The Deputy - Edge Series 2 (3 page)

15

‘No. My name’s George North. Sheriff of Bishopsburg. Little town forty miles or so south of here.’ He moved to take the chair vacated by Edge. ‘The Railton City marshal speaks highly of you.’

‘I do my best to stay on the right side of the law and the men who enforce it.’

Edge paid the never talkative Baldy and went to get his hat from the stand just inside the door.

‘He told me that one time recently when you were in a cash bind you hired on to do deputy duties. For a Sheriff John McCall of a town out in the territories?’

Edge turned to lean his back against the wall beside the hat stand, met the level grey eyed gaze of North reflected in the mirror above the basin before which he sat and said:

‘You want to get to the point, feller? Maybe keeping in mind that the local marshal neglected to tell me as much about you as he seemed to have told you about me?’

North inclined his head slightly, shifted the direction of his gaze so his eyes in the mirror met those of the elderly barber who stood behind him and said in the same even tone as before: ‘Short and neat and tidy, if you please. The marshal tells me you don’t miss a trick in listening. But that you’re real careful what you talk about?’

‘Believe the marshal, sheriff,’ Baldy confirmed as he fastened the cape in place. Then began to use his comb and scissors with well practised smooth dexterity on his new customer.

North said to Edge: ‘There’s a Mexican woman locked up in the Railton City jailhouse across the street. She’s not a prisoner. Held in protective custody until a man stands trial for murder in Bishopsburg.’

Edge took out the makings.

North continued: ‘Circuit judge will be down there to hold court the day after tomorrow and the woman will be called to give eye witness evidence if I can get her from here to there in one piece in time to take the stand. Could use some trustworthy help to do that.’

Edge sealed the paper around the line of tobacco. ‘The marshal here had three full time deputies at the last count, feller.’

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‘He did me a favour, holding my witness in his jail for the last four weeks. I don’t want to get deeper in his debt. Particularly since he didn’t make the offer and there’s no reason why he should feel he has to.’

‘You don’t have any deputies of your own?’

‘I’ve got Ted Straker, who’s a fine lawman. But somebody had to stay home and mind the store.’

‘Uh-uh.’

‘I’m paying ten dollars if you’ll partner me over a distance of forty some miles. Riding herd on a woman.’

‘Who friends of the feller accused of murder will try to keep from getting to Bishopsburg, I guess?’

‘You’ve got the idea. You want the job? Five bucks here and five more when we reach Bishopsburg? I’ll provide trail rations.’

‘Can’t say until I know more about it.’

‘Talk’s cheap, so it’s no trouble for me to have a friendly palaver. If you can afford five minutes to listen?’

Edge lit the cigarette and showed an easy smile through the expelled smoke.

‘You’re talking money and that means you’re playing my tune, sheriff. So buddy, I can spare some time.’

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CHAPTER • 3

___________________________________________________________________

ISABELLA GOMEZ was the only witness to a rape and murder some four weeks
earlier, the Bishopsburg sheriff told Edge in Baldy’s Barbering Parlour: the lawman having his hair cut while his listener leaned against the wall near the door, smoking a cigarette. The crime took place on the night of a church picnic and dance held at Red Rocks, a scenic sandstone formation at the mouth of a canyon a half mile west of the Bishopsburg town limits.

The festivities, which were a yearly event invariably attended by almost the entire community, were organised to raise funds for the upkeep of the Reverend Barnaby Crown’s stone and timber church on Main Street.

There had never been trouble before during afternoons filled with children’s games and adults’ cheerful talk, then picnic suppers in the evening and finally dancing in the light of lanterns hung in the encircling cottonwood trees. The picnic was supposed to be dry but inevitably a few men smuggled beer and liquor out to Red Rocks which they attempted to drink in secret. But secrets were difficult to keep in a town like Bishopsburg, so although drinking was frowned upon it was tolerated on the understanding nobody got ornery drunk. And nobody ever had until this July’s picnic. When Jose Martinez and two of his friends showed up early in the evening.

The Martinez family was the richest in this part of Texas, its fortune based upon large and varied business interests in the United States and Mexico: from cattle ranching and horse breeding to banking, silver and gold mining to railroads. Jose spent a great deal of time travelling on both sides of the border, attending to the family’s far flung business enterprises. While his sickly widower father, Eduardo, seldom left
El Blanco Hacienda,
the ranch ten miles to the west of town here he raised some of the finest saddle horses in the south western states and territories.

His only son was not often in one place for very long at a time and whenever he did meet up with his long time friends he liked to raise a little hell. 18

Sheriff North had twice needed to jail Jose and his buddies overnight for disturbing the peace inside town limits. But on neither occasion had the young men been too hard to handle. Then each following morning there was ample Martinez money to compensate for the damage done and feathers ruffled. And that was the end of it. Which satisfied the good people of Bishopsburg –

not the kind of wild and lawless town to tolerate the brand of hell raising shenanigans known to take place in other, more wide-open Texas communities. Too, Eduardo Martinez was proud of his hard earned reputation and he had the power through the family purse strings to make his only offspring toe a line drawn far back from causing serious trouble.

So when they were in town, Jose and his
amigos
had always confined themselves to drinking more than was good for them in the Dancing Horse Saloon, getting a little boisterous and – if the mood took them – spending some time in the company of Rose Riley.

Rose was not a bad looking thirty five years old woman who for the sake of appearances was employed as a piano player and singer at the saloon. But most everyone knew she supplemented the wages Jake Carr paid her by sometimes entertaining men who had the price to pay for her favours in the privacy of her upstairs room.

Thus, young Martinez and his friends out on a binge were inclined to get a little noisy. And occasionally they indulged in some tomfoolery that led to a chair being smashed by one liquored-up young man over the inebriated skull of another. And Rose Riley, who felt she retained a degree of dignity by not always being immediately available for her secondary line of business, was from time to time the butt of their slurred insults.

That had been the sum total of it. Until the night of last month’s church picnic. The first one Jose had attended since he was a kid, when he used to be taken there for the afternoon games and evening supper.

Inevitably, he and his two friends brought liquor out to Red Rocks. But none was, at the outset, offensively drunk. In fact they behaved unusually well and even won over an element of Bishopsburg society that had always maintained the day would come when Jose Martinez would go too far. Get too drunk, too obnoxiously 19

boisterous. And step across the line between good natured horseplay and serious violence.

In the event, the trouble at Red Rocks did not begin with him. The fight over Rose Riley started when two of the town boys not long out of short pants got drunk enough to throw caution aside and seek to become men with her bought body.

But the picnic was one of those occasions when Rose regarded herself as a reputable entertainer only – there to play piano, alongside two men on fiddles and one on trumpet, for dancing.

Rose was indignantly angered at being pestered and one of the lusting youngsters blamed the other for riling her. They fought and when Molly Crowell, a pubescent admirer of one of the boys, sought to break up the brawl, the bodice of her party dress was ripped.

Moments later the young girl was partially naked above the waist, her developing upper body displayed for a few frantic moments to the variously shocked or eager gazes of a large proportion of Bishopsburg’s citizenry. The scrap was quickly ended and soon the party was in full swing again, the music and dancing restarted. But one aspect of the fight remained vividly imprinted on the minds of some men: though only the young Martinez was stirred strongly enough by the recollection to allow it to influence his course of action. The way the people of Bishopsburg pieced it together later, from the eye witness account given by Isabella Gomez and their own reading of events, the eighteen years old Mexican had been powerfully smitten by the sight of the partially naked body of the young Crowell girl.

And the more he drank, the fiercer the fires of lust blazed in his belly. He certainly drank a great deal more: for many disapproving people glimpsed him constantly break the unwritten rule of the church picnic by sucking openly from an upraised bottle of hard liquor.

And some claimed they also saw him staggering about in a near stupor. Too, he was heard to curse in Spanish and English at people he collided with and others who advised him to take it easy with his drinking – including his two embarrassed friends.

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There was no precise time when it became apparent that Jose was nowhere to be seen. People simply realised that the drunken, lurching, slurring and glowering young man with a near empty bottle in his hand was in irksome evidence one moment and blessedly gone the next.

Except for Isabella Gomez, who knew exactly when Jose Martinez left the kerosene lamp lit centre of the party to wander off into the dark, moon shadowed depths of the canyon in back of the cluster of sandstone rocks. Isabella, who now owned the dry goods store in town, had once been one of the most sought after young women in Bishopsburg to escort to social events such as the church picnic. But she had needed to hold herself aloof while she was under the watchful eye of her prudishly over-protective and mistrustful father. Then, after her
padre
died and she was free to look for a husband, all the most eligible bachelors she had been interested in were spoken for. With the exception of Jose Martinez, albeit he was little more than a boy some fifteen years her junior.

So it was inevitable she would pay him particular attention at the church picnic where, in the past, many marriages had been made under the influence of the romantic atmosphere of a moonlit night, with dancing to music, some of the men a little drunk and all the women looking at their best dressed in their finest gowns.

Thus, on the night of the latest picnic, Isabella was paying close attention to the worse for drink Jose: her intention to see that he caused no more trouble than usual and did not antagonise those local people who were less tolerant than most toward him at the best of times.

And when she saw him weave away from the softly lit area of the planked dance floor to disappear into the near pitch darkness of the canyon she went after him.

She did not follow too closely, in case he was simply seeking privacy to answer a call of nature. But the sound of a female voice drew her jealously forward until she was able to see two ill-defined figures and hear their voices clearly. Soon realised there was something wrong.

21

She knew at the start the man who was struggling with the woman was Jose Martinez. But she could not recognise the face and form or the voice of the woman who was fighting to extricate herself from his unwanted embrace. Knew though that the man was trying to force himself on a terrified young
gringo
girl who pleaded with him to let her be. But he didn’t and when she was finally too weak to resist any longer he threw her to the ground and dropped down on her: began to have his way.

Isabella could watch no longer and whirled to run out of the canyon then away from the Red Rocks festivities. Hurried to her living quarters behind the store she had recently inherited from her father where she spent a sleepless night. Wracked with guilt for abandoning the young girl to her fate and nurturing a new born hatred for Jose Martinez.

Found some solace, and a greater sense of guilt when, the next morning, she heard that the daughter of Bishopsburg’s blacksmith, had been found almost naked and throttled to death in the canyon where she had witnessed the start of an assault by Jose Martinez on a young American girl. And she went directly to the law office to tell Sheriff North what she had seen.