This guy had a line of bullshit that stretched clear from here to Buffalo, New York, Prine thought. He had to give him one thing, though. He was a dazzler. He could hold an audience with the best of them.
"But you are no doubt wondering what any of this has to do with my lovely daughter Lucretia. Too simple—and too tragic. They broke into our house one night. I am a widower. Lucretia was home alone. They cut her tongue out. Later, one of the men who helped to do this terrible thing, he told me that this would be worse than killing her. Because every time I looked at my daughter now, I would see what selling my badge had done. That was how the gentleman put it. 'Selling my badge.' I myself personally castrated him. I made sure that he remained conscious. Then I poured kerosene upon him and set him on fire. I did not do this to please my men. Or to appease some crowd of lowborns. I did it to avenge my daughter. I did this alone, with no one else around to see. I waited till he was nothing more than ash and bone, and then I threw him into a pit of rattlers I kept in the ground behind the jail. Sometimes prisoners do not want to talk. Showing them the snake pit can be a very effective means of making them more cooperative." He nodded to Lucretia. "This, then, is my tragic daughter."
The girl looked curiously angry as he told this story. Prine figured it must be having to relive the terrible events that led to her being mute. She'd probably appreciate it if her father wasn't always bringing it up. He'd be pissed off every time he thought of it. The girl curtsied and left the office.
Valdez got up and poured brandy from a fancy cut-glass bottle. Each cup got a strong dose of it. "The coffee is not to every palate. Jail coffee, what can you expect? The brandy is the best one can buy. It makes even this coffee bearable." Finished serving, he capped the bottle and sat down again.
"Now, gentlemen," said the splendid—just ask him—Mexican, "how is it I may serve you?"
"We're looking for two men. Tolan and Rooney are their names," Prine said.
"These are bad men?"
"Very bad men. They kidnapped Mr. Neville's sister and then murdered her."
Valdez was so dramatic in response to this news that he looked as though he might purely faint. "An outrage against all that is true and holy."
"They came this way," Prine said. "They may be in Picaro now."
The drama continued. The fabulous Mexican put his hand on his fist and shook his noble head. "It is a wonder that God above does not strike us all dead, the things we do to each other."
Prine was starting to feel faint from all the ham acting. He said, "We need your permission to look around town. We're not asking for anything official. We just want to check the hotels and the saloons, mostly."
"You do not want to use my men?"
"We don't want to signal them we're here. If your men start asking questions, it won't be long before they figure out that we're here looking for them."
"I see. A point well taken, my friend. But in such a heinous matter—I will be most cooperative in any way you suggest. And if these two should end up in my jail, I can assure you they will rot there."
Neville spoke for the first time. "We'll take them back with us to Claybank."
"Of course, whatever you wish. Cooperation is what I promised you, and cooperation is what you shall have."
Prine said, "We're pretty tired, but we're going to start looking for them right away. Then we'll get some sleep and some grub."
"Your poor sister," Valdez said. "She was young, Mr. Neville?"
"Twenty-three."
"A child—an innocent flower. These men will pay for what they've done, believe me."
"Thank you, Marshal," Neville said. "Now we need to get going."
Prine and Neville pushed up from their chairs. The brandy had made Prine groggy. He needed cold wind to cut his lethargy.
A man in a white apron over Levi's and a red wool shirt walked past the door, nodding. "Good morning, Marshal. This food is much better than they deserve."
It stood to reason that since everything else was so splendid about Marshal Valdez, his laugh would be splendid, too. On stage, it would carry well to all the highest seats in the balcony. Valdez the opera star.
"You say that every morning, Mr. Wiley."
"I say it because it's that good every morning."
Prine had the feeling that the banter was part of an entire ritual. A really boring one.
Wiley vanished. Prine heard the heavy door leading to the cells in back being opened and then closed. There would likely be a slot for food trays built into the cell doors.
"Remember, my friends, I will take every opportunity to help you."
Prine glanced at Neville. Neville looked as weary of this splendiferous speech as Prine was.
Prine thought they'd walk themselves to the front door. But Valdez couldn't just let them go, could he? What kind of host would he be?
"This is a lovely town, this Picaro," he said, escorting them up front. "I hope you have time to enjoy the cultural activities."
Whorehouses, gambling pits, maybe a hoedown or two. Those would be the cultural activities, Prine reasoned. Valdez here could make a good living writing brochures for tourists. With his grandiose manner of speech, he could make a pigsty sound like a Bavarian castle.
Then, at last, they were outside and Valdez was closing the door behind them.
"That guy's as full of shit as a Christmas turkey," Neville said.
"You trust him?"
"Do you?"
"Fuck no," Prine said.
"He's angling for something, but I'm not sure what."
"Money. I'm just trying to figure out how he's going to get it out of us."
"You think he knows where they are?"
"Probably. But there isn't anything we can do about it. He's got jurisdiction here. He's paying me the courtesy of asking around for Tolan and Rooney. But he doesn't even have to do that if he doesn't want to."
"Your badge doesn't travel?"
"Not outside the limits of Claybank county, it doesn't. And we're a long ways from Clayback county."
"A long ways," Neville said, looking around at the town. "A long ways."
Chapter Fifteen
There were five saloons, if you counted a private club called The Gentleman's Grill. They split them up and set about their work.
The first one Prine entered was a latrine with walls and a roof. He didn't know what he was smelling, but whatever it was was long dead. Not that the customers seemed to notice in the crypt-shadowy place that consisted of a raw timber bar and three long benches along the east wall. The place wasn't ten feet wide. A dog was noisily eating something from the damp dirt floor. Prine wouldn't have been surprised if the meal consisted of a human corpse.
One drunk had his head down on the bar. Passing out while you were standing was no modest feat. Another drunk, one of those sitting on the bench, had puked on himself but didn't seem to notice. He was conversing with another drunk who kept almost sliding off the bench. There was another drunk who every few seconds would raise his head and shout, "I need some pussy over here!"
The bartender was ridiculously dapper, a merry fop in a leper colony. White shirt, string tie, rimless glasses, hard dead smile, white hair. He had to be in his late sixties.
"Is that a real badge?" he said.
"It is if you live in Claybank."
"You're a ways away from home."
"Your marshal was telling me about all the cultural activities in town here." He looked around. "I thought I'd check one of them out."
"Believe me, mister," the bartender said, "you can't insult this place. All the jokes have been told. And as for the marshal, we pay that sonofabitch through the nose to stay in business here. He makes as much from this place as I do."