Marshal and the Moonshiner Page 8

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  “Who the hell would want to cut my tires?” Maris said as she pulled into Second Street traffic. “They’re not worth five bucks for the whole set.”

  “Maybe it’s not you. Maybe it’s me.” That thought had occurred to me as I took off the second tire and saw a fresh cut by a sharp knife that matched the slice on the first one. “Maybe those two who attacked me the other night didn’t want to roll me. Maybe they wanted to deliver a warning.”

  “And whoever it is wrote you that note.”

  “And used the hotel’s key to get into my room and look around.” I took off my hat and stuck my head out the window to cool. I’d gotten sweaty and dirty fixing the flats, and I needed to cool down. “Who’d you tell we were going into the city tonight?”

  “Just Uncle Byron. But the diner was packed. Anyone could have overheard my loud mouth.” She eyed every car and truck that passed us as if she expected someone to lean out the window and begin firing. “Did Vincent tell you anything?”

  “Amos is here working for him.”

  “He say that right off?”

  I shook my head and fished a Lucky out of the pack. Once again, Maris held out her hand, and I gave her a smoke. “What, did I adopt you?”

  She shrugged and waited until I lit a match for her. At least she wasn’t playing chicken with other motorists while she fumbled for a light. “Did he tell you Amos was working for him?”

  “He didn’t.” I broke the burnt match head off and flipped it out the window. “It’s what he didn’t say. In his own way, Vincent told me Amos is here with Whiskers.”

  “Who is Whiskers?”

  “I didn’t chance asking him, but Vincent knows Whiskers. Last thing I want is for him to grow suspicious now. How about you? Find anything in Vincent’s office?”

  “Vincent likes nudie calendars.”

  “Don’t we all,” I answered. “Anything we can actually use?”

  Maris didn’t answer but reached down her blouse, and I thought at first she was going to give me her impression of Vincent’s pin-ups. But she came out with a matchbook and dropped it in my lap. “That confirms Amos is back home.” I turned the matchbook over in my hand. It was from the Calso Station in Lander, Wyoming. Just outside the Wind River Reservation. About an hour’s drive from the Iron Horse ranch.

  I turned the matchbook over in my hand. The outside lured kids into selling seed packets. For about a million sales, a youngster could get a masturbating teacup monkey. Two million got the kid a pony he couldn’t take care of. “So we got a matchbook from where Amos lived. That all but confirms what Vincent didn’t tell me.”

  “There’s more,” Maris said, as the bald tires slid to a stop at a sign. “Open the cover.”

  By the light of an overhead streetlight, I read: DUTCH 0620 scrawled inside the match book, and yesterday’s date.”

  “Name mean something to you?” I asked.

  “Like I said that first day, I know most folks hereabouts. I’m certain it’s Dutch Seugard. Sergeant Dutch Seugard.”

  “Police sergeant?”

  “Army. He’s in charge of remount acquisitions at Ft. Reno.”

  “With just a name and a time that’s stretching it a mite—”

  “That’s not a time. That’s a building—620 at Ft. Reno.”

  “Sure?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “How?”

  Maris smiled at me. The glow of her cigarette illuminated her face, and I held up my hands. “You don’t have to say more.” I should have known Maris’s late-night excursions would involve soldiers at Ft. Reno, the site of the army’s remount station that still bred and trained horses for combat. I was certain I’d served with some of those mares and geldings in France during the Great War. “What’s this Dutch’s connection with Amos?”

  “Until tonight I didn’t know there was one,” Maris said. She double-clutched into third. The gears ground and gnashed, and the truck lurched forward. This time I was ready for it. This time I kept my wounded head well away from the roof of the truck. “Stauffer’s got Johnny Notch working on a bootlegging case somewhere in El Reno—I’m certain it’s the first time that nasty bastard’s worked since he came to our agency—but he can’t get a lead on the bootleggers. They’re almighty cagey. But the scuttlebutt is that soldiers sell booze from the commissary building at the fort. My bet is that Vincent is supplying Dutch with booze.”

  “I couldn’t care less about moonshiners in your county,” I said. “No offense. I’m here to find Amos.”

  “And you don’t think Dutch might have some information on the person who might now be working with brother Vincent?”

  “I see your point. We’ll check on that.”

  “Tomorrow.” The city lights faded as we turned onto a dark back road lit by the truck’s two dim headlights. “Tonight all I want is a cool bath.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “There’s room for only one in my tub.” Maris smiled. She twirled her hair with one hand and fought to keep control of the truck with the other. “But maybe the hotel’s tub can fit two.”

  I returned her smile, and I was glad it was too dark for her to see me blush.

  The rest of the trip back to El Reno, I struggled to get the notion of sharing a bath with a beautiful woman from my head. Even a Crazy Woman.

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  I was on my second reading of the El Reno American when Maris finally entered the lobby of the hotel. “You on Indian time again, or just got carried away soaking in that cool tub?”

  She grinned a smile I’d come to recognize as more impish than amused, and her speech was more slurred than coherent. “I actually soaked in a tub. It just took me a little longer to find someone’s tub to soak in last night. Hungry?”

  I wasn’t. But by the whisky lingering on her breath, and her shirt buttoned crooked, I figured she could use some food in her gullet before it was safe riding with her. “Sure,” I lied. “Let’s see what Byron can whip up.”

  I led her outside, and she headed for her truck on the street when I stopped her. “Nice morning. Let’s walk down to Leonard Brothers.”

  She stopped and teetered on the steps of the hotel. “You call this a nice morning for what, dust devils?”

  I had no argument there. The wind had picked up within the last hour and made the morning ritual of the shop owners fruitless as they fought to sweep dust from in front of their stores. She shrugged and took the last step. The wind—or her state of inebriation—caused her to stumble. I caught her, and she fell against me. “Sorry.” She batted her eyes and grinned. I turned my head away as she breathed heavily on me. We didn’t need two of us drunk this morning.

  I propped her up, helped her down the last step, and got headed in the general direction of the diner. I spat grit from between my teeth before I snatched my bandana from around my neck and covered my face.

  We walked past Osmun Brothers Billiards Parlor, and already men with nothing to do this morning milled about inside. A haze of smoke almost as thick as the dust outside covered them as they waited their turn at a game that would take their minds off their despair. In my days of heaviest drinking, after Helen died, I’d sit in just such a place and sip torpedo juice from a mason jar, just wanting to be dead then and there. That was my despair, and I wondered if those men would climb out of their hole as I eventually did. “That many men always hang around?” I’d expected men with no jobs to be riding the rails, travelling, looking for work in California or Oregon, where rumor was every man had a job waiting for him.

  “Reformatory project,” Maris slurred.

  “How’s that?”

  “Federal prison.” Maris turned her back to the window to light a cigarette. By the strong smell of whisky on her breath, I was afraid she’d blow us both to hell with an open flame. “Going to be built here in El Reno whenever the bureaucrats get moving. Land for the reformatory’s been appropriated. Bids
taken and accepted. Men have flocked to town expecting to work on the project.” She chuckled at some inner thought. “Now I hear it’ll be pret’ near a year before they start. And all these out-of-work peckerwoods just hang around our fine little town.”

  Maris staggered across the street, walking past the odor of fresh pastry from the El Reno Bakery. She retched when we walked by, as if the taste of fried donuts would sicken her, and she stopped at the Vanity Beauty Shop. She cupped her hands and peered inside through a gap in the dust sheet. An elderly lady sat in a chair in the center of the shop, curlers jutting out of her head and connected to some frightening contraption. She read Modern Screen, unaware that Maris brushed hair from her face as she stared at the woman. “Someday I’m going to do that.”

  “What, go to Hollywood or be a beautician?”

  “Neither. Someday I’m going to get all ladied-up with someone else doing the work for me.” She snorted. “Get my hair fixed. My nails done right. Maybe when this Depression is over and I got money to burn, I’ll do it.”

  “When I stopped drinking, I had enough money to buy a lot of things. Now if you stopped, you’d have enough—”

  “I never pay for my booze,” Maris said. “That’s what men are for. No offense.”

  We continued to Leonard Brothers Café. We stepped through the wet sheets to a packed house; a cacophony of mindless conversation filled the diner. Byron handed out plates to two tables of roustabouts. They stared at two men I’d seen go into the bank, glaring at them as if they’d caused this Depression, and the bankers looked at the roustabouts as if they wished they could afford what the oil men ordered. One roustabout whispered something to his table, and they turned in their seats. Their eyes wandered to Maris’s backside as she straddled a stool before they turned around and resumed eating.

  We sat at the counter just as Byron set two cups down for us. “You look like hell,” he told Maris. “Did you not clean up before you picked the marshal up?”

  “At least I’m dressed.” She scratched a match and brought her shaking hand to the cigarette in her mouth. “That’s more than I could say an hour ago.”

  “If Stauffer sees you like that, it is good-bye Deputy Red Hat.” He turned to me and spoke as if Maris wasn’t there. “The sheriff is a horse’s patoot, but he does not go for his people hitting the sauce. You still get the urge?”

  “Every single day. I could easily tip a jar of bathtub gin and be back looking worse than Maris.”

  “That would be looking awful. Enjoy your joe. I will be back in a few moments.”

  Byron grabbed Maris’s arm and half-pulled her along. She tried to jerk away, but he dragged her into a back room. The bankers eyed the spectacle but said nothing. The oil men threw out some catcalls, then went back to their breakfast when Maris and Byron disappeared into the back. I reached over and grabbed the pot from the hot plate, topping off my mug, grateful that this coffee would be the strongest thing I’d drink today.

  Within moments, Byron reappeared without Maris. He grabbed the coffee pot and began making the rounds, refilling cups. “She getting cleaned up,” he told me as he walked to the table of bankers. “I got a bathtub in back.” He finished his round and disappeared into the kitchen. He returned with a plate of flapjacks and a side of ham. He checked that everyone else had coffee before he sat on the stool next to me. “I used to be like her.” He looked at the door leading to the back. “I guess that is what galls me so much.”

  Byron walked to the cash drawer and took payment from the bankers, who eyed the rowdy roustabouts every inch until they disappeared through the door. Byron smiled and sat back at the counter. “Bankers think the oil men are about to jump them.”

  “Banks aren’t exactly on the top of people’s favorite list.”

  “And they shouldn’t be.” Byron scrunched his nose up at his cold coffee. “I don’t know what to do about my niece.”

  “Looks like you’re doing all you can, just being here for her.”

  Byron nodded. “You mentioned you were on the sauce pretty heavy.”

  “Up until a few years ago,” I answered.

  “What got you on the juice?”

  Any other man and I’d have dropped him like a bad habit for asking that. But Byron was another recovered alkie, and anything I might say to him might help keep him sober. “I started when I came home wounded from France. I’d lost sight in one eye at the Wood, and most of my hearing on the right side as well. I felt sorry for myself lying there in the hospital recuperating.”

  “With nothing else to do but sneak a little afternoon nip?”

  I nodded. “Isn’t that how it usually starts—just one pull of the jar in the afternoon?”

  Byron laughed, but it held no humor. “That’s how I started—with the afternoons working their way back until I was having whisky for breakfast. Thank God Margaret left me.” His smile returned. “How long were you on the sauce?”

  “Seven years. Four years drinking after I was appointed US marshal for Wyoming.”

  “Need a refill here, old timer,” one of the roustabouts yelled as he held up his cup.

  I began to rise, but Byron laid a hand on my shoulder. “I handle his kind all day. Just relax. It’ll be all right.”

  Byron grabbed the pot off the hot plate and walked to the roustabouts’ table. Despite what Byron said, I kept a close eye on them. I still had time to educate the roustabout in manners if he needed it.

  Byron returned to the counter. “Where were we? Oh, yeah, you were going to tell me how touchy it is enforcing alcohol laws when you’re a federal marshal.”

  “I leave the enforcement of Prohibition to revenuers. Besides, no one knew except the guy I bought from that I was a boozer.”

  Maris came out of the back room brushing her hair. She had washed it, and it hung shiny and black and fell across her shoulders naturally. She had put on just enough lipstick and rouge to redden her cheeks and applied enough Mercolized Wax to even her splotchy complexion from last night’s bender. And to garner the attention of the oil men. One whistled when he saw how she filled out her patched jeans. Another blew her a kiss. She pinned her badge on and turned around so they could see. The oil men acted as if they’d never seen a woman officer before. Then again, Maris was my first, also.

  She turned back around and sat on a stool when she caught me eyeballing her. “What, did I leave my fly open or something?”

  “No,” I answered. “I was just witnessing a miracle.”

  “What miracle?”

  “How well you clean up. You should start doing that every day. And make it a point to come to work on time.”

  “I was on time. My time.” She hugged her growling stomach and grimaced. “And I’ll feel as good as I look once I get something in my belly. You still have the griddle hot Uncle Byron?”

  “Pushy. Just like her Aunt Margaret.”

  Byron disappeared into the kitchen, and I heard him stirring the batter.

  Maris finished braiding her hair, then popped a pre-breakfast Chesterfield in her mouth and struck a kitchen match on the seat of her jeans. I admired the match. “You don’t approve of my drinking?”

  “That’s a profound understatement,” I answered. “Of course I don’t. Didn’t anyone tell you it’s illegal these days? And not very wise for a deputy sheriff.” But I knew my lecture made no more difference to her than it did to me when I drank.

  “I don’t start out to drink when I go out at night,” she said, almost in a whisper. She scooted to the stool next to me and knocked her ash into a chipped rooster ashtray on the counter.

  “Then why—”

  “I usually find some cowboy—or Indian—who wants to party. And a lady can’t party sober.” She looked down into her coffee cup and swirled the liquid around. “I’ve got an . . . itch, is how Uncle Byron says it. An itch for men.”

  “Like you crave some attention you never got at home. Or in Cholocco?”

  “You a psychiatrist now?”

/>   I smiled. “No. Just got some college psych classes under my belt.”

  “Well, even if you hit it on the head, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  I tried thinking of something profound to say when Byron emerged from the kitchen and rescued me from making an ass of myself. He put a plate of ham and eggs in front of Maris. Within minutes, she’d wolfed the breakfast down, then jumped up and tossed her napkin on the counter like she’d never come to work late this morning. And drunk. “Now it’s you who are on Indian time.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I’m fired up to look for Amos,” she said. “Either you’re coming, or I’ll find him on my own.”

  It took me only a split second to imagine what someone as dangerous as Amos Iron Horse would do if Maris found him by her lonesome and tried bringing him in. So I finished my coffee, paid Byron, and just caught Maris as she was firing up that thing she called a truck.

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  I appreciated the newly paved road west of town heading towards Ft. Reno. For once I could ride Maris’s jalopy without jarring my kidneys up around my throat. “Only reason this road’s so nice is they plan to build the prison,” she answered in response to my question about it, as she gestured with her hands. The truck drove toward a ditch before she wrapped her hands around the wheel and jerked it back.

  We passed the ground that would house the reformatory, and she snickered. “Damned place is gonna be more like a halfway house,” she said. “First offenders and juveniles. Sons of bitches ought to serve hard time like everyone else.”

  “Even first offenders?”

  “Them, too.”

  “Like someone caught consuming booze illegally?”

  She finally realized I was talking about her, and she scowled at me.

  We passed four men sitting on the side of the road, their backs against a wind-dilapidated fence, passing a brown bag between them. They looked up as one as we drove by, their hollow looks like many during these hard times. Dressed in shabby suits, they might have been bankers or lawyers or schoolteachers. Once. Before hard times hit with a vengeance and put them on the road to nowhere. Men such as these had migrated here to El Reno hoping to build a prison that might never be built unless the bureaucrats got their heads out of their kiesters.