by Jake Logan
“One hundred dollars.” Slocum stood. “Five hundred. All right, five hundred!”
This was enough money to take the starch out of Slocum’s legs. He dropped back into the chair, amazed that the banker would offer a man he hated such a princely sum. That more than anything else told of the extent of the embezzlement. Bray must be losing his starched shirt to the unknown thief to ever think of paying that much.
“I’m not a gun for hire,” Slocum said.
“I don’t want anyone killed. You’re a clever man,” Bray said grudgingly. “I can see that by the way you talk to the marshal. I want you to find who’s stealing from me.”
“How many men you got working here?”
“Those three. That’s it.”
“How’d they ever get their hand into your till? You count their box at the end of every day, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. I just don’t know how they’re stealing.”
“You think they might be breaking into your bank vault?” The idea came to Slocum how this would get him a whale of a lot more money than taking Bray’s five hundred dollars. However much was stashed in the vault had to be many times that. He had robbed a bank or two in his day and would relish the prospect of emptying Bray’s until there wasn’t dust left for the termites.
“I’ve changed the combination several times. That didn’t stop the thieving. I’ve gone over the books and it’s slick, whatever they’re doing. Did I say ‘they’? Might be they’re all in cahoots.” Bray’s arrogance was replaced with outright fear now.
“What’s your boy do around here? He dresses mighty fine. You have him listed as an officer of the bank?”
“Randall is . . . something of a ne’er-do-well. He’s the apple of his mother’s eye.”
“What about your missus? She work here, too?”
“No, nothing of the sort. Philomena tends our house and does charitable work around town.”
“She on the church committee with the new preacher man?”
“What’s Henry Dawson got to do with this? The thievery must have started months and months ago, maybe a year for it to be so widespread. That was long before the reverend came to town.”
“Shame about his wife.”
“That’s your concern. I’m paying you good money to stop the theft from this bank. You—you’re the only one I know who can’t be involved since you just came to town.” Something of Bray’s obnoxious personality shone through his fear of losing even a dime. That notion caused Slocum to ask a question that had gone begging for an answer.
“How much?”
“I told you. Five hundred—and—” Bray clamped his mouth shut and rocked back in his chair. His jaw muscles tensed when he realized what Slocum was asking. “The bank has lost almost ten thousand dollars.”
Slocum kept his best poker face on. He had expected the sum to be immense but had no idea it was so large. Banks had to keep a large reserve as guarantee against the loans outstanding. If anything happened that required Bray to cough up a large sum of money, he might not be able to do it. Thoughts of ransacking his vault fled. There might not be anything left to steal.
“You keep the marshal off my back, and I’ll see what I can find. Unless there’s something obvious like a tunnel into your vault, I’ll have to ask a lot of questions and see whose answers don’t fit. Most folks don’t like answering, so I’ll likely ruffle some feathers.”
“Marshal Dunbar will not be a problem.”
Slocum almost asked about Dunbar and Bray’s partnership. Being the lawman in a town like Clabber Crossing afforded Dunbar the chance to steal. Who was there to watch the marshal? This was a peaceable community and not prone to crime.
“How many women’ve died in the past year or so?”
“What’s that got to do with my problem?” Bray looked ready to chew nails and spit tacks when his two tellers returned.
“Back, sir. Done took our break and ready to work.”
“You’ll put in overtime tonight,” Bray snapped. “Slackers.”
“But you said we—” April’s beau was the one who complained. Slocum wondered if he might also be brave enough to steal from the bank to impress the lovely Cyprian. Bray didn’t seem the sort to be overly generous with his pay and keeping a woman like April in clover could be an expensive chore. Pleasurable, probably, but very expensive.
“So don’t give me the loan,” Slocum said loudly. He locked eyes with Bray, who nodded once at this diversion to explain why Slocum had been so long in the bank. “I’ll get the money elsewhere.”
“Get a job with a rancher, not a whoremonger like Severigne,” Bray said. “And maybe this bank can see fit to give you that loan.”
Slocum winked at April’s boyfriend as he left, stepping into the hot sun. He had not realized how oppressive the interior of the bank was until the fresh breeze and burning sunlight surrounded him.
Although Bray had denied the possibility, Slocum circled the building, studying the ground for any sign that someone had tunneled into the vault. Even the best excavation would cause sagging in the ground over the tunnel unless they had dug down much deeper than common sense would dictate. On his second trip around the bank, finding nothing, he looked up to see a boy running away. It wasn’t the marshal’s courier, Jed, though he was close in age. This one had dark hair that reminded him of Emily Dawson.
Slocum scratched his head, wondering if the Peeping Tom he had almost seen several times was none other than the preacher’s son. It was one more Clabber Crossing mystery that would eventually come to light. Right now, he had to see if Sara Beth might want to take a break just before the noontime crowd elbowed their way into her restaurant. After that, she might even give him some of the information he needed to solve Martin Bray’s theft problem.
But Slocum wasn’t going to rush getting to that. No, sir.
9
“The whole town’s going to starve if I keep closing the restaurant in the middle of the day,” Sara Beth said, snuggling closer to Slocum in the tiny bed. The heat of her body was fine, but the late morning sunlight slanted through the curtained window and turned the room into a furnace. As hot as it had been between the two of them a little while before, it was even hotter now. Uncomfortably so.
Slocum turned so he could sprawl on his back. Sara Beth moved to put her head on his chest.
“You’ve got such a strong heart,” she said.
Slocum kept looking toward the window and thought he saw a shadow pass by outside. It might have been his imagination, but he had come to doubt it.
“What do you know of Edgar Dawson?”
“That’s a strange question to ask,” she said. The blonde moved to lie alongside him so only their hips touched. Sweat began turning their skin slippery and quickly even this bit of intimacy became too much for them. They slid even farther apart, but Sara Beth kept her hand on Slocum’s belly, as if her fingers might slip down a bit lower and try to resurrect the momentarily dead.
“I think he’s been spying on purty near everyone in town, but you especially.”
“Me? Why, Emily and I were friends. I was over at their house many times and he was always polite.” She fell silent. Slocum felt her hand tense as she dug fingernails into his stomach. “Now that you mention it, he was a bit too attentive. I never saw a boy want to fetch for his momma’s friends like he did.”
“You’re a mighty fine-looking woman, and you could lead the men in this town around by their noses. You said Dunbar was always coming along after you. Why not the preacher’s son, too?”
“I’ve got what I want,” she said. Her hot breath gusted across his bare chest. At another time, a cooler time, that would have been exciting. Now it only added to Slocum’s feeling he was being boiled alive.
“You and Emily were friends. What about her and the banker’s wife?”
“Philomena? Oh, I saw her there often enough at the church. She did a considerable amount of sociable work, but she always avoided me like I had lepro
sy. A working woman wasn’t of the same cultural class, you know.”
“Who else would be in Clabber Crossing?”
“Nobody, and Philomena Bray let everyone know it, too. She came from some filthy rich Boston family. Heaven knows why she married Martin.”
“He’s a banker,” Slocum pointed out. “She might think being a big fish in a small pond like Clabber Crossing was better than swimming around with the really well-off back in Boston.”
“Could be. Seems like she exiled herself here, though.”
“Almost as if she wanted to get as far away as possible,” Slocum said, thinking aloud. “Do you know for a fact that she came from a rich family?”
“That’s what everyone says,” Sara Beth answered. “It really doesn’t matter so much, does it? She’s here, she’s rich, and she lets everyone know it at the drop of a hat. All she ever wanted from her charity was to be known for it. Who she helped—if anyone—didn’t matter as much as everyone thanking her for being so caring.”
“That must have rankled Henry Dawson. He struck me as a man of deep convictions.”
“Just like Emily. Deeply devoted to doing God’s work.”
“You still on good terms with the preacher?”
“I suppose, though I was certainly better friends with Emily. After all, Henry is the pastor. I can’t imagine getting too friendly with him, if you know what I mean.”
“Why don’t you go talk to him about Philomena? I’d like to listen in.”
“It’ll cost you,” Sara Beth said. She moved her hand and squeezed down with enough force to make Slocum grumble. “Oh, very well. Not now, but later.”
“Make it a rain check,” Slocum said.
“Oh, my, aren’t you the romantic one wanting to make love in the rain?”
That hadn’t been on his mind at all. As he got dressed, he was thinking hard about all the possible reasons Emily might have killed herself—or gotten herself killed. She might have talked with Philomena and learned something about the embezzlement from the bank. Martin Bray wasn’t the kind to believe his wife—or any woman—had a lick of sense, but Philomena might have mentioned something to Emily about the embezzlement that got the woman killed.
Slocum tried to picture any of the three tellers murdering Emily Dawson and couldn’t do it, but what did a killer look like? A man who might have a scheme to steal thousands of dollars without getting caught would do most anything if he was going to be exposed. It would hurt both his pride and his poke. Still, those tellers all looked the sort to spook easily. They’d hightail it out of town rather than commit murder.
But that didn’t leave a whole passel of folks who might be dipping into the bank’s vault. Bray had mentioned having a lawyer. Slocum didn’t trust lawyers as far as he could throw them. He mentally corrected that. Nowhere near as far because he’d be inclined to throw them over a tall cliff. Who better to insinuate himself into the bank’s accounts than a crooked lawyer?
If the lawyer and Philomena were in cahoots, that made the crime all the easier. Bray looked like a pinchpenny and a woman used to traveling in high society circles back in Boston might consider salting some money away before leaving him.
Slocum heaved a deep sigh when he realized he might as well have been smoking loco weed for all the truth in any of it. He needed something more definite before spinning wild tales—and with the facts, they’d be the truth, not stories to tell around a campfire.
“I don’t know, John. This doesn’t seem right. I don’t mind talking to the pastor, but his wife’s just died and you eavesdropping and all. It’s just not right.”
“No, it isn’t,” Slocum said, giving Sara Beth a quick kiss. “But you’ll do it anyway.”
“For you.” Her lips thinned to a line. “No, for Emily. You’re going to find out what happened to her.”
Slocum felt beholden to a lot of people in Clabber Crossing—and they were all women. He wondered how he had gotten himself into such a pickle.
They left the back of the restaurant and took separate paths to the church. Slocum watched carefully to see if anyone noticed them leaving Sara Beth’s or heading in the same general direction. The town was still sluggish from the growing heat, although a strong breeze had kicked up and brought some promise of cooler weather from the far distant Grand Tetons. Slocum looped around and went to the abandoned cabin where Emily Dawson had asked to meet. Her body was gone and nothing he found poking around in the debris in the main room gave him evidence one way or the other. She might have killed herself, but why would she bother passing him the note so secretly? The woman had something she wanted to tell him.
But why him?
It was a puzzlement.
Slocum quit hunting for what wasn’t here and made his way up the hill to the church. The small house behind it was the likeliest spot for Sara Beth to meet with the preacher, so he headed there. The windows were open and the lace curtains snapped fitfully in the rising wind, but their sound didn’t muffle the conversation going on inside.
“It’s good of you to come by, Miss Vincent,” the preacher said. “Emily often spoke of you and how good a friend you were to her.”
“I’m so sorry about what happened, Reverend Dawson,” Sara Beth said. Slocum looked inside and saw her facing the window. She made a shooing motion with her hand to warn him to hide himself better.
“Is there a fly annoying you?” Henry Dawson asked. “I should get more fly strips, but then there are so many things I should do. Somehow, I haven’t had the gumption to just do them.”
Slocum settled down to listen without being seen, but the conversation rambled, touched on things he had no interest in. He was almost at the point of popping back up in the window to signal to Sara Beth to get down to the point when he saw a boy poke his head around the corner of the house and stare at him, unblinking.
Not knowing what to do, Slocum simply stared back until the boy vanished. Slocum started to go after him because he was sure this was Edgar Dawson and the boy would tell his pa, but Sara Beth finally asked a question Slocum wanted answered.
“This isn’t proper for me to mention, but I happened to overhear Philomena tell Emily about money problems. I thought it was odd she was asking my wife rather than coming to me, but sometimes folks are more comfortable with their own kind.”
“Emily was easy to talk to,” Sara Beth said. “What kind of money problems? Sometimes I don’t have enough money to buy the best steaks for the restaurant, but I usually have enough for eggs. That kind of problem?”
“I think it was more serious,” Reverend Dawson said.
“But Philomena is the banker’s wife. I can’t imagine Mr. Bray letting his wife do without.”
“Martin is a frugal man.”
Sara Beth laughed, just a tinge of bitterness in it, then said, “‘Frugal’ wasn’t the word I had in mind. Mr. Bray is an outright skinflint.”
“I won’t argue that,” Dawson said, chuckling.
“If there is anything I can do for you, please let me know. It’s not easy losing a spouse.”
“Yes, you would know. You lost your husband, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Sara Beth said brusquely. “Now I really must go. The town needs to be fed, and I’m the best one to do it.”
“I’ll stop by for coffee and some pie,” Dawson said.
“You order what you want, Reverend, and it will be on the house. I know your money situation is tight.”
“The repairs to the church cost so much,” Henry Dawson said almost wistfully.
Sara Beth bade him good-bye, and Slocum joined her on the road back into town. She bounced along, and he found it difficult to concentrate because of the motion.
“I’m so happy, John! I found out what you wanted to know. Philomena Bray was in financial straits.”
“Why? Why couldn’t she go to her husband?” Slocum’s mind raced with this new tidbit of gossip. He had thought Philomena might have been embezzling from the bank, but Bray said the thef
t had gone on for some time and Philomena had told Emily how she needed money. If as much had been stolen from the bank as Bray said, his wife would be rolling in clover. There was nowhere in a town the size of Clabber Crossing to spend wildly. With Bray owning the only bank in town, it behooved him to be sure his wife was well dressed and possessed of the finer things so he could lord it over Clyde Clabber and anyone calling the town’s namesake friend.
“I wouldn’t ask Bray for the time of day. Knowing him, he’d charge me for it.”
“You’ve got to talk to Philomena. You know her, don’t you?”
“Not that well. We certainly don’t travel in the same social circle.”
“How many social circles can there be in a place like this?” Slocum asked.
Sara Beth laughed and again it carried a bitterness to it that surprised him.
“More than you think. No one talks to Severigne or her girls, no one decent, but nobody talks to Philomena either, because she’s at the top of the social strata.”
“What about you?”
“I . . . I don’t mind being under you, socially speaking,” Sara Beth said, giving him a wicked smile. “Mostly, I find myself something of an outcast since my husband died. The married women won’t have anything to do with me, and the unmarried ones are all fifteen years old. Or so it seems. Come this time next year, they’ll be married, too.”
“Do you think Philomena confided in Emily because they knew each other?”
“Of course they did. Philomena worked for the church to raise money.” Sara Beth eyed him harder. “You meant something else, don’t you? I don’t see how they could have known each other. Philomena married Bray years ago, somewhere back East.”
“You know where?”
“I don’t remember hearing.”
“Ask her that, too.”
“John, I have to—” She saw how determined he was. “Oh, very well. But you’ll owe me.”
“I always pay my debts, especially to the prettiest lady in all of Wyoming.”
“Only Wyoming? Not west of the Mississippi?”