The Perils of Sherlock Holmes (9 page)

“The errors of la Mancha and Richard III are most instructive in the legal profession.” Holmes drank beer. I had the impression that among Mongols he’d have slaked his thirst with mare’s milk. I never knew a man who assimilated himself so thoroughly with the natives. “However, we have not come to this place to discuss the classics.”

Earp seemed to concentrate upon lighting a cigar, but it seemed to me all his attention was on Holmes.

“They’re set on hanging my friend. I don’t mind telling you I’m against it.”

Holmes’s eyes glittered. Direct speech affected him like a chemical stimulant. “Dr. John Henry Holliday.”

“I see you’re a man who squeezes all the juice he can out of a newspaper. If you know his name, you know I’d never have walked out of that alley but for Doc. He killed two men who wanted me in hell, both in the space of a half minute.”

“And he calls himself a physician! What about his oath?” My exposure to war had not prepared me for barbarism in the humanitarian professions.

Earp’s reptilian gaze was uncannily like Holmes’s when he placed me under scrutiny.

“Doc’s a dentist, if it counts. He’s separated more men from their teeth than their lives, but that was before consumption got the better of him. He came out from Georgia for his health. It don’t look like the locals mean for him to find it.”

He explained that he and “Doc” Holliday had left Tombstone to seek out and confront the conspirators who had slain Earp’s brother Morgan and severely wounded Virgil, another brother. The precise cause of these attacks, and of the murderous street fight that had preceded them, was shrouded in territorial politics I could not understand. I gathered that this mission of vengeance had succeeded to some extent, but that Holliday had suffered a relapse of his corrosive pulmonary disease and come to Youngblood for medical attention. When after a few days his friend arrived to look in on him, he found him in jail charged with murder.

“It happened last night; I just missed it. Doc don’t make friends easy, but he draws enemies like flies to sorghum. They say he disagreed with a tin-panner over the proper number of aces in a deck. The tin-panner knocked him down, which you can do with a finger when Doc’s ailing. They say Doc gunned him in front of a gang of witnesses down the hill an hour or so later.”

“Is he guilty?” Holmes asked.

“He says he’s not sure. He took a bottle back to his room after he got up from the floor and don’t remember a thing till the town marshal pulled him out of bed and threw him in a cell.”

Holmes asked if he’d been convicted.

“The town’s just a mining camp with no authority. They can’t hold a trial till the circuit judge gets here. That could take days or months, and these get-rich-now prospectors aren’t inclined to be patient. Hank Littlejohn was well-liked by all but three, and the other two didn’t dislike him enough to go up against a bunch of tin-panners with guns and a rope over the likes of Doc. I ask you now, does that look like a party that’d sit on its hands when hemp’s so cheap?” He inclined his head towards a group of men in muddy overalls hunched at the end of the bar, drinking straight whisky and taking turns looking over their shoulders towards our table.

Holmes kept his eyes on Earp. “I noticed them when they came in. The former teamster is their leader. He is the only one who hasn’t looked our way.”

“What makes him a teamster?” Earp asked. “They all look the same in them Tombstone tuxedoes.”

“Such muscular development as his is a common result of swinging a pickaxe or handling a team of mules or oxen. Since by calling them ‘tin-panners’ you suggest they haven’t yet advanced beyond the stage of panning streams for nuggets, I must conclude they are not ‘hardrock’ miners. That serpentine scar coiled round his neck ending at the corner of his jaw could only be the consequence of an accident with a whip—a hazard of the trade, based upon my observations since St. Louis. ‘Bull-whackers,’ I believe the men are sometimes called.”

“You’re a detective, for a fact. I’m glad to see the scribblers got it right for once. That’s Elmer Dundy, Hank Littlejohn’s old partner. When they got here, they quit the freighting business to find their fortune in the hills.”

“Holmes, he’s coming this way.” I slid my hand into my pocket.

“Hold, Doctor. We can’t shoot them all.”

Elmer Dundy was burned the color of the native sandstone, with a great bald head sunk between shoulders built for a yoke. His eyes were tiny black pebbles above a broken nose and a thick lower lip that sagged to show a row of brown teeth and green gums. He’d been drinking whisky from a beer glass, which he held by its handle in a fist the size of a mutton roast.

“So you dug up some friends,” he told Earp in a Londonderry brogue—filtered, it seemed, through cactus spines. “They don’t look like the killers you run with regular. What’s the matter, they all fly the coop?”

Holmes intervened.

“You’ll pardon my speaking without invitation, but I’m unaccustomed to being discussed in the third person when I am present. If you wish to address a question to myself or my companion, be kind enough to do so directly.”

Dundy regarded the speaker. Holmes was stretched languidly in his chair with one arm slung over the back and his stick resting alongside his legs, crossed at the ankles.

“English!” The former teamster spat viciously, splattering the floor an inch from Holmes’s boot, and swung the heavy beer glass at his head.

What happened then took place in less time than I can describe it.

Holmes seemed merely to shift his grip on the handle of his stick, the ferrule end flashed so swiftly it was a blur, and dropping one shoulder and twisting the handle slightly, he inserted the stick between the oaf’s ankles and sent him crashing to the floor.

Only when the building shook beneath his impact did I claw out my weapon, but before I had it free, Wyatt Earp scooped out his enormous revolver, thumbing back the hammer and levelling the barrel at Dundy’s friends, stopping them in mid-charge.

Belatedly, as it seemed, Dundy’s thick beer glass, released as he fell, struck the floor with a thump. The gaggle of miners stared at it comically.

“Drag him out before he gives the place a bad name.” Earp’s tone was as hard and cold as steel.

“Wait.”

I got up to examine the insensate man. I asked the bartender for brandy. That fellow had come round from behind the bar with a length of billiard cue in his fist, only to find the drama ended.

“Busthead’s all I got,” he growled.

I looked to Earp for a translation, but it was Holmes who supplied it.

“Whisky, in the regional argot; I’m assembling a glossary. The term may be ironic in the current context, but the spirits should prove more than strong enough, though the flesh be weak.”

The remedy was produced—“Bill it to Dundy, when he’s perpendicular,” Earp instructed the bartender—and in a little while we were quit of the miners, who needed no further encouragement to conduct their unsteady friend outside.

Earp shook his head.

“I must tell Doc. Your partner’s slow on the draw, but I doubt even Doc would think to pull a bad tooth from a man I buffaloed. I’d hire you both in a minute, but apart from my interest in the Faro game here in the Mescalero, I haven’t a cartwheel dollar to pay you for your trouble. My luck’s gone sour since the fight at Fly’s.”

Holmes finished his beer at a draught.

“I shall play you for my fee when the thing’s done, and accept your promise of payment should I win. When may I speak with Holliday?”

We placed our bags in the bartender’s charge, with a warning from Earp to look after them as if they were his own, and repaired to the jail.

The town’s only building of substance was constructed of stone round an iron cage transported from some wild railhead that had been dismantled the last time the tracks moved westward; American civilisation, I learned, was a portable thing in that rapidly developing wilderness. A gimlet-eyed deputy bit down upon Holmes’s pound sterling, inspected the result, and gave us five minutes with the prisoner.

I have remarked frequently upon the ascetic gauntness of Sherlock Holmes, but he appeared well-fed in comparison with Dr. John Henry Holliday. Holliday was an exemplar of the attenuated Southern aristocrat, saffron in colour, with the skull plain under a crown of pale thinning hair and a lank set of imperials blurred by days without a razor. He sat in a six-by-eight-foot enclosure on a cot, with a deck of sweaty pasteboards laid out on the blanket in a game of patience. A dirty collarless shirt, wrinkled trousers with the braces dangling, and filthy stockings, all of good quality notwithstanding, comprised his entire costume.

“I detest this game,” he said in lieu of salutation. “It’s like making love to a mirror, with the prospect of humiliating yourself through failure.”

“If it’s the latter you wish to avoid, I should move the queen of clubs from the king of spades to the king of hearts. Unless, that is, black-on-black is the custom in this country.”

The prisoner corrected the error with a throaty noise of self-disgust that turned into a paroxysm of coughing. He stifled it against a sleeve, which bore away with it a pink stain. His gaze, bright and bloodshot, took in Holmes.

“God’s wounds, an Englishman. Is business so good we’re importing hangmen now?”

Wyatt made introductions. Holmes began his interrogation before Holliday could form another ironic comment.

“Your friend said Hank Littlejohn was well-regarded among all but three. Who, pray, are the other two?”

“Algernon Woods and Jasper Riley. Woods stopped playing poker with Hank for the same reason I did, and Riley got into a dust-up with him on the road here over a sporting woman they both admired in Bisbee; but I wouldn’t waste my time trying to pin it on either one.” He coughed and turned up another card.

“Are their alibis so sound?”

“Jasper’s is. The Chinaman who runs the opium concession here swears he was in his establishment smoking up dreams the night Hank got it. Being a celestial, he’s got no friends in town and no reason to lie.”

“Lies don’t always need reasons. What about Woods?”

“Algernon says he was working late in his shop alone. He’s not your man, or even half of him. He’s a dwarf, and fat besides. No one would mistake him for me even on a dark night, and there was a moon out big as a pumpkin.”

“You said he has a shop. He is a merchant?”

“He’s a combination tailor and undertaker. I was his customer once and it looks like I will be again.”

“Where were you when Littlejohn met his fate?”

“Sleeping off a drunk in Mrs. Blake’s boardinghouse. Whisky’s a thief of recollection, but I’m inclined towards that conclusion. If I was to start killing poker cheats, I’d never be quit of it, and I’m a lazy man.”

“Thank you. Dr. Watson and I will do what can be done.”

Holliday chuckled, coughed, placed a red ten on a black knave.

“I’d get to it directly. There’s another big moon tonight, dandy for trimming trees with dentists.”

“I cannot understand such a man,” said I, when we were outside the jail.

Wyatt Earp dropped his cigar and crushed it under his heel. “You get used to that honey-and-molasses drawl. The Wester he goes, the Souther he gets.”

“I was referring to his character. My training tells me he’s a consumptive in the tertiary stage, but that’s hardly a reason to joke about hanging.”

“Life’s a joke to Doc. What part of it he’s got left is too small to take serious.”

“It’s not so small to you, however,” Holmes observed.

“Nor mine to him neither, comes to that. He’s innocent.”

“Of that I have no doubt. A man who’s so willing to accept death would sooner lie and say he’s guilty.”

“It’d stick in his craw.”

“Let us see if this Chinese opium seller suffers from that condition. There is no such thing as a watertight boat or an ironclad alibi.”

Earp led us to a large tent pitched upon a slope so steep it would flood during rains and collapse before a mild rockslide. The moss growing upon it made the interior as dark as a cave, lit only by greasy lanterns suspended above rows of folding campaign cots, some occupied by men mostly insensible. Evil smoke fouled the air. Earp slid his bandanna over his nose and mouth whilst I buried mine in my handkerchief. Holmes, meanwhile, took in a deep breath and let it out with a contented sigh.

“Wantee pipee?”

This invitation came from an Oriental in a black silk robe and mandarin’s cap, round as Buddha and no taller than a child, albeit plainly in his sunset years. Gold shone in a wicked smile.

“No wantee pipee. Wantee straight talk, and not in pidgin. I know an Oxford accent when I hear it.” Holmes held up a gold sovereign, snatching it back when a yellow claw snatched at it.

The old man shrugged and folded his hands inside the sleeves of his robe.

“The missionary who taught me was a retired don. If you are here on behalf of a wife or mother, you may browse among these wretches for him who is lost. I do not insist upon introductions and so am ignorant as to their names.”

“If that is the case, how were you able to identify Jasper Riley among your customers the night Hank Littlejohn was killed?”

“I did not say I never pay attention to faces. In election years, many of my former colleagues in San Francisco went to jail because they failed to recognise the same undercover policemen who had arrested them before.”

“Did Riley pay you to say he was here all night?”

“Had he been here and made the proper offer, I should have accepted; but honestly, do you think a common teamster could meet my fee for such a risk? I bring in more in a night than he sees in a month, and it is nothing to hang a Chinese here.”

“Very well. Here is your sovereign.”

The old man left his hands folded. “That is not the coin you showed me. You are not the magician you fancy yourself.”

Holmes grunted as if put out, slipped the coin into his waistcoat pocket, and produced another from inside his cuff. This the opium seller took with a mocking bow.

We went out, where Earp and I drew in great lungfuls of fresh air. Holmes chuckled, without mirth.