Fiction River: Risk Takers, page 7
“The murderer’s exit,” she said with evident disgust. Moll had fought like a Kilkenny cat. Too bad none of us had been here to hear her struggles. But we’d been at the annual masked ball White-Eyed Kate put on at the opera house each year. Moll was on her monthly and feeling it hard, so she’d opted to stay behind and keep the fires burning so even the Chinaman could go mingle freely with polite society. It was the only night of the year he or we were allowed.
In the hall, I crouched down beside the piteous collie and offered what comfort I could. But as my hand grazed his cheek, he yelped and snapped at me. He weren’t the first male to try to hurt me, and I’ve always been fast enough to come away unscathed. But it was out of character for the sweet Scotch collie. A closer inspection revealed a wound to the side of his head, no doubt made by the same pitcher that had done in his master. I took him to my room and made him a bed of clean linens, so that I might return to the work of changing the boudoir of bedlam back to a den of feminine comfort.
***
The funeral of China Moll was the largest I had seen, ’cepting for that of the famed sweetheart of Engine Company #1. Though those brave men of the firehouse had surely appreciated the charms of our Moll, only their Jule would ever know the glory of a full professional procession. She walked in a sunlight denied the rest of us.
The proper ladies of town once again closed their shades as we passed by to lay our sister to rest on Flowery Hill, but not a man lowered his eyes or turned away. Only them that was on shift in the tunnels stayed away. Even the one-bit saloons were closed for an hour, and the hurdy gurdy fell silent as we who could sang the songs of emerald fields and ancient sadness that our China Moll had taught us.
One-Eyed Jake, left at The Brick for fear of disrupting the proceedings, howled his lament from the large picture window that looked out over our corner at Union and D—the best property on Sporting Row. The saddest property on the Comstock today.
***
Miss Martine put out word to the girls in the cribs, parlor houses, saloons, and even the hog ranches down toward Gold Hill. Every working girl from the hurdy gurdies to the courtesans wanted justice for our China Moll, she who had never hurt anyone. Whoever murdered our sweet-throated angel was likely injured himself, probably by One-Eyed Jake’s strong teeth.
Miss Martine swore more than justice for our girl. She swore revenge. And she knew just the sort of hard men for hire that could help. Only her fear of the law kept her from acting. Her fear of the law and her fear of leaving us without a mother. A mother was hard to find, and she took her role seriously.
Cleaning up Moll’s room—a room that would stay empty out of respect, at least for some time—fell to me, as Miss Martine wanted one of our own to see to it, not any hired help. She didn’t like strangers or straights digging around the house, never trusting what they might say or who they might say it to. Why she trusted the Chinaman I never knew. Though rumor was he’d done some dirty work to help her become a grass widow in a state not keen on divorce.
Truth be known, I volunteered to put to rights Moll’s room. I’d seen the patterns in the blood that awful morning Miss Martine found her. The struggle that had awakened our girl, the way she’d clawed at that pillow over her face, maybe getting free when old Jake came to her aid. I couldn’t be certain, o’course, but it looked every bit to me like Jake got in a good bite, drew some blood that led to that closet where he’d been locked in the dark. And maybe Moll had grabbed that silver pitcher herself and done some damage before she got pushed back onto her bed and beat to death with that pillow back over her face. It weren’t just her blood crying out the evidence.
***
If Jule Bulette had been the belle of the firehouse, I was maybe the belle of the newsroom. Maybe. It weren’t like those boys had the push and pull of the firehouse boys. But they were a mite cleaner and didn’t mind a little sag here and there. I was able to read and write a fine hand, and some of those boys at The Territorial Enterprise had taken a shine to me. A few went so far as to ask my opinion on their stories, which I happily gave. Some wanted an unnamed source, and no one was better at being that than an old-timer like me who polite society had decided should always remain nameless. I’d been at The Red Brick longer than Miss Martine, but I followed her rules. And her rules were pay for play. So long as I charged and the law stayed lame, she was sound on the goose. And time for words paid the same as time for flesh. Didn’t make no nevermind to me.
***
In the end, it was one of those newspaper boys what led me to some answers. Seems he’d heard about another girl done like our Moll at one of the cribs down by the Silver Springs Mine. This girl, sometimes known as Mad Martha, was of sturdier stock than our own China doll, though, and she’d thrown the roughneck off her and out the door, claiming to be no worse for wear from the pillow shoved over her face and a few punches thrown. The only damage she said she got was a loose tooth she hadn’t been too keen on anyway and a couple of bruised ribs. The former didn’t slow her down none, but the latter bit into business and she’d had to send her next hour back the way he’d come. And the way he’d come led him right to me.
It didn’t make the papers, any of it. Such things never did. Like I said, ’cept for Miss Jule Bullete. But this particular lady of easy virtue was a favorite of a certain sort of customer, the kind what liked to have a little pain inflicted upon him during his sport. And that was an area of expertise I’d been known to dabble in as well—for a cut above the usual price, and never at The Brick. Miss Martine didn’t go in for that sort of entertainment. Said it was too dangerous. Lines could get crossed, law brought in, and Miss Martine, she liked to stay clean of the law.
So when this ink jockey sent message via our Chinaman that he had news on the abuse of another untidy woman, I met him at his room and gave him a good forty in exchange for the information.
***
The man Mad Martha had thrown out was a Frenchman, I told Miss Martine when I returned to The Brick. He worked at the bakery where she bought the fancy cakes we served during the afternoon poker games come Saturdays and he rented a room in the eves above the ovens. He’d not been to Martha’s before and seemed confused by the rules of her crib, his English being so terrible she thought in hindsight that maybe he’d thought he was buying her pain rather than his. He whistled an Irish tune as he took down his trousers and she readied the washstand to get him presentable to her liking. She didn’t know the name of his ballad but she could hum the tune well enough that my newspaperman did. China Moll had taught it to him. And to me.
When Mad Martha went to soap his nethers, the Frenchman took the rag roughly from her hands and did it himself, flinching as the water dripped down his right thigh to a prominent bite mark on his upper calf. It was red and swollen, but the teeth marks were clear as sin. He claimed he’d gotten between a coyote and a trap while preparing to rid the creature of its fur. She told the newsman how she worried coyotes were becoming too bold. She told him he should write about that.
***
Miss Martine hatched the plan, it coming upon her like a blessing, she said.
A pony purse was made up among the girls at The Brick to pay Mad Martha a little encouragement for the story she needed to tell the law. Every one of us put in a little more than we could painlessly spare. It weren’t far from the truth, this story, and she told it well—to the law, to the court, to the newspaperman who took his encouragement in trade from me. It was time well-spent.
I wasn’t the only unnamed source this time, but it was my words that brought him glory for being the man who solved the crime of Julia “Jule” Bullete.
***
We surely put a spoke in John Millain’s wheel with Mad Martha’s story of a midnight attack in her cabin. Millain seemed confused when she pointed him out on the street as the fiend who’d busted in her window. He had no words for how Miss Jule Bulette’s stolen belongings made their way to his rented room. He was surely riled when Miss Martine confirmed they had belonged to the beauty of Fire Engine Company #1. Despite his broken assertions that he hadn’t even been in Washoe during the time of Miss Jule’s murder, he was found guilty. As painted lady after painted lady came forward during the appeals, swearing (and honestly so) to the ownership of item after item found in the battered trunk in his room, Millain seemed to lose hope. But the cincher was Miss Martine herself, when she produced a dress pattern that she swore on the Holy Book Millain had sold her—a pattern bought by Miss Julia Bullete in a respectable lady’s shop, said respectable lady remembering the purchase clearly.
***
On April 24, 1868, some 4,000 good folk of the City of Virginia watched the Frenchman John Millain hang until dead for the vicious murder of Julia Bullete. All us girls, Miss Martine, and the Chinaman were among the blood-thirsty throng. We watched him climb the steps to the gallows, and we hummed a little Irish tune taught us by the gentlest of dolls the Orient had ever produced. China Moll had her justice, if under a different name.
Not a one of us ever asked Miss Martine where she’d gotten that dress pattern. Or where the Chinaman had gone the night of Millain’s arrest. Some say they saw him carrying a trunk up the hill toward the bakery, but none that saw ever said it twice.
Introduction to “A Tale of Good Whiskey, Bad Coffee, and One Devious Woman”
The other Nevada resident in this volume has also written a western. But, unlike “China Moll,” which is based on a real event, “A Tale of Good Whiskey, Bad Coffee, and One Devious Woman” contains a whiff of steampunk.
Annie Reed has become a Fiction River regular. Her stories have appeared in five of the first seven issues, and two more stories will appear later this year in the volumes Sparks and Recycled Pulp. Her award-winning short fiction has also appeared in many other anthologies as well as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. She wrote her latest novel, Wedding Belle Blues, because, she says, “everyone needs a little romance in their lives.”
“A Tale of Good Whiskey, Bad Coffee, and One Devious Woman” does not contain romance, but it falls into yet another genre—the tall tale.
A Tale of Good Whiskey, Bad Coffee, and One Devious Woman
Annie Reed
Well, now that you let me wet my whistle, so to speak, I best be getting on with tellin’ you that story I mentioned when you so kindly let Emmett ’n me set foot in your establishment, seein’ how we’re a little short of cash at the moment. Emmett’ll tell you he saw the thing first, but he’d also tell you how he found gold nuggets the size of his fist just lying on the ground out in the middle of nowhere back when we was prospecting if he thought anybody might buy him a shot or two of whiskey just to hear him tell the tale. See, Emmett and me, we been riding together a bunch of years. While he’s about the best friend I got in this world, Emmett and the truth ain’t never been more than nodding acquaintances.
Of course, what we seen when we was riding trail out there in the Colorado Territory... well, ain’t nobody gonna believe that story no matter who tells it, but I like to think I come as close as anybody to how it really happened, without all that extra stuff Emmett puts in his stories. Embellishments, he calls it. ’Fore I heard him say that word the first time, I didn’t even know he knew words that big.
That’s the thing about Emmett—he’s smarter than he looks. He just can’t cook worth spit.
That’s how the whole thing started. With Emmett’s coffee.
We was out looking for cows that wandered off from Old Man Sumpter’s herd. Ain’t nothing dumber than cows ’cept maybe sheep, and yes, I know first-hand how dumb sheep can be, and no, I ain’t telling that story.
I’m telling the story ’bout how I found the artifact.
We’d been out riding east of Sumpter’s Flats, just Emmett and me. Why Old Man Sumpter claimed that spot of land for his own I ain’t never figured out since it wasn’t much ’cept for sagebrush and scrub and desert, the mountains so far away to the west they don’t look real. We hadn’t had so much as a lick of luck tracking down the cows we was supposed to be looking for, ’cept for that one we found that the buzzards claimed for their own. Emmett ’n me, we ain’t the world’s best cowboys, but we’d make even worse soldiers. We’d hightailed it out of Abilene before Mr. Lincoln’s war started—the one sure-fire thing we done right—and we been riding trail in the Colorado Territory ever since.
Contemplating our poor fortune trying to track down critters dumber than a mule, we’d made camp the night before in a little hollow in the middle of all that nothing. I went to sleep hoping I’d have at least one cow to bring back to Sumpter so I could prove I’d earned my pay. I woke up to the bitter smell of Emmett’s coffee and the burnt-grease stink of those nasty little biscuits he likes to cook over the campfire.
I made myself choke down one of those biscuits. While I waited to see if my stomach was gonna rebel, I talked Emmett into playing a bit of poker. Emmett, he don’t like poker much, but there ain’t much else to do to pass the time out in the middle of all that nothing. We sat there by the campfire playing for the money Old Man Sumpter’d pay us once we got back. I won more than I lost thanks to a pair of one-eyed jacks. Emmett told me even if I was the luckiest sumbitch he’d ever known, he wanted a chance to get his money back, and he poured us both more coffee.
Now Emmett’s coffee ain’t the best most mornings, and this time he’d truly outdone himself. I might have myself a cast-iron stomach, but a man’s got his limits. I didn’t mind the prospect of playing poker instead of hunting cows. I did mind having to swallow more of that godawful coffee. So when Emmett wasn’t looking, I threw my coffee into the brush behind me.
Well, damned if something didn’t yell at me from that self-same clump of sagebrush.
“I say, good sir!”
I about jumped right out of my skin. I ain’t been so surprised since I won that pot in Abilene, best damn hand of poker I ever played in my life, but that’s another story for another day. This story’s about the metal man I threw Emmett’s coffee on, and what happened after that.
Yes, I would like another whiskey. Thank you kindly for asking.
And yes, I said metal man.
Weren’t no bigger than my boot neither, sitting propped up against the brush, arms and legs and body and head all made out of some kind of metal that didn’t look quite shiny enough to be gold. O’ course, it being the desert and all, and he was as dusty as my chaps and his joints squeaked and squealed when he...
No, I’m not joshing you. He was made of metal and he could move and talk all on his own. No, his voice did not sound like mine. If anything, he sounded like some of those high fallutin’ fellers I seen waiting for the train in Abilene. Only he was small.
Real small.
Well, my horse didn’t much like that little metal man, let me tell you. By the time I got my horse over a good case of the jitters and settled back down, that metal man had crawled out from beneath the sagebrush and was standing on one leg right there as big—or not so big—as day.
“I say, do you happen to have any oil on you?” he asked us. “A lubricant of any decent variety will do in a pinch.”
I turned to look at Emmett to see if he was seeing the same thing I was. Emmett was sitting stock still, mouth hanging open, and holding that dented pan of his over the fire, the biscuit he’d been cooking starting to burn.
“Buck,” he said. “You seein’ what I’m seein’?”
“I do believe I am,” I said.
Emmett blinked. “We ain’t got no oil,” he said to the metal man. “Got a little bacon grease.”
“Bacon grease,” the metal man repeated. A bit of steam escaped from the back of his head, and his metal shoulders seemed to droop. “It is a type of lubricant. Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Emmett cooked those nasty biscuits of his in bacon grease whenever he had it. He tossed the pot he kept the grease in to me since I was closest to the metal man.
I held the bacon grease out like I was offering up my finger to a rattler. The metal man took it from me with metal fingers that looked like tiny versions of my own, except with even tinier gears and rivets holding them together.
Emmett and I watched as the metal man worked bits of bacon grease into the joints of his legs. High overhead a hawk was circling in a way that made me wonder if the metal man looked like a meal. He might smell like a meal now thanks to all that grease, but when he was finished, his joints didn’t squeak and squeal no more.
“Ah,” he said, bending his knees. “I thank you, kind sir.” He handed the bacon grease back to me. “I would love to stay and chat, but I really am quite long overdue.”
“Overdue where?” Emmett asked.
The biscuit still cooking in his pan caught fire right about then. Emmett yelped and jumped up from the rock he’d been sitting on and dumped the pan, burning biscuit and all, into the dirt. He stomped around on that biscuit until the fire was out.
“Bravo!” the metal man cried. “I say, good show!”
I was beginning to think the metal man was somewhat limited in his choice of words. Maybe it had something to do with the size of his head. Could be that’s all the words he had room for.
“Overdue where?” Emmett asked again, a little out of breath this time, what with all that unexpected stomping and the swearing he’d done putting out the flaming biscuit before it caught the sagebrush on fire.
“On my ship, of course,” the metal man said. “I say, you haven’t seen my ship, have you?”
Ship?
“Ain’t no water ’round here big enough to hold a ship,” I said. “Where exactly are you from, anyway?”
