Worth pulled his hand away as if the drawer were hot.
“Now talk,” Lancaster said. “Do you have family in town?”
“No.”
“Then Gerry must have offered you money,” Lancaster said. “A cut.”
“H-he said he’d kill me if I didn’t go along with him.”
“If he was going to kill you, he would have done it when he was killing the other two,” Lancaster said. “No, there was no threat. He was cutting you in. Did you get your money yet?”
Sam Worth licked his lips.
“No, you didn’t get paid yet. So why are you still here?”
Worth frowned.
Lancaster laughed.
“You don’t know where he is, do you?” he asked. “He pulled a fast one on you.”
Sam Worth sank back in his chair with a defeated look on his face.
Twenty-nine
The sheriff came out of the cell blocks and hung the key on a wall hook. He turned and looked at Lancaster.
“I got a telegram that said you were coming,” he said. “I didn’t expect you to solve the robbery so soon after you got here.”
“I got lucky, Sheriff Carver,” Lancaster said. “I happened to know Gerry Beck’s methods. And there was too much lead flying around that office for Worth not to have been hit. It had to be deliberate.”
“Do you think he did any of the shootin’?” Carver asked.
“I don’t know,” Lancaster said. “He had a gun in his top drawer. You could check to see if it’s been fired.”
“You didn’t do that?”
“Not part of my job,” Lancaster said.
“But you questioned him.”
“That was part of my job,” he said.
“Did you find out anything?”
“Only that he was in on the job with Beck,” Lancaster said.
“And you believe he doesn’t know where Beck is?” Carver asked. “That they’re not gonna meet and split the money?”
“No,” Lancaster said. “I believe he was cheated by Beck, who left him here to take the rap.”
Carver settled his bulk behind his desk. He was in his forties, had been sheriff of Henderson for over ten years. “So what are you gonna do now?”
“Try to find Beck.”
“How?”
“I’ll think about that over a steak,” Lancaster said. “Where can I get a good one?”
“Across the street. Bessie’s serves the best steak in town.”
“Thanks.”
Lancaster headed for the door, then stopped. “One other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Have you ever heard of a man named Sweet?”
“Sweet? No.”
“What about Adderly or Cardiff?”
Carver gave it some thought.
“I don’t know those names, either,” he said finally. “Why are you askin’?”
“I’m tracking them.”
“All three?”
“That’s right.”
“Because of this job for Wells Fargo?”
“No,” Lancaster said. “This is personal, and just happened to coincide with this job. I know that one of those three men came here in the past few weeks.”
“Well, if they did they didn’t have any contact with me,” Carver said. “Looks like you better start checking hotel registers.”
“And rooming houses,” Lancaster said.
“So does this mean you’ll be in town for a while?” the lawman asked.
“Overnight, at least,” Lancaster said. “And I’ll have to send a telegram back to Wells Fargo in Laughlin.”
“Why’s that?”
“To tell them they’ll have to close down the local office until they can replace Sam Worth.”
“They won’t take too kindly to that,” Carver said. “Bound to cost them some business.”
“Unless they can replace him locally, which doesn’t seem likely,” Lancaster said, “they’ll have no choice.”
“Well, they only had the three men,” Carver said. “Two are dead and now one’s in my jail.”
“I’m sure they’ll be sending somebody from the home office to handle everything,” Lancaster said. “I’m going to go and get that steak now, and then I’ll start checking around town.”
“For those three men?”
“And for any trace of Gerry Beck,” Lancaster said. “He must’ve spent some time with somebody, and knowing Gerry as I do, I’ll probably have to start at the local whorehouse.”
“Likes whores, does he?”
“He loves women, whores or not,” Lancaster said, “and they like him.”
“Well,” Carver said, “even if Beck was in town long enough to go to the whorehouse, I didn’t cross paths with him, either.”
Lancaster didn’t like the sound of that. Beck had to have been in town long enough to case the Wells Fargo office. And since he was working alone, he’d have taken his time. If the sheriff never came across either Beck or one of the other three, then he was the kind of lawman who ignored strangers in his town.
He was either a bad lawman or, after so many years at it in the same town, he’d become a lazy one.
Thirty
The sheriff had been right about one thing. The steak at Bessie’s was so good it must have been the best in town.
He’d stopped first at the livery to get Crow Bait taken care of. He’d gotten the expected reaction from the liveryman, paid the man to take good care of the horse, and left him scratching his head.
After finishing his steak and topping it off with a slice of pie, Lancaster started hitting the hotels and checking registers. He started with the hotel he was staying in, the Shamrock. They didn’t show any guests named Sweet, Adderly, Cardiff, or Beck in the past month.
He’d arrived in town midday, so he had time to check the hotels and boardinghouses. It was dusk by the time he finished and he decided the saloons would be next, to see if any of the bartenders could help.
Henderson was a decent-sized town, with more saloons than hotels. It took longer to get a bartender to give up information about one of his customers than the desk clerk at a hotel. Desk clerks could be bought cheaper.
In the saloons he had to order a beer, and drink at least half of it. He had to stop after four saloons, or end up drunk. The four bartenders he’d spoken to had never heard of any of the four men. Or so they claimed. He decided to leave the rest of the search for the morning.
He left the Hi-Lo Saloon and headed back to his hotel.
The bartender at the Hi-Lo took two beers to a table in the back. The two men stared up at him.
“We didn’t order no beers,” one of them said.
“Beck did,” the bartender said.
“Beck?” the other asked.
“He told me if anybody was in askin’ about him I should bring you some beers.”
The bartender put them down.
“Who was askin’?”
“Tall guy with the flat-brimmed black hat who was just in here,” the bartender said. “He’s been askin’ about four men.”
“Four?”
“One of them is Beck.”
“Who were the others?”
“Never heard of them.”
“Was it us?” one of them asked.
The bartender looked at them and said, “I ain’t never heard of you, either.”
He walked away.
The two men looked at each other.
“Whataya think?” Bill Kent said.
“I think if this hadn’t happened we’d be leavin’ town tomorrow, and all we did was sit around and drink beer to earn our money,” Wes Tyler said. “Now we gotta kill a guy.”
“That’s what Beck paid us for, Wes,” Kent said. “Stay here one week, kill anybody who was lookin’ for him.”
“You know I’d rather earn my money sittin’ around drinkin’ beer, right?”