“Nobody did,” Fred Maye said. “And if you keep taking me for a hothouse plant with soft roots, you could be making a dangerous mistake, bucko. I’ve hung tougher stiffs than you out to dry.”
“All right,” said Sid Stratton, wearing his customary smile of faint amusement. “All right. Quit bristling like a pair of strange dogs, you two. Al, you can lay off our friend here. He knows how to handle himself.”
“Yeah,” Al said. “Sure he does. Just like that Steve Des—”
“That’s enough, Al,” Stratton said sharply. “Get up front and keep an eye on the bar crowd for a while.”
Hutton shot a baleful glance at Maye, shrugged elaborately, and went forward through the private card room—where Amos Krausmeier had died—to the saloon bar out front.
Maye went into Stratton’s office and took a seat. His eyes glittered. “I don’t ordinarily take that kind of talk from hired hands.”
“Al’s a good man.”
“Dime-a-dozen tinhorn. I could get you ten like him at the snap of a finger. The trouble with you, Sid, you’ve never outgrown two-bit ways. You’re getting in pretty fast company for that kind of deadweight. But I guess it can’t be helped. You came up a long way from the gutter where you must have started, but you’ve never washed off the smell. I don’t think you ever will.”
Normally pale, Sid Stratton’s face was flushed. He had seated himself behind his desk; now he bit the tip off a slim cheroot and spat it violently to one side, and snapped, “Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice, Fred. Not now, not ever. I’m not that much different from Al Hutton, and I’ll admit that here in this room, but don’t forget Al and I know the rules of the game in that gutter even better than you do. It only took one bullet to take care of old Krausmeier. The same size bullet can take care of you.”
“Not likely,” Maye said with a thin smile. “If I get killed, Sid, a sworn deposition goes to the law. It doesn’t just implicate you, Sid, it ropes you and hogties you and wraps the hangman’s noose around that pink soft neck of yours. So let’s quit playing games threatening each other, all right?”
By now the smooth smile had resettled on Stratton’s puffy face. It never failed to startle Maye, how Stratton’s face was so pink and fleshy while the rest of him was skinny as whipcord.
Stratton said, “Maybe I underestimated you a little at that. Leaving a deposition for the law to open if you die —that’s the kind of thing my kind thinks of. I guess it won’t surprise you to learn I’ve done the same thing. A gent I trust has a letter that goes to the law if I should happen to turn up missing or dead.”
“Then it looks as if we understand each other, doesn’t it?”
“Looks like,” Stratton agreed. “Now, then. I didn’t expect to see you for quite some time. What’s on your mind?
“It’s about Mainwaring.”
“It always is, with you.”
Maye said, “You did a sloppy job on the kid, Sid. This wasn’t the time for it.”
“The time for what?”
“Cut it out,” Maye said. “Which one killed him? Hutton?”
“Killed who? What the hell are you talking about?”
Maye’s eyes narrowed speculatively. “Are you trying to tell me you had nothing to do with it?”
“Do with what, for Christ’s sake?”
Maye leaned forward, the frown fixed on his block-square face. He ran stubby fingers through his charcoal hair and said, “Earle Mainwaring died this morning. Pushed, or fell, off the second-story landing of the stairs. Broke his neck when he hit the floor.”
Sid Stratton made a face. “Jesus. You’re not joshing me?”
“No. That new deputy, Destiny, was out there. He doped it out that Earle was the only one in that game last night, besides you and your boys. Earle supposedly knew that Krausmeier had won a bundle and that you’d killed him to get it back. So, according to the deputy, you had Earle killed to keep his mouth shut.”
“The hell!”
“I did what I could,” Maye said. “Slipped one of Garrett’s fancy cigars out of his pocket and planted it in the kid’s fist, to make it look like they’d struggled. Then I put the idea into Jeremy Six’s head that Mainwaring had a motive to shut Earle up—to save his own position in the market. Which was more or less true, except that Mainwaring never knew a thing about your little dealings with Earle.”
“This is all damned interesting,” Sid Stratton observed, “except that I didn’t kill the damned kid. Hell, he was useful to me. I’m going to have a tough time finding another shill with all the doors open to him that Earle had. But the question is, who did kill him—and why?”
“Who knows? Maybe it was an accident. What difference does it make? The point is, it plays right into my hands. I’m just about ready to raid the Mainwaring holdings on the market. He doesn’t suspect a thing. If I can get him arrested for the murder of his own son, the price of Mainwaring stock in San Francisco will drop to peanuts. I can pick up the whole shebang for a song—lock, stock and barrel. Which solves one of our biggest problems, if you recall, because Mainwaring was one of the few kingpin Mogul miners we never had a prayer of sucking into these card games of yours. Mainwaring never played cards in his life. We’d never have got him into the games. This way, we’ve got him right where we want him.”
Stratton said, in a deceptively mild way, “Just don’t be forgetting who put up half the capital for these raids of yours, Fred. And don’t forget who bailed you out by refinancing your own mine-and-mill outfit.”
“It’d be hard to forget it,” Maye said, “since you’ve got it all down on paper in black and white.” His smile was completely without friendship or humor. “We’re a pair of bastard thieves, you and me, Sid. We don’t trust each other any farther than we could throw the Silverbelle Mine. But we can help each other out. You and I, we can make each other rich. Let’s not spoil it by bickering.”
“Suits me,” Stratton said. “Now, then, what is it you want?”
“I need some more trumped-up evidence we can use against Mainwaring. Something strong enough to get him arrested for the murder of his son. I don’t care about getting him convicted; that doesn’t matter. If he gets arrested it’ll be enough to ruin his price on the market.”
“What kind of evidence you want?”
“I don’t know,” Maye said. “I did what I could, on the spur of the moment, but that cigar won’t be enough to make Six arrest him. Six knows Mainwaring. Anyhow, it’s still possible the kid fell over the banister all by himself. No, we need something pretty ironclad to indicate he killed the kid.”
Stratton nodded. “I’ll give it some thought.”
“Do it fast, Sid. The longer you wait, the funnier it’ll look.”
“Sure. I’ll get on it right away. Anything else on your mind?”
“No, that’s all.” Maye got up and went to the door. “Just tell that tinhorn of yours to lay off me. I don’t take kindly to insults from his breed.”
Stratton’s smile stretched a little thinner; and Maye left the place, his face lowered in a speculative frown.
All day Jim Destiny went through the motions of work, moving like a mechanism. It was as if a dirge kept running through his head, drowning out thought. He could not come to grips with his own mind; he found himself paralyzed with indecisiveness—he could not make up his mind.
He made the rounds that night with professional competence, stopped a fight in one dance hall, closed down a Mexican shell game and arrested its operator for cheating, and went to bed at two in the morning. For a long time he could not get to sleep, yet he could not bring his mind to focus on the central issue: the problem of his own part in the upheavals of the past twenty-four hours, and what he ought to do next. He drifted into a kind of half-sleep, dozing fitfully through the night, and got up at the crack of dawn. He had a bath, shaved, combed his hair and put on fresh clothes from the skin out, as if to cleanse himself and perhaps start fresh—but that didn’t seem to help at all. He had a
small breakfast and picked at it indifferently. He wandered around town, asked a few questions here and there, got no answers that helped, and tried to look industrious while he groped and grappled with his private demons.
The vision of Lisa Mainwaring intruded often in his thoughts—beautiful, disturbing, and twinging him every time with sharper pangs of guilt.
In that frame of mind he drifted, scuffing, back toward the Marshal’s Office. It was nine thirty, and heating up fast; the temperature would go past 100° today. Sweat beaded his temples and upper lip and the hollow of his throat. It would get worse before it got better; was that also true of his predicament, the vortex into which he had drawn not only himself and the dead Earl, but Garrett and Lisa Mainwaring as well, and Fred Maye and Jeremy Six and Sid Stratton…
He blinked back the dimness of the office and saw that the place was not empty. Jeremy Six was sitting behind the desk.
“Morning,” Six growled.
Destiny nodded abstractly. “I didn’t expect you to be up and around this quick.”
“I won’t be fit to make the rounds for a while yet, but at least I can hold down this desk while you’re doing the leg work.”
“You feel all right?”
“I feel fine,” Six snapped. “You too?”
“Me too what?”
“Everybody in this damned town seems to think I need babying.”
Destiny said shortly, “I wouldn’t want to see you bleed to death on account of obstinacy.”
Six waved a hand. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. It rags a man to be laid up.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“It makes a man start to think about getting old,” Six muttered. Destiny looked at him. Six didn’t appear as if he had to worry about hitting forty for a while yet. He was a big rock of a man, broad through shoulders and chest, with a muscular neck and a shield-shaped face battered by the scars and weather-beating of a life on hard trails. He hadn’t lost any hair; it was thick and brown, prowed into a blunt widow’s peak. His eyes, steel gray, were set wide apart above square cheekbones; his nose was bladed, his mouth wide but slightly thin-lipped, his jaw a long hard line. In one respect he didn’t look like most peace officers: his expression wasn’t lined with the tracks of resigned cynicism. It was, in fact, fundamentally a friendly face, formed for easy smiling. The face of a basically kindly man, who perhaps had decided early in life not to let himself be depressed by the human dregs with whom his profession would bring him into constant contact.
Still, there was plenty of quick shrewdness in the slope of Six’s eyelids and the alertness of his expression. He was not bovine, not slow, not one of those amiable ones who smiled at everything because they didn’t know better. Six clearly had an impressive capacity to take things seriously when they warranted it. It was just that he had an equally great capacity not to get buried under tons of sorrow, self-pity, or the delusion that everything could be set right with a flourish and a few words. In short, he had never lost his sense of humor.
Destiny said, “I’ve been asking some questions, trying to find one or two clues about what happened to Amos Krausmeier.”
“Get anywhere?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think you would,” Six said, and in response to Destiny’s quick glance he added, “You can’t expect too much.”
“I expect to be able to nail Sid Stratton’s hide for that one, before I’m through. Is that expecting too much?”
“Maybe it is,” Six said. “Justice is blindfolded, and pretty slow sometimes. Don’t expect everything to turn out neat and hemmed all around the edges. We may not ever pin that murder on Stratton, but sooner or later we’ll pin something on him. When we do, he’ll be put away. That kind always does. They get too greedy and that makes them careless, and that’s when you catch them. But it takes patience, maybe more patience than you’ve got in you.”
Destiny felt sweat on his palms. He said angrily, “How many more Krausmeiers have to get murdered before you run out of patience, Marshal?”
“I sincerely hope none,” Six began, and seemed about to continue when someone knocked, hesitantly, at the door. Six’s eyebrows went up, and Destiny walked to the door to open it.
A wide, short man with hair the color of brick and face the color of beet stood just outside the door, his fist raised to knock. When Destiny opened the door, the squat man yanked off his hat and blinked. “Would the marshal be in?”
Destiny stepped aside to let him enter. Jeremy Six said, “Morning, Flynn. How are you?”
“Uh—tolerable, Marshal, just tolerable. How be you?”
“Coming along,” Six replied. “Something we can do for you?”
“Well, I …” Flynn whipped his head around to look at Jim Destiny. “It’d be a bit o’ confidential business I’d be havin’ with ye, Marshal, if ye don’t mind.”
Six said, “My deputy, Jim Destiny. You can talk freely, Flynn.” To Destiny, he said, “This is Mike Flynn. One of the section foremen from the Silverbelle Mine.”
“Mainwaring’s mine?”
“That’s right.”
Destiny nodded and shook Flynn’s broad powerful hand. Flynn glanced at the door, and back at Destiny, and so Destiny closed the door. Flynn was crushing his soft hat in his fists. He said apologetically, “I ain’t had much sleep, y’see, been up all night makin’ me mind up what to do.”
“About what?” Six asked.
“Well, it’s like this. It’s something I seen—something enough to put the bleedin’ shivers into a God-fearing man, Marshal.” With a half-frightened look around the room, Flynn went to the desk, leaned forward and spoke very softly, “It was yesterday mornin’, it was, and on me mother’s sacred grave I swear it’s the bleedin’ truth I’m goin’ to tell ye. I seen a murther take place before me own disbelievin’ eyes, Marshal.”
Six straightened in the chair. “A murder?”
Destiny said, “What murder?”
The Irishman fixed his eyes on the hat in his tortured grasp. He said, “The murther o’ Earle Mainwaring it was,” and shot a brief glance up at Destiny.
Slivers of fear plunged into Destiny. Involuntarily, he stepped back until the wall blocked his shoulder blades. His eyes narrowed; his hand slipped toward his gun. But Six wasn’t looking at him—the Irishman had Six’s full attention—and as Destiny moved back, Flynn said in a grief-stricken voice, “As God’s me witness, Marshal, I owe more than an honest man can be repayin’ to that fine man Garrett Mainwaring, but me Christian conscience won’t allow me to keep still no longer.”
Six said carefully, “You’re telling us you saw Mainwaring kill his son?”
Destiny’s eyes widened; his mouth shot open. Mike Flynn said, “That’s the truth, and it’s with me heart busted that I have to confess it to ye.”
Destiny brought himself under control enough to keep from yelling; he said, in a voice just short of a snarl, “You’re lying.”
Flynn wheeled like a frightened rodent and backed up, shaking his head violently. Six held up one hand, palm out, signaling Destiny to silence; Six said, “You’d better tell us the whole thing, Flynn.”
And so Flynn told his story. Stripped of its convoluted Gaelicisms, it was straightforward. Destiny listened with growing alarm as the plausibility of Flynn’s tale became steadily greater. Flynn said he had arranged with Earle to leave the week’s daily rosters and ore-reports at the Mainwaring house, so that when Garrett Mainwaring came home the reports would be immediately available to him. On that errand, Flynn claimed, he had gone to the Mainwaring house yesterday morning, very early so that he could be back at the mine by the changing of the shift. He had dismounted in front of the house, as always, and mounted the porch; he had been about to pull the doorbell cord when he had heard the rising voices of two men in bitter quarrel. Staying his hand, Flynn had stepped along the porch to the parlor window and looked inside. He had seen two men at the head of the stairs—Garrett and Earle. At that momen
t, Garrett had roared with rage and thrust Earle away from him, across the landing. Earle had spilled over the banister, had grabbed it in panic, and almost fallen over. Then Garrett had rushed forward and hit his son, breaking Earle’s hold. Earle’s free hand had grabbed a rung of wood, but it had broken off, and Earle had fallen to the ground floor. With an expression of numb shock spreading across his face, Garrett Mainwaring had stood frozen on the landing for quite some time, then had plunged downstairs and rushed to his son. Flynn could see, by the unnatural pose of the body, that Earle was dead. Desperate, confused, and terrified, Flynn had backed off the porch without waiting to see more; he had led his horse quietly down the drive until he was out of earshot, and had returned to the mine without saying a word to a soul. For the past twenty-four hours he had been struggling with his conscience; finally his loyalty to Mainwaring had succumbed to the horror of what he had seen, and he had been compelled to come to the marshal.
It was a powerful performance, an impressive and totally convincing story. Jim Destiny would not have hesitated a moment in believing Flynn’s eyewitness indictment of Garrett Mainwaring—except for one thing. Destiny had been there.
Jeremy Six said in a slow voice, “There couldn’t be any mistake about this, Flynn?”
“I wish to God there was.”
“You did the right thing to come forward.”
“I ain’t after bein’ sure of that at all, Marshal. I only know I couldn’t keep it to meself no longer.”
“There’ll be a harder part yet,” Six said, looking him in the eye.
“A mháistir … sir?”
“You’ll have to testify to it in court, Flynn. Under oath, and facing Garrett Mainwaring.”
Flynn dropped his eyes and wrung his hat. “I’m not be wantin’ to do that.”
“You’ll have to. Under subpoena if necessary.”
“It’ll hurt like blazes, Marshal.”
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