“This is going to take all day if you keep butting in like that, ma’am. It don’t take a head doctor to savvy that all-too-familiar pattern. Slovenly housekeepers raise compulsed neat daughters, and vice versa. You wanted your own house to keep, a lot neater. So you married Tom Banes, young, so’s you could be the mistress of your own home, and tidy it up all you wanted.”
“Is that a crime?” she asked disdainfully.
“I ain’t got to criminal charges yet. Since it’s your house, I can’t even say it was wrong for you to cart all your late husband’s hunting trophies back to his workshop as soon as you was rid of him.”
She followed his glance to a spot above the fireplace where a moose head might have once hung and replied defensively, “I see no reason to deny that. I never shared Tom’s interest in hunting and, to me, all those glassy-eyed dust-catchers were just an extra bother. As for my having gotten rid of anyone, I’d best point out my husband died at work, not here, of a heart seizure.”
“That’s true, right after he’d enjoyed the lunch you packed for him, if the time of death on record is correct. But that’s a local matter, and we’re getting ahead of my federal case some more. Before your husband died, your parents did. I’ll accept that as natural. They was both elderly and in poor health, when you married hasty to get away from them.”
“How can you be so cruel?” she protested.
He shrugged. “Sometimes it goes with this job. Cruel or not, facts is facts So the fact is that by the time you found out you’d married a good-natured, natural slob, you also found you was dependent on him. As a manager at Denver Dry Goods, he made enough to support you decent enough and, by the way, the post office says all them Wild West magazines they delivered to this address was delivered in your husband’s name, not your kid brother’s.”
“I could have told you that, had you asked. It never crossed my mind at the time.”
He sighed and said, “I should have checked that earlier. It occurred to me at the time that, for an unwelcome guest with no visible means of support, your kid brother had a lot of reading material stacked in his room. You likely hauled them out back when you tidied up after your late husband, right?”
She shook her head a bit wildly and said, “No. I told you Tom was interested in outdoor western notions. But he didn’t save a magazine once he’d read it. He passed it on to Joseph, and Joseph never threw anything away.”
Longarm raised an eyebrow. “You told me your husband tried to interest your brother in going hunting and such with him on the weekends, but that the kid preferred to mope about the house and get in the way of your dusting.”
She shrugged. “What of it? That was why Tom asked him to leave, in the end. Tom said there had to be something wrong with a slugabed who’d rather read about cowboys than rid like one when he had the chance.”
“Let’s not worry about whether it was an easy-going brother-in-law or a vexed big sister who threw the kid out. The point is that someone did. So he was off in the army, no doubt vexing them with his useless ways, when your late father died, leaving both his kids well provided for with that trust fund at the Drover’s Savings and Loan.”
The young widow flashed her eyes at him as she snapped, “What of it? What a woman might or might not own in her own name is her own business, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am. There was nothing dislawful about your no-doubt fond father leaving you that house of theirs you still own, boarded up, a quarter-mile away.”
“Are you suggesting Joseph could be hiding there?” she asked.
“Nope. The Denver copper badges already looked. That’s how come I knew it was boarded up. County records don’t show that. I agree it’s smart of you to hold off putting it up for sale with real estate prices in Denver still rising, since the beef market got better, just recent.”
He leaned back and caught himself reaching for a smoke without thinking. He put the thought aside and said, “The point is not that you are today a woman of independent means. The point is how you got that way. You came into modest wealth by birth right only after you’d stuck yourself with a husband who hung animal heads all over your walls and doubtless had other habits a fussy housewife couldn’t abide. So, once you no longer needed him to support you, he—let’s say he just died young and unexpected. I got enough on my plate as it is.”
She gasped and called him a son of a bitch. He chuckled and replied, “Takes one to know her own litter, I reckon. Anyway, just about the time you had this house prissed up more to your liking, your kid brother showed up on your doorstep. Slow-witted as he might have been, he’d have heard about the death of his own old man. So he offered to move back in with you and help you spend the family fortune.”
She nodded and said, “That’s true. I’ll admit I told him he wasn’t welcome and you saw the bruise he left on me. I gave him some money, damn it, but he wouldn’t leave.”
Longarm said, “He couldn’t. He was dead. Had you waited until the army gents showed up, they’d have been glad to take him off your hands for you. But you didn’t know that. You figured you was stuck with a bad penny you couldn’t get rid of no other way. You killed your pesky little brother long before the army showed up to reclaim him. Then, when they showed up with that search warrant, you had to kill them, as well.”
She stared at him owl-eyed and protested, “You must be as crazy as poor Joseph! How could you accuse a poor helpless woman of engaging in a gunfight with two experienced law officers?”
He smiled thinly and said, “That struck me as mysterious even when I considered a weakling who couldn’t even aim a ball. The only way a green gunhand can drill anyone direct through the heart calls for firing point-blank at a stationary target. So you set ‘em down here in this very parlor, served them refreshments as they was asking you about your fool kid brother, and, once they was dead, you just lined them up neat, as usual, over there on the floor, and-“
“Is that why you haven’t touched your coffee?” she cut in, pointing at his cup. She laughed incredulously. “Did you really think I was trying to poison you?”
He nodded soberly. “Yes, ma’am. We’ll no doubt find out which of them chemicals from your late husband’s workshop you prefers to kill folk with, once we dig up all the bodies. It may be enough just to go by the results of your brother’s autopsy, once we dig him up from under the loose paving of your carriage house. I noticed the last time I poked about out there that it tended to make you jumpy. Is that why you pegged them shots at me, up the hill, right after I’d left here? No offense, but Black Jack Junior wasn’t a good shot at any distance.”
