A Good Man (33 page)

At last, Strathway issued an ultimatum to Ada. If she did not permit him to operate, she would be as good as guilty of murder. Her husband’s life rested in her hands. Would she give her consent to an amputation? Ada agreed the time had come to act over Randolph’s objections. The doctor asked whether she could call on any friends of her husband to assist him in the surgery. He would need strong men to help restrain him during the procedure. For Ada, the doctor’s inquiry drove home a sad fact – Randolph had no friends, only clients and business acquaintances. For an instant, she considered sending for Wesley Case and Joe McMullen, but then she thought better of it given Case’s behaviour on New Year’s Eve.

She blurted out, “I can think of only one man I could ask. However, he’s as strong as an ox. He should be sufficient to restrain my husband.”

And so it was Michael Dunne who took hold of Tarr’s arms and stretched him out on the mattress as if it were a rack, held him fast there, shrieking and thrashing, until the bone saw chewing its way throgh his femur shocked Tarr’s heart into arrest and ended his life.

A woman with no family or friends to guide and assist her, Ada numbly took on the responsibilities that now beset her. The undertaker wanted to know whether the remains of the deceased were to be kept until spring arrived and the ground could be dug, or did she want to pay to have it thawed and her husband immediately interred? The thought of Randolph lying for months in the graveyard shed with ice in his hair and frost on his cheeks was too much to bear. At considerable expense, she ordered a load of coal to be burned on his grave plot to soften the earth. A telegram was dispatched to Philadelphia, relating the news of her father’s demise to Celeste. Her stepdaughter’s reply lamented her father’s death in twenty words. She did not extend condolences to her stepmother.

Randolph’s last will and testament needed to be found. She discovered it in his office desk. When she read that Randolph had bequeathed the house and all its contents to his daughter, she assumed this was an earlier will that predated their marriage. But that illusion was destroyed when she read further and came to a clause that divided equally the remainder of property between his wife and daughter. This property was a chimera. Randolph’s financial affairs were exactly as he had claimed they were when he dismissed Dunne. The cashbox in his office held exactly $81.42, scarcely enough to cover the funeral expenses. A few clients appeared on the books as owing Randolph money, but the sums outstanding were insignificant. On the other hand, there were a good many unpaid bills. Her hope that Randolph’s claim to be teetering on bankruptcy was a dramatic exaggeration was utterly extinguished, and replaced with a small cold anger at his irresponsibility. Her husband had neglected everything: his health, his business affairs, last of all her.

She wired Celeste news of her inheritance. An immediate response came – not from Celeste but from her fiancé. With airy benevolence, the Lieutenant informed Ada that he granted her permission to remain in the house rent-free until a decision was made about the disposal of his bride-to-be’s property. He gave no hint when this might be, of when she faced eviction, but she had no intention of worrying about that now. She needed to see Randolph buried.

Fort Benton lacked a church, but she received permission to use the schoolhouse for the funeral service. She engaged a Baptist lay preacher, Mr. Clumb, to lay Randolph to rest. There was no question how Randolph would have liked to go to his grave; he would have wished to be borne there by the luminaries of the town whose esteem he had always assiduously cultivated. Her husband’s ambitions needed to be honoured without passing judgment on them. There had been few enough acts of kindness and consideration they had shown one another during their married life.

So she had gone to each of Benton’s merchant princes, I.G. Baker, T.C. Power, the Conrad brothers among them, to ask if they would do her the favour of serving as pallbearers for her husband. She saw how taken aback they were by her request, but refusing a grieving widow was hardly the thing to do.

The day of Randolph’s burial the congregation proved to be just as indifferent to her husband’s passing as the grey sky overhead. Randolph’s pallbearers knew no more about him than the guard of honour at a military funeral knows about the man in the box they fire their rifles over. His funeral was nothing but ceremony and a cold e at that.

But then something extraordinary happened. Just as Mr. Clumb was paging through his Bible, readying himself to commence the obsequies, Michael Dunne came solemnly marching down the aisle, bearing an enormous wreath of silk and paper flowers. The reverence with which Mr. Dunne placed his garish floral tribute on the casket top, the way he remained standing there, head ostentatiously bowed in prayer for such a long time, swept Ada with gratitude for this tiny flame of human warmth. So when Dunne turned and began to make his way back to his seat, Ada caught his eye and offered a wan and heartfelt smile of appreciation. Despite his differences with her husband, only Dunne had shown any spirit of generosity towards the departed.

When it came time for her to follow the casket out, Ada glimpsed Joe McMullen and Wesley Case seated in the last row of chairs. McMullen’s face wore a look of earnestly conventional sympathy, but Case appeared to be avoiding looking her way. His head was lowered, his eyes fixed on the fingers he held knotted on his lap. Perhaps he feared she might now harbour certain expectations. On that score, he had nothing to worry about. She was not about to latch on to any man’s coattails. She had done that with Randolph and he had dragged her off to where she found herself now.

Two weeks after his former lawyer was laid in the ground – an interment that John Harding had not given a second thought to attending – the mining magnate is drowsily considering the gold, scarlet, and orange autumn leaves fluttering above him. This is baffling, since something else in the back of his mind reminds him he is warm in his bed, it is winter, and every tree has been bare for months. What’s more, he can feel his wife’s plump haunch nestled against his leg, and a pillow tucked under his head. When he rolls over, searching for an explanation for this puzzle, he can see the same bright colours leaping and throbbing on the windowpane. That’s when his feet strike the floor and carry him to the window in a headlong rush. In the yard below, the gazebo he had erected at the insistence of his daughters and wife is enveloped in flames. Fire crawls up its pillars, greasy black smoke rolls out from beneath its cupola.

Nightgown flapping, Harding snatches open the bedroom door, runs to the stairs, and bellows to the help, “Fire! Fire, damn you!”

But the alarm is raised too late to save Mrs. Harding’s charming pergola. The servants’ efforts to quench the conflagration are unavailing. Master and mistress stand at their bedroom window watching the blaze until the roof collapses, cascading embers into the snow where they hiss derisively.

For the first time, Mr. Harding feels a twinge of regret at Randolph Tarr’s passing. It seems that with the lawyer gone, the madman Gobbler Johnson has now put his eye on him. The next day he sends a wire to Fort Benton.

Thoughts of Ada Tarr warm Dunne during the long, cold ride to Helena. Her sweet smile when he placed the flowers on her husband’s coffin has been revisited, again and again, ever since the funeral. A moment of perfect understanding.

Of course, a respectable woman is bound by proprieties, an he has sworn to himself to do nothing to endanger her reputation by paying court too early. He is perfectly content to stand aside while she observes the required period of mourning. The secret they share is enough for now. Besides, it gives him time to see to their future. He is confident that Harding summoning him to Helena will prove profitable, add to the substantial nest egg he has been accumulating over the past ten years. Ada Tarr deserves to be kept in a style worthy of her, and he will see that she is.

But as Helena comes into view, huddled in the shadowy bottom of Last Chance Gulch, Dunne reminds himself to keep his mind on the business at hand, keep his wits about him. Riding through the clamorous, soot-stained town, he scarcely gives a glance to the flash saloons and jaunty sporting houses, the imposing facades of the grander mercantiles, or the miserable log cabins and raw plank shacks of miners and prospectors that straggle helter-skelter along the creek bed. He keeps his eyes on his goal, Harding’s grand house perched on a steep hill, stark against a pewter sky.

At Harding’s front door he turns over his horse to a stableboy, stiffly climbs the brick steps, and gives the bell pull a tug. When he gives his name to the maid, she leads him up an impressive walnut staircase, lit by stained glass windows, to the third floor, and ushers him into a gallery-shaped room where Harding sits behind a trestle table heaped with assay reports, maps, ore samples, and lumps of brownish coal. The bitumen has shed a powdery dust over everything in the vicinity, right down to the Turkey carpet. Harding extends no welcome to Dunne, simply gets to his feet and beckons him to the window behind the worktable. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the two men contemplate the bleak ruin of the gazebo.

Harding says gloomily, “I reckon now that Tarr’s dead he’s turned his attention to me. Arson. To put a scare into me.”

“That’s the Gobbler Johnson style. He put a fire threat on Tarr. What you want done about it?”

Harding points to a humble wooden chair on the other side of the table. “Sit,” he says, and walks heavily back to a leather armchair glinting with mineral grains and specks of metal. He drops down into it with a grunt, props his elbows on the low table, leans forward and says, “What I want done is a question for later. If I hire you,” he qualifies. “Understand?”

Dunne shrugs.

“Tarr always bragged you up as a trained operative, but I ain’t seen no evidence of it yet. Last time when you went looking for Johnson you was short on results.”

“You said look for him in Missoula, which I done. Then you said the Cypress Hills. I took you at your word that you knew where he was. Well, he wasn’t. I just did as I was told.”

Harding picks up a chunk of rock and begins to turn it over in his hands. “Maybe it was because of them kind of lame excuses the Chicago Pinkerton Agency dropped you so quick. Tarr told me you didn’t work for them more’n six months.” Harding taps his temple with his forefinger. “Don’t try and pull nothing over on me. I don’t buy a pig in a poke.”

“The Pinkertons didn’t drop me. It was ved goodbye to them.”

“And what would be your reason for leaving their gainful employ, pray tell?”

“Because they put me to work as a cinder dick, riding railroad cars to see that conductors weren’t slipping the odd railway fare into their pockets. You don’t use a sharp tool like me for that kind of job. It was a insult.”

“Sharp tool, is it? You got a pretty high opinion of yourself.”

“Ain’t a opinion, it’s a fact. Worked a good many years as a government detective up in Canada. I’d be there still, but they shut down the service. It was the head of that whole operation who recommended me personal to the Pinkerton Agency.”

“Which you was too good for.”

“No. Other way around. Mr. Pinkerton cared more about hiring saints than men who produced results. He was more worried about looking respectable than getting the job done. Ran the agency like a Sunday school superintendent. Wouldn’t handle divorce cases for fear it would soil his precious reputation. But divorce is a profitable business. That’s a word you appreciate – profitable,” Dunne says, pausing for a reaction to his observation. None comes. “That’s why Tarr asked me to go to work with him, on account of he recognized my abilities. If he was alive you could ask him.”

“He ain’t. So you tell me.”

“Chicago was booming those days. A lot of rich married men with money to keep mistresses. A lot of lawyers was of Allan Pinkerton’s opinion, thought divorce was a shady business. Tarr didn’t agree. Took every case he could lay hands on. But grounds for divorce are slim. You got insanity and you got
flagrante delicto
. It was up to me to catch them
flagrante delicto.”