Longarm placed the cheroot to her lush lips as he shook his head and said, “Forget that holding company entirely. I was just explaining to another curious kid how you start by eliminating everyone who has to be innocent. T.S. Nabors is a tight-fisted bargain hunter, but he’s smart. It would have been dumb to order outsiders such as that Englishman and a federal deputy murdered when he could have had nobody but your own self disappear, at half the cost and a whole lot more discreetly. You saw yourself how easy it was to have your two-faced maid drop out of sight, and the clincher is where her body wound up.”
Constance handed the smoke back, objecting, “Sarah was found on C.C.H. property, dear!”
He set the cheroot aside, saying, “By C.C.H. hired help, in the hopper of a stamping mill, for Pete’s sake. I saw what was left of a body run through such a process up near Deadwood a spell back. I knew who it was beforehand. it was just as well. There’s no way to identify a corpse chewed to bits and sort of blended with a mess of rock dust.”
She shuddered against him—it felt swell—and said, “Brr. I don’t think I’d like to be run through a stamping mill. But you just said C.C.H. owned it, remember?”
He nodded and said, “That’s what lets ‘em off. T.S. Nabors would have had to be way dumber than a mine manager ought to be if he hid a dead body in his own stamp mill and never turned on the steam engine! Think how simple it would have been for the man in charge of the whole shebang to just reduce little Sarah to nothing anyone would ever have noticed.”
She did, but demanded, “Then who, if not them?”
He said, “I was able to eliminate old Jed Nolan, cheap and greedy as he’d be as well. He was trying to hog all the cows in this park. But he hadn’t been stealing them. They were standing there in plain sight, waiting to be stolen. It’s been my experience that not even a range hog steals his own cows.”
She began to toy with the hairs on his belly as she confessed he had her totally confounded.
He took her wrist to move her hand down where it might do them both more good and told her, as she took the matter in hand, to let him start from the beginning again.
She tweaked his limp member playfully and allowed she was all ears. He said he’d get her for that and continued. “Jed Nolan was planning on an even bigger herd on more open range. His foreman, Buck Lewis, was planning on stealing the herd he had and driving ‘em over to another boom to sell ‘em sudden at a handsome price. He’d recruited Oregon John as a guide over the mountains and that drifting badman, Quicksilver Quinn, as a badman.”
“What about that mean Ginger Bancott who shot poor Gaylord?” she asked, moving her hand faster as she felt some response down yonder.
Longarm said, “Forget Ginger for now. He was just another killer on the dodge. The cow thieves never recruited him.”
She started to ask who had. He warned her to hesh and went on. “Set Ginger aside for now and come with me to the Elk Rack Hotel where a wayward gal named Tess Jennings was sleeping on the sly with yet another drifter. We’re still working on whether she’d run off from home, a husband, or a house of ill repute. She had no criminal rec ord.”
“But I thought she was that bandit Bunny McNee!” Constance protested.
He said, “Not so fast if you want me to get to the point in time. She wasn’t Bunny McNee. The real Bunny McNee is a short soft-looking lad who may or may not be a sissy as well as a bandit. As of now, nobody on our side knows where he might really be. The so far unknown saddle tramp Tess Jennings was traveling with had her dress as a man for some reason that might have made more sense to them.”
“I’ll bet she was hiding out from a jealous husband!” the young widow decided. Longarm didn’t bother to say jealous idiots had been known to act scary. They’d already talked about Will Posner.
He said, “Let’s keep on eliminating. The shabby couple must’ve been low on money but expecting some. He might have been a gambling man, hoping his luck would change. At any rate he put her into the hotel as a single, then snuck up the service stairs after dark to steal his half of a double room. You can’t hide every sin from hotel help. So they figured a young sissy boy was entertaining some brutal queer-lover, and who’s going to knock on any door at a time such as that?”
She stopped beating his meat. You had to admire a gal who knew just how to get along with a man in her bed. He knew she wanted to hear the end of his story first. So he said, “Whatever the deal, her traveling companion deserted her. He may have had to skip out on other card sharks. He might have just gotten tired of her. She wasn’t all that statuesque with her shirt open. So the poor thing was stuck there, eating in her room and putting it on the hotel tab she had no way of paying. Then she finally just tried to skip. She boarded your narrow-gauge at the last moment, and might have made it if, through no fault of your own or anyone else, your combination hadn’t been stopped by rocks on the tracks and backed up the grade with her, after the hotel had already spread the alarm. So Constable Payne arrested her on a charge of theft of service, and that would have cost her thirty days in the county jail if that had been the end of it.”
Constance sat up on one elbow to stare down at him with a puzzled smile as she clung to his organ-grinder, asking, “But didn’t you say everyone thought she was Bunny McNee?”
Longarm shook his head and said, “An eager kid deputy called Nate Rothstein thought the prisoner in the back might be the notorious Bunny McNee. The older and wiser Constable Payne knew better, whether he ever got any from her or not. But Nate Rothstein saw a resemblance to an outlaw with considerable paper hanging on him. The real Bunny McNee would be worth over a thousand dollars in various bounties, and I know for a fact that old Amos Payne was drawing less than five hundred dollars a year and had expensive habits.”
She gasped. “You mean he knew, but hoped to collect some reward money before anyone was any the wiser? But Custis how would he get a wayward girl to go along with the charade long enough for him to collect even half that bounty money?”
Longarm dryly answered, “How else? He made a deal with her, of course. He told the desperately broke gal that he’d cut her in on the bounty money if she’d play at being Bunny McNee until he could collect it. The deal was for her to go through the whole charade, as you put it, stoutly maintaining her innocence and denying she was the real Bunny McNee whilst everyone winked, nudged, and paid off on the lying little rascal. But of course, once the bounties had been paid, and before she served any real time …”
“She only had to open her shirt and drop her jeans!” The naked lady in bed with him laughed.
Longarm said, “Yep. That was the plan. Then they heard Billy Vail was sending me instead of the original deputies assigned the chore. I don’t like to brag. But I’ve been in the papers more than Smiley and Dutch from my home office. So Payne panicked. He figured I was chosen because I knew something. Likely something as simple as what the real Bunny McNee looked like. Payne couldn’t confide in his kid deputies. None of them knew what he and the gal in the back had been planning. But he’d somehow met up with Ginger Bancott, who might have been bribing an underpaid lawman not to notice he was up this way. At any rate, he got in touch with the killer and they made yet another deal. I was saved by the simple fact that they only had a description to go by and that English civil engineer you’d hired sort of fit it.”
She gasped, “Oh, Lord, poor Gaylord! Nobody ever shot him to keep him from working for me! They shot him because they thought he was you! But wait a second, dear, didn’t Constable Payne shoot Ginger Bancott for shooting you—I mean Gaylord?”