Phantom Purloiners, page 10
“Wyoming is indeed a small town on a long street.”
“Generally speaking, there are three kinds of smoke from a diesel engine: black, blue, and white. Black smoke is most common, and it indicates incomplete fuel combustion. If a bus smokes, it’s most likely to be black smoke because most of the buses on the road are old. White smoke is not uncommon, but I don’t see a lot of it. White smoke means the fuel is not burning properly. Blue smoke, the kind you are asking about, means your engine is burning oil. The most likely reason is that you have worn piston rings or a faulty valve system. That leaks oil into the diesel, and you get the blue smoke. All smoke comes and goes unless there is a real problem. Let me revise that; if a bus is spewing a lot of smoke, any color, it goes into the shop for repair. White smoke and blue smoke come and go. If the smoke persists, the bus goes into the shop. Replacing the piston rings is expensive, so you only do it if you absolutely, positively, have to.”
“I know this is a crazy question . . .”
“You want to know if you can make a bus smoke. Like I said, all of Wyoming . . .
“. . . is a small town. I’m getting used to it.”
“Yes, you can make a bus smoke. Thinking like a bad person, if I wanted to make a bus smoke, I’d get something like a syringe or a small cooking baster and fill it with some kind of low-heat sensitive liquid. You might even be able to find that kind of liquid in a magic shop. You would just walk around to the back of the bus and squirt it into the exhaust pipe. Even if the bus was off, the pipe would still be hot enough to vaporize the liquid into blue smoke. Lots of liquid, lots of blue smoke.”
“Or a more sophisticated liquid.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m an expert on buses, not smoke.”
“How much smoke would it take to set off a fire alarm?”
“Not a lot. The problem isn’t the smoke itself. I mean, the smoke you can see. There are a lot of other things in smoke that affect the fire alarm. The threshold for setting the alarm off is low because of insurance. You don’t want people suing the bus company because they claim their shortness of breath comes from being in a smoky bus terminal.”
“So having the alarm go off if a bus is smoking is not unusual.”
“No. Just as likely the bus driver or the terminal manager would see the smoke and pull the alarm.”
“Or someone on the bus.”
“Possibly.”
“So it’s perfectly reasonable for a bus to smoke. And blue smoke does not indicate much. And having a fire alarm go off because of smoke in a terminal is not unusual either.”
“Yes, and sorry. I was hoping I could help you crack the case.”
Noonan didn’t say anything but kept writing in his notebook. Finally, he looked up. “Just one more thing,” Noonan said as he turned to go. “You are an unabashed Viking.” He pointed at the ceramic map of Norway and the oversized print of Thorstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukka. “But your first name is Nels. That’s Swedish. How did that happen?”
“My father married beneath his station; my mother was Swedish.”
CHAPTER 28
Joshua Three Trees was split on his feelings for Las Vegas. On the downside, it was not Wyoming. Nothing like Wyoming. A long way from Wyoming. Was not wide open like Wyoming and had more people in a single block than Wyoming had at the height of tourist season statewide. On the upside, this was where the money was. The big money.
The three of them met in a clothing optional rent-by-the-hour sauna out on the desert. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas was the plan, and being without clothes had nothing to do with sex. It had to do with wires. Each of them trusted the other, but such was not the case up the administrative food chain of their respective coconspirators, particularly when it came to Three Trees. His partners had spent too much time watching cops and robbers show. But that was fine with Three Trees. It was a good idea to be over safe. He was only going to be doing one big money transaction in his life, and this was it. On his end, the transfer of money was legal, legitimate, and confirmed by the legal beagles in the casino consortium.
He wasn’t facing any legal consequences.
She was.
But she knew exactly what she was doing.
She had set the whole plan in motion. Made the contact in Las Vegas. Made the contact with Three Trees. She was the one taking the risk. But it didn’t matter because she would be long gone when the scheme would be revealed. But then again, it stood a very good chance of being a silent robbery, one where the insurance companies quietly paid off rather than risk the publicity. So, at the end of the day, it just might be a nonrobbery event. Three Trees liked that idea. So did the fat man from the casino consortium.
“There is just one more shoe to fall,” she told the two. “After the detective talks to our man in Casper, we will move. Quickly. I figure we will have about thirty-six free hours. The money has to be paid and transferred in that window. When your check has cleared, the papers will be signed over.”
“Why thirty-six hours?” the fat man asked.
“The key to success here is chaos,” she said. “We have to keep John Law struggling to figure out what is happening. Everyone will eventually figure out what has happened, but by then it will be too late. The money will have been transferred and buried. The paperwork will have been filed legally, and then”—she pointed to the fat man—“your consortium will be the only game in town.”
“And that’s the way we like it,” the fat man said and slopped water on his face.
CHAPTER 29
Undoubtedly the best-known drink in the world, both in the East and in the West, is the martini. It can be made with gin or, as James Bond prefers it, with vodka, “shaken, not stirred.” Depending on whom you ask—and when—the perfect martini is served straight in a cocktail glass with an olive or lemon twist. Straight or on the rocks, your choice. But the mix ratio is important. The IBA, International Bartenders Association, lists the current standard as 6:2, gin and vermouth. But these numbers had changed over the years. During Prohibition when you weren’t supposed to be drinking at all, the ratio was 3:1. When liquor became legal and America went to war, 4:1. As the years went on, the denominator stayed the same but the numerator went to six, eight, twelve, fifteen, and even as high as fifty or one hundred. Per playwright Noël Coward, “A perfect Martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy.”
The reason one salutes Italy, even though there may not be as much as a hint of vermouth in the cocktail glass, is because Italy is the home of this fortified wine, which is flavored with a variety of roots, barks, flowers, seeds, herbs, and spices. While fortified wines have been around for a millennium, the most popular vermouth comes from Torino, Italy, where it has been marketed under the label Martini & Rossi since 1863. In fact, it is the Martini of Martini & Rossi that gives the drink its name.
Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, and James Bond have made the martini a household name in America, but in Italy, the names are a comedic punch line. When a businessman wished to indicate that everyone was involved in some enterprise, the salesman would say that the investors had included family members of the Sabatini, Ferraro, Martini, and Rossi. When shell corporations were established in Italy to hide foreign investment, the names Martini and Rossi often appeared as corporate directors.
Such was the case of the Stupinigi Corporation of Torino. Established at the same time as the Nimerigar, it had a threefold purpose. First, since it was established in Italy, it was legal for Italians to invest Italian money in the corporation. The currency laws in Italy, archaic as they are, only allowed a certain amount of cash to be exported out of the country. To dodge the restriction, rich Italians invested in Italian companies that had foreign investments. As long as those foreign investments did not convert to cash within a set time period—which varied with each election—the money could legally leave the country. The Stupinigi Corporation, on paper, had five corporate directors. Two of them, however, were Giuseppe Martini and Geraldo Rossi. Then there was a Lorenzo Furbo, a bona fide Italian lawyer whose law firm was a post-office address only. With three directors of the five, the company was legitimately Italian. The other directors were a Nathaniel Three Trees of Wyoming and Karen Hutchinson of Las Vegas.
The Stupinigi Corporation directors met quarterly, as required by Italian law, and filed corporate papers as required by Italian law. Its asset base began with the acquisition of a defunct railroad-and-mining conglomerate on the western slopes of the Laramie Mountains and the adjacent flatlands advancing on the miniscule—miniscule by Italian standards—community of Colter, Wyoming. The corporation was also leaping through US Bureau of Land Management hoops and State of Wyoming requirements to acquire land in the general area of the three counties that included Washakie, Bridger, and Colter.
To those in the know in the three counties, the Stupinigi Corporation was simply a scam by some clever Italian lawyer. These pie-in-the-sky schemes were a dime a dozen. A horde of mining conglomerates, railroad enterprises, homesteads, fracking companies, and dude ranches had come and gone. The Stupinigi was just another one. When the casino concept collapsed under its own weight, the Stupinigi Corporation would quietly sell out to some other pie-in-the-sky shyster, and the process would begin again.
The only difference between the Stupinigi Corporation and those who had come before was this company had a local lawyer, Harold Bodacious. He was headquartered out of his own office in Colter where he specialized in anything that made money. To have Harold Bodacious represent you meant one of two things: you were sleazy and needed representation for an underhanded enterprise or needed a connection for an underhanded enterprise. Either way, everyone knew a shoe was going to drop. When and where, no one knew because if Harold Bodacious was involved, something just might happen.
CHAPTER 30
Historically speaking, and considering his knowledge of Alaskan history because of his wife, Noonan was not so sure he was looking forward to visiting Cheyenne. It was, after all, the epicenter of the Johnson County War, and smack-dab in the center of the Johnson County War was Frank M. Canton, cowboy and hired assassin.
Canton had a reputation as a cold-blooded killer while working as a peace officer in Oklahoma and Wyoming before he went to Alaska to let things cool down in the lower states and territories. He had been a criminal in Texas under the name of Joe Horner and had killed at least one man legally, Bill Dunn, in the line of duty when he was a lawman in Pawnee, Oklahoma, in November 1894. Dunn, a criminal, rode into town to kill Canton and, in a classic good-guy-versus-bad-guy confrontation, hid in the doorway of a butcher shop until Canton came out of a restaurant where he had been serving subpoenas. Canton walked up the plank sidewalk, his hands in his pockets because it was a brisk day.
But he was armed with a Colt .45.
Dunn stepped out into the open and yelled, “Frank Canton. I’ve got it in for you.”
Canton claimed he saw “murder in [Dunn’s] eyes” and Dunn’s hand on his gun.
Canton was fast. He snatched his Colt from a clip on his waistband and fired at the outlaw point-blank range. The slug struck Dunn in the forehead before the man had a chance to fire, and he went down heavily still “working the trigger finger of his right hand.” A grand jury declared this to be a case of “plainly justifiable homicide.”
The saga of Frank Canton in Alaska was short and painful. Constantly short of cash because the government was slow to pay, he had to pay many of his expenses out of his own pocket. These expenses were necessary because he could find no one in Circle who was willing to feed prisoners at the rate of three dollars a day, and the federal wage for being a jail guard was so low there were no takers. Even when Canton was paid, the money was inadequate for his upkeep. “It has been a hardship on me to discharge the duties of the office as I have no funds at my command”—Canton wrote his superior—“and have been compelled to borrow money to meet expenses.”
Canton never did receive any compensation from his superior. Then he was dismissed. The year before he had come to Alaska he had been accused of submitting fraudulent expense claims while he had been in Oklahoma. The wheels of justice move slowly, but they did move, and Canton was left in Alaska and broke. He had to borrow from a friend to pay for a steamship ticket to Seattle.
His life in the lower states and territories was a lot more sordid. Born Josiah Horner in 1849, he spent his early years drifting, robbing banks, and rustling cattle. In 1874 he got into a gunfight with some buffalo soldiers, killing one. Three years later he was arrested for robbing a bank in Comanche, Texas. He escaped while still a prisoner and moved to Nebraska where he changed his name to Frank M. Canton.
After a vain attempt to walk the straight and narrow path, he ended up in Johnson County, Wyoming, working for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association as a “detective.” For “detective,” Noonan and historians read “killer.” The euphemism in those days was “regulator.” And, at the same time, he was working as US deputy marshal.
On April 9, 1892, in a scene that would be relived in all manner of Western movies for next century, Canton and a body of regulators descended upon the KC Ranch. Two men outside were captured right away and another one killed. Nate Champion, the target of the raid, holed up inside the K C ranch house held off the regulators for most of the day. Champion killed at least four regulators and wounded several others. Canton, finally tired of being forced to wait Champion out, set the house on fire. When Champion came out of the house, gun blazing, he was shot twenty-eight times. A few days later, the table was turned. Some of Champion’s friends and a sheriff descended on the regulators at the TA Ranch, and a gun battle ensued. Canton survived the battle but was never charged with any crime. A century later, there is a Nate Champion Statue at the entrance to the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame in Buffalo, Wyoming, and Champion was in the first class of inductees. Frank M. Canton is not in the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame.
Basically, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association—headquartered out of Cheyenne—was nothing more than a power grab by wealthy ranchers to drive out the smaller operations. Canton and the regulators were hired to kill or chase off the smaller operators. How involved was Canton with the actual killings? History records Canton’s forces of law and order—such as they were in days when there was a US deputy marshal on one side and a sheriff on the other—lost a gripsack, which contained, according to Wikipedia, “a list of 70 [Johnson] County residents to be either shot or hanged, and a contract to pay [the Regulators] $5 a day plus a bonus of $50 for every rustler, real or alleged they killed.”
After the Johnson County War, Canton moved to Oklahoma where he continued to work as a US deputy marshal and later for Isaac “Hanging Judge” Parker with such Western legends as Heck Thomas, Chris Madson, Bill Tilghman, and the man who would become the model for “The Lone Ranger,” Bass Reeves.
All in all, Canton had lived a speckled life, and Noonan, a lifelong advocate of law and order, found Canton to be historically interesting but legally repulsive at the same time. Further, the Johnson County Wars were not that long in the past, and, in Wyoming, as Chloe Fetterman had so accurately stated, the Sand Creek Massacre was “yesterday.”
Casper was not that large by North Carolina standards—sixty thousand—so Noonan had no trouble finding the psychiatric facility. He also had no problem meeting with Harrison Day Three as long as he had his loyer there. That was what the loyer said, not Harrison Day Three. Noonan was lucky that the loyer was there because she was the only person in the room answering questions. Harrison Day Three was all over the psychological map.
The FBI was recording his thoughts.
He was being sent to Hawaii as part of the witness protection program.
The Pope had given him a new name.
He had a fortune that the State of Wyoming was keeping for itself.
He had been assaulted twenty-eight times in the last week at the psychiatric facility.
The loyer was most apologetic. “Sorry you wasted the four hours driving here from Washakie,” she said. “Mr. Harrison has been this way since he checked himself in here.”
Noonan was taken by surprise. “He checked himself in?”
“Yes, I thought you knew that. The police in Washakie knew it. There was nothing to hold him on. They tried to get a court order but failed. Mr. Harrison agreed to be checked in. Why, I do not know. He’s not here under a court order.”
“So he can get out at any time?”
“That’s the law.”
“Then why are you here?”
“There is a murder involved, and Mr. Harrison is a destitute suspect. He’s entitled to legal representation.”
“As I understand what you said, you only represent him with regard to the case of murder, not being held here.”
“Correct. I have no say whether he comes or goes from here. I only handle the paperwork for the murder charge.”
“And there has been no murder charge.”
“Not as far as I know.”
“You are correct; this was a wasted trip.”
“Sorry.”
Noonan shrugged. “That’s OK. I’ve always wanted to visit Rawlins.”
“To see the skin shoes, right?”
“How did you know that?”
“Everyone in law enforcement who comes to Casper finds an excuse to go to Rawlins. What else would they do in a town of ten thousand in the middle of nowhere?”
“You read me like a book.”
The loyer pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to Noonan. “Leave me your cell phone just in case Mr. Harrison becomes lucid. Not that I believe that is going to happen in your lifetime, but you never know.”
“I’m going to spend the night in Rawlins,” Noonan said. “If anything happens, let me know. I have to come back through Casper to get to Bridger.”
“Generally speaking, there are three kinds of smoke from a diesel engine: black, blue, and white. Black smoke is most common, and it indicates incomplete fuel combustion. If a bus smokes, it’s most likely to be black smoke because most of the buses on the road are old. White smoke is not uncommon, but I don’t see a lot of it. White smoke means the fuel is not burning properly. Blue smoke, the kind you are asking about, means your engine is burning oil. The most likely reason is that you have worn piston rings or a faulty valve system. That leaks oil into the diesel, and you get the blue smoke. All smoke comes and goes unless there is a real problem. Let me revise that; if a bus is spewing a lot of smoke, any color, it goes into the shop for repair. White smoke and blue smoke come and go. If the smoke persists, the bus goes into the shop. Replacing the piston rings is expensive, so you only do it if you absolutely, positively, have to.”
“I know this is a crazy question . . .”
“You want to know if you can make a bus smoke. Like I said, all of Wyoming . . .
“. . . is a small town. I’m getting used to it.”
“Yes, you can make a bus smoke. Thinking like a bad person, if I wanted to make a bus smoke, I’d get something like a syringe or a small cooking baster and fill it with some kind of low-heat sensitive liquid. You might even be able to find that kind of liquid in a magic shop. You would just walk around to the back of the bus and squirt it into the exhaust pipe. Even if the bus was off, the pipe would still be hot enough to vaporize the liquid into blue smoke. Lots of liquid, lots of blue smoke.”
“Or a more sophisticated liquid.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m an expert on buses, not smoke.”
“How much smoke would it take to set off a fire alarm?”
“Not a lot. The problem isn’t the smoke itself. I mean, the smoke you can see. There are a lot of other things in smoke that affect the fire alarm. The threshold for setting the alarm off is low because of insurance. You don’t want people suing the bus company because they claim their shortness of breath comes from being in a smoky bus terminal.”
“So having the alarm go off if a bus is smoking is not unusual.”
“No. Just as likely the bus driver or the terminal manager would see the smoke and pull the alarm.”
“Or someone on the bus.”
“Possibly.”
“So it’s perfectly reasonable for a bus to smoke. And blue smoke does not indicate much. And having a fire alarm go off because of smoke in a terminal is not unusual either.”
“Yes, and sorry. I was hoping I could help you crack the case.”
Noonan didn’t say anything but kept writing in his notebook. Finally, he looked up. “Just one more thing,” Noonan said as he turned to go. “You are an unabashed Viking.” He pointed at the ceramic map of Norway and the oversized print of Thorstein Skevla and Skjervald Skrukka. “But your first name is Nels. That’s Swedish. How did that happen?”
“My father married beneath his station; my mother was Swedish.”
CHAPTER 28
Joshua Three Trees was split on his feelings for Las Vegas. On the downside, it was not Wyoming. Nothing like Wyoming. A long way from Wyoming. Was not wide open like Wyoming and had more people in a single block than Wyoming had at the height of tourist season statewide. On the upside, this was where the money was. The big money.
The three of them met in a clothing optional rent-by-the-hour sauna out on the desert. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas was the plan, and being without clothes had nothing to do with sex. It had to do with wires. Each of them trusted the other, but such was not the case up the administrative food chain of their respective coconspirators, particularly when it came to Three Trees. His partners had spent too much time watching cops and robbers show. But that was fine with Three Trees. It was a good idea to be over safe. He was only going to be doing one big money transaction in his life, and this was it. On his end, the transfer of money was legal, legitimate, and confirmed by the legal beagles in the casino consortium.
He wasn’t facing any legal consequences.
She was.
But she knew exactly what she was doing.
She had set the whole plan in motion. Made the contact in Las Vegas. Made the contact with Three Trees. She was the one taking the risk. But it didn’t matter because she would be long gone when the scheme would be revealed. But then again, it stood a very good chance of being a silent robbery, one where the insurance companies quietly paid off rather than risk the publicity. So, at the end of the day, it just might be a nonrobbery event. Three Trees liked that idea. So did the fat man from the casino consortium.
“There is just one more shoe to fall,” she told the two. “After the detective talks to our man in Casper, we will move. Quickly. I figure we will have about thirty-six free hours. The money has to be paid and transferred in that window. When your check has cleared, the papers will be signed over.”
“Why thirty-six hours?” the fat man asked.
“The key to success here is chaos,” she said. “We have to keep John Law struggling to figure out what is happening. Everyone will eventually figure out what has happened, but by then it will be too late. The money will have been transferred and buried. The paperwork will have been filed legally, and then”—she pointed to the fat man—“your consortium will be the only game in town.”
“And that’s the way we like it,” the fat man said and slopped water on his face.
CHAPTER 29
Undoubtedly the best-known drink in the world, both in the East and in the West, is the martini. It can be made with gin or, as James Bond prefers it, with vodka, “shaken, not stirred.” Depending on whom you ask—and when—the perfect martini is served straight in a cocktail glass with an olive or lemon twist. Straight or on the rocks, your choice. But the mix ratio is important. The IBA, International Bartenders Association, lists the current standard as 6:2, gin and vermouth. But these numbers had changed over the years. During Prohibition when you weren’t supposed to be drinking at all, the ratio was 3:1. When liquor became legal and America went to war, 4:1. As the years went on, the denominator stayed the same but the numerator went to six, eight, twelve, fifteen, and even as high as fifty or one hundred. Per playwright Noël Coward, “A perfect Martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy.”
The reason one salutes Italy, even though there may not be as much as a hint of vermouth in the cocktail glass, is because Italy is the home of this fortified wine, which is flavored with a variety of roots, barks, flowers, seeds, herbs, and spices. While fortified wines have been around for a millennium, the most popular vermouth comes from Torino, Italy, where it has been marketed under the label Martini & Rossi since 1863. In fact, it is the Martini of Martini & Rossi that gives the drink its name.
Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, and James Bond have made the martini a household name in America, but in Italy, the names are a comedic punch line. When a businessman wished to indicate that everyone was involved in some enterprise, the salesman would say that the investors had included family members of the Sabatini, Ferraro, Martini, and Rossi. When shell corporations were established in Italy to hide foreign investment, the names Martini and Rossi often appeared as corporate directors.
Such was the case of the Stupinigi Corporation of Torino. Established at the same time as the Nimerigar, it had a threefold purpose. First, since it was established in Italy, it was legal for Italians to invest Italian money in the corporation. The currency laws in Italy, archaic as they are, only allowed a certain amount of cash to be exported out of the country. To dodge the restriction, rich Italians invested in Italian companies that had foreign investments. As long as those foreign investments did not convert to cash within a set time period—which varied with each election—the money could legally leave the country. The Stupinigi Corporation, on paper, had five corporate directors. Two of them, however, were Giuseppe Martini and Geraldo Rossi. Then there was a Lorenzo Furbo, a bona fide Italian lawyer whose law firm was a post-office address only. With three directors of the five, the company was legitimately Italian. The other directors were a Nathaniel Three Trees of Wyoming and Karen Hutchinson of Las Vegas.
The Stupinigi Corporation directors met quarterly, as required by Italian law, and filed corporate papers as required by Italian law. Its asset base began with the acquisition of a defunct railroad-and-mining conglomerate on the western slopes of the Laramie Mountains and the adjacent flatlands advancing on the miniscule—miniscule by Italian standards—community of Colter, Wyoming. The corporation was also leaping through US Bureau of Land Management hoops and State of Wyoming requirements to acquire land in the general area of the three counties that included Washakie, Bridger, and Colter.
To those in the know in the three counties, the Stupinigi Corporation was simply a scam by some clever Italian lawyer. These pie-in-the-sky schemes were a dime a dozen. A horde of mining conglomerates, railroad enterprises, homesteads, fracking companies, and dude ranches had come and gone. The Stupinigi was just another one. When the casino concept collapsed under its own weight, the Stupinigi Corporation would quietly sell out to some other pie-in-the-sky shyster, and the process would begin again.
The only difference between the Stupinigi Corporation and those who had come before was this company had a local lawyer, Harold Bodacious. He was headquartered out of his own office in Colter where he specialized in anything that made money. To have Harold Bodacious represent you meant one of two things: you were sleazy and needed representation for an underhanded enterprise or needed a connection for an underhanded enterprise. Either way, everyone knew a shoe was going to drop. When and where, no one knew because if Harold Bodacious was involved, something just might happen.
CHAPTER 30
Historically speaking, and considering his knowledge of Alaskan history because of his wife, Noonan was not so sure he was looking forward to visiting Cheyenne. It was, after all, the epicenter of the Johnson County War, and smack-dab in the center of the Johnson County War was Frank M. Canton, cowboy and hired assassin.
Canton had a reputation as a cold-blooded killer while working as a peace officer in Oklahoma and Wyoming before he went to Alaska to let things cool down in the lower states and territories. He had been a criminal in Texas under the name of Joe Horner and had killed at least one man legally, Bill Dunn, in the line of duty when he was a lawman in Pawnee, Oklahoma, in November 1894. Dunn, a criminal, rode into town to kill Canton and, in a classic good-guy-versus-bad-guy confrontation, hid in the doorway of a butcher shop until Canton came out of a restaurant where he had been serving subpoenas. Canton walked up the plank sidewalk, his hands in his pockets because it was a brisk day.
But he was armed with a Colt .45.
Dunn stepped out into the open and yelled, “Frank Canton. I’ve got it in for you.”
Canton claimed he saw “murder in [Dunn’s] eyes” and Dunn’s hand on his gun.
Canton was fast. He snatched his Colt from a clip on his waistband and fired at the outlaw point-blank range. The slug struck Dunn in the forehead before the man had a chance to fire, and he went down heavily still “working the trigger finger of his right hand.” A grand jury declared this to be a case of “plainly justifiable homicide.”
The saga of Frank Canton in Alaska was short and painful. Constantly short of cash because the government was slow to pay, he had to pay many of his expenses out of his own pocket. These expenses were necessary because he could find no one in Circle who was willing to feed prisoners at the rate of three dollars a day, and the federal wage for being a jail guard was so low there were no takers. Even when Canton was paid, the money was inadequate for his upkeep. “It has been a hardship on me to discharge the duties of the office as I have no funds at my command”—Canton wrote his superior—“and have been compelled to borrow money to meet expenses.”
Canton never did receive any compensation from his superior. Then he was dismissed. The year before he had come to Alaska he had been accused of submitting fraudulent expense claims while he had been in Oklahoma. The wheels of justice move slowly, but they did move, and Canton was left in Alaska and broke. He had to borrow from a friend to pay for a steamship ticket to Seattle.
His life in the lower states and territories was a lot more sordid. Born Josiah Horner in 1849, he spent his early years drifting, robbing banks, and rustling cattle. In 1874 he got into a gunfight with some buffalo soldiers, killing one. Three years later he was arrested for robbing a bank in Comanche, Texas. He escaped while still a prisoner and moved to Nebraska where he changed his name to Frank M. Canton.
After a vain attempt to walk the straight and narrow path, he ended up in Johnson County, Wyoming, working for the Wyoming Stock Growers Association as a “detective.” For “detective,” Noonan and historians read “killer.” The euphemism in those days was “regulator.” And, at the same time, he was working as US deputy marshal.
On April 9, 1892, in a scene that would be relived in all manner of Western movies for next century, Canton and a body of regulators descended upon the KC Ranch. Two men outside were captured right away and another one killed. Nate Champion, the target of the raid, holed up inside the K C ranch house held off the regulators for most of the day. Champion killed at least four regulators and wounded several others. Canton, finally tired of being forced to wait Champion out, set the house on fire. When Champion came out of the house, gun blazing, he was shot twenty-eight times. A few days later, the table was turned. Some of Champion’s friends and a sheriff descended on the regulators at the TA Ranch, and a gun battle ensued. Canton survived the battle but was never charged with any crime. A century later, there is a Nate Champion Statue at the entrance to the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame in Buffalo, Wyoming, and Champion was in the first class of inductees. Frank M. Canton is not in the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame.
Basically, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association—headquartered out of Cheyenne—was nothing more than a power grab by wealthy ranchers to drive out the smaller operations. Canton and the regulators were hired to kill or chase off the smaller operators. How involved was Canton with the actual killings? History records Canton’s forces of law and order—such as they were in days when there was a US deputy marshal on one side and a sheriff on the other—lost a gripsack, which contained, according to Wikipedia, “a list of 70 [Johnson] County residents to be either shot or hanged, and a contract to pay [the Regulators] $5 a day plus a bonus of $50 for every rustler, real or alleged they killed.”
After the Johnson County War, Canton moved to Oklahoma where he continued to work as a US deputy marshal and later for Isaac “Hanging Judge” Parker with such Western legends as Heck Thomas, Chris Madson, Bill Tilghman, and the man who would become the model for “The Lone Ranger,” Bass Reeves.
All in all, Canton had lived a speckled life, and Noonan, a lifelong advocate of law and order, found Canton to be historically interesting but legally repulsive at the same time. Further, the Johnson County Wars were not that long in the past, and, in Wyoming, as Chloe Fetterman had so accurately stated, the Sand Creek Massacre was “yesterday.”
Casper was not that large by North Carolina standards—sixty thousand—so Noonan had no trouble finding the psychiatric facility. He also had no problem meeting with Harrison Day Three as long as he had his loyer there. That was what the loyer said, not Harrison Day Three. Noonan was lucky that the loyer was there because she was the only person in the room answering questions. Harrison Day Three was all over the psychological map.
The FBI was recording his thoughts.
He was being sent to Hawaii as part of the witness protection program.
The Pope had given him a new name.
He had a fortune that the State of Wyoming was keeping for itself.
He had been assaulted twenty-eight times in the last week at the psychiatric facility.
The loyer was most apologetic. “Sorry you wasted the four hours driving here from Washakie,” she said. “Mr. Harrison has been this way since he checked himself in here.”
Noonan was taken by surprise. “He checked himself in?”
“Yes, I thought you knew that. The police in Washakie knew it. There was nothing to hold him on. They tried to get a court order but failed. Mr. Harrison agreed to be checked in. Why, I do not know. He’s not here under a court order.”
“So he can get out at any time?”
“That’s the law.”
“Then why are you here?”
“There is a murder involved, and Mr. Harrison is a destitute suspect. He’s entitled to legal representation.”
“As I understand what you said, you only represent him with regard to the case of murder, not being held here.”
“Correct. I have no say whether he comes or goes from here. I only handle the paperwork for the murder charge.”
“And there has been no murder charge.”
“Not as far as I know.”
“You are correct; this was a wasted trip.”
“Sorry.”
Noonan shrugged. “That’s OK. I’ve always wanted to visit Rawlins.”
“To see the skin shoes, right?”
“How did you know that?”
“Everyone in law enforcement who comes to Casper finds an excuse to go to Rawlins. What else would they do in a town of ten thousand in the middle of nowhere?”
“You read me like a book.”
The loyer pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it to Noonan. “Leave me your cell phone just in case Mr. Harrison becomes lucid. Not that I believe that is going to happen in your lifetime, but you never know.”
“I’m going to spend the night in Rawlins,” Noonan said. “If anything happens, let me know. I have to come back through Casper to get to Bridger.”
