by Ed Gorman
“And Phil of course would be blameless?”
Bayard snorted. “Well, Letty Chesney’s been buying those stories of his for years. So why wouldn’t she buy this one?” The pipe went back into his mouth. He dragged on it, but it was already dead. He took a lucifer and struck it underneath his desk. When he got the pipe going again, he said, “One afternoon, this employee of mine is out hunting near the cabin, and he sees Stanton standing on the front porch. And Stanton isn’t alone. Laura Webley is with him.” It sounded right. Maybe it was just because I wanted to believe it. But still and all, it sounded right. “Callie said Stanton used to love to seduce the wives of powerful men. It gave him a sense of power, too. You know, having something like that over them.”
“He comes to town and offers all this stuff on Callie to Paul. Webley pays him and asks him to hang around to verify everything if and when it comes out-just in case you didn’t back off Trent the way he wanted you to-and so Stanton decides to have a little fun while he’s hanging around. He sees that Webley’s wife is a beauty and he goes after her. Everybody knows how much she hates this town, thinks we’re all a bunch of hayseeds and ruffians, and so when she sees a sharpie like Stanton, she decides to have a little fun for herself.” He paused and then said it for me: “What if Paul found out about it? What do you think he’d do?”
“Kill Stanton.”
“Right-as far as it goes. But you’ve got to put yourself in Paul’s mind. He’s a very devious little man. I admit I hate him because of what he did to the Utes-but I still can’t take anything away from him. He plans everything out very thoroughly.”
“So,” I said, “he kills Stanton, but he also has somebody ready to take the blame.”
“And who better than Callie? As I say, you know how much I hate the man, Lane. So my opinion of all this is prejudiced. But I think it’s something you should look into.”
“Hell, yes, it’s something I should look into.”
“I don’t want to see him get away with this-if he’s involved. I’m not going to be alive and kicking too many more years. I’d sure hate to go out with Webley getting away with a murder he’d committed.”
“I appreciate this, Edgar.”
“I’m the one who’s appreciative, Lane. You’re doing my work for me. I wasn’t sure how to handle this. But I know you will.”
“I’m sure going to give it a try, Edgar. I’m sure going to give it a try.”
FOURTEEN
I SAT IN the cafe across the street from the marshal’s office. Callie didn’t come out for nearly two hours. Even from here I could see how drawn and shaken she looked. Her shoulders were stooped, which wasn’t like her, and when she went to step up on the buckboard, she missed and fell against the vehicle. She put her head down. I wondered if she was crying.
I was next to her in less than a minute, turning her so that she faced me, letting her fall into my arms. She wasn’t crying. I held up her face. Her eyes were colder than I’d ever seen them. A kind of crazed cold, part rage, part shock.
Old Sam was there a moment later. “Horace didn’t go easy on her. I didn’t expect him to. But then I didn’t expect him to be quite as rough as he was either.” He put his hand on Callie’s shoulder. “How you doing, sweetheart?”
“Tired,” she said. The anger was waning. She seemed to slump even more. She looked up at me and said, “All the way into town, I kept thinking this was just a formality. That Horace just had to go through the motions. But I think he really believes I did it, Lane. He really thinks I killed David.”
“He’s taking himself off the case as of right now,” Old Sam said. “He’s going to send for another prosecutor to handle it.”
“I thought he was our friend,” Callie said, sounding dazed. “All those dinners at his house-”
Old Sam said, “Maybe you’d better get her home, Lane.” A few minutes later, I was sitting on the buckboard seat, Callie next to me, and we were leaving town. It was a smoky autumn afternoon. I followed the arc of an eagle down the sky to the west and the galloping flight of a chestnut stallion across a hill to the east. Callie said nothing, not even after I told her what Edgar Bayard had told me about Paul’s wife. “How you doing?”
“Tired.”
“You go right to bed.”
“I really did think we were friends.”
‘Try not to think about it.”
“I’m so sick to my stomach, I want to throw up.”
“Want me to stop the wagon?”
“No, please, just go on home.”
I got her to bed. I forced her to sip on a shot of whiskey. I left the front door ajar to let in the soft breeze.
“I won’t be here when you wake up.”
“You going out to that cabin?”
“Worth a try.”
“Laura would be just the type David would have gone after. Selling blackmail about me to Webley and then sleeping with his wife on the side. David would think that was just great.”
“Sounds like a hero.”
She smiled. “Oh, yes, a real hero.”
She held her hand up, waved me over to her. I sat down on the bed and put my head into the warm female sweetness of her neck. “It’s starting to get loose,” she said.
“What’s starting to get loose?”
“My neck.”
“Not that I’ve noticed.”
“Sure, you’ve noticed. I’m getting older and my neck’s going. That’s the first thing that goes in all the women in my family. The neck.”
She started crying then. A gentle crying but a very melancholy one. She gets in moods-as do I-when you let it all rush in like a tidal wave, all the things that have bothered you of late, even some of the things that have bothered you for years. And you almost drown in them.
“I just need to cry.”
“I know.”
“Sometimes it’s the only thing I know how to do.”
I nodded, held her hand.
“When I get like this,” she said, “I even think of the kitten you bought me that time.”
“Alexandra.”
“Yeah.”
“She lost all that weight,” she said, “and died so fast. She was so tiny.”
***
Things that have bothered you of late; things that have bothered you for years. Poor little Alexandra was a long ways back there on our road together. But her memory came back to both of us every once in a while.
She took good care of her dun and so did I. I talked to the animal a few minutes, and when he seemed comfortable enough with me, I got ready to go. I used her saddle, a lightweight California style with a lot of tooling, and her bridle, which was braided horsehair. I took her Winchester as well, mine still being back in the livery with my horse.
The warm afternoon seemed to have inspired a lot of work among squirrels, chipmunks, and beavers. I saw a good number of them along the wide lake that led to the steep, rocky Ute path that led to Chesney’s cabin. Between the green aspens, I caught glimpses of the ruins some Easterner professors had spent most of the year looking at. The newspaper interviewed them. They said they thought the ruins pointed to a prehistoric civilization of some kind. Callie had read the article to her students. It’s all they’d wanted to talk about for days.
The cabin was actually a house and a nice one. Chesney was a minor cattle baron who’d done especially well selling beeves to the Army during the days of the Indian wars. He was an argumentative man, and God help you if you hinted that his prices to our fighting troops had smacked of war profiteering.
The exterior of the place was cedar shingles. There was a long, screened-in front porch. To the right of the house was a gazebo and to the left a horseshoe pit and enough room for a croquet match. He loved his parties, especially the ones his sickly wife didn’t attend.
I had no idea what I was looking for. Even if it was true that Laura Webley had come out here, what did I expect to find that would prove it?
I hid my horse in the woods and then w
alked up to the house. I had drawn my Colt, though the stillness of the place made me feel a little foolish about it. Maybe I’d have a shoot-out with a raccoon. The place looked deserted.
Before going in, I stood on the porch and surveyed the area. The cabin had been built on the rocky crest of a small mountain. It stood in the center of a clearing surrounded by green aspens and jack pines. You could see sunlit flashes of the lake below. And you could see, in the blue and autumn-hazy distance, the town of Skylar.
The only sounds were those of birds and some heavy thrashing of undergrowth in the nearby forest. Maybe a bear.
I went inside. I always confiscate burglar tools when I find them on felons I arrest. I keep the best of the tools for myself. They come in handy.
The interior of the place was just about what I expected. The heads of a lot of dead animals on the walls-proving the virility of the cabin’s owner-leather furnishings, a huge stone fireplace, a polished wooden floor with colorful hooked rugs, a kitchen that most women would kill to own, and a small screened-in porch on the back that was all set up with an expensive poker table and chairs.
The upstairs consisted of three large bedrooms, each laid out identically-bureau, closet, double bed. It all had the feel of a hotel. Everything had been cleaned recently. Even the bedclothes seemed fresh.
I spent half an hour going through all the bureaus and closets and found nothing. I’d come out here filled with hope. I’d find something that linked Laura Webley to Stanton. I’d find something so conclusive that I’d be able to link the Webleys directly to Stanton ’s murder. And then my wife could have her life back.
I ended up sitting on the back porch at the poker table with the heavy blanket thrown over it to protect it from rain. I rolled myself a smoke and tried to puzzle through what to do next. The trip had been wasted. There’d been a good number of women through this place over the years, but whoever cleaned it up for Chesney made sure there was no trace of them left behind. In fact, the place had been cleaned so thoroughly, it was almost as if no human being had ever set foot in the place.
I was rolling cigarette number two when I heard the sound of horseshoes working carefully against the rocky path leading to the house.
I hurried to the front window to see who was coming.
I’d never seen her in anything less formal than an expensive Chicago dress. Even in a plain white blouse and butternuts, though, there was something formal and doll-like about Laura Webley. Her chestnut hair almost matched the color of her mount.
I walked over to the closet beneath the staircase. Stepped inside, realizing as I did so that she’d find the front door unlocked. Maybe she’d make something of that and maybe she wouldn’t.
I waited.
She took some time coming in. I wondered what she was doing. Maybe, finding the front door unlocked, she was leery of walking around inside.
She was as light of foot as Callie. I could picture her diminutive steps, the polite and unimposing way she carried herself, as she stood in the center of all those masculine symbols in the front room-not just the animal heads, but the gun racks and portraits of racehorses and bare-knuckle champions-standing there so elegant and refined even in her riding clothes, seeming a little lost and overwhelmed.
Then she went to work.
She opened and closed all the same closet doors I had, all the same bureau drawers I had, walked all the same steps up and down. And apparently came to the same conclusion I had: Whatever she was looking for wasn’t here.
She’d forgotten one closet, though. The one I was hiding in. She knew her way around this place. She’d know where to look and where not to look. I guessed this was one place she ruled out as being a good possibility for her search.
But then, just as I had, she got a little desperate. She started opening and closing some of the same closet doors and bureau drawers again. Second time through. I could imagine her reasoning. Maybe I missed something the first time through. Maybe it was right in front of me all that time and I missed it.
I knew that eventually she’d get to the closet I was hiding in and eventually she’d find me.
***
When the door opened, I just stood there with my Colt pointing directly at her. She made a small gasping sound and then said, “Oh, God, Marshal, you scared me.”
“I meant to,” I said, and then stepped out from the closet.
“You meant to? Why, that’s a terrible thing to say. And why are you holding your gun on me?”
“I thought maybe you had a gun.”
“Me? I wouldn’t know how to use one.”
“How about a knife? Have you ever used one of those?” I don’t think she understood the implication at first. But within seconds recognition shone in her eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I took her arm. “Where’re we going?” she asked.
“The back porch.”
“But I-”
“I’ll save you the trouble, Mrs. Webley. I’ve already gone through the whole house. I didn’t find nothing and you won’t either. Chesney must’ve hired somebody to clean this place up, and they did a very good job.”
She jerked her arm free. “I don’t want you touching me.” I gave her a slight shove in the direction of the back porch.
“Paul is going to be very unhappy when I tell him how you treated me.”
“He’s going to be even more unhappy when I tell him about you and Stanton.”
“Me and Stanton? You mean David Stanton? I hardly knew him.”
“Sure.”
She quit walking. “If that’s what this is about, then you’ll waste a conversation on me. As I said, I hardly knew him.”
“Then what’re you doing here?”
“I-I left something here a week or so ago. There was a party.”
“I assume Paul was with you. Husbands usually accompany their wives to parties.”
For all her beauty and poise, which were considerable, she was an amateur when it came to lying. She gulped and stammered and glanced from side to side. “He was sick. He stayed home.”
“I can’t think of a single husband who’d let his wife go alone to one of Chesney’s parties.”
“Paul trusts me completely.”
“Then he’s a fool.”
I gave her another push toward the back door.
When I got her seated at the poker table, she said, “You’re not the marshal anymore anyway. Why should I do anything you tell me to?”
“Because if you don’t, I go straight to your husband.”
“If you mean with that stupid story about me and David Stanton-”
“Somebody saw you out here, Mrs. Webley. Saw you and Stanton.”
“I don’t believe it. Who saw me? I want to know so I can call them a liar to their face.”
“They saw you, Mrs. Webley. I take their word for it. And even if your husband doesn’t believe me right away, he’ll start thinking about it. He’ll start wondering if there wasn’t maybe some truth to what I said. And he’ll start discreetly asking questions. He’s a powerful man. People are afraid of him. Eventually he’ll find out the truth. And then where’ll you be, Mrs. Webley?”
We didn’t say anything for a long time. I just listened to the birds and thought of poor Callie at home. I hoped she was sound asleep. Right now that was the only escape open to her.
Mrs. Webley said, “I only saw him once.”
“I don’t believe you.”
She made a face. Even making a face she was lovely. Spoiled and lovely. Empty and lovely.
“It would destroy Paul. For such a powerful man, he’s very sensitive.”
“I want the truth.”
She sighed. “The truth is I came here today to see if I’d left anything behind. And yes, I saw him a few times. ”
“You had what the French call an affair.”
Her smile was deadly. “Imagine. A town marshal telling me about the French. You’ve been to Paris, I assume, Marshal?”
“Y
ou had an affair. And you started to like him more than you’d planned. And when you found out he was seeing other women, you got angry and smashed up his hotel room.”
She started to say something and then fell into silence again.
She had very long, elegant fingers. She splayed them on top of the blanket covering the poker table, and we both inspected them.
She said, not looking up from her hand, “He got mad at me one day when I got jealous, and said that my face and hands were starting to look old. He was lying. He just wanted to hurt me.”
She wanted a compliment, reassurance. She didn’t get one.
“How many times were you in his hotel room, Mrs. Webley?”
“Just a few times.”
“How many?”
She shrugged, finally pulling her gaze from her hands and looking at me. “You know how I got in and out without being spotted? I dressed like an old Indian woman. It was dangerous but it was fun, disguising myself that way. It made me feel young again. Back East-I used to have fun all the time. But out here-” She paused. “I’m sorry I said that about Paris. I was just being a snob. I’m a terrible snob, I’m afraid. It’s how I was raised. Then my poor father went broke-he’d owned a huge shipbuilding company and one of his partners betrayed him-and then I wasn’t rich any longer. All I had left-all my sisters and I had left-was our totally useless finishing-school education and our snobbery. Those don’t get you much in the real world.”
“So that’s when you met Paul?”
“Yes. He was back East, buying things. He wants to be taken seriously as a person. It’s because he’s so small. I don’t think he feels very manly sometimes. He can’t do anything about his size, but he can do something about his social standing. At least he thinks he can. So we go back East two or three times a year, and he buys things.”
“You’re too bright not to have known what Stanton was right off.”
This time there was a sad, knowing warmth in the smile. “Of course I knew what he was right off. That was the fun of it. The danger, as I said. Sneaking around. Having him tell me all those wonderful lies about myself. He hated anybody who was more powerful than he was. So he always made a point of seducing their wives. That way he had the power over them, if that makes any sense.”
