Longarm nodded soberly and replied, 'That's doubtless why he don't look worried. But have you ever had the feeling someone was trying to bullshit you beyond endurance?'
The sheriff said, 'All the time. It goes with the job. What do you suggest we do about it, pard?'
So Longarm told him. The sheriff grinned like a mean little kid and said, 'Worth a try. I sure admire a lawman who can think crooked as you, Longarm!'
CHAPTER 24
The Sabbath dawn was breaking over a mine site quiet as a tomb when Longarm dismounted near the empty foreman's shack and tethered a blue roan livery mount, He saw he'd beaten everyone else out to the Black Diamond. So he was sitting on the steps, smoking a cheroot, as a dray pulled into the site, stopped and discharged three county deputies with a half-dozen leashed bloodhounds.
Longarm told his fellow lawmen the suspect's buggy hadn't shown up yet. The dog handler protested, 'You should have let me search Homagy's hotel room like I asked last night. Must have been at least some dirty sock for my dogs to sniff.'
Longarm shook his head wearily and said, 'I told you then, the suspect worked in yonder mine. Bloodhounds would naturally be able to pick out his scent from others after no more than a few weeks. But Homagy had license to wander all through the diggings, and I was assured that mountain's been riddled like Swiss cheese.'
The four of them heard a distant yell. Longarm got to his feet to reach inside his frock coat as a sleepy-eyed but husky-looking cuss with a Greener Ten-Gauge came across the wide dusty expanse to tell them they were on company property, damn their souls.
Longarm got out the search warrant signed by a J.P. in town the night before and said, 'We're the law. This here's our hunting permit, and how come it took you so long to notice we might be trespassers?'
The watchman looked sheepish and replied, 'Who'd expect kids or lumber thieves at this ungodly hour? It gets mighty calm out here once the last Saturday shift knocks off around sundown. But I heard you messing about over here after a while, didn't I?'
Longarm said, 'You surely did, and if you'd care to help us conduct a murder investigation, I'd be proud to write you up in my official report.'
The watchman said he'd do anything sensible to help them, and asked who'd been murdered.
Before Longarm had to explain, a dusty black buggy drove in behind a span of mules. As the deputy driving it braked to a stop nearby he called out, 'They assured me at the livery that this is the suspect's very own buggy. He had it shipped by flatcar with him from Texas and stored it right off in their carriage house. But there's nothing hidden in it, Longarm. We searched it high and we searched it low for evidence of anything. But Homagy had all the baggage in the back carried over to that hotel he blew up.'
Longarm nodded, turned to the dog handler, and suggested, 'She'd have wound up on the floor mats up front or in back, whether bleeding or just oozing the way they do.'
The dog handler asked him not to teach his granny to suck eggs. He picked up his bloodhounds in turn to let them slobber and sniff around in the dusty buggy. Then he put them back on the ground and said, 'If they have her scent they have her scent. Where do we try for her trail?'
Longarm pointed at the mine adit with his stubbled jaw, saying, 'All roads lead to Rome. He carried her in through that one rabbit hole if she's in there at all.'
She was. The hounds hesitated at first, confounded by the many scents of both the day and night shifts. Then, when Longarm suggested one side drift, and that didn't work, the dog handler paused near a partly boarded-over opening, posted with a warning to keep out, and the bloodhounds tried to drag him in there on his face.
They didn't, of course. But as he leaned back against the leashes with his heels dug into the black grit, he chortled, 'They're on her trail. Ain't seen 'em this sure since a Mex full of mescal and chili busted away from the road gang on us!'
it was more complicated than that. The played-out drift they were following ran a furlong into the mountain to end in a sooty slope of shattered shale. The bloodhounds seemed as confounded by this as the rest of them. Longarm turned to the mine watchman, who'd followed along, to ask if it was possible a longer tunnel had been partly caved in.
The coal-mining man shone his carbide lamp on the rock ceiling and said, 'Never caved in. Someone brought it down. See them sort of belly buttons in the shale, there, there, and yonder? That's what you see in the new facing after a blast's been mucked away. Somebody with a star drill stuck just enough dynamite in that ceiling to bring some of it down!'
Once that much had been explained, you didn't have to be a mining engineer to see about how much shale there was to dig through. So they rustled up some loose boards, the mining tools having been put away for the Sabbath, and got to work.
The bloodhounds started going loco before the duller human noses with them noticed. Then one of the deputies working closer gagged and said, 'Oh, Lord, something's died around here!'
Longarm sniffed and said, 'Not something, somebody. Once you've been through a war, you never forget that lovely aroma. I doubt anyone died here in the mine. Neighbors saw a covered buggy leaving Homagy's house around midnight of a Saturday. He's likely got rid of the snap-on leather covers since. Folks who knew Magda Homagy's rep naturally never expected her to sneak out in the dead of night with her husband. I doubt she'd have gone with him on such a peculiar ride of her own free will. So let's say he knocked her out or killed her right in the house, snuck her out to his parked buggy, and sort of eloped with his own wife in the dark. I keep warning others not to leap to conclusions but I keep doing it myself. So you can't blame the neighborhood gossips all that much.'
The same deputy gagged again and said, 'We're through. I sure wish we weren't. Kee-rist, that smells awful!'
Longarm borrowed the carbide lamp as he hunkered down to shine the beam through, saying, 'Bohunks eat all that paprika goulash, and she seems to be laying in a mud puddle, naked as a jay, save for her high-button shoes. Them shoes and that blond hair are all the coroner's jury will have going for 'em now. She's in what the undertakers call a state of full decay. Mostly bones and mush held together by skin as dark and wrinkled as prunes.'
One of the other county lawmen grimaced and observed, 'Going to be a bitch to say how she ever died then. Don't you have to prove someone was murdered to charge even her husband with murdering her?'
