Deaugrey stumbled forward. “He was more than willing to watch . . . to see . . . to let . . .”
“How much did he have to drink?” Frank asked while scowling at Deaugrey.
“At least triple the amount the rest of us did,” Nate replied.
Angelica patted Deaugrey on the shoulder, which was enough to force him to sit down on a pile of straw with his legs stretched in front of him. “I opened that safe and found a stash of papers inside,” she told Frank. “It turns out they were deeds and legal documents for the ownership of the Joplin Mercantile Company.”
“Good Lord,” Frank sighed. “Another company.”
“I never heard of it either,” Nate said. “What matters is that Preston Anstel had heard of it. Joplin Mercantile has been trying to get some of the money being brought in by the railroad expansions, but are third in line behind Anstel’s company and Western Cartage.”
“So why would Preston Anstel have an interest in owning a company that’s already being beaten by his own?”
“He doesn’t,” Angelica told him. “He didn’t even know about the papers. Preston didn’t even know about the compartment in his safe or that it was a Grunwaldt. Keyes must have switched it out with one of the safes that were already in Anstel’s office. Also, it was Keyes who’d signed those papers to gain controlling interest of Joplin Mercantile.”
“I was right about Keyes playing both sides against each other,” Nate explained. “Him and Pescaterro were in with the two leading companies so they could chip away at them both from the inside while keeping them at each other’s throats. While Western Cartage was being set up to look like a bunch of heavily armed outlaws willing to burn this place to the ground to spring Dog Ear out of jail, Anstel was going to be exposed as a blackmailer in possession of all the dirt Keyes himself collected. Both companies would either be run out of town by the law or tear each other down, clearing the path for Joplin Mercantile to sweep up the profits once the railroad made their big expansion.”
“And Keyes is the owner of Joplin Mercantile,” Frank said.
“Not anymore. He’s dead so it reverts back to Michael Jamieson, the founder of Joplin Mercantile, who was pushed out by a particularly nasty bit of blackmail used by Keyes.”
“Which is all now burnt to cinders after I dug it out of the papers that were hidden in that beautiful safe,” Angelica said.
“What was he being blackmailed with?” Frank asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Don’t know. Don’t care. My job was just to open the safe.”
“Which she did incredibly well!” Nate said as he planted a kiss onto Angelica’s lips.
“So Keyes was hiding his documents in Anstel’s own safe?” Frank asked.
“Not just any safe,” Angelica told him. “A Grunwaldt. If I hadn’t already seen one exactly like it, I might have missed the panels hidden inside that thing. Anyone without a trained eye would have never noticed them. And the only reason I got the second compartment open is because I’m the best you’re likely to find who isn’t Grunwaldt himself. When it was time for Keyes to finish what he was doing, all he needed to do was go up to that office and get his papers. Until then, Anstel would do all the work of guarding them for him.”
“Not a bad way to go, actually,” Frank admitted. “Hopefully the town law finds this story interesting as well. I doubt we’ll be able to avoid meeting up with them before leaving Joplin.”
“Already taken care of,” Pete said. “We scrounged up the sheriff after Keyes went down.”
“Any trouble with the company’s hired guns?”
“It’s funny how timid men like that get when they see the biggest and baddest of them gunned down right in front of them like a dog in the street. By the time I came back with the law, I believe Anstel was damn close to tears.”
“Quite a sight, really,” Angelica said.
Nate chuckled. “Don’t feel too bad for him. He may have lost everything he had, but he was also the one doing his best to force another company out of business through intimidation and blackmail.”
“What about the owner of that other company?” Frank asked. “Western Cartage?”
Deaugrey sat with his back against a wall. “Sam Cavett. He’s already in a jail cell after funding last night’s fire. Of course, he says he didn’t give any order to bust Dog Ear out of jail, but it don’t really matter now. He’s through in this town and every other.”
“I don’t feel bad for any of those businessmen,” Angelica said. “It was quite a sight to see a man as imposing as Preston Anstel get worn down to a nub.”
Frank hooked his thumb back toward the wagon where Pescaterro was stewing in his own juices. “And this one?”
“He’s ours for the taking,” Nate said. “After he got a look at everything in those safes and heard what witnesses said about me defending myself against Keyes, the acting sheriff was looking for a way to thank me for doing his job for him.”
“We’re the ones that get to drag Dog Ear Pescaterro back to Kansas,” Frank pointed out. “I wouldn’t exactly call that a reward.”
“Then you can forsake your cut of the money that’s due to us and ask for a nice pat on the back instead.”
Frank waved that off and took the mostly empty bottle of whiskey from Nate’s hand. After removing the cork, he sniffed the liquor and nodded in approval. “Rich men do have the best whiskey. Wait a second. This whiskey and that wine were given to you by Preston Anstel?”
“I said they were from Anstel’s office,” Deaugrey corrected. “I never said he gave them to us.”
“Well then,” Frank declared as he raised the bottle, “here’s to finally leaving a town without being chased out of it.”
None of the others were as happy about that as Frank. Finally, Nate said, “We’re actually supposed to leave Joplin as soon as we can.”
“You mean . . . in the morning?”
“No. I mean now. The sheriff doesn’t want to see any of our faces again.”
“Ain’t that what happened after the last job you hired me for?” Pete asked.
Nate didn’t have to think very long before saying, “Yep. More or less.”
Raising his bottle even higher, Frank said, “Then here’s to consistency.”
Sathow's Sinners Page 25
