Showdown

by Edward Gorman / Ed Gorman

  And then murdered him.

  Prine walked around the lake a final time. He didn't find much this time, either. Not that he had any idea what he was looking for. The killer probably hadn't left him a personal letter: Here's where I threw the body in, Prine.

  But the lapping waters of the past few days had washed the sand clean of footprints. Plenty of evidence of animal tracks, none of human.

  Not a button, not a piece of fabric, not a bullet casing.

  Nada, nada, nada.

  "I'd like you to tell me about the Pentacle fire."

  "The Pentacle fire?" Sheriff Daly said. "What the hell's that got to do with anything?"

  "You wanted me to find this Woodward. And that's what I've spent the day doing."

  It was that lazy hour in the office right before suppertime. The business of the day was trailing off—official meetings, informal meetings, spontaneous meetings, meetings-you-ran-from-but-that-ensnaredyou-anyway—and now was the lull before all the saloon woes of the evenings. If this town was ever voted dry—as some communities had been leaning to lately—it wouldn't have needed a nighttime deputy. Everybody'd be home snug in their beds and minding their own business.

  "So you found him, Tom?" Carlyle said.

  "I think I found him."

  "Now, that don't make a lot of sense, Tom," Daly said. "You either found him or you didn't."

  "Stone Lake. I've just got this strong sense he's at the bottom of it."

  "Why would he be at the bottom of Stone Lake?" Daly said.

  So Prine went through what he'd learned. The suspected arson. The letter Woodward received. The inquiry he'd made about Stone Lake.

  "So maybe Woodward was onto something?" Carlyle said.

  "At least the killer thought he was."

  "The fire chief," Daly said, "didn't see any trouble with the fire."

  "I found Woodward's notes, Sheriff. He was sure it was arson."

  "So if he's dead, where does that leave us, Tom?" Carlyle said.

  "I suppose we could let the insurance company know what I know."

  "But we don't know anything for sure," Daly said.

  "All we need to say at this point is that I checked it out and that Woodward seems to be missing and that we hope he'll turn up. They'll figure the rest out for themselves."

  "They'll figure out that he's dead?" Daly asked.

  "The reputation he's got, they'll know he's not off somewhere with a jug and a whore. They'll know that he would have wired them if he'd been able to."

  "You know," Daly said in the slow, cautious way he had when he questioned a deputy's theory, not wanting to hurt the man's feelings. "Natural causes are always a part of this. He was thrown by a horse and is lying unconscious somewhere. Or he had a heart attack and there isn't much left of him once the coyotes got hold of him. Or he decided to have one last big fling before he got his gold retirement watch and his wife picked out their burial plot."

  "Natural causes, that I could see. A fling? Sheriff, you have to hear people talk about him. The guy's practically a saint—in their eyes, anyway."

  "So will you telegram the insurance company for me?"

  "Sure, Sheriff. I'll go and do it now, before supper."

  All this time he'd been talking, he'd been sitting on the edge of Carlyle's desk. He hadn't made it over to his own desk yet.

  When he got there, the first thing he saw was the letter. A soft blue envelope. His name written on the front in a round feminine style.

  "Lucy left that for you," Carlyle said.

  "I figured," Prine said.

  "She's a fine gal," Daly said.

  Prine scowled at him. "She got to you, too, huh, Sheriff? I knew she had Bob there in her rooting section. But now it's you, too, huh?"

  "It's not a matter of her 'getting to me,' Tom. I just happen to think she's a very pretty, very intelligent gal who'd make you a damned good wife. Sensible and down-to-earth. Worked hard for every pittance she's ever made."

  "As opposed to Cassie Neville and all her evil money and her snotty friends."

  "Cassie's a very nice gal, too. For her own kind."

  "Men who can afford her, in other words," Carlyle said.

  "We're only saying this with your best interests in mind, Tom," Daly said.

  Prine smirked. "What'd she do, promise you each a piece of free pie if you agreed to tree me for her?"

  Carlyle laughed in such a way that Prine knew that's exactly what happened. Lucy's mom made the best pie in the whole state. And Lucy was quite willing to use it as bribery.

  "What kind of pie are you going to get?" he asked Bob Carlyle.

  "Aw, Tom."

  "C'mon, now. You ragged me a little about her. Just the way she bribed you to. So I just want to know what kind of pie you get."

  "Well, I guess it don't make any difference if I tell you. Apple."

  "With ice cream," Daly said. "Two scoops."

  "Same for you, I imagine, Sheriff."

  "Blueberry for me. And I ain't ashamed of bein' bribed, because I believe in what I'm sayin'. She'd make you a damned good wife. A much better one than Cassie Neville ever would. And I'm speakin' for Bob when I say that, right, Bob?"

  "Right, Sheriff. I wouldn't agree to do it if I didn't believe in what I was sayin'."

  "Not even for two pieces of apple pie?"

  "Don't forget the ice cream," Daly said.

  "Not even for two pieces of apple pie with ice cream, Bob?" Prine said.

  "Hell, Tom," Daly said, "if you was nicer to her, you'd get free pie, too."

  Prine couldn't take any more matchmaking. He left.

  Lucy Killane was having one of her bad days, days that were even more damaging to body and soul than her monthly visitor.

  She had walked past the sheriff's office five times today, in hopes of glimpsing Tom Prine. Five times. Today the pain was as fresh as if they'd just broken up last night. Panic—fury—self-pity—confusion—panic again. This was the course of her day. She waited on people at the café, she sat out back and ate lunch with three other café workers, she even went to the hospital just now to get her instructions. But it was as if somebody else had done all these things.

  Now she was walking past the sheriff's office for the sixth time and—

  —there he was. Coming out of the door. A letter—her letter, she was sure—in his hand.

  He saw her and nodded hello.

  Her instinct was to run away, flee. It would be humiliating to see him after writing him such a mushy and forlorn letter, a letter that basically begged him to ask her to stay in town. Not leave.

  He didn't wait for her to walk up to him. He walked up to her.

  "Haven't had time to read it," he said, holding the letter up.

  She could be pretty damned bold sometimes. And right now was a good example. She tore the letter from his fingers.

  "Hey," he said, "that's mine."

  "No, it isn't," she said. "It's just a silly, stupid letter that belongs to the silly, stupid girl who wrote it."

  She froze in place. All street sounds faded—clatter of wagons; shouts of day's end children; corner conversations of loafers and idlers and riffraff; neigh of horse, cry of infant, laughter of flirty young girls. All of it faded and there she stood on some plane of her own making—some plane that displayed her to all as the fool she was.

  Prine must have sensed this, because he took her arm and said, "Where you headed?"

  "Madame Missy's," she managed to say.

  "I'll walk with you."

  She didn't object. Couldn't. Needed his strength now. Had none of her own.

  Oh my God Tom why did you quit loving me?

  Walking. Him saying, "You're doing the whole town a favor. Checking those prostitutes the way you do."

  One of the jobs she had as a hospital volunteer was to visit the two cribs each week and see if any of the girls had rashes, discharges, pain, runny noses and eyes that were bothering them. Syphilis flourished in many—too many—western
towns. Her girls liked Lucy and her high spirits and her sympathetic eyes even if the madams didn't. The madams found her an imposition. The only reason they allowed her in was that Sheriff Daly demanded weekly talks with somebody from the hospital. At first doctors and nurses came. But there was something so cold and official and disapproving about them that neither the madams nor the girls would cooperate with them.

  Lucy was a compromise. She didn't examine the girls physically, and that helped. And she certainly didn't make moral judgments about the girls. She liked many of them and felt sorry for all of them.

  She was gradually beginning to breathe normally, becoming aware again of her surroundings, feeling less embarrassed about having been so open with Tom.

  "I think I'll try Denver."

  "Denver's a good place for a young woman, Lucy. No doubt about that."

  "Or maybe Cheyenne."

  "That'd be good, too."

  "One of the girls at the café thinks I should try California."

  "Heard lots of interesting things about California."

  "Then there's always the East."

  "There sure is, Lucy. I'd like to see New York myself someday. Stand down on the street and look up at all those tall buildings."

  "Another girl said I could get a lot of New York things in Chicago and I wouldn't have to travel as far."

  "That's true. And they're planning to have the world's fair there in a few years."

  "The world's fair," Lucy said, "imagine that." Then: "Of course, you don't have to even leave the town limits here to see mansions and things. The Nevilles' place—"

  "Well, technically that isn't in the town limits, but I see your point." He pressed her arm gently, and they stopped walking for a moment. "So you heard."

  "Heard?" All innocence.

  "That Cassie Neville invited me out to her place last night."

  "Oh, yes—I guess I do sort of remember hearing about that. But it skipped my mind."

  "Uh-huh." He smiled and then did the thing she least wanted him to do and the thing she most wanted him to do. Kissed her. Only briefly. Only briefly. But kissed her nonetheless.

  "I take it that's what your letter was all about. Me going to the Neville place."

  "I guess I did mention it in passing."

  "Given that temper of yours," he laughed, "I'll bet it was more than 'in passing.'"

  "You know, when I finally get out of here, wherever I go—Chicago or New York or Denver or California—I won't give things like the Nevilles a second thought. I'll be a different person."

  She thought—hoped—that he would kiss her again. But he didn't. He just started walking again, taking her along with him.

  She said, "You think you'll see her again?"

  "Oh, Lucy, please don't ask me things like that."

  "I guess you plan to, then."

  "We'll just have to see what happens."

  Madame Missy's was melancholy in the purple shadows of the growing autumn dusk. A player piano sounded ridiculously merry given Lucy's mood. And Madame Missy herself, who knew everything about everybody who was anybody in Claybank, peeked her Pekingese face between the parted curtains in the front window and took a gander at them.

  Lucy knew she'd come undone if she stayed here. She slid her arm from Tom's and said, "Well, I appreciate you walking with me."

  "Lucy, I—This is hard for both of us, but—" He stopped himself.

  "But what?"

  "It's just a selfish thought I have."

  "What sort of selfish thought, Tom?"

  "I—I just don't want you to leave town. But I can't make any promises if you stay."

  So finally it wasn't Lucy who broke away but Tom himself. He said, "You're a fine woman, Lucy. In all respects. Never forget that."

  And then he was gone.

  Chapter Eight

  Prine didn't sleep well. His dreams alternated between Cassie and Lucy. A man could get confused.

  Around three, he became fully awake and there was hell to pay. The nocturnal orchestra of the hotel where he boarded was performing a full symphony. You had your snoring, you had your hawking, you had your rolling, you had your tossing, you had your headboard creaking, you had your amorous sex dream moans, you had your muffled-scream nightmares, you had coughing, scratching, muttering, snorting, and gasping.

  What you had, in other words, was just about every kind of prohibition against getting back to sleep you could think of.

  Up and down the hall the symphony played, fading, then full again, unceasing.

  He sat up and smoked. He lay back down and scratched. He thought. He tried not to think. And then he repeated the entire sequence all over again.

  Dawn came haughty and gray, taunting him with the fact that he wasn't ready for this day. Flesh and bone and blood and sinew were not strong and eager. His mind was dulled, unable to focus sharply.

  He didn't need to see Lucy at the café. There was another one a block away. The food wasn't as good, but coffee was what he really wanted anyway.

  He'd seen a cartoon once of a man pulling his lower eyelid out and pouring a cup of coffee directly into the eye pouch. He remembered this as he sat in the café, bringing the first cup of coffee to his lips. On the table in front of him were four cigarettes. Last night, unable to sleep, nothing else to do, he went ahead and rolled himself twenty cigarettes.

  A number of people nodded to him, but nobody tried to sit down. He kept his expression grim as possible so nobody would be tempted. Carrying on a conversation would be too much of a strain at the moment.

  The day came alive despite his best efforts to keep it away. The people in the café headed for work; wagons rumbled on the street outside; a factory whistle blew; the Catholic church rang its bell.

  He got up, paid his bill, and forced himself to go to work.

  "Boy, you look like shit, Tom."

  "Thanks, Bob."

  "I just mean you look plum wore out. Another romantic night?"

  "Afraid not. Just couldn't sleep."

  He spent the first fifteen minutes in the office going through the arrest sheets of the night deputy.

  "Not much there," Bob Carlyle said. "Lucky he was able to stay awake, a night as slow as that."

  One saloon fight. A lost dog (found). A wife-beating (husband arrested). Two public-drunkenness arrests.

  "See what you mean, Bob."

  Prine hadn't quite finished saying that when the door exploded inward and Mike Perry, the Neville ranch foreman, stood there with a Winchester in one hand and a Colt in the other. He was out of breath.

  "Where's the sheriff?"

  "Courthouse," Prine said. "He's testifying." He sensed what had happened. He had to be careful to act surprised.

  "Miss Neville's been kidnapped," Perry said.

  Carlyle was up and out of his chair. "What the hell you talking about?"

  "On the way into town this morning. Her usual trip. She asked me to ride into town with her. She thought a wheel might be loose. I told her it looked fine, but she was nervous about it. So I was right there when he rode up. A man in a mask. Kerchief all the way up to his eyes. Had a sawed-off shotgun. Knocked me out—and I've got one hell of a headache to prove it. Anyway, we need a posse and fast. We can't wait for the sheriff."

  "But where the hell would we even start?" Carlyle said. "We need to get organized before we do anything."

  "You want me to tell Richard Neville you wouldn't get a posse up till you got 'organized'?"

  "We'll be ready in fifteen minutes," Prine said. "But we need you to tell us where it happened and give us the best description you can of the man who took her. What he looked like, sounded like, what kind of horse he was riding." He glanced at Carlyle. "You want to get all this from Mike here, or do you want to round up the posse?"

  "You're better with people than I am," Carlyle said. "Why don't you round up the posse?"

  And so he did.

  He got seven men—the blacksmith, the freight manager of an overland shippin
g company, an unemployed sixteen-year-old who had been winning marksmanship contests since he was twelve, a retired deputy eager for action, a railroad man on a weeklong vacation, an auxiliary deputy, and a saloon bouncer.

  They joined Carlyle and Mike Perry and swung east to the stage road on which Cassie Neville had been kidnapped.

  One of the kidnapper's horses had a shoe that hadn't been fitted quite right. The blacksmith explained what was wrong with it, but nobody paid much attention. The posse wanted to get going. You don't join a posse to get a ten-minute lecture on how to fit a horseshoe properly. You join a posse because you've got a personal stake in it or because it gives you blessed relief from the workaday world or because you think there's at least the possibility that you'll be able to wound or possibly kill somebody legally.

  Carlyle was better at geography than Prine, so he assigned the ground he wanted his two-man teams to cover. Prine drew the timberland to the west, where the pine-covered foothills slanted toward the largest river in this part of the state. There was always the possibility, Carlyle said, that they'd taken her to the river where a boat waited. If that was the case, they could be a long ways from here.

  They were just about ready to ride off to their appointed search areas when a rider, coming fast, started shouting for them to wait. He was coming from the direction of the Neville ranch. As he drew closer, Prine saw that it was Richard Neville.

  The first surprise was that Neville didn't look like Neville. Prine had always seen him in business suits and fancy dress suits, like what he had worn last night. In a faded blue workshirt, Levi's, and a black western hat, he looked like just another cowpuncher. He had a Winchester in his rifle scabbard and a lasso around his saddle horn.

  "I missed the first group that went out," Neville said. "I'll go with this bunch if that's all right." He hadn't seemed to notice Prine till now. "Tom Prine. Why don't I go with him?"

  "You do whatever you want, Mr. Neville," Carlyle said. "She's your sister."

  "All right with you, Prine?" Neville said.

  "Fine."

  Prine noted that among workingmen Neville was less showy, even humble. He didn't tell Carlyle what he was going to do. He first asked if it would be all right. Apparently, he was one of those men who knew how to play to each crowd he was with. He needed these men. And they'd quickly resent him if he played the peacock land baron as he had last night.