The Cold Millions: A Novel, стр. 1
Map
Map copyright © Springer Cartographics
Dedication
To my father, Bruce, and my brother, Ralph
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Map
Dedication
Waterbury, 1909
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
The Kid, 1864
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Jules, 1909
Part II
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Gemma
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Ursula the Great
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Del Dalveaux
Part III
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Del Dalveaux, 1909
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Gurley
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Gig
Part IV
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Gig
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Gig, 1910
Chapter 37
Sullivan, 1911
Epilogue
Rye, 1964
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Jess Walter
Copyright
About the Publisher
Waterbury, 1909
DARKNESS CAME on that town like a candle being snuffed. This was my wife’s primary complaint about Spokane after two years of me copping there, what Rebecca called the “drastic dark” of autumn. We’d come from Sioux City, a town she still called home, and where I’d walked an easier beat. I found Spokane in a land-spec ad, but the piece I bought turned out to be cliff-face basalt and not arable, so we took four rooms in a brick apartment north of the river, and I got on with that roughneck police force. These were hard years, ’08 and ’09, everything about Spokane hard, bringing to mind Rebecca’s word, drastic. Steep hills, deep canyons, cold winters, hot summers, and those dark autumn evenings that made her so melancholy, when five felt like midnight.
It was one of those nights Chief Sullivan pulled me aside. A burglar was prowling the big houses on Cannon Hill, and he needed good, sober cops on it. Nothing got up the mayor’s ass like someone prying south-side windows, stealing candlesticks from the Victorians on the hill, the mayor quick to remind Sullivan that he was acting police chief and his act was to make the moneyed wives of those mining millionaires feel safe. Sullivan assigned me and two other cops to patrol the lower South Hill and catch this master burglar.
It was vagrant season. “So all’s you’ll miss is bum harvest,” Chief Sullivan said. Good by me, as I preferred real police work to the endless roust-and-run of tramps anyway.
Sullivan talked up this South Hill window-crawler like he was the dastardly demon of hell himself. One of the silver barons had threatened to bring in a Pinkerton, and nothing ate at Sullivan like someone hiring private. There were six detective agencies in Spokane, three nationals—Pinkerton, Thiel, and Allied—and three local thug shops used by the mining companies for union busting. The national detectives treated us city cops like horse clods, fine for running bums and whores but about as helpful solving crime as a blind ranch dog. I thought this perception not entirely unfair, and had complained more than once about the laziness and graft of the old brute cops. I’d even considered putting in papers with the privates myself.
If I stayed a cop, it would be for John Sullivan, for I admired the man. Sully was honest and affable, off-the-boat County Kerry, six-four and 220, five of those pounds brush mustache. He’d come on the force just after the Great Fire of ’89, with brutes like Shannon and Clegg, and to hear them tell it, those three had singlehandedly driven out the last of the Indians and tamed the whole frontier town.
But unlike those others, Sullivan wasn’t only brute. He was brave. Savvy. In ’01 two holdup men set up shop on the north end of Howard Bridge, like fairy tale ogres, robbing every wagon that crossed. When Sullivan came to arrest them, one man pulled a pistol and squeezed off a couple before big John could knock the gun from his hand. As he was beating the robbers, Sully realized his boot was filling with blood. The ogre had shot him in the leg, below the groin. He dragged both outlaws to jail, then rode his horse to the hospital, where he promptly underwent surgery, met a nurse half his age, and married her.
How could you not want to work for such a man?
Sully could grow nostalgic for the rough old days, but he was also clear: the old Klondike town had grown into a proper city and the time was up for a brute like Clegg, who saw his job as hassling tramps and whores into paying him for protection, and was not above running a girl himself if she came up short. “Nah, it’s the last shift for them old boys,” Sullivan said when I complained about Clegg taking booze from the evidence room.
He made a point of promoting cops like Hage and Roff and me, for our brains and our rectitude, I guess, but also because we didn’t care if Bill Shannon could throw a keg through a window, or that Hub Clegg once rode a patrol horse through a burning tavern to rescue a favored sporting girl.
That’s why he put us three on the Cannon Hill burglar. But three men was a big commitment during vagrant season, with the east end full of floaters and union men coming from all over to agitate the Stevens Street job agencies. I was not unsympathetic to their cause, for there was no denying the corruption of those employment agents, who charged the poorest men a dollar for suspect job leads. But the IWW protested by filling the town with stinking foreign rabble, and this brought out the tavern girls, opium and faro boys, mystics, seers, and pickpockets, a cloud of vice that swarmed the tenderloin like mayflies over a putrid stream.
“Take this window thief down fast, boys,” Sullivan told us, “for we’ll need your batons the other side of it.”
And so, Hage and Roff and I ventured out into that cold dark evening. We took an empty trolley up the South Hill, got off at the first stop. We were in plainclothes and overcoats, with fur hats for warmth and so my bald head wouldn’t reflect the streetlights. The plan was for Hage to amble the alleys while I walked the street in front and Roff the street behind. We’d square each block this way, work