The Case of the Petrified Man (23 page)

As a final insult, he kicked the ghoulish Stone Baby in its cigar box.

“Ow!” he yelled. He hopped on one foot and let loose a stream of profanities such as I have never heard before nor hope to hear again. Needless to say, they are unfit for publication.

Abruptly he halted in mid-profanity.

He looked down at the Stone Baby & a strange expression transformed his face.

I could not read it.

Without another word, he turned on his heel & limped quickly out of my office.

Scarcely had the door closed behind him when it flew open for the third time in as many minutes.

There stood Deputy Marshal Jack Williams and another man, whom I found out later was a police officer.

“P.K. Pinkerton?” The Deputy fixed me with his cold & unblinking gaze.

“That is me,” I said.

“There is something not quite right about you,” he growled, “and I am gonna find out what. In the meantime,” he said, “I have a warrant for your arrest. Come with me.”

“What?” I said. “Why? What for?”

For the first time I saw him smile.

His mouth stretched sideways but his eyes remained cold & narrow. It was definitely Expression No. 2—a Fake Smile.

“I am arresting you for the brutal murder of a woman named Sally Sampson,” said he. “You do not have to come along peaceably,” he added, “I will enjoy taking you there by force.”

I WAS ON A HIGH MOUNTAIN PEAK
—happy & calm—but someone was trying to topple me off it.

“P.K.?” said a voice from a long ways off. “P.K. what is wrong?”

I ignored the voice. My gray stone mountain was as narrow and jagged as a pine tree and it stood among many other such peaks, but it was the tallest. At the top of my peak was a small flat place. I sat on a soft & shaggy buffalo skin. I could see for a thousand miles in every direction. I was higher than the Thunderbird. I was so high that I could almost touch God. There came only the sound of the wind & of chanting.

And the irksome voice.

“P.K.?” said the irksome, faraway voice.

“I’ll rouse him, by God!” said another distant voice.

“No,” said the first. “Let me try one more thing.”

Then I heard a man’s voice softly praying.

He was praying like Pa Emmet used to do, so I came back down to earth. The chanting ceased inside my head and I opened my eyes.

Everything seemed strange. I seemed to be inside the mountain, not atop it. I blinked. Everything around me was gray stone. Then I remembered: I was in Jail. Two men were in the cell with me.

“P.K.?” A face loomed into view. A man’s face with blue eyes & a fair mustache & beard. He looked vaguely familiar.

“Who are you?” I said. My tongue was sluggish and my voice sounded strange.

“It is me, the Reverend Charles Volney Anthony. Do you realize you were rocking back and forth, chanting? The jailer says you’ve been doing that for a couple of hours.”

“Course he knows!” said the angry voice. “He’s been doing it to vex me.”

“P.K.,” said the Rev. C.V. Anthony, “I’ve brought someone who might be able to help you.”

“Hello, P.K.,” said another voice. Not the angry voice. With great effort I turned my head. Another blue-eyed man with a huge beard loomed into view. My Indian mother called white men “owl-people” because they look like owls with their staring white eyes and feathery faces. I nodded to myself. These two certainly looked like owls.

“It is me,” said the bearded man. “Bill Stewart. I found
something about that man you were looking for. Deforrest Robards. He spells his name with two Rs.”

I blinked again and he began to look less like an owl.

“He is a deserter,” said Bill Stewart. “A Lieutenant in the Twenty-Second Alabama Infantry Regiment.”

I blinked. I was trying to remember who “Bill Stewart” was.

The man spoke again. “Do you hear me? Deforrest Robards is a Confederate Lieutenant who gathered together a band of volunteers, mainly upon his father’s insistence. But when he led them into a battle at Shiloh, he froze with terror and then ran, causing a rout of his men and great loss of life. They want to bring him back to stand trial and face a firing squad if necessary.”

Then it came to me. “You are a lawyer,” I said. “Mr. William Morris Stewart. My foster pa said Lawyers were the Devil’s Own.”

“We covered that ground already,” said Mr. William Morris Stewart. “You can drop that line.”

“P.K.,” said the Reverend Anthony. “You seemed to be in some kind of trance. Have you been drinking?”

With great effort I turned back to the first owl. “No,” I said. “I promised Ma Evangeline never to kill a man, nor drink nor gamble.”

“Smoking opium?” asked Mr. William Morris Stewart.

“No,” I said. “I am not a dope fiend.”

“Then what is it?”

I said, “Ma Evangeline called it ‘the Mulligrubs.’ It happens when I am scared or low.”

Mr. William Morris Stewart put his big arm around my
shoulder and leaned forward. “Do not be scared,” he said, “and do not be low. I will be your Champion.”

“Why would you bother?” I said, staring at the floor of my cell. “I called you ‘the Devil’s Own.’”

“I will be your champion,” he said, “because you remind me of my mother.”

I looked up, startled out of my fog.

“My mother never told a falsehood,” said Mr. William Morris Stewart. “She often came across as blunt. You are about as honest as she, and a sight more honest than some Methodist reverends I have met, present company excepted. For this reason I am happy to represent you. Now, can you tell me what happened?”

I thought for a moment & tried to order my thoughts. Then I shook my head. “Too jumbled,” I said. “Everything is too jumbled and tangled in my head.”

Then I had an idea.

“In my office,” I said, “are some blank ledger books on one of the shelves. Bring me one and I will write things down.”

“Ledger books?” said Mr. William Morris Stewart. “Why ledger books?”

“Because I wrote up my first case on ledger sheets,” I said, “and so I bought a dozen more for future cases, along with half a dozen small notebooks like this one.” I showed them the Detective Notebook in my pocket.

“But why ledger books?” said the Rev.

“So they would look even on the shelf,” I said.

Mr. William Morris Stewart shook his head and gave a half smile. “Do you need anything else?”

I nodded. “Coffee,” I said. “Black, please. Also I am hungry.”

And that was how I came to be here in prison, accused of committing the very crime I have been diligently trying to solve. Now it is late & my coffee is finished & both pieces of layer cake that my Lawyer brought me for dessert. Even the night jailer is asleep so I am going to sleep as well.

I have written this account as fairly & accurately as I could.

I will swear on the Bible to that.

You can see that Deputy Marshal Jack Williams has got it in for me because he blames me for the recent spate of shooting affrays here in Virginia City & because I am a Misfit & half Indian.

Yes, I confess I am half Indian.

Yes, I confess I vanquished the previous Chief of the Comstock last week and maybe that caused some competition for the position.

Yes, I confess that Trouble seems to follow me wherever I go.

But, no, I did not murder the Soiled Dove who went by the name of Short Sally Sampson. It is true that I do not have an alibi for most of that night apart from the few hours I was in an Opium Den, but if you read my account of that case and also of this one, you will know that I am guilty of nothing more than trying to help a poor frightened girl & of searching out the Truth behind a dastardly deed that the Law had forgotten.

Dear Mr. Judge and/or Gentlemen of the Jury: please judge me NOT GUILTY and set me free to solve this crime.

AS YOU CAN PROBABLY TELL
from the fact that I am now writing in ink, not pencil, I am not in Jail anymore.

Here is how it happened.

After I wrote the account you have just read, I put down my pencil, climbed onto the hard & narrow shelf of my cell & fell asleep upon the instant.

The next morning I was woken by a cheerful argument.

It was the night jailer and a new jailer I had not seen before. I guessed he was the Saturday Jailer as
it was Saturday. They were debating something in the newspaper.

One of them kept saying, “It’s true, I tell you.”

“No, it ain’t,” said the Night Jailer. “I am telling you. It’s a big Hoax.”

“No! They really found a Petrified Man out there in the desert. Place called Gravelly Ford.”

“I ain’t never heard of no Gravelly Ford,” said the Night Jailer.

“But they wouldn’t of printed it if it warn’t true.” He picked up the paper and read. “Listen to this. This is how they describe the posture of the man.”

When he said the word
posture
I remembered what Jace told me & I adopted the pose as he read the description.

“‘The body was in a sitting posture,’” began the Night Jailer, “‘leaning against a huge mass of croppings; the attitude was pensive, the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the forefinger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open; the right eye was closed, and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.’”

I found when I adopted this posture that I was thumbing my nose with my right hand like Belle Donne, and pulling down the lower lid of my left eye, just like Mr. Absalom Smith at Topliffe’s Theatre when he was telling a joke.

“Thar!” cried the Night Jailer. “Look at the boy! He’s doing what the paper describes. See? That reporter is cocking a snook at us.”

The other prisoners were laughing and nodding.

“But they wouldn’t of printed it if it warn’t true,” repeated the Saturday Jailer.

“Course they would. Look at the name of the fellow who wrote it.”

“Josh?” said the other one. “What does that prove?”

“Well, ‘josh’ means ‘joke,’ don’t it?”

“It could be his real name.”

“Don’t be a numbskull,” said the Night Jailer. “Those fellows hardly ever use their real names.”

At that moment I had a Revelation.

It was as if the Clouds of Heaven had parted and God had sent a great Sunbeam of Illumination into my brain.

Martha had heard Sally call the Killer “Deforrest” & “Lieutenant Robards.”

My Lawyer had told me that a “Lieutenant Deforrest Robards” was a deserter from the Reb Army.

But why would a deserter who had escaped to a new town keep his real name?

He would adopt a false name, like Sam Clemens who called himself “Josh” & a whole passel of other Pen Names to boot. I suddenly realized I knew lots of people with false names: Dan De Quille, Poker Face Jace, Stonewall, El Dorado Johnny, Whittlin Walt, Boz & Extra Dub. Then there was Big Gussie & her four girls: not one of them going by her real name. Even I have used different names from my Indian one, and sometimes I go by the name “Maisie.”

In fact, I knew more people with fake names than I knew with real names.

Lieutenant Deforrest Robards might be known to
hundreds of people here in Virginia City, but not by his
real name
. Only Short Sally Sampson, an “old friend” of his, had recognized him & called him by his true name, in Martha’s hearing.

Like dominoes, that revelation gave me another: that had been the motive for the murder! Short Sally had recognized the coward Deforrest Robards. Maybe she had taunted him. Maybe she had threatened to expose him. Maybe both. If he was found out he would be sent home to be tried, and then hanged or shot, because he had been an officer with men under his command.

My heart was beating fast with excitement. Everything made sense now. It was the “dam domino effect.”

That meant I could go back to my list of suspects.

I pulled out my Detective Notebook and opened it with trembling hands.

Here was the list I had compiled: