Slocum Giant 2013 : Slocum and the Silver City Harlot (9781101601860)

by Logan, Jake

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “Just knock,” Whitehill said with a touch of irony in his tone. “And leave that six-shooter of yours here on the desk.”

  Slocum slipped the Colt free and softly placed it on the desk atop the papers Whitehill had been poring over. He went to the back cell and pulled the blanket aside. Marianne sat disconsolately on the cot, her hands cupping her forehead. She looked up with dull eyes.

  “It took you long enough to come, John.”

  “News travels slow when you’re bunked out in a stall. The deputy had to tell me. What happened?”

  “I heard the sheriff’s rendition of it.” She stood and came over, her hands clutching the bars so they touched Slocum’s just enough. Silently she mouthed, “Thanks for not telling on Randolph.”

  “You weren’t shy about letting everyone know you had it in for Carstairs. How’d your knife get blood on it?”

  “I told the sheriff. I rode out to the Argent Mine and spied on them, on Carstairs. He was stealing from the mine, putting big chunks of silver into a box for himself.”

  Slocum said nothing. This meant nothing in the woman’s defense.

  “I confronted him about all he’d done.” Her hand went to the shiner. The vivid yellow and purple bruise half closed her left eye. “He hit me.”

  “So it was self-defense,” Slocum said flatly. He started to go argue the matter with Whitehill when she reached through the bars and clutched at his sleeve.

  “We fought and I cut him, but he fell and hit his head. When miners came, I hightailed it away from their camp, but Carstairs was alive when I left. He ordered his men to chase after me, but I had a horse and they didn’t.”

  “It was night, too,” Whitehill piped up. “Ain’t many miners who’re capable trackers, much less good enough to trail a horse in the dark.”

  “I came straight back to town and went to bed. The sheriff woke me up around sunrise. He had my knife.”

  “That she used to kill Carstairs,” Whitehill added.

  “I don’t deny fighting with him.” She looked down at her dress and the bloodstains. “This is his blood. On the knife, too, but he was alive when I left.”

  “That so, Sheriff? What’d Carstairs’s men have to say about that?” Slocum asked.

  “You surely do want it all ways to Sunday. You called the same men liars when they alibied him out of jail the other night. Now you want to believe them?” Whitehill snorted, spat, then said, “They never saw Marianne, and they did talk to Carstairs after the fight near the mine. He got on his horse ’round midnight and rode out. A rancher comin’ to town for flour and cornmeal saw the body smack in the middle of the road and brung it in.”

  Slocum studied Marianne closely as the sheriff recited the facts. He played poker and could read gamblers well, but Marianne was a closed book to him. She had cried enough to leave dirty streaks on her cheeks, but now her face presented an emotionless mask. The despair he had seen when he first spoke to her had been pushed aside, buried.

  “How’d you decide she was the killer?” Slocum asked.

  “She told me to my face she wanted to carve him up. I asked around. I wasn’t the only one she’d said somethin’ similar to, so I took it upon myself to search her room and found the murder weapon.”

  Slocum’s mind raced. Marianne had probably returned to town by the time Carstairs got his innards all sliced up. Why had he ridden out of camp so late at night, after he’d been carved up by her earlier? Revenge? Had Carstairs found her along the road and she had killed him? It could have happened that way. Whitehill obviously thought this explained the crime.

  And it had a completeness to it that bothered Slocum. Marianne had mouthed off about wanting to kill Carstairs for what he’d done to her. She was all beat up and admitted to slicing him with the knife. That nobody had seen the crime, that Carstairs acted strangely riding out of his camp after the fight, only made for more confusion.

  In his gut he doubted Marianne had it in her to kill Carstairs in cold blood. From her rendition of the fight, she had the chance to kill him. If Carstairs had caught her, she could still claim self-defense—and it would have been. Even a coldhearted jury would see how a man’s fists had battered her good looks. There couldn’t be a single man in Silver City who wouldn’t have shoved his knife into Carstairs himself if threatened in such a powerful way.

  She refused to admit she had killed him. From all Slocum knew of Marianne Lomax, she wouldn’t lie. And there was little reason to if the two had met up once more on the road. Carstairs would have been furious at her, making her knife work on his guts again self-defense. If she had killed him—and she said she hadn’t.

  The only thing that made sense to Slocum was that she told the truth. Massaging the facts just a little would bring her to another claim of self-defense, which she refused to state.

  “Where’s the body?”

  “I had the rancher lug it on over to the undertaker’s store. Olney was all drunk and passed out on his own examination table.” Whitehill chuckled. “I think poor ole Rafe had drunk some of that there embalmin’ fluid of his.”

  “Mind if I look at it?”

  “Slocum, I don’t care what you do to while away the hours, but there’s nothin’ to see. One body’s same as any other, and Carstairs is very dead.”

  He reached through the bars and brushed his hand against Marianne’s arm. She drew away as if his touch burned her. That reaction irritated him, even as he understood her reasons. The charges against her looked insurmountable, and even self-defense might not hold water if the prosecutor claimed she had been beaten up, then laid an ambush for Carstairs.

  Slocum scooped up his six-shooter from the desk and headed straight for Rafe Olney’s Funeral Parlor down the street. From the front door of the undertaker’s, he could see the cemetery not twenty yards down the road. That made it handy for the undertaker but gave Slocum a tiny shiver of dread. Carstairs might already be buried. Digging up the body wasn’t something he looked forward to, should the need arise.

  Inside the small office, the heavy wine-colored velvet curtains, which might have come from a successful burlesque theater, made him stop for a moment. All sound was deadened by those curtains, so it came as a surprise when they parted and a small, thin man with a hatchet face and bloodshot eyes stepped out. Slocum’s hand had already reached the butt of his Colt. He forced himself to relax and ask, “You Rafe Olney?”

  “I am, sir. How may I help you in your hour of bereavement? Has a brother or parent died? A partner from the silver fields?”

  “Lester Carstairs,” Slocum said.

  “Ah, you are in his employ. A sad thing when such a fine, upstanding citizen is cruelly dispatched.”

  “He was a bully and tried to rape Marianne Lomax,” Slocum said. “The night he died, he beat her up.”

  “Ah, the woman who stabbed him to death. You a friend of hers?” Olney pulled the curtain half around him, as if he could do a magician’s disappearing act using the velvet drape.

  “I want to look at Carstairs’s body.”

  “This is highly unusual. If there is to be a viewing, it ought to be arranged by someone in the deceased’s family. Or a business partner.”

  “He in the back?”

  “Sir, I can’t—”

  He let Slocum push past into a narrow corridor. Only two doors opened off it. Slocum saw one led to a bedroom where Olney lived. The other revealed a larger room with two waist-high tables. On one lay Lester Carstairs. Even in death a sneer marred his face, as if he knew his death would falsely indict Marianne.

  “What do you want of him? Are you paying for his funeral?” Olney stood in the doorway behind Slocum, fearfully wringing his bony hands and shifting from foot to foot.

  “He had plenty of silver nuggets to pay for his burying,” Slocum said. He doubted any of it had been found
. The miners who had saved him from Marianne at the mine likely took what the woman said had been scattered over Carstairs’s chest. Even if the foreman had hidden the silver again, there wasn’t any reason for him to take his ill-gotten silver with him when he rode out hours later.

  Or was there? If one of the men working for him had seen the silver and Carstairs had tried to leave with it, robbery could be an explanation for his death. There’d never be any way to find his killer or prove who did it. That meant Marianne would be convicted and the real killer would get away scot-free.

  A cursory look at the man’s knuckles verified what Marianne had said about the fight. Carstairs had connected more than once with her face and had skinned his knuckles. The raw look and torn flesh showed these were recent injuries. Slocum peeled back the man’s shirt and looked at the cut across his middle.

  “This is what killed him? That scratch?”

  “The sheriff thought it so,” Olney said. The undertaker went to a cabinet and opened it, hands shaking. He took out a silver flask, popped out the cork, and took a long drink that settled his nerves. A second draft, consideration of a third that he finally avoided, then the flask was placed back in the cabinet.

  The undertaker’s voice was firmer now, as was his spine.

  “You cannot be here. Illegally interfering with a corpse is a criminal offense.”

  “How do you properly interfere with a corpse?” Slocum asked. He peeled back more of the shirt stuck to Carstairs’s belly by dried blood, hunting for a deeper wound.

  Marianne had been frightened during the attack. Slocum knew how she must have felt; he had seen so many raw recruits during the war. The first shot, the first threat, their brains turned off. Their bodies might react but there’d been no telling what they would do. He had seen one youngster, hardly sixteen, fire his musket repeatedly, never once putting in a bullet. A fistfight with Carstairs would have disoriented Marianne. She had cut Carstairs enough to make him bleed like a stuck pig, but maybe there had been a deeper wound.

  How Carstairs could have gotten up, dealt with the miners who had come to his rescue, and waited at his camp for hours before riding off to his death afforded Slocum more of a mystery than he cared to think on. Marianne might have stabbed him and penetrated his intestine or stomach and Carstairs had died hours later out on the road.

  There wouldn’t have been any way the pain wouldn’t have hobbled him completely, though, if that had happened. None of his men had reported Carstairs being in such pain. He had mounted and left camp on his own. A stab wound to the gut would have prevented easy mounting, and riding would have been excruciating.

  Slocum yanked back the shirt and looked at every inch of Carstairs’s bloody chest. The belly cut was the only wound he saw. It had bled sluggishly but hardly amounted to an injury serious enough to kill him.

  As he turned away from the table, he stopped and looked back at the body.

  “You see that, Mr. Olney?”

  “To what are you referring?”

  “In the cut. If you bend down and look along the cut you see a bit of his guts all puckered up.” Slocum spread the cut as wide as he could to allow the undertaker to see what he had by accident.

  “I do not understand.”

  “You got a thin blade or those clamps like a doctor uses to pull out bullets?”

  “I have a trocar—I use it to drain the blood.”

  Slocum held out his hand and waited for the undertaker to pass it over. The thick tube had a sharp point for piercing veins. The thickness was about right, unless Slocum missed his guess.

  “See that skin all puffed up.”

  “It appears to be pushed back and upward.”

  “From a bullet wound.” Slocum began digging around, following the path of the slug through Carstairs’s body. The sharp tip banged against the bullet. A bit of digging caused it to pop out, all mashed up and bloody. He handed it to Olney.

  “I don’t understand,” the undertaker said.

  “Carstairs died from a gunshot to the belly, not from a knife wound. It just happened the bullet went in where the knife slash had already opened him up.”

  “That seems incredible,” Olney said, elbowing Slocum out of the way to better examine the wound. He poked and pulled, then rubbed his fingers together. “He was shot at close range. This is unburned gunpowder. I’ve seen this often when a man is killed by a gun barrel shoved up hard against him before the killer fires.”

  Slocum had seen men’s clothing set on fire from the muzzle blast. The blood soaked into Carstairs’s shirt hid any such evidence, but the bullet showed that Marianne hadn’t stabbed him to death.

  “I’ve got to talk to the sheriff,” Slocum said. “Don’t you go getting so soused you can’t remember what you just saw.”

  Rafe Olney turned paler, if that was possible, and bobbed his head up and down as if it had been mounted on a spring. Convincing the sheriff that the man on the table had been shot to death and not killed with a knife would be easy enough. How did Slocum convince Whitehill that Marianne hadn’t been the one who pulled the trigger and then hidden the pistol?

  14

  “I ought to hang you, Slocum,” the sheriff said tiredly. He hiked his feet up to his desk and laced his fingers behind his head. He looked relaxed, but from the way he scowled, Slocum knew Whitehill was on a hair trigger. “Since you blowed into town, I’ve had bodies pilin’ up somethin’ fierce. You have any reason to offer why I shouldn’t clap you back in a cell for killin’ Texas Jack Bedrich?”

  “I didn’t do it,” Slocum said. “And Marianne didn’t kill Carstairs either. The bullet proves that.”

  “It proves she didn’t end his miserable life with a knife, that’s all. How do I know if she had a hideout gun somewhere? Easy enough to shoot Carstairs, then toss it into a well or just bury it alongside the road.”

  “She wouldn’t have confessed to being in the fight with him if she’d killed him,” Slocum said.

  “There’s some logic to that, but it might be she had to explain why her eye was swole shut, and she had enough bruises to make her look like a Chinee, all yellow-like.”

  “Olney will confirm what I said.”

  “Don’t doubt that for a minute. Ole Rafe’s likely takin’ a pull or two on a whiskey bottle ’bout now. I go over there, and he’s usually knee-walkin’ drunk ’fore noon. Earlier in the day if he has a burial service.”

  “Let the doctor examine the body.”

  “Doc Fuller’s got real work to do. Besides, he’d charge the county for a house visit if I did that.”

  “You—”

  “Hold your horses, Slocum,” Whitehill said, bringing his right hand around as if to caution Slocum to halt. “I’m not sayin’ anything you told me’s not the gospel truth. That slug came from somewhere and Rafe’s likely to tell me you did pull it out of Carstairs.”

  “Then let her go.”

  “I explained that to you. I let you out because Tucker vouched for you. How Bedrich became deceased is a matter of some controversy ’tween me and my deputy. Tucker’s inclined to say it don’t matter much, that Bedrich wasn’t liked that much so why bother? Now, I’ve been in Silver City longer than Dan and know Texas Jack wasn’t a bad fellow. He ruffled feathers every chance he got, but he was on the up-and-up.”

  Slocum heard more in the sheriff’s words than was spoken. Whitehill hadn’t cared much for Bedrich. And there was something else he couldn’t put his finger on.

  “There’s no way you could have known Bedrich. I got a telegram out to Santa Fe and asked the marshal there to find out what business took Bedrich that far north. So far, ain’t heard back, but I will or know the reason.”

  Whatever had happened to Bedrich, it had been in Holst’s icehouse. Slocum didn’t want to muddy the water by bringing up the prospector’s death, but that charge still rode mighty close behind him
. Without Dangerous Dan’s good words about him, Slocum knew he would be locked up beside Marianne.

  “The matter of Marianne and Carstairs is something else,” Whitehill went on. “She knew him, spoke ill of him, and told anyone who’d listen, includin’ me, she was going to kill him.”

  “She’s hot tempered.”

  “Fiery,” Whitehill said, nodding in agreement. “Nothing you’ve told me speaks to her innocence.”

  “She has to look after her boy,” Slocum said.

  “Now that is a shame. I’ll speak to Mrs. Gruhlkey about that.”

  “No, wait!” came Marianne’s aggrieved cry. She yanked down the blanket and rattled the bars. “Don’t put Randolph in her care.”

  “Now, Marianne, the boy needs lookin’ after. Ain’t gonna be a good thing lettin’ him and Billy have their head. Randolph’s a follower and Billy is the kind who can think up some real mischief. One day, I’ll have to arrest him. It’d be a shame if Randolph joined him in a cell.”

  “John, you find Randolph. You look after him until I get out of here.”

  “What’s bail?” Slocum asked. The question startled Whitehill.

  “Hadn’t given that any thought. Can’t rightly set bail without a judge pokin’ his nose in. Besides, she’s likely to pull up stakes and leave before any trial. It’s not like she has family or ties to Silver City.”

  “There aren’t many who do, Sheriff,” Marianne said.

  “The only one in my jail for killin’ a man is you, Marianne. Don’t care about any of the others in town ’less they up and shoot somebody, too.”

  Slocum again heard something in the sheriff’s tone that made him curious to find out more. It wasn’t as if he denied bail for any legal reason but rather to keep her in the cell.

  Where he could watch her.

  “I’ll see that Randolph is all right,” Slocum said to Marianne. He was rewarded with a look of pure gratitude—and something more. He wished iron bars didn’t separate them.