Relentless

by Ed Gorman

  Edgar Bayard had been a partner of Paul’s for many years. They’d run silver mines together and had prospered. One of the mines was located on land belonging to the Ute Indians. It was widely known that Webley had initially wanted to start a fight with the Utes so that he would have a pretext to seize the land with the help of the Army. But Bayard had made the deal with the Utes, promising to give them a decent percentage of the mine’s profits, and he didn’t want to betray that trust. He had no special liking for Indians. But he did having a liking for his reputation. His word was his word. It took Paul seven years to achieve what he wanted. During the long year when the cancer took Bayard-and when most folks assumed he would soon die-Paul brought in some Pinkertons who forced some Indians into a gun battle, reporting it to the local Indian agent as an attack. Webley had one of the state senators appeal to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and he was permitted to break his deal with the Utes. Bayard wasn’t strong enough physically to fight him. But when he heard what Webley had done, he insisted on being bought out. The two men had not spoken since.

  “Maybe it’s time for me to move on, Edgar.”

  “I meant what I said about my grandkids.”

  “You’ve got your own reasons for going up against Webley, Edgar.”

  “You should, too, Lane. He’s been after you since the day you were sworn in.”

  “There’s a Paul in every town, Edgar. When you’ve been a lawman as long as I’ve been, you get used to them.”

  He fixed me with those Old Testament eyes of his and said, “I’m following up a rumor I heard. Don’t make any other decision until you hear from me.”

  “I don’t even get a hint?”

  “No.”

  “I assume it involves Paul.”

  The eyes were bitter now. His usual poise was gone for the moment. He was just one more pissed-off human being like the rest of us. He still had that fine speaker’s voice, though. “He’s got it coming, Lane. And maybe this time he’s going to get it.”

  “Some people think my wife may have killed Stanton.”

  “You know Callie better than that and so do I. She’s one of the finest women in this valley. She did something foolish when she was young. She took up with a scoundrel. But we’ve all done foolish things. You grow past them.”

  I smiled. “Hard to imagine you doing foolish things, Edgar.”

  He snorted. “Every night I lie in bed and think of all the stupid things I’ve done and said in my life. And I’m ashamed of myself and wonder why God ever let me draw a breath.”

  “You’re pretty tough on yourself for somebody most folks think is a paragon of virtue.”

  He laughed. “Some paragon I am.” The rancor was back in the blue gaze. “Remember, Lane. Don’t do anything till you hear from me. I need your word on this. You don’t leave town. All right?”

  “All right.”

  He almost never said hello or good-bye. He just appeared and disappeared. He disappeared now, leaving me to wonder just what he’d heard about Paul that I hadn’t.

  TWELVE

  OVER COFFEE AT noontime Callie told me about her morning.

  At first, she’d decided against going to school. She just wasn’t up to facing the parents who would, inevitably, be at the school door to call her unfit and insist that she resign. Or be fired.

  But then she thought about the children. She owed them an explanation and perhaps an apology. She loved them and she knew that most of them loved her. In a very real sense, she saw them as reflections of herself, what she’d taught them these past years.

  A group of eight mothers met her at the door. There were no children present. As usual with mobs of any size-and eight is plenty for a mob-there were two outspoken ones. The rest lost a lot of their ire when they saw her. They suddenly felt sorry for her or realized that they, too, had done foolish things in their own past.

  Callie tried to get into the schoolhouse to write a note on the blackboard for the students, but the two women wouldn’t let her. Nor would they let her get her things out of her desk. Hiram Weaver, one of the two town councilmen who liked Callie and me, showed up and told everybody to calm down. He noted that Callie, whatever her past had been, was a fine teacher and that Skylar was lucky to have her. Callie was heartened by this, thinking that Hiram would at least let her write out her note of apology on the blackboard. But he ultimately sided with the two women and said that it would probably be better if she just went on home for a few days until this thing was all straightened out.

  By this time, half the women present were taking Callie’s side and arguing with their self-appointed leaders. Callie said that the arguments had gotten not only testy but pretty personal. The only way she could stop the women from having at each other was to slip away. Hiram walked with her to her horse. He was long on apology but short on advice. All he could come up with was: “Maybe you and Lane better stick pretty close to home until things settle down. Grice and Toomey are raising holy hell. Paul’s pretty quiet now. He got his way. He somehow managed to get the judge to come up with a sudden case of gout so that Trent couldn’t be tried.”

  She stopped by church and said some prayers. The old monsignor came out. He wore an eyepatch these days because of a detached retina. He emerged from the shadows of the sanctuary, looking pretty damned sinister for a cleric. She’d been almost afraid to speak to him, which was a good measure of how upset she was. He was one of the first people to befriend her when we’d moved here. And now she was afraid of him?

  But her misgivings were soon dispelled. He knew that her secret was out. She’d long ago told him in confession of her background, so he was well aware of what she was going through.

  “They think I killed him, Monsignor.”

  “Nobody who knows you thinks that for a minute, child.”

  “One of the women said that Lane resigned this morning. I’ve ruined his life along with mine.”

  “You have to have faith that this will be all right when it’s finished.”

  “But things aren’t always all right, Monsignor.”

  “That’s a difficult thing to know sometimes. Even when they go wrong, you see God’s terrible wisdom years later. You find out what He really had in mind for you. You see why He made you suffer.”

  “ But Lane ’s suffering, too.” Callie frowned. “ ‘Terrible wisdom.’ That’s a strange way to say it, Monsignor.”

  “Sometimes His wisdom does seem terrible. At least until we come to understand it.” He took her slender white hand into his own huge, age-mottled one. “All you can do for now is pray and know that someday, in some way you don’t expect, you and Lane will be vindicated.”

  As she had told Lane many times, the younger priests always had bright little homilies to offer you in times of trouble. It was their way of keeping you and your problems at arm’s length-because they didn’t have any answers, either practical or theological. They were just human beings.

  This was why she appreciated the monsignor’s candor. He never offered easy answers. He sometimes implied that righting a wrong might take years, and even then it might not be righted. But somehow the realism of his words was more comforting than the homilies of the younger clerics.

  “You have to stand by your husband because he’s innocent,” the old monsignor had concluded, “and he has to stand by you because you’re innocent. That’s the strength you have to rely on, Callie. That no matter what they say about you or try to do with you, you’re innocent. You know the real truth. That’s the only weapon you have. And it’ll help you survive this. You’ll see.”

  ***

  She went for a long ride afterward. She pretended that she would be teaching again soon. She rode along the river, making note of the various trees and undergrowth and how it had all changed over the course of this lingering Indian summer. She would take her class on a trip. Yes, a morning trip, when the light and the air were at their freshest, and she would identify various botanical splendors for them-

  But th
e fantasy was short-lived. It all came crowding in on her again. She relived her time in the Irish ghetto in Chicago where she’d been raised. Her parents had been loving but frail. She’d watched two of her brothers and one of her sisters die of influenza. Early on she realized that life was a fragile business. She worked in a sweatshop crowded with other immigrant girls, chiefly Jewish. She sewed garments. Though Jews and Catholics didn’t especially get along, she made good friends with several of the Jewish girls. For all their seeming differences, both ethnic experiences had been pretty much alike.

  On Saturday afternoons, they went to plays together. These tended to be musicales aimed at working girls. They invariably dealt with poor girls being swept away by poor boys who were secretly royalty in disguise-dashing young men who just wanted to see if the girls loved them for themselves and not for their money or status.

  The girls, certainly not Callie, never tired of this particular plot. A prince would come into her life someday. She was sure of it. She just hoped it was before she turned eighteen. That was the age when decline began to set in among the girls at the sweatshops. They came in at eleven or twelve, fresh and pretty as morning-cut flowers. But five, six, seven years of working for a dime an hour, sometimes seven days a week, sometimes twelve hours a day… well, after a few years of that, who could look fresh and pretty?

  So she was all primed to meet somebody like David Stanton that sunny Sunday afternoon when she was strolling in the park with her friend Dorothy Steiner. Dorothy was every bit as pretty as Callie, but she’d fallen in love with a young soldier a few weeks earlier and was waiting for him to get back to Chicago following a brief bivouac for new recruits.

  And that’s how it happened. Stanton took her to plays, baseball games, operettas in the park. He brought her flowers, candy, even wrote her sweet, corny little poems. He took her to places where she had her first real glimpse of urban society. She didn’t know if his friends were really as important as they tried to pretend-but they were certainly more important, and interesting and entertaining, than anybody she’d ever met in the ghetto.

  He was wise enough not to even try and seduce her for some time. She was a good Catholic. Her virginity was a very basic part of her entire personality.

  But he was sly and he was stealthy and so, two weeks after he’d convinced her to give up her job at the sweatshop, two weeks after he’d convinced her that through his various business enterprises he could support them both, he took her one rainy midnight to his apartment. She’d felt curiously tired and worn that night, sorry that she couldn’t be more sensitive and alive to what was going on. Months later, she would realize that he’d drugged her.

  Once they were married, she soon realized that his business enterprises were all confidence games. Not only was he a crook, so were all his important-acting friends. And even more, he enjoyed cheating people out of their money. He and his friends laughed long and drunkenly into the night, exactly like boastful children, about this or that scam and how much they’d enjoyed pulling it.

  She took a teaching job and prayed a lot. Went to three, four masses a week, hoping that God would answer her prayers and turn David into a decent man.

  One night, he asked her to deliver some papers to a certain address. She didn’t want to, but he berated her enough that she finally gave in. The papers turned out to be forgeries of bank documents. When the mark went to the police, he described not only David but David’s “accomplice,” Callie. Thus she became a wanted felon. She found a lawyer and instituted a divorce proceeding. And then she fled Chicago before she could be arrested.

  ***

  “A year later, I met you.”

  “I appreciate you telling me.”

  “I’ve destroyed your life, Lane. I’m sorry.”

  I shook my head. “I agree with the monsignor. We need to wait and see how this thing turns out. I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “Work? But you resigned.”

  “That doesn’t mean I can’t nose around and ask questions. Besides, I want to see what Edgar’s got in mind.” I told her about my meeting with Bayard.

  “He didn’t even give you a hint?”

  “No.”

  “I want to help.”

  “You can help by writing down everything you did yesterday. Write the times down, too, as close as you can remember them. And mention everybody you saw everywhere you went.”

  “I don’t know if I can. After everything that happened- it’s all sort of a jumble.”

  ‘Try. You maybe saw somebody who might prove important and we don’t know it yet.”

  She came over and sat on my lap. The rocking chair squeaked. We rocked for a good long time without saying anything. Her head was on my shoulder. The scent of her hair in my nostrils was pretty damned wonderful.

  I gave up any hope of relaxing, even here in the rocking chair. I was formulating all sorts of ways Stanton could have been murdered and by who.

  ***

  I spent the first hour in town getting stopped by people telling me they wished I haven’t resigned and that they sure hoped I’d reconsider. I appreciated their words, but at the moment I wanted only one thing and that was to find Ned Hastings.

  I had no luck at his hotel, at any of the saloons, at the barbershop or the livery. Hadn’t been there.

  I walked into the section where the vice was contained. Barbara Parsons ran the most popular of the three whorehouses. The place was open only at night. I found Barbara in the backyard behind the two-story white-frame structure, tending, as usual on a warm day, to her garden.

  She was a slender little thing of sixty-some years. She wasn’t pretty, but she managed to make herself attractive by dressing in proper Eastern clothes. She had a yellow dress on. A merry yellow ribbon decorated the right side of her graying head. She was using a pink can to sprinkle water on her chrysanthemums.

  “Looks good,” I said.

  “Me or the flowers?”

  “You are a flower, Barbara. A beautiful, elegant flower.”

  “And you are a bullshit artist, Lane Morgan.”

  I laughed. “My mama taught me to always be polite to ladies.”

  “Well, then you don’t need to worry about me. I’ve never been a lady in my life.” She covered her green eyes from the sun and peered at me. “I heard you quit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I also heard that your wife may be in some trouble.”

  Enough preamble. “I’m looking for Ned Hastings.”

  “Then you came to the right place.”

  I’d expected her to say, at best, that he’d been there and gone. “He’s here?”

  “Upstairs. Still unconscious from last night.”

  “I didn’t know you allowed sleep-overs.”

  “I don’t usually. But I didn’t feel like throwing him in a wagon and hauling his skinny ass back to his hotel.”

  “What about Richard?” He was her colored bouncer and factotum. “Doesn’t he usually haul the unconscious ones away?”

  “Richard’s a mite indisposed himself. Went to a colored whorehouse in Denver his last trip and picked up a very bad case of the syph. He’s back in Denver now bein’ treated for it. I sure wish he’d get his ass back here. I need him.”

  “Mind if I go see Hastings?”

  “No roughhousing. I’ve got a lot of nice things in my house and I mean to keep them nice.”

  “I just want to have a little talk with him.”

  “I hear he’s the one who claims your wife killed Stanton.”

  I nodded. “ Stanton ever come here?”

  “Just once.”

  “You talk to him?”

  “Not much. He was real interested in Irene.”

  “Guess I’m not sure which one she is.”

  “She’s new. Little blonde. Looks like she’s about thirteen or fourteen. She’s actually seventeen. Some fellows like ’em young like that. Seems to give ’em an extra kick for some reason.”

  “She around?”
>
  “Should be. Turns out Hastings is one of them who likes his pussy young, too. He kept her up till damned near dawn.”

  “Any trouble with him?”

  She smiled. “Not that he wasn’t willing to pay for.” Then: “Fact, the little blonde tells me he had a nice pocket full of gold pieces.”

  “Wonder where he got ’em.”

  She shrugged. “A business like mine, Lane, you never ask. All you care about is if they’ve got it.”

  ***

  The interior of the house was as tasteful as Barbara Parsons’s wardrobe. All very proper furnishings, and a nice big fieldstone fireplace in the parlor where the gentlemen sat as the girls came down for inspection. The framed prints were of idyllic New England scenes. Barbara’s only visible sentimental streak had to do with her girlhood in Vermont.

  Most of the girls were gone. They spent a lot of time shopping. Most folks didn’t bother them. There’d been a few incidents, but I was able to get the self-righteous back in their cages before any serious damage was done.

  Hastings wasn’t hard to find. I followed the noise on the second floor, his snoring. I peeked in on him. He lay on his back, shirtless, in trousers. A few black flies supped on what appeared to be wine. His near-hairless chest was purple and looked sticky.

  I went down to the end of the hall, knocked on the door Barbara had told me to. “Uh-huh.” That was all the acknowledgment I got. I pushed the door open. She sat in a satin sleeping dress. She was a bit thinner than I liked my women, but she had a face that had probably broken a thousand hearts, all clean-scrubbed innocence just waiting to be defiled.

  “Hi, Marshal. I seen you out the window. Talking to Barbara.”

  I tried hard not to notice her nipples beneath the sheer material. She had a kid grin. “Should I cover up more since you’re the law?”

  “I’m not the law anymore.”

  Her fetching blond head gave a start. “How come?”