17
Sinclair’s Fast Stop Market and Cafe
Washington, D.C.
Lewis had gone over the list of numbers Carruth had given her. That, plus the files he’d copied—no trouble breaking into those, Simmons had used his birthday for the password—gave whoever had killed him at least two fingers pointed vaguely in her direction. One of her one-time phones was on the list a couple times, and there was an e-mail drop.
The one-time phone she crushed under her heel and dumped into a garbage can on a street corner. The e-mail address was a spoof, and she zeroed it out. End of trail.
Maybe whoever tapped out Simmons had nothing to do with her, but it was better to be safe than sorry. There was no way to trace her from what had been in his files. The phone she’d bought for cash from a Best Buy electronics store on a busy Saturday; the e-mail addy was at a server in Hong Kong, paid for by a credit card that went no further than a post office box rented under a fake name. She wouldn’t be going back to it.
But:
There was one thing. She and Simmons had met a couple times. She hadn’t given him her real name, of course, but he did know what she looked like. If whoever had killed him had been looking for her—and there was no reason to believe that, but just in case—then he could have given them a description, if pressed.
If they killed Simmons to get to her? Probably he had done that much.
Of course, “a blond young woman” covered a lot of territory, and if that was all they had, they could look for a million years and never find her. But even so, it bothered her. What did it mean?
Carruth didn’t even bother to sip at the coffee he’d ordered, just left it sitting on the scratched, green plastic table, going cold.
“So, is this going to be a problem for us?”
She shook her head negatively. “I don’t think so. Whoever killed him, it isn’t connected to us. And even if it was, there’s nothing here that would lead them to us.” She hoped.
Carruth nodded. “Good enough. What next?”
“We—you—hit another base.”
“Won’t the Army have changed all the codes and other stuff by now?”
She smiled. “I am the Army, remember? Gridley might think he’s closed those loops, but he can’t be sure, and neither can anybody else. I’ve got the new codes to our next target.”
“Which is . . . ?”
She told him.
He smiled. “I like it. Finally something we can pick up a few bucks on. When?”
“No time like the present. How long do you need?”
“Day or two to run the scenario, get my boys up to speed. Travel to Kentucky. We can roll on it pretty quick, I’d say.”
“Good. Let’s do it.”
After he left, she sat there watching her own coffee cool for a few minutes. She didn’t like it that Simmons was dead, but he wasn’t the only op who could serve. She’d find another snoop and keep checking things out. It was still on track.
Bill Curtis’s Saloon
Thirteenth Street, Third District, Chestnut Valley
St. Louis, Missouri
Christmas Night 1895 C.E.
It was all about the hat, Jay knew. There were dozens of stories and versions of how it happened, scores, maybe even hundreds of versions of who did what to whom, but at the heart of it, it was the hat.
Some said it was a hat formed of human skin, made by the Devil Himself to seal the deal for the pimp Lee Shelton’s soul, but from what Jay had found, largely due to the excellent scholarship of Cecil Brown, who had written a book about the whole affair, it was no more than a pale, blocked-felt, cowboy-style hat. A milk-white broad-brimmed, five-gallon Stetson . . .
Christmas Night 1895, and the Curtis Saloon was smack-dab in the middle of the St. Louis black vice district, surrounded by bars, bordellos, and billiard halls.
The place was full of cigar and pipe smoke and noise, the air thick with them, and the smell of spilled alcohol. There were men drinking or eating pickled boiled eggs, and women of less-than-sterling character offering their less-than-sterling virtue for short-term rent. While Jay didn’t usually change his race in scenarios, he had done so for this visit—a face as pale as his wouldn’t blend in here. Here, he was—in the terminology of these times—a Negro; and one large enough in stature to forestall casual trouble, dressed in a plain brown suit and shoes, minding his own business.
Billy Lyons and Henry Crump, two well-dressed black men, stood at the bar, among men who were of somewhat lower stripe and caste. It was a bad man’s bar, mostly, and Lyons had borrowed a knife from Crump, just in case he had to take care of business. Jay knew the history: The two men had been in better establishments earlier in the evening, but they had come to Bill Curtis’s to wind down, even though they knew it was dangerous.
Alcohol didn’t make most men smarter, Jay also knew.
It was a cold and windy night, and Billy and Henry moved close to the stove by the bar. A ragtime band noodled in the background, playing rinky-tink piano, banjo, and guitar, a Christmas song, then something by Scott Joplin, maybe. There were occasional shouts from men shooting craps on the wooden platform in the back, and while not very crowded, the place was busy enough for a holiday when most people stayed home with their families.
Billy and Henry, already feeling little pain from earlier libations, commenced to drinking beer, talking about Christmas and the coming New Year.
Jay stood nearby, sipping at his own beer, watching the two men. He pulled his pocket watch and looked at it. Just about time . . .
Lee Sheldon, aka “Stack Lee,” aka “Stagolee,” arrived, and even in the dim light he was a sight to behold. He wore tailored leather shoes, “St. Louis flats,” with low heels, curved toes, and tiny mirrors on the tops that reflected the light. He had gray spats, gray striped trousers, and a box-back coat over a yellow embroidered shirt with a high celluloid collar. A red vest, a gold-headed ebony walking stick, and the Stetson hat—with a picture of his favorite girl and wife, Lillie, embroidered on the hatband—completed the sartorial splendor of Stack’s outfit. He was a high-rolling pimp and dressed to be seen—one of the elite “macks,” as they were known locally—as well as owner of his own club, so the story went. Why he wasn’t there instead of here on this night was a question never answered.
Other stories had him as a waiter, a bartender, or a cab driver, take your pick. All agreed he was a sporting man, with plenty of folding green in his pocket, and at least four or five women in his string, including his wife.
Jay watched as Stack—so-named for a riverboat or its captain, depending on who you asked—lit a big cigar and stopped to chat with somebody nearby. Jay wasn’t close enough to hear, but the story was that Stack was asking who was treating that night.
And it turned out that it was Billy Lyons who was being generous on that cold Christmas, and so Stack ambled over that way, allowing everybody to see his finery.
Being locals forever, Stack and Billy knew each other. There was one story that there was bad blood between them—that Billy’s stepbrother, Charlie Brown, had killed Stack’s friend Harry Wilson, and that Stack meant to take his revenge—but on that night, they stood drinking together, laughing and talking. For a while, anyhow.
Jay edged a little closer, to listen. The talk had turned to politics, and had grown heated.
“You don’t know nothin’ ’bout it,” Stack said, shaking his head.
Billy took a pull from his drink. “I guess I know more about it than you—I was there, I heard the man’s words from his own mouth.”
“You say you did?”
“You just heard me tell you so, you ignorant son of a bitch.”
Stack set his drink down and drew himself up to his full height, which wasn’t that much; he was maybe five-seven or -eight. He flicked his hand out and hit Billy’s hat, a derby, with a little tap.
“Call me ignorant? That fo’ yo’ hat,” Stack said.
“That right? Well, that for yo’ hat.” Billy, a bigger man, slapped at Stack’s Stetson, knocking it slightly askew on Stack’s head.
Stack Lee grinned. He straightened his Stetson. Quickly, he reached up and grabbed Billy’s derby, snatched it from his head. He held it in his left hand and with a sudden blow, smashed the crown in with his right, breaking the blocking. He laughed.
“You done broke the form!” Billy said.
“I believe I did.” He tossed the ruined hat onto the bar. “And it’s an improvement, you ax me.”
“You owe me a hat. I want six bits from you!”
“Six bits? Sheeit, you could buy a rack of hats like this fo’ six bits! Ain’t worth a nickel.”
Billy, who might have been passing drunk but not slowed from it, reached out and grabbed Stack’s Stetson and pulled it off. “Well, I reckon we trade, then.”
“Gimme back my hat,” Stack said.
“Nossuh, I ain’t gonna, till you give me my six bits!”
“You will give me my hat back, or I will blow out your f*ckin’ brains!”
“That’s what you say.”
Jay watched the next part carefully. It was a lesson in escalation of violence—and why drinking and arguing in a bad man’s bar was not a good idea.
Stack pulled a blue-steel Smith & Wesson .44 revolver from his coat pocket and clouted Billy Lyons upside the head with it.
Billy didn’t speak as he bounced off the bar and came back glaring at Stack. He hadn’t been hit that hard, but certainly it was hard enough to both stun and piss him off.
Things got real quiet in the saloon.
“You give me my hat now, motherf*cker, or I will shoot you!”
Lyons, still holding the hat in his left hand, jammed his right hand into his pocket, where, Jay knew, he had the borrowed knife.
He said, “You cockeyed son of a bitch, I’m gon’ make you kill me!”
There was a general stampede for the door as most of the two dozen patrons decided at that moment they had pressing business elsewhere. Men did pull guns in that part of town frequently and they did go off. That Christmas Day, there would be at least four or five other shootings in bars, poolrooms, and whorehouses within a couple of miles. Some of the shooters weren’t very good at it, and innocent bystanders had been known to collect bullets more than once. Bad enough to be killed for something you did; worse to be killed by a stray bullet by accident. Dead, either way.
Stack took three steps backward and pointed the gun at Billy. Jay stayed where he was.
Stack shot Billy. Just the one time, in the abdomen. The noise was very loud in the saloon, and the gray smoke that belched to join that of the tobacco had that unmistakable gunpowder stink.
Billy Lyons fell back against the bar, lurched to one side, still clutching Stack’s Stetson.
Nobody said anything. The few patrons and bartenders still there stood frozen. Nobody wanted to move and become a target.
Billy sagged against the bar, and dropped the hat. Stack stepped up to him. “I told you. You give me back my hat!” And with that, he bent down, retrieved the Stetson, and put it on.
Lyons slid lower. “You done killed me,” he said.
“You took my hat. It’s on you.”
With that, Stack put his gun away and walked out.
Strolled out, in no hurry at all.
Billy, Jay knew, would linger on for a time. They would take him to the infirmary, and later to a hospital, where he would pass away at about four in the morning. Not a testament to his intelligence. What kind of man refuses to give a swiped hat back to its owner when staring down the barrel of a gun?
Well, the kind soon to be a dead man . . .
Stack, Jay knew, went to one of his houses—he had a couple—reloaded his .44 and stuck it in a drawer and, apparently unconcerned, went to bed. That was where the local police found both Stack and his gun at about three A.M., an hour or so before Billy Lyons died.
That was the true story of how Stagger Lee shot Billy.
No gambling late, Lyons didn’t win all Stack’s money, and while Lyons did have three children by a local woman, he wasn’t married to her or anybody else, so most of the versions of the songs that came later got it wrong. It was in St. Louis, not Memphis, nor Chicago, nor New Orleans. And how Stack Lee Shelton became any kind of hero after that was a puzzle to Jay. Cold-blooded murder over a hat didn’t seem like the stuff of heroic legend to Jay.
Stack Lee was tried twice for the crime. The first trial ended in a hung jury, with Stack’s white lawyer arguing self-defense, due to the knife in Billy Lyons’s pocket. But the lawyer, an alcoholic, died shortly thereafter following a drinking binge, and Stack’s next attorney apparently wasn’t as good as his first. The second trial, he was convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years. After a brief parole, he was incarcerated again, and died in the Missouri State Prison Hospital, on March 11, 1912, of tuberculosis.
One of the most accurate of the songs that came from the Missouri riverboat roustabouts around the end of the nineteenth century had a final verse that Jay liked:
If you evah in St. Louis
And you goes to the Curtis Club
Well, every step you walk in
You walk in Billy Lyons’s blood
Talkin’ ’bout a dead man
Kilt by mean ole Stagolee . . .
Jay watched the bartenders and bystanders haul Billy Lyons out of the club. What had he learned here? Well, not as much as he’d hoped, but at least it had been interesting. And maybe if he ever got tired of working for Net Force, he could go into the entertainment biz. He could tell and show a pretty good story. There was always a market for scenario-builders of his caliber.
Shoot, maybe even Hollywood . . .