He knotted the bloody kerchief tight around the unresisting man's stump. It seemed to help, unless the poor bastard had just lost too much blood to spurt worth mentioning.
Longarm said, "You knew everyone in town was waiting to see what you aimed to do about your wayward wife. So after you shut her up forever it was you, not her, who grabbed my name and rep as a fighting man off a newspaper laying around your house and declared it was me, not the Zoltan Kun everyone suspected, who'd been strumming on her old banjo."
He shook the mangled man and demanded, "How did you kill Magda? We know you done it because we found her body where you hid it, you sneaky cuss!"
Homagy croaked something in his own odd lingo.
Longarm swore and said, "Talk English and let's see if we can get a clearer picture. I figure you killed her at the time or not too long after she confessed to screwing Zoltan Kun whilst you were out of town. He might or might not have had to threaten her. We both know he was a dedicated bastard. But you didn't have the balls to kill both of them. You could have left your dead wife for a day or more behind your locked doors. Few if any of the neighbor women had ever seen the buggy a well-known labor organizer kept in a Trinidad carriage house. There was no place for either you or Zoltan Kun to park atop Bohunk Hill." Homagy could have been confessing or cursing for all he could tell.
Longarm shook him some more and insisted, "Come on, own up to what you done. You drove up to your own house in an unfamiliar buggy that you kept in the carriage house, with new curtains snapped to the top. It was after midnight, on an early Sabbath morn with the mine site shut down. Nobody really saw Magda getting in to go for such a mysterious ride. Nobody had to. We all go through life with a literal blind spot in each eye. But we never notice, because our brain fills in the bitty gaps with imaginary blue sky or even wallpaper. When a buggy stops out front and the lady of the house ain't there no more, she naturally drove off in the wee small hours with some buggy driver. How were they to know you meant to carry her to a casually guarded coal mine and hide her in an abandoned drift?"
Longarm saw that yard bull was coming back with a whole crowd of other gents. He told Homagy, "Hang on and we'll get you to a hospital in time to save your worthless life. You'd have likely been better off dropping all that shale atop the body instead of in front of it. I don't envy the coroner, but there are ways to tell whether a victim was strangled or stabbed. No matter how you killed her, you wanted to distract anyone from looking for her. You made your neighbors think she'd run off with her lover because you knew she wasn't with Zoltan Kun. That gave you the excuse not to challenge him about your missing wife. Nobody in Trinidad knew shit about me. So when you said she'd run off with me, they had no call to look anywhere else for her."
A man in the oncoming crowd shouted, "I'm a doctor. How bad does he seem to be hurt?"
Longarm called back, "Bad. He's lost a bucket of blood and may have a concussion as well. Fell a good ways betwixt them coal gondolas a mile or so down yonder now."
As the chunky M.D. in black serge hunkered down on the far side of Homagy, whistled, and popped open his oilcloth bag, Longarm told the mangled Hungarian, "Your bullshit with me was just razzle-dazzle from the beginning. Like another four-flusher I met up with at Fort Sill, you knew the safest man to challenge to a gunfight would be a paid-up lawman with no call to fight a total asshole. We have to account for ourselves when we shoot kid shotgun messengers or old coal blasters with no warrants out on 'em. You both hoped your pals would be more impressed by your bravery than a grown man might be. You couldn't have expected my boss, Marshal Vail, to play right into your hands by taking your threat seriously. Billy Vail's been married up a spell, and he'd likely get upset as hell if his old wife told him she'd been giving French lessons to some blackmailer. How's he doing, Doc?"
The doctor the yard bull had fetched shook his head and murmured, "You were right about that concussion. Is there any point to all this conversation with him?"
Longarm nodded and said, "There is. If you can save him he'll likely hang for murder. The unwritten law only lets you kill your wife and plead passion if you kill her lover at the same time and don't hide any bodies."
As the doctor put some smelling salts to Homagy's nostrils, the tall deputy said, "You slickered us all pretty good by chasing me so persistently, demanding I pay for stealing your wife. But you overdid it by pestering me and pestering me, until it occurred to me you couldn't be serious about wanting to fight me."
Homagy blew some bubbles and groaned, "I told you why I didn't want to kill you after all. I wish I had now."
Longarm grimaced and said, "Yeah, let's talk about that sloppy blasting at the Dexter Hotel. Your foreman assured me you could dust a room with dynamite and never bust a window. Yet Zoltan Kun wound up on the roof and there was structural damage down to the basement. How come you used so much dynamite unscientifically, old son?"
Homagy didn't answer. The doctor said, "He's gone." Longarm asked, "What's he trying to say if he's dead then?"
The doctor said, "Nothing. That's called the death rattle because you have to be dead to make that funny sound. It's a change in the acid balance in the throat tissues. It'll stop in a moment."
Longarm stared down at the dead man's glassy eyes and muttered, "You sneaky old son of a bitch. You knew I'd never be able to prove my case against you unless I could get you to confess. So you up and croaked on me without confessing!"
Then he smiled ruefully and added, "What the hell, mayhaps it's just as well this way. It's not as important how you murdered your wife, now that you've saved the taxpayers the expense of trying, convicting, and hanging you for it!"
CHAPTER 25
Some time later, Longarm was washing down some of the fine free lunch served by Denver's Parthenon Saloon when his boss, Billy Vail, grumped in with a manila file folder in hand. Longarm had hoped that might not happen. The file looked thicker today than it had when he'd had young Henry type up his official report.
Vail joined Longarm at the free lunch counter, grabbed a ham-on-rye sandwich with his other hand, and said, "We got to talk. Let's go back to one of the side rooms."
They did. Like most first-class saloons, the Parthenon provided a maze of semi-private chambers, great and small, for the discreet get-togethers of patrons too delicate-natured for the main taproom up front.
Along the way, Longarm caught the eye of a barmaid carrying a tray of beer schooners, and pointed his own half-consumed beer at the doorway they were headed for.
Billy Vail led the way in and plunked his stubby form down on one side of the table, taking up a good part of the space in there. Longarm left the sliding frosted-glass door slightly ajar as he took his own seat across from his boss, placing his beer schooner on the table between them.
Vail said, "You'd best shut that door all the way. This is private."
Longarm said, "Trixie will be coming to take our orders. You'll be glad I was so thoughtful when it sinks in how salty that ham you chose really tastes. What's so infernally delicate about the report I just filed for you, Boss?"
He was bluffing, of course. Billy Vail tracked as good across a report as a Digger Indian across fresh snowfall. But Longarm hadn't been dumb enough to write down any lies.
Vail said, "Most of it's just swell. Considering I was only out to keep you from getting shot as a skirt-chaser, you done us proud in the Indian Territory. The War Department is pleased with you, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is pleased with you, and even the Indians are glad you showed up when you did."