Find Angel! (A Frank Angel Western #1) (8 page)

‘
Well, it isn’t good enough, Angus,’ the Attorney-General
said. ‘Haven’t the Provost-Marshal’s office come up with
anything?’

‘
Just
the names,’ Wells replied. ‘They’re in the report.’

‘
Anything known?’

‘
Like
it says,’ Wells told him. ‘Cravetts was in the California Column.
Mustered out in Fort Stanton, New Mexico in ’66. That’s all we
have.’

‘
Not
enough,’ grunted the Attorney-General. He reached over his desk and
took a long, black cigar from the box on his right, then offered
it, as an afterthought, to Wells. The latter shook his head as the
Attorney-General set fire to the cigar. He had once unwisely
accepted one of those cigars; they tasted like a mixture of tarred
rope and horse blankets. The Attorney-General inhaled with every
indication of huge enjoyment and blew a cloud of smoke towards the
ceiling.

‘
Not
enough at all. You’ve read all this stuff, of course? He gestured
with his cigar towards the sheaf of papers on his desk.

‘
Nothing much there either,’ Wells said. ‘The
Provost-Marshal’s people did the best they could, but there was
really nothing to follow up. They robbed the paymaster’s wagon at
Fort Riley, then turned up at a ranch near Fort Dodge, where they
killed two men and raped a woman, stealing ten horses. After that
they disappeared. Nobody saw them. All we have are sketchy
descriptions provided by the woman — ’

‘
Mrs.
Gibbons?’

‘ —
that’s right, sir, and the names of the men.’

‘
What
about this youngster who pulled her out of the house. The hired
hand, what was his name? He shuffled through the papers and picked
out something with his finger. ‘Angel. Frank Angel. Could he have
been involved in any way?’

‘
Inside man, you mean?’ Wells shook his head. ‘I doubt it. The
Army people at Fort Larned spoke very highly of him.’

‘
And
… ?’

‘
And
nothing. He seems to have dropped out of sight.’

The
Attorney-General tapped his teeth with the shouldering
cigar.

‘
Interesting,’ he said.

‘
Not
really, sir,’ Wells replied. ‘By all accounts he was just a young
fellow without any family. He probably drifted off looking for
another job somewhere. Could be anywhere in Kansas.’

The
Attorney—General shrugged. ‘If you think so,’ he said. ‘But I want
some action on this, Angus. If that gang gets off scot-free,
they’ll hit another payroll somewhere, or a bank, or a mining
shipment. Look at all the trouble down there in Missouri with this
guerilla gang.’

‘
In
Clay County, you mean? The James-Younger bunch? That’s just local
stuff,’ Wells said.

The
Attorney-General shook his head. ‘No, Angus, you’re wrong. They’ll
cross a State line, sooner or later. Iowa, perhaps, or Kansas. Then
they’ll be our problem.’

‘
You
may be right,’ Wells said.

‘
Damn
sure of it,’ the Attorney-General said. ‘That’s why I want this
Cravetts bunch brought in. Nipped in the bud, stopped now. Before
they get the taste for it,’

Wells
nodded. ‘You want me to get on to it myself.’ It wasn’t a question
and the Attorney-General nodded.

‘
As
soon as you can,’ he said. ‘When can you start?’

‘
I
can be in Fort Riley by the middle of the week,’ Wells
replied.

The
Attorney-General looked up, surprise in his eyes.

Then
he smiled.

‘
No,
no, Angus,’ he said. ‘We’re going to play this one a little more
cunningly. You’ll never backtrack that bunch. The trail is two
months old. I want you to try something else.’

Wells
leaned forward. He liked to see the Chief’ s mind working: his
hunches were legendary.

‘
Fort
Stanton, New Mexico,’ the Attorney-General said, almost dreamily.
‘Start there. And work forwards. My hunch is you’ll meet them
coming in instead of chasing them halfway across the
country.’

‘
It’s
worth a try,’ Wells said. ‘I’ll get started.’

‘
You’ll have to do better than just try, Angus,’ the man in
the chair by the big window said flatly. ‘I want this wrapped up
and I want it wrapped up very soon, and I want it wrapped up by
this Department and not the Army. Do I make myself
clear?’

Wells
nodded, and went out of the office. The Attorney-General’s
secretary was sitting in the anteroom, copying some reports. She
looked up and smiled.

Wells
shook his head. ‘Phew!’ he said.

Miss
Rowe smiled again. She’d never seen one of the Department’s
Investigators come out of that room yet with a smile on his
face.

He
rode in past San Miguel Church.

Children playing in the dusty streets outside huddled jacals
called to him as he rode by, and the men lounging in the shade of
the plaza’s big cottonwoods eyed him beneath tilted sombreros as he
hitched his horse outside the hotel.

Frank
Angel had come a long way, and he looked different now to the
youngster who had set out so many weeks ago from Fort Larned. There
was a different air about him. A lot of the boyishness was gone
from the face, to be replaced by a wolf like angling of the jaws
and a cold, wary look in the pale eyes that said, as clearly as if
the word was written on his forehead: hunter.

The
trail he was on was much warmer now. There were fewer places for
his quarry to be, and where they had passed, people had recalled
los gringos. At Herlow’s Hotel on San Francisco Street in old Santa
Fe, they had purchased new horses. Old Herlow had been happy to
describe them, and their riders, to the cold—eyed inquisitor,
happier still to accept the twenty dollars Angel gave him for his
help. He had brought a new horse himself — a rangy, lineback dun
with plenty of stamina. He had new clothes, bought as had been the
horse with the money he had taken without shame from the men he had
killed in Las Vegas. He did not think much about the rights and
wrongs of the way he had killed them. They were a species of
vermin. Only a fool would release a trapped rat to breed another
generation of rats.

Socorro was quieter these days than it had been when the
mining boom had been on, but it was still a bustling, lively town.
Big rambling adobes fronted on to the plaza, and the streets were
busy with pack trains heading up into the Magdalenas or moving
carefully south towards the Jornado del Muerto.

He
went into the cantina next to the hotel.

‘
A
beer,’ he said. ‘The coldest one in the place.’

‘
Si
senor,’ grinned the bartender. He drew the beer and put it on the
rough bar, the foam slopping over the sides of the glass. After the
hard dry heat of the desert, it was like drinking iced nectar.
Angel drank it down in one long swallow and put the glass down,
motioning the barkeep to fill it up again. He looked around. There
were only a few people in the place, most of them
Mexicans.

‘
Have
one yourself,’ Angel said to the man behind the bar, and watched
while the man filled a glass. ‘Where’s the bank here?’

The
bartender directed him across the plaza and he walked through the
tree-shaded square across to the solid adobe building which housed
the First National Bank of Santa Fe. He pushed inside into the
welcome cool gloom.

There
was a counter with a grille in front of it, a door to one side. He
asked to see the manager.

The
man came out of the office. He was a slender man of about forty, a
neatly-trimmed beard and florid face.

‘
How
can I help you, sir?’ he said.

‘
I’d
like to get some coin for this,’ Angel said, handing the man the
buckskin bag of gold dust he had taken off Kamins. The manager
hefted it in his hand. His eyes flickered over Angel briefly as he
set up the scales.

‘
Stranger in these parts?’ he asked.

‘
Passing through,’ Angel replied. ‘Heading for
Mesilla.’

‘
So,’
the bank manager said. ‘I make this a shade over four hundred and
thirty dollars. You want coin or paper?’

‘
Paper will do,’ Angel said. The man nodded, and went through
into the open area behind the counter, opening a drawer and
counting out some notes. He locked the drawer and came back into
his office.

‘
You
may be able to help me,’ Angel said. ‘I’m looking for a place owned
by a man named Torelli. You know it?’

The
manager looked at him differently. There was surprise in his eyes
and a curl of distaste on his full lips.

‘
You
know the Torellis? he asked.

‘
Never met them,’ Angel said. ‘Friend in Santa Fe told me I
should look them up.’

‘
Listen, Mister - ah?’ Angel supplied his name. ‘Mr. Angel, if
I may speak frankly, I’d recommend you leave your money with us
here at the bank if you’re going to the Torelli place.

Angel
looked his question.

‘
It’s
a road ranch, Mr. Angel. One of those — ah, places, you know, they
have, ah — girls there, cheap liquor. It — they have a very
unsavory reputation, sir. I could not let you go there without at
least warning you. It isn’t the kind of place a gentleman would go
to. No, not at all. A thoroughly bad lot, the Torellis.’

‘
Tell
me about them,’ Angel suggested. The manager warmed to the task. He
obviously felt strongly about the bad influence people like the
Torellis had on the character of the town. He told Angel that there
had originally been three brothers, all of Italian origin, who had
come west from New York at the time of the mining boom.

They
had enough money to buy a rundown old spread about six miles south
of town, and it had become a Mecca for the miners down from the
Magdalenas with dust in their pockets to spend, for teamsters and
outlaws coming in off the Jornado, dry as a bone and looking for
fun.

‘
They
haven’t quite the character to be badmen,’ the manager told him.
‘One of them, Bill Torelli, was hanged right here in town a few
years ago. He tried to bust up a poker game he was in and shot a
man in the hand. The miners strung him up from one of the beams in
the hotel and put a notice on him: “Hanged for being a damned
nuisance!” The other two brothers made noises about coming up here
and taking revenge on the town, but a bunch of men from the town
rode down there and sorted them out. Franco ran for it. He didn’t
even have the nerve to stay and face the posse. The third brother,
Steve — his real name is Stefano — came to a sort of agreement with
the townspeople. He would keep his girls and his friends out of
Socorro and Socorro would leave him alone. There were some of us, I
should tell you, who thought that was a mistake. We ought to have
burned the place down. At any rate, it’s still there, and a filthy
dirty dump it is. My advice, Mr. Angel, would be to steer clear of
it.’

Angel
had listened carefully to the man’s gossip. If Socorro was like
other towns in the west, the road ranch would be tolerated because
it kept the hookers out of town itself, where they could offend the
local people.

Better that than the way it was on Texas Street in Abilene,
where the whores jostled the decent women and spat at
them.

‘
This
Franco,’ he asked. ‘He never came back?’

‘
Not
that I’ve ever heard,’ the bank manager said. ‘I did hear once he
was working in the railway yards at Kansas City, but I don’t know
whether it was true or not. I never imagined any of them doing an
honest day’s work.’

Angel
picked up his hat and rose.

‘
I’m
obliged for your help,’ he told the manager.

‘
Maybe I’ll steer clear of the Torelli place after all. One
last question: you know a man called Cravetts, Dick Cravetts?’ He
described the man. The bank manager pursed his lips, thought
awhile, then shook his head ruefully.

‘
Afraid not,’ he said. ‘I know most people in Socorro, but the
name’s not one I’ve heard before.’

‘
No
matter,’ Angel said. ‘I’ll find him.’

He
went out of the bank, and the bank manager found for some reason
that he suddenly felt chilled. He went out into the plaza and stood
for a moment in the sunshine, watching as Frank Angel swung aboard
the lineback and moved on to the street, heading south.

There
was something about the man which he could not quite define, and it
bothered him. It was much later that he associated the feeling with
the chill he had felt when Angel had said, very quietly, that he
would find the man he was looking for.