Wilde West Page 4

  Oscar realized, all at once, that he was gaping. She was quite simply the most beautiful and the most utterly sensuous woman he had ever seen.

  “My dear, my dear,” said Tabor, bustling across the room, his grin gleaming at her. (The presence of this remarkable woman here in this house—for that matter, the fact of her existence anywhere in the world—went a long way toward explaining that perpetual grin.) He held out his arm at a stiff officious angle and she placed her slender hand upon it. He put his own atop hers, protectively, and led her into the room, his entire body, scalp to toes, clearly turgid with pride.

  “Gentlemen,” Tabor announced, his eyes beaming, “allow me to introduce Elizabeth McCourt Doe. My fiancée.”

  Her large radiant eyes were the color of violets, and dancing behind them was an unmistakable intelligence that recognized exactly the effect she produced, and found it—what? Entertaining? Amusing? The gown left bare her throat and her long slender arms, and her skin was as smooth as Parian marble, and as white and poreless (and as peerless, Oscar appended later, when all his faculties had returned). Her nose was straight and strong, with finely sculpted, slightly flaring nostrils. Her mouth was just a whisper too wide to be considered perfect by classical standards; but, canted softly in its faint Gioconda smile, it was a lush red remarkable mouth that, all by itself, dramatically and conclusively proved that classical standards, perhaps all of them, were wrong.

  “My dear,” said Tabor, “this is Mr. Oscar Wilde.”

  She removed her hand from Tabor’s arm and held it out to Oscar. He took it—and felt an erotic shock, swift and startling, dart through his loins. He blinked in surprise and alarm. (Surely everyone in the room had sensed that jolt leap through him? Surely she had?) Quickly he bent over the hand, which was warm and dry against his own clammy, traitorous palm.

  “Madam,” he said. His voice was unusually thick, a stranger’s. He forced himself, an act of conscious will, to look up into those extraordinary violet eyes—much the way, in Germany, in the Harz Mountains, he had once forced himself to peer over the edge of a ragged windswept abyss. He felt now precisely what he had felt then, a sudden wild urge to jump, to leap, to plunge headlong and heedless, wailing with terror and exaltation, down into the giddy depths.

  Those eyes narrowed and she smiled her small ironic smile. “I’ve read your volume of poetry, Mr. Wilde.”

  “Ah,” he said, straightening his back, standing up to his full height, which was all at once too tall. “Have you.” He was speech-less if not speechless, and this for the second time in a single night. That grim killer, that Holliday, he too had possessed extraordinary eyes. But those were empty, hollow, ghastly. These were—what were they? Worry that out later.

  Her hand still lay in his. She said, still smiling, “I think you must be a very wicked man.”

  He said, “One can only hope so, madam.”

  He said it without thinking—he had said it, or something like it, many times before—but she laughed easily, tossing her lovely head lightly back as the muscles of her throat played beneath the surface of that smooth incomparable skin. Her white even teeth were small and slightly pointed. Lamplight glinted, gold and copper, along her hair. And Oscar realized that he would be quite ridiculously happy for the remainder of his life if he could spend it making this woman laugh.

  “You tease me, Mr. Wilde,” she said, her eyes sparkling at him, that amused light dancing behind them. “But may I call you Oscar?”

  He inclined his head. “So long, madam, as you call me often.” If she wanted laughter, he would provide it.

  And, gratifyingly, she laughed again; and then finally, yet still too soon, she slipped her hand from his.

  “And this,” Tabor told her, “is Mr. Jack Vail. The business manager.”

  Oscar looked at grinning Tabor with mild surprise; for a few moments he had totally forgotten that the man was there.

  Good Lord. She lived with him.

  Bit of a snag there.

  Almost physically, he felt something leave him, flutter like a bird from his breast: a possibility, a hope. A dream.

  So much for a lifetime of laughter.

  An abrupt and altogether absurd sadness settled over him. (Or was this simply petulance, masking itself as something less trivial?)

  She passed in front of Oscar, offering her hand to Vail, and he caught the fragrance of her perfume, something dark and complex, herbs and flowers in a matrix of musk. Even in his preposterous melancholy (or petulance), he found it intoxicating. Preposterously.

  Where women were concerned, Vail normally demonstrated the sensitivity of a turnip. But even he was obviously impressed, possibly even intimidated, by Elizabeth McCourt Doe. He had plucked the cigar from his mouth, and now, his brow furrowed, his glance shifting nervously as it looked everywhere but into her eyes, he took her hand and mumbled, “Pleased, I’m sure.”

  “Come, my dear, come,” Tabor told her. “Sit.”

  With lamplight rippling down the sleek red silk, she moved across the carpet, Tabor at her side. She turned and sat, her back upright, her ankles crossed.

  Oscar and Vail returned to their seats, the two of them suddenly an audience.

  “Brandy, my dear?” Tabor asked her.

  Oscar discovered that he was leaning forward; he sat back.

  “Yes, please, Horace,” she said. “Thank you.” As he busied himself with the brandy bottle, this unlikely fiance of hers (wasn’t there already a Mrs. Tabor lurking somewhere in the wings?), she turned to Oscar. He could feel the weight of her glance along the skin of his face; those bright violet eyes transfixed him “Now,” she said, smiling. “Please. You must tell us about your countess.”

  Lightness. Lightness is all. “There’s very little to tell, madam,” he said. “All of us, of course, are in search of something. I, in my humble way, am searching for beauty. My good friend Mr. Vail, like Diogenes, and with as much luck, is searching for an honest man. Colonel von Hesse, the Countess’s escort, is searching for God. The Countess, as it happens, is searching for real estate.” Specifically, a large productive piece of it firmly attached to a reasonably presentable (and himself unattached) rich man.

  “She’s traveled with you from New York?”

  “From San Francisco.”

  She smiled. “I imagine that countesses must be very beautiful. Like the princesses in fairy tales.” (Princesses: courtly. Yes.) She took the brandy snifter from Tabor, thanked him, turned back to Oscar. “Is she very beautiful, your countess?” she asked as Tabor sat down, grinning, beaming at her with naked and really rather embarrassing adoration.

  “I had thought so,” Oscar said. “But that was before I met you, madam. Since then, of course, I have reappraised all my notions of beauty, and found them wanting.”

  Courtly.

  She laughed. A wonderful sound: relaxed and musical. Oscar’s sadness—if such it had been—was beginning to lift, a mist blown away by the breeze of her laughter. Or by the silent storm of his effort.

  “A flatterer, too,” she said. “You are a wicked man.”

  “That may be,” he said. “But it would be abjectly wicked of me not to give beauty its due.”

  From the corner of his eye, he had been watching Tabor, trying to gauge the silver baron’s reaction to all this. Occasionally Tabor would shoot a quick look at Oscar and at Vail, as though to reassure himself that his guests were still there, still happy; but always he returned his gaze, puppylike, to the woman. The grin never left his face. The man was besotted. Understandably.

  She sipped at her brandy. “Is that the only form of wickedness you recognize?”

  “For me,” he said truthfully, “the only true wickedness is cruelty.”

  She raised an eyebrow, at once amused and challenging. “And what, then, of Sin?”

  “The only true sin,” he said, and, to punctuate the statement, sipped at his brandy again, “is boredom.”

  “A dangerous philosophy.” She smiled, the smile hint
ing that she had a secret fondness for dangerous philosophies. She sipped from her snifter. “I fear you’ll corrupt us all.”

  Oscar returned her smile. It was wonderful, really, this move and countermove behind the brandy snifters. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure,” he said.

  She laughed again. “I see that I mustn’t expose myself to your influence too often.”

  Off to the left, Vail was fidgeting: legs restlessly moving.

  Oscar glanced at Tabor: still mooncalfing. “Then, madam,” he said, “by your cruelty to me, you should yourself be guilty of wickedness.”

  Another laugh. She turned to Vail. “Tell me, Mr. Vail, does your poet always carry on like this?”

  Vail shifted in his seat. Eyes dim, mouth tight, he no longer looked comfortable. “He’s a great little kidder, ma’am,” he said, with a peculiar emptiness in his voice.

  She turned back to Oscar. “I read in the newspapers that you met Mr. Walt Whitman at his house in New Jersey.”

  Oscar nodded. “I did. I admire him very much.”

  “The man or his poetry?”

  He shrugged lightly. “For me, the two are inseparable.”

  “I’ve never met him, of course, but I enjoy the poetry. I find it so very”—she cocked her head lightly, smiled—“physical.” And so she would’ve found the man: for two hours old Walt hadn’t taken his thorny speckled hand off Oscar’s knee. “Don’t you?”

  “I make no distinction,” Oscar said, vaguely aware that Vail was squirming in his seat and digging plump fingers into the snug pocket of his waistcoat, “between the physical and the spiritual.”

  Vail had produced his watch. “Gee,” he announced with elaborate regret, “look at the time. I’m real sorry, folks, but I got to get Oscar here back to the hotel.”

  Oscar frowned, surprised. “Come now, Vail.”

  “Nope,” said Vail, and stood up. “Sorry, Oscar boy, we got a matinee tomorrow, and then another lecture tomorrow night. And then on Wednesday we got Manitou Springs.” He turned to Tabor and Elizabeth McCourt Doe and he made a quick awkward shrug. “You folks understand how it is.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Tabor, grinning as he rose from his chair. “I know how you artistic-type people need your rest.” Not at all displeased to see them leave.

  Well, to be sure: he had the woman; what did he need with poets and business managers?

  Presented with a fait accompli, Oscar pulled himself slowly and reluctantly to his feet. As he did, he looked over at the woman and saw that her glance was traveling, calmly, reflectively, up the length of his frame. When the glance met his, she smiled.

  Electricity surged up his spine. His face, he realized, was flushed and taut, flesh suddenly too full for skin.

  Betrayed once again by his treacherous, ungainly body.

  The woman turned to Tabor. “Perhaps Mr. Wilde can join us tomorrow for breakfast.”

  For the first time, Tabor’s grin vanished. “Gosh, Baby, I’ve gotta leave early in the morning. That cattle thing, I told you. But hey.” He turned to Oscar, the grin suddenly back in place. “You could come, couldn’t you, Oscar? Baby loves company in the morning. Be a real favor to me if you stopped by and joined her. What do you say?”

  Oscar looked at the woman, who sat there smiling faintly up at him, violet eyes sparkling over the rim of her brandy snifter.

  From the Grigsby Archives

  March 3, 1882

  DEAR MARSHAL GRIGSBY,

  I understand that you knew my predecessor, the late Mr. Henry Bettinger, former Sheriff of Leavenworth, Kansas. You no doubt have heard of his unfortunate and untimely death. Two months ago the good citizens here appointed me his successor. I am sure that you and I will enjoy the same friendly relations that existed between yourself and Mr. Bettinger while he was alive.

  The reason I am writing to you is this. Two nights ago, on the 1st of March, a young woman was murdered here in Leavenworth. Her name was Carolyn Mullavey and she was the wife of Thomas Mullavey, who operates the general store here. Mr. Mullavey informs me that his wife has a brother, a Mr. Benjamin Whelan, who lives in Denver. I would be grateful if you would verify this statement for me, and if you would verify for me that Mr. Whelan was in Denver on the night of April 1st, when Carolyn Mullavey’s homicide was perpetrated. If he was not, I would be grateful if you would ascertain his whereabouts on the night of March 1st. If you have reason to believe he was here in Leavenworth, Kansas, I would be grateful if you incarcerated him.

  So far, of course, Mr. Whelan is not actually a suspect. But in policework, as you know, it is always necessary to eliminate the innocent in order to determine the guilty.

  I have sent a telegram to the Chief of Police there in Denver, Mr. William J. Greaves, which contained a similar request, but so far I have had no response. I have heard some unfortunate stories about Mr. Greaves and so I took it upon myself to write to you, in your capacity as Federal Marshal.

  I enclose a clipping from the Leavenworth Sentinel which gives some details as to Mrs. Mullavey’s death. The actual facts were even worse than those reported there.

  If Mr. Whelan, the brother of the deceased, was actually in Denver at the time of the murder, please extend to him my deeply felt sympathy and assure him that I am fully confident we will bring to justice the madman who perpetrated this heinous crime. Scientific policework and careful investigation will produce results every time. As you know, of course.

  Thanking you in advance, I am

  Your humble servant,

  Lawrence Draper

  Sheriff of Leavenworth

  MUTILATION ON MAIN STREET!

  Woman Found Butchered!

  A Leavenworth woman, Mrs. Thomas Mullavey, was found savagely mutilated early Thursday morning in the alleyway between Mullavey’s General Store and Harper’s Hardware Emporium. The body was discovered by Cecil Cooper, of Leavenworth, an unemployed house painter who often utilized the alleyway as his “sleeping quarters.”

  According to recently elected Sheriff Lawrence Draper, Cooper stumbled upon the unfortunate woman’s horrible remains at three o’clock on Thursday morning. He immediately notified Deputy Sheriff Orville Cleaver, who, after viewing the mutilated body, promptly roused Sheriff Draper from sleep. Cooper is not suspected, Draper says.

  According to Draper, Mrs. Mullavey and her husband had attended last night’s lecture by Oscar Wilde, the celebrated English esthetical poet, at the newly built Leavenworth Opera House (see story on page 2), leaving the hall at ten o’clock. She and her husband, the owner of Mullavey’s General Store, then returned to their home on Sheridan Street. At twelve o’clock, Mrs. Mullavey, discovering that she and her husband were out of whiskey, left the house with the intention of procuring a bottle from their store on Main Street. Witnesses, said Sheriff Draper, have testified that they saw her walking along Main Street unaccompanied. She was never seen alive again.

  Her husband, meanwhile, had fallen asleep and was unaware of the fearful fate that befell his wife until awakened and informed of it by Sheriff Draper.

  Dr. Hiram Buckley, who examined the body of Mrs. Mullavey, said that her death apparently was caused by a single wound to the throat, such as might be made by a long-bladed butcher-type knife. Asked to respond to reports that the body had been brutally mutilated, Dr. Buckley declined further comment. Sheriff Draper also refused to discuss the nature of Mrs. Mullavey’s dreadful mutilations.

  The husband of the deceased was unavailable for comment. Witness Cooper, however, interviewed at the Blarney Stone Pub on Grant Street, provided additional information regarding the mutilations. “It was awful,” he said. “He chopped her up like a hog. There were parts of her lying all over the alley.” Mrs. Mullavey’s ferocious wounds were of such gruesomeness that they cannot be described in a family newspaper.

  Mrs. Mullavey, with her vivacious ways and her flaming red hair, was well liked here in Leavenworth, to which she came five years ago from St. Louis, Missouri. Neighbors and f
riends, all outraged at this despicable act, agreed in describing her as outgoing and gregarious. “She was a swell gal,” said neighbor Kathleen Krebs. “Sure, she liked a good time. Don’t we all? But there wasn’t a mean bone in her entire body.”

  While admitting that no arrests had been made as yet, Sheriff Draper asserted that several suspects had been interviewed, and he vowed a speedy solution to the case. “I personally promise the good citizens of Leavenworth that I will apprehend the craven coward who perpetrated this horrendous crime. Murderers such as he stand no chance when confronted by the irresistible juggernaut of Scientific policework.”

  THE JUNIPER LOGS BURNING in the cast-iron stove had warmed the air in the room and spiced it with the delicate peppery smell of woodsmoke.

  “I think the chartreuse,” said Oscar thoughtfully. “Yes. Definitely, the chartreuse.”

  His left arm extended to display the four draped cravats—blue, mauve, chartreuse, and red—Henry Villiers nodded his long black solemn head. He plucked away the chartreuse cravat and hung it carefully over the back of the wooden chair. He slid his right hand under the other cravats, deftly slipped them off, and then turned and carried them back to the closet.

  Sitting in the room’s only comfortable chair, his legs crossed, wearing black leather slippers lined with rabbit fur and, over his saffron yellow cotton pajamas, a black dressing gown of Japanese silk, Oscar enjoyed his first cigarette of the day.

  The night had been lovely and restful, his sleep artfully interwoven with dreams, forgotten now but for the lingering impression of a slow deliberate sensual surfeit. Languorous, pleasantly sated, he sat and watched his exhaled smoke roll into the golden light slanting through the opened lace curtains and become, magically, a precisely defined, incandescent slab of bright white whirls and swirls and spinning convoluted arabesques.