“Sidewinders. Them’s rattlers, and a word suited for the likes of the Rhomers.”
“I know what a ‘sidewinder’ is, Tulley. I just want to make you know your job isn’t ‘town character’ anymore. You’re a deputy now.”
“Well, this deputy could use some shut-eye.”
“Come midnight, camp out under that window over there.” York pointed toward the livery stable. “You hear anybody ride into town, wake up like a real rattler crawled up your pant leg.”
Tulley nodded. “You sleepin’ in the jailhouse tonight?”
“No. I made arrangements to bunk in over there.” He pointed to the nearest shanty of a pueblo in the barrio. “So you know what to do?”
“I know.”
“Once you’ve done it, scramble back in that livery and take cover. They could come after you.”
“They do, and we’ll have ’em in a squeeze, won’t we?”
“That’s the idea. One of the ideas, anyway.”
A big toothy grin blossomed in the white beard. “People gonna write about this, ain’t they? Ned Buntline and them dime-novel authors.”
“Yep. The trick is to be alive to read ’em.”
Tulley closed one eye and jabbed a finger at him. “You stay alive, too, Caleb York. I needs somebody to read ’em to me.”
York walked down to the Victory Saloon, where business was a little better tonight but still nothing to get excited over, and found Rita at the bar in conversation with Hub.
“A word?” York said to her.
In a red-and-black satin number, she shrugged and led him to a table in an empty area of the saloon. They both sat.
She said, “I hear the Citizens Committee tried to give you the boot. And you talked them out of it. I never took you for the slick type, Sheriff.”
He ignored that. “How’s Pearl doing?”
“Better today. I’m backing her off on her bottle of happiness. She’s talking about going back to work.”
“What kind of work?”
Rita smirked. “The kind you think. If I can wean her off that laudanum, I might be able to keep her on here, after I shut the brothel down. She’d be a right pretty girl with some meat on her, and if those dark bags under her eyes would pack up and leave.”
Hub brought his boss a Mule Skinner and York a beer.
York sipped the warm brew, then asked, “She have other special male friends, besides that bank clerk?”
“None that want to marry her. Several that saw her regular.”
“Would one of them be Gil Willart? Foreman out at the Circle G?”
Her glass froze halfway to her lips. “Why do you ask that?”
“Playin’ a hunch. You know Willart? Never mind Pearl—is he a regular here?”
A tiny shrug. “He comes in, time to time.”
“You know, I believe I’ve seen him in here myself. I might even put it stronger than ‘time to time.’ ”
A bigger shrug. “Put it however you like it, Sheriff. It surprise you, we got cowboys around here who are regulars? Who else did you think we catered to?”
He sipped beer. “Gil Willart was in Las Vegas for a couple days this week, on Circle G business.”
“Fascinating, the information you lawmen pick up.”
“Speakin’ of that, I received a wire today from the sheriff in Las Vegas, warning me the Rhomers are heading to Trinidad. Packing five bullets with my name on ’em. Knowin’ the Rhomers, all misspelled.”
Her expression was bored, or pretended to be. “Should I stop you when this starts having anything to do with me or the Victory?”
“Don’t bother. We’re almost there. What the sheriff in Las Vegas didn’t tell me was that the Rhomers are hired guns in this. That somebody paid them to take their vengeance out on me. Oh, that’s right—you told me, Rita.”
“Did I? I forget. I run at the mouth sometimes. Bad habit.”
Another sip of beer. “You wouldn’t tell me who told you, as I recall. I’m guessing it was Willart.”
She said nothing.
He grinned at her. “Think we just got there, didn’t we? The place where this starts to have somethin’ to do with you, Rita, and this place.”
She said nothing.
“It was Gil Willart who told you the Rhomers were coming after me. Because it was Gil Willart who hired them to do it.”
She winced as if he were being so stupid, it hurt. “Why would Gil hire somebody to kill you?”
“Because somebody told him to. That bank president, maybe. Now tell me this—why didn’t you want to say Gil was who told you? You’re not a priest. What’s betraying that kind of confidence to you, anyway?”
“Sheriff . . . Caleb. . . .” She sighed and touched his hand. My God, her eyes were wet! “There’s some things you shouldn’t ask me. There’s some things I shouldn’t tell you.”
“Let me tell you something then—no ‘ask’ about it. That bank president, or some accomplice of his, murdered Pearl’s intended. And that bank clerk could be just the first, should there be other loose ends that need snipping. Are you one, Rita? Is Pearl?”
She drew her hand back. “Caleb. Please don’t.”
“I want to put her in a jail cell.”
“Pearl didn’t do anything!”
“I know she didn’t. I want to protect her. You should be in the cell next to her, and whether you did or didn’t do anything, I want to protect you, too.”
Those dark eyes were wet. “Why do you want to protect me?”
“Because I’m the sheriff.”
“Not the man who saw me in the glow of lamplight?”
“I’m him, too. We both want to protect you.”
She swallowed thickly. Sighed deep. Her lashes fluttered like tired butterflies.
Then she said, “He’s here right now.”
York sat up. “Who’s here right now?”
“Gil Willart.”
“What the hell . . . ?”
“He was worried about Pearl. He’s one of her regulars, I told you. One of her . . . special men.”
York looked at her, disgusted. “You mean, he’s up there right now, bouncin’ on the bedsprings with that sick kid?”
“No, no, no. He cares about her. Truly cares. He just wanted to check on her, talk to her. . . .”
York was out of his chair and halfway across the room in seconds. He started up the stairs and then, heading down them, came a cowboy in dusty chaps and a green-striped silk shirt and a hat so battered its original shape was a mystery. He was of medium size with an oversized mustache, and his squashed oval face was home to leathery skin and green eyes.
Gil Willart.
For a moment, the two men froze, each with a hand hovering over a holstered six-gun.
York tried to calm the situation. “Just need a word, Gil. Just a word.”
Right hand still poised to draw, York gestured with his left for Willart to keep coming. When they were on the same step, the two men walked slowly down, side by side, and then over to an empty table toward the front.
York and Willart sat across from each other. The weathered foreman looked glum.
“How’s Pearl doing?” York asked.
“She’s gonna be okay. Purty blue right now. Been through plenty.”
“You like the girl.”
“I do.”
“Maybe you’d like to take her away from all this.”
“What d’you mean, Sheriff?”
“Maybe give her a better life.”
“I’m a damn cowboy.”
“So, you weren’t jealous? Of Upton?”
The green eyes in the leather mask flared. “That pip-squeak! Hell, no. If he wanted to marry her, that was jake with me. Pleased to see her catch a break.”
“You wouldn’t have minded that? Her going off and marrying somebody else?”
The cowboy shook his head. “No. Why, you think I belly-shot that clean-nails bastard? No, sir. I wasn’t even in town.”
“That’s
right, Gil. You were in Las Vegas.”
Willart shifted casually. “I was at that. Lookin’ into buying some cattle for my new boss.”
“Didn’t happen to run into the Rhomer boys while you was there, did you?”
The foreman frowned. “What’s Rita been tellin’ you, anyways? You know you can’t believe nothin’ these whores come up with.”
“Call Rita a ‘whore’ again, Gil, and I’ll hand you your teeth.”
York waved Rita over.
“Yes?” she said.
“Check on Pearl,” York said. “If she’s up to comin’ down, put a robe on her and bring her. If not, tell her we’re comin’ up to talk.”
Rita shook her head. “Can’t you leave the poor kid alone?”
“No.”
She sighed and trudged off.
“Gil,” York said pleasantly, “if I find out you hired the Rhomers to come and kill me, I’ll consider that right unfriendly.”
Willart worked up a sneer. “And you’ll kill me like you killed so many?”
“Most likely, yes. Now my thinking is, you don’t have enough against me to hire those Rhomers yourself. You’d be doin’ it for somebody else. That banker maybe.”
“I’m listenin’.”
York shrugged. “Well, in that case, I’d be way madder at who give you that task than at you for carryin’ it out. I might even trade your worthless goddamn life for such information.”
Willart was thinking about that, green eyes moving, when the scream came from upstairs.
A woman’s scream, it ripped the quiet night at the Victory apart like a piece of cheap cloth. York and Willart both jumped to their feet, looking up in the direction of that terrified howl.
Rita was on the landing in front of the doors to the dance-hall girls’ cribs, leaning on the railing, her face white, her eyes huge, the red mouth in the pretty face distorted into something ugly.
“It’s Pearl!” she cried.
“Come with me,” York said to Willart, but he needn’t have bothered, because the cowboy was just behind him as they both bounded up the stairs.
The door to Pearl’s room stood open, the way Rita had left it.
The skinny brunette was sprawled on the bed, still half under a sheet, much of that sheet stained scarlet now, the girl’s head back too far, in a position made possible by whoever slashed her throat ear to ear, creating a gaping, grinning second mouth. The blood had run down the front of her white nightgown, like her body was crying for her, but she was dead, so it wasn’t flowing now.
York instinctively turned to Willart, whose horrified expression turned to fear as he shoved York, hard, and took off running.
York followed the cowboy out onto the corridor of the landing. Gasps and cries came up from the patrons below. Willart ran down the stairs so fast that he stumbled a third of the way from the bottom, somersaulting the rest of the distance, and when the cowboy got to his feet, he found himself facing Caleb York, halfway down the steps by now.
“Don’t!” York said, holding up his left palm, and stopping where he was.
But Willart went for his gun, and it hadn’t cleared its holster when York’s two .44 bullets ripped through him, shaking him, making him do the saddest little dance, as blood shot out his back in twin streams, before he crumpled on legs that, no matter how bowed, just couldn’t hold him up anymore.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The explosive reports of his .44 were still echoing and reverberating in the high-ceilinged saloon when—still several steps up from the man he’d just shot—Caleb York said, “Damn.”
He went down those last few steps and knelt by Gil Willart, knowing the man would be dead but checking anyway. Rita was making her way slowly down the stairs, leaning a hand on the banister all the way down. Her face was white as a lace hanky.
She paused on the step from which York had fired, asking, “Did you have to kill him?”
Slowly, York got to his feet. “I wish to hell I hadn’t. He died knowing things I need to.”
The dark eyes were big and round. “Why did you then? You shot him twice, Sheriff. If you wanted him alive . . .”
“A man pulls on me, I put him down.” He glanced at her. “That’s how I can be standing here jawing about it with you.”
She drew in a breath, nodded. But she stayed where she was on the stairs, the garish beauty of her dance-hall attire at odds with the crumpled shot-to-hell cowboy at its foot.
York asked the woman, “Were any of the other rooms up there occupied?”
She shook her head. “No. None of the girls was doing any . . . entertaining this evening.”
“Well, we need to clear this place out,” the sheriff said, but when he turned to look, the clientele had already skedaddled. All that remained were one bartender and the dealer at the poker table, as well as the girls at the table back near the empty dance floor and unmanned piano. The doves looked ashen and afraid, and one was crying. They’d clearly seen Willart die, and even in a room this size, the bouquet of gunpowder lingered.
Finally getting around to holstering his .44, York went over to the bar and told Hub to stand guard at the batwing doors. For now, the Victory was closed. The big bartender did this without comment or question.
Then York went over to the poker table and told the gambling man who dealt there to go fetch Doc Miller.
The dealer, Yancy Cole, wore a white round-brim black-banded hat, a gray suit, and a ruffled shirt. It was the kind of outfit that got you killed if you weren’t a gambler, and sometimes got you killed, anyway.
In a Southern accent that might have been real, Cole said, “Perhaps the unduh-take-ah might be the bettah party to bring around.”
“We won’t have to send for the undertaker,” York said. “He should be here anytime now.”
The sheriff had barely spoken those words when the bartender at the doors let in a little man all in black—did Perkins sleep in those mourner’s duds?—and came over in a solemn one-man procession. He had his black beaver high hat in hand, revealing a head bald as an egg, and he was skeleton skinny under that frock coat.
Perkins stood near the corpse and said to York, “Has the deceased any family?”
“Not that I know of. Likely be the usual two dollars paid by the city.”
The undertaker nodded. Such bad news was as inevitable as death itself.
“But there’s another two dollars upstairs,” York said encouragingly. “One of the girls here. Murdered.”
“By this gentleman?”
“I don’t believe so. But I don’t want any of the bodies dragged off just yet. I have some detective work to do here first.”
Hub was letting Doc Miller in. Based upon the rumpled state of his brown suit, and his uncombed white hair, the stubby little medic probably did sleep in his clothes.
The doc, Gladstone bag in hand, trundled over and raised a white eyebrow at the corpse, then turned his gaze to the undertaker and raised the other one.
“Mr. Perkins here has the right idea,” Miller said. “There appears to be nothing more to be done for this poor creature but to bury him.”
“Agreed,” York said, then gestured a thumb at the ceiling. “And you’ve lost another patient upstairs.”
York filled the doctor in.
Having absorbed it all, Miller nodded toward the undertaker. “That also sounds more like this gentleman’s purview than my own.”
“No, Doc, I want you to bring your medical eye to the murder room.”
That seemed reasonable to Miller, who followed the sheriff up the stairs, Rita having already gone back up to the landing, where she paced a small area, arms folded.
As the two men stood poised at the doorway of Pearl’s little room, the doc said, “Well, our dead friend downstairs didn’t do this.”
“I know he didn’t.”
“Then my medical eye may not be needed. How did you come up with that diagnosis, Caleb?”
York gestured. “Headboard’s against the wall.
The girl’s killer faced her. Left side of the bed, I’d say. A throat slashed like that bleeds all to hell. Willart would have been covered in the stuff.”
Miller nodded. “Well-reasoned. He’d have been sprayed head to thigh. Whoever did this went out dripping.”
“Good point. Keep lookin’, Doc, I’ll be back right quick.”
York moved out onto the narrow strip of landing between wall and railing. The flooring had a runner of carpet, dark red, and on close inspection, drops of similar red indeed could be made out. They led to the doorway onto the rear stairs that emptied out into the alley where not so long ago Tulley had found the body of Pearl’s bank-clerk fiancé.
Those stairs were bare wood and all the way down a trail of red drops, tiny splashes where they hit, led to the door and then out into the alley. There the killer had mocked York by dumping something between those two garbage barrels, right where Upton had been found.
A duster, the front of the tan light-linen coat drenched in Pearl’s blood, still shimmering with it, lay crumpled, discarded, like a skin a snake crawled out of.
Well, hadn’t one?
A tossed handkerchief was covered in blood—the killer had wiped his face off, since that much flesh at least had been exposed to the scarlet spray.
York could see where somebody had scraped the bottom of their shoes the way you would deal with muddy soles before heading inside. Smears of blood were dug into the wavy, heavy shoe marks, and no droplets led away from the alley at all.
A cold-blooded killing had taken place in the very building where—and while—York had been questioning Gil Willart. That is, the killer’s blood had been cold—Pearl’s was still warm. But the sheriff had no doubt that when Willart left Pearl, she’d still been breathing.
This had just happened.
And the killer had slipped away, out the back door, like a cheating husband.
Right under York’s damn nose.
Heaving a sigh of self-disapproval, York trudged up those back stairs and soon was with the doctor in the murder room again.
“She died quick,” the doc said. “Horribly, but quick. One of those small favors we’re expected to thank God for.”
“What else can you tell me?”
The doc pointed to the floor near the bed. “Look under there. That’s the murder weapon.”
The Big Showdown Page 16
