wouldn't be a federal crime. Killing her to prevent or delay her work, then dumping her body in a federal waterway, might be. We'd have to know for certain someone had done that before we could arrest 'em, though.'
'What about those unusual banking transactions?' O'Brian asked in a thoughtful tone. 'Don't you find it unusual that the same bank president who reported that stolen payroll note was the one who paid out all that other money to at least two elderly people who wound up dead or missing within hours of their last withdrawals?'
Sheriff Tegner laughed gleefully and said, 'Hot damn, let's all go arrest Banker Plover. He ain't a Swede and it's an election year, dad-blast his murderous eyes!'
Longarm laughed and said, 'I ain't sure it's against the law to manage a Minnesota bank without being Swedish, Sheriff. After that, leave us not forget old P.S. Plover would have been awesomely dumb to report a stolen government payroll note in his possession, knowing it had been stolen, if he hadn't come by it honestly. I'm still working on where Wabasha Chambrun got that hot paper in the first place. His Indian sponsors have been sending him, or his Santee wife, innocent checks drawn on an honest Omaha bank. Not all of them have been cashed here in New Ulm. Those cashed Lord knows where may or may not have stuck the Chambruns with that one and only suspicious hundred-dollar note. The damned things have turned up so many places I have to agree with my boss it would be a waste of time, even if we could backtrack that one bill to yet another poor soul with no apparent connection with the robbery.'
'Then why are you still here?' asked O'Brian. 'Do you suspect Plover of having those two elderly depositors murdered for some other reason?'
Longarm chuckled and said, 'You're as cynical as me about bankers. As a matter of fact, I did have something like that in mind when I asked the coroner's office to compare a list of heavy withdrawals with sudden deaths in this fair city. But as we've all been saying, Jake Thorsson seems to have died natural, and nobody knows what happened to that old lady yet.'
O'Brian insisted, 'That still leaves close to twenty thousand in untraceable bills unaccounted for, right?'
Longarm shook his head and said, 'Wrong. We still don't know the depositor calling herself Janice Carpenter at the bank is really missing. She could be anywhere else, with her money in some other bank or, hell, under her mattress. So all we know for certain is that a man called Jacob Thorsson died in front of witnesses, including a doctor, in a manner I'd hate to have to arrange ahead of time. As for his missing money, who's to say it's really missing? You know what a fuss they can make in probate court about money left behind with no will to probate. They charge the kin for letting them have their own money too. So who's to say somebody around the old man's deathbed, maybe the old man himself, never got the grand notion to just avoid all that bother? Had anyone with money coming felt they'd been screwed, they'd have doubtless let the whole world in on it by now.'
O'Brian ran a thoughtful thumbnail along the stubble of his fleshy jaw as he mused, half to himself, 'That only works if nobody there had any idea the old man had drawn all that money out of the bank.'
Longarm nodded, but demanded, 'Would you lay there for three days without mentioning you'd been robbed if you'd been robbed?'
When O'Brian said he didn't think he would, Longarm went on to say, 'Damned right. But if you'd still had the money on you, or anywhere on or about the premises, somebody would have surely found it as they cleaned up after your demise. You get to clean up a heap after a man spends three days dying of internal injuries.'
O'Brian nodded soberly, said he'd been in the war too, and asked how Longarm felt about a maid, or someone from the undertaker's, helping himself or herself to a bundle and never reporting it.
Longarm shrugged and said, 'Happens all the time. It ain't nice, but it ain't a federal crime. I doubt the sheriff here would take your suspicion as a gift in an election year, unless there was some complaint by some damned citizen to go with it.'
Sheriff Tegner muttered, 'Damned right. Gotta have a corpus delicti before you can arrest anybody. Jake Thorsson's corpse wasn't delicti. He was run over by a brewery dray!'
Longarm suggested, 'What I think he means is that you have to be able to show the body or substance of a crime to the grand jury.'
O'Brian sniffed, 'I guess I know what corpus delicti means, and I fear I follow your drift. Whether either of those old folks lost any money after they took it from their own savings accounts, we'd have a time proving anyone at their bank took a dime of it.'
Longarm said, 'That's about the size of it. I like to arrest as many bankers as I can too. But I don't see how even a banker could know in advance.'
'Know what in advance?' asked O'Brian with a puzzled frown.
Longarm replied, 'How even an old drunk would be sure to get run over by a dray after, not before, you cleaned out his bank account.'
'There must be a way,' Sheriff Tegner suddenly decided, spilling almost as much as he was pouring as he insisted, 'Never trusted that P.S. Plover. Never will. What sort of a name might Plover be? It sure sounds odd for these parts!'
Longarm gently took the bottle from the befuddled older lawman as he said, 'You got to watch them Anglo- Saxon bankers, Sheriff. But I'm a peace officer, not a bank examiner.'
O'Brian suggested a bank examiner might be able to figure a way to fiddle the books in order to show withdrawals taking place after rather than before a depositor died.
Longarm shrugged and said, 'You gents feel free to examine all the bank ledgers you want. Meanwhile, I'd rather work on suspects, red or white, who've threatened me directly. Marshal Vail never sent me here to investigate Banker Plover, and Plover surely couldn't have been expecting me to. Yet sinister cusses have been trying to stop me ever since I left my home office, and to tell the truth, it's getting tedious as hell.'
Sheriff Tegner didn't answer. He put his head down on his desk and commenced to blow small caraway-scented bubbles.
O'Brian grinned at Longarm and murmured, 'I thought it was Irishmen who couldn't handle the creature. Where do we go from here, pard?'
Longarm said, 'You go anywhere you like. One of us has to stay here until at least one of this old gent's own deputies shows up.'
O'Brian seemed sincerely puzzled as he demanded, 'How come? Neither of us ride for Brown County, and it
