The footsteps came closer. O’Malley’s desire was to have another go with the flask but what if in his nervous state he dropped it?
O’Malley held his breath as the footsteps reached the door. People died of heart attacks, didn’t they? Would this be his time? And then the steps went on by.
He proceeded to go through the room. He had been here once before and that was when he found the coat with the silver button. Unfortunately, he’d heard somebody coming down the hall and panicked. He raced from the room before he had time to go through everything. Today he planned to look at everything carefully.
He’d done enough police reporting to know how coppers went through rooms. How they not only lifted up cushions and pillows but felt inside them to see if anything had been hidden in them. The same with clothes in closets. The same with rugs that needed to be lifted to see what might be hidden under them.
He found a number of things under the couch cushions. Coins, combs, halves of opry house tickets, even a magazine. But none of these told him anything. The same with the cardboard wardrobe in the corner. Nothing special about the clothes at all. And nothing special in their pockets. He went through shoes and boots. Nothing inside them either. Frustrated, he went to a stack of magazines and started turning them upside down to see if something might drop out. Pieces of tobacco, a candy wrapper, another opry house ticket stub.
There were only three framed paintings on the wall. All frontier depictions. He took them down, felt along the backs, found nothing. It was while he was looking at the last painting that his eye settled on the bottom of the armchair and the space underneath. He’d checked the armchair along with everything else but what he hadn’t done was look under the armchair. Shouldn’t be difficult, just push it aside.
The chair was covered in a red-and-black design. He nudged against one arm of it and pushed it back far enough so that he could see the floor. Nothing to see but some dust devils and a few magazine pages that had been torn out and collected under the chair. He looked at the pages for some sort of clue to prove his theory but if they had some significance he couldn’t find it.
The failure was getting to him so he stopped for another drink. He thought of smoking in here but that would be too dangerous. What if he accidentally burned something? A telltale sign that somebody had been in here.
He capped the flask and shoved it in his back pocket. And this time his gaze fell on the couch. He didn’t hold out much hope—this whole excursion felt now like a total failure—but what the hell. He’d leave after this and try to think of another way to prove his suspicions.
He walked over to the couch. This took more effort to move than a simple nudge. He bent down and began pushing it out of its position. It was heavier than it looked, the claw feet and all the wood in the structure giving it real weight. He had only turned the couch halfway beyond its previous point when he saw it. A shallow box about the size of a magazine. A feminine blue lid with a lighter blue bottom. He reached down and picked it up. Given the room’s dust, he had to blow a coat of gray from the lid. He took the flask from his pocket, dropped it on the couch and then seated himself to open the box and examine its contents.
The rather stiffly posed photograph on top told him that his suspicions had been correct. There had been a link between the robbery of the woman’s house and the killer. He looked through a trove of illicit obsessions. More posed photographs, two locks of hair, a fine handkerchief, a delicate comb and three or four newspaper articles. But the letters were what held his interest. They were love letters that had never been sent. Their passion, their yearning, their blunt vulnerability—who would suspect any of this in the person O’Malley now knew to be the killer? He went through the unsent letters twice, practically memorizing one of them. He could imagine them on the front page of a newspaper. One per issue. He could imagine how they would be talked about.
How they would be mocked by some, secretly cherished by others. He could imagine the editors of powerful newspapers saying that they must get in touch with the man who wrote these stories. They must have him on staff. And they would agree to just about any salary he asked for. Yes, what a great element these letters would make when the killer had been unmasked and these letters were quoted in O’Malley’s stories about the strange and sad events in little Cawthorne, Colorado. This story had everything that readers wanted.
He sat back and lifted the flask to his mouth. As he was closing the box, he saw the edge of something he had somehow missed in the corner of a group of recipes and church bulletins he had not bothered to look through. There’d been enough of them that he hadn’t noticed it till now.
He lifted the papers and there it was. He stared at it as if he’d discovered one of those mythic treasures writers so loved to write about—pirates’ gold or a lost work of art. But in this case it was more valuable than either.
A posed photograph of Ned Lenihan with his face slashed several times.
He closed the box and left quickly, more excited than he’d been since his days in St. Lou.
At one o’clock in the afternoon the Gold Mine was only half full. Instead of the gamblers who collected here at night the card players were older men playing not poker but pinochle. There were sandwiches of beef and bread on the bar. The piano was quiet and there was no sign of girls. Fargo didn’t have trouble spotting Kenny Raines. He sat at a table with a glass of beer in front of him glaring at Fargo. His gun hand was bandaged. The younger man sitting next to him, with the same bulbous nose and freckled face, was obviously his younger brother. He glared too but he couldn’t summon the same intensity as his brother.
The day bartender, a beanpole of a man in a vivid yellow shirt and red arm garters, took it all in and reached beneath the bar. Fargo saw the move and said, “There won’t be any trouble.”
“The hell there won’t,” Kenny Raines shouted. He started to stand but his brother reached up and yanked him back down.
“You don’t have a gun hand, Kenny,” Sam said, reminding Kenny of the obvious. But it was clear to Fargo that Kenny had been doing a lot of drinking for this time of day.
The card players had stopped to watch. Not only were they interested in the possible gunplay—they wanted to scatter if they needed to. One curious thing about saloon shoot-outs was that the victims often had nothing to do with the fight itself. They just hadn’t been able to get out of the way fast enough.
Fargo walked over to the table where the brothers sat. He grabbed a chair and sat down.
“This hand’s gonna get healed, Fargo. And then I’m comin’ after you.”
Fargo looked at Sam. “Tell your brother by the time this hand heals I’ll be long gone. Also tell him that all I want to do is ask you a few questions. Both of you.”
“You shot his hand.”
“I shot his hand because he was drunk and started a fight with me.”
“Me and him and Clete were good friends.”
“Then I’m talking to the right people.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t talk to that son of a bitch, Sam,” Kenny said, waving his white-wrapped hand as if willing Fargo out of existence.
“It means two things. It means that because you knew in advance about that money shipment, you’re both suspects.”