Santa Fe Showdown

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Santa Fe Showdown Page 15

by Jory Sherman


  “Ain’t that what the Irish say, Wayne?”

  “Yeah, that’s what the Irish say, and they’re the wisest folk on this green earth.”

  The two men lit cigarettes. They smoked and waited, until they heard a knock on the door. Crisp opened it.

  The whiskey had arrived.

  21

  BLACKHAWK HAD SOME DIFFICULTY FINDING THE U.S. MARSHAL’S office in Santa Fe. He learned from the head of the local constabulary that Marshal Cordwainer Vogel had recently moved his office from the police station in the old presidio to a small street off the main square in downtown Santa Fe.

  “Used to be a military post,” Constable Rudolfo Aguilar explained. “It was empty, and Cord wanted a place to work that wasn’t so busy.”

  “Yeah, Cord’s a loner. That’s why they stuck him way out here in Santa Fe,” Blackhawk said. Aguilar gave him directions to the office, and Blackhawk rode there in late afternoon after having lunch in a nondescript Mexican café called Lupe’s, in the shadow of the old fort where so much of Santa Fe’s history had been written.

  The office was on Calle Alameda, where there were trees, cobblestoned streets, a small square or plaza with a number of other business establishments, and attorneys’, assayers’, and land offices. He had to tie his horse outside the compound and walk into the alameda. Typical of Cord Vogel, he thought, make it real hard to see him.

  He hadn’t seen Vogel in years, but he knew Cord was a good man. They had worked half a dozen cases together and Blackhawk knew him to be a dedicated, honest, hardworking lawman. If there was any criticism of the man, it was his elusiveness. He tended to go off on his own hook without checking in with his superiors. But, as that type of individual, Vogel was a man after Blackhawk’s own heart.

  He entered the modest office, which had a small sign on the outside door that simply read U.S. MARSHAL. A small flag stood on a tall flagpole. A person could get a crook in his neck if he looked up at it for more than a moment.

  He approached the desk, behind which sat a young Mexican woman with long black hair drawn up in a bun, an immaculate bronze complexion, lively brown eyes, and a patrician nose. She wore a plain white blouse and looked very efficient. She was busy with stacks of papers arranged in neat piles. There was an In Box and an Out Box on one corner of the desk, and a metal spindle on which were impaled three or four telegraph messages. On one wall there was a corkboard with Wanted posters tacked to it. One of the posters bore the name of Lew Wetzel Zane.

  “May I help you?” the woman asked.

  “I’m Horatio Blackhawk, U.S. marshal out of Springfield, Missouri. Here to see Marshal Vogel.”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Blackhawk, Mr. Vogel said you’d be showing up here. He—he’s not here, but he left a letter for you. Let’s see, I think it’s in this drawer of my desk.”

  While the woman opened the drawer, Blackhawk sniffed her perfume. Lilacs, he thought, or organdy. She had a touch of rouge on each cheek, none on her lips.

  “Where is Cord?” he asked.

  She pulled an envelope from the drawer and handed it across the desk.

  “He rode off to Socorro yesterday. Said he’d be back inside of a week.”

  “Socorro? What’s going on down there?”

  “Murder, I think. Or murders. Including the sheriff. He said he had to investigate.”

  “Well, I hope to see him while I’m here. Is that all you have for me?”

  “Yes. Mr. Vogel doesn’t discuss his cases with me. He said to give you the letter.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  There were two benches in the front of the office. Blackhawk sat on one of them and opened the unsealed envelope. He pulled out a single sheet of paper and began to read. He knew Vogel to be an economist with his speech, and he was no less of one with this missive. But at least he had printed it out with block letters so that it was easy to read.

  MAN AND WOMAN CHECKED INTO EL PALACIO HOTEL.

  MAN SIGNED AS ED JONES.

  MAN LEFT NEXT DAY.

  WOMAN LEFT FOLLOWING DAY.

  JONES STAYED AT EL RINCON.

  WOMAN VANISHED. SO DID MAN.

  SEE YOU NEXT WEEK.

  CORD.

  He turned the paper over, and Cord had listed some names and addresses of the El Palacio and El Rincon hotels, the El Caballero stables, and the name of the owner. Also, cryptically, Cord had written down the name of a cantina without giving any reason why. The name he wrote was the Tecolote, and it was written in script, not block letters, as if it was a hurried afterthought.

  “Does that tell you what you want to know?” the woman said to Blackhawk as he put the letter back in the envelope, folded it in half, and stuffed it in his back pocket.

  “Just enough to keep me busy. Thanks. I didn’t catch your name, ma’am.”

  “I am Julia Delmonte, sir.”

  “Pleased to meet you. I’ll stop back by in a few days.”

  “A pleasure,” she said politely, then returned to her work.

  Blackhawk walked across the alameda, untied his horse, and stepped into the saddle. He’d have to backtrack, find out what happened to Lew Zane and the girl, whose name he had learned was Marylynn Baxter. Cord hadn’t said a word about Wayne Smith, but Blackhawk would lay odds that Smith was also in Santa Fe, planning his next robbery.

  Alonzo Gutierrez was very helpful, Blackhawk thought. He found him at the Caballero stables after learning that he also owned the hotel across the street, El Palacio.

  “The girl, she came in and asked me where she might sell her horse. I told her, and she rode out. She never come back. And when I looked, she had checked out of the hotel. That is all I know.”

  “Where did you tell her to go?” Blackhawk asked.

  “I sent her to the stockyards, where they have the auctions every Thursday. That is tomorrow. So you may find her there.”

  “What about the man who first rode in with her? Do you know where he is?”

  “He leave the next day after they come in. I don’t see him no more. And the lady, she does not ask about him.”

  “He say where he was going, Alonzo?”

  “He don’t tell me nothing, that man. He just saddle his horse and he ride away. I never see him again. Are these two banditos?”

  Blackhawk shook his head and chuckled.

  “No. I just need to talk to them. Thanks, Alonzo.”

  “You are very welcome, Marshal.”

  He rode to El Rincon and met with the day clerk there, a man named Ralph Sinclair, who said the owner lived in Taos and that he was the manager. Blackhawk asked to see the ledger, and Sinclair showed it to him.

  “This man, Ed Jones. He still here?”

  “Nope. Left yesterday, with nary a ‘by your leave.’ Just threw the key on the counter, walked out the back to the barn, and that was that.”

  “He have a woman with him? A young gal?”

  Sinclair shook his head.

  “Nope, not that I know of. We don’t watch our guests real close.”

  Blackhawk studied the ledger. He ran a finger over three names that looked suspicious to him.

  “What about these three? What do you know about them?”

  Sinclair looked at the ledger, scratched his head. He wore a striped shirt, suspenders, and a string tie. He was very neatly dressed, and sported a small handlebar moustache and neatly trimmed sideburns. He looked like a gambler with two garter belts on his sleeves, but Blackhawk knew, from a long study of men, that Sinclair had never played a hand of poker and would surely lose his shirt if he did.

  “Those men are still here. They aren’t here much, though. They go out every night. To the Tecolote, I think. From the night clerk I gather they stay pretty much there until closing. They don’t make much noise. Once in a while some loud talking, but then it’s like they whisper.”

  “What kind of men do you take them for, Mr. Sinclair?” Blackhawk asked.

  “Hmm, now let me see. They don’t seem like regular businessmen. I do
n’t think cattle. Or sheep. I guess they’re just traveling men. Night clerk said they came in all dusty and unshaved. Now they look pretty decent. In a rough sort of way, I guess.”

  Blackhawk pulled a flyer from his pocket, unfolded it, lay it on the counter.

  “Does this drawing look like anybody who’s stayed here in the past week?”

  Sinclair bent over and examined the likeness on the flyer. He stood up straight and shook his head.

  “Nope. Don’t recognize him as anybody who’s stayed here.”

  “You got a lead pencil, a piece of charcoal?” Blackhawk asked.

  Sinclair opened a drawer, took out a stub of a pencil, handed it to Blackhawk. The marshal began drawing a beard over the chin of Zane’s likeness. Then he turned the flyer around and told Sinclair to look at it again.

  “Why, now that I see it, maybe. Does resemble that man Jones. Only Jones has a lot more beard than that.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Sinclair. Now, do you have any idea where Jones might have gone?”

  “He didn’t ask me or anyone who works here about another hotel. Maybe he left town.”

  “Yes, maybe he did,” Blackhawk said. “Those other men whose names are here in your book, are they in?”

  “Why, yes, I believe they are. Do you want their room numbers?”

  “I’ll take them, but don’t you tell them I was asking after them, hear?”

  Sinclair shook his head.

  “No, sir, I surely will not. Are they…?”

  “Don’t you fret about it none, Mr. Sinclair. I was just curious, that’s all. Where do they board their horses?”

  “We have a small barn out back. Mr. Jones kept his horse there. But, of course, it’s gone now, and so is he.”

  “Thank you.” Blackhawk left, rode around to the alley and to the back of the hotel. He tied his horse out of sight and walked to the small barn. He looked over the horses, studied their brands. Then, he looked at their hooves, the marks they made on the ground.

  He didn’t recognize any of them, nor their hoofprints. But he knew Smith and his bunch had switched horses several times. He didn’t know if the three men in the hotel had any connection to Wayne, but Sinclair had mentioned that same name that was scrawled on the back of Cord’s note. Tecolote. That could be where he might find Smith and the others who had helped him rob Horace Tabor in Denver.

  He left and rode back to El Palacio, where he took a room and boarded his horse. He ate supper in the dining room that night and then rode into town, looking for the Tecolote.

  He didn’t expect to run into Wayne Smith there. Smith wouldn’t be that easy to find. But he wanted to look the place over, see if he could spot the hard cases who were staying at El Rincon. At the very least he wanted to see what kind of a place it was and why Cord had scrawled the name on the back of his note.

  When he got to the Tecolote, he saw the three horses tied up out front that had been in the barn behind El Rincon. So, the three using fictitious names were inside. He looked at the other horses, too, checked their brands.

  There was one that he recognized. He drew back in surprise.

  The horse belonged to a man who had been with Smith in Pueblo. Blackhawk suspected the man was involved in the Tabor robbery. The man was wanted in three states for murder, bank robbery, and stagecoach theft, along with other assorted crimes, going back to when he was a kid in Kansas. He knew the man, knew what he looked like, and knew he worked for Wayne Smith. He knew him from dozens of posters, flyers, and from seeing him in the Springfield jail once. He had escaped and was still on the loose. Oh, yes, he knew this man, what he looked like and what he did.

  He just hoped the man didn’t know him by sight.

  The man’s name was Freddie Moon.

  22

  THE PRIMAVERA HOTEL ON AVENIDA JUAREZ WAS SMALL, NON-DESCRIPT, out of the way. Which was why Lew had chosen it for him and Marylynn. This was not a street lined with beggars, like so many of the more commercial ones. There were a few tiendas, little shops proclaiming abarrotes and panaderia, a farmacia, and various other poor adobes that sold everything from food to clay pots and ashtrays.

  “This is more like a boardinghouse than a hotel,” Marylynn said after they had settled in their room. “Did you see the little dining hall?”

  “Yes. Reasonable, too.”

  “You mean cheap.”

  “Yeah, cheap. Main thing is we’re away from the main part of town. It’s quiet here. If a bunch of hard cases rode up the street, the people would set up a hue and cry. We’d be warned.”

  “What are you going to do next? I hope you’re not…”

  “Tomorrow, we’ll trade horses at the auction,” he said. “You need to get a small horse, fourteen or fifteen hands high. You’re just a tiny thing.”

  “Tiny?”

  “Well, small, for a woman.”

  “You don’t like small women?”

  “Marylynn, don’t start an argument over nothing. You’re here only because I felt sorry for you. Don’t get used to it.”

  “No argument. But you keep bringing up unpleasant subjects, Lew. You just can’t wait to get rid of me, can you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Well, I would.”

  She touched the tabletop, saw that it had been dusted and didn’t need something done to it. She had gone over the entire room, small as it was, looking for something to clean. The truth was, the room was spick-and-span, neat as the proverbial pin. She felt useless, as unwanted as dirty soapsuds.

  “Marylynn, come sit down,” Lew said. “We’ve got to talk this out right here and now.”

  She bowed her head and sat down, like an obedient child. But her eyes were flashing with hope. Lew sat on the other chair, a small table between them. She looked up at him, batted her eyelashes.

  “Yes?” she said, with a look of longing in her eyes, eyes that bored straight into his with a fixed, searching stare.

  Lew cleared his throat, tried not to look at her.

  “Damn, this is hard,” he said.

  “What?” she asked innocently.

  “What I have to say, Marylynn.”

  “Don’t say it, then.”

  “I have to say it. You don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “What you’re getting into with me.”

  “I know. You’re a wanted man.”

  “That’s only half of it,” he said.

  “Half of it? What’s the other half?”

  He knew she was being coy, teasing him. She was a lot smarter than her imbecilic questions. He knew that. He drew in a breath, looked out the window. There was a flower box there, just outside, blooming with red and yellow flowers, a splash of color in a drab world of adobe brick. A fly buzzed in the room, an irritating fugue to the silence between them.

  He put his hands down flat on the table, splayed his fingers into spiky, fleshy fans. He looked down at them, his brow knitting, furrows running across his forehead and the bridge of his nose.

  “Four men tried to kill me the other night. I expect Marshal Blackhawk to show up any day now. He’s the one chasing me all the way from Missouri.”

  “I know. You told me.”

  “These other men. I think they’re part of a kind of gang, here to meet up with a bad man I had a run-in with in Pueblo.”

  “You didn’t tell me about him.”

  “No, because that was a part of my life you sure didn’t need to know.”

  “I’m interested in everything about you, Lew. You know that.”

  “Stop it, Marylynn. This isn’t sweet talk.” He felt the anger boil up in him, not at her so much as at himself, for even talking to her like this.

  “I didn’t mean anything,” she said. “Go on. Who is this man and what happened in Pueblo?”

  “This man is from Missouri, too. His name is Wayne Smith. He took out an insurance policy on his wife, Carol. They had two little kids. Wayne murdered her so he could collect the money when she w
as dead.”

  “How awful.”

  “I saw him do it. Well, I mean I saw him right after he did it. He killed his kids, too.”

  Marylynn stiffened, rocked backward in her chair, a look of shock on her face.

  “Why, that’s terrible,” she said. “You tried to catch him.”

  “Yes, but that’s not the important part. Wayne had abandoned her, up in Leadville. Left her and her children to fend for themselves or starve. I met her up there.”

  He stopped and closed his fingers, slid his hands toward himself, gripped the edge of the table. He felt Marylynn’s eyes on him. The fly buzzed past his nose and he swatted at it. Sunlight streamed through the flowers and into the room. The flowers glowed like sunlit stained glass, their petals like the gossamer wings of butterflies, delicate, quivering in a light breeze that wafted past the window.

  “What is it, Lew? What happened didn’t have anything to do with you, did it? I mean, you couldn’t have stopped it, could you?”

  “No. I helped the woman out. She was a nice lady.”

  A sadness crept into his voice. Marylynn cocked her head and stared at him in puzzlement.

  “There’s more to it, isn’t there?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it, Lew?”

  “I loved her,” he said. “We were going to get married. She was going to divorce Wayne. She never got the chance.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry, Lew. I didn’t know.”

  The silence again. The buzzing fly. The flowers in the window box dulling now as a cloud passed over the sun and the breeze died. There was a somnolence to the moment.

  Lew sighed as the silence turned awkward.

  “I’m sorry, too,” he said. “This Wayne Smith—I think he’s here in Santa Fe. Some of his men are here. They’re the ones who tried to kill me the other night.”

  “Because of you and Carol?”

  “No. I don’t know if they know about that. Maybe Wayne does. I don’t know. No, I think it’s that reward. A man named Grimes. I met him in Las Vegas at the hotel there. He picked up that flyer in Glorieta, you know.”

 

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