The Killing Machine (11 page)

The Trail of Tears. The Cheyenne loved their lives in Georgia, which they considered to be a gift directly from God. The Cheyenne had long ago adopted many of the ways of the white man. They built roads, schools, churches, and had a form of democratic government. But more and more whites pushed into Georgia as part of the migration west. And they took more and more land belonging to the Cheyenne.
When gold was discovered, the Cheyenne feared they would be pushed out of their land altogether. And they were. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson, a greedy and ruthless man, helped Congress pass the Indian Removal Act. A pretty fair share of white people battled against the act, but finally had to give up. A few years later, the Cheyenne were forced to migrate west without enough food, medicine, or even horses, to make the trip safely. Many of them died. Some of them ran away, not following the others to Oklahoma where Jackson and Congress had promised abundant and fertile land. It wasn't surprising that some of them had found their way to this area and to this island. It wasn't surprising, either, that they would want to build a cairn that was a curse to the white man.

“Let's head back.”

“Maybe we got the curse now. Maybe tonight somebody'll chop off our heads with an axe. They say that's what happens when his ghost pays you a visit. I wouldn't've come out here except for my daddy made me.”

“You'll be fine.”

She rowed us back. This time I didn't feel so emasculated about sitting with one arm in a sling while a burly lady rowed me to the far shore. I was too lost in my thinking to worry about it.

About halfway to the mainland she said, “You want to hear about Fred? It'll pass the time.”

“Sure,” I said. I have the ability to look right at a person and appear to be listening intently to everything they're saying. But behind my eyes and ears, I'm lost in my own world. She told me about Fred. All I can remember was that they both got an awful
lot of tattoos bearing each other's name. Well, I remember a few other things, too: that he beat her, stole from her, publicly humiliated her, and made her serve a three-month jail sentence that rightly belonged to him.

“So,” she said, concluding in such a way that I thought she was going to cry, “you can see why I'd love a man like that. He sure was good-lookin'.”

 

Marshal Wickham was having a piece of apple pie and a cup of coffee when I found him in the café. His Stetson took up about half the space of the small table where he sat. He had to set it on a chair so I'd have room for my own pie and coffee.

I said, “Unless Wayland's a damned good actor, we can eliminate him.”

“Why's that?”

“He tried to bribe me. Said he wanted to give me a preemptive bid for the gun.”

“He thinks you've got it?”

“Apparently.”

Wickham's eyes gleamed with a kind of mean humor. “You could make yourself a nice pile of money.”

“I'd rather have the man who killed my brother and the gun.”

“You Federal boys are what they call single-minded.”

I shrugged. “Not always. Investigators get bribed off from time to time. But never when family members are involved.”

“So if we eliminate Wayland…”

“That leaves us Spenser and Brinkley.”

“I don't take much to Spenser.”

“I doubt even his mother did. He's a grade-A ass-hole.” I sipped the coffee. It had a nutty flavor I liked. Kind of walnut. “I've been looking into some other things.”

“What other things?”

“A couple of people tell me that David wasn't killed for the gun.”

“People like to talk. Passes the time. Makes them feel important. I get that all the time. Want to butter up the marshal by tellin' him something he don't know. So they come up with these stories.”

“I don't doubt that. But James's wife got me to thinking about a few other ways to look at the shootout that night.”

I reminded him about the money James had suddenly come into. The new house, especially.

“You know,” Wickham said, sitting back and lighting up his pipe with a stick match, “I wondered about that. Where James came into that kind of money. I should have pressed him harder about that. The place isn't a palace, but it's a nice, solid house. And it'd be expensive for everybody except rich folks. But James came up with the money.”

I told him about the envelopes from Fairbain.

“I'll be damned,” Wickham said.

“What?”

“That's a story that might lead somewhere. You might be on to something here, Ford.”

“But if David wasn't killed for the gun, who took the gun and where is it now?”

“Yeah, that's the hard angle to figure. If he wasn't killed for the gun, why would the killer take the gun?”

“Only one reason I can figure, Marshal.”

“What would that be?”

“To confuse us. Make us think it was for the gun.”

He smiled. It made him look ten years younger. “So that's why you Federal boys make so much money. 'Cause you can figure things out us poor old local folks couldn't get to in a month of Sundays.” Then: “You got any idea why he was killed, then? If it wasn't for the gun, I mean?”

“Not yet. Maybe never. I mean, we can't rule out the possibility that it was for the gun. Sometimes the obvious reason is the right reason.”

“Those envelopes sure sound interesting. Think I'll go ask Spenser about them. I don't think he hates me quite as much as he hates you.”

“You trying to hurt my feelings, Marshal?”

He laughed. “Just like you said, he's a grade-A ass-hole. Soon as I bring up those envelopes, I'll be right at the top of his shit list, too. You can bet on that.”

“Good luck.”

He pulled his hat on, cinched up his gunbelt. “Maybe I'll get lucky and he'll give me a reason to shoot him.”

“I'd sure hate to think about that, Marshal. A fine man like Spenser. Shoot him a couple times for me, all right?”

T
he desk clerk said, “A Mr. Spenser was asking for you.”

“Oh? When was this?”

“Maybe an hour or so ago.”

“He say when he'd be back?”

“No. He just said you'd know where to find him.”

This clerk was a new one for me. He was round and had a nose so red the railroads could use it at night. The eyes were nervous. They were almost as red as the nose. He'd either had a big night or some long years of big nights.

“Is everything all right?” he said.

“I think you started to say something, then stopped.”

“I was just going to say something that wasn't any of my business to say.” He touched pudgy fingers to his golden cravat.

“I see.”

“I mean I'd say it if you said it was all right to say it.”

“I've got plenty of time. Why don't you go right ahead then?”

“Well, the management here, they think I talk too
much sometimes. Say things to the guests I shouldn't.” He must have sensed my impatience. “He looked scared.”

“Scared.”

“Yessir. The way he kept looking around, real nervous like. And when I said you weren't in—well, I know this sounds funny, but I honestly thought I saw tears in his eyes. And you should have seen his hands.” He put one of his own pudgy ones out to demonstrate. He made it twitch. “Just like that.”

“Thank you for telling me that.”

“You're most welcome, sir. That's what I keep trying to tell the management here. That guests like to know things that you know but that they don't. Things that might be more important than they seem.”

He had a strange way of talking and it was wearing me down.

I went upstairs to my room. Every once in a while the sling started to irritate me. I took it off and lay down. Hotels are generally quiet in midafternoon. Even the wagon traffic on the main street had slowed.

I was more tired than I wanted to admit to myself. You hear saloon stories of men who get shot and are up to full steam after a good night's sleep. Maybe there's a species of very special men who can do that. I belong to the plain, old, human race and there's one truth that race holds to. The older you get, the harder it is to spring back after any kind of serious injury or wound. I could take my sling off all I wanted, trying to convince myself that I was healing up real quick, but sleep came so fast and so hard that there was no denying my exhaustion. And it wasn't yet three p.m.

The knocking was part of my dream. Or I thought it was. The part of my mind that was aware of the external world convinced me that if I woke up there wouldn't be any knocking, that I was dreaming the knocking. So why wake up? Just slip back into full sleep; you needed the rest anyway, friend.

But then some part of me figured out that the knocking was real and that it was in fact getting louder and more persistent and that somebody on the other side of my hotel room door was suddenly and sharply calling my name.

I don't know what I did exactly, but without my sling I managed to inflict a whole lot of pain as I slid my legs off the bed. I grabbed my Colt from the holster on the floor and barefooted my way to the door.

It was Marshal Wickham. “Somethin's sure goin' on here, Ford.”

“What're you talking about?”

“Get your socks and boots on and I'll tell you.”

The first thing I did was get my sling back on and then I tended, one-armed, to my socks and boots.

“That's a bitch, getting boots on one-handed,” Wickham said. “I never thought of that before.”

“So you're pounding on my door and shouting my name. What the hell's going on?”

“The desk clerk told me that Spenser was here to see you earlier and he looked real scared.”

“You woke me up to tell me that?”

“No, I woke you up to tell you that somebody got into Spenser's hotel room and cut his throat. Just the way they cut your brother's throat.”

I
spent an hour in Spenser's hotel room. I mostly went through his two travel bags and his mail. He'd apparently been on the road for some time. He had twenty-six pieces of mail. I went through each one, found nothing that bore on the gun or his murder.

Brinkley and Wayland were sitting in Marshal Wickham's front area when we got there.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Wickham said.

With four of us in there, Wickham's modest office was crowded. Wickham didn't waste any time. He said, “So who's killing you men off?”

Brinkley said, “Why don't you tell us, Marshal? Unless I'm mistaken, that star you wear means that you represent law and order in this hick burg.”

Wickham glanced at me. Frowned. People think that when you wear a badge, citizens snap to. A lot of them don't. Given the circumstances, Wickham's question was well taken. But they didn't feel like answering him, so they didn't.

He looked back at them. “Let me put it this way, then. Why would somebody want to kill you four men?”

Brinkley and Wayland looked at each other. Then they faced Wickham and Brinkley said, “The gun. Why the hell else would they kill us?”

“You're telling me you have the gun?” Wickham said.

“No,” Wayland said, “he's telling you somebody thinks we have the gun.”

“Then you don't?”

“No.”

“Any idea who does?”

“No.”

“And no idea, of course, who killed Fairbain or Spenser?”

Brinkley spoke: “You're the lawman here, remember? If you don't know, how the hell can you expect us to know?”

Wayland said, “I want to leave town.”

“Not quite yet, I'm afraid,” Wickham said. “If you're afraid you might be killed, you can always stay here.”

“Here, meaning the jail?” Brinkley said. “Why would two respectable businessmen want to be thrown into a jail cell with a bunch of ne'er-do-wells?”

“You're forgetting,” I said to Wickham, “these are very high-toned men. Selling arms is an admirable business.”

“Why is he here?” Brinkley asked.

“He's a law officer same as I am.”

“This is your jurisdiction.”

“He's Federal.”

Brinkley scowled.

Wickham said, “So you don't know why anybody would want to kill you, even though two of you are
dead. You don't have any idea who might be behind the killings. And even though you wouldn't ever consider staying in a cell here where you'd be safe, you want to leave town because you're afraid the killer will take your lives if you don't.”

“None of that sounds particularly unreasonable,” Brinkley said.

Wayland: “I want to know how much longer we have to stay here.”

Wickham was about to speak when I slipped the envelopes from inside my jacket pocket and held them up in the air. “Before you answer that, Marshal, let me ask them if they know anything about these envelopes.” There were four of them. Two each. They took them, looked them over. Handed them back.

“Envelopes,” Wayland said. “More of a waste of time. Now will you answer my question, Marshal? When can we leave town?”

I said, “Fairbain sent James four of these. James's wife claims that James knew something and that's why Fairbain sent him cashier's checks.”

They managed to look conspicuously innocent.

“That's between Fairbain and James,” Wayland said.

“And you of course wouldn't know anything about it, either, I suppose?” I said to Brinkley.

“Hell, no, I don't. The only time I ever saw Fairbain was when we were together in town here. Otherwise we didn't keep any contact. I had no idea what he did.”

I slid all four of the envelopes into my pocket. “I'll bet you've heard the word ‘blackmail' before.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Wayland said.

“Somebody was blackmailing Fairbain,” I said.

“So?”

“So, Wayland, maybe you knew why he was being blackmailed. Or maybe the same blackmailer was getting money from you.”

“Hardly. And as Brinkley said, I didn't know anything about Fairbain except what he told us when we were together in town here.”

“Spenser must have known,” I said. “He was killed, too.”

“I still don't see what that has to do with us,” Wayland said.

I smiled at Wickham. “Have you ever seen such a pair of innocents?”

“Not since I made my First Communion,” he said. “The gun they were after gets stolen, two of their cohorts get killed, and at least one of their group looks like he was paying blackmail money. And these two don't know anything about any of it.”

“They must sleep a lot,” I said.

“An awful lot,” Wickham said.

“This is all very funny,” Brinkley said, “but it's also a waste of time.” He stood up. “Unless you're arresting me, Marshal, I plan to walk out of that door over there right now.”

“And the same goes for me,” Wayland said. He stood up, too.

“You're not being very smart,” Wickham said. “Looks like somebody is after you, but you won't take any help.”

“The only help I want is to get on that train and get out of here,” Wayland said.

“You could probably sneak on a train or a stage,” Wickham said, “and I wouldn't be able to stop you.
But once I found out you were gone, I'd put out an arrest warrant on you. I know a lot about you by now. No matter where you went, I'd find a way to serve that warrant.”

“Arrest us for what?” Brinkley said.

I said, “Maybe you two knew something that Fairbain and Spenser did. Maybe you're the blackmailers.”

“This is getting stupider by the minute,” Brinkley said.

“Is it? I'm sure the marshal will be happy to help me search your rooms. Maybe we'll find something there that'll clear this whole thing up.”

I was congratulating myself on how deftly I'd bluffed them when Brinkley said, “I can't speak for Wayland here, but feel free to check my room. In fact, you can go up there now and go through it. Tear it apart for all I care. I'll even wait right here for you to come back and stammer your way through a few excuses for not finding anything.”

“Same for me,” Wayland said. “You check out my room and I'll sit here and wait for you.”

See, it's not supposed to work that way. You're supposed to bluff them and they're supposed to get all nervous and sweaty and give you all kinds of legal reasons why you can't search their rooms and you'd better damned not try.

I'd forgotten that it works the other way sometimes. The bluffer can get outbluffed, too.

“You want to go check out my room or not?” Brinkley said.

I shrugged. “Maybe later.”

He smirked. “Your little bluff didn't work so well, did it, Federal man?”

“I guess I'll have to work on it a little more.”

“‘Work on it a little more,'” Brinkley sneered.

They sneered at both Wickham and me, in fact, and then left.

 

You knew the town had come of age when you saw the tiny window bearing the words
REAL ESTATE OFFICE
. They were repeated on the glass of the door, in case you missed them on the window.

The interior was short and narrow. One wall had framed lithographs of the president, the territorial governor, and a cranky-looking old bastard who probably founded the town. There was a law about that. All town founders had to look like mountain men and look cranky as hell. Of course most town-founder stories are bullshit. But that's the law, too. Who wants to hear the truth when you can hear the myth. Maybe he didn't really hold off six hundred Injuns by himself. But it was better than the truth, hearing that one day he had the trots real bad, stopped off by the river down here, and decided to stay a while. Bloodthirtsy Injuns make for a much better tale.

There were two desks. One was occupied by a gray-haired woman in a blue dress with a high, frilly, white collar. Several of her fingers, working blur fast, inflicted pain on typewriter keys. The keys striking the platen seemed as long as pellet shots in the sun-streaming silence.

The other desk, behind hers, was empty. Behind that desk were three wooden three-door filing cabinets and a large map of the county.

She didn't look up. She didn't even stop assaulting the typewriter. She said, “May I help you?”

“Are you the realtor?”

“I am the realtor's secretary.”

“Well, maybe you could help me.”

Still typing away.

“Are you looking for land, sir?”

“No. Some information on who owns a certain cabin.”

She stopped typing, turned around with great efficiency in her swivel chair. She had a sweet-ugly face, just now showing the loose flesh of age. “Then you would want Mr. Benson.”

“Mr. Benson?”

“Mr. Richard Benson. Sole owner and proprietor of Benson Realty.”

“Benson Realty. I see. It just says Real Estate on the window.”

“Mr. Benson thought of naming the company after himself but he decided it would look vain.”

“A humble realtor. I see.”

“A humble and successful realtor. There are three realtors in the county. We outsold them four to one last year.”

“Maybe he'll have to reconsider putting his name on the door.”

She caught the sarcasm. “I'm very busy. And Mr. Benson isn't here and won't be back until tomorrow. He's on a train coming back from Denver.”

“And you're sure you can't help me?”

“I'd prefer not to. I told somebody something once that I shouldn't have. It gave another realtor an edge in a deal Mr. Benson was trying to close. Mr. Benson was nice enough not to fire me. But now I'm
strictly a secretary. Mr. Benson handles everything else.”

“Like your job, huh?” I looked around. It was an orderly place—I suspected this was due to her—with modern office furnishings and a couple of leather-bound books that no doubt contained photos of everything Benson was selling. Plus there was the sweet scent of furniture polish on the air. This was a place where you could relax and think. You didn't have all the traffic of a retail store to keep you on edge with insincere goodwill and people trying to haggle you out of your profit.

“Do you see this?” she was saying.

“The typewriter?”

“Only one of three in the entire county.”

“Impressive.”

“And the blond filing cabinets? Only First Montana Bank has filing cabinets as modern as these.”

I nodded. “Nice.”

“And Mr. Benson says that we'll have the first telephone in town. They're putting up the poles and lines now.”

She had an owner's pride. She also suddenly had a child's enthusiasm. Her face in that moment was not only sweet-ugly. It was also downright cute.

“I'm sorry I can't help you.”

“Oh, that's all right. I don't want to get either one of you in trouble.”

She'd been eyeing me closely for the last couple of minutes. Now came the revelation. “You're David's brother.”

“That I am.”

“He sure was a charmer.” Then, not wanting to appear foolish: “And quite the businessman. He got
Mr. Benson to drop his price considerably for that ranch. He made a lot of inquiries before he came here and when Mr. Benson told him the rental price, your brother said he'd pay so much and nothing more. Mr. Benson isn't used to that kind of customer. When I was going to get married again—I'm a widow—I had my eye on a nice little house and even for me Mr. Benson would only go so low.”

“So you didn't buy the house?”

“No, and as it turned out we wouldn't have needed it anyway. The marshal found another woman.”

“Marshal Wickham?”

She smiled and shook her head. “Don't look so surprised. Old folks have romances, too. He just found somebody else.” She looked down at her typewriter and then back at me. “I got over it.” But the confidence of the voice didn't match the wistfulness of the gaze.

 

I waited for Jane in the room where everybody took their breaks. I waited nearly half an hour. When she came in, she looked tired. She picked up the half-empty coffeepot and waggled it at me. I shook my head and slapped my hand over my empty cup; she filled her cup and came over and sat down. We didn't say anything. She blew upward on a stray piece of hair lying across her forehead. That didn't work, so she carefully lifted up the piece of hair and smoothed it back into the rest of her hair.

She started to take a sip of coffee, then stopped. Too hot apparently. She blew on the surface of the black, steaming coffee.

“You all right?”

“Long day. We lost Mr. Hendricks. One of my favorite old men.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You shouldn't get as attached as I do.”

“Better than not getting attached. People generally know when you're concerned for them.”

She didn't say anything. Went back to her coffee.

“I came here to ask you a couple of questions.”

“The Army investigator.”

“That's right.”

“I hope my head is clear enough to answer. I need a lot of sleep.”

“Hard to sleep?”

“I just lie there and think about your brother.”

Pretty damned unseemly when you come right down to it. How I felt hurt every time she mentioned David romantically. She'd been his woman—one of them, anyway—and I sure didn't have any claim on her. But every time she mentioned him I felt like a spurned lover.

Then I brought up the island, which I'd been thinking about more and more.

“He ever say anything about maybe hiding the gun on Parson's Cairn?”

“Not to me, he didn't. But the more I think about the island, the more I remember him talking about it. He liked it over there. Said he could sit there and finally get some thinking done.”