had passed up certain of the earlier courses.
When he was done filling the aching void that had been in his stomach, Longarm pushed back from the table, thumped the flat of his belly, and asked, “Anybody care to join me in a cigar after dinner? I have enough to spare.”
“I’ll take you up on that offer, mister,” one man said.
“Me too.”
“You may smoke on the front porch, Mr. Long,” Mrs. Willets announced firmly. “Please do not light up until you are outside.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, docile as a lamb and twice as innocent.
The two smokers in the crowd led the way from the dining room onto the porch, Longarm following close behind. Once outside, Longarm’s excellent cheroots in hand and streaming wisps of pale smoke, the men introduced themselves. Thomas Carey and Bernard Hicks, they said they were. The names meant nothing to Longarm. Apparently there had been no reason to mention either of them in the report Thad Browne’s coppers had prepared in the wake of the accident that killed Carl Beamon.
“What brings you to Aurora, Mr. Long?”
“Where are you from?”
Longarm smiled at the two and told them, “Business, Mr. Hicks. And I’m from real far away.” He blew a smoke ring. “All the way from Denver.” He laughed. “Had to stay overnight and picked this place on the recommendation of a fella I met once. Carl Beamon? Either of you know him?”
“We did,” Hicks said.
“Did? What’d he do, move out?”
“He’s dead,” Tom Carey informed the newcomer.
“No shit,” Longarm said with feigned surprise. “What happened?”
“Just an accident,” Carey said.
“Bullshit,” Hicks disagreed. “Carl was murdered, and that’s a fact.”
“Murdered?” Longarm prompted.
“He was.”
“Mr. Long, don’t believe that. Beamon died in an accident. Just a runaway wagon.”
“He was murdered,” Hicks insisted. “It was an accident.”
“What makes you think it was murder, Mr. Hicks?”
“I don’t think it was, I know it was. Carl—I knew him better than anyone else here—Carl told me he was going to come into some big money. He was supposed to meet two men that evening, see. He knew something important, and these men he was meeting, they were going to pay him to tell them about it. But only them. That was the deal. They wanted him to tell them everything he knew, but agree to not tell anyone else.”
“Did he tell you what it was that he knew, what it was that was so important?”
Hicks shook his head. “He said he couldn’t. Not if he wanted the money.”
“Mr. Long, my friend Bernie here has a real vivid imagination. Don’t believe any of this. Beamon was killed in an ordinary, everyday kind of accident. That’s what the police said, and who would know better than them?”
That was a question Longarm was not inclined to get into at the moment. If he ever did, though, Tom Carey might be in for some rude awakenings.
“So who were these two men?” Longarm asked. “Did he meet with them before he was killed? Did he have money on him when he died?”
Carey scowled and said, “I don’t want to be rude, mister, but I don’t want to listen to any more of this. Good night, the both of you.” Carey went back inside the boardinghouse, leaving Longarm and Hicks alone on the porch. Longarm settled into a rocking chair and motioned for Hicks to join him in a companion chair nearby.
“You really believe Beamon was murdered, don’t you?”
“I do, sir. Like I said, I knew Carl better than anyone else here. He was genuinely excited about his good fortune, about coming into some money. I don’t know how much these men had talked about paying him, but it must have been some hundreds of dollars anyway. That would have been very big money indeed for someone like Carl. Or for that matter for someone like me. I know I’ve never made more than eight dollars in one week, not in my whole life. I doubt Carl ever made that much even.”
“Who were these men? Police? Reporters? Something like that?” The men who spoke with Boatwright had introduced themselves as reporters. Two of them. Longarm’s experience, though, was that genuine reporters seldom traveled in pairs. Generally they were loners interested in being the first to get the news, competing even with others working for the same newspaper or magazine. Two men had talked to Boatwright. Two men were supposed to talk with Beamon. Longarm placed scant faith in coincidence at the best of times, and he saw no reason to suspend that skepticism now.
“I don’t know,” Hicks said. “Carl never told me that.”
“Do you know where they were to meet him?”
“Yes, he did tell me that. They were meeting him at the Lone Tree Saloon.”
That was interesting, Longarm thought. It was outside the Lone Tree that Beamon had died. And these two men, whoever they were, knew to expect Beamon to be at that place, presumably at that time. It would have been no particular trick to fake a runaway and deliberately run someone down in the street. It was the sort of thing that could be done in plain sight of half the town’s population and no one would know it was no accident.
