Diana and the Three Behrs Read online

  Diana pulled off her cloche hat, kicked off her shoes, and sank back into the shabby armchair. “It does sound sinfully lazy, doesn’t it? When Miss Bradford told me we wouldn’t be holding classes this summer, I was terrified. No salary for two months? That’s courting disaster.” She unfastened the pins holding her neat blonde chignon at the nape of her neck and let her hair cascade freely down her back. “I almost didn’t try for the job listed in the advertisement this morning. It did say they were looking for a man. Then I thought, how many men are going to want such a short-term post? In addition, how many have experience with academic requirements? So I went.”

  “And got it, did you?” Pamina sat up and patted the marcelled waves of her bobbed red hair to be certain they were still in place. “Even with your references and training, that took nerve, going to apply when they were asking for a man.”

  “At first I thought they were going to turn me away without even looking at my qualifications. There was this one man, not one of the professors—I’m not certain exactly why he was there except he placed the ad—who tried to put them off, telling them a woman would be flighty and undependable. Snarled something about ‘flappers’ like he thought the word was obscene. When he saw they really might take me on, he suggested they could pay me less because I wasn’t a man. The professors, bless their little owl heads, apparently didn’t agree. I start tomorrow with an assortment of elderly gentlemen who are meandering through Fort Worth, looking for the essence of all things Cowboy. All except the historian, who seems to be enamored of train holdups and bank robbers.”

  “Well, you should be safe enough, even in a hotel room, with seven aging eggheads.”

  Diana had to admit she’d been concerned about the location. “When I saw they really had taken a hotel room for their office, it worried me. Such an unconventional place. And seven of them. I felt a little…oh, apprehensive, I guess. Then I met those perfectly harmless professors.” She hesitated. “Actually only six of them are certifiably innocent. One of them, the one they call Trey, might not be so wooly and mild. He’s kind of a funny bird, as owlish as the rest, but he’s a long way from aged. Maybe mid-thirties, handsome as sin—though the cheaters don’t do much for him—but he shows signs of being a live wire. I’d bet he’s not immune to the female of the species.”

  Pamina perked up, blue eyes brighter. “Sounds like he might make your days more interesting. What about the other one, the fuddy-duddy who thinks women belong in the kitchen, not the office? Does he come with the rest of the set?”

  “The Horned Owl? He’s not a professor, but he seems to be attached to them some way.” Diana tried again to remember his name and failed. “Not old. Trey’s age, I’d guess. He’s so full of hooting and tooting, I really didn’t notice anything else about him. Big man, well over six feet, and broad in the chest. Brown hair that’s more light than dark. Sharp gray eyes that I swear could read the date on a nickel at fifty feet. Bristly eyebrows. That’s all.”

  “But nothing worth noticing? Seems to me you noticed quite a lot about Mr. Horned Owl.”

  “Not really. He’s like a big bump in the road. You see it, but you go around it and get on with where you’re going.” Diana waved away the image. “I have to tell you about their project, the reason they need me. They’re professors of various subjects, and they all have different interests, ivory tower interests that probably only get attention from other professors. Every summer they choose some kind of topic they can all examine and then write a joint paper. As I said, this year’s topic, if you can imagine anything less scholarly, is Hell’s Half Acre. Cowboys, gamblers, and, I guess, saloons and outlaws.”

  “Learned professors playing Cowboys-and-Indians?” Pamina giggled.

  “That’s about it. They want to talk to some old timers, write down their stories, and develop theories about what impact the time of the Cowboy and the wild days of the Half Acre had on life today.” Diana stopped. “Well, that’s mainly what they’re doing. One of them, this Elmsford, has a little different idea. He wants to track down anybody who knew Butch Cassidy and his gang. Wants to know why the Wild Bunch came here and what they did. He thinks there’s some unknown reason they came but never committed a single robbery here.”

  Pamina nodded. “There’s a story in that question. I’d bet on it.” Her gaze sharpened. “You know, we could help him, your professor.”

  “Pam, I know what you’re thinking. Forget it. I’m not telling those doddery, innocent owls about Tommy Gunn’s place. Not a chance. They might find useful information, sure, but then they might find something else. It’s not just a speakeasy. It’s the place where every lowdown palooka and snake charmer can find a patsy. More than a gin mill. Most every crime in town has some kind of connection to Tommy Gunn. I’m not pointing my nice little owls that direction. Let them find their sources somewhere else.”

  “Di, it’s not that bad. I’ve been there, and I came home in one piece.” Pamina hunched forward on the sofa, her eyes narrowed. Diana knew that look. “Just think, if they did find somebody who would talk about the old days, about Butch Cassidy and his ilk, I might pick up something I could use, too. All it would take would be one good story to get me off the agony desk and into real reporting.”

  “No!” Diana could see the wheels turning in her sister’s mind. “I’m all for you getting somewhere on the newspaper. You can cover murderers and bootleggers and gun molls all you want, but you’re not getting me or my professors into it.”

  Head tilted, eyes bright, Pamina had a little smirk lifting the corners of her mouth. “There’s a bartender at Tommy’s. Old as dirt, but sharp. Poured drinks at…let me think, one of the places in the Half Acre. Bet he’d know something. Or know somebody who does.”

  “Pam, I’m telling you. I’m not going to suggest it to the professors. You know what happens out there, what kind of people they are.”

  “Okay, Di. We’ll leave it for now. But if your downy owls get stuck for information, just remember, I know people, reporters and their friends, who can get us in.” She rose and started for the wardrobe in the corner as she unfastened her kimono. “Come on, dear. Put your shoes on, put your hairpins back, grab your hat, and let’s see if we can find dinner that doesn’t come from a boarding house. I got paid today, so it’s on me.” She slipped out of her robe and reached for the dress hanging on the wardrobe door. “Maybe we can think of some places your professors can safely find what they’re looking for. I still might get a story out of it.”

  Chapter 2

  “Still at your post, Miss Woods? Isn’t it time for lunch or some little errand?”

  Diana kept her tone as sweetly snide as her visitor’s. “Come to interrupt the professors again, Mr. Behr? Too bad. They haven’t come back yet. Dr. King met someone he wanted them to interview.” Diana still thought of him as a Horned Owl, though she’d managed to remember his name at last. During the week she’d been working with the scholarly group, Adler Behr had dropped by at least once a day—usually, like today, at a most inconvenient moment.

  “Trey and I are having lunch.” He put his hat on the table and settled into the armchair near the window. “He’s expecting me. I’ll wait till he’s back.”

  “He’ll be a while. The professors had barely started their morning dispute when Dr. King called them away.” Diana turned back to her typewriter and began translating her notes into more coherent sentences. Even with her back to him, she felt his gaze. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as she stubbornly refused to let him distract her.

  “You are quite proficient with that machine. We’ve talked about getting one for the office at my bank, but I don’t think my staff would be interested in using one. Never touched one of the things myself.”

  She heard his steps on the polished floor and felt him standing beside her. She continued her work for a moment, but Behr didn’t seem to understand that he was being ignored.

  “You aren’t even looking at the keys.”

  From the
corner of her eye, she saw him lean over the table beside her, his long fingers jostling her notes. Enough! She turned to glare up at him.

  “I use the touch method, Mr. Behr, as do most professional typewriters. We learn where the keys are and which finger should stroke which key for efficiency. After a good bit of practice, we can copy long documents very quickly with minimal errors.”

  “What is that you’re working from? Those curls and hooks? Your own code?”

  “No, it’s Gregg shorthand, a standardized form for taking dictation. It enables me to take down verbatim conversation or meetings at the speed of normal speech. Nothing is lost or misquoted. It’s quite helpful to the professors when they are…discussing…their various points of view.” When he didn’t answer, she turned back to her work. “If you don’t mind, I’ll get on with it. I’m certain Dr. Carpenter will be back and join you as soon as they finish their interview.” She turned the page of notes and skimmed them, then resumed copying as if he weren’t standing within an arm’s reach.

  “What were they planning to discuss today? Before King found more interesting prey?”

  “I believe the topic was the men who made trail drives, how they lived on the trail, and what made them do it. The celebration at the end of the drive has been a topic much discussed.”

  “They should come out to my part of the state to meet some of the drovers who actually made those drives and lived that life. They’ll find more of the old timers out there than here in the city.” He stepped back. “I’ll suggest that to Trey. Remind him that a good many of them are still working cowboys, even if the long cattle drives are in the past.”

  Surprised that Behr had made such a positive suggestion, Diana turned aside from her work. “That seems like a very sensible idea. They would get a different concept, a more realistic view, if they spoke to some of the men who lived, or perhaps are still living, the cowboy life.” This is the first time I’ve had an actual conversation with this man. He’s almost pleasant when he’s not treating everybody as a subordinate. “I hadn’t realized Fort Worth isn’t your home. What part of the state do you come from? Ranching country?”

  “Small town about a hundred miles from San Antonio, one of the German settlements that sprang up fifty to seventy years ago. Little town of Pfeiffer. My family is in the banking business. That’s why I’ve been here this week. The banking commission had its annual meeting here and asked me to talk to them about the concerns and needs of the small town private bank. Trey is an old friend; he wrote me about the plans he and the fellows were making for their annual migration. They had latched onto the idea of examining traces of the Old West as their project. I suggested they start here, in what used to be the gate to the West. Since I was going to be here for several days, their visit would give me time to catch up with Trey. While they’ll likely find a good bit of information here, I think in a few weeks they plan to move on to San Antonio to look at the Mexican influence, the origin of the vaquero. I’ll suggest, if they have time, a visit to Pfeiffer, since it’s not far off their route. I can probably arrange for them to meet a few useful people.”

  “That sounds like a good way to conclude their study, provided you can get them to agree on anything that practical.”

  Behr sat down in the chair beside her table. “If Trey brings it up to them, or just suggests they might like to see a working ranch before they go back, by the time they’ve wrangled over it for half a day, they’ll begin to think it was in the plan all along. Trey’s good at managing them. He’s been clever at coping with the academic bunch since he was an undergrad taking Pearce’s class in sociology. That’s how he became the old boy’s assistant. Then, when he stayed on for graduate school, they became colleagues and the best of friends. Never thought when Trey and I were roommates, back in our salad days, Trey would wind up with a doctorate in English literature and teaching at our old alma mater. I didn’t think he took classes all that seriously back then; he was always the fellow who planned the parties and knew where to find the pretty girls. With his knack for getting along and getting things done, it seemed like his future was in politics.”

  “People change,” Diana reminded him.

  “I suppose. I swore I’d never go back to my father’s bank and settle for life in Pfeiffer, Texas. Thought I’d go abroad, see the world. I did, of course, courtesy of the army. I saw all the foreign places I’ll ever need to see, through the batteries of cannon and smoke of war. Small town banking in Texas sounded like Heaven after that. Life brings all kinds of surprises.”

  A muddle of voices, the confusion of several men talking at once, with each trying to be heard above the others, announced the return of Diana’s professors. They crowded through the doorway, a bundle of dark suits, a cane, hats, and untidy pages of paper slipping from unfastened portfolio cases.

  Feeling like the den mother of a pack of aging cub scouts, Diana managed to sort out their pages of notes. Trey and Adler Behr slipped away for their lunch date as the others bickered more or less amiably about whether to adjourn to the hotel dining room together or go their separate ways and reconvene in the afternoon to continue discussing the exciting topic of driving cattle to the railhead. Torn between amusement and exasperation, Diana watched the last one, twittery Mr. Withers, scurry after Dr. King, leaving her alone with a disorderly assortment of pages and a suddenly quiet room.

  “And I thought working with such learned men might be too quiet and too dull.” She took a moment to enjoy the temporary silence, then took her box lunch from the drawer and settled in to skim the next batch of notes as she nibbled her sandwich.

  ****

  “No, Holmes, that’s not the way he said it. You have the emphasis wrong. It’s ‘ax-el,’ not ‘hack-sell.’ Used on wagon wheels. His accent was thick, but I understood every word.”

  “I beg your pardon, Getty. It’s ‘axle grease’ and is not something to lubricate a wagon, Pearce. It’s butter. Plain butter. That’s what Pecos told us. He was telling us about trail cooking and how hard it was to get anything but beans and coffee when he was batching it. Batching it, I believe, was the term he used for making up his stores for the drive.”

  Elmsford slapped a sheaf of loose pages on the desk, sending them flying in three directions. “Not what he meant, I’m certain. Axle grease? Why would that mean butter? Makes no sense. Batching? I’ll have to consult some other references. I seem to remember hearing that word in another context.” Ignoring his scattered pages, Elmsford turned to a stack of reference books piled on the end of the table. “Ask Withers if you don’t believe me.”

  “You aren’t the linguist here, Getty.” King waded into the melee with delight “And you’re deaf, anyway. You don’t know what you heard.”

  Holmes added another bit to the confusion. “Heard? Getty, you’re talking about hearing? Everybody knows you’ve been deaf as a post since 1918. Don’t tell me what you think you heard.”

  Pearce’s calmer voice, and louder tone, cut across the discussion. “No, you’re both wrong. ‘Axle grease’ wasn’t a term, it was a name. Axel Gras, a German name, probably another of the men on the drive. That other word, ‘batching’? It was a single syllable and there was no ‘t’ in it. ‘Bachin’ it,’ not ‘batching it.’ Living alone, living as a bachelor. That’s it.”

  The gabble erupting in the room around her put a full stop to Diana’s shorthand. She pushed her stenography pad to one side. The discussion, if it could be so described, had worn on for more than an hour. She didn’t hope to see the point settled soon.

  “Gentlemen, I believe it’s time for coffee. I noticed some very nice coffeecake at the bakery when I came in this morning. Would you like some with your coffee?”

  Withers, always ready for a snack and an end to the verbal warfare, turned toward her. “Oh, my dear Diana, what a perfectly lovely suggestion. Yes, yes, indeed, I think Dr. King would approve of that idea. Yes, Dr. King?” He glanced at the frowning face across the table in appeal. “Wouldn’t that b
e just the ticket? A nice cup of coffee and some of that coffeecake?” His look shifted to Pearce and Holmes. “You’ve put in a hard morning. All the ideas, the possibilities we’ve talked about. Perhaps a little something now, just to keep up the inner man?”

  Pearce nodded. “Good time to regroup, isn’t it?” He motioned to Trey, who was nearest the door. “Would you go, dear boy? I believe I’m quite parched myself. Coffee? And that coffeecake Diana mentioned?”

  “Certainly, Archibald, if you can spare Diana to come with me. If she’s there, I’ll be sure I’m getting the right thing.”

  Diana slanted a grateful look at him. A few minutes away would be heavenly.

  Pearce waved toward the door. “Do go with him, Diana. He’ll return with yesterday’s biscuits or something equally indigestible, without guidance.”

  Pulling on her hat, Diana hurried toward the door, hoping the professors wouldn’t come up with a reason she had to stay. Much more of their bickering would magnify the headache she could feel building behind her eyes.

  “I’ll order the coffee to be sent up. Which way to the fabled coffeecake, Diana?”

  “The little bakery across the street.” Interesting how quickly they all came to call me by my first name after Trey started it. It’s as if they’d known me for years instead of a week, like a flock of elderly uncles on an extended visit.

  Trey placed the order for coffee and followed her out into the sunshine of a Texas summer day. The heat was mounting as the sun moved higher in a cloudless sky. She was grateful for the break, but equally glad the bakery was only a few steps down the street. They didn’t hurry along the hot, busy avenue.

  “The old boys were on quite a tear this morning, weren’t they?” Trey paused outside the shop. “You had your hands full, trying to keep up with all the crosscurrents.”