Wilde West Page 9

  Over the course of the next few hours, he had somehow neglected to ask Elizabeth to leave Tabor and come away with him. At first, the hurry of passion had distracted them both. She was naked beneath her disguise, no underclothing whatever, her lambent skin once again a revelation; and as soon as he could wrestle the denim trousers from her long elegant legs, the two of them collapsed like felled trees to the red silk quilt.

  Later, the novelty of smoking opium had diverted him. With the quilt wrapped around his middle and falling in Neronian folds from his shoulder, Oscar sat plumped against the headboard as Elizabeth McCourt Doe, perched cross-legged atop the mattress, prepared the pipe. She still wore her man’s denim shirt—its metal snaps had been ripped apart during the proceedings (by him, by her, who knew?), but the shirt had remained on her shoulders—and in its opened front her bare breasts swayed slightly, teasingly, as she moved.

  The smoke from the drug was thick, milky, at once sweet and acrid, and it seemed to insinuate itself almost immediately into the joints and interstices of his body. Soon a warm luxurious languor had settled over his entire frame. His mind was lucid and buoyant and utterly relaxed. The colors in the room, he noticed, had somehow acquired a clarity and an intensity that he had observed before only in dreams, but which he had not realized, till now, that he had observed in dreams.

  “You like it?” she asked him.

  “Ah well,” he said gravely, “I am morally compelled to.

  Look at Coleridge. Look at Poe. At Baudelaire. The modern poet must know as much about opium as he knows about dactyls and iambs.” He smiled suddenly. “How convenient. Making a vice of necessity.”

  She laughed and held toward him his glass of champagne. “Try another vice.”

  “You tempt me, madam.” He took the glass.

  She smiled. “My intention exactly.”

  “And whatever shall I do with all these new temptations?”

  She put her hand along his naked thigh. “I believe that the only way to remove a temptation is to surrender to it.”

  He laughed.

  Another bout of passion provided an additional distraction. He had become persuaded that he was too deeply sunk in this marvelous lassitude ever to function sexually again, ever to want to; but Elizabeth McCourt Doe, with her cunning fingers and skillful mouth, proved him mistaken. Freddy rose, as it were, to the occasion and performed prodigies of valor and endurance.

  Later, drained, growing a bit muddled, he had become distracted by their conversation.

  He had said, almost to himself, “But I still fail to understand how all this happened.”

  “I felt,” she said, “when I met you, that I already knew you completely.”

  He smiled. “To be known completely is what everyone tells himself that he most desires. And what everyone, of course, secretly most dreads. You knew me from my poetry?”

  “From your eyes.”

  Again, he smiled. “Eyes can lie. They often do.”

  “So does poetry.”

  He laughed. “And what did you know from my eyes?”

  She lifted his hand from her knee, kissed the knuckle of his thumb. “That you carried within you a great sadness.”

  “Really?” he said, surprised and delighted. “You knew that?”

  Now, lying in his bed at the hotel, he could recall that he had been so taken by her insight that he had prattled on for an hour, ecstatically, about his great sadness. He had talked about the deaths of his sister, his half sisters, his father; about his loneliness at public school, at Trinity, at Oxford. Finally he had become—how dreadful—almost maudlin. He was still sadly babbling away when they dressed; still babbling as they went back to the carriage.

  He had grown silent only when he was alone in the carriage as she drove it—more sedately this time—through the gray light of early dawn. He had, now, only the vaguest memory of that journey; could recollect only in disjointed fragments his actual return to the hotel.

  Had he in fact made a fool of himself? This would have been, in any circumstance, a disaster; in her presence, it would have been a catastrophe.

  Or would it? For some reason he couldn’t bring himself really to care.

  How astounding. Had his love died so quickly?

  He searched within himself for the passion, the heights and depths of it, that he had felt so strongly last night. He found only a dull lifeless discomfort that might have been merely the residue of the champagne. Or the opium.

  Was passion like currency? Once spent, forever gone?

  Perhaps this was the catastrophe.

  Whatever the truth might be, certainly this morning he felt catastrophic. Parts of his body that had never experienced pain before experienced it now: his hair, for example; his eyelashes.

  Fortunately he delivered no lecture until this evening. If he wished, and he wished it most fervently, he could stay in bed all day. He could lie there and attempt to reason out the peculiar evanescence of rapture.

  Just then, as though to disprove this, a loud unpleasant rapping suddenly sounded at the door.

  Henry? But he had told Henry he wouldn’t be needing him until this evening.

  The rapping came again. So emphatic it was that Oscar felt as though someone were pounding a fist against his temple.

  Rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”

  He sat up, swung his legs off the bed, slipped his feet awkwardly into his slippers, fumbled his arms into the dressing gown.

  Who would be so barbaric as to come calling at—he glanced at the clock on the dresser—nine o’clock?

  Bang, bang, bang.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” he mumbled, tying the gown’s belt. He shuffled over to the door, unlocked it, jerked it open.

  CRIGSBY WALKS INTO MOLLY WOODS’S room and closes the door behind him. The air is heavy with a dank, slaughterhouse stench. He looks around him and for a moment he cannot comprehend what it is he sees. For a moment, his mind is unable, or it refuses, to recognize what lies before it.

  Something awesome and fearful sprawled upon the narrow blackened bed. Limp strips and bits of something strewn around the tiny room. Fragments of something clinging to the walls, the oval mirror, the sides of the rickety wooden dresser.

  And when, abruptly, it all comes into focus, when he understands, his legs buckle and the blood drains from his face; and he knows, with an absolute conviction, that his life is forever changed. He knows that this room and the horror it holds will be with him, will reappear in sweat-soaked dreams and unbidden memories, until the day he dies.

  He closes his eyes. He wants nothing now but to sink into the embrace of his absent wife, bury his face in her neck. He hears himself mutter her name: “Clara.”

  He forces himself to open his eyes. To look again.

  The thing on the bed, its upper half propped against the wall, was once Molly Woods. The thing wears a petticoat, pushed back to its waist, and its legs are drawn up. There is no skin or flesh on the legs: glistening white shinbones, a pair of round white kneecaps, white thighbones. Only the feet, splayed out against the bed, are intact. Each toenail, he notes, is painted red.

  The flesh has been stripped, too, from the ribs, and between white arches of bone he can see a dull film of pink tissue.

  The arms are peeled as well, from shoulder to wrist. The curled fingers of both hands—these, like the feet, intact—have been placed at the black savage rent in the belly, as though to make it appear, obscenely, that they are drawing back the wide lips of the awful wound.

  The face is gone. The thick red hair, falling to the exposed shoulder bones, frames a leering skull from which empty sockets gape.

  Grigsby takes a low shallow breath through his mouth. Deliberately, he moves his glance around the room.

  The strips lying about are ribbons of flesh. They are everywhere: stuck to the walls, piled atop the mattress, dangling from the knobs of the dresser, arranged in careful coils along the floor, Four or five of them hang from
the rim of the mirror like meat left to dry.

  Grigsby looks at the table to his right. Exactly in its center is a small mound of flesh. It is a woman’s breast. On either side of it, stuck to it with blackened dried blood, is a human ear.

  Grigsby has seen enough. Has seen far too much. He stumbles to the door.

  When he stepped outside, Grigsby sucked in a long deep breath. After Molly Woods’s room, even the sooty, sulfurous air of Shantytown tasted as sweet as spring water.

  Without a word, Hanrahan held out the tin flask of whiskey. Grigsby took it, unscrewed the cap, raised the flask to his lips and drank, holding his throat open so the liquor could reach his stomach more quickly. He lowered the flask and his body made a small, quick, involuntary shiver.

  He could feel the watchful stares of the younger policemen. It was as though they were waiting for the words that would explain the violated thing lying on the bed inside, and the crazed, inhuman violence that had created it.

  The words that could explain this, Grigsby knew, didn’t exist.

  He said to Hanrahan, “Need to talk to you for a minute, Gerry.”

  Hanrahan glanced at the other policemen, turned back to Grigsby, nodded. Together the two of them walked away from Tolliver and Hacker until they were ten or twelve yards distant.

  “Anybody see anything?” Grigsby asked.

  Hanrahan shook his head. “You know better than that, Bob. No one ever sees nothin’ in Shantytown.”

  “You covered the street?”

  “Not all of it. Waiting for Greaves now, we are.”

  “He’ll try to keep this under his hat.”

  Hanrahan nodded. “Bad for business, a thing like this gets out.”

  “You send for Doc Boynton?”

  “I did.”

  “Tell him I’d like to hear from him afterward. Soon as he finishes.”

  Hanrahan nodded. “Greaves won’t like it a-tall.”

  “He won’t if he knows about it.”

  For a moment Hanrahan pursed his lips thoughtfully together. Then, “What’s yer interest here, Bob? Where’s the federal side come in, exactly?”

  “Like I said, somethin’ I’m working on.”

  “And might ye be sharin’ that with us one day?”

  “When I got somethin’ to share.”

  “Playing it a bit close to the vest, ain’t ye, Bob?”

  “The way I always play it, Gerry.”

  Hanrahan glanced back at Tolliver and Hacker, looked again to Grigsby. “Right you are, Bob. Time being, then, it’s yer deal.”

  Grigsby nodded. “’Predate it, Gerry.”

  Hanrahan shrugged. “I owe ye one. Ye’d best make tracks, though. Before—ah, well. Too late. Here’s himself arrivin’ now.”

  Grigsby turned. Drawn by four large black geldings whose sleek coats had been brushed until they gleamed like patent leather, the big black carriage rumbled down the narrow street. On the vehicle’s door, gilded in ornate gothic script, were the words CHIEF OF POLICE, CITY OF DENVER.

  The carriage stopped ten feet away from Grigsby and Hanrahan. The door opened and William J. Greaves stepped out. He was tall and broad-shouldered and, even now, despite the extra weight that good living had added to his frame, despite features that had somewhat blurred and thickened, he was still a striking man. His jet black mustache was artfully waxed and his curly black hair was theatrically silver at the temples, a color that was precisely matched by the fur lining at the collar of his elegantly tailored black wool topcoat.

  He looked like everything a chief of police should be, very smart, completely fearless, and totally incorruptible; and he was, Grigsby knew, only very smart. In Denver, Grigsby had once told Clara, it wasn’t just the cream that rose to the top. The scum did, too.

  Greaves glanced down at the muddy ground, grimaced with distaste, looked up and saw Hanrahan and Grigsby. The grimace became an angry frown.

  Stepping down from the carriage behind him came Harlan Brubaker, assistant to the chief. Brubaker was Greaves’s bagman. He collected the protection money from the saloons and gambling halls, the brothels and opium dens. He was a short, officious, ferret-faced man who was wearing a fur-lined topcoat identical to Greaves’s. The two men were the same age, midforties, but the difference in their size and the similarity of their dress made them look like prosperous father and promising son.

  Greaves stepped onto the sidewalk and stalked up to Hanrahan. Pointing a blunt forefinger at Grigsby, he demanded, “What is this man doing here?”

  “We were just discussin’ that, Chief,” said Hanrahan.

  “This is city business. He has no jurisdiction here.”

  Hanrahan nodded. “Exactly, Chief. I just got finished ex-plainin’ that very thing.”

  Greaves’s eyes narrowed. “You and Grigsby go way back, don’t you, Sergeant. Rode for a while together. Texas Rangers, wasn’t it?”

  Hanrahan shrugged. “Years ago, that was. Can’t hardly recall it a-tall now, Chief.”

  “I certainly hope so. That dime-novel nonsense, cowboys and Indians and the wide open prairies—those days are gone, Sergeant. You’re supposed to be a policeman now, working for the City of Denver. I hope, for your sake, that your loyalties haven’t gotten confused.”

  Grigsby, looking on, thought that Hanrahan’s face might have grown a shade redder. But the sergeant’s voice was level and unemotional when he said, “Nobody’s ever had cause to doubt me loyalties.”

  Grigsby said to Greaves, “She was one of my informants.”

  His face tight with displeasure, Greaves turned to him and looked Grigsby slowly, coldly, up and down. Finally he said, “What?”

  “The prostitute. Molly Woods. She was one of my informants.”

  Greaves snorted. “Informants. Is that what you call them now? What’d she inform you about? The price of pussy?”

  Behind him, Harlan Brubaker chuckled.

  Grigsby took a step toward Greaves and Hanrahan interposed his bulk between the two men. To Greaves he said, “I already explained to Marshal Grigsby that this here’s a city matter. He was just leavin’, Chief.”

  “See that he does. And Sergeant, if I find out that this man, this old buckaroo of yours, has interfered in any way with a municiple investigation, I’m going to hold you personally responsible. Is that clear?”

  “Absolutely, Chief.”

  With another quick cold glance at Grigsby, Greaves turned and stalked away. A smirking Harlan Brubaker followed him.

  Watching the two march toward Molly Woods’s shack, Grigsby said, “You shoulda let me slam him one, Gerry.”

  Hanrahan shook his head. “Too many witnesses. He’d be off in a flash to see Judge Sheldon, and between the two of them they’d have yer job by lunchtime.” He grinned. “Besides, these days an old codger such as yerself is like to get sorely hurt in a donnybrook.”

  Grigsby smiled. “The day I can’t take a bag of pus like Billy Greaves is the day I toss in my badge.” He watched as Greaves and Brubaker entered the ramshackle building.

  “Ah,” said Hanrahan, “yer only thinkin’ that, ye see, ’cause yer still livin’ in those famous dime-novel days of yers. How was it he put it now—cowboys and Indians and wide open prairies.”

  Grigsby looked at him, smiled again. “Maybe so,” he said. And added, “buckaroo.”

  Hanrahan grinned. “I’ll talk to Doc Boynton. Prob’ly he can get to yer office this afternoon.”

  “Good, Gerry. ’Predate it.”

  Just then there was a sudden bang as the door to Molly Woods’s shack flew open and Harlan Brubaker came reeling out. His face white, he pushed aside Officer Hacker, staggered to the edge of the sidewalk, bent forward at the waist, and vomited into the street. The two city constables looked away.

  Grigsby sympathized. The interior of that room was a vision he wouldn’t wish on anyone, even someone like Brubaker.

  Hanrahan shook his head sadly. “Ye know, the pity of it is, that’s the first time I ever see
n the fella show a single solitary spark of humanity.”

  The thing on the bed, its upper half propped against the wall, was once Molly Woods. The thing wears a petticoat, pushed back to its waist, and its legs are drawn up. There is no skin or flesh on the legs …

  Grigsby took another sip of whiskey and closed his eyes.

  “No steak this mornin’, Bob?”

  Grigsby opened his eyes and looked over the bartop at Conlan, the beefy Irish barkeep. “No, Tim. Not today.”

  Polishing a glass with a bright white rag, Conlan said, “Well then, listen, I made up a nice hot batch of porridge this mornin’. Fresh as mother’s milk. Why don’t I fetch you a big bowl of the lovely stuff?”

  Grigsby sipped at his shot glass of whiskey. “You know, Tim, one day you’re gonna make some lucky cowhand a wonderful wife.”

  Conlan smiled, shook his head, shrugged his meaty shoulders. “Ah well, Bob, you have it your own way, then. You usually do.” He turned and ambled down the bar.

  Grigsby stared down into his shot glass.

  Wilde. It all came back to Wilde.

  In three cities where Wilde had given one of his talks—three that Grigsby knew of; there might be more—hookers had been murdered and cut up.

  So far as Grigsby knew, he was the only person aware of the connection between Wilde and the killings. He had learned only by accident, through the crazy coincidence of those letters, from Clara, from Earl in El Paso, from the spit-and-polish new sheriff of Leavenworth. And, technically, he had no jurisdiction in any of the murders; each had occurred in an area with its own local police force, its own local courts.

  Technically, he should give what he had to Greaves.

  But, Jesus Christ, the idea of handing a murder investigation over to Greaves—Grigsby just couldn’t do it. Even if Greaves managed to get together enough evidence to bring Wilde to trial, he’d only use it to line his own pockets somehow. Wilde was in tight with Tabor, and Tabor had money. Greaves goes to Wilde, Wilde goes to Tabor, Tabor goes to Greaves with a handful of cash. And Molly Woods’s murder goes unsolved.