She frowned and decided, “You’re conning me. You never got a chance to question any of the others. I was the only one you ever had more than a few words with, and I know I never told you anything!”
He leaned the empty Big Fifty against another tree and gathered up the reins as he told her, “Look on the bright side. It’ll give you a puzzle to ponder late at night as you while away your jail time.”
So he never told her, no matter how she cussed and pleaded all the way back to Yuma, where they parted unfriendly.
But once he got back to his home office and filed his report, his immediate superior, the crusty U.S. Marshal William Vail of the Denver District Court, seemed less than satisfied as to some details.
Thus it came to pass that on a payday afternoon, as Longarm was anxious to go calling with a bunch of violets and a copy of the Kama Sutra in a plain brown wrapper, he found himself literally on the carpet in Billy Vail’s oak-paneled and smoke-filled back office.
A million years went by as Longarm sat smoking milder tobacco in the leather chair across a cluttered desk from the older, shorter, and far beefier Billy Vail, who seemed to enjoy reading reports over and over as the banjo clock on the wall ticked away whole minutes of fun a man could be having most anywhere else.
At last the older lawman lowered the typed-up first copy with a puzzled sigh and declared, “All right. You did well enough, I reckon. I sent you to bring back Harmony Drake and you at least produced that sepia-toned photograph they took before they nailed the coffin lid in Yuma. You paid for that out of your own pocket, of course?”
Longarm nodded soberly and said, “I owned up to his death in that report. I confess off the record I got a deal on the burials. Knowing how you feel about us putting in for bounty money, I suggested a pal on the Yuma force might as well, provided he’d care to take those dead boys off my hands, along with Goldmine Gloria.”
Vail nodded his bullet head curtly and said, “I ain’t puzzled about the way Harmony Drake and so many of his pals wound up dead, and you did good by turning that confidence gal over to the Pinks and saving the taxpayers the needless expenses of a federal trial.”
He chewed thoughtfully on his evil-smelling but expensive cigar and decided, “I’m taking your word you were in hot pursuit and never noticed you were in Mexico until you had that little misunderstanding with the greaser law, albeit sometimes these reports of yours push reasonable to highly unlikely. What I’m still trying to fathom is who put you on to that half-abandoned desert homestead owned by Goldmine Gloria Weaver under the name of the Widow Dundee.”
He brandished Longarm’s typed-up report like a sword as he added, “Sure, it all works after the fact. You say that once you got back to Yuma, figuring the gang had needed a good reason to double back there after such a wide circle through Old Mexico, you spent a few hours at the Yuma hall of records, narrowed it down to half-a-dozen possibles, and just rode about on a borrowed horse and saddle until you came to the right one.”
Longarm nodded. “It was all those dead fruit trees that gave the show away, Boss. Over an acre of expensive citrus saplings boxed in by a carefully transplanted cactus hedge. I saw right off how someone had put a heap of thought and hope into what had once been a tidy little experimental farm. That’s what you call it when you try to grow irrigated stuff that’s never growed on a desert before: an experimental farm.”
Vail growled, “You said it was an experimental farm homesteaded by a retired doctor and his somewhat younger wife in this report. I asked how come you knew where to look, damn it!”
Longarm nodded and said, “I reckon I got ahead of my story. It all begins on a train, where a confidence woman who’s really out to free a lover from a poor innocent lawman conned him good by pretending to be a trained nursing sister.” Vail nodded and said, “I heard about you and that nursing sister on the Pine Ridge Reservation. I can see how she’d have to put on a better than average act with a cuss so interested in medical matters.”
Longarm smiled sheepishly and confessed, “Goldmine Gloria sold me with some technical jargon you’d seldom read in the Police Gazette. So once I figured she’d only been conning me, I still knew she had to know more about medicine than your average outlaw’s doxie.”
Vail nodded grudgingly and said, “I follow your drift. But ain’t it a long reach from a gal who might have read some medical books to the widow of a doc who’d left her a homestead out in the desert?” Longarm shook his head and said, “Not hardly. She lured me off the train in another part of that desert with a lie about the trader there being a retired doc growing oranges and such under irrigation. A half truth makes a mighty good lie, and I’ve noticed a heap of crooks use the same when pressed for convincing bullshit. But it only came to me when a Mex pal told me how lots of Anglo settlers had been experimenting in the desert around Yuma with exotic crops that the lying gal might have fed me a half truth about another retired doc entirely. Once that came to me, it was easy enough to scout through the local files and cut their trail. How many doctors marry young wives and file homestead claims in a given neighborhood, for Pete’s sake? I never meant to hold out on you when I wrote that report up on the train, still feeling sort of coy. I reckon I was still enjoying my little joke on her. I hope she loses heaps of sleep in the years to come trying to figure out how any gal as smart as her slipped up with somebody dumb as me. Can I go now? I promised a lady supper at Romero’s come payday night.”
Vail laughed despite himself and said, “Go on. But just one thing more, Custis. This report says you wound up in Yuma last Thursday. So how do you account for not leaving town for another three days?”
To which Longarm could only reply, “Goldmine Gloria reminded me of a book that Mex pal I told you about had never read. So I bought a copy. And then, of course, I had to translate it some.”