Relentless

by Ed Gorman

  “Something wrong, Marshal?” he said again. Ken Adams was a slender, towheaded man with wiry strength and a somber, insular personality ideal for the frontier. The frontier demanded a certain stoicism from its survivors, and Ken Adams was stoic enough for any six men. Except-and understandably-when he caught his wife in another man’s hotel room.

  I rolled a cigarette as we walked. I said, thinking of no other way to do it, “I went to your place to see you and Sylvia. She killed herself, Ken.”

  And damned if he didn’t haul out his Bull Durham and build himself a smoke and get it lighted before he said a word. The only sign that he’d heard me was in his dark eyes. They glistened with quick tears.

  “How’d she do it?”

  “A Colt.”

  “She leave a note?”

  “Not that I could see.”

  “You were the one who found her?”

  “I talked to her first. She bolted herself in the cabin. She wouldn’t let me in.”

  He took a deep drag from his smoke and exhaled in a stream. The smoke was blue in the moon rays. “She say anything before she did it?”

  “How sorry she was.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That she was ashamed. And that she worried how the other kids would treat yours at school.”

  He said, and without any rancor, “She wasn’t no whore.”

  “I don’t think she was.”

  “And nobody better say she was. Not to my face anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, Ken.”

  “She warned me how she was. Sometimes she just- strayed. This was the only time she ever done it here, in town.”

  “She said that, too.”

  “That Stanton, he was workin’ on her the first time he was here. And then the second time they got together.” Something about that wasn’t right, what he’d just said. “You said ‘the first time.’ He was here more than once?”

  “He was here about a month ago. He met her in the library. He was askin’ her all kinds of questions about Paul.” A very different story from the one Webley had told me about hiring the Pinkertons.

  “And she wasn’t the only one Stanton shined up to either.”

  “Another woman, you mean?”

  “He must’ve liked ’em married. I knew a fella down in Tulsa like that. He liked ’em married. Said they was more fun ’cause it was kinda dangerous and all. You know, the husband out there somewhere with a gun.”

  “You know who this other woman was?”

  He shook his head. “They had a fight about her, I guess. Him and Sylvia. She went up to his room and heard some other woman there. They was arguin’ about that when I got there.”

  I hesitated. “Did you kill him?”

  “I sure wanted to.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “I wanted to but I didn’t.”

  “Did Sylvia kill him?”

  He sobbed. He’d fought so hard against showing me anything-some misdirected sense of manliness, I guess-that it burst out and he couldn’t stop it. A sob of the kind a woman would make. “She always said she never cared about them no other way except the thrill of it. I guess she was a little like that fella down in Tulsa I mentioned. But this Stanton -I guess she felt somethin’ for him ’cause she got jealous when she found out about this other woman.”

  I said again, “Did she kill him, Ken?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re not sure.”

  “She went down there again tonight.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah. I followed her into town, if that’s what you mean.”

  “You go to his room?”

  He nodded.

  “What happened?”

  “He was dead,” he said. “Maybe I would’ve killed him if somebody hadn’t beat me to it.”

  EIGHT

  TOOMEY AND GRICE were in my office when I got back to town.

  “Well?” Toomey said.

  “Well, what, Walter?”

  “Well, did you arrest him?”

  “And who would ‘him’ be?”

  “Who would ‘him’ be?” Phil Grice said. “Ken Adams, of course.”

  I shook my head. I pitched my hat on top of the bookcase, sat down with my cup of coffee, and rolled myself a cigarette as I went through Sylvia’s suicide and Ken’s denial.

  “And you believed him?” Grice said.

  “Not necessarily. But I didn’t-and don’t-disbelieve him either.”

  “He had a damn good motive,” Grice said.

  “And people saw him in the room,” Toomey said.

  I smiled. “You want to get saddled up and all three of us’ll ride out and lynch him?” They were the two most prominent businessmen on the town council. They were

  sleek and well-fed and as full of their own self-promoting bullshit as anybody in Skylar County. Toomey owned two stage lines and a short-haul railroad, and Grice oversaw his daddy’s varied business interests, sort of the way Paul did, but less successfully. They both had eyes on seats in the state legislature.

  “You’re forgetting, Marshal, what happens the day after tomorrow.” Grice gave Toomey a smug smile.

  I was confused. Tomorrow was the trial. But what about the day after?

  Toomey said, “The lieutenant governor is coming here. Phil and I convinced him to spend a day with us. And we certainly don’t want some sordid murder hanging over our heads.”

  I’d forgotten about the lieutenant governor, whose name I couldn’t remember anyway. “So you want me to just arrest somebody, is that it?”

  “Well, it would look better if we had somebody charged with it and in jail,” Toomey said. They were both too stout to wear the kind of sharply cut suits they did, but that didn’t deter them, of course. They wore matching pearl-colored derbies, too.

  “And you could always let him go free after the lieutenant governor left,” Grice said.

  I laughed. Couldn’t help it. “I’m glad law and order means so much to you. Murder isn’t much more than an inconvenience to you, is it?”

  “Is it wrong to have civic pride?” Grice said.

  “Some hayseed kills a visitor,” Toomey said. “How does that look to important people, do you think?”

  “A ‘visitor’? You two know anything about David Stanton?”

  “He came into the taproom several nights,” Grice said.

  “He was a well-traveled man. He had a lot of wonderful stones.”

  “I’ll bet he did. And I’ll bet at least half of them were true, too.”

  “He was an educated man,” Grice said. “He talked about how either Phil or I could become governor if we wanted to.”

  You couldn’t go wrong buttering up two pampered blowhards like these two. Easy enough to imagine Stanton painting them pictures of themselves as great national leaders rising up to lead the masses to the promised land.

  “You sure he didn’t mention anything about the presidency?”

  Grice said, “I’m going to ignore that, Marshal. You’ve obviously come to the conclusion that you should have arrested Ken Adams. And now you’re going to try to make yourself look better by belittling us.”

  Deke Newton, my senior night deputy, came in. “There’s somebody up front who says he’s got information about the murder. Says he saw something he wants to report. You want me to handle it or you want to?”

  Toomey said, “I don’t mean to be rude here, Deke, but when you’ve got two members of the town council talking to the high marshal, isn’t it obvious that you should handle this yourself?”

  Deke started to say something, and then stopped. What was the point of trying to be reasonable with two legendary national leaders like these?

  “You handle it, Deke. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Deke nodded and left.

  “I’m sort of surprised he couldn’t have figured that one out for himself,” Grice said.

  I usually saw these two only at town council meetings, the other
two members of which acted as my protection.

  They kept Grice and Toomey from doing their pompous worst, and interrupted their orating whenever it looked as if I might jump up and do sizable damage to their sizable frames.

  “Now,” Grice said, “where were we?”

  “I think you were asking me to arrest somebody before the lieutenant governor gets here so we can tell him that the murder is solved and the kingdom of Skylar is safe again.”

  “You don’t have to take that tone with us,” Toomey said. This would have been something for all the schoolkids to overhear. There were too many towns where the law would give in to two showboats like these and jail a possibly innocent man just to make things look good.

  “I do when you’re asking me to do something this shoddy. I admit he’s a strong suspect. And he admits he was in the room and had seriously thought of killing Stanton. But he said Stanton was dead when he got there. I have to weigh what he said against his wife committing suicide. There’s at least as good a possibility that she killed Stanton. I wanted to give him at least a little while with his kids. Their lives have just come apart. They need their father. I’m looking to ride out there tomorrow noon and talk to him some more. If he looks any better for it, I’ll arrest and bring him back here.”

  “Well,” Grice said, “why didn’t you say so?”

  “I didn’t say so”-keeping my temper in check-“because I didn’t want to give you the impression that I was going along with your scheme to throw somebody in jail before the lieutenant governor gets here. What I’m doing tomorrow is what I would do under any circumstances, whether you’d come in here tonight or not.”

  They looked happy. Fat and sleek and happy. Despite what I’d just said, they were obviously convinced that they’d talked me into cooperating with them.

  “You say noon?” Grice said.

  “Yes,” I said. “ Noon. Why?”

  “I was wondering if you couldn’t make it earlier,” Grice said.

  “Can’t. I have to be in court tomorrow morning. Trent Webley’s trial.”

  Toomey glanced at Grice and then at me. “You mean you didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “About the trial tomorrow.”

  A deep and terrible sickness began to form somewhere in my stomach. “What about it?”

  Toomey said, “It’s been called off. The judge came down with a terrible case of the gout. Trial’s been postponed at least a week.”

  “So you can go out to Adams ’ place bright and early tomorrow morning,” Grice said.

  They said some other things, too, but I didn’t hear them, or if I did they didn’t register. All I could think about was the judge and what Paul had used on him to get the trial called off.

  I needed to get out of the office, get home, before I confronted Webley and made even more trouble for myself.

  NINE

  SHE WAS GONE when I got home.

  A lamp burned on the table. A meal of cold beef and a boiled potato and a slice of pumpkin pie had been set out for me. I had a drink instead.

  I sat in the squeaky hardwood rocking chair my grandfather had brought with him from Kilamey and tried to sort through everything that had happened today and tonight.

  All I knew for sure was that Paul had lied to me about hiring Pinkertons and I was pretty sure why. He’d wanted to impress me, intimidate me with his sweeping powers to counter anything I might do. And that way I’d give in to him. A seedy blackmailer coming to him was much less impressive.

  David Stanton was dead. I had three suspects, two I was willing to talk about, Ken and Sylvia Adams. The third suspect was my wife.

  I knew one other thing as well: I’d been bushwhacked. I hadn’t thought of Paul getting to Judge Pickett. Pickett was a fusty old bastard, and we’d never been friends, but his rectitude was beyond question. But he was human, meaning that sometime, somewhere he’d committed an indiscretion that Paul had been able to find out about.

  My world tonight was a very different one from my world this morning, when I’d been happy to play the role of the middle-aged lawman to a brood of schoolkids eager to hear dime-novel tales of derring-do.

  I wondered if Callie had killed him.

  I was still wondering this when she came in the door, carrying a wicker basket she used to carry things down to the creek for a sturdy washing. Most of our things she washed in the galvanized tub. But things that got stained badly needed a pounding and scraping against wet, coarse rock.

  She set the basket down and said, “I couldn’t get the blood out.”

  She sounded and looked weary. She came over to the table and sat down across from me. The bourbon bottle sat in front of her. She poured herself a drink in a glass she’d used earlier. I’d never seen her take a drink before.

  She said, “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Then what was the blood?”

  “I-was trying to make sure he was dead. I'm sure I was hysterical. He-he’d been my husband once. As much as I hated him, I still didn’t want him dead.”

  “Be careful you don’t make me cry.”

  She glared at me. “So you’re going to be jealous? That’s all you can think of at a time like this? To be jealous?”

  All the jealousy I hadn’t felt earlier tonight in the park when she’d given me a partial version of the truth-now it was upon me. I was at my cold worst. “How many times did you see him?”

  She shrugged, looked away. “Four, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I didn’t keep track. It wasn’t anything I wanted to remember.”

  “Why’d you see him?”

  “You’re treating me like one of your suspects.”

  “You are one of my suspects.”

  “Oh, great, Lane. Just great.”

  “Answer my question.”

  “Quit talking to me that way.” Then: “He said if I didn’t see him he’d tell people about me-about us.”

  “But you didn’t think to tell me?”

  ‘Tell you that I was a wanted felon with a reward on my head?”

  “I deserved the truth.”

  She stared at me. The anger faded in her blue eyes. “Yes, you did,” she said softly.

  “Sylvia Adams killed herself tonight.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “She was seeing him, too.”

  The anger was back. “Oh, no, you don’t, Lane. You don’t make it sound like I was seeing him for the same reason she was. She was going to bed with him. I wasn’t.”

  “He didn’t try and get you in bed?”

  “Of course he did. But I wouldn’t go. All I was doing was trying to stall him, figure out how to handle him before he put the word out about me.”

  “That’s why you were there tonight?”

  “I was there tonight,” she said, the anger still cold and hard in her voice, “because I wanted to see if he was the one who’d sent me that envelope.”

  “He wasn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Paul was.”

  “Webley-”

  “ Stanton tracked you down somehow. There weren’t any

  Pinkertons. He went to Webley directly. He was in town twice.”

  ‘Twice? That I didn’t know.”

  “Well, he sure knew about you. And he must’ve picked up that Webley was looking for some sort of weapon to use against me so I’d drop the charges against Trent.”

  “But you’re not going to.”

  “That’s sort of a moot point now.” I told her about Judge Pickett.

  “Oh, Lane, I’m sorry.” Then: “Oh, my Lord, what a mess.”

  She came over and sat in my lap the way she did sometimes, and we rocked in the noisy chair. I listened to the night and watched the play of a shaft of moonlight on a boulder near the front of our land. There was so much to say and nothing to say. She was woman and child at this moment; and I felt like man and boy. Both of us were undone by it all.

  And then we were in bed and con
joined as much in spirit as in body, solace as much as sex being what we were after, the gentility of it being exactly what I needed. I didn’t doubt her then, not at all, and told her so and told her I was sorry for how I’d interrogated her. And then I remembered that Deke had brought a witness in, a witness I’d forgotten to check out myself.

  But then she was holding me and we made love for the second time and I forgot all about Deke and the witness, forgot everything as we brought the covers up over us, the night suddenly chill, and cuddled like children, her falling asleep in my arms the way she used to long, long ago when we’d first been married.

  I slept too, hard and deep and long, and when I woke up I heard ridiculously happy morning birds and saw a ridiculously beautiful slant of sunlight through our window. I then slipped in and out of sleep for a time, knowing I needed to get up but not wanting to, purposely keeping certain thoughts at bay for a time, just enjoying the texture of her sleep-warm skin and the distinct sweet scent of her hair.

  And then it was all gone, ruined, smashed by a fist meeting our door several times, a knocking sound that bore no good.

  My first word of the day-a word that would later seem appropriate to the entire day-was “Hell.”

  “I wonder who it is.”

  “Nobody I want to see, that’s for sure.”

  I got up, snagging my Colt from the holster on the floor, dragging myself to the door in the butternuts I struggled into.

  Tom Ryan stood there. He looked both sleepy and upset. His horse was ground-tied on the edge of our property.

  “I’m sorry about this.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I thought I’d better warn you.”

  “Warn me about what?”

  He told me in his usual manner. Carefully, thoroughly, and as objectively as possible. He waited till the end to make his personal comment. “I don’t believe the sonofabitch, of course. But some people might.”

  It was a day for the fishing hole. Take a pipe and a good book along. Even if you didn’t catch anything, the day would be its own reward, the lazy sunlight on the lazy river and all the forest creatures that came to the bank to give you a quick inspection. And then heading home just as the sunset was streaking that rose color particular to Indian summer dusks. A damned good day.