“They were with Turk?”
He shook his head. “The old man thought he was just protecting his boss’s interests when the shooting started. I mean to put in a word for him at the trial. As for Arnie, well, I don’t see him pulling much more than a suspended sentence considering Shedwell’s reputation. The judge takes a dim view of professional killers.”
I was having a hard time keeping up. The laudanum had dulled my comprehension. “What about Turk?”
“Terwilliger got there just in time to see it from a distance.” He spoke slowly. “After he shot you, Turk took cover in what there was of Périgueux’s new chateau. Shedwell went in after him standing up. The night rider wounded him first shot. From then on Shedwell might have been invisible the way Turk’s bullets just kept stitching up the ground all around him. Shedwell fired once. Just once.”
I considered. “Arnie must have seen it too. When he realized who it was, he must have gone to get the English rifle, thinking that killing Chris Shedwell would make him man enough for his uncle.”
“Men have died for lots less,” he said. “Anyway, Terwilliger’s the one to thank for saving your hide. He threw you in one of the Marquis’ wagons and trundled you into town more dead than alive.”
“Damn nice of him, considering I saved him a few dead men himself. Any messages?”
“I almost forgot.” He reached inside his coat and drew out a sheaf of telegraph forms. “Guess who.”
“Answer them. Tell the Judge I’ll report in person.” I searched his face. “Anything else?”
“No word from her. She hasn’t budged from Martha’s since you were brought here.” Angrily he thrust the forms back into his breast pocket. “She’s no good, Page.”
I laughed nastily. Even that hurt. “Who am I, the Pope?”
“You know what I mean.”
The doctor returned. “That’s enough visiting for now. He needs rest.”
As he said it I realized how tired I really was. I held out my left hand. “I can’t say you didn’t keep me entertained.”
Yardlinger grasped my fingers in the cast. “Don’t worry about Doc’s bill or the rent on this room. The city’s taking care of it, though the council doesn’t know that yet. Your horse is at the livery and I’ve got your gun. Anytime you’re ready for them.”
I grinned. “Marshal, are you ordering me out of town?”
“Maybe.” His tight smile flickered behind the lank moustache. “The sooner you’re gone the quicker I can get the citizens of Breen accustomed to orthodox law enforcement.” He left. I was asleep before the door closed.
That afternoon I was walking around the room, and by the next day I could dress myself and venture out to the barroom for a beer and some conversation with Alf. There was no news from the new opera house, where the trial was in its second day. The bartender caught my attention wandering toward the deserted side room.
“She ain’t been around,” he said, polishing a glass. “Talk is she’s leaving.”
I paid for the beer without a word and returned to the back room. My shoulder was beginning to act up in spite of the sling.
The trial lasted three days. Michel d’Oléron, Marquis de Périgueux, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. He never spent a day behind bars. The sentence was later commuted to ten to twenty years at hard labor, then suspended. He sold out his holdings in Montana and returned to France, where rumor had it that he married into another fortune after his first wife, a woman of frail constitution, perished during the ocean crossing. The two night riders were hanged in Breen for murder. The jury found Ed Strayhorn innocent of complicity in the raids and he was released. His nephew Arnie received six months on a work detail clearing land for the Great Northern Railroad, scheduled for completion in 1883. After that he joined a theatrical troupe and toured some eastern cities as “The Man Who Shot Chris Shedwell.” I lost track of him in succeeding years.
In a separate action, the circuit judge dismissed out of hand the case against the three Terwilliger men for lack of evidence. No one ever came to trial for the raid on the Six Bar Six and the murder of three employees of the ranch.
Dick Mather died of consumptive bronchitis in 1882.
By a six-to-four vote of the city council, Oren Yardlinger was appointed to a two-year term as Breen city marshal. The appointment wasn’t renewed and he drifted down to Wyoming, where he took a job as deputy sheriff in Cheyenne and was shot in the back by an unknown party while making his rounds. He died with his Navy Colt still in its holster. I didn’t hear of Randy Cross again until 1899, when he refereed the Jeffries-Fitzsimmons fight in Coney Island, N.Y. After that, nothing.
The last I heard, Bob Terwilliger was still alive and living in comfortable retirement on his ranch, now under the management of his son.
Against doctor’s orders I testified on the last day of the night-rider trial and retired to the Glory during the recess for a drink. Colleen Bower was in the side room, dealing blackjack to a man in a suit with an eastern cut.
I peeled enough off the roll Yardlinger had returned to me for my bills at the hotel and livery, bought some chips out of the rest, and slapped what was left down on the table in front of the easterner. “Try your luck at the wheel.”
He glanced up, annoyed. Then he saw the sling I was wearing and went a little pale. He scooped up the bills and his chips, mumbled polite excuses to the lady, and went out. My reputation was spreading.
“Any news?” She dealt two cards apiece without looking at me. Her hair was done up the way I liked it and she was wearing blue.
“Judge turned it over to the jury. Nothing to do now but wait. Twenty-one.” I turned up the ace of hearts.
“Twenty.”
I took in her ante. She dealt again. “Been sick?” I asked.
“I needed a little vacation. Nineteen.”
“Seventeen.” I watched my chip go onto her stack and fed the pot again. “You knew Chris Shedwell pretty well, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer. Cards slithered over the table’s polished top. “I’m over.”
I claimed her chip. “Well enough to scout for him, I’d say.”
She hesitated, then resumed dealing. Her eyes never left the cards. I grabbed her hand. She glared.
“It was convenient for Shedwell,” I said. “Not every killer has someone he can blame for his profession. He could fancy himself a soldier until that day in Centralia when Abel Turk made a murderer out of him and the others in Anderson’s crew.
“Being confined to a bed gives you a chance to think. I kept wondering what it was that made Shedwell hate him enough to want to kill him. When he told me about Centralia I thought it was because of what Turk had done to those unarmed Union soldiers, but that wasn’t it. It was because of what he thought Turk had done to him. It’s been eating at him all this time. Maybe he thought destroying Turk would wipe out the last sixteen years and let him start over clean.”
Still she didn’t say anything. I held on. I knew from experience that she had to be a captive audience to listen.
“Then I started wondering how he found out Turk was here. That wasn’t too hard to answer. You were the only person he knew in Breen. How did you send the wire, in code? Something you fixed up together before he sent you in this direction to nose around and find out what you could? It doesn’t really matter how you did it. But it was smart. Who’d suspect a lady gambler of spying for a killer?”
She had a new handbag. I caught her eyes wandering toward it and released her hand to slide it toward me. It was heavier than most reticules. She sighed resignedly and sat back.
“It wasn’t like that at all.” One of her fine white hands went up before I could interrupt. “Oh, I sent him a wire, and I used a simple code designed to stand up to a first glance. But he didn’t send me here. I recognized Turk by accident from Chris’s description when Turk visited Martha’s. Chris didn’t depend on women to lay his groundwork. And he didn’t come
here to kill Turk. I thought you understood that.”
I summoned a sneer. Then I spotted my reflection in the glass chimney of the lamp on the table and stopped. “He didn’t go out to Périgueux’s ranch to swap old war stories.”
She shook her head, exasperated at my density. “I’m not saying Chris wouldn’t have tried to kill him if he thought he could. He didn’t think he was good enough. As it turned out he was, but he couldn’t know that. He had nothing but memory to compare with.”
I stared at her, trying to put what she said in order. This time I couldn’t blame it on laudanum. “You’re saying he came here to die.”
“Is it so hard to accept?” She pushed aside the deck of cards. “Some people slash their wrists. Others take a gun and blow their brains out. Chris chose the way he thought was best for him. I like to think that Doc Ballard was wrong and that he had a chance to realize what had happened when that unexpected bullet hit him. That way he would’ve died content.”
“He hated living that much?”
“Not living, waiting to die. Have you ever heard of the law of diminishing returns? They talk about it a lot back East. The more durable you make a product, the lower your chances of selling a replacement because the first one never wears out. When you’re best, you sow the seeds of your own destruction. With Chris, it stood to reason that if he kept killing off the gunmen who weren’t as good as he was, the odds of his meeting one as good or better increased. No, it wasn’t living he hated. It was waiting.”
I didn’t say anything. After a few moments she retrieved the deck and dealt. We played a few hands, winning each other’s money, then: “Alf tells me you’re heading out.”
“Soon as I can hire a wagon.” She dealt herself twenty-one. “I don’t need one, but a lady of my breeding can’t be seen riding horseback across the prairie.”
I won the next turn. “Ladies don’t travel alone.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“If you’re headed west.”
She shook her head. “If you can survive the Nations without an escort, you can survive anywhere.” She won the last hand, drew in the discards and shuffled the deck. “Care for another go? Maybe we can break this deadlock.”
“I wish we could.” I got up, taking my chips. I started to say something else. She put more energy into her shuffling, the cards hissing. Her eyes remained on the deck. I moved toward the door.
“Planning to hang around Helena for a while?”
I stopped, my back to her. “For a while.”
There was a pause, then: “Thanks for the warning.”
I left. Outside, it was a bright spring day.
The Door to Shedwell’s Room Was Partially Open when I reached the fourth floor of the hotel. There were three ways I could go from there. I could hit the floor as I entered, and hope that any lead that flew would be directed at a standing target. Or I could wait for him to make the first move, as I had done a long time ago waiting for a killer at that cabin in Missoula. Or I could walk in bold as brass and give him a clear chance at me.
To hell with it. I’d been brained, drawn on, shot at, and ambushed and I was tired of being careful. I filled my lungs and stepped inside.
Right away I knew I’d made a mistake.
The room was richly carpeted and furnished. A trail-battered valise with a rolled-leather handle worn fuzzy sat on the floor next to the too-high bed. A slouch hat I recognized occupied the mattress. No Shedwell.
A voice inside me shouted, Get away from the door. But before I could move there was a snick of metal across the hall, two quick footsteps on the runner, and death in a steel case punched my right kidney.
“Move and you’re part of the wall …”
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1982 by Loren D. Estleman
eISBN 9781429926188
First eBook Edition : July 2011
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 81-43410
The Murdock's Law Page 16
