A Knife in the Heart Read online

  “Is it a riot?” Preston asked.

  “My God, we’ll all be killed,” sighed the bookkeeper, Montgomery Berrien.

  “It’s not coming from here,” Fallon said, and stepped back from the window. The whistles were too faint, and the bell sounded like it came from the fire engine at the kiln. “It’s from the new construction site.”

  He stepped to the filing cabinet, opened the top drawer, and pulled out the top-break Schofield .45. He broke it open and found the box of cartridges nearby. He pushed in five shells, keeping the chamber underneath the hammer empty, and shoved the heavy revolver into the front of his trousers. Then he grabbed his hat and pushed past the two prison employees. “Wait here,” he told them, and moved for the stairs.

  * * *

  Citizens, ne’er-do-wells, even two school-age boys playing hooky crowded behind the barricade manned by several guards as Fallon stepped through the cell block construction site. A few reporters from the Leavenworth newspapers asked him what was going on, but Fallon waved them off and saw Elliott Jefferson approaching him. The whistles had stopped long before Fallon arrived, and the engine bell no longer pealed.

  Supplies for the construction zone had been delivered, postholes already dug, even a few poles in place, and spools of barbed wire lay on the outer edge, but no one worked on those now. Guards surrounded several prisoners, and a cordon had been put up around the first cell block.

  The inmates stood with their hands clasped behind their heads. Fallon recognized two of them, his old enemies, Aaron Holderman and Sean MacGregor, but he knew those two felons, and the others standing erect, staring at the cell block under construction, likely had nothing to do with what had led to the alarm. They were just being held until they could be marched back to their cells. That explained why MacGregor looked so pleased. So did other faces. They’d get out of the work detail early.

  “Over here, sir,” Elliott Jefferson beckoned. The kid’s face had turned white, and he kept swallowing down whatever kept rising up in his throat.

  Fallon moved into the stone walls, now about four feet high, and saw the guards standing outside one of the cells. The prison doctor stepped out through the opening for the door, shook his head, and waited for the chaplain to follow. They began whispering.

  “It’s in there, sir,” Elliott Jefferson told him. The kid had no desire to go back into that cell, so Fallon thanked him and moved through the guards. Big Tim O’Connor stepped out, saw Fallon, and waved him in as he returned to the cell.

  The floor was stone, thick, the walls rough, hard, well mortared into place. Fallon saw several sawhorses in the five-and-a-half-by-nine-foot triangle, iron doors placed on several, and a few more leaning against the unfinished wall. The body was covered with a white sheet that soaked up blood. A crimson pool already stained what had been a pristine stone floor.

  Big Tim O’Connor knelt, waited for Fallon to step closer, and then withdrew the sheet just over the man’s face. Sightless eyes stared up at the sky, and blood had congealed in his mouth, run down his open jaw. “It’s Wesley Westinghouse, sir,” the captain whispered.

  The locksmith. Murdered.

  O’Connor lifted his head. “Do you want to see the rest, sir?”

  Fallon nodded.

  “It ain’t pretty,” the guard warned.

  “It never is.” Fallon nodded again.

  Standing, O’Connor pulled back the sheet to the dead man’s waist. Westinghouse’s shirt had been torn open, and then . . . Fallon stepped closer, knelt down, feeling the nausea but mostly the disgust. How could someone do this to another person? He thought, becoming the detective again, that at least two men had grabbed the prisoner’s arms, pinned him back, while another, maybe more than one, had ripped open his abdomen with a knife. They had laid him onto the floor and . . . Shaking his head, he stood.

  Quickly, O’Connor covered the body.

  “Inside his stomach . . . ?” Fallon asked.

  “Locks.” O’Connor nodded toward the sawhorses. “For the prison doors.”

  Fallon felt his head bob up and down. “That’s what I thought.” He spit on the floor.

  “Doc says they shoved something into his mouth, to keep him from screaming,” O’Connor reported. “He was likely alive when they started shoving the locks into his gut. But not for long.”

  Fallon pointed to the footprints.

  “Yeah,” O’Connor said. “One of them wasn’t too careful where he stepped. Marcy Huntt, been a guard here for six years, he found the body. Westinghouse worked alone, and, being a model prisoner, we never posted guards on him. I sent two men following the trail, but the blood stopped, so the trail ended.”

  “They got away?” Fallon asked.

  “No. We knew the prisoners working here. I had all of them lined up. We got the one with bloody soles in the cell over yonder.” He gestured with his right arm, and then used the hand to wipe his own mouth. The guard pulled out a greenback from his pocket. “Found this on him.”

  Fallon stepped closer and picked up the fifty-dollar note. “Uncle Sam’s work,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. But he’s not at it again. We got the plates, and this bill is fairly old.”

  “Let’s see what the murderer has to say about who paid him to gut our locksmith and weigh him down with locks.”

  “He won’t say nothing, sir.”

  “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  The murderer’s name was Winfield McGarry, a hardcase who had done time in territorial and federal prisons. He was already serving life in prison, and because of that, he spit as Fallon approached him and let the smirk form across his face. The guards had taken him from the assembly of men working in the area and put him beside the brick kiln.

  “Have all the guards wait outside except you, Tim,” Fallon said.

  The guard frowned but obeyed, and when they had the work area to themselves, Fallon smiled. “Let’s make this easy, McGarry,” he said. “You give us the names of the men who acted with you—and the person who paid you—and I see to it that you don’t hang.”

  McGarry spit onto the toes of Fallon’s shoes. “You ain’t got nothin’ on me.”

  Fallon showed him the fifty-dollar bill.

  “Never seen it,” the killer said.

  Turning the bill around, Fallon shoved it closer to the cocky convict’s face. “See that, you idiot. That’s a thumbprint. A blood thumbprint. You’ve been in stir too long, McGarry. People are being identified by fingerprints. A few years back, some copper down in Buenos Aires, Argentina, caught a woman who killed her two boys, then tried to cut her own throat to make it seem as though she were a victim, too.”

  The killer laughed, shook his head, and said, “Warden, I’m here for life. You can’t do nothin’ for me. So if you hang me, hell, that means I get out of this place a lot sooner.”

  Fallon’s fist caught McGarry just below the rib cage, doubled him over, and dropped him to his knees. Fallon’s quick glimpse showed him that Tim O’Connor was shocked, but he kept his mouth shut, and simply stepped back to avoid McGarry’s body as Fallon shoved him to the ground. Before the man could catch his breath, Fallon straddled him, pinning his arms with his knees.

  “You . . . can’t . . . do . . .” McGarry tried to say.

  “I can’t do what? Do nothin’ for you. Isn’t that what you said? Oh, but you’re wrong, McGarry. You’re dead wrong.” He pulled the big Schofield from his trousers, eared back the hammer, and put the cold, hard barrel against McGarry’s nose. “I can cut your stay here in Leavenworth really short.”

  The man gasped. His eyes widened.

  “You . . . wouldn’t . . .”

  “Wouldn’t I?” Fallon shoved the barrel harder against McGarry’s nose. “Are you so deaf you haven’t heard? I’ve been behind bars. I know what it’s like in prison. Do you know who I am? Have you ever heard of Monk Quinn? Linc Dalton and his boys? They’re all dead, McGarry, because of me. Do you think the president of our United States
, the attorney general, anybody in Kansas or the world, would give a hoot if you were found in this kiln with your brains plastered across the bricks?”

  He leaned closer. “That’s what happens, buster, if I don’t hear answers. Look into my eyes. What do you see?”

  Fallon was staring into the eyes of McGarry, and he knew what he saw in those pupils.

  Fear.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Back in the old prison, Captain Big Tim O’Connor stepped in front of the door Raymond had just pulled open and aimed the shotgun at the small man stretched out on the cot, smoking a cigarette.

  “There’s no smoking in the cells, Hardin,” Raymond told the murderer.

  “So shoot me,” Bowen Hardin said.

  Raymond pumped a shell into the chamber. “Don’t tempt me.”

  Behind O’Connor, Fallon watched as the surly man with the shaved head swung his striped britches off the cot and onto the floor, pitched the butt, and stood, casually grinding out the cigarette with the heel of his shoe.

  “Hands clamped behind your head, Hardin,” Raymond ordered, gesturing with the twelve-gauge. “Now move, eyes forward, fingers locked, and if you even breathe wrong, I’ll blow your damned head off.”

  The black-eyed man stepped around the barrel of the murderous-looking scattergun, saw the five other guards, and laughed when he spotted Harry Fallon. “Well, ain’t this something. The warden hisself comes to visit me. What’s the matter, Harry, did somebody eat something that made his belly sort of . . . messy?”

  Down went Hardin with a curse, to his knees, almost falling flat on his face, but he managed to stick his hands out to break the fall. Fallon never even saw O’Connor slam the butt of the Winchester pump into the back of the convict’s head.

  “That’s enough, Captain,” Fallon told the red-faced guard. “You have your orders.”

  “Raymond,” O’Connor barked. “Wilson. Brisbin. Inside.”

  Bowen Hardin turned his head, saw the guards entering his cell, and he managed to laugh, although Fallon could tell that even cracking a joke pained the man after the blow the powerful captain had landed. “That’s right . . .” Hardin shook his head. “It is time . . . for new . . . sheets.”

  “Stand up,” Fallon ordered.

  The killer laughed and managed to get to his knees before two other guards jerked him to his feet and shoved him against the outer wall.

  Other inmates locked in their cells began hissing, but Fallon silenced that with a reminder: “It’s just as easy for me to send all of you to the sweatbox for a month.” He stepped in front of Hardin. “Go ahead, Hardin,” he said. “Rub your head.”

  “Thank you, Harry.” The convict did just that.

  “I heard some bells and whistles,” Hardin said after a while. “Don’t rightly think it’s the Fourth of July already, though it’s hot enough to be. Was there some sort of celebration . . . ? We figured it was.” He grinned the coldest smile Fallon had seen in years. “That’s why we was all cheerin’.”

  “You’re in big trouble, Hardin,” Fallon said.

  The killer laughed and spit off to the side. “Well, hell, Harry, how much more trouble can I be in? They plan to stretch my neck in a couple of months.”

  “It’ll be a lot sooner,” Fallon said.

  “My lawyer might have something . . .”

  “Your lawyer won’t be able to do much for you,” Fallon told him. He reached inside his pocket and withdrew the bloodstained money.

  “I’m sorry,” Hardin said, “but convicts here in Leavenworth ain’t allowed to have no currency in their possession.”

  “Too bad Winfield McGarry didn’t remember that rule,” Fallon said.

  “McGarry. Don’t think I know him.”

  “How about Wesley Westinghouse?”

  He appeared to consider the name. “Nah,” he said after a moment. “But, see, they don’t let me out too much. Me being condemned to a gallows. All a miscarriage of justice, you understand.”

  “Oh, well, if you were innocent of those crimes that got you here, we can just hang you for the murder of Wesley Westinghouse.”

  “I don’t think I killed him,” Hardin said. “Seein’ how I was locked up here all today.”

  “Yeah, but you ought to look closer at that note.”

  Hardin stretched his head closer.

  “Counterfeit,” Fallon said.

  “Why, I’ll be a suck-egg mule. That’s against the laws of our United States, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah. But we won’t hang you for passing illegal currency. But for hiring the murder of another inmate . . .”

  “Now, how could I do that?”

  “Warden.” Raymond stepped out of the cell. Hardin turned to see the guard holding a handful of matching fifty-dollar banknotes. Fallon caught a glimpse of uncertainty in the killer’s eyes. The man turned back, flashed a quick smile, and said, “I’ll say you boys stuck those fake bills in my cell.”

  Fallon nodded. “And we’ll show the confession signed by inmate Samuel M. Lippert that he made those bills for you, for payment of six copies of what the state of Kansas would classify as pornography and four boxes of Cuban cigars. We’ll also produce the confessions of the men you hired, who had money that for some reason was an exact match of the fifty-dollar bill that we used to identify Winfield McGarry, who said he was paid by you to kill a man you considered a traitor, a locksmith merely plying his trade.”

  “Well.” He spit again. “If you boys want to delay my execution, I’ll be glad to stand trial for having a hand in the death of this belly-aching, traitor to the stripes he wears, fool who got what he deserved, Wesley Westinghouse. Hey, the way courts are runnin’ these years, I might live to see the new century roll in. Maybe even the next one.”

  “You’ll be swinging in a week,” Fallon told him.

  The killer turned around, raising his arms until the barrel of O’Connor’s shotgun almost touched the tip of his nose. “I’m to die by firing squad.”

  “You can’t lynch me, you son of a . . .”

  “You won’t be lynched, Hardin,” Fallon told him. “Once the evidence is put in front of the judge who sentenced you, and a copy sent to the attorney general and the president of the United States, your execution date will be moved up. Because of the threat you pose to not only guards, but prisoners.”

  Hardin’s lips began to quiver. His face drained of more color and he raised his right hand to rub the knot forming on the back of his head. “You . . . you . . . you can’t do this to me.”

  “You did it to yourself, Hardin.” He stepped away. “No firing squad. You’ll swing. Nasty way to die.”

  Slowly the man turned as the guards exited the cell.

  “I’ll kill you for this, Fallon,” the bitter little man said before Raymond slammed the door shut.

  “You have a week to do it,” Fallon told him.

  * * *

  Fallon was wrong. Two and a half weeks. That’s how long Bowen Hardin had to live. The U.S. government had reduced his time on Earth by three and a half weeks. Well, it was a start, and this time the government did not drag its feet. The judge had issued his ruling the next morning, the U.S. attorney general had telegraphed his affirmation by that afternoon, and the president had refused to intervene or make any comment whatsoever.

  On Saturday morning, while Christina was teaching the prisoners in the pen, Fallon was making sure Rachel Renee put on the proper outfit while he straightened his tie.

  “Why do I have to go with you, Papa?” the little girl asked.

  “Because I couldn’t find anyone to look after you?”

  “What about Miz Janice?”

  “She’ll be where we’re going.”

  “To the funeral?”

  “Yes, honey, to the funeral.”

  “Will it be sad?”

  “Well.” Fallon turned and knelt beside the love of his life. “Yes. It’s always sad to say good-bye to a friend. It’ll be sadder, of course, for his family.
We weren’t his family. But we’ll also be celebrating his life, telling him good-bye, telling him how much we liked him.”

  “Did you like him?”

  Fallon smiled. Honestly, he hardly even knew Wesley Westinghouse. And he didn’t think the old locksmith had any family, but the guards had put up enough money to persuade the Baptists into taking him in, preaching the funeral for him, and burying him in the church cemetery.

  “Why isn’t he being buried in the prison?” Rachel Renee said.

  “Well, honey, when a man is sentenced, he’s sentenced for a certain time period. Five years. Ten. Twenty. But no matter what the sentence is, even if it’s for the rest of his natural-born life, when that term is over, he’s free to walk out of the gate. So in Mr. Westinghouse’s case, he has finished his time in the Leavenworth pen. We don’t get to keep him after he’s dead.”

  “Oh.” She smiled. “Will there be singing?”

  “Most likely.”

  “Papa?” The smile had faded.

  “Yes?”

  “The Widow Daniels says everybody in the prison are bad men, that none of them should never get out. That ain’t true, is it, Papa?”

  “No,” Fallon said, “I don’t think that’s true. But remember, Mommy doesn’t care much for the word ain’t.”

  “Oh. Right. I’m sorry.”

  “I won’t tell Mommy.”

  She smiled again.

  “So why do people go to prison?”

  “Sometimes they just made a bad mistake. Sometimes they’re just bad people. It depends.” He pulled her close. “Rachel Renee, you’re a lucky girl. Because you’re usually surrounded by good people all the time.”

  “Except for the Widow Daniels.”

  Fallon laughed. “Well, honey, she’s not exactly a bad person.”

  “She ain’t exactly good neither.”

  “Don’t say ain’t.” He figured the double negative would be too much for her five-year-old brain to comprehend. Fallon had trouble with that one himself on occasion.