A Knife in the Heart Read online

“They killed—”

  “I know what happened, Lawless.” He had switched from first name to last. “That’s a name you deserve, Number Three-Nine-Seven-Two. Lawless. So white whiskey runners get four Cherokee boys, in their teens, drunk on their forty-rod they’re peddling. Those boys go to your place, and, yeah, what they did was horrible. Butchery. And being drunk isn’t an excuse for their barbarity. Which is why the Cherokee police arrested them, which is why a Cherokee judge sentenced them, and which is why forty days after your family was murdered, those four kids were hanged in Tahlequah.”

  Lawless’s head dropped.

  Fallon caught his breath, and continued, “But you, Ben Lawless, you couldn’t see that. You didn’t think that was enough, that the four kids who ruined your life, who murdered your family, that they were dead. But you didn’t go after the white men who ran that whiskey into the Cherokee Nation. You let those men go free. Hell, I don’t believe we ever learned who they were. Maybe they wound up in Detroit. Most likely they did. Perhaps they even spent a year or two here in Leavenworth with you. You let the white men go, Ben Lawless. You went after innocent Indians.” Fallon shook his head in disgust. “And, hell, Number Thirty-Nine-Seven-Two, I might have a bit of respect for you had you done it with some sort of honor. Walk in, draw a gun, shoot a man in the head. Hell, shoot a man in the back. That’s one thing. But you poisoned water wells. You poisoned canteens and gourds. You poisoned pies left on a windowsill to cool. You were like a sneak thief, but instead of stealing money or silver, you stole the lives of innocent Cherokee families. And why they didn’t hang you for that, why they made taxpayers keep you alive for decades . . . that’s another thing about our judicial system that I can’t wrap my head around.”

  Fallon moved back to his chair, sat down. “You disgust me, Ben Lawless. I hate your yellow-livered guts. But I’m here for you, boy. I’m here as your protector. You want absolution. Maybe you’ve got it. But you also want respect. From those wearing stripes like yourself. You want to be the big man. Well, from where I sit, I can help you get that. For a price, Ben. For a price. You’ve been in this hellhole long enough to know how things work, Ben Lawless. It’s that old deal. I don’t like it. But I’ve seen it enough in Illinois—in every other dungeon I had to stick my head into. This time, I’m here of my own accord. So I’m playing the game. I know the game. It’s the game we all have to play in pieces of filth like this. We have to deal with filth in places of filth. I’m dealing with you.”

  He quit preaching. His mouth felt like it had been coated with gall. Finding his cup, he brought it quickly across the desk, spilling some, but not caring, and drank greedily. The coffee was cold by then. He was finished. He swallowed what he could, and spat more into the trash can. Then, leaning back in his chair, Fallon waited until Ben Lawless raised his head.

  “Let’s make a deal, Ben,” he said, going back to the first name now. “I let Captain O’Connor spray you with water. So the fresh fish know just how dangerous you are. I keep Bowen Hardin as a nobody. I make things tougher for Indianola Anderson. You reap the profits. You’re the king of Leavenworth till you die. Which, for me, can’t be soon enough. What’s your price?”

  He waited.

  Ben Lawless sat there, a wretched, pale little man, scalped years ago by drunken and foolish Indian boys. Saw his life ruined. Then ruined his own life, and the lives of many innocent Cherokees till a handful of deputy marshals finally brought him to Fort Smith. Fallon could remember watching the jail wagon as it rumbled down Garrison Avenue—and he could remember the cheers. Some of them were for the lawmen. Most had been for Ben Lawless.

  That sickened him, too.

  After what felt like hours, Ben Lawless cleared his throat and made his demand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “I want,” Ben Lawless said, lowering his one eye, and speaking in an arid whisper. “I want to . . . read.”

  Fallon’s mouth opened. He leaned back in his chair and looked at Big Tim O’Connor to make sure he had heard right, but the captain’s face registered as much shock as Fallon’s own must have.

  “You want to . . .” Fallon couldn’t finish.

  “Read,” the little man said. “I know the Good Book from what the preacher man has been tellin’ me. But I want to read it . . . for my own . . . my ownself.” A tear suddenly ran down from the corner of the killer’s dark, cold brown eye.

  “Ma taught me some of my letters back in Tennessee. But . . . I done forget ’em.” He wiped away the tear. “I’d like to be able to read the Good Book before I’m called to Glory. Or sent to the Pit. Whatever. I know I don’t deserve to walk the Streets of Gold. But . . . I’d surely like to be able to read the Bible. Read my own name. Read anything. And write my own name. Before I die.”

  Money . . . a whore . . . whiskey, not the awful, sometimes lethal, brew the prisoners could come up with on their own . . . maybe even just a chance to fish from the banks of the river, or a carriage ride through town. Something like that. But most likely the money, prostitute, or good whiskey. That’s what Fallon expected from a miserable wastrel like Ben Lawless.

  Fallon glanced at the cross the man had carved, and looked again into the red-rimmed eye—the one the drunken teenagers had not carved out with Lawless’s own fork.

  “All right, Ben,” Fallon heard himself say. “Let me see what I can do.” His head turned away from the pitiful prisoner and locked on Big Tim O’Connor.

  The captain stood, moved to the door, and called out for Raymond and Wilson. When the two guards appeared, Fallon rose from his seat. His back felt sweaty, drenched in water, like he had been the victim of the bath treatment from the city fire engine. “Return the inmate to his cell,” Fallon instructed the guards. “His work detail is over for this day. When you have done that, report back to your stations at the work detail. Thank you, men.”

  Ben Lawless rose, without a word, without acknowledgment. He was back as the prisoner, finding his cap, keeping it in his hands until he was outside. His head hung down, that one eye kept trained on the floor, and he marched as though in lockstep with another prisoner, out of the office, and out of the building.

  Fallon sat back down. Tim O’Connor closed the door.

  “I could use a drink,” O’Connor said.

  Fallon whispered an answer. “Sorry, Tim. I’ve been off redeye for years.”

  “You’re a smart man.”

  Fallon laughed. “If I was smart, I’d be looking for a bottle of rye with you.” He leaned back in the chair. “Read.”

  “And write. Ain’t that the damnedest thing?” O’ Connor said, and began searching his pockets for his tobacco.

  Fallon leaned forward. “How many prisoners can read and write, Tim?”

  The guard had the chaw in his hand, was bringing it up to his mouth, but he stopped, and let the hand drop down to his thigh. “I wouldn’t know . . . Hank.”

  Fallon remembered the paper he had taken from the stack on Preston’s desk. He waved it toward O’Connor, then brought it before his eyes. “This is a note, from my predecessor here, a report for . . . well, that doesn’t matter . . . but it says that most inmates released are destined to return to prison.”

  “That’s true.” O’Connor decided it was all right to chew his tobacco, so he bit off a mouthful and slipped the rest into the pocket of his trousers. “We turned one ol’ boy out three weeks ago. Deke Reno. I told him when I shoved him through the gate that I’d keep his cell ready, that he’d be back. And he will. Though I thought he’d be back before now.”

  Fallon barely heard what the big man said. “It goes on to say that because of our location in the West, because most of these inmates did not grow up with all the temptations in the Eastern cities, there is a better chance of rehabilitation of these inmates. That we can do something to prevent them from returning to a life of crime.”

  “That’s from”—O’Connor shifted the chaw to his other cheek—“the warden before you took this job.”

&n
bsp; “Yes.”

  O’Connor rose to bring the spittoon closer. He shook his head when he sank back into the chair. “No offense, Hank, but that son of a strumpet was off his rocker worser than you are.”

  Fallon started tapping just below his lower lip with the fingers on his right hand. O’Connor’s juice made a pinging noise as it hit the rim of the brass cuspidor. “In every prison I was in,” Fallon said, “Joliet, Yuma, Jeff City, and the Walls. Every one. There always was a library.”

  “We got one here, too,” O’Connor told him. “Twelve books, three of them Bibles but one’s for the Mormons, and newspapers when some people donate them after they’ve read them. Subscribe to Harper’s and Frank Leslie’s. But that’s for the guards.” He chuckled. “The guards we got that can read for themselves. We used to keep the Police Gazette, but the warden before the last one stopped that. Said it gave the inmates bad ideas.”

  Fallon stared hard at Big Tim O’Connor.

  The captain wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt, chewed on the tobacco with his molars, and finally said, “I can read pretty good, Warden,” he said. “If that’s bugging you.” He pointed at the desk. “Hand me one of those papers and I’ll prove it to.”

  “I don’t question your literacy, Tim,” Fallon told him. “I was just thinking. All those prisons. We had libraries. But no one ever thought about the inmates who could not read.”

  “We got The Count of Monte Christo by this guy named Dumb Ass.” O’Connor snorted. “Funny name.”

  “Dumas,” Fallon corrected after he chuckled with the captain of the guards. “A Frenchman.” He took in a deep breath and let it out. “And, yes, every prison I’ve been in had that book in its library. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it.”

  “I never read it,” O’Connor said. “The prisoners we got who can read . . . they read it. Says it’s a good story.”

  “It’s about revenge,” Fallon told him. “And escaping from the Bastille.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A prison. In France.”

  “Maybe we should ban it.”

  Fallon laughed. O’Connor spit.

  “It’s a big book,” the captain said after a while. “That’s why I don’t read it. Haven’t read it, I mean. I like the smaller books. The half-dime novels and the dime novels. But I don’t even read them much.”

  Fallon barely heard him.

  “Hank.”

  Three times later, Fallon realized O’Connor was talking to him. “Yes?”

  “You made a bargain with Lawless. How you plan on keeping that?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” He resumed tapping his fingers below his lip.

  “Well.” O’Connor spit into the cuspidor, wiped his lips, and pushed himself out of the chair. “I think I should get back to the building site, make sure no one has lit out for the Indian Nations or Canada. Make sure none of my guards are giving somebody a bath when it ain’t his birthday.” He stood, waiting, hat in his hand, staring, wondering if Fallon had heard him at all.

  Fallon hadn’t. “How big is the library here?” Fallon asked.

  O’Connor thought a moment. “Not big. Your office. Maybe with part of Mr. Preston’s office. Too big a building, though, for as few books and stuff that we got.”

  After scratching his head, O’Connor spit again, and this time removed the plug from his mouth, and dropped it into the spittoon, even though he had barely chewed it. “Are you thinking about . . . turning the library . . . into a . . . school?”

  “I’m considering it,” Fallon answered without hesitation. “But the library wouldn’t work. Prisoners and guards are in there too much. We need a building that doesn’t get much use to serve as a—”

  “School.” O’Connor spit again. “Teaching murderers. . . counterfeiters . . . scum of the earth . . . to read and write.”

  “Some of them,” Fallon said. “Lawless, certainly. Not the killers.”

  “Ben Lawless is a murderer, sir,” O’Connor pointed out.

  “He wasn’t convicted of murder, though. Attempted murder. And running ardent spirits into the Indian Nations. Justice isn’t always justice, you know.”

  “For which he got life with no chance of parole. An extreme sentence.”

  “Which the president of the United States allowed. That was Lawless’s only chance of appeal.”

  “Because a lot of those jurors didn’t care for Cherokees or any Indians.”

  Fallon sighed. “We don’t sentence the men here. We don’t convict them. We don’t try them. We try to rehabilitate them, and that’s where we have failed. And we try to keep those who can’t be rehabilitated away from the public.”

  “Well . . .” O’Connor pulled his cap on and withdrew the tobacco from his pocket. “I’ll be back in the yard, sir. You keep thinking on your dream. But where you gonna get a teacher, Hank? And don’t look at me.”

  Fallon didn’t hear the last part, either, and Big Tim O’Connor left him in the office, closing the door, and hearing Fallon say over and over: “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  When Montgomery Berrien tapped on the door frame, Fallon looked up from the papers scattered across his desk and pushed back his chair, waving in the timid, tiny, bespectacled man, who was wearing the finest suit a man could find in Leavenworth, Kansas.

  “Come in, Monty, come in,” Fallon said, and pulled the handkerchief from his vest pocket to wipe away the ink and pencil marks staining the tips of his fingers. Paperwork left a mark on an administrator. Fallon always preferred trail dust and sweat stains on his hat.

  The little man swallowed and stepped inside, finding the chair Fallon had positioned closest to the desk. He settled into that, cleared his throat, and said, “You wanted to see me, Hank?” He smiled the smile of an incredibly nervous man.

  Only my friends call me Hank flashed through Fallon’s mind, but he would let this slide for the time being.

  After sliding back closer to his desk and shoving the handkerchief inside the pocket, Fallon reached down, picked up one of the papers, and waved it at the little man. He sort of reminded Fallon of Sean MacGregor, only not as corrupt, and smaller in size and frame and mental capacities.

  “Monty,” Fallon said, “I’ve been going over the prison’s books.”

  The little man stopped fidgeting. “I’m the bookkeeper, Hank,” he said, trying to sound stern, but squawking more like a nervous hen.

  “You were the bookkeeper.” Fallon let the paper fall softly back to the stacks on his table. And this Hank stuff was ending now. “And only my friends call me Hank.”

  What little color was in the bookkeeper’s face drained like beer from a tapped keg right after a trail crew hit the saloon. His mouth hung open, and his upper lip quivered, and he tried to say something, but it appeared that Montgomery Berrien had forgotten how to talk.

  “That’s a nice suit you have there, Monty,” Fallon said. “Bloomingdale’s?”

  The man shook his head.

  “I didn’t think so. Tailor made?”

  The head could move up and down, too.

  “Yeah.” Fallon opened the top drawer, found another sheet of paper, but it was yellow, and smaller, and the writing was made in a beautiful cursive, with many of the words in French. The numbers at the bottom were the most important part. “I dropped in to see Jean Baptiste Alphonse Charpentier’s place downtown.” Smiling pleasantly, Fallon waved the receipt. “That’s a lot of name for such a tiny fellow. Charpentier, Couture de la Plus Haute Estime. I don’t know what that really means, but that’s what’s spelled out on this receipt, on his shingle, and in real pretty letters on the plate-glass window of his suit-making shop.” He stopped waving the paper. “You recognize this? It’s his copy. Not yours.”

  The little head’s movement was just perceptible.

  Fallon shook his head and laid the paper on the desk. “When I rode for Judge Parker’s court down in Arkansas and
the Indian Nations, I could have bought twenty suits for what you paid for this one.” His arms folded across his chest. “Course, that was quite a few years ago. I guess prices for suits have gone up since then.”

  Berrien’s head nodded in ready agreement.

  “But not that much.” Fallon found another piece of paper. “Especially not on what the United States government pays you.” He waved this sheet, too. “According to the records I have here.”

  “I came into some money . . .” the petite man tried.

  “Inheritance?”

  He had to think, finally shook his head. “No . . . it was . . .” He thought of something genius. “Gambling.”

  “Poker?” Fallon fired out.

  “Yes. No. No. Horses.”

  Fallon congratulated the bookkeeper and found another paper. He flashed it toward Berrien. “You’ve been betting on horses a long time. According to your bank account.” He smiled. “And who is this Sienna Ginevra Di Genova?”

  Now the face became scarlet. “You have no right.”

  Fallon found another paper. “This is a warrant, Monty. Signed by a federal judge. And from more papers on my desk here, I see that Sienna Ginevra Di Genova is not your wife. That’s an Italian name, isn’t it?” He replaced the warrant with another paper. “Your wife is Marian Berrien. I like the rhyme.”

  Tears welled, then flowed, and in moments, the bookkeeper blubbered in the chair so much that Fallon tossed him the handkerchief he had been using to clean his fingers. He let the man cry. When the sobbing reduced to a sniffling, Fallon pushed his chair back against the wall and propped his boots on the edge of his desk.

  “Monty, embezzlement of a substantial amount of money from a federal institution lands the embezzler in the federal penitentiary for quite a few years.” The loud crying resumed. Fallon added: “With luck, Monty, your cell will be across from Ben Lawless’s or Bowen Hardin’s.”

  The man wailed like a banshee.

  Fallon knew his handkerchief, if Monty Berrien didn’t keep it, would be going into the trashcan. Letting the man sob relentlessly, Fallon stood, crossed his office, and stuck his head out of the doorway. Preston, the clerk, was still enjoying his dinner at the commissary. The doors to the rest of the closest offices remained closed. Fallon shut this one, too, and went back to his chair, letting the man cry for another minute.