“It’s mostly smoke,” Placido Geist said. “Everything at secondhand, gossip or hearsay, none of it solid.”
“I take your point,” the judge said, “although we’re not in front of a jury.”
“Even in Texas juries are loath to hang a woman.”
Lamar shrugged. “The injustice was done that girl by her birth and no fault of her own,” he said. “How do we know what other wrongs were done her, each following from the first? She’s led a gypsy life.”
Placido Geist smiled without humor. “Is this your line of defense?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s wholly inadequate for a capital crime,” Lamar said. “Then again, which of us is pure in heart?”
Placido Geist sketched the air with his hand, a gesture of acquiescence. “I admit my reasons are selfish,” he told the judge. “I don’t know the name she was born with or what name she goes by now. I doubt whether I could find her if I tried any harder. Nor am I dead certain that I’m right about this. It’s too slippery to grasp.”
“You’d like to be sure, one way or another.”
“Every act has consequences, but not necessarily those we foresee,” Placido Geist said. “I took the Dutchman’s shilling in the hope I could lay his ghost to rest, but I succeeded only in disturbing other ghosts out of the unquiet past. It does me no distinction.”
“This is churlishness,” Lamar said shortly.
Placido Geist was stung by the reproach, but he realized the judge hadn’t intended a gratuitous insult.
“We all look for resolutions,” Lamar said. “Something neat, a means of satisfaction, or even redemption. But that instinct runs counter to the rule of entropy, the natural reign of chaos. We try to impose order, discipline, a sense of fitness, because it suits our vanity to think we are the measure of destiny, that man is made in the image of God, with mastery over the brute forms of the earth and over our own narrative, as if history weren’t messy, accidental, and arbitrary. You can’t blame yourself for failing in a responsibility when there’s no reckoning.”
“Does that absolve us?” Placido Geist asked him.
Lamar snorted. “The mark of a criminal is not that he breaks the law but that he feels it doesn’t apply to him and other men are fools not to simply take what they require or deserve,” the judge said. “The criminal doesn’t consider what’s lost in the transaction. An outlaw, in the original sense, isn’t just someone trying to escape penalty but a man who’s placed himself beyond legal protection. There’s your choice. An honest man owns up to his responsibilities not from fear of censure but because he understands the limits of the social compact. We accept this construct, this common fiction, as a convenience.”
“You contradict yourself,” Placido Geist told him. “You say on the one hand that man’s endeavors are no more than a tissue of futility and on the other that we owe ourselves an accounting. Which do you believe?”
“Where’s the contradiction?” Lamar asked. “I say only that this evident artifice keeps misrule at bay. Most of us have very little patience with ambiguity or mixed results. We like our answers straight, our oracles unclouded. We ask for a simple table of elements — earth, air, fire, water — or an easy calculus to explain the Furies that drive us.”
“You make it too abstract,” Placido Geist said.
“Very well,” the judge said. “In plain English, that whore’s child has slipped through your fingers. You have lost very few bounties over the years, a point of some pride, and this shabby business is left at loose ends.”
“She’ll cheat the noose,” Placido Geist pointed out.
Lamar sighed. “She won’t be the first, nor will she be the last,” he said. “Any more than some innocent might stand in for her on the scaffold, and without prejudice.”
The bounty hunter thought this rather a startling admission for a man retired from the bench, but he chose not to pursue it. In his time Lockjaw Lamar had sent more than a few men to the hangman, and if he’d doubted their guilt, this was the first Placido Geist had heard of it.
They set out the chess pieces, and their talk turned to other things. Politics, of course, a staple of Judge Lamar’s discourse and the reason he kept his residence in the state capital. Men they’d known, both good and bad, most of them dead now and the few still living a reminder of their own obstinate durability. The passing of time and the nature of memory. The changes that had overtaken both themselves and the country in a single lifetime.
It wasn’t all old man’s talk about the past by any means. The judge kept his ear to the ground and enjoyed a bit of current scandal.
There was a recent case in West Texas, a woman found in a hotel room with a man not her husband. Adultery was not at issue, as she’d shot him stone dead when he presumed on her virtue. She was handsomely acquitted of manslaughter at her trial, having a skillful lawyer and the sympathy of the jury on her side, and the fact that she was married to a man of considerable property did her no harm. The few questions that lingered after the verdict were put to rest by her obvious composure, startling in one so young.
“Mrs. Ansel Pym,” Lamar told him in answer to his question. “Child chatelaine of Pitchfork.”
“Ah,” Placido Geist said. He remembered Spengler’s comment about the girl. “Chaste but undowered.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. Who was the man in her hotel room?”
“The dead man was identified as one Messenger, a villain of some reputation,” Lamar said.
Placido Geist nodded. “He was known as Handsome Andy,” he said. “A jack of all trades, they say, but a proper brigand. I’d always heard nobody knew what he looked like.”
“Curiously enough, her lawyer did,” the judge said. “He defended him years ago on a forgery charge.”
“Did he get him off?” Placido Geist asked, smiling.
“Yes, he did. We’re talking about Johnny Beauchamp out of San Antonio, a man who never takes the losing side.”
“Speaking of villains of some reputation,” Placido Geist remarked, without malice.
“The fellow’s a scoundrel, no question,” Lamar said. “I wonder he didn’t employ Messenger himself in some capacity.”
“If he had, the Pym woman did him a service,” Placido Geist said. “Handsome Andy might have embarrassed any number of people had he ever been put in the witness box.”
Lamar chuckled. “Dead men tell no tales,” he said.
“I wonder what brought them together.”
“Ranch business, or that was his pretext for meeting with her,” the judge said. “Apparently she keeps the pursestrings and wears the pants as well. Her husband is a hopeless drunk, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“And she holds the prize,” Placido Geist said.
Lamar put the chessmen back in position on the board. They’d won a game apiece. Lamar picked up a white pawn and a black one and put his hands behind his back.
Handsome Andy would have been there to sell, not buy, Placido Geist thought. He wasn’t in the cattle business, and surely rape wasn’t on his mind.
The judge held his clenched hands out, a pawn in each. The white pawn moved first.
The richest spread in West Texas, and now it was hers. He reached out and tapped Lamar’s left hand. Lamar opened it and showed him the black pawn. Placido Geist sat forward. He’d be a move behind for the rest of the game, and he couldn’t afford a mistake, not if he wanted to win.