Nothing was said for maybe half a minute.
Then York offered, “Lovely day.”
“Very nice. Little cool, but I like it crisp.”
“As do I. What time did you open up this morning, Clarence?”
The merchant smiled. “Well, actually, I didn’t. My daughter and that boy of mine in there did. They’re starting to make me feel as useless as teats on a boar. You know, that girl has an equal share in my will. I believe if she finds the right man, she’ll be the one carrying this hardware store into the next century.”
“Where were you then?”
“I took the wagon out.”
“Really? Where to?”
“I had supplies to deliver to the Circle G. Why?”
The Circle G was in the general area of the Bar-O, but not close enough to make this admission anything for York to sit up about.
York asked, “Folks out there back you up?”
“Of course. But why the hell would they need to?”
York told him.
The big fleshy man slumped in his chair. His face went bloodless, and he was shaking his head, staring at the planks underfoot.
Mathers’s voice was hushed. “Murdered, you say? Hell of a thing. Hell of a terrible thing. We wouldn’t have a town without that man! This part of the country would be Indians and wild animals without the likes of him! Who would do such a thing?”
“I was thinking maybe one of your brother merchants on the Citizens Committee.”
His eyes and nostrils flared. “Not a chance in Hades! We had a dispute, yes, but we were all friends. No one can deny that. He was on the committee, for Lord’s sake!”
“He stood in the way of progress. Of commerce.”
“He’d have come around.”
“Because his daughter would have stood against him?”
That surprised Mathers. “I... I didn’t say that. Where did you hear that?”
York didn’t answer. He stood and said, “You have any further thoughts on this subject, Clarence, I’d be obliged if you shared them.”
He left the man there, still seated in front of his storefront windows, staring bleakly at his feet and the wood beneath them — the wood of a boardwalk his nails held together.
The office of the Trinidad Enterprise was at the church end of Main, in a narrow two-story clapboard building the color of butter, brand new and nestled next to the saddle shop.
York went in and was immediately hit with the oily smell of ink. Editor Oscar Penniman, in gartered shirtsleeves and a black visor, sat at his rolltop desk against the right wall, hunkered over a torn-off sheet of foolscap, writing in pencil.
At a table at left, Penniman’s young aproned assistant, Harold Jones, a Kansas City import, whom York had spoken to only once or twice, sat arranging type by hand in little metal trays. Against the wall were four five-foot narrow-drawer typeset cabinets.
Toward the rear, and consuming much of the space, was a cast-iron and wood contraption as big as a buckboard, with a central drum, levers, gears, and springs. Silent now, the printing press looked like it could make a hell of a racket in motion, like some ancient beast that might come lumbering toward you.
No bell over the door had announced York, but the editor soon sensed his presence, anyway, and turned toward him with a guarded smile, a nod, and “Sheriff.”
“Mr. Penniman. I have a story for you.”
“Come. Take a seat.” A smile flickering under the perfectly trimmed mustache, he gestured to a nearby chair, which York went over and filled.
“I admit I’m surprised to see you, Sheriff. I rather got the impression that your opinion of me and my paper was, well, less than entirely favorable.”
“I really have no opinion either way,” York said. “But it does seem a bit on the shady side that you don’t advertise your silent partner.”
“What silent partner would that be?” the editor asked too innocently.
“The Santa Fe Railroad. But we’ve covered that. And, anyway, if I have a story that needs putting in front of the public, where else could I go but the Enterprise?”
Penniman studied the sheriff for a moment, then shrugged and grabbed a new piece of paper, pencil poised. “All right, then. What news is it you have for our readers?”
“George Cullen has been murdered.”
The editor stiffened, looking up from the as yet unwritten-upon paper. “Well, that’s a shock. Terrible to hear. You’re... you’re sure of this?”
York nodded, then gave him a superficial account, just the bare facts and none of the doctor’s medical opinions.
Penniman frowned. “But... that sounds as if he was thrown from his horse...?”
York gestured to Penniman’s paper.
Then he said, “ ‘Sheriff Caleb York, formerly a detective with Wells Fargo, considers the circumstances highly suspicious and is handling the tragedy as a murder investigation. The body apparently was moved and arranged to suggest accidental death. The deceased’s reluctance to support the Santa Fe Railroad’s proposed branchline, the sheriff says, is a possible motive.’ You get all that?”
Hunkered over again, Penniman was still writing. Then he said, “I got it. Want to hear it?”
“Yes.”
The editor read it back. He had it word for word.
“You’re talking to possible suspects, I assume,” Penniman said.
“Yes. For example, where were you this morning between sunup and ten?”
The editor straightened a little. “So I’m a suspect, then?”
“You and the Santa Fe Railroad... but you don’t have to quote that if you aren’t so inclined. Where were you, Mr. Penniman? This morning?”
The editor’s dark eyes flared. “Right here! You can talk to Mr. Jones there, and he’ll confirm it. I took an early breakfast at the hotel and was at the office by seven thirty.”
“Mr. Jones might be inclined to back up his boss.”
“What, and risk being charged as a murder accomplice? Sheriff, based upon what you’ve said, I would need a buckboard to accomplish this foul deed, one of which I do not own. Here, I don’t even own a horse. And the only place I could have rented either buckboard or steed would be the livery, and you can check there and find that I didn’t.”
York nodded, rose. “I’ll do that. Add to the story, if you please, that the sheriff would appreciate any information about this possible murder that your readers might be able to share. All right, sir?”
Penniman frowned — almost scowled — but he nodded before returning to his foolscap.
The front windows of the next business Caleb York visited displayed two well-crafted mahogany caskets with brass fittings and a small dignified sign that said:
Such fancy coffins were only for those well-off citizens to whom life, if not death, had been kind. This display at times had made way for the remains of such outlaws as the late sheriff Harry Gauge and various members of the Rhomer clan, who’d had a grudge against the current sheriff.
If York ever ended up on the wrong end of a gunfight, he knew his next stop would surely be this window.
York entered into a showroom of sorts, with less ostentatious caskets at right and various cabinets, dressers, tables, and chairs at left — death on one hand, life on the other. A desk off in a corner was not for sale; this was Undertaker Perkins’s work area, though he was not seated there. Hammering from in back sent York in that direction.
The back room was a workshop, with stacked lumber, a tool-strewn workbench, and the smell of sawdust. The barn-style doors at the rear of the building allowed the storing of a funeral wagon, its black, feathery plumes and glass windows protected by a tarpaulin. Skinny, bald, mustached Perkins, without his usual Abe Lincoln high hat, looked even smaller than he usually did. But in his BVD top he showed off a surprising musculature as he hammered away at his latest creation.