The Crack in the Lens (19 page)

Bales looked back and forth between me and my brother as if trying to decide which of us was the bigger loon. Eventually he cleared his throat and brought the note up to eye level.

“‘From Hell (a.k.a. San Marcos),’” he read. “‘A woman’s work is never done, and neither is mine—except what I work on is women, ha ha. It’s been five years since I plied my trade here, and in that time I’ve picked up a trick or two. For proof, you can look to my lucky Star. Don’t bother looking for
me
, though. By the time you see this, I’ll be gone again. But fear not—or fear do, if you be a whore. As long as there are soiled doves to pluck, Texas Jack will be on the job. Send word to the barber: I’ll be back one day for another trim, snip snip.’”

Bales refolded the letter and stuffed it back in his pocket.

“It’s signed ‘T. J.,’” he said.

While the lawman had been reading, my brother had sagged more and more against the bars, until now he gripped them with both hands as if they were the only things keeping him upright.

“My God…it’s so obvious I didn’t even see it,” he said. “It looks like
I
killed Adeline.”

“Looks like?” Bales scoffed.

“That note don’t prove nothin’,” I shot back at him. “You know yourself Gustav can’t write a word.”

“But
you
can,” the marshal said. “I talked to Mortimer Krieger this morning, too. He told me you and your brother dropped by yesterday. Came in with some wild story about being writers or sleuths or something, investigating a murder…wanting to see anything he had on the Whitechapel killer. You even joined the library so you could take a look at his Ripper book. And the membership form you filled out—for yourself, Otto?”

Bales patted another of his pockets, signaling that the form was right there, safe and snug.

“The handwriting matches the note.”

There was a long pause while my brain worked through these words, rejected the only possible interpretation, tried again, came to the same conclusion, then finally ground to a smoking, spark-spewing halt.

“That’s impossible,” I managed to mutter.

Bales barked out a mirthless, incredulous laugh, like I’d just told him the same bad joke twice.

“Oh, it’s possible, alright. So possible it’s true.”

“You really believe that, don’t you?” Old Red said, eyes unfocused, voice hoarse. “You haven’t been tryin’ to run us off cuz you’re the killer or you’re coverin’ for him or any of that. You been doin’ it cuz you think
I’m
a killer.”

“You actually seem surprised,” Bales said, looking something close to astonished himself. “But…don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Five years ago. The last time I saw you before you left San Marcos. You came into my barbershop drunk, raving, practically foaming at the mouth.”

Old Red’s knuckles whitened, tightening around the gray iron bars. He wasn’t just readying himself for his knees to give out anymore. It was more like the whole world was falling away beneath his feet.

“That’s when you admitted it to me, Gus,” Bales said. “You told me
you
killed Adeline.”

Or, We Learn Why Bales Is So Bitter, and It Sours Me on Him Even More

Gustav staggered back from the bars and plopped down onto the little cell’s lone bunk.

“You really don’t remember, do you?” Bales said to him.

“Of course he don’t,” I said. “Cuz it didn’t hap—”

“Otto,” Old Red cut in, and when I looked at him he held up a hand and shook his head. “Tell me what
you
remember, Milford.”

Bales scowled at him, nose crinkled as if at the smell of bullshit. A heap of it. Yet something drew the lawman on.

“I was sweeping up in the shop one night, maybe four or five days after Adeline died. And I heard noise in the alley out back, off towards the Star. It sounded like shouting and sobbing. Some kind of argument. I tried to ignore it, at first. I didn’t want to go out there. Not after what I’d seen…”

A fire lit up in the marshal’s eyes.

I’d hoped it was the benefit of the doubt that had kept him talking, but it was looking more like a reckoning now. Bales wanted to rub my brother’s nose in his own dirt.

“Oh, yeah—I saw the body,” he said. “When I came in to open the shop the next morning, it was still back there in the alley, waiting for the undertaker. Old Marshal Cerny had a deputy there, and the son of a bitch was letting kids take a peep for a nickel apiece. I went to chase ’em off, and that’s when I saw…”

His eyes went glassy, losing focus. Or focusing elsewhere, more like. On a picture seared into his mind.

“Anyway,” he said, and suddenly he was back with us, staring hard at Old Red. “A few nights later, I hear that commotion back there, and I start thinking, ‘What if the killer’s come back? What if another girl’s getting murdered, and I’m just standing around with a broom in my hand?’ So I took a look. And it was you, Gus. Alone. Behind the Star.”

“What was I doin’?” Gustav asked. He truly had no idea.

“Blubbering, ranting…though I couldn’t understand a word. You were so soaked, the whole alley reeked of rye. So I got you to come into the barbershop, thinking we could talk things through. Friend to friend.”

Bales’s thick lips puckered like he’d just bitten into a rotten lemon.

“I didn’t really know you at all, did I? You never even told me about you and Adeline until that night. You were pacing around, bawling, and that’s when it came out.”

The marshal clasped his hands together, face contorted in anguish like a bad actor in an amateur melodrama. He wasn’t just going to tell us what Gustav had said all those years ago. He was going to show us.

“‘If I loved her, Milford, why’d I do her like that?’” He aimed a beseeching gaze heavenward. “‘I’m sorry, hon! I am so,
so
sorry!’”

Bales locked eyes on Old Red again, and his tone went icy cold.

“I asked what you were sorry about, and that’s when you said it. ‘She’s dead because of me, Milford. I killed her.’ Just like that, plain as can be, you admitted you murdered Gertie.”

My brother had been listening with an air of weary forbearance—Job taking another whipping from Jehovah because, one way or another, he figures he must deserve it.

One word snapped him out of it.

“I murdered
who
?”

Bales looked both flustered and defiant. He knew he’d made a mistake—but part of him
wanted
to make it.

“Adeline,” he said.

Gustav shook his head. “No. You said Gertie. That’s what her family called her. That’s what I called her.”

Bales couldn’t hold it back another second. The truth he’d wanted to spit in Old Red’s face ever since he first saw us—he finally let it fly.

“And it’s what
I
called her!” he roared. “You think you loved her? You don’t know what love is, you sick bastard!
I
loved that girl! Me! And you’re finally gonna pay for what you did to her!”

My brother didn’t just slump back into the bunk. He collapsed into it. Even old Job didn’t have to take a blow this low.

“Oh, Gertie,” Gustav moaned.

“So that night…when she was in the alley behind the Star”—I turned to Bales—“she was comin’ to the barbershop. To see
you
.”

“Oh, didn’t he tell you that part?” Bales sneered, jerking his thumb at my brother. “She’d been meeting me over there for months, whenever she could slip away. Only that night, I wasn’t there…and Gus was. Gertie always swore she hadn’t told a soul about us, but I guess he found out somehow—and he tore that poor, sweet girl apart!”

“Bull—!”

“
Otto
,” Old Red said, cutting me off yet again.

After that, though, he seemed to have a hard time getting out more words. Not that there weren’t any to say. It was more like there were too many, and he had to pan through them to find the right ones to start with.

“The night….”

It came out a croak, and Gustav cleared his throat and tried again.

“The night you and I talked in the barbershop. After you heard me say…whatever I said. What happened then?”

Bales shrugged.

“I took a swing at you, you took a swing at me, we struggled.”

He spoke carelessly, as bored with his own words as Old Red had been mindful. He’d said what he’d been itching to say for so long. Now that he’d scratched the itch, he was losing interest.

“Eventually, you got your hands on a pair of scissors, and I thought it was all over. You were going to slice me up, too. But I guess killing a man in a fair fight just isn’t your way. You dropped the scissors and stumbled out.”

“Yeah…yeah,” Gustav said slowly, perhaps catching glimpses of memories long lost in an alcohol fog. “Then after that…what? You went to Marshal Cerny?”

“Of course. He thanked me, too—and then didn’t do a thing about it. You left town a few days later, and that was that, far as he was concerned.”

“But not for you.”

“No. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That I could know a man, think of him as a friend, and he could do
that
. I even tried reading up on it. To try and understand you. But nothing I ever saw made a lick of sense.”

My brother nodded limply.

“
The Whitechapel Mystery: A Pscyho Logical Problem
,” he said.

The marshal looked startled, as if Gustav had just told him his mother’s maiden name or that he had a mole on his unmentionables—something he couldn’t possibly know. Then he must have recalled that we’d done some snooping around the Kriegers’ library, and he relaxed and rolled his eyes.

“Yeah. That thing. I may as well have been reading Mother Goose, for all I got out of it. No, the only grip I could get on you, Gus, didn’t come out of any book. It came from Brother Landrigan. He led me to repentance and salvation and acceptance…of a sort. There’s no understanding evil, look at it all you want. It just is, no rhyme nor reason. If any good was going to come of what happened to Gertie, I’d have to make it myself.” Bales tapped the badge pinned to his coat. “And the first step was making sure Kaz Cerny wasn’t wearing this if another lunatic like you showed up.”

“But
I
showed up again, Milford,” Gustav said. “How come you didn’t arrest me the second you saw me?”

Bales waved the thought away—though a trifle too quick, it seemed to me.

“I had no proof.”

“You’re the town marshal. Your word alone might’ve been enough to…”

Old Red let his words trail off, and he gave Bales a sidelong, sizing-up sort of look. Then he shook his head.

“You didn’t
wanna
testify, did you?” he said. “You steered clear of the Eagle all them years ago, did your dirty business in your barbershop, for chrissakes. And even now that you’ve repented and been saved, hallelujah, you’re still tryin’ to protect your precious reputation. Cuz love Gertie or not, you don’t want folks knowin’ you was ever mixed up with a low-down whore. So you got your pals to help run me and my brother out of town when you thought—truly believed—I was a mad-dog killer. What the hell kinda lawman does that?”

The marshal’s face went so red-hot I half expected him to blow up like an overstoked boiler.

“Face it, Milford—you ain’t changed,” my brother pressed on. “You think that badge made you something new, washed you clean? Well, it didn’t. You’re still just a haircutter pushin’ a broom.”

“Are you through?” Bales growled.

“Yeah,” I threw in. “Are you through?”

“For the moment,” Gustav said.

Bales opened his mouth.

I opened mine faster.

“Well, it’s about time. Because I have been waitin’ and waitin’ and waitin’ for you to swing back around to
the point
. And since you never did, I guess it’s up to me.”

“And the point is?” Bales asked.

“That my brother is not a murderer,” I told him, “and that you, marshal, are a goddamn moron!”

“E-excuse me?” Bales spluttered, so surprised he wasn’t even angry yet. “No, I don’t believe I will. Not while I’m in a jail cell because of your stupidity.”

“Otto,” Gustav said once again, but it came out more of a groan this time. He knew there was no stopping me until I’d worked off my head of steam.

“You’re so twisted up with grief you got your head worked up your ass,” I raged at Bales. “I mean, please! That ‘confession’ Gustav made?” I popped my eyes and clapped my hands to my face, mock-shocked. “Goodness me! Do you mean to say he allowed himself to become
visibly agitated
merely because the gal he loved had just been
murdered
? Well, no wonder you pegged him for the culprit. Cuz, of course, only a cold-blooded killer would get shit-faced and start actin’ nuts if his fiancée—yes, I said
fiancée
, Marshal—was
hacked into mincemeat
!”

“Listen, Amlingmeyer,” Bales began.

“And that badge of yours?” I sped on. “The one you wanted in case another lunatic came thisaway? Well, you been wearin’ it while some madman killed four chippies right under your nose—and that ain’t even includin’ Adeline and Big Bess!”

“I don’t know what you’re babbling about.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you? You big—!”

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

Gustav had sprung up from the bunk.

“Otto here might not be puttin’ it the way I’d have liked”—my brother’s grip on my shoulder tightened to a painful pinch, then let loose—“but it’s true you misunderstood me, Milford. Gertie’s blood
is
on my hands, but not cuz I killed her with ’em. I thought we needed more money ’fore we married, so I let her keep on…you know. And it got her killed. I’m sure that’s what I was tryin’ to say that night—I should’ve got her away from Ragsdale and Bock first chance I got. And you know what? If you truly cared for her, like you say? You should have, too.”

The angry flush on Bales’s face had faded to pink. He wasn’t boiling anymore, but he was still asimmer.

“So you’re trying to take it back,” he said.

“I can’t take back a confession I never made!” Old Red snapped, exasperated at last. “And if you’d bothered checkin’, you’d know I not only didn’t kill Gertie, I
couldn’t
have. The night she died, I was asleep in a bunkhouse ten miles outside town. You can ask Suicide Cheney or Joe Koska down on the Lucky Seven. You can go out and ask”—there was a pause so brief I’m sure only I noticed it—“Bob Harris. They’ll all tell you the same thing. I didn’t even know Gertie was dead for days.”

“I always knew your pals would cover for you,” Bales said, shaking his head. “It doesn’t prove a thing.”

“Milford, I don’t have no pals around here anymore.”

“Look, Marshal,” I said, “have you even asked yourself why we’re here? If Gustav really killed Adeline…Gertie…
her
…if he’d done it, why on earth would he come back to San Marcos?”

“Because he thought he got away with it.”

I barely reined in a “Sweet Jesus!”

“He came back,” I said slowly, with as much patience as I could muster, “because he aimed to do what he couldn’t five years ago. We’re here to find the killer.”

“Well, if that’s true,” Bales replied, mimicking my overdeliberate, explaining-math-to-a-halfwit cadence, “then why is there another dead prostitute in your hotel room?”

“Someone put her there,” I said, my words coming out now like molasses in January. “You think we’re so stupid we’d leave a body in our room while we went to church?”

“It’s…not…that…you’re…stupid,” Bales said. “It’s…that…you’re…
crazy
.” He turned his glare on Gustav. “And now you’re done.”

He turned and stomped toward the stairs. “You’re crazy…you’re done”—that said it all, as far as he was concerned.

“What we told Krieger about bein’ sleuths?” I called after him. “That’s true! We’ve been railroad dicks and we’ve caught killers and I know it doesn’t look like it but we’re actually good at this stuff! Believe it or not, you need our help!”

Bales reached the top of the steps.

I turned to Old Red. “You gotta show him I ain’t lyin’.”

Bales stopped on the first step down.

Old Red said nothing aloud, but his eyes were talking plenty.

I can’t
, they told me.

“Go on, Brother,” I said. “You can do it. I know you can.”

Even if you don’t
.

Bales muttered something and started down the stairs again.

“You don’t wanna believe me about Gertie, fine,” Gustav called after him. “I can understand. Big Bess, though—at least hear me through on that.”

Bales tromped out of sight.

“Dammit, Milford!” Old Red grabbed the bars of the cell door and gave them a rattling shake. “I know who killed her! And if you give me just two more minutes, I can prove it, too!”

Bales’s footsteps faded.

Then stopped.

Then grew louder again.

Bales reappeared at the top of the stairs.

“Two minutes,” he said, pulling a watch from his waistcoat pocket. “Starting
now
.”