THERE ARE WOMEN WHO DO NOT WISH TO BE PURSUED. During a dozen years of active frontier prostitution, Mária Katarina Harony had often declared, “I pick and I choose!” That was no idle boast. In the grim world of two-dollar house girls, Kate Harony had always named her price, getting what she demanded and doubling the fee if a john dared to argue.
“I know what I’m worth,” she’d declare. “If that’s more than a cheap bastard like you can afford, be damned to you.”
Men had lined up, year after year, hoping to be accepted. How many of them? Four thousand? Five? Maybe more. Too many, that’s for sure. She was thoroughly tired of men and their lust. Tired of the whole damn business.
It’s a rare whore who anticipates that the market for her wares will turn. Rarer still: a whore who saves her cash and makes plans for what comes next. Kate Harony was a realist who’d always kept an eye out for the next opportunity and in the beginning, that’s all Doc Holliday was. A way out. A way up.
Of all the men who’d had her, Doc alone asked the right questions and showed an interest in the answers. He alone knew her for what she was: the pampered, well-educated daughter of a Budapest physician. Fluent in four modern languages, familiar with the Greek and Latin classics. Exiled by war, impoverished, orphaned, fostered out. Ruined by the guardian who should have protected her, she’d run away, and it was in a string of frontier brothels that she learned her seventh language: a vulgar and ungrammatical English. Doc, too, had lived with luxury in childhood, with poverty in adolescence, and with hardship in adulthood. He admired the nerve and self-possession she brought to the only work a girl could get paid for on the frontier. His respect meant a great deal to her. So did his cash. So, eventually, did he.
She never meant to love him.
He didn’t make it easy, for if Doc deplored the way Kate made her money, she was infuriated by how he spent his. They had traveled together off and on since 1878, a pair of souls chained together in the fourth ring of the Inferno—the miser pushing a boulder up a hill while the spendthrift shoved it down. Doc could win in an hour what Kate earned in six months, but he’d spend it just as quickly. He insisted that they live in a town’s best hotel, that they eat in the finest restaurants. It was French frocks for her, English suits for him, lavish parties for his friends. And then there was the stupid way he’d slip a few bucks to anyone he felt sorry for! She understood that he was trying to recapture childhood’s careless abundance, but they weren’t aristocratic children anymore, and the way he squandered money drove her crazy. The very fact that he had walked away from their saloon in Las Vegas—just gave her his interest in it—proved what an idiot he was about finances. And how could he possibly believe it was wrong to kill a dangerous, crazy, drunk bastard like Mike Gordon? Doc did the world a favor when he shot that mad dog down, but she couldn’t make him see that.
She had no reason to stay near the sanatorium after he left, so she sold out and cleared enough to buy a six-bedroom boardinghouse in a silver camp in northern Arizona. She’d gone from silk to calico before, but this time she wasn’t drudging for an Iowa bastard who called himself a foster father but worked her all day and rode her all night. This time, by God, she was on her own and liked it that way.
She divided the six rentals into two twelve-hour shifts. “You don’t need no bed when you’re working,” she told each miner. “I’ll give you a discount to share.” That was a lie but one they fell for, each of them hoping that she was part of the deal. She hired a cook, learned to make plain, cheap meals in quantity, fired the woman, and did the work herself to reduce expenses. “The goddess of parsimony,” Doc called her once, and he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.
Then, he started sending all these telegrams, each one more provoking than the last. Why did he waste money on Western Union when a penny stamp would have sent a whole letter? Was he afraid she would see from his handwriting that he was sick again? Was he trying to trick her into coming to Tombstone so she would nurse him like she did in Dodge? “George Sand was an imbecile,” she’d mutter at night, rereading the stack of messages before she turned down the lamp and went to sleep.
The telegrams finally stopped coming at the end of April. In what appeared to be a final contact, Doc had sent a pair of earrings. Indian turquoise set in Mexican silver. “I thought of your eyes when I saw these,” he wrote, his beautiful copperplate handwriting firm and controlled. “Perhaps you will think of me when you wear them. In the meantime, dum spiro, spero.” That seemed to be the end of it. Which was a relief at first. But as the weeks passed, she began to wonder if he really was sick. Dum spiro, spero: While I breathe, I hope. Was that some veiled reference to his disease?
She was too damn busy to sit and read a newspaper these days. They were just advertisements and bullshit anyway. Still, when a month had passed with nothing further from him, she asked Florence at the grocery store if there’d been anything in the news lately about Doc Holliday.
Learning that Doc was a suspect in a stage robbery back in March confirmed her opinion of journalism. Doc hated dealing faro because it made him feel like a thief to take money from men who didn’t stand a chance of winning a game they didn’t understand. Kate was about to tell Florence, “I know Doc—he’d starve before he’d steal!” But before she could, the man behind her in line piped up.
“Yeah, ole Doc, he’ll shoot you just to see if his gun works. He’s wanted in Las Vegas, too. Killed his wife. Took her up into the mountains and—bang! Shot her right in the head.”
Kate choked a little on this “news” but played along. “That poor woman!” she cried, making her eyes round and serious. “Except . . . I heard Doc Holliday, he always uses a knife when he kills women. How do you know he shot her?”
“I helped bury her,” the man said, proud of this swift invention.
Kate lowered her voice. “I wouldn’t noise that around, mister. They’ll call you accessory to murder and string you up!”
Doc would have thought that was a wonderful story.
IN MAY, she began to think that it would be nice to get away from Globe for a while. She’d certainly earned a rest. Twelve men meant twelve breakfasts, twelve lunch pails packed, and then twelve dinners. Fifteen thousand meals, with all the shopping, cooking, serving, and cleaning that entailed. And then there was the laundry, and all the beds, and making sure the miners settled up with her before they gambled and whored and drank their pay away.
A little trip to Tombstone might be nice. Everybody said it was a real city, not a shit hole like Globe. She could stay with Bessie and James Earp—she’d known them for years professionally and counted them as friends. Florence was tired of working for the son of a bitch who owned the grocery store, and she’d been asking about Kate and her going partners on the boardinghouse. This would be a good time to see how that might work out; Flo could look after the business while Kate was gone.
A few days later, when she’d made all the arrangements, Kate went to Western Union and used one of Doc’s paid-reply forms to send a telegram to Bessie Earp.
ARRIVING BY EVENING STAGE MAY 25 STOP DONT TELL DOC STOP
She knew Bessie would ignore the second part of the message. She knew Doc would be waiting for her at the depot and that he’d treat her like a princess—he always did. She would be haughty, perhaps a little scornful at first. Then she’d relent, and they’d have a few drinks, and the fun would begin. She’d take some cash down with her, too, and let Doc parlay it into something more. Maybe even set up a few poker games for him. It’ll be just like old times, she thought.
And to everyone’s misfortune, she was right.
THERE WAS A LONG LIST OF PEOPLE who’d died abruptly in and around Tombstone during its first three years of existence. When Mária Katarina Harony awoke on May 27, 1881, she did so with an absolute certainty that she would soon be counted among them. This conviction did not come to her from the abstract philosophical assurance of the famous syllogism arising from the premise “All men are mortal.” It arose instead from two objective facts: Someone angry was banging on a door, and the noise was going to kill her.
The need to rid herself of that last shot of whiskey battled with dread of the spasmodic violence that would precede relief, but the mere thought of vomiting was now enough to trigger the act. Rolling onto the side of the bed, she threw up over the edge.
This would be the high point of her day.
I will never drink again, she thought. It was a vow she had made before. This time she meant it.
“Kate! Damn you, open the door!”
She recognized the voice. It was Wyatt Earp’s. And he had just cursed her. Wyatt never cursed.
She tried briefly to open her eyes, but daylight felt like a knife in her skull, and she sank onto the pillow. Ó, Krisztus! she thought. What have I done this time?
“Doc?” she called in a tiny voice. “For pity’s sake, get the door.”
There was no answer.
Out in the hallway two men were exchanging tense, quiet words. A key was fitted into the lock. An instant later, the door was flung open with such force that it slammed against the wall, and there stood Wyatt like an avenging angel, his face twisting when he smelled the puke.
Next thing she knew, he was jerking her upright, not caring when she cried out in pain and fear. “You are trouble,” he said, his voice low and mean. “You’ve always been trouble, but you have really done it this time. Get up and get dressed.”
She was still drunk. Her fingers were clumsy on the buttons, her mind three steps behind what was going on. Glimpses of the past thirty-six hours flickered by.
Champagne, she remembered. She and Doc had started with champagne.
No. Not champagne. They had started with dismay.
She’d given no thought to appearances while running the boardinghouse, working in comfortable cotton dresses, leaving her corsets and silks stored away until the day she packed for Tombstone. Doc had always had an eye for fit and registered the straining fabric around her middle, but if she had waxed, he had waned. They were the same age—not quite thirty—but he was gray and thinner than ever. She had forgotten how bent he had become, his bones weakened by his disease. My God, she’d thought, he’s an old man! And he knew what she was thinking. And yet, within moments, all that was forgotten. There was the quick, murmured banter in French and Latin and Greek: shared amusement at absurdities they saw all around them in that striving, busy, bumptious town. A swirl of hotel staff. The door closing behind them, the bed before them . . . His merry cry, “Not dead yet!” in the laughing, breathless aftermath, and the drowsy ease that followed. Room service, and the first bottle of champagne. And then what? What went wrong this time? Something about her being a walkin’ abacus. “I can see you addin’ it up in your head! It’s my money, darlin’. I’ll spend it as I please.”
Later, he had to go to work, and she went with him to the Alhambra. And then . . . Oh, Jesus. That girl! Kate thought, as Wyatt gripped her arm and propelled her down the hotel stairs. It was about that girl!
Small, dark. Wild curling hair. Flashing eyes, and a great show of “Aren’t I adorable?” The little tramp showed up at Doc’s table, saying something about “I’m always lucky when I play you, Doc,” and Doc said, “Luck has nothin’ to do with it, sugar.” That must have been when the fight began.
“Please,” Kate begged Wyatt when they passed by the hotel bar on their way to the lobby. “Let me have one drink. Just one!”
“Shut up,” Wyatt snapped, pausing at the desk only long enough to tell the clerk, “Collect from Behan. He checked her in. It’s his bill.”
Behan? she thought. Who’s Behan?
The sunlight was catastrophic. Wyatt steered her off the boardwalk and across the crowded street. “You’re hurting my arm!” she cried. “Where are we going?”
“To court. You’re going to take it all back.”
“Take what back? What’s going on?”
The courtroom was already filled when Wyatt marched her up the aisle and sat her down in the front row. A bailiff called, “All rise for Judge Spicer.” Thoroughly frightened now, she looked around, trying to make sense of all this, but her eyes went wide when Doc was brought in. Unshaven. In shirtsleeves. Shackled.
“Goddammit, Behan,” Virgil Earp cried. “Take those things off him! You should have had Luther King in irons, not Doc Holliday!”
“Once bitten, twice shy,” the sheriff said reasonably. “I don’t want another murder suspect escaping.”
Murder suspect? Kate thought. Wait! That’s Behan?
Suddenly the argument over that girl came back to her. Kate knew faro mechanics when she saw them—the sleight of hand, the nudge of bets from one card on the layout to another. Most dealers cheated punters that way, but Doc was feeding money to this little bitch, and Kate demanded to know why. The girl was just a friend, Doc claimed. He helped her out now and then. And if Miss Josephine were more than that, he muttered, Kate had a hell of a nerve expectin’ monogamy from others. And then . . . what happened then? A lot of yelling.
She left the Alhambra, went looking for a way to get back at Doc. There was a saloon just down the street. The bartender there hated Doc’s guts, too, and showed her his crippled hand. Suddenly there was a handsome, half-Irish charmer at her side. Johnny, he said his name was. And he was so sympathetic, keeping her glass filled, asking why she was angry at Doc. When she told him about that little tramp, his eyes went small. “Infidelity is a terrible thing,” he said. Commiseration. More whiskey. They were two jilted lovers, taking comfort in each other’s company, but at some point Johnny started talking about that stagecoach robbery, suggesting things about Doc. None of it made any sense, but she didn’t care. She just kept drinking, agreeing with Johnny about what a louse Doc was, the way Johnny had agreed with her about what a slut Josie was.
“Mary Katherine Harony, approach the bench.”
She was sworn in, shown a piece of paper, asked if that was her signature scrawled on the bottom.
“Yes,” she said, “but I don’t remember signing nothing.”
She was told to be quiet. Her statement was read to the court. Dr. John H. Holliday had planned the Kinnear stagecoach attack. He was a deadly shot. She’d seen him kill dozens of men. He told her he’d killed Budd Philpot and the passenger, both. The Earps had inside information about Wells Fargo shipments and they knew when the strongbox would be full. They were in on the robbery, too, and wore disguises; that’s why Bob Paul didn’t recognize them. She’d seen the disguises in a steamer trunk in Doc’s room. The disguises were made of black rope tied to look like long beards.
That was when people started to laugh.
“I never said none of that!” she cried as the judge banged his gavel. “I don’t know nothing about that robbery! Doc would never steal!” She twisted in her chair. “Judge, please! We had a fight. I was mad at him, that’s all! If I signed that paper, I didn’t know what it said. I was drunk!”
“That, Your Honor,” said Doc’s lawyer, “is the first thing out of this woman’s mouth that my client will not dispute.”
“Doc, please! I didn’t say none of that!” Kate cried, but Doc wouldn’t look at her, his thin, lined face ashen in the harsh morning light. “I’m sorry! Please, Doc! I’m sorry!”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Judge Spicer muttered. “Sheriff Behan, I can’t hold this man on a statement given by an angry, drunken woman. There’s no evidence here.”
Weeping, she barely understood the legal maneuvering that followed.
The sheriff, making a case for setting bail at $5,000: “He’s a suspect in a capital crime, Your Honor.”
Doc’s lawyer, protesting: “Your Honor, my client doesn’t have anything like that kind of money!” Something about “a continuance, if it please the court.”
Virgil Earp shouting something at Johnny Behan. Doc being taken out of the room, irons clinking. Morgan calling: “We’ll raise the money, Doc!” Wyatt and another man, talking to the bailiff.
Spectators, laughing about “black-rope beards” as the room emptied.
The sound of her own sobs, filling the silence that was left.
SHE WAITED FOR DOC in front of the jail on the day he was bailed out, trying again to apologize, to explain. Doc wouldn’t even look at her. Wyatt Earp spoke for him. “Go back to Globe, Kate. And don’t come back.” She tried again at the Alhambra. Morgan Earp stopped her before she could get to Doc’s table. At the back of the room, Doc went on dealing, his eyes on the layout, his face expressionless. She sat outside his boardinghouse next, until his landlady threatened to have her arrested for loitering.
In the end, she went to see James and Bessie Earp, hoping they would intercede, but Bessie was a southerner like Doc, and she saw no way back.
“They laid hands on him, Kate. They put him in irons, and they set his price like he was a field hand. You sold him down the river for a bottle of whiskey.”
“If those charges stick, he’ll hang,” James said.
“In the meantime, he has to live here,” Bessie continued, “among men who are draggin’ his name through shit. He has to swallow their insults and tolerate their jokes—”
“Because if he talks back,” James said, “Behan will throw him in jail again. And if he jumps bail, it’ll bankrupt Wyatt and me, both.”
“Against all that,” Bessie said, “sorry don’t count for much.”
Kate opened her mouth, but there was nothing more to say.
“Go back to Globe, honey,” James advised. “That’ll be best for everyone.”
THE NEXT MORNING, sitting side by side on a bench outside the Oriental, Cochise County sheriff John Harris Behan and Tombstone city councilman Milton Edward Joyce watched Doc Holliday’s woman climb aboard the morning stagecoach and settle herself for the long journey north.
Even at a distance, they could see the marks of prolonged weeping. The swollen eyelids, the puffy face.
“Doc Holliday is a cruel, cold man,” Johnny murmured. “I believe he has broken that poor child’s heart.”
“The dear girl was a gift from Jesus to us both,” Milt said solemnly, “and I’m that sorry to see her go.”
“We had a wonderful evening together,” Johnny confided, straight-faced. “Not that she’d remember it. Christ, but she was drunk!”
Milt smothered a laugh—not very successfully—and for a few moments the two gave themselves up to quiet, elbow-nudging glee as the coach pulled away.
“And now she’s left the wicked Doc Holliday here in Tombstone,” Johnny observed, “hung like a millstone around Wyatt Earp’s neck.”
“God bless her! What’s next, then?” Milt asked cheerily.
Johnny stood and stretched luxuriously before surveying the busy street before him. Mule-drawn ore wagons, delivery vans, saddle horses. Pedestrians hurrying to accomplish as much as they could before the heat of the day set in. “Word is, Wyatt Earp just mortgaged everything he owns to post bail for Doc Holliday.”
Milt stood, too, and came to Johnny’s side. “So we know exactly what his property is worth at current market prices.”
“County taxes ought to be adjusted accordingly,” Johnny said.
“I imagine,” Milt murmured, “it would do no harm if I were to mention that to the city assessor.”
“At your earliest convenience, if you please, Councilman.”
“Shall we go after John Meagher, too?”
Meagher owned the Alhambra, and he’d helped Doc post bail.
“Leave him alone for now,” Johnny said, “but . . . Perhaps the city ought to reconsider the valuation of James Earp’s tavern.”