Chapter Five

The Schuylkill County Coroner’s wagon was sitting in front of Maggie’s gate and as they approached—Liam with his face as black as thunder, his hands stuffed in his pockets and his chin sunk on his chest, Barlow appraising him out of the corner of his eye. Before they reached him, the driver flicked his horses’ flanks with his reins and the wagon moved towards them, clanking and squeaking.

Liam couldn’t bear watching it go. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut as hard as he could and after a moment a couple of tears ran down his cheeks as the wagon moved past. Abruptly, he opened his eyes wide and turned on Barlow in a fury:

“What the hell do you mean, Maggie was an Eye?”

Inspector Barlow took Liam by the shoulder and gave him a little shake.

“Easy, lad,” he said in a kindly voice. “Back in the city you may be the King of the Silk-Stocking Cracksmen and the flyest bird in Mulberry Bend but down here in Henderson’s Patch, after six months out of the swim, you’re about as fly as a great big lump of coal.”

“You can skip the poetry,” Liam grated. “Just answer my question.”

“Let’s start with this,” Barlow said, “like it or not you’re an Eye yourself.”

For a moment it looked like the Inspector might have gone too far—Liam’s face turned absolutely white, then red as a beet, then Liam growled low in his throat and moved towards Barlow with a look that made the older man raise both hands like a copper stopping traffic:

“Whoa there, Sonny Jim,” Barlow said sharply, “put your brain back in charge!” Liam halted, still mad but listening, and Barlow continued: “You’re down here working as an agent for Mr. Pilkington, aren’t you?”

Liam had figured that Barlow knew all about him, but hearing it said out loud was like a faceful of cold water; he looked around sharply, but thank God nobody was near enough to have heard it. Barlow shook his head exasperatedly:

“Don’t be a jackass, McCool! You think I’d give you away to the Mollies and see six months’ good work wasted and you with a bullet in your brain? I’m just trying to give you some idea which end is up, and I mean why working for the Old Man, for Mr. P., is no different from working for Stanton himself!”

Despite Liam’s ominous glare Barlow moved closer and lowered his voice: “I know you were nabbed trying to break into the safe at the Union Square office of Pilkington’s International Detective Agency. Doing a favor for a pal, sez you, but still Breaking & Entering any way you slice it. And I know you were sent to Sing Sing to do a five spot for B & E, from where Mr. Pilkington got you out on his own personal say-so, so’s you could join the Mollies and blow the gaff if they tried to stop the hangings. The only thing I don’t know is just why he picked on you out of all the fly birds that’s stuffed in the Big House …”

Barlow raised his eyebrows expectantly, letting Liam know it was his turn to tell what he knew. After a moment Liam shrugged and made a wry face:

“You can put that down to your Boss, old-timer—and I mean dear old Eddie Stanton as runs the Federal Department of Public Safety, not some hick that runs the Coal and Iron coppers. Last I heard, old Mr. Pilkington’s boy Willie was the big cheese in the DPS’s Secret Service.”

“So they say,” Barlow said, looking thoughtful. “Don’t stop now, you’ve got my attention.”

“Well, the thing is, Willie Pilkington and me happen to go back a long ways.” Liam laughed without much humor: “Back in ’63 I had a sudden urgent need to leave the city, and anyway—I was going to be fourteen pretty soon and like the fella says, I wanted to See The Elephant. Willie on the other hand, didn’t much care to do his Army service, thank you—as I recall, his exact words were: ‘I have other priorities.’ So I took his $300 and ended up on Little Round Top charging the 15^th Alabama with nothing but my pig-sticker.”

The 20^th Maine’s bayonet charge was famous enough to send both men into a moment of remembrance. Then Barlow shook his head:

“I guess you Saw The Elephant.”

“Yep. And the India Rubber Man and the Fat Lady into the bargain.”

“Funny thing, though,” Barlow said. “I heard that at the time, Willie Pilkington was all broken up and tragical because the doctors had told him he had a heart murmur that would keep him from serving in the war.”

“Is that so?” Liam said. “Well, I heard there’s a Tooth Fairy that comes to good little children at night and puts a penny under their pillows.”

Barlow nodded slowly, thinking it over. “You’re a smart lad, McCool, so I expect I don’t have to beat this dead horse too hard. You know that Daddy Pilkington, Old Mr. P., ran the spy service against the Confederacy when Stanton was Secretary of War. So when Mr. P. needed an ancient moss-back that looked like a C & I inspector to see how his operation was doing down here, he just got on the voicewire to his pal Eddie in Washington and borrowed me from the Secret Service.”

He cocked his head for a moment and grinned sardonically at Liam. “And likewise, when Franklin Gowen called the Old Man to say he’d heard rumors the Mollies were going to make sure the hangings never happened, Mr. P. decided he needed someone dependable who looked like a right young thug to go undercover with the other young thugs so he got on the voicewire to Son Willie, who obligingly came up with his old comrade-in-arms Liam McCool.”

Liam folded his arms on his chest and gave Barlow a long-suffering look: “Are we through yet, Inspector?”

Barlow just grinned and shook his head. “I’m not sure the penny’s dropped yet, young McCool, not to where you really get it that you’re working for Secretary Stanon just like me. That little bulletin from Frank Gowen set Eddie Stanton to thinking. What if all this worker unrest and the hangings of the Iroquois seditionists and the Molly Magees and all the rest of it has put a dent in the Public Safety? So just to be safe, Secretary Stanton took the hint and put all his Eyes on alert in case the Little Russians decided to take advantage and send their airships across the Mississippi, or the Communist Frenchies in Mexico took a notion to visit their comrades in Florida with troops and gunboats. It’s all wheels within wheels, young fella, wheels within wheels within wheels …” he paused dramatically, “and these are dangerous times and anybody that’s called on is going to end up doing their duty with the Department of Public Safety, like it or not.”

Liam made a face. “OK, that’s what you say makes me an Eye. But how about Maggie?”

“She had a little trouble once, too,” Barlow said, “something she needed to make amends for. It was back in her New York days, something to do with the labor unions. Now, you know the DPS doesn’t have a very high opinion of unions …” he spread his hands and left Liam to fill in the blanks.

Liam shook his head tiredly and pulled open the gate into Maggie’s front yard.

“Let’s go,” he said. “That’s about all of that I can stomach right now.”

The Coal & Iron bluecoat standing at Maggie’s front door threw Inspector Barlow a salute as he approached and stepped aside as Barlow and Liam climbed the front steps.

“Everything OK?” Barlow asked. “No snoops? No gawkers?”

The man grinned. “Some, sir, ’specially when the Coroner’s van showed up. But I just mentioned as how there was lots of Spring vacancies in the Pottsville clink and they cleared out spry-like.”

“Well done, Billy. You keep a weather eye out, now, and I’ll see to it somebody relieves you for lunch.”

The guard touched the peak of his uniform cap and opened the door for them. Liam made a face as he saw the chaos of muddy footprints in the hallway:

“Maggie would have killed you if she saw that mess.”

He looked down the hallway that ran past the front parlor to the dividing door, the one that Maggie had always kept firmly locked. It was cracked open now, an inch or two of light showing in the gap.

“Did they run that stampede through the back, too?”

They walked down the hall with Barlow in front. As he reached the door to Maggie’s quarters he halted for a moment with his hand on the knob and gave Liam another reproving look:

“Billy’s no thinking-machine, but he got here in time to keep everybody away from Miss O’Shea’s personal quarters till I arrived. Except the Coroner, of course.”

He opened the door the rest of the way and went on into Maggie’s parlor, Liam following with his feet dragging.

The curtains had were wide open now and the room was flooded with light, brighter than he had ever seen it—somehow it put a distance between Liam and what had happened here, and he felt a welcome sense of relief.

Barlow gestured towards the spreading patch of blood on the carpet, dried black now.

“You all right to talk about it?”

“Depends. What is it you want to talk about?”

“Miss O’Shea came aboard as an auxiliary back in ’73 but we hadn’t asked her to do much until the Mollies started terrorizing the coalfields. That was when we decided to ask Mr. P. to put McPherson in as a spy with Boylan’s lodge and we sent Miss O’Shea down to Henderson’s Patch to open this boarding house and give McPherson a safe place to use as a post office. Once he broke the case and we rounded up the terrorists his life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel around here so we pulled him out—but we left Miss O’Shea behind to keep an eye on things.”

Liam squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead hard with his fingertips. It seemed like Barlow had driven every word in through the top of his head with a sledgehammer and Liam was beginning to feel dangerously like knocking the old man down and kicking him till he shut up. Barlow nodded sympathetically:

“I know all that is making you pretty sore, but nobody knows better than you that the DPS and our helpers like Mr. Pilkington don’t offer any choices about where we send you and what we need you to do. On the bright side, though, we don’t usually interfere with an auxiliary’s private life and we didn’t with Miss O’Shea’s either. Of course we kept a bit of an Eye on her …” Barlow smiled blandly. “No pun intended.”

“Get … to … the … point,” Liam said through gritted teeth.

“I’m just saying that once I had a good look around the scene of the crime I was pretty sure the murder didn’t have anything to do with politics. That’s why I wanted to take a good look at you since you were Miss O’Shea’s current sweetheart. Now I’m just as sure it was somebody else, someone she’d thrown aside but who was still sweet on her.”

Liam examined the Inspector thoughtfully; maybe he wouldn’t kick the old bastard’s slats in after all:

“How do you figure it?”

“I noticed when I turned her over that the way the blood had stained her gown the fabric must have been pushed up from below and pulled down at the top after she was shot and the blood was pooling. Was it you that straightened it out? I like to know these things if I can find them out.”

Liam gave him a wry smile. “Why don’t you just ask me right out, was I here? Yes I was here, dammit, I came calling and found Maggie like that.” He hung up for a moment on the memory, then pushed it away and continued: “I don’t know what the lousy rat was up to, doing that with her gown; maybe just making her look like a bad woman, somebody that was asking to be violated. But Maggie … Maggie would have really hated having any stranger see her like that.”

Barlow nodded. “I’m thinking the murderer had a real grudge against her.” He gestured towards the bloody footprints leading back through the door to the hall. “I followed those out to the backyard, and I’d be willing to bet the second set I saw going around next to them was yours.” A small smile: “Do I need to have you stand in them so I can make sure?”

Liam shook his head: he hadn’t been wrong, the old boy was sharp.

“I pondered on the footprints all the way through half a bottle of bad rye, I expect even Billy could have put it together sooner or later. It had to be somebody dressed up for a visit, somebody that knew Maggie well enough to know you had to come in through the back if you were calling on her because the front way was for boarders, and somebody that surely didn’t want anybody seeing him coming or going. And he either had a copy of the key, or she let him in once he said who he was.” He screwed up his face as if the words had tasted bad.

“Which you figured because …?”

Liam shrugged. “She kept the place locked up tight, ever since some drunks bothered her a while back.”

“I guess she must have let him in,” Barlow said carefully, his eyes drifting towards a tabouret behind the desk. On it sat a bottle of French brandy with a few fingers out of it and two empty glasses. Liam made a face.

“Yeah,” he said, “I saw that last night. I hate hard liquor and Maggie never took more than a sip of anything. Must have been some she used to keep for the rat that killed her.” His voice hardened. “But get this, Barlow, I don’t give a damn about any of that, what she did with some other bird ‘once upon a time.’ Both of us had been around plenty on our own, but once the two of us got together we started a whole new page.”

Barlow let it drop. “You’ve got a mighty sharp eye for details, Mr. McCool. Better than most coppers.”

Liam shrugged. “Comes in handy sometimes.”

“I expect,” Barlow said drily. He looked around the room. “Well, young McCool, tell me what else your cracksman’s eye caught, maybe you can help me lay my hands on this villain.

Liam looked slowly around the room, registering the changes.

“I see you found the bullet. I might as well tell you it was me that gave Maggie the gun it was fired out of, a nickel-plated Webley Bulldog in .45 caliber.”

“Was it you notched the bullets?”

“You don’t suppose she knew how, do you? I expect she went for the gun when he tried to go further than she wanted him to. Then he managed to turn it around on her when they wrestled for it. The bastard probably took a shine to that nice nickel finish and just dropped it in his pocket. But I’ll tell you one thing—he had to be plenty strong to beat Maggie wrestling. When she was mad she could coldcock a mule if she took a notion to.”

Barlow nodded. “I was figuring he had some weight on him from the depth of his footprints. Small feet, wearing those pointy-toed opera shoes, but going by the average height to-distance-between-footprints ratio he shouldn’t be any shorter than you. For a man of normal height to make that deep a print he must be carrying some heft around on those little tootsies. You notice anything else?”

Liam hesitated: “You’d find it sooner or later, but you might as well know about it now.”

He walked over to where he’d looked under the carpet the night before, knelt down and turned the rug back again. Then he took up the floorboard and gestured to the empty Mason Jars.

“When the Panic started in ’73 Maggie lost every penny she had in the Fourth National crash—that’s probably why she ended up working for you people. Anyway, this is how she did her banking after that.”

Barlow squatted down next to Liam and examined the cache minutely. “Looks like our friend made a withdrawal before he left. Practical fellow, this murderer—waste not, want not.”

Liam gave him a hard little smile: “I’m just hoping he hung onto something that I’ll recognize when I run into him; I expect he did—somebody that greedy probably still has his first dime.” He stood up, dusted off his knees and looked around the room. “That’s about it as far as I know,” he added. “Except maybe the tickets, I didn’t check that before.”

He went over to Maggie’s desk and pulled open the middle drawer. He searched carefully, examining envelopes and papers tied up with lengths of ribbon, finally running out of patience and turning the contents out onto the desktop so he could rummage freely. At last he came up with a brown paper envelope that had “R. R./Frisco” written across it in bold letters. Its ribbon had been removed and stuffed inside, but otherwise it was empty.

“Damnation,” Liam muttered. “Besides my pistol and our savings that thieving skunk took the tickets Maggie got us for the Trans-Little Russia Railroad to San Francisco. First class, I guess that’ll be a pretty penny when he asks for a refund.”

“Anything else?” Barlow was peering at him expectantly, as if he were waiting for Liam to notice something he’d missed.

“Wait a minute …” Liam pulled out one drawer after another and searched through them feverishly, irritated that he’d forgotten something that important. Finally he gave up and slammed the drawers back into the desk, glaring at Barlow as if all this misery were his fault.

“Her diary,” Liam said. “Maggie wouldn’t even let me touch it, but she’d always say that one day it might be the saving of us. Now what in the name of the Devil himself did that murdering swine want with Maggie’s diary?”

Shaking his head angrily Liam turned and headed for the door.

“Hang on a minute,” Barlow called after him.

“What?” Liam was tired of being careful with the old pest. “I haven’t got time to stand around holding hands, I need to get my life moving again.”

“I just wanted to ask what you know about Miss O’Shea’s boarders. Bound to be more than I do.”

Liam rolled his eyes but turned back. He pointed overhead. “Directly upstairs, that’s Arthur Morrison, the accountant at Henderson Anthracite. He’s a milksop, wouldn’t say boo to a goose, let alone do murder. The front rooms on this floor, that’s the chief engineer at Henderson’s, Hiram Kreutzer. He’s waiting for his wife to bring the kiddies so they can buy a house. In between times he’s practicing for sainthood except for the occasional snort of gin, so I’d count him out. The upstairs front now, that’s Lukas—looks like the Missing Link, talks like a professor and dresses like a fashion plate. But if you want hard facts …” Liam shrugged: “People know about as much about Lukas as they do about the Grand Cham of Tartary. Last thing Maggie said about him was he was off to New York … I think she said he was interviewing somebody for some big book he’s writing. As far as I know, he was supposed to be back next week …” He spread his hands: “That’s all.”

Barlow was plunged into thought, eyes narrowed and lips working as if he were chewing on a persimmon. Finally he nodded.

“What would you say if I told you it looks like this Lukas is gone for good?”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I mean scrammed, cleared out, absquatulated.”

Liam was taken aback. “He took everything with him?”

“I haven’t had time yet to go through it with a finetooth comb, but if he left anything behind the mice must have carried it off.”

“That’s too many for me,” Liam said, “I’m pretty sure Maggie didn’t know anything about him leaving.”

Barlow shrugged. “No telling just when it happened, but it had to be either him or somebody else that got his stuff together, so it must have been when Miss O’Shea wasn’t around.”

“She goes … she went around every morning with the cook, shopping for stuff for dinner and the next day’s breakfast, I guess it could have been then—Morrison and Kreutzer would both be out of the house at work. But why would Lukas have cleared out like that unless …?”

Barlow nodded. “… it was him that killed her. It’s a possibility.”

Liam’s impatience had vanished, replaced by a kind of hungry, predatory focus intense enough to make Barlow glad he wasn’t the prey.

“OK if I have a look?”

“Why not? Come on, I’ll keep you company.”

The door to Lukas’ suite was standing open and Liam could see from the hall that the place had been stripped. Still, you never knew. He and Barlow entered and started turning the place upside-down: mattress picked up, pictures lifted off their hooks, sofa pillows thrown on the floor, rugs rolled up and the floorboards tapped for hiding places, closets opened and scoured, wardrobes pulled away from the wall; Barlow even stuck his arm up the chimney and got nothing more for his pains than a sleeve-full of soot.

Liam stood there looking around the room for a moment, then saw where Barlow had pulled all the drawers out of a big bureau and grinned:

“You’d make a poor sort of thief,” he said, pulling the drawers out the rest of the way, turning them upside down and stacking them on the floor. Then, as he started the right-hand set of drawers, he hit pay-dirt:

“Well, well, well,” he muttered. A big white envelope was held against the bottom of the drawer with sticking-plaster and Liam ripped it free impatiently. The first thing he came up with made him sit down on the bed as if the wind had been knocked out of him. It was a photograph taken at the Centennial Exposition in Philly, a picture of Maggie and Lukas all lovey-dovey and grinning at the camera like a couple of idiots. Liam stared at it with such a stricken expression that Barlow left him alone for a moment or two.

Finally he pulled himself together, handed the picture to Barlow and turned the envelope upside down so that the contents fell out onto the mattress. Some of them seemed to be love letters from Maggie to Lukas, and these Liam pushed away to one side. The only remaining item was a pamphlet with a pink cover printed in Cyrillic letters: Динамит—Лекарство OT от Капитализма [Dinamit—Lekarstvo ot Kapitalizma]. Underneath the Cyrillic words were English ones: “Tipografia of The People’s Will. Springfield, Illinois Guberniia, 1876.” Barlow peered at it over Liam’s shoulder:

“Looks like Russian,” he said. “Can you read that?”

Liam nodded and started to answer, then caught himself and stared at Barlow with a quirky little smile.

“Whoa, old man, not so fast!”

Barlow frowned: “What’s your game, McCool?”

“No game, just time for a little quid pro quo.”

“Uh huh. And what would that be?”

“You tell me everything Pilkington said when he briefed you on coming down to Henderson’s Patch, and I mean everything. Treat me square and I’ll tell you what the pamphlet’s about. Otherwise you can wait till you get back to Washington and give it to one of the DPS bright boys.”

Barlow pursed his lips and stared at Liam as he chewed on that; after several long moments Liam fancied he could about hear the gears grinding in the old boy’s bean.

Liam finally had to laugh. “I knew a fellow once could hypnotize chickens putting his finger on their beak,” he said. “They looked just about like you do now when he got finished with them.”

Barlow snorted irritably. “Sure I’ll tell you. It’s no big secret—he said your job’s done here now. Thanks to you we’re ready to put the collar on the lads that mean to blow up the prison yard Monday. Your orders are to check in with McPherson in Pottsville and then report back to Pilkington HQ on Union Square. And that’s supposed to happen toot sweet, no dilly-dallying.”

“That’s it? That’s everything?” Liam’s look was as black as a thundercloud. “I’m supposed to ‘report to headquarters’?”

Barlow seemed a bit taken aback. “What’s the problem with that? That’s what he said.”

“I’ll tell you what the problem is! Old Pilkington told me at the beginning that when this job was done, we were quits. He’d tell the New York cops to tear up their papers on me and I was free as a bird.”

Barlow spread his hands. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is what he told me: you check in with McPherson, then you report back to HQ.”

“And what about my Gran? Pilkington sicced the coppers on her for running a policy bank, then he said they’d hold up the arrest warrant till I had done this one little job for him. If I did it right, he said, he’d make sure the court voided it. What about that then, are they still hanging a sword over my grandma’s head?”

Barlow shook his head helplessly. “Like I said, all I know is what he told me.”

“Damn that old twister anyway! We had a deal.”

Liam turned away abruptly and headed for the door.

“Hold on!” Barlow said sharply. “We had a deal too, and I did my part.”

Liam made a face, picked up the pamphlet and read aloud: “‘Dynamite—The Cure for Capitalism’”

Barlow was riveted. “You don’t say?”

Liam flipped the booklet open at random and translated out loud: “Death to the bourgeois! Always, wherever he may be, he will be overtaken by an anarchist’s bomb or bullet.” He snorted and threw the pamphlet aside, on top of the love letters. “What a pack of morons! Sounds like Stanton’s sermonizing about national security turned inside out, you people and these evil crackpots deserve each other.”

He threw the pamphlet back on the bed, spun on his heel and headed out the door.

“Hey!” yelled Barlow. “Where do you think you’re going?”

His only answer was the sound of Liam’s heels clattering down the stairs.