Fatal Elixir Read online

  When my panting subsided, I said I was glad to have been able to please him; it was a comfort to know my suffering wasn’t in vain.

  “You should be pleased, too,” he said somberly. “I believe no bones are broken, and I don’t think we will have to cut off that handsome boot.”

  With that, he grabbed heel and toe and pulled it off. It hurt like fury, but I managed not to scream again. Gingerly, the doctor peeled off the stocking and examined my foot, probing more gently this time.

  “No,” he said. “No broken bones, just a nasty bruise. Cold compresses for the next few days. Keep the foot elevated as much as possible. Take ten drops of laudanum in cold water if you are unable to sleep because of the pain. And be more careful of how you carry things.”

  “I’ll try to be.”

  “And stay off the foot for a couple of days. Unless, of course, you get hold of some of the miracle of Ozono. Then you can do acrobatic dances at the opera house, apparently.”

  “Aha,” I said.

  “And what, precisely, do you mean by ‘Aha’?”

  “Well, the reason I had your son help me limp over here was something other, believe it or not, than to deliver him to a scolding. I wanted to get out of the office for a few moments because the people there had become amazingly grumpy, and I sought you out as pleasanter company in my time of affliction. At least in your case, I can see what’s bothering you.”

  Mayhew smiled in spite of himself. “It’s not hard to fathom, is it? Had you been in town longer, you would have known ahead of time that I would feel this way.”

  “Happens every time a medicine show comes to town?”

  “Those quacks drive me to distraction. They—”

  He brought himself up short, then rubbed his bony chin. “No,” he said. “At least, they don’t do it alone. It’s the people of the town. Winter and summer, day and night, I put my hard-won expertise at their disposal, reducing their fevers, setting their broken bones, delivering their babies, traveling miles in the dead of night.

  “Sometimes, I get so weary I fall asleep, and trust to the horse to find his way home. Many’s the night my wife has sacrificed her own sleep to have a hot bath ready for me on my return so that I can soak the ache of cold from my bones.

  “Then one of these... charlatans comes to town, with a tambourine and a scantily clad girl, and some cheap conjuring tricks—”

  “And a medical miracle,” I offered.

  “Oh, yes,” the doctor said. “We mustn’t forget the medical miracle. Some foul-tasting herbs that couldn’t cure anything, let alone cancer or ulcers.

  “And those are the better ones. A mixture such as I’ve described might actually be of some small use as a liniment, and probably wouldn’t do any actual harm if imbibed—unless, of course, as happens all too frequently, the victim is someone whose internal organs are already damaged by overindulgence in alcohol.

  “The worst of them might as well be peddling prussic acid.”

  “That bad?”

  Mayhew frowned. “Well, no. I don’t know of anyone who has actually died from using any of this nonsense. But I do manage to get hold of a bottle of each of these patent medicines and run an analysis, so I know what I’m dealing with if one of my faithless patients gets sick from it. Do you know what I found in one called Dr. Eliza’s Miracle Nectar?”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess,” I said.

  “Silver nitrate. Silver nitrate!”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It’s very bad, Booker. Silver nitrate is a useful substance; it has its place in the pharmacopoeia. It is useful in cauterizing exuberant granular tissue, and much less painful than cauterization by fire. It can seal off the growth of external ulcers, and treat shingles. But if it’s taken internally, crystals of silver build up in the subcutaneous fat and turn the skin a deep indigo blue.

  “Fortunately, I was able to warn the people in town, and for once they listened to me. All but Harold Collier.”

  “He didn’t listen to you?”

  Mayhew shook his head impatiently. “I didn’t get the warning to him. Harold lived—still does for all I know—on a tiny freehold about forty miles north of here, up near the Montana line. He’d come to town about twice a year—it was two days’ ride, after all—but he was well liked, and seemed levelheaded. No one knew he’d bought a case of the evil stuff and brought it back to his place, and took it for every ailment he got and many he imagined.”

  “Didn’t he see himself turning blue?”

  “Of course he did. But since he was well supplied with the ‘sovereign remedy for every known ailment,’ he took it for that, too.

  “Finally, he came back to town, hooded and gloved, and came to this office in the dead of night, begging for my help. But there was no help to give him. The process is irreversible.”

  “What’s happened since?”

  “I have no idea. That was the last time anyone around here has seen Harold. He begged me to keep his secret, and—Oh, my Lord, I have just told it to a newspaper. Booker, I beseech you, please don’t—”

  “How many years ago was this, Doctor?”

  “Four—no, five.”

  “Then it hardly qualifies as news, does it? However, there might be a story in your battle against quackery in general. Would you mind giving a formal interview on the topic, say tomorrow?”

  “But Blacke always sells advertising to these fakes!”

  Now I felt a little irritable. “That is unworthy of all concerned, Doctor. Louis Bowman Blacke was a deputy U.S. marshal for twenty years, and earned a reputation for being absolutely incorruptible. He has earned that integrity into the newspaper business. It is true that anyone with something to say may buy space in the Witness in which to say it. But it is also true that advertisers have no effect on the editorial content of the newspaper. I would not work there if that weren’t true.”

  The doctor sighed, a sigh drawn way up from inside his lanky frame.

  “Yes, Booker, you are undoubtedly right. I beg your pardon once again.”

  “Don’t mention it. But consider this. Saturday’s Witness will carry the advertisement for this Dr. Herkimer—” I had a sudden thought “Do you know him, by the way? Has he been here before?”

  “Not under that name. Some of them change their names every time they have new labels printed. And I’ll tell you this: If it’s this Dr. Eliza, I’ll know him again. And I’ll do something about him. Doctor.” He practically spat the word.

  That would make a story, too, I thought.

  “Saturday’s paper will have the advertisement, because it’s paid for. And it will carry an article about the coming of the medicine show, because that is news. It would be good for the paper, and it would be good for the townspeople, if we carried a dissenting voice in the same columns.”

  “It might be,” Mayhew conceded. “It might also do more harm than good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Booker, that the people want so much to believe in these quacks. And though they madden me, when I calm down, I can’t really bring myself to blame them.”

  “Because although there have been physicians since ancient times, medicine as a science is still in its infancy. After all the eons, it is only in the second half of this century that Semmelweiss and Pasteur have gained even an inkling of the cause of sepsis. There is so much more to learn... which in practical effect means there is so much we—I, as the only doctor around—don’t know.

  “Booker, you are from a great, sophisticated city in the East, you have been to university, you are the only person around here I would dream of confiding this to. Too much of a doctor’s job, more than half of it, consists of facing diseases and disorders of which you know little and can do nothing.

  “At those times, the practice of medicine is reduced to making the patient as comfortable as possible and soothing his fears in order to give the body the best possible chance to cure itself.”

  “And someone comes along
,” I offered, “who says, ‘Yes! I can cure you!’ ”

  “Exactly. Exactly. Whatever you have, I can cure you with the miracle in this little bottle. And because disease and pain are so terrifying, they force themselves to believe. They even force themselves to believe the cure works. At least for a while. Then they ask me why I can’t offer remedies like that. Some of them even try to console me for my failure to have developed a miracle of my own.”

  He slapped a fist into his palm, making me jump.

  “It’s the worst kind of fraud, Booker. It preys on our most basic fears for profit, but worse than that, I will never know how many people have died that I might have helped if only they’d trusted me instead of some foul-tasting tinted alcohol. How many parents have all unknowing let their children die or become feebleminded with a fever that none of these miracles could have helped, but that a competently administered cold-alcohol bath could? Even one would be too many, and I am certain that there have been far, far more than one.”

  “All the more reason for the article I mentioned.”

  “They won’t listen. They’ll just think I’m jealous.” He rubbed his chin again. “And perhaps I am, at that. Jealous at the trust a mountebank can earn with a tambourine that I can’t acquire even after years of hard work.”

  It occurred to me that the doctor was making things bleaker than they were. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust him. It was just that sometimes they were in the market for miracles rather than medicine, and as he’d said, he didn’t keep miracles in stock.

  Mayhew helped me struggle back into my boot and loaned me a handsome black cane with a silver handle to help me get back to the office. I thanked him, asked him to think about that interview. He said he would, and I left him and hobbled on home.

  3

  “OF COURSE HE’S HEADING this way, Blacke,” Sheriff Asa Harlan said. “Wouldn’t you be headed this way in his place? It’s only natural.”

  As almost always happened in the presence of Lobo Blacke, the sheriff was agitated. His voice was hoarse and loud, and his bald pate glowed red. He was making pleats in the hat that usually covered it. The rabbit-fur-like hair of his gray fringe and moustache was bristling.

  I knew for a fact that Harlan was brave, and one of the best shots in the territory. I also knew that he was stupid, with a deep, profound, angry ignorance that went clean to the bone. Harlan was stupid enough not to notice he was stupid, most of the time. Blacke, however, seemed to take delight in pointing it out to him, in person and in the pages of the Witness. Since for various reasons I’ll get into later Harlan couldn’t do much about Blacke, he tended to avoid him and everything associated with him.

  For the sheriff to be here in the Witness office in the middle of the day was news in itself.

  “No,” Blacke said distinctly. “I would not be headed this way in his place. Far from it. I would probably be hightailing it north across Montana to try to get to Canada as soon as I could.”

  “It’s only natural for him to want to come here.”

  “It’s only natural for an idiot, Harlan. Paul Muller is a thief and a killer, but he’s hardly an idiot.”

  The sheriff was on the verge of figuring out that Blacke had called him an idiot yet again when I cut in.

  “Paul Muller? Isn’t he in jail?”

  “Well, he busted out last night. Killed a guard doing it,” the sheriff said. “Just got the wire. Came here to try to get your boss to use his precious newspaper to warn people that he’ll be coming this way.”

  “I’ll run a story on the breakout, Harlan. Just don’t tell me what to say in it.”

  “Talk about idiots,” the sheriff said. “You’re one of the reasons he’ll be headed here.” Harlan squinted and turned to me. “And what the hell do you know about Paul Muller, Booker? When he went to jail, you were still going to Society cotillions in New York.”

  The truth was, at the time Paul Muller went to jail six years ago, I had withdrawn from the Society life my grandparents had planned for me and was living in the hinterlands of West Seventy-second Street, freelancing occasional articles for Mr. Pulitzer’s New York World, but making my living primarily by turning out dime novel potboilers about the West, which at that time I had never seen. I frequented the library, watched the wire services at the newspaper, and (to admit an embarrassing fact) read the work of other dime novelists in order to evoke the West of my fiction.

  I even based a few of my villains on Paul Muller, a daring and ruthless bank and train robber, though I remember finding his name impossibly dull. I think I called him Buck Murdo, or some such concoction. My heroes shot him to death (in fair fights, of course) with some regularity.

  And I must admit he helped me prosper. I finally made enough money to visit the West in person. And it was then, in Boulder, Wyoming, flat on his back in a hotel bedroom, being nursed by a prostitute everyone then called Becky, that I met Lobo Blacke. He had been set up, ambushed, and paralyzed for life.

  I wangled a meeting with Blacke and made him a business proposition. He and I would collaborate on his memoirs and split the proceeds. It took some persuading, but Blacke agreed. He had come to realize that if he was going to maintain any sort of independence, he needed some sort of income.

  So for seven weeks, he talked and I asked questions and took notes, and the result was The Memoirs of Lobo Blacke as Dictated by Himself, now in its twenty-second printing, and still selling very briskly, thank you. The book has made us both quite comfortable in financial terms, but there was more we both wanted.

  For me, the money was a mixed blessing, since without the encouragement of financial need, my indolent nature was all too ready to drift back into the kind of idleness I’d fled from in the first place.

  For Blacke, the royalties from the book enabled him to move to Le Four and establish the Witness, the better to try to track down evidence against the man he was sure had masterminded the cowardly attack that had crippled him. We shall have more to do with the man in question later in this narrative.

  In any event, Blacke found he needed help in turning out the paper (and doing the investigations the journalistic enterprise provided an excuse for), so he sent for me. That, at least, is the reason he gives. I suspect, though, that his shrewd brain divined that I was going stale in the metropolis, and he got me out here to see if curiosity wouldn’t do for me what poverty once had. His plan had succeeded in at least one way—these days, I was hardly ever idle.

  “I know enough about Paul Muller,” I told the sheriff, “to be tempted to agree with you.”

  Asa Harlan had opened his mouth to argue with me before the meaning of my words penetrated his brain. He stood there with his jaw open while I turned to Blacke.

  “Muller was your last big arrest before you got shot.” There was a time when I might have tried to be more circumspect in my language, but I had learned that anything but direct speech about his condition infuriated Blacke. “I’ve never seen the territorial prison, but from what I hear it’s no garden spot. Why shouldn’t Muller be coming here to get revenge on you?”

  “Because he’s not stupid, and revenge is a stupid man’s game.”

  “I’ve heard you say that crime is a stupid man’s game.”

  Blacke cocked his head and looked up at me appraisingly. “That’s an annoying habit you have, Booker, tripping a man up with his own words.”

  I grinned.

  “But this is different,” Blacke said. “If he gets caught this time, he won’t get off with just a robbery charge. He’ll hang by the neck until he’s dead for killing that guard.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it would hurt to accept the possibility that his desire for revenge has grown stronger than his instinct for self-preservation.”

  “It’s been known to happen,” Blacke conceded. “But I’m not going to cower in front of the guy, either.”

  “Oh, come on, Louis,” Harlan said, “you ain’t never cowered in your life, and nobody’s gonna think you’
re starting now.”

  Blacke twisted a finger in his ear and blinked his eyes a couple of times. “I must be on the way out, Asa. I thought I just heard you say something nice about me.”

  “Huh. I still think you’re a grandstanding showboat with a chip on his shoulder who don’t know how to make the right friends, but anybody can tell there ain’t a drop of yellow in you.”

  The sheriff wiped the back of his hand across his moustache, as if to remove any flavor of his endorsement of Blacke’s courage from his mouth.

  “Besides,” Harlan said, “I said you were one of the reasons to think he might be coming here. There’s another one. Bigger. Nobody but me and Lucius knows it.”

  Blacke’s eyebrows went up. “Oh? And now you’re going to share it with us, are you?”

  “Hope to kiss a pig’s ass if I do,” the sheriff declared. “This isn’t no business of yours, and especially it’s no business of a newspaper.”

  Blacke sighed. “Asa, Booker and I both pledge our word of honor that we won’t print a word of what you tell us. Isn’t that right, Booker?”

  It went against every instinct I have as a writer. Why bother to learn something if you aren’t going to publish it? I almost blurted out an angry No! before I got a look at Blacke. I knew that crafty look. The skills and instincts that had seen him through the decades of dealing with outlaws had spotted an angle. I could see that Blacke felt it was more important to know this than to publish it.

  That was good enough for me. “Oh, absolutely right,” I said. “Word of honor.” I raised my right hand as if under oath.

  Harlan narrowed his pale eyes. “And you won’t tell nobody by word of mouth, neither.”

  This really was important. The sheriff was thinking hard today; ordinarily, he never would have come up with that one.

  “You promise, you two?”

  We both said we did.

  Harlan wiped his moustache again. “I don’t rightly know if I should. I’m inclined to tell you, because you might think of something to do that could help me out, but—”