Longarm and the Unwritten Law

by Tabor Evans

  Longarm gently but firmly declared, "I'd like to meet your Eva, Mister Nagy."

  Nagy protested. "She is not dressed. Even if she was, she no speak English. Why you want to see Magyar girl who can only weep right now?"

  Longarm said, "You can trot her out here or I can come back with a search warrant. It's up to you.

  So Nagy swore in his own lingo, went in the back, and returned with a willowy young blonde wearing a flannel chemise and a black eye. Nagy said defiantly, "Here she is. You still think we did something bad to her?"

  Longarm smiled thinly and decided "Nothing she might not have had coming. You all heard about Zoltan Kun, eh?"

  Eva Nagy savvied enough English to cover her face with her hands and bawl. Her mother smacked her again and chased her into the back.

  Longarm smiled thinly and asked, "Did you put your foot down before or after you heard about her balding admirer getting blown through the roof?"

  Bela Nagy scowled and said, "Last night I was here, home from mine, when Zoltan come to take out Eva for buggy ride. I tell him what you tell me about father who lets daughter get dirty with older men. He laugh and say he maybe needs night off himself. Zoltan Kun was not a nice man!"

  Longarm said he wouldn't argue the contrary, asked Nagy to tell his wife he couldn't stay for grape pie, and left while the womenfolk were still fighting in the back.

  He rode on back to town, left the mount at the livery so it could be cared for better as he traipsed around town, and headed over to the county jail to have a more serious talk with Attila Homagy.

  His man wasn't there. The desk deputy agreed it was a ridiculous mix-up, but a county politico looking for the immigrant vote had just bailed old Attila out.

  They'd convinced the easygoing J.P. who'd issued that search warrant that a man who'd come forward of his own accord after killing a man in accord with the unwritten law hardly deserved to spend the Sabbath locked up like a common criminal.

  Longarm swore, and tore across the square for another word with that same J.P. His Arapaho housegirl said he'd gone visiting. She couldn't or wouldn't say where.

  Longarm managed to thank her instead of cuss her. He doubted anyone sneaky as Attila Homagy would hang around town until the proper county court opened on Monday. Longarm tried to think himself into the older man's boots as he strode back toward the livery near the depot. He decided he'd be too smart to buy a train ticket or ask for his old buggy back, whether he knew the law had impounded it or not.

  A coal-mining man who knew his way around by rail might know a bum could ride for many a mile without a ticket aboard an open coal gondola. They were easier to get into than the average box car. But while Trinidad shipped a heap of coking coal to all points east, it was the Sabbath and no freight would be moving out of the Trinidad yards... or would it?

  Railroads, shipping lines, telegraph outfits, and such paid way more attention to round-the-clock profits than the Good Book. The freight dispatcher over at the yards would know more about his own timetable. So that was where Longarm headed next.

  After a short, interesting conversation Longarm was a quarter-mile up a quiet siding, spooking big butterfly-winged prairie grasshoppers as he eased along what might have passed for a string of gondolas just waiting for Monday, if that dispatcher hadn't said a switcher would be moving them over to the main line in a few minutes.

  As any railroad bull could tell you, a man hidden in a car with a gun had the edge, if you went about rousting him wrong.

  Longarm moved to the far end of the string, drew his.44-40, and took his time climbing the steel-runged ladder over the coupler, holding on with his left hand.

  He peered over the top rim. The gondola was almost filled to the brim with coal. He rolled atop it and worked forward, crunching some in spite of himself.

  The next gondola held only coal as Longarm leaped the gap between, crunching the coal much louder. As he tried to ease onward more silently, he heard a not-too-distant puffing, and glanced up to spy locomotive smoke puffing his way. It was that switch engine, coming to pick up the string.

  Longarm didn't care. He kept going until, another car forward, he spotted movement and called out, "I see you, Homagy. Stop right there if you don't want a bullet up the ass!"

  The shorter and older Hungarian paused and turned his way atop the coal in the next gondola. He'd gotten rid of his seersucker and had on darker and more practical denim work duds. Longarm didn't worry about his own tobacco brown tweed pants as he leaped into the same gondola with his man, but they were both staggered when that switch engine banged into the far end and jerked the whole string into motion with a crunch of steel knuckles.

  Moving forward again, Longarm told Homagy, "I see you noticed we found your wife where you'd left her, you poor heartbroken cuss. Would you like me to tell you how the rest of your charade was supposed to read?"

  Homagy must not have wanted him to. He stared wild-eyed, decided not to go for his own hardware after all, and spun around to try for a dash to Lord only knows where on the swaying, crunchy coal.

  Longarm bawled, "Don't do that, damn it! There's no place you can run to and you're fixing to fall down betwixt the cars."

  But Homagy just kept going as Longarm fired a warning shot over him. Then the wily killer vanished from view as Longarm ran forward, stared soberly down at the empty void between cars, and muttered, "I told you you'd fall betwixt the cars, you asshole!"

  He holstered his six-gun and swung himself down a ladder to leap clear and land running. It felt as if he had to run a mile before he was able to stop, spin about, and run the other way.

  He found most of Attila Homagy between the rails, bleeding all over the cross-ties. Homagy had lost a right forearm and left foot to the steel wheels. Being dragged across the ballast a good ways hadn't done him a whole lot of good either, but to Longarm's surprise the coal-blasting man was still conscious.

  Longarm knelt to whip off his own shoestring tie as the older man croaked, "I should have killed you that first day up in Denver."

  Longarm decided the severed ankle was bleeding the most. So he tied that off first, muttering, "You never had the balls to kill anyone wearing pants. You heard your woman was fooling around. You beat the truth out of her right off. But Zoltan Kun was too big a boo for you. He was mean and cocky with good reason. He knew you were scared skinny of him. But the unwritten law called for a man to do something about the man his wife had betrayed him with. So you got rid of her before she could say anything different. Then you told everyone a well-known American, not a Bohunk bully, was the man on your shit list."

  Longarm heard shouting, and looked up to see a railroad yard bull running across the yards at them with a baseball bat. Longarm called out, "I'm the law and we need us a doctor here! So stop waving that fool club and go get one!"

  The yard bull must have thought Longarm meant it. He turned to run the other way. Longarm got out a pocket kerchief and went to work on the stump of the sobbing Homagy's gun arm as he continued in a conversational tone, "You knew full well that had you demanded satisfaction from Zoltan Kun, he'd have laughed in your face, if you were lucky. Had you taken a swing at him he'd have kicked the shit out of you. Had you even hinted you meant to draw on him, he'd have killed you easy. I know it ain't fair, old son, but in real life bullies who've grown to manhood without getting it slapped out of them are tough sons of bitches."

  He knotted the bloody kerchief tight around the unresisting man's stump. It seemed to help, unless the poor bastard had just lost too much blood to spurt worth mentioning.

  Longarm said, "You knew everyone in town was waiting to see what you aimed to do about your wayward wife. So after you shut her up forever it was you, not her, who grabbed my name and rep as a fighting man off a newspaper laying around your house and declared it was me, not the Zoltan Kun everyone suspected, who'd been strumming on her old banjo."

  He shook the mangled man and demanded, "How did you kill Magda? We know you done it because w
e found her body where you hid it, you sneaky cuss!"

  Homagy croaked something in his own odd lingo.

  Longarm swore and said, "Talk English and let's see if we can get a clearer picture. I figure you killed her at the time or not too long after she confessed to screwing Zoltan Kun whilst you were out of town. He might or might not have had to threaten her. We both know he was a dedicated bastard. But you didn't have the balls to kill both of them. You could have left your dead wife for a day or more behind your locked doors. Few if any of the neighbor women had ever seen the buggy a well-known labor organizer kept in a Trinidad carriage house. There was no place for either you or Zoltan Kun to park atop Bohunk Hill." Homagy could have been confessing or cursing for all he could tell.

  Longarm shook him some more and insisted, "Come on, own up to what you done. You drove up to your own house in an unfamiliar buggy that you kept in the carriage house, with new curtains snapped to the top. It was after midnight, on an early Sabbath morn with the mine site shut down. Nobody really saw Magda getting in to go for such a mysterious ride. Nobody had to. We all go through life with a literal blind spot in each eye. But we never notice, because our brain fills in the bitty gaps with imaginary blue sky or even wallpaper. When a buggy stops out front and the lady of the house ain't there no more, she naturally drove off in the wee small hours with some buggy driver. How were they to know you meant to carry her to a casually guarded coal mine and hide her in an abandoned drift?"

  Longarm saw that yard bull was coming back with a whole crowd of other gents. He told Homagy, "Hang on and we'll get you to a hospital in time to save your worthless life. You'd have likely been better off dropping all that shale atop the body instead of in front of it. I don't envy the coroner, but there are ways to tell whether a victim was strangled or stabbed. No matter how you killed her, you wanted to distract anyone from looking for her. You made your neighbors think she'd run off with her lover because you knew she wasn't with Zoltan Kun. That gave you the excuse not to challenge him about your missing wife. Nobody in Trinidad knew shit about me. So when you said she'd run off with me, they had no call to look anywhere else for her."

  A man in the oncoming crowd shouted, "I'm a doctor. How bad does he seem to be hurt?"

  Longarm called back, "Bad. He's lost a bucket of blood and may have a concussion as well. Fell a good ways betwixt them coal gondolas a mile or so down yonder now."

  As the chunky M.D. in black serge hunkered down on the far side of Homagy, whistled, and popped open his oilcloth bag, Longarm told the mangled Hungarian, "Your bullshit with me was just razzle-dazzle from the beginning. Like another four-flusher I met up with at Fort Sill, you knew the safest man to challenge to a gunfight would be a paid-up lawman with no call to fight a total asshole. We have to account for ourselves when we shoot kid shotgun messengers or old coal blasters with no warrants out on 'em. You both hoped your pals would be more impressed by your bravery than a grown man might be. You couldn't have expected my boss, Marshal Vail, to play right into your hands by taking your threat seriously. Billy Vail's been married up a spell, and he'd likely get upset as hell if his old wife told him she'd been giving French lessons to some blackmailer. How's he doing, Doc?"

  The doctor the yard bull had fetched shook his head and murmured, "You were right about that concussion. Is there any point to all this conversation with him?"

  Longarm nodded and said, "There is. If you can save him he'll likely hang for murder. The unwritten law only lets you kill your wife and plead passion if you kill her lover at the same time and don't hide any bodies."

  As the doctor put some smelling salts to Homagy's nostrils, the tall deputy said, "You slickered us all pretty good by chasing me so persistently, demanding I pay for stealing your wife. But you overdid it by pestering me and pestering me, until it occurred to me you couldn't be serious about wanting to fight me."

  Homagy blew some bubbles and groaned, "I told you why I didn't want to kill you after all. I wish I had now."

  Longarm grimaced and said, "Yeah, let's talk about that sloppy blasting at the Dexter Hotel. Your foreman assured me you could dust a room with dynamite and never bust a window. Yet Zoltan Kun wound up on the roof and there was structural damage down to the basement. How come you used so much dynamite unscientifically, old son?"

  Homagy didn't answer. The doctor said, "He's gone." Longarm asked, "What's he trying to say if he's dead then?"

  The doctor said, "Nothing. That's called the death rattle because you have to be dead to make that funny sound. It's a change in the acid balance in the throat tissues. It'll stop in a moment."

  Longarm stared down at the dead man's glassy eyes and muttered, "You sneaky old son of a bitch. You knew I'd never be able to prove my case against you unless I could get you to confess. So you up and croaked on me without confessing!"

  Then he smiled ruefully and added, "What the hell, mayhaps it's just as well this way. It's not as important how you murdered your wife, now that you've saved the taxpayers the expense of trying, convicting, and hanging you for it!"

  CHAPTER 25

  Some time later, Longarm was washing down some of the fine free lunch served by Denver's Parthenon Saloon when his boss, Billy Vail, grumped in with a manila file folder in hand. Longarm had hoped that might not happen. The file looked thicker today than it had when he'd had young Henry type up his official report.

  Vail joined Longarm at the free lunch counter, grabbed a ham-on-rye sandwich with his other hand, and said, "We got to talk. Let's go back to one of the side rooms."

  They did. Like most first-class saloons, the Parthenon provided a maze of semi-private chambers, great and small, for the discreet get-togethers of patrons too delicate-natured for the main taproom up front.

  Along the way, Longarm caught the eye of a barmaid carrying a tray of beer schooners, and pointed his own half-consumed beer at the doorway they were headed for.

  Billy Vail led the way in and plunked his stubby form down on one side of the table, taking up a good part of the space in there. Longarm left the sliding frosted-glass door slightly ajar as he took his own seat across from his boss, placing his beer schooner on the table between them.

  Vail said, "You'd best shut that door all the way. This is private."

  Longarm said, "Trixie will be coming to take our orders. You'll be glad I was so thoughtful when it sinks in how salty that ham you chose really tastes. What's so infernally delicate about the report I just filed for you, Boss?"

  He was bluffing, of course. Billy Vail tracked as good across a report as a Digger Indian across fresh snowfall. But Longarm hadn't been dumb enough to write down any lies.

  Vail said, "Most of it's just swell. Considering I was only out to keep you from getting shot as a skirt-chaser, you done us proud in the Indian Territory. The War Department is pleased with you, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is pleased with you, and even the Indians are glad you showed up when you did."

  Trixie came in with a flounce of her Dolly Varden skirts to ask what they were drinking back there. Longarm suggested a pitcher of draft and an extra glass. When Vail didn't argue, he asked Trixie if she could throw in some of those devilish eggs and mayhaps some good old pickled pig's feet.

  Trixie said she knew how to serve a growing boy, and flounced out. Vail cocked a thoughtful eyebrow and said, "I'd ask, if I thought I'd get a straight answer."

  Longarm shook his head and said, "Don't talk dumb. I like this place too much to trifle with the hired help. I told you in the very report you're holding how Fred Ryan was augmenting his four-figure salary as a junior Indian agent. Catching him was no big deal."

  Vail said, "Chief Quanah seems to think it was. Thanks to the prestige the Comanche Police gained at the expense of those crooked Cherokee, your Sergeant Tikano is turning away Kiowa and even Kiowa-Apache volunteers!"

  Longarm said that was why he'd let the Indians tidy up the loose ends themselves.

  Vail said, "Let's talk about loose ends. Are you sure yo
u really put down everything about them crazy doings around Trinidad at the last, old son?"

  Longarm met Vail's thoughtful gaze--it wasn't easy--and managed to reply, "Like I wrote, me and Las Animas County agreed Attila Homagy broke no federal laws when he lost his temper with his wife. Coroner in Trinidad says he strangled her. Despite the condition of her body, there's this small ring of bone wrapped halfway round your windpipe, and when it's busted-"

  "You're shitting me," Vail cut in. "I know Homagy killed his wife when she confessed her affair with Zoltan Kun. I see why the desperate cuss put us through that charade to avoid a showdown with a meaner Bohunk who had the Indian sign on him. But after Homagy chased you to the Indian Territory and back, I'm supposed to believe he all of a sudden found the nerve to kill his big boo after all, clumsy as hell for any professional dynamite man?"

  Longarm smiled sheepishly and said, "I wish you weren't so smart. Are we talking off the record, Billy? I've good reason for asking, and I told you that case wasn't federal."

  Vail frowned thoughtfully and decided, "Tell me the whole story and I'll decide whether it was federal or not, damn it!"

  Longarm sighed and said, "You got to understand Zoltan Kun was a human wolverine who got what he had coming, Billy."

  Vail nodded and said, "You put down how the shitty labor recruiter plucked immigrant gals like flowers from his private garden, whether they were spoken for by lesser men or not. You explained how Homagy was terrified of him but had to do or say something to somebody when his neighbors saw him as a pathetic excuse for a Hungarian husband. Now explain that unprofessional dynamiting at the Dexter!"

  Longarm took a deep breath and said, "Homagy never done it. He never went near Zolton Kun. He'd come back from Trinidad, figuring he'd chased his missing wife and her lover far enough for his honor. He'd learned I was in town and, knowing I'd be leaving on my own in any case, made more war talk so he could say he ran me out of Trinidad."

  Longarm took a sip of suds and continued. "Meanwhile, Zoltan Kun had started up with a younger greenhorn gal with an even shorter father. His name was Bela Nagy. There was no need for him to appear on paper. So he don't."