Eureka

CHAPTER 8

I stopped at the grocery and picked up some tomatoes, a bottle of milk, and a pint of chocolate ice cream, and walked to the end of the block to Lupo’s butcher shop. Lupo was about five-five and all muscle, one of those people without a neck. His head was shaped like a fat pumpkin, with skimpy black hair, and he had bull shoulders that bulged out just below his ears, and a torso that went straight down from under his arms. He could carry a side of beef between his thumb and forefinger. His apron was splattered with blood and he wore rubber boots folded over at the knee. I was afraid to bring up sensitive subjects like sanitary conditions when I was in the shop.

“How about a nice T-bone or porterhouse steak, Zee,” he said with a grin.

“Thirty cents for a pound of steak?” I said. “The cows must be on strike.”

“That’s a good one.”

“How about some bones for my dog?”

“Since when you got a dog? What kind?”

“I don’t know, Lupo, he doesn’t have a birth certificate.”

“Another good one,” he chuckled. “How many bones you want?”

“How does six sound?”

“Six! He must be some big dog. What’s this hound’s name?”

I thought about that for a minute and finally I said, “His name’s Rosebud.”

“ His name?”

“He’s a used dog, the name came with him. I tried to change it to Slugger but every time I call him that, he looks around to see who Slugger is.”

He wiggled a finger at me and I leaned toward him.

“He’ll come to Rosie,” he said in a low confidential voice. “Anybody asks, tell him you named him after Slapsie Maxie.”

He was sitting under the yucca plant staring up at a mockingbird that was singing like a blue jay, when I walked out on the back porch.

“Hey, Rosie,” I called, “how about a bone?”

He came loping across the yard and leaned against me, and I scratched him behind the ears. We went inside and I dished out his can of food and put it on the floor, and he went at it like a hyena attacking carrion. Then I gave him a bone.

“You can eat that in here,” I said, but he walked to the screen door and waited for me to open it. “You’re some creature of habit,” I said, and let him out.

I took out the clips Pennington had loaned me. Culhane’s was a surface biography, no scandal attached. His picture showed a handsome man with a hard jaw and sun-creased skin. He was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and a striped tie, and wearing a black fedora-mischievous pale eyes under the brim, and a vague smile. He was leaning against a wall, with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Beside it was a second picture of a younger Culhane, dressed in a workman’s shirt and dark pants, with one of those round, peaked hats the cops wore back in those days and the puttees he probably had worn in the Marines. He was stern-faced and looked ill at ease in front of the camera. He had his foot on the running board of a four-door Ford ragtop. Beside him was the sheriff, Buck Tallman, who was sitting on a big roan. Tallman was a tall, erect man in a western shirt and a buckskin vest, who obviously ran the county from the back of a horse and used a. 44 Peacemaker as a convincer. He had a ten-gallon hat pulled down over gentle eyes, and a proud smile under a handlebar mustache. It was a face that demanded respect, a face that concealed a harsh life on the frontier and a lot of history he probably wanted to forget or had rewritten through the years. He could have been fifty or a hundred and fifty. Together, they kept the peace, which, according to the story, was not as easy as it might sound. Eureka had been like a border town, wide open, noisy, and mean, a town where gambling, boozing, and whoring were the main occupations. Under those circumstances Tallman was not an anachronism, although he might have become one by the time the two of them had decided things were changing and it was time for San Pietro to change, too.

From the story, I learned that Culhane was born in 1884 in that wide-open, sin-ridden town. In 1900, at the age of sixteen, he lied about his age and joined the Marines, ending up on the Western Front, a sharpshooter who won a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and the French Croix de Guerre in the last battle of the Somme. He came home in 1920 and went back to work as a deputy sheriff.

In 1921, Tallman was shot down in what the paper described as “the massacre at Grand View House, the town’s most respectable fancy house.” A new county council immediately named Culhane the sheriff. A year later he was duly elected to the post on the promise that he would clean up San Pietro County and “make it a town and county we will all be proud of.” During the years that followed, he kept that promise. He drove out the mobsters and gentrified San Pietro. Now it was a thriving tourist town.

There was a sidebar relating to the 1922 arrest and conviction of a gangster named Arnie Riker for the murder of a young woman named Wilma Thompson. Riker, of course, had claimed he was framed by Culhane. Not surprising. I never met a hooligan yet who didn’t cry “frame” when faced with the goods. He got the gas chamber, later commuted to life without parole on an appeal.

All in all, a favorable piece without a hint of the kind of scandal and corruption that must have been rife during the early days, and one that gave no hint of the stuff I had been hearing from Ski and others about Culhane, except for one thing. When asked about his political platform, Culhane told the reporter, “You’ll find out when I’m good and ready to tell you.”

That sounded like the Culhane I was expecting to meet.