“I’m going to,” York assured her. “But I need your help.”
“I’m too sick for that. Maybe tomorrow. He was so sweet to me. I knew he was special right off. I only let him pay me the first few times. We was gonna get married. Put all of this behind me.”
He wondered if what she planned to leave behind included her laudanum habit.
“Pearl,” he said, “I need to know if Herbert mentioned anything to you about his boss. Thomas Carter, the bank president.”
“I know who his boss is. I can’t tell you anything.”
“You can’t tell me anything because you don’t know anything? Or because you’re afraid to?”
“I can’t tell you anything.”
“If you’re afraid, I can protect you.”
Her smile was a crooked line drawn on her face by a child artist. “Herbert was a very sweet man. We was gonna move away from here. Now he’s gone. Now I’m just a girl at the Victory again.”
York sat forward. “Pearl, I think Mr. Carter may be responsible for Herbert’s death. But right now, it looks like Carter may get away with it.”
“He’s an important man in this town.”
“That’s right. But it doesn’t give him license to take a man’s life. To take your man’s life.”
“Iffen I told you something, my man would still be gone. I would still be a girl at the Victory.”
“If you know something, Pearl, you have to tell me. It’s the only way for you to...” What would work with her? “...get even.”
This smile showed teeth, yellowed but nicely formed. “Getting even don’t bring Herbert back. That’s gone from my life. Sheriff, I know you want to do right. But doin’ right don’t do no good. I’m sleepy now. Maybe we can talk later.”
“Pearl...”
Rita’s hand was on his shoulder. “That’s enough,” she said softly.
She was right.
York rose wearily, but when he got to the door, Pearl called to him.
“Sheriff — why are people afraid to die?”
He returned to her bedside, but didn’t sit. “Because we don’t know what’s on the other side of that door, Pearl. Not for sure we don’t.”
“Is it heaven?”
“Might be.” Of course Herbert Upton, if he were anywhere, would be in a warmer place. “You afraid to die, Pearl?”
“I am. I don’t know why, because bein’ a girl at the Victory, that’s no kind of life. But the way Herbert got shot, that hurt him, didn’t it? Bad. Did he take a very long time to die?”
“I’m afraid so, Pearl.”
“So I should help you make the person who did that die, too. Maybe die just as bad.”
“He’d hang. That’s plenty bad.”
The big blue eyes stared up at him; they were truly beautiful. “Maybe being dead ain’t what scares me. Maybe it’s the time it takes doing it. The dying?”
“Let me protect you, Pearl. Tell me what you know, agree to testify, and I’ll—”
But now the eyes had closed. She was not dead, just sleeping. Just riding the laudanum cloud like an angel.
Chapter Twelve
Around six o’clock, with the day’s sun still sliding into evening, a clerk from Harris Mercantile came by the jailhouse with word from Mr. Harris.
The towheaded youth — maybe sixteen — was the shop-owner’s middle boy. He’d never been in the sheriff’s office before and his eyes were big with the gun rack and wanted posters as he said, “Pa says the Citizens Committee is about to convene. They request you attend, with due respect.”
Caleb York — seated not at his desk but by the barred window onto the street, should the Rhomers make good time on their ride from Las Vegas — said to the boy, “That ‘due respect,’ son — are they giving it, or am I to bring it?”
“Sir, I don’t know, sir. I just know they want you.”
“I’ll be right down.”
The boy nodded, looking around all big-eyed, taking in the first of the cells before the others disappeared out of sight behind the far wall.
“Sheriff, how many cells you got back there?”
“How many do you need?”
The boy blinked at him.
York smiled. “Four cells. We accommodate four to a cell, if called for.”
“What if there was more bad people than sixteen?”
The boy had math skills.
“Well, then,” York said, “I guess I’d just have to shoot the excess.”
The boy’s eyes got even bigger, he swallowed, and scurried out.
York got up, tied his .44 down just in case, went out, and locked the door behind him. As he began to walk down to the mercantile, he nodded over to Tulley, out in front of the livery stable, leaning on a broom.
The deputy, who nodded back, would appear to anyone riding in — the Rhomers, for instance — just a harmless coot doing odd jobs at the livery. Few if any would notice the scattergun leaned up against, and mostly hidden, by the nearby blacksmith anvil.
The sign said CLOSED in the window of Harris Mercantile, but the door was unlocked. A meeting was already under way in back, past the front two-thirds of the store, and just beyond the wood-burning stove. Perhaps a dozen chairs were arranged in two semicircular rows, leaving an aisle between; the seating faced the same slightly raised table used on occasion by the circuit-court judge.
Is this a trial? York wondered. And am I the defendant?
At that table, in the judge’s chair, sat Jasper Hardy, the town’s fastidious little barber mayor, gavel in hand, with elaborately well-dressed banker Carter seated up there at His Honor’s left, their host Newt Harris to his right.
Curl-brimmed hat in hand, the black-clad sheriff moved down the aisle past the other city fathers — druggist Clem Davis, hardware man Clarence Mathers, telegraph manager Ralph Parsons, undertaker Perkins, among others — and took a seat right in front.
York knew he must be a topic of discussion here — perhaps the topic — because he normally wasn’t invited to these meetings. So he positioned himself where they could have at him. If they had the grit.
Too late he realized he was sitting right across from Willa, seated next to her father, with Zachary Gauge on the other side of the old man. She wore a blue-and-white calico dress and her hair was down, blue-ribboned back — she looked nothing like a tomboy this afternoon. They exchanged nods and polite, awkward smiles.
The smile the mayor gave to York was similarly polite and even more awkward. “Sheriff, we’re glad to see you here. Thank you, sir, for accepting our invitation.”
Why? he thought. Is it a dance?
The room was already pin-drop quiet when the mustached mayor pointlessly banged his gavel a couple of times, then contradicted the formality of that by addressing York again.
“Sheriff,” Hardy said, “please understand — this isn’t an official meeting.”
York said, “Could have fooled me.”
“The committee members did meet just half an hour ago,” the mayor went on, “and while no vote was taken on the subject, we were in general agreement that it would be best for Trinidad... and in your best interests, too... if you were to step down from your post.”
“That’s my intention,” York said, in a voice both quiet and strong, “when a certain matter is resolved.”
“If I might, Jasper,” Thomas Carter said to the mayor. Then the banker’s gaze went to those watching, though not landing on York. “I believe this concerns me as much, if not more, than anyone here.”
Then, with the kind of sincerity only a crooked bank president could muster, Carter smiled down at York and said, “We all appreciate everything you’ve done for Trinidad. Your quick response to the robbery of First Bank took down two of the scoundrels right at the scene, and, of course, you tracked down and shot and killed their ringleader. You even returned a portion of the stolen funds. A small portion, granted, but nonetheless a gesture appreciated by me... by all of us.”