Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (33 page)

"What about those unusual banking transactions?" O'Brian asked in a thoughtful tone. "Don't you find it unusual that the same bank president who reported that stolen payroll note was the one who paid out all that other money to at least two elderly people who wound up dead or missing within hours of their last withdrawals?"

Sheriff Tegner laughed gleefully and said, "Hot damn, let's all go arrest Banker Plover. He ain't a Swede and it's an election year, dad-blast his murderous eyes!"

Longarm laughed and said, "I ain't sure it's against the law to manage a Minnesota bank without being Swedish, Sheriff. After that, leave us not forget old P.S. Plover would have been awesomely dumb to report a stolen government payroll note in his possession, knowing it had been stolen, if he hadn't come by it honestly. I'm still working on where Wabasha Chambrun got that hot paper in the first place. His Indian sponsors have been sending him, or his Santee wife, innocent checks drawn on an honest Omaha bank. Not all of them have been cashed here in New Ulm. Those cashed Lord knows where may or may not have stuck the Chambruns with that one and only suspicious hundred-dollar note. The damned things have turned up so many places I have to agree with my boss it would be a waste of time, even if we could backtrack that one bill to yet another poor soul with no apparent connection with the robbery."

"Then why are you still here?" asked O'Brian. "Do you suspect Plover of having those two elderly depositors murdered for some other reason?"

Longarm chuckled and said, "You're as cynical as me about bankers. As a matter of fact, I did have something like that in mind when I asked the coroner's office to compare a list of heavy withdrawals with sudden deaths in this fair city. But as we've all been saying, Jake Thorsson seems to have died natural, and nobody knows what happened to that old lady yet."

O'Brian insisted, "That still leaves close to twenty thousand in untraceable bills unaccounted for, right?"

Longarm shook his head and said, "Wrong. We still don't know the depositor calling herself Janice Carpenter at the bank is really missing. She could be anywhere else, with her money in some other bank or, hell, under her mattress. So all we know for certain is that a man called Jacob Thorsson died in front of witnesses, including a doctor, in a manner I'd hate to have to arrange ahead of time. As for his missing money, who's to say it's really missing? You know what a fuss they can make in probate court about money left behind with no will to probate. They charge the kin for letting them have their own money too. So who's to say somebody around the old man's deathbed, maybe the old man himself, never got the grand notion to just avoid all that bother? Had anyone with money coming felt they'd been screwed, they'd have doubtless let the whole world in on it by now."

O'Brian ran a thoughtful thumbnail along the stubble of his fleshy jaw as he mused, half to himself, "That only works if nobody there had any idea the old man had drawn all that money out of the bank."

Longarm nodded, but demanded, "Would you lay there for three days without mentioning you'd been robbed if you'd been robbed?"

When O'Brian said he didn't think he would, Longarm went on to say, "Damned right. But if you'd still had the money on you, or anywhere on or about the premises, somebody would have surely found it as they cleaned up after your demise. You get to clean up a heap after a man spends three days dying of internal injuries."

O'Brian nodded soberly, said he'd been in the war too, and asked how Longarm felt about a maid, or someone from the undertaker's, helping himself or herself to a bundle and never reporting it.

Longarm shrugged and said, "Happens all the time. It ain't nice, but it ain't a federal crime. I doubt the sheriff here would take your suspicion as a gift in an election year, unless there was some complaint by some damned citizen to go with it."

Sheriff Tegner muttered, "Damned right. Gotta have a corpus delicti before you can arrest anybody. Jake Thorsson's corpse wasn't delicti. He was run over by a brewery dray!"

Longarm suggested, "What I think he means is that you have to be able to show the body or substance of a crime to the grand jury."

O'Brian sniffed, "I guess I know what corpus delicti means, and I fear I follow your drift. Whether either of those old folks lost any money after they took it from their own savings accounts, we'd have a time proving anyone at their bank took a dime of it."

Longarm said, "That's about the size of it. I like to arrest as many bankers as I can too. But I don't see how even a banker could know in advance."

"Know what in advance?" asked O'Brian with a puzzled frown.

Longarm replied, "How even an old drunk would be sure to get run over by a dray after, not before, you cleaned out his bank account."

"There must be a way," Sheriff Tegner suddenly decided, spilling almost as much as he was pouring as he insisted, "Never trusted that P.S. Plover. Never will. What sort of a name might Plover be? It sure sounds odd for these parts!"

Longarm gently took the bottle from the befuddled older lawman as he said, "You got to watch them Anglo-Saxon bankers, Sheriff. But I'm a peace officer, not a bank examiner."

O'Brian suggested a bank examiner might be able to figure a way to fiddle the books in order to show withdrawals taking place after rather than before a depositor died.

Longarm shrugged and said, "You gents feel free to examine all the bank ledgers you want. Meanwhile, I'd rather work on suspects, red or white, who've threatened me directly. Marshal Vail never sent me here to investigate Banker Plover, and Plover surely couldn't have been expecting me to. Yet sinister cusses have been trying to stop me ever since I left my home office, and to tell the truth, it's getting tedious as hell."

Sheriff Tegner didn't answer. He put his head down on his desk and commenced to blow small caraway-scented bubbles.

O'Brian grinned at Longarm and murmured, "I thought it was Irishmen who couldn't handle the creature. Where do we go from here, pard?"

Longarm said, "You go anywhere you like. One of us has to stay here until at least one of this old gent's own deputies shows up."

O'Brian seemed sincerely puzzled as he demanded, "How come? Neither of us ride for Brown County, and it was his own grand notion to get drunk on duty."

Longarm sighed and said, "Neither of us are running for re-election this fall, and he was trying to be friendly. What do you have to do that's so all-fired important with the afternoon sun so low?"

O'Brian said, "Send a wire back to my real boss for openers. Now that we've talked I ain't sure whether they want me to stay and back your play or head on home. No offense, and I know you're supposed to be good, but you don't seem to have any play in mind."

Longarm only shrugged. He didn't want another lawman, or any man at all, backing his play with pretty Vigdis Magnusson, now that the bank had closed for the day and most everyone but Viggy would be on their way home before long.

CHAPTER 24

After the man from Saint Paul was gone, Longarm helped himself to some wanted flyers, took another seat, and smoked and read the ugly statistics of wanted men and women until, a million years later, that senior deputy he'd already met came in, nodded morosely at the top of the sheriff's gray head, and muttered, "I see we've been into that old aquavit again. Thanks for holding the fort, Longarm. I can handle it from here, as long as nobody sets fire to the church or robs the bank!"

Longarm rose so they could shake hands and part friendly. Then he picked up his Winchester and headed for the Western Union himself.

He hadn't heard from old Jay Gould as yet. The railroad robber baron was doubtless already dining on fish eggs and green turtle back East, where it would be suppertime by now. But good old Whispering Smith, riding herd on gold shipments out of the Black Hills for the U.P. line, had wired he knew the Bee Witch well. Only her real name was Miss Judith Wright and she'd been a Union spy for old Allan Pinkerton's Secret Service.

But Whispering Smith said she hadn't stayed with Pinkerton when the gruff old Scotsman started his private agency after the war. Smith said the sly old colored gal worked free-lance for both railroad and land-developing outfits, having been taught to make pretty good contour maps when she wasn't pretending to be a laundress, a midwife, or some other sort of harmless dumb coon.

Longarm had already figured what the sly old gal had been up to in these parts. He wired Whispering Smith an urgent request to ask all about and find out whether the dusky old detective gal was alive. He explained he wasn't interested in any other secrets she or her real outfit might want to keep.

After that, knowing in advance how Viggy's notions of supper were doubtless better for her waistline than his own, Longarm stopped at a stand-up beanery to down some Swedish meatballs and potato pancakes with two mugs of black coffee.

Feeling refreshed by his light snack, Longarm consulted his pocket watch and decided it was safe to take his saddle gun to the bank. Viggy let him in, as he'd expected, but giggled at his saddle gun and said, "I surrender, dear. Everyone else has been gone for some time, so where do you want to come, on that same chesterfield in the rear office?"

Longarm chuckled, hauled her in, and kissed her with enthusiasm inspired by chastely thinking of other women all that damned day.

But then he said, "There's no sense having to get dressed over and over when it's this close to sundown to begin with and I got some bank examining to do whilst there's still some daylight."

The beautiful blonde sighed and said, "Pooh, I thought you were only after my body. Didn't you go all through that ledger for last December last night, darling?"

He said, "I did, and I'm pretty sure I made out no more than two styles of handwriting. But I'd like to make certain, so..."

"I can tell you who made each entry, dear." She led the way around to the backs of the teller's cages as she continued. "You just missed them. I thought it was me you were interested in. But we have two more tellers, and we naturally transcribe all our daily transaction in the day book for that month at the end of every working day."

As she hunkered down to rummage for that ledger from the year before, Longarm said, "Hold on. Did you just tell me old P.S. Plover would have never made any entries in his own handwriting?"

She panted, "Here it is. I thought you'd finished with the clumsy old tome. Why would Mister Plover be making entries in deposits and withdrawals, dear? He's the manager."

Longarm started to make a dumb objection. But he could see without asking how the front office would tally all the real cash on hand in person before locking it in the vault overnight.

Viggy rose to full height and flopped the heavy gray ledger atop the long work counter running the length of the teller's hidey-holes. As she opened it for him she idly asked what they were doing. So he brought her up to date on that old drunk and the missing colored lady as he found the entries dealing with the both of them. Then he sighed and muttered, "Thunderation! Neither withdrawal seems to have been tampered with, other entries above and below them confirm the dates for both of them, and worse yet, the two withdrawals on different days were recorded in different scripts!"

Viggy put a polished nail to the paper, saying, "This would have to be Mister Spandau's handwriting. Isn't it pretty? Mister Quinn writes clear enough, I suppose, but he's not as tidy a penman as Mister Spandau."

Longarm said he didn't care, and asked if any one teller got much time alone back there.

Viggy thought and decided with a giggle, "Playing detective is a lot of fun, albeit I'd still rather play house. I see what you suspect one of us sneaks of doing, dear. I suppose it would be possible for one teller to alter the books whilst the other was out of the cage to heed the call of nature or run some other quick errand. But he'd have to be awfully fast as well as awfully clever, don't you agree?"

Longarm swore under his breath and nodded. "I sure wanted to arrest me a banker too. Another lawman I was just jawing with had the same motive for my demise figured out. But old folks do withdraw all their savings and leave town or get run over by a dray."

She asked if he was through back there. He kissed her again and said he was ready to play house instead of bank examiner. So she led the way back to that chesterfield.

But once they got to old Plover's office the sunset was peeking fire-engine red through the drawn blinds. So Longarm repeated what he'd said about just getting undressed once the right way, with her grand old bed to play on once they had.

She dimpled and stopped trying to unbuckle his gun rig as she told him she agreed it was time they got out of this ridiculous vertical position.

They slipped out the back way and moved along a back street in the gloaming. Off in the distance, a train whistle seemed to be mourning the death of another day. But Longarm knew it was that eastbound he'd have had to wait for if he'd taken that clerk's suggestion about modern transportation. When Viggy asked what he'd just chuckled about, he told her, "I'd be crossing the Sleepy Eye trestle aboard that train about now if I hadn't checked today's timetable and met up with a buckskin pony that was more convenient. Don't know whether they'll be stopping at Sleepy Eye or not. Either way, they'd have been letting me off here even later."