He suspected why she sort of avoided his eyes when he asked what else the ash blonde might have said about him. The schoolmarm was blushing but composed herself as she murmured, “Just that the two of you were becoming… good friends. What’s this all about, Deputy Long?”
He said, “My good friends call me Custis. They told me over at the hotel that Trisha didn’t work there anymore. She wasn’t at her own place, either. I finally found some old boys who’d been spitting and whittling in front of the tobacco shop when she’d ridden by, headed down the coach road to Santa Fe most likely. The wires ain’t up yet, and I ain’t sure I want her stopped in any case. Might that have been your mare she lit out on, Miss Meg?”
The schoolmarm sat down across from him, shaking her head firmly as she said, “My Pixie is right out back, if you’d care to see her.”
Longarm said, “I’ll take your word for it, ma’am. No lady capable of such fine marble cake would tell really dumb lies.”
She met his eyes this time as she blazed, “See here, I’ve not a thing to hide from you or any other lawman! I haven’t been the one in bed with an impossibly endowed man night after night, damn it!”
He didn’t ask how disappointed she felt about that. He just smiled sheepishly and said, “She told me you were a dried-up old prune. But I ain’t charging her with that big fib. I’m trying to determine how deep she was in more serious stuff. I turned to her to borrow your pony for me that night. I figured I might be able to confide in a waitress gal who didn’t work for the late Queen Kirby. I figured wrong, and the two of them were playing me for a total sap until mighty recently.”
Meg Campbell brightened and said, “So that’s what it was! Did you say the late Queen Kirby? What happened to her?”
Longarm said, “You go first and I’ll tell you the whole tangled tale from the beginning. What were you about to say something was?”
The brunette said, “Trisha boasted that whether you were willing to take her away from all this or not, she was going to leave town on her own high-stepper, with money to start over in a real town. I guess I’m as nosy as I ought to be, and so I naturally kept after her about it. But all I got was that certain parties were willing to pay good money to learn harmless little secrets. Do you think she was telling Queen Kirby you’d been, you know, up in your hotel room?”
Longarm smiled thinly and replied, “I doubt Queen Kirby cared about my love life. That’s all a matter of taste—literally, in Queen Kirby’s case. But it’s sort of soothing to know Trisha was only a dumb blonde after all. I doubt she’d ever be able to tell us more than we already know, and what’s a little betrayal betwixt friends?”
The brunette poured some coffee for herself as she gently but firmly reminded Longarm he owed her a story.
Longarm washed down some cake and began. “Once upon a time there was this sort of odd couple, well-fixed for cash but on the dodge for having obtained the cash under many, many false pretenses. They came in their travels upon this bitty trail town, well-located but dying on the vine because it was located betwixt a haunted mesa and an Apache reservation. Being keen students of human nature, the couple I’ll call Frenchy and Dolly saw folks were still unreasonably spooked by Indian troubles of the past. So it was possible to buy valuable property up this way cheap.”
He took another bite and continued. “They did. One going business finances another, and so in no time at all Frenchy and Dolly became Queen Kirby and her boys. They naturally sent for other grifters to help them run their private town.”
Meg Campbell protested, “They didn’t own all of us. I’ll have you know I was hired by the town council, not any card-house or parlor-house madam!”
He said soothingly, “I know. Almost half the town council is made up of more respectable old-timers. That’s what was eating the greedy gent who was posing as a gal.”
She gasped. “Good Lord! Queen Kirby was a man?”
Longarm said, “I reckon Trisha never told you because she never knew. He made a fairly convincing old gal, But that wasn’t the crime that caused so much bother. There was a colonial governor back in the time of the real Queen Anne who liked to dress up like a fine lady, but he never dressed others up as Indians to spook folks even worse.”
He saw he’d gotten ahead of himself again when she marveled, “Those Apache were dressed up silly too?”
He silenced her with a wave of his coffee cup and said, “Forget a heap of their unusual habits and you’ve still got greed. The natural laws of supply and demand raise real-estate values as a township gets more attractive to investors. They must have noticed how unwise it was to simply grab property the way they did down Lincoln County way. It was slicker when they grasped how Uncle John Chisum had wound up owning everything when the gunsmoke cleared, leaving the surviving property-holders demoralized and ready to sell out for a song. But as word got out about those Jicarilla being cleared to make room for progress, land values in these parts figured to go up, not down, and leave us not forget the rising price of beef back East. In sum, Queen Kirby’s trail-town empire had finished expanding for the foreseeable future, unless they could make the future look different.”
He sipped, put down the cup again, and said, “They sent out for more help. Some of them hardcase killers but mostly just adventurous saddle tramps. Only a small number of them had to be let in on their true plans. They didn’t want to make it easy to add up the numbers, so they had some camping over in the canyonlands at first. That was a mistake they corrected as soon as they heard word was getting out to the real world about private armies gathering. They knew Governor Wallace and even the president who’d appointed him would be on the prod for another New Mexico dust-up like that Lincoln County War. So they pulled them into town and enlisted them with the rest of their so-called Regulators before I ever got here.”
“Regulators regulating what?” she demanded.
He said, “Apache, of course. Turns out no Jicarilla have really gone all that wild over the latest BIA nonsense. They likely figure Washington will reshuffle everybody back the way they were as soon as they get Victorio calmed down or buried. But everyone else with the hair and horseflesh they value was already braced for another Apache war before this county’s effeminate answer to Uncle John Chisum decided to provide ‘em with one. It was simple for Wes Jones, as Frenchy now called himself, to stage some Apache raids while pretending to be protecting all the white settlers from the savages. They didn’t have to steal half as seriously as real raiders to scare the liver and lights out of folks. They didn’t want to kill anyone capable of signing a bill of sale for some quick cash on the way to safer parts. So for all the dramatics, it was mostly hollow noise.”
She poured him more coffee as she marveled, “Well, I never. But how much of this might Trisha have known, the two-faced thing?”
He grimaced and replied, “Not much. There was no need for hardly anyone they used to know what they were really up to. Trisha never came into the story before I came down from Colorado, by a devious route and a tad late. They’d known I was coming. We’re still working on old pals they might have had on the BIA payroll, working for the railroad or whatever. Drifting grifters meet a lot of other shady sorts in their travels and a buck is always worth a hundred cents.”
He sipped more coffee—she’d brewed it swell—and explained, “It was my getting here way later than expected that confounded them about me. I fear their first plan was to have me killed by Apache. I showed up not exactly as described after killing somebody else along the way. So, not wanting to waste a possibly valuable asset, Queen Kirby, or more likely the one you all knew as Wes Jones, came sneaking around, found Trisha in my room with me somewhere else, and made a quick deal with her.”