Frame Angel! (A Frank Angel Western) #7 (11 page)

He turned south between two of
the crack-faced adobes and came out onto San Francisco Street. He
saw the sign almost immediately:
‘P. F. HERLOW – ROOMS DAILY OR WEEKLY
RATES.’ He slid off his horse outside and gratefully stretched his
cramped legs. It had been a long ride.

It was dark and cool inside the
rambling adobe. There was a rough deal
counter on one side of the doorway
built across what had perhaps been an alcove. A corridor lay
straight ahead, curtained off. Angel could see the doors of rooms
on each side of it.

The man at the counter watched him with
unabashed curiosity. He was a thick-faced, square-jawed man with
the shrewd eyes of a pimp. He spoke with a German accent, rasping a
reflective thumb across a three day stubble when he heard the name
of the person Angel was asking for.

‘
Hainin,
Hainin,’ he said, aloud. ‘Dot’s his name?’

‘
Come
on,’ Angel said. ‘I don’t have all day.’

‘
Hainin,’ the man said again, reflectively.

Angel didn
’t have time to waste, and he
lost his temper. He grabbed the front of the man’s shirt and hauled
him half over the counter. ‘What room is he in, damn
you?’

Bug-eyed and astonished, the
clerk wriggled and struggled in vain against
Angel’s grip. ‘Zeven,’ he
gasped. ‘Zeven.’

Angel let him go, and the
man
’s boots
thumped back on the packed, earthen floor.

He was slapping the tatty
curtain aside and going into the hallway as the man called,
‘Ze ozzer man said
don’t—’

Angel wheeled around and came
back to the desk.
‘Other man?’ he rasped. ‘What other man?’

‘
Ze
ozzer American,’ faltered the man behind the counter. ‘He came
earlier. Iss still zere, I sink.’

Angel slid the gun from his
holster, and the man
’s eyes bugged again. He looked as if he expected the gun
in Angel’s hand to attack him on its own.

‘
What’s
your name?’ Angel asked.

‘
Herlow,’ the man told him. ‘Peter Herlow. This my
place.’

‘
All
right, Herlow,’ Angel said tersely. ‘Here’s what you do. Run as if
your life depended on it. Get the sheriff or the marshal. Tell them
there’s been a murder here.’

‘
Murder?’ Herlow managed. ‘Here?’

‘
Go on,’
Angel said. ‘Get going!’

Herlow looked at
Angel
’s face,
and what he saw seemed to convince him that the most sensible place
he could be was outside his own hotel and on his way to the
sheriff. This cold-eyed American who spoke of murder didn’t give
the impression of being a man who’d joke about such things. He
lifted the hinged counter uneasily and slid beneath it, his eyes
never leaving Angel’s revolver. Then he nodded nervously once,
twice and bolted for the doorway.

Angel slid cat-footed into the hallway,
moving along the rush matting on light feet until he came to the
door with a rough figure seven painted on it. Edging up close to
the wall, he cocked his ears for any sound coming from the room.
Nothing but silence and the far-off sound of a woman laughing in
another house down the street.

He kicked the door open and went in on one
knee, the Colt cocked and only his thumb holding the hammer
back.

The place was empty, featureless. A typical
adobe cell: a sagging bed with a mud-colored blanket; a commode
beside it with a sooty-chimneyed oil lamp standing on top; a
cupboard in the corner of the room built into the wall, its green
door slightly ajar. Nothing else.

He was across the room in two
strides. He pulled the cupboard door open. Hainin was jammed
inside, his head between his knees, his arms at his sides, in the
position an exhausted runner sometimes takes when he falls out of
a
grueling
race. Hainin had fallen out of the most grueling race of
all.

Grunting with exertion, Angel
manhandled the body out of the cupboard and managed to sling the
dead robber face downward on the protesting bed. There was blood on
Angel
’s
hands, and he wiped them clean on the dead man’s shirt, swiftly
checking Hainin’s pockets, knowing he would find
nothing.

He
turned the man over. Hainin’s face still
bore an expression of faint surprise, as though he had not been
quite prepared for death. He had been killed professionally, Angel
noted; there was only the one thick-lipped knife wound just to the
right of and below the sternum. A long-bladed knife would have slid
into Hainin’s heart as smoothly as if oiled, its wicked inner
rigidity razoring the astonished heart to instant silence. Hainin
hadn’t even bled a lot, although there was a thick coagulating
puddle on the floor of the cupboard.

Angel turned quickly and checked
the drawer of the commode
– an empty Durham sack, some matches, an oilskin
wallet containing money, about thirty dollars, and a photograph of
a long-haired woman in a bell-shaped dress, standing with one hand
resting on the arm of a sofa. The legend below the photograph read
‘Gainsborough Studios, El Paso.’ Angel looked under the bed and
found an army duffle bag with Hainin’s clothes clumsily stuffed
into it – Hainin’s killer had obviously checked that. Something
gleamed. He stretched beneath the bed, and his fingers touched
metal. It was a straight-bladed dirk, what they called a Mexican
knife. The blade was seven inches long and as sharp as a razor.
Around the hilt were the sticky traces of Hainin’s blood. Angel
stood with it in his hand, knowing it would tell him nothing – you
could buy a knife like this in any hardware store in the southwest
for a couple of dollars. With a gesture of disgust he hefted the
knife and threw it down, driving its point deep into the top of the
commode. The knife spanged shivering into the wood. It was still
quivering when the deep voice at the door told Angel to stand very,
very still.

He stood still while his gun was
lifted from his holster. Hands patted his body: their owner knew
where a man might keep a hideaway gun or a knife, and he
wasn
’t a bit
concerned about embarrassing his captive. But Angel had no knife or
gun hidden on him, and after a moment he was told to turn
around.

‘
Name?’

His questioner was a stocky,
almost portly man of about five feet seven, dressed in ordinary
blue work pants and a white cotton shirt. His open vest was held
together by a looping metal
watch chain, which started at a horizontal silver
bar slipped through the buttonhole on the left side and ended in a
bulging pocket on the right. The waistcoat had old-fashioned
lapels, and on one of these was pinned a five-pointed star with the
word
Sheriff
engraved on it in script.

‘
Angel,
Frank Angel,’ Angel told him. ‘Sheriff, I’m glad you’re here – this
man’s been murdered.’

He saw Herlow peering at him
from behind the sheriff, pimp
’s eyes taking in the whole scene with vicious
satisfaction.

‘
Well,’
the sheriff said in his unexpectedly deep voice. ‘As to that, I’m
sorta glad I’m here too, Mr. Angel. Sure as Satan didn’t figure
he’d died from old age, there.’

‘
He was
dead when I got in here,’ Angel said. ‘You can see for yourself.
Whoever killed him stuck him in that cupboard there. I just dragged
him out before you came.’

‘
Sure,’
the sheriff said. ‘You want to try the other leg, now?’

Angel looked at him for a long moment and
then at Herlow. His face set.

‘
What
did he tell you?’ he said.

‘
Who,
Herlow? Said some feller come into his hotel, asked for a guest
who’d told ’im nobody knew he was here an’ that was the way he
wanted to keep it, an’ then said he should go get the sheriff
’cause they was goin’ to be a murder done.’

Angel nodded, acknowledging his own
stupidity. The Easterner was out-thinking him all along the
line.

‘
And of
course, you came in here to find me with blood on my hands, the
dead man with his pockets turned out, and the murder weapon right
there for you to use as exhibit number one for the
territory.’

‘
Boy,
you’re half-smart for someone done somethin’ this dumb,’ the
sheriff said.

‘
Herlow
didn’t mention the other man who was in here just before
me?’

The sheriff raised his eyebrows.
Without taking his eyes off Angel, he said,
‘Herlow?’

‘
Sheriff?’

‘
Was
some other guy in here before our visitin’ Angel, here?’

‘
No,
sir.’

‘
Let me
talk to him …’ Angel said, starting to move forward. Herlow shrank
back, fear washing his face white, but Angel stopped in mid-stride,
the sheriff’s gun jammed into his belly.

‘
Don’t
you be an old silly-billy, now,’ the sheriff said
gently.

‘
All
right,’ Angel said. ‘All right.’

He took a step back, hands held at mid-bicep
level.

‘
I’m
going to get something in a pocket in my belt, sheriff,’ he said.
‘OK?’

‘
What is
it?’

‘
It’s a
badge,’ Angel said, ‘just a badge.’

‘
Get
it,’ the sheriff said, curiosity on his face now. ‘But get it
slow.’

Angel unnotched his belt, and
from the slit pocket on the right hand side above his hip, he
produced a circular silver badge. He tossed it on the bed where the
sheriff could see it. The watery sun coming in through the
deep-walled window caught highlights on the embossed
lettering,
Department of Justice, United States of America.

The sheriff looked at it and then at
Angel.

‘
You
might’ve stole that,’ he said, reasonably.

Angel was already unfolding a parchment from
the thin oilskin in which it had been wrapped. He handed it to the
sheriff, who took it with his left hand.

‘
That
paper says I’m a special investigator for the Department of
Justice, acting on direct instructions from the attorney general of
the United States. One part of it somewhere says that all federal
and territorial officers are requested to give me their fullest
cooperation and assistance in all matters.’

‘
You
could’ve stole this, too,’ the sheriff said.

‘
I could
be Billy the Kid as well,’ Angel said. ‘But I’m not. Look at that
bastard’s face an’ tell me he told you the truth!’

The sheriff looked at Angel
dubiously. He wasn
’t going to fall for any of those tricks. He was good at
what he did, and he was able to keep on being so by never falling
for the old dodges. He took a step back until his shoulders touched
the wall. Now he could see both Angel and Herlow.

‘
Well,
Herlow,’ he snapped. ‘What about it?’

‘
Listen,’ Herlow faltered. ‘I didn’t know. It …
he—’

‘
All
right,’ Angel rasped. ‘Let’s hear all of it, Herlow!’

Cornered, Herlow gabbled it all out,
stuttering in his anxiety to tell it all as fast as he could, to
get out from under the basilisk glare of the sheriff, whose name,
Angel now learned for the first time, was Hogben.

Herlow told them that the first
man, the big American who had come into the hotel perhaps an hour
before Frank Angel, had asked for Hainin. Hainin had paid Herlow
twenty dollars to say to anyone who came asking for him that he was
not there and then to tip him off so he could check out whoever it
was before revealing himself. But the big American had said,
‘Tell me the room
number, nothing more,’ and when Herlow had professed ignorance, he
had started counting ten dollar gold pieces out onto the counter,
stopping each time he added five to the growing pile to ask once
again for the room number, nothing else. When the pile was three
hundred dollars, he stopped and straightened. Herlow, fearing that
this fortune in gold was about to be swept from beneath his nose,
had blurted out Hainin’s room number. The American had
nodded.

‘
Something else,’ he had said quietly. ‘In a short while,
perhaps two or three hours, no more, another American will come
here asking for Hainin.’ He had described Angel perfectly, then
continued, ‘You will tell him that I am still in the room with
Hainin. Nothing else. You understand?’ Herlow had said he
understood, and the American had then told him that Angel would
probably question him about who the first man had been and what he
looked like or send for the sheriff or the US Marshal or both. If
he claimed to be a government investigator, he was lying. He was,
in fact, an escaped convict named Briggs, who had broken out of
Folsom Penitentiary a few days back and was wanted for attempted
murder. Herlow would be able to claim the reward, and there would
be no risk involved, no risk at all.