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“What a silly thing to say,” she said. She buried her face in his neck, her teeth biting tenderly into his throat.
HACKBERRY RETURNED TO his hotel room and sat on the side of his bed and finished the pint of whiskey. Then he unsnapped his suitcase and removed a canvas U.S. cavalry water bucket, the soft, collapsible kind that could be dipped by hand in a stream or tied by a rope to the handle and cast out into the current, where the water was deeper and cleaner. He had bought it in a secondhand store after he heard Ishmael had joined the army and become an officer in the cavalry. He had never used it to draw water from a steam or well or pond; he had always kept it dry and brushed free of dust and on a peg in his tack room. Every time he looked at it, he thought of his son and pretended that in some fashion he was at his side.
Its only utilitarian purpose was to carry the items associated with his trade: a set of brass knuckles he had never used; a pair of manacles whose spring mechanism and locking steel tongs he kept oiled and cleaned; two boxes of ammunition; his bowie knife in the beaded scabbard; his 1860 converted army revolver; a blackjack with two lead balls sewn in tandem ins
ide a hand-stitched leather sock mounted on a spring and wood handle; and a Peacemaker .45 single-action revolver presented to him in a ceremony by an officer of the Colt Company at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver.
Mealy Lonetree lived in an apartment above his office on the alleyway in the brothel district. He was packing a suitcase on his bed when Hackberry pushed open the door. Hackberry was wearing his slicker buttoned over his gun belt. The door had not been locked, and he wondered at the casualness of Mealy’s omission. Mealy looked over his shoulder at Hackberry, then folded a pair of trousers and pressed them inside the suitcase and smoothed them flat with his palms. He didn’t look up again.
“I’m just one of the little people, Mr. Holland. I don’t got a choice about what I do a lot of the time,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me Jimmy Belloc or No Lines or Whatever worked for you in New Orleans?”
“He made collections, that’s all. It was numbers money. It was innocent. The Italians love lotteries. Don’t ask me why.”
“Where is he?”
“A rooming house one block down from Fannie Porter’s old place. He likes to be close to the colored cribs. Because of the way he looks. He can feel superior instead of being a freak.”
“I wouldn’t have forced you to give me his name. Why did you give me his name and hold back on me at the same time?”
“I got no answer.”
“You’d better think of one.”
“I’m nobody. All that stuff about sending out people to beat up other people with lead pipes and chew off their ears is crap. My clientele are pimps and working girls and thieves, all of them trying to screw each other. Look at where I live. How I look. How would you like to be me?”
“You wouldn’t send me into a trap, would you?”
Mealy faced him, his eyes askance, shiny with fear, his doughy hands curling and uncurling. In the poor light, the dandruff on the shoulders of his blue serge suit glowed like tiny snowflakes. “Jimmy No Lines is a throwaway guy. Why go after a throwaway guy? Somebody wants to hurt Miss Beatrice. Maybe somebody wants to hurt you. Why help them do that, Mr. Holland? Go back home.”
“Arnold Beckman again?”
“We have newspapers here. Those men who were pulled out of the Guadalupe inside mail sacks? They used to come to the cribs on this alley. They worked for Beckman down in Mexico, when he was supplying arms to Villa or Huerta or some of those other greasers they got there. The newspaper didn’t say this, but I’ll make you a bet: They went out hard.”
“Give me the address of the rooming house,” Hackberry said.
“Forget the rooming house. This time of night, check out Betty’s Vineyard. He uses the back stairs, even there. Don’t do this, Mr. Holland. Get out of town and give Mr. Beckman whatever he wants.”
“What does he want?”
“I got no idea,” Mealy replied, his expression miserable.
THE MADAM’S NAME was not Betty, even though the house had been known for years as Betty’s Vineyard. Where the name came from, no one knew and no one cared. The house had been in existence since the days of the Chisholm Trail, which wended its way from Yoakum up through San Antonio and across the Red River into Oklahoma Territory to the railheads at Wichita and Abilene in Kansas. Betty’s Vineyard was like a tattered replica of Fannie Porter’s sporting house one block away. It was a termite-eaten Victorian, the paint curled into chicken feathers, slats broken from the veranda, the ventilated shutters cockeyed, the hinges bleeding rust, the carriage lanterns on the porch lit with blue bulbs.
A girl who looked like a maid opened the front door. “Come in, suh,” she said.
Hackberry removed his hat but remained where he was. “I’m looking for Jimmy Belloc.”
“Suh?”
He could see three men sitting on a couch in the living room. They looked white, but he wasn’t sure because they were wearing hats and their faces were covered with shadow and they made a point of bending forward as they talked among themselves, the smoke of their cigarettes rising from between their fingers. “Go get the lady you work for.”
“You the law, suh?”
“No.”
“Miss Dora ain’t here.”
