her infant tight in her arms. Given the raw wind, she had to keep it completely covered.

Close up, the woman was even prettier, a delicate female face with blue eyes that spoke of intelligence but also anxiety.

“I need to talk to this man, Wendy. I’ll see you in an hour or so.”

“Supper’s ready and waiting.”

But Nordberg seemed more interested in talking to me than he did in talking to his wife. He just looked at her and said, “This is Noah Ford. This is Wendy. My wife.”

She said all the nice things, including, “I hope you enjoy your stay here, Mr. Ford.”

After his wife and baby were gone, Nordberg said, “C’mon inside. It’s too cold to stand out here for very long.”

The front desk wasn’t manned. A coffeepot bubbled on the potbellied stove. He set us up with a cup each. He sat on the edge of the desk, I sat in a chair. The walls were covered with various plaques and awards his office had received. From what I’d seen of him, he probably deserved all of them.

“Your friend’s at it again. He somehow met Mike Chaney’s sister Jen and got her all stirred up. She was cooperating with me. But not since she’s talked to Daly. And that’s just one thing. About an hour ago somebody swore they spotted Chaney in town here. Not far from Jen’s place. I ran out there but didn’t find him anyplace. Thought I’d look around some more. I’m headed out there now. I just wanted to put something warm in my gut because I just might be outside for a long time tonight. I was going to look you up, anyway. See if you wanted to go along. After I find him, I’m going to put your friend Daly in a cell and he stays there until the train is ready to pull out and I put him on it.”

“I don’t blame you. I wonder how the hell he got mixed up with Chaney’s sister.”

“She’s a very nice gal. She’s just afraid that your two federal men are going to kill her brother. She’s sure that Flannery Jr. put them up to it.”

We took our last sips of coffee and headed out.

B
one-cold, wind-whipped, wind-blinded, we spent a good (well, bad actually) two hours chasing phantoms on the north edge of town where there were ample hiding places, including a shallow wooded area, a roundhouse and boxcars, a wide creek with steep banks, and Jen Chaney’s small farm.

The year I worked for the Pinkertons I did a lot of railroad investigations. I’d forgotten the dubious pleasures of scrambling up boxcars and then walking along the top while the wind was doing everything it could to hurl you to the ground and smash your bones.

Nothing.

None of the men in the roundhouse were any help, either. They had everything battened down for the big storm. I counted two card games, one penny-pitching game, and a noisy arm-wrestling match among the leisure activities. The pipe tobacco and the coffee smelled damned good on a night like that. I hated to go back outside.

There had been four of us looking—two deputies
had met us on our way out there—and since I hadn’t heard any sudden shouts I guessed they’d done as poorly as I had.

The moon was a mean one. So icy-looking it made you even colder. But it showed everything up pretty good, which was bad for people trying to elude the law.

The deputy named Dob—I can’t remember his last name—came tripping and stumbling and swearing and shouting and waving toward me. He was so out of breath when we caught up with each other, he put his hands on his knees and just held them there while his breathing threatened to rip his whole chest cavity apart. He sounded like a dog dying mean.

And then he said, “Your friend, Mr. Ford.”

“Daly? What about him?”

He held up a hand. His panting wasn’t done. It almost sounded fatal then. His nose was running and the snot glowed green in the moonlight. His white face was raw red from the wind.

“Dead.”

“What?”

“Dead. And I seen who killed him.”

“Who?”

More ragged breathing. “Mike. Chaney.”

“Chaney? Why the hell would Chaney kill Daly?”

He just shook his head.

By now Nordberg and the other deputy were running toward us. They must have heard Dob there despite the wind.

When they reached us, Dob, in torrents of breath, told them what he’d seen and we immediately set off.

Next to the railroad tracks, Tom Daly lay face down while the wind played wild with his hair and clothes.

I knelt down next to him on the off chance that he might still be alive. But I knew better.

“And you’re sure it was Chaney?” Nordberg asked. Then he said what I’d said: “Why the hell would Mike kill Daly?”

My knees cracked as I stood up. I had snot on my face now, too. I wiped the back of my glove across my nose.

I had a mental picture of Susan opening the telegram I’d have to send her. The one telling her about her dead husband. She wasn’t the type who would scream or be dramatic in any way. She’d take the telegram and sit slowly down on a chair and then she’d lean her head back and close her eyes. And after a minute or two of absolute stillness, the lamplight would glisten on the soft slow tears making their way down her cheeks. There would be sobbing but that would come much later on.

“Dob, you sure you couldn’t have made a mistake?” Nordberg was asking.

“No, sir. The wind blew his cap off. I got a good look at him. It was Mike Chaney for sure.”

“Mike Chaney,” Nordberg said, shaking his head encased in his buffalo parka hood. “Why the hell would he want to kill Daly?”

He took his turn with the corpse. While he did that, I looked around everywhere for anything that might have been dropped on the ground. A couple of moonlit glints got me curious but they both turned out to be just rocks that had that fool’s-gold brilliance to them.

Nordberg came over to me and said, “You can bet that’s where he went.”

He pointed to the mountains. They had never looked larger or more imposing or more impregnable.

“No sense going after him tonight. He’ll go high enough to get a good hiding place. We’ll wait for sunup.” He shook his head. “Now I got to go tell Jen.” He pinched his lips together before speaking. “This just isn’t like Mike Chaney.”

He turned to his deputies. “One of you stay with the body and one of you go to town and get the funeral wagon out here.”

He turned back to me. “I’d appreciate it if you’d come along. This isn’t anything I’m up to alone.”