Hart the Regulator 9 Read online

  ‘I always thought detectives worked to some kind of plan.’

  ‘You bet! Pick myself up every time I fall down. Other than that, I prefer to take things how they come.’

  ‘An’ Robert MacPhail, you plannin’ to take him?’

  ‘Let’s find him first.’

  ‘But when we do?’

  Fowler shook his head slowly. ‘Persistent bastard, ain’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. When I need to be.’

  ‘All right.’ Fowler made a short chopping gesture with his hand. ‘His mother wants him back, that’s what she’s payin’ for—’

  ‘So you’re goin’ to drag him across a hundred miles of this damned country—’

  ‘Look, you ask a question. At least let me finish tellin’ you what you want to know.’

  ‘Okay, only I don’t see how—’

  ‘I said let me finish!’

  ‘I said okay!’

  Both men stared hard at one another. The livery man hovered in the background, wanting to talk to Fowler about payment but figuring now wasn’t exactly the best time. He moved into one of the stalls and started tossing some hay around. Fowler had another fast shot from his flask, offering it across the doorway to Hart, who refused with a quick shake of the head.

  ‘We find the kid, I try to persuade him, right. Tell him his ma’s missin’ him, she’s worried about him, why don’t he take a couple of weeks out and ride back an’ see her, talk with her. After that what he does is up to him.’

  Hart breathed heavily, shifting his weight. What Fowler said sounded all too reasonable—he just couldn’t see it working out that way.

  ‘You satisfied?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Grudging sort of a bastard, ain’t you?’

  Hart shrugged and started to say something but the detective cut across him. ‘What did you think? We were goin’ to shanghai him and take him back tied down to a mule?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hart murmured.

  ‘No, you don’t!’

  ‘I just don’t see a kid like this stoppin’ to listen while you say all them reasonable things, that’s all.’

  ‘You don’t, huh? An’ that’s all that’s worryin’ you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Fowler began reaching for his bourbon again. ‘What the hell else is there?’

  Hart looked beyond the livery towards the crowded buildings of the small town. ‘Somewhere out there there’s his father.’

  Fowler exhaled slowly, letting his fingers slide away from the sides of the flask. He drew the cigar end from his mouth and dropped it to the ground, grinding down on it with the heel of his boot. ‘Yeah,’ he breathed, the word little more than a grating hiss of stale air. “Yeah. Somewhere.”

  ~*~

  Jordan MacPhail was sitting on the uneven edge of a bed in the back room of a bar less than two hundred yards from the same livery stable. The place was close enough to the water for the lap and turn of the tide to be heard and felt. The floor seemed to shift in the night like on board ship. Jordan winced at the least movement now with his hand, touching the side of his head. A bruise spread across the swelling, brown darkening to purple, and it didn’t matter that he couldn’t see it. Feeling it was bad enough. Jordan caught his breath and bit down into his lower lip and gingerly felt the head of the swelling, an egg-shape that was crowned by an inch-long ridge of scab crusty to the touch.

  He blinked his eyes awake and turned his head and shoulders with difficulty. The mattress sagged at the center and the woman had rolled down into the dip, the thin cotton sheet pulled up over her body so that all he could see was one round shoulder and a mass of tangled dark hair.

  Jordan blinked some more. If he’d wanted to remember her face he wouldn’t have been able. She wasn’t a woman he’d been keen to remember, she certainly wasn’t the woman who was the cause of the lump on his head—all she had been was the woman who’d rolled his face out of the sawdust on the bar floor and wiped the blood away from his face, finally helped him to stand up and thrown his arm over her shoulder so that she could drag him, with difficulty, to the back room where she slept. And worked. Except that this night she wasn’t working. She was being human, she was feeling sorry for some feller she’d only seen a few times and whose face and body set her in mind of a man she might have got married to once ... if that hadn’t been in a dream.

  Now she slept on, dreaming other dreams, as Jordan MacPhail found his way to the small wash stand and, cursing softly, poured cold water into the bowl from the cracked jug and, scooped a handful of drowned flies from the surface before splashing the water up into his face as gently as possible.

  Behind him the woman stirred and he saw now that her arm was not big but big and fat, that she was fat all over, the sag of her breasts outlined beneath the sheet, the roundness where her hips were somewhere hidden.

  He wanted some coffee to break the pain in his head and clear the taste of cheap, warm beer from his mouth. He felt in his pants pocket and was surprised to find the few bills and coins he had left were still there. Quickly, the woman moving again, he looked around the small room, searching for any money she might have hidden. All he found was a twenty-cent piece, which he shook his head at and left where it was.

  Jordan winced again, the sudden movement of his head a mistake.

  He rested one hand on the head of the bed and tried to drag his thoughts together. The woman he’d been propositioning, the wrong woman, or rather the right woman at the wrong time, she’d been slim and pretty and in the light from the kerosene lamp she’d even been young. She’d played along with him for half an hour or more before the game had started and watched from time to time as he lost more money than he won. When the game broke up, Jordan had made a few suggestions and she’d laughed and told him he was one hell of a feller and then the barkeep had swung some kind of club at his head and he’d gone down and thought for a few seconds about getting back up but the idea never really had one leg, never mind two. He recalled thinking, as he drifted back into unconsciousness, never to try and make out with a bartender’s lady again: not when they were in the same bar.

  He’d woken up in the small hours to the clamor of gulls and the warmth of a strange woman’s back. Woken and laid there thinking about how Robert would be back at the place on the water, waiting. Hell, no, he’d be fast asleep. Wouldn’t even know he hadn’t come back. And so what if he did? Did he figure he was going to change his life, coming out of the blue the way he had, some strange kid he’d never seen for thirteen years? Walking up to him after tagging him around town for the best part of a day. Right up to him and coming out with it straight: I’m your boy. I’m your son, Robert.

  Could have been lying. Could’ve been anyone. Except for the cold shiver that ran the length of Jordan’s back and over his shoulders, down into his fingers till they were gripping ice. For seconds his legs refused to move, even to feel.

  ‘I’m your boy. I’m your son, Robert.’

  It had taken a long time for Jordan to say anything. He’d stood there and stared at him, tall for a kid of – what the hell age would he be? – but so skinny you could lose him in a high breeze. Looked as if he hadn’t eaten anything but grits for weeks. That face, though. Sure was goin’ to be a good-lookin’ bastard, that was for certain. Good-lookin’ bastard just like his old man.

  ‘C’mon. Robert,’ he said finally, clapping an arm round the boy’s shoulders and turning him. ‘Let’s go get us a beer. I guess we got us somethin’ to celebrate.’

  He bought a couple of beers and watched as Robert got through a plate of stew without even seeming to take breath. He did near the same with some deep-dish apple pie, second helpings as well. Jordan shook his head and sank his beer and took the kid out to the place he was using as a base -just for a few days, just while I look around and put a few things together—which was a disused boathouse reached by means of a long curving walkway that teetered out over the water.

  Jordan dragged aw
ay one of the two old mattresses he’d optimistically bought and pulled it over by the opposite wall.

  ‘There. Now you got a bed. Roof over your head as well.’ He made a little mocking laugh. ‘Home from home, boy. Reg’lar home from home.’

  ~*~

  Robert had been awake since before dawn. The smell of the ocean, the sounds of the birds and the sense of movement beneath the boards had rocked him out of sleep and woken him to the hardness of his mattress and his loneliness in the room.

  He lay there for a few moments, lingering over the realization that he had found his father. Not simply found him, but been accepted by him. There they were, living together, father and son.

  Except that his father wasn’t there. Not at the moment.

  Robert thought that perhaps his father had woken even earlier and was somewhere outside, perhaps walking along the edge of the water, fishing for their breakfast. The air was cold and the light was beginning to spin out around the horizon. Robert shivered in this thin shirt and realized that his father had not been back. So what? A grown man—why shouldn’t he be having fun? Likely too worried about his son’s reaction to bring a woman back home. Robert laughed: maybe in time they’d both bring their women home together, throw the mattresses back together and have one whale of a time!

  Mist grew up the legs supporting the walkway like gray ivy. Robert hurried back inside the boathouse and threw one of his father’s coats round his shoulders. His eye caught a coffee pot standing near a small stove. He would make his father coffee for breakfast and see the look of surprise and pleasure on his face when he got home.

  What seemed hours later there was a lot of movement along the waterfront and the sun was warm now on the boy’s back. He’d drunk the contents of the first pot of coffee and a second had become cold. Fear that his father had run out on him was only knocked aside by the fact that so many of his things were still inside the boathouse.

  Robert’s mind sank lower and lower as he waited, thinking of what his mother had said to him about his father’s accident, trying to figure out why she had lied. Why she hadn’t wanted to see him again. Why his father had been content to stay away, make no apparent effort to see him. If he had not run off and begun searching on the basis of a half-heard rumor, they would never have met.

  When the boy had almost given up hope, he heard steps at the far end of the spidery walkway and turned to see his father approaching, one hand holding a bag over his shoulder, lips pursed together as he shrilly whistled.

  ‘Robert!’

  Robert ignored the greeting, stared at his father accusingly.

  ‘You had breakfast?’ Jordan said, choosing to ignore the look and going on past towards the entrance to the boat house. ‘Bought a few things.’

  He drew bacon and flour and eggs and a fresh-baked loaf of bread from the bag and set them on the square table someone had thrown away under the stilts of the walkway and which he washed down and dragged up—the same way he’d got hold of most of the possessions in the place.

  ‘I said: you had your breakfast?’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Robert shook his head. He was staring at the swelling and the dark bruise back past his father’s right eye. ‘What in hell’s name happened to you?’

  Jordan touched the scab and laughed. ‘That’s a tale, son! That sure is a tale. Wait while I cook up some grub here an’ maybe I’ll tell it you. Maybe I’ll tell you a mess of things.’

  He turned away, reaching for the blackened pan. That’s what it’ll be, he was thinking, so long as I cut it close to the truth—a mess of things.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Since arriving in Monterey Jordan MacPhail hadn’t kept his attentions to the girl of a barkeep in a waterfront bar. Better for him if he had. That way the only trouble that would have come his way would have been a two-day headache, a six-day bruise and a dent in a not inconsiderable ego.

  But Jordan had used his charm and looks on women for so long, it was automatic. Except for the fact that he’d never made a woman get out on the streets or into a cathouse on his behalf, he was as close to being a pimp as you can get. Even when he was married to Lydia MacPhail and her gold, he was close to being a pimp. Times he collected the money she deposited in his account at the bank he was as close as a man can be.

  The money was never enough on account of Jordan liked to gamble but he wasn’t very good at it, didn’t even come out a winner when he was using his own marked deck. So Lydia’s money paid his bills and let him hold his head up when he walked over to a poker game and asked to sit in.

  Another woman’s money and other men’s women—that was pretty much Jordan’s life.

  One night in Monterey he’d had more luck than usual at five card stud and an hour of blackjack had confirmed that things were swinging his way at last. Not wanting to miss out while he had the chance, Jordan asked where he could find the biggest game in town and was pointed in the direction of the Spanish Star.

  The Star was a gambling place and dance hall that swung out over the ocean at the northernmost edge of town. Lamps hung outside, shifting a little in the wind that slid up off the ocean, and music with a Mexican tinge drifted through the low, white fog along the boardwalk.

  The Spanish Star was owned by a Mexican named Luis Aragon and if it had been the only property he owned, he would still have been a wealthy man. Luis took a twenty per cent rake-off from all the tables and the wheel, clipped twenty-five per cent of the bar takings, twenty-five per cent of the girls and he made sure all the liquor that was sold there was stuff he’d freighted in himself.

  That would have made Luis Aragon rich.

  The other three smaller saloons he owned, the whorehouse he was part-owner of, the thirteen fishing boats and the wine import-export firm he ran made him richer.

  Velma Moriarty made him happy. She was twenty-six years old, weighed just enough to move the scales at all, and was a couple of inches taller than average. She got her temper from her Irish father and her round and dark good looks from her Greek mother. When she first met Luis she was working at the whorehouse he owned half of and he almost failed to notice her. Someone pointed out to Velma who the man with the white suit and the dark moustache was and she got close enough to spill a glass of cheap wine in his lap and make it look like it was his fault.

  Velma fluttered her eyelids some and wiped Luis down, not letting that opportunity go to waste for a moment. Her hands sent messages up Luis’ spine that a straw man would have found hard to ignore.

  ‘What was in your glass?’ he asked, struggling to keep calm.

  ‘Champagne,’ she said, letting the tip of her tongue rest wetly on the center of her bottom lip for longer than was strictly necessary.

  Luis Aragon smiled and ordered a bottle of champagne. He knew that what she’d been drinking had been ordinary white wine, knew that she had arranged to bump into him on purpose. He thought she had a lot of spunk for a three-dollar whore … and his body wasn’t forgetting the rubbing down she’d given it.

  They sat and talked for hours until the band had stopped playing and then Luis had her driven in his carriage back to the Spanish Star where the music went on until the dawn.

  Before the musicians had broken off to eat breakfast, Luis had told Velma she wasn’t turning any more three-dollar tricks, she wasn’t wasting herself on any other men, she was going to be his mistress.

  Velma sat back and surveyed the fifty-year-old paunchy man with thinning hair who now had wine stains on the jacket of his white suit and said that suited her fine.

  So it did until Jordan MacPhail chanced to come to the Star looking for a big game of stud and she started feeling a little itch somewhere she hadn’t felt it for some time.

  Jordan lost most of the money he’d won earlier but when he saw the amount of attention that thin good-looking girl was giving him he reckoned his luck hadn’t run out on him at all.

  If he’d seen Luis Aragon spying on the two of them round back of the place that night, he might have t
hought different. Instead, he soothed Velma’s itch for a while and kissed her softly on the mouth before slipping back to his houseboat and promising to come calling again.

  Time passed like time does and Jordan never got to go back to the Spanish Star and if he had he might not have recognized Velma Moriarty on account of the cut that Luis had razored down the center of her face. In any case, Velma didn’t step out in public that much anymore.

  Then Robert arrived and moved in with Jordan and if he had any lingering memories of a half-way exciting fifteen minutes pushed up against the back of a building with music throbbing through the wall, they soon slipped away.

  Not so for Luis. He’d needed to deal with Velma himself, show her who was boss in his own way, but the cheap gambler she’d betrayed him with, he wasn’t worth taking risks over. Not in person. Luis was patient enough to send for two men who would deal with the gambler just like they were sweeping up horse shit from the middle of Main Street.

  ‘Sure I seen him around.’ The dealer leaned back in his chair, angling his head round towards Fowler while never taking his eyes off the table. ‘He comes in every coupla days, talks a lot, looks real handsome till he sits down and starts playin’ the cards.”

  The dealer flicked two cards down and with absolute precision against the stack of coins opposite; he gave one new card to the next player in line, then two, then three, took one himself. The deck touched the surface of the table with a soft slap.

  ‘He ain’t as good as he thinks he is. He ain’t bad ... but he ain’t good. You understand me?’

  Fowler grunted: he understood.

  ‘And …’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If he could stop his eyes wanderin’ off the game an’ on to every woman that comes by, he might be a sight better.’ The dealer winked without seeming to move the muscles on his face. ‘You understand me?’

  ~*~

  Wes Hart was sitting on a stool at the end of the downstairs bar at the Spanish Star. He was nursing a glass of beer and trying to hold the barman’s attention while other, thirstier, customers called their orders and tapped coins on the brittle counter top.