Karen Memory

Chapter Seven

I said how Bea is a slip of a thing, all eyes and fingers and crinolines, and how she’s still learning her English. What I might not have said is how she’s kind and clever … so when I walked into the library with Marshal Reeves I shouldn’t of been surprised to find her sitting with Priya on the long divan. Signor was cuddled up in Beatrice’s skirts and Priya was wrapped up in a knit afghan Miss Francina had made. They were chattering away in French.

Or rather, Beatrice was chattering. Signor wasn’t saying much. And Priya was answering, haltingly, and her accent was worse than mine — which was saying something, because mine was no better than wretched. But she was feeling her way through complete sentences, albeit simple ones and with the verbs all cattywumpus. At least Beatrice was laughing at her, the same’s she laughed at me. But that, I reckon, was the moment when I started to figure out just how smart Priya really was. Because she hadn’t listed French as one of her accomplishments to Madame, and I’d bet my toenails that she had been desperate enough to stay that she’d have mentioned anything she might be able to do that would be of the least little use at all. Which meant she’d picked up what she was doing now in whatever time she’d spent with Bea this evening — not much if she’d been roused by the fuss not a quarter hour before — and while I had been out that afternoon.

They both looked up when I came in, and Beatrice bounced to her feet wearing a worried look none of us would ever let a john catch us in. That was probably why it smoothed away again the second the Marshal stepped through the door behind me.

Girls in my profession know a little too much about men. The ones who want to know a woman as a person are fewer than you’d hope, and most of those don’t even realize it about themselves. They don’t care who a woman is, or what she’s scared of, or who she wants to become. They think they want a woman, but what they really want is a flattering looking glass wearing lipstick and telling them what they want to hear. Easy enough for me; it’s my job, ain’t it? I’m not as good at it as Pollywog, but I can mostly keep my face straight on my skull.

Harder if you have to live with one and play that role all night and day, without your sisters to keep you from going starkers. I can’t imagine being married to most men.

Well, maybe a man like Da. But I suspect most women don’t even know that men like Da are possible.

Anyway, the Marshal came in and I saw Bea and Priya both assemble their sweet, stupid faces in a hurry. What was funny was I saw him noticing them doing it and I saw the sharp little twist of his frown when he did. He got control of it again right quick, and I was left with the strange thought that everybody in that room just then was wearing a mask for the purpose of not upsetting one another.

It was a queer thought, and it rightly unsettled me.

“This is Marshal Bass Reeves,” I told the ladies. “Marshal, this is…” I stumbled, realizing all at once that he’d want the last names and that I did not know Priya’s. Hell, I didn’t know if the Indian girls had last names, exactly. The Chinese did their names in some kind of a funny order, and the Spanish girls had three or four last names apiece, and our Indian girls — the American ones, I mean, rather than the Oriental ones — might have last names or might not, as suited them and depending on what tribe they came from. “… Miss Beatrice Malvot,” I finished when I realized everyone was staring at me. “And Miss Priya—”

She winked, and she came to my rescue. “Priyadarshini Swati,” she said. “Priya is fine.”

“Miss Swati,” he said. He’d lifted off his hat and tucked it under his arm when he stepped inside, so he touched his forehead. “Miss Malvot.”

“Charmed, Marshal Reeves,” said Beatrice with her beautiful manners. She extended her hand like a real lady, and nothing in her face gave away that Marshal Reeves hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with it after he took it. If I’d been her, it would of been endless awkwardness — but she just lifted her glove away from his after a moment, and nodded like the French Queen. If France still had Queens, which it hasn’t since my da was alive, which I know because he was at pains to tell me when it happened that another great nation had become a Republic.

Whatever that means.

“Polly?” I asked.

“Miss Lizzie took her up to bed. Perhaps you would like a drink, Marshal Reeves?” Bea offered, and I realized that I should of rung for Connie already. Her accent made her sound even more regal. “Madame will be with you in a moment. I assume you’re here about … what happened outside?”

“Yes,” the Marshal said. “And a cup of Arbuckle’s would go down just fine, if you don’t mind. Sleeping hasn’t been much on my mind of late.”

Bea would of rung, but Priya slithered out of the afghan and headed to the kitchen, still wearing her trousers and cardigan. Bea and I watched her go, then hastily collected ourselves. I was the one who remembered to offer the Marshal a chair.

I hoped Priya would be back with the coffee around the same time Madame finally put in her appearance. It’d strike a good note.

“So, Marshal,” I said after we’d both found chairs not too far from either Beatrice or the fire, “I have the distinct impression that nothing in that alley much surprised you.”

He’d hung his hat on his knee. Now he huffed and moved it to the floor. Signor stood up in Bea’s lap, stretched his portly self six ways, and hopped down to the floor with a bump that was the shame of supposedly graceful and elegant cats everywhere. He thudded over to Marshal Reeves and began investigating his boots and hat with a pink, twitching nose.

The Marshal, meanwhile, had at first kept talking. “You’d be right, Miss Memery.” Then he seemed to get stuck. His breath went in and out, flaring his nostrils, and he found that deaf cat inordinately distracting.

At last, he said, “I’ve followed this son of a bitch from the Indian Territory. Begging your pardon, ladies.”

“If you have followed him,” Beatrice said, “you must know who he is, no?”

Behind the luxuriance of his mustache, Marshal Reeves’ expression pickled. “I wasn’t sure I’d even come to the right place until now. I don’t mind saying it, I’m half-sorry to have my theory proved.”

He reached to his inside pocket, past his gold watch chain, and brought out a scrap of oilcloth tied with a bit of bootlace. He laid it on the low table and was just about to start unwrapping it when Priya backed into the room balancing a coffee tray — the same one I’d brought upstairs to her not twenty-four hours before.

She had set it down on the receiving table by the door and had just commenced to pouring when a commotion arose in the parlor. Miss Bethel’s and Miss Francina’s voices combined with some male ones, and through them I heard Madame’s heavy tread on the stair.

I might of stayed in the library, to speak honest, but the Marshal tucked his packet back in his coat and stood. “I’ll show you before I go,” he promised when Beatrice and I protested.

We followed him out into the parlor, though I hesitated for a moment at Priya’s hand on my sleeve. She whispered me a question and I answered, likewise under my breath.

Priya looked like the best kind of savant when she slipped a coffee cup into Madame’s hand, cream and one lump, just as Madame preferred it. And I hid a smile behind my hand at Madame’s brief expression of respect. I think only I and possibly Marshal Reeves noticed the exchange, but it would of been easy to miss anything in the sudden chaos and bustle of the parlor. Effie and Crispin was there, out of breath with running, and with them were Miss Bethel, Miss Francina, and three constables — two roundsmen and a sergeant. Miss Lizzie had come downstairs with Madame. And of course there was Bea and Marshal Reeves and Priya and me.

Eventually, Miss Francina got everyone settled and introduced and Priya outdid some professional butlers of my acquaintance with that tray of coffee. The sergeant — one Waterson — even sat, though the roundsmen shifted about uncomfortably, accepting no coffee and looming by the door. Waterson looked a little put out to find a U.S. Deputy Marshal already on the scene and made a little fuss about Reeves being out of Judge Parker’s court district. “You’re a long way off your patch,” he said.

“I am that,” Marshal Reeves allowed.

Nobody else paid that much mind, however, and Sergeant Waterson dropped it. After that I thought Madame was going to send Beatrice and Effie and Priya and me out of the room, but apparently it was Pollywog mostly who they wanted to talk to, so we all stayed while Miss Lizzie went back upstairs to fetch her, since she’d sent her up to her bed. It weren’t all real organized like, and I wondered what was taking them all so long. And then Polly came down in her robe — not a peignoir such as we’d wear for entertaining, but a warm dressing gown — with her hair all crinkled on her shoulders from her braids — and I realized what they’d been up to.

You’ve never seen a whore look so scrubbed and clean and pristine.

They talked, all right. They talked for hours. Not that the talking came to much of anything.

How had she come to be out in the night? She had offered to help Connie with the rubbish, sir. How had she come to find the dead woman? “Well, she was laid right by the trash, sir.” Had she seen who might of done it? “No sir.” Did she know how long the woman had been there? “No sir, not that, either.” What had she done when she found the woman? “Touched her, felt her cold, and cried for help, sir.” Had she ever seen the woman before? “No sir.” Then she’d never been employed at the Hôtel Mon Cherie? “No sir, never.”

And on and on. Occasionally, a constable would poke his head in from outside and whisper to one of the men by the door. Even more occasionally, one of the men by the door would walk over and whisper to Waterson behind his hand. Once he passed the sergeant a note, which Waterson read twice, scowling.

Finally, the Marshal intervened — half a beat, I thought, before Madame had been planning on it. He said, “Sergeant Waterson, I think you’ll find — if you search in the mud along the top of the well — that there are footprints there that demonstrate that this victim was lowered on a rope from above. And that someone spent some time up there, smoking cigarettes and waiting to enjoy the spectacle of his work discovered.”

Waterson was a slight man with transparent hair combed over the beginnings of a bald spot. He had a high, freckled forehead and his brass star was pinned to a gray wool waistcoat over a sharply pressed shirt. It only flashed when his movements disturbed the hang of his jacket. He wore a string tie and a frustrated expression. I didn’t know if the sharp look he shot the Marshal was because he didn’t like being told by a black man or because he thought he knowed something the black man didn’t.

I wouldn’t of wagered on him being right about that second one, personally.

“We found the cigarette ends,” he allowed. His voice was rich with suspicion. “How did you know?”

“I checked the top of the wall before I climbed down. I have reason to believe the guilty party is someone I’ve chased here from Indian Territory.”

He pulled a creased slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it to Waterson. “I’ve a writ for his arrest.”

Waterson perused it. “This says ‘person or persons unknown.’”

“That’s how I swore it,” Reeves agreed. “I trust that’s how it’s written.”

“You haven’t read it?”

“Can’t read,” said Reeves. “They don’t teach slaves that.” He touched his forehead. “I’ve got a hell of a memory, though.”

I liked Waterson better when he tapped his fingers on the rustling paper, handed it back, and said, “I can respect that.”

Madame set her coffee on the saucer with a disciplined small click. She pinned the Marshal on a look and said, “How’d you know to come to Rapid City, if you don’t know who you’re chasing?”

Beside me, Beatrice looked delighted. We all want to be Madame, should we be lucky enough to achieve that certain age. And here was Madame echoing just what Bea’d asked previous.

Again, the oilcloth packet made an appearance. Reeves picked at the knot with a thick, split thumbnail and had it worried open in a moment or two. I thought he probably could have even done it faster, but he was enjoying the suspense. He balanced it on his knee and extracted two objects, though I didn’t think the packet was empty yet. One of the things he handed over was a greasy, grime-rubbed ticket stub with a part of a boot print still visible on it. The other was a cuff link, mother-of-pearl in sterling. I reckoned, though I didn’t touch the thing.

“The man I’m looking for killed at least two women in the Indian Territory. One in Frogville and one in Wauhillau. The same way: flogged, left to die, and dumped. I know he would have stayed to watch because he stayed to watch before. And I came here looking for him because of these. As I told these ladies earlier”—his gesture took in Beatrice and me—“I wasn’t sure until tonight that I was even in the right territory.”

No one else made a move for the ticket and the cuff link, so after a glance around I did. Waterson looked like he might of intercepted me, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Marshal Reeves raise a big hand — his hands belonged on a man even bigger than he was, and that were saying something — and Waterson slumped back on his chair.

The ticket stub was a rail ticket from Rapid City to Sherman, Texas, dated May 25, 1878. The cuff link was stamped on the back of one link 925, and on the back of the other was a hallmark: HB&S RC.

I handed both to Waterson, who frowned over them.

“Harney Brothers and Sons,” Reeves said, without being prompted. “Rapid City, Washington Territory. They’re on Burnside.”

“You’ve been to talk with them, I suppose?”

“They sell these by the dozen.” Reeves accepted the cuff link and stub back from Waterson. He rewrapped both carefully. “But they might be a little more forthcoming with the local law, if you know what I mean. And if I can find a man who visited the Indian Territory this year—”

“With a gold rush on? You’ll find a thousand.”

Reeves nodded without looking up from his meticulous fingertip job of knotting. “There’s a reward in it for those as helps me. And I figure, well, this scoundrel’s different from the general run of rogues blown in on the Klondike wind.”

“He’s been here before,” said Waterson. Then, a little crestfallen: “So he knows his way around.”

Reeves gave a tight smile, and the first glance he’d offered Waterson that didn’t seem to imply that the sergeant was studying up to become a half-wit. “And somebody knows him. And if he’s killing … soiled doves, begging your pardon … then he’s got to be patronizing them, hasn’t he? And not crib whores, and not ladies like you, who work a parlor. He needs privacy and time for what he’s doing. Also, all his victims have been white so far. Which ain’t no accident, not in the Indian Territory and not in Rapid City.”

“They’re streetwalkers,” Madame said slowly. “Women who’ll go with him without asking any fucking questions. Without a struggle.”

I don’t know if Reeves or Waterson could read the lines of her face, but I knowed from experience that her insides were casting up like poured steel. Maybe they felt it, because no one said anything until Madame gathered herself and continued, “I’ll make sure the word gets out. And I’ll make sure our sisters on rounds know to be careful.”

Reeves sucked his teeth. “Make sure they know who to come to if they meet anybody who makes ’em feel … odd or unsafe, too, if you please?”

Miss Lizzie barked laughter. “In our line of work, sir, men who seem odd or unsafe are two-thirds of the custom.”

Reeves tipped his invisible hat to her again. “Ladies, you have my solemn vow. I came nigh on two thousand miles by nag and rail, without a cook or a wagon and trailing only one posseman, leaving my seven children and my pregnant Jennie back in Oklahoma. When I leave Rapid City you have my word as a Christian that I intend to do it wearing that bastard for a hat.”

Considering how polite he was to whores, I admit I wondered a bit just how Christian Marshal Reeves was. Which ain’t no aspersion; I’m not so much for churching my own self. And you’d think them as follows Jesus, who befriended a stargazer, might be kinder to robins and crows.

So come to think of it, maybe he was a Christian after all, and a better one than most.

“What else is in that wrapper?” Madame asked.

The Marshal tipped his head. He handed her a little box, just folded stiff paper. “Sergeant Waterson will want to see that when you’re done.”

She lifted the lid and glanced inside. I snuck a look over her shoulder: there was a scrap of a hand-rolled cigarette inside.

“I ain’t no expert on tobacco leaf,” the Marshal said. “But that looks to me like those scraps on top of the wall. And I don’t know about you-all, but I save my cigarette ends and reroll them. There’s good tobacco left in there.”