Longarm and the Sins of Laughing Lyle (9781101612101)

by Evans, Tabor

  Large, stylish indigo letters announced the hotel’s name on the false façade rising above the third story. The opulence of the place bespoke an optimism its founder must have at one time felt regarding Nowhere’s future—an optimism that had likely dulled along with the House’s chipping paint and moldering porch pillars. A tumbleweed sat undisturbed on the loafer’s bench left of the broad double doors.

  Longarm went in and rented a room from a birdlike little woman who kept giving him suspicious, sidelong looks that, coupled with those of Butter’s big deputy, started to get on his nerves. When Longarm had paid for two nights in advance—he had a feeling he’d be in Nowhere for a while, waiting for Laughing Lyle to heal, if he didn’t expire in the next few hours—she slid a key across her polished mahogany desk but kept her large, somber gray eyes on Longarm. He reached for the key, but she closed her long, withered old hand over it.

  Longarm arched a brow at her.

  “Lawman?” she said tonelessly.

  “That’s right,” Longarm said. “Federal.”

  “You here for”—she jerked her chin, shaped like a pistol butt, to indicate the doctor’s office—“him?”

  “Laughing Lyle. Yes, ma’am.”

  She lifted her hand from the key and stared down at it gravely. “If you’re all by your lonesome, son, you’d best forget about ole Laughing Lyle and ride on out of here while you still can.”

  Longarm stared at her skeptically. Her demeanor as much as her words caused a prickling of the short hairs at the back of his neck. He was about to ask the little woman to explain herself when a pale, plump young girl in a black serving dress and dusting cap poked her head out of a near doorway and said meekly, “Mordecai would like a word about the roast, Ma.”

  The old woman glanced up at the tall lawman once more, then strode out from behind her horseshoe-shaped desk to follow the serving girl into the kitchen flanking it. Longarm stared after her for a time. He turned to look out the lobby’s front windows into the dusty street that was gathering shadows now as the sun fell.

  One horsebacker rode past the hotel at a leisurely pace, leaning out from his horse to spit a wad of chaw into the dirt. He ran the back of his hand across his mustache-mantled mouth as he swung his horse toward the Nowhere Saloon, sitting just east of the hotel.

  That made Longarm think of a drink as well as made him conscious of the throbbing in his upper right arm. He palmed the key, grabbed his rifle and scabbard off the desk before him, and hiking the saddlebags on his left shoulder, started up the stairs to the second story. Room five was on the right side of the hall trimmed with a flowered runner, bracket lamps, and the same green paint that decorated the House’s exterior, though the knots in the cheap pine paneling showed through.

  Longarm went in, tossed his gear on the bed, sagged onto the edge of the cornshuck mattress, and tossed back a long pull from Alva’s bourbon bottle. The only thing that could beat a slug of good Kentucky bourbon was his preferred Maryland rye, but it wasn’t often he could find the stuff beyond Denver or a like-sized city. He took another drink, then shrugged out of his frock coat and his shirt, and went to work undressing his wound.

  As he did, he thought about the words of warning that the birdlike proprietor of the Organ Range had offered him downstairs. He thought about Laughing Lyle and the missing saddlebags and Town Marshal Butter and then about the big deputy town marshal, Benji Vickers.

  What strange, menacing looks the mountain-sized boy had given Longarm. . . .

  Why?

  The only conclusion the federal badge-toter could come to as he poured cheap whiskey over his expertly sewn wound, letting it run off into a washbowl atop the stand beside the bed, was that someone here in Nowhere knew more about those saddlebags than they were letting on. True, Benji could just be suspicious of strangers, but Longarm felt the kid’s odd demeanor was due to the stolen loot.

  Which meant that Humperdink, the liveryman/undertaker, or Butter was lying to him, or possibly both.

  Or maybe they themselves had been lied to by the Reverend Todd and his daughter, Bethany, who had been the first ones to encounter Laughing Lyle and, ostensibly, the stolen bank loot from Stoneville. Obviously, they were the ones Longarm needed to speak to next.

  First, he’d pad out his belly. Just thinking about a plate of food made his stomach grumble. He’d been so immersed in his problems that he’d forgotten how hungry he was. When he’d pulled on his shirt and coat and donned his hat, he glanced at the Winchester. The prickling under his collar told him he might need the long gun before too much time had passed, but he supposed he’d look foolish toting it into the dining room.

  He left the gun in its scabbard leaning against the dresser, loosened his Colt in its holster, then stepped into the hall, locking the door and pocketing the small, tarnished silver key. When he’d taken three steps toward the stairs, a latch clicked behind him. He swung around quickly, wrapping his right hand around his Colt’s polished walnut grips.

  A door on the other side of the hall from his own closed. The latch clicked again. Silence.

  The bracket lamps flickered and smoked, rasping ghostly in a vagrant draft scuttling along the hall from the room behind the recently closed door.

  Longarm scowled at the door. Whoever was in there was a mite curious about whoever was out here. Natural curiosity or something else?

  Longarm turned and continued walking toward the stairs, glancing over his shoulder once more, feeling as though he had a target drawn on his back.

  Chapter 8

  Butter was already in the dining room, waiting at a table near a front window and a dusty potted palm. There were three other men in the place—traveling drummers, judging by their cheap, gaudy suits, complete with checked or striped trousers and bowler hats with frayed brims.

  Butter sat back in a Windsor chair, legs outstretched before him beneath the table, hands laced over his paunch. His cream hat was on the table, which was decked out with a white tablecloth and a green candle in a brass holder. A fire crackled in a fieldstone hearth on the room’s far side, compensating for the evening chill.

  Night had fallen over Nowhere. The room’s three curtained front windows were dark.

  Longarm dragged out a chair and sat down, and when the serving girl came, he took Butter’s advice and ordered the elk and potatoes with a side order of buttered carrots, and, of course, a beer and a shot of the house’s best whiskey.

  When the girl had left, Butter frowned across the table at the federal lawman. “You seem troubled, Marshal. Don’t worry—we’ll find that stolen loot.” He fingered the mole at his left temple, rheumy brown eyes regarding Longarm reassuringly. “If Laughing Lyle don’t make it, which looks likely, you’ll at least have that to take back to Denver. That’s the most important thing, anyway, right?”

  Longarm had just bit the end off a nickel cheroot and fired a match on his shell belt. Leaning forward with both elbows on the table, he touched the flame to the cigar, and blew smoke into the air above the table. “Tell me something, Marshal—”

  “Call me Roscoe.”

  “All right, Roscoe—tell me about your town here. Tell me about Nowhere.”

  Butter chuckled. “Don’t the name pretty much say it all?”

  “What about this hotel? Doesn’t look like a place someone would build if they didn’t think the town they were buildin’ it in had a future. If they didn’t think the town wouldn’t be nowhere for long.” Longarm looked around at the lushly if sparsely appointed room, looking past the aged, ragged edges, including the faded quality of the Oriental rug at his feet and the faint coffee stains on the tablecloth before him. “If they didn’t think the town would someday be somewhere. You get my drift?”

  Butter leaned forward, slid his chair up closer to the table, and lifted the whiskey shot the serving girl had just set on the table before
him, alongside a frothy, butterscotch-colored ale. He glanced over his left shoulder, then sipped the whiskey, showed his teeth, and said, “See those three men over there?”

  Longarm glanced at the three hunkered over their plates and conversing in dry tones, and nodded.

  “Railroad surveyors,” Butter said, keeping his voice down. “On a survey run for some third-rate railroad that might be laid fifteen miles south of here, along Sandy Wash, to connect Albaquerk to the mining camps in the Black Range.”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “About five years ago we had a survey crew moving through Nowhere, and the word was that we were about to have a major line run through here—a line that would connect Albaquerk to us and the mining camps that were just then cropping up in the Organ Range. The line would then head off to the southwest and reach all the way down to Phoenix in the Arizona Territory. So, after all was said and done, Nowhere—this little joke of a town that started out as a cavalry outpost twenty-two years ago and never grew into much since but a supply camp for a handful of small ranches—would be connected to the entire country and the whole Pacific Ocean!”

  Butter grinned exaggeratedly, eyes flashing, as he stretched his arms wide, as though to indicate the breadth of the entire planet.

  “But it never happened,” Longarm said, tapping his cheroot against an ashtray.

  “Nope, it sure didn’t.”

  “What happened?”

  “No one found enough gold or silver to make the mining camps in the Organ Range profitable, and the rail line that had such big plans and got us all steamed up for wealth and prosperity fell apart on account of a bunch of crooks in their main office in Kansas City. Several o’ them mucky-mucks were hauled off to jail. And Nowhere . . .”

  Butter scowled down at his shot glass, threw back the rest of the whiskey, and set the glass back on the table, turning it broodingly between his fingers. “Well, the name was just so damn fittin’ that we kept it. Now the only surveyors we see through here are workin’ for a little narrow-gauge spur line to the south, and those fellas just remind us what could have been.”

  “Somewhere,” Longarm said.

  “You got it.” Butter laughed gratingly. “So we make a joke out of the name. Why not laugh about it?”

  He removed his arms from the table, as did Longarm, for the serving girl had just brought a steaming plate of elk roast for each. She took their beer glasses away for refilling, and the two men dug into the food hungrily.

  They’d gotten only halfway through the meal before Longarm saw Benji Vickers’s broad, bulky frame fill the doorway that opened onto the hotel’s lobby. The big man held his age-silvered bowler in his paws up close to his chest, kneading the brim uncertainly, fidgeting and looking around before he moved forward into the dining room, setting each foot down and wincing, reminding Longarm of nothing so much as the bull in the proverbial china shop.

  Butter heard the big deputy’s heavy footfalls and looked up, chewing. “What is it, Benji?”

  Benji stopped before the table, shifting his deep-set, anxious gaze from the town marshal to Longarm and back again before saying haltingly, “The Widow sent me to fetch you, Marshal. She’s havin’ trouble gettin’ the baby down to sleep and she says she’s just fit to be tied!”

  Butter’s face turned the rose of a summer sunset as he glanced sheepishly at Longarm. He ran his tongue around over his teeth, apparently pondering the situation, before he slid his chair back, tossed his napkin onto the table, and grabbed his hat.

  “Longarm, I do apologize, but there’s a personal matter I must tend to.”

  Longarm shrugged—curious but keeping it to himself. “Nothing to apologize for Roscoe. If you gotta go, you gotta go. Shame to leave half a plate of food, though. Perhaps Benji could finish it for you.” Why not take the opportunity to have a little sit-down chat with the oddly behaving deputy?

  Benji was staring eagerly at the town marshal’s food. But as Butter rose from his chair, donned his hat, and made his way around the table, he tugged gently on the big man’s arm. “Benji’s shift is gonna have to start an hour early, I’m afraid,” Butter said. “Come on, Benji. You’d better start makin’ the rounds.”

  Benji wore a pained expression as he dragged his eyes away from Butter’s half-finished plate of elk roast, mashed potatoes, and gravy, but he dutifully turned to follow his boss on out of the dining room. Longarm watched them go, then glanced at Butter’s plate, twiddling his fork over his own plate, even more puzzled than he’d been a few minutes ago.

  Who was “the Widow” and why was she calling Butter away from his supper to tend a child? Was it his own child? Roscoe looked too old to be raising babies.

  And what was it that Butter didn’t want Longarm possibly finding out from Benji?

  Damn, Longarm thought, I’m pret’ near gonna have to sit this whole town down and whip them to get any information out of them. But then he remembered his intention of paying a visit to the Reverend Todd’s residence, and he resumed shoveling food into his mouth. A clock on the far well read seven-thirty. He didn’t want to get over there too late, as the clergy were known for retiring early to say their prayers and read their Bibles.

  Or, in this case, possibly to count their money . . . ?

  Just as Longarm had scooped the last forkful of potatoes and meat into his mouth and was swabbing the remaining gravy from his plate with a biscuit, the birdlike proprietor strolled over to his table and picked up Marshal Butler’s half-empty plate.

  “The marshal was called away again?” she said in her leathery rasp.

  “I reckon he was. That a habit of his?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know,” she said quickly.

  The old woman, whom the serving girl had called Ma, set the marshal’s beer schooner and whiskey glass atop the plate and began to turn away.

  “Oh, I think you might, Mrs. . . .”

  She turned back to the federal lawman, pinching her thin lips together beneath a very slight mustache, just visible in the shadows shunted by the room’s oil lamps. “Marcus. Margaret Marcus, but most folks call me Ma on account o’ I’m so old. Funny thing is I don’t have any kids of my own.”

  She started to walk away again, and Longarm quickly wiped his mouth with his napkin and held her back with “Ma, I sure wish you’d be a little more specific about your warning earlier.”

  She stopped and glanced cautiously around the room. A few more people had come in and were eating and conversing, raising a low hum, but none appeared to have overheard what Longarm said. She turned back to him, her gaunt, powdery cheeks flushing slightly, blinking her eyes slowly, portentously. “I said all you need to hear, Marshal, and that advice stands. Would you like to pay for the meal now, or shall I add it to your bill?”

  A quick glance toward Butter’s side of the table told him the town marshal hadn’t left any money for his own food. Had he been in too big of a hurry or was he just the cheap sort?

  “Add it.” Longarm rose, donned his hat, and adjusted the gun on his hip as the old woman reached for his empty plate. “How ’bout if you point me in the direction of the Reverend Todd’s residence? That wouldn’t be too much information, would it?”

  “Little red shack on Third Street, just south of Norvald’s Six-Shooter Saloon,” she said, shuffling toward the kitchen’s swinging door with the empty dishes. “Go with God, Marshal,” she added amusedly as she disappeared into the kitchen. Or, at least, that’s what Longarm thought he’d heard her say beneath the clattering of pans in the kitchen and the hum of various conversations around him.

  Again, he adjusted his pistol on his hip and glanced around him skeptically. Several pairs of eyes quickly turned away from him. Feeling that uneasy stirring of his short hairs again, he headed on out of the hotel and onto the broad front veranda, the cool evening air pushing against him
and filling his nose with the smell of burning piñon pine and the cinnamon tang of mountain sage.

  The town’s few saloons were easily identified by the lights in their windows and the horses nosed up to their hitch racks. From one of them to Longarm’s left emanated the muffled tinkling of a piano.

  He’d seen the sign for Third Street earlier, so he looked around carefully, then stepped down off the veranda and began angling west across the main drag, before turning south on Third Street, which was the last of only three cross streets in the little town. It was eerily dark out here, the black shapes of both short and tall buildings and stables hulking around him.

  The darkness was tempered by the crisp light of the stars and, as Longarm continued walking, the lamplight of a distant building on the street’s right side. It was Norvald’s Six-Shooter Saloon, which was a tiny, adobe brick place with a brush roof and crumbling veranda and only two saddle horses tied to the hitch rack.

  Both horses regarded Longarm curiously, angling looks behind them, as he continued south to where the town began to play out. Before it did, a little red shack slumped at the lip of a deep ravine that curved in from the south and then ran west behind the little place, which wasn’t much larger than the Six-Shooter but which had a small second story perched precariously atop the first one.

  There was a picket fence around the front yard, but it was lacking a gate, as well as more than a few pickets. Longarm tramped up the worn path through spindly clumps of sage and buckbrush. A faint amber light burned in an upstairs window over the porch, and there was another, dimmer lamp lit in a large, first-story window to the left of the front door.

  Longarm’s boots squawked on the loose boards of the six-by-six-foot stoop, atop which stood a rusting corrugated tin washtub. An unseen cat gave an indignant meow, and Longarm heard the little, padded feet scampering off across the stoop and the light thump as the frightened beast leaped into the yard.