by Tabor Evans
“Because that’s my orders from Mr. Pennington,” Pete hissed, touching his bloody lips. “You had no right to slap me that way!”
“You brought it on yourself,” Longarm growled. He retrieved the man’s rifle and then propped it up against the shack. “Do you live here all the time?”
“Hell yes. What’s it to you?”
“I want to know all about your boss.”
“Kiss my skinny ass, Marshal!”
“I won’t kiss it, you old fart, but I will kick it from one side of this mountain to the other.” To get his point across, Longarm drew back his fist and when Pete cringed, he slammed the man up against the shack. “I don’t know why you’re trying to make this a lot harder than it needs to be.”
“What the hell do you want to know about Mr. Pennington?”
“Tell me about the young blond that he was seeing in Reno.”
Pete blinked. “How’d you know about her?”
“It’s my business to know.”
Pete looked past Longarm at Delia. “And how’s it supposed to be that woman’s business?”
“Never you mind her,” Longarm snapped. “Just tell me about the blond gal.”
Longarm had laid the trap and now he needed to know if Pete was going to step into it. Again, he grabbed Pete by the throat and drew back his hand. “Tell me or I’ll bust that nose of yours across your ugly face so hard it will look like a puddle of strawberry jam!”
“All right!” Pete swallowed hard. “Mr. Pennington told me not to tell anyone about what he does or the wimmen he does it with. If you tell him what I said, he’ll fire me and nobody will give me a job anymore. I’ll gawdamn starve to death and it’ll all be your fuckin’ fault! Goliath will starve, too! You want the deaths of an old man and a dog on your conscience? Is that what you want, Marshal!”
Longarm didn’t release his hold. “You and the dog starving would be way down on the list of bad things I’ve had to do as a federal lawman. So start talking!”
“Ain’t much to tell you about the girl.”
“Did he bring her up here to Virginia City and this mine?”
“Just once.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Don’t know and don’t care! But she was young and just as pretty as that woman you’re with now.”
“When you saw the girl, did Maxwell Pennington use her name?”
“Nope.”
“Did she look hurt or scared?”
“No, sir! She was hangin’ all over him real lovey-dovey like. I could see that they was lustin’ for each other. It was dark when he brought her up and he just stopped here to give me a little food money and then they set off up the street to where Mr. Pennington lives. Big house up on the hill. I never was allowed inside and I don’t care about that. But he’d bring women up all the time and take ’em to the big house for a couple of days.”
“When did you see this blond girl and was she the last that your boss brought up here?” Delia asked.
Pete glared at Delia. “You sure as shit don’t wear a badge, missy! So what the hell do I have to answer your questions for?”
Delia’s beautiful face suddenly wasn’t beautiful. Her eyes blazed and she looked as if she wanted to bite a big hole in the old watchman’s face. “You’re scum, Pete! You’re the kind of a man that doesn’t deserve to breathe and your dog has become just like you.”
“Goliath was kicked around as a pup, missy. He got beat every day by the first man that owned him and when he grow’d big enough, he near tore out the bastard’s throat and then he took to the sagebrush. Goliath lived two years as a wild dog catchin’ and killin’ rabbits and stealing food from the miners until he came around and I started to feed him regularly. Took another two years before I could touch him and he learned to protect me from others.”
“Well,” Longarm said, voice softening. “I’m glad I didn’t have to shoot Goliath. When you sleep you ought to keep him on a chain close at hand. He’d still bark and wake you but he wouldn’t go after people. Might be a couple of kids come by and he’d tear them apart.”
“Ain’t no kids living up on this godforsaken Comstock Lode. Never was but a few.”
“All the same,” Longarm said. “I can tell that the dog means something to you and you need to make sure that he doesn’t kill somebody one of these days.”
“If you’d have shot Goliath, I’d have found a way to return the favor,” Pete said.
Longarm had met many men like Pete. You couldn’t flatter them into being nice and you couldn’t reason with them to help you out of a sense of duty or decency. The only thing that men like Pete understood was force and fear.
“When was the last time you saw Mr. Pennington with the young blond girl?”
“About ten days or two weeks ago.”
“And did you ever see the girl since?” Delia asked.
“Nope.” Pete’s eyes shifted up and down Delia’s body. “You’re the kind of woman that would have caught Mr. Pennington’s eye. He’d have sweet-talked you into his bed in no time at all.”
Delia’s cheeks flushed and she turned her back to them.
Pete winked at Longarm. “You got a looker there, Marshal. Bet she’s a wildcat on a rug or a thin mattress.”
Longarm shook his head, not knowing whether to put his fist in the old man’s leering face or just to turn his back as Delia had done and walk away. “Where is this big house that your boss owns?”
He pointed. “Up there at the top of the hill. Got a wrought-iron fence around it painted black. You’ll see the Pennington name fixed to the gate.” Pete licked his bloody lips. “But like I told you, Marshal, Mr. Pennington ain’t here now. Probably humpin’ that pretty yeller-haired girl on a steer or buffalo hide in front of his Fallon fireplace. Oh, yeah, and he’ll be makin’ her buck and squeal!”
Longarm suddenly couldn’t stand to be near this dirty, disgusting old man. He supposed that Pete’s only redeeming value was that he had saved the wolf-dog Goliath. They made a real good pair.
“You didn’t ask me nothin’ about this Empire Mine!” Pete called as Longarm and Delia started to leave.
Longarm turned. “Does the hoisting works and that steam engine still work?”
“Sure do! I go down now and then huntin’ for gold. Ain’t found much lately. But someday I will and then me and Goliath gonna leave this stinkin’ country.”
Longarm pivoted around and saw that Goliath had rejoined his master by the shack. He studied the pair for a moment, then yelled, “That wolf dog deserves a second chance at life . . . but you sure as hell don’t!”
“Go sod yourself, you big, overgrown son of a bitch! And then sod that pretty bitch of a woman!”
“I think I’ll go back and kill him with my bare hands,” Delia said in a voice that trembled with rage.
And she actually did start back, but Longarm grabbed her around the waist and turned her away. “There is nothing but anger, hatred, and evil back at that mine. The real question is this . . . who was the pretty blond girl that he said his boss brought by that night? Could it have been Miss Emily Pierce?”
“I’m sure it must have been.”
“Maybe, but maybe not. It’s clear that Maxwell Pennington is a womanizer, and he if he’s as handsome as the editor told us, he’ll have had a lot of young women and some of them would have been blonds.”
“You don’t think that the one that old man was talking about was Emily Pierce?”
“I just don’t know.”
“So do we leave for Fallon tomorrow?”
“I’d say that we take a look inside the Pennington house first, and then we decide our next move.”
Delia took his arm. “Do you think that . . . that Emily might have been there and even have died at Pennington’s house up on that hill?”
“It’s a pos
sibility,” Longarm replied. “And if so, I’ll smell the death and we ought to find evidence of blood.”
Delia looked up at him. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll go back to the hotel, get a bottle, and go take a hot bath. That old man back there . . . the way he talked and his expression when he spoke of the women . . . well, I need to get drunk and take a bath . . . if I don’t throw up first.”
“I’ll take you by the hotel and then I’ll wait until dark and get inside the Pennington house. I’ll most likely be back in time to take you to a late dinner.”
“Don’t hurry because I don’t think I could keep any food down this evening.”
Longarm smiled grimly. “Maybe you’re not quite as hard and callous inside as I thought.”
“Keep thinking that, Custis, and I’ll get to you yet.”
Longarm barked a hollow laugh as they walked back into the heart of Virginia City.
Chapter 17
Longarm arrived at the Pennington house about seven o’clock that evening after the winter sun had set and everything was clothed in darkness. He studied the two-story Victorian only a moment and then opened the gate and walked quickly up to the front porch. He knocked and when there was no answer just as he’d expected, Longarm moved around the house looking for an easy entry. He found it in the back where a door to the kitchen had a latch and lock. Using a rusty shovel, it took him only a few minutes to pry the latch away and then he moved inside.
“Anyone home!”
He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one, but it didn’t hurt to make certain that the house was empty. After a few minutes of fumbling around in the dark, Longarm found a kerosene lantern and moments later he was moving room by room through the house, looking for evidence of murder in the form of bloodstains or bullet holes. It took less than five minutes to cover the downstairs carefully enough to know that whoever had last been in the house had liked their liquor. There were whiskey and wine bottles stacked up on the kitchen table and remains of old, moldy meals along with dirty dishes.
“Pigsty,” Longarm said to himself as he headed for the upstairs bedrooms.
The second room that he entered was the spacious master bedroom with a large window that offered a view of the city lights just down the hill. The bed was enormous and unmade. Longarm slowed his search, looking very carefully at the bedsheets and pillows. He saw lipstick and a woman’s rouge on the pillowcases and there was a big mirror suspended on velvet cords from the ceiling directly over the bed. Piled on the floor in a corner near the bed were expensive women’s nightgowns and underwear; most interesting because they were of all different sizes. There was an ashtray spilling over with cigar butts, all Cuban. On the walls were some very good nudes including one with a grinning man with a huge erection standing next to a smiling girl spread-eagled on a bed who looked to be about fourteen. The girl was blond and buxom.
“Delia would have appreciated this seducer’s lair,” he said with a trace of amusement.
On the other side of the bed were a man’s rumpled clothes and a bathrobe with Oriental designs that still reeked of cologne. Two empty bottles of champagne lay on a Persian carpet and in the closet were a dozen silk shirts and eight pairs of shoes and boots. Everything was in disarray and the room gave Longarm the impression that it had been hastily vacated. Longarm also found a couple of opium pipes, which told him even more.
He bent down and studied the Persian carpet, finding a few strands of long blond hair but no bloodstains. What it looked like, Longarm decided, was a bedroom you would expect to find in a very expensive New Orleans whorehouse.
Longarm scowled and held the lamp up overhead taking one last look around and trying to gauge Maxwell Pennington. It wasn’t hard to deduct that the man was something of a pig and a wastrel . . . someone drawn to debauchery and sexual orgy.
A pure hedonist.
Longarm could find nothing else of interest or evidence of foul play. He frowned with disappointment and headed for two more bedrooms across the hall. One of them was large and neat. The walls were filled with bookshelves stocked with tomes mostly relating to American and English history. A heavy leather chair looked well used, and there were notes on a desk table along with writing materials. Longarm set his lamp down on the table, took a seat and thumbed rapidly through the papers, quickly learning that they were banking, mining, and assay reports. And although he was unfamiliar with such reports, it was easy enough to see that the accounts painted a very bleak financial picture for the Empire Mine.
Two letters were from creditors demanding payment and threatening lawsuits if money was not immediately forthcoming.
Longarm surveyed the room, noting the oil paintings of well-recognized American landscapes, the neatly made bed, the lack of empty liquor bottles or overflowing ashtrays. This room could not have been more different from the one across the hall and, if he had to guess, it had belonged to the elder and missing Mr. Pennington.
Longarm was about to leave when something on the floor caught his eye. It was the rug and it was pushed up against a wall so that it was slightly bowed. Normally, such a small thing would not have caught his attention, but the rest of the bedroom was so orderly that it seemed odd.
“Hmmm,” he mused aloud, staring at the round rug, which was roughly six feet in diameter, and then on impulse tugging at it. It seemed to be cemented to the floor, and he had to put the lantern down and really put his back to it to tear the rug up from the floor. He tossed it aside and then picked up the lantern for a closer look.
“Oh, my,” he said, taking in a sharp breath, because under the rug and no doubt causing it to feel pasted to the floor was a very large, crusted, and blackened pool of blood.
“Murder,” he said to himself as he found his pocketknife, unfolded the longest blade, and began to scrape at the blood. “Someone was murdered right here in this room and the rug was either pulled over to conceal the stain, or else dragged in from another part of the house. Not that it matters.”
Moments later, he was digging a misshapen lead bullet out of the hardwood floor. “Forty-five caliber.”
Longarm refolded his knife and dropped it along with the bullet into his pocket, and then he looked around for a few more minutes finding nothing.
“So where is the body?” he asked, before briefly checking the last bedroom and finding nothing.
Downstairs, he walked around for a few moments lost in thought and then he remembered that rusty shovel that he’d used to pry off the back door latch. He also remembered he had seen a miner’s pick.
Longarm hurried outside and searched the backyard, looking for the sign of a recent burial. It didn’t take him long to see where the hard, rocky ground had been overturned as evidenced by clods. Longarm toed the dirt and thought it felt spongy and loose, unlike the surrounding yard dirt.
He studied the ground and considered attacking it with the rusty pick or shovel and immediately rejected the idea. In the dark with only the lantern, he might overlook or disturb something important. Better, much better to wait until tomorrow and then return with at least one or two observers.
Dan DeQuille immediately came to mind along with Delia.
“Yes,” he said, “and besides, I’m hungry and Delia is waiting. Tomorrow we will find out what is buried in the Pennington backyard.”
Would it be poor, foolish Miss Emily Pierce, or would it be the senior Mr. Pennington? Or maybe it would be one of the Virginia City ladies of the night that made had the fatal mistake of coming to party with Maxwell Pennington before being brutalized, perhaps even sodomized, cruelly tortured, and then sadistically murdered.
Chapter 18
“So,” Delia said, wringing her hands together with ill-concealed excitement. “It looks like we are going to find the body of either Emily or the senior Mr. Pennington.”
“It could be something or someone else,” Longarm told her. “We’ll
just have to wait and see. But I want Dan DeQuille to be there with us when we dig so that we have a reputable witness.”
“To murder.”
“I wish it were that simple.”
“What do you mean?”
Longarm paused. “I mean that even if it is a body and we can identify it as belonging to Emily or the senior Mr. Pennington, it’s going to be a difficult to prove that the person was murdered by Max Pennington.”
“But you just showed me the bullet and told me that a rug had been . . .”
“I know,” Longarm said. “But let’s suppose it is the father. And let’s assume that Maxwell Pennington isn’t stupid. So if you or I were Maxwell, would it really be that hard to claim that his father or the girl had perhaps gotten a hold of a gun and a bottle and gone crazy? Crazy enough to have committed suicide?”
Delia’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Suicide or an accident,” Longarm told Delia. “That’s what any reasonably intelligent lawyer defending Maxwell Pennington would claim. And how in the world could that be disproved?”
“But why would a beautiful girl or a decent, respected man like Mr. Pennington shoot themselves?”
“Let’s just suppose I am the lawyer defending charges against the younger Mr. Pennington. I’d most likely say that the girl was lovesick and when Maxwell made it clear that he was just using her for sex and was going to cast her aside, she shot herself.”
“Oh, come on!”
“And if we exhume a corpse and can actually prove it is the elder Pennington, a defense attorney would likely claim that the man had committed suicide because of impending financial ruin and humiliation. It happens, Delia. And that would be enough to get Maxwell off free and clear.”
Delia threw up her hands. “I can’t believe that you’re telling me this.”
“I am because I’ve seen it happen time and time again. A man with money hires a good defense attorney and then spins a tale that can’t be proven or disproven. Because of the doubt, a jury has no choice but to come to a verdict of not guilty.”
