“No, ma’am. I didn’t expect to be staying over.”
“Yes, well, you seem a nice man, Mr. Long. I am willing to make an exception for you. Come inside. Supper will be served in twenty minutes. There is a pump and wash basin on the back porch, clean towels in the pantry. One towel and one change of linen each week. Not that that applies to you, of course.”
“Yes, ma’am, thank you, ma’am.” He touched the brim of his Stetson and went inside to join the men who had been Carl Beamon’s friends. Or so, at least, he hoped.
Chapter 33
It was no wonder Mrs. Willets was so impressed by a compliment to her food that she agreed to make an exception to her rules for the man who gave it. Longarm was fairly sure the poor soul had never before received any compliments on her cooking. If only because none were warranted.
The food was, to be charitable, lousy. Bland and cheap, without even the saving grace of being greasy. And all of it pretty much the same pale gray color, boiled meat included. A man had to be mighty hungry in order to force the shit into his face. Fortunately Longarm was plenty hungry. He finished his first plateful and, to Mrs. Willets’s obvious approval, asked for seconds. None of the other fellows at the table competed with him in a scramble for refills.
“Save room for dessert, Mr. Long,” Mrs. Willets helpfully advised.
“Oh, I’ll surely do that, ma’am, thank you.” He smiled at the old battle-ax and had some more lumpy mashed potatoes swimming in an off-white liquid that was either gravy or library paste, he wasn’t quite sure which.
Dessert turned out to be bread pudding lightly laced with small black lumps that he almost desperately hoped were raisins. They must have been, he concluded, because the other boarders, who should already be wise to the potential dangers of Mrs. Willets’s table, all dug into the bread pudding without restraint, although several of them had passed up certain of the earlier courses.
When he was done filling the aching void that had been in his stomach, Longarm pushed back from the table, thumped the flat of his belly, and asked, “Anybody care to join me in a cigar after dinner? I have enough to spare.”
“I’ll take you up on that offer, mister,” one man said.
“Me too.”
“You may smoke on the front porch, Mr. Long,” Mrs. Willets announced firmly. “Please do not light up until you are outside.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, docile as a lamb and twice as innocent.
The two smokers in the crowd led the way from the dining room onto the porch, Longarm following close behind. Once outside, Longarm’s excellent cheroots in hand and streaming wisps of pale smoke, the men introduced themselves. Thomas Carey and Bernard Hicks, they said they were. The names meant nothing to Longarm. Apparently there had been no reason to mention either of them in the report Thad Browne’s coppers had prepared in the wake of the accident that killed Carl Beamon.
“What brings you to Aurora, Mr. Long?”
“Where are you from?”
Longarm smiled at the two and told them, “Business, Mr. Hicks. And I’m from real far away.” He blew a smoke ring. “All the way from Denver.” He laughed. “Had to stay overnight and picked this place on the recommendation of a fella I met once. Carl Beamon? Either of you know him?”
“We did,” Hicks said.
“Did? What’d he do, move out?”
“He’s dead,” Tom Carey informed the newcomer.
“No shit,” Longarm said with feigned surprise. “What happened?”
“Just an accident,” Carey said.
“Bullshit,” Hicks disagreed. “Carl was murdered, and that’s a fact.”
“Murdered?” Longarm prompted.
“He was.”
“Mr. Long, don’t believe that. Beamon died in an accident. Just a runaway wagon.”
“He was murdered,” Hicks insisted. “It was an accident.”
“What makes you think it was murder, Mr. Hicks?”
“I don’t think it was, I know it was. Carl—I knew him better than anyone else here—Carl told me he was going to come into some big money. He was supposed to meet two men that evening, see. He knew something important, and these men he was meeting, they were going to pay him to tell them about it. But only them. That was the deal. They wanted him to tell them everything he knew, but agree to not tell anyone else.”
“Did he tell you what it was that he knew, what it was that was so important?”
Hicks shook his head. “He said he couldn’t. Not if he wanted the money.”
“Mr. Long, my friend Bernie here has a real vivid imagination. Don’t believe any of this. Beamon was killed in an ordinary, everyday kind of accident. That’s what the police said, and who would know better than them?”
That was a question Longarm was not inclined to get into at the moment. If he ever did, though, Tom Carey might be in for some rude awakenings.
“So who were these two men?” Longarm asked. “Did he meet with them before he was killed? Did he have money on him when he died?”
Carey scowled and said, “I don’t want to be rude, mister, but I don’t want to listen to any more of this. Good night, the both of you.” Carey went back inside the boardinghouse, leaving Longarm and Hicks alone on the porch. Longarm settled into a rocking chair and motioned for Hicks to join him in a companion chair nearby.
“You really believe Beamon was murdered, don’t you?”
“I do, sir. Like I said, I knew Carl better than anyone else here. He was genuinely excited about his good fortune, about coming into some money. I don’t know how much these men had talked about paying him, but it must have been some hundreds of dollars anyway. That would have been very big money indeed for someone like Carl. Or for that matter for someone like me. I know I’ve never made more than eight dollars in one week, not in my whole life. I doubt Carl ever made that much even.”
“Who were these men? Police? Reporters? Something like that?” The men who spoke with Boatwright had introduced themselves as reporters. Two of them. Longarm’s experience, though, was that genuine reporters seldom traveled in pairs. Generally they were loners interested in being the first to get the news, competing even with others working for the same newspaper or magazine. Two men had talked to Boatwright. Two men were supposed to talk with Beamon. Longarm placed scant faith in coincidence at the best of times, and he saw no reason to suspend that skepticism now.
“I don’t know,” Hicks said. “Carl never told me that.”
“Do you know where they were to meet him?”
“Yes, he did tell me that. They were meeting him at the Lone Tree Saloon.”
That was interesting, Longarm thought. It was outside the Lone Tree that Beamon had died. And these two men, whoever they were, knew to expect Beamon to be at that place, presumably at that time. It would have been no particular trick to fake a runaway and deliberately run someone down in the street. It was the sort of thing that could be done in plain sight of half the town’s population and no one would know it was no accident.
“Did Carl mention anything to you about a girl?” Longarm asked. “A pretty girl? Something that had to do with the bombing he escaped a few days before he died?” That clue was one BethAnne Mobley had unknowingly given him. A pretty girl who Beamon had talked about, a pretty girl who had done something. Longarm had seen Commissioner Troutman’s wife. No one in his right mind would have termed her a pretty girl. Probably not even when she’d been young enough to qualify as a girl, and that had been one hell of a long time back.
“No, he didn’t. He never said anything like that. I’m sure of it.”
“How about an Indian girl?” Longarm asked. “He never said anything to you about a pretty Indian girl?” The official line still maintained that the Utes were behind the bombing. If the bomb was thrown by a girl—one Longarm suspected Beamon might have seen and been talking about—he supposed it would not have been impossible that the girl was a Ute.