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“You recollect it?”
Dick glanced away from Bob to the sitting room. The yellow eyes of a cat were looking at him and then the cat curled down to lick at its chest. Dick said, “You’re not as hungry when you get to be my age, Bob. You get to be twenty-nine years old and you look back and see you’ve never done anything good that you can brag about and you sort of forget all your pipe dreams. I gave up all my ideas of grandeur.”
Bob slid his chair back and moved the coal-oil lamp from the kitchen to the sitting room. He said, “Oftentimes things seem impossible up until they’re attempted.” Then he lidded the chimney glass with his palm and suffocated the light.
CLAIMING A MORNING APPOINTMENT with a dentist in Richmond and some chores to accomplish afterward, Bob left the house at dawn on January 5th and surreptitiously journeyed to Kansas City by railroad car. He dunked cinnamon doughnuts in coffee at a Kansas City cafe and scanned three Missouri newspapers for more information about John Samuels but saw not a word
about him, only about Charles Guiteau: a jailkeeper had allowed more than three hundred visitors “to inflame and gratify the assassin’s vanity and indulge their own morbid curiosity by an admission to Guiteau’s cell.” The correspondent went on to say, “It is an admonition to persons about to commit murder: ‘Choose a big man for your victim. Shoot a President; club a Cabinet Minister; creep up behind a Senator and kill him with a slingshot; but don’t kill any private citizen, for if you do the Court will deal harshly with you.’ ”
Bob brushed cinnamon off his mouth and tie, tipped the counterman a nickel, and browsed through a clothing store’s city directory for the address of Police Commissioner Henry H. Craig. He noted the cross streets on his shirt cuff and walked outside.
The streets were mud and slush and rutted manure, coal smoke cindered the sidewalks and made the air blue, telegraph, telephone, and electric wires criss-crossed overhead and chattered when a wind rose. He was slightly lost but could tell this was the commercial district: male accountants, secretaries, clerks, and commodities brokers stood under lowered awnings conferring about the universe, all in creased and corrugated suit coats that were black or navy blue in color so that they need never be cleaned. Bob cut between two surreys to cross a street and saw a boy with unsold copies of the Kansas City Times rolled under his left arm. He followed the boy down West Fifth to Main and then into the Times Building, where Henry H. Craig leased a law office in room number 6.
He blew his nose and knuckled the sleep from his eyes. He removed his bowler hat and slicked his fine brown hair with his palm. He rapped twice on a window of frosted glass and saw a faint blur become a man’s black form and then he was being appraised by an apprentice attorney-at-law who seemed scarcely seventeen. Bob said, “I’m looking for Commissioner Craig. I’ve got some information about the James gang.”
The apprentice glanced down to see if Bob carried a gun, then invited him in and shut the door. He asked for Bob’s name but Bob wouldn’t give it. He said Mr. Craig had a client with him at the moment and Bob said he expected the information would keep. The apprentice disappeared for a minute and then invited Bob into a room that contained green chintz furniture, tall bookcases of Kansas and Missouri statutes and judicial opinions, and a cherrywood box with a crank and black ear trumpet, which Bob took to be a telephone.
He heard the room’s door creak and click shut and turned to see a stern man in his late forties with his suit coat off and circular bifocals on. His left eyebrow was cocked in a manner that made him look quizzical; his wide brown mustache was streaked with gray and covered his mouth and chin with shadow, so that he seemed even more severe than he was. “My assistant mentioned something about you and the James gang.”
“Yes sir. I want to bring them to justice.”
“The James gang,” Craig said.
“Well, not each and every one all at once. Maybe I’d start out with the lowlier culprits and that would give me the opportunities I need to capture Jesse and Frank.”
Craig squinted at Bob. “Who sent you here?”
“Sheriff James Timberlake of Clay County. Sort of indirectly. By that I mean he mentioned you but didn’t know I was coming.”
Craig hooked a finger inside his cheek and flicked a smidgen of chewing tobacco into a brass cuspidor. He moved his tongue around inside his mouth, then bent over and spit. He asked, “How do you know the James brothers?”
Bob foresaw the snarls of cross-examination and answered, “Did I say that I did?”
“Do you spy on them?”
“You’ll excuse me for saying so, but isn’t what matters the fact that I can round these culprits up?”
“I get told that once a week, and they’re still uncaught. You can see how I’d be skeptical.”
Bob lowered into a magisterial chair and rested his bowler hat in his lap. He let his palms appreciate the sculpted mahogany armrests. “Just lately?” he asked.
“Just lately what?”
“Anybody come to you lately saying he could bring in one or two of the James gang?”
Craig cleaned his eyeglasses with a white handkerchief. “Why do you want to know?”
“I just sort of thought they might’ve.”
“It was a woman.”
“She give her name as Mattie?”
Craig moved a chair over and sat across from Bob, shrugged forward like a rowing coach, his elbows on his knees. “You tell me. Her name was Mattie. Mattie what? Who was she acting for? Who were they going to bring in? You in Dutch with Jesse? Or is it only the reward money? You’ve got to give me something. I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Bob.”
“Just Bob?”
