Longarm on the Santee Killing Grounds (8 page)

Longarm said, "Neither did the glass-eyed cuss who died down in Denver under the same name. What did your Calvert Tyger look like, and how come you recall him at all, seeing he was here such a short time?"

The newspaper man wrinkled his nose. "You'd be as apt to recall a dapper dresser who favored a velvet frock coat and a lavender brocaded vest, and who lit up one of them violet-scented French cigarettes he smoked. After that he was just a tad taller than me but way under six feet, and couldn't have tipped the scales at one-fifty with his boots on. Some say he won at draw poker more often than such a sissy might find safe in towns as raw as Durango. So to tell the truth, I was set to publish his epitaph a good three days before he died in a more unusual way than I'd been expecting."

Longarm reached absently for two cheroots as he mused half to himself, "Tinhorns living dangerously have been known to use the name and rep of somebody more dangerous. But it's odd that you had him down as a gambling man from down this way when a certain blackjack dealer up the street couldn't tell me anything at all about such a spectacular sport."

The newspaper man accepted the offered smoke with a nod of thanks. "No mystery there. Tyger or whoever he was was a professional to begin with, and a sissy boy after that. He'd have never been interested in betting against them pretty gals at the sucker palace up the street. His game was draw poker, like I said, played in the back room of the Strand Saloon most often."

Longarm thumbed a matchhead aflame and lit them both before he suggested, "Run that part about him being a sissy boy past me some more. Were you talking about the way he dressed or the way he liked to make love?"

The older man took a drag, grinned dirty, and said, "Both. He dressed like a sissy, walked like a sissy, and while I never got to watch, he was seen more often in the company of young boys than any kind of gals. Some say he haunted the gin mills and rooming houses on the wrong side of the tracks because of the young drifters who've got less choice about such matters than a half-way lucky tinhorn."

Longarm blew a thoughtful smoke ring and cautiously observed, "A pal of mine who writes for the Denver Post keeps telling me a newspaper reporter hears lots of things and has lots of suspicions it's best not to print, lest somebody proves you wrong or sues your ass off."

The cruder version of the Post's more polished Reporter Crawford nodded. "That's true. There was heaps of gossip, vicious to common sense, when that sissy went up in flames. Are you asking me official or like a pal just smoking and bullshitting with you?"

Longarm agreed they were only bullshitting. So the newspaper man said, "I'll swear I never said this if you try to use it in court as my say-so. But try her this way. There was a handsome young cowboy and queer whore, according to some, who dropped out of sight the same time. I've never said this to a soul before, but we all like to play detective like Mister Poe, even when we don't write stories for a living. So what if a rich sissy took a poor sissy to his own bitty room and they had a lovers' quarrel?"

Longarm considered and replied, "Any serious wrestling in a small space lit by a candle or an oil lamp could get mighty heated, and an upset stranger would be more likely to charge into a wardrobe than somebody who knew his way out through the smoke."

The older man cackled. "I always figured I'd have made a good detective if I hadn't won that old hand press in a card game on my way West. Would you agree your average sissy boy who'd just about cremated a queer whore with friends in town would have felt any call to linger here in Durango?"

Longarm shook his head. "Most gents in such a fix would be as worried about the local law, whether the victim had friends or not."

Then he blew another smoke ring and quietly added, "That's not to say a queer whore who beat, robbed, and roasted a customer had any call to hang around either. You'd better give me the name and some description of that wayward youth, pard."

The newspaper man did, as Longarm got out his notebook to take down the probably fake name of Jake Brown and the banal description: a slender youth, dressed cow and having nothing to set him apart from your average run-of-the-mill white cowhand or saddle tramp pretending to be a cowhand as he scouted for easier money in a land of opportunity.

Longarm put the notes away as he shrugged and opined, "It's sure starting to look like I've been chasing down a false lead. I wish we didn't have to do that so often. But the only way you can tell is by trying. So I thank you for your help in eliminating the late Calvert Tyger of Durango as any likely lead to the whereabouts of the outlaws I had in mind."

As he started to turn away, the newspaper man said, "Hold on, old son! Don't you care whether it was that boy-lover or the boy he was out to love who left the other to die in that fire and is still running wild?"

Longarm shook his head. "Not hardly. I'm packing a federal badge, and heated lovers' quarrels in local rooming houses ain't federal, praise the Lord. I got enough on my plate with those more serious outlaws who rode off with a federal payroll. As I put what you just told me together, it seems like a tinhorn who didn't even know how to dress sensible adopted the name of a more ferocious gunslick in the hopes of not having any gunfights at all. He got himself in a whole other mess entire. If he was the one who got out alive, like I said, it's a local matter. If it was that kid called Brown, it's still a local matter. I ain't packing no federal wants on a squirt called Jake Brown. I'll allow he describes like heaps of cow-town drifters, but there was nothing about queers in any of the yellow sheets we have on the real gang led by the one and original Calvert Tyger. So it's been nice talking to you, but if I don't get it on down the road my boss told me to take, I'm likely to get my own ass fried to a crisp!"

So they shook on it and parted friendly. Longarm would have felt even dumber as he boarded the train that morning if Amarillo Annie hadn't fried him up those swell scrambled eggs without crisping them at all.

CHAPTER 7

There was no way to run a railroad through the Rockies that didn't involve a certain amount of exciting scenery. So the two young gals seated behind Longarm were squeaking like mice by the time the eastbound D&RG combination was two hours out of Durango.

Longarm was tempted to turn and tell them the few hairpin turns and nine-degree grades on this line were kid stuff next to that new narrow-gauge they were running north to Silverton out of Durango. But he never did. The gals were kid stuff as well, neither was all that pretty, and it was a caution how expensive it could get to soda-and-sandwich three passengers on this infernal line.

He decided to read instead. His saddlebags and most of his possibles were riding up forward in the baggage car, but he had a recent issue of the Police Gazette and the onionskins of that payroll robbery to peruse as the train commenced to scare the wits out of those two young squaws with the mountains to the east getting a mite more dramatic. He failed to see why they insisted on staring out the downhill windows if they found the view so frightening. It was tempting to point out there was nothing to look at but walls of dynamited rock if they'd only move across the aisle and stare that damned way. But starting up with squeaky young gals was a lot like dipping into a cracker barrel. Once you got started, it was a chore to stop. So he just let them squeak as he read in the Police Gazette how some London society gal had been dropped by the old Prince of Wales and his set for getting too familiar with his nibs. That was what they called putting ice cream down the back of an old drunk's stuffed shirt, getting too familiar. The gal sounded like a mite more fun to Longarm than the prince's usual play-pretties. But on the other hand Longarm wasn't as old, stuffy, and married up. Fair was fair, and Longarm had to allow a prince might have a chore explaining all that ice cream in his underwear to his handsome but humorless princess once he got home.

Longarm didn't really care who got to drink with the Prince of Wales these days, and he failed to see what all that fuss about Miss Sarah Bernhardt was about. He'd met the Divine Sarah that time they'd asked him to bodyguard her on her Western tour, and she'd made no mystery of the simple fact she'd been born Jewish but partly raised by Catholic nuns and hence felt as comfortable, or uncomfortable, praying either way. The current dispute seemed to have something to do with Miss Sarah's unconventional ways with men and other pets she liked to lead about on leashes. Longarm had found her a good old gal who'd only kissed him like a sister that time he'd saved her life. But it seemed the French Jews and Catholics were having a serious row over her now, with the Catholics insisting she was Jewish and the outraged Jews insisting she'd been baptized by those nuns and so the Catholic Church was more than welcome to such a flashy thing.

Longarm didn't bother to finish the dumb news item. He found it mighty tedious that grown men could really care what an actress did or didn't do just to work up some curiosity about her show. Longarm had been too polite to ask, but the Divine Sarah had told him to his face she'd never slept in a coffin or kept a live crocodile in her bathtub like some said. But those Jew-baiters he'd had to save her from out Virginia City way must have believed even worse tales about her judging from the wild way they'd carried on.

This old world seemed filled with folks who carried on wild as all hell over nothing much. It was one of the reasons he was packing his badge and guns. He'd found some of the wildest bastards convinced of their own God-given right to raise hell in the name of some half-ass excuse, such as Frank and Jesse's conviction they were riding for a Confederate Army they'd never been enlisted in to protect kith and kin from the cruel advances of the Missouri Pacific, which ran way the hell over on the far side of their state but deserved to be robbed in any case, according to them.

Calvert Tyger's gang of Galvanized Yankees seemed to have worn their own fight for the Lost Cause a mite thin, to Longarm's way of thinking. The James boys, at least, could be said not to know any better, since their only military experience had been with half-assed guerrilla bands who'd never surrendered for the simple reason nobody had ever asked them to. But Tyger had enlisted in the real rebel army, been captured fair and square, and enlisted in the Union Army so he could get out of Sandusky Prison and fight the Santee.

That romantic bull about two flags waving at Little Crow side by side, as boys in blue and gray civilized him with butt stock and bayonet, was postwar twaddle. Calvert Tyger and his pals had foresworn the Confederacy a good spell before Lee's surrender, and would have been free to head home the same as any other Union vets had they not deserted both armies in time of war.

One of the young gals behind Longarm squeaked "I can't look! Tell me when it's over!"

Longarm glanced out his own window as he set the Police Gazette to one side and dug out the sheaf of typed-up onionskins Henry had given him. The tracks wound gently alongside the brawling San Juan through the South Ute Reserve near the New Mexico line, and what the hell, most everyone aboard figured to live if this old car jumped the tracks and rolled no more than three or four times down that forty-five-degree slope. He wondered what those gals were fixing to squeak when they got to the really high hairpins further up the line. His own asshole had puckered some the first time he'd been over that series of sheer-drop zigzags along the Pinos on the far side of the Divide, where the ranges rose more steep and craggy.

He'd read Henry's terse but thorough rundown on the Tyger bunch and their recent robberies a dozen times since leaving Denver on what seemed to have been a wild-goose chase. He read them again, with the breeze through the open window fluttering the corners of the thin pages as he searched once more for some pattern that made a lick of sense.

The double turncoat and his half-dozen followers had shot up that federal paymaster's office at Fort Collins as gleefully and senselessly as a wolverine raiding a box full of kittens. A stenographer gal they'd spared after some mock gallantry had given the same description as the one wounded clerk who'd not been hit as bad as he'd let on. The other four men on the premises had been gunned down like dogs after they'd opened the damned safe and given up the damned money. The paymaster in charge, who'd told the others not to put up a fight, had doubtless seen how tough a time they were going to have with those high-denomination treasury notes, intended to pay government expenses rather than salaries at that time of the year. The gal said Tyger had cussed her boss about those hundred-dollar notes before gunning him, as if it had been the poor paymaster's fault. Tyger had never been accused of deep thinking. Longarm was hardly the first lawman who'd wondered why a nondescript outlaw who was said to be fairly well educated insisted on being so famous.

Frank and Jesse, the Youngers, and that stubborn young rascal they called Billy the Kid down Lincoln County way tended to get named a lot because they perforce hung out in the same parts, where lots of admiring folks knew them and tended to gossip about them even as they were helping them hide out.

But nobody riding with Tyger, Flanders, and that more mysterious Chief had ever gone home after the war. They seemed to roam all over the Far West with no particular base the law had any line on. So why would even a mad-dog killer take such pains to let the law know just who they were after? Anyone you were robbing at gunpoint was just as likely to turn over the money whether you said your name was Smith or Jones, and the law would take far longer as they tried to figure out who'd done it.