Then he recognized the same detective he’d just talked to at Police Headquarters and added, “Come on in and I’ll show you what a swell present they meant to leave for me.”
The El Paso lawman and two beat men followed Longarm into his room warily. He picked up the rewired telephone and told them, “Don’t worry. I cut the wires attached to the dry cell as soon as I noticed it.”
The detectives took the mahogany box-stand to peep into its exposed innards. Then he whistled and said, “Jesus, six quarter-sticks of sixty percent dynamite would be bad enough, but I see they stuck a mess of nails in ‘em as well!”
Longarm said, “I don’t think they Red me. The plan was to switch this infernal device with my regular set whilst I was out, and it’s sure lucky I came home early to change this wilted shirt. If I hadn’t, they’d have waited until I came back this evening. Then one of ‘em would simply have gone to the desk, asked the operator to ring my room, and blooey. The bell mechanism was set to close the circuit and detonate the bomb, right next to the head of my bed. Even if I’d lived through it, I’d have been off the case for a good spell. My department retires deputies who go deaf in the line of duty.”
The El Paso lawman handed the sneaky device back, saying, “All right, we don’t get to arrest you after all. Them gents you just gunned down in self-defense may have some I.D. on ‘em, and there’s even an outside chance it won’t be fake. Who do you figure they might have been?”
Longarm put the rigged telephone down beside its innocent twin as he opined, “There’s not that much figuring involved. The Great Costello just lost two stooges from his act.”
The older and perhaps more cynical lawman said, “Hold on. You could be jumping to conclusions, Longarm. A man with your rep makes enemies, and by now it’s no secret you’re in town.”
Longarm shook his head and insisted, “Men in our line of work make lots of enemies. I’ve had so many try to shoot me in the back that my shoulder blades itch even when nobody’s aiming at ‘em. But I can’t see the whole James-Younger gang coming with anything this clever if they studied on it all together, sober. On the other hand, at the moment I’m on the trail of a professional magician who goes in for doing sneaksome things with mirrors, trick boxes and such. So add it up.”
The detective did, and decided, “Well, this time his stage magic surely backfired on him. Instead of them getting you, You got two of them.”
“it turned out worse than that, from their point of view. It tells us for certain that I guessed right about them being holed up near the scene of their last crime,” Longarm said. “The Great Costello and likely most of the others are eastern city-bred rascals, but they likely know how to ride. And we know at least one of ‘em can shoot, more than common sense might call for. But after that, they can’t feel too comfortable in our wide-open western spaces. They feel safer hiding in the cracks of fair-sized towns, like cockroaches.”
The detective said, “Well, seeing as they must be somewhere in or about our fair city, I’d say that makes your job a lot easier, right?”
“You must not have ridden with my old outfit in the war. If you had, you’d have had to help us take some towns. So let me tell you, pard, there ain’t no more desperate fighting than house to house, even when You’re allowed to shoot innocent bystanders. I Suspect the Great Costello ain’t as worried about that as I have to be, the trigger-happy little bastard.”
Chapter 12
After a while, they’d carried the bodies off to the El Paso morgue. The hotel manager had put a hall porter to work on the blood stains and busted glass, asked Longarm to check out, and been told to go to hell. Finally Longarm was free to take a quick bath and put on fresh underwear and a dry shirt, but by the time he got to the Western Union office a short walk away, he was starting to wonder if it had been worth the effort. The afternoon sky above the frying-pan streets of El Paso had clouded over an ominous mottled gray, but that only added to the tropical humidity and made his sweaty legs itch ferociously inside his brown tweed pants and cotton longjohns. The longjohns were supposed to sop up the sweat, which was why men who might have to ride a lot on sudden notice wore the otherwise dumb things. He had no undershirt under his hickory shirt and tweed vest. It didn’t help much.
He block-printed an up-to-date report with a sweaty pencil on wilted yellow telegram paper, and told the wilted clerk to send it to Billy Vail, night-letter rates. Old Billy fussed at him for not reporting his progress in the field at all, but fussed almost as much and kept wiring dumb suggestions when he knew what was going on. He couldn’t really fire Longarm if he got the progress report sometime tomorrow morning, and Longarm didn’t want any further orders just now. The ones he’d left Denver with had sounded dumb enough.
But, having done his duty for the moment, Longarm had to admit this fool’s errand seemed to be getting sort of interesting after all. The Great Costello was pretty good at misdirecting the western rubes he felt so superior to, but he had a lot to learn about the owlhoot game he’d chosen as a new trade. The jails and prisons of this imperfect world were filled with fools who’d started out thinking they were smarter than the law, not because the law was all that smart, but because of the way it worked.
The contest was never between one crook and one lawman, like a game of chess. It was between one or at most a small band of wise-ass crooks and all the lawmen, everywhere.
Whether they were as interested or not, the local lawmen had made the right routine moves Longarm never could have managed on his own. Country sheriffs and small town copper-badges were on the alert for the easy-to-spot magician, no matter which way he chose to limp on his deformed right hoof—It was one thing to just lower the curtain when a magic act was over, but things didn’t work that way in real life, when the audience really wanted to know how you’d hauled that rabbit out of that hat.
There was a city directory at one end of the Western Union counter. Longarm was going through it when the clerk rejoined him to say, “Your office ought to get that night letter around nine tomorrow morning. What are you looking for in that old out-of-date directory, Deputy Long?”
“It must be out-of-date if you have even one theatrical agent in El Paso, for I can’t seem to find such a listing.”
The clerk said, “If there’s any such person here, he’s yet to send a wire asking any actors to come down this way. I notice such unusual trade. We get show business folk in here all the time. El Paso ain’t no hick town, and we got more than one vaudeville house, along with the opera and lecture hall. But I suspect touring entertainers are sent here from somewhere else, not the other way around. Why don’t you ask up to the opera house? It’s just up the street a piece.”
“I ain’t looking for opera singers. It was a wild shot to begin with. If the rascals I’m after was reconsidering life upon the stage I wouldn’t be after ‘em so much. I might try a couple of vaudeville doormen to see if they might know any real names matching the descriptions of a couple of cusses we got on ice, though. The names they was packing in their wallets didn’t show much imagination, considering how Irish they both looked.”
