Longarm on the Overland Trail (21 page)

"The trail only goes to Salt Lake, not Virginia City," Longarm said, "and young Slade never meant to go to neither. We just got slickered by a slick and cunning killer, not a lunatic. Do you want to tag along and share the credit for the arrest?"

"Sure, if you can prove Joseph Slade is here in Denver. Can you?" Vail asked.

"Not a hundred percent, before I find him. But I expect to before this day is over. Coming, boss?"

Vail glanced out the window before he said, "It's too hot out to chase a hunch. But I'll listen to your hunch. Where do you mean to start?"

"The Banes house, where the killing all started. It ain't far. I may need you, if them army gents are still sore at me."

Vail shook his head. "They ain't. They gave up on the stakeout right after they got word Slade had shot up Fort Halleck, up north. As for that stupid Colonel Walthers, I used the arrest warrant he swore out on you to prove how stupid he was to an old drinking pal in the War Department. So he won't bother you no more if he wants to keep his oak leaves. There's nobody over at the Banes house right now but the killer's elder sister."

Longarm said, "I'd best have a word with her, then," and left alone.

Billy had been right about the heat outside. Longarm was sorry he'd had to change back into his tobacco-brown tweeds and shoestring tie as he walked even that far with the noonday sun beating down on him.

When he got to the house, and Flora Banes Slade came to her door, he could tell from the feather duster in one hand and the thin poplin duster she had on that, despite the heat, he'd caught the house-proud little gal hard at housekeeping. The duster she wore was oversized and shapeless, but he could still see more of her shape than she might have wanted him to, thanks to the way the thin poplin clung to damp bare skin.

She looked surprised if not dismayed to see him. She waved him in with her feather duster, saying, "Come in. I hope you don't have news too grim about my poor brother. You wouldn't be back this soon if you hadn't caught him, I know. But please tell me you took him alive, at least."

He removed his Stetson and waited until she'd led him into her parlor and seated him on her sofa before he told her, "I never caught up with him, dead or alive. That's likely because he was never in any of the places I was led to look for him. I don't like to boast. But it has been my experience that when I can't cut a fugitive's trail he just can't be out ahead of me. So I come back to where the trail started to start looking better. I may as well begin by informing you, formally, that the federal search warrant made out by the Denver District Court to them army men is still in force until such time as your brother is found on or about these premises."

She laughed weakly. "Good heavens, I told them and all the other lawmen who've tramped through this house that they were welcome to poke about all they liked, with or without a warrant. But before you begin, I'd better serve you some coffee and cake. For you'll surely be here some time if you expect to find Joseph in this house at this late date!"

He thanked her for the offer but said it was too hot for such a notion. She rose anyway and said, "Speak for yourself. If you don't need some coffee to clear your head right now, I do. This heat must be getting to my poor head. I don't understand one thing you've said so far."

She moved back to her kitchen, leaving him to stare at the four walls a spell. He was dying for a smoke, but he saw no ashtrays in sight and he doubted she shared his scientific theory that tobacco ash was hard on carpet beetles.

He could see she'd laundered her lace curtains and gone over the wallpaper with a sponge since his last visit. But there were still cleaner patches, mostly oval in design, where less tidy stuff had once hung on the walls. He was still thinking about that when she came back in with a silver service on a silver tray and put it down on the small teak table near the sofa.

As she took her own seat in the plush chair across from him he saw she'd filled two cups despite his disinclination. She asked if he preferred cream or sugar and he said neither. So she picked up her own cup and leaned back, toying with the buttons of her duster with her free hand as she smiled and said, "I like mine strong and black, too. Now, what was it you were saying about my poor little brother?"

"I don't want nobody accusing me of tricking 'em later. So I'd best tell you, now, that on my way from the Union Depot to my office in the federal building I saw fit to stop at the county hall of records and the main post office just a few doors away. I have found that, even when folk don't leave a trail on the hard soil of summer, you can often get a line on them by following the paper trail we all leave filed here and there."

She was working on another button, lower down, as she said, "I hope my brother's school records and such verified everything I told you about him."

Longarm nodded and said, "He was more pathetic than even you or your neighbors may have been willing to tell a stranger. He was so lackluster in school that a kindly teacher had his head examined. The doctor's report was in with his poor report cards and such. It says he seemed to be stunted in growth, with poor hand and eye coordination. His brain just made it to what they writ down as dull-normal."

She nodded and opened another button as she said, "Everyone knew he was touched in the head, poor thing."

Longarm shook his own head. "That ain't what the doc put down. He put your brother down as a slow learner without much ambition or imagination. He never put down a thing about the kid being loco. How come you want to show me your tits again, ma'am? We established the last time you did it that you're a gal, and not a lunatic boy pretending to be his own sister."

She hastily regathered the front of her duster as she protested, "I wasn't trying to prove anything but how hot and stuffy it is in here right now. That other time was to show you the bruise Joseph gave me when he beat me."

Longarm nodded. "I'll take your word on the fight you must have had with him, ma'am. You were both about the same size and weight, so it was likely an even match. But we're getting way ahead of the story. I'd best start from the beginning, now that I've been pawing through old city and county records, instead of chasing shadows along a trail that ain't been used enough to matter for years."

She leaned forward to pour more coffee in her own cup as she warned him his was getting cold. He ignored that to tell her, "In the beginning, there was a Pappa Slade, a Mamma Slade, and two little Slades, a boy and a girl, living between here and Evans Grammar School. The boy, like I just said, was puny and dim of wit and ambition. His older sister was smarter and a lot more energetic, even if her main ambition was to one day have her very own house to keep, sort of compulsed and overly tidy."

She sniffed and said, "All right, if you must know, my mother was a dear, but a lazy and careless housekeeper. You didn't have to snoop about to find that out. Everyone knew it."

"This is going to take all day if you keep butting in like that, ma'am. It don't take a head doctor to savvy that all-too-familiar pattern. Slovenly housekeepers raise compulsed neat daughters, and vice versa. You wanted your own house to keep, a lot neater. So you married Tom Banes, young, so's you could be the mistress of your own home, and tidy it up all you wanted."

"Is that a crime?" she asked disdainfully.

"I ain't got to criminal charges yet. Since it's your house, I can't even say it was wrong for you to cart all your late husband's hunting trophies back to his workshop as soon as you was rid of him."

She followed his glance to a spot above the fireplace where a moose head might have once hung and replied defensively, "I see no reason to deny that. I never shared Tom's interest in hunting and, to me, all those glassy-eyed dust-catchers were just an extra bother. As for my having gotten rid of anyone, I'd best point out my husband died at work, not here, of a heart seizure."

"That's true, right after he'd enjoyed the lunch you packed for him, if the time of death on record is correct. But that's a local matter, and we're getting ahead of my federal case some more. Before your husband died, your parents did. I'll accept that as natural. They was both elderly and in poor health, when you married hasty to get away from them."

"How can you be so cruel?" she protested.

He shrugged. "Sometimes it goes with this job. Cruel or not, facts is facts So the fact is that by the time you found out you'd married a good-natured, natural slob, you also found you was dependent on him. As a manager at Denver Dry Goods, he made enough to support you decent enough and, by the way, the post office says all them Wild West magazines they delivered to this address was delivered in your husband's name, not your kid brother's."

"I could have told you that, had you asked. It never crossed my mind at the time."

He sighed and said, "I should have checked that earlier. It occurred to me at the time that, for an unwelcome guest with no visible means of support, your kid brother had a lot of reading material stacked in his room. You likely hauled them out back when you tidied up after your late husband, right?"

She shook her head a bit wildly and said, "No. I told you Tom was interested in outdoor western notions. But he didn't save a magazine once he'd read it. He passed it on to Joseph, and Joseph never threw anything away."

Longarm raised an eyebrow. "You told me your husband tried to interest your brother in going hunting and such with him on the weekends, but that the kid preferred to mope about the house and get in the way of your dusting."

She shrugged. "What of it? That was why Tom asked him to leave, in the end. Tom said there had to be something wrong with a slugabed who'd rather read about cowboys than rid like one when he had the chance."

"Let's not worry about whether it was an easy-going brother-in-law or a vexed big sister who threw the kid out. The point is that someone did. So he was off in the army, no doubt vexing them with his useless ways, when your late father died, leaving both his kids well provided for with that trust fund at the Drover's Savings and Loan."

The young widow flashed her eyes at him as she snapped, "What of it? What a woman might or might not own in her own name is her own business, isn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am. There was nothing dislawful about your no-doubt fond father leaving you that house of theirs you still own, boarded up, a quarter-mile away."

"Are you suggesting Joseph could be hiding there?" she asked.

"Nope. The Denver copper badges already looked. That's how come I knew it was boarded up. County records don't show that. I agree it's smart of you to hold off putting it up for sale with real estate prices in Denver still rising, since the beef market got better, just recent."

He leaned back and caught himself reaching for a smoke without thinking. He put the thought aside and said, "The point is not that you are today a woman of independent means. The point is how you got that way. You came into modest wealth by birth right only after you'd stuck yourself with a husband who hung animal heads all over your walls and doubtless had other habits a fussy housewife couldn't abide. So, once you no longer needed him to support you, he--let's say he just died young and unexpected. I got enough on my plate as it is."

She gasped and called him a son of a bitch. He chuckled and replied, "Takes one to know her own litter, I reckon. Anyway, just about the time you had this house prissed up more to your liking, your kid brother showed up on your doorstep. Slow-witted as he might have been, he'd have heard about the death of his own old man. So he offered to move back in with you and help you spend the family fortune."

She nodded and said, "That's true. I'll admit I told him he wasn't welcome and you saw the bruise he left on me. I gave him some money, damn it, but he wouldn't leave."

Longarm said, "He couldn't. He was dead. Had you waited until the army gents showed up, they'd have been glad to take him off your hands for you. But you didn't know that. You figured you was stuck with a bad penny you couldn't get rid of no other way. You killed your pesky little brother long before the army showed up to reclaim him. Then, when they showed up with that search warrant, you had to kill them, as well."

She stared at him owl-eyed and protested, "You must be as crazy as poor Joseph! How could you accuse a poor helpless woman of engaging in a gunfight with two experienced law officers?"

He smiled thinly and said, "That struck me as mysterious even when I considered a weakling who couldn't even aim a ball. The only way a green gunhand can drill anyone direct through the heart calls for firing point-blank at a stationary target. So you set 'em down here in this very parlor, served them refreshments as they was asking you about your fool kid brother, and, once they was dead, you just lined them up neat, as usual, over there on the floor, and-"

"Is that why you haven't touched your coffee?" she cut in, pointing at his cup. She laughed incredulously. "Did you really think I was trying to poison you?"

He nodded soberly. "Yes, ma'am. We'll no doubt find out which of them chemicals from your late husband's workshop you prefers to kill folk with, once we dig up all the bodies. It may be enough just to go by the results of your brother's autopsy, once we dig him up from under the loose paving of your carriage house. I noticed the last time I poked about out there that it tended to make you jumpy. Is that why you pegged them shots at me, up the hill, right after I'd left here? No offense, but Black Jack Junior wasn't a good shot at any distance."