Hooked (2 page)

Ladies Cultured Artists Society Likes It in the Buff

By Matthew Gage

Imagine this reporter's surprise when I was approached by a young man in the bar of the Embarcadero Hotel and was told a story so fantastic, I didn't believe it at first. The cream of San Francisco womanhood taking men out of their drawers for the sake of art. Those refined ladies of the Cultured
Artists Society hiring virile men to pose in the nude and perform such tasks as lifting weights and serving tea in nothing but their skin.

I know firsthand the classes were falsely concocted as a way to look at naked men because I posed for them. And not a one got my face right . . .

Once again, Tweedy gazed with wide eyes into the cell and the man lounging next to cold steel with one foot crossed in front of the other.

Godamercy, it
was
him!

Matthew Gage. In the flesh. The renowned stunt reporter for
The San Francisco Chronicle
. When Tweedy had arrested him at the Palace Hotel a half an hour ago, he never would have guessed he'd just cuffed the notorious newspaper columnist.

Gage had caused so much ballyhoo with the exposé he'd written on the San Francisco Ladies Cultured Artists Society, that the story was known as far away as Bozeman, Montana. One of the upstanding ladies in the artists society had been none other than the San Francisco mayor's wife. And now the mayor demanded the newspaper fire Gage for spoiling his wife's good reputation.

But the reporter had gone into hiding at his editor's request. A big to-do about it had been printed some months ago. The real humdinger was that the society artists article had doubled
The Chronicle's
circulation and Gage had taken his undercover work on the road.

As the reporter blended in across the countryside, his stories came into the paper's office with regularity. Gage exposing a corrupt charity in Denver that pocketed
money intended for the poor. Gage inditing six lawmakers in Reno for improperly introducing a bill in the state Senate. Gage posing as a striking railroad worker with the nation's biggest railway system in Wichita.

Matthew Gage's sensationalist style had become the novelty of the day. Readers couldn't get enough of it. Nobody knew what story would be printed in the next edition of
The Chronicle
or, more importantly, where the reporter would turn up.

Nobody knew except Ben Tweedy. The deputy marshal had the reporter locked up in the city jail on a charge of disturbing the peace. Imagine that.

“As I live and breath,” Tweedy said in awe.

Contemplation lit the depths of the prisoner's gold-green eyes, and a glint of something else—perhaps mild amusement over his entrapment.

On occasion, Ben had tried to imagine what the man looked like who could con people, talk them into believing anything while charming his way through whatever situation he came across—all just to get his stories.

Gage's tall and well-muscled frame barely cleared the jamb of the jail cell's doorway. He sported a full head of hair, ink black in color, neat and barber-trimmed. His shoulders were wide set; his legs long. Gage's dapper pin-check suit probably cost a whole month of Tweedy's salary. And yet the reporter wore the attire with lazy indifference.

Given the brawl Gage had gotten into tonight, barely a scratch marked him—just a tiny tear in the right shoulder seam of his fancy coat. Mr. Gage had licked Walter Toomey but good.

Godamercy!
Deputy Tweedy wanted to slap his
hand on his thigh and shout a praise to the man high up in the sky. Matthew Gage, right here in the jailhouse!

“Say, Gage,” Ben addressed as he lit a cheroot and waved out the match, “is it really true those blue-blooded ladies of Nob Hill only pretended to be artists? While, in reality, they just wanted to look at men modeling nothing but their smiles?”

Folding his arms across his chest, Gage replied, “It's all true.”

“Hot damn on a tin roof!” Tweedy settled into his lumpy chair. “What about the corruption in Denver? And the Wichita railroad scandal?”

“True.”

“Even the six lawmakers in Reno?”

“The lobbyist gave me a thousand dollars to pay off six assemblymen.” Gage relaxed his stance, putting one hand in his hip pocket. “He bragged to me that he'd gotten up to ten thousand to pass or kill a bill.”

“Godamercy,” Tweedy breathed, “you've heard it all, haven't you?”

The other prisoner in the jail threw his tin drinking cup into the steel bars, kicking up a noisy ruckus. “You haven't heard it all from me, Deputy.”

Tweedy switched his stare to that of Vernon Wilberforce, who occupied the cell next to Gage's. Unlike the savvy Gage, Wilberforce didn't have the brains of a beetle. “Be quiet, Wilberforce.”

“Spare a smoke?” Gage said to Ben. He nearly missed the question, his attention having shifted to Wilberforce.

Ben abruptly rose to his feet, feeling like somebody important because the big newspaperman Gage had hit him up for a cigar. After all, men like Matthew
Gage didn't ride into Bozeman everyday and get into fights with the town's ugliest sumbitch, Walter Toomey, and walk away with only a few pulled threads in his coat seam.

Handing Gage the cheroot through the bars, Ben struck a match and lit the smoke for him. Gage nodded his thanks, then sat on the plain wooden cot in his cubicle. Leaning his back against the brick wall, he bent one leg and stretched the other out as if he were settling in. With a smooth motion of his wrist, he removed his bowler and rested the hat crown on the tip of his shoe. A shoe polished to a sheen, Ben noticed. That black leather had nary a scuff on it. Much like the man himself.

Ben Tweedy gawked, his mouth hanging open until he realized what he was doing. Then he went back to his desk and sat.

The deputy said, “You really are a sly impersonator Matthew Gage.”

A succession of smoke rings came off of one puff on Gage's cheroot. As he watched the tiny gray spheres float toward the ceiling, Gage mildly stated in a matter-of-fact voice, “I'm not an impersonator. I'm a journalist.”

“But you pretend to be somebody just to get your story.” Tweedy sat forward, eagerly anticipating Gage's remark to that one.

Gage made no comment.

Sitting back into his seat, Tweedy grinned.
The truth was the truth.

The deputy tapped his ash onto the floor. “So, Gage, what was it really like to shuck down below the navel to be sketched for the sake of a story?”

Rolling his thin cigar casually between his thumb
and forefinger, Gage shrugged. “No different than posing as a gambler to report on the city's illegal pool rooms.”

Tweedy took a puff, gazed at his cigar, then manipulated his fingers to roll the smoke like Gage. Only Ben didn't have Gage's flair and he promptly dropped his cigar onto the desktop. Embers sparked up a stack of warrants and as Ben slapped at the fire with the butt of his revolver, he made his documents smoke more than a wet wood fire.

The cigar mishap under control, Ben's cheeks grew warm. He called himself a fool for trying to emulate a man who was larger than life. Only Gage could be Gage and get away with it.

Without preamble, Wilberforce announced, “Are you going to waste time talking to him all night? What about me? I've got to get out of here.”

Tweedy frowned. “You're not getting out, so shut up.”

Wilberforce went on. “My wife will have my hide if she finds out I've been arrested . . . especially if she hears what I've been locked up for.”

Tweedy sagely advised, “You shouldn't have tied a rope around Miss Beaulah's Kinetoscope and attempted to steal it.”

The silver-plated machine in Beaulah Belle's Bordello played fifty decadent frames of Miss Mabel doing a strip tease. Every man in Bozeman had bought a peek. Vernon vehemently denied taking the movie machine for the nickels inside. Claimed he had a love-tooth in his head for Miss Mabel and had to have her all to himself.

Ben propped his big booted feet on the desk. “Vernon Wilberforce, you are some piece of work thinking
you could steal Beaulah's pride and joy. That movie machine is the only one of its kind in Montana and she's damn possessive of it. You're a lucky man she didn't up and shoot you in the chestnuts while you dragged the machine across her velvet carpet.”

Wilberforce woefully declared, “I've got to be in the town of Harmony the day after tomorrow. It's imperative I'm there.”

“What's so important in Harmony?” Gage asked, leisurely stretching out his leg.

Tweedy grew resentful of Wilberforce luring the newspaper man into a conversation. The deputy could only hold Gage for the night on the charge he'd been arrested for, then he'd have to let him go. While he had the man captive, he wanted to hear all about the makings of his scandalous stories. But he couldn't exactly do that with Wilberforce yammering his woes.

“Wilberforce, I'm telling you to shut your yap,” Tweedy warned.

“I'm a contestant in the twelfth annual fly-fishing tournament,” Vernon said, ignoring Tweedy.

Large in the body and short in size, Vernon pressed his wide forehead against the bars to look into Gage's cell. “First prize is one thousand dollars. If my wife finds out about me being in here, she'll never forgive me.”

Ben interjected, “You should have thought about
that
before you went and lassoed the movie machine.”

Wilberforce stared a hole in the floor. “I just couldn't help myself. I've never seen a woman as beautiful as Miss Mabel.”

“Probably ain't never seen so
much
of a woman, is more like it,” Ben snickered.

“Next time you get an itch,” Gage drawled, “maybe you ought to pay for a woman.”

“I'm not that kind of man, Mr. Gage.” Wilberforce sat taller and put on a somber expression. “And I've had many opportunities. I'm in the traveling business. Bissell carpet sweepers. I sell them. The whole line. Your baby sweeper, child sweeper, grand rapids, prize and regular grand. I'm pretty good at it, too. I've got a wide territory. Bigger than most who work for the outfit.”

“Put a lid on it,” Tweedy growled, but Wilberforce brushed him off.

“You see,” Vernon said, “I've got my catalogue case with me. Was planning on making some rounds while I headed over to Harmony. But . . .” His voice quivered and trailed, then, “but I'm in an awful jam, Mr. Gage. Biggest mess I've ever been in if I don't have some proof that I was in Harmony for that flyfishing contest. Because if I don't, the missus will want to know why. And what can I tell her? The truth? It would break her heart.”

“You're getting me mad, Wilberforce.”

Wilberforce pinned his stare on Ben. “I keep trying to tell you, I'm not an offender of the law—aside from that one time I sold a dozen Bissells to a hotel line and charged them for thirteen. But the missus was carrying our fifth child and I needed a little extra. You know how it is. You have a wife and family, Deputy Tweedy?”

“No.”

Vernon then asked, “What about you, Mr. Gage?”

Crossing his legs at the ankles, his bowler still teetering on the tip of his shoe, Gage responded without emotion, “No.”

“That's a shame. Behind every good man, there's a good woman. My Violet, she's a good woman. She can't find out I've been arrested. I shouldn't have had them two shots of whiskey. I temporarily lost my head. I don't know what I would have done with that machine even if I'd've made it out the door. Couldn't exactly put it on the train with me.”

The deputy broke into Wilberforce's lamenting. “Gage doesn't want to hear your hard-luck story. Save it for the next fellow to occupy his cell. Because you, Wilberforce, are going to be here for a while.” Through a snort, he announced, “If you're let out at all. Stealing in these parts can be a hanging offense. It'll be up to the circuit judge to decide. And he won't be back through here for another month.”

Wilberforce blanched, grabbing hold of the cell bars and staring at Ben. “You don't understand! My life is over if you don't let me out. I have to send my wife letters from Harmony so she won't suspect anything is wrong. I'm already registered in that fly-fishing contest, and Violet is counting on me winning the thousand dollar first-prize purse. If she finds out I'm in jail, she'll take the children and move in with her mother.”

The reporter continued to blow smoke rings from puffs of his cigar, but added nothing to the conversation—confirming to U.S. Deputy Marshal Ben Tweedy that he wasn't interested in Wilberforce's dilemma.

And why should he be? After all, Gage had duked it out with Walter Toomey. Bozeman's biggest blowhard.

From what Ben gathered through the night clerk's ranting, both men had wanted the continental suite at the Palace Hotel and had arrived to ask for it at the same time. Toomey had brought a lady friend with
him. Gage had been alone, which made Ben admire Gage all the more. The man had so much class, he sprang for a high dollar room just to get some shuteye.

Toomey had thrown the first punch. But Gage had gotten in the last. Now Walter was getting his cut eye sewed up at the doc's.

“Everybody knows that contest is rigged,” Tweedy said dryly. “Look what happened last year. That highbrow young fellow won. He shouldn't have. Something real fishy went on. Everybody knew that Stratton boy had it in the bag. He was the best ever.” The rub of denim against the leather of a chair fused through Tweedy's comment as he shifted in his seat. “Or so I heard he was the best. I wasn't there. Rumors. You know how they are. When there's a lot of money at stake, you've got gall and wormwood if all the marbles don't roll into your corner.”

“Deputy Tweedy,” Wilberforce enunciated, “I don't care if you think that contest is rigged. At this point, I don't even care if somebody illegally wins that thousand dollar prize. Because if my wife doesn't receive letters postmarked Harmony, Montana, my life is ruined.”