The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [86]
Later that same day, in a rat-infested alley outside his headquarters, two patrolling policemen found the body of Ding-Dong Dunham, notorious leader of the Houston Dusters. No tears were shed at the precinct over this discovery, but even the most hardened cops expressed shock at the loathsome brutality of the murder: Whatever Ding-Dong had done to inspire this mutilation must have been off the scale they used to calculate his previously established low standards of behavior.
Only one witness came forward, one of the Dusters, a mental defective named Mouse Malloy, who, no longer able to function productively as a street criminal after being kicked in the head by a horse while trying to knock over a beer wagon, had since served as their clubhouse mascot and errand boy. Shaken and terrified, he claimed to have watched from a room in the back as a tall, blond German man came into headquarters earlier that day with a suitcase full of gold coins. When Ding-Dong refused to hand over to the German an old leather-bound book, demanding to know why he wanted it, the man smiled, pulled a knife, and went to work on Ding-Dong like a priest carving a Christmas turkey.
Like most of the rest of what Mouse told the cops—he had a reputation for running his mouth, and his stories tended to veer toward the fanciful ever since the horse had made such a strong impression on him—they paid no mind to his unlikely account, figuring Ding-Dong had simply met up with the sordid, inevitable end that awaited every gangland leader, and from their point of view the sooner the better. Case closed.
The only difference being that this time Mouse Malloy was telling the God's truth.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
In spite of Bendigo Rymer's histrionics, or maybe because of them, the authorities at the Phoenix station would not allow the mail train to leave for Wickenburg until the cars were searched upside and down and every last member of the Penultimate Players had been questioned. And no, as it turned out, ' none of them had seen a Chinaman running around the train station waving a sword—which was what Rymer had ordered , them to say even if they had. The delays incurred by having members of his troupe held over as witnesses at a murder trial could puncture the solvency of their tour as quick as a spike through a pneumatic tire.
Bendigo himself was actually the only Player who had caught sight of Kanazuchi; from a distance he hadn't clearly seen his face, but he did look Chinese, and as he ran off from behind the cotton bales, the man had been brandishing something that looked to Rymer's well-trained eye for steel-edged weapons suspiciously like a scabbard.
Railroad cops found the dead guard stashed behind the bales, uniform missing, his neck badly broken, but they couldn't find his assailant. Rumors had started to circulate about a series of gruesome murders committed at a railway yard in Yuma. Atrocities, crimes against nature: men with heads chopped off and mounted on spikes, women raped, children devoured; the usual human embroideries. And word was spreading fast that this smorgasbord of crimes had been committed by a crazed Chinaman.
If their delayed departure wasn't irritating enough, this annoying old rabbi had now decided to travel with the Penultimates at least as far as Wickenburg and perhaps beyond. He wasn't prepared to say why, but what reason could he possibly have except a ridiculous infatuation with Rymer's leading lady? And her doing everything this side of decency to encourage him: The woman knew no shame! Bendigo kicked himself as he watched the two of them billing and cooing in their seats three rows in front of him: Trouble usually showed up wearing a skirt and this English strumpet was just the latest in a long line the enemy camp had sent to torment him. He should have obeyed his instincts and booted her unceremoniously out after that first night in Cincinnati when she either seduced him or refused to sleep with him; the memory was a little hazy.
His heart beat like a caged bird. How could he go on? The strain