Tonight’s incident had involved the grandee’s drunken son holding a knife to his wife. The grandee didn’t want anybody else to know about this, so he’d summoned Tom out there and Tom spent three hours trying to talk reason to the son. He insisted that his wife had been unfaithful. She insisted that the son was the unfaithful one. The problem was that the son had a butcher knife big enough to carve up a jungle elephant and was holding it to the slender, white throat of his fetching young wife, about whom Tom had had many fanciful fantasies himself.
Finally, Tom threw a bottle of expensive bourbon against the east wall of the bedroom they were all in. This distracted the drunken son just enough for Tom to jump him, wrench his wrist so hard he had to drop the knife, and then knock the stupid bastard unconscious with a single and impressive punch.
The young wife fell not into the arms of the grandee but into the arms of the lawman. The way she moved against him ignited his loins and made him think that maybe his fantasies about her may someday come true.
The grandee was all gratitude and praise. And Tom was fittingly modest.
But as he rode back to town—he always checked in at the office before going home for the evening—the fantasy of the fetching wife began to fade, he started thinking about the man Fargo. The man seemed honest and, unless he was the killer, didn’t have any reason to lie about the dead girl or her supposedly missing brother.
He’d never really discussed this with the old man. The travelers who turned up “missing” over the years. What was done with them. Why old Noah wanted them in the first place. Even if he’d asked, the old man wouldn’t have told him. To Noah, Tom was both stepson and employee. And most of the time he treated Tom more like employee than son. Noah’s brother Aaron—a drunken wastrel, according to most folks, but the best friend Tom had at the ranch—seemed to know something about these missing people, but would shut up when Noah scowled at him.
The way Noah seemed to feel was that he’d set Tom up as sheriff, built a nice house for him in town, made sure he married into a respectable family, and then urged Tom to begin having a brood of kids that stretched from here to sundown. Aaron often came to Tom’s house to see the kids. He got along well with Tom’s wife, too.
That was what he needed to do now. Get Uncle Aaron, as Tom had always called him, alone somewhere so they could talk without the threat of Noah walking in on them.
What the hell was going on here, anyway?
12
Maybe when his wandering days were over, Skye Fargo could get himself a job as a baseball pitcher.
The rock he threw at the burly man guarding the side entrance to Noah Tillman’s mansion struck him right on the side of the head and pitched him sideways to the ground.
Fargo moved fast.
He jumped down on the man, striking him hard twice more on the side of the head to keep him out for awhile. He untied the man’s bandana and used it to gag him with. He bound the man, wrists and ankles, with the man’s belt and shirt. Fargo had learned long ago how to roll up a shirt so that it held like a strong, tight rope.
He eased up to the side door, put his ear to it, and crept inside.
He stood at the base of four stairs that led to a closed door. He drew his Colt, proceeded forward. Voices, now. Male. He listened again. The voices spoke in a Mexican dialect. He could piece together enough of the conversation to know that the voices belonged to servants. Apparently, they were finishing up their work for the day.
Fargo just hoped that neither one of them opened the door.
They finally broke up and went in separate directions. Fargo listened until their footsteps could no longer be heard.
The door. He stood on the second step, turned the doorknob, peered at what lay on the other side.
With the guttering sconces, the huge paintings, the pedestals bearing objets d’art of every kind, the marble floors, the vast hallway resembled a museum more than a home. Doors opened off of the hallway. He needed to get started. Somebody was likely to find that sentry soon enough.
He moved on tiptoe down the shadowy hall, the barrel of his Colt leading the way. The open doorways were easy to peer inside. The closed doors presented more of a danger. He listened first and then pushed his way through, but found no one. Each room was decorated so lavishly that the fussiness began to detract from what could have been a simple beauty. He suspected that all this represented not the taste of a tough old bastard like Noah Tillman but the taste of a woman decorator that Noah Tillman had hired. She must’ve been damned pretty to convince a ruthless land baron like Tillman to accept all this.
He spent fifteen minutes downstairs. The silence surprised him. The feeling was of a church late in the day, when nobody but old women prayed at the Communion rail.
He was just about to go upstairs—something he wasn’t happy about, it being so damned easy to get trapped on a second floor—when he heard a male gringo voice barking an order. An order for a bourbon and water and go easy on the water this time, dammit, Manuel.
Noah Tillman, undoubtedly.
He’d been so intent on listening to Noah Tillman that he heard—too late—the faint shuffle of shoe leather behind him.
The cold reality of gun metal chilled the back of his neck.
“I do not believe you were invited here tonight,” a Spanish voice said. “Now I will have to turn you over to the guards.”
The man moved around in front of him. Fargo looked at the man who’d been shooting at him from the roof earlier today.
“He was your cousin?” Liz Turner asked.
“Yes, ma’am. My first cousin.”
Her name was Bernice Cooper. She lived in a flat above an ice cream shop. She was old enough that her skin had a papery quality and her voice quavered from time to time. But her brown eyes gleamed with health and life. Liz had found her name among her late husband’s notes on Noah Tillman, and decided to visit her. Apparently, Richard had never gotten around to it.
“And he came here why?”
“He worked on boats.”
“Worked on?”
“Repaired them.”
“I see.”
A breeze came through the west window. In the lamplight, the small living room had a quaintness about it that made Liz feel at home. There was a couch, two chairs, a bookcase, and a tiny table where, she suspected, Bernice took each meal. The walls were covered with religious paintings.
“And he came here—”
“He came here to fix Noah Tillman’s boat.”
“There wasn’t anybody who could do that locally?”
Bernice shrugged. “Bobby Lee was the best, I guess. At least that’s what folks said. Plus he wasn’t that far away. Just a day’s ride, over to Simpson.”
“And you saw him?”
Bernice nodded. “Two or three times. He took me out for supper twice. He was a nice man, Bobby Lee.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“I don’t know what else I could think. He just vanished. Never came around to see me again, never went back to his own place, either. He was just—gone.”
“Did you ever talk to Noah Tillman about him?”
She made a face. “You ever try to talk to Noah Tillman about anything? He just sort of waves you away, like he’d never stoop low enough to speak to you.”
“And all this was—”
“Two years ago. About now, in fact. Fourth of July coming up and everything.”
Liz was trying to make some sense of this story. The woman wasn’t a hysteric, wasn’t accusing anybody of anything, hadn’t even asked for help. Liz had had to seek Bernice out. But here was one more tale of “vanishing,” one that Richard had found during the course of his investigation, one that he’d obviously planned to follow up. She now planned to talk to every person Richard had listed in his notes about this story.