Killing Time In Eternity - Edge Series 4 (16 page)

Edge asked of the middle aged, short and rotund, sallow faced man who he knew to be the clock and watch repairer: ‘This the first time you’ve been in the building today, feller?’

‘You’re Mr Edge, aren’t you? The new owner of Roy Sims’ old store, isn’t that right?’

‘And you’re George Mills.’ He pointed to the nearby door with the man’s name on it.

‘Yes, that’s me.’ He was suddenly apprehensive. ‘May I ask why you . . . ? As it happens, I did take the morning off, but I fail to – ‘

‘No sweat,’

‘I’m sorry, but I – ‘

‘I don’t reckon you have anything to worry about, feller.’

‘Do you mind telling me – ‘

‘Somebody stuck a knife in Arthur Colbert earlier today.’

‘Oh dear, surely not! Oh goodness me, that’s awful! Is the poor man – ‘

‘He’s dead. You want to stay here and make sure no one else goes into his office?

While I bring the marshal?’

Mills shook his head in shocked disbelief, expressing deeper concern by the moment. Then he thrust out an arm when Edge made to step by him. ‘Would you mind too much if I went for Mr Flynt, sir?’

He peered anxiously along the hallway and swallowed hard. ‘You see, I’m a little squeamish when it comes to blood and dead bodies and such like?’

Edge shrugged. ‘If that’s what you want. But what I want is for you to go straight to the law office and tell Flynt what’s happened. There’ll be time enough later to spread the word.’

Mills jammed on his hat angrily above a face set in an indignant frown and protested:

‘I can assure you, sir, that I may be relied upon to do my duty as a responsible citizen in such tragic circumstances!’

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Edge nodded impassively and Mills went hurriedly out into the steadily falling rain. He was gone maybe two minutes which was time enough for Edge to roll a cigarette before the door swung open and a grimacing Ward Flynt entered. The lawman was closely followed by a stone-faced Clay Warner. And the still nervous George Mills brought up the rear.

‘Art Colbert’s been killed?’ the tall and heavily built Flynt demanded rhetorically, redder in the face than usual as he blinked his eyes rapidly. Edge gestured along the hallway. ‘The door to the right at the rear, marshal.’

‘I know where his goddamn office is!’ the irritated lawman snapped. ‘All of you stay right here!’

He strode the length of the hallway as the tall and almost emaciated, black-clad Warner closed the front door, put his back to it and folded his arms as he spread a half smile across his lean, nondescriptly good looking face.

Edge lit the freshly made cigarette.

Mills said tentatively: ‘I have some adjustments to do on a watch for a client who’ll be coming by to collect it very soon now. Will there be any objection if I go into my workshop? I’ll be there should the marshal need me?’ He turned toward his door. Warner warned tersely: ‘Ward said for you to stay right here, mister.’

Mills scowled his resentment of the implied threat.

‘Just visiting with Flynt?’ Edge asked evenly of Warner.

‘What’s that to you, mister?’

‘I need to know if you have any legal standing in this town. Of the kind you did have a time ago: as a deputy? In the event you start to give
me
orders.’

Warner rasped softly: ‘You figure you’re a real hard
hombre,
don’t you?’

The November day continued to provide a background of wet sounds from outside the building while Flynt made subdued noises in the office down the hallway. Then several clocks behind Mills’ door began a melodious chiming to mark the time of two thirty.

‘I like to think I’m my own man.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Warner demanded.

‘You’ll get to find out if you ever try to stop me doing something I want to do, feller.’

Edge continued to keep his tone even as he became disconcertingly aware that this second ill-humoured exchange of the day with a surly hard man had deteriorated to a juvenile level.

Warner toughened his expression further and splayed his feet wider to emphasise his immovable position in front of the door. But if it was in his mind to continue the belligerent 85

goading he was checked when Flynt emerged from the dead Colbert’s office. The lawman did not close the door before he started down the hallway, looking grimly morose.

‘Shit, it’s like Billy Childs getting killed started an epidemic of dying the bad way in Eternity!’ he complained. ‘Clay, I’d be obliged if you’ll go down to the funeral parlour. Let Joel Gannon know he’s got some business to attend to here. Edge, want you to come over to the office and tell me what you know about what happened. You, too, George.’

Warner grimaced his dissatisfaction with the chore but turned abruptly and went out into the cold and wet afternoon.

‘Marshal?’ Mills said nervously as Flynt ushered Edge out of the building ahead of him. ‘Like I told Mr Edge, I took the morning off and I only just got here. So I can’t tell you a thing. And I have urgent work to do on a watch for Mrs Brown. She’ll be coming by soon and – ‘

‘Okay, George,’ Flynt allowed wearily. ‘I know where I can find you if needs be.’

Edge stepped out of the building and the lawman emerged behind him and caught up. Then they walked side-by-side, heads bent low against the wind-driven rain. And maybe in Flynt’s case as a sign of how dejected he felt in the wake of the latest killing in his town.

The lawman led the way into his stove-heated office, dropped heavily into a highbacked leather chair behind the desk and delved a hand into a drawer. Edge stood near the stove where two wooden kitchen chairs with some crumpled copies of the
Eternity Post
Despatch
on the floor between showed how Flynt and Warner were passing the time before Mills came with the bad news.

‘Sit yourself down and tell me about it.’ Flynt placed a pad of paper on the desktop and waved a pencil between the stove and the front of his desk. ‘Drag one of those chairs over here.’ He started to write on the pad and explained as Edge shifted the chair, sat down and re-lit the cigarette he had pinched out for the walk through the rain: ‘I’m just jotting down your name and the address of the store. Then I’ll make notes of what you’re gonna tell me.’ With an almost savage stab of the pencil he added a full point to what he had written, looked up briefly and invited without enthusiasm: ‘Okay, fire away.’

‘There’s not much to tell, marshal. I went to see Colbert at his office. The building was deserted. Except for him and he was dead. Mills showed up as I was leaving to come tell you about the killing. But he said he wanted to do that while I waited over there. Seems he’s spooked to be around a corpse.’

Flynt had not written down anything and now raised his head slowly and peered across the desk with a forlorn expression in his weak looking brown eyes. ‘Is that all?’

‘It’s how I came to find Colbert’s body.’

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‘Why’d you go to see him?’

‘On legal business: he was a lawyer.’

‘I saw you ride over the bridge on to the Wyoming Turnpike this morning. There’s only the Colbert place out that way? Unless you were exercising your new horse again? Or went to meet a woman?’

Edge showed a narrowed-eyed frown as a tacit response.

Flynt waved a dismissive hand and looked disconsolate as he said miserably: ‘Okay, forget I ever said that. Even if it was funny, this ain’t no time for laughing, is it? Did you go out to the Colbert house to see Art?’

‘I saw him and his sister both. But what we were talking about was unfinished because he had business at his office and he left for town.’

The door rattled open and Clay Warner came in, shaking rain off his Stetson and shrugging out of a slicker that he hung on a coat-stand. As he headed for the stove he was still disgruntled from having to run the errand.

‘The undertaker’s doing his undertaking, Ward,’ he reported as he dropped into the chair before the stove and spread his hands toward the heat. ‘Bradley Frost from the newspaper went with him after I told him you’re too busy to talk to him yet. Did this guy say anything I ought to know?’

Edge ground out his cigarette under a heel and directed a questioning look across the desk at the lawman. Flynt was abruptly even more embarrassed and needed to clear his throat before he offered an explanation.

‘There’s a special train due to make a water stop at the Eternity depot tomorrow, Edge. It’ll be carrying freight that’s real valuable. Be some guards aboard, but there’ll be need of extra protection while the train’s halted here. I figured it was necessary to take on some deputies and I’ve already sworn in Clay. As a matter of fact, I was planning to ask if you’d – ‘

‘Special train, marshal?’

Flynt could not hold Edge’s level gaze as he responded: ‘I ain’t at liberty to go into any details. And I wouldn’t have mentioned it unless I thought there was a good chance you’d agree to lend a hand. You being the kind of man you are, if you get my drift? With just me running the law around here, I figure I may need some help. Especially with all these killings and – ‘

Warner cut in on the lawman who had started to talk too fast as he grew more uneasy by the moment. ‘Hell, Ward, quit gabbing on that way. Has this guy told you anything that makes it look like the Colbert killing has something to do with Shelby getting

– ‘

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‘Clay, you’re just my temporary deputy for awhile!’ Flynt’s tone was suddenly harsh with authority as he hardened the natural scowling line of his mouth. ‘Hired on as a guard for while the train is in Eternity is all. I’ll take care of the murder investigating side of the law business around here, okay?’

Warner looked about to argue the issue but then he shrugged. He drew a slim cigar out of a shirt pocket and lit it with a piece of glowing wood from the stove clamped in a pair of tongs.

Flynt eyed Edge quizzically and reminded: ‘I was asking why you went to see Colbert. First out at the spread and then at his office?’

‘I heard that Billy Childs maybe rode out to the Colbert place the night he was killed. Needed to find out if anything came of his visit that could have led to him getting killed.’

‘And did you?’

‘Like I told you, I never had much time to talk to Colbert at the house. Which is the reason I went to see him at his office. And found him in no state to tell anybody anything.’

Flynt sighed and shook his head then murmured as if speaking a thought aloud:

‘Stabbed not too long before you got there. It sure beats me, a straight-up, respectable guy like he was.’

Edge said: ‘Colbert was a lawyer. Guess somebody in that line of work can make as many enemies as other fellers in the law business. Kind of like you, marshal?’

Flynt nodded absently and fingered his lush moustache.

Edge could think of a number of questions that he would have asked if he had been in the lawman’s position. And he could not decide if it was innate stupidity or a lack of the will to discover the truth that hampered Flynt’s thought processes. He asked: ‘Is that all?’

‘You got some pressing business someplace else, mister?’ Warner demanded sardonically.

Edge did not turn in the chair to look at Warner when he replied: ‘Yeah.’

‘Which is nothing to do with my pressing business?’ Flynt asked and directed a warning glance toward the scowling, cigar smoking man slumped in the chair before the stove.

‘I guess some of what you’re investigating relates to finding out who took a shot at me last night, marshal?’

Flynt’s simmering anger of frustration broke to the surface and he snarled: ‘You know damn well it does!’ Then he sighed, massaged each temple with fingertips and moderated his tone and expression. ‘Way this whole mess of violent trouble is getting stirred up all at once, I reckon it just has to be tied up in one bundle somehow. So, if you come across

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anything that concerns me while you’re poking around, it’s your duty to tell me about it, right?’

‘Sure.’ Edge put on his hat. ‘One thing?’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’d like to take a look over the Childs house. And since there’s nobody else I can think of to ask, I figure you’re the one to give permission? You’ve got the keys, maybe?’

Flynt shrugged. ‘Reckon it won’t do no harm for you to look over the doc’s place. But I don’t have any keys for the property. It could be that Sue Ellen Spencer has them, her being his assistant and the both of them working at the house.’

‘And I reckon that lady will be real happy to be of assistance to you,’ Warner said with a leer.

Flynt glowered at him and asked of Edge: ‘What do you plan to look for at the Childs house?’