The Wrong Case

  “Milo, you’ve been a wonderful father, and I thank you, but, man, I need that mad money of yours. I’m good for it, man, you know that.”

  “What is it? Don’t you believe me? Don’t you trust me? You think—”

  “I think you’re gonna fuck it up, man,” he interrupted, and I couldn’t blame him for thinking that.

  “Just hang on for a few more days, okay?”

  “No, man, this dude up here is getting real nervous having me around, and he ain’t nervous at all compared to me. I know what the slammer looks like from the outside, and that’s all I want to know, man, that’s all. Hell, I was counting on you for the bread, but if you ain’t got it—”

  “I got it,” I said, “I’ll bring it up this afternoon. Okay?”

  “That’s so fine, man, I can’t tell you. And, hey.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t let anybody tail you, huh?”

  “Oh, shit, Muffin, shut up,” I said and hung up.

  “My mother says it isn’t polite to say ‘Shut up,’ ” I was informed by a little girl standing beside me.

  “Tell her I said ‘I’m sorry,’ okay?” I told her, ruffling her hair. She smiled as if she fully intended to.

  When I glanced at the girl behind the counter, her smile was harried but undaunted, reminding me of Mindy. The Holy Light Hog Farm was a few miles out of the way but in the same general direction as the north-fork hunting camp where Muffin was waiting for my money. I thought about dropping by to say hello to Mindy and Reese. But when I climbed into my rig, I saw the black folder and remembered that I was supposed to be working, so I headed back to the office for mad money and a drink.

  Fifteen

  After I filled my wallet with my two thousand, I added a thousand of Nickie’s and hoped I could cover it somehow. Then I sat down at the desk to have a drink and take a quick look at the folder Mrs. Crider had given me. But I thought about her instead. She was a hell of a woman. She had asked me to kill without even flinching. I liked that, but it also scared me. We weren’t even on first-name terms yet, but she assumed because I had lied to her that I owed her a murder. Just as Jamison assumed that I owed Simon one too. Unfortunately, I didn’t know who was owed what. And I began to wonder about their judgment of my character. So I opened the folder. It was the beginning of his thesis on Dalton Kimbrough and Western justice. As I had told Helen Duffy, my great-grandfather made his way into law enforcement and capital gains by killing Dalton Kimbrough, so I had always been interested.

  But the thesis wasn’t a simple history of Dalton Kimbrough or an estimation of Western justice. It was an examination of the difference between myth and reality in the Western hero and villain. The Duffy kid began with the distance between the Wyatt Earp created by Ned Buntline and the often too human lawman, then passed on through the careers of Billy the Kid, Joaquin Murieta, Jack Slade, et al.—the easy research—and on to the life and hard times of that infamous outlaw, highwayman and killer, Dalton Kimbrough. As it turned out, Dalton was a man ahead of his times: he handled his own public relations. The first thing he did was change his name from Ernest Ledbetter to the more heroic Dalton Kimbrough, then out of a spotty criminal career that included one arrest and one gunfight he made a name for himself throughout the gold fields of the post-Civil War West.

  His solitary arrest record was for shoplifting in St. Joe, Missouri, where he had been raised. The shopkeeper had collared Dalton with a pocketful of .44 rounds and an old Navy Colt under his coat. The revolver was a paperweight with no firing pin. Dalton did his thirty days, then headed west for a life of crime and excitement in the gold camps. Dalton drank, tried mining, and probably hung around the bars more than he should have, looking for trouble. One winter, over in Montana, in a log-cabin bar just large enough for a four-foot plank bar, one table and two bunks on the opposite wall, Dalton finally found a gunfight in the midst of a poker game.

  When the gunfire ended, everybody’s revolver empty, there was a great deal of smoke and powder burns, but nobody had been hit. Except the bartender’s dog, which had been killed by a single round through the lungs. The game resumed peacefully amid smoke and the good feelings that come with survival, only to be disturbed again. This time by odd groans from a miner sleeping off a drunk in the lower bunk. When they turned him over to tell him to shut up, they found a large puddle of blood beneath his body from a round that had passed through his thigh. He groaned once more, then died from the loss of blood. Dalton, ever ready for fame, claimed both killings as his very own, and nobody bothered to dispute his claim.

  Dalton also boasted of numerous stage holdups and bank robberies, all of which either never took place in recorded history or were committed by other men, who had never heard of Dalton Kimbrough. As far as anybody knows, Dalton took part in only one stage holdup, his last one. Perhaps the gunfight in the bar went to his head. Later the same winter, he and two men stopped the Salt Lake stage as it topped the south pass into the Meriwether Valley, the stage carrying my great-grandfather to his new home, an Army wife with her young son, and a strongbox.

  As the horses were blowing at the top of the pass, three armed men appeared on horseback, demanding the strongbox, which was bolted to the coach floor. Dalton fired five rounds at the lock, but it didn’t open. So he went after the passengers. My great-grandfather couldn’t speak English but he could count, and he was often courageously surly. When Dalton tried to open his coat to see if he carried a money belt, he met an unhappy Russian, who grabbed him in a clumsy hug. As they struggled, one of the mounted outlaws pulled off a round. Right through Dalton Kimbrough’s kidneys. He fired once more from his wildly bucking horse, hitting the frightened stagecoach driver in the chin, then his horse pitched him off. When he hit the frozen ground, he went out cold. The third outlaw, who finally decided to take control, also began to fire, but for reasons unrecorded—probably either wet or forgotten percussion caps—his revolver wouldn’t fire. He cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger several times, then rode away in disgust, never to be heard of again.

  After being shot through the kidneys, Dalton lost his taste for holdups and fights. He fell to the ground in my great-grandfather’s embrace, where his skull was crushed by a large stone in a Russian peasant’s burly hand. When the snow had settled, my great-grandfather trussed the unconscious outlaw like a pig and tossed him into the boot with Dalton’s body, bound the driver’s face, helped the lady back into the stage, then drove into history. As soon as his English was passable, he was hired as Meriwether’s constable, then elected sheriff, and nearly appointed territorial governor. In death, Dalton Kimbrough’s public relations paid off. For my great-grandfather.

  And in a less obvious way, for the stagecoach driver too. He stayed around town for years, wearing a scarf over his missing chin, becoming a local curiosity and drunk. The Army wife found her husband shacked up with a Willomot squaw, which she might have forgiven if he hadn’t been cashiered too, so she went back East, where people were civilized. Dalton Kimbrough’s body was hung next to his partner’s, the good folk of Meriwether deciding that stringing him up dead was nearly as good an example to potential outlaws as hanging him if he had been alive.

  As the years passed in the usual manner, the story bloomed into heroics with the aid of imaginative newspaper editors and my great-grandfather’s whiskey. According to Duffy’s thesis, my great-grandfather encouraged the Kimbrough myth to further his own political ambitions, which was probably true. At the end of the typed pages, he scrawled a sour note: A fucking klutz. I got the impression that although he believed his thesis, he didn’t especially like it, preferring myth to reality even as he cast the terrible light of a debunking truth across the years of Dalton Kimbrough’s petty life.

  All this was twice as sad because the truth about Kimbrough and my great-grandfather had been known for years before Raymond Duffy found Willy Jones and his papers. Even the B Western filmed in the early fifties had to invent a hero: the chinless stage driver.
In the movie, he knows the truth of the Milodragovitch pose and the puniness of Kimbrough’s villainy, but is unable to tell anybody. Until he is taught to write by a gentle schoolmarm from Philadelphia. Then he is able to expose the character of my great-grandfather as a cowardly and overbearing sham. In the last scene, the actor playing Milodragovitch lies sprawled in the middle of a dusty, back-lot street, the victim of unfounded pride and drunkenness. As the camera draws back, the sober, upright storekeeper, who has shotgunned the mad Russian and his knouted hand, is seen advancing like a cartoon hunter clutching a hammerless double-barreled shotgun. Then the frame widens to include the chinless hero, his eyes above the scarf suggesting a triumphant but sad smile, his hand on the schoolmarm’s delicate arm. She is smiling too, but in a rather pinched way, as if the chinless wonder needs a bath. They do not embrace. Music rises. Dissolve to list of cast.

  Just to set the record straight: my great-grandfather died quite bitterly sober in an old folks’ home.

  There is a quaintly modern notion that information will eventually equal knowledge, which is neatly balanced by the cliché that the more one learns, the less one knows. Both ideas are probably more or less accurate, but neither is particularly useful in dealing with the human animal.

  As I thought of Raymond Duffy, nothing came to mind. An image remembered from a bar, his eyes as black as gun barrels glistening with pleasure above his pale cheeks. They were murderous, not suicidal. And even though Reese had said that the kid was very depressed over the death of Willy Jones, I couldn’t see him killing himself. Maybe it was an accident, pure and simple, dumb-ass, a mistake. But I still needed a reason, if not for his death, then at least for his depression beforehand. If I knew what caused the depression, then I would be able to justify accidental death. Mistakes do happen. Like my father’s death, which I had always thought of as an accident caused by the mistake of leaving the bolt open on his deer rifle, of not looking at the shotgun as he lifted it out of the closet, of not checking the safety when he put it away…

  But as I thought of these things, an odd feeling came over me. I was missing something. And suddenly I knew and was damned sorry that I did. I remembered his first lecture about guns: Always keep them loaded, a full magazine and a round in the chamber, and you’ll never be killed by an empty gun; keep the safety on, check that always, but keep them loaded. Drunk or sober, he had never made a mistake with a gun; he put them away loaded, the safety on. But I remembered as clearly as I remembered the bloody stain on the hallway ceiling that the bolt of the deer rifle was open, the chamber empty. I wondered how long he had planned it, that accident planted in the hall closet like a bomb.

  I had a sip of whiskey, which seemed proper, but I was too tired and sore to feel any real grief. If that was the way he had wanted it, then I wasn’t about to disagree with him. I wondered if my mother knew, and decided that she did. Some knowledge rises out of information, disorganized but nonetheless true. If he couldn’t kill himself with a whiskey bottle, my father had to make do with guns, which made me wonder why the Duffy kid had chosen drugs instead of his pistols…

  “Bingo,” I said to myself and sat up straight in my chair.

  Even though it seemed that my father’s death wasn’t caused by a mistake after all, I’d bet good, or bad, money that Willy Jones’s had been. If you play with guns long enough, my father had told me, eventually you’ll kill somebody. And I saw the Duffy kid, drug-crazed, playing with guns, drawing and snapping the trigger in the old drunk’s face, saw the round left in the cylinder by mistake, saw the old man’s face explode, the back of his head hit the far wall, skull fragments and blood and brain matter all over the room. That would do it to a kid raised on bloodless violence, Hollywood and quick-draw contests; that would drive him over the edge. When he saw what firearms are meant to do, when he saw the effect of an unjacketed lead round fired into a human face, that would make him throw his pistols away, cut his hair and discard his gunfighter clothes. I knew. At that range, when a bullet enters the human head, the hydrostatic pressure blows the face up like a cheap balloon; the eardrums burst, the eyes pop out, and the head seems to dissolve in a shower of blood. Oh God, did I know, and not want to at all.

  Assuming that I had had a hard day that morning, I had a long drink, then another before I called Amos Swift. He agreed that he might have missed powder burns and a gunshot wound in Willy Jones’s head because the body had been so badly burnt. But he bet money that he wouldn’t miss it a second time. If I could come up with something solid enough to convince a judge to sign an exhumation order. I told him I hoped it wouldn’t be necessary, then hung up.

  What a mess, I thought, what a hard day. I called Helen just to hear her voice, to remind myself why I was doing all this. She came to the telephone on the ninth ring, answered it breathlessly, timidly.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s nice to know you’re still there,” I said.

  “Oh. I’m still here. I just—didn’t know if I should answer your telephone—I was in the backyard—and I tripped coming in the back door.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Oh yes—I’m fine. How are you?”

  “I’m not in jail, anyway. I’m in pain,” I said lightly, “but free.”

  “Oh—I’m glad.”

  “Are you going to be there when I get back?”

  “Are you—coming home—right now? I didn’t know…when you were coming back.”

  “Well,” I said, thinking about the trip up the north fork with Muffin’s money, “I’ve got a few things to do yet. It’ll take three or four hours, but I’ll be home to take you out to dinner. If you don’t mind being seen in public with me.”

  “Of course not,” she answered, sounding happy instead of confused. “It’s a date.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Hey, you know it’s nice to call my house and have you answer the phone.”

  “Oh—oh—I’m sorry about—this morning.”

  “So am I, but let’s forget about it.”

  “Okay—if you want…I’ll—see you tonight.”

  “Take care,” I said.

  “You too,” she answered hesitantly, then we both hung up.

  Whatever I’d expected out of the call to make me feel better hadn’t been there, but telephones had always had some sort of curse on me anyway, so I didn’t worry about it. I started to take the office bottle with me but decided to put it back in the drawer. By the time I reached the top of Willomot Hill the weight of the morning made me regret my decision. I turned into the empty parking lot of the Willomot Bar, thinking to get a couple of drinks in go cups and maybe have an unfriendly chat with the owner, Jonas. I could depend on him not to change character, not to confuse me. He had hated my guts for years, and there was something reassuring about that.

  —

  Jonas was sitting at the first table inside the door, leaning back in a chair, his tiny boots crossed on the battered tabletop, his narrow eyes watching the tourist traffic avoid his place like the plague, watching the rectangle of sunlight retreat across his dirty floor toward the doorway. Standing in the bright doorway, I assumed I must have been an anonymous shade because Jonas smiled as I stepped in. I guess the smile was too much. I lifted my foot and shoved his table. He went over backwards, thumping his head solidly against the cement floor.

  Jonas was small, but stout as a stump and meaner than a sow bear, with quick hands and agile feet. He wasn’t a big man but he was damn sure a handful of trouble. I had taken him before, three or four times, but that had been in the line of duty, sort of, and I had used the sap or a billy. I had a frozen moment to remember my face and all the aches and pains, especially my nose, and to regret most of my life. Two middle-aged bucks sat over shot glasses at the end of the bar, working on their hangovers, and the thick-faced barmaid stood across from them. The three heads swiveled toward the crashing sound of Jonas and furniture. One buck banked toward the back door past the dark shadow of the bear, but the other raised his glas
s, either toasting me or trying to hustle a drink. The barmaid simply looked away in boredom.

  But Jonas wasn’t bored. He rolled once, came up ready, his feet spread, his short thick arms cocked, his head bobbing and weaving like that of a punch-drunk fighter, then he saw me and broke out in a mean grin.

  “What the hell’s happening, Milo?” he asked happily. “You drunk ’fore noon, you old son of a bitch? What the hell happened to your face? Hey, man, I heard ’bout poor ol’ Simon. What a fuckin’ shame. He usta be a hell of a man. Did I ever tell you ’bout the time he got my old man off a manslaughter bust? The old man found two goddamned tourists cleanin’ a cow elk up in that timber on the other side a the ridge and he cut down on the dumb-asses, and…”

  As he rattled on with his favorite Simon story, he came around the table, kicking chairs out of the way with an absent-minded violence that amazed me all over again. He grabbed my arm and led me to the bar, shouting for shots and beers, shaking my hand over and over, pausing only long enough to gun his shot and half the beer chaser. By the time he finished his story, he had forgotten why he was telling it to me.

  “Oh yeah. Simon. Goddamned old drunk. Goddammit, I’m sorry ’bout him. That’s a nasty way to go, man, ugly. I seen a bum one time when I was a kid been hit by a train, and that was bad as I ever wanna see, but when I heard ’bout how Simon got it, man, I nearly got sick,” he prattled. “And goddammit, Milo, you know nothing makes me sick.” Then he laughed happily.